More thoughts soon on Feast of Love (MGM, September 28), a fairly engaging (and nudity-saturated) kaleidoscopic drama from writer-director Robert Benton about tumbling in and out of romantic affection, but by far the line of the most incidental hilariousness came from a small supporting character, who counsels her roommate thusly: “We all have dreams — I wanna buy new tits and a hybrid.”
Oh, and this is funny, too. So you just got a two-for-one, actually.
So Ben Affleck, who turns 35 today, and Natasha Henstridge, who turns 33, share a birthday, ehh? That must’ve made for a nice moment on the set of Bounce. I like to think that Henstridge pointed it out in effusive fashion over craft services one day, and Affleck just stared at her blankly and told her how he was the bomb in Phantoms. Affleck’s directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, bows in just over two months; no word on any of Henstridge’s moves behind a camera.
several times before last night’s screening of The Invasion at The Grove in Los Angeles to make sure that journalists knew the embargo on reviews for the film was Friday, the date of the release. So, no reviews before then.
That’s Friday, August 17. That’s when The Invasion opens. Starring Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig and Jeremy Northam.
Just sayin’…
FilmStew has up a nice little piece about Uwe Boll’s response to a critic’s response to his latest film, Postal, and it’s a laugh-out-loud doozy. Among the more coherent charges levied at Wired writer Chris Kohler? That he “wrote that article in bad faith to damage me — his whole goal is to destroy my business,” as well as the fact that “people like [him] are the reason that independent movies have no chance anymore.” It gets even better than that, though, trust me.
I’ve interviewed Boll a couple times before (even talking about Postal, which he said would be “like Falling Down,
but funny”), and he’s got a bit of a hair-trigger temper, no doubt. He also speaks, though not quite as heavily accented as you might expect, in a garbled manner that certainly shows English is not his native-born language. But it’s useless trying to parse constructive criticism with him, because he then just gets wildly excitable and starts making even less sense than usual. Dry sarcasm, that’s the way to go with Boll; give him enough rope and let him hang himself…
2
Days in Paris — which she wrote, directed and stars in — is significantly
different than Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, the two chatty,
European-set relationship pictures she’s made with Ethan Hawke and director
Richard Linklater.
photographer Marion (Delpy), and American interior designer Jack (Adam
Goldberg, above right), as they attempt to re-infuse their relationship with romance on the
end leg of a European vacation. But the combination of
offbeat parents and a number of flirtatious ex-boyfriends, along with the
natural language barrier, make for choppy waters.
autobiographical, even though she and Goldberg used to date. “We were together for
a short time, [but] truly, to me, it didn’t have much influence on the film — maybe
more for him than me,” Delpy says. “For me, I’m very detached. When it’s over,
it’s totally another world,” she says, adding a swooshing sound for emphasis.
mill. “I’ve always liked Adam for the idea of putting him in a movie more than
being with him,” Delpy adds with a laugh. Then there’s a small pout of
reflection. “I shouldn’t say that. He’s not going to be happy about that.”
Jesus. And one wonders why some folks are leery of dating actors
and actresses…
Lost amidst reporting on other forms of viral marketing is the fact that apparently Rush Hour 3 is advertising or sort of sponsoring, if you will, Sigalert, which is the coupled slang for the traffic and vehicular smash-up reporting service here in greater Los Angeles county. In addition to a little movie logo on their web freeway map, a couple days ago accidents — noted by differently colored diamonds on the screen — were also marked with a pop-up text card for the movie, in very small print. The latter no more — I guess someone made the point that you don’t want your movie literally associated with horrible accidents. Check it out by clicking here; who knows how long after opening weekend it’ll last.
So wait… gun-for-hire filmmaker Brett Ratner has accidentally gotten blowjobs from dudes pretending to be chicks? (And it’s happened to his friends, plural, as well?) That’s according to an interview with The Advocate, in which Ratner explains/defends a joke in the forthcoming, relatively uninspired Rush Hour 3 (more on this later this week). “That’s from my personal experience,” says Ratner. “My
first blowjob was from a man, but I didn’t know it
was a man. That’s where that comes from, it’s based on
personal experience.”
