You can tell right away that Ryan Murphy‘s Eat Pray Love is, at the very least, decently written (by Murphy and Jennifer Salt), engagingly acted (Julia Roberts in her Madwoman of Chaillot mode) and beautifully shot by Robert Richardson. Apparently a quality chick flick. Especially with the travelicious eye candy (Italy, Indonesia, India), plus James Franco, Javier Bardem, Billy Crudup, Richard Jenkins, Viola Davis, etc. Looks like a hit…maybe.
It took Murphy…what, three years to get out of movie jail after Running With Scissors? Good for him, must have taken some doing. Movie-jail terms tend to last four to five years — a year to eighteen months to realize and then face up to the fact that you’re actually in movie jail, and then three-plus years of political maneuvering in order to extricate yourself.
Dollars to donuts Expendables director-writer-star Sylvester Stallone drew the original rough art for this just-released one-sheet. I believe this because I used to indirectly work for Stallone, believe it or not. I was a poorly paid employee of Bobby Zarem and Dick Delson, who were Stallone’s personal p.r. reps during the Rambo II phase in ’85 and ’86. And I saw some conceptual poster art that Stallone had drawn for possible use in the teaser poster. And it had the exact same skull image, only with a bowie knife and a green beret.
Hey, Tim Palen — am I right or am I right? Stallone roughed it out and your team applied the finishing touches…n’est-ce pas?
Like the poster says, The Expendables, which has no website, will be released by Lionsgate on 8.13.10. We’re all hoping it’ll play during the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. I’m guessing it won’t be part of the regular festival, but market screenings are likely. If this happens, one way or another I’ll get myself in.
I’m into seeing Hubble 3D, which, being a Warner Bros. film, I naturally wasn’t invited to see at a press screening. And now Lou Lumenick is reporting that the Leonardo DiCaprio-narrated doc will only play a lousy one-week run at the Lincoln Square IMAX and with only one 8 am showing per day because because the tepid and tiresome Alice in Wonderland needs the prime-time screening slots. Hubble 3D‘s exposure will be a bit more liberal at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City.
Ivan Reitman will attempt a long reach across the generational divide in May when he begins filming a GenX/GenY romantic comedy called Friends With Benefits, based on a script by Elizabeth Meriwether (writer of the highly-touted, similar-sounding Fuckbuddies…is this the same script with a different title?). Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher will costar in the Paramount flick, which already has a locked-in early 2011 release date — January 7th. Variety calls this date “a lucrative frame for femme-driven comedies,” but a pre-slotted early January release amounts to a kind of statement of expectations about what the film is likely to be.
Distractions kept me from last night’s Runaways red-carpet photo op at the Sunshine Cinemas, so I went to the after-party at the Bowery hotel, hoping for a shot of Kristin Stewart and Dakota Fanning. It was a very nice gathering with tasty food, etc., but Stewart and Fanning decided to temporarily blow the party off by going somewhere else after the screening. (Young actors sometimes need to express disdain for publicity.) I knew they’d show up sooner or later but waiting around became interminable.
Falco Ink’s Janice Roland had graciously passed me into the event, but I was pretty much left to my own devices once I was in. Survival of the fittest, the scramble to survive, etc. There was the usual roped-off VIP area with two or three apes guarding the entrance. The party was filled with stylishly dressed, slightly desperate-looking people who had clearly attached great significance in their heads to being there. I began to feel badly about being there, and then really badly about it. I began telling myself that the people at this party were the worst people in the world. I was suddenly seized by a desire to talk to someone like Henry Fonda‘s Tom Joad character in The Grapes of Wrath.
Late in the game I chatted about the film with a hazel-eyed blonde who was sitting at the bar, and asked her at one point how she felt about Fanning’s performance as Cherie Currie. She said into my ear, “Do you mind if I don’t talk about that?” I said to her, “It’s okay — please don’t.” I gave her a look of slight contempt as I turned away and returned to the VIP area to wait with the other paps for Stewart/Fanning. It was a lot like standing around gate 225 at the Port Authority bus terminal.
After a while I just couldn’t stand it and left. I’m guessing that Stewart or Fanning or both eventually appeared, but it felt great when I finally left the party and hit the pavement and began walking north and breathing in the night air.
The only truly appealing part of the evening was speaking briefly to Apparition co-chief Bob Berney about everyone hoping to see Terrence Malick ‘s The Tree of Life at Cannes. Berney doesn’t expect the notoriously reclusive Malick to take part in any of the usual promotional exposures and appearances if the film plays there — no photo op gang-bang, no press conference attendance, no one-on-one press luncheon sit-downs, etc. Didn’t Malick go to Cannes in the ’70s for either Badlands or Days of Heaven?, I asked. Berney couldn’t remember but I think he did. I know that Malick won the festival’s Best Director prize in ’78 for Days of Heaven.
One last dental journey to New Jersey this morning and I’m done. It’s not pleasant, it eats time and money, etc. But you can’t ignore this stuff. Attention must be paid. Which means a final catch-as-catch-can, battery-powered, filing-from-waiting-rooms-and-roadside rest stops column day.
