wired

Let’s face it, let’s be really honest — there’s a lot of us out there who want to hear the audio track of that videotape that was recording when that grizzly bear killed and ate Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, in October 2003 up in the wilds of Alaska. This ghastly event isn’t heard in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (Lions Gate, 8.12), a doc about Treadwell’s devotion to communing with grizzlies, but we do see Herzog listening to it and grimacing and then telling a woman from Treadwell’s family that the tape should be burned. I respect Herzog’s decision not to include it (he said “I didn’t want to make a snuff film”) but c’mon…this is a movie about a guy who loved hanging with grizzlies in their natural habitat, but was paradoxically killed by a bear because the bear got ornery and decided, “Hey, why not?” Herzog wasn’t wrong but I don’t believe in shielding people’s eyes and ears from the realities of life. If you’re making a film about Richard Nixon’s impeachment, you show the House Judiciary Committee voting to impeach. If you’re going to make a film about a weird guy who got eaten by a bear, make a film about a weird guy who got eaten by a bear. A guy has written in a discussion group that “it would be terribly insensitive to tack an audio recording of a human being getting eaten alive at the end of the film just for shock value,” but it wouldn’t be for shock value. It would be what happened — the reality is the reality. Here’s an IMDB discussion
of the incident and some of the particulars on the tape.

Wait a minute…Hustle & Flow dropped 50% in its second weekend for a $4 million haul? The big hit of Sundance…one of the very best films of the year so far with a vibe that leaves you in a very spiritual place went down 50%? Don’t misunderstand — Craig Brewer’s film will turn out to be one of Paramount Classics’ biggest hits (figure $25 million domestic when all is said and done) but Hustle should have dropped 25% or 30% this weekend, at most. A 50% drop means people out there are telling their friends, “Yeah, sorta…but not altogether.” And they’re dead wrong…they’re lazy and short-sighted. I’m not an ivory-tower elitist, I spent my childhood in Union County, New Jersey, and I’m now staying in a non-affluent middle-class area of Brooklyn. So I understand the regular-guy thing and am speaking with a certain authority when I say that the people failed this weekend — they let Hustle & Flow down, let themselves down, let the specialness-of-movies down. I haven’t felt this upset and dismayed since the November ’04 Presidential election when it was clear that younger voters had stayed away from the polls in sufficient numbers to allow Goerge W. Bush a second term.

Downfall‘s Oliver Hirschbiegel doing Body Snatchers (or Invasion of…), a remake of a ’70s Phil Kaufman film that was a remake of a landmark ’50s Don Siegel film that was also reworked by Abel Ferrara in ’93….really terrible idea! Even with (or do I mean particularly with?) Nicole Kidman in whatever the lead role will amount to this time. Shooting is apparently set to begin in October.

I had this horrible idea for a movie this evening…horrible but oddly unshakable. Nobody would ever have the courage to push this with anyone else, but it’s basically Oliver Stone’s 9/11 movie meets Wedding Crashers. Remember Will Ferrell’s character telling Owen Wilson’s character that funerals are better than weddings for scoring? Okay…now remember that brief phenomenon that happened in New York City right after 9/11 called “terror-fucking,” which was about a lot of guys (fireman in particular) going home with a lot of women because everyone wanted to obliterate the horror of what had happened with sex…almost any kind of available sex they could get their hands on? This movie would start with a couple of horndogs (good-time guys like Wilson and Vince Vaughn’s characters) who start to realize two or three days after 9/11 there are some phenomenal opportunities out there, etc. Clearly, the idea of guys trying to exploit the heartbreak of 9/11 by trying to get laid is a ghastly reaction to human suffering, but as long as we’re going to see at least a couple of 9/11 movies in ’06, why not go all the way and try for a twisted 9/11 sex comedy? You know…really push the envelope? I think we’re ready for it.

