Month: February 2015

The serial rapist allegations of the last three months have turned Bill Cosby into comic dog meat. You can tell jokes about him any damn way you choose and audiences will laugh and Cosby can’t say a damn word. He’s over, toast, kaput. But according to some tweets posted this evening by Norm MacDonald, Eddie Murphy refused to mock Cosby during the “Celebrity Jeopardy” skit on last Sunday night’s Saturday Night Live 40th Anniversary Special. Murphy didn’t want to dump on Cosby, McDonald tweeted, even though “he knew the laughs would bring the house down. Eddie decided the laughs [were] not worth it. He will not kick a man when he is down.” Update: NBC News has reported that Cosby is grateful. “I am very appreciative of Eddie and I applaud his actions,” the 77 year-old comedian said.

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Scott Feinberg’s blunt-spoken Academy member from the publicist branch says the following about Birdman: “[It’s] a weird, quirky movie that Fox Searchlight did a really good job of selling. I never thought that it would make it all the way to the finish line like it has, but then I remember that it’s about a tortured actor, and when you think about who is doing the voting, at SAG and the Academy, it’s a lot of other tortured actors. I just don’t know how much it’s resonating out in the world. I mean, American Sniper made more in its third weekend in wide release than Birdman has made in its entirety.”

The long-adored Bringing Up Baby was not an out-and-out flop in 1938, but it sure as hell wasn’t a hit either. Joe and Jane Popcorn pretty much shrugged it to death.

Wells response: In other words, Joe and Jane Popcorn related more to the “veteran kicks ass in the Middle East but pays the emotional price when he returns to the heartland” narrative than the big-city tale about a neurotic actor trying to get beyond a ’90s superhero identity by redefining himself with a Raymond Carver play. Okay, understood. But Joe and Jane Popcorn caring less about Birdman and more about American Sniper doesn’t mean squat in the long run. Joe and Jane have never been and never will be at the forefront of perception and recognizing the finest and most lasting creations…ever. They like popular entertainments. When it comes to recognizing and celebrating films are up to something new and provocative, Joe and Jane are always lagging and more often than not at the rear of the herd.

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Variety‘s Andrew Wallenstein is reporting that Warner Bros. CEO Kevin Tsujihara, already notorious for committing Warner Bros. whole-hog to a cornucopia of superhero comic-book movies for the next several years, confessed yesterday to thinking and acting in a (how to put this diplomatically?) chickenshit fashion when Sony Pictures was being plundered by the North Korean hack and particularly when George Clooney tried to get the other big studios to rally round.

Warner Bros. CEO Kevin Tsujihara during yesterday’s Code Media speech in Dana Point.

“It all happened so fast [but] we could have and should have done more, for [Sony chairman] Michael [Lynton] and Sony,” Tsujihara said at the Code Media conference Wednesday in Dana Point. “But you get caught up in ‘Is this going to become Whack-a-Mole? When you get lawyers and people in the room, things don’t happen.”

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I’ve written that while I don’t regret posting an honest, blunt response to Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Only God Forgives during the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, I feel badly about hurting Refn’s feelings. On top of which he was entirely gracious about it when we chatted two months ago during a 20th Century Fox holiday party. I’ve previously noted that the pan I wrote is memorialized in Liv Corfixen‘s My Life Directed by Nicholas Winding Refn, a Heart of Darkness-like doc about the making of Only God Forgives. It’s basically an honest look at a good filmmaker going through the usual doubt and pain; Corfixen is just as candid in portraying their healthy but less-than-ideal marriage. (Is anyone’s marriage “ideal”?)

The doc will play at L.A.’s Cinefamily between 2.27 and 3.5. Corfixen and Refn will attend on opening night. I think that in all fairness I should also attend and take video and so on.

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The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg has posted Oscar-race opinions from a refreshingly blunt-spoken, presumably long-of-tooth female Academy member who hails from the public relations branch, and I’m telling you that if this woman wrote a daily online column with this kind of double-barrelled candor I’d be worried about the competition. Her views about Citizenfour are appalling (Edward Snowden has “a God complex”?) and stating that Birdman‘s “single-shot thing gave me a headache” probably reveals more about her core psychology than the film, but otherwise everything she says cuts right through the b.s. and the hoo-hah. Terrific stuff.

Quote #1: “I put in the Inherent Vice screener, and it became apparent that it’s a terrible, incoherent movie, so I turned it off. I thought it was not possible for me to hate something more than I hated The Master, but I hated this more.” Quote #2: Boyhood‘s Patricia Arquette “gets bonus points for having no work done during the 12 years. If she had had work done during the 12 years, she would not be collecting these statues.” Quote #3: “When a movie about black people is good, members vote for it. But if the movie isn’t that good, am I supposed to vote for it just because it has black people in it?” (HE response: “If you wind up writing a column you can’t say stuff like this. You’ll get beaten up by the p.c. Stalinists and guys like David Poland will tweet that you’re a racist. Trust me.”) Special “take heed, Sasha Stone and Anne Thompson” quote: “If you told me when I saw Boyhood that it would win best picture — or even be in the running — I would have told you that you were insane. I thought it was ambitious and a directorial triumph, but I never thought, ‘Wow, this is The One!'” HE aside: Is this woman friendly with Steve Pond by any chance?

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I posted this clip 15 months ago, or about ten weeks after Dakota Johnson was chosen to star in Fifty Shades of Grey. This short little scene is so much better than the entirety of Fifty Shades — better written, acted, edited, scored — that saying so in this sentence is one of the worst redundancies I’ve ever committed as a writer. This is how it’s done, what it feels like. Right away you want to sink in and stay there. It makes you want more. I was more or less okay with the opening hour of Fifty Shades but restless and irked during the second hour, and that’s when a good film should be making sure you’re invested and enthused by delivering a scene like this one. Which arrives (correct me if I’m wrong) right around the 60-minute mark in The Social Network. Johnson was 20 when she shot this; she’s now 25.

