wired

Who the hell is Thomas Bezucha? Until this evening I didn’t have a clue, but he’s the former fashion executive (ten years as creative services vp for Polo/Ralph Lauren) who’s come out of dead friggin’ nowhere to write and direct one of the best-written, most emotionally on-target and true-to-life family Christmas movies (okay, with a tidy commercial attitude…fine) ever made. It’s called The Family Stone (20th Century Fox, 11.11) and there’s no question it’s a hit. Don’t count on a rave from Armond White, but I’m telling you it’s going to go over big with educated blue-state Average Joes, at the very least. I’m not so sure about the family- values folks in Bubbaland…some of them might have qualms about a family that embraces a child-adopting gay-male couple, etc., but this movie is so relaxed and well-jiggered and human- tragedy funny…so half-dramatic and half-sitcom likable that you don’t even want to think about the red staters…screw ’em. The story’s about a large New England liberal family…all grown-up kids (Luke Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Dermot Mulroney, Tyrone Giordano, Elizabeth Reaser) and mom-and-popped by Diane Keaton and Craig T. Nelson..assembling for a snowy Christmas with an oddball apple floating in the punch. Her name is Meredith (Sara Jessica Parker), Mulroney’s uptight bring-home-date and (who knows?) possible fiance whom everyone hates because she’s so emotionally conservative and screwed down tight. Stunned by the disapproving vibe she incurs from this semi-mellow brood, Meredith pressures her sister Julie (Claire Danes) into joining her to provide emotional support, and this in turn lays the stage for all kinds of upheavals and complications. There’s a big plot point I’m not going to reveal that also throws everyone off-balance. Is The Family Stone an Ingmar Bergman dramedy-farce about a cultivated, semi-neurotic family coping with the emotional land mines that always seem to go off when families get together in late December? Yes…if you drop the “Ingmar Bergman.” This is a commercial movie, which isn’t always a punishable crime. It does this kind of thing as well as you can expect a smart commercial movie to do this kind of thing. That’s not meant as a diss. In its own realm of confection, Bezucha and his cast do a bang-up job. It’s a studio souflee that feels more prickly and chaotically realistic than any home-for-the-holidays movie I can think of right now. It’s not gnarly or snarly enough to compete with a certain 1942 wintertime movie called The Man Who Came to Dinner, but it’s almost as tonally assured and smartly written as that classic….really. Everyone says Keaton will be a Best Supporting Actress nomineee and okay, maybe…but Parker is the one who lays it out and goes whacko and takes the big character journey. Nelson is fantastic, and Wilson is the best he’s ever been since Bottle Rocket. There’s a SAG ensemble acting award, right? Settled…these guys own it. How do you pronounce Bezucha’s name, by the way? Like bazooka bubble gum?

I have to side with David Poland’s “stop, George, stop” plea about George Clooney’s plans to remake Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayefsky’s Network for television. It was a cutting and wonderfully nervy film in ’76 because it was forecasting trends — reality TV, infotainment, cult-of-the-personality news anchors — that were starting to take shape but hadn’t quite happened. And of course, the fact that Network turned out to be prophetic has added to its reputation. But Clooney himself nailed the problem of a remake when he told the Associated Press that he was “briefly mystified when he screened it for a group of young people and none of them saw it as a dark satire. ‘I couldn’t understand it, (then) I realized that everything Chayefsky wrote about happened. And so, suddenly, the idea that the anchor is more important that the news story, and that you’d be doing sort of reality-based shows with heads of gangs and Sybil the Soothsayer all happened. And when you have that great speech with Ned Beatty sitting there going ‘There is no U.S.A. and Soviet Union, there is only Xerox and IBM,’ you realize all of those things were true, or came true.” Exactly, and the point of re-making a film that’s no longer forecasting but echoing today’s reality is….? Note: Scratch that thing I wrote about the Black Panthers and updating the terrorist gang element. I read the article too quickly and I’m always racing around, etc.

Two for the Money (Universal, 10.7) is about this hunky ex-college football player (Matthew McConaughey) with some kind of supernatural psychic ability to pick the winners of football games. Or who knows teams and their quirks and tendencies so well it seems like he’s got a crystal-ball thing going on. And he gets hired to work for a kind of high-end betting consultancy firm, run by this larger-than-life blowhard named Walter Abrams (Al Pacino), that sells information about which teams to bet on and…I can’t do this. I don’t mind gambling as long as it’s not my money on the table, and I dearly loved California Split, one of the hippest and sexiest loose-shoe gambling movies ever made. But this thing has no groove or heat. It plays loud and abrasive, and feels boorish and forced. It was directed by D.J. Caruso (Taking Lives, Salton Sea), but, being a Morgan Creek film, was almost certainly influenced in a hundred hair-on-the-back- of-your-neck ways by M.G. honcho James G. Robinson, who is known by anyone who’s worked in this town as the biggest bad-vibe producer around. Somehow, through force of will or obstinacy or what-have-you, just about every film Robinson has made has seemed a little bit icky or underwhelming or crude or less-than-cool. All I know is, Morgan Creek = caveat emptor. And I figure Robinson is probably at least partly to blame for the sand-draining-out-of-the-hourglass feeling that runs all through Two For the Money. It doesn’t figure that Caruso could have screwed up this badly. His last two films were second-tier but they were at least stylistically intriguing and had some good moves here and there, so something happened this time. Consider the following: when last night’s all-media screening at the Mann’s Chinese ended, a certain big-name critic came up to a colleague and expressed his feelings about Two for the Money by forming an imaginary pistol with his thumb and right forefinger, holding it to his head and then pulling the trigger. This was more entertaining than anything that had transpired on the screen. Plus it was enormously comforting to feel a sense of kinship.

