Director David Lynch is no stranger to taking his message to folks in unusual ways, and his advocacy of transcendental meditation is well documented. For those in the midwest, though, or with the means, money and time to get there, there’s an interesting event unfolding May 25-27, at the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, and an extremely reasonable $20 registration fee can gain you admittance.
I can’t claim insider information that would shade this as either truth or fiction, but Hollywood Interrupted‘s Mark Ebner has up a piece about John Travolta’s alleged denial over his son Jett’s autism. And it’s provocative, I’ll give him that. I read Ebner’s book of the same name, co-written with Andrew Breitbart, and it was a good read, so I don’t necessarily doubt his journalistic credentials. There does seem to be an axe to grind with Scientology, though (no crime, that), and I’m also not sure how the couple cited in the story would have access to all this insider information. At any rate, something to make you go, “Hmmmm…”
Amber Tamblyn’s
new film, Stephanie Daley,
about a small town teenager accused of murdering her newborn baby, is a pretty
hardcore drama, but that doesn’t mean that she and costar Tilda Swinton didn’t
find time for a little relaxation while filming in the tucked away regions of
upstate New York. “Tilda and I, because there was nothing to do up there, went
to Woodstock,” relates Tamblyn. “We
drove down there together a couple times and got lost. And we saw Grizzly Man
four times in the theater because we loved it so much. We were obsessed. We were even trying to compare
it in some way to Stephanie Daley,
and have those characters be other people. And you know Tilda — she was like,
‘I feel like I’m more of the bear
presence, let me explain why,’” says Tamblyn, affecting Swinton’s slight
patrician Scottish accent.
Bearish allegories aside, Tamblyn still keeps in touch with
her costar as well. “Tilda and I still have a joke, actually,” she confides.
“The final climactic scene where we’re sitting in the office and she… gets me
to start talking about [my character’s delivery] and says, ‘Was it down in the
leg of your snow-pants?’ After a while — because we shot that stuff
consecutively, all of the things in the office, all within four days, and
back-to-back — we started to go a little crazy with the dialogue, and the
back-and-forth of it. The psychology is so thick that we started saying each
other’s lines. And then we’d be like, ‘Oh, shit!’ So every once in a while I’ll
get an email from Tilda and the subject title will be her line of dialogue, ‘And
then what happened?’ And I’ll write back, ‘I don’t remember.’ It just became
laughable…”
While Spider-Man 3 does its thing at the box office today and throughout the weekend, George Lucas is still somewhere in Marin County, poised on a high-dive in a bathing suit made out of $100 bills, and getting ready to swan-dive into a pile of coins, a la Scrooge McDuck. (That means he’s rich, yo.)
Amber Tamblyn
got her start in television, and drew wide acclaim in CBS’ Joan of Arcadia, a blend of Quantum
Leap and Touched by an Angel,
centering on a frustrated teenager with a direct line to God. The big screen
has been nice to her as well, though, with The
Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and The
Grudge 2 turning into solid hits, and affording her the opportunity to do
small, intimate indies like Stephanie
Daley, in
release now. Still, Tamblyn isn’t turning her back on the small screen.
“I just did a pilot for CBS, and I did it because Michael
Cuesta wrote it. Cuesta did L.I.E.
and 12 and Holding,
and created Dexter and has done a lot
of Six Feet Under. He’s a very
interesting director,” she says. “It’s a show called Babylon Fields and it’s with Ray Stevenson, Kathy Baker and Jamey
Sheridan and it’s about everybody coming back from the dead — everyone in the
world, Indian tribes, everything. It’s not an apocalyptic scenario, but it
really focuses on this one tiny town on Long Island and
this girl, Janine. Her father comes back from the dead, played by Jamey
Sheridan, and he’s a corrupt cop. What we, the audience, find out is that
someone, either Kathy Baker or myself, put an axe in the back of his head, and
that’s how he died. He finds the axe and places it in the back of his head and
realizes that that’s how he was killed, and then goes on to investigate his own
murder. So it’s about him trying to fix all of these awful situations and
relationships that he had, as well as other characters.”
