Month: May 2014

The first Annie trailer popped on March 5th or thereabouts. Now we have a newbie, which is smartly cut and rhythmic and so on, but which basically delivers the same spunk and pizazz. We’ll probably see version #3 sometime around Labor Day, and then version #4 in early November. And then it opens on 12.19. So eight more months of this and then the Oscar campaign, which HE, of course, will be delighted to banner. It still looks like spirited wealth porn, which there’s an audience for above and beyond the fans of the stage musical and the 1982 John Huston-directed screen version. As I said before, if the new Annie turns out to be half-decent Quvenzhane Wallis…well, let’s see what happens.

Ari Folman‘s The Congress debuted at Director’s Fortnight in Cannes a year ago and got all kinds of nice attention and good reviews. Then it more or less vanished. Now it’s being trailered for commercial release on 8.29 via Drafthouse Films and Films We Like, but it feels like old news at this point. Robin Wright, more or less playing herself, agrees to be digitally replicated for use in various media but, of course, there are complications. Costarring Kodi Smit-McPhee, Danny Huston, Harvey Keitel and Paul Giamatti. The title is awful, a non-starter.

Quentin Tarantino in Cannes a few days ago: “As far as I’m concerned, digital projection and DCPs is the death of cinema as I know it. It’s not even about shooting your film on film or shooting your film on digital. The fact that most films now are not presented in 35 millimeter means that the war is lost. And digital projections, that’s just television in public. And apparently the whole world is okay with television in public, but what I knew as cinema is dead.” HE response: Except for an apparently still-unsolved problem with inky blacks, digital projection is heaven for me. Movies these days don’t just look better on big screens — they look and sound extraordinary. QT is just sentimentally or romantically attached to the organic 35mm experience of the ’70s, which Grindhouse was a huge tribute to. He can have it. Too many green scratches and sound pops, not to mention those occasional faulty reel changes. I used to be a projectionist so don’t tell me. Eight at the gate.

In Ryan Murphy and Larry Kramer‘s The Normal Heart (HBO, now airing), a wrenching drama about the dawn of the AIDS crisis in the ’80s, Mark Ruffalo‘s Ned Weeks, a stand-in for Kramer, angrily pushes an initially resistant gay community and the political establishment to face up to the epidemic and stop hiding their heads in the sand. In the view of N.Y. Times critic Neil Genzlinger, Ruffalo/Weeks “is incredibly irritating (as he’s supposed to be)…all annoyance, all the time; no empathy for him allowed, even though, at this point, we know he is on the right side of history.”

Read more

There’s a passage in Tom O’Neil and Michael Musto‘s just-posted Gold Derby discussion of the upcoming June 8th Tony Awards that caught my attention. Musto predicts that Byran Cranston will win Best Actor for his ball-of-fire portrayal of Lyndon Johnson in All The Way (which I saw earlier this month), but his caveat about Cranston not really playing the “laconic” Johnson Musto remembers is beside the point. (Here’s the mp3.) He’s correct in observing that in public appearances Johnson was no firecracker and did, as Musto notes, sound a little bit “like Huckleberry Hound.” But even though he doesn’t attempt to mimic Johnson’s laid-back South Texas drawl, Cranston is playing the real, behind-the-scenes, wheeler-dealing LBJ — the man behind the curtain.

Read more

In a 5.25 article about Medium, a site/app for telling and reading stories, N.Y. Times “Media Equation” columnist and ex-Bagger David Carr has ignited a mini-Twitter shitstorm by calling the Evan Williams-led operation behind Medium a “platisher,” which Sulia CEO Jonathan Glick defined last February as “both a platform and a publisher.” The Twitter reaction to Carr’s mention of the term was instantaneous. No way, get outta here, shove it, etc. Why the hostility? I can only explain my resistance. A new term works or not depending on the sound of it. If it sounds fleet and cool, it’s in. If it sounds twerpy or dorky, forget it. Nonsensical as this may sound, platisher sounds to me like a mixture of platypus and phisher. Nuff said. Into the wolf pit like Ernest Borgnine in The Vikings…”Odin!!!”

