Greed, lies, avarice: Former Us Weekly editor Jill Ishkanian, a former Us editor who quit in ’05 to help launch a paparazzi agency called Sunset Photo and News , is being pressed by the FBI about whether she illegally tapped into Us‘s e-mail system to steal scoops and get the jump on everyone, including Us. Ishkanian’s attorney Glenn Feldman has told L.A. Times reporters Richard Winton and Chris lee that Ishkanian continued to work as a freelancer for the magazine and used the password of an Us reporter, Amy Sultan, to get into the network. Sultan’s password “was given to a lot of people,” Feldman said. “Jill and other people outside, including an independent photographer, had it.” Feldman also said that Sunset Photo “has provided that information and documentation to the FBI, including details that West Coast Executive Editor Ken Baker” — a good hombre whom I worked with at People from mid ’96 to early ’98 — “authorized Ishkanian’s access. He noted that the magazine didn’t change Sultan’s password even though they knew Ishkanian had it.”
A pretty good piece by Hollywood Wiretap‘s Stephen Saito about the situation facing poor Josh Lucas , who has now starred in two huge simmer wipeouts — Poseidon and last year’s Stealth. Lucas, who was stuck on the creepy-bad-guy track for years, will have to do some fast footwork in order to erase that association. It’s a brutal world out there.
Rocket Man
The great critic F.X. Feeney told me the other day about a short film about 9/11 called The Falling Man, and that it was about to be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival. With Paul Greengrass’s United 93 set to open the festival on Tuesday, 4.25, I thought right away, whoa…I should see this. So I did on Friday afternoon (4.21), and I went “whoa” again.
Directed and written by Kevin Ackerman, The Falling Man is an M. Night Shyama- lan-styled spooker about a real-life guy who bought it on 9/11…probably the best known of the 200-something people who jumped from the burning towers because his picture was in the New York Times and everywhere else the next day.
Rick Ojeda as Windows on the World employee Jon Briley in Kevin Ackerman’s The Falling Man
Taken by AP veteran Richard Drew, it showed a tallish, goateed, light-skinned African-American guy, falling upside down in a white shirt, orange T-shirt, black pants and black high-tops, dropping at close to 150 mph in a perfectly vertical posture, not flailing (in this particular shot, at least) and seemingly resigned to his fate, or at least not desperately fighting it.
Part flashback and part flash-forward, The Falling Man is a trippy life-death riff, and well worth seeing.
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It’s about a waiter (Rick Ojeda) working at Windows on the World, the restaurant on the top floor of the north tower, who’s sent down to the 103rd floor to the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald to deliver some food, but he can’t find anyone. Vacant. Empty desks, papers on the floor, silhouettes behind smoked glass but no one there. He’s Earl Holliman in “Where Is Everybody?”, anxious and starting to freak out.
Then he runs into a woman with gray skin who looks like a zombie out of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, and it hits you after a second or two that her skin isn’t zombie-gray but ash-gray. And then spookier things happen, all leading to a realization.
It’s September 11, 2001, of course. Sometime around 9:41 am…or in some nether place made of memory, premonition, and flashbacks thrown together. But most of it is happening in the mind of the waiter, who existed and was named, in all likeli- hood, Jon Briley.
There was natural curiosity in the public mind about who he was because of the photo, but Briley’s identity was in question for the better part of two years, partly because his body was destroyed, partly because the photo was pulled from circulation, and partly because his father and others in his family didn’t want to know or deal with it.
But then Esquire‘s Tom Junod wrote a piece about the photo called “The Falling Man“, which ran in the September ’03 issue (with Colin Farrell on the cover). Junod came to the conclusion it was probably Briley, and then a British documentary, also called The Falling Man, ran last month and concluded it was probably Briley too. The makers based their findings on testimony from a top chef who worked at Windows on the World named Michael Lomonaco as well as Briley’s older sister, Gwendolyn.
Then came a filmmaking contest sponsored by Esquire a few months later in which contestants had to make a short film based on one of a selection of short stories and features that had appeared in the magazine.
Ackerman, who had recently directed a low-budget noir called Lonely Place, decided to make a film about Junod’s piece. The idea has come to him in a flash during a visit to the downtown LA set of In Good Company, when he realized that a suite of offices in a tall building he was standing in could double for the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald.
Falling Man director-writer Kevin Ackerman; 9/11 victim Jon Briley
Ackerman shot the film in April 2004 over a couple of days, just before the contest deadline. It cost him about $6000 at the end of the day. Ojeda and Ron Sanford produced it with him. It was shot by John Hale and Steve Smith and edited by David Miller.
Although Esquire‘s contest specified that the shorts be no longer than five minutes, Ackerman’s ran eight minutes. It meant he couldn’t win the prize money (a piddly $2500) but the judges — among them director Alexander Payne (Sideways), former Paramount Classics chief Ruth Vitale and Endeavor agent (and Paramount Clas- sics honcho-to-be) John Lesher — saw it anyway, and were impressed.
By September 2004 Ackerman had moved on to other things, but Payne got in touch that month and said he was really taken with The Falling Man (“This film is fantastic”) and urged Ackerman to shoot additional footage in order to round it out and fulfill his vision.
So Ackerman did that. He added some new footage (a sequence with a 9/11 memory wall was a significant addition, I can say) and finished the extra lensing in September 2005. Naturally, he felt the Tribeca Film Festival was the best place to premiere it, especially given a stated interest by festival honcho Robert De Niro in wanting to see 9/11-themed films submitted. De Niro saw a rough cut of The Fall- ing Man last December and it was accepted soon after.
Falling Man admirer and supporter Alexander Payne
Ackerman just finished the final, fussed-over version — transferred to 35mm film, in anamorphic scope — earlier this week. He flew to New York this weekend with the print.
The Falling Man will have four showings during the festival — on Sunday, 4.30, 9 pm at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, on Tuesday, 5.2, 6 pm at Pace University’s Schimmel Center, on Wednesday, 5.3, 10 pm at AMC Loews Village VII, and on Friday, 5.5, 11 pm at Regal Cinemas Battery Park 5.
It’s not an absolute masterwork but it’s a very penetrating film, obviously because it draws on 9/11 emotions, but also because it adds a surreal, Twilight Zone-ish feel- ing to a familiar canvas, supplying a kind of fresh echo…producing a result that’s unnerving but on some level very “real.”
Ackerman can be reached via Tried & True Productions at 323.466.1602. His email is citizenack@aol.com.
Aroma, Sizzle, Steak
I used to love movie poster art, but there are so few today that pop through in any kind of sexy or distinctive way that the fun, for me, just isn’t there any more. Or not enough.
Take five or ten minutes and browse through this British website devoted to classic one-sheets, and you’ll see what I mean. (Make sure you check out the Saul Bass page.) A lot of them were standard primitive sells, but the better ones from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s had flair, smarts, suggestiveness…a kind of art-gallery urbanity.
Movie posters that were hanging in Hollywood Museum on Thursday, 4.20…but are gone now because it was just a one-day, one-shot deal.
Many of today’s posters, of course, are geared to mall-heads. They get your attention but in a much more rudimentary way. Many of them are basically about emphasis over enticement, and always seem to use the primary colors, emotions and attitudes that are likely to appeal to younger, less educated viewers with shorter attention spans.
But I figured I’d go down to the Hollywood Museum anyway to check out the 2005 posters that have been submitted for the 2006 Hollywood Reporter Key Art Awards. The winners will collect their trophies at a big swanky ceremony held June 16 at the Kodak Theatre, with Kevin Nealon serving as m.c. (Click here for more info.)
I got there around 12:30 on Thursday, and ten minutes later I was almost ready to leave.
The first and second floors were stuffed to the gills with posters and standees for cinema primitivo — primarily big-budget action, horror, FX and teen-market crap. Precisely the kind of films I loathe. I read books, I’ve been to college and I’ve stood inside the Pantheon in Rome, and every poster and standee on those floors said, “C’mon, man…you’re a gorilla. You know you are. Here, have a banana.”
Then my hosts — Hollywood Reporter publicists Lynda Miller and Alisha Maines, and mPRm’s Shari Mesulam and Wendy Martino — took me to the third floor and finally…some good stuff! Posters with a semblance of art and finesse and sophis- tication.
My choice for the best one-sheet is the one pictured above, for Transamerica. I’m also a fan of the one-sheets for Capote, Jarhead, Inside Deep Throat, et. al. But very few of them had that capturing-the-essence, vaguely highbrow approach. I mean, a few did.
The one-sheet for Warren Beatty’s Bulworth (1998) had that element, that way of compressing the soul or attitude of a film into a single chord.
I asked what percentage of the posters submited were from the indie sector and and big-studio distributors. An answer never came back, but Key Art Awards Coordinator Marc Romeo, who’s been facilitating the entry and judging process for six years, says that 70% of this year’s 1,423 entries received (in 29 categories) have been submitted by agencies and vendors and 30% were submitted by studios.
I happened to notice two posters hanging on a stairwell for a couple of broadly commercial films from the ’50s that no one wants to see these days, that aren’t on DVD and that I’ve either forgotten about or never heard of. One was All Hands on Deck, a 1961 Navy comedy with Pat Boone and Buddy Hackett, and You Can’t Run Away From It, a remake of It Happened One Night with Jack Lemmon and June Allyson.
These movies may have been popular in their day but they’re dead now — unknown and unwatched by even the cultists. I mean, you could send a messenger with a basket of fruit, a bottle of champagne and a new DVD of All Hands on Deck to my door, and I really doubt if I’d watch it.
We all have ideas, I’m sure, about which films playing today are not only disposable by today’s standards but certain to be forgotten by history. Most of the films that have come out over the last couple of months belong in this category, February, March and early April releases being what they are. It’s a desert out there.
Anyway, my four hosts took me to Mel’s after our tour, and we all sat down and ordered the healthiest foods we could find on the menu. And then mPRm honcho Mark Pogachefsky dropped by to say hello, and then Hollywood Reporter ad sales exec Lynn Segal came in with friends for some lunch. And it was basically a nice visit.
But it would have been nicer if Saul Bass had been there.
Glub-Glub
What are the odds that Wolfgang Petersen’s Poseidon (Warner Bros., 5.12) will be an above-average thrill ride? Pretty good, I’d say. And if you scan the saleable elements it looks like something a lot of people are going to want to see.