“Eventually there’s going to be some really hilarious things,
like ‘zombie AA,’ where they all go to meetings so they don’t eat flesh,”
continues Tamblyn. “I mean, it’s really dark, dark comedy. It’s right up my
alley. I guess when I read it I was like ‘CBS is going to do this? Are you
kidding me?’ They said, ‘Yeah, they want their Heroes orLost, they want
something along those lines.’ So I said, ‘Well, if they’re crazy enough to put
money behind it, I’m crazy enough to do it. Let’s do it.’ It’s great.”
Tamblyn isn’t yet sure that the series will be picked up,
and it hardly seems to have the ingredients of a fuzzy, feel-good break-out
smash. Still, she’s not worried. “It’s a great character role,” Tamblyn says.
“My character, Janine Wunch, is this Long Island girl
who carries a gun, and is really kind of clumsy but sort of sweet and even a
little hardcore. I read it and everybody was saying, ‘Don’t go back to CBS, don’t
go back’ and I said, ‘I don’t have a choice, this is amazing.’ I mean, I don’t
want to go do Scooby Doo 5. There
aren’t enough roles to keep me sustained. A good script in Hollywood,
for me, comes along maybe three to four times a year, which is not enough. I
know that sounds ridiculous, but even then, sometimes I can’t do those, so that’s
the way it goes. So I’d rather be doing something like this where it’s
consistent and it feeds me. I feel like I’m always hungry for it. It’s very,
very cool. I think it’s going to be a big cult thing. I like sticking with the
cult themes — soap operas, horror films, that’s my target. All I need to get
now is a guest role on Battlestar
Galactica, then I’m good to go. I love that show. That and The Wire; it’s all I watch.”
Shannon Elizabeth still has breasts. This is what one learned from her recent appearance on Thank God You’re Here, NBC’s competitive improvisational sketch comedy show, which throws together a new quartet of celebrities each week with a couple of holdover cast members.
Hosted by David Alan Grier and judged by Dave Foley, who presents the winner with a trophy of some sort, the show drops costumed celebs into both group and individual colorful scenarios in which they have no idea what will happen, except that they’ll be greeted by the titular phrase. I only caught this show due to a TiVo lag, but once I glimpsed the pain that was Elizabeth attempting improv comedy, I couldn’t avert my eyes. It was like tonguing the gaping hole of a newly missing tooth, watching a police pursuit and car accident, and inhaling deeply at the gasoline pump, all at once.
Appearing alongside George Takei, Tom Green and some other chick whose name escapes me, Elizabeth — who was dragged to momentary fame in American Pie courtesy of her bared breasts, then suffered the ignominious fate of costarring in a movie in which David Ogden Stiers ingests a human testicle (that would be 2001’s Tomcats) — evidenced absolutely no knowledge of the basic working precepts of improv. A fading, bitter sex symbol who’d receded from pop cultural memory over the past four or five years except for winning some stupid poker tournament, Elizabeth was clearly a called-in chit of her agent or manager, who probably said something like this: “No, she’s really, really funny, I swear! Did you see her guest spots on That ’70s Show? No? Oh! Oh, let me tell you…”
After delivering an eye-gougingly bad solo set, the show-closing group sketch found the celebs adorned in Viking get-up, and called before their chief, ostensibly to talk about his replacement. With nothing better to do, Elizabeth pounced on the guy and started grinding on and making out with him, which then led Tom Green to do the same. The piece devolved into a mock-outrageous orgy, with Elizabeth kissing everyone in sight and Foley even joining in on the action. Then, making her play for top honors, Elizabeth ran over and mounted a since withdrawn Foley, saying, “You’re the real judge!” Grier appeared embarassed by the whole episode, and an amused Foley only slightly less so. Look, Shannon, play the sexpot card or not, but don’t constantly bitch about the parts you’re offered, pose for Playboy and then talk about how much you regret it, or insist you’ve so much more to offer other than your body or looks and then disingenuously reach into the hootchie grab-bag when you’re painted into an improvisational corner. And most of all, please stop trying to be funny… you’re killing me.