After last week’s Armond White-vs.-Leslee-Dart kerfuffle over his not having been invited to see Noah Baumbach‘s Greenberg, everyone has been awaiting White”s Greenberg review with bated breath. Well, the piece is up — and guess what? White tosses off two or three observations, but he barely “reviews” the film at all.
That’s because his ire and fire are mostly aimed at Village Voice critic Jim Hoberman, whom he regards as a small-minded lackey of the imperialist ruling circle of publicists and producers, and 42West publicist Leslee Dart, who kept White away from Greenberg screenings until last week’s brouhaha brought about a reversal.
The interesting thing is that White, a longtime Baumbach hater, almost gives Greenberg a backhanded compliment by calling it “a mite less obnoxious than Baumbauch’s other films.”
White otherwise devotes most of the 20 paragraphs in the article to vivisecting Hoberman for supplying photo-copy proof last Wednesday afternoon that White did in fact suggest in ’07 that his issues with Baumbach might been remedied by “retroactive abortion,” and for doing so for purely venal reasons. And to lambasting Dart, founder of 42West publicity, for being an enemy of free speech and a possible guest on an upcoming segment of the Glenn Beck Show. It goes on and on, and makes for vivid reading if nothing else.
My favorite part of the article notes that Greenberg was “co-conceived with Baumbach’s talented wife Jennifer Jason Leigh, and that in this respect the film continues Leigh’s filmography of masochistic females encountering sadistic males. It’s interesting to watch Greta Gerwig spar JJL-style with Stiller’s Baumbachian prick. I’ll probably be attacked for stating the obvious — that Greenberg seems to dramatize Leigh-Baumbach’s curious relationship — but that’s the film’s only point of interest.”
The last paragraph reads as follows: “This Greenberg problem has had the unexpected effect of unleashing Hoberman’s small-minded vanity. He has such enmity for me he’d rather embarrass his profession than defend it. From his inherited hipster perch at the Village Voice, Hoberman sets a corrupt agenda for the blogosphere’s wannabes. It seems not to matter to these backward children that Hoberman lied and distorted, creating his own WMD. He resents that I am a challenge to his authority; the Hobermanbots fear lively critical dialogue; they all want control. But aspiring critics and mainstreamers won’t make a worthwhile contribution to film culture until they learn to think (and read and see and feel) for themselves.
“Don’t get it twisted: This Greenberg squabble is not about me, it’s about the contempt that the Leslee Darts of this world show toward critics and that Hoberman displays to competition. If they can do this to me, they can do it to you.”
Don Hahn and Peter Schneider‘s Waking Sleeping Beauty (Disney, 3.26) is a crisply entertaining, well-done, slightly fawning doc about how Walt Disney Co. honchos Michael Eisner and particularly Jeffrey Katzenberg led a team that made profound animation history for roughly a decade — from the time they took over the fairly moribund Disney studios in ’84 until Katzenberg’s resignation in ’94.
During this period Disney released the most successful string of animated feature hits ever seen from any studio before or since — The Great Mouse Detective (’86), Oliver and Company, Who Framed Roger Rabbitt (’88), The Little Mermaid (’89), The Rescuers Down Under (’90), Beauty and the Beast (’91), Aladdin (92), The Nightmare Before Xmas (’93), and The Lion King (’94).
The real hey-hey was closer to a seven year period — ’88 to ’95. In my book it all started with Roger Rabbitt in ’88 and more or less fanned out from there.
Pocahantas, released in ’95, was certainly a product of the Katzenberg regime and the attendant mindset. Toy Story, also released in ’95, was mainly a Pixar show but also rich with the double-tracking mentality that characterized the new-regime Disney classics — kid-friendly but also smart and clever enough to appeal to hip adults.
My two boys were born in ’88 and ’89, and my ex-wife and I were there as Los Angeles-residing parents all through this glory period. We lived it, paid for the tickets and toys and action figures, went to all the films (or rented them all and watched them repeatedly), sang “Under The Sea” with the kids, etc. And this movie brought it all back. A good feeling.
Hahn and Schneider’s doc thoroughly explains how the fortunes of Disney studios were basically in the crapper at the time Eisner and Katzenberg were brought in by Roy Disney. Box-office flops, pessimistic forecasts, etc. “The artists were polarized between newcomers hungry to innovate and old timers not yet ready to relinquish control,” etc.
Waking Sleeping Beauty producer Peter Schneider (l.) and co-producer-director Don Hahn following Monday night’s screening of the film at the Museum of Modern Art.
As Alec Guiness‘s Prince Feisal puts it in Lawrence of Arabia, “What we need is a miracle.” And that’s pretty much what happened. The Eisner-Katzenberg run was the most productive, commercially bountiful and accolade-filled period in the annals of 20th Century animation.
Waking Sleeping Beauty was funded by and will be distributed in all media by Disney, but I don’t think it’s fair or accurate to brusquely dismiss it as “a work of corporate self-congratulation,” as Variety‘s Ron Nelson did after the big debut at last September’s Toronto Film Festival.