The trailer tells you the effects are going to be cool. (That rogue wave gives me the creeps.) Petersen is nothing if not a dependable craftsman, and the movie he’s made, to judge by the trailer, has the look and feel of something fairly well-rigged.
Kurt Russell (front & center)), Josh Lucas (behind Kurt), Emmy Rossum (rear) and Richard Dreyfss (lower right) in Wolfgang Petersen’s Poseidon (Warner Bros., 5.12)
I tend to shy away from big-budget effects movies, but even I’m half into seeing this thing. I really like Kurt Russell, I’ve always enjoyed Richard Dreyfuss (especially if he gets angry) and I’m cool with Josh Lucas playing the lead. If I didn’t expect to see it at a press screening within a week, I’d be okay with buying a ticket.
Why, then, are the Poseidon tracking figures in the toilet?
This is a very expensive film ($150 million? more?) and it needs to have a huge opening weekend. And yet recent figures say the overall general awareness is 54% compared to 92% for Mission: Impossible III , which opens a week earlier. The definite interests are at 23% — they should be somewhere around 40% at this stage. And the respondents calling Poseidon their first choice are around 3% when this group should be more around 10% or 11% (M:I:3‘s first-choicers are currently at 13%).
Warner Bros. has three weeks to rectify things, but right now they have reason to be worried.
They’ve been advertising on TV, the trailer is playing in theatres all over, and that upside-down-and-underwater-ship one-sheet is already iconic. (If you ask me it deserves to be a nominee at the Key Art awards next year.) And yet so far, the audience waiting to see it doesn’t seem hefty enough.
So what’s happening? Are audiences saying no to big loud disaster movies for some reason? Are people seeing some kind of 9/11 echo in this thing? (It’s not that much of a stretch.) Maybe the same folks who are frowning at the idea of seeing United 93 are doing the same here?
I think you have to lay at least some of the blame on that lousy TV movie, Hall- mark Entertainment’s The Poseidon Adventure, that aired last November. It was critically trashed, it didn’t draw that many viewers and it may have poisoned the well. It was produced by Larry Levinson, directed by Jon Putch and starred Rutger Hauer, Adam Baldwin, Bryan Brown, Steve Guttenberg, Peter Weller and C. Thom- as Howell.
I wonder who greenlit their Poseidon first — Levinson and Hallmark or the Warner Bros. people?
The cast of the Wolfgang Petersen film is of a higher calibre than the TV movie, but not that much higher. Russell will always be Mr. Cool in my book but he’s a long way from his Snake Plissken heyday. And Lucas didn’t show much drawing power last summer when Stealth , a $130 million Rob Cohen thriller that he starred in, ended up with $31,704,4316 (domestic) last September.
Warner Bros. obviously decided to sink most of the money into special effects rather than big-star salaries, but this may not be enough at the end of the day.
This isn’t a matter of how good the film will be. It’s a matter of marketing, about how many millions of people can be persuaded to pay to see this film on opening weekend based on ads, interest levels, trailers, TV spots, anticipation…whatever.
If the movie plays well and sells itself, it would probably help to sneak it across the country a week before. I mean, that’s as far as my thinking takes me.
Grabs
Paramount Studios parking lot, snapped just after Wednesday morning’s Mission: Impossible III screening — 4.19.06, 1:15 pm.
J.J. Gittes: “Not that Mulwray?” Evelyn Mulwray: “Yes, Mr. Gittes…that Mulwray.”
Bunny Rabbit
I saw Mission: Impossible III (Paramount, 5.3) this morning at screening room #5 at Paramount Studios, and I’m not dissing anyone or anything with the title of this piece. Not even a little bit.
The MacGuffin of J.J. Abrams’ power-packed thriller, after all, is a smallish device called “rabbit’s foot”, and Tom Cruise’s hard-wired performance as IMF agent Ethan Hunt feels, to me, like something new: he’s made himself into the energizer bunny of action heroes. And it works.
Keri Russell, Tom Cruise in J.J. Abrams’ Mission: Impossible III (Paramount, 5.5)
The advance buzz about M:I:3 being awfully damned good has turned out to be true, I’m afraid — as shallow but very expensive action films go, this is about as good as it gets. But I would hold up on the talk about Phillip Seymour Hoffman stealing the picture from Cruise.
Philly is super-cool — cold and snarly with style to burn — but he hasn’t been given enough ammo — not enough scenes or killer lines — to help him stand up against M:I:3‘s 43 year-old star.
It’s no secret Cruise has been getting (“generating” is closer to the truth) a lot of bad press over the last year or so, with most of it centering on the perception that he’s become overly manic…that his stability is perhaps open to question on some level.
Well, guess what? Cruise answers that perception straight-on in this frenzied summer action film and then rolls right over it like a tank.
He’s made Hunt into a kind of mirror image of hard-core tabloid Tom. It’s like he’s saying, “Okay, fine…you guys think I’ve gone around the bend? All right, then I have! And I’m into it! Being hard-core, I mean.” And this leaves you with feelings of respect for the guy. He may be this or that, but is standing his ground. No backing off! I am what I am!
Hunt is a “character,” yes, but based more than ever on the pumping piston rods of Cruise’s personality. A guy who’s all about focus, juice, intensity, endorphins. Sca- ling walls, rapelling down walls. Plotting strategy, eyeballing his costars, running for his life (in more ways than one) and turning tomato red in the face. Neck veins! Neck veins!
And you’re fine with all of this because…I haven’t said this in so many words, have I?…Mission: Impossible III is easily the best of the three M:I‘s. No, I’ll go further: it’s one of the best high-torque summer action films ever.
Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible (1996) had two or three brilliantly staged sequences, especially the CIA break-in-and-robbery and the chunnel-train sequence, but some of it was in and out and a lot of people felt confused by the plot.
John Woo’s Mission: Impossible II (2000) was an okay spin on Notorious with Thandie Newton as Ingrid Bergman and Dougray Scott as Claude Rains, and my memories of it aren’t that vivid, so it couldn’t have been that great.
Costar Michelle Monaghan, Cruise
This new one, directed and written by Abrams, is far more relentless and slam- bammy than its predecessors. You’re supposed to give your audience a little downtime between action beats, but this sucker won’t rest. You know the old analogy that action films are like musicals? Mission: Impossible III is almost an opera.
Okay, there’s a mildly relaxing party sequence in the beginning and one or two dialogue-with-Laurence-Fisburne-as-the-obligatory-company-asshole-riding-the- IMF-team scenes, but that’s pretty much it. The rest is all on the treadmill running at 10.
There are four beautifully composed set pieces — a rescue mission in a factory in a Berlin suburb, a kidnapping in the Vatican, an aerial attack on a causeway over Chesapeake Bay, and a break-in and a rescue in Shanghai. But there are always tangents and side-shows connected to these main events, and something riveting is always going on.
This is the kind of summer “ride” movie that even sourpusses like me can sit back and roll with. Shrewd, inventive and into punching the gas. It’s empty, yes — it’s basically just one technical challenge after another, with arguments and a couple of “I love you”‘s thrown in — but this is one of those films in which depth would get in the way.
Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Maggie Q, Ving Rhames
When I hear a film is a “check-your-brain-at-the-door” thing, I know I’m going to hate it. This is not that. It exemplifies what a good geek-level action film should be. Abrams, the director-writer, keeps playing to slightly higher intelligence levels than these films are usually geared to.
Harry Knowles has called M:I:3 “the best damn retooling of True Lies that will ever be done.” Funny, but the only thing I remember about True Lies is liking Tom Arnold’s dialogue and attitude and Bill Paxton’s character begging for mercy in front of Arnold Schwarzenegger by saying he had a “little dick.”
Hold on…it’s coming back to me. Arnold was a secret operative who hadn’t told Jamie Lee Curtis what he really does, and then a job he’s on turns bad and Jamie Lee gets brought into it and so on. Michelle Monaghan is the Jamie Lee character, I guess, but…you know what? Screw this analogy. I’ve never once seen True Lies on DVD, and for a reason.
M:I:3 is about the IM force trying to shut down a ruthless arms and technology dealer named Owen Davian (Hoffman), who’s about as lethal as they come. The story is basically a tit-for-tat game. I’ll kidnap and try to squeeze you for inform- ation, and then you’ll come after me or my girlfriend and try to squeeze me for information, and we’ll see who’s smarter and craftier.
Rhys-Meyers, Rhames, Cruise, Maggie Q in, I think, Shanghai
Abrams starts things off an extremely fierce and intense tone. Right away you’re saying to yourself, “This is good…Abrams clearly knows what he’s doing.” As far as hero-being-tortured, tell-me-what-I- need-to-know-or-else scenes go, I would say it’s up to the level of Laurence Olivier pulling Dustin Hoffman’s teeth out in Marathon Man.
Hoffman’s Damian is the torturer, and it’s a little odd that this is his best scene in the film. He’s nearly spellbinding in just about every scene he’s in, but after Capote and all you’re kind of waiting for Philly to really step up with something climactic and classic…and it never comes. He kicks ass with the lines and scenes he’s been given, but somebody wanted this to be Tom Cruise’s film.
The IMFers — Ving Rhames, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Maggie Q — hold up their end. Billy Crudup is perfunctory as Cruise’s home-office ally. Simon Pegg (last in Shaun of the Dead) has the obligatory computer-geek-who-saves-the-day-with- crucial-key-punching-in-the-last-act role.
Michelle Monaghan has the meatiest female role as Ethan’s initially clueless wife. Keri Russell burns through strongly in the first act. Maggie Q (Around the World in 80 Days, Rush Hour 2) is…well, she’s fine, but the best thing she does is wear a very hot red dress to a black-tie affair at the Vatican.
Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Owen Davian
I laughed three times out loud — not at anything “funny” but because I was really enjoying the moxie that went into the writing or acting. I won’t spoil them by sharing.
I had a good enough time with this that I’m going back to see it a second time this evening.
Too many cheerleading pieces and people will start to think I’m a professional kiss-ass, but I have to say it: Tom Cruise’s image problems aren’t going to vanish like that when Mission: Impossible III opens 16 days from now, but they’re probably going to be put on hold.
Aroma, Sizzle, Steak
I used to love movie poster art, but there are so few today that pop through in any kind of sexy or distinctive way that the fun, for me, just isn’t there any more. Or not enough.
