Compliments of Shane Morris, a.k.a. Cailfornia Cornbread. Watch all the way to the end.
I’ve watched two of the videos allegedly composed by Jared Lee Loughner, the 22 year-old right-wing nutter who shot Democratic Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 17 others five or six hours ago. Tea Party gun wackos are all over Arizona, but are you going to tell me that Sarah Palin‘s “Take Back The 20” website (which has since gone down) and its use of rifle-sight imagery to target Giffords wasn’t an inflammatory factor?
After Giffords’ office was attacked, she spoke to MSBNC about being the target of Sarah Palin’s campaign that had Congressional areas in crosshairs. “Sarah Palin has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district,” she said, “and when people do that, they’ve gotta realize there are consequences to that action.” She stated that such imagery was trying to “incite people and inflame emotions.”
N.Y. Times Update: “Pima County Sheriff Clarence W. Dupnik offered an emotional, angry assessment of the state of America in the wake of the shootings in Arizona, saying that two of his close friends — Ms. Giffords and Judge John Roll — were among the victims.
“Mr. Dupnik blamed the crime on the rhetoric — presumably political rhetoric — in the country.
“‘When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government,’ he said. “The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on this country is getting to be outrageous and unfortunately Arizona has become sort of the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”
“Mr. Dupnik said it is time for the country to ‘do a little soul searching.’
“‘The vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business…This has not become the nice United States that most of us grew up in.'”
Update: An HE reader made a fair point in linking to this 12.13.04 Democratic Leadership Council page with a map targeting red states that were deemed possibly winnable by Democratic candidates in future elections. Each state is marked with a target icon similar to Sarah Palin’s Take Back The 20 website. Yes, it’s the same idea but — key distinction! — the Democrats used archery target icons while Palin used rifle-sight icons. Bows and arrows are inherently less lethal and obviously an anachronistic alliteration. If and when an assassin tries to kill a politician with a bow and arrow, let me know and we’ll talk.
I haven’t seen Martin Scorsese‘s American Boy for over 30 years, but I remember it well because its subject, Steven Prince, was a world-class raconteur. Guys who can tell stories with just the right levels of smirk and emphasis are like jazz musicians, and are few and far between. I’ve known four or five of them in my life, and they’ve just got something that you can’t help responding to.
In the above clip Prince, best known for playing the gun salesman in Taxi Driver, tells about (a) working as a stagehand (or was he tour manager?) for Neil Diamond and receiving an injection of pure meth from a fellow worker, (b) managing to wangle a 4F classification for homosexual tendencies, and (c) pulling a gun on a guy who’d tried to rob him, and then dealing with a cop who happened by.
At some point in the doc Prince, a former heroin addict, tells a story that was later used by Quentin Tarantino in Pulp Fiction, about using a medical dictionary and a magic marker to inject adrenaline into the heart of a woman who’d overdosed. There’s also a story about Prince shooting a tire thief who’d tried to attack him with a knife. This story was retold in the Richard Linklater‘s Waking Life.
I suspect that HitFix’s Drew McWeeny knows something when he says that Jason Eisener‘s Hobo With A Shotgun is “genuinely deranged” and “far bloodier and nastier” than a Troma film. I just want to add to what Steven Gaydos wrote about how Hobo might be (and certainly should be) a great social-vengeance metaphor about an angry disenfranchised guy blasting expensively-cut hair all over them walls. It should be, in short, double-billed with Inside Job.
Hobo With A Shotgun, unseen, has caught on. Do I believe that Eisener had the slightest inkling of making a shotgun-splatter film that could function as a payback metaphor for the grand theft that caused the financial collapse of ’08? Of course not. I’m sure, being a friend of Eli Roth‘s, that he’s made a common abbatoir film. But maybe on some level Hobo can be interpreted that way anyway, despite the presumably slovenly motives that were in Eisener’s head. Now excuse me while I dream about Wall Street yuppies being gutted like hogs.
