Changing your agent is like buying a new car. It feels better to drive one with that fresh-car smell, especially if it has a more powerful engine or a better-sounding music system, or because it’s more energy-efficient. I know that cars are primarily about emotion and secondarily about function. That said, I’ve been waiting for Babel director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu to jump ship since around this time last year, which is when his longtime Endeavor agent and ally John Lesher took the job of running Paramount Vantage. He stayed with Endeavor through the award-season Babel campaign out of familial loyalty, but on February 26th it was back to brass tacks. He’s now a CAA guy.
There’s nothing wrong with Cate Blanchett taking a straight paycheck job in the forthcoming Indiana Jones film, which people are somewhat interested in seeing but also skeptical about because Harrison Ford (a.k.a., the guy who catches z’s in the back seat of his girlfriend’s car while she’s shooting on a nearby sound stage) turns 65 in July.
Not only is the stringbean-thin Blanchett great at tongue-in-cheek vamping (she was the best thing in The Good German), but she’ll look like a freshly-sprouted flower in Indy IV alongside Uncle Festus. She probably wants to lighten up anyway after recently completing three heavy roles (in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Golden Age and I’m Not There) following her big melodramatic ’06 run in German, Notes on a Scandal and Babel.
Premonition, the poorly reviewed Sandra Bullock film, tracked at 75, 25 and 19 yesterday morning, which means it’ll earn somewhere north of $15 million. 300 may be #1 again but expect at least a 45% to 50% drop. Chris Rock‘s I Think I Love My Wife — 60, 31 and 11 — will do mezzo-mezzo business, maybe around $10 or $12 million. Dead Silence — 42, 20, 4 — is no Saw. Of all the forthcoming March openers, Blades of Glory (Will Ferrell as a preening, amusingly obnoxious ice-skating champ) is looking the best (64,40, 7). Reign Over Me, opening a week earlier than the Ferrell (3.23), is only at 48, 29 and 2. Not good — the gut-instinct types are shrugging their shoulders.
Reign Over Me is Mike Binder‘s “best film, and these are two of the best performances I’ve seen from either Adam Sandler or Don Cheadle, and that is saying something for both of them,” writes HE columnist Moises Chiullan (i.e., “Arthouse Cowboy”) from South by Southwest.
“What’s that? Sandler isn’t an actor, he’s a comedian? And Cheadle playing the straight man is no big task? Wrong, wrong, wrong.
“Sandler has everything he needs in his tool kit that every great American actor has had: humor, charisma, emotional sensitivity, and depth among them. He usually doesn’t get to show them off. He says he purposely doesn’t read what the press writes because of what it does to you to have to endure that kind of defamation and ridicule. It’s like asking to get picked on at school.
“I don’t think you’re qualified to be a film critic if you can’t objectively give Sandler his due for this movie. I don’t know how Hollywood politics work, but this performance…..you know, I’m not gonna go there, this is enough of a rave already. I’ll put it this way — if you think you saw all the nuance he had to offer in Punch Drunk Love, you’re sadly misled.
As for Don Cheadle, another comment brought up in the q & a was how difficult it is to play the straight man — having the script and knowing everything that’s really going on, but having to spontaneously, moment-to-moment go back to the place where you can’t see in the other guy’s head and feel that helplessness…that’s a bigger challenge than you’d think. Cheadle knocks it out of the park, across a state line, and out of another park altogether.
“You seriously have to see this movie. It’s more relevant than every movie I can think of currently in active, first-run release, and as summer approaches, you never know when you’ll get to see a movie that really has something to say anytime soon.”
Some people who saw Judd Apatow‘s Knocked Up at South by Southwest (including Variety critic Joe Leydon) are doing cartwheels. Leydon is calling it “uproarious…more explosively funny, more frequently, than nearly any other major studio release in recent memory…indeed, even more than the filmmaker’s smash-hit sleeper The 40-Year-Old Virgin.”
