Jeffrey Wells

This trailer for Todd Phillips‘ The Hangover Part III (Warner Bros., 5.24) along with the one-sheet suggests it’s less of an ensemble piece (i.e., Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifiniaki, Justin Bartha going back to Vegas) than about the travails of Galifiniakis’s Alan character. A 6.4.12 story by Robin Leach said the plot begis with an attempt to rescue Alan from a mental hospital.

I was planning on hating this movie (which will apparently be the last and final installment) regardless, but I really despise Galifiniakis. And I stopped being a Ken Jeong fan after he revealed his cashew-sized dick in Hangover II. Listen, I see my own small dick every day. I don’t need to see one in a movie. That joke is played, OK guys?

Wells to Phillips and co-screenwriter Craig Mazin: That highway bit in which Galifiniakis murders a giraffe by decapitation is really funny! Hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah! I can see why you didn’t show the giraffe’s head being shattered or his neck being severed and split open and the blood and guts splattering all over the road. That would interfere with the joke. Comedy is hard to pull off. You guys know your stuff.

I can remember a bit in a Laurel & Hardy movie in which a gorilla and a piano fall off a cliff and land hundreds of feet down. You can hear the faint sound of piano chords crashing into the earth and rock. So I guess animal cruelty is part of the history of Hollywood comedy.

This taste of Sofia Coppola‘s The Bling Ring (A24, 6.13) isn’t anyone’s idea of assaultive or frenetic. Not too much information but enough to entice. Attitude, entitlement, Emma Watson, swagger, cops, trouble, Taissa Farmiga, flash-bang, Halston Sage (cool name!), Leslie Mann.

Wiki page: “The Bling Ring was a group, mostly of teenagers based in and around Calabasas, California, who burgled the homes of several celebrities over a period believed to have been from around October 2008 through August 2009. In total, their activities resulted in the theft of about $3 million in cash and belongings, most of it from Paris Hilton, whose house was burgled several times. However, over 50 homes were reportedly targeted for potential burglary.

“Nancy Jo Sales, who covered the story for Vanity Fair, called the events “completely unprecedented in the history of Hollywood”

Here’s an Emma Watson interview about the film, conducted last September by Vanity Fair‘s Krista Smith.

A pleasant chat happened Thursday night between Lenny star Valerie Perrine and director-screenwriter Larry Karaszewski at Santa Monica’s Aero. She was relaxed and open and self-effacing and put everyone in a good mood. But Perrine has no love for W.C. and Me costar Rod Steiger, a foul-mannered “jerk” who treated her horribly during filming, she said.

(l.) Director-screenwriter Larry Karaszewski, (r.) Lenny and Slaughterhouse Five costar Valerie Perrine at Santa Monic’a Aero on Thursday, 3.7, around 9:45 pm.

And guess what? Bob Fosse‘s Lenny, which screened before their discussion, hasn’t aged very well. Mostly because Dustin Hoffman‘s Lenny Bruce material is either unfunny or tedious or old-hat. The film is no longer provocative — it now feels way behind the curve. If Hoffman had played Bruce as a slightly less likable guy, if he hadn’t smiled so much and been a little snippier or more combative, and if he’d made more of an attempt to “become” Bruce rather than just perform Bruce’s material in a thoroughly Dustin Hoffman-like fashion, his performance would play better by today’s standards.

You know why Sony made this survivalist adventure about a dad and his son, etc.? Apart from the likelihood that Will Smith and his son found it emotionally fulfilling? Because it’ll play everywhere. Every bored, compulsive, under-educated teenager or ADD-afflicted 20something in every under-developed or emerging or flush economy…they’ll all feel good about this. To me it’s nothing. To me the “jumping off a cliff and soaring like a bird” shot is tired Avatar bullshit.

Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy has written a smart essay about who might direct a forthcoming televised version of Stanley Kubrick‘s Napoleon, which Steven Spielberg has said he’s hoping to produce. The piece has many sage observations, but I was especially taken by McCarthy’s clever notion about who would be best suited to direct Kubrick’s 186-page screenplay, which would run about three hours but could theoretically expand into a six-hour miniseries.