Update: A film critic friend just wrote to say he’s “not sure that today is a good day to be encouraging fantasies of violent revenge. Remember: The saloon door swings both ways.” To which I replied, “I was basically continuing the thought of Steven Gaydos about an apparent fact, which is that a Wall Street revenge fantasy may have already been created and put into a forthcoming grindhouse exploitation film. What’s better — a straight slaughterhouse film for the mongrel audience, or a slaughterhouse film that seeks to express social anger a la Inside Job?”
Season of the Witch is down to an historic 1% Rotten Tomatoes rating, and it’ll still make $11 or $12 million by Sunday night. Which is more than Fair Game has made since opening in early November. Blue Valentine is 20 times better than Season of the Witch and most of the Snookis and Guidos out there would rather die than pay to see it. All because they want to hang with their friends. And to them, Nic Cage, Ron Perlman, murky medieval landscapes and CG demons fall under that category.
Joel and Ethan Coen‘s True Grit beat Little Fockers, earning $4.5 million in 3124 situations to Fockers‘ $4.2 million on 3675 screens. Again, how and why are people still going to see Fockers? It’s awful, it’s hateful, it’s not funny and it’s made roughly $115 million so far. Why? Because Fockers is a kind of comfort blanket, and because Ben Stiller, Robert DeNiro, Teri Polo, Owen Wilson, Blythe Danner, Barbra Streisand, Dustin Hoffman and Jessica Alba are pallies who make audiences feel good on some level, no matter how rancid the film is. It’s diseased but that’s what most people seem to want. I need to breathe into a paper bag.
Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, the 24 year-old film obsessive who will begin co-hosting Roger Ebert Presents At the Movies (along with Associated Press film critic Christy Lemire) on 1.21, has compiled some kind of “Annual Critics Survey” preferred films of 2010 list, as posted by Indiewire. All I can say is that I hope Iggy knows how to charm the camera and that he and Lemire get some chemistry going.
At The Movies co-host Ignatiy (a.k.a. “Iggy”) Vishnevetsky.
I was amused from the start by the perversity of Ebert choosing a guy who’s arguably dweebier than Richard Brody to co-host a TV show aimed at American film lovers whose idea of stirring high-class cinema is The King’s Speech.
Vishnevetsky’s choices confirm my initial gut read on the guy, which is that (a) he’s quite headstrong and highly intelligent (anyone who puts Roman Polanski‘s The Ghost Writer at the top of the list has my allegiance), and (b) is averse to American-made films of any size (particularly those with pseudo-populist themes or stories about individual perseverance), and strongly prefers small-scale European flicks about complex social-political conflicts and/or glum family situations with an occasional Asian crime film thrown in.
In short, he’s one of those brilliant and impassioned cinefile types you see every year at the Cannes Film Festival with a crowd of six or seven at some side-street cafe, loudly and exuberantly proclaiming their preferences and revulsions and clearly determined to push their anti-mainstream, Euro-Turkish-Iranian choices as a way of gaining attention and favor with the international festival elitist crowd. Which is obviously one way to go and best of luck, etc., but I’d be astonished if Joe and Jane Popcorn take to the guy on Ebert’s show. And if I’m proved wrong, great. I’d much rather watch a young Russian eccentric than another Ben Lyons-type guy.
But I have to say that Vishnevetsky’s aversion to American-made stuff seems excessive in a best-of-2010 context. To not include even one or two of the year’s finest U.S. films — The Social Network, Black Swan, The Fighter, Inception, Blue Valentine, True Grit, Toy Story 3, Winter’s Bone — but include George Romero‘s Survival of the Dead is, for me, a little game called tweak. It takes me back to the days when Village Voice critic Stuart Byron would argue that Mark Lester‘s Truck Stop Women was far superior to Costa-Gavras‘s State of Siege. I’m reminded of a passage from The Film Snob’s Dictionary about “reverse film snobbery” and how the snob will sometimes flaunt “his populist, un-arty taste.”
And yet most of Vishnevetsky’s preferred 2010 films are arty and conventionally tasteful and thoughtfully downish and socially striking in a mostly Euro-centric way.
