So every time Andrew Garfield‘s Peter Parker has to drop everything and become Spider-Man, he has to remember to take the web-shooter device with him. And God forbid if the device malfunctions, as they all do sooner or later. MTV’s Josh Horowitz obtained confirmation last night from Spider-Man costar Emma Stone.
Criterion’s recent confirmation that they’ll release a Bluray/DVD of James L. Brooks‘ Broadcast News in January 2011 suddenly reminded that I haven’t felt any How Do You Know intrigue in a while. I mean, the trailer is okay (although it does make the film seem a little thin and sitcommy) and it’s coming out on 12.17 but it’s just kinda lying there. I’m not hearing a drumbeat that says “hey, we’ve got something really awards-season special here.”
Will the Broadcast News Bluray, arriving with a motive right in the midst of Oscar balloting, remind people what a masterful director-writer and emotional button-pusher Brooks still is, or what he used to be in the ’80s and early ’90s before his game went soft? Will How Do You Know earn a place alongside Broadcast News, Terms of Endearment and As Good As It Gets, or will it be another Spanglish?
An HE reader named “Webster” wrote the following this morning: “I saw How Do You Know at a screening in Orange County last week. (No end credits at the screening — still being massaged.) What I saw started a little slow, but really picks up steam midway through and ends strong. In a five-slot race, I wouldn’t give it a chance for a Best Picture nomination, but with 10 slots…who knows?
“The guy who delivers the good is Paul Rudd. This will raise his profile to the A-list. This is a guaranteed Best Supporting Actor nomination.
“ Reese Witherspoon is a little hard to warm to at first, but is fine; and Owen Wilson plays to his strengths, although I never really bought him as a $14 million-a-year pitcher — we never see him on the mound. And Jack Nicholson is Jack — with one huge laugh-out-loud Jack moment in the movie’s ‘money’ scene inside a hospital room.”
Brooks never shows Wilson throwing a few from the mound? Why?
“All in all, if I’m grading on a curve, I’d give it an A-minus. I liked it much more than As Good As It Gets, but not as much as Terms of Endearment or (my favorite Brooks film) Broadcast News.”
The Broadcast News Bluray will feature (a) a restored high-definition digital transfer, (b) audio commentary rom Brooks and editor Richard Marks, (c) deleted scenes and an alternate ending, (d) a “new documentary” on Brooks’s career, (e) a “new video interview with veteran CBS news producer Susan Zirinsky, one of the models for actress Holly Hunter’s character and an associate producer on the film, and (f) a booklet featuring an essay by Philadelphia Inquirer film critic Carrie Rickey.
Elena Kagan‘s rep as a brilliant and exacting legal mind preceded yesterday’s appearance at her Supreme Court confirmation hearing, and now she has shown herself to be political and gracious and gentle-mannered. It’s also clear that she’s dropped a few pounds and has let her hair grow out so she looks a little less dykey — smart moves. And I love her Zabar’s accent.
Update: Producer Scott Rudin, producer of David Fincher‘s forthcoming The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo pic, says the report about Carey Mulligan playing Lisbeth Salander, punk heroine of Stieg Larsson‘s bestselling trilogy, is “absolutely not true.”
Previous posting: I’ve been waiting for Nikki Finke or the trades to run a confirmation of John Harlow‘s 4.25 Times Online report that Carey Mulligan is set to play Lisbeth Salander, punk heroine of the bestselling trilogy that began with “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” in an alleged feature to be directed by David Fincher and produced by Scott Rudin.”
Except the report hasn’t been confirmed by anyone, or not to my knowledge. I’ve asked a certain party in a position to know so we’ll see.
Mulligan has “won the approval of Fincher as well as the the family of the late Stieg Larsson, the Swedish author who created Salander,” Harlow reported. “The choice follows weeks of casting rumors, with producers sifting through nearly 5,000 potential candidates,” blah, blah.
I was okay with Neils Arden Opley‘s film version of the first novel, but I wasn’t what you’d call a huge fan. The movie was all plot, plot, plot, plot and more plot. Fincher and Rudin, I would imagine, would make something more formidable.
L.A. Times/Envelope columnist Pete Hammond heard last weekend from the Cannes people that he was good to go with his press pass. But I was only just told today. I first became accustomed to being one of the last kids to be chosen in grade school, because my last name ends with a “W.”
