Yesterday Harvard University honcho Lawrence Summersrecounted the April 2004 episode depicted in The Social Network in which Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss visited his office to complain about a violation of Harvard’s student-ethics code by Mark Zuckerberg, etc.
Summers’ money quote was essentially that male Harvard students dress in jackets and ties for one of two reasons — i.e., they’re looking for a job or they’re assholes. Summers quickly came to the conclusion that Cameron and Tyler fit the latter category.
Today the Winklevii posted an open letter to Harvard University president Faust. It lamented the cavalier if not disrespectful manner of ex-president (and current Charles W. Eliot Harvard University professor) Summers during their April 2004 meeting with him, and emphatically contended that they are not, in fact, assholes.
The bottom line is that all exceptionally bright or creative people instinctively loathe to-the-manor-born preppy jocks wearing Brooks Brothers apparel. T’was ever thus & will be. In this sense Summers and Zuckerberg are brothers of the cloth.
Summers said yesterday (or was it the day before?) that The Social Network‘s depiction of the meeting he had with the Winklevii was more or less accurate.
This moment of compassion and generosity at Phoenix’s Chase Field was posted yesterday. Young kid shrieks and frets over failure to catch ball, a slightly older kid snags it instead…and hands it to the upset kid. A Captain America moment, or something like that. All but unthinkable in an adult context.
These aren’t deleted scenes — they’re deleted snippets, pickups, inserts and throwaways. And all of them worthless. This is another reason why George Lucas is the most loathed and despised franchise mogul of all time. I’ll never retrieve the 57 seconds I devoted to watching this cheap reel, and as far as I’m concerned Lucasfilm has stolen them from me.
These clips will be included in the big Star Wars Bluray package coming out in September. If you weren’t such a shameless huckster, Lucas, you’d let guys like me buy episodes #4 and #5 (A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back) as stand-alones without having to purchase the box set. Only drooling fanboys want to watch The Phantom Menace or Return of the Jedi again. You can forget Episodes #2 and #3 also.
On the day the box set comes out dedicated Lucas-haters need to stage a big media-friendly bonfire event in which copies (with A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back removed) are ceremonially burned. Throw copies of Willow into the fire while you’re at it.
If Peter Debruge‘s positive Variety review can be believed, Crazy Stupid Love (7.29) is a much better movie than what that dumbed-down trailer has been selling for several weeks. Congrats to Warner Bros. marketing for nearly persuading some of us that this allegedly endearing ensemble comedy, directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (I Love You Phillip Morris), might faintly suck.
“In a time before raunchy, R-rated laffers competed for the how-low-can-you-go prize, the demand for mature, grown-up romantic comedies resulted in pics as wise and wonderfully character-driven as Crazy, Stupid, Love,” Debruge begins. “Old-fashioned as that might sound, there’s a fresh, insightful feel to this multigenerational love story, in which square dad Steve Carell finds himself taking dating tips from ultra-slick ladykiller Ryan Gosling after getting tossed back into the singles scene.
“Instead of forcing the material to go high-concept or lowbrow, Warner Bros. trusts a first-rate cast and rock-solid script to sell auds. Response should be upbeat for this refreshingly upscale offering. Though it refuses to be reduced to a simple, one-sentence pitch, Crazy, Stupid‘s various storylines revolve around the shattered love life of happily married Cal (Carell), who has a midlife crisis foisted upon him when Emily (Julianne Moore), his wife of nearly 30 years, files for divorce.
“No magic body-swapping. No talking hand puppet. Just a sincere, soulful look at how someone who married his high-school sweetheart and never once imagined himself with another woman adjusts to being alone.”
A dissenting journalist confided the following this morning: “Off the record (as I am about to use language I wouldn’t use in a professional context), Crazy, Stupid, Love is phony fucking bullshit of the highest order, an utter wad of falsehood shot through with behavior no human being would actually engage in, with the additional blow of withholding one piece of vital information far, far past when it would have come up in real life for the purposes of a ‘surprise’ in the third act designed to make idiots gasp. It’s horrible, and while Peter Debruge is normally on his game, he is most assuredly not in this case.”
“By finding an ingenious way to streamline a now-familiar genre — and by providing a means to fill up your muggy summer afternoon watching hordes of evil soldiers gettin’ their arsche handed to them by a true-blue Sentinel of Liberty — Captain America: The First Avenger does his country proud.” — from a review by npr.org’s Glenn Wheldon.
“There is something miraculous in what Johnston and company have created from the hero that Jack Kirby and Joe Simon first unveiled in 1941. This is a big-scale movie that feels intimate, an action adventure built with the precision of a thriller, a popcorn lark that quotes knowledgeably from a list of influences as diverse as Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Medal of Honor videogames and Johnston’s own fine 1991 film The Rocketeer.
