The director of this Ben Quayle political spot is an amateur. It’s pathetic when Quayle walks off-screen toward the camera and to the left as he mutters, “And I approved this message.” The work of a rank amateur. A political candidate who can’t find better people to shoot his political spots isn’t that bright, trust me. I’m sure Quayle didn’t intend to indict himself with this shortcoming, but he has.
I’ve just spoken to an exceptionally bright female industry professional who’s an Eat Pray Love-hard. She saw the big Ryan Murphy-Julia Roberts film last night at the Grove in L.A., and her basic reaction is (a) she was a wee bit disappointed that the pic didn’t tap into the spiritual and metaphysical currents that the book uncovered but (b) she wasn’t that disappointed and was more or less happy with it.
“I was sitting next to a woman who hadn’t read the book and she thought it was great,” my source says, “but if you’ve read the book, and I’m a superfan…I think it’s hard to live up to great expectations. So it was good, not great, but perfectly enjoyable.
“I totally didn’t buy the Billy Crudup-is-a-problem-husband thing…not a bit. He and Julia didn’t look like they fit together. In the book this breakup section went on a long time, and it ended with her curled up on the bathroom floor, and there’s really no question that she has to leave this guy. But they don’t explain it much in the film. In the movie she’s lying in bed next to Crudup and saying ‘I don’t want to be married.’ He’s kind of a wanderer, and seems to be in love with her. He’s said he doesn’t want to go to Arruba, but that’s no reason to get divorced! She’s doing okay and has a book deal so what’s her problem? She’s like some some whiny chick.
“The Italy section was fine, the India section is fine, the Bali section is fine. The Richard Jenkins character was very prominent in the book and he’s very good here. The Javier Bardem character, whom she got married to in real life, is great. The James Franco character is good and believable. It matched what I remember from the book, which I read twice.
“The bottom line is, when you have a book that has resonated so much with readers on a spiritual basis, its very hard to translate that into a film. I know in order to reach a movie audience, you have to sacrifice the in-depth spiritual metaphysical stuff because that doesn’t translate well in [filmic] terms. But in the book, I underlined passages. It’s a very enjoyable movie, but I didn’t cry once. Reading the book, I was sobbing.”
The Time Warner “wideband” service is still screwed up. A new cable guy is here now — this makes the third TW visit today. The last guy tried to do it twice, but, as Howard Hawks would say, “he just wasn’t good enough.” I’ve been tooling around with my backup Toshiba and the AT&T air card in the kitchen, but there have been other issues besides. I have to leave for a 6:30 pm Eat Pray Love screening in about 90 minutes so the whole day has been a wash. Update: The third guy finally fixed it. (I think.) He went outside and re-wired something — that did the trick.
My entire morning was destroyed by the geniuses at Time Warner cable. A guy came by to install TW’s new wideband service (“speeds up to 50 mbps”), and it took him well over 90 minutes to figure things out with the TW brainiacs back at TW command central. And then he couldn’t type in the right password, and we spent nearly a half-hour trying to decipher that mystery.
And then we discovered than only two computers could use the wireless service at the same time, and not three. (Which I have.) Then I couldn’t access Gmail, either through the online platform or via Thunderbird. And then that eventually resolved itself but only after much arguing and exasperation and trying to understand certain nouns and verbs as spoken by tech support guys with New York Hispanic accents.
And then a tech support guy from Metropolitan Cable named Juan (whom I later learned is actually a member of SPECTRE — special executive for counter-intelligence, terrorism, revenge and extortion) called to explain that I actually hadn’t had TW’s wideband service installed, but something less fast. He called it “torrbough.” What? “Torrbough.” What’s torrbough? I don’t know what youre sayin’, man. “Torrbough,” he repeated. Could you please spell it? “T-U-R-B-O,” he said. Oh, turbo….fine! So you’re saying I have turbo and not wideband? “That’s what it says on my computer.”
The service guy came back an hour later and explained that Juan is some kind of mental defective impostor (like that guy Tony Curtis played in The Great Impostor) and that he’d taken flight about 20 minutes earlier and that he’s now being hunted down by Time Warner agents. The service guy said I was cool, that I had wideband, and that I really didn’t need to worry or even think about turbo or “turrbough” or anything along those lines.
