Three reactions to Eddie Murphytelling Extra‘s Tanika Ray that he’s considering retirement from film acting with comments like (a) “I have close to fifty movies and it’s like, why am I in the movies?,” (b) “I’ll go back to the stage and do standup” and (c) that he “doesn’t want to be a part of” Brett Ratner‘s Beverly Hills Cop 4 because “the movie [isn’t] ready to be done.”
Eddie Murphy; Frank Sinatra.
One, Murphy may be feeling deflated about the tracking on Meet Dave (7.11), which has been fairly abysmal for the last couple of weeks. The first-choice numbers have recently improved (they’re up to 2 or 3) but the signs are unmistakable that the bloom is off the rose and that people have finally understood that the odds of a Murphy comedy being gross or sloppy or not funny enough are pretty good so why bother in the first place? Murphy has since quashed the retirement talk, but that’s only because he’s moody fuck who feels what he feels when he’s feeling it. The bottom line is that he’s in a lousy place.
Two, he’s talking about a “Frank Sinatra retirement” which really means an extended “fuck all this” adventure that’s about shedding the old skin and finding new sources of vitality or what-have-you. A soul-seeking, soul-recharging exercise that every high-stress creative person goes through once or twice, usually in their 40s or 50s. In short, a bout of the middle-aged-crazies.
Three, it’s obviously a healthy thing or Murphy to be thinking about getting out of the rut and get back to his stand-up roots. I used to love the guy in the old days (late ’70s to ’83). I saw him perform live twice back then — once at a comedy club in Manhattan, once at the Universal amphitheatre. But the hip industry people haven’t been with him for 20 years. His loss of the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Dreamgirls confirmed that, and then people really didn’t like his graceless ass when he bolted out of the Kodak theatre 90 seconds after Alan Arkin, the winner, took the stage.
All I know is, the guy used to be really funny, and that he needs to get back to that place again if he wants to matter again. Or feel anything again. Right now he’s a dead man.
About 40 minutes ago (i.e., just before 11 am Pacific), Slate‘s Kim Masters ran a response to yesterday’s press-release development in the story about why HBO decided to change the ending of Marina Zenovich‘s Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, to wit:
“Following up our report this week about the new Roman Polanski documentary, we take note of a weird statement released Wednesday” under the signatures of prosecutor Roger Gunson as well as defense attorney Douglas Dalton — the case’s two principle advocates.
“Both are featured in an HBO documentary, Roman Polanksi: Wanted and Desired, in which they bemoan the shabby treatment that alleged child rapist Polanski suffered at the hands of the Los Angeles Superior Court in 1977.
“As we reported, the documentary originally ended with the assertion that an unnamed judge in 1998 was going to permit Polanski to return to the United States without risking jail time, but only if he appeared at a court proceeding that would be televised.
“Last week, the Los Angeles Superior Court identified that judge as Larry Paul Fidler and vehemently denied that he had ever imposed such a condition. After a pause, HBO said Friday that it would change the end of the film to say that Polanski feared the proceeding would be televised, which is quite different from having a judge insist that it had to be.
“The altered documentary aired Monday. Yesterday, the film’s publicists released a statement signed by Gunson and Dalton contending that at the 1998 hearing, Dalton pressed ‘for a resolution of the case that would allow for minimal news media.’ The statement says Dalton ‘recalled that Judge Fidler would require television coverage,’ and then adds: ‘Mr. Gunson recalls television coverage discussed at the meeting.’
“Talk about lawyer words. There’s no further elaboration as to what, if anything, Gunson remembers about that discussion. The statement, based on this rather threadbare set of assertions, concludes that both lawyers denounce the court’s ‘false and reprehensible statement’ disputing the notion that Fidler demanded television coverage.
“No word from HBO on whether the film will be changed again.”
I woke up this morning — late, around 9 am — to news of the death of Sydney Pollack. Which we all knew was coming for a long while. The thing about “death’s honesty” (a Bob Dylan coinage from the mid 60s) is that all dread and preparation are forgotten once that solitary walk across the footbridge has been made. Then it all comes washing in. Sydney wasn’t a “friend” but a confidante and supporter, a guy I could always call and, I felt, a warm acquaintance.
As difficult as approaching a threshold always is, once it’s been surmounted there is only peace and tranquility for the traveller. The burden is over, the pain is over. In finality, serenity. And yet it feels…I don’t know, like I’ve lost a favorite uncle or something. I’m feeling that fluttery thing inside.
