Cameron Crowe‘s Hawaii-based romcom, frequently referred to within the archives of Hollywood Elsewhere as Son of Deep Tiki in lieu of having an official title, has finally been given a title — Aloha (Columbia, 5.29). My first reaction was that it has a resigned, downish sound as “Aloha” tends to mean goodbye more than hello. (It’s defined in Billy Wilder‘s One, Two, Three as “Hawaiian for ‘get lost.'”) So right away you’re assuming it’s a love story with a melancholy vibe. It sounds less calamitous to be called Aloha rather than Untitled Cameron Crowe Project, but I honestly prefer Son of Deep Tiki. At least that has something that makes you go “hmmm…fuck is that about?” At least it triggers a little curiosity while Aloha just sounds like some guy about to get on a plane and saying to himself “okay…fuck it, I’m gone.”
12.12.14 HE post: Cameron Crowe‘s still-untitled romantic dramedy (Columbia, 5.29.15) that costars Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone and Rachel McAdams, was more or less panned by Sony honcho Amy Pascal in an in-house message (dated 11.13.14) to senior staffers.
“An earlier version of the film-once-known-as-Deep Tiki nearly went before the cameras 2009 with Ben Stiller and Reese Witherspoon costarring, but the plug was pulled in pre-production. Except that, in Pascal’s view, “Cameron never really changed anything” in the re-written version, and so the script problems are stubbornly manifest. “I’m never starting a movie again when the script is ridiculous and we all know it,” Pascal wrote, explaining that “people don’t like people in movies who flirt with married people or married people who flirt.”
Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone in Cameron Crowe’s film that will eventually be given a title sometime in the first third of 2015.
Son of Deep Tiki had been slated to open on 12.25.15, but on 7.21.14 it was bumped to 5.29.15.
On the day of the date-bump Columbia marketing chief Jeff Blake told TheWrap‘s Jeff Sneider that “once we saw the film, we knew it would make a perfect summer release” — got it, understood, not good enough for late 2014. On top of which Blake’s follow-up statement — “the movie is Cameron at his best” — sounds like a slight diss.
As I noted the same day, “Crowe’s ‘best’ used to be about a lot more than delivering warm-weather diversion. Between the time of Jerry Maguire (’96) and Almost Famous (’00) he was regarded as a world-class hyphenate and renaissance soul man who made emotionally affecting award-season films.
“And then came Vanilla Sky, a psychologically dark melodrama with Tom Cruise and Penelope Cruz, was regarded as well-made but curiously bleak. Then the calamitous Elizabethtown in ’05. And then the meh-level We Bought A Zoo (i.e., ‘We Bought A Jail‘) in 2011.”
Son of Deep Tiki is some kind of romantic dramedy set in with Hawaii and having to do with the Air Force and space satellites. Cooper, Stone and McAdams aside, it costars Danny McBride, Alec Baldwin, John Krasinski and Bill Murray.
