I’m sure I’ll eventually be forgiven for feeling underwhelmed about David Fincher‘s decision to hire Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander in his English-language version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I don’t know what it is, but on some level she seems…I’m searching for the word. Opaque? Unremarkable? I’m not thinking off-pretty — she’s mildly attractive — as much as off-charismatic. I’m just not getting that Vivien Leigh voltage.
The fact that I’m a much bigger fan of her older sister, Kate Mara, makes me a fuddy-dud, I suppose.
Fincher knows Rooney Mara from a costarring role she’s played in The Social Network, which will have its big debut at September’s N.Y. Film Festival.
The adaptation of the Dragon Tattoo flick, to be produced by Scott Rudin, is based on an adaptation by Steve Zaillian. Shooting will reportedly begin next month in Sweden. Vait…in Sveden? So the actors in Fincher’s film are going to talk Eenglish vith a Max von Sydow or Liv Ullman accent?
Because the Salander casting is a matter of some importance to millions of fans of Stieg Larsson‘s “The Girl…” trilogy doesn’t mean it’s all that big of a deal from a Movie Godz perspective. A tough bisexual girl who’s a genius with digging stuff up online and finagling computer code = tough-assery and empowerment. Well and good. But it’s a big deal because of the money, because of the 40 million copies sold in 44 countries and blah, blah. If there’s something else going on here, I’d like to know what it is.
Joaquin Phoenix has not, to my knowledge, made rap-music history since retiring from acting. On top of which it’s not interesting to ponder the psychology of a meltdown. Anyone can throw his or her life away any time. All you have to do is say “screw it” and go home and flop down on the couch. So no offense but screw this movie, whatever it is.
Casey Affleck‘s I’m Still Here — a doc about Phoenix’s meltdown (or put-on meltdown) — will either open theatrically via Magnolia on 9.10.10 after debuting at the Venice Film Festival or…whatever, go straight to DVD. I’m open to either possibility.
A 5.7.10 L.A. Times story by John Hornreported that the film features “more male frontal nudity than you’d find in some gay porn films and a stomach-turning sequence in which someone feuding with Phoenix defecates on the actor while he’s asleep”. Film buyers were reportedly uncertain whether it was a serious documentary or a mockumentary.
I would much rather than see a full-on mockumentary with Phoenix portrayed by Ben Stiller, continuing in the vein of that hilarious Phoenix bit he did on the ’09 Oscar telecast.
L.M. Kit Carson and Lawrence Schiller‘s An American Dreamer, a 1971 doc about the late Dennis Hopper, was screened last night at the Walter Reade theatre by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Speaking as a longtime pal of Carson’s and an admirer of Schilller’s, I regret being unable to think of anything remotely flattering to say. The vibe in the room was kindly and sympathetic, but what I heard and felt after the show was mainly polite astonishment. Why had Schiller and Carson decided to even show this thing?
I was stunned by the doc’s shapeless sloppiness, amused and repelled by its portrait of Hopper as a bearded, drug-fried horndog on the verge of destroying his directing career with the abomination that was The Last Movie, and appalled at the ugliness of the print (faded sepia-tones having replaced whatever color it had to begin with).
You might expect An American Dreamer to be a portrait of an allegedly gifted director (Hopper helmed Easy Rider two years before the doc was shot) at some kind of personal crossroads, his state of mind clearly affected (to put it mildly) by pot and hallucinogens. You’re thinking you’ll at least get to sample Hopper’s milieu and personality as he was finishing editing on The Last Movie, a film so allegedly incoherent that it ended his behind-the-camera career until he finally sobered up in the mid ’80s. And maybe get to “know” the guy on some level.
You get to know Hopper, all right. What a shameless, self-absorbed, cowboy-booted asshole. Watching An American Dreamer is enough to make you at least consider the Sean Hannity-Bill O’Reilly-Glenn Beck-Pat Buchanan view of the changes brought about by the counter-culture. And that’s a terrible thing to do to any viewer.
What The American Dreamer provides — and I mean all in and nothing else — is footage of Hopper swaggering, stoning and blah-blahing his way through several willing women at his hippie-commune home in Taos, New Mexico. He stammers on about this and that philosophical issue from time to time, but the bottom line is (a) he’s apparently dead-set on self-destructing and becoming the new Orson Welles (he talks at one point about his suspicion that The Last Movie probably won’t find much of an audience), and (b) there are girls galore — provided, I learned last night, by Schiller and Carson — and he’s going to enjoy as much fine soft flesh as he can get his mitts on.
All Schiller and Carson did was just shoot and shoot and shoot as Hopper swaggered around and sampled the wares. And it was awful, just awful to sit there last night and watch this 40-year-old grope-a-thon unfold so haphazardly. Jett, sitting next to me, was chuckling and groaning. “This was the ’60s?,” was his basic reaction. Several serious people were there last night — director James Toback, Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman, etc. — and I was sharing with all of them the same two thoughts: “Why?” and “What the fuck?”
