Randoms

Goldstein on two scripts

L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein takes a gander at the script for Peter Jackson‘s The Lovely Bones, and thereafter understands “why the film’s supporters see it as less of a brooding Little Children-style drama and more of a supernatural thriller, packed with creepy chills and a sense of wonder.”
It doesn’t matter. Even if it’s a dark adult drama about a 14-year-old girl who is brutally raped and murdered, which sounds nervy at the very least. If it’s a Peter Jackson film, I know I’m going to suffer one way or another. All of you Jackson haters out there know exactly what I’m talking about. He can’t and won’t go home again and revert into the filmmaker who made Heavenly Creatures. He’s become like Federico Fellini was in the late ’60s and ’70s (i.e., indulgence is everything!), and nothing is going to change that.
Goldstein then reads the untitled Michael Mann-Leonardo DiCaprio Hollywood period thriller that’s been having trouble getting financed, and concludes this is due to (a) it being too costly at a $120 million, plus the concern that Mann almost always goes over-budget, and (b) the film being “full of familiar Hollywood characters who’ve been portrayed endlessly, in altered form, in films over the years…for all its popularity among filmmakers, the inside-Hollywood movie genre has a limited commercial reach.”
As much as I love anything Mann does, I wasn’t all that thrilled when I first read the idea for thisfilm — DiCaprio as a private gumshoe in 1938 who falls in love with an actress he’s hired to watch/protect. Burnished period stuff has a built-in ceidling. But I’d love to see Mann and DiCaprio make theirversion of For Whom The Bell Tolls.

Randoms

Goldstein on two scripts

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