An HE reader named “Webster” wrote the following this morning: “I saw James L. Brooks‘ How Do You Know at a screening in Orange County last week. (No end credits at the screening — still being massaged.) What I saw started a little slow, but really picks up steam midway through and ends strong. In a five-slot race I wouldn’t give it much chance at a Best Picture nomination, but with 10 slots…who knows?
“The guy who delivers the goods is Paul Rudd. This will raise his profile to the A-list. This is a guaranteed Best Supporting Actor nomination.” Really, Webster? Good for Rudd. I like hearing that.
“Reese Witherspoon is a little hard to warm to at first, but is fine; and Owen Wilson plays to his strengths, although I never really bought him as a $14 million-a-year pitcher — we never see him on the mound. And Jack Nicholson is Jack–with one huge laugh-out-loud Jack moment in the movie’s ‘money’ scene inside a hospital room.
“All in all, if I’m grading on a curve, I’d give it an A-minus. I liked it much more than As Good As It Gets, but not as much as Terms of Endearment or (my favorite Brooks film) Broadcast News.”
Jett didn’t want to know about watching a five hour and 30-minute film, but after being urged to see Carlos over and over (even Todd McCarthy told him to re-think his reluctance during a New York Film Festival party) I managed to drag him to the IFC Center last night for a 7 pm screening. Director Olivier Assayas spoke with us briefly in the lobby, and then delivered some opening remarks before the crowd.
Carlos director Olivier Assayas at Manhattan’s IFC Center prior to 7 pm show — Saturday, 10.16, 6:50 pm.
The truth? We caught three and three-quarter hours’ worth (i.e., Parts 1 and 2) but felt too whipped to make it through part 3. (We would have been there until 1 am, give or take, if we’d gone the distance.) I loved Carlos just as much as when I first saw it inside the Grand Palais in Cannes, but that was a midday screening with all kinds of juice and pizazz. The sound and projection levels at the IFC Center are totally fine but it’s just not the same, and I start to fade concentration-wise around 11 pm after being up and working hard since 7 am.
I took two videos of Assayas at the mike (clip #1 and video #2). The second one suffers from cruddy sound.
You know what would be adventurous and cool? For a major critics group or two (like the NYFCC, say) to give Carlos its Best Picture award.
Criterion’s recent confirmation that they’ll release a Bluray/DVD of James L. Brooks‘ Broadcast News in January 2011 suddenly reminded that I haven’t felt any How Do You Know intrigue in a while. I mean, the trailer is okay (although it does make the film seem a little thin and sitcommy) and it’s coming out on 12.17 but it’s just kinda lying there. I’m not hearing a drumbeat that says “hey, we’ve got something really awards-season special here.”
Will the Broadcast News Bluray, arriving with a motive right in the midst of Oscar balloting, remind people what a masterful director-writer and emotional button-pusher Brooks still is, or what he used to be in the ’80s and early ’90s before his game went soft? Will How Do You Know earn a place alongside Broadcast News, Terms of Endearment and As Good As It Gets, or will it be another Spanglish?
An HE reader named “Webster” wrote the following this morning: “I saw How Do You Know at a screening in Orange County last week. (No end credits at the screening — still being massaged.) What I saw started a little slow, but really picks up steam midway through and ends strong. In a five-slot race, I wouldn’t give it a chance for a Best Picture nomination, but with 10 slots…who knows?
“The guy who delivers the good is Paul Rudd. This will raise his profile to the A-list. This is a guaranteed Best Supporting Actor nomination.
“ Reese Witherspoon is a little hard to warm to at first, but is fine; and Owen Wilson plays to his strengths, although I never really bought him as a $14 million-a-year pitcher — we never see him on the mound. And Jack Nicholson is Jack — with one huge laugh-out-loud Jack moment in the movie’s ‘money’ scene inside a hospital room.”
Brooks never shows Wilson throwing a few from the mound? Why?
“All in all, if I’m grading on a curve, I’d give it an A-minus. I liked it much more than As Good As It Gets, but not as much as Terms of Endearment or (my favorite Brooks film) Broadcast News.”
The Broadcast News Bluray will feature (a) a restored high-definition digital transfer, (b) audio commentary rom Brooks and editor Richard Marks, (c) deleted scenes and an alternate ending, (d) a “new documentary” on Brooks’s career, (e) a “new video interview with veteran CBS news producer Susan Zirinsky, one of the models for actress Holly Hunter’s character and an associate producer on the film, and (f) a booklet featuring an essay by Philadelphia Inquirer film critic Carrie Rickey.
I’ve always wanted to send a camera into space. I actually tried something like this with an 8mm movie camera and a bunch of helium balloons tied together when I was eleven or twelve. (The experiment failed.) Brooklyn’s Luke Geissbuhler and his son Max recently sent a styrofoam-encased iPhone 4.0 about 19 miles into space with a weather balloon. He just turned on the video camera and let it fly.
The balloon eventually burst and the iPhone, which fell at speeds over 100 miles an hour, parachute-landed 10 or 12 miles from the launch site in Newburgh, N.Y. (The landing spot was in Rifton, a little north of New Paltz.) The footage runs about six minutes. The iPhone battery died just before landing so the video abruptly stops about 1000 feet up. Geissbuhler located the iPhone through GPS tracking. It landed in a tree.
