I abhor dubbed films, but if Sony Classics wants to get the jump on the American version of The Lives of Others that Sydney Pollack, Anthony Minghella and Harvey Weinstein are planning to make, why don’t they just hire English-speaking actors with German accents (including original Others cast members like Sebastian Koch, Ulrich Muhe and Martina Gedeck) to lip-synch an English-with-German-accents version that can be booked in the rube areas?
The Hollywood Reporter‘s Gregg Kilday announced today that the first new project under the just-renewed pact between the Weinstein Company and Mirage Prods., the production company run by Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella, will be — yoicks! — an English-language remake of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck‘s The Lives of Others, which won the Best Foreign Language Oscar last Sunday.
Note: image stolen from nervepop’s Bilge Ebiri
I wrote Pollack earlier this morning about this, mentioning that news about the Lives of Others remake is getting around (i.e., Bilge Ebiri wrote something also), and some people are going “whaat?”, and that perhaps he might want to talk some specifics about the remake. No reply yet (it helps if people can get back to me within the hour when I write them about a story or an item — they can blow me off if they want to & that’s fine, but the clock is always hyper-driving here and the pace is always 24/7 breathless) so here’s what I said:
“Surely it’s occured to you and Anthony that your Lives of Others remake for Harvey Weinstein will (a) lose force and gravitas if transposed to an American setting (i.e., the original being very specific to East Germany and Stasi wiretaps and the mid ’80s) and (b) it will therefore essentially become (as Peter Bart told Hollywood Wiretap‘s Pete Hammond a few days ago) The Conversation.
“I’m writing to ask if the American remake that Mirage/Weinstein Co. is doing is going to be set in the U.S. of A., and if so, in what time period? I’m presuming it would be shot here because a literal remake set in 1980s East Germany with the actors speaking German-inflected English would be silly.
“It staggers me to think that there’s a sizable American audience out there that’s refusing to see Florian’s film, despite it being one of the most emotionally moving political thrillers-slash-love stories ever made & despite last Sunday night’s Oscar, simply because they dislike reading subtitles. I can’t even call that posture ridiculous…you just have to throw up your hands.”
L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas is calling David Fincher‘s Zodiac “a study in the passage of time and the accumulation of massive amounts of information — a movie that seems to be unfolding inside of a cramped storage locker. And it is, though it may not sound like it, thrilling to behold.” This ties into that complaint mentioned in a piece by Village Voice critic Nathan Lee, a friend of his groaning that “I felt like I was stuck in a filing cabinet for three hours” and Lee responding, “Exactly!”
Here we go with another “Al Gore may be too fat to be president” riff, this one written by Pop Machine‘s Mark Caro. And here’s another Caro thing about dumping the short film Oscars.
An early February Nikki Finke Deadline Hollywood Daily story ran the following quotes: (a) “If Al Gore has slimmed down 25 or 30 pounds, Lord knows [what he might do]” and (b) “Gore’s weight, which has ballooned since he left office, is widely seen as a barometer of his ambitions, and the Clinton, Obama and Edwards campaigns have been studying his girth closely.”
This ties in with Mick LaSalle‘s “fat Al” riff from a couple of months ago.
There’s also this weight thing I wrote about a year ago: “[An Inconvenient Truth] is very persuasive, but it would be a tad more so if Gore were a little bit thinner. He’s not Oliver Hardy but he looks very well fed, and the metaphor is obvious. The under-message of An Inconvenient Truth suggests that a new kind of austerity is vital for the earth’s survival, and I feel it would play better if Gore looked like someone who practices more denial.”
Oscar’s biggest loser Kevin O’Connell, a sound-mixer who’s been nominated 19 times and lost every time, was allegedly “dissed” by Oscar-winning Dreamgirls sound-mixer Michael Minkler last Sunday night, to wit: “I think Kevin should go away with 19 nominations, Kevin is an okay mixer, but he should take up another line of work.”