Take five or ten minutes and browse through this British website devoted to classic one-sheets, and you’ll see what I mean. (Make sure you check out the Saul Bass page.) A lot of them were standard primitive sells, but the better ones from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s had flair, smarts, suggestiveness…a kind of art-gallery urbanity.
Movie posters that were hanging in Hollywood Museum on Thursday, 4.20…but are gone now because it was just a one-day, one-shot deal.
Many of today’s posters, of course, are geared to mall-heads. They get your attention but in a much more rudimentary way. Many of them are basically about emphasis over enticement, and always seem to use the primary colors, emotions and attitudes that are likely to appeal to younger, less educated viewers with shorter attention spans.
But I figured I’d go down to the Hollywood Museum anyway to check out the 2005 posters that have been submitted for the 2006 Hollywood Reporter Key Art Awards. The winners will collect their trophies at a big swanky ceremony held June 16 at the Kodak Theatre, with Kevin Nealon serving as m.c. (Click here for more info.)
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
I got there around 12:30 on Thursday, and ten minutes later I was almost ready to leave.
The first and second floors were stuffed to the gills with posters and standees for cinema primitivo — primarily big-budget action, horror, FX and teen-market crap. Precisely the kind of films I loathe. I read books, I’ve been to college and I’ve stood inside the Pantheon in Rome, and every poster and standee on those floors said, “C’mon, man…you’re a gorilla. You know you are. Here, have a banana.”
Then my hosts — Hollywood Reporter publicists Lynda Miller and Alisha Maines, and mPRm’s Shari Mesulam and Wendy Martino — took me to the third floor and finally…some good stuff! Posters with a semblance of art and finesse and sophis- tication.
My choice for the best one-sheet is the one pictured above, for Transamerica. I’m also a fan of the one-sheets for Capote, Jarhead, Inside Deep Throat, et. al. But very few of them had that capturing-the-essence, vaguely highbrow approach. I mean, a few did.
The one-sheet for Warren Beatty’s Bulworth (1998) had that element, that way of compressing the soul or attitude of a film into a single chord.
I asked what percentage of the posters submited were from the indie sector and and big-studio distributors. An answer never came back, but Key Art Awards Coordinator Marc Romeo, who’s been facilitating the entry and judging process for six years, says that 70% of this year’s 1,423 entries received (in 29 categories) have been submitted by agencies and vendors and 30% were submitted by studios.
I happened to notice two posters hanging on a stairwell for a couple of broadly commercial films from the ’50s that no one wants to see these days, that aren’t on DVD and that I’ve either forgotten about or never heard of. One was All Hands on Deck, a 1961 Navy comedy with Pat Boone and Buddy Hackett, and You Can’t Run Away From It, a remake of It Happened One Night with Jack Lemmon and June Allyson.
These movies may have been popular in their day but they’re dead now — unknown and unwatched by even the cultists. I mean, you could send a messenger with a basket of fruit, a bottle of champagne and a new DVD of All Hands on Deck to my door, and I really doubt if I’d watch it.
We all have ideas, I’m sure, about which films playing today are not only disposable by today’s standards but certain to be forgotten by history. Most of the films that have come out over the last couple of months belong in this category, February, March and early April releases being what they are. It’s a desert out there.
Anyway, my four hosts took me to Mel’s after our tour, and we all sat down and ordered the healthiest foods we could find on the menu. And then mPRm honcho Mark Pogachefsky dropped by to say hello, and then Hollywood Reporter ad sales exec Lynn Segal came in with friends for some lunch. And it was basically a nice visit.
But it would have been nicer if Saul Bass had been there.
Glub-Glub
What are the odds that Wolfgang Petersen’s Poseidon (Warner Bros., 5.12) will be an above-average thrill ride? Pretty good, I’d say. And if you scan the saleable elements it looks like something a lot of people are going to want to see.
The trailer tells you the effects are going to be cool. (That rogue wave gives me the creeps.) Petersen is nothing if not a dependable craftsman, and the movie he’s made, to judge by the trailer, has the look and feel of something fairly well-rigged.
Kurt Russell (front & center)), Josh Lucas (behind Kurt), Emmy Rossum (rear) and Richard Dreyfss (lower right) in Wolfgang Petersen’s Poseidon (Warner Bros., 5.12)
I tend to shy away from big-budget effects movies, but even I’m half into seeing this thing. I really like Kurt Russell, I’ve always enjoyed Richard Dreyfuss (especially if he gets angry) and I’m cool with Josh Lucas playing the lead. If I didn’t expect to see it at a press screening within a week, I’d be okay with buying a ticket.
Why, then, are the Poseidon tracking figures in the toilet?
This is a very expensive film ($150 million? more?) and it needs to have a huge opening weekend. And yet recent figures say the overall general awareness is 54% compared to 92% for Mission: Impossible III , which opens a week earlier. The definite interests are at 23% — they should be somewhere around 40% at this stage. And the respondents calling Poseidon their first choice are around 3% when this group should be more around 10% or 11% (M:I:3‘s first-choicers are currently at 13%).
Warner Bros. has three weeks to rectify things, but right now they have reason to be worried.
They’ve been advertising on TV, the trailer is playing in theatres all over, and that upside-down-and-underwater-ship one-sheet is already iconic. (If you ask me it deserves to be a nominee at the Key Art awards next year.) And yet so far, the audience waiting to see it doesn’t seem hefty enough.
So what’s happening? Are audiences saying no to big loud disaster movies for some reason? Are people seeing some kind of 9/11 echo in this thing? (It’s not that much of a stretch.) Maybe the same folks who are frowning at the idea of seeing United 93 are doing the same here?
I think you have to lay at least some of the blame on that lousy TV movie, Hall- mark Entertainment’s The Poseidon Adventure, that aired last November. It was critically trashed, it didn’t draw that many viewers and it may have poisoned the well. It was produced by Larry Levinson, directed by Jon Putch and starred Rutger Hauer, Adam Baldwin, Bryan Brown, Steve Guttenberg, Peter Weller and C. Thom- as Howell.
I wonder who greenlit their Poseidon first — Levinson and Hallmark or the Warner Bros. people?
The cast of the Wolfgang Petersen film is of a higher calibre than the TV movie, but not that much higher. Russell will always be Mr. Cool in my book but he’s a long way from his Snake Plissken heyday. And Lucas didn’t show much drawing power last summer when Stealth , a $130 million Rob Cohen thriller that he starred in, ended up with $31,704,4316 (domestic) last September.
Warner Bros. obviously decided to sink most of the money into special effects rather than big-star salaries, but this may not be enough at the end of the day.
This isn’t a matter of how good the film will be. It’s a matter of marketing, about how many millions of people can be persuaded to pay to see this film on opening weekend based on ads, interest levels, trailers, TV spots, anticipation…whatever.
If the movie plays well and sells itself, it would probably help to sneak it across the country a week before. I mean, that’s as far as my thinking takes me.
Grabs
Paramount Studios parking lot, snapped just after Wednesday morning’s Mission: Impossible III screening — 4.19.06, 1:15 pm.
J.J. Gittes: “Not that Mulwray?” Evelyn Mulwray: “Yes, Mr. Gittes…that Mulwray.”
Bunny Rabbit
I saw Mission: Impossible III (Paramount, 5.3) this morning at screening room #5 at Paramount Studios, and I’m not dissing anyone or anything with the title of this piece. Not even a little bit.
The MacGuffin of J.J. Abrams’ power-packed thriller, after all, is a smallish device called “rabbit’s foot”, and Tom Cruise’s hard-wired performance as IMF agent Ethan Hunt feels, to me, like something new: he’s made himself into the energizer bunny of action heroes. And it works.
Keri Russell, Tom Cruise in J.J. Abrams’ Mission: Impossible III (Paramount, 5.5)
The advance buzz about M:I:3 being awfully damned good has turned out to be true, I’m afraid — as shallow but very expensive action films go, this is about as good as it gets. But I would hold up on the talk about Phillip Seymour Hoffman stealing the picture from Cruise.
Philly is super-cool — cold and snarly with style to burn — but he hasn’t been given enough ammo — not enough scenes or killer lines — to help him stand up against M:I:3‘s 43 year-old star.
It’s no secret Cruise has been getting (“generating” is closer to the truth) a lot of bad press over the last year or so, with most of it centering on the perception that he’s become overly manic…that his stability is perhaps open to question on some level.
Well, guess what? Cruise answers that perception straight-on in this frenzied summer action film and then rolls right over it like a tank.
He’s made Hunt into a kind of mirror image of hard-core tabloid Tom. It’s like he’s saying, “Okay, fine…you guys think I’ve gone around the bend? All right, then I have! And I’m into it! Being hard-core, I mean.” And this leaves you with feelings of respect for the guy. He may be this or that, but is standing his ground. No backing off! I am what I am!
Hunt is a “character,” yes, but based more than ever on the pumping piston rods of Cruise’s personality. A guy who’s all about focus, juice, intensity, endorphins. Sca- ling walls, rapelling down walls. Plotting strategy, eyeballing his costars, running for his life (in more ways than one) and turning tomato red in the face. Neck veins! Neck veins!
And you’re fine with all of this because…I haven’t said this in so many words, have I?…Mission: Impossible III is easily the best of the three M:I‘s. No, I’ll go further: it’s one of the best high-torque summer action films ever.
Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible (1996) had two or three brilliantly staged sequences, especially the CIA break-in-and-robbery and the chunnel-train sequence, but some of it was in and out and a lot of people felt confused by the plot.
John Woo’s Mission: Impossible II (2000) was an okay spin on Notorious with Thandie Newton as Ingrid Bergman and Dougray Scott as Claude Rains, and my memories of it aren’t that vivid, so it couldn’t have been that great.
Costar Michelle Monaghan, Cruise
This new one, directed and written by Abrams, is far more relentless and slam- bammy than its predecessors. You’re supposed to give your audience a little downtime between action beats, but this sucker won’t rest. You know the old analogy that action films are like musicals? Mission: Impossible III is almost an opera.
Okay, there’s a mildly relaxing party sequence in the beginning and one or two dialogue-with-Laurence-Fisburne-as-the-obligatory-company-asshole-riding-the- IMF-team scenes, but that’s pretty much it. The rest is all on the treadmill running at 10.
There are four beautifully composed set pieces — a rescue mission in a factory in a Berlin suburb, a kidnapping in the Vatican, an aerial attack on a causeway over Chesapeake Bay, and a break-in and a rescue in Shanghai. But there are always tangents and side-shows connected to these main events, and something riveting is always going on.