to make the doughnuts, immediately discover three or four problems in your inbox, before your first shots of caffeine have even really had a chance to work their way through your system, and then you get a ray-of-comic-sunshine email like this, which has you checking your calendar to see if it’s not April 1 instead of May 1:
“What do you get when you mix a reality TV crew, four handheld
digital camcorders and an eye surgeon to the stars (that would be ophthalmologist
Dr. Robert K. Maloney, presumably self-described) with a TV beauty’s pursuit of
20/20 vision and one innovative company willing to document it all? You get the
breakthrough online docu-drama RealityLASIK,
which documents Kristin Cavallari’s pursuit of the latest in vision correction
surgery and her decision to ultimately undergoing [sic] Advanced CustomVue LASIK
with the IntraLase Method.” (parentheses and correction mine)
That’s right. Cavallari (above), perhaps equally known for her role
several years ago on the MTV reality series Laguna
Beach: The Real Orange County, and her more recent role in consoling Nick
Lachey’s jock (allegedly) after the break-up of his marriage to Jessica Simpson,
needs glasses. Or needed, I guess. Then
she decided she was through with that mess — glasses are so 20th century, nerds! But here, let me let a talking head
explain.
“Kristin had made the decision to have LASIK surgery, and
approached us with the idea of documenting her own experience as a fun way to
speak to her fans and others considering the procedure,” said Lauren
Kanner, AMO’s global director of consumer market development. “The
medical industry is always looking for ways to earn the public’s trust. The
very nature of a reality-based program is to draw the audience in, and we
thought this was an engaging opportunity for people to live the LASIK surgery
experience through Kristin’s eyes, not ours.”
So there you have it. Cavallari will have LASIK surgery,
presumably in a bikini. I’m not sure what qualifies this project as a “breakthrough,”
other than simply the dizzying combination of ingredients — though by this classification,
an omelet consisting of everything in my refrigerator would also be a “breakthrough.”
I do know I’m happy for its existence, though. It’s given me an out-loud laugh,
and staked a strong claim to the most awesome thing of the day. Take that, birthday of Wes Anderson!
For more information, I suppose you can visit the web site by clicking here.
In response to the growing importance of the global cinema marketplace, The Hollywood Reporter is, well, reporting that Sony Pictures Entertainment has created an international motion picture
production department, which will be led by Gareth Wigan, vice chairman of the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, and Deborah
Schindler, the former head of Red Om Films who has run the East Coast motion picture production and development operation for Columbia Pictures since 2005.
With the way the film business is expanding these days, I’m frankly a bit shocked to learn that Sony is the only Hollywood studio to maintain stand-alone, local-language production units throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America. International theatrical receipts are of course a bigger and bigger slice of the pie these days (see Night at the Museum, if you doubt). They can make a bonafide hit out of relative under-performers like Troy or Kingdom of Heaven, and help birth sequels for so-so successes like Underworld and Resident Evil. But the under-discussed subtext of that lesson is that there is such a thing as separate foreign tastes (duh), and those distinctions are bubbling to the surface more and more. Why more Hollywood studios don’t try to explicitly cater to those rabid, burgeoning bases, I’m not sure.
As previously mentioned, the lit department filings here at Shared Darkness are relatively rare, but one tome that French film fans in particular will likely want to check out is author Judith Mayne’s same-titled exploration of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1943 debut filmLe Corbeau, part of the superb French Film Guide series from the University of Illinois Press. Despite being under German rule at the time, the French film industry survived and in fact in many ways thrived, and Mayne examines the domination of the industry by Continental Films, the Nazi-owned arts company for which Clouzot worked. The author asks, crucially, how such a film came to be made at such a time, evoking as it does the intense paranoia of an era in which anonymous letters denouncing friends and neighbors were encouraged by the German occupier. It’s a quite good read, studiously researched and faithfully annotated. To purchase the book via Half.com, click here.
In support of the Fox Searchlight film Waitress, the Adrienne Shelly Foundation, a non-profit organization
dedicated to the memory of multi-hyphenate Adrienne Shelly, has partnered with CharityFolks.com to auction off one-of-a-kind aprons decorated, designed and
autographed by stars such as Keri Russell, Cheryl Hines, Jordana Brewster,
Lisa Kudrow, Amy Smart and more. Waitress
was Shelly’s final film before her untimely death in November of last year, and
her first writing and directing effort since 1999’s I’ll Take You There, starring Ally Sheedy.
The proceeds of the online auction will benefit the organization’s
mission to support the artistic achievements of female actors, writers and
directors through a series of grants to help finance student films and
independent film projects. Money will also supplement film school scholarships and awards, and
fund staged readings of deserving scripts. Bidding starts on Sunday evening, April 29 and closes on
Monday, May 14 at 6 p.m. Eastern
time. For more information, click here.
