Day: October 2, 2014

Vice‘s Keegan Hamilton is reporting that North Korea’s Supreme Dictator Kim Jong-un, 31, has either been removed from power or has at least been seriously challenged by the country’s Organization and Guidance Department (OGD), “a powerful group of officials that have allegedly stopped taking orders from the dictator and have effectively taken control of the country.” Kim “has been absent from public view for nearly a month and was last seen walking with a pronounced limp during a July ceremony commemorating the death of his grandfather, Kim Il-sung,” he explains. “The South Korean news agency Yonhap cited anonymous sources saying that Kim, a heavy smoker who has become markedly plump since assuming the role of dictator, is ‘suffering from gout, along with hyperuricemia, hyperlipidemia, obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure.'” If Hamilton’s report is echoed elsewhere and picks up steam, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg‘s The Interview (Sony, 12.25), a comedy about two lightweight TV news guys (Rogen, James Franco) goaded by the CIA into assassinating Kim Jong-un, won’t have as much relevancy. How can Rogen-Goldberg not be at the very least concerned if not worried?

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Excuse me for not jumping on this trailer when it popped three hours ago — I was walking around the West Village on this, one of the most perfect warm fall nights ever. Watch it with the sound on and then off. This is great stuff. I’m sensing an Eastwood surge.

Deadline‘s Anita Busch and Mike Fleming have tapped out a piece about Midnight Rider director Randall Miller trying to get back to work. He’s been quietly assembling a similar-type film called Slick Rock Trail. The Deadline guys are calling it a drama about “a washed up, hopeless long-haired old rocker with addiction problems who shaves his head and drives to Utah in an effort to tie up loose ends in his personal life before he dies” but “in the process ends up helping out a fledgling blues band called The Drainpipes.” Which sounds to me like Tender Mercies — a forgiveness and redemption story. Obviously Miller wants to move on and maybe earn some degree of forgiveness in his own life. The Busch/Fleming implication is that Miller shouldn’t be doing anything except throwing himself on the church steps, submitting to lashings, eating bitter herbs and living a life of penance. I don’t have Busch’s email but I just wrote Fleming the following: “Mike, Miller’s carelessness cost the life of a crew person — a huge, horrible mistake — but does that mean he has to stop all work and put on monk’s robes and go into a fetal-tuck position and drown himself?”

This is absolutely the most enjoyable post of the day (and the late Pertwillaby can go fuck himself) — a smart, laser-like analysis of the super-precise choices and stylings of David Fincher over the past…oh, 18 years or so. Tony Zhou, the creator of the piece, has assembled a series of Vimeo essays in this vein under the heading “Every Frame A Painting.” Creator, editor, narrator, etc. If this doesn’t fortify the case for Gone Girl‘s Best Picture headwind and Fincher’s Best Director status, nothing will. He’s our Kubrick.

Kevin McDonald‘s Black Sea (Focus Features, 1.15.15) costars Jude Law, Scoot McNairy, Ben Mendelsohn (the eternally greasy psychopath), David Threlfall, Tobias Menzies and Jodie Whittaker. “I know what gold does to men’s souls. As long as there’s no find, the noble brotherhood will last. But when the piles of gold begin to grow, that’s when the trouble starts.” — spoken by Walter Huston‘s “Howard” in The Treasure of Sierra Madre (’48).

Why is it that I still get a slight tingle out of this scene? Why does it make me think that satanic forces (not the ISIS kind but followers of a real supernatural demon with claws and a tail and horns and hooves) might actually exist and therefore, if you want to be logical about it, an opposing force of heavenly goodness might exist also? Why at the same time can I feel only contempt for the makers of Left Behind, which is drawing water from a similar (i.e., primitive) mythology? Could it be that Roman Polanski knew what he was doing while Left Behind director Vic Armstrong and producer-writer Paul LaLonde, who have never been accused of improper relations with underaged women, haven’t a fucking clue?

Starting last May and extending into July I wrote three or four pieces about Robert Harris‘s attempt to persuade MGM honchos to allow an independently-funded restoration of 65mm elements of John Wayne‘s The Alamo. I jumped in myself at one point and convinced a roster of hotshot directors — Darren Aronfosky, JJ Abrams, Guillermo del Toro, Matt Reeves, Alfonso Cuaron, Rian Johnson, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu — plus actor Bill Paxton and producer Bob Gale to lend support to this effort.

