David Carr, the N.Y. Times “Bagger” blogger, says Paramount Picture’s calorically-challenged president Gail Berman (I’m sorry but c’mon, this is a distinctive characteristic…you can’t say it isn’t) may be toast after all, and that Endeavor’s Ari Emanuel may be coming in to take up Berman’s slack. Carr is calling Paramount topper Brad Grey‘s defense of Berman in that 2.6 Laura Holson Times piece “remarkably wan,” and saying that “two people” he’s spoken to have “suggested that Emanuel will be brought in to help run the place in Ms. Berman’s stead.” Strange and prejudiced and as un-p.c. as this may sound, I suspect that deep, deep down (and I mean down the elevator in a coal mine), Berman’s c.c. factor is not a political plus for her. Face it — there are next to no c.c. stand-outs in the film industry, and I think we all recognize there’s a reason behind this.
Everyone’s heard by now about Valley of the Wolves Iraq, the Turkish anti-American film that shows American soldiers in Iraq “crashing a wedding and pumping a little boy full of lead in front of his mother,” and “killing dozens of innocent people with random machine gun fire, shooting the groom in the head, and dragging those left alive to Abu Ghraib prison…where a Jewish doctor cuts out their organs, which he sells to rich people in New York, London and Tel Aviv,” according to a Feb. 2 Associated Press story by Benjamin Harvey. Wolves, essentially a Turkish variation on a mid ’80s Rambo film, opened in Turkey last Friday. “It feeds off the increasingly negative feelings many Turks harbor toward Americans,” Harvey’s story reports, and is “the latest in a new genre of popular culture that demonizes the U.S. It comes on the heels of a novel called ‘Metal Storm’ about a war between Turkey and the U.S., which has been a best seller for months.” What isn’t as well known is that Gary Busey and Billy Zane gave walk-on performances in the film, and that they’re going to take some heat from righties for helping to perpetrate anti-U.S. propaganda. A connected film guy from Manhattan (I’d give him credit but he might get pissed if I ran his name) confides he is “now hearing on the record that Busey signed on [to act in the film] without seeing a script and left for Turkey all in 48 hours. I am also told off the record that Zane did see a script but that the brutal stuff was added when he got to the shoot.” I’m told Wolves will screen at the Berlin Film Festival next week, but what about a U.S. screening for media types like myself?
Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter about an encounter he had with Capote star Philip Seymour Hoffman at the magazine’s pre-Golden Globes party at the Sunset Tower (i.e., the old Argyle): “Hoffman…is a terribly serious young man, and in an ill-fated attempt to lighten the moment, I told him that I too do a pretty mean Truman Capote. While he stood there, I did my own impersonation, including the high-pitched, fey, lisping voice and the waving of a crooked finger while I adjusted my eyeglasses. He gave me a pissed-off look and just walked away.”
A good Mark Lisanti/Defamer slash about Teri Hatcher‘s see- through outfit at Wednesday night’s Grammy Awards: ‘We did a few twirls around to make sure you weren’t seeing anything you weren’t supposed to be seeing,’ Hatcher told reporters. Unfortunately, the thing you really ‘weren√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢√É‚Äû√ɬ¥t supposed to be seeing’ — an aging, nighttime soap star clawing at the spotlight in an outfit that says, ‘Hey, everyone! Look at me! I’m in my underwear! Isn’t that outrageous?!’ — was still clearly visible to the naked eye.”
I missed this 2.5 “Page Six” item about Tony Curtis dissing Brokeback Mountain. The remarks came from a recent interview Curtis did with Fox News critic Bill McCuddy. Curtis’s views — he hasn’t seen Brokeback and probably won’t, “[it’s] not as important as we make it… it’s nothing unique,” and “Howard Hughes and John Wayne wouldn’t like it” — suggest that Curtis, 80, is no longer thinking like the sharp cat he used to be. He can dislike Brokeback all he wants, but refusing to see it and invoking Wayne and Hughes is way of saying he prefers the sanctity of nostalgia to the alive-ness and prickly challenges of the present. (I called Curtis this morning at his home near Las Vegas to make sure he was quoted correctly and fully, but he didn’t pick up.) I met and got along with extremely well with Curtis six years ago when I met him for an interview in March 2000, and back then, when he was 74, he seemed like a different guy. “Curtis has always embodied a certain pugnacious cool, as palpable today as it was when he was starting to come into his own as an actor, in the late 1950s,” I wrote in my March 2000 piece, which I called “Cat in a Bag.” “Bluntness, ambition, class resentment, latent anger — these are fires that have always burned within Curtis, the man…and it seems to me they’re still there.” In a larger sense Curits’s remarks mean that the older, somewhat more conservative Academy crowd will be voting for Crash, which a journalist pal has described as “the middle-class Best Picture choice.”