With so much blather in the air, the viewer is soon dying for reality checks of any kind. Schiller and Carson, enamored of Hopper and/or flattered by his largesse (and most likely enjoying the harem atmosphere themselves), provide absolutely nothing along these lines. They never engage Hopper in discussions of his acting career. They never talk to critics or film executives of the time to get a sense of perspective. And they ignore a seminal Rolling Stone article that was written about Hopper’s ongoing Taos orgy — a piece by Robin Green called “Confessions of a Lesbian Chick.”
If Green’s disapproving perspective had been somehow included in the doc (by way of a hindsight re-edit, say) it might have been, perhaps, half-tolerable, but without it it was all punishment. I summarized Green’s piece in a 1991 Movieline article I wrote called “Ten Interviews That Shook Hollywood.”
I was truly mystified by Schiller and Carson’s decision to show a raggedy “pink” print despite Schiller’s admission that a decent-looking print exists. The good print isn’t being shown, he said, in order to protect it from wear and tear, but why not digitally scan it and show that? Cost, said Schiller. He mentioned a figure of $31 thousand. I called restoration guru Robert Harris this morning and asked about this figure. “First of all you’re going in the wrong direction,” he said. “You don’t want to scan a print but the negative. Where’s the negative?” Nobody mentioned that, I said, but if you had the negative and it was in decent shape, what would it cost to scan it and create a digital master? “2500 to $3000,” he said.
I’m interested to a point in seeing the extra footage, but I’m not sure I’m interested in doing the whole “Avatar for 15 dollars in an IMAX theatre” thing again. I’d be into seeing it at a press screening or reviewing an extra-footage Bluray version, but I take it Fox isn’t offering either of these options in Manhattan. They just had a press junket in Los Angeles so you’d think they’d do something here. Maybe I’m just out of the loop.
“I was telling him for a long time to get out of that thing because there is only room for one captain on the ship. Instinctively I knew that Peter was going to take over and do the movie. Guillermo, to his credit, didn’t listen to me and wanted to do continue and had some great designs — and I have seen all the designs. Of course he would have done a spectacular job, but don’t we want to see Peter do it?
“He should do it and Guillermo should do his thing. That’s what I told both of them. You should just stay in your corners.” — James Camerontelling the Herald Sun‘s James Wigney about advice he gave to Guillermo del Toro about directing The Hobbit. (Via Movieline.)
Source: Celebration V in Orlando, Florida — an “official Lucasfilm event celebrating all things Star Wars, produced by fans for fans” –August 12th to 15th.
Danny Boyle‘s 127 Hours, which stars James Franco, tells the true story of Aron Ralston, the mountain climber who amputated half his forearm with a Swiss Army knife in order to free himself after being trapped by a boulder for a full five days in ’03.
The theme of 127 Hours is about courage, “choosing life” — a brave kind of heroism. The first half-hour is reportedly dialogue-free, which sounds intriuging. I believe that the dialogue-free opening of There Will Be Blood lasted appproximately 15 minutes, give or take.
Fox Searchlight will be facing a marketing challenge, to say the least, in persuading Average Joes to want to see this, or to sit through the arm-hacking portion, at least. I’m
not trying to deflate anything or anyone. I’m just honestly asking myself a question that I’m sure others are grappling with as we speak. Who wants to see such a story?
If I was Ralston I wouldn’t walk around with a naked arm stub. I would get myself a cool-looking prosthetic Dr. No arm — black, nimble-fingered, powerful grip, etc. Or a T2 arm.
“‘Tis the thing behind the mask I chiefly hate; the malignant thing that has plagued mankind since time began; the thing that maws and mutilates our race, not killing us outright but letting us live on, with half a heart and half a lung and half an arm.”
I humped it all the way across the Williamsburg Bridge and across lower Manhattan to the Film Forum last night to catch a 3-D showing of Gorilla at Large, only to be stopped by this note on the ticket-seller’s window. I thought I might be able to cup my ears and tough it out, so I asked the ticket-taking guy if I could go in and listen to the sound of the unspooling 7:30 pm show before paying my $12 bucks. The actors were whispering to each other. It was like listening to throat-cancer survivors.
Nanette Burstein‘s Going The Distance, a long-distance relationship dramedy with Drew Barrymore and Justin Long, has reportedly been pushed back from 8.27 to 9.3, presumably because it was tracking in the toilet. Obviously a last-minute decision with the print ads (like this one, snapped last night near Houston Street) showing the 8.27 date. But that’s not the only issue.
