This being a relatively fallow period, I’m in the mood right now for Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor (20th Century Fox, 10.25). I’d like to see it this weekend, I mean. Or tonight at a screening. Cameron Diaz‘s style and makeup consultant did a pretty good job at conveying her character’s trashy inclinations or low-rent origins — leopard-spot tats, gold tooth, black-and-blonde hair, a little too much mascara. But I’m stuck on the last line. Diaz says “what a world,” Penelope Cruz says “you think the world is strange?” and Diaz says….what? “I meant yours”? “I’m a source”? “I meant Soros”…a subtle reference to to Democratic donor George Soros? I’ve listened to it five times on earphones and I can’t make it out.
Daily
Forget Bumping Wolf To 2014 — Don’t Even Go There
Yesterday In Contention‘s Kris Tapley wrote that “a release-date bump” for Martin Scorsese‘s Wolf of Wall Street (Paramount, 11.15) “is looking very likely.” Paramount execs saw the first cut last weekend “but almost no one has seen it yet as [Scorsese] has been hard at work whittling down a typically massive first cut (with elements that would easily yield an NC-17 rating, by the way). But does it go to 2014 or to December?”
2014? Who’s saying that? A eunuch? If Paramount distribution execs are actually pondering a bump into next year (and I’m not presuming anything at this stage), they need to grim up and conduct themselves like persons of character and conviction. Having read and really enjoyed Terence Winter‘s Wolf script, I know what this film more or less is — Goodfellas/Casino meets Wall Street. Or, if you will, the conclusion of Scorsese’s Rise and Fall Of A Flamboyant American Criminal trilogy. Any talk about concerns over a possible NC-17 rating is totally candy-ass, in my view. From what little I know of editing an R rating is certainly achievable.
Grace Off To Showers
TheWrap‘s Todd Cunningham reported this evening (Monday, 9.23) that The Weinstein Co. has decided to bump Olivier Dahan‘s Grace of Monaco into early 2014 — almost certainly due to concerns about the biopic’s ability to hold its own during award season. The film, which costars Nicole Kidman as Grace Kelly and a moustachioed Tim Roth as Prince Rainer, had been set for an 11.27 limited opening. (Kidman offered a few words about Grace at a Weinstein Co. promo party during last May’s Cannes Film Festival.) Cunningham reports that Grace “has been pushed to next year to allow for the film’s completion, according to an individual close to the project.” He adds that “the most likely scenario at this point calls for a January release in France ahead of a U.S. debut in March.”
Never Better Than This
A Masters of Cinema Region-2 Bluray of Howard Hawks‘ Red River will street on 10.28. High-def 1080p presentation (as opposed to what…720p?) A booklet featuring the words of director Howard Hawks containing “rare imagery.” Original trailer. Exclusive lengthy video conversation about Red River and Hawks by filmmaker and critic Dan Sallitt, conducted by Jaime Christley, and shot by Dustin Guy Defa and James P. Gannon.
Zampano, I Feel Your Pain
“La Strada may be almost 60 years old, but Federico Fellini’s masterpiece is in the news,” writes Columbia film professor Annette Insdorf. “In an interview published late last week, Pope Francis called La Strada his favorite film. Some might have expected a more church-friendly movie, like Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City — which Fellini co-wrote — about a priest helping the Italian Resistance fight Nazi occupiers during World War Two. While he also mentions it, the pontiff’s favorite choice crystallizes his embrace of the fallible and the marginalized.
Muttonchops
“From the very first shot – an extended, foul-mouthed epic poem to the glory of his own sex organ — Jude Law’s titular Dom Hemingway exudes the very specific rapscallion charm British bad boys have in spades,” writes Film.com;s Jordn Hoffman. “But this…is not just another case of glamorizing an outlaw. Indeed, the opening shot of gratification ends with a punchline — Dom Hemingway is simultaneously a cool guy and a goof, a sliver-tongued genius and a bit of a dumbass. It’s a marvelous and rich character and Jude Law, a little puffier and hairier than usual (he looks like Liev Schreiber in X-Men Origins: Wolverine) turns in a career-best performance.”
Eight months after its debut at the just-concluded Toronto Film Festival, Fox Searchlight will release Dom Hemingway on 4.4.14.
