And so begins the rejuvenated, out-of-the-woods, post-hard drive crash, five-pounds-lighter-due-to-stress phase of Hollywood Elsewhere, with only five days to spare before the flight to Cannes. The new hard drive is installed, all the programs are re-installed and running, and pretty much everything is back to normal.
Before anything else I need to give a shout-out to Angelo Moratta, the guy who got me out of this mess more than anyone else. Angelo runs a shop about 50 miles north of Manhattan called Mindtrain Computer Services, and if you’re ever in any kind of serious dutch with your computer you need to call this guy, seriously. He’s got one of those great remote control hookup systems in which you let him see your computer screen and access everything in it, and it’s just like having a house call. Plus Angelo’s got a relaxed and gentle voice (with a slight New Yawk accent), and he never gets riled and always figures it out, whatever the issue is.
Never trust the Geek Squad, never trust the Geek Squad, never trust the Geek Squad. They’re nice guys and they know what they know, but they’re not smart all the way around the track and they charge too much and they take forever. Or the fairly smart guy you spoke to the day before is taking a day off and the other guy who’s half-acquainted with the situation doesn’t come in until 3 pm. Forget ’em, bad news, exasperation time.
The only problem now is that it’s pretty warm outside and fairly stuffy in here, and the Oscar-winning lease holder on this apartment removed the air-conditioner — the one I bought a couple of years ago from the second-hand guy down the street — and put it under a bunch of boxes in an overstuffed hall closet. Do I spend an hour hooking it up (i.e., buying an extension cord and electrical power strip, cutting out a precisely cut slab of cardboard to seal off the window, finding masking tape to make sure it’s nice and tight) or just get down to today’s column items? These are the choices and the terms….and it’s always something.

The Los Angeles Film Festival (6.21 through 7.1) will kick off with Kasi Lemmons‘ Talk to Me (Focus Features), the real-life story of Ralph Waldo “Petey” Greene (Don Cheadle), an ex-con who became a talk-radio personality in the 1960s in Washington, D.C., and close with Danny Boyle‘s Sunshine (Fox Searchlight), the mostly well-reviewed space-mission sci-fi adventure that’s already opened in Europe. I asked for a screening opportunity in L.A. since I’ll be able to catch it France or Italy at a commercial cinema later this month, but the Fox Searclighters didn’t want to show favoritism (or something along those lines). So I’ll pay to see it and run a reaction during the Cannes Film Festival, or maybe a little bit after.

Yesterday’s news: Michael Moore’s Sicko, the long-awaited health-care doc due to premiere in Cannes, will be released domestically on June 29th by Lionsgate. The Weinstein Company will handle marketing and publicity and cover all the p & a costs whiel Lionsgate, which handled the release of Farenheit 9/11, will book theatres and handle physical distribution. TWC will also handle international sales. How interested will European auds, who enjoy pretty good government-supported health care benefits, will be in an exploration of how ridiculously costly health care is over here? Your guess.

Ben Kingsley, Tea Leoni and Luke Wilson in the trailer for John Dahl‘s You Kill Me, which is automatically afforded exceptional interest due to the Dahl-Kingsley configuation.

