A critic friend caught White House Down a couple of days ago, and so I called this morning to see what he thought. “Roland Emmerich is as soulless and bombastic a director as Michael Bay,” he replied, “and this” — Emmerich’s latest — “is no better than Olympus Has Fallen.” Whoa, whoa…what? All the while I’ve been presuming that White House Down would be the slicker, pricier, more upmarket version of a White House-attacked-by-terrorists film, certainly compared to Antoine Fuqua‘s Olympus Has Fallen, a C-grade, Walmart-level piece of shit that opened last March and did about $160 million worldwide.

“But it looks so much better than Olympus Has Fallen,” I argued, not having a shred of first-hand observation to fortify my view. “It has to be at least half-decent or tolerable…right? Olympus was a drag. WHD at least looks and sounds like a tonier product. A slicker Sony Studios-type deal rather than…you know, a film that looks like it was shot in Shreveport.”

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Now that a presumably fair-sized percentage of the HE community has seen Marc Forster and Brad Pitt‘s World War Z, reactions can be shared. The projected $60 million-plus weekend haul indicates that the dicey pre-release buzz (troubled, re-written and re-shot, hugely expensive) had no effect on anything. Well, maybe a bit.

“I wasn’t floored but I was definitely okay with [it],” I wrote from Paris on 6.12. “Two or three times I opened my mouth with an ‘oh my effing God…whoa!’ Once or twice I chuckled in amusement. It’s not ‘scary’ as much as a big, epic-sized action-adventure zombie spectacle with some strikingly good, super-fluid CG compositions. It’s basically a globe-sprawling, much more expensive 28 Days Later. A lot of serious exacting work has gone in to making this thing look and feel and sound right. But it’s basically just a good mass-zombie movie that cost a shitload (i.e., $200 million).

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According to a 6.20 story by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Borys Kit, Anne Hathaway will produce and star in an open-seas survival drama called The Lifeboat, an adaptation of Charlotte Rogan’s novel of the same name. Hathaway will play a refugee from a sunken luxury liner. She faces murder charges after being picked up because, as Kit writes, she and her husband determine that the lifeboat they’re on “has too many people, meaning [that] some folks have got to go.” This is similar to the plot of Abandon Ship!, a 1957 film in which Tyrone Power played a ship’s captain who made the same call about an over-crowded lifeboat. The Wiki page claims that a voiceover at the end of the film states that the real-life captain “was brought to trial on a charge of murder.”

They’re calling this the first official trailer for Joshua Michael Stern‘s JOBS (Open Road,8.16). It didn’t do all that well with the critics when it played at the tail end of January’s Sundance Film Festival. (I left the day before it screened.) But it’s obviously a necessary thing to see, if no other reason than to reference and compare when Aaron Sorkin‘s Steve Jobs film turns up.

My Paris plane touched down last night at JFK at 7:30 pm. Taxied forever on the tarmac. The passport line took a good 35 to 40 minutes because there weren’t enough passport guys at the desks. At 9:15 pm I was waiting for the slow-as-molasses A train at Howard Beach. I finally arrived at Hanover Square, my area of residence for the next couple of weeks, around 10 pm. The neighborhood, south of Wall Street and a block away from the East River, is a bit on the chilly, corporate side. Not exactly saturated with historical aroma. It could be a corporate high-rise region of Cleveland, Detroit, Hong Kong or Boston’s North End. It had a certain charm back in the days of Martin Scorsese‘s Gangs of New York, but then you had to deal with guys sinking meat cleavers into each other’s heads so it all balances out.

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I had problems the instant I walked into this place last night. The interior atmosphere was dark and cave-like and sort of Guido-ish with awful hanging mini-lamps and tacky sound-level screens on the walls behind the bar, like something you’d see in some laughably low-rent recording studio in the early ’80s. And the music was way too loud…thump thump thump thump thump. I understand obnoxious house music at a club but not for a place where people are supposed to effing eat. “Uhm, does the music have to be this loud?,” I asked the waitress when I first sat down. “I mean, this is basically a restaurant, right?” She said she’d ask…nothing. I asked again 15 minutes later. She came back and said, “They said the music is part of the ambience here…sorry but it’s always been like this.” So in retaliation I tipped her 5%. I know it wasn’t her fault but someone had to pay. I hope this place dies. It deserves to.

