This is perhaps due to curator Bruce Goldstein‘s inability to find a decent print, or maybe because he thought -30- just isn’t good enough. I wouldn’t argue with him. I saw it 20 or 25 years ago on the tube, and it’s definitely a flatly-mannered, heart-tugging Webb confection through and through.
But it does serve up a heaping assortment of late 1950s-era newspaper characters (although they seem part of a much earlier era), and the whole thing does occur in a newsroom, start to finish. So if the idea of the FF series is to taste the atmosphere of a dying industry when it was thriving and vigorous, -30- certainly delivers that.
Talk about a film rank with the smell of newsprint, printing presses, underarm perspiration and bad coffee in styrofoam cups, and seething with newsroom cliches — crusty but benign editors, eager-beaver copy boys, hungry female reporters, old-time press agents, cynical reporters with mushy hearts, etc. I can’t breathe!
The other thing is that -30-, a Warner Bros. film, doesn’t exist anywhere — not on the Warner Bros. archives site, not on DVD, and only from second-hand sources on VHS.
Update: It turns out that -30- is buyable/rentable on iTunes. I didn’t spot it because iTunes is calling it Thirty.
Former liberal-turned-arch-conservative screenwriter Mark Tapson (The Path to 9/11) has reviewedJohn and Jez Butterworth‘s screenplay of Fair Fame, the Doug Liman-drected political thriller costaring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts.
Naomi Watts as Valerie Plame and Sean Penn as Joseph Wilson in Doug Liman’s Fair Game.
He puts it down, of course, for being too anti-Bush administration. Tapson’s view isn’t surprising given the right-wing enzymes in his system, and I’m certainly not excerpting his critique as something to seriously wade into. But it does offer an idea about how the right-wing media and blogosphere may come after Fair Game when it opens next fall, or perhaps even as soon as next month, if and when it screens at the Cannes Film Festival.
You almost have to admire Tapson’s determination to find ways to diss a script that adopts and advances the Joseph Wilson-Valerie Plame perspective on the ignoble outing incident, and which presents Karl Rove and Scooter Libby (being played by David Andrews) as the bad guys.
Tapson’s key retort is that Bush-Cheney-Rove-Libby were not responsible for Plame’s outing, explaining that the culprit is/was State Department official Richard Armitage — “a Bush critic, not an evil neocon, who leaked Plame’s name, and who hid his involvement for many months while Rove and others unfairly bore the brunt of the investigation and of the public excoriation.”
The Fair Game screenplay “is a full-out assault on Bush’s ‘war of choice’ and on what Roger Ebert, whose career has degenerated into making petty insults toward decent Americans, calls ‘neocon evildoing,'” Tapson writes.
“Must I issue a spoiler alert for this one? Would it really come as a surprise to hear that the script paints the entire Bush administration as power-mad schemers, and the Wilsons as courageous patriots putting themselves on the line to save the lives of American soldiers and defend our Constitutional rights?
“That it asserts that Bush’s abuses, not Saddam Hussein’s central role in international terrorism, constituted the real threat to this country?
“That a whole slew of critical CIA operations was abandoned, thanks to the vengeful outing of Valerie Plame, leaving many agents exposed in the field?
“And that as a result, Iraqi nuclear scientists (‘the real WMDs,’ as Watts/Plame says) defected to a welcoming Iran instead? If so, then I have some property in Death Valley I’d like to sell you.
“President Bush and other top level White House figures appear in the movie only in actual news footage, selectively chosen to suggest that they are conspiring in a ‘coordinated’ coverup. But lesser players Rove and Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff, are more central to the script, which shows Libby intimidating CIA analysts so intensely that they burst into sweat and waves of nausea.
“He and Rove are also shown engaging in backroom manipulations to ‘bury’ Plame and Wilson (the title itself comes from a quote which Hardball host Chris Matthews attributed to Rove, about Valerie being ‘fair game’ – a phrase Rove says came from Matthews).
“But the truth is, it was State Department official Richard Armitage who leaked Plame’s name. In other words, as David Horowitz writes in Party of Defeat, ‘The entire affair was concocted out of whole cloth by opponents of the war.’
“And yet Armitage’s name never appears in the script. And how could it? That would defuse the filmmakers’ intent to demonize Rove and Bush and to condemn the war as shameful, unjust American aggression.”
