Career management for anyone in Hollywood is a tough game, a slippery slope, the most inexact science, really. If
success comes a calling, choosiness must then be balanced with concerns
for not only a modicum of financial security, but also some loose sense
of supervision of profile. After all, familiarity generally breeds
success, and if too many risky indies all crap out, actors can find
themselves on the outside staring in, trying to get meetings with
up-and-coming directors, and phones calls returned from studio execs
who just a few short years ago were hounding them for a lunch
date. For women, the game can be even tougher, with less starring
vehicles and thus less statistical opportunity. Sigourney Weaver,
though, has had an amazingly diverse and successful career, numbering
more than 40 films. How does she do it — what’s her battle plan? Acting her age, as remarkably simple as that sounds. For the full feature piece, from FilmStew, click here.
The web site is kind of sludgy and fucked up — it looks like
a MySpace page as tinkered with by a well-meaning boomer who has no idea what
they’re doing — and so, not surprisingly, I couldn’t get the trailer to work
for me, but I’m still have a passing intrigue in writer-director Jack
Piandaryan’sThe Parallel,
a new independent film which will get its exclusive Los Angeles engagement on Friday, May 11 at Laemmle’s Town Center 5
in Encino.
Starring Taylor Gerard Hart (who really looks like a ringer
for a young Jim Caviezel) and Margaret Scarborough, the movie is described as a
drama about a cocksure teenager who, full of himself and great expectations, wakes
up from a debauched night with his girlfriend’s best friend to find himself 20
plus years older and trapped in a bleak life he’d never imagined. That
probably sounds like a lot of marriages out there. I’m intrigued, I guess,
because I’m not yet sure where the movie’s line of division falls, and what
sort of “return” is broached or brokered, if any. I’ve always thought there’s a
fascinating movie out there to be made of a teenager’s loss of
innocence/intellectual awakening — being thrust against his will, in a very fantastical
but non-comedic way, into adulthood’s compromises, responsibilities and hardship, but then finding reward
and purchase in it. I doubt The Parallel
will be that film, but who knows? I
might try to check it out. For more information, click here.
So this is old news, the Grindhouse Festival at the great New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles. Programmed by Quentin Tarantino to celebrate the down-and-dirty cinema of his misspent youth — and of course coincide with his own Grindhouse release — the fest presents straight eight weeks of five dozen deliriously bad movies, including The Swinging Barmaids, Cry of a Prostitute and Yul Brynner’s Death Rage.
What’s (arguably) worth mentioning is that a couple weeks back I caught a double feature with a few friends, of Rino Di Silvestro’s The Legend of the Wolf Woman and Derek Ford’s The Girl from Starship Venus (aka The Sexplorer). Tarantino and Eli Roth were in attendance as well, and enjoying the New Beverly’s exceedingly reasonably priced popcorn, as well as trailers between the movies that included Cat People, scream queen Barbara Steele‘s The She Beast, the clip for the original The Howling, and Galaxina, with Dorothy Stratten.
Of the two flicks, the latter was probably more fun — a sort of more deliciously stupid cross between Carmen Electra‘s The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human and Jesus knows what, starring the beautifully vapid Monika Ringwald. As the titular “surveyor,” Ringwald moved through modern-day London from one amusing situation to another, discovering sensory experience via lascivious pans up and down a wildly gyrating stripper (Tanya Ferova), a sex room full of balloons (explained by a comedically leering guy looking to close the deal as offering a “certain tactile pleasure”) and, eventually, a bubble bath with a dorky, helmet-haired chap. The backdrop for all of this is literal-minded, cautious and increasingly hilarious and pleading voiceover narration from Ringwald’s unseen mission commander, who mans a ship that is — in the best tradition of low-rent, filmic practicality — a silver ball bearing. It’s long gone from the New Beverly, but if you’re predisposed to kitschy T&A romps and you can track down a copy, The Girl from Starship Venus offers up a great audiovisual backdrop for your next party.
The festival wraps up soon, meanwhile; today through Tuesday it’s a double-feature of 1977’s Jailbait Babysitter, starring Therese Pare, and 1974’s Grave of the Vampire. Also knocking heads April 29 through May 1 is 1973’s ultra-rare The Real Bruce Lee, along with Lee Lives Within. Double-feature admission is $7, but a discount card for eight admissions is only $32. For more information, click here or, if you must, phone (323) 938-4038.
The New York Post’s Page Six
is reporting that 20th Century Fox’s Babylon
A.D. is experiencing a grand clash of on-set egos, between director Mathieu
Kassovitz and star Vin Diesel. It’s the usual blend of late arrivals and temper
tantrums hearsay… yadda yadda yadda. (I’m betting co-stars Michelle Yeoh, Gérard Depardieu and Charlotte
Rampling are sitting on the sidelines, shaking their heads).
The movie is based on a novel by French author Maurice G.
Dantec, and stars Diesel as a war vet-turned-mercenary named Toorop (sigh…) escorting
a woman from Russia to Canada… a woman who’s carrying an organism that a
bizarre cult wants to harvest to produce a genetically modified Messiah. Mmmkay…
In addition to budget and schedule overruns — the result of a
skiing sequence that had to be shot in Sweden thanks to a lack of snow in
Eastern Europe, producer Alain Goldman explained — a lot of the problem would simply
seem to be a matter of communication: French director, largely Czech crew, muscle-bound
star in his own self-aggrandizing orbit. Besides, doesn’t the movie’s planned release
date, February 29, 2008, tell us a lot about what we really need to know? For
the link to the Post piece, click
here.
