Vincent Gallo has the lead part in Francis Coppola‘s upcoming Argentine drama Tetro, but less than a month ago it was Matt Dillon‘s role. What happened?
Gallo will play the title character, “a brother in a family torn apart by rivalries and betrayal.” (Good God.) Javier Bardem will play an Argentine literary critic, Alden Ehrenreich will play Gallo’s younger brother, and Maribel Verdu plays Tetro’s longtime love interest.
I’m sorry, but something snapped inside after I saw Youth Without Youth. Before that experience the name Francis Coppola had, in my yearning moviegoer heart, a certain electricity, a creative vibe, a positiveness. That’s gone now. The man who directed the Godfather films, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, One From The Heart and The Rain People, I fear, is no longer with us. I would love to be proven wrong.
Tetro, budgeted at less than $15 million, starts shooting on 3.31 in location in Buenos Aires. A 2009 release “with an as-yet-undetermined distributor” is planned.

“Rebooting the Batman franchise may be behind him, but Dark Knight director Chris Nolan still has to improve upon it,” writes N.Y. Times reporter David Halbfinger in tomorrow’s paper. “Sequels are always trickier. And now he must also navigate the aftermath of the Jan. 22 death of Heath Ledger.”

Nolan says he “felt a “massive sense of responsibility” to do right by Ledger’s “terrifying, amazing” performance as the Joker. “It’s stunning, it’s iconic,” he says. “It’s going to just blow people away.”
Halbfinger notes that “news that the prescription drugs that killed [Ledger] included sleep aids — along with narcotics — prompted internet chatter about whether his intense performance as the Joker, styled after Malcolm McDowell‘s in A Clockwork Orange, had been a factor in his demise.
While Ledger once called his Dark Knight experience “the most fun I’ve ever had, or probably ever will have, playing a character,” his fatigue was “obvious” to costar Michael Caine, Halbfinge reports. “He was exhausted, I mean he was really tired,” Caines says. “I remember saying to him, ‘I’m too old to have the bloody energy to play that part.’ And I thought to myself, I didn’t have the energy when I was his age.'”

That sounds like disingenuous movie-set talk. Caine wasn’t a sickly youth. When you’re in your 20s you can do just about anything and then go out drinking with your friends. Anyone in their 20s who moans about being tired and drained from work all the time is lacking youth’s natural constitution.
Dark Knight cinematographer Wally Pfister adds that Ledger seemed “like he was busting blood vessels in his head…it was like a seance, where the medium takes on another person and then is so completely drained.” What is this? What’s being said here? It’s called acting, giving yourself over to the role, submitting to the spirit, etc. Why are these people characterizing Ledger’s efforts as analogous to being flogged and nailed to a cross?

Variety‘s Joe Leydon likes Robert Luketic‘s 21…great. But after his slightly-too-affectionate Semi-Pro review that ran on 2.28, I don’t know. I’m still smarting from that. I feel a little more comfortable with reviewers who err on the side of hostility, or at least snideness.

“A flashy fictionalization of an extraordinary true-life story about college kids who counted cards to win big in Las Vegas, [it’s] is a better-than-even-money bet to be an important player in the spring B.O. tournament,” Leydon says. “Pic shrewdly shuffles together attractive young leads (Jim Sturgess, Kate Bosworth, Aaron Yoo, Liza Lapira, etc.), cagey screen vets (Kevin Spacey, Lawrence Fishburne) and a fantasy-fulfillment scenario in a slickly polished package that should appeal to anyone who’s ever dreamed of beating the odds.
“Only the lack of some truly megawatt star power might hold the Sony release back from a massive, rather than just lucrative, payday,” Leydon writes.

