“Nothing will prepare you for the rampant foolishness” of M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water,” says Village Voice critic Michael Atkinson. “It’s as if on some semiconscious level, Shyamalan, who I do not doubt is a serious and self- serious pop-creative original, is calling his own success into question and daring his audience to gulp down larger and spikier clusters of manure, just to see if they will. Or he’s lost his mind.”
As I wrote last week, I think Shyamalan’s sub-conscious game is to get people to write him off and perhaps even deliberately create a huge failure so he can escape from the penitentiary of his Sixth Sense legend and the large expectations that have come from that. Overly, consciously, I’m sure he wants audiences and critics to like Lady in the Water…naturally. But life is always, always about the deep-down stuff.
“This isn’t magical realism, it’s pure magical thinking,” Atkinson continues, with Shyamalan “mystically assuming that any idea or image that pops into his skull will make a shapely tale, no matter how much cock-and-bull logic he has to invent to Gorilla Glue it together. Like all his movies from The Sixth Sense on, Lady pivots on the dawning awareness of a vast cosmic plan, foisted on grieving parents and spouses as a holy scab for their wounds. [And] it’s beginning to chafe as a formula.”

“This is the umpteenth movie I’ve seen this year about guys in their 30s who aren’t quite sure what they want to do with their lives,” Scott Foundas writes about Kevin Smith‘s Clerks 2, “and it’s the only one that strikes a real chord, because it’s neither an exaltation nor a condemnation of slackerdom, but rather just a sweet little fable about how sometimes the life that you think could be so much better is actually pretty damn good already.”

Scott Foundas

Foundas then offers Smith “a few words of brotherly advice: I said before that you’ve never really left Jersey, and for the most part I mean it as a compliment — like the original, Clerks 2 has a lived-in, blue-collar feel that Hollywood almost never gets right. At the same time, I can’t quite shake the feeling that you haven’t much wanted to set foot outside of your self-created View Askewniverse, even though there’s a great big Mooby’s-less world out there full of stories that could benefit from your telling.”

“If you’d like an apology, I’m glad to apologize,” ABC movie critic Joel Siegel said to Clerks 2 director-writer Kevin Smith on the radio this morning for walking out of a critics screening of Smith’s film.
“And if there’s a second movie I walk out on, I’ll be much quieter.” And then Siegel confessed mid-conversation that he didn’t know he was talking to Smith. It’s pretty funny — give it a listen.
As he explained on View Askew, Smith said he wasn’t steamed about Siegel walking out of the screening as much as theway he did it.
“I can’t fault Siegel for feeling ‘revolted’ by our flick,” Smith wrote. “There is a donkey show in it, and I recognize that brand of whimsy might not be for everybody. Film appreciation is very subjective, and maybe Joel just isn’t into ass-to-mouth conversations.
“However, I can fault him for the manner in which he left the screening. Apparently, rather than quietly exit, Joel…made a big stink about walking out, calling as much attention to himself as possible, and being generally pretty disruptive.
“Roughly forty minutes into the flick, when Randal orders up the third act donkey show, Siegel bellowed to his fellow critics ‘Time to go!’ and ‘This is the first movie I’ve walked out of in 30 fucking years!’ Now, I don’t need Joel Siegel to suck my dick, but shit, man — how about a little common fucking courtesy?”
Houston critic Joe Leydon asked this morning if Siegel also bolted “during that scene in The 40-Year-Old Virgin in which characters described a woman having sex with a donkey”? Probably not, I’m thinking, since it was just dialogue. But then Smith, who’s never depicted anything particularly raw or throbbing in his films, doesn’t really “show” anything. In fact, I could imagine someone out there beefing about the Clerks 2 donkey scene not being rude or envelope-pushy enough.
Here‘s what Manhattan publicist and marketing guy Reid Rosefelt has to say about the whole magilla. I agree with him — critics are professionally obliged to see the whole movie. Columnists, on the other hand, can do whatever they want. They can walk out and then write a piece about how proud they were to have done so, or about the soul-stirring joy that comes from any well-motivated bail-out. Or they can run a piece about the best theatres to take a short nap in (i.e., the ones with the most comfortable seats). Or, to shift gears, a columnist can watch a film all the way through and do the usual-usual.

I should have linked yesterday to Claudia Eller‘s L.A. Times account of Nina Jacobson‘s dismissal as Disney production president. Jacobson was told Monday morning by studio chairman Dick Cook “when she called him from the hospital room where her partner was about to deliver their third child. Despite the record-breaking performance of Disney’s current release, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, she was hearing rumors and wanted reassurance that her job was safe. It wasn’t.”
Acknowledging that the timing was bad, Cook said, “I begged to see her face to face and she wanted to talk to me right then. This was not what anybody wanted.” (Of course, we all know that when you’re hearing rumors that your job might be imperiled and you call your boss for reassurance and he/she says, “Come to my office so we can talk,” you’re as good as dead anyway.)
And Nikki Finke is seeing an old-boy sexist angle with Paramount’s Gail Berman and Sony’s Amy Pascal “the only women [reminaing] in positions of real Hollywood power” with Jacobson, Fox 200’s Laura Ziskin, Columbia’s Lisa Henson and Lucy Fisher, Paramount’s Sherry Lansing, Universal’s Stacey Snider and DreamWorks’ Laurie MacDonald having “all left their posts, because of situations where either they jumped or were pushed. ” (Obviously Snider’s move from Universal to Dreamamount was neither a tragedy nor a comedown.)
The result, Finke laments, “is that Hollywood movies are returning to the old days when it was a man’s world.”

