I’ve been told that Monster in Law (New Line, 5.13), the Jane Fonda vs. Jennifer Lopez marital comedy, is a hit. The numbers are said to be good (in the mid ’80s or thereabouts), the script works, and apparently the benefit is more J. Fo’s than J. Lo’s. (“Lopez is good but Fonda is terrific,” is how it was put to me.) I don’t know what the dollar projection would be, but I’m hearing it’s definitely some kind of cash cow. An even bigger hit for New Line is David Dobkin’s The Wedding Crashers, the Owen Wilson-Vince Caughan comedy that opens on 7.15. The numbers for this one are through the roof (higher than Monster-in-Law‘s, which probably means somewhere in the ’90s), which seems to indicate a likely haul of $100 million or higher. And there may be a third New Line winner in the Tony Scott actioner Domino (8.19), which I’ve been hearing promising things about since last December. (Richard Kelly’s script is the shit.) If there’s research on this one, it hasn’t been shared.
Beautiful Journey
How many coming-to-America immigrant movies have I seen that have put the hook in? Not that many. Up until two days ago I would have said I’m not a huge fan of this genre, if you can call it that. People uprooted, struggling, adversity, etc. I’ve got enough aggravation.
I remember liking Elia Kazan’s America, America (1963), about a young Greek guy (based upon Kazan’s uncle) making his way to these shores. And the young Vito Corleone, Robert De Niro, life-in-Little- Italy sections of The Godfather, Part II. And I’ll never forget Oliver Stone’s Heaven and Earth (1993), about a young Vietnamese woman going through all kinds of pain on her way to the States. It was hell to sit through, I mean.
Damien Nguyen, Thi Kim Xuan Chau, Bai Ling aboard freighter in Hans Petter Moland’s The Beautiful Country.
And that was pretty much it for me until last Monday night, when I saw Hans Petter Moland’s The Beautiful Country (Sony Pictures Classics, 7.8) and just about flipped.
It won’t open for another two and a half months, which is plenty of time for people to read this article and then forget about it, but this 125 minute Norwegian-made, mostly English-speaking film is, by my sights, a nearly great thing. And it’s come out of nowhere, in a sense. And it needs all the advance word it can get.
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A road (and sea) movie in the most profound sense of that term, and a story about the resilience of the human spirit (although I have mixed feelings about describing it this way, given how totally full-of-shit that last proclamation sounds), The Beautiful Country is a movie about restraint, restraint and more restraint…and eventually, huge payoffs.
Especially during the last 20 minutes or so, when the great Nick Nolte arrives.
Set in 1990, The Beautiful Country is about a mixed-race, half-American young Vietnamese guy named Binh (Damien Nguyen) whom we first meet in a rural Vietnamese village working as a handy man, and dealing with racist disdain for being the son of an American G.I., and generally wondering who he is and where he belongs.
The movie follows Binh to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) to find his long-lost mother. He lives and works with her for a spell, and then something bad happens and he drifts off to sea with some boat people with his mother’s young son in tow.
They land in a Malaysian refugee camp, where Binh meets and falls in love with the beautiful Ling (Bai Ling). He and Ling and the boy eventually climb aboard a rusty freighter, which is captained by a cold-hearted prick (Tim Roth), that’s transporting illegals to the U.S.
And then it’s into his life in New York City as an indentured slave worker in a Chinatown restaurant, and finally a trip to Texas where he eventually finds his dad, who turns out to be Nolte.
The 64 year-old Nolte gives one of best-ever performances, and if you ask me is a probable candidate for a Best Supporting Actor nomination eight or nine months from now.
I could feel The Beautiful Country taking hold and feeling like the real deal almost immediately. You can say it’s not 100% perfect (maybe a tad cliched here and there, but only a little bit), and that it’s just another variation on a Terrence Malick-styled young-people-on-the-run movie. (Malick thought up the basic story idea and co-produced the film with Badlands producer Edward Pressman).
But it felt to me (and I can be a soft touch at times) like some kind of masterwork…one of the most profound and compassionate and finely nuanced films about the rough-and-tumble, never-say-die life of a roaming, disenfranchised person I’ve ever seen.
