Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke did some actual calling about the Pamela Anderson–Kid Rock–Borat argument at Universal honcho Ron Meyer‘s home that resulted in her filing divorce papers. Wondering why “those two losers were included among the 20 VIPs on what’s supposed to be a triple-A screening list,” Finke is reporting, the following:
“Anderson is a friend of a Meyer neighbor, who asked the studio mogul if Pam and Kid Rock could come over for the screening because new hubby hadn’t seen new bride in Borat yet. The way ‘Page Six’ made it sound, there was a screaming match in the middle of Meyer’s screening room. Wrong. None of the guests knew anything happened — just that the couple left in the middle of the movie.”
Wait a minute: Anderson doesn’t appear in Borat until the the final third. Almost the very end, in fact. The marital meltdown fight was allegedly over Kid Rock ‘s reaction to Anderson’s appearance in the film, so they couldn’t have left “in the middle” of the film, right?
Meanwhile, here’ s another “Page Six” posting, a Kid-Rock’s-side-of-the-story thing. What am I doing puttng this crap up?
In my 3.12.06 rave review of Sidney Lumet‘ s Find Me Guilty (Freestyle, 3.17), I wrote that the courtoom drama “is being sold the wrong way — the one-sheet and the trailer are telling you it’s a jaunty mob-guy comedy, a kind of farce, and the music toward the end of the film tries to convey this also, and this feels like a sell-out to the moron trade. Is everyone listening? The advertising is dishonest .”
And ineffective, I could have added two or three weeks later. The critically-hailed film only brought in less than $2 million worldwide.
But now, over eight months later, there’s a ninth-inning attempt by Guilty producers T.J. Mancini and Bob DeBrino to persuade critics and Academy voters to reappraise Lumet’s film as the superbly focused, well-layered entertainment that it is. They’re doing this intially by issuing a new one-sheet that represents what it actually is, as opposed to the light-hearted goof-off that distributor Bob Yari tried to sell it as. I’ll be posting the new art later this afternoon, but a piece by L.A. Times writer Bob Welkos says it “shows Diesel looking positively Perry Mason-like in a courtroom, and banners a number of rave reviews.'”
Mancini says he’d also like to send out screeners to Academy members as well as members of the various guilds, but he also says that Yari’s ongoing lawsuit with the Academy over his being elbowed off the list of Crash producers last year is interfering with this effort. Yari Film Group spokesperson Susie Hayasaka that the lawsuit is only preventing the mailing of screeners to Producer’s Guild (PGA) members. Otherwise, she says, “We are very supportive of Find Me Guilty…we’re very proud of it, and we want to do everything we can to remind people of its quality.”
“He taught me so much, made me discover authors, painters — a certain art of living, with elegance and discretion,” the great Bertrand Tavernier has written about the late Phillipe Noiret. “He gave me a sense of actors and showed me that one could be exacting and passionate while remaining pleasant and gentle.
“He was a very generous actor who loved his co-stars — Michael Galabru in The Judge and the Assassin, Isabelle Huppert and Eddy Mitchell in Coup de Torchon, Fran√É∆í√Ǭßois Perrot and Sabine Azema in Life and Nothing But…Jean Rochefort, Claude Rich, Jean Vilar and Gerard Philippe.
“Listening to him talk of the old days, of Hitchcock and Gary Cooper, flooded you with warmth. He loved to love, and his admirations were contagious. You got the sense that they fortified him. We were always talking about the breadth of our admirations — for Gary Cooper, who we both wished we had known, for Hitchcock, Fred Astaire, Mario Monicelli, Marcello Mastroianni and Marco Ferreri.
“The Reeler” editor Stu VanAirsdale on the latest death spasms (or certainly downshiftings) of Manhattan’s elite downtown film culture establishment, as represented by the ending of annual Village Voice film critic’s poll. (The bottom-line Voice management guys probably decided it was too expensive to maintain or too pie-in-the-sky, or both.) But on the heels of interim film editor Allison Benedikt having officially assumed the duties of the deposed Dennis Lim “comes word that Lim is working with indieWIRE to revive a comprehensive year-end survey.”
The bottom line is that the prosecutors of “Hollywood’s biggest scandal”, as New Yorker writer Ken Auletta once described the Anthony Pellicano wiretapping case, can’t nail anyone big so they’re after small fry in hopes of shaking something loose. And so, as L.A. Indie‘s Ross Johnson reports, they’re looking to nail a peripheral Anthony Pellicano wiretapping player named Joann Wiggin, who was acquitted on four of five perjury charges after a jury trial last September.
Coming Soon‘s Edward Douglas and Box Office Guru‘s Gitesh Pandya riffing in The Envelope about what kind of impact box-office performance may be having on certain Best Picture nominees. The biggest benefits have gone to Little Miss Sunshine and The Queen. The opposite appears to have affected Flags of Our Fathers and, to a lesser extent, Babel (although it’s outrageous and stupid that the latter should be affected by “only’ making the money so far that 21 Grams did…gimme a break).
