I’m too whipped to write anything about Steven Soderbergh‘s Haywire, which screened tonight at AFIfest to a wildly revved and delighted crowd. If the Sean Connery-Robert Shaw train compartment fight in From Russia With Love is your idea of a classic, Haywire will throttle you right down to the marrow. I’ve always felt that Angelina Jolie was too small and skinny to kick large male ass, but I believe in Gina Carano‘s aggressive abilities 110%.
Asian martial-arts films can go suck it on their knees, but this movie is the shit.
A bit more writing, another video and several photos tomorrow morning. But for now it’s safe to say that Haywire is the smartest, most genuinely thrilling and involving and satisfying kick-ass, faux-exploitation action thriller I’ve seen in a long time. Carano, bless her, beats her way through the entire male cast, and I believed each and every battle.
The above clip contains Soderbergh’s opening remarks before the film began.
Hollywood Reporter film critic Kirk Honeycutt, who’s been with the trade for a very long time, has been cut loose. Tough break. Can’t feel good. Honeycutt had been THR‘s first-string critic for…I can’t find a decent online bio but at least since the early Bill Clinton era, no? He was demoted to “international critic” status when THR honcho Janice Minhired former Variety critic Todd McCarthy a little more than a year ago.
Here’s hoping that Honeycutt, a knowledgable critic and a good writer, lands a suitable new gig in short order.
No Kirk Honeycutt recap will ever be complete without a mention of the Courtney Love Sundance incident (“What am I, a piece of shit?”). Love hit the roof when Honeycutt’s wife took a photo without asking, which prompted the actress-singer to snatch the camera. A People reporter wrote that Honeycutt “is said to have then grabbed the camera back from Love, prompting Love’s boyfriend, music exec Jim Barber, to jump the critic, who reportedly referred to Love as a ‘pig‘ (preceded by a very descriptive adjective),” etc.
Hollywood Elsewhere’s Tyrannosaur screening fund-raising campaign was kind of exciting while it lasted and I’m glad I did it, but you know what? Not that many people showed up. I was able to pay for three extra screenings on top of what Strand had booked so the people who needed to see this film would have a few more options, and at the end of the day the silence was almost deafening.
The Aidikoff screening on 10.27 lured about nine or ten journalists, the 10.31 showing at the Ocean Ave. Screening Room attracted three or four, and the third & final screening at the Sunset Screening Room on 11.2 played to five or six people. Several top-drawer Los Angeles journalists that I expected to see attend didn’t attend. So either they saw it at Sundance 2011 or LAFF 2011 last June, or they plan to see it at the 10 am screening at the Royal on 11.8, or they’ve figured some other way to catch it. It just feels like not that many people give a shit. I figured the “Olivia Colman as a deserving Best Actress or Best Supporting Actress” factor would attract a few more rsvps. But no.
If people have something better to do, you can’t stop ’em.
There are light or semi-frolicsome heist films like Topkapi, The Hot Rock, Sneakers or the Oceans films, and there are dead-serious ones like Rififi, The Asphalt Jungle, The Killing and Odds Against Tomorrow. Obviously Tower Heist belongs in the former category. Its closet cousin, I feel, is Peter Yates‘ The Hot Rock. Smart chat, amusing antics, likable perps, etc,
Okay, it’s good natured and even funny now and then, and yes, Eddie Murphy has definitely given his funniest comic performance since Bowflnger. I actually started liking him again after I don’t know how many years of throwing mental spitballs at the guy.
But I was a little bothered that director Brett Ratner didn’t seem very invested in the fantasy of actually doing the job, much less getting away with it. Too few details, no suspense to speak of…no way to believe that Ben Stiller and the guys had any kind of serious shot at success. An audience needs to believe a little bit in the reality of the job, and my sense was that Ratner didn’t give a shit. The whole thing felt larky.
As silly and japey as The Hot Rock was, I had a better time with it, and I was at least half-invested in the realistic terms of the various heists. Yes, even the helicopter attack on the Manhattan police station. Even Afghanistan Bananistan. I didn’t believe the Tower Heist guys were all that committed.
Two weekends ago (or was it three?) I made the mistake of renting four Blurays at Vidiots. I watched them within a couple of days, took them down to the car, threw them into the back seat and forgot about them. This morning a Vidiots clerk called and said I owe them $160. That seemed excessive. I told the clerk that my first reaction would be not to return the Blurays, but to build a fire outside and burn them. More emotionally satisfying, etc. He said fine, but if I keep them or burn them they’ll charge me $160 plus the cost of the Blurays. This is why I don’t rent, and why I’ll never go back to that store again.
