With Michael Mann‘s Public Enemies set to open July 1st, it’s not surprising that the high-profile Los Angeles Film Festival has arranged to screen it a few days prior. The 1930s high-def gangster flick will show as the fest’s Centerpiece premiere. The L.A. Film Festival runs from June 18th to 28th. Here‘s the lineup on PDF.
I’m very much at peace with never having listened to a single Jessica Simpson song, including “I Want To Love You Forever.” I didn’t mind her performance in The Dukes of Hazzard, but I didn’t think it was very good either. I really hate conservative-minded entertainers who talk about having conversations with God. Simpson has probably done as much to recruit Taliban followers as Sex and the City or the Charlie’s Angels movies. A lot of us believe that the world would be a better place if she’d never become famous for anything.
Why has Vanity Fair put her on the cover of its June issue? And run this story about her? And who wrote the copy that says she’s “fighting back against unflattering tabloid portrayals” — i.e., Vanity Fair-speak for the fact that Simpson became fat last year and that people took pictures of her. And who decided to describe the photos in the piece as Simpson “showing off her God-given assets”? The wearing of dresses is showing off assets?
My favorite Dom DeLuise moment — the funniest, I mean — is the most appalling in terms of homophobic attitudes. It’s the “French mistake” dance scene, of course, in Mel Brooks‘ Blazing Saddles (’74). “Wrong!!!….watch me faggot!…sounds like steam escaping.” Sorry but it’s funny. Brooks is the principal offender, of course — DeLuise just went with it. Brilliantly. His end came last night in Santa Barbara. He was 75. We all have the time that we have, and then we don’t.
I had a smooth and relaxing late-breakfast sitdown with Star Trek director JJ Abrams about two hours ago. We’ve been corresponding four or five years but had never met so it was cool to finally do so. My being a moderately big fan of the film (I gave it an HE grade of 8.7 or 8.8 last week) along with the softly-lighted setting of the lobby of the Four Seasons hotel only enhanced the vibe.
Abrams is full of pep and positivism, and about as sharp as they come. He’s almost certainly a as much of a compulsive work fiend as yours truly (if not more so) and is one of those guys who seem preternaturally skilled at being 100% present in the room — there’s no sense that he’s keeping a portion of himself hidden — and at the same time are expert at making conversational partners feel they’re being fully listened to and focused upon.
He had a typical Jewish breakfast (salmon, bagels, cream cheese) and I had the same typical WASP breakfast (scrambled eggs, rye toast, orange juice, bacon served as volcanic ash) that I’ve been eating since I was eight years old.
I conveyed my basic feelings about the film — that it’s a reboot to the Trek franchise in the same way that Casino Royale rebooted the 007 films, that it feels well-coiled and tightly constructed, and that it’s especially successful in the sense that it leaves you just a little bit hungry (as opposed to films that make you feel you’ve absorbed too much of them). His answers speak for themselves.
I asked if long-departed Paramount production chief Gail Berman in fact “came up with the idea of doing the Star Trek prequel now arriving in theaters,” as it said in a 5.4 Brooks Barnes N.Y. Times piece. Abrams basically said yes, she did come to him and proposed a new Star Trek film, and that he answered that he didn’t want to do Star Trek #11 and wanted to get back to basics with a reboot approach and that she said cool.
We also talked technology, travel (i.e., a Star Trek screening for troops in Kuwait), kids, health and so on. I was expecting no more than a 20-minute session after a negotiation with his tough assistant; we wound up talking for about 45 minutes.
That’s not just Tom Hanks with a worried look on his face — it’s also me. Or at least a portrait of how I’m feeling. The guys in red and gray tunics and hats are journalists and Sony publicists who may be harboring secret information about a screening this week of Angels and Demons. I’m worrying about other stuff besides (i.e., most of it having to do with pre-Cannes issues), but this, right now, is certainly front-and-center.
Ron Howard‘s film is opening stateside a week from Friday (i.e., on 5.15), and of course I leave for Cannes next Monday, 5.11, and the Manhattan all-media screening is on Wednesday, 5.13, so I need to see it this week. I can always catch it on 5.13 at a commercial theatre in Cannes, but it would be so much easier to just get it over with here. Preferably in the inner-sanctum comfort of the Sony screening room at Madison and 55th.
On a scale of one to ten, how cranked are Hollywood Elsewhere readers about lining up to see this? To what extent did The DaVinci Code burn the bridges of trust? We all know what Angels and Demons will almost certainly be. The clips make it obvious. And we all understand it’ll clean up like the first one did.