Jon Favreau’s Iron Man, set for release by Paramount in May 2008, is an adaptation of Stan Lee‘s Marvel comic about “troubled” billionaire Tony Stark (Robert Downey) who’s forced to wear a “life-support suit” after a life-threatening accident, and thereafter turns this hindrance into a crime-fighting alter ego routine. (Sounds more or less like the same old Bruce Wayne shit, no?)
As some of you know, IESB posted video footage last Thursday of a guy (Downey?) in an Iron Man suit between takes in Long Beach. Yesterday Paramount attorney’s pressured IESB’s server to shut the shite down due ot perceived copyright infringement. Except it wasn’t quie that, and IESB editors Robert and Stephanie Sanchez hassled it out with Paramount and finally got the site up again this morning.
Here’s the IESB version of how it all went down:
“The IESB is back up and running. We want to thank everyone for their phone calls, emails and postings. We were just put back online around 8:00am after being shut down yesterday at 2:15pm Pacific.
“To answer everyone√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s questions, yes, it is true [that] Paramount Pictures sent a letter to our hosting company demanding that our site be shut down immediately claiming copyright infringement from our spy video and images of the Iron Man set that are posted here.
“We were not notified in any way, or asked to take it down, we were literally in the middle of posting a story and all of a sudden our server was gone. We called our hosting company, they transferred us to legal and we were forwarded the letter that was sent from Paramount on Friday that demanded the site be shut down — a letter we were never sent and weren’t given any warning about.
“Here’s the kicker — the video and pictures that were in question, were IN NO WAY property of Paramount Pictures. Both were shot from a parking lot of a 24 Hour Fitness Center across the street from the Iron Man shoot that was taking place on a PUBLIC STREET in Long Beach CA. There was no violation of copyright whatsoever.
“After hours on the phone yesterday with Paramount reps (who had no clue about it) they completely apologized and said this should have never happened, it was the idiots in the Paramount legal department who did this without checking with anyone else. But, it was too late when they finally got a retraction together, the legal dept. at our hosting company was already closed and had gone home for the day and wouldn’t receive any of Paramount’s requests until the morning.
“So we just had to wait, and wait some more. We lost traffic, we lost respect for the studio, we lost out financially and most importantly it was just really a blow to our reputation.
“Without even asking, the online community posted and supported us through the entire ordeal. Everyone’s sentiments and support are very much appreciated.
“We need to say thanks to our online colleagues, LatinoReview, TheMovieBlog, Ropeofsilicon, Collider, FilmStalker, Ain√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t It Cool News, Obsessedwithfilm, Firstshowing, Film.com, Cinema Blend, Cinematical and the many others who posted or sent in kind words of support. Thanks guys!
“Robert Sanchez and Stephanie Sanchez and the entire IESB team.”

A special edition DVD of Alfred Hitchcock‘s To Catch a Thief came out today — special because it was mastered, for the first time, from the original VistaVision elements, which means more visual detail and fullness of color. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. Paramount Home Video put out an okay-looking Thief DVD about six or seven years that provided the matted 1.85 to 1 aspect ratio of VistaVision, but without the visual splendor. Thief cinematographer Robert Burks won an Oscar for his efforts. Some of the film — okay, a fair amount of it — is engrossing as far as it goes, but among Hitch’s glorious 1950s films, it’s easily his least substantial. That’s not a problem, but it’s mainly pleasurable for a kind of elegant-lull quality — the look, the framing, Cary Grant‘s mild-mannered performance, the easy-does-it vibe, the occasionally awesome editing. Not the “all” of it as much as the way it all kind of goes down like a swallow of champagne on a warm summer’s night on the Riviera. The way it mostly breezes along without any noticable sense of urgency.

20 minutes to go until the cyber cafe closes. Why can’t they stay open until midnight? 19 minutes now. It’s an Australian place — it’s called Tuck Shop — and it doesn’t feel spirtually or geographically in character for a down-under establishment to close early. I’ve never known an Australian guy to not stay at a party until the wee hours or not close a bar down. I’ve just wasted another five minutes — 14 minutes to go.

When I get my computer back tomorrow and everything’s technologically jake (I hope, I pray), I’ll bang out some kind of longer tribute piece about 28 Weeks Later (Fox Atomic, 5.11), which I saw this evening. (I’d write it now but the cyber cafe I’m sitting in on West 49th Street closes at 11 pm, and they’re charging $11 bucks an hour. Hey, why not $15?)

28 Weeks Later is a “wow” second-act piece — more of a continuation of 28 Days Later than a sequel. It doesn’t thematically build upon or add intriguing new layers to Danny Boyle‘s original raging-zombies flick. It’s not The Godfather, Part II, in other words — it’s The Empire Strikes Back, complete with a semi-cliffhanger finish that doesn’t end the story it’s been telling as much as bring to an abrupt close.

Which I was totally fine with. It’s a wildly inventive, envelope-pushing, high-end jolt movie all the way. I was staring at it open-mouthed, amazed and thrilled and even half-stunned at times. (Honestly.) Anyone who liked the first will certainly feel satisfied (i.e., enjoyably throttled) by it. But it’ll be up to whomever directs the third chapter — the completion of the trilogy — to really bring home the bacon. That isn’t to say that 28 Weeks Later doesn’t rousingly do what it sets out to do. You just have to process it as a “more of” thing rather than “heavier or stronger than.” Which, for me, filled the bill and then some.

Computer trauma update: It’s 3:35 pm on a beautiful blue-sky day, and after almost 24 hours of high anxiety I’m almost out of the woods. I came to my senses last night and realized that buying a brand new computer simply because the hard drive had crapped out was ridiculous. (Thanks to those who stated this in the reader replies.) I obviously wasn’t thinking clearly yesterday. All I was saying to everyone was, “I have to fix this problem fast.”

