Month: May 2014

“This is not very complicated. It really isn’t. It’s prophesied in the Bible and the Bible says that before the beginning of the tribulation which will be in the end times, which I have no doubt we are living in…so therefore [the rapture] could happen tomorrow…the church is going to be called home and caught up in the air and taken to heaven and that’s what this movie’s about.” — Left Behind producer and co-writer Paul Lalonde, explaining the gist of the drama, which Samuel Goldwyn Films will open theatrically on 10.3.

So now we have two rapture/end times dramas to grapple with, both dealing with the sudden disappearance of millions — Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta‘s The Leftovers (HBO, 6.29) and Left Behind, in which poor Nicolas Cage stars. What a humiliation to go from being a legendary, envelope-pushing eccentric in the ’80s and ’90s to acting in…I shouldn’t judge, should I? The fair-minded thing would be to not process Left Behind as Christian ideological dreck mixed with disaster-movie spectacle and…you know, give it a fair shake. But of course it almost certainly is Christian dreck mixed with disaster tropes. What else to expect from a producer-writer who’s openly trying to spread Christian gospel through movies?

Read more

I had never seen this infamous Dick Cavett Show episode (aired on 9.18.70) until a half-hour ago. Honestly. Wow. Shitfaced behavior is often hilarious to other drunks, isn’t it? The idea that these three gifted, accomplished, hard-working guys somehow convinced themselves that vomiting the least intriguing aspects of their personalities onto Cavett’s gray shag carpet…the mind reels.

Read more

Yesterday I posted a piece about (a) the photo-chemical elements of the 202-minute, 70mm roadshow version of John Wayne‘s The Alamo being all but half-ruined, and (b) rights-holder MGM refusing to allow a crowd-funding effort to pay for a 70mm-quality restoration because it’ll make them look like pikers. The piece was called “Alamo‘s Loss Is MGM’s Shame.”

In response to an email about this issue, MGM Senior VP for Library Rights Management Trish Francis issued this statement: “I have spoken with our Technical Services staff who assured me that the film is not in danger of being lost. They proactively and routinely monitor and assess the condition of the various elements of all of MGM’s films and take steps as needed to protect and preserve them. The film is a valuable part of film history and naturally want to protect it. I will mention [the] concerns to the appropriate people.”

Read more

There are two stand-out pull quotes from Kate Aurthur‘s Buzzfeed piece (“No One Really Wants A Nikki Finke Comeback,” 5.30) about the apparent return of Nikki Finke. Her new website will allegedly launch on Monday, 6.2. The quotes are from Finke’s competitors so naturally they’re less than admiring. Quote #1: “She’s powerless at this point. She doesn’t have the work ethic or clout to be able to do what she did years earlier. Quote #2: ““There is an ecosystem in this world that she disrupts and tries to disrupt. In her heyday, she was able to move the news cycle. Toward the end, she was lazy and only doing box office — she was gone before she was gone.” Finke is apparently intending to ignore or declare invalid the part of her contract with Penske Media Corporation, which bought Finke’s Deadline Hollywood in 2009, that forbids her from competing with Deadline before 2016. I’d be lying if I said I’m not interested and intending to read whatever Finke posts, but what are some of the reactions among HE readers?

Yesterday I popped for a pair of tickets to an upcoming Black List Live! performance of Stephany Folsom’s 1969: A Space Odyssey, Or How Kubrick Learned to Stop Worrying and Land on the Moon, a 2013 Black List script. The reading, which Folsom is directing, will happen on Saturday, 6.14.14 at the historic Los Angeles Theatre. The script is about a White House Public Affairs assistant (Kathryn Hahn) who hires Stanley Kubrick (Jared Harris) to stage a fake moon landing in the event that disaster befalls the Apollo 11 mission. Thomas Sadoski and Shannon Woodward will costar.

Parisian car drivers never bully scooter drivers or treat them inconsiderately in any way. Not in my experience, at least. As in Rome, nobody really follows any traffic law except for stopping at red lights. Nobody pays attention to lanes. Well, a bit but not really. You can do what you want as long as you don’t drive like an idiot. Everyone is watching everyone else and small-fry scooters are offered the exact same measure of respect that cars and buses and taxis get. Everyone seems committed to getting along and keeping things cool. I’m sure Paris has its share of clueless assholes whose driving tendencies make things difficult for everyone else, but I haven’t run into a single one yet.