Read more

It always bothers me when old-time Hollywood guys use the word “called” in a certain context. Older actresses and foreign-born filmmakers never do this — it’s only and always the former big-shot males of age 70 or older. Guys whose careers have slowed down a bit and who are looking to gently remind the listener that they were once flush with success. It happens when they mention a famous film, play or TV show that they had something significant to do with. Instead of saying “and then we put our heads together and made Coming Home,” they’ll say “and then we put our heads together and made a film called Coming Home.” “Called” is code for “the film/play/TV show had a huge impact and our lives were greatly enhanced as a result, even to this day.” Nothing criminal in a little boasting — it’s just irksome. It’s classier to avoid the embellishment. Listen to Martin Scorsese when he talks about the old days. He’ll never say “and then we made a film called Mean Streets” — he’ll just say “and then we made Mean Streets.” No biggie.

“Bad behavior online is so common that it has generated its own typology of abuse. ‘Flaming’ is to engage in a deeply personal and angry war of words across an online discussion. ‘Griefing’ is repeatedly to torment someone, mostly through abuse in an online forum. A ‘troll’ is someone who intentionally disrupts online communities, most often under a pseudonym, and the activity of ‘trolling’ is so widespread that the online Urban Dictionary lists dozens of rival definitions — ‘being a prick on the internet because you can is the most succinct.” — from a 5.23 Financial Times piece by John Sunyer. I’ve been flamed a few times and even griefed once or twice, and Lord knows HE has seen its share of pricks and trolls. But things haven’t been too bad around here lately, which is nice. Truly malignant commenters have been relatively few and far between. I’ll zotz someone every so often but that’s par for the course.

I was going to catch Bryan Singer‘s X-Men: Days of Future Past at the Pathe Wepler tonight but I think I’ll wait until tomorrow — too popular, long lines, sold-out houses, etc. $90.7 million domestic by tonight, $110 million by tomorrow night (bigger than Avatar), $171 million foreign, $261.8 million worldwide. There’s almost a 20-point difference between the 91% Rotten Tomatoes score vs. the 74% Metacritic rating. That means there’s a little grumbling going on so what’s the HE verdict? It’s okay to rave, of course, but does anyone hold with Amy Nicholson’s view that “there’s not a line of dialogue that isn’t exposition, as though screenwriter Simon Kinberg feared that if he stopped drilling home his messages about peace, love, and social panic, we might think we were simply [looking] to have fun…it’s like discovering your box of Milk Duds is really chocolate-covered vitamins.” Or Robbie Collin’s opinion that it “squanders both of its casts, reeling from one fumbled set-piece to the next…it seems to have been constructed in a stupor, and you watch in a daze of future past.” A stupor?

Not long before Friday night’s Isla Vista mass killing, 22 year-old Elliot Rodger apparently sent a 106,000-word biography called “My Twisted World” to a Santa Barbara TV station. Here, apparently, is the document. It makes for very creepy reading. Sad, curious, at times horrifying. A tolerable writer, Rodger relates his story in relatively clear terms. I’ve never read an explanation of a mass killing quite as personal or elaborate as this one.

Rodger was very much a child of the entertainment industry and no stranger to occasional privelege. Hotshot industry dad (documentarian, second-unit director, photographer) and an actress stepmom. Even his shrink, Dr. Charles Sophy, is an author who’s appeared several times on the tube.

Read more

In a 5.24 post, Badass Digest‘s Devin Faraci says he’s hearing that the Marvel problems (Edgar Wright quitting Ant-Man, Drew Goddard leaving Daredevil, Marvel wrestling control of Thor: The Dark World away from director Alan Taylor) ) are “coming from higher up than [Marvel topper] Kevin Feige — Disney execs are sticking their fingers into the Marvel pie. Marvel [has] always been autocratic but things have been getting uglier over there for some time, especially now that Disney is getting involved. Why would the studio fuck with the division that’s making money and having a huge cultural impact right when they’re at their best? Because of dumb egos. Hollywood is dumb, run by dumb, venal people, and the executives who aren’t creative resent the people who are, and want to get their stink on the movies.”

We all remember Edward Woodward as The Equalizer back in the mid to late ’80s — a tough, disciplined loner who helped people who lacked the courage or strength or resources to stand up to bad guys who were giving them trouble. Anyone who saw Denzel Washington as “Creasy” in Tony Scott‘s Man on Fire knows that he’s a perfect choice to succeed Woodward in a film version of The Equalizer (Columbia, 9.26), but the trailer is indicating (to me at least) that director Antoine Fuqua is no Scott and that Richard Wenk‘s script might be on the primitive side…maybe. Let’s hope not.