Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Warner Bros., 7.15) is tracking very big. The trailer makes it groaningly clear this is one of those heavily painted, what-you-see-is-what-you-get films…which American audiences have alway tended to wet themselves over. I guess I’m different because it definitely gave me pause. Is Burton over? Is it fair to ask if he has another Ed Wood, Edward Scissorhands or Beetlejice in him? I wonder.
Jett says he’s sick to death of superhero team-spirit movies and that Tim Story’s Fantastic Four flick (20th Century Fox, 7.8) is therefore going to suck it next weekend. The tracking says he’s wrong — it’ll end up somewhere in the mid $30 million range….maybe higher. Jett’s age group isn’t the target audience anyway; this is more of a family-trade film for the not-very-hip.
Okay, all right…the Butterscotch Stallion, the Butterscotch Stallion, the Butterscotch Stallion…the whirlwind holy-hell Butterscotch Stallion! It’s like one of those songs
that get into your head and you can’t flush out to save your life. I paid no attention to the original “Page Six” item when it ran a week ago last Tuesday (6.21) but now it’s stuck in my head and it won’t go away. And here comes The Wedding Crashers (New Line, 7.15) to keep it all going.
Those Tom O’Neil calls about the lead Oscar ponies are way early, obviously, but they sound reasonable. It’s cool that O’Neil shares my excitement about George Clooney’s Goodnight, and Good Luck (Warner Bros., October) as something that might warrant excitement. It may sound presumptuous to speculate that David Straitharn’s portrayal of Edward R. Murrow during his ethical showdown against Sen. Joseph McCarthy might (who knows?) punch through on its own terms…but when has Straitharn ever dropped the ball? I’ve only one concern: Murrow’s mystique was very dependent upon the sound of that soothingly authoritative voice of his and I’m wondering if Straitharn can coax his own voice into delivering that special timbre. O’Neil’s prediction about Goodight is, of course, based on absolutely nothing except the fact that the Gold Derby homies want very much to admire and promote the shit out of it if it’s any good. If this happens, they and others may be pushing it for a Best Picture nomination along with Steven Spielberg’s 1972 revenge-for-the-Munich-massacre drama (which I wrote about in early March), Sam Mendes Jarhead, Rob Marshall’s Memories of a Geisha (this website does not approve of geisha films) and Tommy Lee Jones’ The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (a critics’ film but not for the Academy, I fear).
It needs to be clearly understood as far in advance as possible that The Legend of Zorro, the Antonio Banderas-Catherine Zeta-Jones movie called coming out on 10.18, should not expect and won’t in fact get any support from this corner. Pay no attention to that earnestly-reported here-comes-Zorro piece by Lewis Beale that ran in the L.A. Times Calendar section on 6.28. The original Martin Campbell Zorro movie was self-consciously flamboyant crap and a creative embarassment all around, and it gave rise to the money-grubbing, T-Mobile-hawking career of Catherine Zeta Jones, certainly one of the biggest capitalist-pig actresses of our time. One look at her face and all you can see are dollar signs…I want this, I’m going to marry him, you can’t have photos of my this or that aspect of my private life unless you sign here, etc. I guess it’s okay to read the Isabel Allende Zorro book , but let’s leave it at that.
Architecture doesn’t make me tear up like movies do, but I can’t suppress this, can’t keep it down any longer: I feel crestfallen when I look at the new Freedom Tower design. The building itself is okay, but that pointy, top-of-the-building thing looks inelegant…like a hypodermic needle drawn by a nine year-old. That off-center, see-through beacon thing that sat on top of the
old Freedom Tower design (i.e., the one announced on 12.20.03) was much more striking for its delicacy and unusualness….it really had something. The newly designed one feels too square and so-whatty.
Tragic Synch
New Line Cinema’s decision to move the release date of Tony Scott’s Domino from 11.23 back to mid-August (which is when the film was originally scheduled to open for several months) may look like an exploitation of a tragedy to some…but apparently it’s not.
I was shocked to learn Tuesday that 35 year-old Domino Harvey, the former model-turned-bounty hunter portrayed by Keira Knightley in Scott’s action thriller, was found dead in a bathtub in her West Hollywood home on Monday night.
Edgar Ramirez, Mickey Rourke, Kera Knightley in Tony Scott’s Domino.
The daughter of late actor Laurence Harvey was facing jail time over drug-dealing charges after feds busted her a month ago. She was charged with conspiracy to distribute drugs (i.e., amphetamines), possession, trafficking and racketeering, and was apparently looking at a possible long sentence.