This is the kind of summer “ride” movie that even sourpusses like me can sit back and roll with. Shrewd, inventive and into punching the gas. It’s empty, yes — it’s basically just one technical challenge after another, with arguments and a couple of “I love you”‘s thrown in — but this is one of those films in which depth would get in the way.
Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Maggie Q, Ving Rhames
When I hear a film is a “check-your-brain-at-the-door” thing, I know I’m going to hate it. This is not that. It exemplifies what a good geek-level action film should be. Abrams, the director-writer, keeps playing to slightly higher intelligence levels than these films are usually geared to.
Harry Knowles has called M:I:3 “the best damn retooling of True Lies that will ever be done.” Funny, but the only thing I remember about True Lies is liking Tom Arnold’s dialogue and attitude and Bill Paxton’s character begging for mercy in front of Arnold Schwarzenegger by saying he had a “little dick.”
Hold on…it’s coming back to me. Arnold was a secret operative who hadn’t told Jamie Lee Curtis what he really does, and then a job he’s on turns bad and Jamie Lee gets brought into it and so on. Michelle Monaghan is the Jamie Lee character, I guess, but…you know what? Screw this analogy. I’ve never once seen True Lies on DVD, and for a reason.
M:I:3 is about the IM force trying to shut down a ruthless arms and technology dealer named Owen Davian (Hoffman), who’s about as lethal as they come. The story is basically a tit-for-tat game. I’ll kidnap and try to squeeze you for inform- ation, and then you’ll come after me or my girlfriend and try to squeeze me for information, and we’ll see who’s smarter and craftier.
Rhys-Meyers, Rhames, Cruise, Maggie Q in, I think, Shanghai
Abrams starts things off an extremely fierce and intense tone. Right away you’re saying to yourself, “This is good…Abrams clearly knows what he’s doing.” As far as hero-being-tortured, tell-me-what-I- need-to-know-or-else scenes go, I would say it’s up to the level of Laurence Olivier pulling Dustin Hoffman’s teeth out in Marathon Man.
Hoffman’s Damian is the torturer, and it’s a little odd that this is his best scene in the film. He’s nearly spellbinding in just about every scene he’s in, but after Capote and all you’re kind of waiting for Philly to really step up with something climactic and classic…and it never comes. He kicks ass with the lines and scenes he’s been given, but somebody wanted this to be Tom Cruise’s film.
The IMFers — Ving Rhames, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Maggie Q — hold up their end. Billy Crudup is perfunctory as Cruise’s home-office ally. Simon Pegg (last in Shaun of the Dead) has the obligatory computer-geek-who-saves-the-day-with- crucial-key-punching-in-the-last-act role.
Michelle Monaghan has the meatiest female role as Ethan’s initially clueless wife. Keri Russell burns through strongly in the first act. Maggie Q (Around the World in 80 Days, Rush Hour 2) is…well, she’s fine, but the best thing she does is wear a very hot red dress to a black-tie affair at the Vatican.
Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Owen Davian
I laughed three times out loud — not at anything “funny” but because I was really enjoying the moxie that went into the writing or acting. I won’t spoil them by sharing.
I had a good enough time with this that I’m going back to see it a second time this evening.
Too many cheerleading pieces and people will start to think I’m a professional kiss-ass, but I have to say it: Tom Cruise’s image problems aren’t going to vanish like that when Mission: Impossible III opens 16 days from now, but they’re probably going to be put on hold.
Glub-Glub
What are the odds that Wolfgang Petersen’s Poseidon (Warner Bros., 5.12) will be an above-average thrill ride? Pretty good, I’d say. And if you scan the saleable elements it looks like something a lot of people are going to want to see.
The trailer tells you the effects are going to be cool. (That rogue wave gives me the creeps.) Petersen is nothing if not a dependable craftsman, and the movie he’s made, to judge by the trailer, has the look and feel of something fairly well-rigged.
Kurt Russell (front & center)), Josh Lucas (behind Kurt), Emmy Rossum (rear) and Richard Dreyfss (lower right) in Wolfgang Petersen’s Poseidon (Warner Bros., 5.12)
I tend to shy away from big-budget effects movies, but even I’m half into seeing this thing. I really like Kurt Russell, I’ve always enjoyed Richard Dreyfuss (especially if he gets angry) and I’m cool with Josh Lucas playing the lead. If I didn’t expect to see it at a press screening within a week, I’d be okay with buying a ticket.
Why, then, are the Poseidon tracking figures in the toilet?
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This is a very expensive film ($150 million? more?) and it needs to have a huge opening weekend. And yet recent figures say the overall general awareness is 54% compared to 92% for Mission: Impossible III , which opens a week earlier. The definite interests are at 23% — they should be somewhere around 40% at this stage. And the respondents calling Poseidon their first choice are around 3% when this group should be more around 10% or 11% (M:I:3‘s first-choicers are currently at 13%).
Warner Bros. has three weeks to rectify things, but right now they have reason to be worried.
They’ve been advertising on TV, the trailer is playing in theatres all over, and that upside-down-and-underwater-ship one-sheet is already iconic. (If you ask me it deserves to be a nominee at the Key Art awards next year.) And yet so far, the audience waiting to see it doesn’t seem hefty enough.
So what’s happening? Are audiences saying no to big loud disaster movies for some reason? Are people seeing some kind of 9/11 echo in this thing? (It’s not that much of a stretch.) Maybe the same folks who are frowning at the idea of seeing United 93 are doing the same here?
I think you have to lay at least some of the blame on that lousy TV movie, Hall- mark Entertainment’s The Poseidon Adventure, that aired last November. It was critically trashed, it didn’t draw that many viewers and it may have poisoned the well. It was produced by Larry Levinson, directed by Jon Putch and starred Rutger Hauer, Adam Baldwin, Bryan Brown, Steve Guttenberg, Peter Weller and C. Thom- as Howell.
I wonder who greenlit their Poseidon first — Levinson and Hallmark or the Warner Bros. people?
The cast of the Wolfgang Petersen film is of a higher calibre than the TV movie, but not that much higher. Russell will always be Mr. Cool in my book but he’s a long way from his Snake Plissken heyday. And Lucas didn’t show much drawing power last summer when Stealth , a $130 million Rob Cohen thriller that he starred in, ended up with $31,704,4316 (domestic) last September.
Warner Bros. obviously decided to sink most of the money into special effects rather than big-star salaries, but this may not be enough at the end of the day.
This isn’t a matter of how good the film will be. It’s a matter of marketing, about how many millions of people can be persuaded to pay to see this film on opening weekend based on ads, interest levels, trailers, TV spots, anticipation…whatever.
If the movie plays well and sells itself, it would probably help to sneak it across the country a week before. I mean, that’s as far as my thinking takes me.
Grabs
Paramount Studios parking lot, snapped just after Wednesday morning’s Mission: Impossible III screening — 4.19.06, 1:15 pm.
J.J. Gittes: “Not that Mulwray?” Evelyn Mulwray: “Yes, Mr. Gittes…that Mulwray.”
Bunny Rabbit
I saw Mission: Impossible III (Paramount, 5.3) this morning at screening room #5 at Paramount Studios, and I’m not dissing anyone or anything with the title of this piece. Not even a little bit.
The MacGuffin of J.J. Abrams’ power-packed thriller, after all, is a smallish device called “rabbit’s foot”, and Tom Cruise’s hard-wired performance as IMF agent Ethan Hunt feels, to me, like something new: he’s made himself into the energizer bunny of action heroes. And it works.
Keri Russell, Tom Cruise in J.J. Abrams’ Mission: Impossible III (Paramount, 5.5)
The advance buzz about M:I:3 being awfully damned good has turned out to be true, I’m afraid — as shallow but very expensive action films go, this is about as good as it gets. But I would hold up on the talk about Phillip Seymour Hoffman stealing the picture from Cruise.
Philly is super-cool — cold and snarly with style to burn — but he hasn’t been given enough ammo — not enough scenes or killer lines — to help him stand up against M:I:3‘s 43 year-old star.
It’s no secret Cruise has been getting (“generating” is closer to the truth) a lot of bad press over the last year or so, with most of it centering on the perception that he’s become overly manic…that his stability is perhaps open to question on some level.
Well, guess what? Cruise answers that perception straight-on in this frenzied summer action film and then rolls right over it like a tank.
He’s made Hunt into a kind of mirror image of hard-core tabloid Tom. It’s like he’s saying, “Okay, fine…you guys think I’ve gone around the bend? All right, then I have! And I’m into it! Being hard-core, I mean.” And this leaves you with feelings of respect for the guy. He may be this or that, but is standing his ground. No backing off! I am what I am!
Hunt is a “character,” yes, but based more than ever on the pumping piston rods of Cruise’s personality. A guy who’s all about focus, juice, intensity, endorphins. Sca- ling walls, rapelling down walls. Plotting strategy, eyeballing his costars, running for his life (in more ways than one) and turning tomato red in the face. Neck veins! Neck veins!
And you’re fine with all of this because…I haven’t said this in so many words, have I?…Mission: Impossible III is easily the best of the three M:I‘s. No, I’ll go further: it’s one of the best high-torque summer action films ever.
Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible (1996) had two or three brilliantly staged sequences, especially the CIA break-in-and-robbery and the chunnel-train sequence, but some of it was in and out and a lot of people felt confused by the plot.
John Woo’s Mission: Impossible II (2000) was an okay spin on Notorious with Thandie Newton as Ingrid Bergman and Dougray Scott as Claude Rains, and my memories of it aren’t that vivid, so it couldn’t have been that great.
Costar Michelle Monaghan, Cruise
This new one, directed and written by Abrams, is far more relentless and slam- bammy than its predecessors. You’re supposed to give your audience a little downtime between action beats, but this sucker won’t rest. You know the old analogy that action films are like musicals? Mission: Impossible III is almost an opera.
Okay, there’s a mildly relaxing party sequence in the beginning and one or two dialogue-with-Laurence-Fisburne-as-the-obligatory-company-asshole-riding-the- IMF-team scenes, but that’s pretty much it. The rest is all on the treadmill running at 10.
