The unrated extended edition DVD of American Gangster coming out on 2.19 will run 174 minutes vs. the 157-minute theatrical version. As I said in my original review, I could easily rolled with a three-hour theatrical cut.
The unrated extended edition DVD of American Gangster coming out on 2.19 will run 174 minutes vs. the 157-minute theatrical version. As I said in my original review, I could easily rolled with a three-hour theatrical cut.
The usual February dog days aren’t as canine as they could be. Screenings of City of Men, The Eye, Young at Heart, Diary of the Dead, The Hottie and the Nottie, Cover, The Witnesses, Snow Angels. (What about Vantage Point?) In Bruges, The Band’s Visit and Fool’s Gold (HE favorite Matthew McConaughey!) opening on 2.8; Be Kind Rewind, The Counterfeiters and Vantage Point on 2.22; Chop Shop on 2.27 in NYC; Chicago 10 (limited); City of Men and The Other Boleyn Girl on 2.29. Plus the will-they-or-won’t-they-happen Oscars, special screenings, script reviews, next week’s DVD of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, etc (which, of course, will be bare-bones to allow for a subsequent “director’s cut with extras” version down the road.)
How does a neutral observer square “more WGA progress” and “things are looking very good” (posted two days ago by the WGA-friendly Nikki Finke) with Michael Ceiply‘s 1.31 N.Y. Times report about Phil Alden Robinson‘s United Hollywood 1.29 post saying the DGA deal is wrong for the WGA and calling for a toughened bargaining position?
I’m not getting a conciliatory let’s-build-upon-the-DGA deal, things-are-starting- to-coalesce vibe at all. (Consider also this Alan Rosenberg/Doug Allen letter to SAG membership letter.) Feels like the same-old digging in the heels. Ceiply concludes with a paragraph that says that Robinson and Jeff Hermanson, the writers√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢ strike coordinator, recently met with Academy chiefs “to hear their case for allowing the Oscar ceremony to proceed without interference by strikers. The guild officials told academy leaders they believed the strike might be settled by 2.24, when the ceremony is scheduled for broadcast by ABC. If not, they said the ceremony would be picketed.”
Imagine the complex thoughts and emotions being experienced by those ten L.A. motorcycle cops as they roared down Coldwater Canyon last night (actually this morning), accompanying an ambulance carrying the permanently fried, baked and scattered Britney Spears, the ultimate meltdown/basket case of our times, along with two squad cars and a handful of SUVs on a trip to a medical facility at UCLA. (Her psychiatrist apparently felt her frazzled state of mind demanded a lockdown evaluation.)
You’re vrooming along on your bike and saying to yourself, “This is my life…look at this! I get paid either way but this is embarassing. I’m an officer of the law by day but right now I’m a paid goon, like a buffed-up spear-carrying guard in a Cecil B. DeMille Biblical spectacle…I’m part of a deranged psychiatric circus. I’ll be reading about myself in the supermarket tabs this weekend. I feel used, abused. The sickness…the madness!”
Paying the least bit of attention to this grotesque spectacle is like glancing at Medusa; one look and you’re infected.
Tomorrow night’s Barack-vs.-Hillary debate at Hollywood’s Kodak theatre will be a political version of an American Idol season finale. Moderated by Wolf Blitzer, questions from L.A. Times reporter Doyle McManus and Politico‘s Jeanne Cummings, no time limits — 5 to 6:30 pm Pacific. Invited guests will be let in at 2:30 pm, doors close at 4 pm; cameras, cell phones and PDA’s verboten. This column will shut down around noon or so.
There’s a sublime tension and at the same time a kind of coming together in Lindsay Anderson‘s This Sporting Life (’63), which was re-issued last week on a Criterion DVD. A 1963 kitchen-sink drama about a somewhat loutish, emotionally needy rugby player (Richard Harris) blundering his way through an unexamined life, it has the usual elements — British working-class despair, rage, sex, banging into furniture..
But there’s such balm and tranquility provided by Denys Coop‘s black-and-white cinematography that it all seems strangely beautiful. Monochrome as luscious as Technicolor, sometimes moody and murky or fog-lit, sometimes pierced by odd shafts of light or reflections of same. A rough-and-tumble world lit and captured with tonal perfection.
“Barack Obama has now cut the gap with Hillary Clinton to 6 percentage points among Democrats nationally in the Gallup Poll Daily tracking three-day average,” today’s Gallup summary reads. “And interviewing conducted Tuesday night shows the gap between the two candidates is within a few points.
“Obama’s position has been strengthening on a day-by-day basis. As recently as Jan. 18-20, Clinton led Obama by 20 points. Today’s Gallup Poll Daily tracking is based on interviews conducted Jan. 27-29, all after Obama’s overwhelming victory in South Carolina on Saturday. Two out of the three nights interviewing were conducted after the high-visibility endorsement of Obama by Sen. Edward Kennedy and his niece Caroline Kennedy.”
The Weinstein Company will distribute Woody Allen‘s atrociously-titled Vicky Cristina Barcelona sometime later this year. Figure late summer/early fall. The romantic roundelay costars Javier Bardem, Patricia Clarkson, Penelope Cruz, Kevin Dunn, Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson and Chris Messina.
In the Jan. 14 issue of Maclean’s, the Canadian news magazine, Allen says this the following during a three-page interview: “I finished a film in Barcelona this summer that’s a romance. It’s serious in the sense of like Hannah and Her Sisters, [but] it’s not heavy at all, there’s no killing or life-and-death issues in it. It’s a relationship picture.”
For reasons no one fully understands, the forthcoming Hannah Montana concert movie is being called (ready?) Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour. The 3D Disney release comes out on 2.1.08, and Fandango’s Harry Medved has passed along the following:
(a) It currently accounts for 91% of all ticket sales on Fandango, (b) Although plenty of tickets are still available for midweek shows, over 1,000 showtimes are already sold out, (c) It’s the best-selling concert movie in Fandango’s seven-year history; (d) Exhibitors are regularly adding additional show times at their theaters, including Thursday midnight shows and Friday morning shows (as early as 8:00 a.m.).
Slashfilm’s Peter Sciretta has posted two shots of Sean Penn in bearded, early ’70s guise as the late, deeply mythologized San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk in Gus Van Sant‘s currently-rolling Milk. It appears as if Penn is trying to merge with Milk by wearing a prosthetic schnozz. His own nose has never been patrician or baloney-slice thin, but it does seem larger and more bulbous in the black-and-white Milk photo.
I dropped by Santa Barbara’s Marjorie Luke theatre yesterday afternoon to see four short films, but mainly to take a look at Josh Brolin‘s X, which he directed, wrote and self-produced. A 15-minute piece about a heavily-tattooed criminal dad (Vincent Riverside) and his hard-bitten, Bonnie Parker-like daughter (Eden Brolin) sharing a violent fate in the desert, X is a first-rate effort — well-shot, nicely paced, engagingly acted. 3 days of shooting, 96 set-ups. It convinces you that Brolin will probably be directing a feature within two or three years.
That said, X‘s like-father, like-daughter theme is depressing. Riverside’s character is a low-rent loser who has not only ruined his own life but, it seems, his daughter’s. The short has a certain scuzzy integrity, yes, but I wouldn’t want to see X expanded into a feature. It’s too bleak, the characters too doomed. It left me with nothing except a belief that Brolin can handle himself behind a camera. He’s a funny guy. Something tells me he’d be good with a sardonic comedy of some sort.
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