Last Saturday (i.e., two days ago) I attended a Fox Searchlight press event at L.A.’s The Grove to promote the 6.17 release of the Grand Budapest Hotel Bluray, and more particularly to celebrate an all-Lego replica of the fictional hotel that was built by Ryan Ziegelbauer and a team of eight model builders. It took them 575 hours but it looks great. Ziegelbauer and Tony Revolori (who plays lobby boy Zero Moustafa in the film) posed for shots and gave interviews to a small group of journos. Honestly? I was into the Lego inventiveness but I was also hoping to snag a complimentary Bluray of the film. Nothing happened then and there, but a copy is arriving on my doorstep tomorrow. (Thanks, guys!) An after-reception was held at Morel’s French Steakhouse and Bistro, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t at least partly interested in some free vittles. But nothing was served except for little bowls of slightly-warmer-than-room-temperature French fries along with some kind of hors d’oeuvre that tasted a bit icky. I waited around for another 20 or so minutes and then unobtrusively slipped out.

(l.) Grand Budapest Hotel Lego architect/foreman/designer Ryan Ziegelbauer, (r.) Tony Revolori — Saturday, 6.14, 11:10 am.

I’m telling you right now I don’t want to see a movie about how Bowe Bergdahl was some kind of gentle, perceptive anti-war humanist who found the courage not to fight in Afghanistan any more and to abandon his post only to be captured by the Taliban, etc. No offense but I really don’t want to see anything like this. And I don’t want to see a movie about a dork who lives on his own planet either. I’m mentioning this because Deadline‘s Mike Fleming is reporting that two Bergdahl projects are gearing up, one from Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty partners Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal, and another one from Fox Searchlight with Todd Field (In The Bedroom, Little Children) attached to direct. The Field project will apparently be based on “America’s Last Prisoner Of War“, an investigative article by the late Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings.

No issues with Edgar Ramirez, a charismatic, first-rate actor who’s proved his mettle in Carlos and Zero Dark Thirty. I would simply prefer a biopic of Simon Bolivar as directed by Steven Soderbergh or Olivier Assayas. The Liberator “is a respectable, sprawling endeavor that covers nearly three decades of tumultuous events in the life of Simon Bolivar,” wrote Variety‘s Dennis Harvey. “Yet it lacks that essential spark that would turn it into a great biopic rather than a competent one, and make history seem alive rather than merely illustrated.”

Here’s a respectful but less than enthusiastic review from Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy.

In response to last week’s arrival of a hooded sweatshirt promoting Bennett Miller‘s Foxcatcher (i.e., the very first Oscar swag package of the 2014/15 Oscar season), allow me to slightly amend or modify the first paragraph of my initial Foxcatcher review, which I posted from Cannes on 5.22.

Amended version: “Speaking as a devoted admirer of Bennett Miller‘s Capote and Moneyball, it gives me no particular pleasure to state that Foxcatcher is a very well crafted, psychologically acute downer of a murder saga. Why play games or mince words? It’s obviously a quality package, but it’s not about fun and games. There’s no doubt that Foxcatcher is very strong and precise and clean, especially as crime dramas tend to go. And I respect the fact that it contains undercurrents that stay with you, and I certainly respect and admire what Miller has done here with his deft and subtle hand.

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The last time I checked Isis was an ancient Egyptian goddess. Right now, of course, ISIS is an out-for-blood army of Islamic fundamentalist wackos who’ve taken over most of Iraq and are almost certain to capture Baghdad sooner or later. What’s happening right now in Iraq is obviously similar to the situation in South Vietnam in April 1975, when North Vietnamese forces had overtaken the country and surrounded Saigon. We might as well face it — the extremist nutters are about to win and woe to their enemies, particularly Iraq’s prime minister Nouri al-Maliki and his governmental allies (not to mention any and all American contractors doing business with the Maliki administration). On 6.14 The Guardian‘s Jason Burke posted an article explaining how Malicki is pretty much to blame for what’s happening over there. The United States always trips over the same rock. Time and again our government backs corrupt, business-friendly despots who are mainly out to line their own pockets. We never hook up with nativist movements. And then the inevitable chickens come home to roost. It’s going to be ugly when ISIS comes to town. Executions, severed heads, arterial blood spurtings, etc. “One former associate of Maliki, now based in London, pointed out that few rulers of Iraq leave power peacefully or, indeed, alive,” Burke writes. “This is something, he says, of which the prime minister is acutely aware.”