1. Roman Polanski‘s The Ghost Writer
3. Marco Bellocchio‘s Vincere
4. World on a Wire (the 37 year-old Rainer Werner Fassbinder film, right?)
5. Claire Denis‘ White Material
7. Johnny To‘s Vengeance
8. George A. Romero‘s Survival of the Dead
9. Jacques Rivette‘s Around a Small Mountain
10. Manoel de Oliveira‘s Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl.
Postscript: I’m presuming that you’re supposed pronounce Vishnevetsky’s first name as something like “Ig-nyah-tee.” Well, forget it. Nobody’s going to be able to begin to say that correctly (remember Hillary Clinton trying to pronounce Dmitry Medvedev?), so that’s why I’m calling him “Iggy.” I’m doing the guy a favor, trust me, because that’s something that Joe Schmoe can relate to.
What gets me isn’t that The Kennedys, the eight-part miniseries, has been deep-sixed by The History Channel, etc. What gets me is how stunningly awful Greg Kinnear‘s JFK voice sounds. Listen to this putz at the 40-second mark, and especially when he says “is entitled to defy the caught of lahww.” The chickenshit Vaughn Meader way he says “lahww” is dreadful. His voice is soft and sonny-boyish, not even slightly resembling the deeper pitch and timbre of the Real McCoy.
Listen to this clip of Kennedy’s 1962 U.S. Steel speech, and this one of a phone chat he had with General Eisenhower toward the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The tonal gaps between these clips and Kinnear’s imitation are embarassing. Kinnear’s JFK appearance isn’t too bad, so why didn’t they just hire some guy who can actually do Kennedy’s voice to dub him?
The miniseries is/was presumed to have a conservative mindset and a characterization of the Kennedy family that’s on the luridly critical side. The co-creator and exec producer is 24’s Joel Surnow, and if you know 24 you know where he’s coming from. Katie Holmes plays Jackie, Barry Pepper is Bobby Kennedy, and Tom Wilkinson as Joseph P. Kennedy. “This country is ours for the taking,” blah blah.
I realize that Joe Carnahan‘s The Grey has gotten some mention over the last day or two, but a producer friend told me about this a few days ago and I’ve decided it’s a must-see. I scratched Carnahan off my list after The A-Team, but this is about a bunch of guys who crash-land in some desolate Alaskan tundra and struggle to avoid being eaten by wolves. They get picked off one by one, of course.
The movie will sink or swim based on the realism of the wolves. I’m telling Carnahan right now that if he uses CG wolves he’s asking for trouble. By that I mean wolves that are obviously off a hard drive. If he can fool me into thinking they’re not, fine. But if I can spot the CG he’s a dead man.
I’ll tell you right now that Liam Neeson will either be the last guy to be eaten, or he won’t be eaten at all. Dermot Mulroney might get eaten, but he’ll last until the end. The others — Dallas Roberts, James Badge Dale, Frank Grillo, Nonso Anozie, Joe Anderson — will almost certainly die horribly. Ethnics, exotics and guys whose last names end in a vowel tend to go first. Guys with personality issues also die early.
Shooting will begin in Vancouver and the Northern British Columbia sometime this week. A year-end release would be likely.
What is this strange, unholy fascination that respectable columnists and film critics have with Jason Eisener‘s Hobo With A Shotgun, which will have its blood-spattered debut at Sundance 2011? Movieline‘s Stu Van Airsdale expressed enthusiasm (along with yours truly) last September, and now the Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell has it at the top of his list of must-see 2011 films. It’s the sound of the title, of course — cool, funny and bloody idiotic. Plus the vengeance of the disenfranchised.
God knows how many others out there are chanting “Hobo With A Shotgun! Hobo With A Shotgun! I must see Hobo With A Shotgun!”
Howell’s other 2011 favorites are Guy Maddin‘s Keyhole, Sarah Polley‘s Take This Waltz, David Cronenberg‘s A Dangerous Method (hey, these are all Canadians!), Pedro Almodovar‘s The Skin That I Inhabit, Lynn Ramsay‘s We Need To Talk About Kevin, Wong Kar-wai‘s The Grandmasters, Walter Salles‘ On the Road, Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life, Jon Favreau‘s Cowboys and Aliens and Martin Campbell‘s Green Lantern.