There are four beautifully composed set pieces — a rescue mission in a factory in a Berlin suburb, a kidnapping in the Vatican, an aerial attack on a causeway over Chesapeake Bay, and a break-in and a rescue in Shanghai. But there are always tangents and side-shows connected to these main events, and something riveting is always going on.
This is the kind of summer “ride” movie that even sourpusses like me can sit back and roll with. Shrewd, inventive and into punching the gas. It’s empty, yes — it’s basically just one technical challenge after another, with arguments and a couple of “I love you”‘s thrown in — but this is one of those films in which depth would get in the way.
Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Maggie Q, Ving Rhames
When I hear a film is a “check-your-brain-at-the-door” thing, I know I’m going to hate it. This is not that. It exemplifies what a good geek-level action film should be. Abrams, the director-writer, keeps playing to slightly higher intelligence levels than these films are usually geared to.
Harry Knowles has called M:I:3 “the best damn retooling of True Lies that will ever be done.” Funny, but the only thing I remember about True Lies is liking Tom Arnold’s dialogue and attitude and Bill Paxton’s character begging for mercy in front of Arnold Schwarzenegger by saying he had a “little dick.”
Hold on…it’s coming back to me. Arnold was a secret operative who hadn’t told Jamie Lee Curtis what he really does, and then a job he’s on turns bad and Jamie Lee gets brought into it and so on. Michelle Monaghan is the Jamie Lee character, I guess, but…you know what? Screw this analogy. I’ve never once seen True Lies on DVD, and for a reason.
M:I:3 is about the IM force trying to shut down a ruthless arms and technology dealer named Owen Davian (Hoffman), who’s about as lethal as they come. The story is basically a tit-for-tat game. I’ll kidnap and try to squeeze you for inform- ation, and then you’ll come after me or my girlfriend and try to squeeze me for information, and we’ll see who’s smarter and craftier.
Rhys-Meyers, Rhames, Cruise, Maggie Q in, I think, Shanghai
Abrams starts things off an extremely fierce and intense tone. Right away you’re saying to yourself, “This is good…Abrams clearly knows what he’s doing.” As far as hero-being-tortured, tell-me-what-I- need-to-know-or-else scenes go, I would say it’s up to the level of Laurence Olivier pulling Dustin Hoffman’s teeth out in Marathon Man.
Hoffman’s Damian is the torturer, and it’s a little odd that this is his best scene in the film. He’s nearly spellbinding in just about every scene he’s in, but after Capote and all you’re kind of waiting for Philly to really step up with something climactic and classic…and it never comes. He kicks ass with the lines and scenes he’s been given, but somebody wanted this to be Tom Cruise’s film.
The IMFers — Ving Rhames, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Maggie Q — hold up their end. Billy Crudup is perfunctory as Cruise’s home-office ally. Simon Pegg (last in Shaun of the Dead) has the obligatory computer-geek-who-saves-the-day-with- crucial-key-punching-in-the-last-act role.
Michelle Monaghan has the meatiest female role as Ethan’s initially clueless wife. Keri Russell burns through strongly in the first act. Maggie Q (Around the World in 80 Days, Rush Hour 2) is…well, she’s fine, but the best thing she does is wear a very hot red dress to a black-tie affair at the Vatican.
Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Owen Davian
I laughed three times out loud — not at anything “funny” but because I was really enjoying the moxie that went into the writing or acting. I won’t spoil them by sharing.
I had a good enough time with this that I’m going back to see it a second time this evening.
Too many cheerleading pieces and people will start to think I’m a professional kiss-ass, but I have to say it: Tom Cruise’s image problems aren’t going to vanish like that when Mission: Impossible III opens 16 days from now, but they’re probably going to be put on hold.
Gotta Have It
I finally finished reading I Wake Up Screening: What To Do Once You’ve Made That Movie (Watson-Guptill) last week, and it’s one of the most easily processed, best written, most thoroughly sourced books ever written about how to get your indie movie seen (and maybe even distributed!) once it’s more or less finished.
I’m not going all kiss-ass on this book because I’m friendly with its authors, critic- journo John Anderson and Warner Independent marketing exec Laura Kim, or because I know just about every distribution exec, producer’s rep, indie publicist, film festival director, critic and entertainment journalist they’ve quoted.
Park City’s Main Street during the ’04 Sundance Film Festival
I’m saying this because it’s a sharp, cleanly written, well-organized thing, and because it contains lessons that I know are wise and based on hard experience, and because I’ve never read anything of its type quite as good. Really.
L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan, Magnolia Pictures’ Eamonn Bowles, filmmakers Bill Condon and Kirby Dick, Picturehouse’s Bob Berney, New York Times critic Manohla Dargis, Cinetic’s John Sloss, exhibitor Gregg Leammle, N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman, producer Ted Hope, Sundance honcho Geoff Gilmore, publicist Jeff Hill, Sony Classics’ Michael Barker, Telluride Film Festival director Tom Luddy, Variety‘s Tom McCarthy…these guys and maybe 50 others are quoted.
And there’s a minimum of attitude and self-referential blah-blah in this thing. Every page contains a set-up graph or two plus quotes, quotes, quotes…a set-up graph plus quotes, quotes, quotes. Solid, thoughtful…a very smooth, sans-bullshit read.
The specific advice/lessons for nascent filmmakers include (1) evaluating your film, (2) putting together the perfect team, (3) legal matters, (4) using the right launching pad, (5) sussing Sundance, (6) dealing with the media, (7) the right materials, (8) screeners, (9) the elements of buzz, (10) how not to alienate potential supporters, (11) doing things yourself, (12) finding your audience, and (13) various case studies.
I Wake Up Screening is a how-to manual, but the inside school-of-hard-knocks aroma sets it apart. One or two pages and you’re sold. Trust levels go right up and stay up.
I seriously believe it’s in the realm of choice inside-the-industry books like The Ultimate Film Festival Guide by Chris Gore; The Whole Equation by David Thomson; Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood by Peter Biskind; The New Biographical Dictionary of Film by David Thomson; Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of “Heaven’s Gate” by Steven Bach; The Devil’s Candy: “The Bonfire of the Vanities” Goes to Hollywood by Julie Salamon; The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 by Andrew Sarris; Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman; You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again by Julia Phillips; and Edward Jay Epstein’s The Big Picture
Every so often I found myself wishing Anderson and Kim had included some ruder, more Peter Biskind-type material (i.e. the kind of quotes and stories that result in certain people refusing to talk to you for four or five years).
And I was a wee bit irritated that they only spoke to (or wrote about) old-media critics and reporters. You’d never know from reading I Wake Up Screening that there are such things as online critics, journalists and buzz-spreaders who wake up and wail every damn day.
I Wake Up Screening co-author Laura Kim
“Think of yourself running in a mile-long race,” Bradford Patrick writes on the book’s Amazon.com page writes. (Sorry, but this guy’s a fairly good writer.) “You kill yourself to finish the mile, and when you can see the tape, you find out you have four more miles to go!
“That’s exactly how the authors frame the problem for a filmmaker. You got the money scraped together, you shot your film, you’ve been in post cutting the film, and then (and perhaps only then) do you become aware of the millions of details, hurdles, and pitfalls that lie between you and bliss — a theatrical release.
“The authors love film, and want nothing more than for your film to find an audience…but how? This is where the step-by-step analysis of dealing with PR, producer-reps, attorneys, media and buyers all get outed in fascinating detail.”
Anderson and I spoke about the book and the business last weekend, and here’s the recording of it. We got going and our chat lasted about 44 minutes.
Anderson is the chief film critic at Newsday, a past member of the selection committee of the New York Film Festival and a two-time past chair of the New York Film Critics Circle, a member of the National Society of Film Critics, and a member of the National Book Critics Circle.
Screening co-author John Anderson, whose eyes rarely glare like they do here
Kim is exec vp of marketing and publicity for Warner Independent Films. Previously the senior vp of mPRm, she’s worked on such films as (I’m taking this right from the book) American Splendor, Dirty Pretty Things, The Pianist and Being John Malkovich.
Buy it or borrow it from a friend…but if you’re even half into the idea of being a serious filmmaker (now, soon, eventually), definitely read I Wake Up Screening.
(Since tapping this out Monday afternoon I’ve learned that “I Wake Up Screening” was also a title of a 1993 book about indie filming, written by director-writer Frank Gilroy.)
Lost Bash
Fantastic jump-up Cuban sounds at Monday night’s after-party following the Hollywood premiere of Magnolia’s The Lost City, a tale of pre-Castro and post-Castro Cuba in the late ’50s and early ’60s, directed by and starring Andy Garcia.
Pretty lady at the party — born in Uruguay, dad was a journalist — who was with Lost City costar Steven Bauer. (I think.)
Andy Garcia during the concert portion of the Lost City after-party.
Curiously mesmerizing pool water
Bunny Rabbit
I saw Mission: Impossible III (Paramount, 5.3) this morning at screening room #5 at Paramount Studios, and I’m not dissing anyone or anything with the title of this piece. Not even a little bit.
The MacGuffin of J.J. Abrams’ power-packed thriller, after all, is a smallish device called “rabbit’s foot”, and Tom Cruise’s hard-wired performance as IMF agent Ethan Hunt feels, to me, like something new: he’s made himself into the energizer bunny of action heroes. And it works.
Keri Russell, Tom Cruise in J.J. Abrams’ Mission: Impossible III (Paramount, 5.5)
The advance buzz about M:I:3 being awfully damned good has turned out to be true, I’m afraid — as shallow but very expensive action films go, this is about as good as it gets. But I would hold up on the talk about Phillip Seymour Hoffman stealing the picture from Cruise.
Philly is super-cool — cold and snarly with style to burn — but he hasn’t been given enough ammo — not enough scenes or killer lines — to help him stand up against M:I:3‘s 43 year-old star.
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It’s no secret Cruise has been getting (“generating” is closer to the truth) a lot of bad press over the last year or so, with most of it centering on the perception that he’s become overly manic…that his stability is perhaps open to question on some level.
Well, guess what? Cruise answers that perception straight-on in this frenzied summer action film and then rolls right over it like a tank.
He’s made Hunt into a kind of mirror image of hard-core tabloid Tom. It’s like he’s saying, “Okay, fine…you guys think I’ve gone around the bend? All right, then I have! And I’m into it! Being hard-core, I mean.” And this leaves you with a feeling of respect for a guy who may be this or that, but has stood his ground. No backing off! I am what I am!
