Daily Archives: July 12, 2007

Michelle Pfeiffer on Troubled Woman

Interviews

At the recent press day for Hairspray, Michelle Pfeiffer talked about why she
hasn’t been seen on screen since 2002’s underrated White Oleander. It’s a messy tale, for those who haven’t heard about it. To wit:

“I spent a couple of years trying to get this movie going,
called I Could Never Be Your Woman,
which Amy Heckerling directed and Paul Rudd stars in with me,” Pfeiffer explains. “It hasn’t
been released and I’m not sure when it will be. But I really, really loved that
project and, frankly, for a few years everything paled in comparison, and it was the
only thing I’d wanted to do. So that was sort of to be my big comeback, and
that was two years ago.“

What’s the delay? “It’s not really legal problems, it has something to do with
deal stuff,” says Pfeiffer. “There are no legal battles per se, but I think it’s about finding
the right distribution deal that everyone can be happy with. It’s the first
time something like this has happened (to me), and initially it was very frustrating. But now that
it’s been two years, I’m kind of not thinking about it, honestly. I would love
for it to come out, but the ship has sailed and I’m moving on.”

Of course Pfeiffer’s being fairly gracious and forgiving. Her make-nice statements are the press-pattycake equivalent of styrofoam packing popcorn — not totally forthcoming, but not necessarily false, either. The film is basically the biggest casualty of the implosion of upstart Bauer Martinez, which in turn is partly a result of the poor earnings of both National Lampoon’s Van Wilder: The Rise of Taj and Harsh Times, but also some rather shady and/or dizzying basic-level mismanagement. (Also caught up in Bauer hell: The Moguls, formerly known as The Amateurs, and Richard Gere’s troubled The Flock.)

Still, Pfeiffer insists that fans needn’t worry about her totally disappearing. Apart from the forthcoming Stardust, she’s also eyeing a couple other projects. “I’ve actually been working the last two years, it’s just that
now everything is coming out,” she says. “It’s kind of natural that I was
due to take a break. It wasn’t a conscious decision… but I’d worked pretty hard for a long time, and it
probably
made sense for my psyche.”

Chuck, Larry and Jessica Biel’s Butt

Musings

What’s a butt worth? Kevin James and Adam Sandler’s gay-but-not-really comedy I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, releasing July 20, has the two single firefighter pals posing as a homosexual couple in order to secure health and pension benefits for James’ kids. Of course, we all knew there had to be some va-voomish feminine temptation to give the movie some hetero sizzle and counterbalance all the willfully uncomfortable, nudge-nudge laughs. That’s where Jessica Biel comes in, naturally. Base level prurience aside though (honestly), I’m intrigued by how… umm, assertively Universal is doing that.

I generally expected a few low-cut dress cleavage shots in the movie’s trailer, but the above screen caps — from the obligatory scene where Sandler’s character must control his libido and surging crush while Biel’s character changes clothes in front of him — are in heavy rotation in the Chuck & Larry TV ads, and not just in the evenings, either. I don’t know for sure that they’re making the rounds on the broadcast networks, though; the summer slate has sent me scurrying back to the comforts of cable.

If an Adam Sandler summer comedy ever needed any help — with his track record, it’s a minimum $40 million opening and a final haul anywhere between $135 and $170, guaranteed — Biel’s estimable back end could help squeeze a few more dollars out of teenage wallets. I just hope that when her character offers Sandler a squeeze of her boobs (part of the same scene, teased in the ads), she’s on to his ploy, and toying with him… mainly because I just don’t like to think about guys like Isaac Mizrahi getting over. Maybe my approach has been wrong all these years…

McPhee-ver Spreads to Big Screen

Casting About

According to The Hollywood Reporter, American Idol runner-up Katharine McPhee has signed on for her first studio film gig, an untitled Anna Faris project for Columbia Pictures, penned by Legally Blonde scribes Karen
McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, and directed by Fred Wolf.

The script centers on a Playboy bunny (Faris) who
gets kicked out of the Playboy Mansion and becomes the house mother to
the lamest sorority on a nearby college campus. McPhee will play a pregnant hippie, and rounding out the major roles of
the sorority sisters will be Emma Stone, Rumer Willis, Kat Dennings and comedian
Dana Goodman. The film is perhaps most notable, however, as the first
female-driven comedy to come out of Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison production company. Production is set to commence the last week of July in Los Angeles so, somewhere, Rob Schneider is slipping into a micro-skirt and high heels right now…

Music in Film, Part One

Musings

I just recently finished reading Spin‘s profile on Amy Winehouse, the British, up-and-coming, vaguely horse-faced jazz and R&B belter, and then I was struck yesterday, while blasted with her catchy hit single “Rehab” while stuck in traffic, that if it hasn’t already been snatched up by some bottom-feeding teen flick, this is a potentially great big screen song. It likely won’t find its perfect match; the quite literal if rather deliciously sardonic lyrics dictate that. But the tune’s superlative horn and trumpet work — working in concert with that slap-happy, click-clackitty percussive loop — give it an undeniable sense of thrift-store uplift. No big production for production’s sake, just everything working in unison.

Rather than finding its cinematic soulmate in the tale of some alcoholic drifter-grifter who makes good, “Rehab” will more than likely be used as spackle to cover up some narrative inanity. You know, kind of how Lincoln Park’s “What I’ve Done” is slapped over the end of Transformers and cranked up to spleen-rattling levels, in an effort (mostly successful, it turns out) to make you momentarily forget that the movie just told you that a massive, city-leveling battle between giant alien robots could be covered up merely by dumping its wreckage into the ocean.