Disney’s winning streak didn’t just happen — it came about through hard work, heavy talent, bold thinking, creative friction, and particularly strong leadership. And this film does a better-than-decent job of sketching how it happened in nuts-and-bolts terms, and making you feel the emotional ups and downs (as well as the stress-outs and anxieties) that were part of the experience. That’s not a corporate thing — that’s blood, sweat and tears shed by real people.
That said, Waking Sleeping Beauty is a kind of family-friendly, PG-13 version of the saga. I believe that all of life is R-rated, no matter the region or subject or personalities involved, and now and then you can feel Hahn and Schenider stepping back from the more pointed or abrasive aspects of the tale. Both are big-time, Disney-employed veterans of the period being celebrated, and there’s a vested, sanded-down tonality to the film that probably wouldn’t have been there if a couple of renegade outsiders had made it.
There are two amusing anecdotes that everyone in the film business has heard and shared about the hard-driving ethos of the Eisner-Katzenberg era. One was a Katzenberg-alluding remark, allegedly passed along to certain Disney employees, that “if you don’t come to work on Saturday, don’t bother coming in on Sunday.” The other, of course, was the studio being nicknamed “Mouseschwitz.” These lines are funny — I don’t care what you say — and were based on what real people were feeling and sharing back then. And yet Hahn and Schneider don’t mention either one in the doc.
Michael Esiner (l.), Jeffrey Katzenberg (r.) early in their reign at Disney.
That’s deliberate myopia — i.e., looking to keep their relationship cool with Katzenberg (who probably resents the allusion to Nazi Germany and the Auschwitz concentration camp) or avoid a scuffle with their Disney benefactors. Hahn told me today these lines weren’t mentioned because they’re “well-trod material,” etc., but my son Jett, a Syracuse senior who knows a thing or two, had never heard “Mouseschwitz” and smirked when I mentioned it to him this morning.
It’s also slightly irksome that no one ever just states the obvious cultural currents. There always seemed to be something a little bland and WASPy about Hollywood’s animation community over the decades. To some extent Disney studios seemed to epitomize a certain white-picket-fence suburban culture (Walt Disney himself was from an Irish-Canadian family). But this string began to run out both creatively and business-wise, and it seems derelict not to mention that the Disney empire was saved by a couple of shrewd, scrappy, no-nonsense Jews.
My biggest beef is that Waking Sleeping Beauty doesn’t provide an epilogue — i.e., how the last fifteen years have unfolded in the animation arena and where all the Disney players went to and wound up. Hahn and Schneider don’t mention that Katzenberg co-founded DreamWorks and ran the animation division of that company, or anything about the powerful ascendancy of Pixar, or the ouster of Eisner by Roy Disney, etc.
Hahn told me earlier today that an epilogue was shot and considered, but they decided that the last fifteen years are “nothing you couldn’t find from looking on Wikipedia.” Baloney. Watching Waking puts you into the characters’ lives and heads and the whole animation culture, and you want to know what happened. Sorry, but it’s bad story-telling.
My favorite clip in the whole film is a shot of young Tim Burton working as an animator at Disney sometime in the early ’80s. He was 25 or so at the time, but he looked like he was 17 or 18. The clip got a big laugh.
Waking Sleeping Beauty will come out on DVD next fall, and will include about 85 minutes of bonus material.
The idea of Obama not just spending time with this distracta, but knowing it well enough to riff about this and that team…amazing. That’s the point, I guess. The bigger the burden the more you want to hide away in the fantasy cave and feel like a 19 year-old.
Several Paris metro stations have IKEA lounge furniture installed for general public comfort. The installations will remain until 3.24. It’s utterly impossible to envision this happening in the New York subway system. There would be vomit and urine stains all over the furniture in no time, not to mention discarded condoms and the odor of booze and beer, etc. Bums would take up permanent residence.
How, then, is this happening in Paris without apparent incident? The answer is that Paris, quite simply, is somehow better regulated and managed regarding its homeless underclass. Less crude and coarse than Manhattan — smoother, cleaner, silkier. How else to explain the IKEA experiment? Am I wrong about Manhattan subways and the skanky element they seem to attract or at least accomodate?
N.Y. Observer/Daily Transom’s Reid Pillifantnotes that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner “continued his charm offensive” in a relatively long sit-down with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow last night.
He spoke a lot about the “innocent victims” of the crisis, how he felt a deep “personal responsibility and obligation” to prevent another crisis, said bonuses made for a “crazy way to run a financial system,” and made it a point to reiterate that he has never actually worked at a bank — or even a hedge fund, for that matter.
But Geithner couldn’t bring himself to fall too far onto the sword, saying the Fed made some mistakes but was still “the strongest, the best, most able of those regulators, in the United States and around the world.”
“I think this is a just war,” he said of the administration’s push to pass a financial regulation bill. In case you couldn’t tell, the White House would very much like to get this done, and soon.