I found a Brooklyn-based computer repair guy named Marcel (his company is called Big Island Interactive) on Craig’s List around 8 ayem this morning. He told me to just bring over the old unit plus a new hard drive (in case he couldn’t repair the malfunctioning one) and a fresh copy of Windows XP (in case the old Windows data is irrevocably screwed up) to his brownstone apartment on Park Place in the Park Slope area.

So I went back to the Best Buy store on B’way and Houston around 10:30, returned the new computer (Windows Vista is a little twitchy…I played around with it last night), picked up the old one, went uptown to buy a new hard drive and a fresh Windows XP disc, hopped on the Q train and delivered everything to Marcel around 2 pm. A hour later he called and said he might be able to repair the old hard drive — he’ll know more by this evening.

I’m now sitting in a combination post-office and internet cafe near the corner of Flatbush Ave. and Park Place. God willing, the troubles will be over by midday tomorrow.

There’s not much time to file before I have to get back on the Q train and catch a screening of 28 Weeks Later at 6 pm. I recorded an interview with the film’s director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo yesterday afternoon, just before that Spider-Man 3 screening at Leows’ Lincoln Plaza that I didn’t attend because of those wonderful tekkies at Gateway. Maybe I can post this if I can find another decent internet cafe after the screening.

There’s a Friedrich_Nietzsche line that Nick Nolte‘s character says in Karl Reicz‘s Who’ll Stop The Rain?: “When in danger, always move forward.”

Today was a moderately good day until the hard drive on my relatively new Gateway laptop (a nice 17-incher with a 160 gig hard drive) hiccuped and froze up and was suddenly functional no more. “A bad hard drive,” the Geek Squad guy at B’way near Houston said about 90 minutes after I first realized I had a problem. No repairs, over and done with, tough luck.

I didn’t purchase unit-replacement insurance when I bought the Gateway for the second time last December (the first unit stopped putting out sound and had to be replaced), so I had to fork over big-time for a brand new unit. The Geek guy swore that Gateway laptops, despite my bad luck, are highly reliablle. Welcomely, the price has dropped to about $700 — down from $1100 five months ago — and of course the new one has Windows Vista rather than Windows XP.

A voice was telling me last November I should buy a Mac; I didn’t listen because I didn’t want to repurchase all the programs (FTP software, photo and video editing, etc.) and because the nice ones cost a good deal more, but I should have just sucked it in and bitten the bullet. If I had I wouldn’t be going through this crap right now. I vaguely disliked and certainly didn’t trust PC’s before today’s misfortune — my feelings are much more adamant now.

All the data and photos and e-mail is being transferred to CDs by that Geek Squad guy (it may take him until tomorrow morning) and I’m going to have to contact all the people I bought programs from and submit the required numerical data so I can re-download and re-install everything. I’ll hopefully be able to file a couple of stories tonight or certainly by tomorrow morning, but wont be back up to full groove speed for at least a couple of days, and more likely not until Thursday or Friday.

The hard-drive issue happened right before I was about to see Spider-Man 3 at the Lincoln Plaza. In Contention‘s Kris Tapley (fresh from a long coast-to-coast road trip) was with me. I’d been told by an IMAX publicist that passes would be waiting for the 5 pm show, but the staffers at the theatre couldn’t find any message or confirmation of this, and by the time they’d sorted it out the sold-out show had begun. So we went to see it a regular 35mm theatre, and then the shit started when I turned on the copmputer to check e-mails. Awful, awful, awful.

Thanks to Houston’s Michael Bergeron for passing along this shot of a pair of Hondo 3-D viewing glasses left over from the original 1953 release of this John Wayne film. (“Ain’t that a Shane?”) It was announced last week that the 3D version of Hondo will be screened at the Cannes Film Festival.

These 3D specs appear to be in awfully good shape considering they’re 54 years old and made of featherweight cardboard

“I look at the people I meet. No one’s dying to have a lot of responsibility in their lives. Very few people are looking at life and thinking, ‘Gee, I wish there was another thing to occupy my time and energy.’ Our characters are definitely trying to avoid that type of thing.” — Knocked Up star Seth Rogen analyzing schlub culture in Sharon Waxman‘s N.Y. Times piece about Judd Apatow‘s focus on (and identification with) nerdy/schlub types in his films.

Can there be any doubt that it was American schlubs who contributed a significant portion of last weekend’s huge Spider-Man 3 haul? Apatow’s Knocked Up characters pointedly mention wanting to catch Spider-Man 3 in the film. Way to go, Judd and Seth…that’s really something to be identified with and be proud of.