wired

I found this 4.13 AICN review of Juan Carlo Fresnadillo‘s 28 Days Later (Fox Atomic, 5.11) highly persuasive. The Danny Boyle original (i.e., 28 Days Later) absolutely hooked me on the horrific idea of seething red-eyed zombies who run like quarterbacks, and the following graph is what got me in particular:

“What’s great is that every so often you latch onto a character [and] think ‘oh, that’s obviously the hero’ or ‘well, she’s the heroine’ only to watch them get torn to bits ten minutes later. There’s nothing predictable about who survives and who doesn’t (with one very obvious exception) and the film cleverly wrong-foots you on exactly who√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢ll be dismembered/eaten/puking blood next.

“In fact, it’s so effective that even innocuous scenes had me wincing because I was expecting something absolutely awful to happen, and there’s no doubt that Fresnadillo enjoys toying with his audience in this way.”

So you pronounce Shia LeBeouf‘s last name how? Lebwehff, Leboaf, Lebuff or Leboof? (His first name is pronounced like “hiya”) And does the popularity of this 20 year-old actor, recently officially confirmed as the second lead in the Indiana Jones IV movie that’ll start shooting in June, signify a multicultural turn in the road in mainstream American culture, at least among the under 25s?

Shia LeBoeuf in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints

He obviously has an exotic-sounding name — half Middle-Easternish, half French. (I’ll bet 97% of the people reading this right now aren’t 100% sure how to say it.) And yet LeBoeuf is something of a hot commodity, especially when you consider Disturbia‘s surprising $24 million haul this weekend.

This tells me that maybe the xenophobes who’ve told political pollsters they don’t like the idea of a U.S. president being named Barack Obama (i.e., because it ‘s not a whitebread American name) might not be as plentiful as I’d feared. Or at least that they might be confined to the over-45 age bracket.

It wasn’t that long ago, after all, when U.S. movie stars had to have names like Richard Gere or Tom Cruise or they’d be considered too “different” sounding and relegated to the sidelines.

There’s a slight problem, of course, if Indy IV director Steven Spielberg is going to cast LeBeoeuf as Harrison Ford‘s son. I say “if” — no one knows if this is the intention. But if so, problem #1 is that LeBeouf isn’t tall enough — 5’ 10 and 1/2 inches compared to Ford being six-foot-one. (Both my sons are taller than me.) Problem #2 is that LeBeouf looks like he doesn’t come from the same country as Ford, much less from the same gene pool. He obviously looks European (look at that French honker) and clearly hasn’t a trace of Ford’s Irish-Russian features.

Will Ferrell vs. his landlord. Moderately, conceptually amusing in an unforced way. Wait…here’s something funnier.

A little more than two years ago I ran an early Shoot ‘Em Up piece, which was basically about the long hard effort that director-writer Michael Davis underwent in order to get the film funded by New Line Cinema with the help of producers Don Murphy, Susan Montford and Rick Benattar. (New Line execes Jeff Katz and Cale Boyter oversaw things for the studio.) Since then it’s been the usual usual — principal, test screenings, re-shoots, etc. — and now, finally, with a September 7th release date in place.

It began filming in Toronto in early ’06 and wrapped in April, and then Davis cut it over the the next five months or so, and then along came some AICN reactions to a Pasadena test screening last November — mostly positive and one slam.

These and other reactions convinced New Line to fund two days of additional shooting (a new beginning and ending) that happened early last month with star Clive Owen. The film is now set to open just after Labor Day, which some people will tell you is a “dump” date. On the other hand Transporter and Crank — two analagous films — opened on or close to September 7th and did pretty well.

There’s no Shoot “Em Up website that I’ve been able to locate (which seems odd), and there’s no teaser-trailer in “new releases” section of the New Line website. (Here’s a rough cut of a teaser that Latino Review ran last fall.) Someone in New Line’s online marketing branch is feeling under-energized, but the pre-release hoo-hah will almost certainly kick in once the summer season begins.

Whenever any cultural catch-phrase pushes its way into the headlines or the columns, T-shirt makers always rush in to capitalize. Obviously millions of shmucks out there have bought this crap in the past, etc., but the people who rush these things out don’t have an eye for uptown design. I mean, these “Nappy Headed Ho” teddy-bear dolls are pathetic. And here I am giving them added attention.

“I do like weed,” Kirsten Dunst has told a reporter for Live magazine. “I think America’s view on weed is ridiculous. I mean, are you kidding me? If everyone smoked weed, the world would be a better place.”

She’s right, for the most part. Pot is an influencer and molder of one’s spiritual outlook, attitude, philosophy, etc., and it does tend to expose the user to intrigues and fascinations that a beer-head would never consider, much less explore. Plus potheads tend to be cooler, funnier, friendlier. (Well, mostly.) I was totally on the side of Charlie Sheen, Willem Dafoe and the potheads in Platoon, and against the Jack Daniels brigade — Tom Berenger, Kevin Dillon, et. al.

