Risky Biz blog’s Anne Thompson has chided David Denby‘s recently posted New Yorker piece about Hollywood’s digital future by calling it a dutiful “term paper” that seems “terribly familar” and “very obvious…and as always, Denby’s sorry to let the old ways go.”
I enjoyed Denby’s piece because it’s honest and thorough and well written — he talked to many of the Left Coast people he needed to speak to and then tried to put it all together in his head, and then he came back to Manhattan and wrote it from his heart. It’s a smart, absorbing read. I don’t get the bashing. From Poland, yes (naturally)…but not from Anne.
And while digital technology is improving new and old films markedly (i.e., first-rate digital projection in theatres is, to my eyes, definitely preferable to film projection), some of the “old ways” of showing and experiencing movies were really spectac- ular. There’s an extra-oomph showmanship quality that’s missing from all but the best theatres (like Hollywood’s Arclight) today.
Those ornate, super-sized movie palaces, for example….finito. I’ve only seen pictures (okay, I was inside Radio City Music Hall once) but I feel like I’ve missed out on something really grandiose and spirit-filling.
I’ve seen 30-frame Todd-AO exactly once in my life (when a restored 30-frame version of Oklahoma! was shown in ’84 or thereabouts), and I’ve never forgotten it. The fluidity of motion and considerable lessening of pan blur in that ancient 70mm process, which hasn’t been freshly exhibited since 1956 or thereabouts, was truly awesome.
Something in me also regrets that Showscan, the 60 frame-per-second process that peaked iin the ’80s and early ’90s, was never used to make a feature film. I’m a little bit sorry also that the old three-projector Cinerama process, dual-projector 3-D projection, Ultra- and Super-Panavision 70, Camera 65, Dimension 150, Aromarama and all the nervy, forward-thinking processes of the ’50s and early ’60s are gone as well.
I think we can all agree that the culture really and truly needs right now another media-related group getting together to hand out year-end awards. Hence, SOAP — the newly-formed Society of Online Awards Prognosticators, the brainchild of And The Winner Is blogmeister Scott Feinberg with members including myself, Sasha Stone and Anne Thompson — has electrically come into being.
The SOAP’s 2007 nominations will post on Sunday, 1.14 — nine days before the Academy noms are announced — with SOAP winners to be announced on Wednesday, 2.21, i.e., four days before the 2.25 Oscar telecast.
The other members: Johnny Alba, The Oscar Igloo; Mark Bakalor, Oscar Central; Carlos Reyes, Oscar Diary; Nathaniel Rogers, The Film Experience; Andy Scott, Everything Oscar; and Giovanni Tagliaferri, The Oscar Jam.
“When the studios are in for a penny, they’re in for a pound. When you’re giving them product, then their nose is in the wind a lot more. If it smells good, they’ll run with it. But if it doesn’t, they’re not invested in it.” — The Painted Veil star Edward Norton to Hollywood Reporter/”Risky Business” columnist Anne Thompson in her 12.18 column.
This is the money quote that pretty much explains why Veil producer Bob Yari is flustered about what he sees as faint Warner Bros. support in terms of “For Your Consideration” Oscar ads for The Painted Veil. The bottom line is that Warner Bros. honchos have put a damp finger to the wind and decided that the film doesn’t smell all that good — that it’s a respectable stiff.
This despite its high-pedigree credentials (an adaptation of a Somerset Maugham novel, shot in rural Chinese locations, well-rendered 1920s period sets and costumes), mildly interesting performances and Stuart Dryburgh‘s eye-filling cinematography. As Slant‘s Jason Clark has written, Veil “is more or less from the school of motion picture that Pauline Kael used to say ‘reeks of quality.'” And the import of the story….good heavens.
It’s basically about how a pretty young British woman (Noami Watts), under pressure from her parents to find a suitable mate, marries a dweeby stuffed-shirt bacteriologist (Norton)…and gradually comes to love and respect him for his character and steadiness and compassion for Chinese peasants afflicted with cholera. The message, in short, is that humorless prigs with commendable inner qualities make good husbands as long as the woman in question gives up all those immature ideas about heady romantic attraction, great sex and other spirit-lifting chemistries.
Watching this film a few weeks ago made me feel frustrated, impatient, bored — bees were buzzing in my head. 70 minutes into it I got up and asked the projec- tionist how much time was left, and when he told me there was another 55 minutes to go my heart just sank. I went back to my seat and told The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil, who was sitting next to me, “I can’t do this”…and I left. As I was driving out of the parking garage I saw a woman who’d been sitting behind O’Neil and myself walking up the ramp. “You left too?” I asked. “Oh, God…please!”, she replied.
Yari, naturally, believes in the film and is fighting for it tooth and nail — the mark of a good producer. But The Painted Veil is one respectably doomed film if I ever saw one. That said, 67% of the Rotten Tomatoes critics who’ve posted so far have raved, liked it or gave it a qualified pass.
L.A. Times film reporter John Horn has written a similar piece about the same kettle of fish.
According to a letter from Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh posted late last night on theonering.net, New Line Cinema has parted ways with Jackson/Walsh over a lawsuit that they had brought aainst the distributor tied to Fellowship of the Ring revenues (i.e., product licensing, “differences of opinion”, etc.).
The positive-minded Jackson/Walsh had been expecting settlement on the lawsuit, which would then be followed by a deal to start work on The Hobbit plus a Lord of the Rings prequel. However, according to the letter, “last week [New Line bigwig] Mark Ordesky called Ken Kamins” — Jackson/Walsh’s manager — “and told him that New Line would no longer be requiring our services on The Hobbit and the LOTR ‘prequel’…this was a courtesy call to let us know that the studio was now actively looking to hire another filmmaker for both projects.
“Ordesky said that New Line has a limited time option on the [Hobbit] film rights they have obtained from Saul Zaentz (this has never been conveyed to us before), and because we won’t discuss making the movies until the lawsuit is resolved, the studio is going to have to hire another director. Given that New Line [is] committed to this course of action, we felt at the very least, we owed you, the fans, a straightforward account of events as they have unfolded for us.”
What’s really going on here, I believe, is a reflection of the this year’s sea-change attitude among distributors and producers towards coddled, overpaid wunderkind types like Jackson — big-name talents who get rich deals for themselves and their production companies, after which they go off and strain or exceed the budget, and then their sometimes indulgent, overlong film (i.e., King Kong) comes out and does moderately well but not well enough. Result: the wunderkind makes out like a bandit and the studio is left holding the bag.
Image-wise, Universal’s King Kong experience with Jackson made him into the ultimate enfant terrible poster boy for indulgent, genius-boy tendencies. Jackson’s middle name is “wheeee!” — it’s what makes him what he is. If you make a movie with Jackson, provision #1 in his contract is that he gets to go “wheeee!” all through the making of it. At the end of the day the film will be in some ways awesome/brilliant/ eye-popping and what the fans want, and in other ways indulgent, show-offy, overlong and flooded with fake-looking bullshit CG shots that “wheeee!” types love to create because fake CG shots are so deliriously comic-book “imaginative.”
You may make a huge profit with a Jackson film and you may not, but one thing for sure is that he and his New Zealand pallies will make out like kings plus they’ll all get to go “wheeee!” for 18 months or two years, on your dime.
I’m basically saying that New Line did a good thing here. The more Peter Jackson gets cut down and has to trim his sails and stop “wheee”-ing his way through movie-making, the better. I say this because I have never suffered so acutely in my moviegoing years…I’ve never felt so awful, so trapped, so stuck on Devil’s Island- with-dysentery as I did while watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy and also the first 70 minutes of King Kong. I just know that the fewer “paints” Jackson has to work with, the better his films will turn out to be.
The loyalty and respect factors among the media in the elite Clint Club run so deep that until very recently, no one had seriously considered actually looking the esteemed director of Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima in the eye and saying straight from the shoulder, “You’ve made an honorable film but it’s not a homer or even a triple, so don’t expect great waves of support from us when it comes to critic awards.” None of the loyalists could ever bring themselves to actually say the words. But now that Flags is sinking fast with the public (it’s losing theatres and will only earn about $2,717,000 for the weekend), no one has to do anything. To paraphrase a Paddy Chayefsky line in The Hospital, Clint’s Iwo Jima film is on the verge of being “simply forgotten to death.” Who could have foreseen such a situation two months ago? How swiftly the tide recedes.
The usual simplistic knee-jerk responses have flooded in since last night’s summary and posting of a link to Michael Fleming ‘s piece about Steven Soderbergh‘s plan to shoot back-to-back Che Guevara films as of May ’07. I ran a response in “comments” this morning, but just so everyone sees it…
I gave this a think-through last night and came to the rudimentrary conclusion that The Argentine and Guerilla combined are are going to resemble parts I and II of Lawrence of Arabia — the promise, the dream and the mixed glory in the first section, and the bitterness, madness and despair that manifests in the second. Presumably there will be much more to these two films than what I’ve just summarized, but it took me just under 15 seconds to figure out the basic strategy — it’s fairly obvious — when I read Fleming’s story last night.
When the Soderbergh-del Toro-Guevara flick was just a single-film project (i.e., for the last several years), it was just Guerrilla — about how Guevara’s revolutionary fervor led him to quit his Cuban posts and embark upon a failed attempt to spark a revolution in Bolivia. It’s a story about failure, isolation…listening more and more to the sounds of your own rhetorical spinnings to the exclusion of real-world reality to the extent that it invites pathetic self-destruction.
As Christopher Hitchens once wrote, “Che’s iconic status was assured because he failed. His story was one of defeat and isolation, and that’s why it is so seductive. Had he lived, the myth of Che would have long since died.”
Because it’s largely about Che’s and Fidel Castro’s glory period (i.e., fighting and winning the Cuban revolution, which everyone marvelled at the world over…Batista’s allegiance was strictly with the moneyed elements who provided for him…he cared not for the poor), The Argentine will be about the hard climb up the mountain and then the reaching of the summit and throwing one’s hat in the air and dancing beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free.