Jack Valenti has passed away at the age of 85, after suffering a stroke in March that hospitalized him for several weeks. A special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson when he
was lured to Hollywood in 1966 by movie moguls Lew Wasserman and Arthur
Krim, Valenti instituted
the modern movie ratings system and guided Hollywood from the
censorship era to the digital age. As the president of the Motion Picture Association of America, Valenti raised the ire of documentarian Kirby Dick and others, who took exception with what they saw as the MPAA’s Neapolitan swirl of secrecy and hypocrisy with regards to classification issues.
Still, throughout it all, Valenti remained enormously popular with industry colleagues, and respected for his measured advice. “I’ve known Jack for more than 25 years as a colleague,
friend and mentor,” said Jean Prewitt, President and CEO of the Independent Film & Television Alliance. “He was the absolute consummate gentleman who loved
every facet of our industry and its people — no matter what their role in the
business. We’ll never forget Jack and his legacy. There will never
be anyone like him.”
I’m catching Paramount’s Next, which opens April 27, today, so maybe I’ll post some thoughts on it later, upon returning. But is it just me or doesn’t the above poster look like it was thrown together by some intern monkeying around on Photoshop? The wall of flame draws your attention to the title, at least, but everything else about this poster seems rather nondescript. “Everyone, look stage left!”
I know it’s based on a Philip Dick story, and they brought out
the big-gun screenwriters for it, but I can’t say that the
effects-intensive TV ads have stirred up much of an appetite in myself, or
anyone else to whom I’ve spoken. Holy crap — I just checked and found out Peter
Falk is in it. And that there are characters named Mr. White, Miss
Brown and Mr. Green, for which there better be a good explanation.
Still, despite its high marks in ordinariness, the poster does roughly hew to my personal breast-to-nose theory of proportion, which holds that no matter how big the head of a given movie’s star, if there’s a sex bomb female costar, her chest should measure at least as big as his beak. As much as Jessica Biel’s rack, though, Julianne Moore’s zippered jacket and high collar let us know who’s (ostensibly) pulling the babe baggage here. Well played, Paramount, well played. Except that discerning kids can still note that the movie is rated PG-13.
Not explicitly movie-related per se, but it sure reads like one… albeit a very familiar one. The Boston Celtics have cut ties with 21-year-old point guard Sebastian Telfair, the erstwhile subject of Jonathan Hock’s documentaryThrough the Fire, who was arrested early Friday after police in
Yonkers, New York, stopped him for speeding and found a loaded handgun
under a seat in his SUV. Telfair did not have a valid license, and police said he and his passenger told them they knew nothing about the gun.
Last October, meanwhile, police questioned Telfair about the shooting of rapper
Fabolous after a $50,000 necklace was stolen from Telfair at the same
club the night Fabolous was shot. Telfair said he wasn’t there at the
time of the shooting.
A bit short on authorial insightfulness, Through the Fire is kind of interesting in spite of itself, but it takes on some additional import now, given Telfair’s troubles, and the fact that hereportedly supports an extended web of 21 family members with his NBA salary. Not surprisingly, that’s a far cry from the tight-knit, single-parent home we see in the film. Hangers-on love the smell of someone else’s green…
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.
Legally Blonde,
in which she played one of Reese Witherspoon’s
enthusiastic, gum-snapping best friends, which catapulted Ubach to a higher
comedic profile. She reprised her role in 2003’s sequel, and had a memorable supporting
role in 2004’s Meet the Fockers, playing sexy maid Isabel, the
deflowerer of Ben Stiller’s Greg.
Ubach’s latest role (above) finds her costarring alongside veteran
actor Kurtwood Smith (That ’70s
Show),
droopy-faced indie stalwart Richard
Edson (known to an entire generation as the unruly valet from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) and up-and-comer Eyal Podell. A character-driven piece about a group of chronic, blue-collar fantasists and ex-cons who plot for
control of a venerable diner after the owner has an “accident,” Hard
Scrambledis written and
directed by Chicago-based playwright David Scott Hay, and was chosen from a
national script search sponsored by critically acclaimed trade magazine Creative
Screenwriting.In conjunction with its recent DVD bow, Ubach took some time
to answer a few questions via email. The chat is excerpted below:
Brent Simon: In Hard
Scrambled you play Crysta, a waitress, which is of course the stereotypical
job of aspirant actors-in-waiting. Any real-life experience slinging hash
(browns, that is), pie, etc.?
