Phil Donahue has told Politico‘s Jeffrey Ressner that he’s “feeling his way along the wall of a dark hallway” in terms of finding theatrical distribution for Body of War, the documentary about a wounded Iraq War veteran he co-directed with Ellen Spiro. The movie can’t get arrested because the leave-us-aloners won’t pay to see Iraq War dramas with movie stars in the cast, which makes distributor interest in a doc along these lines next to nil. It will obviously help if Body of War becomes one of the five Best Feature Doc nominees (it’s on the short list), but…be optimistic!
An 11.23 L.A. Times essay by critic Michael Sragow about the links between No Country for Old Men, Sam Peckinpah, Norman Mailer, Tommy Lee Jones and Roger Deakins.
Touched by his performance as a blind former college professor in Curtis Hanson‘s In Her Shoes, I interviewed the 90 year-old Norman Lloyd at his Brentwood home a couple of years ago. The producer-actor is still going strong today (healthy, plays tennis, gets around town in a Jaguar) and currently the subject of career retrospective doc, Who Is Norman Lloyd?, which opened yesterday at Manhattan’s Film Forum.
Norman Lloyd in his Brentwood home — Tuesday, 9.27.05, 5:45 pm.
I haven’t seen Matthew Sussman‘s doc yet, but presumably a Los Angeles screening or booking is in the cards.
Here’s Matt Zoller Seitz‘s N.Y. Times review. Here’s a a Leonard Lopate interview on NYPR, John Anderson‘s 11.20 Village Voice profile, and Stu van Airsdale‘s recent Reeler piece. Here’s my own interview piece from two years ago.
Lloyd will drop by the Film Forum on Monday, 11.26 at 8:15 pm for a q & a session with Bruce Goldstein and John Martello, exec director of The Players. Surprise guests may show.
Enchanted‘s five-day projection keeps falling, falling…it’s now dropped to under $50 million for five days. $49,198,000, to be precise, with $34,398,000 for the three-day weekend. This Christmas is looking at $27,296,000 for 5 days and $18,800,000 for the weekend. Beowulf will end up with a 5-day tally of $23,399,000. This will bring Robert Zemeckis‘ 3-D fantasy up to a $56,445,000 cume — it’ll be a push to hit $100 million. Hitman keeps on dropping..$20,800,000 for the weekend.
Other 5-day totals: Bee Movie — $15,700,000. Fred Claus — $14,600,000. August Rush — $13,800,000. American Gangster — $13 million even.
The Mist is looking at $12,300,000 for 5 days and $8 million for weekend…dead. No Country or Old Men will earn about $10,700,000 for the five-day holiday for a cume of $16.3 million. It’ll probably pull down $35 to $40 million by the end of the run, although a Best Picture nomination will push it along further. Todd Haynes‘ I’m Not There is will make $955,000 over five days, $720,000 for the weekend — a little over $5000 a print.
Three additional thoughts about Amy Adams‘ performance in Enchanted. You’ll never read these on The Envelope because they’re not cheer-leady enough, but they’re true from a certain perspective.
One, the animated version of Giselle, her fantasy-land heroine, is right out of the Snow White mold, which is to say younger than springtime with a creamy peach-blossom complexion. But within seconds of her arrival in Times Square as a biological presence it’s obvious that Giselle is no spring chicken. Adams is 33, and has the smile wrinkles to prove it. She’s being called a semi-new discovery whose career has been launched by Enchanted, etc., but the hard fact is that things begin to dry out for most actresses when they hit 40 or so. Hooray for Adams and her big score, but she has about six or seven years to make the most of her good fortune. I’m just saying…
Two, Giselle is a quintessential innocent, but she’s so wide-eyed and clueless during Enchanted‘s first act that it’s hard not to think of real-life women who resemble her. Girly-girl bimbos, I mean — pretty, delicate, not especially bright (or looking to hide their intelligence so as not to intimidate insecure suitors), looking for a sugar daddy, in some ways shut down and not very curious about life. It can be argued that such women are not all that attractive in the final analysis because underneath the act they’re serious “pieces of work” with entitlement issues up the wazoo. Surrendering to the conceit of Giselle, therefore, is something of a mixed bag. There are no Snow Whites out there. Everything is “real” and tainted to some degree.
Three, the question of “range” hovers over Adams given the similarities between Giselle and her open-hearted pregnant wife in Junebug. A quote on her IMDB page doesn’t necessarily suggest she’s a one-trick pony, but perhaps an actress who’s especially good at playing a particular type. “I think that I’ve always been attracted to characters who are positive and come from a very innocent place,” she’s quoted as saying. “I think there’s a lot of room for discovery in these characters and that’s something I always have fun playing.” If Adams wants to really make her mark, she’ll need to go wider and braver.