So The Argentine is the upper and Guerilla is the downer. Up the mountain, down the mountain. I doubt if Soderbergh, del Toro and Buchman will make the two films as black-and-white simplistic as this, but this is clearly the basic scheme.
Even the folks in charge of the withered Cuban propaganda ministry would have trouble framing Guevara’s Bolivian episode in a positive light. Give Soderbergh, del Toro and Buchman a break and assume, as any reasonable person would, that they’re certainly not going to attempt to glorify Guevara in part 2…no way. These are intelligent artists making this film. Show a little respect.
They’re primarily attracted to Guevara’s life for the arc that it represents (everyone of any spirit strives for something fine and shining in this world and some achieve it, and then the dream fades and the muddled, sometimes bitter reality kicks in), for the highs and the lows, to the Lawrence of Arabia angle. Because this is the story that will captivate audiences 100 or 500 years from now.
“Guillermo Del Toro was a man on a mission. He’d been sent a tape of Amores Perros by a mutual friend, another up-and-coming Mexican auteur, Alfonso Cuaron, who [like Del Toro] thought the movie was an overlong chef d’oeuvre.
“Though Del Toro was ‘very broke’ at the time — he’d recently paid a hefty ransom to rescue his father from a kidnapping — he caught one of the first available flights to Mexico from Austin, Texas, where he was living then.
“‘Next day, or two days after, I opened the door and I see a fat man with the face of a kid, and with very intelligent blue eyes,’ Inarritu, 43, recalls. ‘And in the next three days he ate all the food in my refrigerator but he made me laugh like nobody, he made my life so happy. And he helped me, really toughly, to get those seven, eight minutes out of it.’
“For the record, Del Toro insists it was 20 minutes, and he swears that every time Inarritu tells the story the tally gets shorter. ‘Alejandro, come on!’ he says, laughing as he relates the anecdote. ‘Next time you’re going to say we took out four minutes!’ — from Reed Johnson‘s nicely detailed L.A. Times piece about Inarritu, Del Toro and Cuaron, obviously in the same vein of Anne Thompson’s 9.8 “Three Amigos” piece in the Hollywood Reporter, only longer and more lusciously written.
John Ford‘s movies have been wowing and infuriating me all my life. A first-rate visual composer and one of Hollywood’s most economical story-tellers bar none, Ford made films that were always rich with complexity, understatements and undercurrents that refused to run in one simple direction.
The closing shot of John Ford’s The Searchers
Ford’s films are always what they seem to be…until you watch them again and re-reflect, and then they always seem to be something more.
But the phoniness and jacked-up sentiment in just about every one of them can be oppressive, and the older Ford got the more he ladled it on.
The Irish clannishness, the tributes to boozy male camaraderie, the relentless balladeering over the opening credits of 90% of his films, the old-school chauvinism, the racism, the thinly sketched women, the “gallery of supporting players bristling with tedious eccentricity” (as critic David Thomson put it in his Biographical Dictionary of Film) and so on.
The treacliness is there but tolerable in Ford’s fine pre-1945 work — The Informer, Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln , Drums Along the Mohawk, They Were Expendable , The Grapes of Wrath and My Darling Clementine .
But it gets really thick starting with 1948’s Fort Apache and by the time you get to The Searchers, Ford’s undisputed masterpiece that came out in March of 1956, it’s enough to make you retch.
Watch the breathtaking beautiful new DVD of The Searchers, and see if you can get through it without choking. Every shot is a visual jewel, but except for John Wayne‘s Ethan Edwards, one of the most fascinating racist bastards of all time, every last character and just about every line in the film feels arch and ungenuine.
The phoniness gets so pernicious after a while that it seems to nudge this admittedly spellbinding film toward self-parody. Younger people who don’t “get” Ford (and every now and then I think I may be turning into one) have been known to laugh at it.
Jeffrey Hunter‘s Martin Pawley does nothing but bug his eyes, overact and say stupid exasperating lines all through the damn thing. Nearly every male supporting character in the film does the same. No one has it in them to hold back or play it cool — everyone blurts.
Ken Curtis‘s Charlie McCorry, Harry Carey Jr.’s Brad Jorgensen, Hank Worden‘s Mose Harper…characters I’ve come to despise by way of the grating artistry of John Ford.
I’ll always love the way Ford handles that brief bit when Ward Bond‘s Reverend Clayton sees Martha, the wife of Ethan’s brother, stroking Ethan’s overcoat and then barely reacts — perfect — but every time Bond opens his mouth to say something, he bellows like a bull moose.
You can do little else but sit and grimace through Natalie Wood‘s acting as Debbie (the kidnapped daughter of Ethan’s dead brother), Vera Miles‘ Laurie Jorgenson, and Beulah Archuletta‘s chubby Indian squaw (i.e., “Wild Goose Flying in the Night Sky”)…utterly fake in each and every gesture and utterance.
I realize there’s a powerful double-track element in the racism that seethes inside Ethan, but until he made Cheyenne Autumn Ford always portrayed Indians — Native Americans — as a kind of creepy, sadistic sub-species. The German-born, blue-eyed Henry Brandon as Scar, the Comanche baddie at the heart of The Searchers…’nuff said.
Jeffrey Hunter, John Wayne
That repulsive scene when Ethan and Martin look at four or five babbling Anglo women whose condition was caused, we’re informed, by having been raised by Indians, and some guy says, “Hard to believe they’re white” and Ethan says, “They ain’t white!”
I don’t know how to enjoy The Searchers any more except by wearing aesthetic blinders — by ignoring all the stuff that drives me up the wall in order to savor the beautiful heart-breaking stuff (the opening and closing shot, Wayne’s look of fear when he senses danger for his brother’s family, his picking up Wood at the finale and saying, “Let’s go home, Debbie”).
All I’m saying is, for a great film it takes an awful lot of work to get through it.
Rollover
I don’t want to say too much about Wolfgang Petersen’s Poseidon (Warner Bros., 5.12) because this isn’t a regular “review” or anything. Maybe if I begin by talking about the 1972 Ronald Neame film (a piece of big-budget schlock that was a major blockbuster in its day), it’ll seem like less of one.
The original The Poseidon Adventure, which I just saw on a new double-disc DVD, was a bit rough to begin with — cornball characters, lumpy dialogue, cheesy special effects — and time has not helped. It’s almost painful by today’s standards — a movie with a two or three strands of silver hair growing out of its ear and some wretched acting here and there, and that putrid theme song, “(There’s Got To Be) A Morning After.”
Gene Hackman’s combover hair style looks awfully weird, and Shelley Winters’ fat Molly Goldberg character is enough to make anyone groan. And the effects…forget about it. The opening credits are laid over a slow-motion shot of what looks like a three-foot model of the S.S. Poseidon cruising along in a studio tank.
Poseidon, which I saw Tuesday afternoon, is a much better film. I didn’t see the reviled TV-movie version that aired last November with Steve Gutenberg, but it’s probably a lot better than that also. Lots of excitement. Much better special effects all around. No bullshit sentiment or emotional fat lathered onto the story or the characters. Streamlined, adrenalized…at least one action-suspense sequence that is arguably classic. And only 100 minutes long vs. 117 minutes for the ’72 version.
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It moves right along and kicks ass according to the rules of the game it’s playing. There is no basis for any substantive quarrel with any movie that does what it sets out to do, and this $150 million action thriller does that. It is what it is, take it or leave it, etc.
Less than fifteen minutes of character set-up and along comes the rogue wave. (I adore the fact that there’s no explanation or set-up except for everyone’s memory of the Southeast Asian tsunami.) And then it’s just a matter of staying with a small team of survivors (Josh Lucas, Kurt Russell, Richard Dreyfuss, Emmy Rossum, Jacinda Barrett, etc.) trying to climb down — up — to the ship’s hull to find a way out.
Josh Lucas in Wolfgang Peterseon’s Poseidon (Warner Bros., 5.12)
What could be simpler? And no one, thank fortune, talks about their fears or longings or what’s wrong with their life, or how much they love or miss their wife, husband or kids. I felt truly delighted — I think I can say I was overjoyed — that Petersen and screenwriter Mark Protosevitch made the decision not to go in this direction.
Remember those desperate survival sequences in Titanic with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet sloshing and swimming around and trying not to drown in the lower areas of the ship as the water gets higher and higher? It’s all like that but cranked up a bit more.
In fact, speaking of Titanic, one of the things intensifying the suspense in Petersen’s film is the fact that this new super-sized S.S. Poseidon is sinking (which wasn’t a factor in the ’72 film).
And I love the eye-filling CGI aerial shot of the big ship that opens the film. It swoops around and goes on for a long while, and I think Petersen did this in part so people will remember that a similar shot in Titanic, released eight and a half years ago, was much cruder…cartoony even.
I’ve probably gone on too long so I’ll wrap it up by saying if Warner Bros. doesn’t give it a big nationwide sneak this weekend (which they apparently aren’t planning on) they’re making a big mistake. They’ve got a quality package — they should let people see it and react. I only know that the TV ads and trailers haven’t sold it sufficiently thus far.
For the first time ever, by the way, I found myself warming to Josh Lucas, although his character — a selfish professional gambler — isn’t exactly “likable.” What got me is the ferocious life-force energy that Lucas exudes once the crawling-through- the-ship action begins. He’s an unstopppable survivalist.
I said to myself early on, “I’m with this guy…I’d want him with me if I were in a tough spot.” I’ve never felt much liking for Lucas before, so this is (somewhat) significant.
Rocket Man
The great critic F.X. Feeney told me the other day about a short film about 9/11 called The Falling Man, and that it was about to be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival. With Paul Greengrass’s United 93 set to open the festival on Tuesday, 4.25, I thought right away, whoa…I should see this. So I did on Friday afternoon (4.21), and I went “whoa” again.
