Criterion has finally announced the release of its single-disc DVD of Peter Yates‘ The Friends of Eddie Coyle (’73). It comes out May 19th. Nothing much besides a remastered high-def version of the film, which Yates approved. Okay, there’s a Yates commentary track, a stills gallery and a booklet featuring a new essay by film critic Kent Jones and a 1973 Rolling Stone profile of Robert Mitchum, based on a set visit. Here‘s an mp3 of the coffee shop gun-talk scene between Mitchum and costar Steven Keats.
The Criterion people think they’re being cute by dropping unsubtle hints about their upcoming Friends of Eddie Coyle DVD, which was a done deal months ago. The drawing obviously alludes to the masks worn by Alex Rocco‘s gang in the opening North Shore robbery. The CC guys felt obliged to add the word “Beantown” to the caption. Quit screwing around and release the DVD already.
“I remember exactly where and when I first stumbled upon The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which is even more shocking considering I was drunk. It was during my third year of law school in the fall of 2000 when, on any given night, the odds were distinctly in favor of me being drunk. But this was a rare night, however, as I didn’t immediately pass out when I got home. Instead, I found myself laying on my bed in a mildly drunken stupor, flipping through the channels in an attempt to find adequate background noise to the impending pass-out.
“And that’s when I came upon a scene with these two dudes talking in a diner. From the tone and color of the film, it was obviously a 70’s flick. And having no idea who Robert Mitchum was, it wasn’t until later that I realized he was the one giving this absolutely engrossing monologue about why he’s so careful when buying illegal guns. And as drunk as I was, I was so roped in by this simple monologue that I willed myself to a semblance of sobriety so I could stay awake for the next 80-odd minutes watching what is one of the best low-down gangster flicks out there.” — From a recent piece by Seth Freilich on Pajiba.com.
When in doubt on a slow news day, bring out Eddie Coyle!
I had a few problems with the first half of Gone Baby Gone when I first saw it three or four weeks ago. On top of which I was so whipped I had trouble keeping my eyes open. On top of which I had to be somewhere so I bailed at the one-hour mark, intending to catch it again in a more rested state. I saw it again last week and this time wide awake and right to the end, and it was a whole different deal.
Ben Affleck
I still have beefs, but the ending is quite strong — deliciously disturbing, I’d say — and in my book that’s almost the whole ball game.
For the finale alone, Gone Baby Gone is a first-rate drama. It’s also a formidable Boston crime film. The atmosphere is genuine, if not quite in the rich-underworld vein of Peter Yates‘ The Friends of Eddie Coyle. It’s a morally complex film that leaves you teetering on a seesaw with a shot of irony that doesn’t wash out, and in fact stays with you for days.
Ben Affleck has done a better-than-decent job in his maiden directing effort, and with the acclaim this film is already getting he’ll have gone a long way to erasing memories of his career-destroying relationship with Jennifer Lopez. He’s scored as a director, he can still work as an actor (as far as that goes) and he can kick ass any day he wants as a political commentator or candidate, even. He’s totally fine.
The best kind of endings build to a climax and drive their thematic point home clear and true. But a Gone Baby Gone-type ending — one that pulls you in conflicting ways with equal force, and both seeming like the “right” course — is nothing to snort at. It’s not quite up to the legendary ending of Eric von Stroheim‘s Greed, but it’s aiming at the same archery target. (And it hits it.) And if you ask me it packs a slightly stronger punch than the finale of Clint Eastwood‘s Mystic River.
Eastwood’s ’03 film shares two things with Gone Baby Gone. Both are based on Dennis Lahane novels, and both are about decent working-class Dorchester folks who’ve pretty much given up on the law and have decided to apply their own solution or justice when it comes to the fate of their children.
I’m not going to spill anything specific, but Gone Baby Gone is basically about a search for a 4-year-old Dorchester girl — the daughter of an empty, emotionally unstable floozie and coke addict (Amy Ryan) — who’s apparently been kidnapped, and a long search for the truth about what why she was taken, who took her and why.
The main problem, for me, is that Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro, the neigh- borhood private detectives who are called in on the case, are played by Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan.
Their performances (especially Affleck’s) are solid, but there’s no buying a couple of actors who look like they’re in their mid to late 20s as case-hardened pros. Sorry, but I need to see people in their mid to late 30s (and looking it) playing these parts. (Affleck and Monaghan were 31 and 30 when they shot the film.) The movie tries to diffuse the issue by having a couple of characters say “how old are you?” to Affleck, but young is young.
