wired

The Guardian‘s John Patterson is calling Ridley Scott‘s A Good Year (20th Century Fox, 11.10), which stars Russell Crowe as a London financial scalawag who inherits a broken-down French vineyard, “another sad case of a comedy being made by people with no sense of humor whatsoever.”

Earth to Patterson: A Good Year isn’t a comedy. Really, really. It’s one of those tonic-for-the-soul movies. A mood piece about whimsy and effervescence and nurturing those things that need nurturing. It’s light, yeah, and it has supporting “characters” and Crowe smiles and goofs around, but that doesn’t mean it’s trying to be Bringing Up Baby. It’s about slipping out the back door and being a little bit happy at times, and it left me in a pleasant, sitting-outdoors-as-the-summer-sun- sets, good-glass-of-wine frame of mind.

“Dr. Strangelove is not only a documentary, but an extremely innocent one given today’s possibilities,” Christiane Kubrick (i.e., Stan’s widow) tells London Times writer James Christopher. “There are so many more things that can go wrong. Weapons are a hundredfold more dangerous. Giant mistakes are easier to make. We don’t have the mental tools to make critical split-second decisions.

“I remember when Peter George‘s book ‘Red Alert ‘came out around the time of the Cuban missile crisis [in 1962]. Stanley said: `We’re not anywhere near scared enough.’ He thought we were being as blinkered as the Germans under Hitler. He even bought tickets to Australia .”
Christopher spoke to Mrs. Kubrick on the occasion of a forthcoming (10.29) screening of the classic 1964 film at the BFI London Film Festival. It looks pretty damn good on the DVD that I own (i..e, the slightly older one with the far-preferable 1.33 to 1 aspect ratio), but the corresponding BFI web page says that Sony’s restoration expert Grover Crisp will be on hand at the showing to “describe the high-resolution techniques used to produce this dazzling new print.”

As a kind of followup to my Thursday item about City Beat critic Andy Klein pointing out the thematic parallels between Clint Eastwood‘s Flags of Our Fathers and Arthur Hiller‘s The Americanization of Emily, an HE reader named “nemo” has discovered another profound link between the two, which he pointed out yesterday afternoon:

(l. to r.) William Bradford Huie, Ira Hayes, Clint Eastwood

“Upon cross-referencing IMDB and Wikipedia, I discovered that The Americanization of Emily was based on a novel by William Bradford Huie who — this is really quite interesting — wrote the screenplay for Delbert Mann‘s 1961 movie The Outsider, starring Tony Curtis as Ira Hayes. Yes, the same real-life Hayes played by Adam Beach in Flags of Our Fathers . The Outsider also focuses on the propagandistic exploitation of Hayes after Iwo Jima.
“Obviously Huie had a strong persistent interest back in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s in taking a harsh, unromanticized look at the conduct of the American military leadership during WW II. (Huie also wrote the non-fiction book The Execution of Private Slovik, later made into a 1974 TV movie starring Martin Sheen).
“Huie was born, grew up, was educated, lived, worked, and died in Alabama. He served as a Naval officer in World War II. His journalism on racism in the South (“The Klansman” and “Three Lives for Mississippi”, about the Goodman-Chaney-Scwherner murders) earned him death threats and a cross burning on his front lawn.”

Alan Cerny wrote in response to my Running With Scissors review that he’s heard the film “has a montage set to Al Stewart‘s ‘Year Of The Cat’ — that alone is enough to make me run screaming.” Hold on, soldier. First of all, director Ryan Murphy doesn’t use the whole song but just the opening piano section. Which is the best part of the song. And listening to a this, trust me, is the most enjoyable portion of the film. I took the song and copied the piano intro a couple of times and edited out the singing — this is almost exactly what’s on the Scissors soundtrack.
“Queen Jane Approximately”