Directed and written by Kevin Ackerman, The Falling Man is an M. Night Shyama- lan-styled spooker about a real-life guy who bought it on 9/11…probably the best known of the 200-something people who jumped from the burning towers because his picture was in the New York Times and everywhere else the next day.
Rick Ojeda as Windows on the World employee Jon Briley in Kevin Ackerman’s The Falling Man
Taken by AP veteran Richard Drew, it showed a tallish, goateed, light-skinned African-American guy, falling upside down in a white shirt, orange T-shirt, black pants and black high-tops, dropping at close to 150 mph in a perfectly vertical posture, not flailing (in this particular shot, at least) and seemingly resigned to his fate, or at least not desperately fighting it.
Part flashback and part flash-forward, The Falling Man is a trippy life-death riff, and well worth seeing.
It’s about a waiter (Rick Ojeda) working at Windows on the World, the restaurant on the top floor of the north tower, who’s sent down to the 103rd floor to the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald to deliver some food, but he can’t find anyone. Vacant. Empty desks, papers on the floor, silhouettes behind smoked glass but no one there. He’s Earl Holliman in “Where Is Everybody?”, anxious and starting to freak out.
Then he runs into a woman with gray skin who looks like a zombie out of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, and it hits you after a second or two that her skin isn’t zombie-gray but ash-gray. And then spookier things happen, all leading to a realization.
It’s September 11, 2001, of course. Sometime around 9:41 am…or in some nether place made of memory, premonition, and flashbacks thrown together. But most of it is happening in the mind of the waiter, who existed and was named, in all likeli- hood, Jon Briley.
There was natural curiosity in the public mind about who he was because of the photo, but Briley’s identity was in question for the better part of two years, partly because his body was destroyed, partly because the photo was pulled from circulation, and partly because his father and others in his family didn’t want to know or deal with it.
But then Esquire‘s Tom Junod wrote a piece about the photo called “The Falling Man“, which ran in the September ’03 issue (with Colin Farrell on the cover). Junod came to the conclusion it was probably Briley, and then a British documentary, also called The Falling Man, ran last month and concluded it was probably Briley too. The makers based their findings on testimony from a top chef who worked at Windows on the World named Michael Lomonaco as well as Briley’s older sister, Gwendolyn.
Then came a filmmaking contest sponsored by Esquire a few months later in which contestants had to make a short film based on one of a selection of short stories and features that had appeared in the magazine.
Ackerman, who had recently directed a low-budget noir called Lonely Place, decided to make a film about Junod’s piece. The idea has come to him in a flash during a visit to the downtown LA set of In Good Company, when he realized that a suite of offices in a tall building he was standing in could double for the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald.
Falling Man director-writer Kevin Ackerman; 9/11 victim Jon Briley
Ackerman shot the film in April 2004 over a couple of days, just before the contest deadline. It cost him about $6000 at the end of the day. Ojeda and Ron Sanford produced it with him. It was shot by John Hale and Steve Smith and edited by David Miller.
Although Esquire‘s contest specified that the shorts be no longer than five minutes, Ackerman’s ran eight minutes. It meant he couldn’t win the prize money (a piddly $2500) but the judges — among them director Alexander Payne (Sideways), former Paramount Classics chief Ruth Vitale and Endeavor agent (and Paramount Clas- sics honcho-to-be) John Lesher — saw it anyway, and were impressed.
By September 2004 Ackerman had moved on to other things, but Payne got in touch that month and said he was really taken with The Falling Man (“This film is fantastic”) and urged Ackerman to shoot additional footage in order to round it out and fulfill his vision.
So Ackerman did that. He added some new footage (a sequence with a 9/11 memory wall was a significant addition, I can say) and finished the extra lensing in September 2005. Naturally, he felt the Tribeca Film Festival was the best place to premiere it, especially given a stated interest by festival honcho Robert De Niro in wanting to see 9/11-themed films submitted. De Niro saw a rough cut of The Fall- ing Man last December and it was accepted soon after.
Falling Man admirer and supporter Alexander Payne
Ackerman just finished the final, fussed-over version — transferred to 35mm film, in anamorphic scope — earlier this week. He flew to New York this weekend with the print.
The Falling Man will have four showings during the festival — on Sunday, 4.30, 9 pm at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, on Tuesday, 5.2, 6 pm at Pace University’s Schimmel Center, on Wednesday, 5.3, 10 pm at AMC Loews Village VII, and on Friday, 5.5, 11 pm at Regal Cinemas Battery Park 5.
It’s not an absolute masterwork but it’s a very penetrating film, obviously because it draws on 9/11 emotions, but also because it adds a surreal, Twilight Zone-ish feel- ing to a familiar canvas, supplying a kind of fresh echo…producing a result that’s unnerving but on some level very “real.”
Ackerman can be reached via Tried & True Productions at 323.466.1602. His email is citizenack@aol.com.
Aroma, Sizzle, Steak
I used to love movie poster art, but there are so few today that pop through in any kind of sexy or distinctive way that the fun, for me, just isn’t there any more. Or not enough.
Take five or ten minutes and browse through this British website devoted to classic one-sheets, and you’ll see what I mean. (Make sure you check out the Saul Bass page.) A lot of them were standard primitive sells, but the better ones from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s had flair, smarts, suggestiveness…a kind of art-gallery urbanity.
Movie posters that were hanging in Hollywood Museum on Thursday, 4.20…but are gone now because it was just a one-day, one-shot deal.
Many of today’s posters, of course, are geared to mall-heads. They get your attention but in a much more rudimentary way. Many of them are basically about emphasis over enticement, and always seem to use the primary colors, emotions and attitudes that are likely to appeal to younger, less educated viewers with shorter attention spans.
But I figured I’d go down to the Hollywood Museum anyway to check out the 2005 posters that have been submitted for the 2006 Hollywood Reporter Key Art Awards. The winners will collect their trophies at a big swanky ceremony held June 16 at the Kodak Theatre, with Kevin Nealon serving as m.c. (Click here for more info.)
I got there around 12:30 on Thursday, and ten minutes later I was almost ready to leave.
The first and second floors were stuffed to the gills with posters and standees for cinema primitivo — primarily big-budget action, horror, FX and teen-market crap. Precisely the kind of films I loathe. I read books, I’ve been to college and I’ve stood inside the Pantheon in Rome, and every poster and standee on those floors said, “C’mon, man…you’re a gorilla. You know you are. Here, have a banana.”
Then my hosts — Hollywood Reporter publicists Lynda Miller and Alisha Maines, and mPRm’s Shari Mesulam and Wendy Martino — took me to the third floor and finally…some good stuff! Posters with a semblance of art and finesse and sophis- tication.
My choice for the best one-sheet is the one pictured above, for Transamerica. I’m also a fan of the one-sheets for Capote, Jarhead, Inside Deep Throat, et. al. But very few of them had that capturing-the-essence, vaguely highbrow approach. I mean, a few did.
The one-sheet for Warren Beatty’s Bulworth (1998) had that element, that way of compressing the soul or attitude of a film into a single chord.
I asked what percentage of the posters submited were from the indie sector and and big-studio distributors. An answer never came back, but Key Art Awards Coordinator Marc Romeo, who’s been facilitating the entry and judging process for six years, says that 70% of this year’s 1,423 entries received (in 29 categories) have been submitted by agencies and vendors and 30% were submitted by studios.
I happened to notice two posters hanging on a stairwell for a couple of broadly commercial films from the ’50s that no one wants to see these days, that aren’t on DVD and that I’ve either forgotten about or never heard of. One was All Hands on Deck, a 1961 Navy comedy with Pat Boone and Buddy Hackett, and You Can’t Run Away From It, a remake of It Happened One Night with Jack Lemmon and June Allyson.
These movies may have been popular in their day but they’re dead now — unknown and unwatched by even the cultists. I mean, you could send a messenger with a basket of fruit, a bottle of champagne and a new DVD of All Hands on Deck to my door, and I really doubt if I’d watch it.
We all have ideas, I’m sure, about which films playing today are not only disposable by today’s standards but certain to be forgotten by history. Most of the films that have come out over the last couple of months belong in this category, February, March and early April releases being what they are. It’s a desert out there.
Anyway, my four hosts took me to Mel’s after our tour, and we all sat down and ordered the healthiest foods we could find on the menu. And then mPRm honcho Mark Pogachefsky dropped by to say hello, and then Hollywood Reporter ad sales exec Lynn Segal came in with friends for some lunch. And it was basically a nice visit.
But it would have been nicer if Saul Bass had been there.
Rocket Man
The great critic F.X. Feeney told me the other day about a short film about 9/11 called The Falling Man, and that it was about to be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival. With Paul Greengrass’s United 93 set to open the festival on Tuesday, 4.25, I thought right away, whoa…I should see this. So I did on Friday afternoon (4.21), and I went “whoa” again.
Directed and written by Kevin Ackerman, The Falling Man is an M. Night Shyama- lan-styled spooker about a real-life guy who bought it on 9/11…probably the best known of the 200-something people who jumped from the burning towers because his picture was in the New York Times and everywhere else the next day.
Rick Ojeda as Windows on the World employee Jon Briley in Kevin Ackerman’s The Falling Man
Taken by AP veteran Richard Drew, it showed a tallish, goateed, light-skinned African-American guy, falling upside down in a white shirt, orange T-shirt, black pants and black high-tops, dropping at close to 150 mph in a perfectly vertical posture, not flailing (in this particular shot, at least) and seemingly resigned to his fate, or at least not desperately fighting it.
Part flashback and part flash-forward, The Falling Man is a trippy life-death riff, and well worth seeing.
