Month: July 2013

Teacher Salami

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“‘The subject of a teacher-student affair may be tabloid fodder,’ the Sundance press notes say about A Teacher, ‘but writer/director Hannah Fidell resists sensationalism or the temptation to pathologize her protagonist.’ I just saw Fidell’s film this afternoon, and boy, was I hoping for a little tabloid sensationalism! Or a touch of pathology. Or a … Read more

NYFF Phillips Splash

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Paul Greengrass‘s Captain Phillips will open the 2013 New York Film Festival on Friday, 9.27. Which means…what, the press screening is three or four days earlier? Greengrass can nail this kind of thing blindfolded with one hand tied. Playing the NYFF, as always, means savoring big media attention without tons of competition. Big frog, smallish … Read more

Shenanigans

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For whatever reason an early request for a press ticket to this evening’s screening of Paul Schrader‘s The Canyons at the Walter Reade theatre was overlooked, and I’ve been struggling to gain admittance since yesterday. I’m told by a well-connected source that one reason for the difficulty is that Dina Lohan (Lindsay’s mom) suddenly announced … Read more

Is Jasmine A Form of Self-Portraiture?

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In Woody Allen‘s Blue Jasmine, Cate Blanchett‘s tragic character “has lost her public identity — indeed, has become something of a pariah. She has lost her money, and she has to find something to do. Allen, of course, also endured (in the early ’90s) the shattering of his public identity and a barrage of hostility; like her, he was rejected by one of his children in the wake of scandal. (And, like her, he’s known to the world under a pseudonym.) But Allen didn’t lose his money and he didn’t lose his ability to work; he didn’t struggle and strive to recover his former status, because he was able to simply keep going forward — and the artistic results have often been wondrous.”

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When Altman Was In Perfect Synch

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I was all over The Player in early 1992 and pushing it like mad with my editors at Entertainment Weekly. It took at least a couple of weeks after I first caught an early-bird screening in…what was it, mid-February?…before EW‘s “News & Notes” section deigned to run a small descriptive paragraph with an enthusiastic quote or two. My opinion (i.e., that it was a hilariously dry and biting satire that had an uncut, beautifully choreographed extended opening sequence and that it would catch on big-time and that Altman had made perhaps the biggest commercial hit of his career) wasn’t notable or newsworthy, of course. I had to find some non-vested types whose reputation mattered, and whose opinion therefore had weight. I knew and could say, in short, but I couldn’t and wouldn’t be heard because I was a freelance reporter and not a hotshot critic. Even if I was a critic I couldn’t have said anything because it was way too early in the cycle.

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Amarcord

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The 2013 Locarno Film Festival program was announced today. 2 Guns. A whole lotta George Cukor. Chinatown and Faye Dunaway. It begins on Wednesday, 8.7, and runs until Saturday, 8.17. A smart, elegant, sophisticated gathering. Locarno is in Switzerland, of course, but it’s really northern Italy in almost every other sense — culturally, atmospherically, architecturally. Scores of gelato stands and foodie joints. Pizza, pasta, etc.

I attended ten years ago with Jett and Dylan, who were then 15 and 14. Europe was suffering at the time through one of the worst heat waves in meteorological history, and I remember how we were constantly damp and sweating. (I remember Roger Ebert‘s face being all pink and sweat-beady during an outdoor discussion panel.) The guys and I took an afternoon swim each and every day in Lake Maggiore.

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Anti-Christian Muslim Author Exposed…Not

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Reza Azlan, author of “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth,” apparently decided that the exposure from a Fox News interview was worth having to field a barrage of prejudicial, bone-dumb questions from “Spirited Debate” host Lauren Green. Azlan’s polite but appalled responses are hilarious. He knows there’s no getting through to idiotic … Read more

Jasmine Is Big

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Approving reviews alone aren’t the reason for the phenomenal opening-weekend haul ($102 grand average on six screens) of Woody Allen‘s Blue Jasmine. It’s approving reviews plus Jasmine being the first taste of an award-calibre “fall movie” (“Okay, so it’s a little early!” as Nehemiah Persoff might have said) plus over-35s being sick to death of … Read more

Rescue This Movie From Disney Marketers

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First the Saving Mr. Banks trailer, which sold the film as something jokier and more comedically cloying than Kelly Marcel‘s first-rate script. And now the one-sheet, which uses adolescent-friendly cartoon silhouettes to indicate the characters played by Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson. It’s saying to the dummies out there, “This movies will be as easy … Read more

No-Go On Slow-Mo

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I really, really don’t like it when directors use slow-mo for action scenes. They should just stage it and shoot it like it looks when it happens for real, and the audience notices what it notices. Slow-mo coolness caught on 46 years ago with the machine-gun death scene in Bonnie and Clyde and then peaked … Read more

ComicCon Seppuku

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“It’s unlikely that the studios are going to drastically change course as the result of one bad summer,” says Variety exec editor Steven Gaydos in a Xan Brooks Guardian piece about Hollywood’s “Summer of Doom.” “However, it is imperative they diversify their slate. They’re laying down too many big bets without anything else on the … Read more

“I Tried To Help You…”

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I’ve been watching the original widescreen version of Elia Kazan‘s East of Eden (1955) since it came out on laser disc in…what was it, ’98 or thereabouts? The reasons I re-watch it every two or three years are (a) the performances — not just James Dean‘s but those from Julie Harris, Jo Van Fleet, Raymond … Read more