That person would not be Spielberg, McCarthy claims, as Napoleon embraces the same misanthropic view of human nature as Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. “An ideal director should be someone whose style is precise, analytical and cold — an analytical sort with a skeptical, if not caustic, view of human motivations and a belief that intelligence and rationality are very often trumped by destructive traits, particularly hubris,” McCarthy writes.

That is Kubrick in a nutshell, and about as far away as you can get from the “fundamentally optimistic and ennobling attitude that is almost always dominant in Spielberg’s work,” he says.

“Who, then, among big-name Hollywood directors, could realize Napoleon — or, more likely, parts of Napoleon — in a way that would be most compelling and still properly honor Kubrick? Seven clear-cut candidates would be David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson, Martin Scorsese, Kathryn Bigelow, Ridley Scott, Christopher Nolan and Peter Weir.”
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Then McCarthy suggests what seems to me like the perfect fellow, “a now highly prominent international director who has only ever undertaken his own projects and has never done anything on this scale but whose work is just as exacting and chilly as Kubrick’s and is probably his intellectual equal: Michael Haneke.

“I have little doubt that Kubrick himself would have loved The White Ribbon, and I believe that, if Haneke shot, in his own style, any portion of Kubrick’s script more or less as he wrote it, we’d have something as close to what Kubrick would have done as any director now on Earth could manage.”

Jeffrey Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere to HBO publicists (sent today): I’m looking to jump in on any press events, junket interviews, DVD screeners or screenings that will allow me to full savor David Mamet‘s Phil Spector (HB), 3.24). I’ve been all over Phil Spector since ’09 and am a huge fan of Vikram Jayanti‘s The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector, which Mamet has said was an inspiration for his script. So please send me a screener or invite me to whatever press gatherings or you-name-it. Thanks.

The total domestic gross for Titanic 3D was $57,884,114. I’m guessing that Jurassic Park 3D will be much more of a 3D gut-slam experience, will at least double the gross of James Cameron‘s converted epic. Steven Spielberg‘s 3D dino flick opens on Wednesday, 4.3. IMAX all-media screenings are happening a little more than a week prior.

A little less than 20 years ago or sometime around mid-May 1993, Anne Thompson (now with Indiewire, then with Entertainment Weekly) and I caught an early press screening of Jurassic Park on the Universal lot. We then drove over to the Warner Bros. lot to pay a visit to the set of Demolition Man and to say hello to producer Joel Silver. Sylvester Stallone and a fairly young Sandra Bullock were peforming a car-driving scene on a sound stage. I remember telling Silver that the last act of Jurassic Park was pretty damn scary and that the film was guaranteed to be huge.

The only problem I’m anticipating in seeing Jurassic Park 3D is having to endure several “Spielberg awe-face” or “Spielberg scared-face” close-ups from Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Richard Attenborough and those two cute kids.

Between this modern-dress adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play (which I didn’t see at the 2012 Toronto Film festival) and his anti-Mitt Romney “zombie apocalypse” video that he posted last October I’m willing to let bygones be bygones with Joss Whedon and basically forgive him for The Avengers and Cabin in the Woods and all of that GenX geek TV stuff that he made his bones with. Filmed on a shoestring, Much Ado will open June 7th through Lionsgate/Roadside.

Star Wars poobah George Lucas has told Bloomberg Businessweek‘s Devin Leonard that Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher are pretty much locked down for cameos or supporting roles in JJ Abrams‘ Star Wars, Episode VII, which will come out in 2015.

I’m cool with Ford, who turns 71 on July 13th, returning as a grizzled and sinewy Han Solo, but do we really want the people in the above photos (Hamill’s pic was taken in 2010, Fisher’s in 2009) messing with cherished memories of the eternally young Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia? Isn’t it better to leave the past alone and…you know, let sleeping dogs lie? I really, really don’t want to see jowly Hamill fighting anyone with a light sabre, and the thought of a plus-sized Fisher wearing Princess Leia outfits…wow.

I’m sure all three will soon be hitting the gym and sticking with a jello, coffee, apples and navel orange diet but there’s only so much you can do with the “lived-in” faces that Hamill and Fisher have acquired. In the words of Dr. Heywood Floyd in 2001: A Space Odyssey, there’s a serious potential for “cultural shock and disorientation” should they try to re-inhabit characters they first played 36 or 37 years ago.

