The MCN link says “The NY Film Critics Circle Sets Its Award Dates for January”…bullshit. They’ll vote on Monday, 12.11 and of course, the winners will be announced right away. The awards ceremony will take place on Sunday, 1.7.07, at the Supper Club, “a new venue for the organization this year.”
89% of the Rotten Tomatoes critics have spat upon All The King’s Men, and in such an atmosphere three or four people have remarked with surprise at Kenneth Turan‘s rave in the L.A. Times. I shouldn’t say anything because I slept through about 30% to 35% of Men when I caught it in Toronto, but a sign of a formidable critic is one who says what he/she likes despite the herd mentality, so Turan’s okay in my book. And he isn’t completely alone. A quick scan of the Metacritic survey tells you tthat Time‘s Richard Schickel is mostly a fan; ditto Toronto Globe & Mail critic Rick Groen…well, he only gave it 2 and 1/2 stars but he’s a big fan of Sean Penn ‘s lead performance.
Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson has penned a column about Zach Helm‘s fabled Stranger Than Fiction script, which “five studios, 37 directors and scores of movie stars threw themselves at.” I knew all about that excitement when it was happening. Everyone was creaming over that script except I couldn’t get past page 20 when I tried to read it (twice), and then I saw the finished film in Toronto and I went, “What the fuck was that about?”
Ostensibly, Fiction is about a problem afflicting IRS agent Harold Crick (Will Ferrell), which is that he’s begun to hear his life being narrated by a woman with a British accent. We gradually learn that the voice belongs to a chain-smoking writer named Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson), who’s having lots of trouble finishing her latest book, which is largely about an IRS agent named Harold Crick. Kay is planning to kill Harold off and doesn’t quite know how. And Harold, once he gets wind of this, seeks her out and pleads with her not to kill him.
Fiction‘s problem is that it never figures out if Crick is or isn’t living inside Kay Eiffel’s head. It never makes a case for the fact that he’s existing in some imaginary realm Kay is creating as she moves along with her book, or, assuming he’s real, how and why Kay’s imaginings have any power over him.
Anyway, Thompson builds her column around conversations she had Stranger Than Fiction director Marc Forster and producer Lindsay Doran, and it reads well in that skillful, well-structured way that Thompson’s columns always read. But then you get to paragraph #13 and it’s like….my goodness! Doran and Forster actually admit to and discuss the film’s fatal flaw.
“One thing they never figured out,” writes Thompson, was”how to explain the logic of exactly how this particularly strange movie fiction works. ‘It was an ongoing conversation,’ says Doran, who sounds amazed that audiences are buying the film at all. ‘We never explain it. I kept saying to Zach, if nothing else we need a scene where somebody says, how could this be happening?’
“Forster shot one such scene, but after preview screenings he cut it. Is he a character out of a book or is he real?’ Forster asks. ‘I see him as real, an everyday man who suddenly has a narrator pop into his life. Some parts of his life are part of the book and some aren’t. Not everything has to be perfectly explained: that’s the freedom and beauty of art and fiction. For me, the title says it all — ‘Stranger Than Fiction.’ ”
Horseshit. Either you work a story out or you don’t. The central riddle in Fiction‘s story has been left open-ended and unresolved, and that’s a shame because I would’ve bought the film if Helm, Forster and Doran had just established and set the rules for Ferrell’s Crick being a character living in Thompson’s imaginary universe…or not. And if they’d gotten rid of Queen Latifah entirely. I hated every moment that Queen Latifah occupies in this film.
Woody Allen‘s story for The Purple Rose of Cairo was a lot crazier and more off-the-charts than Fiction‘s (it’s about a good-looking actor leaving a film playing on a screen in a small town and having a relationship with a female fan in the audience) but he worked out a system and stuck to it. It’s not that hard. You just have to buckle down and figure it out, and then make the crazy figured-out stuff seem inevitable, brisk and entertaining. Hello?