“It entertains zestily but treats you like a grown up; it has spectacles and sensations and all sorts of gee-wizardry, but there are heart and brains and taste, too. Like the best comic book films, Captain America is a feast of geekery that will gratify the most ardent acolytes of its hero. But it’s likely to amuse, enthrall and satisfy just about anyone with a sense of fun.” — from Shawn Levy‘s Oregonian review.
Fortune has posted a video of Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg chatting with Fortune‘s Andy Serwer to discuss 3D technology and why 2011 movies have so far, in Katzenberg’s opinion, blown chunks. JKatz actually asks for a show of hands to confirm or deny “if the last seven or eight months of movies is the worst lineup of movies you’ve experienced in the last five years of your life.”
“For sure the 3D bloom came,” Katznberg says early on, “and for sure the bloom is off the rose for a moment in time, driven by a singular and unique characteristic that only exists in Hollywood — greed. And, you know, so I think there were, unfortunately, a number of people who thought that they could capitalize on what was a great, genuine excitement by moviegoers for a new premium experience, and thought they could just deliver a kind of low-end crappy version of it, and people wouldn’t care, or wouldn’t know the difference. And anything ?? you know, nothing could have been further from the truth.
“The film business, on the other hand, is extremely challenged right now in ways that I don’t think, certainly not in my career in the industry, have we faced. And it’s a sort of perfect storm, if you will, of a number of factors.
“The first is that driven by the most stressed economy of our lifetime, you know, this recession made every single person look at and reassess price/value in every aspect of their life. Proctor & Gamble deals with it the same way, Wal-Mart deals with it, the way movie companies and studios are having to deal with it, which is, is something worth today to me what I’m paying for it. And people are consciously thinking and making that assessment on a daily basis.
“And what happened is, at the moment in time in which they were making those assessments, in particular about owning DVDs, is also the moment in time in which all sorts of new delivery opportunities presented themselves, which, by the way, are still enormously in flux, and you can’t ?? anybody that would sit here today and say, okay, well, I kind of understand where this all ends up a year, or 18 months, or two years from now, I think is kind of foolish, to be honest. There are so many changing aspects about it. And so we have what is for sure a systemic change in consumer habits with regard to how they consume movies. And what we haven’t yet found is what is that new model.
“Now, having said that, more people are actually watching movies today than ever before around the globe. The question is, how are they going to do that, how are they going to access it, how much of it is going to be through streaming, how much of it is going to be bundled, how much of it is going to be on a per-play basis, how much of it is going to be digital, how much of it is going to exist in the cloud, and we can go on, and on, and on with all of these things, all of which are incredibly real. And so, right now in the center of that is a change in habits, a change in platform, a change in delivery, and therefore uncertainty and challenges financially.
“A movie experience is a passive experience. The storytelling narrative is something that I think is still a unique and interesting, and valued experience by people around the world. And whether it’s done in a movie theater or in your home, or on your laptop, or iPad, or whatever the device is, people love that passive experience. And we see it, again, there’s more and more consumption of it.
“What all of these devices and social networking things do is they’re going to actually force Hollywood to make better products, because today the thing that is probably most askew in Hollywood is the issue of marketability versus playability. And what that really means is that there is this sort of unholy alliance that has existed forever between art and commerce, show and biz. And today it’s out of balance and it’s too much on the biz, and it’s too much on the commerce and it’s too much on the marketability and the fact is that I’m pretty confident, and let’s do it, because this is supposed to be an interactive experience here, which is could we agree?
“Let me have a show of hands of people that would say the last seven or eight months of movies is the worst lineup of movies you’ve experienced in the last five years of your life.”
What has Katzenberg been watching? The last six and a half months have seen The Guard, Captain America, Drive, A Better Life, The Tree of Life, Beginners, X-Men: First Class, Bridesmaids, Win Win, Hanna, Midnight in Paris, Source Code, Cedar Rapids, Meek’s Cutoff, Super, The Lincoln Lawyer and Jane Eyre. That’s almost 20 films that have been very good, good or better than half-decent.
For whatever reason it’s only just hit me that Martin Scorsese‘s Letter to Elia, a profoundly personal exploration of not only Elia Kazan‘s life and career but the influence his films have had upon Scorsese almost his entire life, is playing for free on pbs.org. If you haven’t seen it and you regard yourself as any kind of Movie Catholic, you must watch it as soon as you can. Who knows? Maybe they’ll take it down tomorrow or next week.
I’d like to catch the ComicCon Cowboys & Aliens screening (which my Universal p.r. pally wasn’t able to get me into), but otherwise it feels just fine not being in San Diego as we speak. Possible compensation: A livestream feed from the Entertainment Weekly guys and NowLive. A little Dave Karger and Anthony Breznican is part of the deal, apparently.
Very impressive sit-up and leg-lift regimen. Seriously. You have to figure some Ford rep said to the milk guys, “Okay, but a torso shot. The moustache is white. People will see it. No closeup required.”