But if you had told me 18 months ago that Pollack and Anthony Minghella, partners in Mirage Enterprises who worked together on The English Patient, Cold Mountain, The Quiet American and several other quality films…if you had told me then that both of these guys would be lights-out by May 2008, I would’ve said “what…?” Both of them were too active and alive. They had too much talent and know-how, too many miles to go.
People always bring up the Oscar-winning Out of Africa (’85) and Tootsie (’82), the hugely successful comedy with Dustin Hoffman as a straight cross-dressing actor, as Pollack’s finest, best-known films. They’re both solid and accomplished (Tootsie especially), but the Pollack pics that I’ve most enjoyed are the genre thrillers — Three Days of the Condor, particularly, and The Firm — because they exceed their boundaries and then some. They’re about Pollack adding shrewd and surprising things rather than just meeting expectations.
Both have melancholy emotional currents — feelings of loss and regret — and some graceful resignations, courtesy of the wry and understated dialogue by David Rayfiel, Pollack’s pinch-hit rewrite guy for decades. Plus they’re both driven by character as much as plot.
Gene Hackman‘s confession to Jeanne Tripplehorn in The Firm that he plays around “because my wife understands me.” (Too well, he meant.) European Condor assassin Max Von Sydow working with miniature models in his New York hotel room. Condor CIA guy Cliff Robertson asking his superior, played by John Houseman, if he misses the “action” he encountered during the World War II years, and Houseman responding, “No — I miss that kind of clarity.” Both films teem with this kind of stuff.
After these my favorites are (a) Sketches of Frank Gehry (Pollack’s wise, affectionate, layman-level appreciation of our greatest architect), (b) Jeremiah Johnson, (c) the final voice-over moment in Havana, (d) the first half of Random Hearts, (e) all of The Yakuza, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Castle Keep, (f) the bomb-on-the-bus scene in The Interpreter and (g) portions of The Way We Were, particularly the final scene.
And, of course, there were Sydney’s first-rate performances — the divorcee in Husbands and Wives, that red-felt pool table scene with Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut, a pair of cynical and corroded seen-it-alls in Changing Lanes and Michael Clayton.
Here’s an mp3 of a chat I did with Pollack about the Gehry doc.
The last contact I had with Pollack was four or five months ago, sometime around Christmas. I e-mailed him and asked if he’d seen 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days. When he said no I asked him if he wanted a DVD to look at and he said sure. A few hours later I drove over to his Pacific Palisades home — a sprawling, well-fortified Cape Cod-like place with tall trees and beautiful grounds — and dropped it off with his wife. I didn’t ask to see him. He was pretty sick at that point.
I first got to know Sydney a little bit in the summer of ’82. He’d heard I was writing a couple of stories about how Tootsie had been a chaotic shoot (which it was) and had cost an astronomical $21 or $22 million — this at a time when a typical mainstream studio film cost $10 to $12 million to make. I hadn’t yet tried to reach him — he’d heard I was calling around and so he called me. He was pissed off but enough of an adult and a strategic player to get right into it and try to spin things his way.
Pollack and Robert Redford during the 1972 Cannes Film Festival.
We became friendly in the mid ’90s when I wrote an L.A. Times Syndicate piece about Rayfiel, whose lamenting and soulful dialgoue had always moved me. Pollack thereafter helped me with an article I did about Mike Arick‘s restoration of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? I sent him a note when he busted his hip after a bicycle-riding accident. I once gave him a heads-up about the poor quality of a digital master of On The Waterfront that was shown on TCM’s “The Essentials,” which he hosted for a season or two. He talked to me a bit about the making of Eyes Wide Shut, and laughed when I told him the Lars von Trier story about why Harvey Keitel left the film (i.e., the Legend of Mr. White, “an honest misfire,” etc.).
Four years ago Sydney gave me an admiring quote to use when I started Hollywood Elsewhere. He brought me in and showed me a cut of The Interpreter before it had gotten around, and then did a guest appearance up at my UCLA class when I screened it. And we did that phoner about Sketches of Frank Gehry, etc. A steady guy, dependable…about as adult and un-flaky as they come.
He was one of the best DVD voice-over and making-of commentary guys in the business. Sydney was a fretter, a kvetcher. Anxiety-ridden when he was working on something. Always very concerned about fucking up or falling short. Being this kind of person myself, I obviously related.
