Month: December 2012

In documentary terms the story of the West Memphis Three was initially examined by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky‘s Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (’96). Which was followed by Berlinger-Sinfosky’s Paradise Lost 2: Revelations (’00) and Paradise Lost: Purgatory (’11). And then at last January’s 2012 Sundance Film Festival came Amy Berg‘s West of Memphis (’12), the Peter Jackson-produced doc that I feel is the best telling of all.

But there’s still another version to come — a narrative drama from Atom Egoyan called Devil’s Knot, based on the 2002 true-crime novel by Mara Leveritt. Same story, same characters, same everything…except performed by Colin Firth as Ron Lax, Reese Witherspoon as Pam Hobbs, Kevin Durand as John Mark Byers, Bruce Greenwood as Judge David Burnett (original judge of the 1st murder trial), Elias Koteas as Jerry Driver, Stephen Moyer as prosecutor John Fogelman and Alessandro Nivola as Terry Hobbs (i.e., the likely culprit).

I’m mentioning this because two nights ago I was offered a chance to catch a couple of research screenings of Devil’s Knot — one scheduled to happen last night or tonight in West Hollywood, I was told, and one in Pasadena. I don’t attend these types of screenings, of course, but if it’s being refined now…well, it’ll probably debut at the Toronto Film Festival, right? Egoyan being Canadian and a mainstay of that gathering, etc. Or it could turn up in Cannes. The only question is “how many times are the people who would normally be receptive to a smart, grade-A true-crime film…how many times will these folks be wiling to go to the West Memphis Three well?”

Imagine that two years ago director Steven Spielberg, screenwriter Tony Kushner and actor Daniel Day Lewis decided to make a film about the conflicted and largely failed presidency of Andrew Johnson instead of one about Abraham Lincoln‘s passage of the 13th Amendment. Johnson would have told the story of a decent and principled man who was in some ways his own worst enemy and who caught hell over the failures of post-Civil War Reconstruction, and who ended up being impeached by the House only to be acquitted by the Senate.

Andrew Johnson, the 17th President of the United States (1865-1879)

Imagine what the response would be if Spielberg had brought his very best game to the table and if Johnson had turned out to be just as good a film as Lincoln is — superbly acted by DDL, rich in period atmosphere, thoughtful, stirring, well-researched, great supporting performances, first-rate production values. You know that Johnson wouldn’t be as much as a hot Best Picture contender as Lincoln seems to be right now, and you know that people wouldn’t be saying “yeah, I guess you’re probably right — at the end of the day the Best Picture Oscar is probably going to be won by Johnson.”

And you know why, don’t you? Because the presidency of Andrew Johnson doesn’t stir us like Lincoln’s. Because we haven’t been taught since we were six or seven years old that Johnson was perhaps our greatest president ever. Because Andrew Johnson wasn’t assassinated. Because he isn’t on the five-dollar bill. Because Johnson’s contentious presidency is widely regarded as a muddled, frustrating thing, and marked by derision, discord and controversy.

I’m just making a mild, even-handed point about Lincoln, which is that deep down much if not most of the acclaim for Spielberg’s film is about our lifelong embrace of the legend of Abraham Lincoln. Is it a good film? Yes. Is it a very good film? You could argue this. But if Johnson was just as good as Lincoln and perhaps in some ways a little bit better (you can’t beat that Senate vote on impeachment for a third-act climax), you know it wouldn’t be the same thing. Be honest and ask yourself — how much of the Lincoln acclaim is really about the film itself and how much of it is about the worship of a great man and a great historical figure? You know what the answer is. You know it.

Things have gotten bad enough for Bret Easton Ellis over his contentious Kathryn Bigelow tweets that he’s decided to shift gears and offer a little contrition in a Daily Beast piece.

“I’ve taken a lot of hits in my career — they bounce off. The armor was built so long ago that I now assume everyone else in the public eye can handle it when they’re shot at. But the outcry over the Bigelow tweets was eye-opening to me in a way that nothing else has ever been. I got it. I heard it. I looked back at what I was doing with those tweets (quickly, unconsciously, hurriedly, drunkenly) and I have to admit they simply back-fired. Which is why I’m writing this. No one asked me to write this. I simply write something like this when I’m in pain. And I’ve been slowly feeling a painfulness when reading all of the articles reacting to those tweets.”

