Sweat, Tears, Honor

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I’ll always be an admirer of Gavin O’Connor for Miracle, one of the best sports movies ever made because — this is important and fascinating — the hockey coach (Kurt Russell) was a bit of a stubborn, obstinate, broomstick-up-his-ass prick, and yet he brought it all home. I just hope O’Connor’s latest, which obviously stars Joel Edgerton (Animal Kingdom) and costars Tom Hardy (and not the other way around, as publicists for the film have it) doesn’t go in for too much hugging and weeping.

Plea Bargain

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Judge: “Somebody has to take the blame for Your Highness. It’s too awful to just ignore or wave off. Pledges of allegiance to basic cinematic-craft standards have to be asserted, and one or two people have to be punished for the good of the community. I’m sorry but sometimes these things have to be done.

“I’ll never believe that former Moviefone editor-in-chief Patricia Chui wrote that incredibly stupid and arrogant letter to AOL freelancers on her own volition, but she had to be whacked for it all the same — same principle here. And I think I’m being liberal by demanding that only two transgressors suffer.”

Public Defender: “Thank you, your honor, and you are indeed being very reasonable and in fact generous. In anticipation of your honor’s position the defense has already decided upon two names that we hope will meet with your honor’s approval. We’re presuming you agree with the civilized world-at-large that Your Highness star and co-author of the screenplay Danny McBride should pay the penalty rather than director David Gordon Green, who, we believe, was led astray by friendship or….let’s not get into motivation. But we do ask that McBride’s term in movie jail be kept to 24 months, your honor. He’s been funny before and will be funny again. He just can’t be allowed to write a script ever again.”

Judge: “Aahh, but how do you guarantee McBride won’t write another script that gets produced? Who’s to stop him? The same Universal executive or executives who supported and allied themselves with Your Highness could call him during his term in prison and urge him to write another screenplay or two, and when he gets out of jail….wham, another basic violation. No, we have to go farther — we have to enforce the law in a way that will guarantee observance and respect. We have to punish not only McBride but the Universal executives who approved and funded this movie. There may well have been several involved but we’re going to choose one.”

Public Defender: “But your honor, production executives don’t go to movie jail. It’s talent that does that. Movie executives just keep on workin’, truckin’ and enjoyin’ the dough and the perks.”

Judge: “The Universal executive who is finally selected will have to submit to some form of public corporal punishment. Some sort of symbolic humiliation on a twice-weekly basis, let’s say. We have to think creatively about this. Perhaps submitting to a wooden stockade during lunch twice a week? Or a punishment like Eduardo Saverin’s in The Social Network, ordered to carry around a chicken or a rooster, let’s say, and feed it at all hours?”

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“McBride and Green were attempting a deconstruction, in fact a stock-car demolition, of movie competence,” Time‘s Richard Corliss has written. “I mean, adhering to all those standards of quality, coherence, invention — that’s just what The Man wants you to do. Renouncing the silly rules of film craft established over the past century, they have started from scratch, reinventing the wheel by making it rectangular, then blithely propelling it down a hill. The clattering crash you hear is the sound of Your Highness arriving at a theater near you.

“A failed movie is easy to spot; three or four new ones are delivered like dead mackerel to the multiplex each week. But occasionally curious moviegoers will discover an especially rotten specimen of the genus Cinema stinkibus. Entering the theater with low or no expectations, they’ll stumble upon a film of such numbing incompetence that they are forced to realize it’s not just a bad movie but the bad movie — a work of ur-awfulness, counterbrilliance and antigenius.”

Rob-Bop-A-Loo-Bop

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The trailer for Crazy Stupid Love (Warner Bros., 7.29) suggests that Ryan Gosling is playing a glib, semi-shallow, mind-fucking hound. That’s just what the doctor ordered for this fine and exceptional actor who, I’ve long felt, is too caught up in fascinating technique. He needs to play an average dipshit in a semi-average way. Steve Carell, Julianne Moore and Emma Stone costar. The film is written by Dan Fogelman and directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (I Love You, Phillip Morris).

Here’s what I wrote about Gosling during Sundance 2010, after my first viewing of Blue Valentine: “He drives me nuts every time [because] he’s always doing that rop-bop-a-loo-bop, always focused on behaving in his own particular way and making damn sure that we notice this.

“Part of his being inventive and never predictable is that he always imprints and infiltrates each and every film he’s in with a Ryan Gosling mood spray. He’s a behavioralist who lives inside a very deep mine shaft, and when he takes over a movie you’re suddenly deep in that mine with him and noticing that the air is thin and wondering why and feeling it might be time to get the hell out of there, and yet knowing this would be heresy because Gosling is, at the end of the day, a very intense presence with a very shifty bag of tricks that most other actors would never devise, much less resort to.”

Outside Emmerich Wheelhouse?