Now The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil is reporting that O’Connell’s mom died Sunday night — very sad, very sorry — but it seems that Minkler was probably trying to be droll. Dry humor is an art form; ditto deadpan delivery. You have to get it just right. I’m guessing that Minkler’s timing was off and it came out wrong.
The wrinkle is that Kris Tapley riffed on the same thing about 24 hours ago, which Defamer picked up on.
It’s too early and it may seem a silly notion, but it may be time for all good people to rise up and band together in order to stop Johnny Depp from winning the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Sweeney Todd. If anyone wants to launch a website to help amplify this feeling and (who knows?) maybe nip this one in the bud, I’ll contribute $100 bucks…seriously. He’s the one bad guy in the bunch who, I feel, really doesn’t deserve to win. Surely others feel this way?
Okay, bad joke. But there’s this guy who wrote earlier today that he “believe[s] now that Depp is a 95% bet to be nominated for Best Actor as the title character in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street in a very, very crowded field of 2007 male movie performances…and an 80% chance to win.” No offense, but it kinda rubbed me the wrong way.
Obviously nobody’s seen Sweeney Todd. (I saw the excellent Patti Lupone stage revival in New York least year.) Tim Burton’s film could blow everyone away, and Deep might out-do his work in Edward Scissorhands…who knows? But we all know it’s basically going to be another odd-baroque Burtonesque production-design trip — lots of exaggerated leers, period atmosphere, arterial blood, white smocks, Sondheim and straight razors. Maybe there’s a heart element in the stage play that I’ve forgotten about. I suspect the film will be mainly be about classy, high- toned, eye-catching perversity — the imaginative world of Tim Burton’s navel.
And while I realize I’m in the minority, I feel that Depp is going to have to be awfully damn good in Burton’s musical to overcome the resentment effect from having starred in those three “entertaining” but infuriating Pirates of the Caribbean films. Director Gore Verbinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer are the perpetrators, I realize, and even I was okay with Depp’s japey attitude in the first installment. But Dead Man’s Chest was too long and a very rough sit, and I’d be lying if I said I was looking forward to At World’s End. (I can only say for sure that Keith Richards wears too much scuzzy makeup.)
All I know is that when I see Depp, I think about Cpt. Jack Sparrow and having a little touch of revenge. I don’t dislike Depp at all. It’s just that when I see him I think of all the money he made for the Pirates film and all the hours I’ve spent sitting in a theatre watching them so far, I think to myself, “A little payback might be fun.” By which I mean justified.
I’m not saying anyone else feels this way. It’s just me, it’s only February but I’m just sayin’ just for fun. It would be great if Sweeney Todd turns out wonderfully. Let’s hope for that. But if it doesn’t….
Though Walt Becker didn’t write Wild Hogs, its early progress is similarly angled, with much ‘ewww!’ mileage eked from the ways in which William H. Macy‘s sensitive-guy nature sometimes make him seem ‘gay,’ plus a randy cop (Scrubs‘ John C. McGinley) who misreads the traveling male quartet’s bond. Studio product once ridiculed homosexuals outright — now it goes the more insidious route of milking the straight characters’ ‘hilarious’ revulsion whenever they come in contact with or are mistaken for gay people.” — from Dennis Harvey‘s 2.24 Variety review.
Here’s what Zodiac costar Jake Gyllenhaal said to Newsday‘s Lewis Beale yesterday regarding David Halbfinger‘s N.Y. Times article about Fincher’s obsession with multiple takes (which Mark Ruffalo also commented upon in Devin Faraci‘s CHUD interview): “It is positive, whether or not I was willing to admit that at the time. It’s like working with a great teacher or coach — you hate them while you’re doing it, and then you win the game, and you’ll talk about that for the rest of your life. And the complications of that relationship are what make it so special. We did a lot of takes, but David wants something. He knows when something’s honest, and people have different ways of getting there.”
That was San Francisco Chronicle writer Leah Garchik who passed along buzz about that recent screening of Francis Copppola‘s Youth Without Youth, and not Tom Luddy.
