“With September and the rest of the fall now bursting with major Hollywood releases and Academy Award aspirants, the previously uncrowded terrain of summer no longer looks so hospitable for more serious movies. In the next five weeks alone Oscar hopefuls like A Mighty Heart and Evening, Sundance favorites like Joshua and Broken English, Cannes sensations like Sicko, Don Cheadle’s star turn in Talk to Meand films directed by the likes of Steve Buscemi (Interview), Werner Herzog (Rescue Dawn), Danny Boyle (Sunshine) and Griffin Dunne (Fierce People) will jockey for position with sleeper summer hits like Waitress and Once, not to mention the mainstream blockbusters.” — from David Halbfinger‘s N.Y. Times piece about indie counter-programming.
Reality check,Separating wheat from the chaff. etc.: An inexplicably low first-weekend gross awaits A Mighty Heart, despite it being a gripping procedural as well as the best film Michael Winterbottom has ever made with a near-great performance by Angelina Jolie. Evening has the best people and the best pedigree, and it’s a flat-liner from the get-go. The third act of Sunshine is absolutely infuriating. Fierce People is an off-balance film about some very odd people. I haven’t seen Joshua or Talk To Me, but the rest — particularly Sicko, Interview and Rescue Dawn — are highly recommended.

Tonight the L.A. Film Festival begins with a 7:30 pm screening of Kasi Lemmons‘ Talk To Me (Focus Features, 7.13.07), followed by an under-the-stars Westwood street party with everyone drinking, schmoozing and milling around.

Talk To Me is about the late Ralph Waldo “Petey” Green (Don Cheadle), a Washington, D.C. TV and radio talk show host who started out as a run-around, a drug addict and a prisoner in Lorton penitentiary. But he gradually made it into broadcasting and used his mike to speak out against poverty and racism in the late ’60s, etc.
Sounds flat, doesn it? The turht is that I’ve been reluctant to go to the film because it sounded like a glowing tribute film to an African-American hero figure who stood up and confronted the racial issues of his day, but a friend tells ime it’s a lot looser and funnier than that — a “people film” that doesn’t play self-important. Anyone seen it?

The day after tomorrow Ulu Grosbard‘s Straight Time will have an LA Film Festival screening at the Billy Wilder theatre at 6:30 pm, and I’ve just been told Dustin Hoffman will definitely take part in the post-screening discussion with Grosbard and producer Gail Mutrux.
“When people speak lovingly of films from the 1970s, Straight Time is exactly what they are talking about — loose, unpredictable and character-driven,” the LAFF notes observe. “Featuring a truly revelatory performance by Dustin Hoffman, the film follows a convict newly released from prison as he tries to adjust to life on the square. Based on a novel by Eddie Bunker (himself an ex-con), the film is acutely sensitive to the indignities of everyday life.”
Maybe Theresa Russell, Harry Dean Stanton, Gary Busey and M. Emmet Walsh will drop by also.

In late ’04 (two and a half years ago) Wes Anderson was the big-cheese auteur with his latest film, The Life Aquatic, about to open, and by anyone’s yardstick a kind of imposing older-brother figure. Noah Baumbach, obviously, was the new kid on the block — Anderson’s up-and-coming screenwriting collaborator (on Aquatic) whose second film as a director-writer, The Squid and the Whale, was unseen and awaiting its debut at Sundance ’05. And yet Anderson’s film was soon regarded as a disappointment; three months later Baumbach’s was seen as anything but.

Jason Schwartzman, Owen Wilson and Adrien Brody in The Darjeeling Limited

Having seen that Margot at the Wedding trailer and having read Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited (another signature Wessy head-trip flick — quirky humor, odd eccentricities, three brothers on an adventure, father issues, an exotic train ride across India), I would say Anderson and Baumbach’s dynamic has changed.
At the very least Baumbach is standing on his own turf now, and doesn’t seem to be as locked into a stylized attitude trajectory as Wes still seems to be. I should just shut up, I know, and this is hardly an original thought, but I still feel that Anderson needs to rediscover or re-combust the freshness of spirit he and collaborator Owen Wilson had in spades in the mid to late ’90s when they made Bottle Rocket and Rushmore.
Boiled down to basics, I’m still picking up jaded vibes from Anderson camp (i.e., the ones that started to be noticed when journalists began writing articles about the Manhattan tailor who, per specific instructions, cuts Wes’s suits a little tighter and shorter than the norm) but not necessarily from Baumbach’s. I say this, again, knowing next to nothing about Margot or about their collaboration on that animated (stalled?) Raold Dahl fox-and-the-chicken-coop movie.
Fox Searchlight will be opening The Darjeeling Limited on 12.25.07.
Obviously I’m not the only one to remark that Andersonville has been imploding since the days of The Royal Tennenbaums, but maybe the Anderson undercurrents have shifted in ways I’m not aware of and the Wes fans are processing things in a different light.
All that said, I’m still a raging admirer of Anderson’s American Express spot… hilarious, amazing choreography, exactly “right.”

