During last nights after-party for Film District’s Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark: Hitfix’s Drew McWeeny, Guillermo del Toro, Marcia McWeeny — Sunday, 6.26, 10:45 pm.
The great Guillermo del Toro told me a little something about Alfonso Cuaron‘s currently-shooting Gravity at last night’s Don’t Be Afraid of The Dark after-party. He said that Cuaron and dp Emmanuel Lubezki (a.k.a. “Chivo”) are again intending to push the cinematic envelope, although in a different way than they did with Children of Men. The 3D space-rescue drama costars George Clooney and Sandra Bullock.
Sandra Bullock, George Clooney within shouting distance of Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity set.
I’ve gotten hold of a second draft of Cuaron’s script (written in ’09). If anyone has a more recent draft, please forward. The co-authors of a 2010 draft are reportedly Alfonso and Jonas Cuaron and Rodrigo Garcia Barcha.
The Wikipedia logline: “In Earth’s orbit, satellite debris hits a space station, destroying most of it and killing all but two astronauts. The remaining astronauts fight for survival and to return home.” One of the astronauts will be played by Bullock, apparently. I don’t know who Clooney plays, but let’s assume he’s the other astronaut in peril and nor some mission-control Ed Harris-type guy.
Several actresses were considered and/or romanced for Bullock’s role — Angelina Jolie (allegedly demanded her big fat $20 million fee), Natalie Portman (pregnancy interfered), Rachel Weisz, Naomi Watts, Marion Cotillard, Abbie Cornish, Carey Mulligan, Sienna Miller, Scarlett Johansson, Blake Lively, Rebecca Hall, Olivia Wilde, etc.
Yesterday morning Deadline‘s Nikki Finkeposted a letter that Transformers 3 director Michael Bay recently sent to projectionists. The letter urged them to project the 3D version of the film at super-bright levels to combat the underwhelming “dark, dingy” appearance of 3D films that viewers have been complaining about.
“We have also created a new ‘Platinum 6 version‘ of Transformers,” Bay wrote, “for the ultimate in 3D experience, to be played in auditoriums capable of 6-foot lamberts of light on the screen (available to certified auditoriums only).”
Maybe I’m not understanding something about 3D light. The SMPTE standard for optimum desired light levels on 2D films is 16 foot lamberts, not 6. Maybe 6 foot lamberts is regarded as a good thing under 3D conditions, but in my world 6 foot lamberts isn’t satisfactory.
The obvious answer would be that the person who typed up Bay’s letter typed a typo and nobody caught it. Obviously not a biggie, but try and get someone at Paramount Pictures or at Bay’s agency, WME, to confirm or address this and say “uh, yeah, that does appear to be a typo — it should have said 16 and not 6. Thanks for catching it.” I’ve been trying to get an answer since 9 this morning and nobody will say anything.
So let’s just repeat that the foot-lambert information doesn’t sound right (to me anyway) and appears to be wrong and let it go at that.
I’ve decided, by the way, to see Transformers 3D at an IMAX 3D screening tomorrow night at IMAX headquarters in Santa Monica and not at one of the screenings happening today on the Paramount lot. I’m figuring the IMAX 3D will deliver much more impact, etc.
One of the unfortunate tasks for supporters of the First Amendment is that occasionally they’re obliged to stand up for it. Sometimes doing this doesn’t feel very good. Because sometimes it involves supporting creators and distributors of icky and odious ultra-violent movies and video games, which serve a termite-like function when it comes to diluting social-behavior standards that any morally decent society would want to stand by.
“The State wishes to create a wholly new category of content-based regulation that is permissible only for speech directed at children,” the decision reads in part via TheWrap‘s Tim Molloy. “That is unprecedented and mistaken. This country has no tradition of specially restricting children’s access to depictions of violence.”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t the Supremes essentially saying that no venal video- game content can be legally kept out of the hands of children? And in rendering this decision aren’t they basically stating that even the disgusting and unconscionable Japanese video game RapeLay needs to be protected from moral guardians of the state?
I agree that the state can’t and shouldn’t mandate moral content in entertainment and art, but there’s something sickening about courts and lawmakers giving a free hall pass to the makers of this grotesque diversion.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer dissented. I can’t believe I’m siding with Clarence Thomas.
“The law called for fining retailers up to $1,000 per game sold,” Molloy reports. “It covered games ‘in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being,’ if the violence is presented in a way that a ‘reasonable person, considering the game as a whole, would find appeals to a deviant or morbid interest of minors.’
“The law never took effect because lower courts in 2005 and 2007 also said it violated free speech rights. Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, an enthusiastic backer of it, appealed it to the Supreme Court.”
Straight from Moscow, Drew McWeeny‘s Transformers 3 review posted this morning on Hitfix, and he’s calling it “easily the best film in the series” and “an overwhelming sensory experience [with] a solid hour-long action sequence in Chicago that uses everything Bay’s ever done before.”
