Zap2It’s Daniel Fienberg reviews Madea’s Family Reunion, feeling more or less the same as I. The film hasn’t been screened for critics so there’s nothing out there. As I said in my Wednesday review, guys like me so aren’t the point.
Roger Ebert is offering positive and thoughtful reasons for his prediction that Crash will take the Best Picture Oscar, but in my mind he’s essentially predicting that older-Academy- member homophobia is going to ultimately call the tune. I think it’s a tiny bit derelict of Roger to not at least acknowledge what I’ve been referring to as the Tony Curtis factor. The 81 year-old actor was widely quoted as saying he “hasn’t seen the heavily Oscar-nominated picture and probably won’t, and the same is true for other Academy members,” adding that “Howard Hughes and John Wayne wouldn’t like it.” And surely Ebert has at least glanced at or heard about Nikki Finke‘s 2.2 L.A. Weekly column that said “this year’s dirty little secret is the anecdotal evidence pouring in to me about hetero members being unwilling to screen Brokeback Mountain…for a community that takes pride in progressive values, it’s shameful that Hollywood’s homophobia may be on a par with Pat Robertson’s.” I’m not trying to boil it all down to a single us-vs.-them issue, and I assume readers understand I’m not saying it’s homophobic to vote for Crash over Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture. But talk to people with older dads and uncles in the Academy, and they’ll tell you that the World War II generation has indicated they have problems with Brokeback along these lines. It’s also widely acknowledged that Crash, as a certain pundit put it to me a while back, is “the middle-class choice for Best Picture.” Middle class as in “ohh, I don’t know if I want to sit in a theatre with my wife and watch that pup-tent scene.”
Robert Redford on how he got interested in wanting to make a movie about Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who wrote the early stories indicating there was some kind of White House involvement in the June 1972 Watergate break-in. And his attempts to get in touch with Woodward in ’72 and ’73, and initially getting blown off. Excerpted from Redford’s commentary track on the just-released two-disc special edition DVD of All The President’s Men.
“Truman Capote was short — 5 foot, 3 inches — and spoke in a strange, high-pitched Southern accent. He was a wildly camp gay who effortlessly held whole parties in thrall with his anecdotal brilliance and cool outrageousness. I have always remem- bered one story about him, which I hope is true. At the height of his fame, a lady spotted him in a restaurant, rushed over and asked him to autograph her breast. Capote did so. Her husband, incensed, strode over, took out his penis and suggested Capote might like to autograph that too. “Well,” responded Capote, “perhaps I could initial it.” — Brian Appleyard writing in the London Times about the mythology surrounding the famed nonfiction novelist.
“To his credit, Gavin Hood‘s meditation on truth and reconciliation doesn’t traffic in the cheap thrills of art-house exploitation, like City of God; he wrings tears with sincerity, not cynicism.” — N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis on Tsotsi.
New York journalist Lewis Beale acknowledges there’s “no buzz” on Sidney Lumet‘s Find Me Guilty (Freestyle/Yari Film Group, 3.17), but says “it’s quite good and contains a really fine performance by no less than Vin Diesel. It’s the true story of the longest criminal trial in U.S. history, involving members of the Lucchese gang, and Diesel plays a low-level mobster who decides to defend himself. Given that 90% of the movie takes place inside a courtroom it’s still quite watchable (Lumet is an old hand at procedurals in this vein — Prince of the City, Twelve Angry Men). And it has one of those great casts of (mostly) New York character actors, including Ron Silver, Peter Dinklage, Alex Rocco (really great), Richard Portnow, and other faces you’ve seen hundreds of times. Linus Roache is also terrific as a driven prosecutor. Won’t do a dime’s worth of biz, but should get good reviews and definitely builds Diesel’s acting cred.”
In a run-up to tomorrow’s debut of Madea’s Family Reunion, here’s a Salon piece about the Tyler Perry phenomenon by Russell Scott Smith. “Blacks and whites don’t always understand each other,” it begins. “But in Hollywood, everyone’s favorite color is green. So movie executives of all races took notice last February when a movie called Diary of a Mad Black Woman hit No. 1 at the box office — despite no bankable stars, scant mainstream press attention and reviews that were almost laughably bad. ‘Downright awful,’ ‘an absolute mess’ and ‘one of the worst pictures in ages,’ critics wailed. Salon‘s Stephanie Zacharek called it ‘the sort of movie that’s so bad, you just wish it would go away.’ Roger Ebert was offended by the movie’s star, a “Big Momma’s House”-style granny named Madea, who smokes reefer, keeps a pistol in her purse and slices up furniture with a chain saw. This ‘Grandma from Hell,’ as Ebert called her, was played in drag by Perry. ‘All blame returns to Perry,’ Ebert wrote. ‘What was he thinking?’ But there was no arguing the numbers. Perry made Diary on a shoestring $5.5 million budget, and as of last April it had grossed some $50 million.”