“The American press’s reaction to the Bigelow tweets was swift and overwhelming. Without reading the news I could still feel it swirling in the air because everyone around me was talking about it. It was by far the most sustained attack on anything I had tweeted about. What was odd about the collective anger was that the tweets were solely about daunting, glamorous Kathryn Bigelow — they were not directed at women everywhere, yet women united and seemed to bond over what they perceived as both a much broader and more personal “attack” (a word used often in the articles in the days that followed).

“No one likes being wrong — I mean really wrong — about something. And in some of the cases where I’ve been attacked I really haven’t cared, because I’m not an example. I don’t represent. I’m just a lone voice and not a teacher. And I refuse to make my Twitter page one; it is what it is, take it or leave it, follow or unfollow, enjoy it or let it piss you off. But I’m taking a bit of a break from Twitter — not fully, not all the time, just over the holidays — until I see Kathryn Bigelow’s new movie.

“And then, perhaps, we can start all over again.”

Hollywood Elsewhere disappeared about an hour ago for about 25 minutes because of a tiny little spam post about pepper spray that was included in a comment thread under a 3.10.09 HE article called “Mumblecore Plus,” which was a review of Joseph Swanberg‘s Alexander The Last. Well, not specifically due to the spam itself but…here’s how it went down.

All is well now but I can’t believe that anyone in the world can be as anal or petty as the guy who started all the trouble, a Jacksonville merchandiser named Joseph Morris. Except I was the cause of the shutdown — make no mistake. It was me. Nobody else. But Morris was the instigator and the nitpicker.

Somewhere in that “Mumblecore Plus” thread an underpaid schlub from Estonia or China posted a piece of spam about a pepper-spray product. Which ants, worms and maggots, if they could read and could operate a computer, wouldn’t give a damn about.

Six days ago I received a letter from Morris, who runs a Jacksonville-based company called Buy Pepper Spray Today. (Which I’ve been blocked from visiting within the last hour or so.) His letter complained that the March 2009 spam post was infringing upon his legal URL copyright, and that he was prepared to “seek the removal of the infringing material” and therefore block any website hosting this spam, and that he would do so under Section 512(c) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

I read Morris’s letter, and rather than act like an adult by removing the offending spam and alerting him that I had done so, I wrote him the following: “Are you serious? A fragment of a post from 2009, or three and three-quarter years ago, was copied onto my server by some person working from a Chinese or Estonian spam sweatshop, and you’re telling me to do something about it? This is what you do with your life?”

I guess I was also thinking about the product itself. Pepper spray has been used by cops to disperse Occupy protestors, or so I’ve read. So I sitting there thinking, “He’s selling an ugly product so eff this guy.”

“Why weren’t you concerned about this three years ago?,” I continued. “Or two years ago? Why did you wait nearly four years to complain? Are you really being this anal? Are you reading my reply with your thumb lodged inside your anal cavity as we speak? — Jeffrey Wells.”

That took a little energy to write — a little energy and some time to think it through and make the editing decision to not write “thumb up your ass” but instead “thumb lodged inside your anal cavity.” I mean, I could have simply deleted the pepper-spray post and informed Morris of same in half or one-third the time that it took to tell him he was being a huge pain. It was after midnight and I guess I was tired or irritated or whatever, but the bottom line is that it seemed, at that moment, more important to tap out a smartass reply than simply man up and take care of the problem.

And so Morris, obstinate fellow that he is, wrote my server, Softlayer of Houston, and sent them a properly constituted letter about the offense and cited Section 512(c) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). And then Softlayer sent me two letters about this, which I ignored because I don’t read at least half the crap that comes into my inbox because…I don’t know but it probably has something to do with feeling overworked and frazzled, especially in the wee hours. I regard any piece of mail that comes into my inbox that’s not personal or business-related as something to swat or wave away.

So around noon the Softlayer guys blocked the site. I hit the roof, called them up and screamed that this issue was about a single piece of spam that was posted nearly four years ago, etc. They lifted the blockage after a half hour’s worth of ranting, and I finally removed the spam post and it was duly recorded on a Softlayer trouble ticket. I feel like a jerk for not having acted in a more practical-minded way, but that’s how I roll from time to time, especially late at night when I’ve been at it for 16 or 17 hours.

“I loved you in Drive, you got robbed at the Oscars, I paid for the socks.” This was taped (or aired) on 12.6 so it’s ancient. But even after the horrors of Newtown, it’s funny.

Last March I explained two things. One, that I’d read the script for Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis. And two, that Oscar Isaacs’ titular character in this matter-of-fact dramedy set against the backdrop of the early ’60s folk scene in Greenwich Village “bears no resemblance whatsover to the ’60s cafe folk-singer Dave Van Ronk,” or at least the Van Ronk I’ve read about over the years.