Transformers 3 is basically the latest pass at the kind of “personal story on an apocalyptic scale that Bay loves to try to tell, and that other guys like Roland Emmerich and James Cameron and even Steven Spielberg love to do,” McWeeny writes. “And this is the best version of it that Bay’s made so far.
“For the first time since Avatar, I am going to recommend that you find the biggest and best 3D theater you can find and buy yourself a ticket, because Transformers: Dark Of The Moon, especially seen in IMAX 3D, is [the shit]. The sound mix alone is more exciting than anything in the billion-dollar-bore of Pirates 4. This is gigantic action we’ve never seen before, and Bay’s reaction to shooting and cutting his film for 3D is to get better at what he does. It raised his game, and as a result, I feel like we just saw a dare thrown down by one of Hollywood’s biggest action specialists: ‘Top this.’
“The Chicago action finale is an astonishing mix of physical staging, live-action stunt work, location shooting, and visual effects, and there comes a point where I’m really not sure what was built, what was real, what’s totally fake…and it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the stakes in the film are crystal clear, the purpose of the characters is laid out carefully, and the sequence just keeps building and building until finally it comes down to three characters and a bridge.
“And since it’s a Transformers movie, I’m pleased to see that the three characters who are involved in that ending are the right three. The focus in this film finally feels like it’s on the right things and the right moments. If the Chicago sequence was the only great set piece in the film, I’d still say it’s worth seeing, but the movie actually features impressive sequences all the way through, including an early encounter with Shockwave in Chernobyl and a really creepy scene where a bird-like Decepticon hunts down and murders all the humans who have helped the Decepticons over the years.
“And through it all, it feels to me like Bay is trying new things, both in the shooting and the cutting. It’s not a radical re-invention…it’s still recognizably Michael Bay. But the small differences in the rhythms of his shooting and his cutting make a big difference in the overall impact.”
Memo to Brad Bird, Bad Robot and Paramount: Please don’t give us another effing Mission ImpossibleTom Cruise franchise flick! Don’t create action sequences based on the principle that you have to top the last similar-type sequence in the last big budget-busting action movie…begging you! Just figure out what your movie is about and do what feels right for your own purposes and then play it real and to hell with the competition.
I know you won’t do this. I know you’re going to be playing the same old “top the last action movie” game. I know that big studio tentpole actioners are the sworn enemies of movies like Drive. And I know exactly how I ‘m going to feel as I sit there in the 8th row at the all-media, getting bludgeoned and pounded into submission.
Watch the Italian bootleg trailer (i/e., “bootleggia“) and tell me if my suspicions seem correct or excessive or whatever.
Directed by Bird-o with a story by J.J. Abrams and Tom Cruise, obviously starring Cruise as Ethan Hunt with Ving “Mr. Hillbilly Rapist soon to be in agonizing pain” Rhames, Simon Pegg, Paula Patton, Jeremy Renner. Anil Kapoor (Slumdog Millionaire) and Michael Nyqvist (the ’09 version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo).
Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol opens on 12.16.11.
I wrote last year about the death of my Siamese cat Zak from pancreatic cancer at age 15. He stopped eating toward the end, prompting me to put Gerber’s baby food on his nose so he would at least lick it off. He was obviously finished. Any country vet would have taken one look and said, “Take him home and make him comfortable, and if you want to put him to sleep towards the end, we’ll do that for you. I’m sorry, but he hasn’t long to live.”
When I took Zak to TLC Animal Hospital in West Hollywood they managed to extract $600 or $700 for observation and stabilization fees before putting him to sleep. Caring shysters like TLC know full well that pet owners want to do something (i.e., spend something) when their pet is dying, and so they step right up and show love and concern for your pet and offer consolation to the owner[s] and get that money. They’re trustworthy professionals, but they know how to vacuum your wallet.
I’m mentioning this because a couple I’m friendly with just lost their dog. He was diagnosed with cancer about two and a half months ago. They were told by a vet that the cancer couldn’t be cured but that the tumor could be removed and that this would probably buy their dog some time, perhaps as much as a year. So they dropped $10 grand on the operation and subsequent medical attention, and the poor dog stopped breathing a few hours ago, just like that.
Are you going to tell me that the vet didn’t suspect that the removal of the tumor wouldn’t really help that much? Are you going to tell me that the vet didn’t exploit the emotions of the couple?
If you were a vet and you knew the dog/cat was a goner, would you persuade the owner to pay for an expensive operation that would maybe extend the pet’s life for a couple of months but tell them it might keep the pet alive for a year, just to keep them sweet and in a spending frame of mind? If you were a pet owner and you had $10 grand to spend on a pet but you knew it would only extend the pet’s life for a couple of months, would you drop the money or just take the pet home and make him/her feel loved until the time came to put him/her to sleep?
