It rambles, meanders and tap-dances for the sake of tap-dancing. But a smart 7.9 article by the Detroit Metrotimes‘ Ashley Lindstrom does specifically grapple with a big exhibition fear — i.e., that competition from the proverbial third screen (computers, Apple TV, iPhones, iPods) will hurt or kill big-screen venues. The answer, provided by NATO president John Fithian and a USC Digital Media Center report, is that this just isn’t happening.
“It would seem counterintuitive that an attention-deficit generation of instant-gratification addicts still makes up the majority of frequent moviegoers,” Lindstrom writes, “but Fithian recalls a 2007 study by the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) which shows that individuals who own or subscribe to five or more technologies (DVR, satellite TV, MP3 players, etc.) actually see about four more movies per year than, er, neo-Luddites.
In short, “the old wisdom that techies are by their very nature antisocial creatures is being challenged. For instance, the University of Southern California Digital Media Center’s 2008 report showed that internet users say they spend more face-to-face time with friends and family than nonusers.
“‘For [young people], this is just one more form of being pervaded by media,’ Fithian says, adding that many theaters are looking into rowdier, text-friendly auditoriums to serve their long-term welfare by meeting their youthful patrons’ desires– AMC’s Star Theatre in Southfield, anyone? — and additionally creating adult spaces for more challenging content. AMC offers its ‘AMC Select’ for, they tell us, ‘special films for select tastes,’ most of which are released regionally and occasionally screen in a Detroit-area AMC theater.
The result, says Fithian, is that theatres “are finally back on track after the 2005 slump, and that this year’s take — as of 6.13.08 — is only slightly under last year’s — the year of ‘threequels,’ Fithian interjects — and he fully expects to make up the difference in no time.
Fithian further points out that “the total number of U.S. screens actually increased in 2008, though the sum of theater locations has decreased, which he ascribes to older facilities being torn down and the erection of more modern multi-screened structures.”
Wait…”rowder, text-friendly auditoriums”? As in darkened auditoriums where you’re supposed to watch movies? Include me out.
Fantasy Moguls‘ Steve Mason is reporting a higher weekend figure for Martin Scorsese‘s Shine a Light — $2.15 million — than what I’ve been told it’s likely to be, which is something in the vicinity of $1.4 million. Even if Mason turns out to be right, it’s still lower than it should be. You can use terms like “limited success” or “IMAX hit,” but the bottom line is that it fizzled. And nobody under 40 cared what the boomer-aged critics had to say.
If Fox Searchlight’s Young @ Heart, which is also about performing rock standards, is the year’s most heartwarming film, Shine a Light is easily ’08’s most purely enjoyable — rousing, beautifully shot and cut, clap your hands and say yeah. And yet it didn’t do very well outside the IMAX theatres. The reason, of course, is that the Stones don’t mean much to younger GenXers and GenYers. It’s an older person’s rock concert film. The excitement, the charged energy levels and the Stones’ sublime aura of authority are transcendent — it’s one of the best films of this type ever made — and younger moviegoers didn’t want to know.
Jett saw it with a date in Syracuse last night (i..e, the flat version — no IMAX in Syracuse) and says he was mainly taken with the great photography and the editing. He said he didn’t like Mick Jagger showing his stomach (I argued with him about this) but said he was gratified that his forearms were more muscular than they seemed to be during th Stones’ half-time Superbowl performance in Detroit two years ago.
As Far As It Goes
I predicted last August that Dreamgirls (Dreamamount, 12.15) would be a huge thing for costar Jennifer Hudson, who has the role (i.e., Effie White) with the most soul and punch and heartache. I was right. The Best Supporting Actress Oscar is probably hers for the taking. But my feelings are otherwise torn about Bill Condon and Larry Mark and David Geffen‘s period musical, which had its first big preview Wednesday night at the Academy theatre.
I was delighted with it in spurts and pieces — it has a knockout feeling from start to finish, and delivers an adrenalized rush that’s either going to get you or it won’t. It’s one dazzling, machine-gun-edited musical number after another that “sells” itself like there’s no tomorrow, and the sum effect is like something washing over you.
Like, say, a 100-gallon vat of Red Bull and 7-Up. Okay, with a little whiskey and heartbreak thrown in, and a lot of cigarettes and some bad substance abuse on the side.
This is the story of the Supremes — how it all began and came together, and then took off and went sour and finally shook down. It’s recognizably real and yet fast and fizzy — another of those hard-knocks, rough-and-tumble showbiz sagas, this time seasoned with heavy doses of Motown-Broadway pizazz.
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But it didn’t feel to me like it really and truly sank in. After a while you feel so soaked with the stuff it’s selling that you start to go a little bit mad. It didn’t make me angry at all — this is not Chicago but somewhere around the half-hour mark I began to say to myself, “What’s with the push-push, go-go, pop-pop all the time? Why can’t we downshift and quiet down here and there, so we can possibly hear someone’s heart beating?”
That’s not the deal, I realize. This is essentially Michael Bennett‘s vision of Dream- girls re-dreamt and re-launched, and I knew what that probably would be. And I wanted to feel great about it. I really did.
It didn’t feel to me like a real river of a movie (and I trust I don’t have to explain that one — some films have a primal gravity feeling that tells you in a dozens of different ways that you’re into something earthy and fundamental) but for some, like those cheering and whooping in the Academy theatre last night, the razzle dazzle will be enuf.
I “liked” Dreamgirls, for the most part. I didn’t feel hostile in the least. I was entran- ced and smiling and going with a feeling of being among some very good and talented people who are doing everything they can to make me feel it (which I did, as far as it went). I had a much better time with it than I did with Chicago, which I despised to the depths of my soul. But at the same time I felt something missing.
I was going to sort out my feelings and shake it out before writing anything (it won’t open for another 29 days), but then I woke up this morning to a giddy bungee- jumping David Poland rave, and some of the things he said made my brain go into spasms. And then Roger Friedman jumped in, and then Tom O’Neil. But let’s bang up against the Poland.
“Dreamgirls landed in Beverly Hills…last night, and left a giant crater in the Oscar season,” he began. My idea is that it was more of a meteorite that hit and then careened off and then hit and hit again, like a stone skimming across a pond. Dreamgirls is a wowser and not just in a spirited or “technical” sense — it’s a full-tilt, full-throttle thing all the way. It will no doubt turn a lot of people on (it definitely got me from time to to time) but I was there in the room and the feeling during the after-party was not that one of standing at the edge of a huge crater and going, “Wow…big one. I can still feel the tremors.”
The feeling was a mixture of some delight and merriment, contentment (“I went with it,” a journalist friend said) and a kind of “let’s talk this out” therapy session. I wasn’t confused but I felt a wee bit unresolved. I knew I had enjoyed it as much as I’m capable of enjoying an obviously first-rate Motown glitter-funk gay man’s extravaganza, but I was going from person to person and saying (with variations), “It’s not that I didn’t like it — I did for the most part and it’s a great sell. I loved Jennifer Hudson to death. But it feels like a two-hour sketch.”
I realize that there’s something inherently sketchy about all musicals — you’re never going to get Long Day’s Journey Into Night with songs — but for me, Dream- girls is too pat. Everything is in shorthand. Nothing is off or raggedy or haphazard. It doesn’t feel like Detroit, or like the ’60s or ’70s even. It feels like it’s happening in director-writer Bill Condon‘s head, and that’s fine. There’s no one who respects his talent and chops more than I.
“The film was everything promised and more,” Poland said. I would say it was everything promised and somewhat less. Not a crashing disappointment, but a film that simultaneously roused and satisfied in several ways, but didn’t quite bring it home.
Dreamgirls is a highly-charged moviefication of a hot stage musical that was (I’m told) all songs and sparkle (which benefitted from Michael Bennett‘s inspired staging), and nothing really acted or spoken. Condon has, I’ve been told, added narrative tissue and emotional intimacy and made it more of a people thing and less of a big, brassy presentation. I can half-see that, and I respect the effort.
And yet Hudson aside, I didn’t feel much for anyone. They’re all “on” and, as far as it goes, “terrific.” But I wasn’t rooting for Beyonce Knowles and her thin Diana Ross character, and as much as I liked watching Eddie Murphy, Jamie Foxx, Anika Noni Rose, Danny Glover, Keith Robinson and Sharon Leal, I felt pretty neutral about the fates of their characters.
Poland actually said (this was the biggest mindblower for me), “It’s like the old question, is Chinese food in China ‘Chinese food’ or just ‘food?'” A rave review should not, I feel, bring up this metaphor. The odd thing is that I don’t feel this way about Dreamgirls. I feel that the “all” of it, in a certain sense, is quite substantial.
But it’s not an emotional bath experience as much as an emotional car wash — you’re in a mint-condition 1970 Cadillac with the windows up and everything sealed tight, but instead of moving through the water and brushes and soap and hot air at 2 miles an hour, you’re moving at 80 or 90 miles an hour and the car-wash tunnel is almost 185 miles long. I’m saying that for all the application of craft and feeling and kick-out soul, the emotional moisture never really penetrates.
But Jennifer Hudson, at times, is in the car right next you and she’s the absolute real deal. I loved her. I love her now as I’m sitting here. I loved her hurtin’ stuff. I loved her singing “what about what I feel? what about what I need?” I loved the way she sang “Love You I Do,” a new number written by Henry Krieger. I loved the way she sang “One Night Only.” But anyone who says she should be pushed for Best Actress is insane. She’s the new kid and she’s not in Helen Mirren‘s or Judi Dench‘s or Meryl Streep‘s class…please.
Poland has written that Beyonce “absolutely deserves” a Best Supporting Actress nomination. It won’t happen. Her best moment comes when she sings another Henry Krieger song, “Listen,” but her character (like the real-life Diana Ross) is mainly about opportunism and eyelash-fluttering and going for the gold. The only reason she turns is because Jamie Foxx’s character turns into a shit and she feels she needs to go elsewhere to grow. But if he’d been a better, more sensitive partner, Beyonce’s character would be about complacency from start to finish.
Poland thinks Dreamgirls is going to win for Best Picture. It might, but I spoke to people last night who were four-square against it and they were saying “no way.” One guy even said it may not be nominated.
If it does win, I know I won’t go into convulsions like I did when Chicago took it. I know that Dreamgirls doesn’t have the human-condition current that makes films like The Lives of Others, Babel, Volver, Little Miss Sunshine, The Queen and United 93 truly special experiences. It has a musical current, yes, and that punch-it-out spritzy-wow thing, but….
I know that Condon has done as good a job at this kind of thing as anyone could. I don’t pretend to fully understand or support it 100% — I can only try to feel it as best I can and hope for the best — but as far as this kind of musical goes, the heart and effort that went into it has my respect. Let’s leave it at that. For now.
Rally Round
If a movie is going to try and tell the truth about a real event, I believe it should stick as closely as possible to what is actually known, and if certain things about this event aren’t crystal clear then that should be acknowledged and somehow worked into the film.
With this theory in mind, it hit me this morning how United 93 (Universal, 4.28), Paul Greengrass’s 9/11 thriller, should best unfold. Since nobody knows what specifically happened during the last few minutes before United #93 slammed into muddy ground in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the best way is to end it, I feel, is with three different scenarios a la Rashomon .
United 93 director-writer Paul Greengrass as he appears in a promotional video sent to the media earlier this week by Universal publicity
One, passengers burst into the cockpit, grapple with terrorists and plane goes down over a struggle for the controls. Two, passengers charge but are kept out of the cockpit, and then panicky terrorists take the plane into a suicide dive to keep them from taking back the plane.** And three, passengers rush the hijackers but before anything can happen a white military plane hits United #93 with a missile, smoke pours into the cabin and the disabled plane goes down.
Showing all three is not only the most open way to come at it, but it also wouldn’t get in the way of the basic, agreed-upon scenario about the passengers having been courageous and self-sacrificing and doing the hard thing.
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Granted, a multiple ending would be more satisfying for bring-it-on types like myself than the “no, no…too soon!” types who reportedly groaned and snorted around the country last weekend when the United 93 trailer, attached to prints of Spike Lee’s Inside Man, had its theatrical debut.
Is there any chance that director-writer Greengrass isn’t aware of the too-soon crowd and hasn’t made his film with the idea of somehow luring them in and winning them over?
It’s probably a safe assumption that scenario #3, which probably didn’t happen in actuality but can’t be 100% dismissed, was never considered for inclusion in United 93. And scenario #2, obviously, isn’t quite “there” in a dramatic sense.
Scene from United 93
I mean, think about it. Angry passengers chasing the bad guys into the cockpit, and then minutes of banging on the cockpit door, and then wham.
I won’t see the film for another two and a half weeks, but if you’re looking for a slam-bang finish then scenario #1 plays best. Wouldn’t it? Universal seems to be looking to sell this movie as a stirring uplift thing, after all, and it must have been clear to Greengrass all along that any 9/11 film that fails to stir is probably going to tank.
I’m sure that Oliver Stone, Michael Shamberg and Stacy Sher are also keeping this in mind as they prepare World Trade Center, a true-life rescue drama about a couple of Port Authority workers who were buried under the rubble of the collapsed towers, for release in August.
But even with the scenario #1 ending there are indications that United 93 may be facing some resistance from the public.
The strongest evidence of this is that Universal publicity has sent out a promotional video to the media (and also made it available online — click on “A Look Inside”) that directly addresses the “too soon!” attitude. Here’s how it sounds from start to finish.
It features four people whose mates or family members died on United #93, and shows them saying that they fully support the film because it shows their deceased loved ones in a courageous and inspirational light.
Lyzbeth Glick Best, wife of passenger Jeremy Glick, as she appears in Universal promotional video
The video begins and ends with Greengrass saying that before deciding to make United 93 he and his producers visited the victims’ families, and “what we found when we went to each of these families, is that they all want this film to be made.”
The message, clearly, is that if these family members are down with this film after losing one of their own, surely those who simply feel squeamish about a 9/11 recreation drama can deal with it and maybe derive something also, especially since it doesn’t seem to be a downer as much as a heart movie about courage.
The four people in the video are Kenny Nacke, brother of United #93 passenger Louis Nacke II; Allison Vadhan, daughter of passenger Kristin White Gould; Lyzbeth Glick Best, former wife of passenger Jeremy Glick; and Sandy Felt, whose husband, Edward P. Felt, was also on board.
Vadhan says that United 93 is “about standing up for what you believe in, never letting fear take over and doing everything you possibly can…until you can’t.
Felt says at one point that “I want this movie to encourage people to believe that we have [this courage] within all of us.”
Sandy Felt, wife of Edward P. Felt
Greengrass returns at the end and says that not only “immense courage and fortitude” were shown by the United #93 passengers that day, but also “wisdom.”
Greengrass finishes with the following: “I don’t think you ever know when is the right time to make a film like this, and that’s why you start by going to these families…they feel clearly feel this is the right time, and we should listen…we should listen to what their story is.”