In the wake of Jackie Brown 15 years ago I was pretty much a confirmed Quentin Tarantino fan, despite his obvious tendency to rewrite, remake and basically rip off ’70s exploitation films (except with Pulp Fiction, which he co-wrote with Roger Avary). Pulp and Reservoir Dogs had won me over and I was willing to follow him anywhere. But despite the pleasures of Death Proof, I’ve gotten off the boat over the last ten years. The Kill Bill films were tedious (I tried re-watching Part One as few months ago and couldn’t), Inglourious Basterds was basically a wank and there’s no way in hell I’ll ever sit through Django Unchained a second time. If Tarantino was to declare today that he’ll never ever make a film again, I could live with that. I wouldn’t be that sorry. I would say to myself, “Well, he’s basically been over since Jackie Brown so no great loss.”

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What I strongly presumed when I read yesterday’s sad, tragic news about James Gandolfini but which I didn’t give voice to (partly because it’s better to wait two or three days and partly out of fear of being ripped to shreds by Glenn Kenny and HE’s sensitivity police), N.Y. Daily News and N.Y. Post writers have now reported. How dare they print observations and allegations that suggest Gandolfini might be with us today if he’d been a little smarter about certain tendencies? Don’t they realize how heartless stories like this are? Don’t they understand the basic rules when someone famous dies? One, during the first 24 to 48 hours after their passing never touch upon any apparent or probable reasons why and two, focus only on how kind, gifted, beloved and gracious they were, and how we’re now all poorer for their absence.

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Here’s a mildly amusing satirical riff on a 2019 Ain’t It Cool review of a Gangster Squad-like remake of The Godfather. Mildly amusing but dead to rights. JJ Abrams is (a) too smart and (b) too much of a devoted cineaste to even perversely flirt with remaking Francis Coppola‘s mob classic, but you know that if Ruben Fleischer was asked to remake The Godfather with the idea of keeping the characters but punching up the action so as to appeal more to GenY audiences, this is roughly what he would come up with. You know it’s not a stretch. Just maintain an open mind as you read it — that’s all I ask.

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This Fruitvale Station one-sheet is too somber looking. It suggests that Ryan Coogler‘s much-hailed film is some kind of nocturnal, melancholy mood trip about the anxiety of the African-American experience. Speaking as a major admirer, I can say without question that the poster misrepesents it, under-sells it, doesn’t entice. No offense but deep-six it.

I finally saw Shawn Levy‘s The Internship last night at a Paris press screening, and I have to agree with most of the criticisms levelled by Stateside critics. I felt so hammered by the relentlessly positive attitudes of Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson‘s salesman characters (and by the His Girl Friday velocity of their delivery) that I was exhausted by the end. The movie is one big sales pitch. And the Google signage (logo, colors, graphics) is completely oppressive — one way or another Levy and the producers should have cut down on this. I didn’t believe that guys in their early 40s would be that clueless about online stuff. Max Minghella‘s snippy villain did everything but twirl his moustache. And the formulaic story all but puts you to sleep. Almost none of it rang true.

One charming exception: Wilson’s date with Rose Byrne in which he deliberately tries to act like an asshole was the only scene that made me laugh. But then the vibe was ruined when he dropped her off on Telegraph Hill (which no one in her position would be able to afford — and why does she live in San Francisco if she works on the Google campus, which is a good 45 minutes south?) and when she invited him into her apartment. She’s been blowing him off for weeks but suddenly she’s into having sex with him because she suddenly noticed earlier that day that he’s positive-minded and has shown a flair for put-on humor during dinner?

I love doing the column from Europe because your clock is way ahead of everyone in the States (especially L.A. — nine hours!). But I was asleep five or six hours ago when the biggest nuclear explosion to hit the movie and acting realm in many a moon — the sudden death of James Gandolfini, 51, in Rome — was first reported. I woke up at 5:30 am and saw the news…the fuck? WHAT? Okay, I wasn’t 100% surprised (and I’ve already been warned on Twitter to stay away from this line of thinking) but for me this is almost on the level of John Lennon‘s death in terms of its shock and untimeliness. I feel devastated. Thank God for Gandolfini’s brilliance in David Chase‘s The Sopranos and the way he conveyed those feelings of being trapped and haunted and terrified by that sense of being surrounded by goblins…he was our Hamlet, our Macbeth, our James Tyrone. Thank God I have all of that on Bluray to have and to hold.

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