On top of relaxing the Cockatoo diet, I’ve also had two or three cans of Lemon Diet Coke, which disappeared from American shelves a decade or so ago.

Doug Liman‘s Edge of Tomorrow (Warner Bros., 6.6), which I saw last night at a public-access sneak at the Pathe Wepler in Place Clichy, is an A-level, full-throttle, brain-tease-y sci-fi thriller and (don’t take this the wrong way) a videogame movie of the highest order. I realize, obviously, that “videogame movie” is a perjorative but this pleasure puppy knows how to smarten the material and make it seem…well, a bit deeper than it actually is. It’s basically about failing and learning, failing and learning, failing and learning a bit more. It’s Groundhog Day meets Starship Troopers meets Playstation 4. And it’s not overlong or draggy or anything but super-efficient. It’s over before you know it.

The film, written by Chris McQuarrie and the Butterworth brothers (Jez and John-Henry), is about a military campaign to defeat a massive alien invasion of Europe that is much more dominating than anything Nazi Germany managed. (Next Friday’s opening day is the 70th anniversary of the D-Day invasion.) The alien army is composed of “mimics,” which are mechanical spider-octopus monsters that number in the hundreds of thousands and are controlled…is this a spoiler?…by a big, glowing, spherical, electric-blue super-brain called “Omega.”

The hook is that three players — Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt on the weapons-bearing, combat-ready, above-the-title side, plus a nerdy, exposition-providing scientist played by Noah Taylor — are part of a continual time-repeat cycle. (I’m not going to explain how or why.) And throughout the film they’re faced with a series of formidable (i.e., scary as shit) combat challenges and obstructions that can and do result in getting “killed” over and over but instantly reborn each time. This allows them to learn from mistakes and possibly even win if — big “if” — he/she can get past these hurdles and zero in on the Big Target (i.e, “Omega”), which is roughly analogous to the “sum of all intelligence” Mr. Fishbowl guy in William Cameron Menzies‘ Invaders From Mars.

Read more

Read more

I saw David Schecter‘s Life of Crime, an adaptation of Elmore Leonard‘s “The Switch,” at last September’s Toronto Film Festival. Jennifer Aniston, Tim Robbins, Isla Fisher, John Hawkes, Mos Def, Will Forte, Mark Boone, Jr. It doesn’t quite match the enjoyment of reading the book, but it’s a decent stab at capturing Leonard’s low-key vibe and no-big-hurry pacing. That said it’s a bit too glum of heart. It needs to be a little less loser-ish, a little more bouncy…something. The basic plot is similar to Ruthless People (’85) — rich woman kidnapped by loser felons but delighted husband won’t play the ransom, etc. Even though the movie poster is vaguely similar to the hardback book jacket of “The Switch,” shapely gams sticking out of a trunk of a car is a very un-Leonard-like thing. Vegas showgirl gams at that. Of course, gams sticking out of anything is a pitch to the none-too-brights of both genders but particularly to Aniston fans (i.e., older unmarried single women who read supermarket tabloids). But then Leonard’s characters are often none-too-bright themselves so there’s your symmetry.

Freelance film journalist (and Collider contributor) Talia Soghomonian, whom I ran into following Wednesday’s Edge of Tomorrow shut-out on the Champs Elysee.

Read more

I’ve been picking up serious hate and loathing vibes among reactions to Seth McFarlane‘s A Million Ways to Die in the West (Universal, 5.30). It’s early-ish (9 am in New York) so very few ticket-buyers have seen it, but when they do could I get a few reactions? Among critics the main beef seems to be that it’s just not clever or funny enough, certainly not on a Blazing Saddles level. A bit simplistic, I realize, but that’s what I’m reading.

David Cronenberg‘s Maps to the Stars is playing locally, and I, being a fan, wouldn’t mind seeing it again. I was amused when Stars screenwriter Bruce Wagner claimed during the Cannes Film Festival that Evan Bird‘s Benjie Weiss character, a poisonous 13 year-old superstar who immediately summons thoughts of Justin Beiber, wasn’t written or cast with Beiber in mind. A friend told me he ran into Beiber at the AMFAR during the festival. He said he didn’t ask about the Cronenberg film because such a question would have seemed rude given that Wagner had stuck to the party line, etc. “Oh, please!,” I replied. Never trust the artist — trust the tale.