This quality comes through, in any event, in his commentary tracks — a tone that says, “Look, I don’t know everything but I do know this much, and I’ve been around enough to understand what tends to work and what doesn’t, and I tried to make this particular aspect work. I don’t know if I succeeded or not but people have told me I did so okay, maybe. But what I really love is the process — the shaping and refining — even though it gives me gray hairs. And I believe in having a sense of humor, or at least a sense of irony.”
He was a Paris lover, so we had that in common. He was a pilot (or so I recall him saying), and told me once about flying to Paris once in a private jet of some sort.
Pollack was healthy all his life, I’ve been told by his friends. He ate well, cooked well, didn’t drink much, hadn’t smoked for decades. I don’t know where the cancer came from or why it took him when he had a good 10 or 15 years to go, at the very least. Death knocks on the door when it damn well wants to, whether you’re ready or not.
As Woody Allen said during the just-finished Cannes Film Festival, “We’re hard-wired to resist it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t resist us.”
Nobody can be called a near-lock for a Best Actor nomination at this stage of the game. With the start of awards season being a good four months away, it’s way too early to even speculate. Except, arguably, when it comes to Richard Jenkins‘ work in The Visitor. A quiet, heart-melting lead performance by one of the finest character actors in the business, Jenkins’ Walter Vale is one of those career-lifting roles that SAG members tend to warm to, remember and single out.
Especially when the actor in question has been stand-out superb in a long run of supporting roles over the last 20-plus years. For me Jenkins began to come into his own in the mid ’90s with two lawman parts — a police detective in Mike Nichols‘ Wolf (’94) and a gay FBI agent in David O. Russell‘s Flirting With Disaster (’96). I think Jenkins’ career took off with one scene in particular — when his agent reacts to a dose of LSD that’s been put into his food. It’s the single most hilarious drug-related scene in modern cinema.
That was twelve years ago, and for my money Jenkins has hit long doubles or triples with eight performances since, not counting his work in The Visitor. I’m thinking of the psychiatrist in There’s Something About Mary, the sheriff in Scott Hicks‘ Snow Falling on Cedars, some kind of offical or investigator in Sydney Pollack‘s Random Hearts, an EPA agent in Me, Myself & Irene, an aging racist murderer in am FX feature called Sins of the Father, a divorce attorney in Intolerable Cruelty, an uncredited but hilarious part in I Heart Huckabees, and 10 episodes as Nathaniel Fisher in HBO’s Six Feet Under. The Visitor‘s Vale is a morose 50ish college professor who goes through a spiritual wake-up by helping out a couple of illegal immigrants, and then falling in love with the Palestinian mother of one of them, a young man who teaches him how to play a native drum.
His next three features are a British horror-thriller called The Broken, Adam McKay‘s comedic Step Brothers(Sony, 7.25) with Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, and the Coen brothers‘ Burn After Reading (Focus, 9.12).
Jenkins is doing interviews to plug the recent theatrical expansion of The Visitor, which is now playing in some 300 situations. We met at lunch time at Le Pain Quotidien and spoke for over an hour. Here are two portions of that chat, totalling maybe 15 minutes — selection #1 and selection #2. We’re tallking about Burn After Reading as the first mp3 begins. We get into the Flirtiing LSD scene in the second portion.
I can’t believe I’m planning to pay money out of my own wallet — the fruit of extremely hard and grueling day-to-day effort — to see Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay (New Line, 4.25) sometime later today. I know what I’m in for. It’s going to make me want to to kill myself Khmer Rouge-style with a blue plastic bag. But I missed the damn press screening and I need the ammunition that will derive from being able to know and say “yes, I’ve seen it.”
Especially knowing what I do about Kal Penn, which is that he’s an animal. I know of no other youngish actor who conveys chronic brain-cell blockage and open-mouthed slovenliness like Penn does time and again. I’m not saying he’s literally an unbridled idiot off-screen, but he’s relentless at trying to convince audiences that his characters are low-born and dumb as fenceposts, and after a while the effort carries over.
I didn’t realize Penn had the bona fide ape gene until I caught Mira Nair‘s The Namesake (’06), in which Penn played the son. I thought I might be treated to some other aspect of his personality, that working with Nair would allow him to shake off the low-rent moves and attitudes that he’s used in Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle and all the other 20-something TV shows and crap-level movies he’s been in.
