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I was totally sold when the teaser for HBO’s The Brink, a half-hour, ten-episode political satire series about the misadventures of Jack Black in Pakistan, popped a month ago. The just-released trailer makes me feel even more revved. Boilerplate: “Created by Roberto Benabib (Weeds, Ally McBeal) and Kim Benabib, the series takes place during the onset of a military coup in Pakistan. Black’s character is the only U.S. intelligence guy left in the region. But when the U.S. President (Esai Morales) and the Secretary of State (Tim Robbins) order him to be their eyes and ears, things naturally go awry. Jay Roach (Recount) has directed the pilot episode. The Brink starts on Sunday, 6.21.

Until today I hadn’t noticed that Young Americans (formerly College Republicans), the mostly fact-based period buddy comedy about young righties Karl Rove and Lee Atwater on a wild cross-country road trip to Washington, D.C., was going to get made. I rave-reviewed Wes Jones’ script four and a half years ago, and in the same piece disputed suspicions in a 12.17.10 Steven Zeitchik L.A. Times piece that the script might have trouble getting made for lack of commerciality. Zeitchik’s instincts were obviously more astute than mine as it’s taken a long time to get rolling.

The College Republicans casting that might have been in late 2010.

Back then Anonymous was looking to produce with Shia LaBeouf as Atwater and Paul Dano as Rove. The current version will roll this fall with Starstream producing, John Krokidas (Kill Your Darlings) directing and Daniel Radcliffe as Atwater and Dane Dehaan as Rove. Amanda Seyfried (whom I just saw on-stage in Neil Labute‘s The Way We Get By) will costar.  

Here are portions of my 12.19.10 piece:

“This is a very smartly written, character-rich, darkly humorous tale of an actual 1973 road trip taken by infamous Bush strategist and Fox News scumbag Karl Rove, then 23, and the late Republican attack dog Lee Atwater, then 22, as they campaigned and dirty-tricked their way across the south in order to get Rove elected chairman of the College Republican National Committee.

“What this is, boiled down, is another Due Date mixed with politics and, in a manner of speaking, horror. Because it’s an origin story about the wily and colorful beginnings of two scoundrels who made their bones as the architects of rightwing attack-and-subvert politics — guys who not only put two Bushes into the White House but injected a vicious and reprehensible strain into American politics that not only thrives today but has in fact metastasized.

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I’ve briefly flopped in the Hotel Bonsejour (corner of rue Durantin and rue Burq) three or four times over the past several years, mainly because it’s cheap. Within the past year the owners have refurbished the place big-time. It’s still small and spartanish but a lot cleaner now with much nicer bathrooms and new flatscreens to boot. My Airbnb rental (24 rue Constance) doesn’t start until tomorrow afternoon at 12:30 pm. Some people have the character to stay in places like the Bonsejour but most don’t.

So she’s called Angelina Jolie Pitt now…cool. But why isn’t Jolie Pitt hyphenated? A Deadline piece says that By The Sea (Universal, 11.13), which AJP directed, wrote, produced and co-stars in with Brad Pitt, is set in the ’70s…good creative decision! Deadline says it’s “inspired by European cinema and theater of the 1960s and ’70s,” which gets my vote sight unseen. Theoretically, I mean. Shot in Malta but set in a French seaside village, pic is about an American writer Roland (Pitt) and his wife Vanessa (Jolie Pitt) coping with a troubled marriage. Given the freewheeling sexual climate of the ’70s I’m presuming that an incident of infidelity, presumably Roland’s, is a cause of the difficulty.  That or a deceased child.  Jolie Pitt’s statement: “This is a story about a relationship derailed by loss, the tenacity of love and the path to recovery and acceptance.” (That sentence indicates that “the tenacity of love” and “the path to recovery and acceptance” are part of the derailment — awkward phrasing.) Costarring Mélanie Laurent, Melvil Poupaud, Niels Arestrup and Richard Bohringer.

I wouldn’t describe last night’s JFK-to-Paris flight as miserable.  The guy in front of me didn’t lean his seat back too far (much obliged!) so mostly sleepless but tolerable is a fair way to describe it.  I’m presently holding down a corner table at La Sancerre on rue d’Abesses — a free wifi oasis.  Paris is not warm, fall-ish but mild.  Scarf weather.  I can’t move into the crib until 2 pm, or two and 1/2 hours hence.  I’ll be fine once I get a little shut-eye.  I recently watched  a British Bluray of Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (on top of having seen it seven or eight times previously in other formats) so I’m not sure about catching it this afternoon at the Filmotheque this afternoon, as a Twitter guy (i.e., Ben Croll) has suggested, but there’s something delicious about that notion all the same.  Best movie-phile city in the world.  I set foot here and my mood shifts or more accurately levitates.  I’m home.  Well, kind of.