Clinton-McCain, clear choices, two lifetimes of experience. No containing the repulsion…sorry.
“A contender for the Democratic nomination, praising the Republican nominee as preferable to her Democratic rival,” Yale lit professor David Bromwich has written, “was a rash act and probably unprecedented. Joe Lieberman did something like it, but only after he declared himself an ‘independent.’
“In the same session with reporters, Senator Clinton glowed at the thought of herself and John McCain together. ‘Both of us will be on that stage having crossed that threshold,’ she said. And again: ‘I think you’ll be able to imagine many things Senator McCain will be able to say. He’s never been president, but he will put forth his lifetime of experience. I will put forth my lifetime of experience. Senator Obama will put forth a speech made in 2002.’
“As other observers have noted, this is the kind of thing you say if you are John McCain’s running mate, not what you say if you mean to campaign fiercely against him. It was a remarkably destructive statement — a defection from party loyalty, and a subversion of the principle that is supposed to underlie such loyalty.”

10,000 B.C. did $12.5 million yesterday and will wind up with close to $32 million by Sunday night. (It may do slightly better than this, but the word-of-mouth is far short of ecstatic.) Martin Lawrence‘s College Road Trip, a piece of shit according to Rotten Tomatoes, will do about $12.5 million and $4000 a print.
The almost completely dreadful Vantage Point actually came in third and will do about $7.6 million for the weekend. What kind of idiot would pay to see this a film of this calibre on its third weekend? Wlll Ferrell‘s Semi-Pro has dropped 51% for a likely weekend haul of $5.9 million….off to the showers! The Spiderwick Chronicles…$4,990,000.
Roger Donaldson‘s The Bank Job — easily the weekend’s best opener — will come in sixth with $4,980,000 at $3100 a print, which isn’t very good. What’s wrong with people out there? They’d rather pay to see crap than a solid, well-crafted heist film? Is it the rote-sounding title? Is it because the Jason Statham fans, as I hypothesized the other day, prefer to see dumber, more intense action films in which the violence is more pronounced and the pace is more accelerated? The Bank Job, after all, is a kind of ’70s film.

Trailers always distort to this or that degree and sometimes even unwittingly undermine the feature they’re trying to sell, but a voice is telling me that this trailer for Jon Avnet‘s Righteous Kill (Overture, 9.12) is doing a straightforward job of telling us what this cop thriller basically is. It could be an okay sit but you can also tell right off the bat that it sure ain’t Heat. The adjectives that come to mind are “second-tier,” “crude,” “flip” and “paycheck job for Robert De Niro and Al Pacino.”

I decided it was a piece of cheese right at the beginning when a judge says “order! order!” in a courtroom. That’s a dog-eared cliche that you might hear on a Saturday Night Live sketch….maybe, in an ironic sense. No real-life judge would ever use the term “order!” for the simple reason that only actors playing judges in second- rate movies say this.
The main thing I got from the trailer is that Pacino, 67, looks younger (thinner, tighter face, cooler-looking hair) than De Niro, 63.
The plot is about ethical conflicts among two veteran detectives who half-agree with the motives of a vigilante killer who’s offing bad guys. Not original enough….sorry.
It’s very, very hard to make a film work to any degree, but Avnet, no offense, simply lacks that grade-A pedigree element. His two best films, Fried Green Tomatoes and The War, came out 17 and 14 years ago, respectively. Up Close and Personal (’96) was a disappointment given the Jessica Savitch material he had to work with. Red Corner (’97) wasn’t bad (production designer Richard Sylbert did a fine job of recreating Beijing in Los Angeles) but it was also the last feature Avnet directed in a decade. His most recent effort, 88 minutes, is being released on 4.18 from TriStar.

“Fear is a bad adviser. We make bad decisions when we’re afraid.” — Samantha Power, former foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama, speaking on the Charlie Rose Show about her book, “Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World,” sometime in mid to late February. Something for voters to consider, of course…but will they?

Amazon.uk as well as DVD Active, another British site, are announcing a two-disc The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford coming out on March 31st for 20 pounds (along with Blu-ray and HD-DVD editions plus a regular single-disc edition). No Warner Bros. publicists were around this afternoon to answer why this two-disc package hasn’t been offered to the American market.

The second disc offers a documentary, called “Death of An Outlaw,” that examines the life and death of the real Jesse James and also includes interviews with all the key cast and filmmakers. The package also offers a hard-back 44-page book about the film, the legend and the characters.