The New York Post‘s “Page Six” team has written that Man About Town star Ben Affleck took some affable jabs from director “Mike Binger” — try Mike Binder, guys — at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival the other night. Binder took Affleck to task for not attending the film’s Tuesday night premiere. “Fuck Ben Affleck for not being here,” the Post quoted “Binger” as saying. I don’t remember that one (I was in the 18th row) but Binder did say that Affleck’s performance is as good as it is in Man About Town “because I edited his performance very carefully…of course, if he’d shown up, I’d be kissing his ass.” The S.B. festival staffers were a little miffed because they’d booked Binder and his film with expectations that the cast — Affleck, Rebecca Romijn, John Cleese, Jerry O’Connell, Geena Gershon, Adam Gold- berg — would show up, and nobody did. I think that comes under the heading of “bad manners”, guys. You make a film, it preems in or near Los Angeles, and you’re obliged as professionals and as considerate human beings to support it, and to give it some attention with the media…period. Nobody knows what kept Affleck away from Santa Barbara (maybe it was unavoidable), but it was suggested at the Man after-party that maybe the new baby he and Jennifer Garner are taking care of had something to do with it. Take it from me: if anyone ever uses “baby” as a reason for not showing up at an event, don’t believe them. I’ve taken care of two babies, I know what it’s like and how demanding it is, and if you have something important to do for business/career reasons, you can always get away and do that…trust me.
Just wrote a piece about how Mike Binder‘s Man About Town, which screened at Santa Barbara’s Arlington theatre Tuesday night, played cooler and funnier than I remember after sitting alone in a living room and watching an unfinished version of it on DVD two or three months ago. I’m a proponent of the late Peter Ustinov’s idea that comedy and tragedy should always be mixed together, alogn with Christopher Fry’s observation that “in tragedy every moment is eternity; in comedy, eternity is a moment.” I guess this makes me a sucker on some level for Binder’s tragi-comic sense of humor, but to my surprise the audience went for it even more than I and laughed at all the right places. I heard only one diss at the after-party. (Three people who were there last night told me they think it’s better than Binder’s The Upside of Anger.) I loved the unreal anarchic way that Binder throws grief at his lead character, a Beverly Hills literary agent played by Ben Affleck. Distributors may have issues about this and that and it may run into some trouble with a portion of the critics, but last night told me that Man About Town definitely plays with a crowd. (The well-heeled Santa Barbara kind, at least.) In any event, I had the piece written with photos and everything, but I wrote it on Movable Type and didn’t save it as I was going along, and the damn thing crashed on me five minutes ago.
Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (Columbia, 10.13) won’t be treading in the footsteps of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon or Andrzej Wajda’s Danton, if the trailer is a half-honest indicator. Emphasizing the notion that Coppola’s film will be a “stylized” take on Antoinette’s life, the trailer is scored with a song by New Order called “Age of Consent.” Does this mean the whole of Antoinette is going to be scored like A Knight’s Tale and basically be a piece of historical fluff aimed at the women of taste, education and breeding who read Cosmopolitan? I can feel loathing building for this thing already. Coppola’s screenplay is based on Lady Antonia Fraser’s “Marie Antoinette: The Journey,” which I haven’t gotten around to, but the impression is that it’ll basically be a girl movie about what a fun-filled erotic dream palace Versailles was in the 1780s, and how Ms. Antoinette was basically the Paris Hilton of her day. One of the main reasons people went to House of Wax was to see Hilton get killed, and I don’t think I’m alone in saying there will be severe disappointment if Coppola’s fantasist-protagonist, played by Kirsten Dunst, doesn’t get her head cut off at the end…and I really want to see the head falling into the basket, please. (Like in the beheading scenes in the Wajda film…sticky blood soaking the cobblestones.) But I’m a bit worried about this prospect because the trailer doesn’t contain noticable hint of that pesky French revolution brewing outside the gates. Dunst’s costars are Jason Schwartzman (as King Louis XVI), Rip Torn (King Louis XV), Judy Davis (Comtesse de Noailles), plus Asia Argento, Marianne Faithfull, Steve Coogan, Shirley Henderson, et. al.