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The just-out official teaser for Roland Emmerich‘s Anonymous (Sony, 9.23), an Elizabethan period drama that explores whether Edward de Vere (Rhys Ifans), the 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote the plays attributed to William “Bardo” Shakespeare (Rafe Spall), begins with a present-day sequence in which a lecturer (Derek Jacobi) suggests/speculates that Will “never wrote a word.”

But the teaser, obviously, is selling anything and everything but literary authorship.

Inside Guy: “That’s because it’s not about literary authorship! It’s about more than that, I mean.” HE: “I’ll say…sound and fury, a naked backside, a guy getting his head chopped off.” Inside Guy: “That’s a naked guy, you realize…right?” HE: “So no undraped women?” Inside Guy: “We fought for that and it’s in there. And the guy getting his head chopped off is the Earl of Essex. The Essex rebellion happens in the third act.”

I don’t know, man. Emmerich has always been Emmerich, y’know? A leopard can’t change his spots.

Inside Guy: “You will not believe this is a Roland Emmerich film. He’s truly made a fantastic film, one that has almost nothing to do with his other work. I think it will really challenge some people’s preconceptions about his filmmaking abilities.” HE: “I’m not doubting you for a second, but the Sony trailer is obviously suggesting that Anonymous is right off the Emmerich assembly line…no offense.”

Here’s a high-resolution version of the teaser.

Grampires

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Is this one of those concepts that kicks in nicely as a trailer, but would run out of steam as a feature? Because I love this trailer. If I wasn’t on screening lists I’d definitely pay to see a 94-minute version. Grampires and other FunnyOrDie shorts will screen tonight at downtown L.A.’s L.A. Comedy Shorts Film Festival opener.

Proof

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Kim Cattrall‘s performance in Meet Monica Valour (limited, 4.8) has, I feel, broken her out of that MILFy blonde-sexpot Sex in the City persona and shown she can get down, dig deeply and go for broke. This on top of her less-than-large-scaled but respectable performance Roman Polanski‘s The Ghost Writer, I mean. She’s forgiven, she’s cool…she’s earned entry into the serious-over-40-actress club.

Now, if only I could learn to shut up when an interview subject is talking and not go “hmm,” “uh-huh” and “yeah” all the time. I need to go to school to learn to stop doing this.

From my 2.18 Meet Monica Velour review: “Velour actually has a clear theme — a kid growing up by way of dispensing with illusion. And it offers a genuinely strong and ballsy performance from Kim Cattrall as an aging ex-erotic actress on the skids and heading further down — alcoholic, lumpy-bodied, living in a trailer park. And a relatively steady and affecting one from Dustin Ingram (Glee), who’s 20 or 21 now but plays 17 in the film. (Velour was shot in ’07, it appears.)

“The story is relatively well-shaped and believable as far as it goes, and you can tell right away that Bearden knows how to direct and cut as opposed to just adequately shoot a script. There’s a slight problem in his dialogue having a kind of ‘written’ quality, and some of the scenes feeling a little too ‘acted,’ but both are of a somewhat higher (or at least above-average) order so there’s not much interference

“Bearden persuading Cattrall to gain weight and look extra over-the-hill wasn’t, it turns out, such a bad idea. There’s always an impulse to applaud an attractive actress when she appears in a physically unflattering way, and I’m doing that here, but Cattrall goes the extra distance, I feel, in portraying what feels like despair but to actually be that, so to speak. She shows chops in this film that I’ve never seen before. I’m almost ready to forgive her for Sex and the City 2.”

Arthur Sucks but Gerwig Glows

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The Rotten Tomatoes consensus so far is that Arthur (Warner Bros., 4.8) blows the big one. The only guy who’s given it a semi-pass is MSN’s Glenn Kenny. (Can Kenny be trusted when it comes to romantic comedy? The watchword is “caveat emptor.”) My personal view is that it’s not awful, but it sure is unnecessary.


Greta Gerwig in the new, not-so-hot Arthur.

The vibe in the Arclight theatre during last night’s screening felt flat, like a lot of underwhelmed people waiting for a high-school study hall to end. The 1981 original should have been left alone. That was then and this is now. People look at profligate indulgence and giggling, stumbling-around alcoholism differently. For whatever reason Dudley Moore‘s bubbly millionaire slipped through and felt right. But Russell Brand‘s never quite finds the groove.

Brand has done himself no favors, let me tell you. He was looking pretty good and jazzed after the success of Get Him To The Greek, but now he’s bombed and for one reason only: he’s not funny. Plus there’s something generally repulsive (as in “not at all attractive” and “fuck off”) in our post-crash-of-’08 environment in watching a gangly alcoholic infant with a high-pitched “do I sound like Dudley Moore?” voice blowing scads of money and then shrugging it off. I’ll shrug you off, ayehole!

But Greta Gerwig, who plays a version of Liza Minnelli role in the ’81 film, has an inner light in most of her scenes. She’s partly on the movie’s wavelength, partly on Brand’s during their scenes together, and partly on her own. You can sense her basic kindness, openness — a charitable, turn-the-other-cheek disposition. I’ve met and dinner-ed with Gerwig and this is her, pretty much — she’s playing a role in a Warner Bros. film, but also self-portraiture.