A 3.7 Huffington Post article by Cinematical’s James Rocchi draws analogies between Juno backlash (or frontlash) and Hillary hate. As amusing and well-written as the piece is, it would feel slightly more vital if it had come out before the Oscars, or when the Juno backlash was really strong in late January to early February. I think most of us feel Juno-ed out at this stage.

Jonathan Chait‘s 3.6.08 New Republic piece, “Go Already! — Hillary Clinton, fratricidal maniac” — begins with a reasonable judgment that “Clinton’s path to the nomination is pretty repulsive. She isn’t going to win at the polls. Barack Obama has a lead of 144 pledged delegates. That may not sound like a lot in a 4,000-delegate race, but it is. Clinton’s Ohio win reduced that total by only nine. She would need 15 more Ohios to pull even with Obama. She isn’t going to do much to dent, let alone eliminate, his lead.
“That means, as we all have grown tired of hearing, that she would need to win with superdelegates. But, with most superdelegates already committed, Clinton would need to capture the remaining ones by a margin of better than two to one. And superdelegates are going to be extremely reluctant to overturn an elected delegate lead the size of Obama’s. The only way to lessen that reluctance would be to destroy Obama’s general election viability, so that superdelegates had no choice but to hand the nomination to her. Hence her flurry of attacks, her oddly qualified response as to whether Obama is a Muslim (‘not as far as I know’), her repeated suggestions that John McCain is more qualified.”

The situation facing Barack Obama right now is not dissimilar to the one facing Grace Kelly‘s character, Amy, in High Noon (1952). As everyone knows the Illinois Senator has been a proponent, in a manner of speaking, of non-violent campaigning. But the clock has struck twelve, the train has arrived and the Clinton gang, clearly committed to the low and the dirty, is making its way down Main Street and looking to fill him with hot lead. In such a situation, can a pacifist stay a pacifist?

Just as Amy makes it clear early on to Gary Cooper‘s Will Kane that she despises violence and won’t abide it, even if it means not supporting Kane’s decision to stand up to the Frank Miller gang, Obama has said he won’t engage in the old political battle language and reflexes of the past. He believes, correctly, he has to be the guy with a new way, a new hymnbook. He can’t just be another tit-for-tatter looking to get elected. If he succumbs and plays the same old game, Obama believes, he’ll be sacrificing an essential part of his appeal.
Not so. Not at this stage of the game. Obama can’t be anyone other than himself — he’s nothing if not comfortable in his own skin — but he has to find a way to stand up, strap on the leg irons and be the tough guy as well as the good guy. The tough challenges that are sure to confront the next president in the domestic and foreign arenas are in some ways analogous to the tough challenges in a political campaign. Question is, will the big cathartic moment of High Noon, which belongs entirely to Amy, work in a real-life political context?
The big High Noon “turn” happens when Kelly hears shots fired and suddenly becomes combative. She shakes off her philosophical reservations and reacts instinctively. About to leave town on the same train, she jumps off and runs into town to help her husband. A few minutes later she does a shocking and cathartic thing by shooting bad guy Robert Wilke as he’s re-loading his six-shooter. In the back even! And it’s a great moment!

If you’ve ever seen High Noon with an audience (as I have), you know people go batshit when this happens. Somebody involved with the film (director Fred Zinneman, screenwriter Carl Foreman, producer Stanley Kramer) is quoted on the DVD as saying they knew High Noon would be a hit when they heard a test audience cheer this moment.
People understand the way things are. We all agree with non-violence and positivism and constructive behavior as long as the Frank Miller gang isn’t threatening to do harm. When sociopaths push their way into the situation, things change. Sometimes you have to stand up and tell the bullies to surrender their weapons or else. People understand this. They sure as hell don’t respect a man who avoids a fight because he doesn’t believe in fighting. That’s out.
By the way: yesterday I suggested an analogy between older white women who are standing by Hillary Clinton despite her general monstrousness and the “downtown” jury that found O.J. Simpson not guilty in his 1994 murder trial despite the facts presented by the prosecution. The point was that loyalty is blind. Anyone who knows what loyalty is knows the truth of this.