“No other writer-producer-director makes males more excited at the prospect of a new film — especially a cop thriller — than Michael Mann. But it’s an anticipation that crosses gender and taste barriers, integrating art film buffs with the Friday night popcorn crowd. Fans look to this peerless creator of impeccably crafted films about existential male loners — films such as The Last of the Mohicans, Heat and The Insider — for a superior kind of big budget cinema, a hyperrealism that is simultaneously dumbfounding and realistic. He seems to be the sort of guy who can talk fast cars all day with the studio suits, as if he were a suit himself. Yet his artistry is a matter of absolute dedication, making him perhaps the most extreme cinema perfectionist since Stanley Kubrick.” — Nick James in last Sunday’s Guardian Observer.

According to L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein, what makes Michael Bamberger‘s “The Man Who Heard Voices” “especially damaging” is that Lady in the Water director-writer M. Night Shyamalan told Bamberger absolutely everything and let it all hang out. In so doing, says Goldstein, Night “violated Hollywood PR Law No. 1: Never let people see you as you really are. In an era when stars hide behind their handlers, who vet writers, limit their access and keep them miles away from any dirty laundry, Night let Bamberger see it all — straight, no chaser.”
This is an early July riff, I realize, and it’s time to move on, but Goldstein’s column just came out and I’m reacting
I said this before in my response to Janet Maslin‘s N.Y. Times review about Bamberger book, and here it is again. By giving Bamberger access to his insecure inner sanctum without restrictions, Shyamalan allowed for a portrait of “a vulnerable egoistic guy with problems — a guy with a deep belief in dreams and voices (as all creative types need to be) but with control-freak tendencies and a need for a certain kind of approval that requires being not just rich but fully understood by colleagues; a guy with demons and uncertainties like anyone else, but amplified by the power he’s accumulated as a big-time Hollywood director.”
What I find very revealing is that Maslin and Goldstein and a lot of others in the media are contemptuous of Night’s honesty. And they endorse and approve of people who carefully edit their public persona and spin everything up and down the flapgpole. They’re actually standing on the side of the 2006 Generic Deceivers. We all recognize that everyone has to play the game this way if they want to survive, but why am I one of the few people to at least show respect for Shyamalan’s willingness to let people see his trembling inner child? The guy may have problems, granted, but you can’t say he doesn’t have a kind of cast-iron courage.
And one other repeated point: take off the armor and we’re all scared and anxious and messed up in this or that way, including myself and Patrick Goldstein and Janet Maslin and Michael Mann. The difference is that Shyamalan has the courage to confess this and Bamberger has the focus and discipline to just lay it down as he heard and felt it, and all Maslin and Goldstein can write in response is tsk-tsk, “not very smart”, and a repeat of the John Lennon lyric, “Hey, you’ve got to hide your love away.” How very big of them.

If anyone knows anyone who managed to digitally capture that Kim Cattrall Nissan ad that ran on New Zealand TV before it was banned for being too sexually out-there….the one in which she moaned suggestively while driving over a hump in the road (the ad reportedly shows a yellow road sign with that very word printed in black letters), and then, while talking to a Nissan salesman, says, “Why didn’t you tell me it was so big? I just wasn’t prepared for it! The all-new Nissan Tiida makes you feel really, really, really good inside. Absolutely fabulous! I mean the great body and the way you moved it.” Send it along and I’ll run the link or load it onto my server…whatever.

DVD Beaver is one of the greatest DVD sites anywhere. I love the screen-capture comparisons. Check out their comparison piece on new two-disc “Collector’s Edition” of Billy Wilder‘s Some Like It Hot.

In Miami Vice, director Michael Mann and cinematographer Dion Beebe “make everything strange — the hard horizontal lines of office buildings, the maze of tributaries off Biscayne Bay. Shots of Crockett and Tubbs’s team are near hallucinatory in their mixture of amorphousness and brisk efficiency. The violence is fast, messy, discombobulating — much of the climactic shootout is Cops-style, from a limited video vantage, the soft pop-pop-pop of distant guns far eerier than the usual overamplified cannon roars.” — from David Edelstein ‘s rave review in New York magazine.

Director-writer Neil Labute talked about The Wicker Man (Warner Bros., 9.1) at Comic Con last weekend, and also showed a scene from the opening of the film. Nic Cage is a motorcycle cop pulling over a young mother because her daughter has thrown a doll out in the road. The scene starts to get creepy, and then creeper still…and then shocking, and then demonic.

The Wicker Man trailer is even creepier. They’ve both left me with a feeling that it’s going to be a very unnerving, very scary film . Labute is one of the brightest directors around, but I wouldn’t call him warm and fuzzy. And you need a little touch of steel in your soul, I think, to push the right buttons and do the job on people. Labute acknowledged last weekend that the subject, deep down, has something to do with his feelings about women.

DVD Newsroom needs to be denser with Drudge report-type links to all the hot DVD sites, but the idea is good — a one-stop shopping DVD site with a daily blog digest of studio news and releases. As co-editor Suki Jonze explains, “We watch the watchmen with irreverent beer goggles…no more checking tons of sites….we pull it all together with a nice bloggy bow on top. ” Okay, but I want to see a Hollywood Wiretap site for DVD’s. That would make me happier.