(l. to r.) Affleck, Harris, Monaghan, Ashton
Plus there’s a difference between a whodunit being “complex” and verging into “what the fuck?” territory. Maybe I’m just not smart enough (I got a few As but mostly Bs in high school), but I was having trouble following some of the twists and turns. There’s a scene at a rock quarry that doesn’t make a lot of sense. (I’ve seen it twice and I still don’t know what happened.) My head was spinning during parts of the third act. Maybe Ben Affleck should have aped Clint’s Mystic River pace, or otherwise made it a little easier for dummies like myself to keep up.
Amy Madigan plays the aunt of the four-year-old who hires Kenzie and Gennaro. Morgan Freeman plays a police captain and Ed Harris and John Ashton are detectives involved in the case. Titus Welliver plays Madigan’s husband. Nobo- dy’s interest or agenda is quite what it seems at first, but then crime whodunits are always peeling away at the onion.
I say again that a movie that ends this well deserves an audience. For all the irritants, Gone Baby Gone needs to be seen and thought about afterwards. It’s unusual for a crime drama to leave you with this much moral aftermath. And all the hubbub about Casey Affleck’s performance is warranted. He acts and sounds like a real Boston slouch-around, and he almost overcomes the too-young issue because of it. Between this and his arresting turn in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, ’07 has been quite the year for him. Cheers.
John Flynn, director of Rolling Thunder as well as the semi- legendary 1973 crime pic The Outfit (which you still can’t get on DVD), passed away on Wednesday, April 4th, and I only just found out today…er, yesterday.
Warner Home Video should naturally release The Outfit on DVD as a fare- thee-well tribute to Flynn. Based on Richard Stark‘s (i.e., Donald Westlake‘s) 1963 book of the same name, it’s a lean, hardboiled crime film costarring Robert Duvall, Karen Black, Joe Don Baker, Robert Ryan, Richard Jaeckel, Joanna Cassidy and Sheree North.
Duvall gives one of his best performances (in my book anyway) as Macklin, an ex-con out for revenge against some cold-blooded mob types. The Outfit is a studly, pared-to-the-bone programmer in the same realm as Charley Varrick. Not as sombre or big-city noirish as The Friends of Eddie Coyle, but a very fine and flavorful film of its type.
Thanks to reader Tommy Matolla for sending along a photo of the just-departed Peter Boyle as campaign manager Marvin Lucas in Michael Ritchie‘s The Candidate (1972) — my all-time favorite Boyle performance. When I heard of his passing this morning I thought immediately of how superbly on-target he was as the guy who managed, manipulated and mind-fucked Bill McKay (Robert Redford) in his California campaign for the U.S. Senate.
Well-mannered and nicely dressed in a trimmed beard and glasses, Lucas was a sly politico with a cynical heart and a whatever-works attitude, and Boyle’s air of witty refinement surprised a lot of people given his then-current rep as a thuggish meathead type — due, of course, to his breakout performance in John Avildsen‘s Joe (’70), in which he played a hippie-hating blue-collar guy.
And yet Boyle also portrayed Lucas with a subtle (and in my view, quietly hilari- ous) comedic edge. He delivers each line with total sincerity (as far as it goes) but at the same time lets the audience know that Boyle knows that Lucas is a kind of amiable devil — and at the same time just a practical pro with a job to do. It was this performance, I think, that made people realize he was much more than a one-trick blue-collar pony. (Few seemed to understand when it first opened that The Candidate was a very dry comedy — every scene has an oblique comic thrust.)
98% of the public thought of him as the cantankerous Frank Barone in Everybody Loves Raymond, which ran from ’96 to ’05 (while providing Boyle with much financial comfort) but his glory period was from ’70 to ’76: Joe, The Candidate, Steelyard Blues (another hilarious turn), The Friends of Eddie Coyle (as a sinister Boston bartender who handled the hit on Robert Mitchum), Mel Brooks‘ Young Frank- enstein (his legendary performance as a randy, tap-dancing, Wall Street Journal -reading monster with a huge schtufenhaufer) and lastly Martin Scorsese‘s Taxi Driver (in which Boyle played Wizard, the loutish, know-it-all cabbie).
He had a good career after this, but the quality of roles and films for the last 30 years were touch and go. Boyle’s last solid performance in a first-rate feature film was in Marc Forster‘s Monster’s Ball, in which he played Billy Bob Thornton‘s racist father.
