The Terry Press-is-leaving-DreamWorks-but- tangentially-staying-in-the-family story, as written by Variety‘s Nicole Laporte (who’s also the new co-editor of Variety on the Town). Press’s departure has nothing to do with how the Dreamgirls campaign has been going, but nobody would have even glancingly thought otherwise if she’d waited until the Oscars were over and done with. Her new marketing firm will undoubtedly kick ass.
Full-scale Pan’s Labyrinth tree in the main lobby of Hollywood’s Arclight theatre — Thursday, 1.11.07, 3:25 pm.
A simple five-word response: the singer, not the song.
Guillermo Arriaga‘s The Night Buffalo, a novel about an intense love triangle, intense sex, betrayal, death, schizophre- nia and stabs at redemption, has been made into a sharply-honed drama with the same title — produced by Arriaga and directed by Jorge Hernandez Aldana.
Night Buffalo writer-producer Guillermo Arriaga at United Talent Agency headquarters — Thursday, 1.11.07, 4:20 pm
It’ll have its debut at the end of next week at the Sundance Film Festival. This, obviously, is mainly what this article is about — bringing attention to Arriaga’s film and (perhaps) helping him to land a U.S. distribution deal, as well as catching up with a guy I regard as a friend.
In Arriaga’s words, The Night Buffalo is the story “of a man named Manuel (Diego Luna) and a very good friend named Gregorio (Gabriel Gonzalez), who is schizophrenic, and about Gregorio’s great love for his girlfriend Tania (Liz Gallardo). Manuel and Tania are the people Gregorio trusts the most, but while he’s going in and out of the mental asylums, they begin having a relationship until they fall in love. Obviously the relationship between Gregorio and his girlfriend is broken and the friendship is broken.
“When these friends seem to reconcile, Gregorio kills himself, and he leaves Manuel a box with secret messages after being dead, with letters, photographs, tapes, and slowly Manuel begins to get into the spiral of madness that his friend has been living. So this is a story of madness, of love, of a sense of being lost, of guilt, and how in the end you have to realize and assume the consequences of your acts and the valued importance of love.”
Arriaga is best known as the guy who penned Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s three films — Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel — as well as Tommy Lee Jones‘ The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Arriaga is also known for the big creative split that happened between himself and Gonzalez Innarritu sometime early last year (but not revealed until last May, during the Cannes Film Festival).
Just before I left I snapped this shot of Arriaga and Night Buffalo co-producer Jimena Rodriguez — Thursday, 1,11,07, 5:45 pm
I’ve been friendly with Arriaga since the time of 21 Grams (i.e., three years ago). We’ve been talking about sitting down and discussing The Night Buffalo for a long while now. We finally did this in a conference room at the United Talent Agency building yesterday afternoon. Here’s what resulted.
Our chat went on for the better part of an hour. It’s a bit quieter than the Sienna Miller conversation. I wasn’t in a journalistically pushy frame of mind. The gentle, soft-spoken Arriaga had that effect on me.
At the end of our chat I also met Night Buffalo co-producer Jimena Rodriguez, who will be with Arriaga in Park City along with the rest of the team.
Sundance honcho Geoffrey Gilmore says that “male culture, the fickleness of love, and desperate searching by lost souls are only some of the subjects this highly erotic, superbly photographed depiction of young lovers touches upon.
“As despicable as the behavior of this very dysfunctional community is, the need for love and absolution is relentless. As a treatise on the cognitive dissonance of romance, The Night Buffalo is pure and powerful storytelling. It may show us things that we don’t want to see, but it will eventually lead us to a fuller understanding of the mysterious power of love.”
The first Night Buffalo screening will be at 9 pm on Friday, 1.19.07, at Park City’s Egyptian theatre. Then comes a midnight screening on 1.20 at the Holiday Village followed by a 3:15 pm the next day (Sunday) at the same venue. The screening at the Tower theatre in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, 1.24, at 9 pm doesn’t count because nobody goes to Salt Lake City during Sundance and the festival is essentially over anyway by that day.
