Month: July 2014

Before I saw the kidnapping scene in Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Fargo (18 years ago!), I had never heard the word “unguent.” And I haven’t heard it since. If I burn my hand I’ll put vaseline or petroleum jelly on it but the word “unguent” will never be acknowledged, much less spoken. And yet the Coens have some kind of fixation on this word because it’s turned up again on page 50 of their script of Hail Ceasar!, a dryly sardonic period comedy.

Hail Caesar! is actually the title of a Biblical-era film-within-the-film, seemingly based on Quo Vadis. The tone of the Coens’ script is…oh, half Barton Fink and half Burn After Reading…something like that. Pic is currently being cast and will shoot in the fall.

It basically follows the wily maneuverings of George Clooney‘s Eddie Mannix, a real-deal physical production chief and all-around fixer for MGM in the ’50s. Hail Caesar! is set in 1951, and the name of the studio is Capitol Pictures.

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Earlier today TheWrap‘s Steve Pond posted an interview with WETA’s Joe Letteri that includes a discussion prompted by (and referring to) a recent HE riff about Dawn of the Planet of the Apes star Andy Serkis deserving an acting nomination. Serkis has stated in interviews that his performance as Caesar is his own and that WETA has essentially provided “digital makeup.” Letteri’s response: “I know that Andy has used that metaphor of digital makeup before, but I think that he was just trying to explain it to an audience that was not technically very savvy. The difference is that makeup is passive. And the more makeup you put on, the more it actually deadens the performance. [Which is why] we sometimes need to enhance the performance. So yes, we do make those sorts of translations all the time. Sometimes we have to exaggerate it so it reads in camera.”

Hilarious! In a very polite and respectful way, Letteri has helped to kill Serkis’ shot at a Best Actor nomination. Serkis to Letteri backstage at an awards event five or six months hence: “Thanks, Joe!” The best Serkis can hope for at this stage, I guess, is some kind of special Oscar nomination.

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You can tell right away from the teaser that The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 1 (Lionsgate, 11.21) is going to suck eggs. On top of which there’s no validity in an all-white production design scenario any more (not to mention the use of all-white Star Wars drone militia). In any event I prefer the same renegade video-cut-in maneuver in Robert Zemeckis‘s Used Cars (’78).

All the Best Picture contenders feel soft on this or that level. I’ve been hearing for a long while that Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Birdman is a stone knockout and possibly the most home-runnish of the pack, but mainstreamers sometimes resist brilliance because…I don’t know, they don’t find it reassuring or something. People are weird. Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken — sure, okay, but it has to be about something more than “my God, he survived…what strength, what never-say-die spirit!” I’m sorry but that sounds like a Gregorian chant or a church hymn of some kind. Christopher Nolan‘s Interstellar seems soft because Nolan makes brilliant-but-cold films as a rule. J.C. Chandor‘s A Most Violent Year seems soft because a 1980s New York-centric Sidney Lumet crime film doesn’t feel Best Picture-ish, or at least “Best Picture-ish” by the standards of the softies who want love, comfort and reflections of their own struggles, longings and fears. Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Inherent Vice…too diffuse, too stoned, too late ’60s, too Lewbowski-like?

I know this is embarassing, scattershot bullshit. Somebody stop me. Naah, too late.

Ava Duvernay‘s Selma…quite possibly but there are 250 ways to screw up a movie about the ’60s civil rights movement, and if DuVernay thought of 175 of them before she began shooting she’s a genius. However expertly it unfolds, David Fincher‘s Gone Girl will probably register as too cold and ruthless for a Best Picture contender. Jean Marc Vallee‘s Wild…maybe but what can happen during a long hike except perseverance and the kindness of strangers? James Marsh‘s Theory of Everything — this year’s A Beautiful Mind. Jason Reitman‘s Men, Women & Children — a little bit of Ron Howard‘s Parenthood mixed in with a sprinkling of Little Children.

The odds favor Birdman ecstasy in Telluride and Toronto, followed by Mark Harris saying “it’s only September, for God’s sake.”

Breaking: The parting of the Red Sea sequence in Ridley Scott‘s Exodus: Gods and Kings will out-do Cecil B. DeMille‘s backwards water-tank version in The Ten Commandments (1956). Walk like an Egyptian, of course, but first and foremost wear eyeliner like an Egyptian. I really, really like the eyeliner commitment in this thing. Joel Edgerton‘s Ramses looks somewhat weird but that’s the point, I think. I was worried a few months ago that Christian Bale‘s hair might look like a CAA agent’s but that problem has apparently gone away. This is only a teaser allowing for vague impressions. That’s enough for now.

“I have to admit the whole T-shirt thing wasn’t handled as well as it should have been. We didn’t know how the shirts would sell, so when they did we didn’t have enough in stock to satisfy the demand, so we got into this ‘back order’ situation, which then quickly turned into an ‘out of stock’ situation and people just got fed up. But now we’re back, with plenty of shirts in stock and a few new ones to add to the collection. And this is not a threat or a promise, it’s just a fact: all of the T-shirts we offer now will, at some point in the future, become unavailable. Because there’s no rule that everything has to be available all the time, forever. There really isn’t.” — from Steven Soderbergh‘s Extension 765 “threads” page. I’ve ordered a large.