Hunt is a “character,” yes, but based more than ever on the pumping piston rods of Cruise’s personality. A guy who’s all about focus, juice, intensity, endorphins. Sca- ling walls, rapelling down walls. Plotting strategy, eyeballing his costars, running for his life (in more ways than one) and turning tomato red in the face. Neck veins! Neck veins!
And you’re fine with all of this because…I haven’t said this in so many words, have I?…Mission: Impossible III is easily the best of the three M:I‘s. No, I’ll go further: it’s one of the best high-torque summer action films ever.
Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible (1996) had two or three brilliantly staged sequences, especially the CIA break-in-and-robbery and the chunnel-train sequence, but some of it was in and out and a lot of people felt confused by the plot.
John Woo’s Mission: Impossible II (2000) was an okay spin on Notorious with Thandie Newton as Ingrid Bergman and Dougray Scott as Claude Rains, and my memories of it aren’t that vivid, so it couldn’t have been that great.
Costar Michelle Monaghan, Cruise
This new one, directed and written by Abrams, is far more relentless and slam- bammy than its predecessors. You’re supposed to give your audience a little downtime between action beats, but this sucker won’t rest. You know the old analogy that action films are like musicals? Mission: Impossible III is almost an opera.
Okay, there’s a mildly relaxing party sequence in the beginning and one or two dialogue-with-Lawrence-Fisburne-as-the-obligatory-company-asshole-riding-the- IMF-team scenes, but that’s pretty much it. The rest is all on the treadmill running at 10.
There are four beautifully composed set pieces — a rescue mission in a factory in a Berlin suburb, a kidnapping in the Vatican, an aerial attack on a causeway over Chesapeake Bay, and a break-in and a rescue in Shanghai. But there are always tangents and side-shows connected to these main events, and something riveting is always going on.
This is the kind of summer “ride” movie that even sourpusses like me can sit back and roll with. Shrewd, inventive and into punching the gas. It’s empty, yes — it’s basically just one technical challenge after another, with arguments and a couple of “I love you”‘s thrown in — but this is one of those films in which depth would get in the way.
Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Maggie Q, Ving Rhames
When I hear a film is a “check-your-brain-at-the-door” thing, I know I’m going to hate it. This is not that. It exemplifies what a good geek-level action film should be. Abrams, the director-writer, keeps playing to slightly higher intelligence levels than these films are usually geared to.
Harry Knowles has called M:I:3 “the best damn retooling of True Lies that will ever be done.” Funny, but the only thing I can remember about True Lies is liking Tom Arnold’s dialogue and attitude and Bill Paxton’s character begging for mercy in front of Arnold Schwarzenegger by saying he had a “little dick.”
Hold on…it’s coming back to me. Arnold was a secret operative who hadn’t told Jamie Lee Curtis what he really does, and then a job he’s on turns bad and Jamie Lee gets brought into it and so on. Michelle Monaghan is the Jamie Lee character, I guess, but…you know what? Screw this analogy. I’ve never once seen True Lies on DVD, and for a reason.
M:I:3 is about the IM force trying to shut down a ruthless arms and technology dealer named Owen Davian (Hoffman), who’s about as lethal as they come. The story is basically a tit-for-tat game. I’ll kidnap and try to squeeze you for inform- ation, and then you’ll come after me or my girlfriend and try to squeeze me for information, and we’ll see who’s smarter and craftier.
Rhys-Meyers, Rhames, Cruise, Maggie Q in, I think, Shanghai
Abrams starts things off an extremely fierce and intense tone. Right away you’re saying to yourself, “This is good…Abrams clearly knows what he’s doing.” As far as hero-being-tortured, tell-me-what-I- need-to-know-or-else scenes go, I would say it’s up to the level of Laurence Olivier pulling Dustin Hoffman’s teeth out in Marathon Man.
Hoffman’s Damian is the torturer, and it’s a little odd that this is his best scene in the film. He’s nearly spellbinding in just about every scene he’s in, but after Capote and all you’re kind of waiting for Philly to really step up with something climactic and classic…and it never comes. He kicks ass with the lines and scenes he’s been given, but somebody wanted this to be Tom Cruise’s film.
The IMFers — Ving Rhames, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Maggie Q — hold up their end. Billy Crudup is perfunctory as Cruise’s home-office ally. Simon Pegg (last in Shaun of the Dead) has the obligatory computer-geek-who-saves-the-day-with- crucial-key-punching-in-the-last-act role.
Michelle Monaghan has the meatiest female role as Ethan’s initially clueless wife. Keri Russell burns through strongly in the first act. Maggie Q (Around the World in 80 Days, Rush Hour 2) is…well, she’s fine, but the best thing she does is wear a very hot red dress to a black-tie affair at the Vatican.
Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Owen Davian
I laughed three times out loud — not at anything “funny” but because I was really enjoying the moxie that went into the writing or acting. I won’t spoil them by sharing.
I had a good enough time with this that I’m going back to see it a second time this evening.
Too many cheerleading pieces and people will start to think I’m a professional kiss-ass, but I have to say it: Tom Cruise’s image problems aren’t going to vanish like that when Mission: Impossible III opens 16 days from now, but they’re probably going to be put on hold.
Gotta Have It
I finally finished reading I Wake Up Screening: What To Do Once You’ve Made That Movie (Watson-Guptill) last week, and it’s one of the most easily processed, best written, most thoroughly sourced books ever written about how to get your indie movie seen (and maybe even distributed!) once it’s more or less finished.
I’m not going all kiss-ass on this book because I’m friendly with its authors, critic- journo John Anderson and Warner Independent marketing exec Laura Kim, or because I know just about every distribution exec, producer’s rep, indie publicist, film festival director, critic and entertainment journalist they’ve quoted.
Park City’s Main Street during the ’04 Sundance Film Festival
I’m saying this because it’s a sharp, cleanly written, well-organized thing, and because it contains lessons that I know are wise and based on hard experience, and because I’ve never read anything of its type quite as good. Really.
L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan, Magnolia Pictures’ Eamonn Bowles, filmmakers Bill Condon and Kirby Dick, Picturehouse’s Bob Berney, New York Times critic Manohla Dargis, Cinetic’s John Sloss, exhibitor Gregg Leammle, N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman, producer Ted Hope, Sundance honcho Geoff Gilmore, publicist Jeff Hill, Sony Classics’ Michael Barker, Telluride Film Festival director Tom Luddy, Variety‘s Tom McCarthy…these guys and maybe 50 others are quoted.
And there’s a minimum of attitude and self-referential blah-blah in this thing. Every page contains a set-up graph or two plus quotes, quotes, quotes…a set-up graph plus quotes, quotes, quotes. Solid, thoughtful…a very smooth, sans-bullshit read.
The specific advice/lessons for nascent filmmakers include (1) evaluating your film, (2) putting together the perfect team, (3) legal matters, (4) using the right launching pad, (5) sussing Sundance, (6) dealing with the media, (7) the right materials, (8) screeners, (9) the elements of buzz, (10) how not to alienate potential supporters, (11) doing things yourself, (12) finding your audience, and (13) various case studies.
I Wake Up Screening is a how-to manual, but the inside school-of-hard-knocks aroma sets it apart. One or two pages and you’re sold. Trust levels go right up and stay up.
I seriously believe it’s in the realm of choice inside-the-industry books like The Ultimate Film Festival Guide by Chris Gore; The Whole Equation by David Thomson; Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood by Peter Biskind; The New Biographical Dictionary of Film by David Thomson; Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of “Heaven’s Gate” by Steven Bach; The Devil’s Candy: “The Bonfire of the Vanities” Goes to Hollywood by Julie Salamon; The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 by Andrew Sarris; Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman; You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again by Julia Phillips; and Edward Jay Epstein’s The Big Picture
Every so often I found myself wishing Anderson and Kim had included some ruder, more Peter Biskind-type material (i.e. the kind of quotes and stories that result in certain people refusing to talk to you for four or five years).
And I was a wee bit irritated that they only spoke to (or wrote about) old-media critics and reporters. You’d never know from reading I Wake Up Screening that there are such things as online critics, journalists and buzz-spreaders who wake up and wail every damn day.
I Wake Up Screening co-author Laura Kim
“Think of yourself running in a mile-long race,” Bradford Patrick writes on the book’s Amazon.com page writes. (Sorry, but this guy’s a fairly good writer.) “You kill yourself to finish the mile, and when you can see the tape, you find out you have four more miles to go!
“That’s exactly how the authors frame the problem for a filmmaker. You got the money scraped together, you shot your film, you’ve been in post cutting the film, and then (and perhaps only then) do you become aware of the millions of details, hurdles, and pitfalls that lie between you and bliss — a theatrical release.
“The authors love film, and want nothing more than for your film to find an audience…but how? This is where the step-by-step analysis of dealing with PR, producer-reps, attorneys, media and buyers all get outed in fascinating detail.”
Anderson and I spoke about the book and the business last weekend, and here’s the recording of it. We got going and our chat lasted about 44 minutes.
Anderson is the chief film critic at Newsday, a past member of the selection committee of the New York Film Festival and a two-time past chair of the New York Film Critics Circle, a member of the National Society of Film Critics, and a member of the National Book Critics Circle.
Screening co-author John Anderson, whose eyes rarely glare like they do here
Kim is exec vp of marketing and publicity for Warner Independent Films. Previously the senior vp of mPRm, she’s worked on such films as (I’m taking this right from the book) American Splendor, Dirty Pretty Things, The Pianist and Being John Malkovich.
Buy it or borrow it from a friend…but if you’re even half into the idea of being a serious filmmaker (now, soon, eventually), definitely read I Wake Up Screening.
(Since tapping this out Monday afternoon I’ve learned that “I Wake Up Screening” was also a title of a 1993 book about indie filming, written by director-writer Frank Gilroy.)
Lost Bash
Fantastic jump-up Cuban sounds at Monday night’s after-party following the Hollywood premiere of Magnolia’s The Lost City, a tale of pre-Castro and post-Castro Cuba in the late ’50s and early ’60s, directed by and starring Andy Garcia.
Pretty lady at the party — born in Uruguay, dad was a journalist — who was with Lost City costar Steven Bauer. (I think.)
Andy Garcia during the concert portion of the Lost City after-party.
Curiously mesmerizing pool water
A nice page of graphic steals from the opening credit sequence of Jason Reitman ‘s Thank You for Smoking. And here’s the credit sequence itself. Composed by an outfit called Shadowplay Studio, the titles draw from the look of classic cigarette packaging.