“I caught Casino Royale on Sunday. Something kinda stirred in the back of my mind as I watched Daniel Craig do the moves, and about a half hour into it I realized what it was. Craig reminds me of Steve McQueen. In fact, he’s channelling him.
“Not that he absolutely looks like the guy (although he does, somewhat) but something in the Craig equation — the steely understated machismo that McQueen had back in the mid to late ’60s, and shot into a James Bond vessel — is why the movie works. Maybe. Just a thought.” — Jeff Burton, St. Paul , Minnesota, with slight augmentations from Jeffrey Wells.
Budd Schulberg and Spike Lee have been “piecing together” a script about heavyweight champ Joe Louis (and his bout and later friendship with Max Schmelling ) for about five years, according to this 11.24 AP story by Ryan Pearson. I’m sorry but that’s too long. Movies that are truly meant to happen don’t get pieced together over a period equal to one third the lifespan of the average cat. They spew out over a period of days, weeks…months at the most. Okay, a year but no longer.
And the IFP Best Feature award nominees are (a) American Gun (what?), (b) The Dead Girl (congrats to First Look), (c) Half Nelson (drugs in a school toilet stall), Little Miss Sunshine (my personal fave), and Pan’s Labyrinth (the best work ever by the great Guillermo del Toro ). These and other nominees were just posted a few minutes ago. Sunshine and Nelson landed five nominations each.
You might have expected that streaming video of this morning’s announcing of the nominees wouldhave been up on ifc.com by now…nope The names and titles were announced 100 minutes ago (Don Cheadle and Felicity Huffman did the mike duties) and the slacker IFC website still doesn’t have the feed up. They should’ve provided a live feed as it’s happening, no? I mean, this isn’t 1998.
I’ve been there with Ellen Burstyn in a lot of films, but my all-time favorite moment was the way she said to Bruce Dern‘s relentlessly boastful and mouthy character in The King of Marvin Gardens, “You’re full of shit!” The frazzled, end-of-the-road, Uzi-spray impatience in her voice, I mean. It tells you she’s said this to Dern so many times she can barely stand to hear it again, but she has to. Because he won’t quit, because he can’t, because he’s gone over the falls and so has she.
This memory came back after looking at some photos on Burstyn’s new website, which is up to promote her book “Lessons In Becoming Myself.” The press release says it’s “candid, raw, no-holds-barred book.” Burstyn has ended up in a very spiritually whole and connected place — you can see that in her face. I haven’t been sent her book, but reading about finding peace and wisdom isn’t all that interesting…and I hope it’s not about that too much.
I love these two events i(seriously) in her autogiobraphcal timeline:
January 5, 1970. At the age of thirty-seven, Burstyn chooses her current name.
Easter weekend, 1999. Burstyn goes on a spiritual retreat for three days, living on the streets of New York City with no money and no identification. A few weeks later, she forgets her wallet and is once again in New York without money or ID, but feels “completely safe and at home, not just here, but anywhere.”
Tony Scott‘s lame ideas for reconstructing Walter Hill‘s The Warriors is another case of a hip Hollywood guy (and his chortling corporate backers) showing obesiance before the power of street machismo, or the wild west factor in urban culture. Establishing a bond with all this links to a general connection with urban audiences and presumed loyalty down the road. In short, a good business move.
You homies are the shit and the style…predatory turf monsters with fierce expressions and shaved heads and big developed biceps, and you know how fast and cool I can be. (Check out Domino.) And I want to make a film that reflects and worships you and your hard culture (violence, bling, fast money, hot cars, ho’s) to the hilt. Trust me when I say that no amount of grovelling or cinematic fellatio is beyond my bounds.
Scott money quote #1: “I really hate remakes, but the The Warriors is one of my all time favorite movies, and what I’m doing is kind of reinventing it. And rather than a gang it√É‚Äö√Ǭπs going to be 30 guys who take on 3,000. It’s Kingdom Of Heaven meets The Warriors. We’re going to use the L.A. river bed as a major location.”
Scott money quote #2: “I’ve been meeting all the [real] gang leaders, they√É‚Äö√Ǭπre saying they√É‚Äö√Ǭπll sign this treaty for the duration of the shoot. I want this shot of 50,000 real gang members all on Long Beach — tThe Crips, The Bloods, the Vietnamese, the Cambodians, the 18th Street gang… all there. It’s going to be cool.”
Catherine Hardwicke‘s The Nativity Story (New Line, 12.1) “lacks controversy,” said New Line COO Rolf Mittweg to the N.Y. Times Rome correspondent Peter Kiefer, following a Sunday screening at the Vatican. “I think with The Passion, people wanted to see how bloody and gory this movie was. They wanted to see how far one would go to depict that story. This movie isn’t political and doesn’t make a statement in that regard.” Hah! Mittweg seems to almost be saying, “Our film isn’t very edgy. In fact, it’s kinda tame.”
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