“The cretins rule in Alpha Dog, which has much the same entertainment value you get from watching monkeys fling scat at one another in a zoo or reading the latest issue of Star magazine. Of course a little of that nasty stuff may land on you, but such are the perils of voyeurism.
“Voyeurism that [director Nick] Cassavetes, a filmmaker with a lurid imagination and a talent for coaxing full-throttle performances from his actors, rewards with an embarrassment of vulgarities: lusciously tanned flesh, sensuously quivering muscles, cascades of blond hair, acres of tattoos, a sylph in a schoolgirl miniskirt (√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ö‚ÄúDance, bitch!√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ǭù someone cries), a three-way in a swimming pool, intimations of Nazism, a little tae kwon do and a lot of homegrown weed.
“The kids are not all right. Which is, like, you know, the point.” — N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis riffing on Alpha Dog….hilarious.
Speaking of critical effusion augmented by kneepads, the 12th annual Critics Choice Awards, organized and promoted by the Broadcast Film Critics Organization, is handing its awards out tonight in a ceremony at the Santa Monica Civic auditorium. E! will air the show on 1.20.07. I guess I’ll post the winners sometime tonight, but if the BFCA-ers were to suddenly disappear off the face of the earth, I would weep and grieve, yes…but I would wake up the next morning and get on with my life.
Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers, widely regarded as one of the most effusive blurb-whores in the business, has recorded a radio ad for United 93, reading from his own review copy. Dicey, right? No, actually — it doesn’t seem that way to me. Consider this explanation he offered to L.A. Times writer Rachel Abramowitz.
“I jumped into the mosh pit because of the film in question. We’re not talking Big Momma’s House 2. This is United 93, a film I rank among the best of 2006 [but which]’ has faced resistance from audiences who find the subject of what transpired on September 11th, 2001 too painful and way too soon for a movie to tackle. I disagree. Who knows how effective a radio spot is at encouraging viewers to let down their guards and let this movie in? But given how compassionately and artfully director Paul Greengrass has handled the complexities of United 93, I thought it was worth a try.”
“What do Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot, Adrien Brody in The Pianist, and Marcia Gay Harden in Pollock have in common? Two things: All of them won Oscars — and today none of them would stand a chance.
“Academy Award nominations used to be announced around Valentine’s Day, with trophies handed out in late March. Three years ago, that changed; nominations now come in late January. By the time you read this, any Oscar ballot that hasn’t already been mailed won’t be counted. And if you don’t feel you’ve caught up with the year’s best movies yet, you’re not alone.” — Mark Harris writing in his new EW column, “The Final Cut.”
The Central Ohio Film Critics have named Alfonso Cuaron‘s Children of Men the year’s best film, but handed the Best Director prize to The Departed‘s Martin Scorsese. The Northern, Southern, Southeastern, Northwestern and Southwestern Ohio Film Critics have yet to be heard from.
Stephen Frears‘ The Queen corralled 10 BAFTA (i.e., British Academy of Film and Television Arts) nominations this morning, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay (Peter Morgan) and Best Actress (Helen Mirren). And Casino Royale tallied nine nominations, including a deserved Best Actor nom for Daniel Craig. Wait….could all this have a little something to do with nationalistic solidarity?
The winners will be named on a BBC telecast of the London award ceremony on Sunday, February 11.
The Queen has it in the bag, of course, but for the sake of phony suspense The Departed, Babel, The Last King Of Scotland and Little Miss Sunshine have also been nominated for Best Film. And the other Best Director nominees besides Frears are Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Babel), Martin Scorsese (The Departed), Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine) and Paul Greengrass (United 93).
Morgan’s Queen script aside (i.e., another slam-dunk), the other Best Original Screenplay noms are for Paul Greengrass‘s United 93 script, Guillermo del Toro‘s Pan’s Labyrinthand Michael Arndt‘s Little Miss Sunshine.
The Best Adapted Screenplay noms are for Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Paul Haggis‘s Casino Royale script in the adapted screenplay section, with William Monahan (The Departed), Aline Brosh McKenna (The Devil Wears Prada), Peter Morgan and Jeremy Brock (The Last King Of Scotland) and Patrick Marber (Notes On A Scandal) rounding out the pack.
