Three days ago visual effects guy David Berry posted a home movie reel shot during the construction and second-unit filming of Star Wars models (i.e., Millenium Falcon, Empire fighters) inside a San Fernando Valley warehouse in ’76. John Dykstra Richard Edlund, Joe Johnston, etc. (Did I see Harrison Ellenshaw?) A guy named Jeff Wells was part of the Star Wars digital effects team; he’s still at it today.

Jodie Foster‘s decision to cast Mel Gibson in the lead role in The Beaver — a quirky, Napoleon Dynamite-ish dramedy about a gloomy, verging-on-suicidal middle-aged guy who finds rejuvenation when he adds a second personality in the form of a beaver hand-puppet — is inspired. I’m saying this because Gibson’s behavior in recent years has persuaded me that (a) he’s a bit of a loon and (b) is therefore in some ways a kind of real-life incarnation of the “Walter” character in Kyle Killen‘s script, which I read last year.

star Mel Gibson, director-costar Jodie Foster

The role is essentially that of an eccentric angst-ridden kookoo bird, and if Gibson has done one thing in recent years he’s proven repeatedly that he’s at the very least familiar with this aspect of the human condition. Or at the very least with having to constantly swat away demons and struggle with manic impulses.

Gibson’s nutter essence is the reason why his most memorable all-time performance was as Martin Riggs, the pop-eyed, heebie-jeebie, verging-on-suicidal cop in the first Lethal Weapon (i.e., a character that was softened up and copped-out-on in the LW sequels.) It’s why he’s an intense Catholic and why he’s had alcohol problems — two obsessions or behavior patterns that go hand-in-hand. (I’m alluding to the syndrome of people who can’t handle life’s anxieties on top of their own craziness so they need either booze or Christ to get them through the day.) It’s why he’s so hyper in interviews. It’s why he looked like a Bedlam inmate when he wore that huge John Brown beard when he was shooting Apocalypto. It’s why he called that female cop “sugar tits” when he was drunk at the Malibu poilce station.

I’m not saying Gibson is incapable of acting rationally or smiling or being polite and charming at parties and all that. Obviously he is. I’m saying that he’s obviously got a madhouse going on inside, and the occasional pop-throughs are why the crazy-Mel image has taken hold.

Foster will direct The Beaver as well as costar as Gibson’s wife. Variety‘s Sharon Swart is reporting that Foster “boarded the project and brought it to Gibson, with whom she co-starred in 1994’s Maverick. Anonymous Content’s Steve Golin and Keith Redmon will produce the film which wil cost around $18 opr $19 million. Producers are pushing for a September start date in New York. A studio could pick up the project or it could go the indie route, as Golin did with Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Babel.”

Excerpt from Kyle Killen’s The Beaver.

A re-booted Madame Tussaud’s of Hollywood will debut on August 1st. A press preview/walk-through happened a month ago. I’m more than a little impressed with the Bruce Willis figure; ditto the Jamie Foxx. The two most life-like figures in the NYC venue are the Whoopi Goldberg and Morgan Freeman. Other figures, however, are terrible. They look like celebrity look-alike models — almost but no cigar.

My Bruno review ran 11 days ago. Here are excerpts in recognition of opening day:

(1) “I don’t want to sound overly negative here. I did laugh several times during Bruno. I came out in a relatively okay mood, wasn’t pissed off. But a feeling that it didn’t really make it began to grow in the days that followed. I tried writing yesterday about Bruno but the review wouldn’t come, probably because I was torn between laughing and chortling at times and also realizing that the film has hostility and believability problems.”

(2) “The Bruno problem for me is that (a) the tread has worn down on the tires since Borat — a put-on comedy of this kind just doesn’t feel as out-there brash as it did three years ago, in part because it’s harder to believe that the encounters in the film aren’t staged or performed by the victims, (b) the humor is more than a bit cruel and misanthropic at times, and (c) Sacha Baron Cohen‘s Bruno character simply doesn’t work as well as the revolutionary Borat.”

(3) “Borat was funnier because it was at least faintly conceivable that a dorky moustachioed TV correspondent from a small Kazakhstan backwater could be that culturally clueless. But Bruno is no idiot — he’s from Vienna, knows the fashion world, knows the rules of the game. The joke is supposed to be that he’s so blinded by ego, arrogance, ambition and random sexual arousal that he doesn’t realize how offensive and irritating he is to everyone he meets. And that’s just not buyable.”