Variety columnist Anne Thompson has put up a web-exclusive trailer for Noah Baumbach‘s Margot at the Wedding (Paramount Vantage, 10.19.07). Obviously a smart, sharp dramedy about screwed-up relationships — high on my list of want-to-sees and (I would guess) an almost certain ’07 Toronto Film Festival attraction. Scott Rudin (naturally…this is home-turf material) is the producer.

Margot at the Wedding director-writer Noah Baumbach, star -wife Jennifer Jason Leigh

Hey, does anyone have a PDF script they can send me?
Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh play sisters, with the basic story being about Leigh’s concerns and second thoughts about her plan to marry Jack Black, who (judging from the trailer) is playing another hilariously mouthy, pushy, egocentric type. Thompson says she’s been told that Kidman (who is obviously playing the Laura Linney role here — a successful neurotic writer) comes off as” tough” and “not always sympathetic.”
Is this going to be Jack Black’s Terms of Endearment role? Will he ever have such a role and shift into the realm of serious emotional delivery, or is he too immersed in the personality of a renegade shtick artist? I’ve read elsewhere that Black “is not specifically playing funnybones” in this film, and that his character — a guy who has trouble listening to anything except the sound of his own voice –” is going through his hassles and trying to make sense of things.” Wait…that description applies to several thousand people I could mention.

Variety is reporting that Perez Hilton’s webhost, the Australia-based Crucial Paradigm, has dropped Perezhilton.com because of four lawsuits against Hilton pushed by eight photo agenices over Hilton’s alleged theft of shots that have run on his site.
The Oz plug-pulling has left the gossip columnist’s site temporarily on the ropes, running on “less than full power…a skeleton or temporary situation where he can still post [with] limited interactivity” with his archives missing, etc.
Hilton (i.e., Mario Lavandeira) posted a reaction earlier today, admitting to “feeling overwhelmed by our temporary technical difficulties and other roadblocks” and claiming that going out on the town in Manhattan with friends last night made him feel better. “Fuck being depressed! Fuck the pain away!,” he wrote. “Try as they may, can’t nobody hold us down.”
That sounds like a boozy 15 year-old bitching about parental discipline, no? The kind of pain that Hilton is going through needs to be micro-managed and re-thought and negotiated. It’s about money, not feelings.

Forget the would-be significance of the American Film Institute’s refreshed list of the most powerful/important/ legendary films of all time because none exists. The AFI has been whorishly shopping its once- distinguished brand on the tube for years with best-this and best-that presentations, and none of their efforts at self-promotion signifies a damn thing (except for their own diminishment).
That said, there’s something strangely stubborn, even bizarre, about the members continuing to put Orson Welles‘ Citizen Kane in the #1 position. I’m saying this because of a general understanding that kicked in around eight or ten years ago that the industry’s long-established Kane worship was winding down and that Francis Coppola‘s The Godfather was emerging as the new All-Time Big Daddy.
The only really interesting sidelight is to consider the 23 films that were on the all-time top 100 list in 1998, but have now been dropped. Here’s a list of some the dispatched along with possible reasons (most of them indicative of lazy or at least temporary thinking) why they’ve been tossed:
1. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930 –#54 on the ’98 list) — too World War I creaky, too emphatic in its sentimentality, plus boomers don’t relate to doomed German grunts who fought 85 years ago as much as they relate to vets of WW II, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War and Iraq. 2. Amadeus (1984 — #53 on ’98 list) — Tom Hulce’s performance as Mozart was always grating, and the rank-and-file finally got sick of endorsing it time and again; 3. An American in Paris (1951 — #68 in 1998) — with each passing year, the obviously gifted Gene Kelly has seemed more and more un-genuine and absolutely desperate in his need to be loved; 4. The Birth of a Nation (1915 — #44 in ’98) — it took AFI members 90-plus years to decide that D.W. Griffith‘s racism was a more strongly defining trait than his importance as a pioneering film artist; 5. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) (#64 in ’98) — another indication of the continuing dissipation of the Spielberg-is-an-industry-God-and-therefore-must-be-kowtowed-to-at-every- official-opportunity mentality; 6. Dances with Wolves (1990 — #75 in ’98) — a reflection of the fact that many younger industry types feel somewhat embar- assed that Kevin Costner‘s film won the Best Film Oscar that year instead of Martin Scorsese‘s Goodfellas; 7. Doctor Zhivago (1965 — #39 in ’98) — too syrupy and sentimental, and way too much ice and frost on Omar Sharif‘s moustache — a view that’s been building for some time.
Enough…I can’t go through the entire list of 23 films.
One last thing: the dropping of Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Fargo (1996 — #84 on the ’98 list), Fred Zinneman‘s From Here to Eternity (1953 — #52 on the ’98 list), John Frankenheimer‘s The Manchurian Candidate (1962 — #67 on the ’98 list); Franklin J. Schaffner‘s Patton (1970 — #89 on the ’98 list), George Stevens‘ A Place in the Sun (1951 — #92 in ’98), Nicholas Ray‘s Rebel Without a Cause (1955 — #59 in ’98) and Sir Carol Reed‘s The Third Man (1949 — #57 in ’98) is not only unfortunate but curious. I can’t think of any reasons, well-considered or stupidly impulsive, why these films would be cut.
The Reeler‘s Stu Van Airsdale is also unimpressed by the AFI, feeling that its latest list is “bad for cinema.”

