Last week a serious dolphin lady and longtime friend named Gini Kopecky-Wallace, whom I’ve known since ’79, went to see The Cove (Roadside, 7.31). An off-and-on participant with a research project studying wild dolphins for more than 20 years, Kopecky-Wallace writes about dolphins, whales, diving, islands and oceans any chance she gets. Here’s her review:
It wasn’t an especially dolphin-loving crowd that showed up for last Wednesday’s...
Read More »The key sentence in Michael Fleming‘s Variety story about this morning’s whackings of seven senior Paramount execs is found in the fifth paragraph, to wit: “Not surprisingly, the exiting execs were aligned with [the recently whacked Paramount Film Group president] John Lesher and president of production Brad Weston.”
The whackees are Physical Production chief Georgia Kacandes, senior vp production Ben Cosgrove, exec vp of production Dan Levine, head of casting Gail Levin, Paramount Vantage honcho Guy Stodel, senior vp of visual effects Kim Locasio, and Aimee Shieh, head of Paramount’s New York literary office.
Levine, it is noted, “shepherded” G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, the Stephen Sommers-directed CG actioner due on 8.7.
Read More »Remember beaming? Sending your info (or a memo or a short message) to another with a touch of a button. It was a big thing eight or ten years ago with owners of Palm Pilot Vs and I-don’t-which-other-handhelds. When it first came in I used to think it was so amazing. No more writing stuff down! But it’s gone now…a vanished technology. Even the Palm Pre doesn’t have it.
Read More »In Contention‘s Kris Tapley is now a comrade-in-arms regarding Lone Scherfig‘s An Education, which he saw last night and is calling “near perfect,” a “knock-out” and “something close to a miracle — that rare occasion when a filmmaker taps into profound truths with the help of a cast that gets it, the themes surging through every vein, a driven vehicle of purpose.
“Most of the end-of-year awards talk will surely surround Carey Mulligan‘s absolutely peerless and incredibly refined leading performance, as well it should. She won’t need much of a boost into the Oscar race when people get a load of what she has to offer here.”
But Tapley is especially enthused about Alfred Molina‘s performance as...
Read More »It only took the Minnesota Supreme Court seven and three-quarter months to hear the arguments, evaluate the data and decide that Al Franken should be certified as the winner of that state’s ridiculously prolonged Senate race. May the scumbag Republicans who goaded Norm Coleman, Franken’s vanquished Senate race opponent, into contesting this thing well past the point of rational dispute suffer some form of payback.
The N.Y. Times is reporting that Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty, whom I suspect has been a secret go-along scumbag in this affair, “had indicated as late as Monday that he was willing to certify Mr. Franken as the winner once the state’s highest court decided the recount and Mr. Coleman’s battle. On CNN on Sunday, Mr. Pawlenty said: ‘I’m prepared to...
Read More »Laugh-out-loud amusing and “outrageous” as it sometimes is, Sacha Baron Cohen‘s Bruno (Universal, 7.10) — oddly — isn’t all that funny. Certainly not in a convulsive sense. It is sort of heh-heh funny in a dry, observational, “is that all there is?” sense… but what’s that? It’s basically a series of misanthropic “screw you” jokes — 82 minutes worth of effete put-on gags, each one meant to provoke homophobic reactions to SBC’s flamboyantly gay, blonde-coiffed Austrian fashion reporter. The point being to “get” the constipated illiberal, small-minded types by making them look bad.
All I can say is that clips and promotions and put-ons are one thing, but when you sit down for a movie you expect a certain...
Read More »“Is it a sign of impending apocalypse that two terrible Nia Vardalos movies have been released in one month?” asks critic Marshall Fine. “It seemed unlikely that Vardalos could star in a movie flatter or more desultory than My Life in Ruins. But she’s outdone herself with I Hate Valentine’s Day (IFC, 7.3), which she wrote and directed and stars in.
“For good luck, apparently, she cast John Corbett – her love interest in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, – as the male lead. But she could have cast anyone from Brad Pitt to a fencepost and it wouldn’t have made a difference. The writing is that flavorless, the directing that inept.
... Read More »A friend wrote last night that “there’s a rumor starting that Eddie Murphy wants to play Michael Jackson in a biopic.” Patently absurd on more levels than I’d care to list, I wrote back. He’s too old, for one thing. He doesn’t remotely resemble Jackson. His voice is all wrong. He isn’t willowy or feathery or girly enough. “I don’t even know why I’m pointing this stuff out because it’s one of the silliest casting ideas I’ve heard in ages,” I concluded.
Read More »MSNBC switched over to high-def today, although it won’t show up on all the cable systems until early August. It kicked in with my provider, Century Cable, three days ago. So I tuned in this afternoon — channel 723 instead of the regular analog channel 23 — to see how good it looked, and it looked like hell. All pixellated and degraded — basically an analog image with a 16 x 9 aspect ratio. I know what the real thing looks like. This is crap.
