There’s no question that Queen Elizabeth has become physically smaller. Certainly a good deal shorter than she was when Helen Mirren portrayed her in The Queen. I know this syndrome up close as my mother has become significantly smaller than she used to be.
I didn’t get around to checking the pirate sites until an hour ago, and it’s true that several digital workprint copies and at least one DVD rip of Gavin Hood‘s Wolverine (20th Century Fox, 5.1.09) are downloadable as we speak. They all appeared earlier today; the DVD rip went up only about an hour ago. Clearly someone in the post-production loop is the culprit. I don’t know what kind of effort the big distributors put into post-production security, but it clearly hasn’t been enough.
Has anyone in an all-media press screening ever been caught trying to tape a movie? Ever? I’m not saying it hasn’t happened. I’m just asking.
I haven’t looked at any of the pirated copies, but HitFlix’s Drew McWeeny has reported that he looked at “a random three minute segment from the middle of the film this afternoon when first told it was online, and there’s no timecode, no watermark…nothing. It’s a clean, perfect copy. Someone did that on purpose.”
I agree with McWeeny and Nikki Finke that it’s hateful and deplorable when this sort of thing happens, and that it’s bad all around for everyone.
In a Wrap column posted last night, director Rod Lurie (Nothing But The Truth) has ripped into Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke as a “de facto McCarthy,” “destructive and dangerous, “carelessly lobbing accusations and innuendoes against unsuspecting victims,” “wing[ing] around rumors as if they were fact” even as she “protects her integrity by acknowledging up front that this is something she’s heard” and “very often [reporting stories with] agendas or scores to settle.”
Lurie initially ascribes the afore-mentioned characteristics and tendencies to a new gang of reporter-bloggers who “purport to run news items — ‘scoops,’ as they call them — in a shoot-first-and-do-the-interview-later kind of way…with in most cases no editors or lawyers to vet a story — either as a fact-checking measure or to determine whether there is exposure to a libel lawsuit.”
But his real focus is Finke due to her having reported two untrue things about him — one, that he’s hopscotched reps (i.e., has been skittish, temperamental and disloyal with his agents) and two, that he wanted to include a “rough sex” scene between a U.S. President’s daughter and a Secret Service agent in Commander in Chief, the TV series he created. So let’s cut out the qualifications — this is a Lurie vs. Finke piece. And Lurie is saying Finke “is emblematic of a true danger that now exists in journalism — the unchecked reporter.”
Lurie’s most provocative statement is that “there will soon be a revolution in legal Internet journalism. It simply cannot stand that reporters can just willy-nilly report rumors as fact. When that happens, reputations and careers can be destroyed at the whim of the reporter. Something has to and will happen or the entire institution of journalism — which will soon become almost exclusively Internet journalism — will be dead and buried.”
A journalist friend asked me the other night why I hadn’t jumped into the recent Finke-Variety-Wrap brouhaha more strongly. I guess it’s because Hollywood Elsewhere is a personality-opinion-attitude column, and so in terms of this one distinctive bent or tendency — a constant vetting of personal likes and dislikes, faves and devils — HE is similar to Deadline Hollywood Daily.
Unlike Finke, of course, I rarely beat the bushes for news story exclusives. I generate reviews, elitist or curmudgeonly snark, festival coverage, seasoned perspective, tough opinion, cultural complaints, standard movie-love (in feature, DVD and Bluray form), superb photographs, video and mp3 recordings, and all kinds of bizarre head-trip humor riffs — including reactions to hotel managers who fail to discern the meaning of a left-behind cowboy hat and pink-shirt restaurant managers who lack the grace to allow a customer to eat a slice of his own cake that he brought along in a bag.
But when exclusives do fall into my lap (a) I always make sure the facts are as throughly sourced as possible (and if I make a mistake, I fix it as soon as possible) or at least state that what’s being posted is merely the perspective of a known and trusted source, and (b) I always run said stories without naming the source. If I run someone else’s view of a situation or a film or Bluray disc, it’s because I agree with it or feel it at least has some merit. I think I’ve shown pretty good judgment on these matters as well as aesthetic-cultural issues. In any case, them’s the rules.
One definition of a Nikki Finke target is any form of old-boy sexism — any evident regarding of women as objects first and fully proportional and spherical human beings second. A good thing to be against, but Finke’s zeal in this regard can be nothing short of ferocious.
She tried to hurt me a couple of years ago by posting a single stupid-icky paragraph I included in a 15-paragraph letter that I’d privately sent to 3:10 to Yuma director James Mangold , which had been given to her by an ally of Lionsgate marketing chief Tim Palen. Why? Because first and foremost, I believe, there’s something toxic in her soul that prevents her from acting in a more considerate, comme ci comme ca fashion (what she did was appallingly un-mensch-like), but secondly because she considered me a sexist dog and therefore needed to be slapped down.
I suspect that her animus toward Lurie was fostered along the same vague lines — i.e., that because of Lurie’s fictional interest in including a “rough sex” plot point in a TV series he must be a sexist and therefore needed to be slapped around.