Mine, to repeat, are The Ides of March (d: George Clooney), J. Edgar (d: Clint Eastwood), Young Adult (d: Jason Reitman), We Bought A Zoo (d: Cameron Crowe), Moneyball (d: Bennett Miller), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (d: Stephen Daldry), Larry Crowne (d: Tom Hanks), The Descendants (d: Alexander Payne), The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (d: David Fincher), The War Horse (d: Steven Spielberg), The Tree of Life (d: Terrence Malick), Haywire (d: Steven Soderbergh), On The Road (d: Walter Salles), Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (d: Thomas Alfredson), The Whistleblower (d: Larysa Kondracki), The Skin That I Inhabit (d: Pedro Almodovar), This Must Be The Place (d: Paolo Sorrentino) and One Day (d: Lone Scherfig).
An HE friend from Canada bought a copy of the Ishtar Bluray a day or two ago, and has generously offered to snag a copy for yours truly and send it along by mail. Sony Home Video’s recent decision to delay the release date until May or thereabouts was very last-minute and obviously didn’t prevent copies from being shipped.
Nobody knows if Cameron Crowe‘s We Bought A Zoo, which begins filming this month, will work or not. But it it does it’ll be an emotionally satisfying finale to a real-life, hard-knocks Hollywood drama about a gifted filmmaker who’s riding high and then runs into a career ditch and has to struggle for years to make it back to the top, and loses his marriage along the way. Call it Cameron Crowe.
(l. to r.) We Bought A Zoo costars Scarlett Johansson, Matt Damon, director-cowriter Cameron Crowe
It has a better story than Jerry Maguire in some ways — darker, more textured — and much better one than Elizabethtown‘s.
Will We Bought A Zoo (I almost called it Zoo Story) turn things around? I haven’t read the original Aline Brosh Mckenna script or Crowe’s rewrite, but I’m kind of scratching my head at this point. An adaptation of Benjamin Mee’s book sounds, no offense, like a moderately appealing Disney film in which Dean Jones and Hayley Mills might have co-starred in the early ’60s.
Crowe’s Zoo will have a bit more gravitas, I’m presuming. Or at least some angularity. For one thing star Matt Damon (who plays Mee) recently told MTV.com’s Josh Horowitz that it’ll have “a lot of Eddie Vedder and a lot of Neil Young” on the soundtrack. So you have that and then you add a dilapidated zoo, ornery animals, a couple of kids (one of them played by Elle Fanning), zoo staffers, cancer, a girlfriend and a grandma and…well, you tell me. Damon, Fanning, Scarlett Johansson (playing the girlfriend and not the dying wife, right?), Thomas Haden Church, Patrick Fugit, etc.
At the end of the road Zoo might just be just a cool family film or something genuinely touching or (pray this won’t happen) another Elizabethtown. The apparent plan is to open toward the end of the year with a full award-season treatment from 20th Century Fox.
But even if it only half works Zoo will be seen as some kind of directing comeback and a career re-boot for Crowe, who’s been through some stop-and-go times over the last few years. I for one will be happy to see him out of the thicket and back in the saddle.
It’s probably too melodramatic to use a famous John Milton quote — “Long is the way, and hard, that out of hell leads up to light” — to describe Crowe’s career path since ’05. But the former Rolling Stone journalist was clearly basking in auteurist glory after the successes of Jerry Maguire (’96) and Almost Famous (’00).
And then came the sense of shock and total calamity when Crowe crashed into the side of a Kentucky mountain with Elizabethtown (’05), a debacle which also seriously damaged Orlando Bloom‘s career. A combination cutesy romance and career-disaster drama, Elizabethtown wound up earning about $52 million worldwide, and pulled down a Rotten Tomatoes score of 27 hoi-polloi and 19 creme de la creme.