I believe that too, but also that United 93 should try to reflect the full gamut and be as inquisitive as possible and admit what it really knows or doesn’t know, and shape itself accordingly. Maybe this is how Greengrass plays it. The only thing for sure is that right now, the cards are still hidden.
** A portion in Wikipedia’s recounting of the United #93 disaster says that the plane’s “black box recordings revealed that, contrary to popular belief, the passengers were never able to enter the cockpit.”
Sweet Bird of Youth
It’s not so much how the 23 year-old Marlon Brando looked, although this is fascin- ating in itself. It’s more the metaphor of a life not yet blemished or sullied…an aura of freshness, vitality, raw presence.
These are stills from a screen test Brando made in 1947 for a planned film of Rebel Without a Cause, in which he would have played the famously troubled teenager Jim Stark, whom James Dean made into a legendary inconographic figure in Nich- olas Ray’s 1955 film of the same name.
Still from 1947 screen test reel of Marlon Brando reading for role of Jim Stark in an early, never-shot version of Rebel Without a Cause.
The Brando Rebel screen test footage, which lasts about five minutes, will be included in a two-disc special edition DVD of A Streetcar Named Desire that Warner Home Video is bringing out May 2nd, or five weeks from today.
The exact date of the test footage isn’t known (not to me, at least) but Brando was playing Stanley Kowalkski in the stage version of “A Streetcar Named Desire” that year (and most likely at the same time). This was three years before he made his first Hollywood film, Fred Zinneman’s The Men (’50), in which he played a paraplegic.
A story by Dalya Alberge in today’s (3.28) edition of The Australian provides a description of the footage, which I may be lucky enough to see sometime soon, perhaps as soon as this weekend.
Brando “is seen crying, slamming his fist on a table, vulnerable and kissing the girl,” Alberge writes. The test “convinced the producers that he was the man for the Rebel role, but Brando turned them down. After much delay, including at least 40 script revisions, the role was taken by Dean in 1955.
Alberge quotes Darwin Porter, author of a reportedly tawdry biography called “Brando Unzipped” (Blood Moon), as follows:
“Screen tests preserved of the great stars are usually pretty awful …this one had me mesmerized. From the moment Brando enters the room in the test, he is lightning…there is a magnetic appeal to him, as he is at the peak of his physical beauty and virile power — both as a man and an actor.”
Brando “never disclosed precisely why he rejected the role, but Porter suggests that the actor may have been reluctant to sign a seven-year contract with the studio, which would have been required at the time.
In the footage, Brando “is seen walking into a room, angry about his parents. He tells a girl who meets him: ‘My old man … he didn’t give me a chance. He hit me before he even said anything. I hate him. I hate his stupid face.’ He slams the table.
“Comforted by the girl” — I wonder the who girl was? — “he kisses her, asking her whether she has been with ‘other fellows while I was gone.’ His face lights up as he talks of getting a gun and the two of them leaving together for ‘any place, away from here.'”
N.Y. Daily News gossip columnist Ben Widdicombe — a.k.a., “the Gatecrasher” — wrote on 1.21.06 that Porter’s Brando book “promises to be the definitive gossip guide to the great actor’s life.”
Widdicombe wrote that “collectors of Brando ephemera might appreciate the inclusion of a certain infamous photograph [that] depicts a Monica Lewinski moment between Brando and another man.” He then quoted Blood Moon publisher Danforth Prince as saying “we ran [the photo[ at a tasteful 2 inches by 1 3/4 inches on page 404,” adding, “In journalism, we call that ‘burying the lead.'”
This morning I happened across Truman Capote’s portrait of Brando for The New Yorker, which came from a visit with the 33 year-old actor while he was filming Sayonara in Kyoto, Japan, in early 1957.
The Brando that emerges from Capote’s prose is a guarded, withdrawn, somewhat frail figure — a hint of the ruined Brando to come, and a far cry from the sugges- tions of buoyancy and naivete in the face of the young man pictured above.
Money Grabs
On the red carpet for premiere of Nicole Holofcener’s Friends With Money (Sony Classics, 4.7) at the Egyptian theatre, headquarters of the American Cineatheque — Monday, 3.27, 7:12 pm. (Just to the right of the face of the brunette with the green handbag and to the left of the burly photographer with the white T-shirt is costar Jennifer Aniston, speaking at that particular moment in time to Entertainment Tonight‘s Leonard Maltin)
Dancer-models dressed as twin sisters of Casper the Friendly Ghost, and perhaps expressing a sensual appreiciation of life in Los Angeles in the year 2006. Snapped at Friends with Money after-party at Mondrian Hotel’s Sky Bar — Monday, 3.27, 10:20 pm.
Friends with Money costar Bob Stevenson at Sky Bar — 3.27, 11:05 pm. A subtle, soft-spoken actor with piercing blue eyes, Stevenson portrays one of Jennifer Aniston’s love interests in Nicole Holofcener’s film.
Scott Caan (blue jeans, black jacket), also costarring in Friends with Money, on red carpet at the Egyptian theatre — Monday, 3.27, 7:18 pm. (I had an interview set up with Caan at a hotel in Soho last summer to talk about Dallas 362, his fairly good debut as a director, but he wasn’t there when I showed up, and he didn’t leave a note or call later on to apologize…nothing. I was going to ask him what happened last night, but I didn’t see him at the after-party.)
Switcheroo
Like old habits, movie titles you’ve gotten used to can die hard. Even relatively recent ones, like Universal’s Flight 93, the Paul Greengrass 9/11 thriller that’s opening on Friday, 4.28. Or the former Flight 93, I should say. The old-shoe, boilerplate-sounding Flight 93 of yore…a label I was totally down with.
I was so accustomed to the sound of it that when I linked to the trailer three days ago (on 3.24), I didn’t even notice that Universal had snuck in like a cat burglar on the Cote d’Azur and changed it to United 93.
Wait a minute…is it United 93 or United93? The title art seems to indicate this, but maybe not. You don’t want to get too anal about this stuff.
Here’s my best guess (this being Sunday) as to why Universal did this five weeks before the release date: they suddenly decided there was something thematically appealing in the sound of United 93 because it alludes to the unity of purpose among the passengers who decided to take back the flight from the Al Qeada hijackers.
The 9/11 flight depicted in the film having been operated by United Air Lines is parallel-tangential.
The only other reason I can imagine is that someone realized at the last minute that the public might confuse the Universal feature with the A&E Channel’s Flight 93, which aired last January. But they obviously knew about the A&E movie for months, so why would they react this late in the game?
If nothing else, this last-minute decision is proof that Universal’s management is thinking on its feet.
A few movie sites apparently had the new title art up and running by the end of the week, but the switch came as a bit of a shock when I finally tuned in Saturday morning. West Hollywood detectives paid a visit a few hours later and dusted my hard drive and did their usual poking around, and for a while there they were just as befuddled as I was.
Their best estimate — mine also — is that Flight 93 became United 93 sometime between Sunday, March 19, and Tuesday, March 21.
The grand old IMDB hadn’t gotten the message as of Sunday, 3.26, as you can ascertain by clicking here. (They’ll update sooner or later, but they totally believed in Flight 93 as of 11:25 a.m. Sunday morning.)
Rotten Tomatoes still had it listed as Flight 93 as of Sunday, 3.26, although Scott Weinberg ran a post on Friday, 3.24, saying that Universal has gone with the title change, adding at the same time that the change was “old news.”
JoBlo.com is still calling it Flight 93, and a Google search shows that several other sites are still in the old mode.
A 3.19 story by Variety‘s Ted Johnson referred to Flight 93 but a Nicole LaPorte story that went up Sunday, 3.26 used United 93.
Nobody from Universal publicity told me — no e-mail announcements, no phone calls — but the first IMDB chat board question about the title change was posted on Tuesday, 3.21.
Anyway…
Here’s hoping Universal starts screening United 93 sometime soon so there’ll something to write about. April is looking like an incredibly flat month. Maybe my memory is foggy, but it seems worse than usual.
People like me are going to be reaching for anything to write about, but for the most part will have to make do with acceptables, pretty goods and not-too-bads: The Notorious Bettie Page, Free Zone, The Death of Mr Lazarescu, Hard Candy, Kinky Boots and the limited, all-but-invisible northwest release of Mozart and the Whale.
I’m going to have April visits to Houston’s Worldfest Film festival and the San Francisco Film Festival to distract me, but marquee-wise United 93 is the only film due within the next five weeks that seems to have any kind of major voltage. Am I wrong?
And it won’t just be the movie to discuss. There will be plenty to delve into with the head-in-the-sand types chanting their two basic mantras: (1) “Too soon! No 9/11 movies!” and (2) “Don’t mention the concept of U.S. foreign policy having anything to do with motivating the 9/11 attacks…the attackers were the devil’s emissaries and the U.S. was nothing more than a totally innocent, God-fearing victim of evildoers.”
Grabs
2006 Cinevegas Film Festival director of programming Trevor Goth and Sundance honcho John Cooper at party last Friday night (3.24) at the Buffalo Club for “the world’s most dangerous film festival,” which unfurls June 9th through 17th. Taken Friday, 3.24, 7:50 pm.
Director John Stockwell (who gave us the respected but somewhat under-appreciated Blue Crush and the very fine crazybeautiful), whom I still regard as the Genx Curtis Hanson despite the misfire of Into the Blue, with the very foxy Olivia Wilde, star of Stockwell’s Turistas, a forthcoming adventure flick set in the Amazon, at Friday’s Cinevegas party. (Stockwell’s Chasing the Whale, a gambling movie to follow in the wake of Hanson’s Lucky Me, will get his cred back up where it belongs.) Friday, 3.24, 8:25 pm.
A nice girl hired to provide eye-candy diversion at Cinevegas party. I got her name but didn’t write it down, and a slightly older French-born woman friend of hers who had my business card and knew how to get in touch didn’t, so that’s that.
Return of anonymous pink lady along with ferociously alluring Amazon blonde hired for same exploitive purpose at Cinevegas party
Desserts laid out for sensual delight of journalists attending last week’s press junket for The Notorious Bettie Page at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills.
Rae’s diner, the Detroit, Michigan, diner located on West Pico Blvd. in Los Angeles where crafty Clarence (Christian Slater) and Alabama (Patricia Arquette) went for coffee and pie in the opening moments of Tony Scott’s True Romance.
Snakes! Snakes!
You’re in your too-small coach seat and speechless, eyes aglare and back arched. Reason? A dangling diamondback rattler (as opposed to a dangling participle), four or five inches in front of your face and hissing like any well-motivated serpent, is about to bite down hard.
This, in a nutshell, is New Line’s Snakes on a Plane (8.18). Combined with that hilariously idiotic title, it’s also behind a growing camp following and internet groundswell that appears to be turning this low-rent thriller into the first major movie phenomenon of 2006.
I wasn’t on the boat at first. For the last few months I’ve been going, “Okay, a goof, right…but crap nonetheless.” Nothing has changed on the artistic-estimation side, but suddenly the grass-roots enthusiasm levels are turning it into something else. Everyone’s into it, wants to see it the first weekend. Almost five months to go before the opening date and Snakes on a Plane is already (or so it seems) the new Blair Witch Project.
Go to Snakes on a Blog and you’ll see about 487 different songs, T-shirts, posters, marketing slogans. You can can choose which songs, slogans and posters strike your fancy.
My personal turnaround happened when I heard this Snakes on a Plane talkin’ acoustic folk riff this morning. Then it all clicked into place. Not too strident or emphatic. A perfect laid-back attitude.
And nobody at New Line Cinema, which is opening Snakes on a Plane on August 18, has had much to do with this…not really. It’s all come from out there.
To the best of my knowledge, no one in Real People Land is composing and recording Da Vinci Code or Mission Impossible 3 songs, and why the hell would they?
Why exactly has this one-third goof, one-third “piece of shit” genre film (i.e., not an out-and-out bad movie but one that plays with the idea of being one), and one-third horror flick been adopted by a home-grown marketing movement?
Probably because it’s easy to get and to laugh at it. (The more I say that title out loud, the more genius-level it sounds.) And because it’s easy to pass around the goofy humor online.
I only know that Regular Joe’s out there are embracing the damn thing and celebrating the jerk-off attitude way before the opening.
Directed by David R. Ellis (Cellular — he also worked as a stunt man and actor for years) and written by Sebastian Gutierrez, David Loucka and John Heffernan, Snakes is about an FBI agent (Samuel L. Jackson) escorting a captive witness to a court date, and then suddenly has to deal with a planeload of poisonous snakes that have been put there by Cale Boyter’s assistant…excuse me, a bad guy who doesn’t want the witness to talk.
Jackson has at least two money lines — “I’ve had it with these snakes!” and “I want these motherfucking snakes off the plane!”
FBI agent Samuel L. Jackson (l.) and a passenger obviously concerned with some nearby movement
I admit it — my first reaction was to shake my head and wonder what was wrong with Jackson’s judgment, or that of his agent. Now he looks like some kind of genius, or at the very least one very lucky mo-fo.
The phenomenon that has lifted Snakes, an exploitation B-movie if there ever was one, out of the realm of derision and into that of a pop legend is extremely rare. This one, in fact, is damn near close to unique.
As Borys Kit put it in his 3.23 Hollywood Reporter story, “Intense fan reaction to movies most often is associated with titles that have established themselves in other media, such as comic book movies or fantasy novels, before making their way to the screen. Or it becomes attached to surprise hits, like the original Star Wars, that develop massive cult followings [after] they are released.”
On one hand, New Line seems to be on top of what’s happening due to their decision to shoot five extra days of photography earlier this month on “the Lot” (i.e., across the street from Jones) in order to make the film into a hard R — more sex, nudity, graphic violence. They know what they have and they’re cranking it up some.
A New Line source told me this morning that they’ve added, for one example, a shot of “a guy being bitten by a snake on his Johnson.” How does that happen exactly? He’s taking a leak or…? “Mile-High Club,” he answered.
We both agreed that if the movie tips too much into self-parody, the fun of it will dissipate after 20 or 30 minutes. Nobody wants to see Airplane. It has to sit right on the edge between serious horror and wink-wink. Too much in either direction and the conceit falls apart.
We also noted that on the cyber-marketing side, New Line Cinema — ostensibly Ground Zero or Snakes Central — seems to be behind its own curve. Their official website isn’t even up and rolling yet — all it is is a title card and some ominous-bad-stuff-about-to-happen music.
And if you ask me, their 8.18 release date — five months from now — is a mistake at this stage. No movie company can orchestrate what’s happening with Snakes right now, and it’s folly to think that the present energy levels will keep up for another 19 or 20 weeks.
If New Line’s distribution chief Russell Schwartz is smart, he’ll push Snakes into theatres sometime in late May or at least sometime in June — strike when the iron is hot!
My New Line source says “there’s a heavy debate about this going on right now. Some want to stay with August because that gives you a couple of weeks free and clear…the competition isn’t too bad then. But others want to go sooner, for obvious reasons.”