In the summer of ’70 or ’71 a guy I used to know ran into Boyle one night at an outdoor bar on the grounds of the Tanglewood Music Festival. After a couple of pleasantries he offered Boyle a freshly-poured brew and said, “Have a Budweiser, king of beers!” — one of the signature lines from Joe. I don’t remember if Boyle accepted it or not, but as he walked off he said to my friend (or so I was told), “Thanks, kid — you’re all right.”
I was looking at this boring IMDB poll of popular ’70s movies (you’ll never guess which film came out on top), and out of my temporary non-interest in the same old pantheon of classic ’70s films I was suddenly thinking again of John Flynn‘s The Outfit (1973), and wondering why it hasn’t been issued on DVD.
The Outfit isn’t one of those AFI best-of-the’70s movies by any means, but except for a flabby ending it’s a crackling little genre film that’s done almost perfectly. It stars Robert Duvall as an ex-con named Macklin out for revenge against some cold-blooded mob types. Karen Black, Joe Don Baker, Robert Ryan, Richard Jaeckel, Joanna Cassidy and Sheree North costar. Call it a lean, hardboiled, low-key crime drama in the same realm as Charley Varrick. Not as sombre or big-city noirish as The Friends of Eddie Coyle, but a very fine and flavorful film of its type.
The Outfit is based on Richard Stark‘s (i.e., Donald Westlake‘s) 1963 book of the same name, which was apparently part of his “Parker” series. (“Parker”, I gather, is more or less the same guy as “Walker” in the Stark book that became John Boorman‘s Point Blank.)
I mentioned The Outfit as a DVD candidate a little over two years ago…flatline. It’s only viewable on VHS, and has apparently been screened from time to time on Turner Classic Movies. It was originally an MGM release; Warner Home Video now has the rights. WHV honcho Ned Price seems to be napping on this one. Here’s hoping he wakes up and approves a DVD that will include a retrospective docu- mentary and audio commentaries from at least some of the creative principals. Before they’re all dead.
“Life’s hard…but it’s a lot harder when you’re stupid.” — a line presumably written by novelist George V. Higgins, but definitely spoken by a young illegal-sun salesman (Steven Keats) in The Friends of Eddie Coyle.
Hollywood Elsewhere’s self-sponsored follow-up to the Netflix Rolling Roadshow — a non-approved, unofficial fall sequel to the current tour — has just added (1) Elia Kazan‘s Viva Zapata! (’52) , to be screened at an open-air faciity near Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles (Friday, 10.7), (2) Peter Yates ‘ The Friends of Eddie Coyle (’73) at an outdoor theatre adjacent to Boston’s Government Center (Friday, 10.14), and (3) Anthony Mann‘s El Cid (’61) at an undetermined location on 10.21. Admission is free. Bring your own food, drink and blankets. There’s just one problem…
Never Got `Em
The Dukes of Hazzard (Warner Bros., 8.5), a ’70s retro redneck fast-car thrillbillie movie that looks like a lotta fun…the kind of fun that comes from sticking needles in your eyes…will be upon us three weeks from today.
I think it’s entirely fair to assume the worst with films of this type. I mean, look at the trailer already. Get out the chewing tobacco and clothes pins.
Johnny Knoxville, Jessica Simpson, Sean William Scott in The Dukes of Hazzard.
Does anyone see any indications that this might be Starsky and Hutch, a ’70s TV series film that was smartly written and better-than-tolerable for the Ben Stiller- Owen Wilson repartee? Dukes looks common, crude…or am I leaning too much on impressions?
The director is Jay Chandrasekhar (Super Troopers, Club Dread); the costars are Johnny Knoxville, Sean William Scott, Jessica Simpson, Burt Reynolds, Joe Don Baker and Willie Nelson.
I’ll be there because of Simpson’s skimpy outfits but gimme a break with the General Lee flying through the air and all the other crap. And I’m not a reflexive hater of hot-car movies. I loved Gone in 60 Seconds (guiltily) and I bought into The Fast and the Furious.
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I’m encouraged by the tracking reports that a high percentage of urban respondents are marking this one down as a must-to-avoid. Revolt! Go blues!
Reynolds needs the money, I suppose, but it’s a tiny bit ironic he’s in this thing, which is a kind of salute to the redneck films of the mid ’70s to early `80s. Ironic because Reynolds killed his career by making too many of these films with Hal Needham directing.
I don’t remember Joseph Sargent’s White Lightning (’73) as being too bad, but the rest — Stroker Ace, Gator, the three Smokey and the Bandit‘s — were on the painful side.