Early last May Sunset Gun‘s Kim Morgan spoke with Lindsay Lohan during a Burbank photo shoot that would produce images to promote Inferno, the Linda Lovelace film. Tyler Shields took the photographs; director Matthew Wilder was there. But who mixed this just-posted video? Too much music, muddy dialogue…yeesh!
“The dramatic pictures [were] based on an especially sad moment in Lovelace’s life,” Morgan writes. “It was fascinating to watch Lindsay go in and out of character. When it was all done, she sat on the bed with me while I asked questions (and here, simply listened, like a therapist), and she talked quite easily about the sadomasochist relationship of Lovelace and Chuck Traynor, at one point saying the script reminded her of her parents. Yes. She has been through some things.”
“At first glance The Romantics (Plum, 9.10) gives the impression of being one of those trendy value-packed romantic comedies laced with bits and pieces of top talent aimed at getting fans in the seats, but which offer little in the way of good story-telling (He’s Just Not That Into You, Valentine’s Day). But The Romantics is a true ensemble piece where the actors work stronger as a unit then alone.
“The casting by producer-director-screenwriter-novelist Galt Niederhoffer is near pitch perfect, and the players work together seamlessly to create a smart story about the unpredictability of love and how we may get older and wander around, but some things never change.” — an intelligent sounding IMDB person (perhaps a plant) who claims to have seen The Romantics at Sundance 2010.
A critic friend saw Eat Pray Love today. “So how is it on a scale of 1 to 10?,” I wrote five or ten minutes ago. “Is it, like, a 7? Maybe a 7.5?” His reply: “I’d give it a 6. Pretty bland self-help movie with a lot of pretty travelogue footage.” Update: HE reader “bobbyperu” has given it an 8.
Disney publicity is showing Randall Wallace‘s Secretariat (Disney, 10.8) to certain folks in the loop, so I called around today and finally heard two non-vested views. Both informers believe that Diane Lane may be in line to snag the same kind of praise that Sandra Bullock got for her performance in The Blind Side.
“It’s very good for Diane, is what it is,” says one viewer. “Because it’s a strong role, because of her performance, it could turn into a kind of Blind Side thing for her, depending on how Disney handles it.”
Everyone presumably knows the Secretariat story about owner Penny Chenery (Diane Lane), a horse-farm inheritor who brushed back financial pressure and adversity while guiding Secretariat, an unlikely seeming champion at first, to win the 1973 Triple Crown.
The significant costars are John Malkovich, Nelsan Ellis, Dylan Walsh, Dylan Baker and Fred Dalton Thompson.
“It’s a great story with really good acting…a very solid horse-racing movie that’s somewhat conventional but very good,” another viewer says. “They use a special horsey-cam in the racing scenes, a camera that wasn’t used for Seabiscuit, a camera right on the hooves, right in front, right in that race. The sound is really good, the sounds of the horse breathing, as it all happens.
Lane’s character “inherits the horse-farm business from her ailing father (Scott Glenn), a woman in a man’s world….the real story is Lane’s character…persevering against the odds, actually going against her own brother and then her own husband, who wants her to sell the horse because of a $7 million tax bill….they didn’t believe the horse had the stones to win, much less win the Triple Crown. Malkovich is really good. I though it was terrific for what it is, beautifully done.”
I wrote a few months ago that I couldn’t invest in Queen Latifah in a romantic context in Just Wright because she seemed too physically imposing for a guy like Common. I’m also down with any actor who seeks privacy in order to not interfere with any chance of some producer being reluctant to cast him/her in a mainstream romantic comedy.
With the death of former Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens now being reported, the voters of Alaska are being reminded of the constant cycle of things. This actually has nothing to do with Stevens, a corrupt old buzzard, being killed in a plane crash, but the fact is that fresh energy is needed. Alaska needs to shed skins, reinvent itself, support new fellows.
I’ve noted before that a good portion of popular movies and popular actors have always been mediocre and/or mushy. You can’t quite say that the more popular a film is now, the less cultural cred it will have in years and decades to come…but a lot of popular stuff sure seems old or stodgy in retrospect. And an awful lot of popular actors from the big-studio era sure seem like nothing. Which correlates, of course, to our current crop.