Steven Soderbergh‘s Haywire (Relativity, 1/20./12) will be shown tonight at the AFiFest under a “secret screening” heading at 9 pm. A brief q & a with Soderbergh and star Gina Carano and maybe a couple of others will follow.
The costars, as everyone knows by now, are Channing Tatum, Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Michael Angarano, Antonio Banderas and Michael Douglas.
Haywire (originally called Knockout) was shot mostly in Ireland from early February 2010 to 3.25.10 at a cost of $25 million, give or take.
A full fight clip of Carano and Michael Fassbender was reportedly shown at Comic Con last July. “All the stunts in this movie are meant to be more realistic than your normal Hollywood action film. No wire work. No stunt double for Gina except for 2% of the film. No cutting away or shaky cam during the fights. Channing, Ewan, and Michael did most of their stunts also.”
Martin Scorsese‘s Hugo (Paramount. 11.23) screened this afternoon for press at the big Regal plex in downtown LA. It’s a fanciful, heavily CG-ed, 3D storybook film that plays like a “family entertainment” flick during the first two thirds to 75%, which is to say with much familiarity. But the final act, roughly the last 25 minutes, is another story.
For Hugo concludes with a great excursion into filmmaking history and the first dreammakers (particularly George Meiles, director of the 1902 A Trip To The Moon and dozens of other shorts) and film preservation and all that good movie-Catholic stuff.
This finale, aimed squarely at film dweebs and sure to sail right over the heads of most tykes and tweeners, is by far the best portion of the film, and easily worth the price of admission in itself.
Lamentably, the story of poor little Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), an orphan living a hidden secret life in the guts of a Paris train station (apparently le Gare Montparnasse) in the late 1920s, occupies the bulk of the running time, and too much of this section feels rote and boilerplate. Or it did to me, at least.
I have an AFIFest event to go to in a few minutes, but here are slightly expanded versions of this afternoon’s tweets from the Regal.
Tweet #1: Too much of Hugo is done the cute way, the twee storybook way, the endearing childhood emotion way. To me the first 60% to 65% felt needlessly prolonged. Hugo runs 127 minutes, but it could and should have run 75 or 80 minutes. Okay, 90 minutes but no longer.
Tweet #2: The extended running time is due to a needlessly drawn-out relationship between an annoyingly secretive and quite inarticulate Hugo Cabret and the annoyingly secretive and inexplicably nihilistic Melies (Ben Kingsley). Melies is furious that his career has fizzled and therefore discourages any mention of his past glories — an absolutely nonsensical attitude if you know anything about what all filmmakers, failed or successful, are like.
Moderator Paul Thomas Anderson (far left) and the Hugo team (l. to r.) — director Martin Scorsese, dp Robert Richardson, composer Howard Shore, production designer Dante Ferretti, edtitor Thelma Schoonmaker, and visual effects supervisor Robert Legato.
Tweet #3: The other running-time extender is the tediously predatory pursuit of Hugo by Sasha Baron Cohen as a half doofusy, half-villainous train station cop.
Tweet #4: But once the film focuses on the legendary history of Melies and once the dawn of moviemaking in Paris in the early 1900s is recalled and recreated, Hugo is pure spirit-lifting pleasure. Finally the “cute big-eyed kid trying to survive in a Paris train station” story is more or less abandoned and the film lifts off the ground.
Tweet #5: What formerly successful filmmaker wants to hide his illustrious past? What wife of a formerly celebrated filmmaker (a woman who was the star of most of his films) wants her husband’s past success kept under wraps? After pride in craft and the respect of peers, all filmmakers live for recognition and adulation. I can’t imagine any filmmaker trying to suppress awareness of his/her past achievements, or being okay with being forgotten.
Tweet #6: I think I could have done without Sacha Baron Cohen and that Doberman altogether. And 20 or 25 fewer closeups of Butterfield’s big watery eyes and his looks of fear and hurt and bewilderment.
The post-screening discussion, moderated by Paul Thomas Anderson (The Master, There Will Be Blood), featured Scorsese, dp Robert Richardson, production designer Dante Ferretti, longtime Scorsese editor Thelma Schoonmaker, visual effects supervisor Robert Legato and composer Howard Shore.
Here’s an assessment by Hitflix/In Contention’s Kris Tapley.
“Hey Jeff, thought you might be interested in these pics of Ryan Gosling, recently announced as the costar of an upcoming Terrence Malick film called Lawless, doing precisely what Christian Bale was doing with Malick in Austin last month. Only this time, it was a different music festival.” — from a friend this morning.
I’ve got three or four more stories I could write but it’s 11:30 am and I have stuff to do before driving downtown for a 2 pm screening of a film I’m not supposed to mention, which will be followed by a q & with a not-to-be-mentioned director. So that’s it. To be continued, etc.