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It’s about a waiter (Rick Ojeda) working at Windows on the World, the restaurant on the top floor of the north tower, who’s sent down to the 103rd floor to the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald to deliver some food, but he can’t find anyone. Vacant. Empty desks, papers on the floor, silhouettes behind smoked glass but no one there. He’s Earl Holliman in “Where Is Everybody?”, anxious and starting to freak out.
Then he runs into a woman with gray skin who looks like a zombie out of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, and it hits you after a second or two that her skin isn’t zombie-gray but ash-gray. And then spookier things happen, all leading to a realization.
It’s September 11, 2001, of course. Sometime around 9:41 am…or in some nether place made of memory, premonition, and flashbacks thrown together. But most of it is happening in the mind of the waiter, who existed and was named, in all likeli- hood, Jon Briley.
There was natural curiosity in the public mind about who he was because of the photo, but Briley’s identity was in question for the better part of two years, partly because his body was destroyed, partly because the photo was pulled from circulation, and partly because his father and others in his family didn’t want to know or deal with it.
But then Esquire‘s Tom Junod wrote a piece about the photo called “The Falling Man“, which ran in the September ’03 issue (with Colin Farrell on the cover). Junod came to the conclusion it was probably Briley, and then a British documentary, also called The Falling Man, ran last month and concluded it was probably Briley too. The makers based their findings on testimony from a top chef who worked at Windows on the World named Michael Lomonaco as well as Briley’s older sister, Gwendolyn.
Then came a filmmaking contest sponsored by Esquire a few months later in which contestants had to make a short film based on one of a selection of short stories and features that had appeared in the magazine.
Ackerman, who had recently directed a low-budget noir called Lonely Place, decided to make a film about Junod’s piece. The idea has come to him in a flash during a visit to the downtown LA set of In Good Company, when he realized that a suite of offices in a tall building he was standing in could double for the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald.
Falling Man director-writer Kevin Ackerman; 9/11 victim Jon Briley
Ackerman shot the film in April 2004 over a couple of days, just before the contest deadline. It cost him about $6000 at the end of the day. Ojeda and Ron Sanford produced it with him. It was shot by John Hale and Steve Smith and edited by David Miller.
Although Esquire‘s contest specified that the shorts be no longer than five minutes, Ackerman’s ran eight minutes. It meant he couldn’t win the prize money (a piddly $2500) but the judges — among them director Alexander Payne (Sideways), former Paramount Classics chief Ruth Vitale and Endeavor agent (and Paramount Clas- sics honcho-to-be) John Lesher — saw it anyway, and were impressed.
By September 2004 Ackerman had moved on to other things, but Payne got in touch that month and said he was really taken with The Falling Man (“This film is fantastic”) and urged Ackerman to shoot additional footage in order to round it out and fulfill his vision.
So Ackerman did that. He added some new footage (a sequence with a 9/11 memory wall was a significant addition, I can say) and finished the extra lensing in September 2005. Naturally, he felt the Tribeca Film Festival was the best place to premiere it, especially given a stated interest by festival honcho Robert De Niro in wanting to see 9/11-themed films submitted. De Niro saw a rough cut of The Fall- ing Man last December and it was accepted soon after.
Falling Man admirer and supporter Alexander Payne
Ackerman just finished the final, fussed-over version — transferred to 35mm film, in anamorphic scope — earlier this week. He flew to New York this weekend with the print.
The Falling Man will have four showings during the festival — on Sunday, 4.30, 9 pm at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, on Tuesday, 5.2, 6 pm at Pace University’s Schimmel Center, on Wednesday, 5.3, 10 pm at AMC Loews Village VII, and on Friday, 5.5, 11 pm at Regal Cinemas Battery Park 5.
It’s not an absolute masterwork but it’s a very penetrating film, obviously because it draws on 9/11 emotions, but also because it adds a surreal, Twilight Zone-ish feel- ing to a familiar canvas, supplying a kind of fresh echo…producing a result that’s unnerving but on some level very “real.”
Ackerman can be reached via Tried & True Productions at 323.466.1602. His email is citizenack@aol.com.
Aroma, Sizzle, Steak
I used to love movie poster art, but there are so few today that pop through in any kind of sexy or distinctive way that the fun, for me, just isn’t there any more. Or not enough.
Take five or ten minutes and browse through this British website devoted to classic one-sheets, and you’ll see what I mean. (Make sure you check out the Saul Bass page.) A lot of them were standard primitive sells, but the better ones from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s had flair, smarts, suggestiveness…a kind of art-gallery urbanity.
Movie posters that were hanging in Hollywood Museum on Thursday, 4.20…but are gone now because it was just a one-day, one-shot deal.
Many of today’s posters, of course, are geared to mall-heads. They get your attention but in a much more rudimentary way. Many of them are basically about emphasis over enticement, and always seem to use the primary colors, emotions and attitudes that are likely to appeal to younger, less educated viewers with shorter attention spans.
But I figured I’d go down to the Hollywood Museum anyway to check out the 2005 posters that have been submitted for the 2006 Hollywood Reporter Key Art Awards. The winners will collect their trophies at a big swanky ceremony held June 16 at the Kodak Theatre, with Kevin Nealon serving as m.c. (Click here for more info.)
I got there around 12:30 on Thursday, and ten minutes later I was almost ready to leave.
The first and second floors were stuffed to the gills with posters and standees for cinema primitivo — primarily big-budget action, horror, FX and teen-market crap. Precisely the kind of films I loathe. I read books, I’ve been to college and I’ve stood inside the Pantheon in Rome, and every poster and standee on those floors said, “C’mon, man…you’re a gorilla. You know you are. Here, have a banana.”
Then my hosts — Hollywood Reporter publicists Lynda Miller and Alisha Maines, and mPRm’s Shari Mesulam and Wendy Martino — took me to the third floor and finally…some good stuff! Posters with a semblance of art and finesse and sophis- tication.
My choice for the best one-sheet is the one pictured above, for Transamerica. I’m also a fan of the one-sheets for Capote, Jarhead, Inside Deep Throat, et. al. But very few of them had that capturing-the-essence, vaguely highbrow approach. I mean, a few did.
The one-sheet for Warren Beatty’s Bulworth (1998) had that element, that way of compressing the soul or attitude of a film into a single chord.
I asked what percentage of the posters submited were from the indie sector and and big-studio distributors. An answer never came back, but Key Art Awards Coordinator Marc Romeo, who’s been facilitating the entry and judging process for six years, says that 70% of this year’s 1,423 entries received (in 29 categories) have been submitted by agencies and vendors and 30% were submitted by studios.
I happened to notice two posters hanging on a stairwell for a couple of broadly commercial films from the ’50s that no one wants to see these days, that aren’t on DVD and that I’ve either forgotten about or never heard of. One was All Hands on Deck, a 1961 Navy comedy with Pat Boone and Buddy Hackett, and You Can’t Run Away From It, a remake of It Happened One Night with Jack Lemmon and June Allyson.
These movies may have been popular in their day but they’re dead now — unknown and unwatched by even the cultists. I mean, you could send a messenger with a basket of fruit, a bottle of champagne and a new DVD of All Hands on Deck to my door, and I really doubt if I’d watch it.
We all have ideas, I’m sure, about which films playing today are not only disposable by today’s standards but certain to be forgotten by history. Most of the films that have come out over the last couple of months belong in this category, February, March and early April releases being what they are. It’s a desert out there.
Anyway, my four hosts took me to Mel’s after our tour, and we all sat down and ordered the healthiest foods we could find on the menu. And then mPRm honcho Mark Pogachefsky dropped by to say hello, and then Hollywood Reporter ad sales exec Lynn Segal came in with friends for some lunch. And it was basically a nice visit.
But it would have been nicer if Saul Bass had been there.
Glub-Glub
What are the odds that Wolfgang Petersen’s Poseidon (Warner Bros., 5.12) will be an above-average thrill ride? Pretty good, I’d say. And if you scan the saleable elements it looks like something a lot of people are going to want to see.
The trailer tells you the effects are going to be cool. (That rogue wave gives me the creeps.) Petersen is nothing if not a dependable craftsman, and the movie he’s made, to judge by the trailer, has the look and feel of something fairly well-rigged.
Kurt Russell (front & center)), Josh Lucas (behind Kurt), Emmy Rossum (rear) and Richard Dreyfss (lower right) in Wolfgang Petersen’s Poseidon (Warner Bros., 5.12)
I tend to shy away from big-budget effects movies, but even I’m half into seeing this thing. I really like Kurt Russell, I’ve always enjoyed Richard Dreyfuss (especially if he gets angry) and I’m cool with Josh Lucas playing the lead. If I didn’t expect to see it at a press screening within a week, I’d be okay with buying a ticket.
Why, then, are the Poseidon tracking figures in the toilet?
This is a very expensive film ($150 million? more?) and it needs to have a huge opening weekend. And yet recent figures say the overall general awareness is 54% compared to 92% for Mission: Impossible III , which opens a week earlier. The definite interests are at 23% — they should be somewhere around 40% at this stage. And the respondents calling Poseidon their first choice are around 3% when this group should be more around 10% or 11% (M:I:3‘s first-choicers are currently at 13%).
Warner Bros. has three weeks to rectify things, but right now they have reason to be worried.
They’ve been advertising on TV, the trailer is playing in theatres all over, and that upside-down-and-underwater-ship one-sheet is already iconic. (If you ask me it deserves to be a nominee at the Key Art awards next year.) And yet so far, the audience waiting to see it doesn’t seem hefty enough.
So what’s happening? Are audiences saying no to big loud disaster movies for some reason? Are people seeing some kind of 9/11 echo in this thing? (It’s not that much of a stretch.) Maybe the same folks who are frowning at the idea of seeing United 93 are doing the same here?
