Thanks to HE reader Jake Hughes, a Bay Area resident, for taking an hour or so to throw this together. A little weird but I can handle it. Much appreciated.
Thanks to HE reader Jake Hughes, a Bay Area resident, for taking an hour or so to throw this together. A little weird but I can handle it. Much appreciated.
My interest in Toy Story 3 (Disney, 6.18) has mainly to do with the Pixar honchos having hired Michael Arndt, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Little Miss Sunshine, to do the script. I’m therefore expecting a certain snarky urbanity and sardonic flavor. In short, the good old double-track deal (i.e., appealing to kids and hip adults) that the best animated features achieve. The director is Lee Unkrich.
The Jeff Bridges of legend posed during Monday’s Oscar luncheon with his fellow Best Actor nominees. But the portrait in the current Time magazine is…well, the word has to be Luciferian.
Zentropa producer Peter Aalbaek Jensen has told Screen Daily‘s Geoffrey Macnab that he’s “seen it [the story] in the Danish film magazine” about the rumored Martin Scorsese/Lars von Trier remake of Taxi Driver and “what is written there is not true.” Jensen confirmed that the directors had met at the Berlin Film Festival, but that the remake story is “rubbish.”
Positive & negative reviews be damned — the public has already decided to give Shutter Island a strong opening weekend. Definite interest of 46 and 53 among under-25 and over-25 males, respectively, and a surprisingly high 44 and 40 among under-25 and over-25 females. Go figure.
Marlon Brando‘s decision to briefly pause between the words “to” and “fight” in this clip constituted the only moment of wit or subtlety in an otherwise bombastic and broadly emphatic film. Which I’d nonetheless like to see on Bluray some day. Warner Home Video has already mastered for HD-DVD — why not just offer it on Bluray? All 70mm and VistaVision films of the ’50s and ’60s need to turn up in this format, even the somewhat mediocre ones.
The above-quoted dialogue can be found at 6:24.
I’ve been punched, kicked and spat upon, but never face-slapped. I take that back — a pretty blonde who’d had a few drinks slapped me during a high-school party once. But that was eons ago. I suspect that face slaps are mainly a movie thing because they look and sound highly dramatic. I don’t believe people actually slap each other in real life. I’ve almost never seen it happen, nor have I ever heard of it happening.
That said, this clip from Charley Varrick is one of strangest slap scenes of all time.
A quote from Leonardo DiCaprio in the current Esquire goes hand in hand with the Roger Ebert profile, if you think about it: “When I was eighteen, River Phoenix was far and away my hero. Think of all those early great performances — My Own Private Idaho. Stand by Me. I always wanted to meet him. One night, I was at this Halloween party, and he passed me. He was beyond pale — he looked white. Before I got a chance to say hello, he was gone, driving off to the Viper Room, where he fell over and died. That’s a lesson.”
Chris Jones‘ profile of Roger Ebert, one of the most perceptive and deeply moving pieces I’ve read about anyone, is in the current Esquire. Here are portions:
“Roger Ebert can’t remember the last thing he ate. He can’t remember the last thing he drank, either, or the last thing he said. Of course, those things existed; those lasts happened. They just didn’t happen with enough warning for him to have bothered committing them to memory — it wasn’t as though he sat down, knowingly, to his last supper or last cup of coffee or to whisper a last word into Chaz’s ear.
“The doctors told him they were going to give him back his ability to eat, drink, and talk. But the doctors were wrong, weren’t they? On some morning or afternoon or evening, sometime in 2006, Ebert took his last bite and sip, and he spoke his last word.
“He [once] lived his life through microphones. But now everything he says must be written, either first on his laptop and funneled through speakers or, as he usually prefers, on some kind of paper. His new life is lived through Times New Roman and chicken scratch. So many words, so much writing — it’s like a kind of explosion is taking place on the second floor of his brownstone.
“It’s not the food or the drink he worries about anymore, but how many more words he can get out in the time he has left. In this living room, lined with thousands more books, words are the single most valuable thing in the world. They are gold bricks.