Redneck movies were born in the early `70s (’72 and ’73, to be exact). They got rolling in the mid `70s, peaked in the late `70s and early `80s, and were pretty much over by ’84.
That was the year when Reynolds burned his once-loyal fans for the last time (i.e., those who were still with him after two previous Needham pics) with a farewell performance as J.J. McLure in The Cannonball Run II. Nobody was better than Reynolds at being smug.
There were two kinds of ’70s redneck films — the high-speed, action-packed, stupid-ass variety about sexy-macho moonshine smugglers always being chased by the fuzz and always with a Daisy Mae girlfriend or two, along with the creepy-pervy ones about city folk running into toothless inbreds in overalls with all kinds of foul things happening, including outdoor pig-squealing anal sex.
The fun redneck movie was pretty much shoved into gear by White Lightning (’73), in which Reynolds first played the stud-smoothy Gator McLusky. He played the character again three years later in Gator.
The creepy kind came into being in ’72 with John Boorman’s Deliverance (which still plays…a brilliant film) and Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left. And the genre still lives today, most recently in the form of Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek.
Hero‘s Salute
There was only one high-velocity ’70s redneck film that was any good, and it wasn’t even a redneck film.
It was a scrappy piece of backwoods Americana about a young guy on the wrong side of the law who went on to become a famous stock-car racer, a movie that was actually loved by critics and was also an unfortunate financial disaster: Lamont Johnson’s The Last American Hero (1973).
For me, this is the super-daddy of redneck movies, the one that got it right with unaffected realism and a kind of dignity by not dealing in the usual cliches and showing respect for its characters, and by being intelligent and tough and vivid with fine acting.
Hero was loosely based on Tom Wolfe’s legendary 1965 Esquire article about one-time moonshine smuggler and stock-car racer Junior Johnson. Wolfe’s piece was called “The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!”
The movie is about a guy named Junior Jackson (Jeff Bridges) who’s more or less content to smuggle illegal hooch until he gets pinched and his soul-weary dad (Art Lund) persuades him to think twice, and he eventually uses his car-racing skills to break into stock-car racing.
Geraldine Fitzgerald, Ed Lauter, Gary Busey and Valerie Perrine are among the costars.
There’s no question that Johnson’s film was widely admired (nearly all the serious film critics got behind it, especially Pauline Kael). And its influence in Hollywood circles seems hard to deny, its commercial failure aside, for the simple fact that it was the only backwoods-moonshine movie at the time that was seriously respected for what it was, as opposed to being (nominally) respected for what it earned.
As movies steeped in rural southern culture go, The Last American Hero had roughly the same levels of honesty and sincerity as Coal Miner’s Daughter, which came out in 1980.
Hero stood out for the gritty low-key realism that Johnson and his collaborator Bill Kerby brought to the script. The original Hero screenplay was officially credited to William Roberts, but, as Johnson told me during a brief phone conversation yesterday. “it didn’t have any real people in it,”
The Last American Hero director Lamont Johnson
The Last American Hero wasn’t an art film — it was a punchy thing with a kind of B-movie feeling — but it stood out for its avoidance of easy ironies and from any kind of condescension toward the hardscrabble characters, and for the totally on-target performances.
Articles like Wolfe’s and films like The Last American Hero make me forget about my loathing of red-state attitudes and even lead to affection for the vitality of working-class types and the blue-collar thing. They make me feel like their characters belong to my country. They make me want to eliminate the “Blue State” blue-ribbon logo that I’ve displayed in this column space for nearly a year.
It’s not genuine Americana that I can’t stand — it’s the degraded, stupid-ass, hee-haw stuff peddled by downmarket opportunists and turned into corporate-brand jackoff diversions like The Dukes of Hazzard TV series and motion picture.
What galls me is that most consumers out there don’t even know what genuine backwoods Americana is — they just know the Happy Meal-kind that corporations have sold to them.
The irony is that one of the biggest corporations, Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp, the owner of 20th Century Fox, isn’t selling The Last American Hero. It isn’t available on DVD, and Fox Home Video, the rights holder, has no plans to put it out.
When I called that division’s public-relations guy on Thursday to ask about possible DVD plans, he asked, “This is ours? It’s a Fox movie?” Yeah, it’s a Fox movie, I said. Fox has the rights. “We produced it?” Yeah, Fox produced it in ’73, and Fox Home Video put it out as a VHS in ’97.