“Nom/Name: WELLS
Prenom/First Name: Jeffrey
Media/Publication or outlet: HOLLYWOOD-ELSEWHERE.COM
“Nous avons le plaisir de vous confirmer votre accreditation pour le 63e Festival de Cannes. Vous pourrez retirer votre badge a Cannes sur presentation de cette confirmation et d’une piece d’identite. L’entree des bureaux des accreditations se situe entre l’Office du Tourisme et l’entree principale du Palais des Festivals.
“Merci de consulter votre dossier d’informations pratiques personnalise, accessible avec votre reference de dossier, a l’adresse http://reg.online-festival.com. Vous y trouverez a partir du vendredi 9 avril des documents d’informations ainsi que votre bon de transport aeroport de Nice-Cannes.”
HE reader Domenico Salvaggio received the following email from Team Avatar early this morning: “We apologize for the inconvenience, but due to overwhelming demand [for Friday’s free Avatar preview], our RSVP site experienced technical difficulties. As a result of the crash you must re-select a screening time. Please note you may not get the original time you selected. Please click here and choose a new screening time.”
“I have to re-register at 3 am?,” Domenico wrote. “Are we in the early 1990’s? Avatar is supposed to be the harbinger of the future bleeding-edge tech and the system they used to set up the advance screening is a bona-fide Mickey Mouse operation? I don’t blame Cameron, but on some level the guy who professes to be the King of the World and the gateway to cinema-of-the-future needs to re-evaluate his operation.
“Right now Avatar has zero awareness among the laypeople. Only the geeks (such as I) have been championing the project…but if he pulls this dick-move at the 11th hour, he might piss off his core fan group. That kind of backlash 20th Century Fox can’t afford. I feel cheated and I feel like I wasted my time. I structured my whole day around getting those online tickets!
“Yes, I re-registered and got my desired time but only because I was lucky enough to be awake at 3:00 am! What if I woke up tomorrow morning and my desired time of the 6 pm showing @ the Universal Citywalk IMAX in LA was no longer available? (I can’t go to later showings because I have a wedding reception @ 7:00 pm). Or worse, what if it got sold out completely when I woke up and was shit-screwed out of luck? Sorry, fanboy.”
This issue could be handled very easily. The 20th Century Fox techies responsible for the site crash would submit to a minor form of public corporal punishment somewhere on the Fox lot. Stocks and pillories, I’m thinking, but only for an hour and only during their lunch break. Fox shoots a video of this, and then posts it on the Avatar site.
During her Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Judge Sonia Sotomayor “took refuge in the impenetrable language of the law, and in what seemed (and this is becoming a regular strategy in politics) to be the deliberate jumbling of syntax, so people at home won’t be able to follow what is being said,” Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wrote today.
“To be clear and succinct is to look for trouble. Better to produce a mist and miasma of jumbly words, and sentences that do not hold. You’re talking, so you’ll seem alive — in fact people using the syntax dodge are often quite animated — but as to meaning, you can leave that to the TV producers, who’ll wrestle around trying to get something that makes sense and then settle for the Perry Mason soundbite. (Well, in truth the Perry Mason soundbite is pretty much what they want.)”
I’ve been listening to Judge Sonia Sotormayor‘s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. She’s basically okay — prudent, fair-minded, intelligent. Not anyone’s idea of a dazzling intellect but her heart’s in the right place and confirmation is a lock. But people who use the word “absolutely” as a way of trying to convey emphatic resolve and agreement are a problem to me. I think it’s a term that less-than-fully-honest people use to snow others with. Not maliciously but as a mild sidestep move.
When I hear “absolutely” my eyes narrow involuntarily and I start to pull back a bit. People in sales use it relentlessly in order to soothe and reassure, and in my judgment they deserve to be regarded askance for this. The world is divided into two camps — those who use this word and those who will use any word other than “absolutely” as a matter of honor. I prefer “emphatically”or “most certainly” or a simple “yes.”
Envelope columnist Scott Feinberg interviewed Girlfriend Experience star Sasha Grey six and a half days ago — Thursday, 4.30 — at the Edie and Lew Wasserman Cinematheque on the Brandeis University campus. It’s a fairly intriguing piece. Feinberg is polite and respectful but professionally direct at certain points in the chat. Grey comes off as shrewd, mature, intelligent and — sorry — faintly tragic. Because she works in an icky industry filled with untalented and under-educated people, and because no porn star has ever walked away from it intact.