“Here idle chatter doesn’t exist; that would be like lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills. Here there are only sentences and paragraphs divided by section breaks. Every word has meaning. Even the simplest expressions take on higher power
“Ebert’s dreams are happier. Never yet a dream where I can’t talk, he writes on another Post-it note, peeling it off the top of the blue stack. Sometimes I discover — oh, I see! I CAN talk! I just forget to do it.
“In his dreams, his voice has never left. In his dreams, he can get out everything he didn’t get out during his waking hours: the thoughts that get trapped in paperless corners, the jokes he wanted to tell, the nuanced stories he can’t quite relate. In his dreams, he yells and chatters and whispers and exclaims. In his dreams, he’s never had cancer. In his dreams, he is whole.
“We have a habit of turning sentimental about celebrities who are struck down — Muhammad Ali, Christopher Reeve — transforming them into mystics; still, it’s almost impossible to sit beside Roger Ebert, lifting blue Post-it notes from his silk fingertips, and not feel as though he’s become something more than he was. He has those hands. And his wide and expressive eyes, despite everything, are almost always smiling.
“There is no need to pity me, he writes on a scrap of paper one afternoon after someone parting looks at him a little sadly. Look how happy I am.”
Let this become everyone’s motto, regardless of their situation: become an explosion. Do everything you can with every ounce of energy at your disposal in the time you have left.
Unless you’re an HE talk-back hater, in which case I would advise going home and turning on the TV and sitting down on your stained IKEA couch and stewing in your own juices. Because short of some amazing epiphany, that’s as good as it’s going to get for you.
In Contention‘s Guy Lodge has called Noah Baumbach‘s Greenberg “a shaggy, often very funny addition to the recent mini-genre of manchild movies.” And Variety‘s Todd McCarthy has termed it “an outstanding L.A. movie.”
“As a study of stasis and of people conscious of not living the lives they had imagined for themselves,” McCarthy continues, “Greenberg offers a bracing undertow of seriousness beneath the deceptively casual, dramatically offhand surface, even if the characters’ vague ambitions and aimless actions leave the film seeming relatively uneventful on a moment-to-moment basis.”
Lodge writes that “Baumbach’s acrid humor has mellowed a little in the California sun, but his preoccupation with the social failings of the chronically self-absorbed is undiminished.”
As Roger, “a fortysomething layabout with undetermined mental issues and a repeatedly stated resolution to “do nothing for awhile,” Ben Stiller “gives this sneakily ingratiating effort a shot at a general audience,” McCarthy notes, “but it will be most appreciated by followers of distinctively flavored, off-center indie-style fare.”
Mumblecore veteran Greta Gerwig “makes her move toward the mainstream with work likely to divide, or at least puzzle, viewers. A big young woman who’s attractive enough but not at all in the usual glamorous-actress mode, she offers no perceptible performance in the popularly received sense; you don’t detect impulse, calculation, yearning, hidden feelings or anything else beneath the surface. She just seems completely real, behaving the way people do, just reacting to things as they happen.
“Either Gerwig is a total natural — most likely — or she has the most invisible technique of any modern actor. Either way, interest will surround her subsequent work.
“Baumbach and co-writer Jennifer Jason Leigh “convey a strong sense of what it’s like to live in [this] city. Except for the opening shots, which seem specifically designed to spotlight Los Angeles at its smoggy worst, Greenberg‘s metropolis is presented from ground level without editorializing and with a fine balance between the beauty and the blight, the ease and the hassle, the luxury and the basic, the stimulating and the banal.”
Roman Polanski‘s The Ghost Writer “has some of the same elements as Chinatown in that it’s about “a hero who is never quite as smart as he believes because he’s looking at only a small section of the puzzle, without realizing that there is more to it than he can take in.
“The script, by Polanski and novelist Robert Harris, does offer clues – but it resolutely puts us in the ghost’s shoes. The Ghost Writer can be frustrating because you only know as much as the main character right up until the final scene. But when it all becomes clear, all the jagged edges go away and the film comes into focus as the well-honed thriller it has been all along.” — from Marshall Fine ‘s 2.16 review.
You want frustrating? The Ghost Writer opens on 2.19 and I’ve received no screening invites from 42West or Summit…zip. Calls and e-mails to various parties have revealed no further information.
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