I think I convinced him, but I wrote him back again today to ask if he’d had a chance to ask the higher-ups, and he didn’t respond. But at least I’ve started the awareness thing a little bit. Maybe someone else will pick up the ball.
It would be nice to see this film again along with DVDs of my two other most-wanted ’70s films — Play It As It Lays and The Friends of Eddie Coyle.
Jarmusch
One of the six or seven reasons today’s column went up so late today is because I got hung up with technical issues in trying to prepare a digitally recorded interview for what I hope will be the first of a series of Podcasty-type deals I’m trying to turn into a regular thing.
It’s a recording of an interview I did Thursday, 7.14, with Jim Jarmusch, the writer-director of Focus Features’ Broken Flowers, which will open in theatres on August 5.
Apologies for the long boring rambling intro — I’m re-recording it this morning (Saturday). And all that rumbling background noise you can hear while Jarmusch is speaking…I dont know what that could be. We were sitting in a very quiet back room of an Italian restaurant.
Jim Jarmusch in the back room at Ballato’s, an Italian eatery at 55 East Houston (between Mott and Mulberry) — Thursday, 7.14, 4:45 pm.
Like anything else, it’s going to take a while to get these things down and sounding right.
Anyway, here it is. Thanks to Moises Chiullan, a good guy from Florida State University in Tallahassee, for urging me to do this and doing the sound editing and whatnot.
And I’m highly recommending the restaurant, by the way. It’s called Ballato’s, a kind of old-feeling, late 1940s Godfather-y type place. Visually, I mean. Jarmusch has been going there for years and says the food is wonderful. It’s at 55 East Houston, between Mott and Mulberry.
The late-afternoon light in Ballato’s back room is really beautiful — delicate, diffused.
This is Jarmusch in a nutshell — he told the publicity people to run his press kit biography as lean and pruned down as possible. None of the usual press-kit blather…just list what he does, list the film titles and that’s it.
At Long Last
Lifeboat, the only Alfred Hitchcock movie that hasn’t been restored and/or remastered and put out on DVD, is finally undergoing that process and will be released by Fox Home Video before the end of the year, according to spokesperson Steve Feldstein,
Lifeboat isn’t often recognized as one of Hitchcock’s best films, but for me it’s right up there with Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, North by Northwest, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious and Vertigo.
I’m astonished that it took Fox Home Video this long to come around. They had it out on laser disc in the early ’90s but the transfer was awful, which always seemed extra-offensive to me given that Glen MacWilliams’ black-and-white photography is exceptionally beautiful with all kinds of moody textures and fog lightings and whatnot.
The Lifeboat team (l. to r., minus Walter Slezak and Canada Lee): Henry Hull, John Hodiak, Hume Cronyn, William Bendix, Heather Angel, Tallulah Bankhead.
Lifeboat is one of the best-written Hitchcock films (script by Ben Hecht, Jo Swerling and John Steinbeck) with whip-smart dialogue that is on-target and feels authentic for its time. It has a certain “written” quality that was par for the course in the early ’40s, but it’s so well shaped and phrased that the theatrical refinement feels right in the pocket.
Tallulah Bankhead, John Hodiak, William Bendix, Hume Cronyn, Walter Slezak, Henry Hull…talk about assurance. Six performances with a certain actorliness (and flamboyance, in Bankhead’s case), but at the same time relatively straight, unaffected and concise. (There are three performances that feel overly sentimental — Heather Angel’s, Canada Lee’s and Mary Anderson’s.)
Lifeboat is easily Hitchcock’s most visually inventive film. He imposed a huge challenge upon himself in having to tell a riveting story and make it all feel vital and visually absorbing despite the entire thing being set in a lifeboat on the North Atlantic, and damned if he didn’t succeed. (Hitchcock even figured a way for his usual cameo appearance to happen.)
It’s an excellent example of how persuasive studio-based photography and 1940s visual effects could be in the hands of the right director. It was all shot on a Hollywood sound stage, but you can really feel the unruly energy of the sea and taste the salt water on your lips. It’s a much more convincing evocation of what it must be like to be afloat and helpless in the middle of a vast ocean than anything you saw in Waterworld.
I’ve been asking the Fox Home Video people off and on for years about when they were finally going to move on a Lifeboat DVD, and they’ve never had any kind of answer. Like all home-video divisions Fox Home Video has seemed, to me, almost Soviet-like in its penchant for secrecy and not being candid about internal workings or plans.
And yet, oddly, South Korea put out a Lifeboat DVD in 2003.
