The Hollywood Reporter is reporting today that, in a civil trial watched closely by those in the film industry, a jury returned a verdict ordering Warner Bros. to pay producers Alan Ladd Jr. and Jay Kanter $3.2
million in revenue from a series of movies licensed in packages to TV
and cable stations. Hollywood accounting and other chicanery has long been a point of contention, but does anyone really think this is going to change things on balance?
After all, immediately after the verdict, a Warner Bros. spokesperson issued a statement that read, in part: “While we are disappointed by the jury’s verdict,
we understand their confusion over damages. We will now look at this
entire proceeding, and hope to rectify this erroneous decision at this
level or on appeal.”
There are so many movies to write about — including some great stuff out there in the middle distance — but the canted coming-of-age tale Rocket Science, the very loosely autobiographical feature directorial debut of Spellbound director Jeffrey Blitz, is a real treat. Great performances, including a droll anchoring lead turn by young Reece Thompson, give this movie a certain appreciable honesty on its own skewed terms. I’ll have more next week, but the film’s trailer is available here; it releases August 10 from Picturehouse.
At the recent press day for The Bourne Ultimatum, Matt Damon talked about wrapping up a series
that has meant so much to him, personally and professionally, and why he thinks
the Bourne movies have so connected
with audiences. “Maybe Good Will Hunting
did, because it pulled Ben and I out of total obscurity, but in terms of having
an impact on my career, there hasn’t been a role that’s had a bigger impact on
my life,” says Damon. “The movies have come out over the course of five, but
it’s been seven years of my life coming back to the character.”
“All the movies I think are very much of the time that they came
out,” continues Damon. “The first one [came out in] 2002, and it’s a post 9/11
movie, with all of the fear, all of the paranoia, everything in there. And what
I love about them is that you’ll be able to look back and know the second one
is (from) 2004, when things are starting to turn in Iraq,
and now this kind of American guy, this iconic American figure, is going and
apologizing and atoning for his misdeeds, for things that he’s done — he’s
taking responsibility. Now you have the movie ending where Bourne is pulling
the gun and putting it to the head of the person who lied to him, who said,
‘This is what you’re going to be doing, you’re going to be saving American
lives.’ And Bourne’s saying, ‘I see now that you led me into something under
false pretences, and now I understand that and I’m not going to do that
anymore.’ And so each movie is very much a reflection of the time in which it’s
made. We obviously have all the images of water-boarding, of somebody getting
shot in the corner of the room who Bourne doesn’t even know what he did. He
asks what did he do? He’s told, ‘We’ve been through that; you can’t know that.’
So there’s somebody who’s an American who’s killed without a trial. And all of
these things are just little nods to the world that we’re living in right now.
And I like that about the movies, they feel relevant. Bourne has a lot of
integrity, I do think he’s a very American character, and I like that about him
— his thoughtfulness, his intelligence, the fact that he’s trying to do the
right thing, doesn’t always do the right thing or his misled, but is trying to
do the right thing.” For the review of the movie, click here.
While it seems perfectly suited for his own silly,
free-flowing style, the script for Andy Samberg’s new film, Hot Rod,
has actually been around a while, as Samberg recounted at a recent press day
for the movie. “It was written by Pam Brady, who co-wrote the South Park movie and Team America, which are two of our
favorite movies, and it was originally developed for Will Ferrell,” he says. “I
guess it was ’99 or something when she wrote it, so it definitely had been
around, and just [because of] that alone there were adjustments we had to make.
A lot of other movies had come out, and things had been done since then. But if
you actually read her original script, there are so many movies that came out
since she wrote that… she was ahead of the game, it was actually kind of crazy.
But the first thing we had to do was make it something I was comfortable
performing and so it didn’t seem like I was doing a bad Will Ferrell
impression. And I think we got away with that.”
The “we” to which Samberg refers to isn’t a royal (or schizophrenic) affectation — it’s Lonely Island collaborators Akiva Schaffer, who makes his feature directorial debut, and Jorma Taccone, who appears in the movie. To that end, though uncredited, Samberg and his longtime pals “threw every idea and weird bit that we had into
it while staying to the original idea and characters Pam had put in place.” One of those ideas: a fetishistic homage to Footloose. “Many years ago Akiva and I were just watching Footloose on cable and I was like, ‘This
scene is amazing!,’ just the idea [that he’s] so angry and furious with rage
that he has to dance,” explains Samberg. “And Akiva, Jorma [and I] have
written a bunch of other stuff together, and we had that scene in a few other
things before this project that never got made. So when we got to Hot Rod, I was like, ‘We can do the Footloose
scene!’” Yes, Samberg got to dance, at long last. It’ll be another 24 hours or so before projected box office numbers dictate what form of loose celebration, if any, next takes place…
At the recent press day for Stardust, I asked erstwhile
Warner Bros. executive turned Transformers
and Shooter
producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura — who’s currently prepping Nowhereland with Eddie Murphy — about the status of the long-rumored Beverly Hills Cop IV,
which has been parsed and examined by studio bean-counters trying to figure out
if an R-rated franchise installment would make any sense given Murphy’s current
family-crowd drawing power.
always think of the movie
as an Axel Foley movie and less as Beverly
Hills Cop.”
