Yo, Spike — Are You Offering Online Screeners of Ledger Doc?

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I Am Heath Ledger, an affectionate tribute doc featuring rare footage + the usual interviews with family, friends and colleagues, will premiere later at the Tribeca Film Festival. It will also pop in select theaters on 5.3 before airing on the Spike channel on Wednesday, 5.17.

From “If Ledger Had Lived,” posted on 1.4.14: “Ledger, man…I still think about the guy. I was thinking how things might have gone for him if he was alive and crackling today. What films he might have made, what roles he might have stolen from whomever actually played them. He died about two weeks shy of six years ago” — i.e., 9 years and 3 months ago as of 4.5.17.

“I was covering Sundance ’08 but I’d came down with a 48-hour fever. I was my second year at the old “cowboy hat” establishment (i.e, the Star Hotel). Unable to sleep because of muscle ache but unable to relax…lying on a couch in a state of depressed delirium.

“Then the news broke and I knew I had to write something. I couldn’t blow it off. Had to post as soon as possible. I was only able to bang out two or three graphs before collapsing on the couch for a breather, and then another two or three. I could barely think, much less write.

“What kept me going were my feelings of sadness mixed with anger toward the guy. I half-knew him a bit. We’d met in Toronto in ’05. He liked a Brokeback Mountain question I’d asked at the big press conference. I liked him as far as it went. He was always friendly whenever we ran into each other at events. Eye-contact, shoulder pat. And he was gifted. He had ‘it.’ And then he threw it all away because he got sloppy with prescription pills. Brilliant.

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Transcend Hate, Turn The Other Cheek, etc.

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We all know that the path to serenity is only accessible by forgiving your enemies and forsaking dreams of revenge, but what kind of movie would Shane have been if Alan Ladd and Van Heflin had forgiven the Ryker brothers and ignored the fact that Jack Palance had murdered Elisha Cook, Jr.? God help us if we can’t get past our real-life animosities, but drama is not, as a rule, advanced by characters showing mercy and forgiveness and offering olive branches.

Would The Godfather, Part II have felt satisfying if Al Pacino‘s Michael Corleone had decided to adopt a comme ci comme ca attitude about his enemies and maybe invite them over for Thanksgiving? How would it have been if High Noon‘s Gary Cooper had decided to greet the Frank Miller gang with open arms and an offer to sit down and hash things out?

Drama is about pressure, conflicts and choices, and sometimes about doing the hard but right thing, and surely a play or movie is nothing without a prevailing sense of justice at the end. 

The interesting thing about The True American, a forthcoming Pablo Larrain film about a profound act of forgiveness on the part of Raisuddin Bhuiyan, a Bangladesh immigrant who was shot and nearly killed in Dallas by self-described “Arab slayer” Mark Stroman, is that it doesn’t deliver classic payback. And yet it ends on a note of both justice and compassion — a curious hybrid in movie terms.

Larrain’s film will be based on Anand Giridharadas‘ “The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas.” Tom Hardy will play Stroman. You know who should play Bhuyian? Definitely The Big Sick‘s Kumail Nanjiani. I’m surprised his casting wasn’t announced in the press release.

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Fatal Attraction Again

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Producer friend: “Of course you know that the original filmed ending of Fatal Attraction had Glenn Close committing suicide and leaving a note behind that framed Michael Douglas for her ‘murder.’ The final scene is Douglas being taken away in handcuffs. The studio didn’t like the way it played and demanded that James Dearden write a new ending where Close is punished and Douglas gets off free. Close was so upset about the change that she refused to reshoot it, resulting in the studio threatening her with a massive lawsuit unless she complied. To this day Close loathes the movie and doesn’t even have it listed in her publicity bios.”

Me: “She really and truly doesn’t have Fatal Attraction listed in her studio bios? That’s ridiculous. That movie, manipulative and cheap as it was in some respects, was a high-impact H-bomb in cultural terms. It totally made her career. If Close hadn’t broken out of her domestic mom persona from The World According to Garp her career would have stalled. On top of which it wasn’t Paramount as much as advance-screening audiences who hated the original — HATED it. They loved it when Anne Archer got on the phone and told Close she’d kill her if she tries to destroy her marriage again. Read Sherry Lansing’s recollection in her new book. Test audiences wanted the witch to be killed.”