Check out the image of Hodiak and Bankhead on the Korean DVD jacket cover [above]. It’s from a scene in the film, of course (their characters become lovers aboard the lifeboat, although it doesn’t seem to involve anything more than making out), but there’s no missing the allusion. It seems as if Bankhead, who was quite the liberated woman in her time…well, you get the drift.
Grabs
Hacked Again
For the second time during the Xmas holiday, Hollywood Elsewhere has been hacked. But it’ll all be back to normal within hours, maybe only two or three.
For the record, this is being written at 3:06 pm Pacific, on Tuesday, 12.28.04.
The most recent Hollywood Elsewhere column (the one that went up on Friday, 12.24) will be restored and back up by 4 or 5 pm Pacific. The rest of the site, including the proper ads (the currently viewable ads are from our server’s last fully-backed up version of the site, dated December 3rd), will be up and rolling in their proper and timely configuration by the end of the day.
I apologize to all concerned for not being fast or vigilant enough to stay ahead of the hackers or, in this instance, the Fanty worm. For what it’s worth, this latest hacking has happened today on hundreds of other sites. I will be doing everything I can do (and spending everything I can) to keep this from happening again.
I think it’s only fair to lay part of the blame for this latest disruption on the lack of vigilance of the folks at Interland, our Atlanta-based server. They failed to install a protective (or preventive) software called php5 in the wake of the last hacking, which was the weekend before last. If they had things might not have turned out so badly today.
33 and 1/3
It√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s too much of a task to forecast √¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢05 altogether, so let√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s just concentrate on the first third. I’m guessing I’m not the only one who’s giving in to kick-back holiday feelings right about now.
Movie quality tends to slack off (okay, plummet) between January and April, but I’m spotting at least seven films during this period that appear to be worth the price, and two that might qualify as half-decent throwaway’s.
Upside of Anger writer-director Mike Binder guiding costars Kevin Costner (l.) and Erika Christensen and Keri Russell (r.) during filming.
All but two will open in March or April, so grim up for a dud January and a fairly tepid February. In the order of scheduled openings…
Inside Deep Throat (directors: Fenton Bailey, Randy Barbato — producer: Brian Grazer), Universal, 2.11. Serious minded, fully considered documentary about the social impact and cultural legacy of Deep Throat, the 1972 porn film that ranks as the most profitable feature of all time. Hard-luck star Linda Lovelace was grossly under-compensated, and the mafia wound up taking almost all the serious profit. Talking heads include Erica Jong, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, John Waters, Harry Reems, etc. World premiere-ing at ’05 Sundance Film Festival.
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The Upside of Anger (director-writer: Mike Binder), New Line, 3.11. Terms of Endearment with four daughters and without the cancer. Feisty, middle-aged mom (Joan Allen), randy suitor (Kevin Costner), and four Wolfmeyers — Andy (Erika Christensen), Lavender (Evan Rachel Wood), Emily (Keri Russell) and Hadley (Alicia Witt). Great performances, should have been released last fall, will probably put Binder (now finishing Man About Town with Ben Affleck) on the map. Rated R for language, sexual situations, brief comic violence and some drug use.
Melinda and Melinda (director-writer: Woody Allen) Fox Searchlight, 3.18. Acclaimed by Screen International as Woody√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s best in a long while. A discussion between playwrights about the nature of comedy and drama leads to the story of a woman named Melinda (Radha Mitchell, said to be terrific), and a look at her life as a piece of tragedy and comedy. Has already played in Spain, will have played everywhere in Europe by the time it opens here. As a character in the movie puts it, a certain character is “despondent, desperate, suicidal…all the comic elements are in place.” Co-starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Johnny Lee Miller, Josh Brolin, Will Ferrell, Wallace Shawn, Amanda Peet.
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Nicole Kidman in Sydney Pollack’s The Interpreter
Nicole Kidman in Sydney Pollack’s The Interpreter
The Weather Man (dir: Gore Verbinski) Paramount, 4.1. Not about a radical planting bombs in the early √¢‚ǨÀú70s, and at least partially about the stand-out toupee worn in this film by star Nicolas Cage. Gore Verbinski√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s direction of The Ring) has given him newfound respect. Word around the campfire is that this one√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s okay…maybe better than okay. Cage is a Chicago weatherman named Dave Spritz with an extremely chaotic personal life. I don√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t know what this involves precisely, but the writer is Steve Conrad (Wrestling Ernest Hemingway) and the costars are Michael Caine and Hope Davis.