It’s also a great Vietnam healing movie for American audiences. I don’t know how to put it exactly, but this film feels like it’s in touch with feelings about the Vietnam War that should have come to the surface a long time ago. It’s a movie that says to American vets and Vietnamese nationals, “Uhm, guys? You need to talk.” It seems to be mining the emotional aftermath of this 40 year-old conflict on a level that’s never really been sorted out before. And without raising this or that issue or memory or specific incident. It all just kind of seeps in.
Beautiful Country director Hans Petter Molan with star Damien Nguyen.
It’s also a great and sometimes very sad movie about parenting. And it ends with a father-son moment that really touches bottom. And it manages to make the title of the film echo back in a way that feels different and thoughtful.
The irony is that The Beautiful Country was half-written off, or at least put on hold in the minds of potential distributors, after it was shown at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2004. It ran 136 minutes, and everyone (or a good percentage of those who were there) thought it was too long.
It took Moland, Malick and Pressman several months to prune it down to 125 minutes, partly over creative disagreements, and partly, I’ve been told, due to post-production coin being a little short. It played at Karlovy Vary last summer, but the trimmed version, I’ve heard, wasn’t completed in time to make the deadline for last September’s Telluride and Toronto and New York Film Festivals. And it didn’t play Sundance.
But the guys at Sony Pictures Classics saw through all this and now it’s slated as a mid-summer counter-programmer.
The people who mainly go to dumb-shit movies and don’t want to know or feel anything new or exotic will probably figure out ways of ducking The Beautiful Country, and maybe not even seeing it on DVD. It’s their loss and what can you do?
I didn’t know Moland at all before this, but he knows exactly what he’s doing here. I’m told I should see a mother-daughter relationship film he directed in 2000 called Abderdeen.
The Beautiful Country screenplay is by Sabina Murray and Larry Gross, working from a “story” by Lingard Jervey and an idea by Malick.
I said earlier that Roth’s character is a prick, and he is, but it’s part of this film’s delicate calibrations that he’s not painted too broadly and has other colors to show. There’s an American businessman who takes an interest in Ling in the New York section who could have been portrayed as a crass vulgar sort, but he, too, comes through with a certain humanity. Ditto the middle-aged woman who plays Nolte’s angry ex-wife.
There are one or two exceptions, but just about everyone in this movie has some kind of unexpected (by the cut-and-dried standards of too many films these days) dimension.
Stuart Dryburgh’s widescreen photography reminded me at times of the work of Chris Doyle (the dp for all those Wong Kar Wai films as well as Phillip Noyce’s The Quiet American ), which came as something of a surprise. Dryburgh is a respected veteran and all, but his recent credits (Aeon Flux, Bridget Jones’ Diary, Runaway Bride, Analyze This) don’t exactly say “art film cinematographer.”
I disagree with those who’ve said that Nguyen’s performance, which is all about being quiet and saying very little and frequently cowering, is some kind of liability. I believed in his character completely, and didn’t detect a single false note. I actually found him charismatic in a tentative, meditative, internalized way.
Bai Ling, a fairly well-known Asian actress who’s been working in Hollywood for about ten years (Red Corner, Anna and the King, Star Wars, Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith), seems out of place in the Malaysian refugee camp…at first.
Nick Nolte, Damien Nguyen.
She seems too shrewd and attractive to be from the bottom rung, or to have landed in such dire straits. But I bought into this because she delivers a convincingly cynical (bordering on bitter) attitude, and because I wanted her character to hook up with Binh.
Some critics (I can almost predict which ones) won’t fall for this film like I have, and that’s fine. But I can’t imagine anyone not being wowed by Nolte, who gathers that whole grizzled-older-guy thing that he’s been developing over the past 10 years or so and knocks it out of the park.
The title, according to Derek Elley’s Variety review, refers to the Chinese name for America — “mei guo” — which literally means “beautiful country.” But this is a film about beauty in all corners of the world, and in all sorts of unexpected places.
