Three days and a wakeup at 14 rue Constance, south of rue d’Abesses, etc.

I’ve just been invited to a couple of Los Angeles screenings of Brad Bird‘s Tomorrowland. I wrote back and asked if there’s a press screening in Paris on Monday, which is my last full day here before the Tuesday morning train for Cannes. If not I’ll have to either (a) catch a market showing in Cannes or (b) pay to see it at the Olympia on Wednesday, 5.20 — opening day in France, two days before the U.S. release. I’m sensing possible concerns with this thing.  But maybe not.

The general consensus is that Mad Max: Fury Road (Warner Bros. 5.15) will earn $40 million or so during the first weekend. When I read this my first thought was “that’s all?” George Miller‘s $150 million apocalyptic actioner is generating heat through advance word-of-mouth, knockout trailers and high-impact ads, and I was figuring that even the slow boats would be primed by now. But not yet apparently. The last entry in the franchise (Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome) opened 30 years ago, and sometimes the impulse crowd needs a little time to warm up.

Yesterday I hashed things out with Boxoffice.com‘s Phil Contrino, who concurs with the $40 million-or-slightly-better projection. Right now Fury Road is a bit of “a wild card” in the public mind, he said, but “we’ll learn a lot more once they get a load of it. It could break out like crazy if the word of mouth is as good as what I’m hearing from critics. Nobody is not enthusiastic, but right now people are doing a ‘what’s this?’ and thinking it over. With reboots there’s always the challenge of putting your toe back in the water.

“You have to remember that even Chris Nolan‘s Batman Begins (’05) started modestly. The first weekend brought in only $48 million, which was surprisingly low for a Batman movie. And yet it went on to make $206 million and change. People occasionally need time to figure out that a film is awesome.”

Last night while sitting at my desk in room #33 at the elegant Hotel Bonsejour I managed a short phoner with Far From The Madding Crowd‘s Michael Sheen. His touching, achey-breaky performance as William Boldwood, an older fellow of means who is sadly, genuinely crushed by the fact that he has no chance with Carey Mulligan‘s Bathsheda Everdeen, accomplishes something almost unique by making you feel real empathy. Mostly I tend to dismiss such characters in romantic dramas, but not this time. My heart went out. Sheen and I spoke of Boldwood’s situation and what Sheen, who hasn’t been this good since he played Tony Blair in The Queen, found and explored. Said it before, saying it again: Sheen’s Boldwood is the first male supporting performance in 2015 that can be called award-worthy.

This Ex Machina redband trailer is obviously selling eroticism and upmarket reviews. Which is not spurious — the film is certainly spare, brilliant and chilling, and the sexual stuff is unmissable in a dry sort of way. But every hit needs a hook that the dumbest people in the room can appreciate, and as coarse as this may sound I think director-writer Alex Garland missed out when he failed to include a scene in which Alicia Vikander‘s Ava gives Domnhall Gleeson a blowjob. Call me a bottom-feeder but if the word-of-mouth on the street had included the phrase “robot goes down on a guy” business would be double what it is now. You know I’m right. You know Oscar Isaac‘s perverse genius billionaire would have definitely programmed Ava with this ability. Trust me — Metropolis director Fritz Lang would have approved. But that’s Garland for you — he’s not perverse or nervy. He’s a thinky, methodical, carefully ordered type of guy.

Four new True Detective one-sheets have been released but Vince Vaughn‘s carries, for me, the most intrigue because of his career backstory, and because I’ve been a believer since Swingers. Vaughn has been going through a prolonged slump for eight or nine years (’06’s The Breakup was the last half-decent thing he was in) and this second Detective season, which will almost certainly kick ass, might offer a kind of redemption a la Frank Sinatra in From Here to Eternity. Maybe. Vaughn plays a crook tied up in the aftermath of a killing; the cops are played by Colin Farrell, Taylor Kitsch and Rachel McAdams. The eight-episode HBO series begins on 6.21.

I was totally sold when the teaser for HBO’s The Brink, a half-hour, ten-episode political satire series about the misadventures of Jack Black in Pakistan, popped a month ago. The just-released trailer makes me feel even more revved. Boilerplate: “Created by Roberto Benabib (Weeds, Ally McBeal) and Kim Benabib, the series takes place during the onset of a military coup in Pakistan. Black’s character is the only U.S. intelligence guy left in the region. But when the U.S. President (Esai Morales) and the Secretary of State (Tim Robbins) order him to be their eyes and ears, things naturally go awry. Jay Roach (Recount) has directed the pilot episode. The Brink starts on Sunday, 6.21.

