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Shared Darkness

A Communal Life in Film, Examined

Daily Archives: September 27, 2010

Adrian Grenier Gets Snapped By a Paparazzo While Talking About Teenage Paparazzo

Adrian Grenier became famous on HBO’s Entourage playing an actor who shoots to stardom and has to cope with paparazzi marking his every move. Naturally, Grenier then became a real-life target of the paparazzi. Last year, Grenier directed a movie, Teenage Paparazzo, which introspectively chronicles the true story of his unlikely, evolving relationship with a precocious 14-year-old paparazzo, Austin Visschedyk (below left). And while I talked to Grenier a couple weeks ago about this project, in advance of its September 27 premiere on HBO, paparazzi snapped his photo. Snake, meet tail! The conversation is excerpted below:

Brent Simon: The idea of a youngster skulking about at night as a paparazzo evokes a strong first response. How objective or subjective did you want your film to be?

Adrian Grenier: Well, obviously I have my own opinion about paparazzi, especially so often being the victim of their disrespect. I think when I saw Austin that was the last straw for me. I knew I had to do something. I had to figure out, just for myself, what was going on in a culture that would embrace that, and encourage young people to engage in it.

BS: Austin comes across as pretty bright, if typically self-involved. How reticent was his family to participate?

AG: Oh look, there’s a paparazzo! (pause) You should put this shot they’re taking of me right now with the article. There they are. I hope I look OK. (laughs)

BS: Irony of ironies! How much of an influence are paparazzi on your everyday decisions?

AG: They always tend to dominate a situation. You could be having a casual stroll with a friend or loved one, and they just come in and destroy any nice moment. But I think as an actor and performer, we speak in the language of images and stories, and paparazzi are really no different. They get content for tabloids to make stories. And who better to use than performers? What upsets celebrities is that they don’t have control over the story. I don’t think I’ve met any celebrity that doesn’t love a nice fluff piece about them, a picture that says look how gorgeous they look. But what they don’t like is when all the media can’t be positive about them; they can’t take the bad with the good.

BS: Paris Hilton has some interesting insights in the movie.

AG: One thing I really respect about Paris is that I consider her an artist of a different art form — her canvas is the tabloid media. She’s extremely talented in being able to utilize and create on that platform, and I look up to her for that. She taught me a lot about how to be able to roll with it, embrace it.

BS: What percentage of paparazzi maybe is charged mainly by the thrill of pursuit, and actively antagonizing celebrities?

AG: Oh, I don’t know. I think it’s the same proportion of douchebags in any population. They’ll make more money if they can conjure a good story [and] prod a celebrity to do something, whether it’s do a little dance, hold up a peace sign, pose, or throw a punch. They’re like mini-directors on some level, I guess, no different than Stanley Kubrick pushing someone to the brink of sanity to get the shot. The only difference there is that the actor is a willing participant who’s being paid.

BS: The film talks some about parasocial relationships, those one-way feelings of intimacy people have for celebrities. Are any paparazzi like this?

AG: I think we mostly tend to have very simple relationships in our capitalist, consumer society, and paparazzi aren’t different necessarily. They look at celebrities as a paycheck, as food on the table. One thing I am excited about is that the Creative Coalition has invited the film to be part of their spotlight initiative slate, and take it to high schools and colleges around the country as a way to invite students to look at the way they consume media. And I hope TeenagePaparazzo.com will be a continuation of the film, where people who’ve seen it, and users in general, can have a two-way conversation.

BS: How about Austin today? Are you still in contact with him?

AG: Austin will be a presence on the website. I want to give him an outlet to express himself, and also give people an opportunity to see what he’s up to, and what sort of photos he’s taking. Right now we’ve yet to see. I think he’s growing up in his own way, and thinking about college. He’s a much more mature person than he was, and I’m curious to see what the experience of the film’s release will mean for him.

For more on the film, click here.

