wired

It’s been decided by New Line brass that the charms of Snakes on a Plane will probably be unappreciated by a sizable percentage of critics and columnists, and therefore no advance media screenings will be held before the 8.18 opening. Because advance reviews, they’ve obviously decided, may do more harm than good. (Which isn’t to say they absolutely will do more harm than good — only that the possibility is giving them concern.) Please mull this one over, HE readers, and tell me you ‘re thinking. Why would New Line make this call with at least some critics (like AICN’s Derek Flint ) likely to be receptive and then some? Do the odds seem to favor Snakes earning its place alongside other classic absurdist horror-thrillers like Tremors or Reanimator? Or is it starting to look more like it might be in the class of Tremors 2?

Sony’s Blu-Ray seems to be gaining ground over Toshiba’s HD-DVD, but why doesn’t an industry strong-man (or a group of strong men?) just step into the situation and slap everyone around like a mafia crime boss would and lay down the law: “It’s Blu-Ray or nothing…or else .” It’s obvious that the high-def format standoff between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is self-destuctive and killing interest among Average Joe’s in buying a high-def DVD player.

DVD sales are flattening out and an affordable HD-DVD format that catches on could change the whole picture, but it’s not happening because of the stubborn egos of a few men in the industry’s tech arena. This is insane. If Tony Soprano, Chris Moltisanti, Paulie Walnuts and Silvio Dante had any influence over this situation, some limbs and ribs might get bruised or broken but Toshiba’s HD-DVD players would be out of the picture before you know it. And then everyone could start making some money.

The hallucinogenic tea Oliver Stone was sipping at Manhattan’s Park Regency hotel during last weekend’s World Trade Center junket is called ayahuasca, and apparently it’s a lot more potent than anything typically consumed by movie directors under these circumstances. George Rush ‘s N.Y. Daily News column brought it up, but here’s the Wikipedia lowdown:

Ayahuasca is derived from “a giant Amazonian vine native to the rainforest that contains pharmacologically complex psychoactive infusions” — i.e., natural resins that get you high — that are “used for shamanic, folk-medicinal, and religious purposes.” A good strong cup of the stuff is said to contain DMT, otherwise known as” the powerful hallucinogenic alkaloid N-dimethyltryptamine .”

Cinematical is running a story borrowed fron an Australian news service story about Russell Crowe and director Michael Corrente hooking up on a film called The Prince of Providence, a biopic of Bubby Cianci, the colorful (read: unethical but charismatic) mayor of Providence, R.I., who was in and out and up and down over a period of 30 years starting in the mid ’70s and is now doing time for racketeering, conspiracy, extortion, witness tampering and mail fraud charges. Naturally Crowe wants to more or less co-direct the film with Corrente (Federal Hill). “When you’re dealing with a star of this magnitude, he brings in a lot of his own ideas,” Corrente told an Aussie reporter.

John Anderson does an M. Night slice-and-dice in this N.Y. Post piece. The neat part is the observation that Hollywood studios and producers are probably “praying for a Night fall” and that “the whole town has turned into a NASCAR event — you know, with onlookers leaning over the railings and hoping for a crash?” and that this coming weekend “Hollywood heavies will head out to see Lady in the Water as if they were going to the Roman Colosseum — to root for the lions.”

Here’s a think piece by Cahier du Cinema‘s Herve Aubron that’s so French think-piecey it turns into a marble statue with a baguette up its butt as you’re reading it. The premise is that Michael Mann and M. Night Shyamalan have “a shared taste for the lackluster and the dull. The worlds of Mann and Shyamalan are gray because they are limbs. Their occupants are already dead. In Shy, the motif of the phantom persists well beyond the final reversal in The Sixth Sense. In Mann, it is less a question of phantoms than of condemned persons in a hurry to be executed. Already dead, in the sense that their execution is already intended and decided — they run to meet it.” De Niro’s Neil in Heat or Cruise’s Vincent in Collateral may have an inner death-wish thing going on, but their sense of alertness and urban vitality is so acute it’s a contact high.