But within minutes of his first appearance in The Namesake, Penn went into this standard routine, which boils down to that clueless-asshole expression plus that open-mouthed thing he does in nearly every scene. What a creep, I told myself then and there. He can’t class himself up for even a single role. Penn plays it fairly straight and restrained throughout most of The Namesake, but I didn’t believe for a second that he wasn’t a major dumbass beneath the skin.
The only time I half-believed a Penn character might actually have something going on upstairs was during his brief performance in Mike Binder‘s Man About Town.
Penn’s decision to teach two current undergrad courses at the University of Pennsylvania — “Images of Asian Americans in the Media” and “Contemporary American Teen Films” — in no way belies or undercuts what I’ve said here. He doesn’t just “play” morons convincingly — he convinces you that it goes deeper than that.
“The Asian American Studies Program is delighted that Kalpen Modi, a.k.a. Kal Penn, chose our program to host his teaching engagement at Penn,” Grace Kao, director of the Asian American Studies Program at Penn, said last year. “Mr. Modi is one of the leading Asian American actors of his generation and is particularly aware of how his racial and ethnic identification has affected his professional experiences.” And that’s supposed to mean what exactly?
The formidable Tommy Lee Jones lets go with three choice comments during an interview with 02138‘s Richard Bradley — about Iraq and the draft, righties pushing for the building a border fence between the U.S. and Mexico, and the meaning of the ending of No Country for Old Men.
(1) Draft/Iraq: “About eight months ago, [New York Democratic congressman] Charlie Rangel came out advocating the reinstitution of the draft, and people were shocked. ‘Congressman Rangel,’ they said, ‘why would you argue for the reinstitution of the draft?’ He said, ‘It’s very simple. We have a volunteer army. We’re sending ’em back tour after tour after tour. We’re running our military into the ground, and if we would just reinstitute the draft so that it had some impact on American people — those who don’t do a lot of thinking — this war would be over in six months.’
“[And] think that’s right. We had the draft in ’68, we had a bullshit war, and it ultimately ended. And there were terrific repercussions throughout the government. The Bush administration has escaped those repercussions because the American people have a way to turn their head and say, “It doesn’t really affect my family. My daughter is in no threat of having her legs blown off. My son is in no threat of coming back with no face, no ears, no nose — because he didn’t volunteer.”
“If somebody were making them incur those risks, the votership might change radically.”
(2) Border Fence: “The idea of a fence between El Paso and Brownsville bears all the credibility and seriousness of flying saucers from Mars or leprechauns. Or any manner of malicious, paranoid superstition. In other words, it’s bullshit.
“[You hear the talk] and the talk is worth headlines, the talk is worth attention, and that might lead to votes. It’s a predatory approach to democracy by those who would instill fear and then propose themselves as a solution. It’s very destructive. Very, very destructive. And it’s the perfectly wrong thing to do.
“First of all, it won’t work. You can’t build a fence that I cannot get over, through, or under if I want to go to Mexico. In that [border] country, you cannot do it. It’s a complete folly. Ecologically, it’s a complete disaster, and sociologically, it’s a complete disaster. It’s an act of fascist madness.
“And the people who are being appealed to, the voterships that are removed from that country, are being spoken to as if it’s time to fence their backyard so the stray dog doesn’t get in. ‘Okay, let’s just build a fence.’ That’s as far removed from reality as can be, and entirely cynical by those who would manipulate these people. It’s a sad day for the democratic process to see people manipulated through fear and insecurity.”
(2) About No Country: “So there’s a lot of different ways of thinking about morality, is what we were saying last, and the conventional way is not always the right way. Morality might be bigger than you are. And I think the human being needs — I don’t know if he deserves, but needs — frequent reminders that the world ain’t flat and he’s not living in the center of the universe. I think that’s an important part about the last few moments in the movie.
“You’re asking me now about the last scene, which is essentially a speech by Ed Tom Bell recounting dreams about his father. And you have the feeling that Ed Tom is thinking about hope, about the future, and that no matter what evil might have transpired, or no matter what opportunities were lost for communication between father and son, or between brother and brother, sister and brother, that somewhere off ahead through the darkness and cold there’s a father who carried fire to create a warm place to welcome you. And that keeps you going, because you know he’ll be there.
“And after describing that beautiful picture, Ed Tom says, ‘And then I woke up.’ So, as always with Cormac, the question becomes more important than the answer. Was that dream an illusion or not?”