Weapons of War: Volume 1

Along with America’s fascination with flexing its military might, there is a correlative interest in celebrating said fascination, albeit in nothing necessarily more than the fashion of an armchair general. This is the reason for the entire existence of the History Channel — so that those who never paid attention in high school history class can regale their coworkers with newly learned facts about World War II and the Vietnam War. Ergo, there’s also a highly receptive audience for something like the three-volume Weapons of War: Volume 1, which examines in fetishistic detail the history of warfare and how new technologies have changed the ways battles are fought.

Ground War is the first title, a two-part feature film, narrated by R.J. Allison and co-directed by Roger Finnigan and James
Millar, which explores the key technological advances that have defined ground warfare through the ages. With classic examples like the stirrup and lesser known innovations like the gunner’s quadrant, the series reveals how even the smallest innovations can have a wide-ranging effect on not only the way armed conflicts are waged, but also their outcomes. Next up is Warplane, narrated by Stacey Keach. As one might surmise from the title, this sprawling title shines a light on the 100 years since the Wright brothers first took to the air, and how the airplane has evolved from a tentative eye in the sky into the ultimate weapons delivery system, via unmanned drones. Finally, narrated again by Keach, Warship tells the story of the evolution of the warships, right up to the United States’ current cutting-edge navy battle groups — made up of nuclear aircraft carriers and submarines, and a range of other high-tech and immensely powerful ships.

While the technological and spec detail here is sometimes wonky, Weapons of War also does a good job of locating enough personable in-points to make military culture and infrastructure make sense (and even seem appealing, in its just-the-facts-and-mission rigidity) to the average layperson. It would be nice — or at least more honest, and challenging — if there were a correlative look at how military industrial complex spending has both sometimes helped spur private industry offshoot technological advance and innovation, and also sometimes drained needed resources from other government programs and budget necessities, but that’s not what this set of movies is about, clearly.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case with a snap-in tray, Weapons of War comes to DVD spread out on three discs, in 1.78:1 widescreen, with an English language stereo track. The meaty length of its feature presentations — totaling almost a dozen hours — renders the set’s lack of supplemental bonus features a bit less distressing. To purchase the DVD, phone (800) PLAY-PBS, or click here. Or if you need a DVD with public performance rights, click here. Finally, if Amazon is totally your thing, click here. B- (Movie) C- (Disc)

Growth

There are any number of ways to commit a cinematic fumbling — to fritter away a decent concept or creepy set-up or what have you — but one of the more common, at least in the direct-to-video genre realm, is to not trust your story, writing and characters, but instead double down on a reliance on special effects, which too often come across as chintzy when delivered on a budget-level basis. Such is the case with Growth, which features absolutely great DVD cover art and an effective trailer to boot, but, alas, doesn’t deliver the squirmy horror goods.

Written and directed by Gabriel Cowan (Breathing Room), Growth opens in 1989, when a breakthrough in advanced parasitic research on remote Kuttyhunk Island gives scientists a jump in human evolution, endowing subjects with heightened physical and mental strength. Naturally, though, the experiment goes horribly wrong, producing a lethal parasite that kills off three-quarters of the island’s population. Cut to 20 years later, when Jamie Akerman (Mircea Monroe), who lost her mother in the outbreak, returns with her boyfriend Marco (Sleepwalkers‘ Brian Krause), step-brother Justin (Christopher Shand) and best friend Kristin (Nora Kirkpatrick) to sell the family property. There, they uncover details about Jamie’s disturbing past, and horrifying secrets long suppressed by the town’s leader, Larkin (Office Space‘s Richard Riehle). Just when the past seems to be finally buried, a slithering new strain of parasite emerges, and threatens the island and its visitors once again.

An intriguing set-up and some effectively delineated backstory put Growth in a good spot to wring elemental dread out of the inherently human fear of things getting under our skin, and/or otherwise invading unintended orifices (as Star Trek II aptly demonstrated, with those earwigs). Cowan doesn’t fully trust the material, though, and Growth thusly pivots from a movie with the potential to unnerve to a shambling film of goosing provocation and little insight. Without the budget to pull off big-level special effects, the narrative leans on them to an unfulfilling degree.