That website put up by old-line James Bond fans that’s basically about trashing Daniel Craig is back up after going down earlier today. The anti-Craig thing is a bore anyway. He’s a well-planted actor with a cold flinty interior, which is precisely what the Bond films haven’t had since Sean Connery walked. So he’s not quite as tall…big deal. As Roger Moore says….
I’m using this
conversation with Running Scared director Wayne Kramer to fill up most of today’s “Elsewhere Live” broadcast, but here it is in advance. Kramer talks for a bit about his next film, Evilseek, a satanic supernatural thriller mixed with social commentary that Kramer describes as “Heaven Can Wait meets Seven.” The Weinstein Co. production will star Thomas Jane (or Tom Jane…which is it?) with lensing to begin in the late spring or early summer.
Went to one of the most serenely cool parties of my Hollywood life last night — a gathering for Capote‘s director Bennett Miller, thrown by his agents at Endeavor, inside a candle-lit sixth- floor suite at the Chateau Marmont with a sizable, south-facing balcony. Low-key, not crowded, soothing (the view of West Hollywood is what did it), waiters constantly hovering with hors d’oeuvres. Plus a few prominent names to lend a certain punctuation — Naomi Watts, Adam Sandler (whose next film, Reign O’er Me for director-writer Mike Binder, will start shooting in a week or two), Jake Gyllenhaal, Capote screenwriter Dan Futterman, Tobey Maguire, Annapolis and Tristan & Isolde star James Franco, Courtney Love (who scares me a bit), World Trade Center producer Michael Shamberg and Paramount Pictures president Gail Berman. That piece I ran two weekends ago from an agent who has beefs about Berman (“Scent of Toast”) made talking to Berman kind of a “naah, don’t think so” proposition, so I steered clear. The talk was private, but thanks to Bennett for paving the way and PMK/HBH’s Joy Fehily for facilitating.
The thing that killed the belief in Will Ferrell being a hot star, I gather, is the relatively paltry $62 million and change earned by Bewitched last summer. It didn’t make more, producers and agents decided, because Ferrell can’t be and never will be a romantic star (not with that chest-hair problem). And now there’s a faint aroma of concern over his next big studio movie, Stranger Than Fiction (Columbia, November ’06). Directed by Marc Forster (Neverland, Monster’s Ball) from a clever script by last year’s hip-screenwriter-of-the-moment Zach Helm, it costars Maggie Gyllenhaal (as Ferrell’s romantic interest), Dustin Hoffman, Queen Latifah, Emma Thompson. Thing is, the cleverness of it feels to me like it might wear thin after 20 minutes, at which point the film will have to sink or swim based on the audience liking and identifying with Ferrell’s character, a dull IRS auditor. The hook is that he suddenly starts hearing his life being narrated as it happens. Helm’s script isn’t a cute-romance thing (it deals with death) but I don’t know. I started reading it a few months ago and went, “Okay…this is amusing…good idea”…but I wasn’t strongly pulled along and put it aside. I tried reading it again a couple of weeks later…ditto. (But I haven’t given up.) Meanwhile Winter Passing (Focus Features), a downerish drama about suffering writers that Ferrell costars in with Zooey Deschanel, is fizzling (the “cream of the crop” reviews were 42% positive on Rotten Tomatoes), but his next one, Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, an oafish, blue-collar NASCAR comedy (Columbia, August ’06), should do well. Ferrell’s next two films, apparently, are Blades of Glory, a sports drama about Olympic skaters, and David Mamet’s Joan of Bark: The Dog That Saved France.
This is most definitely a movie that I would pay to see. (A significant admission from a journo freeloader like myself.) Earlier this week six armed British thieves nabbed $40 million pounds in cash (which is what…roughly $75 million U.S.?) in the area of Kent. It’s not just the size of the haul that gets me, but how exactly do six guys hold on to that much dough (roughly $12,500,000 U.S. dollars each) without someone getting wind and ratting them out? How do they get the cash out of the country? Is it smarter to try to move the whole load and then split it up, or do they divide up in England and then it’s every man for himself? Where and how do you live with this responsibility? It’s a fascinating logistical challenge. Are these guys actual adults who won’t follow the Rififi script, or will most of them be arrested due to stupidity and panic within the next couple of weeks?
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