Dan Brown‘s Angels & Demons novel is about some kind of threat to the Catholic belief system from the Illuminati, one of the Vatican’s ancient adversaries, etc. Hank’s ‘symbologist’ Robert Langdon is hired by the Catholic higher-ups to sift through the clues left by the Illuminati to find the “ticking time-bomb” they’ve planted under Rome. The Illiuminati “have been dedicated since the time of Galileo to promoting the interests of science and condemning the blind faith of Catholicism,” the copy says. Sounds like a plan.
A guy sent me a script of Aaron Guzikowski‘s Prisoners, which is looking like another Christian Bale-Mark Wahlberg pairing. (Their first co-venture will be in David O. Russell‘s The Fighter.) The rumor mill says Bryan Singer, whose once-formidable rep has been diminished by Valkyrie and who naturally needs to restore face, is apparently considering a shot at directing.
Prisoners is a kidnapped-kids thriller — Taken meets Gone Baby Gone meets Se7en meets the ravenous hunger of producers and distributors looking for the next big thing. It’s about monsters in our midst in at least two senses of that term, and is very tightly assembled. Wahlberg will play Keller, a blue-collar dad turned vigilante pursuer when his daughter and a neighbor’s child disappear on the night of a Thanksgiving celebration. I’m given to understand that Bale will play Loki, a hotshot detective assigned to the case. It’s set in the Boston area.
The guy who sent it to me called it “a complete page turner…I haven’t read something so original or twisted in quite some time…the comparisons to Se7en are understandable…it’s a hell of a script…if Singer ends up directing as rumored, this thing could really be something special.” I’ve read about 50 or 60 pages worth this morning. It’s a taut and muscular genre piece but so far it’s given me a little too much deja vu. It’ll almost certainly satisfy along the lines of other thrillers in this vein unless the director (Singer or whomever) screws it up big-time.
“There’s the whole notion that you need to persist in the illusion of immortality,” Tyson director James Toback recently said to Roger Ebert. “Because we say, well, yeah, but I’m not really dying because I’m going on to the next life. I don’t mean just to be cute about it, but people like that need to look at the Hubble telescope photographs and say, this is where we live.
“We are in an invisible speck of dust. ‘We’ meaning our whole solar system but if you wanna narrow it down further, our planet, and if you wanna narrow it down further, ourselves. We are almost invisible specks of dust in this great huge, vast, expanding cosmos. And once you actually say, that is what’s real, that’s where we are, then you can say, well, then what purpose is there in life?
“Well, you’re here so you make the best of it; you do what you can. You enjoy what you can, you create what you can and then when it’s time you don’t whine and you go. [Except] we’re never conditioned to think that way. It’s never taught. I mean, parents don’t teach it, schools don’t teach it, religions don’t teach it. It’s a kind of warped need to mythologize death into everything but what it actually is.”
After speaking with Toback on 4.11, I wrote that “he’s one of the most sage observers I’ve ever known, and hands down the greatest gabber — not in a blah-blah, listen-to-me-talk sense but in the vein of a guy who just knows and doesn’t believe in trimming his sails. Intimidation never seems to affect him. He doesn’t seem to know from hesitancy either. Which is why his discussions with Mike Tyson went so well, which is the main reason, I feel, why Tyson connects.”
Making a marriage work always gets difficult sooner or later, and once the hard stuff starts in there’s no going back to breezy and easy. At times summoning the strength and patience and discipline you need to get through the rough patches can be exhausting, and certainly draining. There are always farts and potholes and speed bumps along the way, and sometimes worse. I’ve been there; it’s work. Which is why I never bought all that malarkey about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward being a more or less perfect couple.
Hollywood Elsewhere is now definitely covered as far as complimentary copies of Paul Newman: A Life are concerned. And these three don’t include the first copy I got, which I left on a bus.
Which is why I was relieved to read about Newman’s affair with journalist Nancy Bacon in ’68 and ’69. In Shawn Levy’s book, mean — Paul Newman: A Life. Which I now have three copies of.
I know Wes Anderson‘s Fantastic Mr. Fox (20th Century Fox, 11.13.) has been testing in the New York area because I was invited to a New Jersey showing several weeks ago. I tried to RSVP on the up-and-up with my own name, but they said no-go because I wasn’t from the right age group. In any case another showing of this animated stop-motion film happened yesterday and some guy who…like, allegedly attended has passed along a vaguely written impression to Nathaniel Rogers of The Film Experience.
