Month: June 2013

We’ve all been reading about how Guillermo del Toro‘s Pacific Rim (Warner Bros., 7.12) isn’t tracking as well as Grown-Ups 2 and yaddah-yah. Well, a highly-positioned industry figure with an interest in Pacific Rim‘s fate is disputing, to wit:

“These tracking reports are exaggerated, snarky and premature,” he wrote. “We started our campaign last week. We had focused on the core group, which is the most vital group for this film. Since then and as of today’s tracking we are steadily rising in a significant way. We are getting on track. The sensationalist headlines about Grown-Ups 2 are just that. Even a slight contextualizing shows that any sequel or reboot has much bigger built-in awareness than a new property with no stars. The numbers they were quoting were the early numbers from last week. There is also a fundamental truism in the summer, which is that your tracking always pops much later in the campaign.”

Sometime earlier today (perhaps as I as attending the James Gandolfini funeral?), Salt and Clear and Present Danger director Phillip Noyce told NBC News that (a) Edward Snowden is a great subject for “a suspenseful film with some comedic elements”, (b) that Noyce would love to make such a film, and (c) that Liam Hemsworth is an ideal choice to play Snowden.

“This is a movie that’s playing out before our eyes, even though we can’t see anything,” Noyce said. “We can’t see the hero or the villain — the central character. Like Salt, it’s a story where you’re not quite certain if you’re dealing with a heroine or a villain. And we may not be certain until the end of the movie or even beyond that. That’s a beautiful duality to deal with when you’re making a story or watching a movie. You can speculate he’s motivated by complete unselfish motives through belief in protecting worldwide public interests. Or you can speculate he was himself a victim of knowing that notoriety might bring him immortality.”

I got hated on big-time for tweeting about having crashed James Gandolfini‘s funeral this morning at Manhattan’s St. John The Divine. Yes, I flippantly used the term “funeral crasher!” because that’s what I was. But it’s the singer, not the song. The haters ignored the fact that I (a) asked for God’s forgiveness in having crashed, (b) ascribed my crashing success to the intervention of angels, and (c) said that I crashed with reverence and respect for James, David Chase and all the “made” Sopranos guys. The rush-to-judgment pissheads simply weren’t listening. They never do. They’re scolds…shrill finger-wagging scolds going “tut-tut!” and “no, no, no!”

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Famed fashion and portrait photographer Bert Stern, 83, died this morning at his home in New York City. His passing was announced by his wife, filmmaker Shannah Laumeister (Bert Stern: Original Madman), whom Stern married in 2009. I’m a huge fan of this doc — I went apeshit for it last March and April. A brilliant, zeitgeist-defining photographer during his late ’50s to mid ’70s heyday, Stern had been suffering from unspecified old-age maladies and had recently been treated at Manhattan’s Beth Israel hospital.

Bert Stern (1929 — 2013)

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A recently posted Vanity Fair piece containing choice portions of an extended 1988 Ava Gardner interview given to biographer Peter Evans includes the following about Mickey Rooney, Gardner’s first husband: “I still didn’t know that he was the biggest wolf on the lot,” Gardner says. “He was catnip to the ladies. He knew it, too. The little sod was not above admiring himself in the mirror. All five foot two of him! He probably banged most of the starlets who appeared in his Andy Hardy films, Lana Turner among them. She called him Andy Hard-on. Can we say that…Andy Hard-on?”

“He wasn’t what I’d call a handsome may-an, and his shortness surprised me, but there was definitely something appealing about him. He had thick, red-blond wavy hair, crinkly Irish green eyes, and a grin that was…well, it definitely wasn’t innocent, honey, I can tell you that!”

15 days after Tablet‘s David Mikics previewed Ben Urwand‘s The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact With Hitler, about collaboration between the big studios and the Nazi regime during the 1930s, N.Y. Times reporter Jennifer Schuessler has reviewed the basics and spoken to Urwand. (The book isn’t out yet.)

“What [Hollywood] wanted was access to German audiences,” the Tablet piece reads. “What Hitler wanted was the ability to shape the content of Hollywood movies — and he got it.”

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As a fan of Jeff Garlin‘s I Want Someone To Eat Cheese With and given the smart-sounding dialogue in the trailer, I’m definitely into seeing Dealin’ With Idiots (IFC Films, 7.12, VOD and iTunes). Official obit: “Faced with the absurd competitiveness surrounding his son’s youth league baseball team, comedian Max Morris (Garlin) acquaints himself with the parents and coaches of the team (Gina Gershon, Fred Willard, Bob Odenkirk, JB Smoove, Richard Kind, Kerri Kenny-Silver) — not just to help his kid but to find material for his next film.

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A female fight broke out during the closing minutes of last night’s Lincoln Square promotional screening of White House Down. Screaming, slapping, wailing, shouting. Crazy violence on the screen and crazy violence in the seats. It was absolutely fantastic — almost like that Radio City Music Hall scene in Alfred Hitchcock‘s Saboteur in which a shooting scene on the big screen is mirrored by real-life gunplay between the cops and Norman Lloyd‘s “Frye.”

It happened between (a) two 20something African-American chicks (I’m using that term with air quotes) who were sitting directly in front of me and (b) another pair in the row in front of them and off to the center — a spirited X-factor white girl and her African-American friend.

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In his Hollywood Reporter review of Roland Emmerich‘s White House Down (Sony, 6.28), David Rooney says that a Keystone Cops car-chase sequence in which the presidential limo and some bad guy pursuers go tear-assing around the White House south lawn with chunks of turf flying high…Rooney says this scene is “played partly for laughs.” The word “partly” tells me all I need to know about Rooney’s understanding of this self-mocking action slapstick satire. On one level he seems to get WHD but on another level he doesn’t. Or at least, not in the way the crowd did last night at an AMC Lincoln Square promotional screening (which culminated with a real-life slapdown brawl between four 20something women who’d been mouthing off at each other). WHD isn’t entirely played for laughs, but the tonal overlap between it and the Marx Brothers‘ Duck Soup is not, in my view, incidental or unintended.

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Celebrated in international markets as the steel-abbed action hero most favored by submental cretins, Jason Statham has demonstrated time and again his commitment to B-grade action fare. (The only exceptions have been Roger Donaldson‘s The Bank Job — easily Statham’s best — and that brief cameo in Michael Mann‘s Collateral.) Here’s an office-chat interview with MTV.com’s Josh Horowitz in which Statham talks aout Redemption (a.k.a., Hummingbird), which some are describing as a cut (or at least a half-cut) above. Pic opens on 6.28.

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Who thinks of John McTiernan‘s Die Hard With A Vengeance (’85) as a really good one? I think of it as a relatively decent franchise place-holder, I guess, but nothing to hyperventilate over. (Jeremy Irons‘ baddie was tediously kinky.) The second best was Renny Harlin‘s Die Hard 2…right? Dulles Airport, heavy snowstorm, etc. In any event I can’t imagine anyone feeling any excitement upon hearing that White House Down (which premieres tonight at NYC’s Ziegfeld, and which I’ll be seeing this evening at another venue) the best since Die Hard With A Vengeance…Jesus.