I realize this makes me sound like Sydney Skolsky, but I’m hearing excellent things about March of the Penguins, a French film said to have drop-dead beautiful photography. The director-cowriter is a guy named Luc Jacquet, and it’s about a flock of emperor penguins on their annual trek across Antarctic and all the classic life rituals and survival challenges they go through. A critic friend who’s seen it says this Warner Independent release “will do for those tuxedoed Antarctic dwellers what Winged Migration did for birds in flight.” The version that’s been screened so far has the original schlocky French soundtrack (my friend says parts of it “sound like Bjork gone Muzak, along with character voices for Mommy, Daddy and Baby penguin”), which is being trashed. Hipper sounds are being put in its place along with “a natural-science narration.” (I’m not supposed to reveal the name of the big-name actor who will read it). Pic will open on 6.24.05 in New York, L.A., San Francisco, Boston, Chicago and D.C., and expand in mid-July.
Deserving of special attention at next month’s Cannes Film Festival, I’m hearing, will be James Marsh’s The King, which stars an English-speaking Gael Garcia Bernal as a discharged Navy guy who comes home to Corpus Christi, Texas, and resolves some long-buried family issues. Marsh co-authored the screenplay with Milo Addica (Birth, Monster’s Ball), whose work I’ve come to admire. The film will be one of the Un Certain Regard attractions. William Hurt, Laura Harring, Paul Dano and Pell James costar. Marsh’s last feature was the startling Wisconsin Death Trip (1999).
Excellent news that Adam Curtis’s The Power of Nightmares, which I wrote about after receiving a muddy-looking tape of it from Telluride Film Festival honcho Tom Luddy last December, is going to have a special screening at the Cannes Film Festival. Luddy was behind this, of course. He lobbied Cannes artistic director Thierry Fremaux along with Fremaux’s good friend Michael Fitzgerald. Director Bernard Tavernier lobbied for the film also. Curtis’ three-hour doc contends that the anti-western terrorists and the neo-con hardliners in the George W. Bush White House are two peas in a fundamentalist pod, and that they seem to be almost made for each other in an odd way, and they need each other’s hatred to fuel their respective power bases but are, in fact, almost identical in their purist fervor, and are pretty much cut from the same philosophical cloth.
In addition to making this site’s machinery chug along, I’m also a filmmaker. No, I’m not plugging anything. But I am in a bit of a bind. If anyone who reads this knows someone who can answer a question about Final Cut Pro exporting audio to OMF, please click on my name and get in touch.
With weeks of Schiavo ’05, the Pope Deathwatch, and now Papal Idol, it’s been a sickeningly religious year so far. When you factor in “The Passion of The Christ“, President Bush, and the gay marriage brouhaha, we’re drowning in zealots. I imagine this will translate into some more “Left Behind” movies, and more flicks geared to the hopelessly faithful. Some might lament the faith-ization of movies, but I argue that American movies are already imbued with a thick religious vibe. The bad guys always lose, good guys win via a deus ex machina, order is restored, Allah hu Ackbar. Ever notice that the bad guys, if really evil, are never allowed to live? The hero defeats him in a one-on-one battle, then refuses to stoop to his level, and lets him live. The bad guy wrestles a gun from a hapless cop, and then the hero is allowed to kill in self-defense. How convenient. And how Old Testament. Real evil lives on, has civil rights, and gets parole in 20-25 years.
There are many, I presume, who will agree with my praise of that killer suspense sequence at the end of Act Two in Sydney Pollack’s The Interpreter, but now I know New Yorker critic Anthony Lane is one of them. Here’s the passage from Lane’s current review: “Still, to be fair, there is one part of The Interpreter that would, without question, have earned [Alfred Hitchcock’s] smile. All the characters are in different places — one agent is following Silvia, another is tailing a Matoban suspect, and Woods and Keller are in a booby-trapped room. (Catherine Keener, by far the driest deliverer of lines in the movie, looks up at an overhead light strung with explosives and says, ‘Now, that’s just rude.’ Imagine Celeste Holm packing heat, and you’re there.) Gradually, Pollack pulls the figures together, [Sean Penn] starts to yell into his phone, and calamity opens its maw. It is one of the smartest passages of action, allegro sostenuto, that I have seen for a long while — as neat, indeed, as the infamous bomb-on-a-bus sequence from Hitchcock’s Sabotage, and true to his faith in the revelatory powers of excitement, in what it means to have movies burst against our nerves.”