The middle-aged machismo clock has struck twelve for Harrison Ford, 63. I’m sorry to say this, but you can tell in the trailer that Ford has gotten too old to be playing that same late 40ish-early 50ish guy — older but studly and physically trim — he’s been in film after film since Clear and Present Danger. He looks his age and then some in Firewall (Warner Bros., 2.10), and you just don’t believe that a guy with a military-style haircut with white sidewalls and a kind of imperceptibly bent-over walk who basically looks like Uncle Festus from Bakersfield would have a teenaged daughter and a 10 year-old son with a 42 year-old wife (Virginia Madsen). Audiences may decide this doesn’t get in the way of the film (which is pretty good by the way…review coming this Friday), but Ford’s appearance keeps intruding into your consciousness as you watch it. There’s a rugged fight sequence that Ford performs with a younger costar near the end, but you can’t help think while watching it, “Could a guy this old, even if he works out like a Marine every day, really keep up against a guy 30 years younger in a knockdown brawl like this?” At a certain point movie stars known for their cool, panther-like machismo have to face up to the calendar and think about playing their age. (And no, this doesnt invalidate my idea about Ford and Steven Spielberg totally ignoring his age factor in the forthcoming Indy 4 flick and having him do the same grueling physical stuff he did in Raiders of the Lost Ark because it would be a good running joke if they did that.)
The second of its kind to be acquired by Paramount Classics, White Planet is an animals-struggling-to survive-in-a-barren-white- wilderness movie. Just because it sounds like a Penguins wannabe doc doesn’t mean it necessarily is. We all know life is rarely a day at the beach, and here are two films — White Planet and The Call of the North — reiterating this emphatically and at the same time stressing the importance of good parenting.
This 2.7 New York Times story about detective Anthony Pellicano‘s latest difficulties with the law (i.e., prosecutors have hit him with a 110-count indictment accusing Pellicano of racketeering and conspiracy, wiretapping, identity theft, witness tampering, and destruction of evidence) says he “masterminded a sprawling wiretapping ring that helped his clients gain an advantage in disputes with opponents including actors, reporters and talent managers.” Uhm, yeah, I know…my phone was tapped by Pellicano (or one of his guys) in the summer of 1993 not long after my Last Action Hero dustup. I don’t know who hired him to do this, but it was a little chilling and I was ticked off at the time,. Amd yet looking back it all seems mildly amusing, like an episode of Mission Impossible. That aside, I’ve come to an opinion about Pellicano, which is that he’s a decent guy. He helped me with some research for an article a couple of years ago, and it made my work easier and the piece ultimately better. I believe in turning pages and moving on to new chapters. He who lives by the sword will die by the sword, etc., but by doing me a favor in ’03 I think Pellicano was making amends on some level for what happened ten years earlier. I think we both kind of knew that, and I felt a kind of symmetry from this.
Another clever guerilla trailer for an ’80s movie in a new context, in the vein of that joke trailer for The Shining that everyone went nuts over last year.
- Really Nice Ride
To my great surprise and delight, Christy Hall‘s Daddio, which I was remiss in not seeing during last year’s Telluride...
More » - Live-Blogging “Bad Boys: Ride or Die”
7:45 pm: Okay, the initial light-hearted section (repartee, wedding, hospital, afterlife Joey Pants, healthy diet) was enjoyable, but Jesus, when...
More » - One of the Better Apes Franchise Flicks
It took me a full month to see Wes Ball and Josh Friedman‘s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes...
More »
- The Pull of Exceptional History
The Kamala surge is, I believe, mainly about two things — (a) people feeling lit up or joyful about being...
More » - If I Was Costner, I’d Probably Throw In The Towel
Unless Part Two of Kevin Costner‘s Horizon (Warner Bros., 8.16) somehow improves upon the sluggish initial installment and delivers something...
More » - Delicious, Demonic Otto Gross
For me, A Dangerous Method (2011) is David Cronenberg‘s tastiest and wickedest film — intense, sexually upfront and occasionally arousing...
More »