(4) “So what we’re left with is just watching SBC doing his best to put people on and make them squirm as best he can. I’m obviously gay, you’re perhaps a little uncomfortable with gay men, and so I’m going to up the ante more and more until that discomfort tips into some form of hostility (usually suppressed). Over and over and over. Because I’m convinced that you’re a yahoo of some kind, and the point of this film is to expose you as same and too bad if you don’t like it, Ugly American.”

(5) “Clips and promotions and put-ons are one thing, but when you sit down for a movie you expect a certain build-up of dramatic and emotional elements — you need to see characters and story threads start to take shape and transform and pay off in some way. Bruno never even tries to get off the ground in this sense.”

(6) “Laugh-out-loud amusing and ‘outrageous’ as it sometimes is, Bruno — oddly — isn’t all that funny. Certainly not in a convulsive sense. It’s basically a series of misanthropic ‘screw you’ jokes — 82 minutes worth of effete put-on gags, each one meant to provoke homophobic reactions to SBC’s flamboyantly gay, blonde-coiffed Austrian fashion reporter.”

(7) “Remember that moment in Mad Dog and Glory when Robert DeNiro‘s cop character tells Bill Murray‘s mafioso character (who does a little stand-up) that jokes don’t work as well when they’re ‘aimed out’ and that people tend to laugh more when they’re ‘aimed a little more in’ — i.e., at the teller?”

Ten years and 17 days ago I wrote a nice little piece for my Mr. Showbiz column about the nutritious upside of faintly boring movies. I’m asking if anyone thinks it applies in the present and if so, concerning which 2009 films? Here it is:

Anyone interested in higher-quality films these days knows the truth of it. Some of the better ones are unique, special, X-factor — Go, The Matrix, Election, Rushmore, There’s Something About Mary, Run Lola Run, Saving Private Ryan, etc. The rest of the quality movies flirt with being boring from time to time. A good kind of boring, I mean. Nutritional, Brussels-sprouts, good-for-your-soul boring.

It’s important to understand the degree of boring I’ve speaking of here. I don’t mean sinking-into-a-coma boring. Or regular boring. Or even mildly boring. But a little bit boring.

All John Sayles movies are pretty good — some have been excellent — but they’re all a wee bit boring. David Cronenberg‘s eXistenZ was a smart, mostly cool movie, but a bit boring at times. The Red Violin is a teensy bit boring. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is slightly boring. The scent of boredom can be detected, like the aroma of wet paint, in the margins of Cookie’s Fortune. Lovers of the Arctic Circle — liked it, thought about dozing off once or twice. Bernardo Bertolucci‘s Besieged was sensual, delectable, and a bit of a nod.

My point is, it’s often a mark of quality if something is a little bit boring. But I do mean a little bit. Too much of it and you’ll go to sleep. There are dozens of films released every year that are wonderful sleeping aids. I’m not talking about those. I’m talking about films that are laced with boredom. Like a couple pinches of salt in a bowl of egg salad. Just the right amount of it is usually an indication that a film is doing something right.

Atom Egoyan‘s The Sweet Hereafter did a lot of things right — it was mesmerizing, quietly powerful — but it was ever so slightly boring. The English Patient was a bit boring. So were The Wings of the Dove, Seven Years in Tibet, Kundun, Washington Square. All of those fine Merchant-Ivory films, all those Jane Austen adaptations. I mean no disrespect to Carol Reed‘s The Third Man (1949) when I say, good as it is, that it’s a teensy bit boring. Same for some of the great silent classics like Way Down East, Greed, and Sunrise, etc., which I respect and admire.

But I’m always glad after seeing a high-quality, slightly boring film, because I can then say to myself or someone I happen to meet that I’ve just seen one, and because of this my soul is richer and my horizons have been broadened. I never feel this way after seeing a big-studio, high-velocity idiot movie. Does anyone?

Face it — most of us are peons when it comes to upscale, slightly boring movies. We don’t want to know from complex or sophisticated. We just want to sit there and get stroked.

This is probably our fault, to some extent. Maybe movies just seem a bit boring at times because we’ve lost the ability (or the willingness) to stay with movies that require a little patience or concentration. The cliché about today’s kids not having the attention span of a flea is reaching out to the older age brackets. Even the over-40s seem to be losing interest in movies with even a minute meditative edge. It’s not just the kids who play video games — it’s all of us.