They Bought It
A publicist pal asked this morning if I saw Nick Ryan‘s The Summit (IFC Films, 10.4) at last January’s Sundance Film Festival, and I said “nope…can I get a screener?” And then I remembered that I’d not only seen it but had posted a review. What does that indicate? Obviously that this absorbing, highly complex doc didn’t stick. Why? Because its examination of the death of 11 climbers on the notorious K2 in August 2008 is a little too even-handed. It’s so fair-minded (i.e., reluctant to call a spade a spade) that butter wouldn’t melt in its mouth.
“The story of the 2008 tragedy demands specificity and exactitude, and Ryan’s film (which is partly re-enacted) certainly provides that,” I wrote last January. “But in the name of thoroughness and looking at all the angles, it declines to judge or point fingers. Ryan decides to not say in clear, talking-to-a-dumb-guy fashion if this or that climber was guilty of carelessness or negligence. He just says, ‘This happened, and a lot of factors came into play. Either way I’m not going to give you, the viewer, the satisfaction of being able to say ‘this guy screwed up’ or ‘this guy should have known better.’ You can figure that out yourself on your way home, if you want. Or you can do some in-depth reading about it.”
Two Pop-Outs
I’ve seen two of the films opening on Friday, 9.27 — Joseph Gordon Levitt‘s Don Jon (formerly Don Jon’s Addiction) and Greg ‘Freddy’ Camalier‘s Muscle Shoals. I meant to see James Franco’s As I Lay Dying in Cannes but then the word got around and other stuff came up and then the one-sheet surfaced — the film (like the 1930 William Faulkner book it’s based upon) is an ensemble piece and the poster image is no-big-deal snap of a frowning Franco?
Slight Slave Diminishment?
A 9.22 Michael Cieply N.Y. Times article (in the 9.23 print edition) quotes two U.S. history scholars who question whether Solomon Northup actually wrote “12 Years A Slave“, the 1853 novel that is the basis for Steve McQueen‘s highly acclaimed film and more particularly John Ridley‘s script. Chiwetel Ejiofore plays Northrup, a free New York State citizen and family man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery and remained in that realm from 1841 through 1853.
If Cieply’s story had been published in, say, late November or December, it would be seen in some quarters as a typical award-season hitjob on a leading Best Picture contender. But appearing as it is now, a good two months before the Oscar race will begin to heat up, it seems like a fair-enough examination of certain historical anecdotes and particulars. The article isn’t really a hitjob as much as a “hmmm”-job.
Honest Representation
You may not have yet seen Jonathan Glazer‘s Under The Skin and if you have you may not be down with it, but you have to admit that this extended trailer delivers a fairly accurate semblance of how the film looks, sounds and plays. Here’s my Toronto Film Festival reaction.
Mild Quibble
In his mostly ecstatic review of Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity (Warner Bros., 10.4), TheWrap critic Todd Gilchrist describes it as “a hard-science tale.” The $80 million dollar 3D epic certainly feels technologically realistic but the term “hard-science” suggests something dry and matter-of-fact and perhaps even 2001-ish. That’s not how the film plays. Director-cowriter Cuaron spends a lot of time exploring the emotional travails of Sandra Bullock‘s novice-astronaut character, Dr. Ryan Stone. Gravity, truth be told, is basically an emotional-woman-in-peril movie first and a “hard science” thing (if you want to call it that) second. Gilchrist calls it “a virtuoso technical achievement and a powerfully visceral cinematic experience” — definitely. He also says “it offers a uniquely poetic portrait of hope and survival.” I’m less sure about “uniquely” since Bullock’s response to her life-threatening situation isn’t radically different from the responses of Doris Day and Karen Black in vaguely similar films of the past, as I pointed out on 9.19. Gravity is a brilliant achievement, but “hard science” it’s not.
Opened Seven Days Apart
Kyle Patrick Alvarez‘s C.O.G. (Focus Features, 9.20) is a personal-odyssey drama about a Yale graduate (Jonathan Groff) trying to immerse himself in some form of rural reality (i.e, an apple farm) as a way of shaking himself out of his elitist academic realm…or something like that. (C.O.G. is an acronym for Child of God — is there anyone on the planet who can’t be so described?) Jeremy Seifert‘s GMO OMG is a doc about a guy looking for naturally grown, non-corporate foodstuffs. GMO is an acronym for “Genetically Modified Organism.”