A $50 million deposit into Tom Hanks‘ I.R.A. account to star in Angels and Demons? The reported fee is actually $35 million plus a potential $15 million in back-end revenue. You be the judge.
I’m heading up to the San Francisco Film Festival in a couple of hours. I probably won’t be back into things until 5 or 6 pm. There’s a big opening night hoo-hah that I’ll probably try to attend.
The late Dan Cracchiolo, the hot shot get-around who worked as Joel Silver‘s top guy in the mid to late ’90s and a little beyond, once told me about a conversation he and Silver had about the size of the craniums of big movie stars. He said that Silver told him, “Dan, all big stars have really big heads.” Physically, he meant.
I’ve spoken to a fair number of big-name actors and can testify that this is frequently the case. Mel Gibson has a big head; ditto Kirk Douglas and Kevin Costner. (I once wrote that Costner “has a head the size of a bison’s.”) Warren Beatty has a fairly sizable head. So does Phillip Seymour Hoffman. I don’t recall Tom Cruise‘s head being all large, however.
I would say that Clive Owen, to judge by the above photo from Shoot ‘Em Up, certainly qualifies.
There’s obviously something about having a big head that gives a person presence, power…a sense of dominance. Full disclosure: I have a big head myself.
Big movie-star heads are a very consistent visual factor in day-to-day Hollywood life, and yet people who don’t mix it up with talent would never, ever learn of this from mainstream interviewers and columnists. I’m just saying…
Israeli critics and their editors are being bullied and strong-armed by the two biggest Israeli film distributors, Matalon and Forum Film, and Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke is trying to get others riled up about it. In response to this, Tel Aviv Time Out‘s senior critic and film editor Yael Shuv has written to lend his voice to the protest.
Why don’t these stories tell us what we want to know, and let us see what we want to see? Britain’s Daily Snack reported last night that Hugh Grant has been arrested for assault “after allegedly hurling a container of baked beans” at photographer Ian Whittaker yesterday morning (i.e., Tuesday) somewhere in west London.
What I want to know is, did Grant hit Whittaker with the beans in the head or the chest or where? Did the take-away container splatter all over the place and cover Whittaker’s face in brownish-red sauce and gooey-drippy beans?
And where’s the photograph? Can you imagine being a photographer and covered with baked beans that were thrown by a big-name actor and not taking a photo of yourself? Not to have done so argues with the primal instinct that drives all photographers. If I’d been Whittaker I would have persuaded a passerby to take the shot. And yet it happened a day and a half ago and no photo. This suggests to me that there wasn’t much to see.
Whittaker seems to be a well-respected photographer, by the way.
LX.TV is the media sponsor for the Tribeca Film Festival, and they’re sending along videos of the day-to-day action. Today’s video includes a clip of Al Gore, an interview with Paul Haggis, and red-carpet footage of the opening night party.
Ten minutes into watching Stephanie Daley, I was experiencing that “okay, don’t worry, this is going to be very good” realization. But I was also feeling slightly on-edge because I wanted this moody, expertly realized drama to stay on-track and build and dig in and deepen and so on. And it did that. And the performances were killer. And then came the ending, which, to me, felt a little too ambiguous and a touch sudden, as in “wait…that’s it?”
Endings are very, very important — you could argue that they’re almost the whole ball game — but Stephanie Daley is still one of the best solemn-and-sober women’s films I’ve seen in a long, long while. It is absolutely worth seeing on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, or on a weeknight. It will not make you groan or slump in your seat, and the notion of checking messages on your Blackberry in the second act will most likely not come up.
I’m forecasting these reactions because Amber Tamblyn‘s performance as the title character — a 17 year-old high-school junior who may have murdered her baby — is awfully damn good. I’m not using the word “astonishing” because Tamblyn looks and behaves like any young girl with issues pressing on her heart and mind, but “exceptional” definitely applies. It’s almost all in her eyes — a haunted, gloom- ridden, terrified emotional state — and yet she’s immensely watchable, attractively so, every second she’s on-screen. I could call her performance ravishing, but I wouldn’t mean erotically. Talk about a face trying to hide surging currents…
15 months ago I wrote that Tamblyn “is now on the Big Map because of this film.” I added that “it’s too bad after giving such a finely textured dig-deep performance in Daley that she’s agreed to star in the lowballing Grudge 2, but I don’t think this matters. Millions have seen Grudge 2 in theatres and on the screen — a much smaller group will wind up seeing Stephanie Daley, but those who do will not feel in the least bit burned or toyed or fiddled with. It’s all in the mind of the beholder, and it’s a free country.
