Jeffrey Wells

It just hit me that Brad Silberling‘s Land of the Lost (Universal, 6.5) will be gradually boosting its media presence over the next few weeks, and deserves… well, a semblance of acknowledgement. The final two weeks of hype will commence near the end of the Cannes Film Festival, and then during my annual 9-day roamaround so my attention will be compromised. Except there’s nothing to say about something like this…is there? The less said the better. Just shut up.

Big-studio effects-driven comedies are all the same mish-mash. They pay the bills and nobody cares. Will Ferrell + Silberling (whom I wrote off 14 years ago after suffering through Casper) + Danny McBride + CG dinosaurs means big box-office and a mass coast-to-coast bendover. It’s the kind of of movie in which you need to cut a hole in the bottom of the cardboard popcorn container and do a Mickey Rourke-in-Diner move, just to get a reaction. From anyone. Because films like Land of the Lost have a tendency to make the world seem flatter and less full. I’ll pay to see it if I miss the screenings because I’m as much of a slave as anyone else.

“I don’t really have a plan, because [I] don’t know what the next 18 months will bring and I don’t want to think that much about it. I like not having a safety net. I like the risk of not knowing. But I will be involved in all kinds of great things.”

The preceding was spoken by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and published today in a N.Y. Times piece by Jennifer Steinhauer about this time and influence in Sacramento beginning to wind down. The quote is disingenuous in certain ways. It got me all the same because it reminds me of something I once read in one of Henry Miller‘s books from 1930s Paris, and because I myself tend to think this way from time to time.

Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As ‘Fun, Watchable’

Reasonably good news from Variety‘s Todd McCarthy in his just-up review of Ron Howard‘s Angels and Demons. One, this “cleverly produced” film is “less turgid and aggravating than its predecessor.” Two, “the climax, however far-fetched, is visually spectacular and dramatically both evenhanded and unexpected.” Three, Tom Hanks‘ Robert Langdon is fitter looking than he was in The DaVinci Code, and has changed hairdressers (i.e., no more DaVinci mullet). And four, Ewan McGregor‘s performance is “OK.”

Last Saturday night I caught a showing of Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Three Monkeys at the Cinema Village. As many have noted, it’s beautifully shot but slowly (some would say glacially) paced. I adore this Antonioni-esque quality but a 20something couple who sat in front of me started to get bored somewhere around the three-quarters mark and began to yappity-yap. Not whispering, which would have been bad enough, but actually talking.

I cut them a break at first, thinking they’d stop of their own accord — but they didn’t. So I signalled my irritation by coughing twice, which they ignored. Then I knocked on the back of the seat with my knuckles like I was knocking on a door — that shut them up for maybe two or three minutes, then they started in again. So I knocked on the back of the seat again. They finally stopped but it was touch and go for a good ten to twelve minutes.

If you’re bored with a film, the thing to do is leave. Nobody will fault you for that. But who sits there and chit-chats away and alienates anyone and everyone sitting nearby? In situations of this sort shouldn’t it be allowable to pour a soft drink over the head of a talker? Or…you know, down the back of their neck? You pretend that it’s an accident, of course, and offer to get them some paper towels.

“Perhaps Mike Tyson was fortunate to have avoided school and society, inasmuch as his grim early years were the only background that could have produced the inexorable force that he became,” writes New Yorker critic David Denby in his current review of James Toback‘s Tyson. “What this early life couldn’t do, however, was protect him from the many dangers outside the ring.

New Yorker illustration by Tom Bachtell.

“Without the guidance of Cus D’Amato (who died when Tyson was nineteen), he fell among idolaters and users, and blew tens of millions of dollars, as he admits, on houses, cars, clothes, girls, drugs, parties, every kind of excess, to the point where the man who was once the wealthiest fighter in history winds up beached (literally — Toback photographs him facing the sea), stranded amid debts and visits to rehab clinics.

“In that long descent, Tyson acted out his sense of worthlessness. If he cannot be king, he will be nothing; the middle, he says, doesn’t suit his temperament. What he offers Toback’s camera now is savagery recollected in tranquillity — the baddest man becalmed into a state of articulate self-awareness. That victory, at least, no one can take away from him.”