A New York journalist friend wrote this morning and said, “I don’t get it…it sounds so terrible (the movie, I mean).” And I replied that terribleness is part of the friggin’ point. It’s about everyone being in on the joke…about the beginnings of a Rocky Horror coast-to-coast toga party.
If it turns out to be half as good as some of the promotion ideas have been so far, and if it doesn’t end up with too much of a self-mocking attitude, Snakes on a Plane could turn into one of the great communal theatre experiences of 2006.
Did anyone at Showest, the exhibitor convention that just happened in Las Vegas a while back, even mention this? (If so, I didn’t read about it.)
I’m serious…this is not a DVD thing. Everyone is going to have to go to a theatre with their friends and bark like seals at the jokes and the shrieks and fangs-sink- ing-into-penis moments.
I’m hoping it’ll be like the vibe at the Rivoli theatre in 1985 when I was working at New Line (as a publicist, believe it or not) and we all went to see Reanimator on opening night. That show was one of the best movie-theatre highs I’ve ever sampled…the kind of rave experience that high and low types can enjoy from the same place.
Sweet Bird of Youth
It’s not so much how the 23 year-old Marlon Brando looked, although this is fascin- ating in itself. It’s more the metaphor of a life not yet blemished or sullied…an aura of freshness, vitality, raw presence.
These are stills from a screen test Brando made in 1947 for a planned film of Rebel Without a Cause, in which he would have played the famously troubled teenager Jim Stark, whom James Dean made into a legendary inconographic figure in Nich- olas Ray’s 1955 film of the same name.
Still from 1947 screen test reel of Marlon Brando reading for role of Jim Stark in an early, never-shot version of Rebel Without a Cause.
The Brando Rebel screen test footage, which lasts about five minutes, will be included in a two-disc special edition DVD of A Streetcar Named Desire that Warner Home Video is bringing out May 2nd, or five weeks from today.
The exact date of the test footage isn’t known (not to me, at least) but Brando was playing Stanley Kowalkski in the stage version of “A Streetcar Named Desire” that year (and most likely at the same time). This was three years before he made his first Hollywood film, Fred Zinneman’s The Men (’50), in which he played a paraplegic.
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A story by Dalya Alberge in today’s (3.28) edition of The Australian provides a description of the footage, which I may be lucky enough to see sometime soon, perhaps as soon as this weekend.
Brando “is seen crying, slamming his fist on a table, vulnerable and kissing the girl,” Alberge writes. The test “convinced the producers that he was the man for the Rebel role, but Brando turned them down. After much delay, including at least 40 script revisions, the role was taken by Dean in 1955.
Alberge quotes Darwin Porter, author of a reportedly tawdry biography called “Brando Unzipped” (Blood Moon), as follows:
“Screen tests preserved of the great stars are usually pretty awful …this one had me mesmerized. From the moment Brando enters the room in the test, he is lightning…there is a magnetic appeal to him, as he is at the peak of his physical beauty and virile power — both as a man and an actor.”
Brando “never disclosed precisely why he rejected the role, but Porter suggests that the actor may have been reluctant to sign a seven-year contract with the studio, which would have been required at the time.
In the footage, Brando “is seen walking into a room, angry about his parents. He tells a girl who meets him: ‘My old man … he didn’t give me a chance. He hit me before he even said anything. I hate him. I hate his stupid face.’ He slams the table.
“Comforted by the girl” — I wonder the who girl was? — “he kisses her, asking her whether she has been with ‘other fellows while I was gone.’ His face lights up as he talks of getting a gun and the two of them leaving together for ‘any place, away from here.'”
N.Y. Daily News gossip columnist Ben Widdicombe — a.k.a., “the Gatecrasher” — wrote on 1.21.06 that Porter’s Brando book “promises to be the definitive gossip guide to the great actor’s life.”
Widdicombe wrote that “collectors of Brando ephemera might appreciate the inclusion of a certain infamous photograph [that] depicts a Monica Lewinski moment between Brando and another man.” He then quoted Blood Moon publisher Danforth Prince as saying “we ran [the photo[ at a tasteful 2 inches by 1 3/4 inches on page 404,” adding, “In journalism, we call that ‘burying the lead.'”
This morning I happened across Truman Capote’s portrait of Brando for The New Yorker, which came from a visit with the 33 year-old actor while he was filming Sayonara in Kyoto, Japan, in early 1957.
The Brando that emerges from Capote’s prose is a guarded, withdrawn, somewhat frail figure — a hint of the ruined Brando to come, and a far cry from the sugges- tions of buoyancy and naivete in the face of the young man pictured above.
Money Grabs
On the red carpet for premiere of Nicole Holofcener’s Friends With Money (Sony Classics, 4.7) at the Egyptian theatre, headquarters of the American Cineatheque — Monday, 3.27, 7:12 pm. (Just to the right of the face of the brunette with the green handbag and to the left of the burly photographer with the white T-shirt is costar Jennifer Aniston, speaking at that particular moment in time to Entertainment Tonight‘s Leonard Maltin)
Dancer-models dressed as twin sisters of Casper the Friendly Ghost, and perhaps expressing a sensual appreiciation of life in Los Angeles in the year 2006. Snapped at Friends with Money after-party at Mondrian Hotel’s Sky Bar — Monday, 3.27, 10:20 pm.
Friends with Money costar Bob Stevenson at Sky Bar — 3.27, 11:05 pm. A subtle, soft-spoken actor with piercing blue eyes, Stevenson portrays one of Jennifer Aniston’s love interests in Nicole Holofcener’s film.
Scott Caan (blue jeans, black jacket), also costarring in Friends with Money, on red carpet at the Egyptian theatre — Monday, 3.27, 7:18 pm. (I had an interview set up with Caan at a hotel in Soho last summer to talk about Dallas 362, his fairly good debut as a director, but he wasn’t there when I showed up, and he didn’t leave a note or call later on to apologize…nothing. I was going to ask him what happened last night, but I didn’t see him at the after-party.)
Switcheroo
Like old habits, movie titles you’ve gotten used to can die hard. Even relatively recent ones, like Universal’s Flight 93, the Paul Greengrass 9/11 thriller that’s opening on Friday, 4.28. Or the former Flight 93, I should say. The old-shoe, boilerplate-sounding Flight 93 of yore…a label I was totally down with.
I was so accustomed to the sound of it that when I linked to the trailer three days ago (on 3.24), I didn’t even notice that Universal had snuck in like a cat burglar on the Cote d’Azur and changed it to United 93.
Wait a minute…is it United 93 or United93? The title art seems to indicate this, but maybe not. You don’t want to get too anal about this stuff.
Here’s my best guess (this being Sunday) as to why Universal did this five weeks before the release date: they suddenly decided there was something thematically appealing in the sound of United 93 because it alludes to the unity of purpose among the passengers who decided to take back the flight from the Al Qeada hijackers.
The 9/11 flight depicted in the film having been operated by United Air Lines is parallel-tangential.
The only other reason I can imagine is that someone realized at the last minute that the public might confuse the Universal feature with the A&E Channel’s Flight 93, which aired last January. But they obviously knew about the A&E movie for months, so why would they react this late in the game?
If nothing else, this last-minute decision is proof that Universal’s management is thinking on its feet.
A few movie sites apparently had the new title art up and running by the end of the week, but the switch came as a bit of a shock when I finally tuned in Saturday morning. West Hollywood detectives paid a visit a few hours later and dusted my hard drive and did their usual poking around, and for a while there they were just as befuddled as I was.
Their best estimate — mine also — is that Flight 93 became United 93 sometime between Sunday, March 19, and Tuesday, March 21.
The grand old IMDB hadn’t gotten the message as of Sunday, 3.26, as you can ascertain by clicking here. (They’ll update sooner or later, but they totally believed in Flight 93 as of 11:25 a.m. Sunday morning.)
Rotten Tomatoes still had it listed as Flight 93 as of Sunday, 3.26, although Scott Weinberg ran a post on Friday, 3.24, saying that Universal has gone with the title change, adding at the same time that the change was “old news.”
JoBlo.com is still calling it Flight 93, and a Google search shows that several other sites are still in the old mode.
A 3.19 story by Variety‘s Ted Johnson referred to Flight 93 but a Nicole LaPorte story that went up Sunday, 3.26 used United 93.
Nobody from Universal publicity told me — no e-mail announcements, no phone calls — but the first IMDB chat board question about the title change was posted on Tuesday, 3.21.
Anyway…
Here’s hoping Universal starts screening United 93 sometime soon so there’ll something to write about. April is looking like an incredibly flat month. Maybe my memory is foggy, but it seems worse than usual.
People like me are going to be reaching for anything to write about, but for the most part will have to make do with acceptables, pretty goods and not-too-bads: The Notorious Bettie Page, Free Zone, The Death of Mr Lazarescu, Hard Candy, Kinky Boots and the limited, all-but-invisible northwest release of Mozart and the Whale.
I’m going to have April visits to Houston’s Worldfest Film festival and the San Francisco Film Festival to distract me, but marquee-wise United 93 is the only film due within the next five weeks that seems to have any kind of major voltage. Am I wrong?
And it won’t just be the movie to discuss. There will be plenty to delve into with the head-in-the-sand types chanting their two basic mantras: (1) “Too soon! No 9/11 movies!” and (2) “Don’t mention the concept of U.S. foreign policy having anything to do with motivating the 9/11 attacks…the attackers were the devil’s emissaries and the U.S. was nothing more than a totally innocent, God-fearing victim of evildoers.”
Grabs
2006 Cinevegas Film Festival director of programming Trevor Goth and Sundance honcho John Cooper at party last Friday night (3.24) at the Buffalo Club for “the world’s most dangerous film festival,” which unfurls June 9th through 17th. Taken Friday, 3.24, 7:50 pm.
Director John Stockwell (who gave us the respected but somewhat under-appreciated Blue Crush and the very fine crazybeautiful), whom I still regard as the Genx Curtis Hanson despite the misfire of Into the Blue, with the very foxy Olivia Wilde, star of Stockwell’s Turistas, a forthcoming adventure flick set in the Amazon, at Friday’s Cinevegas party. (Stockwell’s Chasing the Whale, a gambling movie to follow in the wake of Hanson’s Lucky Me, will get his cred back up where it belongs.) Friday, 3.24, 8:25 pm.
A nice girl hired to provide eye-candy diversion at Cinevegas party. I got her name but didn’t write it down, and a slightly older French-born woman friend of hers who had my business card and knew how to get in touch didn’t, so that’s that.
Return of anonymous pink lady along with ferociously alluring Amazon blonde hired for same exploitive purpose at Cinevegas party
Desserts laid out for sensual delight of journalists attending last week’s press junket for The Notorious Bettie Page at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills.
Rae’s diner, the Detroit, Michigan, diner located on West Pico Blvd. in Los Angeles where crafty Clarence (Christian Slater) and Alabama (Patricia Arquette) went for coffee and pie in the opening moments of Tony Scott’s True Romance.
Snakes! Snakes!
You’re in your too-small coach seat and speechless, eyes aglare and back arched. Reason? A dangling diamondback rattler (as opposed to a dangling participle), four or five inches in front of your face and hissing like any well-motivated serpent, is about to bite down hard.
This, in a nutshell, is New Line’s Snakes on a Plane (8.18). Combined with that hilariously idiotic title, it’s also behind a growing camp following and internet groundswell that appears to be turning this low-rent thriller into the first major movie phenomenon of 2006.
I wasn’t on the boat at first. For the last few months I’ve been going, “Okay, a goof, right…but crap nonetheless.” Nothing has changed on the artistic-estimation side, but suddenly the grass-roots enthusiasm levels are turning it into something else. Everyone’s into it, wants to see it the first weekend. Almost five months to go before the opening date and Snakes on a Plane is already (or so it seems) the new Blair Witch Project.
Go to Snakes on a Blog and you’ll see about 487 different songs, T-shirts, posters, marketing slogans. You can can choose which songs, slogans and posters strike your fancy.
My personal turnaround happened when I heard this Snakes on a Plane talkin’ acoustic folk riff this morning. Then it all clicked into place. Not too strident or emphatic. A perfect laid-back attitude.
And nobody at New Line Cinema, which is opening Snakes on a Plane on August 18, has had much to do with this…not really. It’s all come from out there.
To the best of my knowledge, no one in Real People Land is composing and recording Da Vinci Code or Mission Impossible 3 songs, and why the hell would they?
Why exactly has this one-third goof, one-third “piece of shit” genre film (i.e., not an out-and-out bad movie but one that plays with the idea of being one), and one-third horror flick been adopted by a home-grown marketing movement?
Probably because it’s easy to get and to laugh at it. (The more I say that title out loud, the more genius-level it sounds.) And because it’s easy to pass around the goofy humor online.
I only know that Regular Joe’s out there are embracing the damn thing and celebrating the jerk-off attitude way before the opening.
Directed by David R. Ellis (Cellular — he also worked as a stunt man and actor for years) and written by Sebastian Gutierrez, David Loucka and John Heffernan, Snakes is about an FBI agent (Samuel L. Jackson) escorting a captive witness to a court date, and then suddenly has to deal with a planeload of poisonous snakes that have been put there by Cale Boyter’s assistant…excuse me, a bad guy who doesn’t want the witness to talk.
Jackson has at least two money lines — “I’ve had it with these snakes!” and “I want these motherfucking snakes off the plane!”
FBI agent Samuel L. Jackson (l.) and a passenger obviously concerned with some nearby movement
I admit it — my first reaction was to shake my head and wonder what was wrong with Jackson’s judgment, or that of his agent. Now he looks like some kind of genius, or at the very least one very lucky mo-fo.
The phenomenon that has lifted Snakes, an exploitation B-movie if there ever was one, out of the realm of derision and into that of a pop legend is extremely rare. This one, in fact, is damn near close to unique.
As Borys Kit put it in his 3.23 Hollywood Reporter story, “Intense fan reaction to movies most often is associated with titles that have established themselves in other media, such as comic book movies or fantasy novels, before making their way to the screen. Or it becomes attached to surprise hits, like the original Star Wars, that develop massive cult followings [after] they are released.”
On one hand, New Line seems to be on top of what’s happening due to their decision to shoot five extra days of photography earlier this month on “the Lot” (i.e., across the street from Jones) in order to make the film into a hard R — more sex, nudity, graphic violence. They know what they have and they’re cranking it up some.
A New Line source told me this morning that they’ve added, for one example, a shot of “a guy being bitten by a snake on his Johnson.” How does that happen exactly? He’s taking a leak or…? “Mile-High Club,” he answered.
We both agreed that if the movie tips too much into self-parody, the fun of it will dissipate after 20 or 30 minutes. Nobody wants to see Airplane. It has to sit right on the edge between serious horror and wink-wink. Too much in either direction and the conceit falls apart.
We also noted that on the cyber-marketing side, New Line Cinema — ostensibly Ground Zero or Snakes Central — seems to be behind its own curve. Their official website isn’t even up and rolling yet — all it is is a title card and some ominous-bad-stuff-about-to-happen music.