Stu VanAirsdale (a.k.a. “the Reeler”) had a moment last night with M. Night Shyamalan at a big-deal Lady in the Water screening at the Museum of Natural History. Naturally, Night is going to deflect and sidestep any questions about all the negative reactions to the film and the book and his alleged ego problems. Nothing new here.
What got me were the two tiny photos of Paul Giamatti. This sounds shallow as hell but I don’t want the poor guy to lose any more hair, and he seems to be doing that. Giamatti has to hold onto that Miles thing — he can’t let himself get too Uriah Heep-y. It’s obviously cool for prominent character actors and stars to have balding or thinning conditions, but the key thing is to not let too much erosion occur so things tip over into flirting-with-egg-bald territory.

Sean Connery is the exception — Gene Hackman is the rule. Hackman has had sparse hair for the last 40 years, but he grimmed up and held on to those 250 or 300 follicles on the top of his head. Same with Jack Nicholson — he kept those sprigs and never went 100% billiard-ball.
In Michael Bamberger‘s “The Man Who Heard Voices” it’s reported that some kind of brief discussion about Giamatti wearing a going-bald wig came up priot to the shooting of Lady, so obviously M. Night Shyamalan gave this issue some thought. It’s not a huge deal, but Giamatti should try and hang on to his Sideways hair for the next 20 or 25 years. Just hold onto it somehow and don’t follow in the footsteps of Kevin Spacey and his constantly expanding Martian forehead in the seven or so years since American Beauty.

“As you might have guessed, I think World Trade Center is the first serious contender to be nominated for Best Picture this year,” David Poland wrote last night after slipping into an even-earlier screening than the earliest one I was told about yesterday…harumph. (Before we go any further, it’s clear what David’s saying but it would’ve been a better sentence if he had inserted “that deserves” after the word “contender” and before the word “to.”)

“I hate the release date,” Poland continues. “It really feels to me like a November movie. I wanted the sharp sting of cold air on my face as I walked out into the street.” (Except there are no sharp stings to be had from Los Angeles weather …ever. Poland is dreaming about seeing WTC in Chicago around Thanksgiving.)
“I wanted a hot drink and a long conversation with a fire crackling nearby. This is a heavy, heavy movie to be hitting America in August.” (I don’t know what that means at all. August is a time for all God-fearin’ folks to emotionally sidestep anything that isn’t Snakes on a Plane or Sherrybaby ?)
“But the weight I felt on my chest walking out of the theater was much like the weight I felt after Munich …” (thud, penalty buzzer) — “after Amadeus, after Million Dollar Baby, after In The Bedroom , after The Pianist, after In America. ” (I’m presuming Nic Cage doesn’t have any Paddy Considine “fee-fi-fo-fum” lines in WTC.)
“It was the weight of something that touched me in a deep, almost inexplicable way, greater than the sum of its parts.” (I know what this feels like when a movie kicks in just the right way, and seems to gather force in your chest the more you think about it afterwards, and yet you can’t quite figure exactly why.)
Anyway, point taken. I’m pumped, as other perhaps are. World Trade Center opens three weeks and one day from now — on Wednesday, August 9th.

And just to remind everyone, my choice for the first deserving Oscar nominee for Best Film of the Year so far, as I said in mid-June, is Paul Greengrass‘s United 93 — a film that many, many people are still too chicken to see, but is “truly a pulse-pounder for the ages, in part because it’s so stunningly well-made, but mainly because the extraordinary craft manifests in all kinds of haunting ways. Composed of a thousand details and a thousand echoes, United 93 is a film about revisiting, recapturing, reanimating…about death, loss and a portrait of heroism that, for me, was too much to absorb in a single viewing. I’ve seen it five times, and I can’t wait to watch and re-watch the DVD.”

British director Roger Michell being in negotiations to direct the next Bond movie for Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli is, I feel, a really bad thing for a good guy like Michell to get into ….except for the conpensation. Make a deal with Wilson-Broccoli and all bets are off. They’re chumps. (I was told that the Michell deal was in the works when I was at the Paramount Vantage-Al Gore party in Cannes two months ago, but it seemed so unlikely — bizarre even — that I didn’t touch it.)

Reuters’ Bob Tourtellotte on movies about GenXers putting off serious career moves until their early to mid 30s, in the vein of my 7.13 “Party On” piece.

Time‘s Richard Corliss goes kind of easy on M. Night Shyamalan and Lady in the Water. Or gets oblique or sheathes his sword or something. You could cherry-pick the critical parts and call this a hit piece, but it reads to me like Corliss and his editors heard the wolves snarling for Nights’ blood and decided to try to cut him a break by writing and structuring the piece just so.