Month: January 2014

I’ve never related to Gov. Chris Christie‘s blustery pugnacious manner, but on some perverse level I don’t mind it. I’m a New Jersey guy from way back so I get that kind of personality. At least Christie isn’t a blow-dried phony — he is what he is. And he’s a kind of moderate Republican, at least compared to the Tea Party wackos. (Okay, maybe he isn’t.) I was really looking forward to a highly combustible presidential primary battle between Christie and Rand Paul, and particularly a contest between Christie and Hillary Clinton for the White House itself. I guess that’s not going to happen now.

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“Take Jake Gyllenhaal‘s lonely OCD decoder in Zodiac and [then] split him in two with one version schlumpy and Adam Goldberg-like and the other like Ryan Gosling on a motorbike. Mix in Eyes Wide Shut‘s plinking/cagey ‘sex party’. [Use] talent agency and university settings as nondescript/sterile as the stockbroker firm in American Psycho. Throw a curveball with inexplicable video-store detours from ye olden times. Stir it all together for a Franz Kafka stew.

“Add a sprinkling of Isabella Rossellini and two blonde love interests — Melanie Laurent and Sarah Gadon — who are both confusingly disappointed. You’re sleeping with Gyllenhall, ladies. Cheer the fuck up!

“Do all that and you might get this eery, compelling, off-putting, possibly slight but mercifully tight (90 minutes) cinematic adaptation of Jose Saramago’s “The Double” (’02).

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Jason Reitman‘s Labor Day (Paramount, 1.31), which I saw and reviewed five months ago at the 2013 Telluride Film Festival, has been all but decimated by critics. An abysmal 32% on Rotten Tomatoes, a not-much-better 52% on Metacritic. Here’s my 8.29.13 review, which was titled “Reitman’s Film Doesn’t Work”:

Jason Reitman‘s Labor Day is a decently crafted, amber-lighted period drama, based on the 2009 Joyce Maynard book and set during the Labor Day holiday of 1987, about…well, it’s hard to put into a succinct sentence. It begins as a kind of home invasion situation that isn’t quite a hostage or kidnapping thing. It’s a family love story of sorts mixed with a criminal-hiding-out-in-the-home-of-a-single-neurotic-mom-and-her-son story.

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“I asked Anne Hathaway about the Judy Garland biopic (based on Gerald Clarke’s 2000 biography “Get Happy“) that she and the Weinstein Co. have been developing for…what, three or four years? In 2010 she told a BBC interviewer that ‘it’s a very sensitive project…we’re really trying to get it right so we’re taking our time with it…very, very slow incremental steps.’ Hathaway told me that last August Harvey Weinstein told President Obama that the film would happen ‘within a couple of years.’ Hathaway is tallish (5′ 8″ but nearly my height with three-inch heels) and Garland, she said, was not quite five feet. So she’ll have to do a Marion Cotillard-in-La Vie In Rose (i.e., acting on large-scale sets with large-scale props).” — from a 12.15.12 post about a Les Miserables party at Spago.

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Following the Santa Barbara Film Festival’s opening-night screening of Mission Blue, director Fisher Stevens (r.) festival director Roger Durling (l.). I arrived a half-hour after film began, and they wouldn’t let me in — sold out. Mission Blue will also play at the Berlin Film Festival.

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