Day: March 5, 2013

I shared my final thoughts last night about Venezulean president Hugo Chavez. He died a few hours ago. This N.Y. Times video commentary by former Venezuelan correspondent Simon Romero sounds fair and balanced, but my heart agrees with what Chavez’s former friend and friendly portraitist Oliver Stone told TheWrap‘s Tim Kenneally.

”I mourn a great hero to the majority of his people and those who struggle throughout the world for a place,” Stone said. “Hated by the entrenched classes, Hugo Chavez will live forever in history.” Notice that Stone didn’t call Chavez a “great hero” by his own standards — he called him “a great hero to the majority of his people.”

“His life was in a manner of speaking gentle, and the elements so mixed in him that Nature might stand up and say to all the world, ‘This was a man.” — William Shakespeare‘s Julius Caesar

Hollywood Elsewhere will become a WordPress site sometime after midnight. Preparing for this has distracted my energies to some extent over the last few days, and especially yesterday as I felt I needed a little tutoring. WordPress is obviously not that big a deal, but I frankly prefer posting with HTML code rather than the purely visual option. (For now anyway.) I’m told that readers won’t have to re-register for the newly installed Disqus commenting software. I know that one way or another I’ll retain the power to delete certain comments and/or ban commenters outright. HE wouldn’t be HE without that.

A couple of hours ago Coming Soon critic-reporter Ed Douglas graciously agreed to do a brief Oscar Poker chat about Oz The Great and Powerful, which opens on Friday. Ed is more of a fan than I am, and has actually called Sam Raimi‘s film “as entertaining” as Victor Fleming‘s The Wizard of Oz (1939). My review will post sometime tomorrow. We mostly compared the two films. I decided that the ’39 version is more personally motivated and character-flavored while the Raimi is more conventonally genre-ish and CG-driven and even socio-political.

Deadline‘s Michael Fleming is reporting that Paramount has bought Allison Schroeder‘s screenplay of Agatha, about the 1926 disappearance of the famed mystery writer Agatha Christie. With Will Gluck (Friends with Benefits, Sony’s forthcoming Annie) attached to direct and Fleming calling the script a “female Sherlock Holmes meets Romancing The Stone,” there’s a clear possibility it’ll turn out to be coy, shallow crap.

Christie’s’ still-unexplained disappearance was the basis for Michael Apted‘s 1979 Agatha, which costarred Vanessa Redgrave as Christie and Dustin Hoffman as American journalist Wally Stanton. For whatever reason Fleming, who rarely misses a trick, doesn’t mention the Apted version. I haven’t seen it in ages, but I recall a decent, so-so drama that at least made a serious attempt to convey authentic 1920s period, dialogue, costumes and interior design. It was certainly a feast for the eyes with the darkish but oh-so-carefully lighted cinematography by Vittorio Storaro and production design by the great Shirley Russell.

I’ve no excuse for missing Robert Redford‘s The Company You Keep at last September’s Toronto Film Festival. Except that I said to myself when reviewing the schedule, “Okay, I’d like to see the Redford but not right this second because I need to see this, that and the other film first. But I’ll get to it.” And here it is March and I still haven’t seen it, although there are L.A. and N.Y. screenings happening as we speak. The NYC junket is just around the corner. Sony Classics is opening it limited on 4.5

The Rotten Tomatoes score stands at 63%. I’m told it’s not all that riveting in thriller terms but is otherwise intelligent and smart written and impassioned as far as it goes. And you know Susan Sarandon will be rock-solid as Bernadine Dohrn, so to speak.

For me the Iron Man franchise went belly-up 2 and 3/4 years ago during that ridiculous Monte Carlo duke-out between Robert Downey‘s Tony Stark (who wore too much eye make-up) and Mickey Rourke‘s Ivan Vanko in Jon Favreau‘s Iron Man 2…God, what an endurance test! And to think what a pleasure the original Iron Man was. Even I, a hater of almost all things geek, was more or less happy with that 2008 film. But I’m off the boat now. Who’s actually enthused about seeing the third installment? Please.