Investigative sleuth Mark Ebner spent some time last week hanging with the “Minutemen” in and around Tombstone, Arizona. The Minutemen are a bunch of volunteer border patrol shmoes trying to stop the flow of illegals over the border from Mexico. Ebner’s report will appear in the Globe sometime next week. (There’s no URL link to the story.) Of course, there’s a journey-of-discovery love story in the basic situation, in the vein of Tony Richardson’s The Border (’82). One of the militamen — an unhappy married guy, no kids — falls in love with a Mexican girl with a baby, and ultimately decides to betray the Minuteman ethos in order to help this girl get started in the States and provide a decent future for her son.
“Wow…real diamonds. They must be worth their weight in gold.” — Marilyn Monroe’s Sugar Kane Kowalczyk upon receiving a gift of a diamond bracelet in Billy Wilder’s and I.A.L. Diamond’s Some Like It Hot.
Considering the Smiths
Things seem to be happening between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie these days. Stories about recent time spent together (shared vacations, swanky hotel rooms, etc.) have been inside all the supermarket tabs, including Us magazine. And the evidence seems conclusive. **
Question is, what effect will these tabloid shenanigans have on the fortunes of Mr. and Mrs. Smith (20th Century Fox, 6.10), an obviously pumped-up, very expensive action comedy from director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Go ) in which they play married-to-each-other professional assassins?
Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie in Doug Liman’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
Liman is one of the best 40-and-under directors out there right now. I talk with him from time to time. He told me last January during the Sundance Film Festival that Mr. and Mrs. Smith is “the best thing I’ve ever done.” I don’t know what he precisely meant by this, but he said it persuasively.
But I have to be honest and say that right now, however great, good or not-so-good the film might be, the Pitt-Jolie affair could usher in some resistance.
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Whenever there’s hanky-panky on a movie set, especially when one of the lovers is married to someone else, women and conservative-minded types in the audience get their dander up and sometimes don’t want to go, and those who line up do so with a kind of a “show me” attitude. Okay, we’ve paid to see this thing…let’s see that chemistry!
If the romantic intrigue is there, fine. If it’s not, or if the director wimps out and tries to push it aside, the movie usually has problems.
Director Taylor Hackford cut out some love-scene footage when he edited Proof of Life , the Russell Crowe-Meg Ryan movie that had the same kind of attention from the tabloids during filming due to Crowe and Ryan’s affair. Hackford’s strategy worked against the film. The general reaction seemed to be, this is what all the fuss was about?
Gigli had problems of its own, but didn’t the Ben and J. Lo affair (which everyone was sick of before it opened) help sink it?
Besides, aren’t all those women who buy the supermarket tabs presumed to be more in Jennifer Aniston’s camp? Vaguely resentful, I mean, about Pitt having cheated on Aniston and taken up with this vaguely wacko hussy type? I’m addressing the situation with dopey tabloid cliches, but you know what I’m saying.
To me, the tone of the Mr. and Mrs. Smith trailer feels arch and a bit staid. It tells me the movie might be funny or clever here and there, and that Pitt uses his charm in a scene or two, but also that Jolie gives up very little.
She doesn’t have a screwball temperament, she doesn’t break down and weep, she doesn’t have a wacky Julia Roberts-type laugh. She’s poised and chilly.
The assassins-out-to-kill-each-other plot is apparently being used as a kind of metaphor for today’s high-powered couples who concentrate so much on their jobs and individual tasking than they don’t know how to unload all that stuff and just “be” with each other.
I know they’re supposed to be a bored married couple (initially, I mean), but the trailer never seems to show Pitt and Jolie being warm with each other or looking into each other’s eyes with any kind of excitement or fear or anything. It seems to be selling a rather dry and aloof film that’s mainly about thrills, aggression and physical comedy. And a lot of hardware.
We’re taking about the trailer, mind. I presume the movie of Mr. and Mrs. Smith is about more than what it conveys. Liman doesn’t make assembly-line crap.
Not an actual Pitt portrait, but a Worth 1000 Photoshop thing.
There’s one really funny bit at the end when a guy says to Pitt, “You’re ticking!” and Pitt realizes Jolie has planted a bomb on him.
There’s a piece about this very subject by Ann Donahue in the May issue of Premiere. It discusses the film’s “rocky” production history and on-set arguments, etc. Liman is quoted as saying he has never had a movie be under such tabloid scrutiny.