In August Variety‘s Sebastian Torrelio began working on a piece about the situation. The MGM guys nearly stonewalled him to death, and then Variety‘s editors decided to fold his Alamo reporting into a broader piece about classic film restoration…or something like that. Maybe it’ll appear this month or whenever. Don’t hold your breath.

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Ridley Scott‘s Exodus: Gods and Kings has been described by Fox Filmed Entertainment chairman and CEO Jim Gianopolus as a kind of classically-produced, cast-of-thousands Biblical epic that William Wyler or Cecil B. DeMille would recognize and respect. The quote, which appeared in a Pete Hammond Deadline story that popped last night, reads as follows: “You don’t see movies on this scale anymore. You don’t see movies using these numbers of people in these massive scenes unless they are computer generated. Ridley did the real thing — and in only 80 days.”

How can you call a movie that uses 1500 CG shots “real”? It’s apparent that most of the shots/scenes in the just-released Exodus trailer use CG to some extent, and that some scenes use a great deal of CG. Yes, Scott and his team gathered a lot of people and animals together for various scenes but I’d be willing to bet — I’m fairly certain, in fact — that very little of Exodus is “the real thing.” (Outside of close-ups, I mean.) I’m sure that it’s all a mixture of real footage and CG. Nobody makes big Bible films the DeMille or Wyler way any more. Not necessary, way too expensive.

It’s a relief, by the way, that Scott is apparently no longer a fan of the herky-jerky action photography that he used in Gladiator.

21 Years: Richard Linklater, an intelligent fellating of the director of Boyhood, opens in theatres and on demand on 11.7.14. Directed and written by Michael Dunaway and Tara Wood, it features friendly tributes from Zac Efron, Billy Bob Thornton, Mark Duplass, Matthew McConaughey, Ethan Hawke, Jack Black, Kevin Smith, Parker Posey, etc. I don’t think there’s much chance of Boyhood not getting nominated for a Best Picture Oscar or Linklater not snagging a Best Director nom, but it can’t hurt to have famous friends presenting the case.

“With a Sharknado-inspired visual style and a deeply weary lead performance from Nicolas Cage, Left Behind is cheap-looking, overwrought kitsch of the most unintentionally hilarious order, its eschatological bent representing its only real shot at box office redemption. This faith-based thriller is likely to inspire far more dorm-room drinking games than religious conversions.” — from Andrew Barker‘s Variety review of Left Behind. “This failed epic — really, an epic failure — would barely be noticed, were it not for former Oscar-winner Nicolas Cage taking on a Sharknado-quality remake of a Kirk Cameron movie.” — from Elizabeth Weitzman‘s N.Y. Daily News review.

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To even acknowledge a movie like Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (Disney, 10.10), much less quote from Justin Chang’s 10.2 review of it, feels like nihilism on my part, but this is a slow day. I have nothing but spitting contempt for anyone who would excitedly buy a ticket to “a passable, tolerable, not unbearable, totally inoffensive adaptation of Judith Viorst’s beloved 1972 children’s book…the sort of busily contrived, one-damned-thing-after-another farce where cars are smashed and Dad gets set on fire, but it all goes down with a spoonful of sugar and a cheery string of studio tie-ins.”

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I’m seriously excited by the idea of Chris Nolan‘s Interstellar (Paramount, 11.5) being the first mainstream film to deliver some kind of coherent conveyance (by whatever means) of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. And by the input of noted astrophysicist Kip Thorne in the film’s scientific verisimilitude. My only hope is that one of the characters (not Matthew McConaughey!) will explain the concept of time-bending by referring to a hand pressing down upon a trampoline — I’ve always liked that one. What I don’t get is the idea of earth’s civilization saving itself by…what, migrating to another green planet somewhere? “Mankind was born on earth” but it was “never meant to die here.” In reality and surely in Interstellar, the billions of souls on our polluted, all-but-doomed speck of dust ain’t goin’ nowhere. A small community of earth explorers could theoretically start over again on another planet (i.e., a voyage that yeehaw-accented McConaughey has spoken of in trailer narration…“To break bayhhrriers, to reach for the stahhhrrs”) but the idea of an exploratory space mission somehow saving the world from its own ecological ruination strains credulity.

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