Radar‘s Jeff Bercovici (i.e., “Fresh Intelligence”) scans the “half-baked” Factory Girl Oscar-heat situation. My understanding is that the extra shooting was done in early to mid November, and that it’s not that much of a problem to insert new scenes into an already- constructed feature. Still, Harvey Weinstein and director George Hickenlooper need to get cracking.
Read More »“With applause came a palpable exhalation of relief: This was not going to be another Rent or Phantom of the Opera train wreck. Dreamgirls, the movie, a quarter of a century in the making, the gay man’s Lord of the Rings, just might…yes! …live up to the hype.” — from Sara Vilkomerson‘s Dreamgirls story in the New York Observer.
Read More »I’m dying to say something about this, but the hour is not quite at hand. A savvy bearded Houston guy has a friend who’s passed along a very excited impression of a soon-to-open film. Meanwhile, back in the jungle…
Read More »I’ve been putting this off for a while now, but the continued absence of presumed Best Actor contender Peter O’Toole is becoming more and more of a factor. By that I mean a kind of puzzlement. He almost didn’t accept his honorary Oscar in ’03 because he felt he was still very much in the game and wanted to win an acting Oscar for a particular performance instead. And now that his brilliant Venus performance as an aging but randy British actor has made this a real possibility, O’Toole is suddenly a non-campaigner and a no-show. Something isn’t right.
The decision by the 74 year-old veteran to not “make the rounds” at this critical juncture (between right now and Christmas is peak Oscar campaigning time — everyone is doing post-screening q & a’s and attending parties like mad right now —...
Read More »I don’t want to sound crude or lowball, but how can one review
the just-announced films for the 2007 Sundance Film
Festival and not at least remark that one of them is a
feature-length documentary named Zoo, about a Seattle man
who died in the summer of ’05 as a result of having
anal sex with a horse? This is why the Islamic fundamentalists
hate us so — because there’s no end to our interest in Godless
perversity.
That aside, the Sundance team has revealed the films that will make
up the Dramatic Competition, the Documentary Competition, the World
Cinema Competion and the World Cinema Documentary Compeitition.
Here are two stories about it — one from IndieWIRE
and
Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke
did some actual calling about the
Pamela Anderson-Kid
Rock-Borat argument at Universal honcho
Ron Meyer‘s home that resulted in her filing
divorce papers. Wondering why “those two losers
were included among the 20 VIPs on what’s supposed to be a triple-A
screening list,” Finke is
reporting, the following:
“Anderson is a friend of a Meyer neighbor, who
asked the studio mogul if Pam and Kid Rock could come over for the
screening because new hubby hadn’t seen new bride in Borat
yet. The way ‘Page Six’ made it sound, there was a screaming match
in the middle of...
In my 3.12.06 rave review of Sidney Lumet‘ s Find Me Guilty (Freestyle, 3.17), I wrote that the courtoom drama “is being sold the wrong way — the one-sheet and the trailer are telling you it’s a jaunty mob-guy comedy, a kind of farce, and the music toward the end of the film tries to convey this also, and this feels like a sell-out to the moron trade. Is everyone listening? The advertising is dishonest .”
And ineffective, I could have added two or three weeks later.
The critically-hailed film only brought in less than $2 million
worldwide.
But now, over eight months later, there’s a ninth-inning attempt by
Guilty producers T.J. Mancini and
Bob DeBrino to...
“He taught me so much, made me discover authors, painters — a
certain art of living, with elegance and discretion,” the great
Bertrand Tavernier has
written about the late Phillipe Noiret. “He
gave me a sense of actors and showed me that one could be exacting
and passionate while remaining pleasant and gentle.
“He was a very generous actor who loved his co-stars —
Michael Galabru in The Judge and the
Assassin, Isabelle Huppert and Eddy
Mitchell in Coup de Torchon,
François Perrot and Sabine
Azema in Life and Nothing But…Jean Rochefort,
Claude Rich, Jean Vilar and Gerard
Philippe.
“Listening to him talk of the old days, of
Hitchcock and...