“A beautiful union of filmmaker and material,” the guy said. “You can sense the love and reverence [Anderson has] for the Roald Dahl story while at the same time putting his stylistic stamp as a filmmaker all over it, without one overwhelming the other. It felt just like a Wes Anderson movie, only animated. Same title/caption font, hip soundtrack (though the only song i specifically remember is ‘I Get Around’ by the Beach Boys), slo-mo dance sequence.
“Only about 60-70% of the animation was completed, but i loved the look of it. I’d describe it as akin to James and the Giant Peach meets a diorama.”
The Wikipedia facts are these: (a) Joe Roth and Revolution Studios bought the film rights to Fantastic Mr. Fox in 2004; (b) Anderson signed on as director with Henry Selick, who worked with Anderson on The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, as animation director; (c) Anderson signed on because Roald Dahl is one of his heroes; (d) In adapting the novel, the story the novel covers would amount to the second act of the film ; (e) Anderson added new scenes to serve for the film’s beginning and end; (f) Selick left the project to work on the Neil Gaiman story Coraline in early 2006, and was replaced by Mark Gustafson; (g) Fox Animation Studios became the project’s home in October 2006 after Revolution folded.[10]
Wolfram Alpha, the name of a new super search engine that will debut later this month, doesn’t sound like a software application. It sounds like a New Age spiritual cult led by a German cyborg. It could be a kind of horror film directed by the ghost of Fritz Lang.
Plus “Wolfram” — the last name of the software’s creator, Stephen Wolfram — is a little hard to pronounce. Anyone with a smidgen of marketing sense would know that teenage and 20somethings are going to regard it askance. It’s a PhD dweeb name. New applications need a name that the dumbest guy in the room is cool with. They need to call it something like Vox or Drill or Vortex or Booby — a name that sounds like a rock band or a sound system.
No specific date has been given for the Wolfram Alpha launch, but it’s being described as an engine that will give you straight, specific intelligent answers instead of the usual catch-as-catch-can Google response when you ask any specific question, allegedly “in a way that the web has never managed before.”
The Independent‘s Andrew Johnson wrote yesterday that Wolfram Alpha “will take the first step towards what many consider to be the internet’s Holy Grail – a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does.
Wolfram “introduced the system at Harvard University last week. Although the system is still new, it has already produced massive interest and excitement among technology pundits and internet watchers. Computer experts believe the new search engine will be an evolutionary leap in the development of the internet.
“Nova Spivack, an internet and computer expert, said that Wolfram Alpha could prove just as important as Google. ‘It is really impressive and significant,’ he wrote. ‘In fact it may be as important for the web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose.
“Tom Simpson, of the blog Convergenceofeverything.com, said: ‘What are the wider implications exactly? A new paradigm for using computers and the web? Probably. Emerging artificial intelligence and a step towards a self-organizing internet? Possibly…I think this could be big.'”
Publicist Kathleen Talbert said a while ago that Francis Coppola‘s Tetro, which will open the Director’s Fortnight program in Cannes, is in black and white and color. A slight exaggeration, it seems. There are dabs of red in the manner of Rumblefish and Schindler’s List , but the trailer is 97% monochrome.
<div style="background:#fff;padding:7px;"><a href="https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/category/reviews/"><img src=
"https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/reviews.jpg"></a></div>
- Really Nice Ride
To my great surprise and delight, Christy Hall‘s Daddio, which I was remiss in not seeing during last year’s Telluride...
More » - Live-Blogging “Bad Boys: Ride or Die”
7:45 pm: Okay, the initial light-hearted section (repartee, wedding, hospital, afterlife Joey Pants, healthy diet) was enjoyable, but Jesus, when...
More » - One of the Better Apes Franchise Flicks
It took me a full month to see Wes Ball and Josh Friedman‘s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes...
More »
<div style="background:#fff;padding:7px;"><a href="https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/category/classic/"><img src="https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/heclassic-1-e1492633312403.jpg"></div>
- The Pull of Exceptional History
The Kamala surge is, I believe, mainly about two things — (a) people feeling lit up or joyful about being...
More » - If I Was Costner, I’d Probably Throw In The Towel
Unless Part Two of Kevin Costner‘s Horizon (Warner Bros., 8.16) somehow improves upon the sluggish initial installment and delivers something...
More » - Delicious, Demonic Otto Gross
For me, A Dangerous Method (2011) is David Cronenberg‘s tastiest and wickedest film — intense, sexually upfront and occasionally arousing...
More »