But every heavy pot-user I’ve ever known has had this aura of passive divorcement from life’s rough-and-tumble — some seem to watch way too much TV or have trouble getting their career started if they’re into it too heavily. While alcohol abuse obviously ruins people’s lives and causes much more grief and pain than pot, people who prefer wine or beer or even hard stuff on the rocks in the evening are a little bit more organized and aggressive and down-to-it.

Of course, tea and water and juices and an occasional Lemon Coke (which you can only get in Europe these days) are probably the best libations of all since drinking them to excess won’t hurt you. (I’m boring myself as I write this.) Alcohol and pot have to be absorbed in moderation, and tens of millions obviously have problems with that concept. As Sterling Hayden (who loved to smoke hash) once told me, “The hard thing is to hold that middle ground….hold that middle ground.”

“I enjoyed parts of Grindhouse, although three hours is a long time to watch two directors draw air-quotes around bad moviemaking. Quentin Tarantino is a pretty good writer and a monstrously gifted director, and I’d rather his movies were hits. But I can’t pretend to be disappointed that Grindhouse is stiffing, because creatively it’s a dead end that he’s been traveling toward for a dozen years.” — EW “Final Cut” columnist Mark Harris in a 4.12 posting that repeats the old gripe that by riffing and sampling from movies instead of (horrors!) drawing from personal observation and life experience, Tarantino is a world-class wanker who’s pissing away his potential.

Last Thursday’s tracking got it wrong. Disturbia hasn’t been neck-and-necking (or slightly edging out) Perfect Strangers — it has left that poorly reviewed Bruce Willis-Halle Berry drama in the dust. Disturbia is being projected to do $24,131,000 (2925 theatres, $8200 a print) by Sunday night, while Perfect Stranger will come in fourth with roughly $11,163,000, at $4000 a print.

Blades of Glory will be #2 with $15,442,000, and Meet The Robinsons will be in third place with $12,447,000. Are We Done Yet — the fact that this complete piece-of-shit comedy did $15 million last weekend says something about the taste buds and guillibility of mainstream auds — will come in fifth with $8,801,000. Wild Hogs is sixth with $4,708,000. Redline will be seventh with $4,604,000. Pathfinder will rank eighth with $4,500,000. The Reaping will come in ninth with $4,477,000, and 300 will be tenth with $4,327,000.

Grindhouse,, off 65%, with come in with $4,036,000. The Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez film is down to $1500 a print, and will start losing theatres next week. The rumble says it cost over $60 million (closer to $70 million, some say) before marketing, and it may end up with $23 or $24 million before petering out — the cume is $19,496,000.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters will make around $3,626,000, and Slow Burn will take in $800,008,000 — $600 a theatre in 1100 theatres.

Last Wednesday I posted claims from two well-placed sources claiming that Warner Bros. attorneys were trying to keep original Get Smart creators Mel Brooks and Buck Henry from receiving fair compensation fees from the film version. But yesterday AICN’s Harry Knowles reported that “ink went to paper and cash went to banks and Brooks and Henry have been officially signed on as creative consultants on the Get Smart movie with Steve Carrell and Anne Hathaway. In fact, Carrell has already shot one joke scene that Mel Brooks wrote for his character in this film. With more to come, apparently from both Mel and Buck.”

John Flynn, director of Rolling Thunder as well as the semi- legendary 1973 crime pic The Outfit (which you still can’t get on DVD), passed away on Wednesday, April 4th, and I only just found out today…er, yesterday.

Warner Home Video should naturally release The Outfit on DVD as a fare- thee-well tribute to Flynn. Based on Richard Stark‘s (i.e., Donald Westlake‘s) 1963 book of the same name, it’s a lean, hardboiled crime film costarring Robert Duvall, Karen Black, Joe Don Baker, Robert Ryan, Richard Jaeckel, Joanna Cassidy and Sheree North.

Duvall gives one of his best performances (in my book anyway) as Macklin, an ex-con out for revenge against some cold-blooded mob types. The Outfit is a studly, pared-to-the-bone programmer in the same realm as Charley Varrick. Not as sombre or big-city noirish as The Friends of Eddie Coyle, but a very fine and flavorful film of its type.

Here I am finally paying attention to Alan Ball‘s Nothing Is Private, an allegedly high quality, sexually frank period drama (based on Alicia Erian‘s “Towelhead“) that sounds like it will definitely be pushing MPAA ratings boundaries. It’s basically about a 13 year-old half-Arab, half-Irish girl named Jasira (Summer Bishil, said to be super-phenomenal in the part) getting sexually involved with two older guys while living with her brusque-mannered Lebanese father in Houston in the early ’90s.

Summer Bishil, breakout star of Alan Ball’s Nothing Is Private

It costars Aaron Eckhart, Maria Bello, Peter Macdissi, Toni Collette and Eugene Jones. The producer is Scott Rudin. I can’t find a mention of a distributor, but Rudin’s ties are with Disney/Miramax. There’s loose talk about this film possibly going to Cannes. but release-wise it looks like a fall entry.