“The Reeler” editor Stu VanAirsdale on the latest death spasms (or certainly downshiftings) of Manhattan’s elite downtown film culture establishment, as represented by the ending of annual Village Voice film critic’s poll. (The bottom-line Voice management guys probably decided it was too expensive to maintain or too pie-in-the-sky, or both.) But on the heels of interim film editor Allison Benedikt having officially assumed the duties of the deposed Dennis Lim “comes word that Lim is working with indieWIRE to revive a comprehensive year-end survey.”
Read More »The bottom line is that the prosecutors of “Hollywood’s biggest scandal”, as New Yorker writer Ken Auletta once described the Anthony Pellicano wiretapping case, can’t nail anyone big so they’re after small fry in hopes of shaking something loose. And so, as L.A. Indie‘s Ross Johnson reports, they’re looking to nail a peripheral Anthony Pellicano wiretapping player named Joann Wiggin, who was acquitted on four of five perjury charges after a jury trial last September.
Read More »Coming Soon‘s Edward Douglas and Box Office Guru‘s Gitesh Pandya riffing in The Envelope about what kind of impact box-office performance may be having on certain Best Picture nominees. The biggest benefits have gone to Little Miss Sunshine and The Queen. The opposite appears to have affected Flags of Our Fathers and, to a lesser extent, Babel (although it’s outrageous and stupid that the latter should be affected by “only’ making the money so far that 21 Grams did…gimme a break).
Read More »“I caught Casino Royale on Sunday. Something kinda stirred in the back of my mind as I watched Daniel Craig do the moves, and about a half hour into it I realized what it was. Craig reminds me of Steve McQueen. In fact, he’s channelling him.
“Not that he absolutely looks like the guy (although he does, somewhat) but something in the Craig equation — the steely understated machismo that McQueen had back in the mid to late ’60s, and shot into a James Bond vessel — is why the movie works. Maybe. Just a thought.” — Jeff Burton, St. Paul , Minnesota, with slight augmentations from Jeffrey Wells.
Read More »Budd Schulberg and Spike Lee have been “piecing together” a script about heavyweight champ Joe Louis (and his bout and later friendship with Max Schmelling ) for about five years, according to this 11.24 AP story by Ryan Pearson. I’m sorry but that’s too long. Movies that are truly meant to happen don’t get pieced together over a period equal to one third the lifespan of the average cat. They spew out over a period of days, weeks…months at the most. Okay, a year but no longer.
Read More »And the IFP Best Feature award nominees are (a) American Gun (what?), (b) The Dead Girl (congrats to First Look), (c) Half Nelson (drugs in a school toilet stall), Little Miss Sunshine (my personal fave), and Pan’s Labyrinth (the best work ever by the great Guillermo del Toro ). These and other nominees were just posted a few minutes ago. Sunshine and Nelson landed five nominations each.
You might have expected that streaming video of this morning’s announcing of the nominees wouldhave been up on ifc.com by now…nope The names and titles were announced 100 minutes ago (Don Cheadle and Felicity Huffman did the mike duties) and the slacker IFC website still doesn’t have the feed up. They should’ve provided a live feed as it’s happening, no? I mean, this isn’t 1998.
Read More »And the IFP Best Feature award nominees are (a) American Gun (what?), (b) The Dead Girl (congrats to First Look), (c) Half Nelson (drugs in a school toilet stall), Little Miss Sunshine (my personal fave), and Pan’s Labyrinth (the best work ever by the great Guillermo del Toro ). These and other nominees were just posted a few minutes ago. Sunshine and Nelson landed five nominations each.
You might have expected that streaming video of this morning’s announcing of the nominees wouldhave been up on ifc.com by now…nope The names and titles were announced 100 minutes ago (Don Cheadle and Felicity Huffman did the mike duties) and the slacker IFC website still doesn’t have the feed up. They should’ve provided a live feed as it’s happening, no? I mean, this isn’t 1998.
I’ve been there with Ellen Burstyn in a lot of films, but my all-time favorite moment was the way she said to Bruce Dern‘s relentlessly boastful and mouthy character in The King of Marvin Gardens, “You’re full of shit!” The frazzled, end-of-the-road, Uzi-spray impatience in her voice, I mean. It tells you she’s said this to Dern so many times she can barely stand to hear it again, but she has to. Because he won’t quit, because he can’t, because he’s gone over the falls and so has she.