As long as I’m bumming scripts, I may as well scout around also for Joshua James‘ adaptation of Peter Biskind‘s “Down and Dirty Pictures,” which is apparently going to be shooting soon under the aegis of director Kenneth Bowser, producer Kevin Scott Frakes and PalmStar Entertainment.
The finished film will almost certainly fail, of course. Any film produced by a company named “Palm Star Entertainment,” trust me, hasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of being even half-tolerable. (The conjunction of the words “palm” and “star” assures ostentation and cluelessness.) In a column posted yesterday Fox News 411’s Roger Friedman said it was politically doomed as well.
The “Down and Dirty” project was first announced in a Variety story in August 2006.
The most interesting aspect of Michael Cieply‘s 3.27 N.Y. Times story about the impending divorce between Paramount and DreamWorks is the photo of Laura Ramsey and Jena Malone in The Ruins (DreamWorks, 4.4), an apparently standard kids-in-peril horror film from director Carter Smith and screenwriter /novelist Scott B. Smith. The subdued lighting and amber tones are intriguing, which is more than you can say for Ceiply’s story about clashing egos.
The IMDB keywords for The Ruins include the following: Severed Leg, Accidental Killing, Tequila, Cell Phone, Mexico, Corpse, Chase Scene, Shower Scene, Surgery Scene, Parasite Underneath Skin, Disturbing, Dance Scene, Vacation, Beach, Shot In The Head, Gore, Knife, Fall From Height, Loss Of Brother, Shot To Death, Pistol, Archeological Dig, Broken Leg, Loss Of Friend, Male Nudity, Female Nudity, Vomit Scene, Bow And Arrow, Stabbed in the Chest, Blood Spatter, Suffocation, Cheating On Boyfriend, Breasts, Self Mutilation, Shot In The Chest, Death, Skeleton, Based On Novel and Twist In The End.
No two ways about it — Martin Scorsese‘s Shine a Light needs to be seen in the IMAX format. It’ll be agreeable in regular 35mm — fun, engaging — but the wow factor will be missing. The Rolling Stones concert film was shot in a semi-intimate setting — Manhattan’s Beacon Theatre — and the intense close-ups and gigantic size of the bodies and faces of Mick Jagger, Keith Richard, Ron Wood and Charlie Watts make it seem even more so. This movie is all over you.
An approximation of the IMAX aspect ratio (1.43 to 1) of Shine a Light
Robert Richardson‘s camerawork (with celebrated dps like John Toll and Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki working as camera operators) swings, soars and glides with pulsing rhythm. At times the camera dives and swoops like a hawk. At times it makes you feel as if you’re literally dancing alongside Jagger, but with the kind of exacting discipline that Gene Kelly brought to his big dance numbers in those ’50s MGM musicals. (With maybe a little Twyla Tharp thrown in.) The cutting is clean and smooth and exhilarating at times. The film has a phenomenal visual energy.
Scorsese starts things off with a 10- or 12-minute short in a relatively small and boxy (1.33 to 1) black-and-white format. Scorsese is the lead character at this point — the director asking questions, sorting things through, being told he can’t do this or that, etc. This is the footage of the show’s planning, preparation, logistics. And it’s very engaging. But the split-second that the show begins….wham! We’re IMAX-ed up — in color with the images suddenly twice as tall and four or five times louder, and we’re off to the races.
It’s thrilling in nearly the exact same way that audiences were wowed when This is Cinerama! (’53) went from boxy black-and-white newsreel footage of Lowell Thomas to a sudden cut to the full-color, three-camera Cinerama shot of a mountain range as the music soared and the curtains parted to make room for a much taller, super-wide image.
Approximation of the 35mm aspect ratio (1.85 to 1) of the same shot
I can’t imagine how this effect can be delivered on a conventional 35mm screen, and I’m not precisely sure how the IMAX image I saw last night at L.A.’s Bridge Cinema will be presented in a “flat” format. The IMAX aspect ratio is on the boxy side with an aspect ratio of 1.43 to 1. Movies in regular theatres are projected at 1.85 to 1 or, if filmed and projected in Scope, 2.39 to 1. The Shine a Light bottom line is that either (a) the 35mm non-IMAX version will present more visual information on the sides in order to fill out a wider 1.85 to 1 image, or (b) the IMAX will be cropped to create a 1.85 to 1 aspect ratio on 35 mm. Am I being confusing?
