wired

I have to pack and blow town and get down to San Diego for Comic Con, so no more postings until late tonight. I don’t even have my press credentials but the site says I’ll be okay if I just show up with clippings (the term “clippings” sounds like such an anachronism) and a business card. I’ll take as many photos as I can. I just hope there are wi-fi areas inside the San Diego Convention Center. I think it’s fair to say that the heat is on Friday afternoon’s Snakes on a Plane presentation in more ways than one, given New Line’s decision not to let anyone see it until the night before the 8.18 opening.

One of my biggest pet peeves is the emotional flavoring that the Fox operator uses when she says the words, “…while your call is transferred.” I don’t know who Fox hired or who coached her, but listen to the schpiel and then pay close attention to how she gives an extra ladelling of maternal sweetness to the last four words. To me, it’s insincere and even a tiny bit odious. She sounds like Louise Fletcher playing Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Tell me if you don’t agree.

There was a top-secret screening of My Super Ex-Girlfriend (20th Century Fox, 7.20) last week on the Fox lot, but I wasn’t shrewd or pushy enough to get into it (and you do have to “work it” to find out about these showings and wheedle your way into them by hook or crook) so no reaction from this corner. I could have seen it last night but I decided to see World Trade Center instead.

A friend who caught it last night disputes David Poland‘s view that it’s “an epic of misogyny”, although knowing how movies of this ilk tend to go (especially ones directed by Ivan Reitman), I wouldn’t be surprised if Poland is on the money. The friend says that while You, Me and Dupree had no one big scene you can talk about with your friends and joke about, My Super Ex-Girlfriend has at least two…so there you go.

The coming Disney layoffs plus the big studios saying “no” to rich big star deals on movies are seen as evidnce of “an industrywide contraction,” and some in Hollywood are getting more and more scared of this, reports L.A. Times staffer Claudia Eller. “It’s as if the managerial elite has made a secret pact to adhere to certain business principles that they want to enforce on agents and artists,” says producer Brian Grazer. Eller says that Grazer “sees studios as more rigid today about how far they’ll stretch to compensate even the biggest stars, directors, producers and writers on movie projects,” and, he says, “that’s never happened in the 25 years I’ve been producing.”

The new Saw 3 trailer will have its world premiere in theatres before showings of The Descent, which Lionsgate is opening on 8.4. Not online…screens only. Drop everything, cancel the trip to the Home Depot, put off the cat’s declawing at the vet, put both cars in the garage and batten down the hatches….the Saw 3 trailer is hitting screens on the same day as The Descent. (Who was that guy in the ’50s who was known for going “Oooh! Oooh!” in low-budget comedies?)

Josh Capps , the HE reader trying to get his fiance Nadine out of Lebanon, says “our situation has worsened. Despite being told otherwise by the very same department at the embassy on Monday, I was told today that even if America continues to evacuate all citizens are out, they’ll only evacuate permanent residents. I was told point blank they wouldn’t evacuate student visas , even those with extreme extenuating circumstances like Nadine’s. At this point I feel I’m against the wall, so I’m trying contact as many media outlets as possible, hopefully pressuring the government to change this policy. Or, at the very least, make some exceptions.”

This one-sheet for Ryan Fleck’s Half Nelson (ThinkFilm, 8.11) strikes me as one of the better designed I’ve run across in some time. It’s something in the ripeness, the buoyant pastel colors and neat brushstrokes… the way it doesn’t exactly “say” anything about the plot or Ryan Gosling’s character, and yet suggests some kind of character problem with that dead- blank expression on Gosling’s face…all very cool. I hereby nominate it for a Hollywood Reporter Key Award.

A slow news day today, but World Trade Center tonight and Comic Con tomorrow.

“Film distributors in Israel have decided not to invite film critics to press screenings. They feel bad reviews hurt the film’s financial potential. This has been going on for nearly eight weeks but only recently has attracted trade press coverage. Most critics have rejected the distributors’ offer to be re-invited to screenings if we only push back the publication date of our reviews, and give their movie, their massive-mega-million-dolar blockbuster, ‘one weekend of grace’. The companies are G.G (Globus Group), UIP (Universal. Paramount. Dreamworks), WB. and Forum Film, representing Disney, Miramax, New Line and Sony. It’s been speculated here that this reactionary move was done without the permission of the Hollywood managenent and that upon running that 7.9 item in Variety, the shit — it seems — has hit the fan. It should be noted that in Israel film distributors and exhibitors are one and the same, an issue once investigated by the anti-trust office at the department of finance, but no ruling was ever issued.” —
Yair Raveh, film critic, Film Critic, “Pnai Plus”, Tel Aviv.

Toronto Star movie critic and essayist Peter Howell survives fierce Canadian rainstorm, inspects tree damage!

Here’s an interesting N.Y. Times piece, written by Elizabeth Hayt, that ran a couple of days ago about sex and seasoned women in movies and books. The primary focus is Laurent Cantet‘s Heading South (Shadow Distribution) and its story of older single women who enjoy sexual vacations with poor younger men in in Haiti in the 1970s. An interesting view on middle-aged female eroticism, but how real is it?

I saw Heading South (or Vers lr Sud) in Toronto last year, and found it above- average, authentically flavored, moderately erotic. It costars Charlotte Rampling, the reigning poster queen for older-woman sexuality (with maybe Isabelle Huppert ranking second), and Karen Young, who played that diligent, somewhat clueless FBI agent on The Sopranos who ran Drea de Matteo‘s Adrianna until the day she confessed to “Christophah” and soon after got plugged twice by Silvio.
Hayt’s article also mentions a book called “A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance” by Jane Juska, which is about a woman in her mid 60s who decides she wants to have good sex with a good guy and how she tries to find that guy through singles ads.
All well and good, but the truth is most women of a certain age are extremely gun-shy about intimate relationships, and that even with strong mutual attracton and good vibes all around it takes many, many weeks (and sometimes a few months) to get to a place of receptivity. Frankly? It’s almost more appealing to eat out alone and get some reading done and devote more time to exercise, etc.
Seasoned 40ish women are the greatest, but even after they give you the green- light look (which there’s never any mistaking) you need the spiritual serenity of Sri Krishna and the patience of Job to get going with them. They’ve been through lots of bad relationships in their youth and they don’t want to get hurt, and this, of course, is very human and understandable. Everyone becomes a piece of work after 40, I guess.
They say that many things in life get easier (or at least are easier to understand) as you get older, but running around isn’t one of them.

The summer is a time for indie-sector “mosquito” movies. I’m speaking of movies that you need and want to see, but there’s always something else you have to do first and then it’s suddenly later than you thought it was. But knowing these little films are being screened and the awful guilt you always feel when you realize you could have gone to see this one or that one the night before except you were struggling to finish a piece and you looked up and it was 8:35 pm….it’s very tough. All to explain it’s analagous on some level to being in a swampy area and surrounded by mosquitoes. That’s not to say that the films themselves are mosquitoes — far from it — but the missed-screening guilt that’s always swirling around your head is, on some level, mosquito-like. Thank God for DVD screeners and the willingness of vigilant publciists to send them over by messenger or mail. I’ve managed to see 13 Tzameti, Edmond, The Groomsmen, Mini’s First Time The Oh in Ohio and Time to Leave this way. And I’ve actually gone to theatre screenings of Brothers fo the Head in a screening room (conjoined male twins with their arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders throughout the whole film…cool) as well as I Like Killing Flies (ThinkFilm, 8.28), a spunky little Sundance doc about a New York restauratuer that I first saw in ’04, I think.