This memory came back after looking at some photos on Burstyn’s new website, which is up to promote her book “Lessons In Becoming Myself.” The press release says it’s “candid, raw, no-holds-barred book.” Burstyn has ended up in a very...
Read More »Tony Scott‘s lame ideas for reconstructing Walter Hill‘s The Warriors is another case of a hip Hollywood guy (and his chortling corporate backers) showing obesiance before the power of street machismo, or the wild west factor in urban culture. Establishing a bond with all this links to a general connection with urban audiences and presumed loyalty down the road. In short, a good business move.
You homies are the shit and the style…predatory turf monsters with fierce expressions and shaved heads and big developed biceps, and you know how fast and cool I can be. (Check out Domino.) And I want to make a film that reflects and worships you and your hard culture (violence, bling, fast money, hot cars, ho’s) to the hilt. Trust me when I...
Read More »Catherine Hardwicke‘s The Nativity Story (New Line, 12.1) “lacks controversy,” said New Line COO Rolf Mittweg to the N.Y. Times Rome correspondent Peter Kiefer, following a Sunday screening at the Vatican. “I think with The Passion, people wanted to see how bloody and gory this movie was. They wanted to see how far one would go to depict that story. This movie isn’t political and doesn’t make a statement in that regard.” Hah! Mittweg seems to almost be saying, “Our film isn’t very edgy. In fact, it’s kinda tame.”
Read More »Anyone in a marriage or a romantic relationship knows you don’t
air your messy feelings in public, much less at in front of rich
industry peers. Keep it at home or in the car. But
Kid Rock (i.e., Bob Richie ) doesn’t get this, or
didn’t, in any event, at a party he and wife Pamela
Anderson attended at the home of Universal honcho
Ron Meyer a couple weeks ago, at which time his
“male insecurity and major anger issues” erupted over Pamela’s bit
on Borat.
A “Page Six” source says this viewing “was the first time Bob had
seen the movie, and, well, he didn’t like it.” He allegedly
“started screaming” — girl talk for using a forceful, urgent tone —
“at Pam, saying she had humiliated herself and telling her, ‘You’re
nothing but a whore! You’re a slut! How could you
do that...
Unlike the Academy, the Hollywood Foreign Press likes to
keep things simple. If a movie is spoken in a
foreign language and is also, you know, set somewhere off these
shores, it’s a contender for a Best Foreign Language Golden Globe
award….even if a L.A.-based distributor funded it. The result,
says Hollywood Reporter guy Gregg
Kilday, is that Mel Gibson‘s
Apocalypto and Clint Eastwood ‘s
Letters From Iwo Jima “could” be in the
running against Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck‘s
The Lives of Others, Pedro Almodovar’s Volver and
Guillermo del Toro‘s Pan’s Labyrinth in
the 64th annual Golden Globe Awards.
The Academy, Kilday explains,...
Some faces are so authoritatively creepy they do more than stay in your memory; they seep into your psyche, your bones …little pan flashes of something long buried. This guy — I won’t insult his iconic status by identifying him or mentioning the film he starred in — got so far under my emotional skin when I was a kid that he’ll probably stay with me into my next life.
Every time I see this chilling face I think of how he was
described: “The sum of all intelligence”…and then I see those
reptile tweezer fingers. It’s not that he’s “scary” — it’s knowing
for sure that face will never be erased.
The question is, who else in films has had a truly startling puss —
something out- there in either a scary or beautiful or mesmerizing
way — that you can’t forget him/ her no matter what, no matter
how...
Sheigh Crabtree strikes again — the second Riskybiz post in a 24-hour period. This one says (most) everyone at a recent Manhattan screening of Dreamgirls was delighted and applauding. She adds, however, that costar Jennifer Hudson didn’t quite get a 100% approval rating. (One guy was saying Jennifer Holiday was better in the early ’80s B’way show…read the item.) Speaking as a mixed-bag responder who knows other mixed baggers, I can say that if there’s any one unanimous feeling about Dreamgirls, it’s that Hudson kills & that the Best Supporting Actress Oscar is pretty much hers to lose.