“That happens to a lot
of heterosexuals — you meet a girl in a bar, and it
turns out she’s not a girl,” continues Ratner (After the Sunset, X-Men: The Last Stand). So that happens a lot? I’d argue its prevalence, I guess, though Ratner and I doubtlessly run with slightly different crowds. And this is exactly what freaks out Bible-belt Americans about Hollywood — the notion of homosexuals as rampant tricksters out to dupe them or take unfair advantage. Trannies, just be upfront about what you’re rockin’, please.
I’m not sure what this says about ex-crush Rebecca Gayheart, really. But, well… who says Ratner doesn’t make personal movies, then? That’s one less criticism that can be leveled against him.
I just put a bullet in an episode of The Daily Show — with guest Matt Groening, from Wednesday, July 18, in advance of a screening of The Simpsons Movie — and I found it interesting that he told Jon Stewart the hit animated show (broadcast on Fox) was expressly forbidden from making fun of Fox News, after using a faux-news crawl that tweaked Rupert Murdoch and also read, “Brad Pitt + Albert Einstein = Dick Cheney.” The reason he said he was given? “We were told viewers might confuse it with real news,” Groening says. I don’t know whether to laugh, or shake my head at the synergistic conspiratorial wonderment of it all.
I have a pal who has such a pronounced, sincere disdain for 11-year-old Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine), and yet a correlative affection for her older brother Spencer (oh… The Santa Clause 3, let’s say) that it sprints past the strange right into camp brilliance. That’s why he’ll be stoked by today’s news. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the Breslin possessing two testicles (as well as actual talent, my friend would exclaim at this point) is set to star in two new films.
First the bad news: he’ll topline the teen-flavored comedy Harold, opposite
actor-producer and box office kiss of death Cuba Gooding Jr., as a prematurely balding student trying to adapt to a new high school. But Breslin’s also lined up a lead role in M. Night Shyamalan’s
rebound thriller project, The Happening, which will start shooting in August, and stars Mark Wahlberg as a father trying to lead his family to safety when a natural disaster threatens to destroy the planet. Presumably there will be no “narfs” or “scrunts” this go-round…
Hollywood Boulevard offers up its own very particular freak show, and I’ve written before about rampaging Wookies and the like. Now it seems, per E! Online, that a Marilyn Monroe look-alike has called the cops on a Chewbacca character, alleging that someone touched her on her right shoulder “without her permission,” LAPD officer April Harding said on Monday. She also told officers that about a month ago a man in a Chewbacca costume grabbed her hand and placed it on his genitals, hence the filed battery complaint. Wait a second… battery and/or sexual harassment, or just some good old role-playing hanky-panky? Hmmm… maybe I’ve revealed too much…
Actually, one funny thing is that this entire incident was apparently set off by a group of tourists approaching the Monroe character — whose name police refused to release — and telling her that she was the worst Marilyn Monroe impersonator they’d ever seen; “Marilyn” then thought that the guy dressed as Chewbecca had egged them or convinced them to say that. The funnier thing is that two weeks ago I was in Hollywood, right around the Hollywood & Highland complex and Grauman’s Chinese, where these folks congregate. From about 30 feet, I saw what I presume to be many of the same characters described herein, and I remember being struck by and even saying at the time to a couple friends of mine, “Jesus, who’s that supposed to be… Marilyn Monroe?” She looked awful, really. Donn Harper, though, quoted in the aforementioned piece, shouldn’t get too uppity… his run-down Elmo costume was equally pathetic and derisible.
So while Transformers and Live Free or Die Hard duel it out at the box office, it seems that director Michael Bay and Bruce Willis are busy feuding online. On a video-enabled chat on the AICN message boards in the days leading up to his film’s release, Willis allegedly said of his Armageddon director, “Bay… would have ruined DH4. Few people will work with him now, and I know I will never work with him again,” prompting Bay to respond in his blog, in a post which he has since taken down.