(Donahue uses the word “controversial” to describe “Liman’s belief that he can bring the small-scale independent film ethos…to major studio productions.” Wanting to make big-budget films sharper, quirkier and more flavorful is controversial?)
Pitt is a bigger star overseas than he is here. Troy earned much more over there than it did here. But he can act when the chips are down (I’ve always loved him in Se7en) and he’s basically likable.
I don’t think Jolie is very likable at all, and I wonder if she means all that much to general audiences. Her second Tomb Raider flick was seen as a tank (cost $90 million, earned $65 million in US theatres), and the responses to her last few films — Beyond Borders, Taking Lives, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow — were underwhelming.
Angelina’s got those great lips and all but she’s also seems kind of crazy, no? Heavily into her own orbit, I mean, in an over-indulged, rich-actress, Tallulah Bankhead-type way. Smooching her brother at the Oscars, refusing to speak with her dad (Jon Voight), blowing off Billy Bob with her U.N. spokeswoman thing and then jumping whole-hog into adopting third-world kids, etc.
She seems like a moment-to-moment person. Not much of an investor in long-term relationships. But really great in bed, I’ll bet…or so goes the general assumption.
I was talking about Brad and Angelina with a woman the other night in the checkout line at Pavilions. Neither of us trusts her, we decided. We also agreed that Brad is in a typically randy, post-divorce rebound mode and his Angelina relationship is not long for this world.
But for the movie’s sake, they should probably try to stay together until the opening.
** Pitt’s p.r. rep Cindy Guagenti has called stories about the Pitt-Jolie romance “untrue.” In a statement given yesterday (4.14) to the Associated Press, Us magazine, which has a cover story saying the Pitt-Jolie thing is very real, said, “Pitt has long denied stories involving his personal life, beginning with reports of trouble in his marriage to Jennifer Aniston prior to the separation. Multiple sources both on and off the record confirmed Pitt and Jolie were physically affectionate in public areas of [a desert] resort where they were [recently] staying.”
Summer Shakedown
It doesn’t matter which big-studio tentpole movies are going to make the most money this summer. What counts is which ones will be good.
The best films of the May-August season are going to be Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (20th Century Fox, 5.6); Paul Haggis’s Crash (Lions Gate, 5.6); Marilyn Agrelo’s Mad Hot Ballroom (Paramount Classics, 5.13.05); Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man (Universal, 6.3.05); Sebastian Cordero’s Cronicas (Palm Pictures, 7.1); Craig Brewer’s Hustle & Flow (Paramount Classics, 7.15); Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know (IFC, 6.24), and Tony Scott’s Domino (New Line, August 19).
Jon Hawkes, Miranda July in Me and You and Everyone We Know.
My apologies for being so buried in the hurlyburly that I somehow missed the announcement (earlier this month?) about Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown, which I put into this piece yesterday (4.15), having been moved from a late July opening to October 14th.
I also failed to include Me and You in yesterday’s posting. I didn’t see it at Sundance last January, but this much loved film has been urgently brought to my attention my friends and readers, so I’m accepting their endorsements on faith.
Crash went over extremely well with my UCLA Sneak Preview class, which is made up of mostly older viewers. Cronicas may do marginal business, or it could do better than this. (It’s a dark piece, but gripping as hell with an above-average John Leguizamo performance.) The rest will all be “audience” pictures. Maybe not as big as the monster tentpoles, but popular.
I’m rock solid about Kingdom, Crash , Ballroom , Cronicas and Hustle & Flow because I’ve seen them. I’ve read Richard Kelly’s Domino screenplay and can’t imagine Scott not making something startling and fully alive with it.
I haven’t seen Cinderella Man but I’ve been hearing pretty good things for a long while and the trailer sells you on the prestige-level elements.
I would like Richard Linklater’s The Bad News Bears to be a bit more than Bad Santa-manages-a-kids-baseball team…but maybe that’ll be enough.
Based solely on the trailer, I have massive hopes for The Wedding Crashers (New Line, 7.15).
I would like to see Mr. and Mrs. Smith and John Stockwell’s Into the Blue (MGM, 9.30) pan out.