Said this before, saying it again: despite Clint Eastwood having told Variety editor Peter Bart earlier this month that Letters From Iwo Jima, his Japanese-soldier-POV Iwo Jima movie, will be released “two months” after Flags of Our Fathers, or sometime in mid to late December, and despite Pete Hammond considering a scenario that Letters will indeed be competing ‘against’ Paramount and Dreamworks’ Flags and Warner Bros. “sources” yelling him “they are only seeing the film for the first time this week and have not yet decided when it will be released but that “it will ‘not‘ be in 2006″…despite all this (and isn’t the confusion about the Letters release date just amazing? the way it persists, I mean?), the bottom line is still this….actually, hold up. There is no bottom line. I’ve just changed my mind. I was going to say Letters will almost certainly be regarded on these shores as strictly backup for Flags of Our Fathers, but nobody knows anything and and that includes me.
Pete Hammond jumps into the will- Paramount-give- Zodiac-a-platform-opening-in-late-December story in his latest Hollywood Wiretap column, which is basically about how end-of-the-year crowding has left the studios with an embarassment of riches. But before exploring the Zodiac particulars, I have a suggestion.
Paramount is apparently still on the fence (i.e., reluctant but unwilling to give this reluctance a full voice) about opening David Fincher‘s allegedly top-drawer policier in New York and L.A. on or before before 12.31.06. (The studio intends to release it wide on 1.17.07.) I’ve written two or three articles pushing for this, but I’ve only read an early version of the script. Since Fincher is now, according to Hammond, “completing editing and mixing and the film should be pretty much wrapped in a couple of weeks,” he and his producers should simply arrange for a quiet little columnists-and-critics screening of Zodiac so certain parties can see it and respond first-hand.
Zodiac may not be all it’s cracked up to be, in which case nobody has to write anything one way or the other and Paramount and the Zodiac team can duke it out between themselves. But if it’s an exceptional wow, which I’ve been told by certain parties, then certain columnists and critics could conceivably proclaim this and the Zodiac team would have a stronger case to make to the Paramount foot-draggers.
“Sources are saying it is brilliantly made with great performances across the board,” writes Hammond. “The cast includes Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards. And even though Fincher’s hard edged previous films (Fight Club, Panic Room, Se7en) have received a grand total of 2 Academy nods in tech categories, this is said to be the one that could change that pattern.
“That is, if Zodiac receives a qualifying run in December ahead of its wide January release. If it has to wait until next year, the odds are long [for ’07 Oscars] since January films are a distant memory come nomination time. But hope remains that Fincher’s film will still be a part of this year’s kudos story. We’ve been told that it’s a complex situation and there are ‘discussions that are probably going to take place.’
“One hurdle may be that Paramount really doesn’t need another picture going for the gold this year since they already have World Trade Center and the upcoming Dreamworks’films Flags Of Our Fathers (10.20) and Dreamgirls (12.21). And although it is a completely separate entity, specialty division Paramount Vantage has a major contender in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarittu‘s Babel (10.27).
“But if Zodiac really does deliver the goods (as those few who have seen it believe), then how can it be denied a passport to the Kodak? After all, remember 1974. One studio accounted for three, count `em , three of the five Best Picture Oscar nominations. The movies were The Godfather Part II , Chinatown and The Conversation. The studio was, you guessed it, Paramount.”
Bottom line: if Zodiac is the goodie its supporters say it is, there is no downside — zip, nada, none — to giving it a platform debut in four or six theatres in N.Y. and L.A. in late December. Paramount can’t lose, especially given the apparent likelihood that Zodiac will need some kind of big advance sell since it’s fairly long (about three hours) and doesn’t end its hunt-for-a-serial-killer plot with a conventional finale.
“If I see one more bus ad for one more fucking animated movie with fucking animals in it, I’m going to start screaming” — an actual comment from a director to his manager-producer, apparently in response to seeing an Open Season poster.
Caught up as I was in my 9.19 Jim Carrey indifference (“Does anyone really give that much of a hoot if he continues to be a big star or not?”), I went all “meh” on Nikki Finke‘s latest L.A. Weekly column, which details the blow-by-blow of how UTA’s Nick Stevens lost Carrey as a client (largely due to the finaglings & ministations of Carrey’s manager Jimmy Miller). I should’ve paid faster attention. It’s a well reported, extremely tasty story.
Here’s a sample graph: “A furious Stevens confronted Miller and [Carrey’s other manager-at-the-time, Eric Gold): If he were doing such a crappy agenting job for Carrey, then how come his client, Ben Stiller, has never been hotter? The managers responded they felt Stevens favored Stiller over Carrey. The agent told them that was nonsense and contended that the only difference between the two stars was that one had managers and the other didn’t. The acrimony was out in the open: Stevens started ranting on the phone and in e-mails that Miller and Gold were poisoning his relationship with clients.”
