Earlier today Harvey Weinstein, attorney David Boies, MPAA honcho Christopher Dodd and First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams kicked around the Weinstein Co.-vs.-Warner Bros. Butler squabble on CBS This Morning. WB attorneys are clearly the ayeholes in this dispute. “What the hell do they need the title for?,” Weinstein said. “If you watched this as a movie, you would say ‘this smells.'” Why not just choose another title, Harvey? “What should I call it? Something Else? A Movie Formerly Known as The Bee?” The Lee Daniels pic opens on 8.16.
Broken Arrow
In a 7.9 review titled “Slaughtering Intelligence,” Marshall Fine calls Killing Season (Millenium, 7.12), the Robert DeNiro-vs.-John Travolta paycheck movie, “sadistically violent, over-the-top…laughably bad.”
Fine saw it last week at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, “[and] if I hadn’t, you wouldn’t be reading this review,” he notes, “because the only press screening in the U.S. is Wednesday night (7.10) and reviews are embargoed online until 6PM Thursday, 7.11.
Travolta introduced the Karlovy Vary screening “and warned the crowd that the film was violent ‘but not gratuitously so,'” Fine write. “That apparently included the scene where Travolta himself gets shot through both cheeks with an arrow, which embeds in a door, leaving him hanging as unhappily as a butterfly pinned to a specimen tray. That’s just before De Niro waterboards him with a mixture of lemon juice and salt.
“I’d call Killing Season a cat-and-mouse game. But that would insult felines and rodents, both of which are much smarter than this movie.”
47 Best Films of the ’80s
Movie Mezzannine‘s Sam Fragoso has polled several critics and posted several lists pondering the ten best films of the 1980s. What wankery. You can’t pick ten effing films to represent the cream of the crop of an entire decade. It has to be least 30 or 40. Here’s Hollywood Elsewhere’s picks, a blend of the best, the most significant, the most enjoyable and and the most influential. I’ve settled on 47.
Warning: It is the respectful opinion of this columnist that anyone who picks Brian DePalma‘s Blow Out as one of the great ’80s films either (a) has a serious aesthetic perception problem or (b) is being intentionally perverse. I tried watching the Criterion Bluray and I couldn’t get past the first 45 minutes or so.
Step Aside, Open Wide
Notice that Josh Brolin is crawling out of a trunk, not a coffin. You know what I see in this? I’ll tell you what I see in this. I see an obvious resemblance to the attitude and stylings of Park Chan-wook, who directed the original Oldboy as well as the loathsome Stoker, and that scares the shit out of me. I see a nod to 1920s German expressionism and to a late 1960s R. Crumb drawing of Weasel J. Weisenheimer, the neighborhood drug dealer. Either way I see high style and black humor. Please, Spike…please turn down the Chan-wook. You’re better than that.
My Kid Could Shoot This
If Fred Maalox of Gainesville, Florida…sorry, if Fred Maalox’s 19 year-old son who’s going to film school had shot this and if everyone in the Hollywood blogosphere was somehow persuaded to watch it, 98% of them would say “this?…what?…whaddaya want from me?” But because it’s from Jean Luc Godard‘s Goodbye To Language, a 3D film to be distributed by 20th Century Fox, and because it’s the great Godard, who arguably peaked in the late ’60s but kept plugging and is still at it at age 82, everyone is respectful and “interested.” Does it feel like a Godard film? Yeah, kinda…but so? I’m not saying it’s a wank, but it could be.
Slaughterhouse Script Unstuck In Universal Miasma
I’m head over heels in love with the idea of Guillermo del Toro directing a new version of Kurt Vonnegut‘s Slaughterhouse Five with a script by Charlie Kaufman. The presumption is that GDT would direct in his adult mode — i.e., not overshooting and just letting the material stand on its own, as George Roy Hill did for his 1972 version. GDT has worked out an adult take on the material “that is perfect for it,” my excellent source says. GDT is pushing Universal to belly up and pay Kaufman to bang the script out, but Uni won’t pay CK’s fee unless GDK assures that Slaughterhouse Five will be shot within 12 months.
Loud and Titanic and Thrashing Around
I’m not feeling the energy to write a full-on review of Guillermo del Toro‘s Pacific Rim (Warner Bros., 7.12) because I felt…well, a form of admiration mixed with a growing fatigue and disconnect when I saw it a couple of weeks ago, and I just can’t get it up today, man. No more than I could write an Architectural Digest review of a huge 75-story office building in midtown Manhattan. I admire the obvious fact that this Jaeger vs. Kaiju (i.e., super robots vs. supersized amphibious monsters) flick was made with heart and steel balls and technical mastery second to none. A lifelong believer in monster realms, GDT presided over every last detail of this gargantuan enterprise, delegating nothing and working his ass off 18/7 and delivering, in the end, a visitation that feels relatively fresh, imaginative and (as far as it goes) non-derivative. And it’s very briskly edited.
All Hail Direction Man
18 and 1/2 years ago L.M. Kit Carson‘s Direction Man, a five-minute short starring the immortal “Larry Williams,” played at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival. I saw it at the Egyptian toward the end of the festival, and came to the immediate conclusion that it was one of the funniest found-footage shorts ever shot, made or shown. Ignore the poor video quality — the material and personality are what count. All I know is that there’s very little likelihood of anyone running into a Larry Williams today with smartphone GPS and whatnot. In my mind Williams is a legend, a kind of genius, a jazzman. And nobody knows where he is today, or so I’ve been told.
“Questions of Quality Aside…”
In a 7.6 piece about Hollywood’s mania for franchise blockbusters, Vulture‘s Gilbert Cruz notes that would-be tentpoles based on old-shoe brands (The Lone Ranger, John Carter, The Green Hornet, The Shadow, The Phantom) have all flopped. Which has had no apparent effect as zombie studio execs only care about market pre-awareness, even if it’s the “who gives a hoot about a decades-old comic book or radio show?” kind. Give Pacific Rim this much — at least it’s an original.
Great, Great Scene
I riffed on this Carnal Knowledge argument scene two and a half years ago. I return to it every so often. How would today’s Man of Steel fans respond to a scene like this? Why can’t more filmmakers try for this kind of thing more often? I know, I know…Richard Linklater came close in the big Before Midnight argument scene. Ann-Margret‘s portrayal of Bobbie-the-alleged-ballbuster delivered in a way that was aching, vulnerable, pathetic. “All hail Mike Nichols for making this scene work as well as it does, and for generally hitting the film out of the park,” I wrote. (Effing WordPress embed links not working again.)