Sin City (directors: Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez) Dimension, 4.1. Any genre movie shot in black-and-white gets my vote sight unseen, and I love the straight-from-a-comic-book visual style of this thing, and the Dick Tracy-like prosthetics worn by some of the actors (Mickey Rourke, Benicio del Toro). Based on three stories taken from Miller√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s graphic novels, the likely emphasis will be on “look” over story and character, but disappointments of this sort are par for the course with comic-book adaptations. Lots of violence, pretty girls, partial nudity, etc. Briefly appearing costars include Bruce Willis, Clive Owen, Brittany Murphy and Rosario Dawson. Pic won√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t be press-screened until mid-March (Rodriguez likes to tweak until the very last minute) so who knows? GenX comic-book freaks will lap this one up.
Hope Davis, Nicolas Cage in Gore Verbinski’s The Weather Man
The Interpreter (dir: Sydney Pollack) Universal, 4.22: A smart, politically sophisticated thriller set within the United Nations community, with a exotic-accented Nicole Kidman and a straight-ahead Sean Penn in the leads. Pollack at the helm means this one will be intelligently assembled and that the characters will have (I√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m assuming) unusual angular aspects, if his past work (like his last New York-based thriller, Three Days of the Condor) is any indication. Universal bumping this from February to mid-April prodded mild concern, but I’m now told this happened only because Kidman will be working in Australia on Jocelyn Moorhouse’s Eucalyptus through the end of March, and wouldn’t have been around to promote a February Interpreter opening.
Crash (dir: Paul Haggis), Lions Gate, 4.29. Screened at Toronto Film Festival, bought by Lions Gate, and kept under a cloak of secrecy since. Not to be confused with David Cronenberg’s Crash, it’s about a group of L.A.-ers united by their involvement in a multi-car pileup. Matt Dillon, Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, Brendan Fraser, Jennifer Esposito, Thandie Newton, William Fichtner, Ryan Phillipe, Larenz Tate and Keith David costar. Written and directed by Paul Haggis, the Canadian-born screenwriter of Million Dollar Baby.
And the possibly passable duo…
Be Cool (dir: Gary Gray) MGM, 3.4. Chili Palmer (John Travolta) shows some low-life L.A. types how to do that preternaturally calm Zen street-guy thing…again. Elmore Leonard, the Michigan-based author of Get Shorty (the basis of the 1995 Barry Sonenfeld film with Travolta, Gene Hackman, Ren Russo) and his hard-bound follow-up Be Cool, tells me Gray√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s film is playing well with audiences, so we√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ll see. The trailer makes it look as if Gray pushed the slapstick humor stuff a little too hard. The best Leonard adaptations have been about character and criminal mood, not hah-hah pratfalls. But trailers can be deceptive, so let’s hold our water. One promising sidelight: Travolta re-united with his old Pulp Fiction dance partner Uma Thurman. Costarring Vince Vaughan, Harvey Keitel, the Rock, Danny DeVito. I just don√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t trust Gray — how can anyone after A Man Apart?
Assault on Precinct 13 (director: Jean-Francois Richet), Rogue Pictures, 1.19. A remake of John Carpenter√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s admired 1976 noir shoot-em-up, itself an homage to Howard Hawks√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ Rio Bravo, has to retain some of the genetic inheritance…right? Plus it has a first-rate cast — Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, Maria Bello, John Leguizamo, Drea de Mateo, Gabriel Byrne, Brian Dennehy, Ja Rule. Carpenter√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s original was set in a South Central L.A. police station, but the synopsis for the new one says it takes place √¢‚Ǩ≈ìduring a snowy New Year’s Eve,√¢‚Ǩ¬ù so I guess that deep-sixes L.A. Screenplay by the not-related to-James-Monaco James DeMonaco.
I was going to run a spring-summer piece, but the summer slate depressed me. It√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s looking even more formulaic and lowbrow than usual. Keep your head down, hold your nose and hope for the best. And may God protect us from Peter Jackson√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s on-the-nose instincts in his direction of King Kong…whoops, unnecessarily negative!
New Chat Room
Hollywood Elsewhere has a brand-new live chat room going. It can be reached through a link on the Poet’s Corner page. There’s something wrong with my Java or whatever because every time I go the chat room my browser freezes up and crashes. HE’s Ohio-based consultant and column editor Brian Walker says it’s working fine and I’m the problem. If anyone else has any complaints, send ’em in.