(l. t. r.) Hustle & Flow‘s Taraji P. Henson, Paula Jai Parker, Terrence Howard and Taryn Manning.
Hooray, sight unseen, for George Romero’s Land of the Dead (Universal, 6.24)! And here’s hoping Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm (Dimension, 7. 29) turns out to be somewhat better than the advance word has indicated for several months.
Long Lines, Few Surprises: Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of The Sith (2oth Century Fox, 5.19); Madagascar (DreamWorks, 5.27); The Longest Yard (Paramount, 5.27); Batman Begins (Warner Bros., 6.17), The War of the Worlds (Paramount, 7.1); XXX2 (Sony, 4.29); Charlie & the Chocolate Factory (Warner Bros., 7.15); The Bad News Bears (Paramount, 7.22); The Island (DreamWorks, 7.22); Dark Water (Disney, 7.8); Fantastic Four (20th Century Fox, 7.8); Bewitched (Columbia, 6.24).
For some reason, Monster in Law (New Line, 5.13) isn’t making me tingle with anticipation. Same deal with Aeon Flux (Paramount, 8.12); The Honeymooners (Paramount, 6.10); The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe (Disney, 4.29); The Lords of Dogtown (Columbia, 6.3); The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (Warner Bros., 6.3); and The Pink Panther (MGM, 8.12).
Talk Soup
That rollicking commentary track by Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church on the Sideways DVD made me think of a few others.
You can’t listen to this anymore unless you’re a laser disc collector, but Howard Suber’s commentary about The Graduate for the Criterion Collection laser disc is the most insightful I’ve ever heard or read about this film.
Suber’s commentaries on the Criterion laser discs of Some Like it Hot and High Noon are, I feel, just about perfect, and it’s a crying shame they’re not available on DVD.
The late John Frankenheimer’s commentary about the making of The Train is one of the best of its kind — the most candid, intimate and precise. It was first available on an MGM/UA laser disc for The Train that came out in the mid ’90s. Wonder of wonders, it was actually transferred to the MGM/UA Home Video DVD.
The giddy, almost drunken-sounding chat between Kurt Russell, Bob Zemeckis and Bob Gale on the Used Cars DVD is a real hoot.
So is the commentary track between Ron Shelton, Kevin Costner and Tim Robbins on the Bull Durham special edition DVD.
The chat between Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter Lem Dobbs on the DVD of The Limey is a classic, especially when Dobbs starts laying into Soderbergh for ignoring chunks of his screenplay and thereby inviting commentary from critics that the explanation of story and character in the film was threadbare….when in fact it wasn’t on the page.
I loved Soderbergh’s chat with Mike Nichols on the Paramount Home Video DVD of Catch 22, and I can’t imagine that the Soderbergh-John Boorman chat on the forthcoming DVD of Point Blank won’t be worth its weight in gold.
David Thomson’s commentary about Out of the Past for the old Image laser disc version that came out in the mid ’90s is lost to the world (and will probably never be heard on DVD), but it was truly a masterful verbal essay.
If anyone has any others they’d like to mention….
For me, a great commentary isn’t about how brilliant or informative or well prepared the talkers are, although obviously that matters. It’s about how much they get to you.
Does what they have to say seem open, engaging, amusing? If it’s a filmmaker talking, is he/she offering some kind of deeply sincere exploration of the process, or is he/she giving what might be called a good-enough performance?
Authenticity
“Have you seen the trailer for The Lords of Dogtown (Columbia, 6.3) yet?
“As an avid skateboarder from 1975 through 1990, I can say with some authority that none of those guys would have said any of the lines in the trailer. The dialogue is atrocious. I’m predicting this thing is going to laughed right out of the theaters by skaters when it hits.” — Jody, c/o, www.guruphiliac.org.
Jeff to Jody: Like what, for example? What doesn’t ring true?
Jody to Jeff: Here are some examples:
“‘Now get out there and surf, you little grommets.’ I think it would be more like ‘you little assholes’ or ‘you little fuckheads.’
“‘With these you can do the same hard turns you do on your surf boards.’ It would be more like, ‘You can shred the street, dude.’ Or, ‘With these you won’t slide out anymore.’