Why is it that Barrymore doesn’t quite look like herself in the ad? (Her nose seems larger and her chin seems to jut out more — she looks more like a sister or cousin of herself.) And why is her hair on the sandy-brownish side when she’s unambiguously blonde in the film? And why does the young guy in the poster look like a hard-to-identify 22 year-old kid rather than the 32 year-old Long? They look fine together in the trailer, but the poster suggests an age disparity. (Barrymore is 35 — born in February ’75.) Why do that?
Why would the Warner Bros. marketing department create a poster that basically says “come see a nondescript uptempo relationship movie starring a woman who almost looks like Drew Barrymore and some younger guy you don’t quite recognize”?
Burstein was the director-producer of American Teen (’08), the Paramount-distributed doc that some suspected was partly staged. “For me, [it’s] too much of a hybrid to be called a ‘documentary,'” I wrote on 7.21.08. “It’s remarkably tight and clean and well-shaped. Almost too much so, it seems. Some of the dramatic ‘scenes’ unfold so concisely and with such emotional clarity that it almost feels scripted. As if every so often Burstein had told the kids, ‘Cut! That was good…but once more with feeling.’ That never happened, everyone says. Teen was just heavily covered and edited. 1,200 hours of footage were cut into a 100-minute film. But still…”
Going The Distance seems like a fairly mild thing in the trailer, but it’s been rated R “for sexual content including dialogue, language throughout, some drug use and brief nudity.”
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World made an anemic $3.5 million yesterday, a dropoff of roughly 23% from Friday’s earnings of $4.5 million. Obviously those reports of a word-of-mouth downtrend were valid. The 23% falloff caused Edgar Wright‘s film to drop from fourth to fifth place. Inception had been in fifth place on Friday, and is now fourth with Saturday earnings of $4.8 million, an $11.8 weekend tally and a grand cume of $249 million.
I sometimes go into convulsions when some demonstrably awful film is the weekend champ, but this is one of those rare instances in which the wisdom of the crowd agreed with my prejudice and vice versa, hence my temporary sense of elation. This weekend will henceforth be referred to in the record books as The Great Scott Pilgrim Slapdown — i.e., a clear-cut verdict in which the rank-and-file sampled and rejected a film that had been celebrated and recommended by the elite geek-dweeb set.
I respect Scott Pilgrim for its spunk and style and Toronto localism, and for the occasional wit, the deadpan flatline attitude, the metaphor about having to deal with unresolved relationship histories, the video-game scheme and the kinetic action scenes that came out of that (until they got old from repetition). I hated much of it and was moved to brief thoughts of suicide a day or so after seeing it, true, but it’s not a “badly made” film. It’s entirely admirable in some ways. So it didn’t fail because it’s not, like, good enough. It failed because too many people told their friends they despised it. Isn’t that a logical conclusion, Devin Faraci?
Edgar Wright is not finished. He’s a bright and talented fellow. He simply needs to climb down off his stylistic high horse and calm down and make something straight and true and naturalistic. Okay, he doesn’t have to do this. He can do whatever he wants. But I think he needs to show, now, that he can deliver a good film without getting all tricky and showoffy.
The Expendables, the weekend winner, dropped a marginal 7% from Friday, resulting in $12.5 million yesterday and a possible $36 million Sunday-night total. The second-place Eat Pray Love barely went down at all yesterday, taking in $8.3 million for a projected tally for $24 million — obviously has legs. The Other Guys is holding third place and then some with $7.1 million yesterday (an upward surge from Fiday’s $5.7 million — a result of the Scott Pilgrim falloff?).
Surely hundreds of particular-minded New York or L.A. residents have now seen Animal Kingdom, easily the best new movie of the weekend. Many of whom, I’m thinking, probably read this site. Reactions? 25 minutes later: Gee, I guess not.
Bluray versions of the six Star Wars films will be released in the fall of 2011, it was officially announced today. And no — not the original versions of Episode #4, #5 and #6 but the digitally tweaked-and-upgraded versions, per the order of George Lucas.
Is there anyone who expected anything else? The man is an animal.
“Perhaps bracing for the reactions of fans who decried some of the changes made to the special-edition films — like, say, an exchange of gunfire between Han Solo and a certain green-skinned bounty hunter — Mr. Lucas said that to release the original versions of these films on Blu-ray was ‘kind of an oxymoron because the quality of the original is not very good,” a N.Y. Times story reports.
“You have to go through and do a whole restoration on it, and you have to do that digitally,” he added. “It’s a very, very expensive process to do it. So when we did the transfer to digital, we only transferred really the upgraded version.”
In short, Lucas could do the right thing but he doesn’t like the price. With all his toy licensing money?
I’ll buy Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back and let it go at that. Which will mean waiting until Signore Lucassimo decided to sell them individually, which will probably be sometime in 2012 or ’13.