The Los Angeles premiere — finally! — of John Scheinfeld‘s Who is Harry Nilsson (and Why Is Everybody Talking About Him)? will be a one-shot thing at the American Cinematheque’s Aero theatre on Wednesday, 8.23 at 7:30 pm. A truly touching saga of a relentlessly self-destructive genius, Nilsson is still apparently looking for a distribution arrangement of some kind. (A call to Scheinfeld wasn’t returned.)
Nilsson was one of rock music’s most gifted songwriters and melody-makers…ever. The glory of his life was a period of eight years — roughly from ’66 to ’74 — when he wrote or sang “Cuddly Toy,” “Without You,” “Everybody’s Talkin’ At Me” (the famous Midnight Cowboy tune), “Maybe,” “One,” “Daybreak”, “Coconut,” “Jump Into the Fire” and “You’re breaking my heart, you’re tearing it apart, so fuck you.” His first 25 years were formative (he was born in 1941) and the last 20 were about self destruction — booze, drugs and who knows how many tens of thousands of cigarettes. His parents both died in their 50s so maybe he believed it was in the cards, but Nilsson’s heart finally gave out in January 1994, just before the big L.A. earthquake.
Obviously those eight years were blessed, shining, God-imbued. The parts of his character that would eventually lead to his death were present and pulsing, but the creative instincts ruled and he was truly king of a kingdom then. The Beatles, Randy Newman and Brian Wilson worshipped Nilsson, and so did everyone else in the music industry along with the millions of fans. But as Eric Idle says of Nilsson, “He liked to party, and he got that….and in the end, it got him.” In the life story of almost any genius, the third act usually sucks.

There’s a bit of a “what’s this about?” feeling behind Lorenza Munoz‘s L.A. Times examination of the daunting tasks facing Universal’s co-chairman Marc Shmuger, and particularly the industry view (which she seems to personally endorse) that marketing guys like Shmuger and Disney’s Oren Aviv running the show at two major studios is a bad trend. I mean, you can feel the agenda when she takes a swipe at Shmuger for “using cold business terms such as the ‘product line.'”
I’m not saying that marketing guys-running-the-big-studios is necessarily a wonderful trend either, but here’s what I think may have happened. Munoz and her editors mainly wanted to go after Aviv, in part because she and her editors were angered and alarmed when Dick Cook picked Aviv to suddenly replace Nina Jacobson last week (everyone was upset about this), and also because Aviv was disingenuous with N.Y. Times reporter Laura Holson the other day about the circumstances leading up to his being offered the job, and because he said “I want to make movies like The Pacifier,” but there’s nothing to really nail him for so she went after Shmuger instead. It’s just a theory, but at least it explains the “why?” behind her piece.
The topical opportunity. obviously, is Michael Mann’s Miami Vice, which opens on 7.28. There’s a graph in which Munoz all but forecasts Vice‘s failure, and you get the idea she’s not exactly dispassionate about the idea of Shmuger struggling and possibly failing to get this richly aromatic crime film off the ground. Calling it Uni’s “biggest gamble,” she notes that Vice “cost $140 million to make…but given the somewhat tepid tracking with audiences so far, the film could have difficulty turning a quick profit despite a $50 million marketing and publicity campaign.”

Miami Vice is “about guns and sex and fast boats, and, baffling as it is at times, it’s still the kind of brutal fantasy that many of us relish a great deal more than yet another aerated digital dream. We can enjoy the pretense that police work is like this — sleepless, incredibly dangerous, constantly vehicular, and unsullied by paperwork. The honesty of this kind of movie can be measured by how juicy its sense of licentious pleasure is. Despite its generally saturnine mood, this one passes the test. ”
Colin Farrell‘s Crockett “eyes the Chinese-Cuban mistress and business manager of the Colombian big guy — Isabella, played by the beautiful Gong Li. She stares back, they exchange a few words, and immediately take off for Cuba to drink and make out. As the two lovers race across the Caribbean in a twin-engine Super Cat, the movie achieves a quality of screw-you willfulness, a sense of reckless freedom. That’s the essence of crime, and, for us landlubbers, it makes up for a lot of narrative confusion and chewed-off gibberish that seems designed to shut us out.” — New Yorker critic David Denby in the 7.31.06 issue.

A late-arriving obit for Argentinian director Fabian Bielinsky (The Aura), who died on 6.28. Nicely written by the Guardian‘s Michael Chanan.

A split decision from the trades on Michael Mann‘s Miami Vice. Variety‘s Brian Lowry doesn’t do cartwheels but he generally approves of the fact that “Mann’s handsome adaptation eschews the campy spoofs and thinly veiled disdain for the source material (think Starsky & Hutch and Charlie’s Angels) that have plagued TV-based movies; instead, Vice revels in the creative latitude that an R-rated feature provides without departing from the show’s rudimentary structure.” But the Hollywood Reporter‘s Michael Rechshaffen is calling it “a long and talky excursion that fails to engage the viewer from the outset” with Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx appearing “to be engaged in a contest to determine who can appear more morose while expending the least amount of energy, especially in terms of their own flat exchanges.”