So clearly, in the backwash of all this cultural deprivation, “a little bit boring” is a serious compliment these days. You just have to mean it (or hear it) the right way.

“I’m afraid that Bruno feels hopelessly complicit in the prejudices that it presumes to deride,” writes New Yorker critic Anthony Lane. “You can’t honestly defend your principled lampooning of homophobia when nine out of every ten images that you project onscreen comply with the most threadbare cartoons of gay behavior. A schoolboy who watches a pirated DVD of this film will look at the prancing Austrian and find more, not fewer, reasons to beat up the kid on the playground who doesn’t like girls.

“There is, on the evidence of this movie, no such thing as gay love; there is only gay sex, a superheated substitute for love, with its own code of vulcanized calisthenics whose aim is not so much to sate the participants as to embarrass onlookers from the straight–and therefore straitlaced — society beyond.

“How efficient, though, is embarrassment as a comic device? It’s a quick hit, and it corrals the audience on the side of smugness; but its victories are Pyrrhic, and it tends to fizzle out unless held in by a plot — as it was in Fawlty Towers, which, from its base on the English seaside, fathomed the most embarrassable race on earth.

“Baron Cohen, in exporting his japes, comes up against a people much less devoted to the wince. I realized, watching Borat again, that what it exposed was not a vacuity in American manners but, more often than not, a tolerance unimaginable elsewhere.

“Borat’s Southern hostess didn’t shriek when he appeared with a bag of feces; she sympathized, and gently showed him what to do, and the same thing happens in Bruno, when a martial-arts instructor, confronted by a foreigner with two dildos, doesn’t flinch. He teaches Bruno some defensive moves, then adds, ‘This is totally different from anything I’ve ever done.’ Ditto the Hollywood psychic — another risky target, eh? — who watches Bruno mime an act of air-fellatio and says, after completion, ‘Well, good luck with your life.’

“In both cases, I feel that the patsy, though gulled, comes off better than the gag man; the joke is on Baron Cohen, for foisting indecency on the decent. The joker is trumped by the square.”

There are three obvious questions about Let The Right One In director Tomas Alfredson intending to direct a feature adaptation of John Le Carre‘s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy — why, how and who?

Why remake the perfectly satisfying 1979 BBC miniseries based on Le Carre’s 1974 novel? How could the story be satisfactorily compressed down to a typical feature length of 110 or 120 minutes, given that the original series ran 290 minutes? And who under the age of 45 would be interested in seeing it?

Bruno‘s Sacha Baron Cohen “has been accused of indulging in gay minstrelsy,” writes Dennis Lim in a recently-up pro-Bruno Slate piece. “Oh, It’s true that he does not ‘play gay’ in the respectably stoic, square-jawed manner of Tom Hanks and Heath Ledger. But Bruno is less a character than a button-pushing social experiment in locating the tipping point of tolerance: How much can he get away with? What does it take to unleash the inner bigot?

“For his merciless ambushes to work, Bruno needs to be this flamboyant — and this moronic.

“The most discomfiting — and incongruous — aspect of Bruno’s pinkface masquerade is the character’s over-the-top sexual voracity. An early outre-sex montage that features a dildo rigged to an exercise bike establishes that we’re not in Kansas anymore. Bruno is a far cry from the prim and prissy old-school sissies, who were all innuendo and no libido. We have long been conditioned to regard effeminacy as a neutered, negative stereotype, but there are moments when Baron Cohen’s extravagant prancing — playing out amid what Bruno’s trailer calls ‘real people, real situations’ — seems not grotesque but defiant, forcing his foils (redneck hunters, straight suburban swingers) to recognize the screaming presence of Otherness.

“In that sense, Bruno could be considered an homage to the proto-gay-lib classic The Naked Civil Servant, a 1975 film based on the memoirs of Quentin Crisp, the author and actor who called himself the ‘stately homo of England.’ An exhibitionist flamer in oppressive early 20th-century Britain, Crisp (played by John Hurt) is a magnet for persecution, but he holds his hennaed head up high. “The world is full of Aborigines who don’t even realize that homosexuality exists,’ he declares. ‘I shall go about the routine of daily living making this particular fact abundantly clear.'”

There’s something about Emma Watson‘s accent that’s just…I don’t know, perfect. It sorta does something to me. And last night’s deadpan delivery of “I hate it” wasn’t half bad. She should consider playing an adult one of these days. “Hey Paul…the kid just gunned me!” “Put that in your little liberal arts program.” “I don’t know what happened.”