Remember how James Cagney looked in Public Enemy in 1931? And how he looked 37 years later when he made Never Steal Anything Small?

The way to bring Luke and Leia back for Episode VII (seriously) is to announce that they were killed by Imperial forces many years ago, but that their spirits are with us like Alec Guinness‘s Obi-Wan Kenobi was a character of sorts in The Empire Strikes Back (’80). And then digitally replicate their bodies from Star Wars, Empire and Return of the Jedi footage and give them new things to do, and then get Hamill and Fisher to simply “voice” them. Spectral holograms of a talking Han and Leia would totally work. Plus the fans would be enormously grateful to Abrams for not having subjected them to a lesson in the ravagings of age.

“We had already signed Mark and Carrie and Harrison — or we were pretty much in final stages of negotiation,” Lucas told Leonard. “So I called them to say, ‘Look, this is what’s going on.’ Maybe I’m not supposed to say that. I think they want to announce that with some big whoop-dee-doo, but we were negotiating with them. I won’t say whether the negotiations were successful or not.”

A weird thing happened as I was driving home last Friday night after having dinner at the Smokehouse. It was around 10:30 pm as I drove south on Laurel Canyon Blvd. Honestly? I was feeling a little bit tired. I passed the light at the Laurel Canyon country store as I drove in the right lane, and as I approached the Hollywood Blvd. turnoff I started to ease in the middle lane…hahhnnk!! A guy had driven into my left-rear blind spot. I zipped back into my lane. Shit.

And then the guy pulled ahead of me and veered into my lane and slowed and then came to a sudden stop at an angle, blocking both lanes. At first I thought we was making a U-turn but he just sat there. When I tried going around his left side he veered forward to block me. Oh my god…a raging asshole who wants to go Dodge City on Lauren Canyon Blvd. Three or four cars were stopped behind us. One of them honked.

The road-blocker opened his window and I could see a shaved head — always a sign of trouble. “You wanna settle this?” he yelled. I indicated “naah” with a hand signal. “Are you a fucking asshole?” he yelled. I just said “sorry, man.” “Don’t fucking drive like that!” he yelled. “Okay,” I said. “You hear me?,” he added. Then he barrelled off.

Everyone gets angry when someone almost drives into their lane, but real men suck it in and let it go. Real men swear and forgive. Mr. Clean was basically conveying that he’d felt very scared for a micro-instant and so, being a baby or an alcoholic or just a rage junkie, he became Vernon Wells in The Road Warrior. “Mommy…this bad man almost hit me!” This is what Los Angeles can be late at night. The psychos who sleep until 11 am or noon the next day tend to come out after 10 pm.

Update: Yesterday I mistakenly referred to to the Road Warrior costar Vernon Wells as Vernon Wez. The character he plays in George kennedy’s 1982 film is called “Wez.”

What Maisie Knew, written by Carroll Cartwright and directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, updates Henry James’s 1897 novel about familial breakdown to contemporary New York,” Evening Standard critic David Sexton wrote during last September’s Toronto Film Festival.

“Eight-year-old Maisie’s warring, profoundly selfish parents are art dealer Beale (Steve Coogan, the weakest link in the film, always only himself, apart from some evocations of Alan Partridge) and aging rock star Susanna (Julianne Moore, as a truly a nasty piece of work). Neither is interested in Maisie herself, only in using her as a weapon against each other.

“Alexander Skarsgard and Joanna Vanderham are sympathetic as their new partners, who come together in caring more for Maisie than her own parents do — but the star of this show is Onata Aprile, just seven but wonderfully good as the wide-eyed, ever observant Maisie, increasingly wounded, turning in on herself.

“The film’s simple strategy of filming always from Maisie’s height whenever she is present works amazingly well, an object lesson in how point of view can be what matters most.”

I think child-custody battles are horrific. I can’t stand parents who’d much rather “defeat” their ex than make their child feel loved and secure. But I’m getting a moderate, intelligent vibe off this film. I could have seen it in Toronto but for several reasons I didn’t.