Day: December 9, 2014

The hacking of Sony’s computer network has resulted in today’s posting by Gawker‘s Sam Biddle of several contentious, impassioned, sharply worded emails, principally between producer Scott Rudin and Sony production chief Amy Pascal, over the fate of Rudin and Aaron Sorkin‘s Steve Jobs project, which Sony lost when Rudin pulled the plug and which is now sitting at Universal.

It makes for fascinating, at times delicious reading. The emails certainly convey a few lively portions of a tale about how and why Jobs fell apart at Sony.

The blustery, vitriolic language in some of these messages is classic Hollywood hardball stuff. The personal insults are hilarious. I can only marvel at the reaction of Angelina Jolie and for that matter Brad Pitt when they read she’s been regarded by a certain party as “a camp event and a celebrity and that’s all…a minimally talented spoiled brat,” and what Annapurna’s Megan Ellison will think when she reads that she’s been described as a “bipolar 28 year old lunatic” whose liking of this or that Hollywood player may or may not depend on whether “she took her meds.”

There’s one email, however, that’s worth pondering in detail. It’s about the quality of the Sorkin’s Jobs script, and it gave me the chills. It was written last August by Sony marketing chief Michael Pavlic, and sent to Pascal. One comment that got my attention is Pavlic’s concern that the somewhat claustrophobic-feeling piece might be a difficult sell if it goes on for three hours. But his descriptions of the script are fascinating. Three hours of intense backstage talk…love it!

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In a recent Conde Nast Traveller piece called “13 Coolest Movie Theatres Around the World,” Munich’s Filmtheater Sendlinger Tor gets its proper due. I fell in love with what looked like a hand-painted marquee during a walking tour of Munich that journalist Thomas Schultze (of the Munich-based G + J Media Entertainment) treated me to in June 2012. It’s one of the rare single-screen venues let in that town, and one of the few remaining in the world. The top photo is on the Conde Nast page; the bottom photo was taken by yours truly.

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Common-Sense Gods to Ryan Murphy, director of the soon-to-shoot FX miniseries The People vs. O.J. Simpson: While Sarah Paulson seems an excellent choice to play Simpson murder trial prosecutor Marcia Clark, Cuba Gooding as Simpson sounds fucking awful. It might even be ludicrous. The midsized Gooding (around 5′ 10″) played a football player in Jerry Maguire, of course, but he doesn’t have that agile, broad-shouldered, brawny big-guy quality that Simpson (who stands around 6′ 2″) had in his prime. Plus you need a square-jawed, Fred Williamson– or Robert Hooks-resembling actor who can deliver that cool, studly, possibly malicious vibe…a guy who just might have an Othello complex going on inside. Gooding doesn’t have the vibe at all. He’s about charm, smiles and occasional glares, but he’s not a rage-aholic. Has Gooding ever killed anyone in a film? If he has I don’t remember, and if he hasn’t there’s a good reason. You know who Gooding should play? Al Cowlings, the guy who drove O.J. around the L.A. freeway system that day in the white Bronco. Cowlings was O.J.’s sensible, mellow friend, right? Gooding could do that in his sleep.

To go by Brent Lang’s yaddah-yaddah 12.9 Variety report, it’ll be damn hard to pin responsibility for the Sony hacking on North Korea and hey, nobody really knows for sure what really happened, right? What squishy, equivocating crap. If you ask me yesterday’s analysis by The Verge‘s Russell Brandom is the piece to go by. He says flat-out that “the pileup of evidence has led many observers (including me) to conclude that North Korea is almost certainly behind the attacks [although] it’s unlikely that we’ll get any evidence that’s more definitive than what we already have.”

North Korean factor #1: Two days ago Bloomberg reported that one of the core IP addresses involved in leaking the Sony files belongs to the private network of the St. Regis Hotel in Bangkok, Thailand.” Plus there’s evidence, Brandom says, that “the attackers were aligned with North Korea.”

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I’ve never been and never will be a big Wire fan, and I’m frankly 50/50 about catching HBO and David Simon‘s remastered high-def version of the 60 episodes, which begins on 12.26. I’ve been beaten up pretty badly by HE commenters over the years about having missed all but a fraction of The Wire when it originally ran so I’m figuring why break the streak? Then again it’ll be something to do during the Christmas-to-New Year’s slumber so maybe. The reason it didn’t pop last September is because Simon wanted to work on re-mastering the high-def widescreen version. He’s written that portions work and some don’t. The series was obviously shot to be seen in 4:3, and that’s how it should be seen today. And yet looking at the two versions below, I can’t say I have a huge problem with the 16:9 version. The cropping and widening seem more or less tolerable.

Last night’s Colbert Report appearance proved yet again that Barack Obama could, if he chooses, handle a TV talk-show gig without too much difficulty. Or something involving public speaking and audience interaction. The really exciting thing would be if Obama ran for a seat in the House of Representatives, like John Quincy Adams did after his one-term Presidency. Or for the U.S. Senate, like JFK said he might do after leaving the White House after the end of his second term on 1.20.69.

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Next week Brad Pitt will be doing director-writer Steven Knight a solid by hosting a screening of Locke, hands down one of the year’s finest films. Two days ago Locke star Tom Hardy won the Best Actor award for the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Pitt and Knight are joined over two reported Pitt projects that Knight is writing (or has written) — the World War Z sequel and a romantic World War II thriller. Here’s my 4.8.14 Locke review.

A just-released, in-depth Senate report on torture during the Bush years delivers “a sweeping indictment of the C.I.A. interrogation program carried out in secret prisons after the Sept. 11 attacks,” says this morning’s lead N.Y. Times story. The report says that torture practices were much harsher than previously reported or acknowledged. And yet, paradoxically, information disclosed this morning by the CIA validates depictions and confirms indirect results of CIA torture in Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s Zero Dark Thirty, which suggested that torture led to key information about the whereabouts of 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden. If anything the report makes clear that Zero Dark Thirty under-played the use of torture by the CIA.

And yet industry-based ZDT critics claimed the film was condoning torture by depicting that it happened. This led to ZDT suffering a terrible award-season takedown at the hands of knee-jerk lefties in late 2012 and early 2013.

Early today the CIA posted the first public acknowledgement that (a) Ammar al-Baluch (played by Reda Kateb in ZDT) was tortured, and (b) that Ammar provided the first big clue after torture that led to the finding of Osama’s courier.

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Smoking is so uncommon these days that whenever I see someone lighting up I say to myself, “Wow, look at that.” And yet smoking persists in movies, particularly in films depicting any kind of teenaged, criminal or anti-social milieu. When I was in high school smoking projected a kind of stand-alone studliness and a James Dean-like existential machismo, which everyone of my age bought into and which I felt was absolutely essential. I more or less began quitting in the ’70s. Relapses followed, and I also dabbled whenever I visited Europe. A stupid instinct but my life has been full of that. About ten or twelve years ago I began posting the occasional piece about smoking in movies, etc. I had Yul Brynner on my mind after writing yesterday about Exodus, and I was moved this morning when I looked again at this testimonial, recorded just before his death from lung cancer.

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