And if you ask me, their 8.18 release date — five months from now — is a mistake at this stage. No movie company can orchestrate what’s happening with Snakes right now, and it’s folly to think that the present energy levels will keep up for another 19 or 20 weeks.
If New Line’s distribution chief Russell Schwartz is smart, he’ll push Snakes into theatres sometime in late May or at least sometime in June — strike when the iron is hot!
My New Line source says “there’s a heavy debate about this going on right now. Some want to stay with August because that gives you a couple of weeks free and clear…the competition isn’t too bad then. But others want to go sooner, for obvious reasons.”
A New York journalist friend wrote this morning and said, “I don’t get it…it sounds so terrible (the movie, I mean).” And I replied that terribleness is part of the friggin’ point. It’s about everyone being in on the joke…about the beginnings of a Rocky Horror coast-to-coast toga party.
If it turns out to be half as good as some of the promotion ideas have been so far, and if it doesn’t end up with too much of a self-mocking attitude, Snakes on a Plane could turn into one of the great communal theatre experiences of 2006.
Did anyone at Showest, the exhibitor convention that just happened in Las Vegas a while back, even mention this? (If so, I didn’t read about it.)
I’m serious…this is not a DVD thing. Everyone is going to have to go to a theatre with their friends and bark like seals at the jokes and the shrieks and fangs-sink- ing-into-penis moments.
I’m hoping it’ll be like the vibe at the Rivoli theatre in 1985 when I was working at New Line (as a publicist, believe it or not) and we all went to see Reanimator on opening night. That show was one of the best movie-theatre highs I’ve ever sampled…the kind of rave experience that high and low types can enjoy from the same place.
Switcheroo
Like old habits, movie titles you’ve gotten used to can die hard. Even relatively recent ones, like Universal’s Flight 93, the Paul Greengrass 9/11 thriller that’s opening on Friday, 4.28. Or the former Flight 93, I should say. The old-shoe, boilerplate-sounding Flight 93 of yore…a label I was totally down with.
I was so accustomed to the sound of it that when I linked to the trailer three days ago (on 3.24), I didn’t even notice that Universal had snuck in like a cat burglar on the Cote d’Azur and changed it to United 93.
Wait a minute…is it United 93 or United93? The title art seems to indicate this, but maybe not. You don’t want to get too anal about this stuff.
Here’s my best guess (this being Sunday) as to why Universal did this five weeks before the release date: they suddenly decided there was something thematically appealing in the sound of United 93 because it alludes to the unity of purpose among the passengers who decided to take back the flight from the Al Qeada hijackers.
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
The 9/11 flight depicted in the film having been operated by United Air Lines is parallel-tangential.
The only other reason I can imagine is that someone realized at the last minute that the public might confuse the Universal feature with the A&E Channel’s Flight 93, which aired last January. But they obviously knew about the A&E movie for months, so why would they react this late in the game?
If nothing else, this last-minute decision is proof that Universal’s management is thinking on its feet.
A few movie sites apparently had the new title art up and running by the end of the week, but the switch came as a bit of a shock when I finally tuned in Saturday morning. West Hollywood detectives paid a visit a few hours later and dusted my hard drive and did their usual poking around, and for a while there they were just as befuddled as I was.
Their best estimate — mine also — is that Flight 93 became United 93 sometime between Sunday, March 19, and Tuesday, March 21.
The grand old IMDB hadn’t gotten the message as of Sunday, 3.26, as you can ascertain by clicking here. (They’ll update sooner or later, but they totally believed in Flight 93 as of 11:25 a.m. Sunday morning.)
Rotten Tomatoes still had it listed as Flight 93 as of Sunday, 3.26, although Scott Weinberg ran a post on Friday, 3.24, saying that Universal has gone with the title change, adding at the same time that the change was “old news.”
JoBlo.com is still calling it Flight 93, and a Google search shows that several other sites are still in the old mode.
A 3.19 story by Variety‘s Ted Johnson referred to Flight 93 but a Nicole LaPorte story that went up Sunday, 3.26 used United 93.
Nobody from Universal publicity told me — no e-mail announcements, no phone calls — but the first IMDB chat board question about the title change was posted on Tuesday, 3.21.
Anyway…
Here’s hoping Universal starts screening United 93 sometime soon so there’ll something to write about. April is looking like an incredibly flat month. Maybe my memory is foggy, but it seems worse than usual.
People like me are going to be reaching for anything to write about, but for the most part will have to make do with acceptables, pretty goods and not-too-bads: The Notorious Bettie Page, Free Zone, The Death of Mr Lazarescu, Hard Candy, Kinky Boots and the limited, all-but-invisible northwest release of Mozart and the Whale.
I’m going to have April visits to Houston’s Worldfest Film festival and the San Francisco Film Festival to distract me, but marquee-wise United 93 is the only film due within the next five weeks that seems to have any kind of major voltage. Am I wrong?
And it won’t just be the movie to discuss. There will be plenty to delve into with the head-in-the-sand types chanting their two basic mantras: (1) “Too soon! No 9/11 movies!” and (2) “Don’t mention the concept of U.S. foreign policy having anything to do with motivating the 9/11 attacks…the attackers were the devil’s emissaries and the U.S. was nothing more than a totally innocent, God-fearing victim of evildoers.”
Grabs
2006 Cinevegas Film Festival director of programming Trevor Goth and Sundance honcho John Cooper at party last Friday night (3.24) at the Buffalo Club for “the world’s most dangerous film festival,” which unfurls June 9th through 17th. Taken Friday, 3.24, 7:50 pm.
Director John Stockwell (who gave us the respected but somewhat under-appreciated Blue Crush and the very fine crazybeautiful), whom I still regard as the Genx Curtis Hanson despite the misfire of Into the Blue, with the very foxy Olivia Wilde, star of Stockwell’s Turistas, a forthcoming adventure flick set in the Amazon, at Friday’s Cinevegas party. (Stockwell’s Chasing the Whale, a gambling movie to follow in the wake of Hanson’s Lucky Me, will get his cred back up where it belongs.) Friday, 3.24, 8:25 pm.
A nice girl hired to provide eye-candy diversion at Cinevegas party. I got her name but didn’t write it down, and a slightly older French-born woman friend of hers who had my business card and knew how to get in touch didn’t, so that’s that.
Return of anonymous pink lady along with ferociously alluring Amazon blonde hired for same exploitive purpose at Cinevegas party
Desserts laid out for sensual delight of journalists attending last week’s press junket for The Notorious Bettie Page at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills.
Rae’s diner, the Detroit, Michigan, diner located on West Pico Blvd. in Los Angeles where crafty Clarence (Christian Slater) and Alabama (Patricia Arquette) went for coffee and pie in the opening moments of Tony Scott’s True Romance.
Snakes! Snakes!
You’re in your too-small coach seat and speechless, eyes aglare and back arched. Reason? A dangling diamondback rattler (as opposed to a dangling participle), four or five inches in front of your face and hissing like any well-motivated serpent, is about to bite down hard.
This, in a nutshell, is New Line’s Snakes on a Plane (8.18). Combined with that hilariously idiotic title, it’s also behind a growing camp following and internet groundswell that appears to be turning this low-rent thriller into the first major movie phenomenon of 2006.
I wasn’t on the boat at first. For the last few months I’ve been going, “Okay, a goof, right…but crap nonetheless.” Nothing has changed on the artistic-estimation side, but suddenly the grass-roots enthusiasm levels are turning it into something else. Everyone’s into it, wants to see it the first weekend. Almost five months to go before the opening date and Snakes on a Plane is already (or so it seems) the new Blair Witch Project.
Go to Snakes on a Blog and you’ll see about 487 different songs, T-shirts, posters, marketing slogans. You can can choose which songs, slogans and posters strike your fancy.
My personal turnaround happened when I heard this Snakes on a Plane talkin’ acoustic folk riff this morning. Then it all clicked into place. Not too strident or emphatic. A perfect laid-back attitude.
And nobody at New Line Cinema, which is opening Snakes on a Plane on August 18, has had much to do with this…not really. It’s all come from out there.
To the best of my knowledge, no one in Real People Land is composing and recording Da Vinci Code or Mission Impossible 3 songs, and why the hell would they?
Why exactly has this one-third goof, one-third “piece of shit” genre film (i.e., not an out-and-out bad movie but one that plays with the idea of being one), and one-third horror flick been adopted by a home-grown marketing movement?
Probably because it’s easy to get and to laugh at it. (The more I say that title out loud, the more genius-level it sounds.) And because it’s easy to pass around the goofy humor online.
I only know that Regular Joe’s out there are embracing the damn thing and celebrating the jerk-off attitude way before the opening.
Directed by David R. Ellis (Cellular — he also worked as a stunt man and actor for years) and written by Sebastian Gutierrez, David Loucka and John Heffernan, Snakes is about an FBI agent (Samuel L. Jackson) escorting a captive witness to a court date, and then suddenly has to deal with a planeload of poisonous snakes that have been put there by Cale Boyter’s assistant…excuse me, a bad guy who doesn’t want the witness to talk.
Jackson has at least two money lines — “I’ve had it with these snakes!” and “I want these motherfucking snakes off the plane!”
FBI agent Samuel L. Jackson (l.) and a passenger obviously concerned with some nearby movement
I admit it — my first reaction was to shake my head and wonder what was wrong with Jackson’s judgment, or that of his agent. Now he looks like some kind of genius, or at the very least one very lucky mo-fo.
The phenomenon that has lifted Snakes, an exploitation B-movie if there ever was one, out of the realm of derision and into that of a pop legend is extremely rare. This one, in fact, is damn near close to unique.
As Borys Kit put it in his 3.23 Hollywood Reporter story, “Intense fan reaction to movies most often is associated with titles that have established themselves in other media, such as comic book movies or fantasy novels, before making their way to the screen. Or it becomes attached to surprise hits, like the original Star Wars, that develop massive cult followings [after] they are released.”
On one hand, New Line seems to be on top of what’s happening due to their decision to shoot five extra days of photography earlier this month on “the Lot” (i.e., across the street from Jones) in order to make the film into a hard R — more sex, nudity, graphic violence. They know what they have and they’re cranking it up some.
A New Line source told me this morning that they’ve added, for one example, a shot of “a guy being bitten by a snake on his Johnson.” How does that happen exactly? He’s taking a leak or…? “Mile-High Club,” he answered.
We both agreed that if the movie tips too much into self-parody, the fun of it will dissipate after 20 or 30 minutes. Nobody wants to see Airplane. It has to sit right on the edge between serious horror and wink-wink. Too much in either direction and the conceit falls apart.
We also noted that on the cyber-marketing side, New Line Cinema — ostensibly Ground Zero or Snakes Central — seems to be behind its own curve. Their official website isn’t even up and rolling yet — all it is is a title card and some ominous-bad-stuff-about-to-happen music.
And if you ask me, their 8.18 release date — five months from now — is a mistake at this stage. No movie company can orchestrate what’s happening with Snakes right now, and it’s folly to think that the present energy levels will keep up for another 19 or 20 weeks.
If New Line’s distribution chief Russell Schwartz is smart, he’ll push Snakes into theatres sometime in late May or at least sometime in June — strike when the iron is hot!
My New Line source says “there’s a heavy debate about this going on right now. Some want to stay with August because that gives you a couple of weeks free and clear…the competition isn’t too bad then. But others want to go sooner, for obvious reasons.”
A New York journalist friend wrote this morning and said, “I don’t get it…it sounds so terrible (the movie, I mean).” And I replied that terribleness is part of the friggin’ point. It’s about everyone being in on the joke…about the beginnings of a Rocky Horror coast-to-coast toga party.
If it turns out to be half as good as some of the promotion ideas have been so far, and if it doesn’t end up with too much of a self-mocking attitude, Snakes on a Plane could turn into one of the great communal theatre experiences of 2006.
Did anyone at Showest, the exhibitor convention that just happened in Las Vegas a while back, even mention this? (If so, I didn’t read about it.)
I’m serious…this is not a DVD thing. Everyone is going to have to go to a theatre with their friends and bark like seals at the jokes and the shrieks and fangs-sink- ing-into-penis moments.
I’m hoping it’ll be like the vibe at the Rivoli theatre in 1985 when I was working at New Line (as a publicist, believe it or not) and we all went to see Reanimator on opening night. That show was one of the best movie-theatre highs I’ve ever sampled…the kind of rave experience that high and low types can enjoy from the same place.
Love Come Lately
I’ve already mentioned I was pretty much blown away by Fernando Meirelles’ The Constant Gardener (Focus Features, 8.26). What’s hitting me now about this film has more to do with irony.
Gardener is essentially a political murder-mystery that achieves a very unique payoff because it also invests in an unusual kind of love story (i.e., a widower falling more profoundly in love with his wife after she’s dead than when she was alive).
The Constant Gardener director Fernando Meirelles, during interview in Regency hotel lounge — Tuesday, 8.9, 4:25 pm.
In so doing Gardener delivers what seems like precisely the sort of freshness that audiences, fed up with the usual usual, are said to be especially hungry for these days. I’ve seen it twice now and if anything it gained from a second viewing.
Mostly set in Kenya, it’s about the brutal murder of a mouthy British activist named Tessa Quayle (Rachel Weisz), who was also the wife of a milquetoasty British diplomat named Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes).
Prior to her death, Quayle has lived within a cloistered and genteel world that doesn’t permit any rude socio political intrusions. But once he starts looking into her killing, he discovers who she really was and gradually finds himself trying to follow her ethical lead as his investigations lead into some complex and dangerous mucky-muck involving the pharmaceutical industry (i.e., Big Pharma).
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The irony is that this visual tour de force (beautifully shot by City of God‘s Cesar Charlone and edited by Claire Simpson) may be too thoughtful and complex and emotionally subtle to play with a popcorn audience.
There’s also the concern we’ve all been hearing about releasing a high-toned fall movie in late August plus the old saw about the two leads, Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz, not being marquee names, etc.
You might think you’ve seen this kind of thriller (i.e., man/woman is determined to find out who killed a loved one) fifty or sixty times before, but there’s such a feeling of adult complexity and discovery in this thing that memories of all those other what-really-happened? dramas are fast forgotten.
I sat down with Meirelles at Manhattan’s Regency hotel on Tuesday afternoon to mainly talk about the cinematography and the editing, which are worth the price of admission in themselves.
There’s a fine line between hyper photography and super-fast cutting being very cool and very annoying. Some of the cutting in The Bourne Supremacy was in the latter category. It seemed that it was cut faster than any big-studio action film that had come before so people would notice it was cut faster than any big-studio action film that had come before.
Simpson’s cutting of The Constant Gardener doesn’t ever feel this way and there’s not much difference between the two so I’m talking about some very slight quantifications. Good editing is like good music and it’s always hard to explain musical quality…but most of us know it when we hear it.
Meirelles and Simpson arrived at the shape and pacing of The Constant Gardener very slowly, he said. At first they told the story in a standard sequential way start to finish, which ran about three hours…but it was “boring.”