I spoke to Geissbuhler this morning via text. He has a website called Brooklyn Space Program. He’s seeking donations for the next flight.
Gus Van Sant‘s Restless is apparently about “a terminally ill teenage girl (Mia Wasikowska) who falls for a boy (Henry Hopper) who likes to attend funerals and their encounters with the ghost of a Japanese kamikaze pilot (Chin Han) from WWII.” Some IMDB guy wrote last April that it’s “absolutely phenomenal…without a doubt it’s Van Sant’s best since Elephant.”
So what about AMPAS concerns that the Oscar Awards have been usurped and/or happen too late in the game, and everyone’s complaint that all the year’s best films are always back-loaded into the last three or four months of the year. I just thought of an idea that could not only solve this situation but turn the whole situation into a win-win.
Have two Oscar awards shows every year — a Phase One Oscar telecast in early to mid October, say, that would honor films released from January 1st through August 31st (that’s right — an eight-month period), and a Phase Two Oscar telecast in late February covering the 9.1 to 12.31 period.
Sounds too expensive and laborious, right? As Robert De Niro‘s Jake LaMotta would say, “That’s in your mind.” Because at least this idea would spur distributors to release better films during the first eight months, and once the public got used to the idea of the Oscars being a twice-yearly thing, the Oscar brand would be supremely recognized as the definitive awards show above all the others. The Oscars would no longer be the last guys to dress up and hand out awards — they would be the first and the last.
Okay, don’t spend quite as much money on the Phase One Oscars. Stage them at the Santa Monica Civic auditorium or someplace that’s almost as cool as the Kodak theatre but not quite. And then just for extra hoopla emphasis, sometime during the Phase Two Oscar telecast bring out all the winners of the Phase One Oscars and have them take a bow.
NYC entertainment journalist driving down to Washington, D.C. on Saturday, 10.30, for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert‘s “send all Tea Party righties to green re-education camps” rally. I wouldn’t mind sharing car rental costs. Plus I’m thinking about crashing somewhere in D.C. for the night. I don’t want to drive all the way back the same day, and I don’t need/want a slick hotel. I’m just looking for a bed and good wifi and a shower — that’s it. But the room has to be located somewhere cool. Georgetown would be nice, but what do I know?
Hey, is there any kind of press credentialing going on for this thing? So I can get a place closer to the stage and maybe take some good stills and decent video, etc.?
You will bow to Paramount’s Jackass 3D — i.e., the $21.8 million it earned yesterday and the $53 million it’ll probably take in by Sunday night. And you will suffer along with Summit’s second-place Red, which took in an estimated $7.3 million Friday and is looking at $20 million by tomorrow night. And some of you will pay to see the third-place The Social Network, which dropped only 32% yesterday. And others will flock to Disney’s Secretariat, which dropped only 29 % for a fourth-place finish.
This video of Transformers 3 star Shia LaBeouf splashing hot coffee on a corpulent paparazzo was on all the sites until yesterday afternoon, when it was taken down. But now, for the time being, it’s viewable again. Paraparazzi are scum. This is the coolest thing LaBoeuf has ever done, onscreen or off. Yes, it would have been a tiny bit cooler if he hadn’t run after dousing the guy.
Diseased cynicism secretes out of Red like the flu, like poison. Anyone who says this bullshit comic-book actioner thing is “funny” is suffering from total corrosion of the soul. Nothing paycheck movies of this type sap and impurify our precious spiritual fluids. They’re a scourge and a pestilence. I really and truly mean that.
It’s fine with me that Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Mary-Louise Parker, Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman and the others got paid for appearing in this thing, but there’s no reason why anyone with even a modicum of taste would want to pay to see it. Words can’t convey how deeply depressing it is to watch Mirren blast automatic rifle fire with a blank expression and without any stress or vibration passed along to her body or face.
I hated this film so much that I got out of my seat and laid down on the screening-room floor (i.e., at the Dolby room on Sixth Ave. and 55th Street) and took a nap at the halfway point. It was that or leave, and I had nowhere to go. I really couldn’t stand sitting there any longer and letting this film infiltrate my system.
“I’ve watched the five-and-a-half-hour Carlos twice now, and am completely convinced that it’s a great film, in serial caps, as it were; and looking at Assayas’ other work, I’m growing in my conviction that Assayas isn’t just one of the most vital filmmakers working today, but that he’s one for the books, as the saying goes — a major figure in his country’s cinema, and world cinema.” — Some Came Running‘s Glenn Kenny in a 10.13 posting.
“It isn’t that Mr. Assayas doesn’t have strong opinions, only that because he wants to move beyond familiar axioms — Carlos the monster, Carlos the cool — he shows history as it’s happening, active and dynamic, rather than how it will be subsequently narrated. Those opinions come through forcefully and at times, with such bluntness, it can throw you.” — N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis in a 10.15 posting.
Sincere gratitude to the Movieline crew for having posted high-quality scans of old Movieline articles from the ’90s, including my own “Ten Interviews That Shook Hollywood” article, which ran in March 1992 or thereabouts.