I’ll try to figure this out tomorrow morning. I tried to get a clear understanding of whether the 35mm image will be wider than the IMAX image but smaller in scale, or whether it will be a less tall version of the IMAX image. I asked and asked and asked, and nobody really knew.
The power of those IMAX speakers…my God! And the re-animated groove that the Stones get into with 80% of the songs is sublime. Before last night I thought I’d heard “Tumblin’ Dice” once too often, but the version in the film is so hypnotically cool and soul-freeing that I’d now like to find a soundtrack recording, or at least an iTunes track of this particular rendition. The only rote performances are of the big headline songs (“Start Me Up,” “Brown Sugar,” etc.) The less well-known ones are mostly transcendent. The relatively quiet and contained performance of “As Tears Go By” is a classic.
The IMAX closeups of all those jowls, turkey necks and crows feet on the Stones’ faces are something really new and different in the annals of rock-concert films. This sounds like I’m being a smart-ass, but I found them genuinely cool and fascinating. Keith looks like a Peter Jackson CG creation, a Lord of the Rings troll.
Did director Gore Verbinski put make-up on Richards for his Pirates of the Caribbean cameo? I walked out before Richards’ scene (the film was despicable), but I saw an online photo of Richards and Johnny Depp and it looked to me like Keith’s face was all gunked up. If he looked this way in the film Verbinksi needlessly embroidered one of the world’s great natural weirdnesses. Shine a Light ends with a knockout Scorsese tracking shot — a half-real, half digital thing in which a single hand-held camera seems to follow Jagger and the others as they make their way through the backstage throng and out the stage door. Scorsese himself, absent since the early black-and-white footage, makes two appearances in this sequence. And then the camera alights and soars over Manhattan and…I don’t want to over-describe, but it’s beautiful.
In a 3.31 New Yorker piece called “Out of Print: The Death and Life of the American Newspaper,” Eric Alterman notes that in a recent episode of The Simpsons, “a cartoon version of Dan Rather introduced a debate panel featuring ‘Ron Lehar, a print journalist from the Washington Post.’ This inspired Bart’s nemesis Nelson to shout, ‘Haw haw! Your medium is dying!’ “‘Nelson!’ Principal Skinner admonished. “But it is!” came the young man’s reply.
IlIustration by Gerald Scarfe
“Nelson is right,” Alterman writes. “Newspapers are dying; the evidence of diminishment in economic vitality, editorial quality, depth, personnel, and the over-all number of papers is everywhere. What this portends for the future is complicated.” But Alter comes up with a tight and sobering assessment later in the piece.
“We are about to enter a fractured, chaotic world of news, characterized by superior community conversation but a decidedly diminished level of first-rate journalism,” he says. “The transformation of newspapers from enterprises devoted to objective reporting to a cluster of communities, each engaged in its own kind of ‘news’ — and each with its own set of ‘truths’ upon which to base debate and discussion — will mean the loss of a single national narrative and agreed-upon set of ‘facts’ by which to conduct our politics.
News, in short, “will become increasingly ‘red’ or ‘blue.’ This is not utterly new. Before Adolph Ochs took over the N.Y. Times, in 1896, and issued his famous ‘without fear or favor’ declaration, the American scene was dominated by brazenly partisan newspapers. And the news cultures of many European nations long ago embraced the notion of competing narratives for different political communities, with individual newspapers reflecting the views of each faction. It may not be entirely coincidental that these nations enjoy a level of political engagement that dwarfs that of the United States.” Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post (which just surpassed the Drudge Report in readership), tells Alterman that the online and the print newspaper model are beginning to converge: “As advertising dollars continue to move online — as they slowly but certainly are — HuffPost will be adding more and more reporting and the Times and Post model will continue with the kinds of reporting they do, but they’ll do more of it originally online.”
She predicts “more vigorous reporting in the future that will include distributed journalism — wisdom-of-the-crowd reporting of the kind that was responsible for the exposing of the Attorneys General firing scandal.” As for what may be lost in this transition, she is untroubled: “A lot of reporting now is just piling on the conventional wisdom — with important stories dying on the front page of the New York Times.”
A guy dropped by Panavision headquarters on Selma Avenue in Hollywood yesterday, and visited briefly with Oliver Stone as he was testing looks for Josh Brolin as George W. Bush in the movie known as either Bush or, according to the drop-by guy, W.