Finke hasn’t posted anything about Lurie’s piece on DHD so far, and probably won’t.
A Michael Fleming Variety story quoted by In Contention‘s Kris Tapley announces that Chris Nolan‘s Shadow of the Bat, his third and final Batman film for Warner Bros., will open in the summer of 2012. It also contains two major-league shockers.
Pic will once again use the Riddler as the prime villain — the third go-round after Frank Gorshin‘s Riddler on the ’60s Batman TV series and Jim Carrey‘s Riddler in 1995’s Batman Forever. The surprise is that Carrey will again play the role in Nolan’s Shadow.
The other “come again?” is that directors Tim Burton, the creator of Batman and Batman Returns, and Joel Schumacher , helmer of Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, have been brought on as consultants to the production.
“Tim and Joel had two completely different visions of the Batman, visions that contrast vastly with my own,” Nolan told Variety. “But I don’t feel that negates the possibility of a creative convergence. Batman is more than the ideas of one person, of one team of artists. He is the result of seven decades of pop culture influence and innovation.”
WB is sadi to be eyeballing a May 2012 release date to coincide with the 73rd anniversary of Batman’s first comic book appearance in 1939.
Nolan begins shooting his latest film, Inception, with Leonardo DiCaprio later this year for a 2010 release.
“It wasn’t until the 20th century that modern-type sunglasses came to be. In 1929, Sam Foster, founder of the Foster Grant company, sold the first pair of Foster Grant sunglasses on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, NJ. By 1930, sunglasses were all the rage.” — from ideafinder.com‘s page on sunglasses.
My just-received copy of Nick Dawson‘s Being Hal Ashby, taken inside the good old Skylight Diner on 9th Avenue and 34th Street following 6 pm screening of Observe and Report.
First bloom, 9th and 42nd Street, 3.31.09, 4:10 pm.
I knew something was wrong last night when a friend and I walked into Sant Ambreous, a little restaurant at the corner of West 4th Street and Perry Street. It was around 9:30 pm. The atmosphere felt a little too stiff and formal, and they were all too glad to see us. Restaurants that have their act together never show excitement when a customer walks in. It’s always a sign of desperation. They need to just smile and keep their zen cool.
On top of which the waiters wore pink shirts with black ties. Village restaurants should always use waitresses who look like Sylvia Plath and who wear black leotard tops or somewhat tight sweaters, or…whatever, young, sharp-looking guys who may or may not be gay but who look it. But nobody wears ties — what is this, the Radisson in St. Paul?
Another trouble sign was that the bartender, a young girl from Brazil, spoke with heavily-accented English, and a little too softly. Bartenders always look you in the eye and speak plainly and with confidence, like a banker.
A voice was telling me to leave right away but we stayed because it was cold out. The voice was actually screaming at me to leave. As Lawrence Tierney‘s gangster character said in Reservoir Dogs, “When you’ve got instinct you don’t need proof.”
The pasta I ordered was so drenched in oil and garlic that it was almost pasta soup. But the defining death blow was the fact that my friend and I had brought a bag with two pieces of cake (i.e., that pear cake from a couple of nights ago) inside some tin foil, and we wanted to sample it. We’d already spent about $62 dollars and had a relatively decent time, but we were the last people in the place and asked the bartender if we could have a couple of forks. It was the end of the night, we’d spent our money and we just wanted a couple of bites of that Dean & Deluca cake.
The bartender asked the manager — a guy in his late 40s or early 50s, also wearing a pink shirt and black tie — and a minute later he came up behind us (we were sitting at the bar) and said he couldn’t oblige. “We have many fine desserts here,” he explained. “You should try one of them.” I saw red. I told him I would never return to his place, and that I would do what I can to dissuade others from visiting. Which is what I’m doing right now.
If it were my restaurant and it was late and a couple that had just ordered a fair amount of food and drink wanted to sample their own dessert…fine. If it was right in the middle of the dinner rush, I might politely decline. But when it’s pushing 11 and your staff is cleaning up and putting chairs on top of tables, what’s the difference?
I was talking an hour or so to this Expedia customer service guy about a flight to Spain that would initially land in Lisbon, Portgual. Which this Expedia guy kept referring to as Lizbonn — Liz Taylor plus Bonn, Germany. My irritation grew with each mispronunciation. “Look, it’s pronounced Lizbuhn…okay?,” I finally said. “Lizbuhn. You should kinda know how to pronounce these cities.” How cut off from civilization do you have to be to get a six-letter word wrong? Is it a matter of education, ethnicity, rural dialect? I knew how to say Lisbon when I was seven or eight after watching Casablanca on the tube.
I actually don’t have a problem with these Japanese-produced Nicolas Cage Pachninko TV spots because however dopey or doofusy, Cage seems like a relatively sane and good-natured goof-off. He’s loose, animated, self-mocking. Which is quite the contrast from his projections of quietly obsessive insanity in Knowing.
