The first screening of the day, KStew‘s Camp X-Ray, happens 45 minutes from now (12:30 pm) at Park City’s Eccles auditorium. Three more at the Eccles will follow — God’s Pocket, Laggies and Frank. Spotty, shitty or nonexistent wifi at the Eccles means fewer postings. Twitter if nothing else.
Four months ago in Cannes, my highly enthusiastic response to Walter Salles On The Road was a minority opinion. Which I didn’t give a damn about. I saw what I saw and knew what I knew. But Salles himself obviously agreed that it needed to be tweaked and modified as the Road screening here is 15 minutes shorter — 124 minutes vs. the 139-minute version shown in Cannes. I’m told last night that the film also has a whole new beginning. It opens in England on 9.21, and 12.21 stateside.
Poor RPatz is said to be distraught beyond measure and “questioning everything” in the wake of KStew’s betrayal of their relationship by…okay, not necessarily boinking but wallowing in some kind of squishy physical proximity with Snow White and the Huntsman director Rupert Sanders. He’s now reportedly hiding out at Reese Witherspoon’s $7 million ranch in Ojai.
Let me explain something here, and I’m doing so because the gossip rags never even glance in this direction. The worst thing you can possibly do on this planet is to be complacent and question nothing, and the best thing you can possibly do is to embrace an existentialist philosophy and question everything. So as painful as the last few days have been for him, RPatz has, if nothing else, experienced significant spiritual growth as a result of this trauma…and that’s not something that young guys tend to come by naturally. So he’s basically in a much better place plus he gets to hang out in Ojai for a while and maybe boink a local or two.
I’ve noticed, by the way, that if you stay at a friend’s place (i.e., a home or apartment that they own or are leasing but aren’t sharing with you) they don’t want you boinking anyone. They’ll never say so in so many words, but under their roof they want you to live a monastic and fastidious life of denial and book-reading and contemplation with constant dusting and cleaning. They don’t want any heated activity or discharges of any kind, which they feel will sully or stain their place on some permanent level even with the cleaning of sheets and the use of Glade air fresheners and a top-tier cleaning service. A word to the wise.
My initial thought was to avoid Eclipse altogether, considering the awful time I had with New Moon last November. But with four sources — Variety‘s Peter Debruge, the Hollywood Reporter‘s Kirk Honeycutt, EW‘s Nicole Sperling and Lynette Rice and Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson — claiming it’s the best Twilight pic yet, I’ve decided to catch tonight’s all-media.
The reason for the uptick, they’re all saying, is director David Slade. I was down with Slade’s Hard Candy but not so much 30 Days of Night .
I’m most impressed by Honeycutt’s praise considering the fact — I need to put this delicately — that he can be a bit of a grump at times. (Like someone else I could name.) I’m figuring if a half-grumpy guy says a popcorn franchise flick like this is okay, you can half-trust him. But you can’t trust positive-minded people who smile and laugh and hug their friends and always say the glass is half-full. I’ll trust happy-face people when it comes to smaller films, the theory being that if a person with a relentlessly sunny attitude likes something that’s edgy or thoughtful or darkly trippy then it might have that open-window element that draws people in.
“While Catherine Hardwicke did a strong job establishing the franchise, Slade is by far the best director,” Thompson says. “And the story of Eclipse, adapted per usual by Melissa Rosenberg, is far more satisfying and well-structured than New Moon, [and] the central love triangle, as both men press their suits with Bella, is front and center. All three actors are comfortable with their characters, and Slade finds the right balance of action and romance; the story feels organic.”
The one “uh-oh” is Honeycutt’s line that “the CG wolves, huge creatures whose ferocity fails to mask their tenderness, are very cool.” That’s an ixnay, I’m afraid, if they’re the same size as the New Moon wolves. Those were the silliest-looking beasts I’ve ever seen in a supernatural fantasy film, bar none. And what does Honeycutt mean about “tenderness”? Wolves can’t be tender except to their own young.
Like a Gatling gun, the names of the Seven Dwarfs: Sleepy, Grumpy, Doc, Wheezy, Snoopy, Sleazy, Happy, Dopey, Bashful…wait, that’s nine.
Much of what’s wrong with New Moon seems tracable to director Chris Weitz. In the view of L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan, Weitz is a “polished” and “smooth professional who makes the vampire trains of Melissa Rosenberg‘s capable script run on time, but he almost seems too rational a director for this kind of project. This lack of animating madness combined with the novel’s demands give much of New Moon a marking-time quality.”
It was precisely this animating madness, a kind of “crazy-in-love energy” that made Twilight work as well as it did, Turan believes. (As do I.) All of this seemed to come from original director Catherine Hardwicke, whom Turn calls “a filmmaker of intense, sometimes overwhelming and out of control emotionality who seemed to feel these teenage characters in her bones.”
The reason Weitz recently told Moviemaker magazine that he might hang it up before too long, or so I suspect, is that deep down he knows he dropped the ball and screwed the pooch. “I still feel that I’m learning,” he says, “and yet I also feel that the number of aspects that go into making a film of the sort that I’m making now have become so multifold that it’s really exhausting.
“Every time I make a movie I’m pretty much convinced it’s the last time I’m going to be able to do it and that really it’s a rather silly occupation to undertake. But I think I have maybe one more film in me.”
He also talks about wanting to “learn to be a better surfer,” and “learn to speak Spanish fluently…I’d like to travel around, live in Italy; I’d like to learn kung fu…It’s nice to make movies, but it’s also really hard.”
Weitz is also talking about the arduous making of The Golden Compass, and how his New Line cinema bosses were awful to deal with and how the failure of that film kind of broke his spirit. But his more recent New Moon experience is obviously weighing on his mind right now, and we all know that people don’t talk about wandering around Europe and eating elegant dinners at sunset and becoming better surfers unless their souls are in need of healing.
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