Josh Brolin; George Bush
“When i walked in, I thought some stand-in that looked an awful lot like young Bush was under the lights,” he says, “but it was Brolin, very skinny and looking amazingly like Bush. The hair was perfect. This may be a home run.” Visually, he means. Obviously.
Let’s review the Judd Apatow comedies yet to come out and arrogantly spitball which ones seem more likely to downgrade or upgrade the brand. We know Drillbit Taylor has gotten slammed and put the brand in a position in which it needs (in the view of guys like me ) to be restored. When will that happen, and what kind of bumps in the road lie ahead? Five Apatow-produced or co-written comedies will open over the next 15 months, and an Apatow-directed and co-written comedy will open in late ’09.
Obviously we’re speaking of films Aptatow has produced, co-written or directed (or plans to direct) that haven’t come out yet. All of them delivering standard Apatow attitude humor, always with the clever stoner-slacker guy, or the space-case or the dork-dweeb or the absurdist cavemen with the one-liners, and always with these guys not only scoring with great-looking women — girls who wouldn’t spit on these guys in real life — but getting into good relationships with them and so on.
Next up, of course, is Forgetting Sarah Marshall (Universal, 4.18), which I mostly hated but which easy-lay under-40 types are apparently going for. Suspicion: Definitely not an upgrade but maybe, in the view of most, not a downgrade either. Call it a maintainer, a non-boat-rocker. I would have liked this film a bit more if it had been called Eating Sarah Marshall. I just like that title. Not the lewdness, but the nerviness.
On June 6th (i.e., 48 days later ) comes You Don’t Mess With The Zohan, an Adam Sandler comedy about a Mossad agent who “fakes his death so he can re-emerge in New York City as a hair stylist.” Apatow only cowrote with Sandler, meaning this is basically a Sandler-brand comedy. Apatow, however, did pitch in creatively and if it turns out to be pretty good and/or popular (the word is positive), it will make Judd look like he’s definitely still got it. Prediction: Faint upgrade. (Dennis Dugan, a longtime Sandler stooge, is the director.)
On July 25th Step Brothers (Sony/Columbia), an Apatow-produced comedy with Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, will open nationwide. Written by Ferrrell and Adam McKay, it’s about “two spoiled guys become competitive stepbrothers after their single parents get hitched.” I know zip but a voice is telling me it’s an underwhelmer. I’m mostly just sick of Ferrell these days, and I’m figuring others are feeling this way also. Prediction: possible downgrade, possible maintainer. My sixth sense says “cuidado!.”
Two weeks later, on August 8th, comes Pineapple Express (Sony), which Apatow produced and wrote the story for. Everyone seems to agree (including one guy I know who’s actually seen it) that this Seth Rogen-James Franco comedy, directed by David Gordon Green, is going to be a hit. Prediction: Upgrade.
Oddly, curiously, there will no fresh Apatow product all through the ’08 fall-holiday season and through the winter and spring of ’09.
On June 5th Harold Ramis‘s Year One, a caveman comedy (10,000 B.C. with laughs) that Apatow produced but didn’t co-write, will open. It costars Jack Black and Michael Cera. The writers are Ramis, Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky. Any time you have lots of special effects, lots of physical comedy and actors wearing animal skins and sandals, the hah-hah factor goes down. Special effects are humor killers. Any scenes with Black and Cera running from saber-tooth tigers and mastodons won’t be funny. Any scenes with Black and Cera clubbing women and dragging them to their cave by their hair won’t be funny. Any humor involving Ancient History or Biblical material won’t be funny. A stunt comedy. Dicey. Prediction (subject to change): Downgrade.
Finally there’s an untitled Aptaow/Adam Sandler project that will shoot later this year and come out sometime in ’09. These two working together obviously sounds promising. Prediction: Upgrade.
Out of the six forthcoming Apatows, I see two and a half upgrades (Pineapple, Apatow/Sandler Untitled and You Don’t Mess with the Zohan), two downgrades (Step Brothers, Year One) and one maintainer (Forgetting Sarah Marshall). Obviously you need to add an extra downgrade if you include Drillbit Taylor. Capsule summary: the Apatow brand will not be enhanced between now and June, get a little bump from the Zohan, take a possible hit from Step Brothers, rise again big-time with Pineapple and stay there for eight months. It may take some animal-hide damage in the summer of ’09, but it will probably bounce back when the Apatow/Sandler comedy bursts on the scene (unless it sucks).
Am I missing something?