There will be, it appears, at least a mild titillation factor for Stanley Kubrick fans in Brian Cook’s Color Me Kubrick. The story’s about a real-life guy named Alan Conway (John Malkovich) who went around London telling everyone he was Kubrick and getting away with it, to some extent…even though he didn’t look much like him. But the teaser on the film’s website (which has nothing on it except the teaser, which raises red flags right off the bat) feels a bit lame…it doesn’t say anything other than the fact that Conway pretended to be Kubrick, etc. And that Conway was gay. No twist, no angularity, no cushion shot of any kind. Something deep down is telling me the movie is underbaked. Maybe it’s the incest angle, since both Cook and screenwriter Anthony Frewin worked for Kubrick (Cook as an assistant director on Barry Lyndon and Eyes Wide Shut, Frewin as a personal assistant). The French trailer says it’ll open in France on 5.4.05, so I guess I’ll be able to take a train to Nice during the Cannes Film Festival and pay to see it in a regular theatre. If anyone in England has seen Kubrick or knows if it’ll be shown at a “market” screening on the rue d’Antibes, please let me know. I’d like these premonitions I’m feeling to be proved wrong.

Kevin Smith has seen Star Wars, Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith and LOVES IT. (he’s posted an early review, with spoilers, on his website.) Can this really be? After Willow, Howard the Duck, and the atrocious last two Star Wars flicks, can Lucas really be poised for redemption? Part of me wants to believe. (“Who’s the more foolish? The fool, or the fool who follows him?”) The rest of me remembers the unforgivable acting in “Attack of the Clones” and prepares for seppuku. I think fans should plan a massive Jonestown-like suicide party, just in case it does suck. Can you imagine the coverage of the line of stormtrooper corpses piled in front of the WRONG THEATER? Silent Bob’s review gives me hope, though. “You’re all clear, George! Now let’s blow this thing and go home.”

“Repeat after me, Kill Bill fans: Referentiality itself is not an intrinsic aesthetic value. Empty referentiality, going through the motions, doesn’t make a motion picture, give cinema the gift of sight….or insight.” So goes Ron Rosenbaum’s very astute piece about cheaply referential films in the 5.23.05 edition of the New York Observer. Quentin Tarantino’s martial-arts flick “was the perfect epitome of and metaphor for what I would like to call ‘The Cinema of Pretentious Stupidity,'” he continues. “The idea that ceaseless tedious references to obscure martial-arts movies known mainly by video-store geeks adds up to art. I’ve heard so many defenses of Kill Bill that depend on the apparently marvelous and unheard-of-before wonder of its referentiality. Dude, just because you make a reference — or many references — doesn’t make it meaningful or worth four hours of our time.”

Why does everyone (myself included) keep running these breathless items about who might play James Bond when the series finally gets rolling again in ’06? The 007 franchise is a very dry and dusty mummy — it’s been completely dead in every way but financial for a long, long time. (I’m not one of those who feel that Goldeneye revived things.) And it’s obvious to me that the people making the calls about the 007 hiring (producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson, and Bond franchise owners Sony Pictures) are erratic and all over the map in their “creative” lungings. In any event, the rumor is now that Pierce Brosnan will do it yet again. London’s Mirror ran a story today (Wednesday, 4.27) quoting Dame Judi Dench as saying: “Despite the fact that everyone on the face of the earth has been tested as his (Brosnan’s) possible replacement, he’ll be doing it again and it will be announced come summer.”

The word is good enough on
Monster-in-Law and New Line Cinema is confident enough that they’ve decided to sneak it on a fairly sizable (800 screens) nationwide basis on the weekend before the 5.13 opening. And the date, of course, will be Sunday, May 8th — Mother’s Day.

Socially, culturally, whatever…I think we have an unusual reaction kicking in with the coming of Warner Bros. and Joel Silver’s House of Wax. The big attraction-repulsion element, of course, is Paris Hilton’s costarring role. There are guys on message boards everywhere saying they’ll go to it only if she dies and some saying, “She dies? Thanks for ruining it!” and still others saying they won’t see it at all because she’s in it. Let’s get one thing straight. If you know anything about horror films, you know that lead actresses sometimes die, but suppporting actresses always die, so she’s toast and that’s it. The pleasure element, for me, is (a) how slowly and painfully will she die, (b) how long and how loud will she scream before she croaks, and (c) how naked does she get before it happens? If the answers to these questions are (a) very slowly and very painfully, (b) really loud and long and (c) fairly naked, I’m there. I mean, I’ll definitely go to the all-media.

A Lot Like Love has opened and people know what the shot is, so here’s my question. The movie takes place over a seven-year span during which Ashton Kutcher and Amanda Peet meet and clack against each other like billiard balls and bounce around and don’t get down to really being with (and for) each other until the end, which is naturally presumed to be now, i.e., sometime in ’05. The story begins, therefore, sometime in ’98. Much of A Lot Like Love happens in New York City, and one of Peet and Kutcher’s early scenes happens somewhere in the vicinity of the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge, and at night. Now, what visual image would immediately convey that this scene is in fact happening several years ago? Obviously, a shot of the World Trade Center towers, which could be easily CG’d into the Manhattan skyline. This wasn’t done, one assumes, due to some form of cowardice or trepidation. Director Nigel Cole (Calendar Girls) didn’t want to throw in a slight gulp-inducing visual cue into a vaguely escapist relationship comedy because he lacked the confidence, and was afraid a glimpse of the towers would somehow upset the vibe. Well, okay, it might have for a minute or two, but life is like that sometimes, and this doesn’t mean lovers don’t go right back to being in love and saying dopey things to each other five minutes later. This movie rests on the idea of Peet and Kutcher’s relationship beginning several years back, and if Cole wanted to avoid the issue I’m raising here he could have easily shot their outdoor Manhattan scenes in Grammercy Park or Yorkville or anywhere else besides the way-downtown area of Manhattan. I understand that comic farces can’t touch reality without shattering their chemistry, but A Lot Like Love pretends to be emotionally earnest and socially particular and down-to-earth. Not using the twin towers as a visual backdrop was, I feel, a profoundly chickenshit move on Cole’s (and Disney’s) part.