The Best Actor noms are Craig, Peter O’Toole (Venus), Leonardo DiCaprio (The Departed), Richard Griffiths (The History Boys…forget it), and Forest Whitaker (The Last King Of Scotland) .
Best actress will be won by Mirren, of course, but for appearances sake the great Penelope Cruz (Volver), Judi Dench (Notes On A Scandal), Meryl Streep (“The Devil Wears Prada”) and Kate Winslet (Little Children) have also been nominated.
“When I first meet Guillermo del Toro, writer/director of Pan’s Labyrinth, one of the true masterpieces of the decade, he is not promoting his own movie,” begins Sasha Stone‘s just-up profile. “He is there, along with his friend Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu to hold a special screening for their friend Alfonso Cuaron‘s new film, Children of Men.”
“Del Toro, Cuaron and Gonzalez Inarritu together have produced some of the year’s best offerings, even if Children of Men and Pan’s Labyrinth hit almost too late for Oscar voters or guild voters to catch up with them. Running the awards circuit can do wonders for films that were difficult to get made, namely in the money department. Being nominated for an Oscar at least doubles your profit out of the gate, which can mean life or death for a labor of love like Pan’s.
“While Babel is a strong best picture contender, and Pan’s the frontrunner for the foreign language Oscar, Children of Men is a highly acclaimed film yet so few Academy members, and perhaps guild members, seem to have seen it. It seemed odd to me that these two lauded directors would be doing anything but trying to gain recognition for their own work, but what you get immediately from them is that they aren’t like the typical Hollywood players.
“The Universal lot was not easy to get to on a Wednesday night. With all of the screenings and parties and voting, how can any Academy voter keep straight all that needs to be seen and done. This is why Del Toro and Gonzalez Inarritu went to the trouble of holding a special screening — in hopes of giving Academy members a chance to see it on the big screen, which greatly enhances the experience of Children of Men.
“Friendship, collaboration and relationships are important to them. The question isn’t why were they doing this for their friend but rather, how could they not do it?”
David Poland vs. various Hot Blog commenters on the fluctuating condition of the Oscar chances of Dreamgirls — a truly fascinating debate with some shrewd analyses. A few commenters have tried to nail Poland for backpedaling on having said Dreamgirls “will win the Best Picture Oscar” with Poland responding he never quite said that but what he said was actually this and blah, blah.
Phantom of the Opera, Munich and now this. Poland is deflecting, sweating… swinging his flintlock like Fess Parker‘s Davy Crockett fighting off Santa Ana’s troops at the Alamo. And for all of it, Dreamgirls might stilll win the Best Picture Oscar.
Poland: “The only tangible problem Dreamgirls is actually having right now is with the same half-dozen press members and a couple of awards consultants who have been gunning for it — with various motives — since November 15th or earlier. The fact is, if I suddenly claimed that I didn’t think Dreamgirls was going to win, based on what’s happened in the last two weeks, I would be a hypocrite and a fool… because nothing but positive things have happened…except in the press and on some blogs.”
“Is there anyone else…with daily spin as unbelievably malicious and stupid as what we’ve seen on Dreamgirls in the last week? Do you think that is a coincidence?”
This is really good reading. I love it. High drama, sharply worded posts….read it all.
And it continues: David Carr (a.k.a. “the Bagger”) has been Poland-swatted for passing along a purported linkage between Gail Berman’s departure and the general Dreamgirls slowdown, and he responded to this early today: “Mr. Poland gets so riled that the Bagger worries he might open up the HotBlog and see nothing but red mist where the headshot used to be. As for all the zigs and zags he ascribes to the Bagger, that’s a bit of overthinking. The Bagger has been out doing events, lots of them, and the lack of sleep and reporting time makes him needy and gullible, not riven by agendas.
“Yes, the Bagger picked Dreamgirls as a favorite to win early on, but he has no real rooting interest other than the running story, which grows more interesting every day. The Golden Globes take place Monday and many smart people don’t know which way the dramatic category is going to go: Departed or Babel? And the comedy/musical award is a three-way jump ball: Little Miss Sunshine, Dreamgirls and yes, Virginia, Borat.”
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