God bless the Internet(s), truly. If there was ever proof needed that Hollywood is like a giant microcosm of high school, except with better cars, more bok choy and yoga and even bigger egos, this is it…
I’ve enjoyed his work in an awful lot of movies — everything from The Green Mile, Galaxy Quest and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to the underrated Confessions of a Dangerous Mind — but I think that Sam Rockwell has to have the most consistently awful hair in Hollywood today.
I get that his wild-guy roles sometimes dictate a shaggy or disheveled look, and from time to time Rockwell also rocks the seedy facial hair and/or porn ‘stache, which does him no additional favors as far as attractiveness. But in both films and real life, almost every time I see this guy I wanna toss him a comb. The impetus for this post was this particular picture (Rockwell’s impression of Nick Nolte’s mug shot?) from the Los Angeles Film Festival premiere of his latest movie, Joshua, but browsing through his IMDB image gallery is its own effective stomach muscle exercise in restrained laughter.
This reputation for bouffant ridiculousness is one of a couple reasons it’s so weird to see Rockwell as a wealthy, hedge-fund managing, racquetball playing family guy in Joshua. Hell, Rockwell probably took the part for this fact alone — simply wanting to see what a normal, upper-middle-class style and trim might look like. Though he sports a few moments of brushed-back, tangled mess, Rockwell for the most part leaves the crazily-askance-‘do heavy lifting to costar Vera Farmiga, who gets to play bat-shit crazy, and sport her hair accordingly. Still, Rockwell: stop taping squirrels to your head, a la Donald Trump. You’re better than that.
Joke of the day, June 23 — my girlfriend, upon seeing the poster for Warner Bros.’ forthcoming License to Wed, starring Mandy Moore, John Krasinski and Robin Williams: “What, no Debra Messing?”
Press conferences are always something of a dicey proposition, and you typically lose quite a bit of the (admittedly manufactured) informality of roundtable interviews in the translation to this format, no matter how well managed against free-for-all they are. Sometimes, though, as at the press day held in Los Angeles this past weekend for the forthcoming Evan Almighty, the tradeoff proves deliciously worth it, either because of an instinctive performance moment born of appearing in front of a larger group or… well, just a stupidly phrased question that provides its own inherent entertainment value. To wit, this exchange with Lauren Graham, above:
Question: In both this movie and in Gilmore Girls, you’re the sexy
mom…
all?
don’t have really any awareness of that. What I knew is that I thought that… You
know, we sort of discussed that I didn’t think [my character] worked. And so I
wanted her to feel kind of casual and natural, especially in opposition to this
guy [Steve Carell] who’s very buttoned up and has kind of gotten into this more professional
time of his life. I felt like this is a girl who’s known him a long time, and
knew him before all this stuff happened. And so I just wanted her to be kind of
a counterpoint for him. And the other stuff: like, if I did anything I wanted
to do, I would be, like, a lot… Uh, this is me like running and doing
everything I can. I’m sort of fighting a battle… I guess. I could go really far the
other way, so this… I work out a lot. I watch what I eat. It’s very hard won
even to be this not skinny. Yes! Next…
For the record, and for what it’s worth, the question came from a female reporter…
I thought I’d inaugurate a new category today, to catalogue film amusements both intentional and less so. This was inspired, in its own way, by a recent viewing of The Salon, in which a character laments the eminent domain struggle over a beauty shop by actually saying, “Doing hair kept me off the streets,” nevermind that the hair salon won’t actually be closing, it’s just being threatened with being moved. Good laugh, that one. Oh, and another inspiration as well was Lucky You, which features a moment where Debra Messing’s bit character randomly runs into an old African-American acquaintance, and asks if he’s still the gondola guy at Casino X, maybe the Excalibur. “No,” he replies with a sly grin. “Now I’m a Nubian slave at the Luxor.” A bit divisive, perhaps, but to have that much punch in a throwaway line in a Hollywood movie is rare — the irony of being paid to portray a slave, of course, and the further insinuation that it was a well-rewarded promotion from his previous position. Edgily well played, Curtis Hanson and Eric Roth…
Basically, though I’ll probably dump some other related stuff in it as well, including previous Wookie filings, this category will chiefly serve as a repository for all (which is to say, some) of the random, throwaway lines from mediocre films which catch my ear — all manner of pithy ripostes, improvised one-liners and earnestly misguided and thus howlingly funny entreaties that aren’t of the traditional comic punchline variety. Oh, to that end, I’m also reminded of Carrie-Anne Moss’ The Fifth Element-tweaking greeting to an orange vest-sporting Jeremy Piven upon his arrival in a scene in 2000’s The Crew: “What are you doing here — and why are you dressed like Bruce Willis?”