(l. t. ro.) Bing Crosby, Robert Taylor, Mervyn LeRoy.
Everyone today gets what Cooper, Cagney, Bogart, Gable, Astaire, Raft, Davis, Widmark, the Marx Brothers, Monroe and Dean were about. But other studio-era figures seem stodgy, Pleistocene. You watch their films and can’t understand what the big deal was.
Who rents the movies of Bing Crosby today? Nobody, but he was a major Box-Office God in the ’40s and ’50s. Ditto the bland and dismissable Robert Taylor, who was quite popular in the ’30s and ’40s. Who talks about the films of Mervyn LeRoy these days? Except for ardent fans of Little Ceasar, I Am A Fugitive From a Chain Gang and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, no one. That’s partly because LeRoy became a total status-quo mush head in the late in the ’40s and ’50s, churning out stuff like Little Women, Quo Vadis?, Million Dollar Mermaid, Mister Roberts, The FBI Story, A Majority of One, Gypsy, etc. All but unwatchable today.
Among the box-office chat-toppers between 1995 and 2000, only one — Titanic — has any dramatic or cultural cred today. (And that’s only because of the last 25 minutes or so.) The rest are borderline embarassments now. ’95’s top grosser was Die Hard with a Vengeance — awful. The ’96 champ was Independence Day — Chinese water torture today. Armageddon topped the ’98 list — all but excruciating because of the machine-gun cutting. The biggest film of ’99 was Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace — enough said. The biggest grosser was Mission: Impossible II, which I’ve seen exactly once and will probably never see again.
So who are the Bing Crosby’s and Mervy LeRoy’s of today? Which actors and directors will mean absolutely nothing to film lovers in 2040 or 2050? Presuming there will be serious film lovers around 30 or 40 years hence is a big presumption, isn’t it? The fans of Michael Cera and Snooki and movies like Scott Pilgrim vs. The World will be in their 50s and 60s and running the show.
Cinema Blend‘s Josh Tyler has written the best defense of The Expendables so far. Wait…who has defended it? Anyone? The point is that Tyler’s writing is honest and the thinking is right out there — no posturing, no subterfuge, no clever-dick wordsmithing. I vaguely sympathize with what he’s saying — this is the age of Michael Cera, the little-girly man with the scrawny bod and the little fairy voice and deer-in the headlights expression, and woe to any culture that embraces such a pale expression of maleness — but The Expendables is still a stinky, third-rate embarassment.
“The Expendables is not a great movie,” Tyler admits, “[and] maybe it’s not even a good movie, but it’s a MAN MOVIE in all-capital letters. For fathers, The Expendables is a rare opportunity to share a little bit of the manly movie magic they shared with their dads, with their own sons.
“It’s violent and gory and utterly reprehensible — there’s no denying that. And it’s true that the story’s a mess and the characters are two-dimensional. Everything Cinema Blend‘s Katey Rich wrote in her negative review of the film is absolutely true. She’s dead on. Yet I’m not sure I’d want it made any other way. The Expendables should be like this. It must be this way. Cavemen are two-dimensional, black and white, on or off. From that dogged, admittedly dumb, often careless simplicity comes their power. So it is with The Expendables.”
- All Hail Tom White, Taciturn Hero of “Killers of the Flower Moon”
Roughly two months ago a very early draft of Eric Roth‘s screenplay for Killers of the Flower Moon (dated 2.20.17,...
More » - Dead-End Insanity of “Nomadland”
Frances McDormand‘s Fern was strong but mule-stubborn and at the end of the day self-destructive, and this stunted psychology led...
More » - Mia Farrow’s Best Performances?
Can’t decide which performance is better, although I’ve always leaned toward Tina Vitale, her cynical New Jersey moll behind the...
More »
- Hedren’s 94th
Two days ago (1.19) a Facebook tribute congratulated Tippi Hedren for having reached her 94th year (blow out the candles!)...
More » - Criminal Protagonists
A friend suggested a list of the Ten Best American Crime Flicks of the ‘70s. By which he meant films...
More » - “‘Moby-Dick’ on Horseback”
I’ve never been able to give myself over to Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee, a 1965 Civil War–era western, and I’ve...
More »