Growth comes to DVD housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover with raised lettering and artwork. It’s presented in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 audio track and optional English SDH subtitles. Its package of ample bonus material is anchored by a feature-length audio commentary track from Cowan and fellow producer Amiee [sic] Clark, as well as a separate audio commentary track with actors Monroe, Krause, Shand and Kirkpatrick. There is a nice little behind-the0scenes featurette built around interviews with cast and crew, and there’s a separate featurette look at how Cowan — via online camera, from Los Angeles — directed one scene shot in South Korea. A clutch of deleted scenes and the movie’s trailer round out bonus materials. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) B+ (Disc)

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Directed by Oliver Stone, Wall
Street: Money Never Sleeps is the rarest of Hollywood sequels, in that it seemingly has
an artistic rather than financial motivation for its birth. This is all the more
ironic given the subject matter of the first film, a financial drama of spotlighted moral decay, and that it saw life in the go-go 1980s, both deftly encapsulating the mantra of its setting-sun era (“Greed is good”) but also, and perhaps much more tellingly, providing a fleeting glimpse into the future (“I create nothing — I own“), and the working mindset of financial services wizards and captains of industry for whom the American economy and electorate are seemingly little more than their grown-up sandbox and toys.

Having served more than eight years in prison for securities fraud, disgraced Wall Street tycoon Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) emerges in 2001, just after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Seven years later, he’s peddling a half-apologetic, half-prophetic book forecasting doom for the American economy. Young Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf), meanwhile, is an ambitious proprietary trader whose affection for both green energy as well as the green of money gets tested when his company fails. Against a backdrop involving both opportunity and jostling related to an old rival, venal trader Bretton James (Josh Brolin), Gordon tries to use his professional knowledge base to arm-twist Jake in friendly fashion into helping him reconnect with his estranged daughter Winnie (Carey Mulligan), to whom Jake is engaged.

Stone’s sequel to his 1987 zeitgeist hit, which won Douglas a Best Actor Oscar, would seem positioned to really sink or soar, given both its unique standing as a Hail Mary-type throwback drama, and its desperately au courant status given the nation’s newfound focus on its economic maladies. Thankfully, Stephen Schiff and Allan Loeb’s script is admirably rooted in character, so the drama pulls one along fairly naturally, abetted by performances that don’t forsake the human element. Whether by cajolement, threat or end-around obfuscation, Stone squeezes out of LaBeouf so much of the nervous-chatterbox energy and too-cool-for-school insouciance that characterize the bulk of his work. Similarly, Douglas taps into nicely layered reserves of an alpha dog brought low, and in significant ways reformed — but someone who still has a burning, hardwired ambition for relevance, above all else.

There’s a pinch of ridiculous alpha-male jockeying (involving a scene of motorcycle racing), but overall Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is engaging and slick without ever coming across as pompous — its story hinging on believable twists and turns born of personality, not wildly fluctuating narrative convenience. Take note, Hollywood moguls. For more on the film, click here. For another, longer take, meanwhile, from Telly Davidson, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG-13, 131 minutes)

Paranormal Activity 2 Works Hard To Whip Up Fan Demand

Paramount is doing a fairly wise thing with the sequel to its 2009 low-fi smash hit Paranormal Activity. Dolling out a handful of viral clips to horror flick sites, certainly — that’s a given. But also debuting the movie for fans that “demand” to see it first, via the movie’s web site. The top 20 cities with the highest registered online demand for the film will be invited to attend a free screening on Wednesday, October 20, before the movie’s nationwide October 22 release. Buzzy word-of-mouth from rabid fans of the first film and other genre diehards will be key in trying to deliver commercial success, since this sequel is bucking the slow-build, platform-release strategy of its surprise $108-million-grossing predecessor, which didn’t top 1,000 screens until its fourth week of in theaters, and finally hit the #1 spot at the box office in its fifth weekend frame. For the movie’s teaser trailer, click here; for more on the film, click here.

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