Month: May 2013

“Male charm is all but absent from the screen because it’s all but absent from our lives,” writes Benjamin Schwartz in a 5.22 Atlantic piece that I missed until now due to Cannes and whatnot. Most men hold charm in vague suspicion: few cultivate it; still fewer respond to it; hardly any know whether they have it; and almost none can even identify it. (The damn URL embed capability isn’t working so here it is: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/06/when-men-lost-their-charm/309303/.)

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I’m glad I’m not staying too long in Paris (I return on 6.20) as the movie-release situation is only slightly more aligned with U.S. release dates than in 2003, which is when I last stayed here for any length of time. It’s mostly a problem and a pain for anyone looking to keep abreast. Simultaneous day-and-date openings are only a little more common, but the smaller films (Ariel Vroman‘s The Iceman, Sally Potter‘s Ginger and Rosa) seem to open much later here as a rule. Broken City is playing on U.S. flights but opening here on 6.26; ditto Identity Thief

Even a couple of biggies (like Star Trek Into Darkness) are opening well past the U.S. debut date.

M. Night Shyamalan‘s After Earth (which I’ll probably hate) opens in the U.S. on 5.31 but not until 6.4 in Paris. Sofia Coppola‘s The Bling Ring opens only two days later in Paris than it does in the States. The Internship opens in the States on 6.7 but not in Paris until 6.26. White House Down opens the same day (6.28) in the U.S. as it does here. Man of Steel opens on 6.14 in the States; 6.19 in Paris. And so on. There’s just no home-court advantage to living in Paris and trying to keep up…none.

I’m in touch with all the local publicists, of course, and trying to see what I can see but it’s a lot of work and a drag on a certain level. I’ve been writing this and that U.S. publicist to see about them sending me DVD screeners, but I’ll be happy to return (two weeks in Manhattan before flying back to LA on 7.7) in more ways than one.

If anyone has a PDF of Rodham, the 2012 Black List script by South Korean screenwriter Young Il Kim, please send it along. James “beardo” Ponsoldt will direct the film version with either Jessica Chastain, Amanda Seyfried, Reese Witherspoon or Scarlett Johansson playing Hillary Rodham Clinton. Pic will focus on HRC’s days during the early ’70s when she was lawyering on the House Judiciary Committee that was looking into impeaching Richard Nixon.

Chastain would be the wise casting call, I would think. Seyfried looks like Clinton did in the early ’70s, but she doesn’t exude enough of a contentious-attorney snapdragon mentality. But Witherspoon could do this by bringing back Tracy Flick.

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Am I the only online know-nothing urging moviegoers to give Shawn Levy‘s The Internship (20th Century Fox, 6.7) a fair shake? Voices in my head have been telling me for months that this Vince Vaughn-Owen Wilson generation-gap/financial-desperation comedy might be at least half watchable, but I’ve been shouted down at every turn by the haters. The Internship is called Les Stagiaires over here, but it doesn’t open in Paris until 6.26 so what can I say or do?

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I missed last Saturday’s 30th anniversary celebration of the commercial debut of Return of the Jedi, which happened on 5.25.83. As all true Star Wars fans know, Jedi was a kind of tragedy as it strongly indicated to anyone who was halfway hip that Star Wars creator and Jedi producer George Lucas had sadly evolved into a shameless hack and that the Star Wars series was effectively over and would never again deliver the power, gravitas and coolness of The Empire Strikes Back.

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Other than Zack Snyder‘s Man of Steel being the third mega-budget Superman origin story to be released in 35 years and the second within the last seven, the problem, clearly, is going to getting through Russell Crowe‘s “farewell, my son” dialogue. Crowe is a total pro and I completely respect his having held his nose and cashed the paycheck, but all of that “you must lead them, show them the way and give them hope” stuff is awful. And I still say Amy Adams (who was perfectly paired with Mark Wahlberg in The Fighter) looks a tiny bit cougar-ish alongside Henry Cavill.

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I hate listening to these courtly parliamentarians (White House Down producer Bradley J. Fischer, producer-writer James Vanderbilt, production designer Kirk Petruccelli) kiss Roland Emmerich‘s ass. All ass-kissing on these suck-up video pieces is inherently boring, and the guys who shoot and cut these things should know that. This aside, I love the smoldering Capitol dome exploding and smoking and flaming all to hell…fantastic. Opening in U.S. and France on 6.28.

In his Vulture review of Steven Soderbergh‘s Behind The Candelabra, Matt Zoller Seitz writes that following about Matt Damon‘s performance as Scott Thorson: “It takes great talent and concentration to play such an opaque soul while still letting us think that we can see into his heart. [Damon] is too old for the part (though the makeup helps sell the illusion a bit), but it doesn’t really matter because he seems to remember what it was like to be a teenager, and lonely, and unformed as a person, and that knowledge infuses the performance.”

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I’m not trying to be a nitpicker but I suffered a basic blockage with Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska that I couldn’t get around. The primary plot driver, contained in Bob Nelson‘s script, is a belief by Bruce Dern‘s Woody Grant, an ornery 70-something alcoholic who’s at least partly out to lunch, that he’s won a million dollar prize from a Publisher’s Clearing House sweepstakes drawing.

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Random drunk woman to her companions: “What is the Great Gatsby?” And then, a few seconds later: “Siri, what is the Great Gatsby?” — overheard at Hamburger Hamlet via Caroline An Stockstill, sent along to Overheard In LA, posted by Emma G. Gallegos on 5.26.

The fact that the drunken questioner was ignorant is not a problem. Asking was a constructive and intelligent act on her part. It’s the companions who didn’t know either. Think of that — not one of them had even heard that Gatsby was a fictional rich guy in the 1920s, and that he was created by a writer named F. Scott something. Not even a shard of some aspect of this information welled up in their brains. When I was 19 and drunk at 1:30 am you could have pulled me aside and said “who was Voltaire?” and I would have said, “I dunno, some French guy, writer…why?” I would have at least said that.