But here’s the best portion: “Known for strategic thinking and savvy deal making, [Stevens, Miller and Gold] moved Carrey from TV into movies and jumped his salary from a paltry few hundred thou for Ace Ventura, Pet Detective to an Industry record of $20 mil for The Cable Guy just 18 months later. In turn, Carrey once rewarded them with spankin’ new Porsche 911 Carrera convertibles. But on September 13, Carrey phoned Stevens and said, ‘I’ve never met with another agency. But I’m feeling like it’s time.’ The two haven’t talked since. The next day, Stevens had that Porsche towed and sold. ‘I could never sit in it again after that,’ the agent was overheard to say.'”
I didn’t hear anything all that good about Michael Ian Black‘s The Pleasure of Your Company during the Toronto Film Festival. Maybe I wasn’t talking to the right people. Whatever the rumble, MGM has acquired the North American rights to this GreenStreet Films and Fugitive Films co-production….go figure.
“I mean, I get depressed like everybody. I have angst. I have anxiety. I worry about the world. Nobody was expecting the kind of fearful times that we live in. It’s really out of the blue. It’s like, ‘My God, what the hell is happening?‘” — Jack Nicholson (plugging The Departed is his usual roundabout way) to Erik Hedegaard in a relatively fresh-off-the-vine issue of Rolling Stone.
It would be nice if Toronto Film Festival slackers like myself had a shot at seeing films they wanted to catch in Toronto but didn’t. Like Paul Verhoeven‘s Black Book, which Sony Classics has acquired for distribution in North America and other territories. I didn’t prioritize it in Toronto, frankly, because of mixed word of mouth…but then Variety‘s Robert Koehler convinced me it was worth seeing. Now comes an announcement that the Netherlands has submitted Black Book, a sexually- pronounced World War II drama, as its official foreign language entry for the Oscars.
A trailer for Zack Snyder‘s 300 used to be on this AICN page, but it appears to have been taken down. (I don’t know what happened.) I know the film is based on the Frank Miller graphic novel of the same name — kind of a Sin City take on the Battle of Thermopylae. Impressively stylish (or do I really mean stylishly impressive?), but also over the top. People like me are always looking for ground-level echoes while graphic-novel guys are always looking for “whoa!” and “awesome!” More’s the pity since the story — how 300 Spartans held back tens of thousands of attacking Persians in order to give their countrymen time to prepare themselves against invasion — has real relevance to today’s events. Just as Kingdom of Heaven worked as an allegory about the current tensions in the Middle East, 300 reflects on some level the struggle between the Persians (i.e., Iranians) and the west, which has been raging off and on for over 2500 years. (Thanks to Rich Swank for the heads-up.)
The only 9.22 opener that looks like anything commercially is Jackass Number Two (Paramount) with, according to a tracking survey, an 81% general awareness, 40% definite interest and 13% first choice. (It also has a 25% definitely not interested, but that’s just the older audience harumphing.) The two liveliest 9.29 openers, to go by the numbers, are The Guardian — 62, 36, 8 — and the animated Open Season — 47, 32, 3. (32% definite interest among adults is a very strong number for a kids film.) And The Departed (Warner Bros., 10.6) is looking very strong — 55, 43 and 7.
- All Hail Tom White, Taciturn Hero of “Killers of the Flower Moon”
Roughly two months ago a very early draft of Eric Roth‘s screenplay for Killers of the Flower Moon (dated 2.20.17,...
More » - Dead-End Insanity of “Nomadland”
Frances McDormand‘s Fern was strong but mule-stubborn and at the end of the day self-destructive, and this stunted psychology led...
More » - Mia Farrow’s Best Performances?
Can’t decide which performance is better, although I’ve always leaned toward Tina Vitale, her cynical New Jersey moll behind the...
More »
- Hedren’s 94th
Two days ago (1.19) a Facebook tribute congratulated Tippi Hedren for having reached her 94th year (blow out the candles!)...
More » - Criminal Protagonists
A friend suggested a list of the Ten Best American Crime Flicks of the ‘70s. By which he meant films...
More » - “‘Moby-Dick’ on Horseback”
I’ve never been able to give myself over to Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee, a 1965 Civil War–era western, and I’ve...
More »