I’m sure that’s great news for those of us who didn’t laugh all that much at Virgin. I know I’m not the only one who felt that most of the comedic material in the first hour (i.e., before the better, more emotionally wholesome second-half portion with Catherine Keener) was too broad and coarse and…I don’t know, too snapping- bath-towel? As well as, like, way too Seth Rogen. A nurse ripping off Steve Carell‘s chest hair with a bandage…yawwww! A pretty drunken blonde girl vomits in Car- ell’s lap…funny! I guess I need to watch more ESPN and eat more hamburgers and grow hair on my back.
I’m glad Knocked Up is hitting a nerve — good for Apatow, I don’t begrudge — but Knocked Up has, in my eyes, a massive credibility problem. The problem is that blonde German- descended shiksa women like Katherine Heigl, who plays a successful on-camera correspondent for E! Entertainment in Apatow’s film, never give the time of day to unemployed, stubby-faced party animals like Seth Rogen, especially when he looks like a chunky beer-head who hasn’t exercised since 1997. Not even if she’s dead drunk on shots of tequila.
In real life (i.e., outside the Apatow realm), Heigl women never fuck Rosen-type guys because they can do better and they know it — it’s that simple. The only way it could possibly happen in actuality would be if the Rogen type was (a) extremely rich, (b) extremely funny or (c) extremely well-connected in the enter- tainment industry…but let’s be honest and admit that such situations are excep- tions to the rule.
In short, and to coin a phrase, “Houston, we have a problem.” Apatow does, I mean. If anyone besides myself is inclined to consider such things. I say this realizing that 93% of the audience won’t care. To those 7% — those few, those hallowed few — hold fast!
Reign Over Me costars Adam Sandler, “never making a false step while maneuvering though vertiginous mood swings,” and Don Cheadle, “deftly commingling instinctive decency with quiet desperation, are individually excellent in the film, and bring out the best in each other. And the pic itself transcends its real but relatively minor flaws to score a satisfyingly potent impact.” — Variety critic Joe Leydon in a just-posted review.
Showest has been downgraded, devalued, etc. Nikki Finke reported this a few days ago, and now N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman has done the same. And by George, I think we’ve got it. “Mass events at places like ShoWest have been replaced by one-on-one contact with the exhibitors responsible for the lion√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s share of American cineplexes, like AMC, Regal and Cinemark,” Waxman writes. “Studio executives say they can cover most of the country with a few phone calls or a visit to an exhibitor√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s headquarters in Kansas City, Mo., or Knoxville, Tennessee.”
As this Pete Hammond audio interview with Mike Binder confirms, Reign Over Me (Columbia, 3.23), which Binder directed and wrote, has a gnarly marketing issue that’ll require some expert finessing.
Reign Over Me director-writer Mike Binder (l.); Pete Hammond
The over-30 couples who would absolutely respect and admire and probably love this film are disinclined to attend because Adam Sandler plays the lead, and the under-30 popcorn-munchers who love Sandler’s dumb comedies are (probably) cool to it also because they can smell the quality aura coming off this film and they (probably) don’t want that — they want funny-irreverent Sandler shtick with a low-rent slacker attitude.
This puts Reign Over Me between a rock and a hard place, and one way Columbia marketers are trying to finagle this is by sending Binder and Sandler on a city-by-city promotional tour in which they’ll do live electronic interviews and post-screening q & a’s. The tour won’t include stops in New York or Los Angeles — Sandler wants to avoid dealing with the N.Y./L.A. journo-critic elites (i.e., the majority of whom resent him going in because they believe he’s an avatar of cultural degradation) and concentrate on supposedly friendly hinterlanders.
“This is not the kind of film that we often see big-studios making,” Hammond says in the beginning. “This has more of an indie feel.”
Binder later discloses that he initially wrote Reign with Tom Cruise in mind for Sandler’s lead role (i.e., an emotionally catatonic ex-dentist who spends all his time playing video games, eating Chinese good and listening to The Who and Springsteen on vinyl) and that the Don Cheadle part (an old dental-school friend of Sandler’s with emotional-sharing issues of his own) was going to initially be played by Javier Bardem until he fell out.
