wired

I fell by last night’s Sopranos premiere (i.e., a screening of the final season’s first two episodes) at the Radio City Music Hall. After it was over, I mean (around 9:40 pm), and as the after-party was about to begin. Fox News entertainment reporter and all-around good guy Bill McCuddy offered to take me inside as his plus-one, but it was mainly a cast-and-crew party, there was a huge, slow-moving line waiting near 50th Street and Sixth Avenue to get in, and it looked like too much of a zoo.

Just after last night’s Sopranos premiere at the Radio City Music Hall — Tuesday, 3.27.06, 9:43 pm

In his usual smiling, smart-assed way, McCuddy said that he was happy with what he saw (“Tony dies in the first episode,” etc.), and a guy standing next to him (presumably a friend, shorter, wearing a nice suit) felt the same.

N.Y. Daily News critic David Bianculli has written that “the first two hours of this final cycle are really good — alternately funny, dramatic, poignant and surprising — but they’re all mostly tease. After last year’s season of simmering, this mixture has to boil — fast. Even the most fervent and forgiving fans of the HBO series (and I count myself among them) have to start looking at the clock and stop excusing every scene as merely a foundation for the Big Ending.”

“Mike Binder‘s an interesting filmmaker,” AICN’s Drew McWeeny wrote two days ago. “As far as I can tell, he’s not chasing any trends. He’s not trying to make the next giantsupermegablock- buster. He’s just a guy who seems to be honing a personal voice, film after film, getting better as he does. He’s never become a hipster fave like Wes Anderson or [Paul Thomas Anderson], and he’s never achieved the pop culture significance of Woody Allen in the early days.

“But he manages to keep getting funding and he manages to keep making fairly personal films the way he wants to. I admire that. And, in a happy coincidence, I also like his movie.”

New York Post critic Lou Lumenick pays a visit to the last operating grindhouse in the New York City area. It’s a greasy dump called the Fair Theatre, “a successor to the tradition of the crumbling, grimy showplaces that used to line both sides of 42nd Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, located on a shabby stretch of Astoria Boulevard near La Guardia Airport.”

Lumenick hopped on the M60 bus and actually visited this place — alone, unarmed, no security escort.

“There appears to be more activity in neighboring rooms,” he writes. “One was showing straight porno, the other gay porno. The latter, I am told, is equipped with private booths for patrons’ use.

“When I begin asking the ticket-taker questions, he summons an assistant manager who said he needed to check with his lawyer. He later told me he was advised not to talk about the theater ‘because of the lawsuit.'”

An inside operator who’s enjoyed a certain perspective on the making of Transformers (Dreamamount, 7.4.07), the forthcoming Michael Bay fantasy-actioner, feels it’s “loads of crap” and “not fit for a barge.” These and other opinions were amusingly conveyed in a Transformer wrap poem that was posted last night on a certain website, and then taken down. A journalist friend copied and and sent it along before the erasure. The Beowulfian account lies three graphs hence.

Merd bombs of this sort never factor into the film’s commercial reception. Older guys taking potshots at a super-expensive pre-pubescent fanboy action FX flick is almost a badge of honor. It’s certainly a matter of very limited consequence in the greater scheme.

What does anyone really expect from Transformers anyway? It’s based on a damn Hasbro toy line (my kids were into Transformers in the early to mid ’90s), so what could possibly manifest beyond a sense of high-robot uber-coolness and a blitz- kreig of hot-lead “Bay-os” (a term coined by producer Jerry Bruckheimer, accor- ding to Variety‘s Dade Hayes, that refers to “automatic weapon fire, rumbling car engines, sweaty military dialogue”).

Before reading it, however, you need to know the players — Bay, DreamWorks chief Stacey Snider, producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura (allegedly alluded to as “Skorponok”), producers Don Murphy and Tom SeSantos, and DreamWorks production chief Adam Goodman. Anyway, here goes…

TRANSFORMERS WRAP POEM

The film is a wrap?

Wow, how about that!

It’s still loads of crap.

And the Stooges swallow this pap?

Murphy and Desanto lead the cheerleader charge

While Skorponok takes credit by and large.

The fact is today

There is nothing okay

The content of the film’s not fit for a barge.

Let your sugary friend answer the clamor

All you sweet kiddles want in on the drama?

The trouble beginning to end

Is named A-D-A-M Goodman

New studio head Snider

Decided him to fire

But then in a Hail Mary pass

Goodman kissed the right piece of ass

“Do not fire me, no do not please”

The chubby young Goodman said on his knees

I can do something you don’t want to do

I can control Michael Bay just for you.

New studio head Snider

Knew he’s a liar

But decided to stay out of the mess

“Sure Mr. Chubwon, you control Bay-san

And keep this boy’s movie shit off my dress”

Then dumb Mr. Goodman

As only a dunce can

Proceeded to hide in the sand

For the first time in history

It was a complete mystery

How one director had ALL of the power!!!!!!