And for the first time in her professional life, Gerwig has studio makeup people and hair people and key-lighting people making her look extra-glowing and glamorous with perfect hair, and it works. She’s golden, and this, coupled with her spiritual light, is what makes Gerwig the only element that half-works in this film.

And to think that the Warner Bros. marketers actually kept Gerwig off the one-sheet when the first one came out. These people really do have Death Star attitudes and souls. They seem to only understand corporate-bullshit-franchise movies — they’re lost in the woods when it comes to movies about real people, or trying to convey that a film has elements that might appeal to same.

Jennifer Garner is arch and brittle in the second-lead female role — an ice-queen who wants to marry Arthur for his holdings. She hasn’t done herself any favors either. Helen Mirren is okay — inoffensive — as Arthur’s 60ish female nanny, and Nick Nolte has a moment or two as Garner’s billionaire dad. Although I still don’t understand a scene in which he forces Arthur to test a special electric table-saw that stops instantly when it senses moisture — testing it by placing his tongue on the whirring blade. What the…?

Coal-Miner Goggles

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Staring at a computer screen for seven or eight hours a day has been playing hell with my eyes over the last few months. My left eye, I mean — redness, puffiness, watering. And so I started wearing these IMAX 3-D glasses on top of my regular glasses to cut down on glare. They’re the only device I’ve found so far that doesn’t make everything look too dark and is fairly comfortable to wear.

I’m told the that the Gunnar people make good glare-reduction glasses. If anyone knows of other options, please inform.

Not A Chance

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Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson has reported that a 4.27 Academy screening of a new digital restoration of Bye Bye Birdie, the 1963 musical comedy that was old-hat the day it opened, is sold out.

I wouldn’t go this screening with a gun at my back + a promise of free quaaludes. The movie is strictly squaresville — a take on the hype and inanity of the rock ‘n’ roll industry by people whose careers peaked in the ’40s and ’50s.

The original 1960 B’way show reflected a stodgy middle-class sensibility that was half-amused and half-appalled by the Elvis Presley phenomenon (hence the Charles Strouse and Lee Adams tune “Kids”). Gower Champion did the choreography, and it costars Dick Van Dyke, Janet Leigh, Paul Lynde and Ed Sullivan, for God’s sake.

Conrad Birdie, the idiotic name of the rock star being drafted, is a riff on Conway Twitty, the rockabilly recording star who was once a quasi-rival of Elvis’s on the charts.

And I really can’t stand Ann-Marget‘s singing of the title tune in the opening credits. I mean, it’s awful. This and her performance in Viva Las Vegas…please. In my mind she was finally saved by her performance in Mike Nichols‘ Carnal Knowledge.

Critic Stephen Farber will host the Bye Bye Birdie screening, followed by an onstage discussion with Ann-Margret and Bobby Rydell.

Right Direction

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Two days ago a fan-made, early ’60s-style main title sequence for the forthcoming X Men: First Class (20th Century Fox, 6.3) got 2000 hits. Yesterday it got 40,000 and today (as of 4:30 pm eastern) it’s at 50,000 and counting. The creator is Joe DiLeonardo (a.k.a. “Joe D”) of Trenton, New Jersey.

X-Men: First Class Title Sequence from Joe D! on Vimeo.

The sequence is a bit slow and lumpy here and there, but Joe (whom I spoke to a few minutes ago) threw it together very quickly, and at least he’s got the early ’60s style down. His only mistakes were including two or three stills that were probably taken in the mid to late ’60s, which of course violates the space-time continuum.

How will this compare to the actual Matthew Vaughn– and 20th Century Fox-approved main title sequence? They’ll be fairly or very similar, I would imagine. The forthcoming prequel is set during the time of the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, so what Joe D. has done is actually a no-brainer. In fact, if I were running the show I’d tell the designers to somehow go beyond this and…I don’t know, just punch through all that shit without losing the period vibe. A kind of hybrid.

“This sequence was designed to give a very brief primer on the time period and the setting, as well as show the relationships of the characters in this film, as they are very different from the previous,” Joe explains. “Audiences shouldn’t be confused as to why Professor X and Magneto, enemies in the original trilogy, are the best of friends in this prequel.

“Super Punch held a contest redesigning the posters for the film, which played it safe by sticking very close to the correlation to the original trilogy, and winding up rather mundane compared to the slick trailer rife with espionage, red fear and early ’60s hair. Several people were quick to make posters in the mod/Saul Bass/James Bond style that I had in mind, so I decided to make a title sequence instead.”

Damn Towels

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Every time I use a big bath towel in a hotel or a rented home, it’s very natural-fibre feeling and nicely absorbent. I love it. And every time I try to buy a nice high-quality bath towel for myself at Nordstrom or Bed, Bath and Beyond, I come home with something that’s a little too soft and smoothly pampered — not natural feeling enough with that 100%, slightly rough cotton touch. It’s infuriating.