Month: October 2013

This refers to a two-day-old discussion of Russ & Roger Go Beyond, Christopher Cluess‘s screenplay about the making of Russ Meyer‘s Beyond The Valley of the Dolls, which was written by Roger Ebert. I wondered aloud “what Ebert — fat, brilliant, bespectacled, desk-bound — could have possibly known about hot lascivious chicks and the charged sexual atmosphere of the late ’60s.” I said I didn’t know what Roger was up to in the ’60s “but I don’t believe he was up to very much.” Well, I’ve heard some hilarious second-hand stories since I wrote that and…uhm, I’m taking it back. Roger wrote brilliantly and apparently never missed a deadline but he also led quite the ribald life. During the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations, at least. Let’s leave it at that.

I’ve never wanted to attend those Jason Reitman “Live Read” presentations at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. That’s because they always read scripts of already-released films that everyone knows. Why not some hot, not-yet-produced scripts? The cream of the current Blacklist, for instance? Is it Reitman’s presumption that people won’t show up for readings of works they’ve never heard of? Timid thinking. Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Boogie Nights was read during last night’s opener. Taylor Lautner, Don Johnson, Judy Greer, Nick Kroll, Jim Rash, Nat Faxon and Kevin Pollack.

Spike Jonze‘s Her (Warner Bros., 12.8), an operating system love story costarring Joaquin Pheonix, Scarlett Johansson, Amy Adams and Rooney Mara, will close the New York Film Festival tomorrow night. Credentialed New York journalists will see it tomorrow morning at 10 am, and their L.A. counterparts will set tomorrow afternoon at 4:30 pm (i.e., 7:30 pm Manhattan time). The official embargo ends at 11 pm Eastern/8pm Pacific.

This is some kind of come-on for Kimberley Peirce‘s Carrie (MGM/Screen Gems, 10.18), although it’s basically a rigged telekinesis stunt a la Punked. (Or is it? The people freaking out seem like they’re performing. Too much footage, way too many angles.) I don’t know anyone who’s seen this Chloe Moretz film. Even a guy I know who sees everything hasn’t seen it. And I still haven’t heard about any screenings next week. Doesn’t that usually mean something?

George Clooney‘s The Monuments Men (Sony, 12.18) was research-screened Wednesday night in Sherman Oaks. A guy I know attended. Here’s an excerpt: “I don’t know how else a Hollywood treatment of this subject matter could have ended up. Clooney’s job was to direct an efficient film that was entertaining and convincingly dramatic, and he accomplished that. Judging from the responses around me, people were…moved and filled with laughter…enjoying the experience and touched at times.” This also: “Cate Blanchett’s French-accented performance stuck out…her hardened, mistrusting art historian was quite funny at times. Clooney gives himself the best scene towards the end when he sits down with a Nazi and explains the futility of an individual who fought on the wrong side.”

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Here’s an example of how an intriguing Bluray jacket design can make a very old and familiar film seem almost new again. The problem for me is that this 1973 Robert Altman neo-noir…I should probably shut up until I see the disc but my impression, having seen this film nine or ten times, is that it can’t look all that much better in terms of heightened resolution or texture. A Bluray upgrade probably can’t improve that much upon the DVD, or so I suspect. The style of Vilmos Zsigmond‘s widescreen cinematography (always moving, slowly gliding left to right and vice versa, never static) is what matters. He shot inventively but under an Elliott Kastner budget. Maybe the soundtrack will be improved.

Earlier today Deadline‘s Michael Fleming urged director Paul Greengrass and producer Scott Rudin to get going on Memphis, their long-gestating docudrama about the last chapter in the life of Martin Luther King. Fleming wrote this because (a) he’s apparently a fan of the Memphis script, but mostly because (b) Oliver Stone and Jamie Foxx are reportedly interested in making some kind of sprawling King biopic with DreamWorks and Warner Bros. Except he doesn’t mention something that Greengrass told me at the after-party for the recent Captain Phillips premiere in Los Angeles. Greengrass had cast an Atlanta-based preacher — apparently an eloquent speech-giver and sermonizer — to play King in Memphis, but the poor guy passed away “three or four months ago,” a friend confides. Greengrass was dispirited by this loss (he didn’t want to go into it during our chat but it was clearly a sore subject for him) and apparently lost his directorial mojo as a result. Or something like that. I should have pushed for more information but an instinct told me to go easy. The next day I tried to learn the preacher’s name but got nowhere. I cold-called three or four feature casting agencies in Atlanta…zip. All I know is what Greengrass told me.