“It’s a hard movie to sell,” Binder says. “I don’t have big expectations. My movies never make any [real] money. It’s true. They come out, people say they like ’em, and….I mean, we just saw 300 open last weekend to $70 million dollars.”
Binder says he actually considered cutting an end-of-Act Two scene when Sandler’s character has an emotional breakdown and unloads his pain about having lost his family, etc. It’s a totally “money” payoff thing and perhaps Sandler’s finest moment as a serious actor…and Binder wanted to cut it because he began to feel uncomfortable about what he felt might be a too-heavy emotional impact.
Here, for the fourth or fifth time, is my Reign review from last August.
If the guy who hired you goes down, you too will go down. Jungle law says you can’t just kill a lion — you have to also kill all the lionesses and cubs and political allies. And so Ruth Vitale, the former Paramount Classics co-president who was hired 16 or 17 months ago by the recently- whacked Henry Winterstern to run the distribution of First Look Studios, is jobless once again.
Today’s announcement follows Winterstern’s departure by about 12 days. Vitale will stay on as a First Look consultant through the end of the year. I find this stuff upsetting. For me, Hollywood execs being suddenly dropped through trap doors is no less startling or traumatic than than that cell-phone video of Saddam Hussein‘s execution, or the whackings on The Sopranos.
Bought a copy yesterday afternoon of Warner Home Video’s just-released DVD of Peter Ustinov‘s Billy Budd (1962). Black-and-white scope is one of my favorite visual formats, and what an exquisite and luscious silver-toned transfer this is — spotless, velvety smooth, ultra-crisp perfection with each carefully-lit value and tiny detail on view, and assembled exactly right.
(l.) Terrence Stamp as Billy Budd in ’62; as Wilson in The Limey some 37 years later
The film itself is taut and intelligent and finely sculpted. If you have the character to get into a film that delivers in an exacting, step-by-step way and which uses the technique of just-so dialogue and characters that build and build upon themselves, it will hold you every step of the way. The dialogue is plain and straight in the way that seamen and gentlemen officers once spoke (“I’m sorry for the manner but not the matter”), but heavy with the irony and immense sadness of Herman Melville’s classic tale, which is basically about a meeting of child-like innocence and craggy evil about a British warship in the 1790s.
And the performances! Much better than I remembered them, especially Robert Ryan‘s Claggart , Melvyn Douglas‘s wise old Danish sailor (I forget the character’s name) and Terence Stamp‘s Billy — one of the more striking debut performances ever.
I thought it was generally understood that Scarlett Johansson hurt herself pretty badly by starring in the triple black-spot whammy last year that was Scoop, The Black Dahlia and The Prestige, and that further alliances with Woody Allen feel like thin-ice excursions given the close-to-shocking atrociousness of Scoop. (Didn’t Joe Queenan write a Guardian column last fall about how Johansson is just about over? Scoop was so bad it made me think that perhaps Allen himself had lost it. He could never have made anything that bad in the ’70s or ’80s or ’90s.)
Hence, Johansson’s decision to costar in Allen’s next film, which will mainly shoot in Barcelona this summer, may be something she lives to regret. (Or the opposite. After all, Allen made one of his all-time best, Match Point, only two years ago.) Rebecca Hall, Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz will also star. The Spain-set film will be Allen’s fourth in a row outside the U.S. The last three were shot in London — Match Point, Scoop and the upcoming Cassandra√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s Dream, a dark, Jules and Jim-ish romantic drama that costars Ewan McGregor, Colin Farrell and Hayley Atwell.
And while we’re on the topic of Americans (and American filmmakers) shooting in Spain, remember Whit Stillman‘s Barcelona! A little too dry and reserved here and there, but overall a penetrating, almost haunting work that I only caught up with last year (at the suggestion of Mike Binder, a friend of Stillman’s).
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