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I’ve re-posted my raves about David Cronenberg‘s Maps to the Stars once too often so here’s an excerpt from Peter Howell’s review: “Kicking at Hollywood foibles is as easy as booting an overripe Halloween pumpkin, [but] it’s a hoot to watch. Watching these appalling people brings to mind the exchange in All About Eve where Gary Merrill scolds Bette Davis for her acid tongue. ‘Have you no human consideration?’ he asks. Her reply: ‘Show me a human, and I might have!'”

Seven and two-thirds years ago or more precisely during the May 2007 Cannes Film Festival, I took my dp friend, Svetlana Cvetko, to a special cool kidz party at the Carlton. I forget what the promotional deal was but only Gael Garcia Bernal had a film playing at the festival that year — i.e., Deficit. Alejandro G. Inarritu had screened Babel there the year before, and his follow-up, Biutiful, didn’t play at Cannes until 2010. Alfonso Cuaron‘s Children of Men had opened the previous December. Giullermo del Toro‘s Pan’s Labrynth, one of his finest, had screened at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. I’m not sure if this was taken with a cell-phone camera or not, but remember how crappy phone photos used to look back then? The very first iPhone had been unveiled by Steve Jobs only four months before this shot was taken, and the first models went on sale in the U.S. on 6.29.07.

The finale of Madmen will be upon us before you know it, and once again Don Draper‘s refusal to grow even modestly-proportioned sideburns is driving me up the wall. I said this last year and I’m saying it again — nobody who worked in any kind of creative circle in the late ’60s wore their hair exactly as they did in the early days of the Kennedy administration. Nobody. Not even seriously constipated, butt-plug guys like Draper avoided sideburns. Even the worst of us keep up appearances, and appearances in the late ’60s demanded a slightly fuller, hairier look…period. The no-sideburns thing has now become a huge Matthew Weiner affectation or hang-up or whatever. It’s out of time and almost surreal. It’s almost on the level of one of the Big Chill characters still wearing a late ’60s hairstyle in 1984 or Matthew Modine‘s Private Joker going through basic training with longish civilian hair. Not quite but almost.

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Last night I popped in the Criterion Bluray of Terrence Malick‘s Days of Heaven (’78), intending to watch a half-hour’s worth before crashing. But I couldn’t stop watching. It’s only 94 minutes long but it feels “longer” in the richest sense of that term. The story is as much of an American tragedy as anything Theodore Dreiser ever wrote. I remember how floored I was after seeing it for the first time at Cinema 1 on Third Ave., and how a week later the bartender at the Spring Street Bar & Grill (where I was working at the time) was frowning and calling it piss poor. It’s a masterpiece — one of the saddest, earthiest and most visually ravishing films ever made. Imagine if Malick…no, don’t imagine it. The guy who shot this film in mid to late ’76 and then worked on the editing nearly all of ’77 and half of ’78 is gone…over the hill and into the next county. Malick will never blend his visual sense and editing techniques with a real (i.e., involving) story and compelling characters ever again. Okay, it’s theoretically possible but artists don’t backtrack — they can’t go home again.

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To hear it from Variety‘s Jay Weissberg, Saverio Costanzo’s Hungry Hearts goes nuts around the midway point. Pic does engagingly enough when focusing on the beginnings of a serious relationship between the spirited Adam Driver and the nowhere-near-hot-enough Alba Rohrwacher, but when a baby comes along…look out.

As things turn weird and then malevolent, “viewers will begin to notice all the absences,” Weissberg notes. “The lack of friends, the fact that Mina doesn’t have a job, or that Jude never seems to be at his. Jude’s deferral to Mina’s peculiarities, at the risk of his son’s life, beggars belief, given how long it takes before he wakes up, and the ending is especially disappointing.

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There was a period between my 20th and 21st birthday when I had no job or goals or academic engagement…nothing. I was in my Bhagavad Gita mystical phase, no fooling, except the constant urge to party and frolic and basically pursue the spiritual pretty much dominated everything. Partying and then recovering the next day so I could party again the next night…well, there was actually more to it than just that. It’s not that I didn’t try to have a kind of “life.” I would land a job I hated and then lose that job. I read the New York Times every day but I ingested a lot of substances and did a lot of sleeping and day-dreaming. I dabbled as a dealer of pot and hallucinogens. Occasional tripping, hitchhiking, chasing girls, wherever the day took me…bars, parties, music and especially (this was huge) lying totally ripped on a floor with two smallish Marantz speakers on either side of my head.

Chance Browne painting of Seir Hill Road in Wilton, Connecticut. My parents’ home was around the bend and down the road a piece.

At some point my parents decided to strongly communicate their disfavor. They wanted me to understand that this lifestyle had nowhere to go but down so they kicked me out of their comfortable Cape Cod-style home in Wilton, Connecticut. I would crash here and there but occasionally I’d have nowhere to go. So I’d show up at the Cape Cod around midnight or 1 am and throw pebbles at my sister Laura’s window. To keep me out every night my father would lock the garage basement door plus the dining-room door that led to the basement stairs, so I needed Laura to let me in. After a couple of taps she’d come to the window and then meet me downstairs. I remember I had to raise the sliding garage doors one inch at a time so as to not make any noise. Laura and I would tiptoe upstairs in pitch black and I’d sleep inside the closet in my room. My parents both worked during the day and gone by 9 am so I’d come down around 10 am or so and get some breakfast, etc.

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