Day: June 29, 2013

Woody Allen‘s Blue Jasmine (Sony Classics, 7.26) starts screening next week, and in concert with this is an exquisitely written Charles McGrath interview piece with Allen in the Wall Street Journal. Choice information: “[Jasmine is] based on a story Allen’s wife, Soon-Yi, told him about a woman she knew whose lifestyle became suddenly downsized after a financial disaster. Cate Blanchett plays a pill-popping, vodka-swigging East Side sophisticate married to a Waspy version of Bernie Madoff (Alec Baldwin). When he’s found out, she loses everything and has to move into the San Francisco apartment of her adoptive sister — a bagger at a grocery store — and her two mouth-breathing sons.

“The story is more serious than comic, and though it’s hard to take your eyes off her, the Blanchett character isn’t always likable. Will it work at the box office? Allen can’t stop to worry about that. He’s already at work on the next one.”

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N.Y. Times reporter Brooks Barnes and script doctor Jordan Roberts came up with a fairly ridiculous pitch for a Washington, D.C.-based Hollywood blockbuster — deliberately bad, but only a step or two beyond the $150 million films that are getting made these days — and showed it to producer Lynda Obst and other Hollywood sharpies. To call their responses deeply depressing isn’t the half of it. Q: What do you call 500 production execs who subscribe to this insane megacorporate mentality about gambling big on elephantine, CG-driven bullshit movies…what do you call these guys at the bottom of the Philippine trench? A: A good start.

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“Because [big fat-ass blockbusters] need to attract the biggest global audience possible, they are increasingly manufactured by committees who tug this way and pull that way,” Barnes writes. “Marketing needs this, international distribution needs that. The all-too-common result is a Frankenfilm, a lumbering behemoth composed of misfit parts.

“When they work, there is a box office bonanza. Studios this year have rejoiced over The Hangover Part III, World War Z and Iron Man 3. When they don’t — well, it’s After Earth or John Carter. (The next big-budget movies to face judgment are The Lone Ranger with Johnny Depp and Pacific Rim, a robots-versus-monsters movie from Guillermo del Toro.)”

You’re reading A.O. Scott‘s review of The Heat, and he states early on that the film, directed by Bridesmaid‘s Paul Feig, has broken a sexism barrier by being the first cop-boddy comedy without guys. It “wears its feminism lightly and proudly, though not always comfortably,” he says. And yet it’s “a fairly standard summertime R-rated comedy, which I guess could be described as a kind of progress.” In other words, it’s bad but not altogether bad given the feminist breakthrough this film has achieved…if you want to be generous about it.

“A simpler, and probably more relevant, way to describe this movie would be to say that it’s around two hours of Melissa McCarthy spewing profanity while Sandra Bullock cringes, flutters her arms and sighs in exasperation. If you need another reason to see it, I can’t in good conscience supply one, since the story is sloppy and thin, many of the jokes are strained or tired, and the level of violence is a bit jarring. But the volatile chemistry between Ms. McCarthy and Ms. Bullock is something to behold, and carries The Heat through its lazy conception and slapdash execution.

The Heat “is not a very good movie,” he says in paragraph #8. “Its script is a rehash of the obvious and the pointless, without the knowing self-mockery of 21 Jump Street. And it suffers from the familiar, crippling desire to be naughty without risking offense. So there are jokes at the expense of albinos and people with Boston accents and halfhearted race- and class-based gags.”

I ought to just man up and pay the ticket price and see this, but I honestly don’t know if I can take it. Honestly.

Does Sylvester Stallone have any idea how good it would be for his reputation and karma to make a prison-escape movie in the vein of Don Siegel‘s Escape From Alcatraz? This Escape Plan trailer indicates the opposite. It suggets that the film will be some idiot-level, power-pumped macho testosterone ghoulash aimed at the “international market” — i.e., not-very-discerning under-25 males in Manila, Bangkok, Riyadh, Sofia, Johannesburg and Seoul.

The above is Steve McQueen‘s final line in Robert Wise‘s The Sand Pebbles (’66). It’s also what Roland Emmerich, Amy Pascal and Sony marketing guys are asking each other this morning with White House Down having underperformed yesterday (earning less than Olympus Has Freakin’ Fallen) but also…choke, cough, sputter…After Earth. Jesus! This means, presumably, that the not-that-hip, not-that-aware popcorn-munchers said to themselves “eff this noise…we just saw this movie with Gerard Butler and Aaron Eckhart and Morgan Freeman, and that one sucked so why let ourselves in for more punishment?”

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Who am I? What’s wrong with me? Why didn’t I try and write more Thursday night and especially Friday after filing the Gandolfini thing on Thursday? Because I’m a sensitive, intelligent individual and my feelings were hurt. I felt stung, morose, detached, weak in the knees. I needed to heal, I guess. And I needed to walk around the city and buy shoe trees and lose umbrellas (it rains, I buy one at Duane Reade, and I go to a screening or something and leave it there) and just “be.” Everybody goes through these interludes and time-outs. I do them a couple of times a year. The rest of the time I’m a hammer.

Since returning a week ago I’ve seen The Way Way Back, White House Down, Stuck in Love, Pacific Rim and Our Nixon…which I saw the night before last. (A conflict kept me away from the all-media screening of The Heat, and this didn’t sink in until two days after.) I can and will write about Stuck and Way Way Back (which is quite good as far as this kind of smart, well-acted, Fox Searchlighty, mid-range, modestly scaled character material tends to go) today or tomorrow. But I can’t write about Rim until much later.

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