They eventually decided to hop around during the first half and start with Tessa’s death being discovered, which, of course, is exactly how the John Le Carre novel begins. They edited it for a total of six or seven months, including two months in Kenya last summer and three months in Meirelles’ native Brazil.
Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weicz
Meirelles is sensing an evolving receptivity to faster and faster cutting. “People wouldn’t understand” Gardener‘s editing style, he says, if it had been released in the 1950s. He supports wholeheartedly the influence of MTV videos over the past 20 years or so, which have brought about a new visual discipline among directors.
Nonetheless, something tells me there’s a limit to this. Velocity in and of itself can be extremely bothersome without a really masterful conductor keeping time.
Meirelles’ next film will be a multi-character piece that will try to explore the effects of globalism, or the gradual eradication of local culture at the hands of corporate multinationals. Meirelles may be kidding or not, but he says the title will be Intolerance: the Sequel.
I’ve said it twice and I’ll say it a third time: The Constant Gardener is the best theatrical adaptation of a John le Carre novel since The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1966), partly because it’s the most emotionally involving. Forget the last John le Carre adaptation, which was John Boorman’s sluggish The Tailor of Panama. Gardener is of a much higher order.
Elder-ly
John Singleton’s Four Brothers is quality crap, and I mean that respectfully.
It’s basically a John Wayne western…a likable, stupid-ass gunfight movie that nonetheless works because it turns the cliches around just enough in each scene, and because the acting and dialogue between the actors playing the bi-racial brothers (Mark Wahlberg, Tyrese Gibson, Garrett Hedlund, Andre Benjamin) is warm and spirited and funny now and then, and because the action scenes are organically slam-bang — fast and hard with a kind of ’70s verismilitude.
This would be a great movie to see at a drive-in if there were still drive-ins. It’s also the kind of film that probably plays a little bit better if you’re drinking beer.
If you’re a slightly older genre buff, the action-driven plot of John Singleton’s Four Brothers will remind you of…
It’s a formula revenge thing about four Detroit guys going after the gangsta scum who were behind the shooting death of their mother. It’s all pulp but I didn’t mind it, and I was expecting to hate it because I haven’t trusted Singleton in a long time. I could feel the audience at last night’s all-media screening having a good time. It’s going to do pretty well this weekend.
David Elliot and Paul Lovett’s script seems pretty closely modeled on Henry Hathaway’s The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), which was about four rambunctious brothers avenging their father’s death and untangling a financial swindle that had victimized their mother.
Kindly but tough-talking Evelyn Mercer (Fionnula Flanagan) is fatally shot for absolutely no reason during a random grocery holdup, which means, of course, that she’s the victim of a hit. The movie starts with her four sons coming home for her funeral, and we know they’ll eventually get wise and take action.
…Henry Hathaway’s moderately entertaining The Sons of Katie Elder, which co-starred John Wayne, Dean Martin, Earl Holliman and Michael Anderson, Jr. (One kink in the rope was the fact that Wayne and Anderson seemed way too far apart in age to be sons of the same mom.)
What wins you over is that Singleton takes his time getting to this point, paying attention first to character-building with good humor and easygoing acting and even some surreal stuff.
When the action stuff kicks in (the highlights are a nighttime car chase during a blizzard and a ferocious attack on the family home by the baddies with automatic weapons), he goes for balls-out vigor but in a non-martial-artsy, forget-John-Woo way that feels refreshing as shit.
As an ex-con with a hair-trigger temper, Wahlberg pretty much carries every scene he’s in. Steady backup is provided by Gibson (Baby Boy, 2 Fast 2 Furious), Benjamin (mainly known as a rapper with OutKast) and Hedlund (the kid with the asshole father in Friday Night Lights).
Also good (if under-utilized) are Hustle & Flow alumni and Singleton pals Terrence Howard and Taraji P. Henson. British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor (last in Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda, and before that in Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things) pretty much kills and is even amusing a couple of times as a Detroit gangster who keeps his troops in line by occasionally humiliating them a la Warren Beatty’s “crawl and bark like a dog” routine in Bugsy.
Envisioning Abe
I’ve spoken to Liam Neeson about his upcoming portrayal of Abraham Lincoln twice this week — once at Focus Features’ Constant Gardener party on Monday night and again at last night’s small-scale soiree at Michael’s for Paramount Classics’ Asylum.
And the second time I passed along a tiny piece of information about Lincoln’s speaking voice that Neeson thanked me for, and which might affect his performance on some level. Hey, it’s conceivable.
Neeson is playing our 16th President in a Lincoln biopic that Steven Spielberg will most likely begin shooting, Neeson said, sometime in March ’06. There was an earlier plan to begin filming in February, he added, but with this, that and whatever (including, probably, some Oscar campaigning for Spielberg’s Munich movie) this date will probably get bumped.
Liam Neeson (not as he appeared at Monday night’s Constant Gardener soiree or at Tuesday’s Asylum party…I didn’t have the brass to take his picture), and a former White House resident known for tallness, eloquence, greatness, etc.
Spielberg has been talking about making a Lincoln movie since `01, when DreamWorks bought rights to a bio being written by Doris Kearns Goodwin. That book will come out in the fall, reportedly under the title “Master Among Men: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.”
Apparently the most recent screenwriter on the Lincoln script has been the British playwright Paul Webb, who has written at least two previous screenplays, Four Knights and Spanish Assassins.
Neeson says the film will be an inspirational thing. “I think his story really speaks to our time,” he said. “About the separation in this country” — I took it he was referring to the red vs. blue culture wars – “and the sacrifices made and the losses of [the Civil War]…160,000 men killed…the losses, my God.”
He believes that Lincoln’s story “shows we can come through this” — an apparent reference to the war against terrorism — “because it shows men at their best and what we could be again.”
I mentioned that Edward R. Murrow, another honorable historical figure, will soon be portrayed in George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck. Neeson said he was interested in seeing this.
Rendering by Hollywood Elsewhere columnist Michael Felsher (“Cinema Obscura”) of how Liam Neeson will most likely appear in Steven Spielberg’s Abraham Lincoln biopic, which will probably begin shooting in March 2006 and hit screens in ’07.
What part of Lincoln’s life will the Spielberg film cover? “From his inauguration to his assassination,” he said.
How long will it be? “I’m not going to get into that,” he replied.
Has anyone else been cast in any roles? Not that he knew of, Neeson said. (I’ve read a suggestion somewhere that Ben Stiller would make a good John Wilkes Booth. I think Glenn Close would make a good Mary Todd Lincoln.)
Lincoln “spoke very well with his hands,” Neeson said. I recalled a certain hand gesture that Jack Kennedy used to use during speeches — not the famous index-finger jab but an easygoing palms-up gesture, and Neeson said, “Because his palm was up it was non-aggressive and sent an appealing message.”
We eventually talked about Lincoln’s voice, which is where my little sprig of information came into play.
Neeson said that the writings of a contemporary of Lincoln’s named William Herndon said that he had “a clear, higher-pitched voice.” I found similar views during internet research the next day. Lincoln didn’t have a bass or baritone voice, apparently, but a tenor voice. It was described by another witness, Abram Berggen, as “high-keyed.”
Raymond Massey in Abe Lincoln in Illinois.
Neeson briefly mentioned Raymond Massey’s Lincoln performance in Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940) and Henry Fonda’s in John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (’39). That led to me to look up Massey’s no-frills biography on Wikipedia. On it I found the following passage:
“Early in Massey’s career, Abraham Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln (1843-1926), heard Massey perform and was struck by the close similarity of Massey’s speaking voice to that of his father.”
Neeson was enthusiastic and grateful when I told him about this last night. Massey had a twangy tenor voice mixed with a certain forlorn tone, like he was hoping for something he knew was unattainable.
If I were about to play Lincoln I’d probably want to come up with a voice something like Massey’s, or at least one that doesn’t sound overly “shrill, squeaking, piping [and] unpleasant,” which is how Herndon described Lincoln’s voice as he gave a speech just before assuming the Presidency.
Jarhead
“Just weighing in with my opinion on Sam Mendes’ Jarhead, which screened late last week in Sherman Oaks. I gave it mostly ‘very good’ or ‘excellent’ marks on my feedback card. It’s clearly a smart, haunting, well-acted, handsomely produced modern war film.
“The acting is solid all the way around, especially from Peter Sarsgaard. On my card, I encouraged a strong Oscar push on his behalf.
Jake Gyllenhaaal (r.) eyeballing a noncom who just might be played by Jamie Foxx (l.) in Sam Mendes’ Jarhead.
“As others have noted, many of the musical selections compliment the film nicely (much in the same way Coppola found the right songs for Apocalypse Now). In fact, young Nirvana-lovers like your son may be able to enjoy this film a bit more due to the music.
“You were right on the money when you suggested that this was a Full Metal Jacket for the Gulf War. This is both good and bad. The audience loved the opening scene, despite the fact that it directly rips off R. Lee Ermy’s famous boot camp tirade. (For this, I jotted down a scathing remark to Sam Mendes on my card…not that he’ll ever read it personally.)
“Overall it works very well and needs only to be tightened ever-so-slightly. Let’s all hope it finds a broader audience than David O. Russell’s unjustly ignored Three Kings.” — John McGilicutty
Going Wrong
“All praise to you! That’s right, all of it! You hit the goddamn nail on the head. Bad year for Hollywood? No, no, no…great year for Hollywood.
“So tickets are down. You know why? Movies are down. I haven’t been this happy since The Real Cancun tanked in theatres and my fear of reality movies taking over film as they did television subsided. In professional sports these are called rebuilding years. Hopefully this is a year where the business realizes it doesn’t have a championship-caliber team after all.
“Hopefully after this we will bear witness to studio executives keeping their noses out of the cookie jars and letting the creators do what they do best…fucking create. They might create a piece of shit, but you know what? At least that piece of shit might be more original, instead of a watered-down piece of shit that doesn’t have an identity. That’s what we’ve been getting. I want ambitious failures! Give me Heaven’s Gate!
“Hopefully — I might be hoping a bit too much with this — we might see a new age of creativity come out of this. One that reverts film from the blockbuster template back to the nitty gritty, I’ve-got-an-idea-let’s-shoot-it-no-matter-how-crazy-it-sounds stuff from the 70’s.
“Here’s to a great bad year of cinema!” — Sean Whiteman
Grabs
New York Daily News gossip columnist George Rush (i.e., “Rush and Molloy”) speaking with The Constant Gardener director Fernando Meirelles (r.) at post-premiere party thrown by Focus Features at Compass on West 70th Street — Monday, 8.8,10:25 pm.
Asylum star Natasha Richardson at tres elegant post-premiere party at Michael’s, 24 East 55th Street on Tuesday, 8.9, 10:40 pm — delivering her thank-you-all-so-very-much, this-is-a-wonderful-moment remarks about her many satisfactions in making the film (a descent-into-madness sexual affair movie set in a British facility for the mentally un-hinged) and especially from the rigors of sinking her teeth into an especially ripe character. Paramount Classics co-prez Ruth Vitale stands to the right in semi-darkness.
Jazz band letting go across the street from Cooper Union — Saturday, 8.6, 2:15 pm.
If I hadn’t gone to Rockaway Beach last Sunday and seen this large banner being dutifully pulled across the skies by a helicopter, I would probably never have known about, much less watched, Beach Girls. But I’ve read up on this Lifetime six-hour miniseries and apparently it’s not too bad. Here’s a review by the Baltimore Sun‘s David Zurawik.
Director-writer Kevin Smith, producer and producer John Pierson at Wellspring party for Reel Paradise, Steve James’ doc about Pierson’s running a theatre in Fiji a couple of years ago. Party followed a premiere screening at Tribeca Cinemas, just south of Houston.
Waiting to see the 10 pm show of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist at the Film Forum — Saturday, 8.6, 9:40 pm.
Rockaway Beach — 8.7, 2:20 pm.
The Virginian
“I have a few questions/observations about your WIRED piece about the failure of Hollywood’s big-budget, high-concept theme-park movies:
“1. Are these really failures? Of course they’re artistic failures, but it’s my understanding that crap like Stealth still makes money, especially once you factor in the overseas haul. The much-debated domestic box-office slump may be a reflection on how bad these blockbusters have gotten, but unless the international receipts also dry-up, Hollywood will never learn.
“2. Given the importance of the international audience, what are the odds that these films will go away any time soon? You know as well as I do that if it’s loud and dumb, it translates well to the overseas market — you don’t need to subtitle an explosion. Cheap seats are still filled with mouthbreathers whether they’re in Times Square or Thailand.
“3. I sense in your words a lament that these piles of disappointment have constantly pushed out worthier, more artistic films of merit. I disagree, in part. The independent artsy films are still getting made in droves, and while they may not make it to the multiplex in the hinterland, they are making it into homes in both blue and red states via cable and DVD.
“The real casualty here is the intelligent action movie or thriller. These are increasingly difficult to find. Critics such as yourself frequently point to Jaws and Star Wars as the culprit, but such highlighting always fails to recognize that those were actually good films, deserving of their success.
“James Cameron’s Aliens or the two Terminator films or the original Die Hard are reminders that Hollywood has put out compelling, intelligent, and entertaining action films, and a whole lot more recently than the 1970s. Hell, these movies look like absolute classics in comparison to dreck like Stealth, which would have been straight-to-video back in the day (with Michael Dudikoff, most likely).
“Yet there are far fewer films of this quality today, and even the ones that come close — like Spielberg’s War of the Worlds — often fall apart upon closer reflection.
“4. Finally, given the problems with getting audiences into theaters, what do you think the solution is? Do you offer them a quiet introspective talky film that plays exactly on DVD at home as it does on the big screen, or do you offer them a big, loud, brash explosion-fueled adventure movie that exploits the THX sound and big screen? There’s a reason why Hollywood relies on this swill: they’re the only things that can get moviegoers to the theater. Geez, this dynamic has been out there for years, I’m surprised I hear so few critics talk about the distinction between movies that are rentals and those that demand to be seen on the big screen.
“Of course, as home theaters improve, more films are going to fall into the rental category regardless of their quality. And as ticket sales fall, Hollywood will inevitably raise ticket prices, killing the golden goose. Meanwhile, the only thing that can possibly save the theater from complete irrelevancy– improving the movie-going experience for people who actually enjoy seeing more than one movie a year on a big movie screen, regardless of subject– that core audience will be ignored.
“Alas, that core audience may paradoxically be the first to abandon theater-going — speaking for me alone, I used to see about sixty movies a year in the theater, but I made less than fifty last year, and in 2005 I’m on pace for less than forty. At these prices and in these conditions (bad lighting, bad sound, bad timing, scratchy prints, inept concessions, annoying patrons), not even a die-hard fan of the big screen like myself is likely to spend money on crap like The Dukes of Hazzard, a film I would have probably seen on a lark as recently as a few years ago.” — Dave, Arlington, Virginia.
