Day: March 12, 2013

It was announced two or three hours ago that Sony will definitely be releasing David O. Russell‘s untitled Abscam movie in December (limited on 12.13, wide on Christmas Day), and you can bet your booty it’ll be a Best Picture contender. It’ll be the “two” in Russell’s one-two punch, and to the Academy members who voted for Argo or Life of Pi over Silver Linings Playbook (which was only the second-best film of 2012 after Zero Dark Thirty and a box-office champ and the winner of eight Oscar nominations and four Spirit Awards), Russell’s message will be “bitches!…this time you’ll do the right thing.”

Unless, of course, the true-life crime saga turns out to be just a good and gripping dramedy with a few live-wire performances from Christian Bale, Jeremy Renner, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence and Louis C.K. In which case all bets are off. Are you kidding me? Of course it’s going to be in the Best Picture conversation.

Russell has either just begun or is just about to begin shooting in the Boston area. Pic is based on a 2010 Eric Singer script called American Bullshit. It’s about the 1970s FBI Abscam sting operation, which ultimately led to the conviction of a U.S. Senator, five Congressmen, and other government figures.

On 12.3.12 The Playlist‘s Rodrigo Perez quoted Russell discussing the Abscam film:

“It’s a crime drama that’s really about some very high end financial con artists who are very colorful, strange characters,” Russel said. “And it’s about the FBI…but Bradley [Cooper’s] like an ethnic FBI guy from the Bronx and it’s about the [eventually indicted] mayor of Camden, New Jersey, Angelo Errichetti, who is Jeremy Renner. Camden was mostly a black and Puerto Rican community at that time. Very amazing, interesting world of New York at that time. It’s very exciting.

“They’re all going to do things we haven’t seen them do in this movie, it’s going to be very exciting. Renner’s going to be like you’ve never saw him. Bradley’s going to be like you never saw him. Christian will be…I don’t want to give too much of it away but they’re all playing real-life characters from the ‘70s and they’re very intense in an insane drama.”

“This [was] life and death stakes for people,” Russell went on. “The mafia was involved in this, it was very frightening. People’s lives were on the line and it was unbelievably hairy what these characters were doing. But I’m interested in their relationships, in their love lives, in their bedrooms, in their hearts…you know, what’s going on between them emotionally. There’s a love triangle between Amy, Bradley and Christian. And Jeremy and Christian have kind of a very unexpected bromance because they’re very similar New Jersey and New York-type characters, so they really take to each other.

“In real life, these things are stranger than fiction so there has to be a lot of comedy in them. Some of my favorite films by the Coen Brothers or by Scorsese or Tarantino, those pictures are both really emotional, intense, and they’re also funny and from a place of realness. It always has to be from a place of realness. Even Tarantino, even when he’s killing Hitler [in Inglorious Basterds] which is unreal, it’s real. It’s like a gothic comic book that somehow is real. It’s emotional because he puts emotions into it.”

Rodney Ascher‘s Room 237 (IFC Films, 3.29) isn’t just about nutty theories about various hidden meanings in Stanley Kubrick‘s The Shining — it’s also about echoes and replications of that classic 1980 film. The new poster (a variation of that famous black-and-yellow Shining one-sheet) reflects this attitude. Ditto the slogan’s allusion to the maze outside the Overlook.

Ditto Acher’s pronounced resemblance to Kubrick as he looked between the mid ’60s and early ’70s [see video].

“Room 237 is so incredibly dense and labrynthian and jam-packed with thoughts and probes and speculations that you almost have to see it twice — there’s just too much to take in during one sitting.” — from one of my 2012 Toronto riffs.

Starting at 2:12 Girls producer-director-writer Lena Dunham explains the emotional and psychological makeup of Adam Driver‘s “Adam” character. He was starting to act this year like a decent and considerate fellow until last Sunday night when he said “get on all fours” to whatsername and then had degrading sex with her…nice. Dunham says Adam is trying to protect himself but I know guys like this. He’s an animal. He’s thisclose to physical violence and perhaps worse.

This IMAX Oz Balloon short is a perfect expression of the rampant CGI virus that’s undermining (if not killing) any chance of “belief” in fantasy films these days. It’s so full of CG touch-ups and whiz-bang editing that you don’t believe a frame of it, and yet the balloon is real and so was the voyage. On 2.13 it visited Hollywood’s El Capitan and then Disneyland in Anaheim, and then Manhattan’s Central Park on March 5th and 6th. But the short suggests it all happened on a hard drive. Nice work, guys.

In Michel Gondry‘s Mood Indigo (opening in France and Belgium on 4.24), Romain Duris plays an inventor who gets married to Chloe (Audrey Tatou). She becomes ill after a water lily enters her lung and starts growing there, which requires a cure. You could never get away with a story like this in an American film…ever. It’s obvious that Gondry has given the film a magical Amelie-type vibe. You don’t need subtitles with a film like this.

Mood Indigo will presumably play at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, or at least in the market section. If all else fails it’ll be playing commercially at the Olympia or the Star.

There’s a clip in this trailer showing Duris being squeezed by moving walls. I can relate to that.

Baz Luhrman‘s The Great Gatsby will open the 66th Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, May 15. Somebody tell me why this is a big deal with the adaptation of F. Scott Fitsgerald‘s novel opening in the States on May 10th. The 3D film will screen for the press on Wednesday morning followed by a press conference with Baz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton, Isla Fisher and Jason Clarke probably taking part. Gatsby was originally slated to open last year but Warner Bros. yanked it. I don’t believe that concerns over DiCaprio having a costarring role in Django Unchained, which opened last December, had much to do with WB’s decision.

So you’ve got yesterday’s Don Draper, faded and opaque in a light summer suit, about to cross Madison Avenue while the new 1968 version of Don (as last season ended in the summer of ’67 with Nancy Sinatra singing “You Only Live Twice“), more sharply defined and perhaps a bit more aggressive, stepping up to the curb. The old Don is saying, “Whoa…did I just pass myself?” The new Don is saying, “Whatever, let it go…this is now and I’m running the show.”

Sooner or later Don is going to have to start growing his hair a little longer, or at least the beginnings of modest sideburns. By ’68 even straight-laced ad execs had started to loosen up and unbutton from the early ’60s button-down style, which was half-inherited from the JFK attitude and half from Sloan Wilson‘s The Man in the Gray-Flannel Suit.