Not realizing at the time that Flags of Our Fathers would be opening on only 1800 or so screens, I called it as the weekend’s top film a couple of days ago. Nope. The Friday numbers are in and Flags wll finish in third place with an estimated $10,749,000. The weekend’s #1 film will be The Prestige at $15,089,000 with The Departed at #2 with $13,733 and a total cume of $77,206,000. Open Season will be fourth with $8,572,000, Flicka fifth with $7,988,000, The Grudge 2 sixth with $7,910,000, Man of the Year seventh with $7,011,000 and I don’t care about the rest.
The Queen is now in 99 theatres — taking things slow and steady — and will earn about $1,464,000 this weekend with an average of about $14,8000 per situation. Marie-Antoinette opened in 859 theatres — if Sony had any kind of all-out confidence in Sofia Coppola’s film they would’ve gone bigger — and will generate about $6000 per situation for a weekend total of about $5,897,000. Running With Scissors has opened in eight theatres and has done pretty well, but I can’t read my own writing on this one so let’s wait until tomorrow.

Hollywood Elsewhere is seeking an intern to work on all aspects of the site except the writing (unless you’re a genius with a prose style very close to mine) in exchange for school credit. Work from your own place but it has to be someone enrolled in a Los Angeles (or L.A.-area) university. I don’t know how it usually works when a journalism major interns with a publication but I’d prefer someone who will commit to a longer rather than a shorter term. Access/entry to press screenings, occasional press junkets, industry gatherings, etc. I’ve been hearing from friends over the past two years that I need to do this. And now I’ve finally taken their advice about six weeks after most fall terms have already begun…brilliant.

“I came to London to study a three-year course, and about a year and a half into it, I was invited to do casting for Amores Perros. I got a phone call from Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, the director, and he asked me to read something, videotape myself and send it back to him. I had never done casting before in my life, so I did exactly what he told me to do. After that, I got a phone call back from him saying, ‘Let’s do it.’

“So he sends me the script, and I said yes. Well, I was going to say yes anyway. But there was one big problem. My school [London’s Central School of Speech and Drama] didn’t allow me to work. In England, they don’t let you miss school. If you miss school for three days, you get chucked out. In Mexico, this is completely incomprehensible.
“So I told Alejandro, and he came up with a very good Latin American solution to this problem. He said that a relative was a director of a hospital and he would be able to get me a medical certificate to say that I had contracted some big tropical disease on my last visit to Mexico. That was perfect because I had no hair when I got back here from Amores Perros and people believed me completely.” — from an excellent Nation Film Theatre q & a with Babel costar Gael Garca Bernal in The Guardian, complete with an mp3 podcast of the event.

The worst trailer mash I’ve ever seen. Uncreative, clunky, witless, tasteless, stupid…really loathsome. Especially the very end of it. “Oh my gosh” is right.

“A favorite quote of the week came from a producer of a major awards contender : ‘I guess since no one has seen it yet, Dreamgirls must be the front runner for Best Picture.'” — from Pete Hammond‘s latest Hollywood Wiretap column.

Arizona Daily Star critic Phil Villarreal has made some early Oscar calls, and decided that the top five Best Picture candidates are Babel (of course), The Departed (definitely), Dreamgirls (almost certainly), Flags of Our Fathers (most likely) and United 93 (brilliant!).

I haven’t even looked at this, but it’s an apparently legit link to a Borat press conference that happened today in Santa Monica.

The Envelope “Buzzometer” is up and running…sort of. Only five or six of the ten contributors — USA Today‘s Claudia Puig, Comingsoon.net‘s Edward Douglas, Newsday‘s Gene Seymour, myself, the Chicago Tribune‘s Michael Phillips, Hollywood Wiretap‘s Pete Hammond (one of the slackers), Rolling Stone‘s Peter Travers, Ebert & Roeper‘s Richard Roeper, and The Envelope ‘s Steve Pond and Tom O’Neil — are there, but I guess everyone will be along by the end of the month.