I think you have to lay at least some of the blame on that lousy TV movie, Hall- mark Entertainment’s The Poseidon Adventure, that aired last November. It was critically trashed, it didn’t draw that many viewers and it may have poisoned the well. It was produced by Larry Levinson, directed by Jon Putch and starred Rutger Hauer, Adam Baldwin, Bryan Brown, Steve Guttenberg, Peter Weller and C. Thom- as Howell.
I wonder who greenlit their Poseidon first — Levinson and Hallmark or the Warner Bros. people?
The cast of the Wolfgang Petersen film is of a higher calibre than the TV movie, but not that much higher. Russell will always be Mr. Cool in my book but he’s a long way from his Snake Plissken heyday. And Lucas didn’t show much drawing power last summer when Stealth , a $130 million Rob Cohen thriller that he starred in, ended up with $31,704,4316 (domestic) last September.
Warner Bros. obviously decided to sink most of the money into special effects rather than big-star salaries, but this may not be enough at the end of the day.
This isn’t a matter of how good the film will be. It’s a matter of marketing, about how many millions of people can be persuaded to pay to see this film on opening weekend based on ads, interest levels, trailers, TV spots, anticipation…whatever.
If the movie plays well and sells itself, it would probably help to sneak it across the country a week before. I mean, that’s as far as my thinking takes me.
Grabs
Paramount Studios parking lot, snapped just after Wednesday morning’s Mission: Impossible III screening — 4.19.06, 1:15 pm.
J.J. Gittes: “Not that Mulwray?” Evelyn Mulwray: “Yes, Mr. Gittes…that Mulwray.”
Bunny Rabbit
I saw Mission: Impossible III (Paramount, 5.3) this morning at screening room #5 at Paramount Studios, and I’m not dissing anyone or anything with the title of this piece. Not even a little bit.
The MacGuffin of J.J. Abrams’ power-packed thriller, after all, is a smallish device called “rabbit’s foot”, and Tom Cruise’s hard-wired performance as IMF agent Ethan Hunt feels, to me, like something new: he’s made himself into the energizer bunny of action heroes. And it works.
Keri Russell, Tom Cruise in J.J. Abrams’ Mission: Impossible III (Paramount, 5.5)
The advance buzz about M:I:3 being awfully damned good has turned out to be true, I’m afraid — as shallow but very expensive action films go, this is about as good as it gets. But I would hold up on the talk about Phillip Seymour Hoffman stealing the picture from Cruise.
Philly is super-cool — cold and snarly with style to burn — but he hasn’t been given enough ammo — not enough scenes or killer lines — to help him stand up against M:I:3‘s 43 year-old star.
It’s no secret Cruise has been getting (“generating” is closer to the truth) a lot of bad press over the last year or so, with most of it centering on the perception that he’s become overly manic…that his stability is perhaps open to question on some level.
Well, guess what? Cruise answers that perception straight-on in this frenzied summer action film and then rolls right over it like a tank.
He’s made Hunt into a kind of mirror image of hard-core tabloid Tom. It’s like he’s saying, “Okay, fine…you guys think I’ve gone around the bend? All right, then I have! And I’m into it! Being hard-core, I mean.” And this leaves you with feelings of respect for the guy. He may be this or that, but is standing his ground. No backing off! I am what I am!
Hunt is a “character,” yes, but based more than ever on the pumping piston rods of Cruise’s personality. A guy who’s all about focus, juice, intensity, endorphins. Sca- ling walls, rapelling down walls. Plotting strategy, eyeballing his costars, running for his life (in more ways than one) and turning tomato red in the face. Neck veins! Neck veins!
And you’re fine with all of this because…I haven’t said this in so many words, have I?…Mission: Impossible III is easily the best of the three M:I‘s. No, I’ll go further: it’s one of the best high-torque summer action films ever.
Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible (1996) had two or three brilliantly staged sequences, especially the CIA break-in-and-robbery and the chunnel-train sequence, but some of it was in and out and a lot of people felt confused by the plot.
John Woo’s Mission: Impossible II (2000) was an okay spin on Notorious with Thandie Newton as Ingrid Bergman and Dougray Scott as Claude Rains, and my memories of it aren’t that vivid, so it couldn’t have been that great.
Costar Michelle Monaghan, Cruise
This new one, directed and written by Abrams, is far more relentless and slam- bammy than its predecessors. You’re supposed to give your audience a little downtime between action beats, but this sucker won’t rest. You know the old analogy that action films are like musicals? Mission: Impossible III is almost an opera.
Okay, there’s a mildly relaxing party sequence in the beginning and one or two dialogue-with-Laurence-Fisburne-as-the-obligatory-company-asshole-riding-the- IMF-team scenes, but that’s pretty much it. The rest is all on the treadmill running at 10.
There are four beautifully composed set pieces — a rescue mission in a factory in a Berlin suburb, a kidnapping in the Vatican, an aerial attack on a causeway over Chesapeake Bay, and a break-in and a rescue in Shanghai. But there are always tangents and side-shows connected to these main events, and something riveting is always going on.
This is the kind of summer “ride” movie that even sourpusses like me can sit back and roll with. Shrewd, inventive and into punching the gas. It’s empty, yes — it’s basically just one technical challenge after another, with arguments and a couple of “I love you”‘s thrown in — but this is one of those films in which depth would get in the way.
Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Maggie Q, Ving Rhames
When I hear a film is a “check-your-brain-at-the-door” thing, I know I’m going to hate it. This is not that. It exemplifies what a good geek-level action film should be. Abrams, the director-writer, keeps playing to slightly higher intelligence levels than these films are usually geared to.
Harry Knowles has called M:I:3 “the best damn retooling of True Lies that will ever be done.” Funny, but the only thing I remember about True Lies is liking Tom Arnold’s dialogue and attitude and Bill Paxton’s character begging for mercy in front of Arnold Schwarzenegger by saying he had a “little dick.”
Hold on…it’s coming back to me. Arnold was a secret operative who hadn’t told Jamie Lee Curtis what he really does, and then a job he’s on turns bad and Jamie Lee gets brought into it and so on. Michelle Monaghan is the Jamie Lee character, I guess, but…you know what? Screw this analogy. I’ve never once seen True Lies on DVD, and for a reason.
M:I:3 is about the IM force trying to shut down a ruthless arms and technology dealer named Owen Davian (Hoffman), who’s about as lethal as they come. The story is basically a tit-for-tat game. I’ll kidnap and try to squeeze you for inform- ation, and then you’ll come after me or my girlfriend and try to squeeze me for information, and we’ll see who’s smarter and craftier.
Rhys-Meyers, Rhames, Cruise, Maggie Q in, I think, Shanghai
Abrams starts things off an extremely fierce and intense tone. Right away you’re saying to yourself, “This is good…Abrams clearly knows what he’s doing.” As far as hero-being-tortured, tell-me-what-I- need-to-know-or-else scenes go, I would say it’s up to the level of Laurence Olivier pulling Dustin Hoffman’s teeth out in Marathon Man.
Hoffman’s Damian is the torturer, and it’s a little odd that this is his best scene in the film. He’s nearly spellbinding in just about every scene he’s in, but after Capote and all you’re kind of waiting for Philly to really step up with something climactic and classic…and it never comes. He kicks ass with the lines and scenes he’s been given, but somebody wanted this to be Tom Cruise’s film.
The IMFers — Ving Rhames, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Maggie Q — hold up their end. Billy Crudup is perfunctory as Cruise’s home-office ally. Simon Pegg (last in Shaun of the Dead) has the obligatory computer-geek-who-saves-the-day-with- crucial-key-punching-in-the-last-act role.
Michelle Monaghan has the meatiest female role as Ethan’s initially clueless wife. Keri Russell burns through strongly in the first act. Maggie Q (Around the World in 80 Days, Rush Hour 2) is…well, she’s fine, but the best thing she does is wear a very hot red dress to a black-tie affair at the Vatican.
Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Owen Davian
I laughed three times out loud — not at anything “funny” but because I was really enjoying the moxie that went into the writing or acting. I won’t spoil them by sharing.
I had a good enough time with this that I’m going back to see it a second time this evening.
Too many cheerleading pieces and people will start to think I’m a professional kiss-ass, but I have to say it: Tom Cruise’s image problems aren’t going to vanish like that when Mission: Impossible III opens 16 days from now, but they’re probably going to be put on hold.
Aroma, Sizzle, Steak
I used to love movie poster art, but there are so few today that pop through in any kind of sexy or distinctive way that the fun, for me, just isn’t there any more. Or not enough.
Take five or ten minutes and browse through this British website devoted to classic one-sheets, and you’ll see what I mean. (Make sure you check out the Saul Bass page.) A lot of them were standard primitive sells, but the better ones from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s had flair, smarts, suggestiveness…a kind of art-gallery urbanity.
Movie posters that were hanging in Hollywood Museum on Thursday, 4.20…but are gone now because it was just a one-day, one-shot deal.
Many of today’s posters, of course, are geared to mall-heads. They get your attention but in a much more rudimentary way. Many of them are basically about emphasis over enticement, and always seem to use the primary colors, emotions and attitudes that are likely to appeal to younger, less educated viewers with shorter attention spans.
But I figured I’d go down to the Hollywood Museum anyway to check out the 2005 posters that have been submitted for the 2006 Hollywood Reporter Key Art Awards. The winners will collect their trophies at a big swanky ceremony held June 16 at the Kodak Theatre, with Kevin Nealon serving as m.c. (Click here for more info.)
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
I got there around 12:30 on Thursday, and ten minutes later I was almost ready to leave.
The first and second floors were stuffed to the gills with posters and standees for cinema primitivo — primarily big-budget action, horror, FX and teen-market crap. Precisely the kind of films I loathe. I read books, I’ve been to college and I’ve stood inside the Pantheon in Rome, and every poster and standee on those floors said, “C’mon, man…you’re a gorilla. You know you are. Here, have a banana.”