“You know, (Jerry) Bruckheimer did such a good job with that
series, and to try to replicate what they did would be a mistake,” continues di
Bonaventura. “We have the advantage of enough time having passed that Axel is a
different guy. What that guy is another question, but that’s going to be the
interesting challenge — how do you take what you loved about him and move it 20
years older? Because he’s a very cocky cat, that’s cool when you’re
twentysomething, but how is it when you’re fortysomething, how do you make that
acceptable when you’re fortysomething? For me, I want to see a little build, I want
to see something happen to Axel where you go, ‘Come on Axel, get cocky again!’
You have to make the audience wish him to be that cocky guy.”
He’s right, of course, di Bonaventura — but the problem, in addition to so-so grosses of the last installment, from 1994 (it grossed $42 million Stateside, but $76 million internationally), is that Murphy remains an aloof and kind of surly public figure. The young, brash, beaming Murphy of Saturday Night Live is gone, replaced with stories of churlish behavior, the obligatory out-of-wedlock love child (with Scary Spice, was it?), and, most damningly, a string of uninspired, mush-mouthed, lowest-common-denominator movies.
All of this is thought to have cost Murphy the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the heavily hyped Dreamgirls. When people see an actor milking a role generally considered long past its prime, as with Sylvester Stallone and last year’s Rocky Balboa, they want some small degree of prostration — a nod of atonement for interim missteps, real or perceived. Why does it not seem likely that Murphy will either grasp or offer that?
I chatted with Danny Boyle recently about Sunshine,
and confirmed what I probably already knew in my gut — that the guy is
whipsmart, intellectually curious and therefore predisposed to make the sort of
movies that, to whatever degrees they individually fail or succeed, still have
an involvement, strong visual sense, momentary hold or some other element that leaves them kicking around in your head for a bit, unlike so much cookie cutter
studio product.
I certainly had problems with the latter-act narrative bends
and turns of Sunshine,
but one thing it most certainly has going for it is a legitimate sense of
uncertainty and ambiguity with respect to who’s getting out of any given
situation. “What’s lovely about an ensemble in space is that you don’t really
know who’s going to dominate in the end, and you can also kill them in any
order that you want,” says Boyle. “And there are some great deaths available in
space; because it’s so hostile, you can kill people in interesting ways.
That was one of the joys — getting all these actors together and then killing
them.”
Great actors, indeed; Boyle and his casting director put
together an interesting and disparate group that includes Rose Byrne, Cliff Curtis, Chris Evans,
Troy Garity, Cillian Murphy, Hiroyuki Sanada, Mark Strong, Benedict Wong and
Michelle Yeoh, but it’s not just a collection skewed toward international
commercial viability, as you see with some movies. “The original script doesn’t
define their gender even, and it certainly doesn’t define their nationality or
race,” notes Boyle. “It’s interesting, because space movies tend to quite
colorless like that — it’s just a group of people, and you can identify with
any of them, because they don’t have any social conventions that they’re
obeying on Earth. But for me, I felt that it should be an American-Asian
mission, because all the advice was that in 50 years time the only economies that
would be able to pay for this sort of staggering cost of space travel would be
the American economy, maybe still, but certainly the Asian economies that are
emerging. And (people we talked to) said probably India
and Brazil too,
but we sort of ignored that a bit, because it was getting too disparate. So we
made the movie mostly American and Asian, and then I just started to search for
my favorite bunch of actors to create an interesting mix. Michelle was the
first to be cast, and I remember saying to her, ‘You can play any part you
want.’ And she picked Corazon, which is actually a Mexican name.”
Matt Damon was on The Daily Show last night to promote The Bourne Ultimatum, and it was another effortlessly charismatic appearance, a reminder of the easy, penthouse-to-sidewalk rapport that both Damon and his pal Ben Affleck have with the press. Damon chatted comfortably with Jon Stewart (who mentioned Death to Smoochy, naturally), told an interesting though possibly apocryphal anecdote about Fat Man and Little Boy (about crew members wagering over how many Oscars it was going to win — the point being that you never quite know how something’s going to play with an audience) and said of the third installment in his spy franchise: “We’re just happy it doesn’t suck. The fact that people love it is great.”
always think of the movie