“Whether I like it or not, or whether anybody else does, when I start a film I have a few ideas,” Gilliam tells Hart in the same piece. “And as you’re getting into it, you think, ‘Ooh, there’s another idea,’ and you’re shooting some more and, ‘Oh, here’s another thing. Let’s do that.’ I’m always changing and adding. That’s just the way my mind works.” And that’s pretty much why, I gather, Gilliam’s The Brother Grimm (Miramax, 8.26) feels like such a hyper crazy-quilt thing. It’s imaginative, all right, but Gilliam throws it all together in such scattershot fashion that his ideas begin to feel like flies you’d like to swat with a rolled-up magazine. Variety‘s Robert Koehler says Grimm is filled with “cumbersome action set pieces that are neither quite fairy-tale fanciful nor convincingly real…it’s this in-between-ness, along with Gilliam’s numbing use of filming with ultra wide-angle lenses that turn [it] into the director’s glummest and most visually clunky production.”

It’s time to admit something and be done with it. I’ve been a big fan of My Date With Drew since I saw it in April ’04, and I’ve written two or three column pieces about it, and it finally opened on August 5th after a long wait and…it tanked. Box Office Guru’s last posting as of 8.14 had total earnings at $181,041. It took in $85,000 on the opening weekend in 85 theatres. People didn’t care. A good thing was ignored, waved away, dismissed…and that’s what happened. Too bad, but I guess those distributors who said people wouldn’t pay to see it because it’s too much like TV were right. I saw it with a festival crowd and they went apeshit and it got a 68% on Rotten Tomatoes, but ticket-buyers were another story.

“I never found a companion who was as companionable as solitude.” I wish I wasn’t quoting someone…

I was feeling fairly revved about Rachel McAdams after seeing her in The Wedding Crashers in July, and now, after catching her in Red Eye, I’m starting to realize that she’s really quite the comer, and I may be putting it too cautiously. She’s probably the fetching-est actress to come along since…I was going to say Reese Witherspoon but she’s a lot more subtle and far more intriguing than Witherspoon and, for that matter, Julia Roberts when she was good (before the calendar and motherhood and everything else caught up with her). It has seemed for a long time that every actress playing a woman-in-peril uses a lot of the same moves. It’s always primarily about what they’re feeling (fear, anxiety) and all that oh-my-God shrieking and heavy panting, and never that much about what they’re thinking or plotting in order to get back at the bad guy. This is McAdams in Red Eye — she’s emotional and vulnerable, but she never screams or crumples or goes nuts, and she’s thinking all the time…waiting, watching, calculating. She’s got something else going on. In her Red Eye review, Manohla Dargis said, “If you don’t look too closely, if you fail to see past the lissome figure and the dimples that punctuate her smile, you might not notice how [McAdams] holds her gaze a few beats longer than need be, suggesting a depth of intensity uncommon in most Hollywood ingenues.”

This is kind of a Defamer-ish thing but here goes: Hollywood Interrupted‘s Mark Ebner is reporting that a Paramount Pictures staffer has told him that 50 Cent has very impressive equipment. The Paramount guy’s opinion is based, says Ebner, on having seen full-frontal footage of the rapper in Jim Sheridan’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (opening 11.9), an urban biopic in which 50 Cent plays himself. Ebner says Paramounters “have seen much of Get Rich and have been astounded by the…size of 50’s [instrument].” He quotes the staffer as saying Sheridan “wants to leave some of the full-frontal stuff in the movie, but there wouldn’t be room for much else on the screen!” I’m presuming the guy who told Ebner this is straight…right?

I’m sorry to say this because I’m a Rotten Tomatoes man all the way, but there’s something very wrong somewhere when The 40 Year-Old Virgin is, according to these guys, the best-reviewed film of the year so far with a 90% positive. Can’t they fix these figures or something? Even though Virgin‘s rating has dropped to 89% since this announcement was posted, let’s consider a few things. One, RT’s review poll only considers the wide releases (no platforms, no little indie releases) which means a higher piece-of-shit percentage. Two, The Forty Year-Old Virgin is, at best, a half-tolerable funny-in-spots comedy. (The critics who gave it unqualified raves should be deeply ashamed of themselves.) Three, the fifth most favorably reviewed wide release of the year was Revenge of the Sith so give us all a friggin’ break.