Reminder
I ran this a couple of weeks ago in the WIRED column, but just to be extra-clear everyone should know that the currently-playing War of the Worlds teaser is, from a strict visual-content perspective, almost entirely b.s.
I’m speaking of two elements: (a) those middle-American families standing in their nightgowns and bathrobes on a small-town neighborhood street at night, looking with concern at those flashing sky lights in the clouds on the far horizon, and (b) those shots of various European capitals.
An insider has told me that the middle-American milieu stuff is horseshit because they’re not in the movie and don’t really represent the film at all. Ditto those images of Paris and London and whatnot, since the film never strays from the limited viewpoint of Tom Cruise’s lead character, a New Jersey longshoreman who just happens to be the grandson of Marlon Brando’s Terry Malloy. (Kidding!)
As reported in a New York Times story about the Worlds shoot in Bayonne, New Jersey, director Steven Spielberg has gone to great lengths to avoid suburban settings. The action takes place largely in Cruise’s blue-collar neighborhood — rusted, down-at-the-heels — and, in certain portions, out in the Jersey countryside.
Thirteen
“I’ve seen the upcoming remake of Assault on Precinct 13, and it blows.
“Unlike Carpenter’s original — a spare, stripped-down ‘B’ pic which understood its iconic origins — the new one is just a bunch of action set pieces strung together, none of them particularly memorable.
“Filled with cliched characters — the oversexed secretary (Drea de Matteo), the guilt-ridden cop who feels he’s responsible for a partner’s death (Ethan Hawke), the geezer cop due for retirement (Brian Dennehy, totally slumming) — the film also features Laurence Fishburne as a kingpin drug dealer, but he’s still doing his stentorian Morpheus thing!
“For this they got some French director I’ve never heard of?
“If I were Carpenter, I’d be really, really pissed at the rape of what is, I think, one of the best ‘B’ films ever made.” — Unsung (in this instance) New York journalist
Wes’s Shortfall
“The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou didn’t look like a masterpiece in the trailer. It didn’t look like director Wes Anderson was trying to perfect the same old riff. It looked like Wes was changing the format and the ground rules. It appeared to be an adventure movie with explosions, stop-film animation, and like it was taking its cues from Spielberg and Fellini. None of the above can be said about his previous films.
“I hoped there would be Wes touches. He has a personality and a voice, and it seemed as if he was trying to hit a new register with this one. It might be a little off key, I thought, as I’d only heard a touch, but it sounded like a new melody.
“And then I saw it, and now I largely agree with what you’ve said. It felt like Wes was trying to break out of his past, but he failed. But if this turns out to be his worst movie, then he’ll have a great run. Then again, Bill Murray said on Letterman that he had to see it three times to really get it. That’s asking a lot of people, but I’ll check it out again and maybe I’ll change my mind.” — Christopher Lee.
Wells to Lee: Aquatic is the same old Tenenbaums melody with modifications. Wes has a voice — that’s what makes him good, makes him Wes — but the boat and Italy and the deep blue sea don’t interfere with the increasingly detail-minded Wes aesthetic. It’s the same basic thing, only less charming and less emotionally involving.
The Other Shoe
“Million Dollar Baby is a powerful and rewarding film, and superior to Mystic River, but I√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m starting to roll my eyes at all the critics fawning over Eastwood√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s bare bones, not-one-superfluous-frame method of storytelling.
“Did every little scene and fragment of dialogue — from Frankie√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s Gaelic to the number of Scrap√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s fights, to pie at Ira√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s diner — require greater significance on the other end? When it√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s so stripped down, I felt myself waiting for payoffs.
“One of the last great character-study movies, The Insider, could have easily been trimmed down 50 minutes. The scenes in that movie that don√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t necessarily drive home the plot, but they still add to the richness and complexity of the overall.
“And am I the only one wishing that Jim Brown had played Scrap? I suppose you can never go wrong with Freeman, though I never saw him as a boxer, and I wasn√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t buying it when he won his last fight.” — Mark Frenden
Coyle
“I ended up watching my VHS copy of The Friends of Eddie Coyle the other day. It’s such an amazing gem and deserves a great DVD. But Paramount’s DVD division has a few putzes on the payroll. They couldn’t even produce great extras for the Saturday Night Fever DVD. And promoting it? Beyond their skills. It’s a shame that Warners didn’t release Coyle.” — Joe Corey.
All I want for Christmas is a quality-transfer DVD of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, with any extras they can throw in with it…commentaries, making-of doc, Robert Mitchum interview, anything. That’s all I want…and that’s not much to ask for.
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