And yet today (12.18) Showbiz 411‘s Roger Friedman described Isaac “as a stand-in for real life folk musician Dave van Ronk”…Jesus!

Look, maybe there were two Dave van Ronks back in the early ’60s. One was this large, hulking troubadour guy who knew everyone, who organized West Village musicians so they wouldn’t be exploited by cafe owners and who “was heavily committed to folk music, to the musician community, to his troubadour way of life and to everything that was starting to happen in the early ’60s…if nothing else a man who lived large.” And the other Van Ronk was this smallish, morose, Latin-looking guy (like Isaacs) who lived and thought small, and was no spiritual match for the hulking Van Ronk…a guy who was glum and vaguely pissed off and resentful, and tried to make it as a folk musician but wasn’t much of a go-getter and who slept on a lot of couches. And the Coens sat down and said to each other, “You know what? Fuck the real Dave van Ronk…let’s make a film about his doppelganger.”

Friedman was writing about a recent friends-and-coworkers screening of Inside Llewyn Davis in Manhattan. His source tells him that Carey Mulligan‘s character is “romantically linked” to Isaac’s — not true. She’s pregnant by him and needs to get an abortion, but in no way are they romantically linked, at least not on the page. Mulligan’s character can’t stand Isaacs’ character. Nothing but bile and bitterness.

Friedman writes that “the film got raves from those who saw it, but it’s also said to be unlike most Coen brothers movies — no violence, no sex, no weird irony.” That sounds like the script I read. Very plain and low-key and untricky.

One viewer tells Friedman that Inside Llewyn Davis “made me cry”….bullshit. The Coen brothers have never made films that anyone has wept over, and they never will. They make cinematic, camera-rich movies with feisty performances and sardonic undertones that you can smirk or chuckle at if you want…but forget weeping or sniffling. Not in their wheelhouse.

Inside Llewyn Davis could possibly travel to Cannes five months hence, Friedman writes…and if you ask me it probably will.

I’ve just downloaded YouTube Capture to the iPhone5. “The app lets you record a video clip, write a caption, select which networks you want to share to, and publish”…wham. Doesn’t just upload to YouTube, but to Google+, Facebook, and Twitter. Includes color correction and stabilization, and “it lets you trim the length and add free background music from YouTube.” I use my own music choices or nothing.

“After all the female avengers of the past fifteen years — Uma Thurman and Angelina Jolie kicking men in the ego and other places — American movies have at last produced a woman clothed, like Athena, in willful strength and intellectual armor.” — New Yorker critic David Denby writing about Jessica Chastain‘s “Maya” in Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s Zero Dark Thirty.

Last night I attended a q & a between Silver Linings Playbook director-writer David O. Russell and Jeff Goldsmith. Russell was fresh and fluid as ever, a nonstop power-pulser. He doesn’t “talk” as much as he channels thought streams and turns on the spigot and out they come. I recorded the whole thing but Goldsmith said “no, no, wait…not yet…Wednesday!” I said “okay, man, whatever, but now is NOW. This stuff doesn’t age well. You have to put it out there. Time’s a wastin’.”

David O. Russell, Jeff Goldsmith at L.A. Film School — Sunday, 12.16, 9:55 pm.

After chatting for an hour-plus, Russell suggested that they take questions from the audience. He sensed that the time had come, he told Goldsmith — “These people are restless, man.”

Sony Classics is opening Pablo Larrain‘s No — an all-but-certain nominee for Best Foreign Language Feature — on 2.15.13, and here, I gather, is the first English-language trailer. I called it “one of the smartest, well-layered and riveting real-life political dramas I’ve seen in ages” after seeing it in Cannes. Indiewire‘s James Rocchi called No “exactly the kind of film you hope to stumble across at Cannes…[something] well-made, superbly acted, funny, human, warm, principled…fiercely moral and intelligent.”

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I’m sorry but I’ve said many times that the standard-issue “free-falling from a great height” schtick is a stopper for me. Jumping off 200-foot cliffs into the ocean will kill you as surely as it killed Tony Scott. Don’t even bring up the male-protagonist-falling-from-a-tall-building shot — it’s been done so often there should be an automatic DGA fine for this. JJ Abrams knows how to play the big-action-movie game much better than I, but why can’t there be thrills and threats that are realistically digestible?

Urban-action-fantasy heroes don’t drop cyanide capsules or shoot themselves in the temple or walk in front of speeding cars because we all know these things kills…but they can jump off any cliff or tall building they want and it’s always “wheee!” Video-game perversion.