I don’t understand why the crowd at the Manhattan all-media screening of Judd Apatow’s The 40 Year-Old Virgin (Universal, 8.19) was laughing so much. Because this thing is mostly…you know what I’m going to say, right?…not even vaguely funny. And the first half is damn near agonizing. And it’s one of the ugliest, most flatly lit films (the dp is Jack Green) I’ve seen in a theatre in a long while. Matters improve slightly during the last third when Steve Carrell’s virginal electronic-store worker is allowed to behave in a less broad, less desperate-for-laughs way and comes down to earth and acts like a semi-believable unhappy guy with a slight…er, problem. The very last bit is the funniest bit. And okay, Henry Cabot Beck wasn’t wrong. Catherine Keener is warm and likable as a positive-minded 40ish woman, and in a way that feels for the most part grounded and reflective of someone you might actually meet somewhere other than a film set. But at the same time let’s not get that excited about her performance. I mean, you know… show some restraint already. This is first and foremost an extremely insubstantial film. It doesn’t come close to catching a whiff of the energy or the attitude of The Wedding Crashers so forget it, Apatow…off to the showers!

Time‘s Richard Corliss writes that a generic Ralph Fiennes performance — and particularly the very fine one he gives in The Constant Gardener (Focus Features, 8.31)– “is a miniature device with intricate moving parts. Movie directors often want their actors to ‘go bigger.’ Fiennes goes smaller — and inside. His onscreen speech is a mix of concealments and confidences, of whispers in a cave or under the covers. And he’s not speaking softly just so you will be startled when he explodes.” A striking example is a scene in which Fiennes, playing a British diplomat stationed in Kenya, is told that his wife Tessa (Rachel Weiscz) may have been killed. “As the camera holds on him, searching for a reaction, Fiennes doesn’t conjure up a rage or a gasp. He doesn’t gush a stream of tears or obscenities. He moves hardly at all. Yet alert viewers will see his pale face turn a shade ashen. They will watch his spirit sink as he struggles to retain propriety. Somehow a symphony of grief, suspicion and copelessness plays lightly on his sharp, elegant features.”

I’m finding this obviously way early and somewhat snarky pan of Doug McGrath’s Have You Heard? (Warner Independent, 9.06), written by Leon Neyfakh and appearing in the 8.22 New York Observer, a tiny bit curious, given the positive things I’ve been hearing all along about McGrath’s script….but you never know. Have You Heard? (formerly known as Every Word Is True) is the “other” Truman Capote biopic that Warner Independent is holding back from release until late next year so as not to get into a pissing match with Bennett Miler’s Capote, which Sony Classics is showing in Toronto and then opening on 9.30. Miller’s film starts screening next week for people like me, and I’ve been told by a weekly magazine writer who’s seen it that Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s performance as Capote is definitely award-worthy.

Any e-mails anyone might have sent over the last two or three days of a pressing nature, please re-send them as my inbox has again been erased and I’m starting out clean as of this morning…thanks.

ThinkFilm will be putting Keith Beauchamp’s The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till into theatres nationwide in October. The doc will have an early exclusive run at the Film Forum starting on 8.17. I’ve seen Beauchamp’s doc, and to be honest I found it an incomplete portrait of Till and the horrible crime that ended his life at age 14 in the summer of 1955. While visiting relatives in Mississippi from his native Chicago, Till was killed by at least two rural white guys (others may have been involved) for the sin of having made a sexually suggestive comment to one of the guys’ wives. The film acknowledges that Till may have unwittingly provoked this woman by flouting social taboos, but accounts of what he allegedly said to the woman are much more matter-of-fact in at least one other account of the case that I’ve read. (Check out the site for the PBS “American Experience” doc called The Murder of Emmett Till.) Beauchamp looked into the case for roughly ten years and made an effort to uncover new details behind this ghastly event, which helped to launch the civil rights movement. A press release says that Beauchamp’s research on the film led to the Justice Department reopening the case on 5.10.04. And yet The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till barely explores or even seems concerned with the fact that no follow-up measures or investigations occured after Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam admitted to having killed Till (after being acquitted of murder charges in a Mississippi court) in a January 1956 issue of Look magazine. It’s a good film, but I must say it’s not a brilliant or even-toned one because it is too heavily invested in the martyrdom of a chubby kid who accidentally stepped into it.

I’m seeing The 40 year-old Virgin this evening, at which point I’ll fully consider Henry Cabot Beck’s claim
about costar Catherine Keener in Sunday’s N.Y. Daily News, to wit: “Few actresses can step into a high-testosterone comedy and single-handedly turn it into a heartfelt experience, but that’s what Keener does [here].” This is another film that has been all but killed by the trailer giving away what feels like too many of the gags and then cutting and compressing them so severely that they’re not even faintly funny. Paul Rudd and two other guys try to get the virginal Steve Carrell laid, and he endures several horrible dates and other misfortunes before things finally go right with Keener’s character…right? Having seen the trailer something like eight or nine times, I’m half-convinced there’s almost nothing the full-length feature can do or show me that I haven’t already digested or smirked at. It feels used up, like I’ve already seen it on an airplane.