I’ve read David Halbfinger‘s 11.23 N.Y. Times piece about how the studios are enjoying a certain advantage in casting this and that actor twice now, and I still don’t get the gist, and I don’t k now that it’s important that I do. It reviews the backstage shufflings in the wake of Brad Pitt‘s departure from State of Play and more particularly the effects of the WGA strike upon the schedules of Russell Crowe, Tom Hanks and Johnny Depp.
With WGA strike talks resuming on Monday, 11.26, the key phrase in Halbfinger’s piece is “the chance of a quick settlement.” The expectation in some quarters is that the strike will be over sooner rather than later. It’s said to be understood on both sides that the time has come for serious horse-trading and that terms will be hammered out by the end of next week if not sooner. But a deal won’t be revealed for a couple of weeks so that both sides can look tough and save face.
The expectation in one corner is that an announcement of a settlement will happen sometime around Pearl Harbor day — Friday, December 7th. Just before, on or just after.
George Hickenlooper needs to get that Woody Allen “Speechless” short shot and cut as quickly as possible.
Consider Eduardo Ciannelli‘s electrifying “kill, kill, kill!” speech from Gunga Din. The striking if antiquated element, of course, is how Alfred Newman‘s music emphasizes every other line — it’s almost a musical number of sorts. This sort of thing disappeared from soundtracks long ago — it would be laughable if James Horner or Mark Isham were to try anything like it today — and yet the effect works in this instance. And the visual element — Ciannelli’s eyes shining like beams against his dark facial makeup — augments all the more.
A day late and a dollar short, but here are the fourth, fifth and sixth WGA “Speechless” video spots.
Rod Lurie‘s prison visitation short (#6) with Kate Beckinsale and David Schwimmer, shot on the set of Nothing But The Truth, is easily the best. Schwimmer perfectly conveys just the right amount of futility about being unable to speak to Beckinsale (and vice versa). Spot #4 stars Jeff Garlin (I Want Someone To Eat Cheese With). Spot #5 features the cast of Ugly Betty.
Three new videos are debuting daily throughout Thanksgiving weekend — morning, afternoon and evening — so three newbies will obviously turn up later day. The series was conceived, produced and in many cases shot by George Hickenlooper and Alan Sereboff.
Enchanted is a huge hit with the public (a five-day gross in the mid-$50 million range) and critics alike (a 93% positive Rotten Tomatoes score), and even hard-core sourpusses need to admit it has four or five scenes that succeed beautifully. But fans are turning a blind eye to an inescapable fact. The concept (four Snow White-ish cartoon characters catapulted into 2007 New York City) is great but Bill Kelly‘s script is flimsy and hackneyed. Because of this, a film that could have been marvelous barely makes it across the finish line.
And yet several things in Enchanted do more than work nicely — they’re actually inspired.
Everyone’s delighted with a Disney film getting laughs from a satire of its cartoon- fantasy origins. Amy Adams‘ performance as Giselle is obviously spirited and faux-“adorable” (even though she’s basically giving us her Junebug character amplified with some Carol Burnett-ish skit acting). That said, somebody is going to have to explain to me how Adams’ pure-of-heart, wide-eyed amazement thing works as an Oscar-level performance. It’s a bit — she’s using the same chops in scene after scene.
There are three musical sequences that work superbly — the Central Park song- and-dance number, the apartment-cleaning sequence with the rats, pigeons and cockroaches, and the third-act masked costume-ball dance number. And the true-love kiss at the finale works perfectly — it’s exactly what we want to see happen. And the CG chipmunk (called “Pip,” partly voiced by Lima) has at least one terrific sequence, when he tries to convey the seriousness of a situation through an antic display of charades.
But the lack of internal logic, the poorly thought-out foundations, the nonsen- sical plot turns…my God! I completely bought into the lunatic whimsy of Being John Malkovich (damp muddy tunnel, Garden State Parkway ejection and all), but I felt constantly jabbed and irritated by the same thing in Enchanted.
Some filmmakers operate under the impression that making a lightweight fantasy or comedy means no heavy lifting. A fool’s philosophy! A comedy or a fantasy has to be carefully constructed upon a solid foundation and thought through to the last niggling detail as much as any thriller, drama or melodrama. Having fun with a concept and being goofy in the bargain is one thing, but crafting a truly sublime fantasy-comedy is a bitch. And Enchanted is fraught with bits and behaviors that result in one dumb pothole after another.