Here are four of fourteen just-released posters from Lars Von Trier‘s Nymphomaniac. Proving once again that sex instantly loses its allure when you go graphic and explicit. Especially under bright lights. As tens of thousands of cheaply shot porn films have made clear. Which doesn’t mean that Von Trier’s film is necessarily reflective of these. Nobody knows anything, but Stellan Skarsgard…wow.

Gold Derby‘s Paul Sheehan reported this morning that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association had decided to classify Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy‘s Before Midnight, easily one of 2013’s best films, as a comedy. While this gives the Sony Classics release a shot at winning a Golden Globe award for Best Motion Picture Comedy/Musical, which is fine, there’s only one moment in the entire film that delivers an actual laugh — when Hawke calls Delpy “the mayor of Crazy Town.” But that’s okay. It’s engages start to finish with bright talk and a nice zingy back-and-forth quality, and that’s all the Globey guys need.

Dallas Buyer’s Club (Focus Features, 11.1), sure to snag nominations for costars Matthew McConaughey (Best Actor) and Jared Leto (Best Supporting Actor), is an inspirational fact-based drama about an actual guy (the late Ron Woodruff) going through a very tough time but doing himself proud in the end. So why is the poster telling us that McConaughey’s Woodruff is smooth, cocky and cool? Because the poster guys want the film to look glamorous and inviting. To hell with the fact that Jean Marc Vallee‘s fact-based film is tough, real and honest. Let the ticket buyers figure that out later. Dallas Buyer’s Club is having a big invitational screening on 10.17 in Los Angeles. I’ll be there with bells on.

In a recently posted Rotten Tomatoes q & a interview, Nebraska‘s Alexander Payne discusses Gravity in a way that I found…well, amusing. RT’s Luke Goodsell tells Payne that “one of the things that’s constant in your career is that you seem attracted to stories about characters in transition, if not outright life crisis. Is there a particular appeal to that kind of scenario?” And Payne says, “Am I really alone in that? Aren’t all great stories about characters in transition? Isn’t it always about character revealed through times of major or minor life crisis?”

Goodsell: “A lot of great movies, yes, but not all of them. You’re right in that you’re not alone in that, it just seems like a very defining trait across your films.

Payne: “I don’t know what to say about it. I’ll think about it. [Laughs] I appreciate the observation but yeah, I don’t know. What’s a movie that doesn’t have that? Even…you know, I just saw Gravity — I’m just pulling this out of a hat because I saw it the other day — and it’s Sandra Bullock in the haunted house, right, but in space?

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I saw the slightly shortened cut of Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska (Paramount, 11.15) last night, and this morning I tapped out a letter to Payne. About halfway through I figured I might as well share it. We’re all talking to each other in the open these days so what the hell. I began by saying that Mark Orton‘s theme music “really sunk in last night. I heard and felt it in Cannes, of course, but last night was different. It got to me on some deeper, more vulnerable level. I tried to buy the Nebraska soundtrack online but it’s not available until mid November. I really want to share that theme (the main-title music heard in the beginning) in the column so people can get into a bit before the film opens.

“Secondly I’m wondering what happened to Will Forte‘s indoor chat (in a gift shop or a post office) with that older pretty woman in that home town (i.e., the one that Bruce Dern came from and which Stacy Keach lives in) at the very end. This woman knew Dern way back when and has a thing or two that she remembered about him, but in the new cut that scene is gone — she’s just standing on the sidewalk and looking at Dern and Forte as they pass by in the truck. That was a poignant moment she had with Forte, I thought, in the Cannes version. It worked. Tell me if I’m wrong but I wasn’t dozing off and I didn’t hit the bathroom at all during last night’s screening. Update: For some mysterious reason I didn’t process this scene even though it’s included in the new cut.

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