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It might as well be faced — Clint Eastwood‘s Jersey Boys is looking at choppy if not rough seas from a critical perspective. And, if you believe the tracking, from a commercial perspective also. But let’s stick to the critical for now. Not that anyone is rooting for a flop. Eastwood’s reluctance to direct a standard uptempo jukebox musical deserves respect. But you can smell the discomfort out there.

On one hand, TheWrap‘s Alonso Duralde says that “if you’re a fan of harmonic 1960s pop, or cars with fins, Jersey Boys will provide a nice evening out at the movies. It’s nice. It’s entertaining. It’s pleasant. It’s all the positive adjectives that mean ‘not terrible but ultimately negligible.’ It fulfills the duties of a jukebox musical: it works in the hits, and it casts singers who make those hits sound virtually identical to the original versions. What the movie doesn’t do is answer the question, ‘Why did I just spend 134 minutes watching the Frankie Valli episode of Behind the Music?'”

On the somewhat more compassionate side, The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy writes that “a dash of showbiz pizzazz has been lost but some welcome emotional depth has been gained. If the ultimate aim of the Broadway musical version was to get the audience on its feet for the final feel-good medley, Eastwood goes for a more mixed mood, combining the joy of the music with what Valli, in particular, lost and cold never regain. Still, commercial uncertainties attach to the potential interest of young viewers unfamiliar with the band and [a] musical milieu of a half-century ago.”

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Last night’s Black List reading of Stepheny Folsom‘s 1969: A Space Odyssey, Or How Kubrick Learned to Stop Worrying and Land on the Moon was somewhere between okay and underwhelming. It was great to visit the Los Angeles theatre (which was built in 1931 or thereabouts) but the sound was imprecise and echo-y and ricocheting all over the large auditorium, and so I really couldn’t hear a good portion of the dialogue.

Plus the show began 45 minutes late, which is pretty close to unforgivable in my book unless you offer an apology once the show finally starts. (Nobody did.)

As for the script itself…well, I can only say that the reading didn’t feel like enough. It’s an amusingly crafted piece about a con job that never quite comes off, and about the natural disharmony between a bunch of Washington tap-dancers and flim-flammers and a genuine artist with a prickly personality.

All I got from it was a rat-a-tat-tat feeling. The applause was polite and perfunctory and that’s all. Want my advice? Start the fucking show promptly next time.

1969 is a better script than Quentin Tarantino‘s Hateful 8, a Petrified Forest-like ensemble piece which had a live reading at the Ace Theatre a while back. The reading of Hateful 8 was nonetheless a more engaging “show” than the Kubrick thing. More personality and pizazz, etc.

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The late Casey Kasem, 82 when he passed yesterday, was a successful, well-liked Hollywood “personality” who led a high-on-the-hog life within the Beverly Hills/Bel Air realm. He was a kind of upscale DJ, actor/voice actor and radio personality who coasted on the froth. “Best known for being the host of the music radio programs American Top 40, American Top 20 and American Top 10 from 1970 until his retirement in 2009, and for providing the voice of Norville ‘Shaggy’ Rogers in the Scooby-Doo franchise from 1969 to 1997, and again from 2002 until 2009.” Due respect and condolences to fans, family and friends. Honestly? I never gave Kasem more than a moment’s thought until today. By all accounts he led a full, robust life, but he never did anything that even slightly impacted mine. And that’s fine.

In a certain way Kim Novak had it pretty rough in Hollywood during her ’50s heyday. Constantly pedastaled and patronized. Praised for her looks and given little credit for her acting skills, which were nothing to sniff at in Joshua Logan‘s Picnic and Alfred Hitchcock‘s Vertigo. In other ways she had it great, of course, but by today’s standards she was often dealing with insults. People respected her for being a gainfully employed breathy sexpot, but what’s that? Consider the comments on the What’s My Line? clip after the jump.

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Mr. Ford is alluding to his recent on-set ankle fracture. He’s also quoting Han Solo’s famous boast. The Kessel Run “was an 18-parsec route used by smugglers to move glitterstim spice from Kessel to an area south of the Si’Klaata Cluster without getting caught by the Imperial ships that were guarding the movement of spice from Kessel’s mines,” it says here. Except a parsec is a unit of distance and not time so I still don’t get it.