More Grabs
Johnny Cash during the Folsom prison performance he gave back in ’68. I’ve been in and out of a Cash head-space since seeing James Mangold’s Walk the Line last Thursday. I’ve pledged not to say anything about it until Toronto, but I wouldn’t want the lack of even a hint of any enthusiasm about it to say the wrong thing, so let me just say without really saying anything that it tells Cash’s story the right way.
Broadway and… I forget, but roughly two or three blocks north of Houston.
I’m starting to have some serious aesthetic doubts about these slow-exposure blur shots.
At the IFC Center last Saturday afternoon, around 4:30 pm. The former Waverly Theater is a brand-new indie house with a cool
restaurant featuring the servings of chefs Claudia Fleming and Gerry Hayden.
Is this the only shot of whatsername, the tattle-tale Jude Law nanny? I read somewhere she’s going to spill to the tabloid news shows…terrific.
I never even went inside when I took this last Friday or thereabouts, but it’s located on West 15th just east of Eighth Avenue.
Reactions?
Whenever a one-sheet art serves up a concise iconic image, it’s easy to accept a notion that the film has its shit together.
The poster for Sam Mendes’ Jarhead (Universal, 12.15) shows dog tags with what looks like blood stains at first, but upon closer study is a reflection of the burning oil wells in Kuwait that Iraqi troops ignited at the end of the Iraq war of ’91…very neat.
It’s also clear that the tone and texture is going to be very male and gritty, especially with that slogan. It’s an encouraging take-it-or-leave-it way to start things off.
The contrast with the one-sheet for Rob Reiner’s Rumor Has it (Warner Bros., 12.25) couldn’t be sharper. Reiner’s film is for couples and women and maybe guys, if it’s funny. Jarhead is…well, I’d like to think that women will get into it also.
Still The Shit
I’ve written so much about Hustle & Flow I’m starting to bore myself, but this is the weekend and now’s the time. I saw it with my son and a couple of his friends at the sneak last Saturday night, and I felt the same satisfied vibe from the people walking out…the same one I’ve been feeling since last January.
This movie sells ideas about life and creativity that may not be true, but people sure as hell want to believe them…I know that. We’ve all got pain in our hearts and poetry in our souls and it’s never too late to make your move, etc,
Terrence Howard and Taraji P. Henson in Craig Brewer’s Hustle & Flow.
In a perfect world the response this weekend would trash the idea that Craig Brewer’s pic is primarily an African American rap movie that’ll play best with non-whites. Bullshit. It should do as well in Bangor, Maine, and Tempe, Arizona, as it does in Memphis, Tennessee. It is so much more than what you think it might be.
Hustle & Flow is as grittily rendered as a formula film can get, and that’s a good combination. By my standards it’s a fairly honest portrait of who and what people are deep-down and how it all works out there, but it’s also a film out to please. It’s got some laughs and some good music and good people in it, and a happy ending.
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In other words, formula can be intriguing. To say you’ve “seen this kind of film before” means nothing. The question must always be, “How well was it made, and how much did you care?”
It’s worth it alone for Terrence Howard’s D-Jay, a flawed, at times brutally insensitive guy in a classic do-or-die struggle to make it as a rap artist. This is really Howard’s time…he’s off and on his way. I hope the Cinderella Man crap-out doesn’t stop that Joe Louis film he’s supposed to make from getting funded.
Anthony Anderson is almost as good as Howard…so good he’s made me wonder more than once why he’s made so many throwaway piece-of-shit movies during his career. Costars Taryn Manning, DJ Qualls, Taraji P. Henson and Ludacris make it play true and steady and right as rain.
Hustle director Craig Brewer, producers Stephanie Allain and John Singleton just after first public showing at last January’s Sundance Film Festival.
Every frame of this movie says, “You know what we’re doing…this guy wants to climb out of his crappy situation and maybe we’re gonna show him do that…but we’re gonna do it in a way that feels right to us.”
And once D-Jay hooks up with Anderson and Qualls and starts to put together a sound and record a few tracks, Hustle & Flow is off the ground and pretty much stays there, suspended.
Forget the funky backdrops and gritty-ass particulars — is there anyone out there who can’t relate to a character who feels stuck in a tired groove and wants to do more with his/her life? Is there anything more commonly understood these days?
Whatever you might expect to feel about D-Jay, he is, by the force of Howard’s acting and Brewer’s behind-the-camera input, utterly real and believable, and even with his anger and brutality you can’t help but root for him. And, for that matter, the film.
Lazy Ass
I didn’t dislike The Bad News Bears. Didn’t love it, didn’t mind it, didn’t hate it…half went with it.
Billy Bob Thornton has been in shittier films and will be again. He’s another nihilist drunk this time, but he’s also an ex-baseball player who used to be good and has retained a certain poise and centeredness. He’s loaded but smooth about it.
I would be ashamed if I were Richard Linklater, who made a much-better studio jerkoff movie called School of Rock a couple of years ago, not to mention the sublime Before Sunset, a film that anyone would be proud of. But of course, I’m not Richard Linklater.
As Thomas Becket says in the movie, “Honor is a private matter, and each man has his own version of it.”
I said to The Bad News Bears about ten or fifteen minutes in, “Okay, you don’t care that much about showing me a really good time, but you’re mildly entertaining here and there. So I’m just gonna sit here and be mildly satisfied and nod off if I feel like it and let it go at that.”
What this is is a decent lazy movie, like a friend who comes over and does nothing but eat potato chips and watch movies without saying too much. He/she is never going to accomplish anything big or invite you to climb mountains in Austria, but he/she is a good soul and you like him/her and that’s good enough.
There are movies that are so slovenly and dumb-assed that they stink. The Bad News Bears is only half-assed bad. According to my system, that means it’s also half-assed good.
I can actually see renting the DVD in December, or watching this thing on a plane someday with the headphones on (as opposed to my standard habit of watching films without sound and seeing how expressive and particular they can be on purely visually terms).
Lifeboat Again
During our brief chat last week about the October release of Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat on DVD, Fox Home Video publicist Steve Feldstein didn’t tell me the precise date. Come to think of it, he didn’t even tell me the month. I’ve since learned from other sources that this special-edition DVD will be in stores on Tuesday, October 18th.
The boilerplate rundown on this disc, passed along at DVD Answers, doesn’t say anything about a digital remastering, but it’s inconceivable that some kind of visual improvement wasn’t pushed through by Fox’s resident preservationist Shawn Belston.
The extras will include a commentary by USC film studies professor Drew Casper, a generic “Making of Lifeboat” featurette (no word if Hitchcock specialist Laurent Bouzereau, who’s directed many making-of featurettes for other Hitchcock DVDs, was hired to do this particular one), the theatrical trailer and a still gallery.
It’s interesting that Fox has taken a shot of the lifeboat survivors in the film, colorized them and lightened them somewhat, and put them onto a wide-angle shot of a placid moonlit sea. A very pretty image. Intriguing, attractive…but my recollection is that nothing remotely like this is seen in the Hitchcock film.
My earlier Lifeboat commentary ran last week, and here it is…just scroll down to the lower part of the page.
Severin
If you haven’t yet decided to see Gus Van Sant’s Last Days this weekend (along with Craig Brewer’s Hustle & Flow, of course), maybe this will put you in the mood. I just listened to it myself, and I’m half-inclined to see Days for the fourth time. Either you hear it or you don’t.
Spanning Decades
“I rented L’Eclisse maybe three months ago, right after the Criterion DVD came out, mainly because it was an Antonioni picture but also because of recommendations I read on several websites, including yours. It’s also present in Scorsese’s documentary on Italian cinema.
“I watched it and granted it was kind of hard at times, but as you said it was unforgettable, especially the final minutes of it and all the stockholder bidding scenes.
“Since then I’ve been trying to spark some interest among my friends to see this film, or any Antonioni movie they can find, and it’s definitely not happening. It’s the same with Kurosawa, Fellini, Tarkovsky, Dassin and everything that is old.
Monica Vitti, Alain Delon in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’ecclise
“I can’t say there’s a definite ‘no way’ attitude about it, but there’s not a real interest in it. It’s a generational thing, but these people are supposed to be interested in film (like your film students) and Kill Bill is not the end of the rainbow, you know.
“I just watched the War Trilogy of Wadja and I’m stunned at how accesible and just beautiful to look at those films are, and it’s been impossible to convince anyone of my age to see them. I go to rent movies, and all these great old ones are just sitting there and all these young “hipsters” are fighting each other to rent ,Party Monster or Lost in Translation.
“But now there’s a lot of interest in seeing Last Days, so maybe we’re onto something.
“Anyway, even though not many people my age care or would appreciate the greatness of L’Eclisse, I just wanted to drop a line saying that everything’s not lost cause I’m 25 and completely loved that one, and when I saw those final minutes of empty streets and wandering strangers in silence, it felt liberating, like cinema has no boundaries or something like that.
“It’s kind of like the feeling you get from Kubrick movies, and 8 1/2, and if film students are not watching these films and others as good, well, they should.” — Alexandro Aldrete, Monterrey, Mexico.
Christians
“I wish you wouldn’t waste your energy and column space sparring with the Christian Right. They are indeed wacko, in addition to being hypocritical and naive. You can bet your ass you will not see Mark from Boston in an Iraqi foxhole anytime soon.
“The Christian right is not interested in compassion, the basic message of Christ. James Dobson, et. al. are more interested in declaiming themselves as members of a Chosen Few Network, and then lording it over the rest of us.
“You can go ahead and inhale NASCAR fumes, lay your concrete or other low value-added job, and be xenophobic. But there are engineers in China and India who soon will be able to dictate our standard of living. And they don’t give a scrap about Jesus.
“So Christian Right lads & lassies, it’s not so much the content of your belief, but your constant, anachronistic mantra has distracted the United States from it’s traditional role as a progressive, rational, technologically superior, and respected nation.
“I disagree with D. Tucker also. I believe the Christian right would vote for a Democratic candidate if and when the bottom falls out of this deficit economy and they have no money for Wal Mart.” — Arizona Joe
“I’ve enjoyed reading your column for several months now, despite my wincing occasionally at some of your condescending prose regarding middle-American Christians. However, you’ve taken it a little too far this week with your denigration of Doug Liman’s “cool hip Christians” comment. What you said has seemed ignorant and offensive, at least to this Christian.
“So I’m removing Hollywood Elsewhere from my list of bookmarks. Just thought you might want to know your arrogance has lost you at least one reader. But since you automatically presume I’m a badly dressed, strangely smiling automaton, you probably won’t mind too much.” — Todd Wicks, Detroit, Michgan.
Wells to Wicks: No, I’m sorry you’re leaving. Sort of.
“Regarding your comment about middle-American Christians dressing horribly, I would blame that more on retail sales than on religion. Trends seem to hit the United States in New York and Los Angeles and work their way inland. By the time a trend is popular in the Midwest, there’s something new on the coasts.
“Availability is another problem. I’m an avid GQ reader, and if I see
something nice in, say, the July issue, odds are I have to get it from a place in New York or LA or maybe Chicago. I think the reason many small-town Midwesterners, Christian or not, dress poorly is that their only choices are the clothes available at their local Wal-Mart.
“I enjoy your column. It’s turned me on to quite a few decent films, most recently Crash — my favorite of 2005 so far.” — John Wilson, Des Moines, Iowa
Wedding Payoffs
“You’re right about the third act in Wedding Crashers killing the steam, but don’t most comedies go that way? Even classic comedies have trouble maintaining the momentum of the first two acts because eventually you have to turn over jokes at the hands of the plot.” — Evan Boucher.
Wells to Boucher: Yes, generally speaking, most comedies turn it down and start playing their sincere cards (i.e., the ones that tell us what the main characters are really feeling) at the end of act two before cutting loose at the finale…Some Like It Hot, The Graduate, Jerry Maguire…all the great ones do this. But these three films, also, don’t seem to be wandering around and trying things out without much assuredness, as Wedding Crashers seems to do in its final act.
Boucher to Wells: Vince Vaughn and Rachel McAdams are the big winners here. Vaughn for being uniquely good at the rapid-fire dialogue and bringing out that affectionate duality (you love him because he’s a good guy and an asshole), which he should stick to for the rest of his career. And McAdams for being more unspecialized. She’s obviously talented, and one dividend of that is that she gives you more than what you think you’re going to get and seems pretty genuine.
“It’s funny that McAdams got her break in Mean Girls as the villain, then went to The Notebook for some chick-flick immersion and now this. Pretty good career path for diversification.”
Wells to Boucher: I think Owen Wilson got a pretty good bump also. The first time people stepped back and realize he’d formulated this witty, absent-minded Texas space-cadet character and had figured out the patent was when he did Shanghai Nights with Jackie Chan and it made money. The Wedding Crashers payoff is about people realizing his presence in comedies always results in a certain intellectual pedigree, and that Wilson can also do emotional sincerity and romantic stuff fairly well.
Boucher to Wells: “Yeah, but I get a different thing from him after this movie. I think that he is just about as good as whatever he’s reading. If it’s good (anything he writes with Wes Andersen, or this one, or Meet the Parents) he comes off as really being a plus for the film. But he certainly doesn’t look like he can carry anything, and he can’t really make something out of nothing.
Wells to Boucher: Aaah, but he can! Everything he’s in, he rewrites or tweaks in order to make that guy he always plays come off in a pithy-funny way. You never just hire Owen Wilson to just show up and act — he’s always the co-writer.
Boucher to Wells: Wilson has never had a success without Stiller or someone else to be the real draw. It might be an odd comparison, but maybe he’s slightly like Jason Alexander in the way that he can never be the man. The worst thing that could happen to this guy’s career is that with that bump you’re saying he’s getting off Wedding Crashers, that he will go back to believing he’s the man and make ten more Big Bounce‘s or Behind Enemy Lines-type things.”
Grabs
49th or 50th Street (forget which) between B’way and Seventh Ave. — Thursday, 7.21, 9:25 pm.
Unintentional shot taken on way out the 8th Ave. and 14th Street subway station — Sunday, 7.20, 6:25 pm.
Stinky, totally soaked aftermath of fire in small store on Canal Street near Lafayette — Saturday, 7.16, 11:40 pm.
The unkindest gossip of the last couple of days is that Katie Holmes either has hammer-toes or only four toes on one foot. It’s cruel to publicly criticize someone’s anatomy. (Private critiquing is another matter.) This close-up shot, which has been cropped from a larger photo, seems to dispel both notions. There was a woman I knew in the late ’90s who had hammer-toes, and I vividly remember standing in her kitchen once and fighting off the thought that her feet looked like an adult gorilla’s, except they were hairless. It would have been painful for her to have overhead this, but I used to refer to this woman in private conversation as “gorilla foot.” In any case, Holmes is not that and she has all five digits on both feet, so leave it alone.
Saturday, 7.16, 9:55 pm.
T-shirt worn by woman at Last Days party — Tuesday, 7.19, 11:20 pm. Cultural-animus sentiments allegedly taken from photo of graffiti snapped in 1979.