I forgot to mention this last weekend, but before going to last Friday’s somewhat disappointing 4K digital screening of Dr. Strangelove at West L.A.’s Landmark, I slipped into theatre #10 — upstairs and on the smallish side but with perfect sightlines and luxurious seating — and I noticed that Once was playing on the screen. But what got me wasn’t the digital projection (which looked fantastic) as much as the sound.

The voices and the ambient sound was unusually clean and full. It didn’t feel the least bit distorted or pushed. It’s a little hard to understand some of Once‘s dialogue because of the Irish and Slovak acccents, but every syllable and vowel was suddenly cleaner and sharper than anything I’d ever heard before, and I’ve seen John Carney‘s film four times now.

The reason for the awesome sound, I’ve been told, is Landmark’s decison to install state-of-the-art Klipsch speakers. Specifically Klipsch professional cinema speakers, Dolby Digital EX surround sound processors, and QSC amplifiers.

An info sheet supplied by Landmark marketing exec Madelyn Hammond quotes Landmark’s chief engineer Bobby Parry as saying that Klipsch builds “the most advanced, best-sounding professional speakers for the cinema industry,” said Parry. “They have the smoothest response curve of any cinema speaker I’ve ever used.”
She also quotes Klipsch exec Chuck Mulhearn and his explanation about how Klipsch uses “advanced Tractrix Horn geometry and compression driver technology that reproduces a more genuine, lifelike sound in theaters. Horn design dramatically increases efficiency, which is important, because it enables Klipsch speakers to produce more output using less energy. This improves reliability and reduces distortion, so you hear exactly what you’re supposed to, instead of speaker coloration.

“This improves reliability and reduces distortion, so you hear exactly what you’re supposed to, instead of speaker coloration,” he concludes.
I know this sounds like p.r. blather, but I’ve been to the Landmark and stood in one of those upstairs theatres and listened and it’s all real. As soon as I walked in a voice went “whoa.” I swear the sound felt just a little bit fuller and cleaner than it does at the Arclight. And that’s saying alot.

A reader I know who doesn’t want his name mentioned saw James Mangold‘s 3:10 to Yuma on 6.18. I’m running it mainly as a counterpoint to that recently posted AICN review that came out of the same research screening:
“I have to say that it was a very good film but nowhere near great or classic,” he begins. “There’s nothing remotely wrong with it — the story is solid, the performances were really good, but I was just expecting a little bit more. The whole movie seems to be building up to the end so a lot of the scenes in the middle dragged the film down a bit. I just wish the movie was a little more suspenseful and tense.
“That said, I was never bored and never wanted the film to end. The best part, for me, was Ben Foster, who plays one of the members of Russell Crowe‘s gang. He gives such a creepy performance you wish you could shoot him yourself. Both Crowe and Christian Bale give solid performances, but you expect that much from them. There relationship in the film reminded me a bit of Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx‘s in Collateral.
“The movie doesn’t reinvent the western and probably won’t win any awards, but it’s entertaining enough. Fans of the genre should like it a lot. But if you haven’t seen the trailer yet, don’t watch it — it literally gives away 95% of the movie. I think lionsgate was forced to do this because they wanted to sell it as an action packed western, when most of the action doesn’t occur until the last fifteen minutes.”

These “Worst Scenes from the Worst Films Ever” clips went up two months ago — proof positive that HE is one of the hottest quickdraw sites on the net. (The getting-eaten-by-a-super-shark scenes are the best…obviously.)

I spent most of this morning tapping out thoughts about that high-expectation prestige movie that I saw yesterday afternoon. I also did a phone interview with a real-life guy who’s portrayed by a major actor in this film. I searched around online for everything I could find out, and I mulled and mulled and mulled.
It’s too early to pull the trigger, but I’m going to be a coy tease and say at least this, which is that yesterday afternoon’s film is absolutely one of the ’07 Big Ones — a movie that will definitely be on the top of the list of Best Picture contenders. I felt I was swimming in holy water five minutes into it. It’s a supremely sad broken-heart movie, a gripping procedural and a monumental political film that never once steps onto overt political turf.

I went over to Book Soup last evening to talk with Variety critic Todd McCarthy about his new book, Fast Women: The Legendary Ladies fo Racing, which is about the world of pre-corporate American race-car competition in the 1950s and the women — Denise McCluggage and Evelyn Mull receive the lion’s share of McCarthy’s attention — who were a vibrant part of that scene. Here’s an mp3 of our chat, which I had to finish quickly in order to see Danny Boyle‘s Sunshine on the Fox lot at 7:30 pm….yeesh.

Todd McCarthy, author of Fast Women: The Legendary Ladies of Racing