Until today I hadn’t noticed that Young Americans (formerly College Republicans), the mostly fact-based period buddy comedy about young righties Karl Rove and Lee Atwater on a wild cross-country road trip to Washington, D.C., was going to get made. I rave-reviewed Wes Jones’ script four and a half years ago, and in the same piece disputed suspicions in a 12.17.10 Steven Zeitchik L.A. Times piece that the script might have trouble getting made for lack of commerciality. Zeitchik’s instincts were obviously more astute than mine as it’s taken a long time to get rolling.

The College Republicans casting that might have been in late 2010.

Back then Anonymous was looking to produce with Shia LaBeouf as Atwater and Paul Dano as Rove. The current version will roll this fall with Starstream producing, John Krokidas (Kill Your Darlings) directing and Daniel Radcliffe as Atwater and Dane Dehaan as Rove. Amanda Seyfried (whom I just saw on-stage in Neil Labute‘s The Way We Get By) will costar.  

Here are portions of my 12.19.10 piece:

“This is a very smartly written, character-rich, darkly humorous tale of an actual 1973 road trip taken by infamous Bush strategist and Fox News scumbag Karl Rove, then 23, and the late Republican attack dog Lee Atwater, then 22, as they campaigned and dirty-tricked their way across the south in order to get Rove elected chairman of the College Republican National Committee.

“What this is, boiled down, is another Due Date mixed with politics and, in a manner of speaking, horror. Because it’s an origin story about the wily and colorful beginnings of two scoundrels who made their bones as the architects of rightwing attack-and-subvert politics — guys who not only put two Bushes into the White House but injected a vicious and reprehensible strain into American politics that not only thrives today but has in fact metastasized.

I’ve briefly flopped in the Hotel Bonsejour (corner of rue Durantin and rue Burq) three or four times over the past several years, mainly because it’s cheap. Within the past year the owners have refurbished the place big-time. It’s still small and spartanish but a lot cleaner now with much nicer bathrooms and new flatscreens to boot. My Airbnb rental (24 rue Constance) doesn’t start until tomorrow afternoon at 12:30 pm. Some people have the character to stay in places like the Bonsejour but most don’t.

So she’s called Angelina Jolie Pitt now…cool. But why isn’t Jolie Pitt hyphenated? A Deadline piece says that By The Sea (Universal, 11.13), which AJP directed, wrote, produced and co-stars in with Brad Pitt, is set in the ’70s…good creative decision! Deadline says it’s “inspired by European cinema and theater of the 1960s and ’70s,” which gets my vote sight unseen. Theoretically, I mean. Shot in Malta but set in a French seaside village, pic is about an American writer Roland (Pitt) and his wife Vanessa (Jolie Pitt) coping with a troubled marriage. Given the freewheeling sexual climate of the ’70s I’m presuming that an incident of infidelity, presumably Roland’s, is a cause of the difficulty.  That or a deceased child.  Jolie Pitt’s statement: “This is a story about a relationship derailed by loss, the tenacity of love and the path to recovery and acceptance.” (That sentence indicates that “the tenacity of love” and “the path to recovery and acceptance” are part of the derailment — awkward phrasing.) Costarring Mélanie Laurent, Melvil Poupaud, Niels Arestrup and Richard Bohringer.

I wouldn’t describe last night’s JFK-to-Paris flight as miserable.  The guy in front of me didn’t lean his seat back too far (much obliged!) so mostly sleepless but tolerable is a fair way to describe it.  I’m presently holding down a corner table at La Sancerre on rue d’Abesses — a free wifi oasis.  Paris is not warm, fall-ish but mild.  Scarf weather.  I can’t move into the crib until 2 pm, or two and 1/2 hours hence.  I’ll be fine once I get a little shut-eye.  I recently watched  a British Bluray of Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (on top of having seen it seven or eight times previously in other formats) so I’m not sure about catching it this afternoon at the Filmotheque this afternoon, as a Twitter guy (i.e., Ben Croll) has suggested, but there’s something delicious about that notion all the same.  Best movie-phile city in the world.  I set foot here and my mood shifts or more accurately levitates.  I’m home.  Well, kind of.

Directed by Harold Ramis, National Lampoon’s Vacation (’83) was a soft, silly comedy of humiliation aimed at the squares. The only thing I really liked about it was the “Holiday Road” theme song. I know that John Hughes‘ screenplay diluted the fuck out of his original National Lampoon short story “Vacation ’58,” which was much, much darker — it really shook hands with the repressed rage of the 1950s-era dads who gave so many boomers such miserable childhoods. The new Vacation (Warner Bros., 7.31) is seemingly a slightly more vulgar rehash of the ’83 film with Russell Griswold (Ed Helms), the son of Chevy Chase‘s Clark Griswold, determined to experience the same family horrors. I’d much rather see Doug Tirola‘s Drunk, Stoned, Brilliant, Dead again.