Stephanie Daley is basically saying that the acts of procreation and giving birth weigh heavily on the soul, and are not to be even considered by kids who are way too young and unable to handle the burdens. The right-to-lifers are going to get hold of this film when it comes out on DVD and show it to high-school kids. It plays right into their view of things, and honestly? I found myself acknowledging as I watched it that the right-to-lifers have a point.
As the film begins the infant death has been discovered and Daley has been saying it was unintentional — that the infant was still-born. The newspapers have been calling her the “ski mom” because she gave birth to — unloaded — a 26 week-old fetus in a bathroom during a school ski trip, and the baby was later found dead in a garbage can.
Enter Lydie Crane (Tilda Swinton), a psychologist assigned to interview Steph- anie and advise the authorities whether or not she should be prosecuted. Crane herself is five months pregnant with a shaky marriage to a guy played by Tim Hutton giving her pause and some grief. (Except for anomalies like The Last Mimzy, it is axiomatic that all relationships with all characters played by Tim Hutton, rumored to be a Charlie Sheen-type hound in real life, are shaky — he has a face that says “alcoholic” and “likely to tomcat around given half a chance.”) Plus she gave birth to a stillborn child a year or so earlier.
This sounds like one of those only-in-the-movies set-ups, but it didn’t feel like a speed bump to me. Such is the level of craft and assurance that Brougher brings to Stephanie Daley. There’s also the beautiful photography by David Rush Morrison, and a kind of smooth painterly quality that seems to transform the innate gloominess of the material into something much more.
The plot isn’t stunningly original, but then again what is? Norman Jewison‘s Agnes of God (1985) was fairly similar, with Jane Fonda playing the older psychologist-investigator and Meg Tilley as a young nun who’d given birth and possibly killed the child. There’s also a 2004 novel by Jodie Picoult called Plain Truth, which is about a young Amish girl accused of killing her baby, and is also about a female lawyer with issues of her own who is assigned to look into the case.
Distributors were naturally scared by the baby-killing aspect, but First Look’s Ruth Vitale stepped up and entered into negotiations with the Stephanie Daley team out of Sundance ’06. But then “the deal got worse and worse” (or so says a person involved in the negotiations), apparently due to someone at First Look not liking the film as much as Vitale, and it all fell apart. Then Regent Releasing, lowballers who open films mainly to promote DVD traffic, stepped in.
Stephanie Daley has an 84% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir, a heavyweight critic, has called it “a major American film, announcing the arrival of an independent director who deserves all the hype.” Tamblyn won the Best Actress award at last summer’s Locarno Film Festival. Brougher won the Best Director award at the Jackson Hole Film Festival. It’s a woman’s film, sure, but the way-above-average pedigree should snag the attention of any half-serious filmgoer.
It’s now playing at Manhattan’s Angelika (subway sounds rumbling up from the floorboards!), and will open on 4.27 in Los Angeles at the Regent theatre — the stand-alone on La Brea, just south of Melrose. Daley will open on 5.11 in Boston, 5.25 in San Francisco, 6.1 in Chicago, 6.29 in Denver and yaddah-yaddah.
There was some talk a while back about Sean Penn‘s Into The Wild (Paramount Vantage, 9.21.07), an adaptation of Jon Krakauer‘s book about a young guy who tried to live like Jeremiah Johnson in the Alaskan wilderness but was found dead inside a bus four months later, possibly turning up at the Cannes Film Festival.
the real Chris McCandless
That may have been a slight possibility (Wild wrapped four months ago) and it may never have been one at all, but at least one solid reason why Penn’s film won’t be in France next month is that it’s about to do some extra shooting here in Los Angeles. Emile Hirsch (Alpha Dog, The Girl Next Door) is playing the wilderness guy, Christopher McCandless, with Vince Vaughan, Kristen Stewart and Jena Malone costarring.
