Day: August 11, 2015

New trailer accompanied by Cannes Film Festival review, posted on 5.18: To me Joachim Trier‘s Louder Than Bombs, an ennui-laden, Euro-style Ordinary People stuffed with the usual suburban, middle-class downer intrigues and featuring one of the most reprehensible teenagers in the history of motion pictures, felt contrived and gently infuriating. Too many aspects felt wrong and miscalculated or even hateful, and once the tally reached critical levels I began to sink into my usual exasperation (faint moaning, leaning forward, checking my watch).

“Uh-oh, this isn’t working,” I began saying to myself at around the ten-minute mark. Later on I was saying, “Wow, this really isn’t working.” Later on I was muttering worse things.

Bombs is about a father and two sons grappling with the death of their wife/mother, and the dysfunctional behavior that emerges in her absence. Dad, a Long Island-based high-school teacher, is played by aging, overly sensitive, watery-eyed Gabriel Byrne. Son #1, a mild-mannered college prof and mystifyingly irresponsible young dad, is played by Jesse Eisenberg, wearing a bizarre straight-hair wig instead of his usual curlies. And son #2, the above-mentioned demon from Hades, is played by Devin Druid.

Isabelle Huppert plays the dead wife/mom — a renowned, N.Y. Times-endorsed war photographer who died some months ago in a local highway accident.

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Don’t ask me how or why but earlier this summer I started going steady with Coke Zero. I knew it wasn’t good for me but I figured an occasional small-sized bottle would be okay. Plus I liked the flavor and took faint comfort in the fact that at least it didn’t have sugar. But two or three weeks ago I started to feel a kind of weird chemical sensation in my bloodstream, and I realized that I wasn’t sleeping all that well because of this. My body sensed that it was something in the Coke Zero. Maybe the potassium benzoate, which is used to protect the flavor of the beverage. Or the acesulfame potassium. In any event I suddenly said to myself “what the hell are you doing?” and threw all the Coke Zero out. Here’s a piece by health writer Ted Elliott that looks a little too forgivingly at the ingredients.

I flipped out this morning when I read Marshall Fine’s pan of Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig‘s Mistress America (Fox Searchlight, 8.14). Me: “How could you do this to such a neurotically and luminously alive film? With such a precise and unique voice? With such a timeless theme — i.e., ‘writers are always selling somebody out’? The first reinvention of 21st screwball comedy that holds together & which isn’t an homage to ’30s screwball (like Peter Bogdanovich‘s She’s Funny That Way) and you take a dump on it? Are you proud of yourself?” Fine: “The truth about Greta Gerwig and the emperor’s new clothes (i.e., lack of acting ability) will eventually get out.” Me: “Dead wrong. She’s a manic neurotic 21st Century Carole Lombard.” Fine: “Let’s agree to disagree. Don’t take it so personally.” Me: “You wouldn’t if you were her? Gerwig is doing something exciting here. She’s breaking new ground on top of being a funnier, flakier, taller and less chubby Lena Dunham. In fact she’s not chubby at all.”

For years the saga of the much-written-about effort to assemble a completed version of Orson Welles‘ never-finished The Other Side of The Wind has been missing a key element — i.e., a bad guy. Whenever a collaborative project stalls, it’s usually because somebody in the loop is being unreasonably demanding or flaky about something. Like Larry Silverstein, the obstinate greedhead who held up the reconstruction of the World Trade Center. The mark in this instance is Oja Kodar, Welles’ lover and comrade-in-arms for the last 24 years of his life and a current, Croatia-residing holder of rights to TOSOTW. Wellesians have long been reluctant to speak ill of Kodar given her tender history with Welles, but now a key chronicler has said “fuck it, let’s call her out.”

A piece posted yesterday (8.10) by Wellesnet.com‘s Ray Kelly claims in concise, chapter-and-verse form that Kodar is the Larry Silverstein of the Other Side of the Wind realm.

Oka Kodar

“And now we face the sad realization that Oja may be stalling the completion of The Other Side of the Wind,” Kelly writes early on.

“In Joseph McBride‘s What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career, Wellesians first learned of the troubled efforts to finish TOSOTW and how Oja and Peter Bogdanovich sacked McBride, a key player in brokering a $3 million deal with Showtime to finish TOSOTW in 1999. The pact soon fell apart.

“In Josh Karp‘s Orson Welles’s Last Movie, numerous individuals (investors, attorneys, executives and others) who have been involved with the project during the last 15 years all told a variation on the same tale in which Oja derailed attempts to complete the film by (a) reneging on agreements, (b) pitting investors against each other, (c) secretly shopping for better deals and (d) shifting her allegiances at critical junctures.

“Oja’s actions prompted an attorney for the Boushehri family, a co-owner of the film, to write in a 2007 memo: ‘We have been waiting for many years for her to agree to a deal…my own personal feeling is that she is incapable of making a deal with anyone..our client has never been the problem. Kodar has been.'”

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The word since last May is that the burn-through performance in Paolo Sorrentino‘s Youth is given by costar Jane Fonda. Not to take anything away from star Michael Caine, who believably inhabits the life of an 80something conductor as he chills and contemplates while staying at a Switzerland spa, but Fonda owns this movie. It’s just a single short scene between her character, an actress, and Harvey Keitel, a successful director who wants her to play a role in his latest film, but Fonda — trust me, I know what goes — is an all-but-guaranteed contender for Best Supporting Actress.

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The ongoing attempt to fund the editing of Orson Welles‘ The Other Side of the Wind is well short of an initially stated goal of $2 million. An Indiegogo campaign has raised $406,405, which came from 2,858 donors. I was told this morning by a source close to the fundraising that $406K is “just a fraction” of what will be needed. I don’t have all the information and I certainly don’t know how it’ll play out, but it sure seems as if the project needs a Daddy Warbucks.

A day or two ago I was speaking about the OSOTW situation with a journalist friend, and he mentioned that “everyone’s saying that Frank Marshall [one of the producers of the OSOTW project] should just pony up the money and get Steven Spielberg to pitch in as well, but it’s the same old story — only use other people’s money, never your own.” He suggested that a good portion of the cost could be raised “if Spielberg would sell the Rosebud sled, but that’ll be the day.”

Spielberg bought one of the three Rosebud sleds (the other two were burned during filming of Citizen Kane‘s final scene) for $60,500 at an auction at Sotheby Park Bernet on 6.10.82, or the day before E.T., The Extra-Terrestrial opened nationwide and six days after the opening of Poltergeist on 6.4.82. Today it would be worth…what? At least $250K or $300K, possibly a half million.

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I’m a devout Bernie Sanders believer and supporter as far as it goes. I have a Bernie bumper sticker on my door and Bernie buttons stuck to my saddlebags. But no way was I going to wait in line for three or four hours to get into last night’s Sanders rally as the L.A. Sports Arena. To have done so would have meant abandoning the editing of yesterday’s Bogdanovich piece and not taking the cats to Laurel Pet Hospital so they could get some Comfortis pills for fleas.