Then my hosts — Hollywood Reporter publicists Lynda Miller and Alisha Maines, and mPRm’s Shari Mesulam and Wendy Martino — took me to the third floor and finally…some good stuff! Posters with a semblance of art and finesse and sophis- tication.
My choice for the best one-sheet is the one pictured above, for Transamerica. I’m also a fan of the one-sheets for Capote, Jarhead, Inside Deep Throat, et. al. But very few of them had that capturing-the-essence, vaguely highbrow approach. I mean, a few did.
The one-sheet for Warren Beatty’s Bulworth (1998) had that element, that way of compressing the soul or attitude of a film into a single chord.
I asked what percentage of the posters submited were from the indie sector and and big-studio distributors. An answer never came back, but Key Art Awards Coordinator Marc Romeo, who’s been facilitating the entry and judging process for six years, says that 70% of this year’s 1,423 entries received (in 29 categories) have been submitted by agencies and vendors and 30% were submitted by studios.
I happened to notice two posters hanging on a stairwell for a couple of broadly commercial films from the ’50s that no one wants to see these days, that aren’t on DVD and that I’ve either forgotten about or never heard of. One was All Hands on Deck, a 1961 Navy comedy with Pat Boone and Buddy Hackett, and You Can’t Run Away From It, a remake of It Happened One Night with Jack Lemmon and June Allyson.
These movies may have been popular in their day but they’re dead now — unknown and unwatched by even the cultists. I mean, you could send a messenger with a basket of fruit, a bottle of champagne and a new DVD of All Hands on Deck to my door, and I really doubt if I’d watch it.
We all have ideas, I’m sure, about which films playing today are not only disposable by today’s standards but certain to be forgotten by history. Most of the films that have come out over the last couple of months belong in this category, February, March and early April releases being what they are. It’s a desert out there.
Anyway, my four hosts took me to Mel’s after our tour, and we all sat down and ordered the healthiest foods we could find on the menu. And then mPRm honcho Mark Pogachefsky dropped by to say hello, and then Hollywood Reporter ad sales exec Lynn Segal came in with friends for some lunch. And it was basically a nice visit.
But it would have been nicer if Saul Bass had been there.
Glub-Glub
What are the odds that Wolfgang Petersen’s Poseidon (Warner Bros., 5.12) will be an above-average thrill ride? Pretty good, I’d say. And if you scan the saleable elements it looks like something a lot of people are going to want to see.
The trailer tells you the effects are going to be cool. (That rogue wave gives me the creeps.) Petersen is nothing if not a dependable craftsman, and the movie he’s made, to judge by the trailer, has the look and feel of something fairly well-rigged.
Kurt Russell (front & center)), Josh Lucas (behind Kurt), Emmy Rossum (rear) and Richard Dreyfss (lower right) in Wolfgang Petersen’s Poseidon (Warner Bros., 5.12)
I tend to shy away from big-budget effects movies, but even I’m half into seeing this thing. I really like Kurt Russell, I’ve always enjoyed Richard Dreyfuss (especially if he gets angry) and I’m cool with Josh Lucas playing the lead. If I didn’t expect to see it at a press screening within a week, I’d be okay with buying a ticket.
Why, then, are the Poseidon tracking figures in the toilet?
This is a very expensive film ($150 million? more?) and it needs to have a huge opening weekend. And yet recent figures say the overall general awareness is 54% compared to 92% for Mission: Impossible III , which opens a week earlier. The definite interests are at 23% — they should be somewhere around 40% at this stage. And the respondents calling Poseidon their first choice are around 3% when this group should be more around 10% or 11% (M:I:3‘s first-choicers are currently at 13%).
Warner Bros. has three weeks to rectify things, but right now they have reason to be worried.
They’ve been advertising on TV, the trailer is playing in theatres all over, and that upside-down-and-underwater-ship one-sheet is already iconic. (If you ask me it deserves to be a nominee at the Key Art awards next year.) And yet so far, the audience waiting to see it doesn’t seem hefty enough.
So what’s happening? Are audiences saying no to big loud disaster movies for some reason? Are people seeing some kind of 9/11 echo in this thing? (It’s not that much of a stretch.) Maybe the same folks who are frowning at the idea of seeing United 93 are doing the same here?
I think you have to lay at least some of the blame on that lousy TV movie, Hall- mark Entertainment’s The Poseidon Adventure, that aired last November. It was critically trashed, it didn’t draw that many viewers and it may have poisoned the well. It was produced by Larry Levinson, directed by Jon Putch and starred Rutger Hauer, Adam Baldwin, Bryan Brown, Steve Guttenberg, Peter Weller and C. Thom- as Howell.
I wonder who greenlit their Poseidon first — Levinson and Hallmark or the Warner Bros. people?
The cast of the Wolfgang Petersen film is of a higher calibre than the TV movie, but not that much higher. Russell will always be Mr. Cool in my book but he’s a long way from his Snake Plissken heyday. And Lucas didn’t show much drawing power last summer when Stealth , a $130 million Rob Cohen thriller that he starred in, ended up with $31,704,4316 (domestic) last September.
Warner Bros. obviously decided to sink most of the money into special effects rather than big-star salaries, but this may not be enough at the end of the day.
This isn’t a matter of how good the film will be. It’s a matter of marketing, about how many millions of people can be persuaded to pay to see this film on opening weekend based on ads, interest levels, trailers, TV spots, anticipation…whatever.
If the movie plays well and sells itself, it would probably help to sneak it across the country a week before. I mean, that’s as far as my thinking takes me.
Grabs
Paramount Studios parking lot, snapped just after Wednesday morning’s Mission: Impossible III screening — 4.19.06, 1:15 pm.
J.J. Gittes: “Not that Mulwray?” Evelyn Mulwray: “Yes, Mr. Gittes…that Mulwray.”
Bunny Rabbit
I saw Mission: Impossible III (Paramount, 5.3) this morning at screening room #5 at Paramount Studios, and I’m not dissing anyone or anything with the title of this piece. Not even a little bit.
The MacGuffin of J.J. Abrams’ power-packed thriller, after all, is a smallish device called “rabbit’s foot”, and Tom Cruise’s hard-wired performance as IMF agent Ethan Hunt feels, to me, like something new: he’s made himself into the energizer bunny of action heroes. And it works.
Keri Russell, Tom Cruise in J.J. Abrams’ Mission: Impossible III (Paramount, 5.5)
The advance buzz about M:I:3 being awfully damned good has turned out to be true, I’m afraid — as shallow but very expensive action films go, this is about as good as it gets. But I would hold up on the talk about Phillip Seymour Hoffman stealing the picture from Cruise.
Philly is super-cool — cold and snarly with style to burn — but he hasn’t been given enough ammo — not enough scenes or killer lines — to help him stand up against M:I:3‘s 43 year-old star.
It’s no secret Cruise has been getting (“generating” is closer to the truth) a lot of bad press over the last year or so, with most of it centering on the perception that he’s become overly manic…that his stability is perhaps open to question on some level.
Well, guess what? Cruise answers that perception straight-on in this frenzied summer action film and then rolls right over it like a tank.
He’s made Hunt into a kind of mirror image of hard-core tabloid Tom. It’s like he’s saying, “Okay, fine…you guys think I’ve gone around the bend? All right, then I have! And I’m into it! Being hard-core, I mean.” And this leaves you with feelings of respect for the guy. He may be this or that, but is standing his ground. No backing off! I am what I am!
Hunt is a “character,” yes, but based more than ever on the pumping piston rods of Cruise’s personality. A guy who’s all about focus, juice, intensity, endorphins. Sca- ling walls, rapelling down walls. Plotting strategy, eyeballing his costars, running for his life (in more ways than one) and turning tomato red in the face. Neck veins! Neck veins!
And you’re fine with all of this because…I haven’t said this in so many words, have I?…Mission: Impossible III is easily the best of the three M:I‘s. No, I’ll go further: it’s one of the best high-torque summer action films ever.
Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible (1996) had two or three brilliantly staged sequences, especially the CIA break-in-and-robbery and the chunnel-train sequence, but some of it was in and out and a lot of people felt confused by the plot.
John Woo’s Mission: Impossible II (2000) was an okay spin on Notorious with Thandie Newton as Ingrid Bergman and Dougray Scott as Claude Rains, and my memories of it aren’t that vivid, so it couldn’t have been that great.
Costar Michelle Monaghan, Cruise
This new one, directed and written by Abrams, is far more relentless and slam- bammy than its predecessors. You’re supposed to give your audience a little downtime between action beats, but this sucker won’t rest. You know the old analogy that action films are like musicals? Mission: Impossible III is almost an opera.
Okay, there’s a mildly relaxing party sequence in the beginning and one or two dialogue-with-Laurence-Fisburne-as-the-obligatory-company-asshole-riding-the- IMF-team scenes, but that’s pretty much it. The rest is all on the treadmill running at 10.
There are four beautifully composed set pieces — a rescue mission in a factory in a Berlin suburb, a kidnapping in the Vatican, an aerial attack on a causeway over Chesapeake Bay, and a break-in and a rescue in Shanghai. But there are always tangents and side-shows connected to these main events, and something riveting is always going on.
This is the kind of summer “ride” movie that even sourpusses like me can sit back and roll with. Shrewd, inventive and into punching the gas. It’s empty, yes — it’s basically just one technical challenge after another, with arguments and a couple of “I love you”‘s thrown in — but this is one of those films in which depth would get in the way.
Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Maggie Q, Ving Rhames
When I hear a film is a “check-your-brain-at-the-door” thing, I know I’m going to hate it. This is not that. It exemplifies what a good geek-level action film should be. Abrams, the director-writer, keeps playing to slightly higher intelligence levels than these films are usually geared to.
Harry Knowles has called M:I:3 “the best damn retooling of True Lies that will ever be done.” Funny, but the only thing I remember about True Lies is liking Tom Arnold’s dialogue and attitude and Bill Paxton’s character begging for mercy in front of Arnold Schwarzenegger by saying he had a “little dick.”