“‘This wave breaks 24 hours a day, everyday. You know what, bros? You’re going to be the first to ride it.’ From Tony Alva? No way. I don’t know the man, but I do know he wasn’t known for his verbal expressiveness.
“And it’s not like these guys suddenly decided to ride pools. There was a distinct progression from ramps and drainage ditches to pools, half-pipes and full-pipes.
“Other offenders:
“‘Yeah, surf it like a wave, man.’
“‘We can’t bail on Skip. We’re Z-Boys. We’re family.’
“‘Hey Tony, it looks like it’s going to be you or me.’
“‘We’re going to be on summer vacation for the next 20 years.’
“It all sounds cloying and false to me, as if they’ve dumbed it way, way down for general consumption.
“These kids were basically the gangsters of their era and area. Some of them may have been intelligent, but none of them wanted to sound it. It just wasn’t cool back then. Insight was not approved.
“I wasn’t there, so I guess I’d have to admit I’m talking out of my ass with regards to the actual Z-Boys.
Heath Ledger (long blonde surfer hair, black shades) in scene from Catherine Hardwicke’s Lords of Dogtown.
“But I did work for a California pro skater in his distribution company. I also sold skateboards at a skateshop in Orange County. And I was at the birth of the Orange County punk movement at the Cuckoo’s Nest in Costa Mesa. I also worked at Gotcha Sportwear and Stussywear, both in Orange County.
“Now I’m a middle-aged graphic designer living a few thousand miles away from the ocean, and I’m an occasional fruitbooter (rollerblader) to boot.
“I could be completely wrong, but the dialogue in the trailer just wasn’t ringing true at all for the time and venue. That’s not at all surprising given Hollywood’s penchant for dumbing everything down to the LCD, but I hoped it would be different for this movie. So far that doesn’t appear to be the case.
“Then again, maybe they used all the worst dialogue for the trailer in the hopes of pulling the widest audience.”
Pitt, Jolie, Aniston
“What is it about beautiful, confident, talented, take-charge women like Angelina Jolie that scares the bejesus out of everyone? And what is it about Jennifer Aniston, who in all her movies seems to be re-cycling simpering, clueless Rachel, that makes people want to leap to her defense and assume that everyone else in the saga is a villain?
“Jolie can act circles around Aniston, does not seem nearly as high maintenance, and does not seem to need everyone around her constantly reassuring her as Jennifer reportedly does.
“I love the spin on this. The Jennifer camp says Brad broke Jen’s heart and that all was a paradise before homewrecker Jolie came along. The Pitt camp says he’ll let her have the house and that he was powerless against Jolie…Brad Mouse to her Angelina Cat. And the Jolie camp just says the hell with all of you, I don’t need to sleep with married men, they’re lining up for me, plus I work for the U.N.
“Why can’t it be as simple as this? Pitt, wanting children, seeing his wife booking movies into her 40s and realizing that it ain’t gonna happen? And Jennifer seeing that the family promises she made during Friends don’t hold a candle to grabbing movie offers before her heat dies down and she hits the Hollywood women-over-40 ceiling?
And Jolie being flabbergasted that Pitt has allowed it all to come to this and nature taking its course?
“Will I see Mr. and Mrs. Smith? Nope. Partly because the trailer looks lame and the story does not sound that compelling. And also partly because of the whole Pitt-Aniston-Jolie saga. I am tired of reading about it and don’t need to pay money to watch Pitt and Jolie play house.” — Zoey.
Danish director Lone Scherfig (Italian for Beginners) was all set to start shooting the high-profile World War II drama Good in Berlin, starring Hugh Jackman as a literature professor seduced by the Nazi propaganda, when she apparently suffered some nasty accident and had to drop out. Looks like instead she’ll segue into directing the semi-biographical Erik Nietzsche: The Early Years, surrounding the misadventures of a rebellious film student. And who was it that had the Danish cinematic community in stitches with his pseudonymous screenplay? You guessed it: Lars von Trier. But why did the director give away such a small personal screenplay? “It’s a self-centred, vanity project” he told ScreenDaily.com. “[Scherfig] can give the main character a little love and some understanding.” But if von Trier feels he was unable to do this himself as a director, does this prove once and for all that he’s a sadist, or a masochist? — Nic Kockum
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