Christoph Waltz as a colorful eccentric is one thing. Perhaps it’s the only thing. But if you ask me he’s more interesting when he’s a bit icy and toned down, as he was in Roman Polanski‘s Carnage. Waltz is apparently back to eccentric in Terry Gilliam‘s The Zero Theorem. I don’t know, man. I’m not too sure about his performance or presence in Tim Burton‘s Big Eyes either. I don’t know anything any more.

A few hours ago I attended a graveside gathering for Jeffrey Ressner, a good friend and a first-rate journalist for Time, Politico, Rolling Stone, The Hollywood Reporter and Cashbox. Ressner died of a heart attack on 6.28. The memorial happened near the crest of a big green slope at the Burbank branch of Forest Lawn Cemetery. The eulogy line that everyone will remember came from producer pal Michael Lynn, who described Ressner as a “melancholy optimist.” Jeff’s interest was mainly in music (he began as a music industry reporter) but he also loved movies, and so I think he would have enjoyed the fact that his final resting place is fairly close to where Lee Marvin‘s “Walker” buried his wife, “Lynn Walker”, in John Boorman‘s Point Blank (’67). Ressner’s longtime partner Rina Echavez, his sister Lise Olsen, DGA Quarterly‘s James Greenberg, Deadline‘s Anita Busch, Amy Dawes, producer-writer Henry Schipper and several others attended.

Tuesday, 7.8.14, 12:45 pm.

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In other words, if the Sharknado 2 producers had invested more money in the visual FX refinements it would somehow detract? The point of these stupid films, in other words, is to be ludicrously self-regarding. But this is Snakes On A Plane territory, and the lesson of that dud is that you can’t ever wink at the audience about anything. You have to play it as straight and earnest as Shakespeare. I’ll probably watch Sharknado 2, but the trailer tells me it won’t be much fun. I’ve no interest in laughing with the actors and the filmmakers and, you know, being nudged in the ribs. I want to laugh at them as they try to make something decent even though they’re doomed, of course, to fail. Because they’re untalented whores.

“With the exception of Kristen Stewart‘s alert, quietly arresting performance as a personal assistant to Juliette Binoche‘s famous, middle-aged actress undergoing an emotional-psychological downshift, Olivier Assayas‘s Clouds of Sils Maria (IFC Films, 12.1) is a talky, rather flat experience. It isn’t Persona or Three Women or All About Eve, although it seems to occasionally flirt with the material that these three films explored and dug into. MCN’s David Poland has written that it sometimes feels like “a female version of My Dinner With Andre” — generous! But on that note I’ll give Poland credit for thinking about this rather airless and meandering chit-chat film more than I did. It just didn’t light my torch. I agree with Poland on one point — it would have been a more interesting film if Assayas has focused more on Stewart and costar Chloe Moretz, who’s more or less playing a version of herself.” — posted on 5.23.14 from the Cannes Film Festival.

I under-described Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood (IFC Films, 7.11) in my initial Sundance review. Calling it “a mild-mannered thing, and yet obviously a mature, perceptive, highly intelligent enterprise” didn’t quite get it. No film in the history of motion pictures has ever delivered Boyhood‘s scope, concept or ingredients — the lives of a young Texas kid (Ellar Coltrane) and his sister (Lorelei Linklater) and their divorced parents (Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette) filmed over 11 or 12 years. So it’s really quite special and, yes, historic in that it captures stage-by-stage growth and aging and the usual surges and setbacks, but it’s also quite well done in each and every way. It’s never less than expert; never less than intriguing or astute or resonant. And yet it’s fair, as I stated last January, to call it “a remarkably novel, human-scale, life-passage stunt film.”

Boyhood grows on you like anything or anyone else that you might gradually get to know over a long stretch, and yet the 160 minutes fly right by. The long-haul scheme naturally gets in the way of what most of us would call a riveting drama. A film of this type is not going to knock you down with some third-act punch. It drip-drip-drips its way into your movie-watching system.

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“This country is too fucking big. I honestly think…in nature, if a cell gets too big, it divides. You can’t come up with a set of rules that’s going to work for 350 million people. You’re just not. So we’re stuck. Robert Kennedy had this great quote: ’20 percent of people are against everything, all the time.’ That’s a big number now. And you know what? ‘No’ is easy. ‘No’ doesn’t require any follow-up, commitment. ‘Yes’ is hard, ‘yes’ has to be worked on. It needs a lot of people to keep it as ‘yes.’ That’s where we’re at. When I’m President, we’re going back to the Thirteen Colonies, is what we’re going to do. It’s a weird time. Because the trajectory…wow, I look around and I’m alarmed. I guess every generation feels that way, I don’t know, but I’m really alarmed. I talk to smart people who work in fields either, you know, neuro-cognition or social analysis, I go, ‘Am I going nuts or is this thing going a certain direction, really fast?’ All of them go, ‘You’re not imagining things.’ And I go, ‘What do we do?’ This could turn into Mad Max, like tomorrow. The fabric is so thin, I feel like.” — Steven Soderbergh to Esquire‘s Mike Ayers in a 7.7. posting.

How far away is “we’re going back to the Thirteen Colonies” and “this could turn into Mad Max” from my suggestion of isolating the rural, under-educated dumb-asses of the South and Midwest by allowing them to fend for themselves in a kind of Slovakia-like splinter nation? I’m not saying Soderbergh is exactly on the same page as me but he’s clearly standing inside the same alarmist ballpark and is thinking about possible solutions that might strike some as a bit radical.