“Chris Weitz‘s A Better Life, which follows a gardener in East L.A. who struggles to keep his son away from gangs and immigration agents, found strong numbers in a limited debut. On four screens, Life managed a $60,000 gross, averaging a strong $15,000 per screen.
“Distributor Summit Entertainment noted that 92% of the audience rated the movie ‘excellent’ or ‘very good’, which bodes well as the film continues its platform release pattern over the coming weeks (including an expansion into 11 theaters on July 1).” — from Peter Knegt‘s 6.25 Indiewire box-office report.
Fine, except A Better Life is not “about a gardener in East L.A. who struggles to keep his son away from gangs and immigration agents.” It’s about an illegal-alien Mexican dad who lives in Echo Park and works as a tree surgeon in West LA homes who enlists his teenage son, who regards him with pity and contempt, to help him recover a stolen pickup truck. At the most the son has a flirting relationship with Hispanic gangbangers. It’s not about “son, what can I do or say to persuade you not o hang out with gangbangers….you’ll end up dead or in jail!” Tiresome much?
Weitz’s movie is nowhere near that kind of thing. A Better Life is basically The Bicycle Thief without the very last story beat that pluralizes the term and turns the title into The Bicycle Thieves.
Inarritu and dp Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki shot the footage a year and a half ago (January and February 2010) in Manchester, London, Madrid, Turin, Los Angeles and Kenya.
“It was made to to be show during the World Cup soccer tournament,” Inarritu says in an e-mail from Beijing. “And it was an insane massive production because the logistics of shooting during the winter in Europe and the amount of football soccer stars plus Kobe Bryant, Rover Federer, Homero Simpson and even Gael Garcia Bernal playing a cameo as Cristiano Ronaldo.
“It was the most visited online ad n 2010 and because most of the players did a very poor job during the World Cup, in the viral crazies people said that it was a ‘cursed’ commercial. But thanks to the Spanish guys the commercial was saved !! Anyway, it was a fun globally interconnected narrative experiment.”
Some kind of congratulations are in order, I suppose, for Dream House costars Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz, who quietly married a few days ago. This would be a good time, obviously, to check out the Dream House trailer, but I can’t find it anywhere. What’s that about?
Dream House is a Universal/Morgan Creek production, and those guys know that any film coming out in 90 days has to at least have a teaser up. Wait — I don’t even see a website.
Jim Sheridan‘s haunted-house thriller shot roughly 13 months ago with additional shooting completed last December, and it’ll finally open three months from now (on 9.30.11) after bailing on a 2.18.11 opening, and there’s still no trailer? I don’t what to say except hubba-hubba, shake a leg, move it or lose it, etc.
There’s reportedly a movie called Cars 2 (don’t care, won’t see it) that will make $67 million by late tonight. Take no notice of the projected $31 million that Bad Teacher will earn this weekend. The C-plus CinemaScore grade plus Boxoffice.com’s Phil Contrino declaring the word-of-mouth is “toxic” is a fate-sealer. And The Green Lantern dropped over 65% with an expected $18 million for the weekend. Justice is served.
Hollywood Elsewhere friendo Phillip Noyce (Salt, Clear and Present Danger, The Quiet American) toured around Vietnam last month to promote a Vietnamese-language edition of Ingo Petzke‘s “Phillip Noyce — Backroads to Hollywood.” He and his family visited Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi and several points in-between. And there’s economic health everywhere, he says. There’s a super-rich class (plus a middle-class and lower-class), thriving industries, friendly people, beautiful jungles and beaches. Delicious food, magnificent architecture. A nice place to visit.
Why exactly did 58,000 young Americans die over there between ’62 and ’75? To keep the Communists from landing on the shores of Santa Monica? I forget.
All I know is that reality-facing political insiders knew North Vietnam couldn’t be beaten early on, we all knew the war was a lost cause by early ’68, and we stayed for another seven years until the last chopper flew off the roof of the American embassy in Saigon in ’75. And for what? 58,000 Americans, mostly blue-collar guys, ate lead and shrapnel and rose up into the sky and became droplets of water in the great eternal fountain, and for what?
Vietnam’s Wiki page says that poverty levels are now smaller than that of China, India, and the Philippines. According to a forecast in December 2005 by Goldman-Sachs, Vietnamese economy will become the 17th largest economy in the world in 2025, with a potential growth rate of almost 10% per annum in real dollar terms that could push it up to around 70% of the size of the UK economy by 2050. Vietnam is now the largest producer of cashew nuts with a one-third global share, the largest producer of black pepper accounting for one-third of the world’s market and second largest rice exporter in the world after Thailand. Other key exports are coffee, tea, rubber, and fishery products. There’s also a thriving tech industry.
During last nights after-party for Film District’s Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark: 