Hold on…it’s coming back to me. Arnold was a secret operative who hadn’t told Jamie Lee Curtis what he really does, and then a job he’s on turns bad and Jamie Lee gets brought into it and so on. Michelle Monaghan is the Jamie Lee character, I guess, but…you know what? Screw this analogy. I’ve never once seen True Lies on DVD, and for a reason.
M:I:3 is about the IM force trying to shut down a ruthless arms and technology dealer named Owen Davian (Hoffman), who’s about as lethal as they come. The story is basically a tit-for-tat game. I’ll kidnap and try to squeeze you for inform- ation, and then you’ll come after me or my girlfriend and try to squeeze me for information, and we’ll see who’s smarter and craftier.
Rhys-Meyers, Rhames, Cruise, Maggie Q in, I think, Shanghai
Abrams starts things off an extremely fierce and intense tone. Right away you’re saying to yourself, “This is good…Abrams clearly knows what he’s doing.” As far as hero-being-tortured, tell-me-what-I- need-to-know-or-else scenes go, I would say it’s up to the level of Laurence Olivier pulling Dustin Hoffman’s teeth out in Marathon Man.
Hoffman’s Damian is the torturer, and it’s a little odd that this is his best scene in the film. He’s nearly spellbinding in just about every scene he’s in, but after Capote and all you’re kind of waiting for Philly to really step up with something climactic and classic…and it never comes. He kicks ass with the lines and scenes he’s been given, but somebody wanted this to be Tom Cruise’s film.
The IMFers — Ving Rhames, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Maggie Q — hold up their end. Billy Crudup is perfunctory as Cruise’s home-office ally. Simon Pegg (last in Shaun of the Dead) has the obligatory computer-geek-who-saves-the-day-with- crucial-key-punching-in-the-last-act role.
Michelle Monaghan has the meatiest female role as Ethan’s initially clueless wife. Keri Russell burns through strongly in the first act. Maggie Q (Around the World in 80 Days, Rush Hour 2) is…well, she’s fine, but the best thing she does is wear a very hot red dress to a black-tie affair at the Vatican.
Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Owen Davian
I laughed three times out loud — not at anything “funny” but because I was really enjoying the moxie that went into the writing or acting. I won’t spoil them by sharing.
I had a good enough time with this that I’m going back to see it a second time this evening.
Too many cheerleading pieces and people will start to think I’m a professional kiss-ass, but I have to say it: Tom Cruise’s image problems aren’t going to vanish like that when Mission: Impossible III opens 16 days from now, but they’re probably going to be put on hold.
Gotta Have It
I finally finished reading I Wake Up Screening: What To Do Once You’ve Made That Movie (Watson-Guptill) last week, and it’s one of the most easily processed, best written, most thoroughly sourced books ever written about how to get your indie movie seen (and maybe even distributed!) once it’s more or less finished.
I’m not going all kiss-ass on this book because I’m friendly with its authors, critic- journo John Anderson and Warner Independent marketing exec Laura Kim, or because I know just about every distribution exec, producer’s rep, indie publicist, film festival director, critic and entertainment journalist they’ve quoted.
Park City’s Main Street during the ’04 Sundance Film Festival
I’m saying this because it’s a sharp, cleanly written, well-organized thing, and because it contains lessons that I know are wise and based on hard experience, and because I’ve never read anything of its type quite as good. Really.
L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan, Magnolia Pictures’ Eamonn Bowles, filmmakers Bill Condon and Kirby Dick, Picturehouse’s Bob Berney, New York Times critic Manohla Dargis, Cinetic’s John Sloss, exhibitor Gregg Leammle, N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman, producer Ted Hope, Sundance honcho Geoff Gilmore, publicist Jeff Hill, Sony Classics’ Michael Barker, Telluride Film Festival director Tom Luddy, Variety‘s Tom McCarthy…these guys and maybe 50 others are quoted.
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And there’s a minimum of attitude and self-referential blah-blah in this thing. Every page contains a set-up graph or two plus quotes, quotes, quotes…a set-up graph plus quotes, quotes, quotes. Solid, thoughtful…a very smooth, sans-bullshit read.
The specific advice/lessons for nascent filmmakers include (1) evaluating your film, (2) putting together the perfect team, (3) legal matters, (4) using the right launching pad, (5) sussing Sundance, (6) dealing with the media, (7) the right materials, (8) screeners, (9) the elements of buzz, (10) how not to alienate potential supporters, (11) doing things yourself, (12) finding your audience, and (13) various case studies.
I Wake Up Screening is a how-to manual, but the inside school-of-hard-knocks aroma sets it apart. One or two pages and you’re sold. Trust levels go right up and stay up.
I seriously believe it’s in the realm of choice inside-the-industry books like The Ultimate Film Festival Guide by Chris Gore; The Whole Equation by David Thomson; Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood by Peter Biskind; The New Biographical Dictionary of Film by David Thomson; Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of “Heaven’s Gate” by Steven Bach; The Devil’s Candy: “The Bonfire of the Vanities” Goes to Hollywood by Julie Salamon; The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 by Andrew Sarris; Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman; You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again by Julia Phillips; and Edward Jay Epstein’s The Big Picture
Every so often I found myself wishing Anderson and Kim had included some ruder, more Peter Biskind-type material (i.e. the kind of quotes and stories that result in certain people refusing to talk to you for four or five years).
And I was a wee bit irritated that they only spoke to (or wrote about) old-media critics and reporters. You’d never know from reading I Wake Up Screening that there are such things as online critics, journalists and buzz-spreaders who wake up and wail every damn day.
I Wake Up Screening co-author Laura Kim
“Think of yourself running in a mile-long race,” Bradford Patrick writes on the book’s Amazon.com page writes. (Sorry, but this guy’s a fairly good writer.) “You kill yourself to finish the mile, and when you can see the tape, you find out you have four more miles to go!
“That’s exactly how the authors frame the problem for a filmmaker. You got the money scraped together, you shot your film, you’ve been in post cutting the film, and then (and perhaps only then) do you become aware of the millions of details, hurdles, and pitfalls that lie between you and bliss — a theatrical release.
“The authors love film, and want nothing more than for your film to find an audience…but how? This is where the step-by-step analysis of dealing with PR, producer-reps, attorneys, media and buyers all get outed in fascinating detail.”
Anderson and I spoke about the book and the business last weekend, and here’s the recording of it. We got going and our chat lasted about 44 minutes.
Anderson is the chief film critic at Newsday, a past member of the selection committee of the New York Film Festival and a two-time past chair of the New York Film Critics Circle, a member of the National Society of Film Critics, and a member of the National Book Critics Circle.
Screening co-author John Anderson, whose eyes rarely glare like they do here
Kim is exec vp of marketing and publicity for Warner Independent Films. Previously the senior vp of mPRm, she’s worked on such films as (I’m taking this right from the book) American Splendor, Dirty Pretty Things, The Pianist and Being John Malkovich.
Buy it or borrow it from a friend…but if you’re even half into the idea of being a serious filmmaker (now, soon, eventually), definitely read I Wake Up Screening.
(Since tapping this out Monday afternoon I’ve learned that “I Wake Up Screening” was also a title of a 1993 book about indie filming, written by director-writer Frank Gilroy.)
Lost Bash
Fantastic jump-up Cuban sounds at Monday night’s after-party following the Hollywood premiere of Magnolia’s The Lost City, a tale of pre-Castro and post-Castro Cuba in the late ’50s and early ’60s, directed by and starring Andy Garcia.
Pretty lady at the party — born in Uruguay, dad was a journalist — who was with Lost City costar Steven Bauer. (I think.)
Andy Garcia during the concert portion of the Lost City after-party.
Curiously mesmerizing pool water
Disturbance
I don’t think Tom Cruise is a nutter. He has the nature of someone intensely driven, plus an emphatic personality that can seem a little manic to some. But among the hoi polloi there’s definitely an idea that he’s a wack-jobber. Or at least a view that sometime last spring or summer he got too cranked up over Scientology, lost it, jumped into a barrel and went over the falls.
If you were hiding under a rock and missed the whole Oprah couch-jump, Brooke Shields-bashing, Katie Holmes-proposal-of-marriage-on-the-Eiffel-Tower meltdown, you can go to a theatre this weekend and see it lampooned in Scary Movie 4 (The Weinstein Co.), specifically in Craig Bierko’s performance as the eccentric “Tom Ryan.”
As Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible III (Paramount, 5.5)
And if you add this impression to some new NRG tracking numbers about Mission: Impossible III (Paramount, 5.5), you’ve got what any p.r. professional would call an issue of concern.
The NRG statistics indicate that Cruise’s box-office appeal isn’t what it used to be. The term is probably “dented” as opposed to “injured.” This allows, in any event, for a possible scenario in which M:I:3, directed and written by J.J. Abrams, may wind up with earnings that analysts will describe as “impressive,” “muscular” or “respectable” rather than “phenomenal,” “spectacular” or “record-breaking.”
There won’t be anything tragic about this. Mission: Impossible III, the first big summer film of 2006, is going to sell a shitload of tickets. I’m half into it myself, having been encouraged by what Kevin Smith said a couple of days ago (“as good if not better than the first [Mission]…Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the most believable bad guy since Anthony Hopkins in Silence“) as well as others.
And even if it’s not the greatest action movie since sliced bread, M:I:3 will still be the Big Thing to see from early to mid May until The DaVinci Code opens on 5.19.
I tried and failed to reach people who attended an exhibitor screening of M:I:3 two days ago — Wednesday, 4.12. Then I heard from a friend who said he’d spoken to two who were there. They liked it, he said, although “I didn’t get the sense that they were absolutely blown away.”