I only know that pre-Elizabethtown Crowe was Mr. Hot Shit…okay, make that Mr. Moderately Hot Shit in the wake of Crowe’s creepily downish Vanilla Sky (’01)…and post-Elizabethtown the word around town was, “Good God, a guy as mature and insightful and gifted as Cameron Crowe wrote and directed this?…what happened?”
That’s what folks on my end were saying, at least.
If you’re any kind of man failure isn’t that big a deal. Fall off a horse, you get right back on…simple. So Crowe didn’t move to the Rocky Mountains and live with the wolves like John Colter. He survived and kept plugging, devoting himself to this and that project and screenplay over the next five-plus years. But for this and that reason nothing quite came together.
And then a new movie — a kind of Jerry Maguire-meets-an-early-version-of- Greenberg-meets-Joe vs. the Volcano-in-Hawaii type deal — almost happened two years ago and then suddenly fizzled out in pre-production, prompting thoughts of Elizabethtown 2.
It was eventually called Deep Tiki, with Ben Stiller and Reese Witherspooon set to costar. It came very close to shooting but then ran over a creative grenade or two and stalled and was more or less abandoned in either December ’08 or January ’09.
It may have been that Crowe said to himself (or one or more of the creative principals said to Crowe), “Wait, wait, wait…hold up. What are we doing here? Spy satellites, an erupting volcano, a sacrifice to Hawaiian Gods?”
I’m trying to think of the last time that a major-league auteur had secured financing and cast two movie stars and had done all the spade work and lined up most of the ducks and then…wait, huddle, stall. Definitely weird.
There’s also Crowe’s Marvin Gaye biopic that Variety‘s Steve Chagollan wrote about on 4.1.10. “Crowe has been working very quietly for three and a half years to align the key elements on a pic about Motown singer Marvin Gaye,” he reported. “Despite securing extensive music rights and the full cooperation of Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr., the project, with Scott Rudin attached as producer, is being reconceived until Crowe and Sony can come to terms on a budget and a star (Will Smith, who has an ongoing relationship with Sony, declined the part after much discussion).”
A couple of days ago I wrote Crowe about some information that came my way about his having written a screenplay based on David Sheff‘s “Beautiful Boy” and Nic Sheff‘s “Tweak,” which both tell the same story about Nic’s methedrine addiction.
The source told me that David “didn’t like the way he was portrayed, so now the production company — Brad Pitt‘s Plan B Entertainment — has moved on to another screenwriter.” A friend who did some checking says the project is legit but isn’t sure about my source’s account. In the thick of We Bought A Zoo or whatever Crowe didn’t respond.
And then last September came the news that Crowe’s musician wife Nancy Wilson, citing irreconcilable differences, had filed for divorce, and that the couple had been separated since the summer of ’08. I don’t get into personal stuff, but one naturally suspects that the whole pressure-of-things-not-panning-out-all-that-well may have been a factor.
In any case, Crowe is clearly due for a little light shining down, a clearing in the woods. As a guy who once heard the roar of the crowd and held mountains in the palm of his hand, he needs to stand on a plateau and feel the kind of serenity and satisfaction that can only come from making a film that people admire and pay to see in great numbers.
Speaking as an ex-Crowe homie who personally likes and admires the guy, I’m pulling for him and We Bought A Zoo and the whole third-act payoff that will (or could or should) make Cameron Crowe a winner.
I’ve never had a fat cat in my life, but the size of Mouse, my borderline obese two and a half year-old Siamese male, has become a problem. 25 minutes ago, I mean. He just jumped onto the top of the wooden cabinet above the sink, filled with plates and glasses with two suitcases sitting on top, and the cabinet couldn’t take the weight and the whole thing just came CRASHING DOWN on the counter and the floor.
Mouse — Friday, 1.7, 1:05 pm.
It sounded like a series of grenades going off, like the building itself was collapsing. The noise must have startled people walking on the street. The cabinet shattered in sections, smashed plates, smashed glasses, smashed bottles, clutter & crap and liquor stink all over the place. The kitchen is a complete disaster zone, and all because Mouse is Orson Welles. Now I’m looking at $300 or $400 in reconstruction costs to put it back up, replace the plates and glasses…at least.
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