Read More »After he suffered a bout of insomnia last Saturdaywhile staying at London’s Ritz Hotel, Al Pacino reportedly “came down to the lobby at 2 am and instead of doing a jennifer Lopez or whatever and complaining and making all kinds of demands about having his room changed, he said he wanted to get to know the people who worked at such a great place” — or so it says in this Mirror story. Pacino, I’ve been told, is in London working on a Looking for Richard-like documentary called Salomaybe, about Oscar Wilde and his play “Salome”. Because of this project his emotonal pores are more open than usual. He’s in one of his gregarious-Al, get-down-with-the-folks, receptive-to-the-beauty-and-poetry-of-life modes. Nobody in the world is a sweetheart 24-7.
Read More »“Given all the publicity surrounding Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen may now be too well known, some say, to fool enough people into taking Bruno — his forthcoming Universal project, which he’ll star in and write and probably produce — as seriously as is required to make the film work,” according to a piece by L.A. Times writer Lorenza Munoz about Universal execs possibly feeling “buyer’s remorse” about agreeing to fund and distribute Cohen’s next comedy, about a gay guy named Bruno.
Come to think of it, Munoz’s sources may have a point. Obviously a lot more people are going to recognize Cohen when he tries to shoot docu-style footage in gay bars or...
Read More »I could do a mass e-mailing of the New York film publicist community, but I might as well use this space to announce that Hollywood Elsewhere will be trolling the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn starting this Friday and throughout the rest of the month. Looking very much forward to (i.e., close to panting for) that very specific New York action and energy, along with the blessed wearing of scarves and overcoats.
Read More »I’ve agreed to a 12.1 review embargo on The Good German
(Warner Bros., 12.15) but this Riskybiz
item submitted by the Hollywood Reporter‘s
Sheigh Crabtree about director Steven
Soderbergh getting a “Bronx cheer”
following a DGA New York screening two nights ago (i.e., Saturday)
leaves an impression that this 1940s-era black-and-white drama is
some kind of marginal embarassment and/or unintended hoot.
(Crabtree reports that one guy in the audience went “puhleeze” and
that a geezer asked Soderbergh during the q & a if he’d
intended “to do a spoof or a parody of The Third Man?”)
And it’s not.
I’ve seen German twice in Los Angeles, both times with
seasoned industry types, and...
Producer Saul Zaentz has been quoted by a German fantasy-film website called Ebenwald that Peter Jackson will direct The Hobbit for the Saul Zaentz Company. (I tried finding a mention of Saul Zaentz on the Ebenwald site, but nothing turned up.) Zaentz appparently acquired the rights to one or more works by Rings writer J.R.R. Tolkien in the mid ’70s. The Hobbit “will definitely be shot by Peter Jackson,” Zaentz has apparently said. “Next year The Hobbit rights will fall back to my company. I suppose that Peter will wait because he knows that he will make the best deal with us. And he is fed up with the studios: to get his profit share on the Rings trilogy he had to sue New Line. With us, in contrast, he knows that he will be paid fairly and artistically supported without reservation.”
Read More »A couple of months ago I
mentioned the snob syndrome among the elite big-city film
writers. I said “there’s something vaguely arid and ingrown about
this culture…a certain tendency to sidestep films with what an
elitist would describe as plebian emotionalism.”
And now here’s Time‘s Richard Corliss
elaborating
on this aversion as a prelude to a thumbs-up review of
Darren Aronfosky‘s The Fountain.
“Movies critics can’t agree on much, but there’s one assumption
most of them hold deeply without ever discussing it. It’s that
a film that says life is crap is automa- tically deeper,
better, richer, truer than one that says life can be
beautiful.
“That’s a 180...
“Animation came in for a number of reasons. There were certain moments that weren’t on film, especially the trial. We needed a way to show what was happening in the courtroom. We could have done it in renactments, or though talking heads, or we could have had courtroom drawings panned and scanned.
“But I thought animation would have served as commentary on the trial; Jerry Rubin called it a `cartoon show,’ and when I read that quote, the bells went off.” — Director Brett Morgen talking to John Anderson in the N.Y. Times about his long-in-preparation, partially animated documentary Chicago 10, which will open the 2007 Sundance Film Festival.
Read More »Kevin Smith vs. Orlando Sentinel film critic Roger Moore — good rantin’, good readin’.
Read More »