Producer friend: “Yes, of course — I know all this. My comments were about Close and how broken up she was about the change.”

Me: “Close needs to get down on her knees every day and thank God that she finally manned up and performed the exploitation ending. If she’d flat-out refused her career would have been toast 30 years ago, and she’d be doing off-Broadway stuff today, maybe, and living in a rent-controlled, one-bedroom Chelsea apartment, if that.”

Producer friend: “Of course I know this too. She was the 30th choice in line to play the part. No one in town wanted to play it. But not the point. My point was understanding why she was so upset. And remember that she got nominated for an Oscar for the role for a reason. Terrific job, total pro.”

Me: “Close was deeply upset because she thought Alex Forrest, however unbalanced, was a half-decent person who had a point…right? Alex Forrest was dangerously unhinged. Harboring a form of insanity. Hostility unbound. AF felt that because she and Michael Douglas ravaged each other over a single weekend that their fates were thereafter eternally intertwined — that their paths would henceforth be one and the same. Togetherness, parenthood…decreed by fate.

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Safer To Wait Until Your 70s

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Farley Granger didn’t come out until he was 70 or thereabouts, after discussing his homosexuality in The Celluloid Closet (’95). Tab Hunter half came out when he made John Waters‘ Polyester and Lust in the Dust, but not officially until ’05, at age 74, in a co-authored autobiography, “Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star.” Richard Chamberlain was outed at age 55 but didn’t come out until ’03 (when he was nearly 70) in his autobiography “Shattered Love“. Liberace, who died at age 67 from AIDS, might have come out if he’d lived into his 70s. Have there ever been any Barry Manilow fans who weren’t completely aware of his orientation going back to the late ’70s if not earlier, and yet he never came out until just now, at age 73. Deep-cave lifestyles are a generational thing for guys reared in heavily closeted times.

Fair Shake For Walter Hill’s The Assignment

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Recent e-mail from critic friend: Walter Hill‘s The Assignment (Saban, 4.7) is a real grindhouse sleeper. It deserves to find an audience. I know it’s taking heat from the LBGTQ community for ‘exploiting’ the issue of gender reassignment surgery etc. But I don’t recall the same complaints when Pedro Almodovar covered more or less the same territory, brilliantly and even more luridly, in The Skin I Live In. Michelle Rodriguez is terrific as the male gangland assassin transformed into a woman by Sigourney Weaver‘s mad scientist (Dr. Frankenstein meets Dr. Moreau) in full-throated Hannibal Lecter mode. It’s much better than anyone except for Todd McCarthy and a few others have let on.”

Posted on 9.17.16 from Toronto: “I just saw it, and it’s nowhere near as problematic as I’d been led to expect. Pulpy and crude, yes, but fairly intelligent, a little slow but far from ludicrous, and generally not bad. It’s way, way better than either of the Sin City flicks. Michelle Rodriguez with a beard looks like Oscar Isaac in Inside Llewyn Davis. I suspect that those time & place title cards along with those animated freeze-frames were tacked on in post. It also seems as if those Tony Shalhoub-interviews-Sigourney Weaver exposition scenes might have been shot after principal photography. I’ve already mentioned that the plot bears a certain similarity to Pedro Almodovar‘s The Skin That I Live In. If Sam Fuller was still around he could’ve made something like this.”

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The New Vaughn Meader

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The President Show (Comedy Central) kicks off on 4.27. Anthony Atamanuik does an excellent Trump, but Trump himself “does” Donald Trump. He’s his own parody. And how do you pronounce Atamanuik? (Like “automatic” without the “t” and ignoring the “u”, I’m presuming.) If I’d been in Atamanuik’s shoes I would have changed my last name to “Atomic” or “Adverse.” There are many, many people out there who don’t know who the late Vaughn Meader was. The poor guy’s bigtime career lasted a year and a half, from the spring ’62 release of “The First Family” to 11.22.63.

