Daily Archives: July 11, 2007

Jason Bourne, Again

Musings

The trailer for The Bourne Ultimatum, the next installment of the Jason Bourne series, is of course out, along with the long-lead television ads and the billboards somewhat strangely pitching the movie’s tag (“On August 3, Jason Bourne comes home”) but with no mention of its title. I guess I say strangely because it’s still hard to think about the sleeper hit of summer 2002 as now being its own sort of instantly recognizable franchise. A spry melding of up-to-date aesthetic and worldview, hand-to-hand combat, and a narrative that dovetails perfectly with its protagonist’s panicky quest for self-actualization, The Bourne Identity has an awful lot to do with James Bond’s Casino Royale reinvention than most mainstream audiences might think. The TV ads for The Bourne Ultimatum are so-so, with David Strathairn as the new barker of orders, to Joan Allen’s returning witness of Bourne’s squirrelly escapability, but the long-form trailer hints at a full temporal memory awakening, as well as featuring some kick-ass car chase bits.

Fiscally, look for a slight uptick on the worldwide grosses of the first two films, which made $213 and $290 million, respectively. A big part of that will be eaten into by a budget that reportedly almost doubled from The Bourne Supremacy, however. Stealing away from his work on the third film, director Paul Greengrass made a special trip to the Los Angeles Film Critics Association dinner this past January to accept Best Director honors for his work on United 93 (his only awards season appearance), and he appeared a bit haggard, to be honest. Granted, a trans-Atlantic flight will help do that to you, but there were other problems born of the movie’s staggered shooting schedule and many locations.

In other news, as part of its promotional campaign for The Bourne Ultimatum, Universal is teaming up with Google for “The Ultimate Search for Bourne,” kicking off on July 16. Using various Google tools to track Bourne across various continents, contestants will make themselves eligible for a variety of prizes, including a bag full of phony passports. No, just kidding about that last part…

All the Web Users Don’t Love Mandy Lane

Ephemera, Musings

Dimension’s boozy teen horror flick All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, starring 21-year-old looker Amber Heard (Alpha Dog) as a virginal object of affection who gets caught up in a greater, downward-spiraling tug-of-war, releases in a little over a week, on July 20. Yet for some reason its web site still isn’t up and operational as of this morning, July 11. For a film about and largely for teenagers, that strikes me as a quite bad idea, no matter how limited the movie’s opening. How much could it possibly cost to slap something low-fi up, produced in-house?

UPDATE 7/13: Mandy Lane‘s placeholder web site is now completely down, and the film’s July 20 release has been scuttled. According to folks at the Weinstein Company, there is currently no new release date set. Two Los Angeles press screenings for next week have been canceled.

John Travolta on Stage Work

Interviews

At the recent press day for Hairspray, John Travolta put to rest rumors that his work in the film — a colorful, toe-tapping musical based on a stage musical based in turn on John Waters’ 1988 film — might have inspired a desire to return to roots, so to speak:

“You know, honestly, I did stage from the time when I was 12
to 26 years old — even when I was in film — and I know it’s sacrilegious to say,
but I did my 13 or 14 years on stage,” Travolta relates. “It’s a lot of work in a different way.
Movies are hard, there’s no doubt about it, but then they’re over. You commit
to a year-long run, or a two-year run of a Broadway show, and you want to be digging
ditches at the end of it, because it’s the same show, same dialogue, same
everything — and after about six months you run out of ideas. It’s take 500,
and you don’t know what to do with it.”