Man, this is fun.
Finally, while I’m sure I’d likely get some legal advice to the contrary, I don’t currently have a lot of faith in lawyers, so we’ll probably also launch a special deadbeats category soon, to keep tabs on the fine, fine folks who default on contracts and otherwise attempt to defraud writers. Good times…
YouTube is great, really — certainly as a waste of time, but also as a canny means of cultural distillation. Despite no small amount of admiration for each of them, I didn’t catch last fall’s Nicolas Cage/Neil LaBute remake of The Wicker Man, though I did a DVD review of the
special edition original when it came out late last year. Now, thanks to this inspired, two-and-a-half-minute YouTube mash-up, I’ll never have to see the the re-up.
I personally loved the roundhouse kick to the face and the bear bitch-slap.
For what it’s worth, it really seems like Cage’s performance is modeled somewhat
closely after Edward Woodward’s from the original film, except with general irritation
replacing a moral stodginess. Madly bubbling-over frustration is part of what The Wicker Man is about, and here, in the remake, it just seems amped up a bit, though I (want to) believe the hill-tumble exclamations of, “The bees, the bees… not the bees!” might be overdubbed or laid in.
It’s a happy birthday to Adrien Brody, who turns 34 today. When I think of Brody, I always fondly recall the intimate press day roundtables in New York City for The Pianist, long before his Oscar victory for the movie, during which an amusingly clueless college journalist asked Brody why director Roman Polanski wasn’t there as well, to discuss his film. To his credit, Brody didn’t belittle the guy by asking, “Are you serious?”
At the press day for Hollywoodland, meanwhile, Brody had some interesting things to say about an actor’s
connection with his audience, and the (false) sense of familiarity that
breeds. For that tidbit, click here.
It’s a happy birthday to single mom Krista Allen, who turns 35 today. Krista, the third season of Project Greenlight totally busted you for being a bit of a diva on the set of Feast, and showing up late one day with what might most charitably be described as a hangover, but I’ll give you props for the final product — you kicked ass and had some fun. Are you a great actress? No. Have you made out with George Clooney more times than I have? Yes, almost certainly.
Also, for all the Jenna Fischer fans out there, she’s on the cover of this month’s Wired magazine, which means you get this photo, covered by a transparency, I gather, as well as this pursed-lips interior pic. No slouch management, hers. It seems they’re aware of the same melancholic image problems I mentioned, and so “the sexification of Jenna” is in full swing.
Which, come to think of it, would be a great title for an exploitation flick. I need to get on that, so I can escape having to write about movies like Premonition…
David Lynch doesn’t seem to think much of corporate-vetted product placement in films. The too-long preamble turns out to be hilarious comedic counterpoint to his succinct answer. Seriously, David, tell us what you really think…
So a friend sent me this link of the car chase from 1990’s Short Time, starring Dabney Coleman, and it’s true that if you have seven and a half minutes to burn, it’s worth a look — a reminder of the kinetic power of non-CGI-infused chase sequences. The early aerial shots really help sell it, and the hood’s smash of the windshield gave me post-traumatic flashbacks — I had that happen once, at 65mph on a freeway.
I particularly enjoy Matt Frewer’s exclamation of, “Your yogurt!” as well as the varied, repeated uses of the phrase “son of a bitch,” which is the perfect low-grade epithet for this chase. Again, for the YouTube clip, click here.