From Meader’s Wiki page: “According to several sources, Lenny Bruce went on with his 11.22.63 nightclub show as scheduled. Just hours after Kennedy’s death, Bruce walked onstage, stood silently for several moments, then said sadly, ‘Boy, is Vaughn Meader fucked.’ The joke proved true. Meader discovered that he was so completely typecast as a Kennedy impersonator that he could not find anyone willing to hire him for any of his other talents.”

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Son of Anthony Quinn’s “I’m Sick! I’m Sick!”

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I used to get stomach aches when I was seven or eight. I would eat too much of my grandmother’s cornbread and wind up groaning in my bed at 2 am or even throwing up. I haven’t suffered a stomach ache since. Occasional fevers but never any need for Maalox, Pepto Bismol, Ranitidine. Until last night, I should say. Today was worse. It felt like a hot copper coil was sitting in my stomach. My first thought was a possible ulcer, but don’t ulcers manifest gradually? Then I thought it might be stomach cancer, but that seemed overly dramatic. All I know is that I’ve felt weak all day (napped once) and barely able to write. As I noted 15 or 16 months ago, I don’t “do” illnesses as a rule. 10:30 pm update: Three or four hours ago “the pain stopped,” like Mia Farrow said in Rosemary’s Baby. I’m out of the woods.

They’re Remaking It Six Years Later?

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Deadline‘s Mike Fleming reported earlier today that Catherine Hardwicke may direct a Sony-financed remake of Gerardo Naranjo‘s Miss Bala, which I went nuts over when I saw it at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. Gina Rodriguez (the CW’s Jane The Virgin) will play the beauty contestant (Stephanie Sigman in Naranjo’s version) who gets dragged into the grotesque intrigues of a Mexican drug gang.

One, why did Hardwicke and Hollywood wait for six years to remake this thing? If a foreign film is adaptable for the U.S. market, producers knows this within days of its first festival screening and are usually all over it, and Miss Bala was highly praised, nominated for Best Foreign Language Feature. Two, Hardwicke is probably going to make it into something fairly different from Naranjo’s drug-dealer melodrama, which basically played like an early ’60s Michelangelo Antonioni film. And three, the Antonioni treatment is why Miss Bala felt like such a knockout. Remove the arthouse element and you just have a kidnapping action drama.

HE tweet from September 2011: “Naranjo has totally ignored the chaotic action aesthetic of Michael Bay and his acolytes, and delivered an action thriller with a truly elegant visual style. Long shots and almost no cut-cut-cut-cutting.”

Acting For The Audience Rather Than Engaging With The Reality Of A Scene

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Yesterday’s “Greatest Female Villains” post led me to this Fatal Attraction clip, and a realization of how unrealistic and miscalculated Michael Douglas‘s acting is in this scene.

Like any husband who’s indulged in an impulsive weekend affair Douglas would naturally be focused on keeping his wife, played by Anne Archer, in the dark. However angry he might be about finding Glenn Close chatting with her, not getting busted would be absolutely paramount. The normal way to handle this situation would be to play along, be polite, adopt a pleasant demeanor and not give Archer the slightest reason to suspect that something’s up.

But Douglas, performing under the direction of Adrien Lyne, plays it the stupid way. He’s rude and sullen, giving Close a death-ray look and saying as little as possible. In the real world Archer would spot in a second that Douglas and Close not only know each other but that some kind of bad business might have gone down.

Lyne didn’t care about that. He wanted Douglas to echo the same negative emotions that the audience was going through when they saw Close sitting with Archer, and to hell with anything else.

This, in a nutshell, is what mediocre directing and acting are all about. Ignoring recognizable human behavior and focusing on goosing the audience.

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Old Shoe Default

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The latest HE header logo is the old logo with the photo switched out. I’m fine with this. Site re-designs are traumatic — people always recoil and complain and ask “what was wrong with the original?” — so it’s good to keep the same old thing at the top.

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