Diallo Tyson of Woodbine, Georgia, happened to see John Milius‘s Red Dawn (1984) the other night, and was struck by the parallels between how the Wolverines (Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Charlie Sheen, et. al.) respond to the Russian/Cuban invaders of the U.S.A., and how those no-good Iraqi resistance guys have been responding to the U.S. invaders since ’03. And how both have vague echoes in the Wachowski’s V for Vendetta. Red Dawn‘s Wolverines, says Tyson, are “a band of insurgents determined to fight and get their country back. They steal munitions, blow up envoys, set up ambushes, and other general terrorist activities. They don’t really succeed in the end but they put up one hell of a fight. When Dawn was first released, it was described as a piece of right-wing jingoistic-patriotic schlock. But when I was a kid I loved it. You wanted the Wolverines to kick some Russo-Cuban butt, and I know I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. I’ve just mentioned it because this reminded me of some of the criticism V For Vendetta has been getting. I believe you ran a recent quote from someone saying in effect, ‘How can we cheer for a guy in a mask who is a terrorist?’ Well, we’ve cheered for terrorists before….obviously a lot can change in 22 years.” The notion of Wolverines as terrorists (which of course they are, albeit sympathetically portrayed) carries a double irony in that the effort to capture Saddam Hussein in Iraq was called Operation Red Dawn, and, according to Wikipedia, the name came from an American commander, Col. James Hickey, who “was a fan of the Milius film.” He also dubbed the military units who actually captured Hussein ‘Wolverine One’ and ‘Wolverine Two’ after the fictional Wolverines unit in Red Dawn.” I trust the ironies have sufficiently sunk in and I don’t have to trot out the old chesnut, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” (I called Milius three times about this yesterday, explaining the gist of my journalistic interest in one of my phone messages, and he never got back…which isn’t like him. He knows me, we’ve spoken over the years, etc.)
Failure to Launch, a Paramount piece-of-shit comedy co-starring a ferocious fanged chipmunk, a vicious mockingbird, a Jaws-like dolphin and one of the most stupendously vapid actors in Hollywood history, took in an astonishing $24.6 million in 3057 theatres…imagine the tens of thousands of folks who paid money to see this only to come out of theatres with faces like “buckets of cold piss” (stealing again from Norman Mailer). Tim Allen’s The Shaggy Dog (Buena Vista) grabbed $16 million in 3501 situations…and if I’m close to dying from boredom I might watch it on a plane someday….maybe. The Hills Have Eyes (Fox Searchlight) nabbed $15.5 million in 2620 theatres. 16 Blocks (Warner Bros.) earned $7.3 million in 2,706 situations. Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Family Reunion (Lions Gate) did $5.8 million in 1812 situations with a $55.8 million cume.
Tom Cruise is reportedly keen to play the Glenn Ford bad-guy role in James Mangold’s forthcoming remake of 3:10 to Yuma, a 1957 black-and-white western directed by Delmer Daves and co-starring Van Heflin. (I’ve never seen this High noon-type drama, but something tells me I’ll be looking at the DVD fairly soon.) And yet, according to Variety‘s Michael Fleming, Cruise hadn’t even sat down with Mangold to chew things over. He just likes Stuart Beattie‘s rewrite of the Michael Brandt-Derek Haas script, and has funnelled news of his interest to Fleming. If the Yuma thing happens it’ll be Cruise going back to Collateral territory, playing another charming psycho type. A riff on the ’57 film says that “Ford practically steals the film in one of his best performances ever: calm, cool, and confident…a ruthless killer with polite manners and an honorable streak.”
Forbes magazine has asked three critics (Richard Roper, Neil Rosen, Jeffrey Lyons) which are the ten best films ever made about money. What a question! Aren’t 70% to 80% of all the films ever made in one way or another about people trying to make, steal, hold onto or somehow get hold of more money? They didn’t choose Rififi or Heat or Eric von Stroheim‘s Greed or L’eclisse…this is lame. The ten they chose suggest their real criteria was choosing the best movies about greed, avarice and scam artists, are Wall Street, Trading Places (what?), The Sting, Boiler Room, Ocean’s Eleven (’60 version), It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, Casino, Glengarry Glen Ross, The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre (good choice) and American Pscyho (another good one).
Dog Has Its Day
Of the dozens of definite-interest films playing at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival (which I haven’t even begun to try and summarize), Nick Cassevetes’ Alpha Dog has easily gotten the most press…and yet it’s showing at the very end of the fes- tival (Friday, 1.27 at the Eccles, and Saturday, 1.28, at Prospector Square) when most of the hot-and-happening crowd will be gone.
I have it on very good authority that it’s worth sticking around for. Alpha Dog isn’t a great film but it’s quite provocative and even agitating (in a good way). It’s certainly thought-provoking, and it boasts more than a few live-wire performances, including a serious stand-out one by Justin Timberlake.
Shawn Hatosy, Emile Hirsch, Harry Dean Stanton, Bruce Willis, Olivia Wilde and Justin Timberlake in Alpha Dog.
Directed and written by Cassevetes, Alpha Dog is more than a cautionary tale about amoral kids gone wild. It’s a condemnation of liberal anything-goes values, of absentee parents, of a society lacking in moral fibre. In short, it’s a film that social conservatives will point to and say, “See? This is what we’re trying to prevent.” And it’ll be hard to argue with them.
The impression is that Dog has fashioned its own particular vibe and attitude, but it will certainly be seen as following in the tradition of Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge, Jack Aaron Estes’ Mean Creek and Larry Clark’s Bully.
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The film also stars Shawn Hatosy, Harry Dean Stanton, a bewigged Bruce Willis, Olivia Wilde, Sharon Stone, Dominique Swain and Ben Foster (another provider of an exceptional performance).
Based on a true story that happened about six years ago, Dog is about a 20 year-old known as Jesse James Hollywood (called Johnny Truelove in the movie, and portrayed by Lords of Dogtown‘s Emile Hirsch), a pot dealer from a well-to-do San Fernando Valley suburb who obviously saw himself as a minor-league Tony Montana.
This plus the general lower-end-of-the-gene-pool idiocy that is not unknown to suburban youth culture led to Jimmy making a fatal error: he and some pals kidnapped the 15 year-old younger brother of a guy who owed him $1200 as a way of applying pressure, and when he later realized he and his cronies would be looking at big-time jail terms he told a flunkie to kill the boy (Nicholas Markowitz in actuality– called Zack Mazursky in the film and played by Anton Yelchin) to keep him from testifying.
Justin Timberlake
When the boy’s body was found Jimmy eventually left the country and, with his father’s help, wound up living incognito in Brazil. But last March he was punched by Interpol agents and brought back to the U.S. to face murder charges.
The reason Alpha Dog has been getting a lot of press (in a David Halbfinger story that ran today in the New York Times and one that Lou Lumenick ran in the on 1.13) is because Cassavetes and the film’s distributor, New Line Cinema, are caught up in a legal tangle over a threatened injunction that could conceivably prevent Alpha Dog from being released on 2.24.06, as New Line is planning.
The beef is from Hollywood’s attorney James Blatt, who’s saying that prosecuting attorney Rod Zonen was guilty of misconduct by providing inside information about the murder case to Cassevetes during the film’s preparation phase. Blatt’s argu- ment is that the release of this information in a dramatic fashion in Alpha Dog will prejudice matters against his client.
Cassevetes was subpoenaed by Blatt last summer as part of an attempt to have Zonen removed from the case for giving Cassavetes access to nonpublic records. The ploy failed. Two months ago a judge ordered Cassavetes’s researcher, Michael Mehas, who is writing a book about the case, to turn over notes and tapes from his interviews to the defense. Blatt is now threatening to seek an injunction against the release of Alpha Dog.
I suspect Blatt is mainly grandstanding and that Alpha Dog will probably open as planned, but ahead-of-the-curve types will probably want to see it at Sundance just to play it safe.
Emile Hisch
Sundance honcho Geoff Gilmore declares in the program notes that Cassavetes’ film “captures the driving energy and sordid anomie of contemporary youth culture,” adding that it end “in a tragedy that would be shocking if we weren’t so aware of the kind of world we live in, a place with kids who live without mores, parents who don’t have a clue, and ongoing conflict between the lingering inno- cence of youth and moral disintegration and dissolution.”
Being a father of a 17 and a 16 year-old, this Cassevetes quote in the Times piece about absentee-parenting struck home:
“I’m guilty of it — of being too busy with your everyday life to properly spend enough time with your children to figure out what’s going on with them.
“You can check in, and you say, ‘Are you all right?’ But it’s not like being on a farm or spending a lot of time in the house. We all live really global, Internetty lives. Kids have more power than they did before. They have cars, they can get around, they have dough, and there’s always some person that’s got something going on that can get everybody killed.”
Vintage Art
Globe Finals
There were no big surprises at the Golden Globes last night, and the big after-party on the roof of the Beverly Hilton…I’m not too sure I can do this right now. It’s 12:25 a.m. and I’m whipped, partly because I couldn’t muster the discipline to leave the after-party sooner but I had a good time so the hell with it.
I ran into and had brief chit-chats with Heath Ledger, Rachel Weisz, Walk the Line director-co-writer James Mangold and producer Cathy Konrad, Ang Lee, New York Times “Carpetbagger” blogger David Carr, Brokeback Mountain producer James Schamus and…
Heath Ledger, Michelle Williams at Focus Features/Universal/NBC post-Golden Globes party — Monday, 1.16.06, 8:15 pm.
I don’t know why I’m dropping names like this. I mean, it’s pathetic. I suppose there’s something a bit more vital about roaming around and chatting people up and taking snaps than sitting around and nibbling food and watching a TV screen, but…
Walk the Line is looking heavily fortified for the Oscars with three Globes in a knapsack — Best Picture (Musical/Comedy), Best Actor in a Musical/Comedy (Joaquin Phoenix) and Best Actress in a Musical/Comedy (Reese Witherspoon) …plus the domestic box-office is set to pass the $100 million mark this weekend.
And if Brokeback Mountain was looking like a hot Oscar contender before, it’s looking even stronger now with four Golden Globe wins — Best Picture, Best Director (Ang Lee), Best Adapted Screenplay (Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana) and Best Song.