Still, if I were on Cruise’s team, I wouldn’t be feeling very good about that stupid Scary Movie 4 parody. David Zucker’s comedy earned a little over $40 million this weekend…that’s a lot of laughing kids streaming in and out…and I don’t see how those Tom Cruise wackazoid gags can do anything but mess with M:I:3‘s revenue.
There are indications all over the map that a portion of the public doesn’t believe that the 43 year-old Cruise is Tom Terrific anymore — they think he’s Tom Wacko.
I got going on this jag after hearing some National Research Group numbers that were released on Thursday, 4.13. They supposedly indicate the public’s interest in seeing Mission: Impossible: 3. I got them from a single source (I tried double- confirming with other marketing people but nobody was around due to the Good Friday holiday) but “they’re straight from the NRG report,” I was told, and “in black and white.”
Two figures got my attention: the 37% who said they’re definitely interested and the 9% who said they’re definitely not interested. My source says that at this same point before the opening of John Woo’s Mission Impossible: 2 — almost exactly six years ago — the definite interest number was in the mid 40s and that the definite non-interests were more like 2%.
Phillip Seymour Hoffman as super-baddie Owen Davian
Paramount spokespersons said the NRG figures on M:I:3 are wrong, claiming instead that the definite interests are in “the low 40s.” (When told about this, my source said, “They’re defending the company position”).
If you go by the NRG figures, there’s clearly diminished interest in M:I:3 compared to the readings for Mission: Impossible 2, and the negatives are obviously higher also.
9% definite non-interest now vs. 2% defininite non-interest then — that’s a different climate. But a Paramount spokesperson disputed the 9% definite non-interest figure, contending that it’s actually “30% lower.”
I’m not saying NRG is the end-all and be-all (their “methodology is terrible,” an industry-watcher contended today), but if the public is feeling somewhat cooler about M:I:3 than they were about the previous two Mission films (and I say “if”), it’s probably safe to assume this isn’t due to global warming.
The Paramount spokesperson reiterated that “this movie is going to make a lot of money,” that the definite interest percentage is “where it should be” at this stage, “our first choice figures are already over 10%” and that “we haven’t even started our [advertising] campaign yet.” Fine, fine.
Director J.J. Abrams, Cruise on set of Mission: Impossible III
How does the HE readership feel about this? Is the want-to-see on M:I:3 just as strong as it was with the last two? How much has the wacko-Tom factor entered into things, if at all? Or is this just some NRG-industry journalist circle-jerk issue that has nothing to do with what real people are thinking?
I for one don’t give a damn about off-screen behavior. Cruise can do double somer- saults and one-armed push-ups on every talk show he goes on and it doesn’t mat- ter. I mean, not as long as the movie he’s selling kicks ass.
So Big
A big new AMC plex (stadium seating in all the houses) plus a big fat second-story food court opened a few weeks ago in Century City, and I finally dropped by Saturday night for a looksee. Something inside me flinches just a bit when I see an outdoor monster banner ad like this one for The DaVinci Code. It’s funny but I can feel myself inching towards feelings of vague dislike for this thing, sight unseen. No reason for this…but in the words of HAL 9000 as David Bowman was removing his memory cells, “I can feel it.”
Sensible Responses
“I’m much more excited about the third Mission than I was about the first two. Why? Because it looks like a better movie.
“And the Cruise kookiness doesn’t dissuade me in the slightest. If I didn’t boycott Val Kilmer for allegedly flicking a burning cigarette at the face of an Island of Dr. Moreau crew member (loved him since in The Salton Sea, Spartan and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang), I sure as hell am not going to lose it for Cruise because he’s passionate about something — even insanely passionate.
“The guy’s a movie star and sometime actor. If he’s an Operating Thetan 7 or whatever it is offscreen, I’m with him as long he keeps up the quality output like his work in Collateral, War of the Worlds, Magnolia and Eyes Wide Shut.” — Colin Moriarty , Canton, Ohio.
“I’m with you on how Cruise’s behavior influences my interest in seeing his movies: it doesn’t. Maybe if would if he had less of a quality track record (like Will Smith or Mel Gibson), but Cruise consistently picks interesting projects and talented directors: Kubrick, Spielberg, P.T. Anderson, Brian DePalma, Michael Mann, Cameron Crowe, etc. Devotion to Scientology can’t override that.
“Add in Mission: Impossible III having the best cast assembled in the series so far, my appreciation of J.J. Abrams’ work on TV, and both trailers so far kicking ass and getting my blood going. Put that together, and M:I:3 is actually the big May movie I’m most confident will be decent or better (because I realize my hopes for X3 may be in vain). A bit of creepy behavior from Cruise can’t change that.
“However, I fear that I may be in the minority on this. I don’t read People or Us or In Touch Weekly , but lots of people do. I know some of my co-workers have expressed a feeling of ickiness regarding Cruise in general and his new sequel in particular, and I have a feeling that the argument that Cruise has shown admirable interest in making good movies in the past won’t fly with everyone.
“In short, this is another case of the general public approaching things from a point-of-view not exactly guided by a love of movies, but rather an interest in celebrity culture and gossip. M:I:3 can probably still bank on at least $180 mil or so, but the gossip-rag backlash that was too late to really harm War of the Worlds may be in effect.” — Jesse Hassenger
Cruise, Michelle Monagahan in Mission: Impossible III
“Who knows how big the wacko-Tom factor will play, but the solid majority of my Lost-addicted friends (college aged, guy-guys) are sold on M:I:3 based solely on writer/director J.J. Abrams. They remember the 2-hour Lost series premiere that Abrams directed, and tune in along with 20 million other viewers each week.
“And as far as I’m concerned — wacko, schmacko. Cruise usually gets the job done with intensity and control. Chef Boyardee may very well have been a nut (this is pure speculation), but dude knew how to can some delicious pasta.” — Kevin Costello
“I was contacted last night by the AC Nielsen people about upcoming films, and I responded with a ‘definitely’ about my desire to see M:I:3. I was then asked about my feelings about M:I:3 costars Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames and Keri Russell, and I said I’m in the camp of believing Cruise’s appeal isn’t what it used to be.
“I found it strange that the surveyor never inquired about the only M:I:3 participants who are solely responsible for my desire to see ot — actor Philip Seymour Hoffman and director J.J. Abrams. I would be skipping this third installment if not for the opportunity to see J.J. flex on the big screen and watch P.S.H. go bad-guy.
“I might be alone in my feelings, but I feel the best way to keep people interested in a fourth installment of this franchise would be a Dr. Lecter-like victory for Hoffman’s character over Cruise’s Agent Hunt.” — Lucas Ross, Oklahoma City, OK.
“The MI films present a conundrum. They’re just ‘movies’ vs. actual aesthetic experiences. Both of these kinds of film can use the power of film, but the desired payoff is different. The aesthetic films we expect to challenge us, nourish us, and, one hopes, maybe even make us better (I know that’s asking a lot). A movie…well, it’s a pleasant way to have a shared experience with some friends that doesn’t involve exchanging bodily fluids.
“For those of us who like a little aesthetics/intelligence with our ass-kicking, M:I:3 seesm like a disappointment in advance. For all the money spent making them, for all the flash and technology, the MI films are more than disposable — they’re forgettable.
“That said, M:I:3 does have my interest for one reason: Phillip Seymour Hoffman. You know he’ll bring it when he shows up, and that alone could put me a theatre seat.” — Roy “Griff” Griffis
“I like Tom Cruise. He’s no Paul Giamatti, but he constantly delivers in an above-average, movie-star-charisma kinda way. He’s got a certain amount of acting talent, but it’s that weird star-wattage thing that defines a Tom Cruise performance.
“Is he crazy? And does that affect the box office? Uhm, he may be a bit nutty, yeah…but quite frankly, that’s how I like my Hollywood stars. Let’s face it, Angelina Jolie was a lot more interesting when she was wearing a vial of Billy Bob Thornton’s blood around her neck.” — David S.
“The best thing Paramount can do to get me to see Mission: Impossible 3 is break my air conditioning on opening weekend.
“Otherwise, what’s unappealing to me about Cruise at this stage is not that he’s a cult member living in his own hermetic cocoon but that his control-freakishness has erased any human interest he once had back in Risky Business or even Jerry Maguire days. He’s as sleekly machine-tooled and inhuman as the T2000.
“Even when he tries to play a character part (Collateral, let’s say) he’s so erased of imperfection that he’s unrecognizable as one. His War of the Worlds character had human imperfections like a Calvin Klein model has stubble.
“Maybe the day will come when, as with Gary Cooper or Randolph Scott, age puts some character into his boyish face and he starts depicting human frailty, not superhuman relentlessness, on screen.” — Mike Gebert
Grabs
Car wash on Pico Blvd. near Beverly Glen– Thursday, 4.13, 5:20 pm.
Photos hanging just above counter and near the jelly beans in the big glass jars in foyer of Sunset Screening Room — Thursday, 4.13, 9:20 pm. Photos were given in tribute to Walter, the guy who’s owned and run the room for years. Pic was taken during a late-inning recess I took from Chen Kaige’s The Promise, a flamboyant Chinese-costume adventure film — arch, bullshit-stuffed, pageantry-for-its-own-sake — that I watched for a half-hour or so but mainly slept through. I hated, hated, hated the parts that I saw.
I’ve never seen a guy sleeping in front of a building with such a nice-looking sleeping bag in my life. He had a nice bag with him instead of the usual plastic garbage bag or shopping cart, and his beard was semi-trimmed and not that long. This seems to indicate he’s a semi-responsible guy who’s run into hard times and is sincerely homeless, as opposed to most of the homeless people I’ve seen, who seem to fit the general definition of “bums.” Taken on Monday, 4.10, just after the first screening of United 93
Hanging in window of a Beverly Hills store…I forget where. The French-made poster is for a 1917 Fatty Arbuckle film called Oh, Doctor!
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