“Early word of Grey’s impending visit set the city of Boston abuzz,” Feinberg writes, “and — as we learned via blogs, Twitter, talk radio and newspaper columns — she is not someone who engenders mild feelings.
“Some said they had never before heard of or seen her; others said they had heard and seen a lot of her. Some said they vehemently disapproved of what she did for a living; others said they couldn’t get enough of her work. Some were outraged that a prestigious university would invite her to visit its campus and that a respected publication would want to interview her; others — especially the 300 students who managed to snag a ticket to the event — were just plain happy that we did.
“So why did we? Well, to clear things up, for two main reasons: (1) The Girlfriend Experience is a significant film, and (2) Grey is, in her own way, a significant filmmaker.”
Has anyone ever watched any of Grey’s films? I finally did last weekend, for a bit. As long as I could stand it, I mean. There’s really only one word for what I saw — ugly.
Not to finish on an argumentative note, but why did it take the L.A. Times tecchies six days to post this? Why didn’t they have it up the next day or by last weekend, or at least by last Monday? Steven Soderbergh‘s film has been on-demand since last weekend but it doesn’t open until 5.22 so the piece wasn’t delayed to coincide with a weekend opening.
I’ll tell you why. Because the L.A. Times tecchies are notoriously slow and bureaucratic when it comes to getting things done. (Staffers and freelancers routinely groan and roll their eyes about their shortcomings — trust me.) And, I suspect, because they prefer not to work on weekends. And when they come to work on Monday it takes them a long while to get rolling. Because they spend huge portions of their work days in meetings.
Web reporting has to turn around within hours, or certainly within a day. The L.A. Times just doesn’t get it. They’re competing in a 24/7 web world, but they’re still behaving in some ways like print.
And why is the video so pixellated and awful looking? Did the guy at Brandeis shoot this on a cell phone? And why do the Times tecchies make it difficult to grab a video embed code? Why do they make you click on “Page Source” and scroll down and scrounge around for the code?
Rewind: After catching The Girlfriend Experience at Sundance on 1.20, I wrote that “it smacks of right-now verite, is smartly written and very well made. (And recently shot also with all kinds of references to the Obama-McCain race and the economic meltdown.)
“No one would call it the stuff of high Shakespearean drama, but I wasn’t bored for a second. It’s smallish and low-key like Soderbergh’s Bubble but set in Manhattan and focusing on a very pretty upscale prostitute and the various men in her life — boyfriend, journalist, sleazy erotic website editor, high-rollers looking to buy her favors, etc.
“I presume that everyone reading this knows that Soderbergh is far too dry, ironic and circumspect to be a provider of hot sex scenes or even mildly suggestive ones (as in, say, Alan Resnais‘ Hiroshima Mon Amour). He maintains a cool distance in this regard at all times, which is welcome considering the appearance of Grey’s clients. Some of them, I mean. Two or three inspired a prayer from yours truly: ‘Please, God, I don’t want to see any middle-aged butt cheeks or bloated stomachs or funny-looking feet.’
“Soderbergh frames most of The Girlfriend Experience with static medium and long shots — there are almost no close-ups. He said during the q & a that the photography in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert was an influence.
“Grey, a real-life porn star, isn’t as much of an actress as she could be. Scene after scene requites her to keep it all locked inside, and she’s good at that. I hate to say this because it makes me sound small, but it seems fair since Frey is presenting herself as an object of desire: her feet are too big.
“Grey’s live-in boyfriend is played by 30 year-old Chris Santos, who delivers reasonably well in a somewhat layered and mildly challenging role.
“I didn’t know what the title meant until I looked at The Girlfriend Experience IMDB page. A trivia notes posting says that ‘a call girl advertising the provision of a girlfriend experience is implying that she provides deep French kissing, full service intercourse with protection, and oral sex without protection.’
“This reminded me of the services that Ashley Alexandra Dupree allegedly provided (or were sought out by) former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer.”
I was told yesterday afternoon to watch for a leap-out New York Observer piece about the Hollywood blogger/columnist. Called “Get Me Rewrite!” and written by John Koblin, it turned up last night at 11:39 pm. Ten minutes later I was going…this? It’s a scamper through the poppy fields, is what it is.
Photo totally stolen from New York/Vulture’s summary of Koblin’s piece. Cheers to photo illustrator Everett Rogue.