There’s only one slight pre-viewing problem with Must Love Dogs (which is sneaking Saturday night) and it’s not that big a deal, but it’s there. It’s my impression, based on the trailer, that John Cusack, one of my favorite guys, has put on a few pounds. He needs to get back to his Gross Point Blank weight.
Nice shot I happened to run across — obviously pre-9/11.
Actual page from press kit for Pretty Persuasion, a Samuel Goldwyn release due in August. I’m a huge fan of James Woods’ performance in Citizen Cohen. I thought he lent considerable dignity to the character of Nate Cohen, a Jewish businessman living in a small Texas down during the 1950s and ’60s who’s forced to deal with anti-Semitism.
49th or 50th and Seventh Ave. — Thursday, 7.21, 7:50 pm.
A guy said this to me (if not in this precise sequence) the other day. He knows this town and how it’s been evolving, etc. And in a moment of despair…
“It was going to be Deliverance in the Gobi desert. The script was about character with everyone slowly going insane as the days went on, and when the new plane was built the pilot is reluctant to fly it because the desert crash was his fault and his confidence is shot.
“And he couldn’t be Mel Gibson. If it was Gibson you’d want to see him do it. You’d be waiting for that.
“Then the studio said they wanted the Bedouins to come back and attack the plane at the last minute, just as they were trying to lift off. But hold on. If the baddy Bedouins are close enough to regroup and gather their forces they must be within shouting distance of some kind of half-civilized outpost, so why don’t the survivors just walk to wherever that is? That didn’t get through. The studio didn’t care about that.
“It was the first movie I ever worked on in which notes on the script were sent along by the head of marketing. Mainly because suddenly the movie was costing $60 million dollars. The average movie costs $65 million, and then it’s $35 million to open it.
“This business has become so wag-the-dog, so marketing driven. And with $60 million being spent no one can look like they’re really hurt or dying, no one can lose their minds, there can’t be any swearing, and no heavy character stuff.
“There was another stranded-in-the-desert thing called The King is Alive. It was a Dogma movie, didn’t cost anything, same basic deal, people stranded in the wilderness. But on a stripped-down budgetary level, Hollywood doesn√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩt know how to make a film like that. They don’t want to know, I mean.
“I’ve actually heard studio guys refer to drama as “the ‘d’ word.
“The phrase you always hear when it comes down to the crunch about whether to greenlight a movie is ‘let’s run the numbers.’ The new kind of studio heads like Jeff Robinov who are ex-studio agents, they all have the same matrix in their heads. They run their p and l’s, profit and loss projections, expectations of earnings in this market, that territory. And I’m telling you this mentality of running the numbers is killing the business.
“Bill Mechanic was the original guy on it, and Michael Mann and Eric Roth worked on it. But then Mann and Mechanic couldn’t come to terms on the deal. But it kept on. Five or six guys wound up writing it in stages.
“Remember when Jeffrey Katzenbeg was running Disney? All the movies started to feel the same? That’s what happening to the movie business as a whole now. They all have to meet the same requirements, and the audience is so chicken these days. Nobody wants to see what’s on the other side, and nobody wants exotic…not really. Everybody wants to see more-or-less familiar. And the adult film is being killed. Studios used to make genre films for adults, and that’s over now.
“We’re getting what we’ve asked for. We really are.
“If I were starting my career now, I would want to be David Chase. That’s who I’d want to be. Doing a show like The Sopranos is the only way to explore character and theme these days and make something that feels like art.
“The old-time executives would bet on a few really good films. Today’s executives have been programmed to skip the heartbeat part. Formula is all. Studio-level jobs are the worst jobs in the world. The way it’s decided, when things are sussed out, they’re all in the room together including the marketing guy, and he always has a very strong voice.
“It’s a free-market economy, and what’s being made is determined by what people want to see. There was this marketing guy who said to me once, “We’re trying to get a younger audience, so we’re retooling the campaign to get the 60 year-olds in.”
“If they were making Dog Day Afternoon today Sonny wouldn’t be robbing a bank to get money for a sex change operation for his lover. He’d need the money now to try and keep his son from dying of cancer.”
Baby Killers
The other shoe on Million Dollar Baby clomped down on the pavement a week or so ago. I’m referring to slams by three fairly heavy cats — Slate‘s David Edelstein, Salon‘s Charles Taylor and New York Press critic Armond White.
These guys are far from nutso. They’re sharp and witty samurais who are fully in touch with their aesthetic standards and can expertly slice and dice when they’ve a mind to.
It’s not that I disagree strongly with Taylor and Edelstein√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩs complaints, which boil down to things in this Clint Eastwood film that they find hokey, hard to swallow, manipulative or old-fashioned. White says the movie proves that Eastwood “thinks in simplistic terms that actually deny modern political complications.” He also describes Baby (or is he talking about the third-act turn?) as “the ghost of bogus Hollywood uplift.”
What these guys are saying is like spitting in the wind. They can take shots with their Anthony Mann Winchester repeat-action rifles and it doesn’t matter. If a movie works, you can feel it and there’s no disputing this. Million Dollar Baby may be this, that or the other thing, but it’s basically about a riveting third act that’s been extremely well set up.
As Taylor wrote, “You’re not prepared — even with the air of fatalism — for the jump from one shameless genre to another. It’s impressive, in the sense that a sucker-punch impresses itself on your skull.”
White says it’s all so hoary and predictable that when Eastwood eventually swings his left hook, gullible viewers are caught unawares. They respond inordinately, as if they’d just seen a ghost.”
With Regrets
“There is already buzz about Jane Fonda’s comeback in New Line’s comedy, Monster-In-Law,” Emanuel Levy wrote the other day.
“The most brilliant American actress of the 1970s has not acted since the disastrous Stanley and Iris in 1990,” he continued. “Fonda proves that, contrary to what Henry James said, there are second (and third and fourth) acts in American lives. Fonda is now beginning her next phase.”
I haven’t heard any buzz at all about Monster-in-Law but c’mon…it’s got Jennifer Lopez in the lead, which means there’s a built-in curse because the Gods are four-square against her these days, and there’s no defeating the Gods when they’re in this kind of mood.
Let me tell you about Jane Fonda’s 21st Century comeback, which is actually a case of a thrown-away opportunity along with a disappointing turndown, followed by a fallback decision to star in a who-knows? New Line comedy.
Last year Cameron Crowe offered Fonda an exquisitely written small part in his recently-wrapped Elizabethtown (Paramount, 7.29.05). It was the role of Hollie Baylor, the mother of Drew Baylor, the romantic lead played by Orlando Bloom.
Once Fonda let it be known a year and a half ago (or was it in early ’02?) that she was interested in getting back into acting, Crowe did everything he could to seduce her into playing the part. I’m told he went so far as to drive out to her ranch in New Mexico to personally deliver the script.
But Fonda felt there wasn’t enough to Holly. She had a point at the time. Early drafts made spare use of Holly in the first and second acts — her only big moment was a speech-before-the-family scene in the third act. Crowe understood what Fonda wanted but asked her to take the journey with him on faith, pledging that together they would fix the problems. Fonda hemmed and hawed but finally said no, and Susan Sarandon wound up taking the part.
If you’re a 60ish woman trying for a comeback, you can’t do better than play a plucky mom in a Cameron Crowe film. Opportunities simply don’t get any better than this, but Jane couldn’t show trust and shot herself in the foot. That’s a fact.
Then she tried to land the alcoholic mother role in Jim Brooks’ Spanglish, but Brooks wasn’t quite sure and asked her to read for the part, which Fonda did. Brooks turned her down, giving the role to Anne Bancroft instead. Then Bancroft had to drop out for health reasons and Cloris Leachman stepped in.
So Fonda took the part of Lopez’s nuptial adversary in Monster-in-Law. It might be a great little comedy and Fonda may be perfect in it, but the premise is basically Meet the Parents with Fonda in the Robert De Niro part. The director is Robert Luketic (Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!, Legally Blonde). Really…all kidding aside…how good does anyone honestly expect this film to be?
Blues Project
I’m okay. It√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩll all be over soon. Just one more week, and then New Year’s Eve and the final weekend, and then the system will start up again.
Christmas is great as an approaching emotional feeling, but when it finally gets here all you want is for it to be over. It�s good for reading books, though. Good for doing quiet-type things. Good for not hearing from anyone. Good for feeling the world has stopped. Good for bike riding, long walks, watching documentaries. Good for testing your mettle by not eating. For me, Christmas is apples and grapes and canned pineapples.
I spent a good part of Thursday editing and composing other columns (two), typing out invoices and insert orders, dealing with technical matters and wondering if it matters if I write a 12.24 column or not. I wish I had the character to blow it off during the down times.
I also watched Paul McGuigan’s Wicker Park on DVD. Not bad. At least it wasn√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩt a thriller. It doesn’t quite deliver as a relationship drama, and there’s no way it’s “a dangerously sexy thriller,” which is a quote from In Touch weekly on the front of the DVD cover.
But I wasn√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩt in agonizing pain watching it, and the leads — Josh Hartnett, Rose Byrne, Diane Kruger, Matthew Lillard — hold up their end fairly well.
Ship vs. Planes
There’s a scene in Titanic when Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack Dawson — an independent-minded, self-starting, vaguely bumpkinish guy who lives by his own rules — sits down with a bunch of white-tie swells in the first-class dining room. Jack’s a little intimidated at first, but he stands his ground by being himself and explaining a personal philosophy that’s hard to disagree with, which is to always “make it count.”
It’s not a great scene, but it’s a moderately satisfying one. It instills respect for Jack, and at the same time lends a certain warmth by saying that even the blue-bloods can relax and laugh at themselves and show respect for a guy who can look them in the eye.
There’s a scene in The Aviator when DiCaprio’s Howard Hughes — vaguely bumpkinish, independent-minded, self-starting, living by his own rules — sits down with a bunch of Connecticut swells, or rather the family of his girlfriend, actress Katharine Hepburn.
Howard’s a little intimidated at first, but the Hepburns are absurdly rude and snooty to him, which eventually leads to his getting testy and a little bit rude himself.
“We don√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩt care about money here, Mr. Hughes,” says Mrs. Hepburn.
“That’s because you have it,” Howard answers.
“Would you repeat that?”
“You don’t care about money because you have it,” he says again. “And you’ve always had it. My father was dirt poor when I was born…”
“Back in torrid Houston, this would be?” asks Mrs. Hepburn.
“Oh, shut up,” snaps Howard.
“Howard!” Kate exclaims.
“I care about money, Mrs. Hepburn, because I know what it takes out of a man to make it,” Howard continues. “Now if you’ll excuse me I have some aviation nonsense to take care of.”
And then he gets up and bolts out of the room like a six year-old. Kate joins him later on for a croquet game on the back lawn. “I think father rather likes you,” she tells him. “But really, though…you can√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩt retire from the field of battle like that or they’ll never respect you.”
Exactly. Nobody likes a quitter. I suppose this scene (written by John Logan) was meant to act as a counter-weight to the scene at the end when Hughes boldly jousts with Senator Owen Brewster (Alan Alda) in front of a battery of cameras and microphones. But I don’t get why a guy with the balls to slap down an aggressive politician can√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩt handle himself better with the Hepburns. It doesn’t add up.
A lot of serious-minded critics are saying The Aviator is a near-great film that should win director Martin Scorsese his long-overdue Oscar. They’re dreaming. The dinner-with-the-Hepburns scene is one reason it doesn’t make it. The stylish thing over the last five or six years among critics has been to loathe Titanic, but it’s a far more satisfying thing to watch than The Aviator.
Voice Critics Poll
“Something about that poll seems to bring out the cunty side of too many critics. The snarky comments turn me off; they often dehumanize actors, filmmakers and devalue the sincerity of movies the critics don’t happen to respond to.
“Some of the participants behave like the smart-ass outsider kids in high school who were shut out of the school’s power elite, and avenged themselves by congregating at a particular cafeteria table and making shitty remarks about everyone else in the room, or by going to a school dance and not dancing, but standing off to the side and making fun of everybody else’s dancing.
“That kind of behavior makes the participants feel more powerful, but the power is illusory, and it inadvertently validates other peoples’ negative opinions of them. The Voice poll is a good idea in theory, but in practice I think it gives the general public one more reason to think of critics as smug, elitist bastards.” — Respected New York film critic
How Bad is This?
“As a holiday treat, I took my staff to see a matinee showing of Meet The Fockers. No wonder why Dustin Hoffman referred to it as ‘this thing.’
“There were definitely a few amusing scenes in it — I laughed mildly at those. But it was such a blown opportunity — most of the jokes fell flat and it was full of the most awful ethnic stereotyping I’ve seen in a movie in years. While the Byrnes (DeNiro and Danner) are still the uptight, conservative couple, the portrayal of their opposites was positively offensive.
“This movie probably set back blue-state causes 100 years. The Fockers are portrayed in the film as the most obnoxious, overbearing, nosy and loud Jewish couple on the Eastern seaboard. Their sentences are filled with Yiddish and Hebrew words, and stereotyped ethnic intonation (especially Streisand), that you really had to wonder what country this couple was born in.
“Hoffman is supposed to be a former 60’s radical from Detroit, but every other word out of his mouth was Yiddish or Hebrew — what baby boomer in their 60’s talks like this? Streisand was saying ‘buballeh’ all the time — you’ve got to be kidding!!
“Clearly the movie was meant to have this ‘blue state’ versus ‘red state’ understory, and you could see there was real potential to explore that — but it barely got out of the gate. Teri Polo looks awful compared to the original film — her makeup looks bad and she looks like she’s aged more than a few years. Stiller and DeNiro sleepwalk. I was most excited to see Hoffman, and it was great to see him in a broad comedy — but NOT THIS ONE, in retrospect.
“Frankly, I don’t understand how Hoffman and Streisand, who are both Jewish, would have bought into this ludicrous script and portrayal of their own people. I guess I can play Devil’s Advocate and say ‘This is a comedy and these guys are supposed to be stereotypes.’ But it’s just so extreme in their case that I’m just waiting for the B’nai Brith to go on the warpath.
“Spare yourself.√ɬØ√Ǭø√Ç¬Ω — Drew Kerr
Wes
“Regarding Christopher Lee’s thoughts on The Life Aquatic and Bill Murray’s comment that he had to see his own movie three times before he ‘got it’, that’s been the same experience I’ve had on all of Wes Anderson’s movies.
“The first time I watched Bottle Rocket, Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, my reaction was, ‘This is it? this is what the fuss is all about?’ And then you watch the movies again and again, and they grow on you.
“Tenenbaums is now one of my favorite movies and I have endless admiration for Wes Anderson, a director talented enough to actually pull meaningful performances out of two of the 21st century’s most irritating and overrated actors, Ben Stiller and Gwyneth Paltrow.” — Michael Zeigler.
“There’s a reason people have to watch Wes Anderson’s movies multiple times (except Bottle Rocket). With every new feature there is less and less narrative flow, less and less development — merely a collection of fully formed, isolated characters that barely interact with one another.
