I’ve been asked to pass along an invitation to local HE readers about a Barack Obama fund-raiser being held on Sunday, October 5th, at Cedering Fox‘s very cool home from 4 pm to 7 pm. They’re looking for $250 a head but they’ll take $175 if you’re strapped. Good food, interesting crowd, a little dough for the right cause, a couple of speakers. I’ll probably attend. It’s actually being called a “Victory Fund Benefit.”
It just hit me that two movies about young mortals in love with young vampires will soon be upon us — Catherine Hardwicke‘s Twilight (Summit, 11.21) with Kristen Stewart having it bad for the blood-sucking Robert Pattinson, and Tomas Alfredson‘s Let The Right One In (Magnolia, 10.24), a tweener vampire romance from Sweden about a 12 year old boy (Kare Hedebrant) who falls for a female vampire (Lina Leandersson) who’s also 12 — and has in fact been 12 for a long, long time, due to her condition.
I haven’t seen Twilight, but I’m naturally suspicious of any film aimed at marginally hip under-30 women — far and away the emptiest, most clueless demographic on the face of the planet — on top of the usual young-male horror crowd. But I’ve been persuaded by film-wise friends and colleagues that Let The Right One In is much more my speed. I’ll be seeing it tonight or tomorrow so we’ll see.
I’m extremely late to the table on Let The Right One In, which has played almost every significant film festival over the past several months. It just won the Best Horror Feature Award at Austin’s Fantasticfest and won the Tribeca Film Festival Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature last May. It’s also something of a tearjerker, if you can go with that.
Cinematical‘s Scott Weinberg caught it at Tribeca and called it “one of the strangest, stickiest, and (yes) sweetest horror movies I’ve seen in ten years. It’s a pretty unique beast [and] a flick that would never arrive via the Hollywood studio system, seeing as how it deals with hardcore gore, pre-teen sexuality, and some rather nasty kid-on-kid violence.
“And yet for a movie that has a lot of dicey components, it sure comes off as a really sweet story. That’s not just good filmmaking; that’s real intelligence behind the camera.”
The irony is that Hollywood — Overture Films and Spitfire Pictures — is in fact cooking up a remake. No script or director yet, but what are the odds that the remake won’t somehow coarsen and/or downgrade the particular alchemy that Alfredson has allegedly put together? American remakes of European film are always more obvious and common and aimed at a dumber crowd. Because, you know, Americans are almost always coming from a dumber, more emotionally primitive and less worldly place.
The only problem is the title. Who in hell is going to remember Let The Right One In or associate it with tweener vampires? Talk about a title that means nothing — nothing at all! — to anyone. Although it does sound cooler and cooler the more you say it.
Let The Right One In will open on 10.24 at West Hollywood’s Sunset 5 and at Manhattan’s Angelika Film Center. It will then open at Seattle’s Varsity on 11.14.
A friend saw Ron Howard‘s Frost/Nixon and “wouldn’t say it’s bad,” he said, “but I don’t think it’s great. Good performance from Frank Langella but otherwise, I was kinda bored.” Stop right there! It’s more or less the stage play, which I saw in New York and wasn’t the least bit bored by. Nobody was.
“As opposed to Gus Van Sant‘s Milk,” the friend continued, “which, according to someone trusted who saw it last week in L.A., is as phenomenal as the trailer.”
Hillary Clinton sidestepped a question this morning from Morning Joe‘s Mika Brzezinski about whether she thinks Sarah Palin could help solve the current financial crisis as vp or, God forbid, president. Did Clinton grim up and say to women voters what needs to be said about Palin once and for all? Of course not.
Clinton ran for cover and slithered away because she doesn’t want to alienate the under-educated Walmart Moms who voted for her during the Democratic primaries, and whose support she’ll need again if and when she runs for president in 2012. This is who and what Hillary Clinton is and always will be.
“I just heard a radio ad for Eagle Eye (Dreamworks, 9.26), the new Shia LaBeouf thriller. I think it’s safe to steer clear of any movie containing the line, ‘Somebody’s hacking into the power grid!'” — email received at 4:35 pm from HE reader Mark Smith.
An elaboration: “He’s an ordinary guy, thrust into chaos. They’re watching him all the time, cat-and-mouse games, he outsmarts them, shit blows up, gets the girl, fast cutting, plot holes, noise, etc.” I couldn’t care less if I were dead.
The Hollywood Reporter‘s Steven Zeitchik is reporting that producers Harvey Weinstein and Scott Rudin are strongly disagreeing about whether to release the Weinstein Co. war-crimes drama The Reader in 2008 or wait until ’09.
“Weinstein is pushing for a December release for the movie, which director Stephen Daldry is working on in post,” Zeitchik writes. “The romance set in postwar Germany and based on Bernhard Schlink‘s novel already has buzz from strong test screenings, though there are post elements left to be completed.”