Domino, based on a sharply written script by Richard Kelly and costarring Mickey Rourke and Christopher Walken, is a partly fictionalized story about Harvey’s giving up modeling in the early ’90s to become a bounty hunter.
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New Line bumped the film from its 8.19 date to late November sometime around 5.25, which was about six days after the news of Harvey’s drug arrest hit the papers.
The reason New Line is now looking to push it back to a mid-August release, I’m told, is because another Keira Knightley film, Pride and Prejudice (Focus Features), is moving its opening date to November 11 from a previous opening date of September 23, and such a conflict would only hurt both films.
There’s also some mucky-muck about Knightley’s busy schedule (she’s currently shooting the Pirates of the Caribbean sequel) and her consequent availability for p.r. duties being a factor in pushing up the Domino release date.
Kelly talked to me earlier today about Harvey, whom he spoke with last year “for a couple of hours” during research for his script. “I know she was very troubled,” he said. He called her recent drug bust and death (which looks like a suicide, although no official ruling has come down) “a very sad situation as Tony was close with her.”
Kera Knightley in studio-issed still from Domino.
He said he last saw Harvey during filming of Domino last fall in Las Vegas. Her head was shaved, he said, and she looked a little worse for wear.
“She has a cameo in the Vegas sequence of the film…actually she is in the final image,” he said. He called the footage of her “very haunting, especially now that she is gone, as the themes of life and death and the precarious/arbitrary nature of both are huge themes in the story.”
A New Line spokesperson said nothing would be changed in the film as it’s “pretty much locked.”
Scott, who knew Harvey on a personal basis, said in a statement that she “never failed to surprise or inspire me over the last 12 years. She was a free spirit like no other I have ever known.”
Domino producer Sammy Hadida said, “We were enormously saddened to hear of Domino’s untimely passing. She and I had been conferring about her music to be used in the film only weeks ago.
“Although our film is not intended as a biographical piece, hers was the dynamic personality and indomitable spirit that spawned an exciting adventure, not just on screen but in real life.”
Pulse-Pounder
War of the Worlds is, on a certain level, a close-to-great, sonically haunting, occasionally scary summer superflick…and anyone who dismisses it by saying things like “it doesn’t suck but it’s not very good either” is being disingenuous, really and truly.
There is no way this film won’t deliver most of what you’re expecting, even after reading this sentence, and I realize how presumptuous this sounds but I’m not wrong.
Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) carrying daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning) as his emotionally and intellectually-challenged teenage son Robbie (Justin Chatwick) glares at the world and wonders how to make his mark in his own way…get ’em, Robbie!
The film is not without problems — it has four, to be exact, including a stinkbomb of a finale that people will be talking about all across the country for the next five days — but it delivers your money’s worth and then some, and anyone who tries to tell you differently isn’t talking about what this film literally and actually is. Don’t listen to them.
War of the Worlds is surprisingly scary here and there. I thought I was CG’ed and FX’ed out and couldn’t be affected by another grotesquely expensive, broad-assed alien-invaders film…but I was wrong.
It’s not cold or savage or unembroidered enough, but even with its various weaknesses WOTW is the new standard-setter for what it takes to arouse a cynical, distracted audience with I-Pods and Blackberrys in their pockets into going yeah, wow…whoa!!…and sit up and stare and forget about going to the bathroom.
At times it is halfway between being merely visually “impressive” and a genuinely fearful thing to sit through, and that’s no small feat. Everyone’s taken note of the 9/11 recreations (there are several, but the most vivid for me is the powdery gray dust covering Tom Cruise’s head after the first alien attack), and this is certainly part of what the film summons.
Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning
But it’s the sheer flattening force of what the alien invaders do to everything and everybody (and especially the sound of all this carnage) that counts. Make sure you see War of the Worlds in a theatre with a fortified Tyrannosaurus Rex sound system.
Forget all that David Poland stuff about the lack of thematic elements or the metaphor not making it or the narrative threads failing to fuse together and make WOTW into something more than what it is. He’s partly right but it doesn’t matter because he doesn’t get it.
I know I’ve hated films that eschew the delicate interior stuff in favor of gross physicality, but this is one of those occasions in which the exteriors are good enough that it’s easy to let the absence of interior values slide. Trust me, this film is as good as this sort of thing can reasonably be expected to be.
Except for four bad things: one mildly bad thing, one puzzlingly bad thing, one irritatingly bad thing and only breathtakingly awful thing.