Last Friday’s announcement of the death of Steven Bach, the former UA exec and author of “Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven’s Gate” (which was later retitled as “Final Cut: Art, Money and Ego in the Making of Heaven’s Gate“) reminded me what a legendary Hollywood filmmaking book it was and is.
Bach’s passing also reminded me to re-watch the Michael Epstein‘s 2004 documentary based on the book.
The entire Epstein documentary, lasting 78 minutes, is on YouTube in eight parts. I missed the ’04 showings at the Toronto and New York film festivals and on the tube, and it’s not available on DVD — but its very easy to watch on YouTube, and anyone who’s never seen it is urged here and now and now to take the time.
I hated Heaven’s Gate when I first saw it 28 and a half years ago, and I couldn’t stay with it when I tried it a second time at home about six years ago. I therefore feel it’s still worth quoting N.Y. Times critic Vincent Canby when he noted that director Michael Cimino‘s approach to his subject in Heaven’s Gate “is so predictable that watching the film is like a forced, four-hour walking tour of one’s own living room…for all of the time and money that went into it, it’s jerry-built, a ship that slides straight to the bottom at its christening.”
I attended the second critics screening at the Cinema I on November 17th or 18th of 1980, and stood at the bottom of the down escalator as those who’d seen the afternoon show were leaving. I asked everyone I knew what they thought on a scale of 1 to 10. I’ll never forget the deflated, zombie-like expression on the face of journalist Dan Yakir as he muttered “zero.”
History long ago noted that renowned critic F.X. Feeney is primarily responsible for recasting Heaven’s Gate as a film deserving of revisionist respect. I never bought into this but Feeney’s efforts in this regard are a reminder of what a genuiinely caring and impassioned film critic can do when he/she puts his/her mind to it. Or at least was capable of doing in the old days.
“With just five features in 13 years, Wes Anderson has established himself as the most influential American filmmaker of the post-Baby Boom generation,” says Matt Zoller Seitz in the first of a five-part narrated video series (along with a printed essay) that will run over the next five weeks.
(The video is very nicely done, Matt — hats off. But the automatic play-reboot function is impossible. Send me a code without it and I’ll put it up again.)
Publishing a pro-Anderson manifesto is, at the very least, an idiosysncratic if not brave thing for Seitz to have done. I mean, is it not the prevailing view that Anderson pretty much shot his wad with Bottle Rocket and Rushmore? And that he’s been slipping more and more into WesWorld and getting more and more caught up in Wes-aesthetics-for-their-own-sake ever since?
Apart from his brilliant ’06 American Express commercial and that Jason Schwartzman and Natalie Portman Hotel Chevalier short that accompanied The Darjeeling Limited, Anderson’s post-Rushmore features have come to symbolize an approach to filmmaking that is so poised, precious and fussed over that the primal dramatic stuff doesn’t come through like it needs to.
As David Amsden wrote in a New York profile of Anderson in late September of ’07, “Pepper in some resurrected classic-rock songs; deadpan dialogue; themes of failure, nostalgia, and fractured families; and the result, at its best, is a world unto itself.”
The other prevailing view is that former collaborator Owen Wilson provided an influence that kept Anderson from getting too Wessy. Like the also-faltering M. Night Shyamalan, Anderson needs to find a way to write his screenplays with (i.e., trust) a bright somebody or other with anti-foo-foo roots and convictions who can save him from himself.
The beginning of the fall-off wasThe Royal Tenenbaums. The first big uh-oh was The Life Aquatic. The Darjeeling Limited, for me, was the Big Thud. And yet Seitz’s essay, I have to say, is great stuff. The passion is right there. It made me fall in love with Rushmore all over again, and feel hope for Anderson’s future works. One hopes in particular that The Fantastic Mr. Fox (which had a test screening in New Jersey a little while ago) will pan out.
“What makes Wes Anderson distinctive is the sheer range of art that has fed his imagination,” Seitz writes. “Nnot just recent American and foreign films, but films from 30, 50, even 70 years ago, plus newspaper comics, illustrations, and fiction. The spectrum of influence gives his work a diversity of tone that his imitators typically lack. It is a style of substance.
“Anderson’s scavenger-hunt aesthetic stands him in good company, alongside Quentin Tarantino, David Gordon Green, James Gray, and the other Anderson, P.T. This series may incidentally illuminate why Anderson-esque movies — from Garden State to Son of Rambow — can seem, no matter what their virtues or pleasures, a weak substitute for the real thing.”
On 9.24.07 I posted a short list of “career-saving suggestions for Anderson to consider: (a) Do a T.E. Lawrence and join the Army or Marines as a raw recruit with a fake name, and serve in Iraq for a year; (b) get a job in Iraq as an ambulance driver, and have an affair with a nurse if he gets sent to the hospital if and when he gets maimed by an I.E.D.; (c) do a T.E. Lawrence and take a low-level job in some blue-collar industry in Missouri or Mississippi for a year, again under a fake name; (d) do a John Pierson and run a repertory movie theatre in some far-off territory for a year — soak up the exotic atmosphere, get to know the locals, etc.”
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