Directed by Harold Ramis, National Lampoon’s Vacation (’83) was a soft, silly comedy of humiliation aimed at the squares. The only thing I really liked about it was the “Holiday Road” theme song. I know that John Hughes‘ screenplay diluted the fuck out of his original National Lampoon short story “Vacation ’58,” which was much, much darker — it really shook hands with the repressed rage of the 1950s-era dads who gave so many boomers such miserable childhoods. The new Vacation (Warner Bros., 7.31) is seemingly a slightly more vulgar rehash of the ’83 film with Russell Griswold (Ed Helms), the son of Chevy Chase‘s Clark Griswold, determined to experience the same family horrors. I’d much rather see Doug Tirola‘s Drunk, Stoned, Brilliant, Dead again.

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Nobody gives a damn about the secondary characters in Ant-Man (okay, maybe Michael Douglas‘s guy) so putting them all on the one-sheet is a waste and a stopper. And why is Paul Rudd‘s head significantly larger than everyone else’s? To remind everyone that he’s a hot-shot movie star? And why is he wearing a hoodie? Honestly, this is one of the most ineptly designed, non-catchy one-sheets I’ve seen in a long time. It looks like a Cannon poster from the mid ’80s. The Disney/Marvel release opens on 7.17.

Quentin Tarantino‘s The Hateful Eight (Weinstein Co., sometime in the fall) might turn out to be “the meanest, grittiest and deadliest movie of the year” but as I’ve noted two or three times now, a draft of the script that was performed in downtown L.A. on 4.19.14 was basically just a buncha guys sittin’ around talkin’. Posted on 4.20.14: “It’s a fairly minor and almost dismissable thing — a colorful but basically mediocre Tarantino gabfest that mostly happens on a single interior set (i.e., Minnie’s Haberdashery, located somewhere near the Wyoming town of Red Rock during a fierce blizzard), and which unfolds in the vein of The Petrified Forest.”

I’ve been waiting for a high-def version of Hal Ashby and Warren Beatty‘s Shampoo to come along for years, and I just noticed yesterday that one is streaming on Amazon right now. Posted six years ago: “The brittleness and acidity in Carrie Fisher‘s personality feels just right in this scene from Shampoo. And the look of slight confusion mixed with resignation on Warren Beatty‘s face when she pops the question is perfect. I wish there were more movies like this today. Whip-smart social comedies with more on their minds than just wanting to make people laugh, I mean.”

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With distributors doubtful about commercial potential and unwilling to cough up, the team behind the assembly and restoration of Orson Welles‘ unfinished The Other Side of the Wind has decided to go the Indiegogo route. They’re looking to raise $2 million by June. Hollywood Elsewhere has contributed $110, and I’m urging everyone who cares the least bit about Welles’ legacy to give whatever they can, but where’s “Beardo” Spielberg when you really need him? What’s the point of being worth $3.5 billion if you can’t shrug your shoulders and drop $500K when the final effort of one of the 20th Century’s greatest and most legendary filmmakers needs a little help? Best part of Brooks Barnes’ N.Y. Times story about the fundraising effort: “[Frank] Marshall, whose producing credits range from Raiders of the Lost Ark to the coming Jurassic World and [Peter] Bogdanovich said they had never even heard of Indiegogo when the service approached [producer Filip Jan] Rymsza in November.”

My Grateful Dead romance, such as it was, peaked with the symphonic, at times jazzily exquisite Live Dead, which I still listen to on occasion. And I liked American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead as far as they went. But the Dead were a vibe first and a good band second. “Although not always described in the film in the most flattering of terms, Deadheads will find plenty to savor in Mike Fleiss’ The Other One: The Long, Strange Trip of Bob Weir, a revelatory documentary about Bob Weir, the Grateful Dead’s legendary rhythm guitarist.” Pic contains “fascinating archival footage, copious musical performances and extensive interviews with Weir, his contemporaries and many of the famous musicians he’s influenced.” — from Frank Scheck‘s 4.24 Hollywood Reporter review. The doc pops on Netflix on 5.22.

Early last February I wrote that the August 7th release date of Ricki and the Flash seemed to indicate caution on the part of TriStar, the distributor. A drama directed by the widely respected Jonathan Demme, written by Diablo Cody and starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline? I don’t know a  thing but Ricki looks — emphasis on that word — like “the first high-pedigree, seemingly interesting 2015 film to be…I don’t want to say dumped but that release date has certainly lowered expectations all around.”