There’s an opening and closing narration sequence — taken straight from the H.G. Wells novel and spoken by Morgan Freeman — that should have been cut. There are times when paying respect to the original author or the original film is a mistake, and this is one of them.
The narration was passable when Sir Cedric Hardwicke read it in the 1953 George Pal War of the Worlds, but Freeman’s reading sounds too storybooky and “once upon a time”-ish. (People began to snicker almost immediately at the screening I attended.)
I appreciate the urge to have H.G. Wells’ opening line digested, but literary tributes are fairly off-track in a film of this sort. The visuals say it all. We’re living in an age of sub-literacy and as nuts as this sounds, sometimes it’s best for filmmakers to just go with the sub-literate flow.
There’s a very queer idea in this film about the alien tripods not coming down from the heavens but buried and waiting under the earth’s surface for a long time and being activated by lighting bolts carrying aliens or alien vessels or whatever.
This is obviously nonsensical…unless, of course, one throws out credibility and just accepts it as metaphor. We are being destroyed by elements from within. This doesn’t add up, but …what?…malignancies in our systems, ourselves, our souls…waiting to be cut loose by time or fate or some built-in trigger?
Why do the aliens have to come from inside the ground? I suspect it’s because Spielberg fell in love with the idea of a tripod bursting its way out of a Hoboken street (it’s a fantastic thing visually, I have to admit) and said to screenwriter David Koepp, “Make it work.”
I ignored it, waved it away…but it bothered me later. People weren’t buying it outside the Zeigfeld theatre on Monday night, I can tell you. One guy was saying, “What the hell was that about?”
The son of Cruise’s Ray Ferrier, called Robbie and played by Justin Chatwin, should have been killed early on and stayed that way.
Chatwin is a good actor caught playing a badly written role. Robbie is a total dumbass. He’s feeling lots of anger and resentment about his irresponsible dad, see…but this emotional posture is unaffected by a smidgen of practical caution or strategic intelligence when the aliens start attacking. But he is sure is emotional!
Robbie and Ray and sister Rachel (Dakota Fanning) are driving through the carnage with one of the world’s last remaining working autos. (The others have had their batteries neutralized by an electro-magnetic pulse.) Ray asks Robbie to take the wheel but tells him to stick to the back roads and avoid crowds for obvious reasons. What does Robbie do while Ray is catching some z’s? You have to guess?
That settled it. Like Frankie Pantegelli barking at Michael Corleone about the hated Rosotto brothers in The Godfather, Part II, I was telepathically text-messaging the same message over and over…”I want this kid dead…mort!”
Then Robbie makes a spur-of-the-moment decision to join the National Guard while they’re trying to stop the aliens from advancing on the populace. Utterly ridiculous, of course, but at least the fucker is gone, I was telling myself. He’s been zapped to death, turned into dust…great!
And then…no, I can’t say it.
Spielberg’s alien tripods aren’t that different from this comic-book depiction from at least 50 years ago, if not further back than that.
The final scene of War of the Worlds is beyond bad. It is so diseased it will send you into grief spasms. There’s a sense of quiet jaw-dropping horror at what Spielberg is choosing to show us and the way he’s gotten dp Janusz Kaminski to shoot it (it’s almost as treacly as the fantasy scene when Anne Baxter waltzes down the steps to meet Montgomery Clift in I Confess) and the actors he’s chosen to cast in this scene.
This is the kind of terrible, terrible finale that only Steven Spielberg is capable of. Jett said as we were leaving the theatre, “Why did he do that? He almost had it!”
Why can’t Spielberg restrain himself on this sentimental shit? If WOTW had been a bit tougher and colder and had excised the emotional cushioning it could have been brilliant. But no…Spielberg has to be Spielberg. He has to pick up that shotgun, he has to put the shells in the chamber, he has to aim it at his left foot and blamm!
I shared this reaction with a director friend yesterday, and he said, “Well, of course…this is Spielberg, the most egregiously sentimental and pandering filmmaker anywhere except for George Lucas.”
This guy, who’s been around for 30 years and knows everyone and all the stories, said that Spielberg is actually a very cold and manipulative guy deep down (Julia Phillips used to say this too), and that he injects sentimentality into his films because he thinks it sells, and he’s right most of the time, but that’s not who he really is.
I don’t know how to go from loathing the last scene back to a sincere admiration of the whole, but that’s what this movie is. As bad as the shitty stuff is, it doesn’t get in the way of the portions that are stunning. I can’t emphasize enough that I was knocked flat and awestruck throughout most of it.