“Rudin, however, has been lobbying hard for a 2009 release. The producer already has two Oscar candidates — Revolutionary Road, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as a married couple in the 1950s, at Paramount Vantage, and the Broadway transfer Doubt, toplining Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman, at Miramax — and a third would mean he is vying heavily against himself.”
To go by the book synopsis, The Reader is a German-guilt movie rooted in World War II. Due respect and no offense, but it sounds like a movie that could have been released in 1979 or 1982 or 1989 or 1996. It costars Ralph Fiennes, Kate Winslet, Alexandra Maria Lara and Bruno Ganz.
Jamie Stuart‘s first in a series of four shorts on the 46th New York Film Festival is mainly about an attempted robbery. Of Stuart. In Stuart’s buuilding. By a thief who’s too good looking, too short and too mild-mannered to be a bad guy. It’s an okay way for Stuart to begin one of his looney-tunes shorts about the NY Film Festival. Except the violent sparring in the hallway doesn’t feel feel right. Too poised, not sloppy enough. And I didn’t believe the stairwell fall. The sound is wrong; you need to feel the pain.
Oh, and the people who suggested a couple of days ago that the quickie razor-blade thing was a tribute to Un Chien Andalou? I don’t think so.
The rest of it is the usual impressionistic mind-melt press conference stuff that Stuart has given us in years past The two directors are The Class‘s Laurent Cantet and Wendy and Lucy‘s Kelly Reichardt. Why doesn’t Stuart ever talk to other journalists?
The Disney publicity guys, a strange and guarded bunch, had an all-media screening last week for Spike Lee‘s Miracle at St. Anna. Naturally they didn’t invite me. I missed it on purpose in Toronto (I was told that the 166-minute length was unjustified), and naturally assumed I’d catch up with it back here. Nope!
Disney always hedges its bets when they’ve got a problem movie of any kind, which Miracle clearly is. But it was also a struggle to persuade them to let me see WALL*E, and that was a near-masterpiece.
Honestly? It’s getting harder and harder to ignore the similarities between Disney publicity and the Church of Scientology
“Spike Lee loses the battles and the war in Miracle at St. Anna, a clunky, poorly constructed drama designed to spotlight the little-remarked role of black American soldiers in World War II,” wrote Variety‘s Todd McCarthy. “Clocking in at 160 minutes, this is a sloppy stew in which the ingredients of battle action, murder mystery, little-kid sentiment and history lesson don’t mix well.
“Nor is it remotely clear who the audience is meant to be; the R rating pretty much rules out younger students, and extensive subtitles will deter action fans, who would be bored anyway. Best B.O. will likely be in Italy, where most of the melodrama takes place.”
As soon as I saw that made-up-to-look-older black guy shoot that made-up-to-look-older white guy in the trailer, I said to myself, “That’s it…the movie is trouble.” I didn’t know a damn thing about it, but I knew. Trailers and ads do more to kill interest in movies than bad reviews. If there’s something wrong with a movie, the trailers will almost always tell you this.
The term “No Talk Express,” I mean. John McCain‘s handlers are obviously fearful that he may say something off-the-cuff that doesn’t add up (which he does a lot), hence a press policy that boils down to “no questions,” “no reporters” and “don’t speak unless you’re spoken to.” Relations between the McCain campaign and the press are said to be in fairly bad shape. Earlier today in Strongsville, Ohio, McCain ignored questions about the bailout plan, prompting one journalist to scream out, “Has your bus become the No-Talk Express?”
One of the things journalists learn sooner or later is that if celebrities use profanity or call you names to your face during an interview, it means they like or at least respect you. Or at least that they trust you enough to take their frank words like a grown-up and not get all emotional. I’ve been yelled at by dozens of Hollywood people over the years, and I still have relations with the vast majority. It’s the ones who never talk to you straight or let you know what’s really going on in their heads — they’re the ones you need to fear.
In this MTV.com interview, Charlize Theron — promoting Battle in Seattle — calls Josh Horowitz an asshole several times, and the twinkle in her eye says it all. And yet MTV.com editors have bleeped out the “hole” each time — what kind of namby-pambies would so such a thing? You can say the word “ass” on TV these days. Nobody cares about mildly salty language.
Eight years ago in Cannes I was part of a round-table group speaking to George Clooney, who was promoting O Brother, Where Art Thou? I started out with a compliment about his performance in From Dusk to Dawn, explaining that I thought he had a certain edge and intensity in that 1996 Robert Rodriguez film that I quite liked. I didn’t mean that he was flat in the films he’d made after that (One Fine Day, Batman and Robin, Out of Sight, Three Kings) but that I really enjoyed what he was putting out in in Dusk to Dawn and that I kind of missed it.
Clooney frowned a bit, looked down, thought it over for five or six seconds, glanced in my direction and said “fuck you.” I’ve liked him enormously ever since. Good fellow.