Late last night the Hollywood Reporter‘s Alex Ben Blockreported that Taylor Hackford‘s Love Ranch, a ’70s period drama about Joe and Sally Conforte‘s Mustang Ranch, will finally get a limited U.S. release in June through E1 Entertainment.
Joe Pesci plays the (in)famous Mr. Conforte and Helen Mirren (i.e., Hackford’s wife) plays Sally. Most of us are a little scared, I think, of husband-and-wife collaborations on films (they tend to disappoint) hence the muted enthusiasm about this one.
The screenplay, however, is by celebrated author and longtime New York magazine contributor Mark Jacobson, who based it on a story he wrote about the ranch, so maybe.
The film, which began shooting in January ’08 but hasn’t been seen at any film festivals, has been tied up in legal wrangles due to the producers, Capitol Films David Bergstein and Ron Tutor, having failed to make payments on loans and being foreclosed upon in late ’08, blah, blah. But financial boondoggles never prevent a film from being shown at a festival or two, as critical acclaim at Toronto or Sundance can obviously add value to the core asset. If it’s worth showing, there’s always a way.
My guess is that Love Ranch hasn’t shown at any festivals because it isn’t all that good. How do ya like them apples?
ABB reports that “it will open in seven to ten North American cities, including New York and Los Angeles,” and “if it gets positive reviews and does good business the release would be expanded.” Oh, give me a break!
Here are Hackford and Mirren talking about Love Ranch with Peter Bart and Peter Guber God knows how many months ago.
Update: A journalist and HE-reader whom I know to be legit says he “saw Love Ranch last year at a test screening. Taylor Hackford was there. The film was flat and un-involving but you do get to see the great dame Helen Mirren swear up a storm, which was kinda funny. She even throws in a Queen of England joke. Pesci has so much makeup on he looked like a tranny. The unknown guy who plays Mirren’s Argentinian lover is also miscast.
“The film was so boring I couldn’t bring myself to do a proper write-up. It would make a good fit for HBO.”
Variety‘s Lael Lowenstein is callingShawn Levy‘s Date Night (20th Century Fox, 4.9), the Steve Carell-Tina Fey comedy, “an uncommonly engaging date movie with action, edge and genuine chemistry between its leads…a home run.”
Tina Fey, Steve Carell and Mark Wahlberg in Shawn Levy’s Date Night (20th Century Fox, 4.9),
But The Hollywood Reporter‘s Frank Shecksays pic “sadly illustrates the current disparity between television and big-screen comedy…[Carell and Fey] star in two of the wittiest, most sophisticated sitcoms on the air, but…they’re stuck with an endlessly silly plot line and overblown physical mayhem that is instantly forgettable.”
Hmmm, “home run” or “instantly forgettable”? Who to trust in a situation like this? I’m sorry but a voice is telling to be wary of Lowenstein. This is a Shawn Levy film, after all.
Lowenstein says that Carell and Fey, “playing a suburban couple whose evening out goes disastrously wrong, are ideally suited both to each other and to the material.”
And yet she also says “pic’s domino-style series of spontaneous adventures, gallery of unsavory characters and brushes with peril suggest a lesser version of the nocturnal black comedies After Hours or Into the Night.” But then she suggests Date Night‘s shortcoming in this regard is primarily due to its PG-13 rating.
“That’s a little too bad, as it would be fun to see where Fey and Carell could really go if let loose, and if Date Night had even further embraced its edginess,” she remarks. “Nevertheless, it’s a date worth making.”
Sheck agrees with Lowenstein about what Carell and Fey bring to the table. “Displaying an unmistakable chemistry together, they give the film its entertainment value, [and] not the overblown car chases and shootouts. If they could make this sort of routine premise work as well as it does, imagine what they could do with really inspired material.”
I’d post Michael Musto‘s second “Hollywood Kid” video report — a new weekly feature on Movieline‘s site — but the embed coding is ridiculous. No matter what proportional dimension you use it won’t post as a stand-alone screen, but as a horizontal split-screen thing. And I know what I’m doing with embed codes so don’t tell me. Here’s to Movieline‘s tech team!