“I always call international the new south, ” says House Party director Reginald Hudlin (also the current entertainment president of BET Networks). “In the old days, they told you black films don’t travel down South. Now they say it’s not going to travel overseas.” — from Michael Cieply‘s N.Y. Times piece about the legend of films with African-American casts, backdrops and storylines being weak overseas. It’s a situation that “may” be changing, Cieply says.
During an on-stage interview at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade theatre last December, Alan Arkin said the job he wants more than anything else is to be in a big-studio franchise movie, the kind of film in which he’d have to gesture wildly in front of a green screen and go, “Look out, the thing is coming!”
I don’t know if Arkin’s winning of the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Little Miss Sunshine had anything to do with this, but his agent has gotten him what he wants — the role of CONTROL in a big-screen version of Get Smart with Steve Carell in the Don Adams/”Maxwell Smart” role. It’ll be crude and common, of course (Adam Sandler protege Peter Segal is directing), and Arkin — who knows the difference between smart, sophisticated comedy and coarse, low-rent crap — will be delighted with the paycheck, especially if they make two or three. But inwardly he’ll be mortified.
Termite art — that ‘s the best term I’ve heard so far (taken from a recent review by the Village Voice‘s Nathan Lee) that summarizes the aesthetic essence of Zodiac. And when you talk to Robert Graysmith, the author of the two Zodiac books (“Zodiac” and “Zodiac Unmasked“) that served as the basis of “Jamie” Vanderbilt‘s script, you get the idea that he’s a kind of termite himself — a relentless eater and chomper of information.
Graysmith is the main character in the film (wth his name used and everything), and he’s played by Jake Gyllenhaal in exactly this mold — a guy who can’t stop absorbing and gathering data. Graysmith sure as hell was that guy when he was on the Zodiac set and watching Fincher make the film. He wrote a book about it calling “Shooting Zodiac” (Berkeley Books) but he’s ambivalent about having it published, for some reason. He’s guessing, I suppose, that the attention given to the film over the next few weeks will surge sales of his two “Zodiac” books and his editor doesn’t want a third Graysmith/”Zodiac” book confusing anyone.
The book will probably come out concurrent with the Zodiac DVD, which is going to be a mother in terms of extras and docs. The DVD’s production budget, Graysmith says, is around $1.5 million.
I mentioned my opinion that the end of the film should perhaps have ended like Vanderbilt’s screenplay did, with “Graysmith”/Gyllenhaal delivering an eight- or nine-page soliloquy that reviews all the persuasive evidence in support of Graysmtih’s belief that Arthur Leigh Allen was the Zodiac slayer.
On the page, this scene works as a kind of crescendo-climax. It’s not entirely satisfying but it gives a semblance of half-assed completion and finality, even if Allen was never arrested for the killings. Fincher’s chose, however, not to try and deliver any kind of ending along these lines, even an intellectual one. Graysmith says that Fincher told Vanderbilt at one point, “Jamie, we’re not trying to convince the audience [of Allen’s guilt]…,that’s not what the movie’s about.”
“We’re satisfied that it was Allen,” Graysmith says. “There was all kinds of evidence…footprints in the garden…I think he was deliberately pitting the police departments against each other…I think it’s this guy.”
Graysmith will be at Thursday night’s Zodiac premiere on the Paramount lot, at which time I hope to take a picture or two. The above jpeg was provided, believe it or not, by his publicist.
I like this riff on the film by Entertainment Weekly‘s Owen Gleiberman:
“Explaining a mystery is an act of reassurance. It makes us feel that chaos has been defeated, and the forces of order restored. Zodiac, David Fincher’s vastly intricate and dazzling drama about the hunt for the serial killer who terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area starting in 1969, offers no such soothing closure, and that’s part of what’s haunting about it. It spins your head in a new way, luring you into a vortex and then deeper still, fascinating us as much for what we don’t know as what we do.”
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