Variety‘s Anne Thompson has a decidedly negative view of Michael Mann‘s decision to “immerse the audience” in the 1930s by shooting Public Enemies in high-definition video. “HD is clear, harsh, honest” she notes. “It works fine in a contemporary setting like Collateral or Miami Vice. But when audiences watch a period film, no matter how authentically recreated, they aren’t expecting it to look like this.”
Read More »Heath Ledger “was always hesitant to be in a summer blockbuster with the dolls and action figures and everything else that comes with one of those movies,” the late actor’s friend and agent, Steven Alexander, tells Peter Biskind in an upcoming Vanity Fair. “He was afraid it would define him and limit his choices.”
Alexander and other confidantes tell Biskind that “one of the reasons Ledger agreed to do The Dark Knight was that it would be such a long shoot it would give him an excuse to turn down other offers. Ledger had a pay-or-play deal on The Dark Knight — meaning he’d get compensated no matter what — so he felt he had the freedom to do whatever he wanted as...
Read More »Not every day can be well organized and super-productive. I was going to bang out my Bruno review (the green light is up) but it wouldn’t happen. When the plane doesn’t lift off the ground and it’s suddenly 4:30 pm when it was only noon an hour earlier, you just have to suck it in and try to do better the next day. And now I have to catch a 6 pm screening of Nia Vardalos‘ I Hate Valentine’s Day. And my early-bird DVD seller still doesn’t have Lonely Are The Brave, which streets on 7.7.
Read More »There’s just no end to the ick factor in the Michael Jackson tragedy. Everything that’s being reported sounds sordid and sad. Or it’s been made up. The Sun posted a story today about the late pop singer’s ghastly physical state — appalling — and then TMZ reported that the story is fake. And 95% of the world is repeating the same mantra — “Ignore the facts, deny the damage, ignore what Michael Jackson became — just listen to the music and focus only on his peak-of-popularity years in the ’80s and early ’90s.”
I found it moderately unpleasant to watch Al Sharpton — Al Sharpton? — and Joe Jackson hold...
Read More »Denby Delighted: “Michael Mann’s Public Enemies is a ravishing dream of violent gangster life in the thirties — not a tough, funny, and, finally, tragic dream like Bonnie and Clyde but a flowing, velvety fantasia of the crime wave that mesmerized the nation early in the decade.
“The scowling men in long dark coats and hats, led by the fashion-plate bandit John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), march into a grand Midwestern bank with marble floors and brass railings, take over the place, throw the cash in bags, and make their getaway, jumping onto the sideboards of flat-topped black Fords — beautiful cars with curved grilles and rounded headlights that stand straight up from the cars’ bodies.
“It’s the American poetry of crime. Throughout the movie, blazing tommy guns emit little...
Read More »In recognition of Bernie Madoff having been sentenced to 150 years behind bars, here’s a re-link to that 3.14.09 piece about how I would have escaped and cavorted it if I’d been in Bernie’s shoes. Excerpt: “I’d hire three full-time prostitutes to travel with me, but they’d have to be prostitutes who know how to sail.”
Why didn’t Madoff get 500 years? Or a thousand? I’ve always loved the poetic ring of 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, which is the title of a 1932 Michael Curtiz crime-prison drama with Spencer Tracy and Bette Davis. It comes from author Lewis E. Lawes‘s 1932 novel.
Read More »I may as well join the crowd and post this HD trailer for Ricky Gervais and Matthew Robinson‘s The Invention of Lying (Warner Bros., 9.25). Trailers always seem to misrepresent what a film actually is (i.e., how it plays) so you always need to take them with a grain. But the basic impression I’m getting is that TIOL may be a little too on-the-nose — an explicit comic thesis going through the movie motions. But maybe not.
Read More »Responding to my recent praise for Michael Mann‘s Public Enemies, legendary film critic F.X. Feeney shared some thoughts earlier this evening, focusing especially on Mann’s history of writing strong and defiant female characters.
“I’m so glad we agree about Public Enemies,” he began. “I think it’s a beautiful confluence of everything I ever loved about Last of the Mohicans and Heat — especially in its sense of America as a still-embattled frontier where men and women continuously invent and re-invent themselves, and protagonists (whether they live within the law or without it) who are defined by their refusals to conform.
“This is one reason I take exception to Mark Harris‘s
Read More »“I respect your love for Public Enemies,” a critic friend wrote this evening. “I have to say it didn’t bowl me over — it’s too diffuse, too uncertain on what story it really wanted to tell. Although, agreed, Marion Cotillard is terrific and there’s no doubt the film looks wonderful, like every Mann project.
“But there’s a point here — and maybe a post — in how the externals of last Thursday’s big NY screening at Leows’ 84th Street may have critically affected its reception.