I never even knew there was a Brokeback Mountain song until last night. It’s called “A Love That Will Never Grow Old” (music by Gustavo Santaolalla, lyrics by B. Taupin, sung by Emmylou Harris), and is heard playing rather faintly on the radio when Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) is driving in his pickup after after visiting Ennis in Wyoming just after the divorce. (Because it’s barely in the film, I’m told it’s ineligible for an Oscar nomination.)
Hooray for Capote‘s Philip Seymour Hoffman winning the Best Actor (Drama) award (although I’m still hoping for a tie between Hoffman and Heath Ledger on Oscar night), and George Clooney nabbing the Best Supporting Actor trophy for his work in Syriana.
Walk the Line director and cowriter James Mangold, producer Cathy Konrad — Monday, 1.16.06, 9:10 pm.
Brokeback Mountain director Ang Lee — Monday, 1.16.06, 9:20 pm.
V for Vendetta star Natalie Portman (foreground), Brokeback Mountain producer James Schamus (far left) — 1.16.06, 9:10 pm.
It was a pleasant evening all around. Maybe a little too pleasant? I have this memory of the Globes being a little looser and more raucous than the Oscars, but the only one indulging in oh-my-God behavior was E! red-carpet guy Isaac Mizrahi with his boob-cupping routines.
At the podium it was all small stuff…Sandra Oh, winner of the Best Supporting TV Actress award for Grey’s Anatomy, having trouble making it up to the stage, George Clooney telling that Jack Abramoff jack-off joke, and Dennis Quaid saying something about the import of Brokeback Mountain rhyming with “chick flick.” I think he meant “dick flick”…witty!
Drew Barrymore and Mariah Carey got the biggest “whoa” responses from the crowd at the Weinstein Co. viewing party at Trader Vic’s — Barrymore because of her green see-through dress and Carey because she’s moving closer and closer to Aretha Franklin dimensions.
And we have to wait until March 5th for the Oscars? Seven weeks minus two days?
Brokeback Mountain producer James Schamus, Universal Pictures honcho Ron Meyer — Monday, 1.16.06, 8:55 pm.
The Constant Gardener costar and Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe winner Rachel Weisz (who’s about five months pregnant) — 1.16.06, 8:20 pm.
There were plenty of GG nominations but no awards for Good Night, and Good Luck, Match Point, Crash and Mrs. Henderson Presents. Does this indicate anything? Naah. Well, maybe.
After making the rounds at the Focus Features party on the roof for maybe 40 or 50 minutes, I thought it might be time to head over to the 20th Century Fox/Walk the Line party, but as I made my way out the door I realized the Fox party guests — Line‘s director-co-writer Jim Mangold and producer Kathy Konrad, Fox Newscorp chief Rupert Murdoch, et. al. — had bailed and decided to join the Universal throng.
I’m just sorry I didn’t run into Capote‘s director Bennett Miller and screenwriter Dan Futterman, who were saluted by Hoffman during his Golden Globe acceptance speech and described as sitting “waay back in the corner.” Capote has brought in roughly $12.5 million domestically so far — I trust Hoffman’s win and the coming nominations will boost business considerably.
Winners — Best Picture (Drama): Brokeback Mountain. Best Director: Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain. Best Actor, Drama: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote . Best Picture, Musical/Comedy: Walk the Line. Best Actor, Musical/Comedy: Joaquin Phoenix, Walk the Line. Best Actress, Musical/Comedy: Reese Witherspoon, Walk the Line.
More Winners — Best Actress, Drama: Felicity Huffman, Transamerica. Best Screenplay: Brokeback Mountain (Larry McMurty, Diana Ossana). Best Original Score: John Williams, Memoirs Of A Geisha. Best Foreign Language Film: Paradise Now.
Memoirs of a Geisha star Ziyi Zhang.
Amber Tamblyn, star of Stephanie Daley, a 2006 Sundance Film Festival Dramatic Competition selection that’s showing next weekend. Amber and I shared a table at the Weinstein Co. viewing party at Trader Vic’s, adjacent to the Beverly Hilton.
N.Y. Times “Carpetbagger” Oscar blogger David Carr
Steve Carell, winner of Best Actor (Musical/Comedy) in a TV series in The Office, and Geisha star Ziyi Zhang.
Bed of roses inside seating arangement at Focus Features after-party.
I think I get the meaning of this. I mean, I think it was meant to be received as (a) a friendly wink or (b) a form of social criticism of some kind in a Diane Arbus vein. Either way it’s cool.
London Daily Mail columnist Baz Bamigboye, Fox 411 columnist Roger Friedman.
Crash Bash
Lionsgate threw a big crowded pre-Golden Globes party at Morton’s last night (Saturday, 1.14). Some Crash stars (Matt Dillon, Terrence Howard, director-writer Paul Haggis, screenwriter Bobby Moresco) attended along with several journalists, Lions Gate brass (Jon Feltheimer, Tom Ortenberg) and staffers, and a lot of corporate promotional partners milling about with their wives and girlfriends.
Crash star and Golden Glove nominee Matt Dillon, manager-producer Victoria Wisdom at Lions Gate soiree at Morton’s — Saturday, 1.14.06, 9:25 pm.
Crash star Terrence Howard, Lion’s Gate CEO Jon Feltheimer
The party was about celebrating the work of Haggis and Moresco, whose Crash screenplay is GG-nominated, as well as Dillon, who’s been nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe, plus the very hot Howard (distinguished in ’05 not just for his Crash performance but his superb rendering of a Memphis pimp going through a midlife crisis in Hustle & Flow).
But it was mainly about turning up the Crash flame in hopes of attracting a bit more Academy enthusiasm and maybe locking down a Best Picture Oscar nomination, plus (one would hope) noms for Haggis, Moresco, Dillon, et. al.
The vibe was friendly, amiable…an aura of flush satisfaction and anticipation and Pinot Grigio frivolity…dampened only slightly by a fire marshall blocking the door at one point and stranding a few latecomers on the sidewalk.
The Envelope “Styles & Scenes” correspondent Elizabeth Snead, Slate Kausfiles columnist Mickey Kaus, Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post.
Crash director and co-screenwriter Paul Haggis, co-screenwriter Bobby Moresco — Saturday, 1.14.06, 9:10 pm.
I wanted to run over and catch a Writers Guild interview between Brokeback Moun- tain screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana and Oscar gadfly/film critic Pete Hammond, but I flaked.
And so concludes the least substantial Hollywood Elsewhere piece I’ve ever written…but I had fun and I don’t care. Working 15-hour days seven days a week requires an occasional kick-back or you’ll go catatonic.
Down To It
I finally saw Debra Granik’s Down to the Bone last night and got the wisdom of what almost every deep-focus movie journalist and critic has been saying since it (barely) opened in New York and Los Angeles nearly six weeks ago, which is that it’s grimly real but has something that doesn’t let up.
This is a profoundly honed and life-like low-budgeter about a mom with two kids coping with drug addiction, and Vera Farmiga, who plays this withered young woman like she’s not playing her at all, is the absolute shit.
Vera Farmiga, Hugh Dillon after last night’s screening of Down to the Bone at Laemmle’s Music Hall — 1.12.06, 9:50 pm.
Farmiga doesn’t perform — she becomes and burns through. She has the saddest eyes and the posture of a Siberian salt-mine worker, and she makes you feel the empty-soul fatigue of working a job at a supermarket check-out counter while nur- sing a serious cocaine habit and…Christ, stealing birthday money from her son in order to score, and then getting fired after she cleans up because the coke made her work faster.
This is Anna Magnani in Open City reborn and time-tripped into something worse than mere poverty.
I’ve been told Down to the Bone is the main reason Farmiga landed major roles in Anthony Minghella’s upcoming Breaking and Entering and Martin Scorsese’s The Departed…you can see why in a heartbeat.
Newsweek‘s David Ansen called Farmiga’s Down to the Bone performance a “reve- lation” and listed her performance among the best of the year, and of course the L.A. Film Critics voted her their ’05 Best Actress award. It was these responses that stirred me from slumber and led to last night’s wake-up.
I am so late-to-the-party on this one I don’t want to talk about it. But I am and I’m sorry, and I wish I’d been able to say this before: this is a moderately weak year for female performances, and there’s no question that Farmiga’s performance in this bleak but mesmerizing film is absolutely gold standard.
Farmiga with Jasper Daniels (playing her older son) in Debra Granik’s Down to the Bone
If we lived in a world that singled out the real jewels in the rough and paid less attention to industry hype and herd-mentality thinking, Vera Farmiga would right now be breathing down Reese Witherspoon’s neck.
But of course we don’t and she’s not, and Farmiga, giving it one last shot and laying it on the line, personally arranged for last night’s Down to the Bone screen- ing at Laemmle’s Music Hall (and for guys like me to be invited)…and good for her. And cheers to Adrien Brody, an old friend of Farmiga’s (they co-starred in an ’02 film called Dummy) who dropped by to lend support.
My apologies to publicist Steven Zeller, who tried to get me to see Down to the Bone early last fall. And a respectful tip of the hat to Farmiga’s ICM agent Chris Matthews, who also dropped by to show support and cheer things along.
And hold on…who’s this Hugh Dillon guy? He gives an assured, quietly sexy performance as Farmiga’s drug-counsellor boyfriend who holds her hand and caresses her cheek as they both spiral downward in the third act. Damned if he isn’t another reason for me to feel like a dilletante columnist.
Adrien Brody, Farmiga, Dillon — Thursday, 1.12.06, 9:52 pm.
Dillon is one of those steady souls who comes into a scene and looks the lead actress right in the eye in an easy, friendly way and says it plain and true (like he does in his first scene with Farmiga) and right away you’re saying to yourself, “This guy’s cool…I trust him.”
Dillon should be happening. He should be the star of a TV cop show… something. He’s got that pale-faced Irish hard-guy thing…he should have been cast as a cop or a wise guy in The Departed.
Don’t mention my having missed Down to the Bone at Sundance ’04 — I’m having enough trouble coping as it is. Just take my word and rent it when it comes out on DVD, which will probably happen over the next four to six months.
I told Dillon after the screening that the movie has a unique tension that comes from pulling you in opposite directions. You want his and Vera’s characters to straighten up and fly right and your heart sinks when they fall off the wagon, but at the same time the bleakness of their lives and surroundings seems so futile and spiritually draining that you can understand the appeal of an occasional snort.
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