Month: December 2013

“Like Dylan, Jagger or the Band, Leonardo DiCaprio is working himself into a sweat to seduce us — on one level because that’s just what Belfort did to his cronies and victims; on another because he wants our respect and awe, if not our love or affection,” writes Film Comment‘s Max Nelson in a Wolf of Wall Street piece.

“In this respect, the key scene is Belfort’s extended motivational speech to the office near the film’s halfway point. It’s a masterful piece of rhetoric, with DiCaprio assuming a role somewhere between a hellfire Baptist preacher and a general gearing his troops up for battle. By the end, he has his listeners standing on desks thumping their chests and chanting rhythmically, like the crowd at a rock concert or the new converts at a camp meeting.”

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“When I got the material, I didn’t like the character. But by the time we got to shooting, I loved her. She’s a badass who’s making lemonade with no fucking lemons.” — Australian actress Margot Robbie, 23, speaking to Elle about her Wolf of Wall Street character, Nadine. What does that lemonade quote even mean?

Presumably Robbie understands that just being (a) hot and (b) really electric and standout-ish as Leonardo DiCaprio‘s tough, gold-digging wife isn’t enough. She needs to figure out the next thing (whatever that might be), and she has maybe 18 months to do that. Pic taken on the red carpet before last night’s Wolf premiere screening at the Ziegfeld. I’m really sorry I’m not at the WoWS luncheon now underway at the Four Seasons.

It’s thrilling that the Ape prequels, based on a mostly low-rent franchise that ran from the late ’60s through the mid ’70s, are turning out to be visionary grade-A entertainments in the classic mold. The reason that Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is going to turn out well, I suspect, is because of director Matt Reeves, who did a bang-up job with 2010’s Let Me In, a remake of Let The Right One In.

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As a way of promoting and honoring the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s now-launching George Cukor series, I was just asked to name my favorite Cukor film. I know what I’m supposed to select. Pat and Mike. A Star Is Born. Holiday. The Philadelphia Story. Definitely not Let’s Make Love or My Fair Lady. But I have a soft spot for Cukor’s last film, Rich and Famous (’81). Not because it’s his “best” work, but because it contains the most openly gay scene he ever shot (i.e., Jackie Bissett doing the hunky Matt Lattanzi, whom she’s only met a couple of hours earlier, in her hotel room). By all reports Cukor was more or less pleasantly closeted all his life, but of course this had to be unpleasant. So two years before he died he “came out,” in a sense, with this scene. I remember discussing this with a gay journalist friend after we saw Rich and Famous at Magno Screening 30 years ago.

If it weren’t for sour-faced scolds like N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick, the Rotten Tomatoes rating for Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (Paramount, 12.25) would be in the 90s, which is certainly where the Best Film of the Year deserves to be. So far it’s at 89%, which is obviously fine but man, that Lumenick! He actually calls it “shapeless” — trust me, this is one of the fastest moving three-hour films in cinematic history — and “pointless.” Earth to Lou: when you get past the Belfort particulars it’s a portrait of the financially drunken orgy that American elites have been enjoying since the Reagan deregulations of the ’80s. In this context it’s probably fair to say that Wolf has a point.

Taken this morning by Jett Wells.

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In the view of the gifted if blunt-spoken Harlan Ellison, Saving Mr. Banks is “bullshit from one end to the other.” It’s about “the dead hand of Walt Disney reaching up from Missouri…even in death…it’s not about P.L. Travers, who has been reviled by this movie [as] a hateful, spiteful, intransigent woman…this movie is about Walt Disney…it’s about burnishing Disney’s reputation…half of it is made up, and despite what you see in the picture, P.L. Travers went to her grave despising the movie of Mary Poppins.”

John Cusack plays a fiendish sniper in Magnet Releasing’s Grand Piano (Tunes/On Demand on 1.30.14, in theaters 3.7.14), threatening concert pianist Elijah Wood with death if he plays “one wrong note.” It’s a good idea for a thriller because the metaphor applies to all public-arena performing in the 21st Century. One wrong note and you are dead. I hang my ass out on Hollywood Elsewhere 24/7, and if I write anything that rubs anyone the wrong way even a little bit, I get shot, zinged and slapped around by a lurking army of snarkers, haters, p.c. brownshirts, etc. So don’t tell me.

When real-life Wolf of Wall Street kingpin Jordan Belfort did time at the Taft Federal Correctional Institute, his cellmate was Tommy Chong of Cheech and Chong. Chong was popped by Bush administration prosecutors for financing and promoting Chong Glass/Nice Dreams, an online drug paraphernalia enterprise. He did nine months at Taft from 10.8.03 to 7.7.04. Josh Gilbert‘s AKA Tommy Chong, a 2005 doc that played seven and a half years ago at the Film Forum, tells the whole story.

A 12.16 Wrap story by Josh Dickey took note of the Peter O’Toole-in- Lawrence of Arabia art that’s painted on the wall of of an old-Spanish-style building on the Sony Studios lot. A correction says that “an earlier version of this post suggested that Sony put the banner up after O’Toole’s death as a tribute; the studio says it’s been there for some time.” 20-odd years, actually. The Lawrence art was part of a $100 million architectural makeover Sony paid for in the early ’90s.