What possesses a rich guy in his mid 40s to go around looking like Ol’ Man River all the time? Scraggly-ass grunge beard with gray skid-row hairs, which always add a good five or ten years. A dopey-looking gray-knit homie cap, stupid gold-rimmed K-Mart shades, dorky neck chain, etc. Like some would-be poet loser from Tenafly, New Jersey, on a break from his job as a radio taxi dispatcher. The idea is to not look like anyone or anything — I get that — but to make such horrendous choices! Wait — is he wearing sandals?
Whereas tracking scores for Kick-Ass and Death at a Funeral were neck-and-neck last week, Kick-Ass pulled ahead in today’s (4.5) report. Definite Kick-Ass interest is now 50 for under-25 males vs. 43 for the same demo’s view of Death at a Funeral. Over-25 males are 38 for Kick-Ass, 32 for Death. Definite interest in Kick-Ass for under-25 females is at 34 vs. 31 for Death, and over-25 females are at 24 for Death vs. 34 for Kick-Ass. The first choice numbers are flow for both — 8 for Kick-Ass, 5 for Death — but there’s a clear trend here.
Terrible hair is rare in feature films, but it happens. Mostly, it must be said, in films from Australia, where mullets have persisted despite every civilized culture dropping them 20 to 25 years ago. Mullets make me see red, in part because red-haired guys often wear them. I only know that if some mullet guy appears….bang, I want him dead. No, that’s raw. If a mullet guy dies I won’t be heartbroken — how about that?
I’m not saying mullets are the downfall of Nash Edgerton and Joel Edgerton‘s The Square (Apparition, 4.9), but they certainly don’t help matters.
Pic is a dirty-doings-in-suburbia thing by way of James M. Cain. A married boyfriend (David Roberts) of a married neighbor (Claire van der Boom) agrees to sub-contract an arsonist to burn her home down so she can steal her husband’s ill-gotten bag of money with no questions asked, and you know the rest. It’s nicely shot, decently cut, well acted, nimble and direct…but with problems.
I was initially intrigued, but then I found it alienating and almost repellent because of (a) the jaw-dropping stupidity propelling most of the key players and (b) the lack of intrigue or promise in same — I didn’t “like” anyone for any reason, no rooting factor, wrote them off, worms in a coffee can.
The basic problem is that The Square is not very well written. The art of writing good thrillers is to make the necessary (in terms of necessary plot turns) seem accidental. But it all seems deliberate in The Square — the Edgerton brothers saying “okay, let’s turn the screws and make things even worse for the perpetrators.”
Which, for me, eliminates any sense of real investment in the story. You don’t care what happens to anyone because the Edgertons are playing a game. They’re like a couple of kids torturing small animals.
Roberts may be a normal sort of guy with an aura of fair-minded morality about him, but his coolness and charisma levels are next to zero. What’s with all the gray hair? And those tiny fretful eyes? Roberts looks vulnerable and wimpy from the get-go. He certainly sounds like a sad candy-ass when Lady Macbeth (Van der Boom) begins talking about burnin’ down the house. “Carla, c’mon….Carla, no…this really wouldn’t be right, Carla,” etc. The man is gelatin. I bailed on him right then and there.
Robert has two expressions throughout the entire film — slightly stunned (even after sex in Carla’s car, his face seems to say “what just happened? Whoa…what was that?”) and clueless/concerned/oh-shit. Does he see anything coming at all? Is he stunned or surprised by everything that happens to him in life? Is he trying to prove to worldwide theatrical audiences that he’s the slowest and stupidest film noir anti-hero in the history of the genre?
I understand that noirs usually paint a fatalistic portrait of doomed characters. They’re not stories about heroes and admirable maneuvers and brilliant solutions. But this is a movie, dammit, and if the lead characters (even if you don’t like them much) are going to commit a serious crime you have to at least engage the audience with a notion that the crime might turn out — that the ne’er-do-wells at least have a shot at pulling it off.
Typical Aussie mullet
Except you know it’s a doomed enterprise from the get-go when Roberts meets with Joel Edgerton (playing the arsonist) in a cafe with…hello?…Edgerton’s younger sister sitting there. Does Roberts know the sister, or have any reason to trust her or be confident that she won’t blab what she’s overheard to her best friend or whomever? Obviously not. So he’s a total idiot, and the whole thing is ridiculous.