We all need to at least half-salute the people who cut the trailer for I Love You, Beth Cooper (20th Century Fox, 7.10) because (a) they make it seem like a grotesquely unfunny, off-the-charts high-school relationship farce and (b) to judge from the reviews so far the movie pretty much is that, so in a way they’re doing people a favor by not concealing anything. They’re saying, “Do you like comedies that are aimed at dumb beasts ? Do you want to be tortured? Do you want to experience the sensation of life itself draining out of you? Then you definitely want to catch Beth Cooper.”

The review quotes so far are so bad they’re thrilling. “If watching this makes you want to be young again you probably grew up in an Algerian prison.” — IE’s Amy Nicholson. “Usually the quality gap between okay and movie isn’t the size of Texas.” — Matt Pais, Metromix. “Did erstwhile John Hughes protege and Harry Potter progenitor Chris Columbus fall behind on his payments on a sub-prime mortgage? Even if so, I’m not sure it fully excuses this joyless, offensively stupid end-of-high-school farce, which is about as funny as a hit-and-run.” — Scott Foundas, Village Voice.

Why does I Love You, Beth Cooper currently have a 34% positive Metacritic rating instead of a seemingly more fitting zero rating, which is what it has right now on Rotten Tomatoes? Because Entertainment Weekly‘s Lisa Schwarzbaum gave it a B plus.

My original trailer take was that it “suggests that the film is coarse and vulgar and way overcranked. A ludicrous teenaged horndog wish-fulfillment plot, gross stupidity, a hissing raccoon, insanely overdone foley effects, every cliche out of the tits-and-zits high-school handbook. Truly repellent. An unfortunate comedown for Chris Columbus, whom I was starting to learn to like after the invigorating Rent. The screenplay is by Larry Doyle, based on his book. I mean, I wanted to throw up.”

I don’t know about all the blisters and leprosy-bubbles in Park Chan-wook‘s Thirst (Focus Features, 7.31), which I saw last night, but I know about Kim Ok-bin, who plays the lead. In my opinion she’s the true star of the film — the reason you need to see it. She actually is the star in that this Korean-made vampire film is based on Emile Zola ‘s Therese Raquin, with Ok-bin playing the Therese role.

In my head I’ve begun calling her the Korean Isabelle Huppert — the crazy Huppert, I mean, by way of My Mother and The Piano Teacher.

The actual lead — the part of a priest who becomes infected with vampire blood — is played by Song Kang-ho, who’s described in a line in the press notes as “the Korean Tom Hanks.” The story is about Song’s vampiric nature leading him into an affair with Kim’s character, who sees herself as trapped in a grotesque and confining relationship and dying for release.

To me, Kim (her first name is Ok-bin) is the stand-out because she completely gives herself over to the film’s mood of erotic insanity. Boiled down, Thirst is a grotesque and bloody love story with a lot of slurping and toe-sucking and two or three very hot love scenes. It’s not so much a vampire film as an “oh God, I can’t help myself” drama.

If I were marketing Thirst I would emphasize that these scenes have some of the panting urgency of the sex scenes in Last Tango in Paris and In The Realm of the Senses. And that Kim Ok-bin’s impish live-wire acting is something of a discovery in this context. In the early scenes her expressions of disgust (at her family situation) and hints of inner perversity are quite alluring. She ends up convincing you that her desire to escape on a wave of abandon has brought her to a state of ecstatic madness.

Kim Ok-bin

The Hurt Locker “is a great film, an intelligent film, a film shot clearly so that we know exactly who everybody is and where they are and what they’re doing and why,” says Roger Ebert in a 7.8. review. “The camera work is at the service of the story. [Director] Kathryn Bigelow knows, unlike the pathetic Michael Bay, that you can’t build suspense with shots lasting one or two seconds.

“Frankly, I wonder if a lot of Transformer lovers would even be able to take Bigelow’s film. They may not be accustomed to powerful films that pound on their imaginations instead of their ears.

“We live in a depressing time for American movies. Half the nation seems hellbent on throwing itself at the horrible Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. The movie’s fans inform me that I don’t ‘get it,’ that what they want is mindless violence and stuff blowing up real good. They like the explosions. It’s entertainment for the whole family. I get it all, all right. [Except] two years from now, no one will quite be able to remember its name.”