Lynn Hirschberg’s Jim Jarmusch profile in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine is awfully well-written…it gets Jarmusch like an arrow through the heart. His latest film, Broken Flowers (Focus Features, 8.5), “moves beyond hipster cool to something more like maturity, but the film still maintains Jarmusch’s outsider stance: it is stripped down, closely observed, with an almost dreamlike aura,” Hirschberg remarks early on. “”It’s all so…independent,” Jarmusch comments. ‘I’m so sick of that word. I reach for my revolver when I hear the word ‘quirky.’ Or ‘edgy.’ Those words are now becoming labels that are slapped on products to sell them. Anyone who makes a film that is the film they want to make, and it is not defined by marketing analysis or a commercial enterprise, is independent. My movies are kind of made by hand. They’re not polished — they’re sort of built in the garage. It’s more like being an artisan in some way.'”

Everyone knew Rob Cohen’s Stealth would crap out on opening weekend, and now it’s more or less done that with a $5 million take on Friday. Wedding Crashers topped the $100 million mark while finally beating out Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, $6 million to $5.2 million. And exhibitors saw John Singleton’s Four Brothers (Paramount, 8.12) a few days ago and are said to be high on it because “it’s commercial.” That’s a code term for “it’s not going to win any Oscars but it’ll probably sell tickets.”

My beloved news ticker has been up and running for a few days now, but it needs to be rewritten in a Flash format. Flash, I’ve been told, isn’t as laborious or cumbersome to load and read on an average slightly-older computer. I don’t know jack about any of this, but if anybody out there is a Flash-head and could lend some insight…

Maggie Gyllenhaal and Maria Bello have been cast in Oliver Stone’s 9/11 flick as the wives of the two Port Authority guys, Sgt. John McLoughlin and Officer William J. Jimeno, who were the last to be pulled from the wreckage of the World Trade Center. Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena (last in Million Dollar Baby) are playing McLouglin and Jimeno, respectively. I know this sounds cold, but I still don’t get what the big human-interest angle is in this thing. Being the last guy to be pulled out of the rubble on that horrible day is more dramatic or emotionally meaningful than, say, being the second-to-last or third-to-last or the first? I still say Pasquale Buzzelli’s story is far more intriguing. I explained it all in a column that ran last March.

Chris Columbus’s Rent (Columbia, 11.11) is already being dismissed as damaged goods. In a recent Oscar prediction chart David Poland asks, “How can something less than a decade old feel so passe already?” (Uhhm, because it deals with one or two characters dying from AIDS and because medical breakthroughs since the mid ’90s have made AIDS a survivable affliction?) Plus in a recent Entertainment Weekly Oscar forecast piece, Dave Karger warned than Rent might not get awards traction if it winds up feeling like a “dated” stage show. Now, maybe Rent works and maybe it doesn’t, but the early dissing isn’t just about AIDS cocktails. It’s partly due to many journalists despising Chris Columbus, Rent‘s director, because he always sentimentalizes and sugar-coats his films. (In weighing a possible Best Director nomination for Columbus, Poland wrote there are “525,600 reasons it ain’t happenin.'”) It’s also about Rent‘s Broadway stage show having been chided by Matt Stone and Trey Parker in ’04’s Team America: World Police, when they included a scene of a Broadway show with several young marionette performers in a chorus line style singing, “Everybody has AIDS! Everybody has AIDS!” So Rent is dead, is that it? No, that’s not it, but you could easily get that impression.

So the reason the ’06 Oscar schedule is a week later than last year’s — the Oscar show is happening on 3.5.06 rather than late February — is because the Academy didn’t want to compete with the closing ceremonies of the 2006 Winter Olympics, which is set for 2.26? Does anyone apart from the families of the Olympic athletes really care that much about a closing ceremony? I really don’t get this.

I listed my Aristocrats favorites in Wednesday’s lead piece — Gilbert Gottfried, Kevin Pollak-as-Walken, Martin Mull-kiki, and the South Park telling. But I just realized I totally forgot to mention the bit when Andy Dick explains the meaning of “rusty trombone.” I never knew what it meant before — now I can’t think about it without smirking. This film is truly diseased.

Some people have been writing and tell me that the news ticker, which just went up last Friday, has been gumming up and/or freezing their computers. This is because the original program driving the ticker was slow and clunky and from Romania. We’ve just installed a new all-American version that may be easier and smoother to contend with….I hope. We’re also looking around for ways to rewrite this news-ticker program with Flash, which may be even easier for everyone to process. Anyone out there know about writing Flash programs who’d be willing to help out?