So a man, Frederick Evan Young, dressed as Chewbacca from the Star Wars movies was arrested this past week for allegedly head-butting a tour guide operator in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater, it’s being reported by Showbuzz/CBS. Even better? When initially asked to stop harassing two young Japanese tourists for money, he supposedly exploded and said, “Nobody tells this wookie what to do,” which I guess is the catch-all, let’s-throw-down loser phrase for Star Wars fans clad as Chewbacca, much like “Do you know who I am?” for celebrities, and “You think you’re better than me?” for drunks and/or rednecks.
I’ve lived in Los Angeles a decade now, and some of these characters — performers is too generous a designation, actually — are the saddest thing around. There are a few skilled mimics or upbeat folks, shaking hands and bringing awe to little kids. But mostly it’s a bitter bunch, these people who stand around in frequently natty costumes, shilling for money. And I have seen some of them react angrily when not compensated for a picture (the origin of this incident), even of the hasty, non-posed variety. It can be aggro panhandling, with capes, boots and the like.
So nice going Frederick. Like hardcore Star Wars devotees didn’t have to catch enough crap without you giving people grade-A bulletin board material like this.
I somehow neglected to mention this delicious morsel when previously recapping David Ansen and Sean Smith’s Oscar roundtable, from what is now last week’s Newsweek.
The obligatory “early jobs” question gives way to this response from Brad Pitt: “I had a job driving strippers around… my job was to drive them to bachelor parties and things. I’d pick them up, and at the gig I’d collect the money, play the bad Prince tapes and catch the girls’ clothes. It was not a wholesome atmosphere, and it got very depressing. After two months I went in to quit, and the guy said, ‘Listen, I’ve got this one last gig tonight.’ So I did it, and this girl — I’d never met her before — was in an acting class taught by a man named Roy London [a famous acting coach]. I went and checked it out, and it really set me on the path to where I am now.”
Ahh, yet another reason to love Pitt: his disarming penchant for candor, even as the most paparazzi-hounded star on the planet. For the rest of the full, lively conversation — which also includes Cate Blanchett, Forest Whitaker, Penelope Cruz, Helen Mirren and Leonardo DiCaprio — click here.
Off topic, especially amidst all the awards chatter, but Timothy Noah has an interesting piece up on Slate about that most famous of (alleged) Los Angeles murderers, O.J. Simpson, in advance of Mark Miller’s piece this week in Newsweek regarding the same. The subject: that explosive chapter of the imploded hypothetical confession If I Did It. So… a friend called “Charlie,” ehh? And Noah points out “the lack of subjunctive tense.” Well, sure. The final chapter is yet to be written, but does anyone doubt that it’s going to end badly for this guy? Like, spectacularly badly. Bad fiction-type badly.
So Primeval‘s about an alligator, huh? How did I not somehow pick up on that during any of the first 400 times I saw its television ads this past week and a half? Kudos for the obfuscation, Touchstone marketers. Well played…
Good to see Orlando Jones getting paid, though. Love that guy, especially in the Evolution sequel I sometimes screen in my mind when sitting through something directed by Shawn Levy. Also, hurrah for the presence of Brooke Langton, who was just slammin’ in that cheerleader outfit in The Replacements, opposite Keanu Reeves. Just sayin’…
Hopefully this thing turns a quick, quiet profit, if only for their sake.
I caught The Nativity Story Monday evening, and one of Joseph’s lines (“I wonder if there’s even anything I’ll be able to teach him”) got me thinking about the parts of Jesus’ life that we always read and hear about, and see on screen — and those we don’t. What about Jesus’ awkward pubescence, for instance? Is there a great comedy (or, OK, more likely mediocre comedy born of a great concept) that I don’t know about? Hell, you know, I’d even I’d even settle for a Gospel-style Muppet Babies, with Jesus and his little cousin John the Baptist navigating the “terrible twos.” Who’s with me?