“As I’m sure you know, the Manhattan screening was a clusterfuck — long lines, not enough seats, etc. Several major critics were heard loudly complaining about all of this, and while this is petty shit and shouldn’t influence any pro’s opinion — I remember giving raves to movies I saw sitting on the floor of the Eccles...
Read More »The L.A. Film Festival Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature went to Cyrus Nowrasteh‘s The Stoning of Soraya M. — a valuable selling point. (I respected and admired it but couldn’t get past the horrific subject matter.) The Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature went to Jeffrey Levy-Hinte‘s Soul Power. And Eva Norvind‘s Born Without won the Audience Award for Best International Feature.
The Target Filmmaker Narrative Award — the confusing moniker for the jury award — went to Sam Fleischner and Ben Chace‘s Wah Do Dem (What They Do), which I didn’t see and which no one told me to see and which no one told me anything about during...
Read More »Here‘s Part 2, Billy Bob Thornton‘s segment, New Rules.
Read More »This portion of a paragraph from a two-day-old Patrick Goldstein column made me blink: “When they weren’t dancing, Brett Ratner and Michael Jackson would watch movies together. [Ratner] says they must’ve watched the original version of Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory 50 times over the years.” Ratner is exaggerating, of course, but still. Speaking as someone who’s watched some great films as many as 25 or 30 times (like North by Northwest, say), the idea of anyone eagerly watching that 1971 film more than four or five times seems awfully strange. It’s good but not that good.
Why hasn’t Warner Home Video come out with at least a seasonal release date for the
Read More »Variety‘s Pamela McClintock is reporting that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen has earned an estimated domestic haul of $201.2 million domestic, a result of business at 4,234 theaters. This is the biggest five-day haul ever after The Dark Knight. Pic’s worldwide total through Sunday was $387 million, one of the best global debuts of all time.
Excuse me but I need to go slit my wrists now.
The good news is that The Hurt Locker had a great opening also. The three-day estimate is $144,000, which came from playing at four theaters for a per-theater average of $36,000. Some were guessing a $30k-per-screen average based on Friday’s business. As Coming Soon’s Ed Douglas
Read More »However Michael Mann‘s Public Enemies winds up faring commercially and critically, Marion Cotillard‘s performance as Billie Frechette, the girlfriend of Johnny Depp‘s John Dillinger, is an award-quality nail-down. No dramatic actress in recent memory has conveyed as much intestinal steel, and it’s all in her eyes. In each of her scenes they have a straight-from-the-shoulder, no b.s. quality. Every time you look at those watery French peepers and think, “God she’s beautiful,” a subsequent thought happens a split second later: “Man, she’s tough.”
Even when Cotillard visibly melts at the end when Stephen Lang‘s G-man character delivers the final line (in what is easily the most...
Read More »I’m feeling a certain hesitancy about the fate of Public Enemies because of what I heard from a couple of critics after last Thursday night’s screening. (Others felt it was brilliant, which is also my view.) Like I said before, the critics and moviegoers who like their meatloaf, mashed potatoes and green beans are going to have problems with it. Public Enemies is a first-rate cops and robbers 1930s time-trip highdef-video art movie, but it ain’t meatloaf and it sure as hell ain’t McDonald’s. It’s a dish of almond praline semifreddo with grappa-poached apricots. Yes — a high falutin’ dessert, as in scrumptious. And then there’s that ending.
N.Y. Times reporter Brooks Barnes continued the food analogy in a recently-posted...
Read More »I must have stuck my head into a couple of dozen bars, restaurants and clothing stores yesterday, and there were very few that weren’t playing tracks from Thriller. Clothing stores especially. “Billie Jean” in particular. And not once did I hear “Will You Be There?” It’s a little drippy here and there, but I’ve always felt this was Michael Jackson‘s best song. As much as I deplored who and what Jackson became over the last 16 years of his life, this song makes me put all that aside. I love the central melody and particularly the rhythm track — clap-clap, clap-pa-clap-clap.
Read More »I’m thinking I might do the odd thing and not sit here all day and write column stories. I’ve been telling myself I need to visit the Francis Bacon exhibit at the Met before it closes in August, and I’m thinking this is the day. I’ve worshipped his paintings nearly all my life, starting with my first viewing of Last Tango in Paris.
An important tenet of auteurism is that the best films are always driven by an intimate connection between the director and the lead character. Alfred Hitchcock and James Stewart‘s Scotty Ferguson in Vertigo, Martin Scorsese and Harvey Keitel‘s Charlie in Mean Streets, etc. And it doesn’t really matter if the director admits to (or is even aware of) self-portraiture. Never trust the artist — trust the tale.
It hit me last night as I was preparing my questions for last night’s q & a with Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow that there’s a certain kinship between herself and Jeremy Renner‘s Sgt. James character — a guy who lives for the thrill of a super-intense job (i.e., bomb defusing) and who isn’t much good at day-to-day normality.
The “tell” is in a
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