Drew Friedman‘s illustration of Alec Baldwin, Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore in Walter Burns/Hildy Johnson/Front Page garb told me not to expect much, and so I wasn’t disappointed.
Boil the snow out of it and Koblin’s piece (a) summarizes that the leading Hollywood reporting blogs (as opposed to opinion/personality/reporting/cherry-pick ghoulash columns like my own, which isn’t mentioned) have pretty much elbowed Variety and the Hollywood Reporter aside; (b) recaps last month’s Nikki Finke vs. Sharon Waxman/The Wrap feud and that brief little dust-up between Patrick Goldstein and Variety‘s Brian Lowry; (c) includes some anti-Waxman views by the eternally dour Anita Busch, chiming in “from beyond the journalistic grave”; and (d) mentions that a slew of enterprising celebrity-actors (Kutcher, Baldwin, etc.) are churning out their own stuff on the Huffington Post. And that’s more or less it.
In short, Koblin’s view is that the most noteworthy online Hollywood coverage is more or less generated by the hammerheads — i.e., two hard-charging women who focus pretty much on the Hollywood economy, the labor disputes, the politics, the hires and fires, the agencies and all that trade jazz. Which are all fine and necessary but where’s the music, man? Waxman-Finke are but one piece of the pie. Goldstein, at least, is a serious film lover and all the more intriguing and readable for that.
Otherwise Koblin ignores not just HE but David know-it-all Poland and Movie City News, Variety‘s Anne Thompson , The Envelope, In Contention, the various seasonal currents, the flavor, the flow, Movieline, Awards Daily, and everyone else.
“Variety [has] ceded its grip on the town entirely,” Koblin writes, “and now the Hollywood press corps is in a state of revolution. There is no power structure. It’s all turned inside out and upside down. Everyone claims victory, but no one seems to have it, nobody is powerful enough to measure it. And, above all, it’s one nasty, mean, shrill place.”
Ex-Variety editor Peter Bart says that “for one thing, you have bloggers who need traffic and are desperate for attention. The overriding truth of the blogging community is they’re trying to figure out how to monetize their endeavors. So you have to call attention to yourself. On that side, you have a clear motive.”
“I do think it’s kind of surprising that Sharon Waxman even has a blog,” Busch tells Koblin. “I think she’s even one of the worst journalists I’ve ever encountered. I’ve never seen anybody that ignores the basics of Journalism 101 as she does. I find it surprising that she’s got this blog. I try not to click through on Sharon’s Web site because I don’t want someone who doesn’t care about journalism to succeed.” See what I mean? She just oozes the stuff.
Waxman says that she feels “sorry for Anita Busch for saying such a thing like that…I think that’s a pretty sad statement…I think it says more about her than me.” Waxman also unloads on Finke, to wit: “Nikki has her own view of reality which does not always accord to reality as others see it. The way she twists things and the way she always manages to bend the facts — and I put facts in quotes — is in a way that suits her.”
The L.A. Times was going to own Hollywood, Koblin writes, “but that never happened. The L.A. Times became hamstrung by too many internal conflicts (competing desks going after the same story, staffers upset that the website gives into celebrity link-baiting temptations) and, of course, a staff that is less than half the size of what it was eight years ago.
“And they suffer from a similar problem to Variety. Bloggers like Nikki Finke have been nimble and fast, and while an L.A. Times reporter is on the phone waiting for confirmation, Nikki puts it up regardless if it’s right or wrong.”
Busch gets in one good quote, though: “Hollywood is a small town filled with sociopaths. And when you’re assigned to cover that? You really have to be on your feet.”
The way I hear it, Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglourious Basterds is currently clocking at 2 hours and 45 minutes. No official confirmation — just information from a guy in a position to know. But this shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who’s read the 165-page script. A minute a page, right on the button.
I thought I was all safe and locked in at Park City’s Star Hotel, having stayed there during the ’07 and ’08 Sundance Film Festivals and having left a cowboy hat there as a token of my intention to return the following year. A cowboy hat left behind means you’re a true-blue guy! But I failed to place a proper, formal confirmation call to proprietor Carol Rixey, and now she’s given away my room. So now I have to scramble with the festival starting in 20 days. If anyone knows of a share situation inside Park City proper (just a room, a bed, a chair and good wifi), please get in touch ASAP.
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