The key to the Giselle humor is that an impossibly sweet cartoon maiden from a storybook fantasy realm (called Andalusia) is going to be hugely confused and disoriented inside the assaultive reality of modern-day Manhattan. And yet certain terms and conditions would have to apply in both worlds. Cartoon characters drink water, eat food, clean houses, try to kill each other, rescue each other and ride horses, so there’s obviously a degree of overlap.
Cartoon Giselle doesn’t know about adult relationships or iPhones or tampons, but she would certainly know about the basics of protecting herself from a threat. If a huge cartoon boulder was to dislodge itself from a mountain top and start rolling towards the cartoon Giselle, wouldn’t she scamper out of the way to avoid being hit?
And if it rains in Andalusia, wouldn’t she naturally take cover under a tree or in a nearby cottage? And if she happens to see a large landscape painting in a castle, wouldn’t she have the ability to differentiate the painting from real-life hills and forests outside? And if she’s able to fall 25 or 30 feet from a tree into the arms of a horse-riding prince in a fantasy world, wouldn’t this ability be nullified if she falls 15 or 20 feet from an elevated billboard in the real world?
By the standards of Enchanted, the answer to all these questions is “no.”
When the flesh-and-blood Giselle climbs out of a magical Times Square manhole (a Malkovich-like portal that all the Enchanted characters — James Marsden‘s Prince Edward, Timothy Spall‘s Nathaniel, Susan Sarandon‘s wicked Queen Narissa — magically arrive through) and sees Seventh Avenue traffic speeding towards her, she does nothing — the instinct to avoid pain and save herself from injury doesn’t kick in.
And when a real-life rainfall happens and she begins to get soaked, Giselle just stands there like a turkey. When she sees a huge Manhattan billboard of a painting of a castle, she thinks it’s real and tries to get inside the castle by knocking on the painted moat gate. And when she falls backward off the elevated billboard platform (which is a good 15 or 20 feet high), she lands on top of real-life attorney Patrick Dempsey…and it’s like she’s just fallen off a step-ladder.
In short, for the first 10 or 15 minutes of her New York visit, Adams’ Giselle isn’t just an innocent — she’s also an idiot.
I understand that Enchanted is not supposed to be The Battle of Algiers. And like I said, some of the fantasy scenes are very buoyant and satisfying. But you really do have to work out a system that allows disparate worlds to reflect each other to some degree and to hang together as a unit. Just ask screenwriter Charlie Kaufman — he conjured a system for Malkovich that worked just fine.
Marsden’s Prince is a friendly boob who leaps atop a New York City MTA bus and then stabs the roof with his sword because…I don’t know. Because he thinks the bus is a threat, obviously. Maybe a kind of dragon. But what kind of dragon carries 25 or 30 perfectly safe, bored-looking people in its belly? I’m lost.
Spall’s Nathaniel arrives in Manhattan to surreptitiously do the bidding of Saran- don’s queen and poison Giselle, but has to contend with chipmunk Pip trying two or three times to alert Edward to his real agenda. But all Nathaniel does to keep Pip from blowing his cover is stuff him in his pocket or inside a glass bowl when the obvious solution would be to throw the little guy into the Hudson River or under a moving subway car — something that might really dispatch him. Attempted murder can be portrayed within the bounds of a light-hearted family flick, but the Enchanted guys were otherwise engaged.
At one point Marsden and Spall walk north out of Manhattan and get themselves a room in some kind of Harlem flophouse. The place is located next to an elevated train track, which has to be the Metro North line that runs out of Grand Central somewhere north of 110th Street. But why do they go to Harlem exactly? Why not the Lower East Side? Why not Williamsburg?
And please don’t mention the CG-dragon-on-top-of-a-building climax — a grotesque left-field addition that couldn’t be more at odds with Enchanted‘s sweet-souled essence, and is also a bald-faced copy of the Ghostbusters finale.
I’m 95% certain this was inserted into the script by producer Barry Sonnenfeld, whose industry rep and influence meant he had much greater power than director Kevin Lima, who comes from feature animation (102 Dalmations, Tarzan) and is basically small fry. Sonnenfeld loves overbearing CG sequences (the Men in Black pix, the finale of Wild Wild West), and the Enchanted finale has his paw prints all over it.