Warren Beatty will argue in a forthcoming court trial that he’s held the rights to the Dick Tracy comic strip since 1985, and that the Tribune Co., which sees things differently, has no legit ownership clams at all. Beatty filed a lawsuit against Tribune Co. in May 2005, and last Friday an L.A. judge decided to put the issue before a jury. Beatty wants to make a sequel to Dick Tracy, which he directed and starred in, and which Disney released in 1990. I presume that at age 69 Beatty doesn’t plan to play Tracy himself in the new film…if he wins, that is.

I’m sure others have noticed that David Poland is never surprised by anything. And that he always knows stuff months before anyone else, and breaking-news stories always make him go ho-hum. Jesus Christ could float down from the heavens and arrive on the White House South Lawn and Poland would go, “Is anyone surprised by this? Religious zealots have been speaking about Christ’s return to earth for centuries. And the lack of morality in our daily political life…” This “Brad Grey has done favors for a lot of people” thing is pretty good, though.

The Nina Jacobson-whacked-at-Disney story had been around for about three hours as of 6:04 pm, and Variety had no story up by that time. It turned out that Variety filed at 6:10 pm, although Sheigh Crabtree‘s Hollywood Reporter story went up about 5:15 pm, give or take. News breaks on a minute-by-minute basis these days. And if a news org can’t file within an hour or two of getting the story, they’re bringing up the rear.

This is ridiculous! In the wake of her recent image upgrade as one of the shrewdest and most perceptive studio execs around because she told M. Night Shyamalan that his Lady in the Water script needed work (Michael Bamberger’s description of their disagreement is the most riveting portion of The Man Who Heard Voices) and with hundreds of millions rolling into studio coffers from the recent success of Pirates 2, Disney — of all the times to do this — has axed Nina Jacobson as president of production and replaced her with marketing president Oren Aviv.

Nikki Finke is reporting that “the uber-ambitious Aviv helped set the stage for Nina’s descent (and his ascent) by telling Disney a while ago that Paramount’s Brad Grey had offered him the same position that Gail Berman eventually took.” I rang Jacobson’s office about 45 minutes ago after hearing the news. This is one of the most bizarre and nonsensically out-of-the-blue whackings in Hollywood history. Disney is looking to scale back on feature production and make more family-friendly films. Fine…and the fang-toothed, razor-clawed Aviv is better for the job of cranking these films out than Jacobson?
“The studio is undergoing a major reorganization, and there simply isn’t room for everyone in the new structure,” Jacobson said in a statement. (Yeah, sure thing …there wasn’t “room” for Disney’s whip-smart president of production.) “I love the company and it has been a great honor to be part of building the Walt Disney brand. I’ve had the opportunity to work on films that I love, with filmmakers I admire and colleagues I adore. I’m sorry to go but I am proud of what I’ve left behind, a vibrant movie studio with major franchises and thriving relationships with some of the most talented filmmakers in the world.”

Todd McCarthy‘s review of Woody Allen‘s Scoop (Focus Features, 8.28) in the 7.16 Variety won’t be lifting anyone’s spirits over at Focus. (Kirk Honeycutt‘s Hollywood Reporter review is a little kinder.)
This McCarthy passage stands out: “Sadly, Allen’s patented harangues and complaints have rarely been more irritating, not only because they sound like barely revised versions of those we’ve heard many times before, but because his broad accent and uncouth manner stand out so conspicuously amid so many well-spoken British thesps.

“Asked with some bemusement by some stiff old Brits about his background, Sid replies, ‘I was born into the Hebrew persuasion, but when I got older I converted to narcissism.’ And yet Allen’s appearance in Scoop belies this: “Looking significantly older than when he last appeared onscreen (in Anything Else three years back), Allen comes off as a disagreeably disgruntled curmudgeon whose wit has curdled.”

This holographic DVD technology was announced eight months ago and I’m just now paying attention. As described here, it sounds so much better and more advanced than Blu Ray or HD-DVD. 1.6 Terabytes per disc means a single disc could hold a dozen high-def movies. I’m sure there’s some tech hurdle I’m overlooking but…

The MPAA movie ratings have been a joke for years (as Kirby Dick’s This Film Has Not Yet Been Rated makes abundantly clear) so why should anyone care about their new Red Carpet Ratings alert? Which will include a weekly email blast that will make it easy for parents to get ratings on their work and home computers or handheld devices, blah, blah. Just remember to see Dick’s film, which IFC is opening on 9.1.06.

It’s been decided by New Line brass that the charms of Snakes on a Plane will probably be unappreciated by a sizable percentage of critics and columnists, and therefore no advance media screenings will be held before the 8.18 opening. Because advance reviews, they’ve obviously decided, may do more harm than good. (Which isn’t to say they absolutely will do more harm than good — only that the possibility is giving them concern.) Please mull this one over, HE readers, and tell me you ‘re thinking. Why would New Line make this call with at least some critics (like AICN’s Derek Flint ) likely to be receptive and then some? Do the odds seem to favor Snakes earning its place alongside other classic absurdist horror-thrillers like Tremors or Reanimator? Or is it starting to look more like it might be in the class of Tremors 2?