All I have to go on is an early March Ain’t It Cool test-screening review by some dude named “Rocksalt.” I don’t know the guy, he could be a plant and nobody knows anything. But AICN editor Drew McWeeny didn’t seem all that suspicious. If “Rocksalt” isn’t a plant and Ball’s film is half as good as he describes, Nothing Is Private certainly sounds like Oscar material.

“Set during the first Gulf War, politics and racism — while present — take a backseat to the real meat of the story,” he writes, “which is Jasira’s relationship with the three men in her life: her abusive father (Peter Macdissi, a/k/a “Olivier” on Six Feet Under), her lecherous neighbor (Aaron Eckhart), and her horny boyfriend (newcomer Eugene Jones).

“But to simply call them ‘abusive,’ ‘lecherous’ and ‘horny’ does a disservice to them all: these are extraordinarily complex characters. As bad as they are, all have redeeming qualities. And in their own ways, all of them care very deeply for Jasira. It’s a very funny film as well… as dark as her situation is, there’s a lot of humor in it. It’s not nearly so oppressively dreary as the plot on paper sounds.”

The guy really goes nuts over Bushill….

“It’s early in the year for me to be making grand statements (something I’m not prone to doing in the first place) but Bushil’s performance isn’t just ‘good’ — heck, ‘m not sure ‘great’ does it justice. This is like going straight from high school to the major leagues and hitting a grand slam in your first at-bat.

“This isn’t like the occasional nomination you see for a kid (Haley Joel Osment, Abigail Breslin, etc). This is the performance of the year, male or female, and the one to beat come Oscar 2008. There are scenes of such raw, awkward, and subtle emotion on display here they simply boggle the mind.

“There may be naysayers who suggest that Ball is fetishizing her and is just as bad as the male characters in the film. Bishil is onscreen nearly the entire running time, at the center of every scene, lovingly photographed (and I might as well say it — she is astoundingly beautiful), but with a performance this good, you want to give it as much screen time as you can.”

A movie called Everything’s Gone Green would naturally be presumed to be about conservation and global warming. It’s actually a wise, intelligent and mildly amusing little film (emphasis on the “mildly”) about GenX mores, values and lifestyles in Vancouver, British Columbia. But it’s a little too amiable and mild-mannered, even though it obviously came from the heads of some very bright, sophisticated and spiritually-centered people — first-time director Paul Fox and screenwriter Douglas Coupland (the author of “Generation X”) in particular.

The problem is that dramatically Everything’s Gone Green never gets out of second gear. That’s not a terrible thing to say about a film. At least I’m saying that the motor is running and it’s in some kind of gear and not just idling in neutral. But you know what driving in second gear is like. You’re moving along and that’s cool, but there’s a voice saying “c’mon, c’mon….let’s get going.”

I didn’t feel bored because the outdoor Vancouver locations are fascinating, the dialogue is smart and witty and the actors don’t try to “act” or overdo it — they’re appropriately low-key and unforced. But the movie is so laid back that it over- relaxed me, and before I knew it my eyelids had begun to droop and I wound up taking a short nap. But this is one of those films that are okay for some fast shuteye. I’m not trying to be a smart-ass by saying this. I’m just observing that when I woke up, not that much had happened and it wasn’t hard to figure what I’d missed so…you know, cool. No harm done.

Everything’s Gone Green is about a bright, vaguely bored young guy named Ryan (Paulo Costanzo) who gets canned from his job on the same day that his girlfriend (Katharine Isabelle) gives him the boot and his frazzled, ’60s generation parents have a fit…forget it, it’s not worth bringing up.

Ryan, who has friendly dead-fish eyes and the requisite disaffected-young-guy whisker thing going on and light brown hair that is Brillo-pad thick, then lucks into a gig writing about winners for the state lottery. He happens to meet a sparkly-eyed set-dresser (Steph Song) who finds him attractive, but he also runs into her ex-boyfriend, who’s a bit of a slime. He persuades Ryan to take part in a scheme in which he sells the names and numbers of lottery winners to the Japanese mafia, who offer to buy the wining ticket for a bigger bulk sum than the winners would otherwise receive. (Or something like that.) Not an illegal enterprise, exactly, but there’s a bit of an ick factor.

Anyway, Ryan does pretty well by the scam — he gets to buy a brand-new yellow Mustang and some new threads — but Song’s character doesn’t like what he’s up to and refuses to be his girlfriend because of this. I lost interest in this point. Women are always the ones to say to husbands, boyfriends and would-be boyfriends, “If you don’t stop your involvement in this morally shady enterprise, I’ll leave you” or “I’ll stop fucking you” or, if the sex hasn’t kicked in yet, “I won’t consider fucking you.” Al I know is, when women say these things to guys in movies and plays, I say to myself, “Here we go again…”

My telepathic advice to Ryan was as follows: “Get out of the scam because you’re going to eventually get popped or shamed in some way, even if it’s not strictly illegal, and also because you’ll be losing a hot girl if you don’t. But the girl, on the other hand, is going to guilt-trip you no matter what the issue is in the future so you might want to get down with someone who’s a little more comme ci comme ca.”