The bottom line is that apart from the animated films created by the genius-level Brad Bird and John Lasseter and a few others, family movies don’t seem to be attracting truly top-tier writers and directors. I don’t know enough players in the G-rated realm to speak with authority, but if Enchanted is any knd of indicator family flicks are largely being written and directed by B- and C-level talents. That doesn’t mean they’re modern-day Ed Wood types, but they’re obviously “not Ivy League.”
Family movies are a different kind of sandbox than regular adult films. Watching one of these godawful things is sometimes like being stuck on Devil’s Island with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. The trailers for the G- and PG-rated films that were shown before last night’s 7 pm showing of Enchanted at the AMC 14 were an absolute nightmare to sit through. (The worst seemed to be College Road Trip, the new Martin Lawrence comedy.) The flawed Enchanted script tells us that Disney is a supporter of “good enough” over “needs more work.” Welcome, I suppose, to the era of Disney production chief Oren Aviv.
The current consensus is that 2007 has come close to being another 1999 — an exceptionally rich and bountiful year in terms of sheer quality. The likelihood, however, is that the Best Picture elimination process that prevailed eight years ago will happen again this year — most of the truly great ones ignored, two or three good ones championed, and a couple of mediocrities working their way into the fold.
The best ’99 films were Election, The Matrix, Fight Club, American Beauty, The Limey, The Sixth Sense, Magnolia, The Straight Story, The Cradle Will Rock, Run Lola Run, Any Given Sunday, The Hurricane, Three Kings, The Insider, Being John Malkovich, The Thin Red Line, Eyes Wide Shut, The Blair Witch Project, October Sky, Open Your Eyes and The Lovers on the Bridge — one of the all-time great cavalcades.
Out of this lot three were Best Picture nominees — American Beauty (which won), The Sixth Sense and The Insider. The other two were The Cider House Rules (pushed into Best Picture status by the legendary Harvey Weinstein promotion machine) and Frank Darabont‘s thoroughly detestable electric-chair drama The Green Mile — a movie I will never, ever see again.
This year we’ve had American Gangster, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, No Country for Old Men, Once, There Will Be Blood, Things We Lost in the Fire, Zodiac, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Atonement, I’m Not There, The Bourne Ultimatum, Control, In The Valley of Elah, Ratatouille, Charlie Wilson’s War and Sweeney Todd. Not as many top-grade releases as we had in ’99, but some kind of banner year.
I don’t want to think too strenuously about the likely ’07 Best Picture nominees (there are some who actually want to see Enchantment among the five), but I wouldn’t be surprised if the ’99 strategem repeats itself.
An IMAX-produced featurette is up about the decision to shoot “certain sections” of Chris Nolan‘s The Dark Knight (Warner Bros., 7.18.08) in IMAX and the challenges that went with this.
Warner Bros. publicity has invited elite and geek press to a special screening of selected portions of the IMAX Knight footage at the Universal Citywalk IMAX theatre on or about 12.5. The three talking heads are director-writer Nolan, dp Wally Pfisterand steadicam operator Bob Gorelick.
Nolan: “No one’s every done this before…shooting certain sections of the film in IMAX would give us the biggest possible canvas with which to keep telling the story.” Pfister: “IMAX has the highest resolution you could possibly achieve [but] it’s to four to five times heavier than the camera we’re used to working with, [and] the aspect ratio is taller than it is wide.” Pfister: “I’ve always been interested in shooting on IMAX. It’s really an extraordinary experienc to see an action sequence on the large IMAX screen….just knocks you out of your seat.” Nolan: “It takes you back to the world of a kid, watching a movie that’s larger than life.”
Yesterday’s projected five-day figure for Enchanted was reported as $68 million instead of the correct $58 million. A mistake, plain and simple.
Yesterday’s box-office projection reporting was ridiculous — the rudimentary Wednesday figures led to overblown and misleading three- and five-day figures on the studio-calculator side, and I misheard (i.e., failed to double-check) two figures that compounded the confusion. Hurried, blurred, holiday fatigued…no excuse.
Enchanted then took in $6.8 million yesterday, down 16%, which has resulted in an adjusted five-day projection of $54 million and a three-day weekend figure of $39 million.
But the studio calculators still don’t know enough and won’t have the precise Enchantment skinny in their sights until the figures comes in for today — Friday, 11.23 . Whatever it does today will bring in the focus that has been sorely lacking thus far. For what
This Christmas figures were also wildly off yesterday. Yesterday I was told $28 million for 3 days, $38 million for 5 days. Now they’re saying $19 million for three days and $27 million for five days. Talk about silly. You can only throw up your hands at this level of day-to-day divergence.
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