How much money was in Claire’s husband’s gym bag? It couldn’t have been that much….what, $15 or $20 thousand? $30 thousand? Two characters are going to risk everything they have in life for $20 or $30 thousand, which they’ll easily burn through within a year or eighteen months after going on the lam?
And what criminal enterprise was the husband involved in? Why didn’t we get to see what it was, what risks were involved, etc.? And why did she get married to him in the first place? She’s a fairly appealing blonde with good genes, and hubby is a thick-bodied, blue-collared, red-haired “yeah, mate” type with a fucking mullet. What about the old birds-of-a-feather rule? She’s morally reckless, but is obviously better than him.
I’m told that Breaking Upwards, the $15 thousand Manhattan relationship flick that I saw and wrote about last week, earned $15,250 last weekend at the IFC Film Center. That was “the highest per-theatre average of any speciality film.” In the country or in the New York area?
So rather than give Elaine May‘s Ishtar — a $55 million debacle, okay, but one of the best “no laugh funny” films ever made — a decent DVD release, the Sony guys have handed it over to Hulu? “We want nothing to do with it,” they seem to be saying. “Nobody saw it in ’87, even fewer people want to see it now, this is all we can do, we’re washing our hands…that’s it!”
Will you look at this odious operator? I’m sorry, that came out wrong. What I meant was, will you look at the face of Jordan Yospe, a wheeler-dealing Manatt-Phelps attorney who brings home the bacon for his partners and his family by aggressively scheming to put products into movies “before the movie is cast or the script is fully shaped,” according to a 4.4. N.Y. Times story by Stephanie Clifford. Product placement is nothing new, she notes, but Yospe is hustling in a more aggressive and inside-ish way, inserting products into scripts at seminal stages.
Manat Phelps product-placement guy Jordan Yospe
All I know is that in their day, directors like Sam Fuller, Sergei Eisenstein, John Ford, the ’70s version of Francis Coppola, Howard Hawks, Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Bresson and the 1950s incarnation of Nicholas Ray might perhaps meet with an operator like Yospe, just to be civil, but it wouldn’t be long before they’d leap up from their chairs, grab him by the lapels, bitch-slap him and toss him out of the conference room.
The point of Clifford’s story about men like Yospe and the syndrome they represent is that those days are over, and it’s time to deal with guys who, if they had their druthers, would make every brand seem a bit more conspicuous than it should be. These are the Hollow Men, and they more than have their foot in the door these days, which means, of course, that a process of slight but persistent polluting of the atmospheric aura of films is increasing. Which means in a roundabout way that thematic and spiritual elements in films are being subtly affected also.
“Now, having Campbell’s Soup or Chrysler associated with your project can be nearly as important to your pitch as signing Tom Cruise,” Clifford writes.
A contemporary urban flick without occasional recognizable brands flashing in and out of frame always feels slightly off, but you know with a guy like Yospe pulling strings there’s a decent chance that the brands will probably seem a bit too noticable.
As I wrote last September in response to a Hollywood Reporter piece about product placement by way of Brett Ratner Brands, “The attitude of the camera should always be, ‘Yeah, okay, a medium-sized Starbucks coffee is being sipped by the star of the film, but so what? Pay it no mind and listen to the dialogue.’ It should be, at most, a tiny bit more than subliminal.
“Because once the appearance of a product registers a little too much, even for a second or two, the spell of the film is faintly disturbed because someone, you sense right away, has cut a deal.
“When did conspicuous product placement start appearing in films? I haven’t done the research but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was proven to have mainly begun in the ’80s, when TV executives began to migrate into producing features and running studios. Or in the ’90s, when the mentality of bottom-line corporate-think began to manifest more and more in films. I know that it was fairly unusual to spot a noticable brand of anything in movies of the ’70s.”
Yospe “cut his teeth wedging brands into shows like Survivor and The Apprentice while he was general counsel at Mark Burnett Productions,” Clifford writes.
A 4.5 Sydney Morning Herald story has re-reported that Steven Soderbergh has shot and assembled The Last Time I Saw Michael Gregg, “an entertaining comedy — laugh-out-loud funny at times — about a theatre company staging Chekhov’s Three Sisters.” He did it as a side project while directing the Sydney Theatre Company play Tot Mom. The first report was posted on 1.6.10.