Hirsch’s parents, Walt and Billie McCandless, are being played by William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden, and last week’s announcement from casting director Rich King said they’re looking for actors who resemble Hurt and Harden as they might have looked in their early 20s. Shooting is supposedly happening on Saturday, 4.28.
“WE ARE SEEKING A YOUNG CAUCASIAN MALE(20-24YRS) who looks like William Hurt,” the sheet said. “This is for a flashback scene so we need a college-aged guy who looks like William did in his early 20’s. He is approx 6’0 tall and slender with sandy blonde hair. He also needs to have a mustache (or can grow one quickly) and be willing to possibly remove it if asked.
“WE ARE [ALSO] SEEKING A YOUNG FEMALE (20-24YRS) WHO looks like Marcia Gay Harden. This is also for a flashback scene so we need a college-aged girl who looks like Marcia did in her early 20’s. She is 5’5 and wears a dress size 4-6 with shoulder length dark brown hair.”
Alaska — the place where young American malcontents (McCandless, Timothy Treadwell) go to commune with nature and inevitably die due to having under- estimated the potential dangers.
The American Pavilion — the big white schmooze tent on the beach at the Cannes Film Festival — has been re-christened as AmPav to discourage notions that it’s only for Yanks. “More than 40% of our membership is made up of journalists and industry professionals from countries other than the U.S.,” founder Julie Sisk has proclaimed. And something else has changed. Last year it cost $25 bucks to buy an advance entry into this well-run establishment — this year it’s been doubled to $50 in advance and $100 on-site. It’s still worth it but whoa.
Do any Manhattan-based HE readers believe that the High Line Festival, a “ten-day mash-up of music, film, comedy, visual art and performance” that will unfold on the lower west side from May 9th through the 19th, is stealing some of the heat from the Tribeca Film Festival, which is happening now through May 6th? One’s a movie festival, the other’s mainly about music. Robert DeNiro is the big Tribeca honcho, and David Bowie is “curating” the High Line. If I were working Tribeca day and night for twelve days I’d probably feel a little festival-ed out by the time the High Line came along. And they’re probably after some of the same corporate sponsors.
Good god, this original Star Wars trailer was really awful. It must have been cut by some old-school guys on the 20th Century Fox marketing team. It couldn’t have been cut by Marcia Lucas or anyone on the feature-version crew…could it have?
Here’s a slightly better one for The Empire Strikes Back that sounds (could it be?) like it was narrated by Harrison Ford.
What is it exactly about “The Bell Jar” and the grimly fatalistic Sylvia Plath saga (i.e., if not one and the same then at least closely related) that Julia Stiles and her mostly female producing partners (Celine Rattray, Daniela Taplin Lundberg and Galt Niederhoffer along with exec producers Christine Vachon and Jocelyn Hayes) feel has been untapped or insufficiently explored by Gwynneth Paltrow‘s Sylvia, which came out only four years ago and grossed $1,302,242 domestic?
Stiles is planning to star (and possibly direct or write?) a brand-new Plath drama in early ’08, based on the famed autobiographical novel, but who’s going to want to see it? Who outside of the hardcore Plath fans is going to say, “Great..another one!” After slogging through Sylvia and with the memory of that awful 1979 Bell Jar adaptation from director Larry Peerce and star Marilyn Hassett still vivid, I’m totally Plath-ed out.
Gregg Goldstein‘s Hollywood Reporter story says that the “1950s-era drama centers on young book editor Esther Greenwood (Stiles), who grows troubled by the social trappings of her time and slowly descends into mental illness.” Good God, we’ve seen it…we’ve seen it!
Stiles wrote and directed the dramatic short film Raving, Goldstein reports. Starring Zooey Deschanel and Bill Irwin, the short will premiere this weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival and May 8 on the Sundance Channel.
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