The film is what it is and that’s all that it is

Most trufans will want to take a long whiz

And though valiant and Brave Tom Ian and Don slaved

Fact is Goodman gave the keys to the Kingdom to Bayed.

If you hate the dumb story

And realize the characters are a worry

And wonder how Bay could screwup so bad

Remember the missive that Sugarboy brought you

It wasn’t just Michael but Goodman too!

Obviously the operator feels very strongly that Transformers could have been something better (better? “better”?) than what has apparently resulted under Bay’s transforming influence. What a lot of bitch-steam over nothing. The more profound malady, as I’ve said two or three times since the days of Pearl Harbor, is that Bay could be a much more influential and widely-respected top-tier director (his chops are second-to-none) if he only had the vision thing…if he only had the willingness (ability?) to grow a soul, or at least direct a script that has one in abundance without Bay-ing it down.

Boiler Room and Wall Street are both about a young, lean hungry-for-money guy (a) gaining entry to the world of high finance, (b) learning the ropes, making big bucks and getting a little drunk on the juice of it all, and (c) eventually going too far, getting busted and crashing into a hole of shame and disrepute. Now we have a third one to process — a big-screen adaptation of Jordan Belfort‘s The Wolf of Wall Street (Bantam, 9.25.07) with Martin Scorsese directing, Leonardo DiCaprio starring and Terence Winter writing the script.

Belfort’s book is about how he became one of Wall Street’s most predatory film-flam artists, plying the trade of “penny stock” trading. A “Page Six” summary says that Belfort’s Stratton Oakmont group “pulled off pump and dump schemes in which fast-talking boiler-room brokers ran up the prices of shares with fraudulent phone pitches.” The item says that whatever money Belfort makes off the book and the film “would immediately be seized,” that “he still owes a fortune to investors, [having] made $13 million in restitution with $75 million or more in claims.”

Question is, what is there to say about or bring to another high-hormone blue-chip cautionary tale? We know all about greedy young guys in suspenders who will do anything to get to the top, and we know what happens to most of them sooner or later, so….what’s new?

Those who recall the halcyon days of “Sixteen” may want to spend a minute with this YouTube video, captured a few days ago at a Syracuse University concert, and consider the moves of the bass player (i.e., stage right).

There is, to me, a kind of warm-bath comfort in the fact of Al Pacino appearing in some current or upcoming film (i.e., one that has a kind of substance) and surging on the oats of raging septugenarian hormones and looking like some kind of incorrigible sartorial dog.

No more guest editorships at the L.A. Times op/ed section because publisher David Hiller has been spooked over the Brian Grazer/Andres Martinez/Kelly Mullens editorial-intimacy scandal and has decided to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

One should never make decisions about substantial matters out of fear or anger. Hiller is obviously being driven by the former — he’s running for the hills.

There’s nothing inherently corrupt about bringing in guest editors — the idea would obviously make things more nervy, exciting, lively. Nothing betokens death as much as a person or organization unwilling to take risks. As Charles Laughton‘s Graccus said to the Roman Senate in Spartacus, “I’ll take a little Republican corruption with a little Republican freedom…but I won’t take the dictatorship of Crassus, and no freedom at all!”

Things aren’t as soft as they seem for Reign Over Me, which took in $8 million last weekend for an 8th place showing. What matters is that (a) the $4788 per-screen average was fairly decent and (b) the film is expected to motor along with good word-of-mouth from women and over-25s. The per-screen tally was better than the opening-frame $3617 average for Spanglish, a semi-serious Sandler film that “actually outgrossed comedies Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore and Little Nicky,” according to Variety‘s Ian Mohr. Reign director Mike Binder confided a couple of days ago that “we actually did okay [last weekend]. Not the kill I wanted but we got a bad [i.e., extremely crowded] weekend. It’s good though. I’m happy.”

Several days after the Hilary 1984 video surfaced, cimaxed and subsided, the N.Y. Times ran a summary piece about it, written by Maria Aspan.

IGN’s Stax Flixburg is reporting that Darren Aronofsky‘s next directing chore will be The Fighter, a fact-based boxing drama that will reteam Departed co-stars Mark Wahlberg and Matt Damon. Filming is expected to begin this summer in Massachucetts, he says. (Variety‘s Michael Fleming and Pamela McClintock almost certainly read Stax’s story, made a few calls and posted their version last night at 7:16 pm, without acknowledging that Stax broke it. That’s the way they do things over there.)

There’s a premiere screening of the first two episodes of the final season of The Sopranos tomorrow night at the Radio City Music Hall, plus an after-party with the cast somewhere…terrific. Just got into town, didn’t do my advance homework, there’s no chance of attending and this is the end of the line.