Cruise the Scientology meltdown nutter was out the window and gone in a matter of seconds. The 9/11 references seemed superfluous and unintegrated to me, and it was obvious WOTW would have been better off not referencing it so strenuously.
War of the Worlds could have been 20% better…it could have been staggering if Spielberg had pruned the crap and the sentiment out. It could have been scarier still if Spielberg had tried for a chillier tone and more of a “take it or leave it, life is hard and alien invasions are really hard and brutal…deal with it” type of thing.
But that’s not Spielberg and it never will be. The man is his own worst enemy.
It turns out the Russell Crowe phone-throwing episode was captured on tape. It’s also being reported that Crowe didn’t just throw a phone at Mercer Hotel concierge Nestor “Josh” Estrada, but also a vase. It’s also been written in this “Page Six” piece that what got Crowe so enraged was Estrada saying “whatever” after Crowe repeatedly complained that he couldn’t get an international phone connection. Now I know who the real bad guy is. I’ve dealt with guys like Estrada all my life and their “whatever” attitudes about life’s challenges, and they really don’t belong in service industries. When a celebrity wants you to hop, there is one and only one answer, and that is “how high?” A guy who says “whatever” about anything a valued customer needs is selfish and indifferent and living deep inside his own flabby head. And now Estrada has an attorney, Eric Franz, trying to milk Crowe for all he can…despite Estrada’s having barely been grazed by the flying phone. Estrada is not a man — he’s a girl. He’s the kind of guy who always goes “waaahh, you hurt my feelings….waahh, I’m telling the teacher” when he bruises his elbow or scrapes his knee. Crowe acted in a vulgar and detestable manner by doing what he did but if you’re going to act like a brute, third-raters like Josh Estrada are the best ones to give it to. This column stands four-quare against anyone and anything who says “whatever” in response to any kind of hard-to-figure situation…unless, of course, the using of this term is in some way appropriate.
I would love to jump into War of the Worlds (having seen it last night) but along with everyone else Paramount publicity insisted on a written pledge that I not review this Steven Spielberg film until Wednesday morning. I think it’s fair, however, to pass along one bit of reportage. The widely-buzzed-about disappointment with the finale, which I passed along in this space two or three days ago, is not about Spielberg’s decision to go with the the original H.G. Wells ending. It is not — not — about earthly bacteria in the alien’s bloodstream. As fantastic and genuinely scary as most of the film is (c’mon…you knew this would be the case), I can tell you that people sitting near me inside the Zeigfeld theatre at 9:05 pm last night were audibly moaning and whimpering when this offending scene unfurled. (It turns out, by the way, that Ain’t It Cool News didn’t break the review embargo — Paramount let them skate on the whole thing.)
The dozens of oddball revisions and reshufflings aside (which are fine — Peter Jackson isn’t doing a Gus Van Sant-folllowing Psycho remake), the new King Kong trailer is actually fairly (emphasis on the “f” word) cool. It’s just that his criteria seems to have been “how can I do this my way, so it doesn’t look like I’m copying?” instead of “how can I take what’s already been done very well and make it better, deeper, spookier…more haunting?” But I love the seeming fact that Jackson has Kong doing his Manhattan rampage in the winter, with snow on the streets…brilliant.
Six or seven bent-over guys wearing ape-pelts around their shoulders and chests are circling a young woman sitting in their center and chanting the chant that goes “Kong!…konnalong- konnalong-konnalong-konnalongalong Kong Kong!!” and beating their chests with each repetition of those last two syllables. They do this two or three times and then suddenly one of them stops circling and stands up and looks at the others and says, “Wait a minute… something feels wrong…it’s not the same.” And the other ape-pretenders wave their ape arms and tell him to shut up, and then they tell him, “It is what it is, bubba. Peter Jackson’s in charge now, not Merian C. Cooper…deal with it.” And then they resume their chanting: “Kong! Konnalong-konnalong-konnalong- konnalong-along Kong Kong!!” And the dissenter says, “You fools! You’re telling me you would’ve been placated and satisfied if Fay Wray, God rest her soul, had lived long enough to be filmed speaking the famous ending line while standing in front of Kong’s dead body on 34th Street, ‘It wasn’t the airplanes…it was beauty who killed the beast.’ That would have been fine with you guys…you would have been cool with Fay Wray saying that line?”
From Roger Friedman’s column a couple of days ago: “Meantime, I’ve got a solid new figure for the budget on War of the Worlds. Are you ready? Not counting promotion: $182 million. With promotion, think more like $230 million.”
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