“Once the disconnected vignettes or emotional set-pieces (like car chases in an action film) are seen once and it is clear that they do not form a cohesive whole (except in terms of tone), then upon second and third viewing the audience doesn’t have to worry about ‘where is this film going?’ or ‘what does this all mean?’
“The repeated viewings are therefore like putting on a comfortable pair of shoes, and thus easier on the viewer and so the films sink in, regardless of the fact they seem to be merely tasteful collections of music videos. I don’t think this is a good thing at all, and I am a big Wes Anderson fan. He takes the easy way out and his films have less and less meaning.” — Craig Kaplan
Kissing Santa
“This time of year in Aspen is amazing. It’s Golddigger week (the last week) and you pretty much get every golddigger and high-end hooker in the country flocking to Aspen like swallows to Capistrano.
“I’ve met some of the contenders and there’s a real hierarchy. The best ones are bright, interesting, charming and very presentable. And very attractive. And worth it.
“The next level down is the aspiring actress type. Donald Trump goes for these women — the top level is out of his league.
“The next level down is a real Town and Country look and an attitude that suggests sophistication and breeding, but if you’ve ever known anyone with real sophistication and breeding you know they make an effort to act normal, not snotty. They’re kinda fascinating and sad. And usually from white trash stock. (They measure everything by dollar value). And when they get too old and haven’t found their scholarship, they can get pretty desperate.
“Next level down from the snotties are the expensive call girls with a slightly sleazy look, all in search of a meal ticket.” — Industry Guy Partying in the Rockies
Wells to L.A. Guy: I take it you’ve had an unsatisfying encounter with a Town and Country girl?
Maybe Baby
Take this with a very small grain, but remarks from a couple of actresses have upped my interest in Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby (Warner Bros., 12.15).
Paul Haggis’s script is a surrogate father-surrogate daughter relationship piece. It’s about an aged ex-prize fighter (Eastwood) who decides to train a young woman (Hilary Swank) who’s determined to box. Morgan Freeman plays Eastwood’s longtime pal and confidante…the character with the pithy sayings and sage ringside commentary.
Haggis’s script is said to be based upon two short stories from the novel “Rope Burns,” by F.X. Toole. The plot has always sounded to me like a riff on Karyn Kusama’s Girlfight, with maybe a tad less emphasis on the girl boxer and a bit more on her trainer.
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Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby
Laura Linney, whom I interviewed last Monday regarding her just-opened film P.S. (Newmarket, 10.15) and who played a blue-collar Lady Macbeth in Eastwood’s Mystic River, has told me Million Dollar Baby is “really good.”
Linney said this with a certain conviction. Not in some deadly earnest, you-must-believe-me way, but in a tone of voice that said, “Well, yeah…of course…what else would you expect?”
An agent friend who sat down with Hilary Swank the other day says Swank is starting to think Eastwood might snag a Best Actor nomination for his portrayal of the haggard ex-boxer. Her remark wasn’t intended for journalistic absorption, so maybe she meant it.
This is all just talk, of course, but hearing these comments in the same week made me go, “Hmmm…maybe.”
You know going in that an Eastwood film will have a planted focused quality… that down-to-it, no-funny-stuff sensibility he brings to all his films. Maybe this will have a bit more.
The 12.15 Million Dollar Baby opening will be platformed — New York, L.A., Chicago, Toronto. It’ll break wide in January `05.
Ethnic Impurities
Easily, without question, Maria Full of Grace (Fine Line) is one of the best films released this year, one of the finest foreign-language movies I’ve ever seen, and a great woman’s film bar none.
Maria is one of those deserving indie flicks — quiet, character-driven, no stars, Spanish-speaking — that needs all the help it can get. A few Oscar noms in January would help.
The story’s about a poor, independent-minded 17-year-old girl from rural Colombia (Catalina Sandino Moreno) who accepts a gig as a drug mule in order to escape a dead-end life. Being a mule involves swallowing 60 or so sealed pellets of cocaine just before flying off to an American city (New York City, in this instance), and then crapping them out when she arrives. For this she gets $5000, minus expenses.
The film shifts into second gear when Maria embarks on her maiden voyage. On the same trip is Lucy (Giulied Lopez), an experienced mule whom Maria has befriended. Things get tense and then tenser, then somebody dies and tough calls have to be made.
(l. to r.) Maria costars Guilied Lopez, Catalina Sandino Moreno, director Joshua Marston, costar Yenny Paola Vega at Sundance Film Festival Fine Line party, January ’04
Joshua Marston, the film’s director-writer, wrote a totally solid script, and got superb performances out of each and every player, Moreno in particular. It seems especially remarkable that the U.S.-based Marston made Maria feel like an organic, hand-made Colombian right down to the bone.
His story is about Colombian characters, and wholly believable ones at that. 99% of it was acted in Spanish by a mostly Colombian cast, with slightly more than half of it filmed in Bogota, Colombia, and in Amaguacha, Ecuador. (A bit less than half was shot in Queens, New York, in the Colombian section of town, and on a set simulating a Manhattan-bound jet.) It’s a movie that looks brown, talks brown, thinks brown.
But it’s ineligible for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar because the money and the behind-the-camera talent was too white.
This was essentially conveyed yesterday when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released their list of submitted foreign-language-feature entries.
Marston is a California Anglo (he went to the same high school as Angelina Jolie, Nic Cage, Lenny Kravitz, et.al.), a lot of the crew members were American, and four out of five companies that put up production cash were U.S.-based.
The Academy’s rejection of Maria Full of Grace as a Colombian film is “just technical,” says Fine Line marketing vp Marian Koltai-Levine. “It’s truly a technicality.”
The country of Colombia “supported it” and “wanted to submit it,” she adds.
Fine Line is unbowed, says Koltai-Levine. “We’re still running Academy campaigns on Catalina as Best Actress and Josh as Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay…we’re going for it.”
Foreigners
Which of the 49 films submitted for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar have the most heat? I asked around yesterday, picked up some hints.
The two films most likely to be nominated are Alejandro Amenabar’s The Sea Inside (Fine Line), a Spanish-produced right-to-die drama with an Oscar-calibre lead performance by Javier Bardem, and Yimou Zhang’s House of Flying Daggers (Sony Pictures Classics), a visually operatic actioner from the Chinese director of Hero.
After these two it gets dicey.
Jan Hrebejk’s Up and Down, submitted by the Czech Republic, is said to be “a humanist cycle-of life” movie that “may play a bit too familiar…it’s good but has been done and seen before.”
Jorgen Leth and Lars von Trier’s The Five Obstructions, a Danish entry and a critical favorite at film festivals over the past year or so, is being dissed as too much of an elitist, smarty-pants exercise to draw any kind of groundswell support.
Bernd Eichinger’s Downfall, a German feature about the last days of Hitler (played by Bruno Ganz) in the Berlin bunker, is said to depict the Nazi leader in a way that may seem overly sympathetic (i.e., too vulnerably human) to industry mainstreamers, which, if true, means it’s toast.
The general Hollywood Jewish community rule is that Hitler can be portrayed only as a warhead of pure evil, straight from the molten caverns of hell. Downfall is based on the documentary Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary, based solely on the recollections of Traudl Junge, a Hitler assistant who was with him right to the end.
Nimrob Antal’s Kontroll, a Thinkfilm release from Hungary, ought to be one of the five. It’s a strong, stylistically nervy thing with a richly developed theme…except that Academy handicappers think it’s too strong and nervy, and they apparently feel the murky underground-subway milieu is a bit much. Go figure.
Brazil’s Olga, a true-life tale with a Holocaust undercurrent, is said to be shamelessly cornball, so it may have a chance. (HE’s Pablo Villaca wrote about this in his “Burden of Dreams” column two or three weeks ago — he said it was embarassing that the Brazilians bigwigs had submitted it.)
Timur Bekmambetov’sNight Watch, a big-budget submission from Russia, is kind of a Hollywood-style special effects fantasy thriller. A publicist tells me it’s set in present-day Moscow and is about “aliens who come down.” The IMDB says it’s about “forces that control daytime and nighttime doing battle.”
Night Watch has been a big hit in Russia, but will the Academy’s foreign branch want to salute a non-nativist Russian film trying to ape Big Hollywood? Fox Searchlight is releasing it sometime in ’05 — they couldn’t say when.
Blue Dog
I was finishing up the column this morning (10.22) and having a perfectly miserable time FTP-ing the photos when a Fed Ex guy came by with a package from Universal — a VHS of the new Meet the Fockers trailer. So I stopped working and popped it in.
Uh-huh, uhm-hmm, funny, funny, uh-huh…yeah, yeah, okay…whoa, FUNNY! A mix of toilet water and pet cruelty, and I was laughing for 15 or 20 seconds after the spot ended. I ran the tape three more times just to replay this one bit.
Except now it’s out there (I guess the trailer will be online before too long) and everyone will know about it going in, and so the movie won’t be quite as funny now.
That’s the trailer business for you — give away the money material in hopes that the audience will pay to see the film in order to get more. One hopes.
The invisible subtitle of this film is “Meet the Jews, Accept Them Into Your Family, and Sacrifice the Purity of Your Wonderbread Bloodline.”
The premise has been drilled into everyone’s head, but maybe someone’s been napping.
Having given their blessing to their daughter Pam’s (Teri Polo) wedding to neurotic male nurse Greg Focker (Ben Stiller), ex-CIA wacko Jack Byrnes (Robert De Niro) and wife Dina (Blythe Danner) travel to Detroit to meet the Greg’s touchy-feely liberal wacko parents, Bernie and Roz Focker (Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand).
Meet the Fockers (Universal) opens on 12.22.
North, Part 2
Here I am finally writing about the entirely agreeable, smoothly run Mill Valley Film Festival, which I visited last weekend. It began on 10.7 and wrapped on 10.17…the usual ten days of screenings, q & a’s, parties, etc.
Mark Fishkin, the festival’s founder and executive director, picked up the phone last Sunday morning to suss things out a bit. The main subject was how Fishkin and his team managed to keep the festival going despite the collapse of the roof of one of the theatres inside the festival’s prime venue, Mill Valley’s Sequoia Theatre, in mid August.
The Sequoia’s owner, Century Cinemas, “was extremely optimistic that they could have it repaired before the festival began,” says Fishkin, “and the optimism was so great that there was no hint that it might not happen in time. As it was, we were told this about two hours before the press conference began.”
Century partly made up for this by providing two screens at the Century Northgate in northern San Rafael.
The rest of the festival schedule played at the first-rate San Rafael Film Center, which is owned and operated by the Film Institute of Northern California (also the parent org of the annual MVFF). The theatre is located on 4th Street in downtown San Rafael, and is know for its top-notch projection and sound quality. (I can attest to these personally.)
Switching everything around at the last-minute cost the festival an extra $20,000, says Fishkin.
I Heart Huckabees director David O. Russell showed up on opening night. Mike Leigh and likely Best Actress Oscar nominee Imelda Staunton dropped by to talk about Vera Drake. Alfred Maysles visited and gave a “master class” on documentary filmmaking. Laura Linney flew in for a day to talk about P.S.. Gena Rowlands stopped by, and so did Kinsey director Bill Condon.
Fishkin founded the MVFF in 1977. The festival has twelve regular staffers based in Mill Valley. The work force goes up to 27 or so in June, and then up to 100 during the festival run, along with the efforts of some 300 volunteers.
“It’s like making a movie every year, but you don’t end up with a negative,” Fishkin says.
Tom Luddy’s semi-secluded, non-competitive Telluride Film Festival was Fishkin’s inspiration when he started the MVFF in ’77. “Our atmosphere is still like that of a destination festival, but the numbers are more like an urban festival,” he says. The attendance this year was 40,000. The highest ever tally was 43,000.
Fishkin acknowledges the obvious fact that film festivals have exploded across the American landscape over the last decade. “First everyone wanted to write the Great American Novel, and then direct their own Hollywood movie,” he says. “Now everyone wants to manage their own film festival.”
Hell You Say
I nominate Tom Cruise to play the part of Lars Von Trier’s spiritually anguished American biologist in Antikrist,, which the provocative Danish helmer plans to shoot after finishing Manderlay, the second part of his Amerika trilogy.
In fact, I insist on this happening…even if Cruise can’t fit it into his schedule.
Peter Aalbek Jensen, von Trier’s producer, said earlier this week (I popped this into the WIRED column on Thursday morning) than the plan is to finish Antikrist in time to show it at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival.
This means Cruise probably can’t do it, since he’ll be making Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds and then Mission Impossible 3 through most of ’05. Because he’ll need to do something solemn and arty after these two, and a good von Trier would be just what the doctor ordered.
The Cruise idea is just a floater from Sweden, but von Trier is looking for a major American actor for the lead, and he went with Nicole Kidman for Dogville, so why wouldn’t he try for Cruise?
Jensen called Antikrist a “horror film.” Knowing von Trier, I’m guessing the horror will be more of a philosophical than a hair-raising thing.
Jensen told a Swedish reporter that Antikrist will “put an end to the big lie that God created the world,” and explore the more compelling view is that “it was Satan who created the human race and the world.”
There’s no script yet apparently, but according to a story in the Danish daily Berlingske Tidende , the plot will be about an American biologist who develops a fear of nature, finding it to be a place of evil, and starts seeking therapeutic help.
As Antikrist develops, von Trier’s theory of Satan being the true father and creator will be explored.
There’s a more detailed piece about this in the Swedish newspaper daily Dagens Nyheter .
Aristotle and Alexander
“Your question about whether Oliver Stone’s Alexander might capture “the bedrock faiths and realities of the time and culture in which he lived is a good one. But is Aristotle a significant player in the film? He should be. The `father of rational thinking’ certainly had a hand in creating the world conqueror, as he was Alexander’s personal tutor during his early teen years.
Aristotle believed in the City State idea, and this thinking was diametrically opposed to the philosophy Alexander later adopted. Aristotle believed that the Greek citizen was superior to others, and he held a condescending attitude towards other cultures, particularly Persians. Alexander came to embrace other cultures, albeit through conquest.
“When Alexander, in the name of cultural harmony, ordered several thousand of his Greek soldiers to take Persian wives, and to consummate their marriages by fornicating on the side of a hill, Aristotle must have come unglued. (I’ll bet that scene isn’t in the film).” — Ron Cossey, Studio City.
Distant Drum
“I’m not surprised that Charles Taylor hated Sideways I went to college with the guy (Connecticut College, class of ’83) and in those days he pretty much despised all contemporary filmmakers except Brian De Palma. (He put Dressed to Kill and blow out in the same category as The Godfather and Nashville.)
“I like Charlie and I think he’s a good writer, but calling Alexander Payne `a pretentious wiseass’ is like calling David O. Russell `formulaic.’ It makes him look stupid.” — C. Hashagen
Wells to Hashagen: DePalma acolytes are a weird bunch. They’re like born-again Christians. They’ve seen the light and you haven’t.
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