I’m trying to imagine what I might find inviting about Mike Newell’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Warner Bros., 11.18). Last year I suggested killing Rupert Grint’s Ron Weasley character because he never does anything except whine and wimper, but you know that’ll never happen. If they would only free Harry and Hermione (Emma Watson) from Hogwarts and set them loose upon the world. Send them on the road…send them up against real-world villains and adult situations. But no…we’re going to be stuck at Hogwarts again with the same old gang, and I can’t understand why everyone is so pleased with these films when they pull more or less the same levers and push the same buttons each and every time.

The decision by Nicolas Cage and wife Alice Kim Cage to name their just-born son Kal-el is…how can I best put this?…deranged. Can you imagine growing up knowing you’ve been named after Superman (i.e., his Kryptonian name)? This ranks with Frank Zappa naming his daughter Moon Unit and that dirty mangy dog in the Johnny Cash song naming his son “Sue.”

I’ve seen a demo of Sony’s Blu-ray high-definition DVD process, and I’ve asked two or three people about the differences between it and Toshiba’s HD-DVD system, and it comes down to this — Blu-ray is a more expensive process but it’s more high-end…more digitally au courant and forward-looking…and HD-DVD, which I haven’t seen, is more of a backward-designed system but it’s cheaper to work with. There are one or two other twists and wrinkles, but that’s what it basically comes down to, trust me. And you won’t find any trade reports anywhere that just say that. The latest development in the DVD high-def techno-clash is that Paramount Home Entertainment has decided to support both the Blu-ray and the HD-DVD system. Scott Hettrick’s Variety report says that “several execs in each camp believe the Paramount announce- ment to publish in both formats, which is the direction Warner has been leaning for the past week or two (with a similar announcement expected this week), is simply a temporary face-saving strategy and that ultimately all studios will shift completely over to Blu-ray by launch time [in the spring of ’06].”

There’s a DVD series called “Sundance Festival Favorites,” and the distributor is the curiously-named Genius Products, Inc. Curious because one of the titles, which is due for release on 10.25, is Jill Spreicher’s Clockwatchers(’98), a comedy about office angst and girl empowerment that costarred Toni Collette, Parker Posey and Lisa Kudrow. Curious because Clockwatchers wasn’t even a slight favorite at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival…it died there. The word was so negative that it took another year and a half for the film to find its way into theatres. It opened on 5.15.98.

A lot of journos (including columnist Emanuel Levy) have written pieces about the just-passed 50th anniversary of James Dean’s death, which happened around sundown on 9.30.55. But how many have driven up to the actual collision spot in Cholame, California, and…you know, gotten out of the car and stood there and closed their eyes and smelled the air and let the lingering vibe of that tragedy (and believe me, you can still feel it) sink in? I’m just asking.

I slipped into a 9:45 pm showing of Capote Saturday night (10.1) at the Arclight and there were only two or three unoccupied seats. Bennett Miller’s film averaged a bit more than $25,000 per screen with a haul of $303,000 in just twelve situations. A good start, but a film like this needs to pace itself. Then again, how can any semi-intelligent movie fan go through the next four or five months without seeing Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s knock-down Oscar-calibre lead performance? There’s no ducking it.

Here’s a nicely written Roman Polanski interview piece by the Guardian‘s Sue Summers. I’m now into catching Oliver Twist, which I didn’t feel like making an effort to see during the Toronto Film Festival. Polanski doesn’t like to sit down with journalists. I tried to speak with him in Paris in ’02 when the Oscar chances of The Pianist were looking uncertain, but he woudn’t do it. Something tells me if Summers had been a fat balding male, the sit-down might not have happened. And it’s a tiny bit curious that Summers pretty much blows the privacy thing with this graph: “A week later I am sitting opposite Polanski in L’avenue, a trendy restaurant situated among the Guccis and Chloes of smart Avenue Montaigne, just next door to where he lives with his third wife, the 39-year-old French actress Emmanuelle Seigner, and their two children, Morgane, 12 and Elvis, 7.”

Nobody at Warner Bros. told me about any screenings of Carroll Ballard’s Duma, which has been called an excellent & moving kids-and-nature movie by Scott Foundas and Roger Ebert, and it’s now hitting me I have to pay to see it at a theatre this weekend ….great. If I don’t go it’ll probably be yanked and then I’ll have to wait four months for the DVD.

Reactions to Susan Stroman’s The Producers appear to be sharply divided at the very least, and that’s not just another way of saying the reactions are “mixed.” The movie has a lot of fans. A guy who attended last Thursday’s research screening wrote that “even though my entire group (myself plus three friends, all of whom see a fair number of flicks) despised The Producers, there were those in the audience who were clearly having a good time. They were clapping after every song. But for me, all the zip and brains of Mel Brooks’ original 1968 movie have been sucked out in favor of sight gags, ugly cliches and awful song-and-dance sequences. Susan Stroman, the director, proves herself completely incapable of creating a movie that doesn’t look like she dropped a camera in the center aisle at the St. James and went to sleep.”