You might expect the idea of Michael Bay remaking Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 The Birds, as reported on 4.26 by THR‘s Liza Foreman, to induce purist convulsions among people like myself. But taken as a whole (and I mean apart from the excellent bird-attack sequences and the “end of the world” scene in the Bodega Bay diner), The Birds has always been a flat and rather stodgy film, and it could use some jazzing up. No one expects an egoist like Michael Bay to do a Gus van Sant and try and visually recapture Hitch’s 42 year-old original, and it would be a total shocker if Bay were to ape Hitch’s discipline in very gradually building the suspense and intimations of the coming bird attacks. We all know he’s going to speed up the story (if he pays any attention at all to the Hitchcock film or the Daphne du Maurier short story it was partly based upon) and go right for the jugular and heap on the CGI and so on. But at least Bay won’t have the terminally glacial Tippi Hedren as his lead actress (watch the Birds DVD…her performance wasn’t that good to begin with, and it really doesn’t hold up by today’s standards). And unless he’s a total klutz, Bay will have to be better with child actors that Hitch was. With the exception of the young Vernonica Cartwright’s, every kid performance in The Birds is flat-out awful…squirm-inducing. My son and I were watching the DVD a couple of months ago, and we were laughing and hooting when those black crows attack the kids as they’re running from the schoolhouse. Their acting was so bad that we wanted them to die.

Arianna Huffington’s celebrity-fed political blog, to be called
www.huffingtonpost.com, debuts on Monday, May 9th…the week the Cannes Film Festival begins. And Andrew Breitbart, the former Drudge Report webmaster, is finally copping to officially being on the team. Among those expected to supply (mostly leftish) rants and musings are Norman Mailer, David Mamet, Walter Cronkite, Vernon E. Jordan Jr., Maggie Gyllenhaal, Nora Ephron, Diane Keaton, etc. I’ve gotta say right off the top the site doesn’t sound like it’ll be quite smirky enough. I’d like to see more 40-and-under smarties like Ben Affleck, Owen Wilson, Ben Stiller, Jay Mohr, Neil Labute, etc. GenX appeal-wise, one wise-ass Jay Mohr piece will be worth 20 by Diane Keaton or Vernon Jordan. Don’t make this too much of a boomer thing or the wired generation will wave it off.

In a current USA Today story, reporter Anthony Breznican asks whether or not Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2oth Century Fox, 5.6) will save the big-budget historical epic genre. Breznican’s piece suggests that since the expensive battle flicks Troy, Alexander, King Arthur and The Alamo were “all casualties of middling U.S. ticket sales,” that a similar fate may await Scott’s $130 million film about the Crusades. Scott replies that a film’s emotional content is more important than spectacle or battles, and that this is provides in the relationship between Kingdom‘s Orlando Bloom and Eva Green. I’m personally more in agreement with Kingdom screenwriter William Monahan’s view that “the problem’s not epics… there’s a problem with people who don’t know how to do epics properly. If you’re not filling seats at a showing of an adequately advertised motion picture, the audience hasn’t failed you…you’ve failed the audience.” All the billboard ads and TV spots for Kingdom indicate a vigorous attempt to promote it, but I’m told there’s been some disappointment among Fox marketers that the film isn’t tracking better. It would be a shame if this film didn’t perform, because by my standards it’s really got the goods.

I’ve been told that Monster in Law (New Line, 5.13), the Jane Fonda vs. Jennifer Lopez marital comedy, is a hit. The numbers are said to be good (in the mid ’80s or thereabouts), the script works, and apparently the benefit is more J. Fo’s than J. Lo’s. (“Lopez is good but Fonda is terrific,” is how it was put to me.) I don’t know what the dollar projection would be, but I’m hearing it’s definitely some kind of cash cow. An even bigger hit for New Line is David Dobkin’s The Wedding Crashers, the Owen Wilson-Vince Caughan comedy that opens on 7.15. The numbers for this one are through the roof (higher than Monster-in-Law‘s, which probably means somewhere in the ’90s), which seems to indicate a likely haul of $100 million or higher. And there may be a third New Line winner in the Tony Scott actioner Domino (8.19), which I’ve been hearing promising things about since last December. (Richard Kelly’s script is the shit.) If there’s research on this one, it hasn’t been shared.

I realize this makes me sound like Sydney Skolsky, but I’m hearing excellent things about March of the Penguins, a French film said to have drop-dead beautiful photography. The director-cowriter is a guy named Luc Jacquet, and it’s about a flock of emperor penguins on their annual trek across Antarctic and all the classic life rituals and survival challenges they go through. A critic friend who’s seen it says this Warner Independent release “will do for those tuxedoed Antarctic dwellers what Winged Migration did for birds in flight.” The version that’s been screened so far has the original schlocky French soundtrack (my friend says parts of it “sound like Bjork gone Muzak, along with character voices for Mommy, Daddy and Baby penguin”), which is being trashed. Hipper sounds are being put in its place along with “a natural-science narration.” (I’m not supposed to reveal the name of the big-name actor who will read it). Pic will open on 6.24.05 in New York, L.A., San Francisco, Boston, Chicago and D.C., and expand in mid-July.