The Playlist‘s Rodrigo Perez has taken note of a 5.5 Jessica Biel interview by the Orlando Sentinel‘s Roger Moore in which she says that David O. Russell‘s Nailed, the financially-plagued Capitol Films production that went through at least four shutdowns last May and June, is an unfinished write-off. “I’m devastated that it’s not finished,” she said, “and who knows when it will be and will come out. I still have my fingers crossed that something good will come of it, that it will be finished.”

With Michael Mann‘s Public Enemies set to open July 1st, it’s not surprising that the high-profile Los Angeles Film Festival has arranged to screen it a few days prior. The 1930s high-def gangster flick will show as the fest’s Centerpiece premiere. The L.A. Film Festival runs from June 18th to 28th. Here‘s the lineup on PDF.

I’m very much at peace with never having listened to a single Jessica Simpson song, including “I Want To Love You Forever.” I didn’t mind her performance in The Dukes of Hazzard, but I didn’t think it was very good either. I really hate conservative-minded entertainers who talk about having conversations with God. Simpson has probably done as much to recruit Taliban followers as Sex and the City or the Charlie’s Angels movies. A lot of us believe that the world would be a better place if she’d never become famous for anything.

Why has Vanity Fair put her on the cover of its June issue? And run this story about her? And who wrote the copy that says she’s “fighting back against unflattering tabloid portrayals” — i.e., Vanity Fair-speak for the fact that Simpson became fat last year and that people took pictures of her. And who decided to describe the photos in the piece as Simpson “showing off her God-given assets”? The wearing of dresses is showing off assets?

My favorite Dom DeLuise moment — the funniest, I mean — is the most appalling in terms of homophobic attitudes. It’s the “French mistake” dance scene, of course, in Mel Brooks‘ Blazing Saddles (’74). “Wrong!!!….watch me faggot!…sounds like steam escaping.” Sorry but it’s funny. Brooks is the principal offender, of course — DeLuise just went with it. Brilliantly. His end came last night in Santa Barbara. He was 75. We all have the time that we have, and then we don’t.

I had a smooth and relaxing late-breakfast sitdown with Star Trek director JJ Abrams about two hours ago. We’ve been corresponding four or five years but had never met so it was cool to finally do so. My being a moderately big fan of the film (I gave it an HE grade of 8.7 or 8.8 last week) along with the softly-lighted setting of the lobby of the Four Seasons hotel only enhanced the vibe.

Abrams is full of pep and positivism, and about as sharp as they come. He’s almost certainly a as much of a compulsive work fiend as yours truly (if not more so) and is one of those guys who seem preternaturally skilled at being 100% present in the room — there’s no sense that he’s keeping a portion of himself hidden — and at the same time are expert at making conversational partners feel they’re being fully listened to and focused upon.

He had a typical Jewish breakfast (salmon, bagels, cream cheese) and I had the same typical WASP breakfast (scrambled eggs, rye toast, orange juice, bacon served as volcanic ash) that I’ve been eating since I was eight years old.

I conveyed my basic feelings about the film — that it’s a reboot to the Trek franchise in the same way that Casino Royale rebooted the 007 films, that it feels well-coiled and tightly constructed, and that it’s especially successful in the sense that it leaves you just a little bit hungry (as opposed to films that make you feel you’ve absorbed too much of them). His answers speak for themselves.

I asked if long-departed Paramount production chief Gail Berman in fact “came up with the idea of doing the Star Trek prequel now arriving in theaters,” as it said in a 5.4 Brooks Barnes N.Y. Times piece. Abrams basically said yes, she did come to him and proposed a new Star Trek film, and that he answered that he didn’t want to do Star Trek #11 and wanted to get back to basics with a reboot approach and that she said cool.

We also talked technology, travel (i.e., a Star Trek screening for troops in Kuwait), kids, health and so on. I was expecting no more than a 20-minute session after a negotiation with his tough assistant; we wound up talking for about 45 minutes.