Alanna Ubach: The only job I had waitressing was at my
sister’s old restaurant, and of course playing Naomi in the movie Waiting.
BS:Hard Scrambled
is all about dreamers and schemers — what sort of crazy schemes have you
concocted in real life, whether they worked out or not?
AU: I had an ongoing daydream of being a rock star, and marrying
Adrien Zmed from Grease 2 when I was
nine. Those didn’t come true. I dream of being 5’5” (note: Ubach is 5’2”). Perhaps
one day they’ll invent a surgery to stretch short people’s limbs, and my dream
will come true!
BS: A familiar question, I’m sure, but were you driven by a
“performance instinct” growing up, and were you considered funny by your
classmates and friends in your teen years?
AU: I was very sarcastic, and as loud as a 90-year-old deaf
woman when I was a kid. I loved to imitate everyone in my family and make
everyone laugh, so yeah, I guess I was driven to perform at a very young age.
BS: Are you desperate to explore the relatively darker tones
of something like Hard Scrambled in
other projects, or it is more a case of, “Que sera sera.”
AU: I want to explore as much as I’m given the opportunity
to.
BS: What can we expect from Patriotic Bitch, your one-woman show — has it already had
its debut? And what’s the status on Equal
Opportunity, and what sort of character do you play?
AU:Patriotic Bitch
made its debut at the McCadden Theatre in L.A.
and got great reviews. I’m now in the early stages of getting it primed and
ready for NY. Equal Opportunity will
be playing at the Aspen Fest and I play an all-American secretary with a very
dry sense of humor.
Presented in 16×9 widescreen on DVD, Hard Scrambled’s
listed special features include interviews with Hay and the actors, cast and
crew bios and an amusingly billed “anatomy of a failed scene.” The two-disc DVD
also includes a dozen modules on the essential topics of producing and
directing. From screenplay structure, continuity and working with actors to financing,
editing, publicity and distribution, there are more than two-and-a-half hours
of bonus materials to complement the briskly paced, 84-minute feature
presentation. For more information about Hard Scrambled, visit the
eponymous web site by clicking here.
It’s great news for cinephiles as, fresh off successful runs in Los Angeles and New York City, a dazzling 35mm restoration of Charles Burnett’s fantastic Killer of Sheep will enjoy its first-ever proper theatrical distribution this spring and summer, from Milestone Films. One of the more acclaimed and influential movies by an African-American filmmaker, Killer of Sheep
was one of the first 50 films to be selected for the Library of
Congress’
National Film Registry.
Set
in Watts in the mid-1970s, the movie centers on a sensitive,
blue-collar dreamer (Henry Gayle Sanders) haunted by his work at a
slaughterhouse, and his struggles to keep his family together, and keep
from becoming detached and numb. Killer of Sheep was the award-winning student thesis project of Burnett (The Glass Shield), but due mostly to music licensing
problems and other rights issues, the
film has been screened publically very rarely, and then typically
only in film school settings and occasional retrospective presentations. For more information and a continually updated list of play dates and venues, click here.
MTV.com has up a piece with director Frank Darabont in which he discusses his upcoming movie The Mist — part of his ever-expanding personal canon of Stephen King adaptations — as well as his long-in-the-works Fahrenheit 451, which an industry friend told me has some casting news in the chamber, ready to be announced in the next couple weeks.
The most interesting tidbit, though, may be Darabont’s pointed evaluation of the time he spent crafting a screenplay for Indiana Jones IV, a period he calls “a tremendous disappointment and a waste of a year.”
Darabont says the experience only confirmed his feeling that he couldn’t be “chained to a computer anymore, not for the paycheck,” noting that Steven Spielberg loved the finished product and wanted to make it his next movie, only to have Lucas — whom Darabont calls one of the most stubborn men he knows — put the kibosh on it. Still, Darabont won’t reveal exactly what it was that Lucas objected to, or how his story might be different than the greenlit product, penned by David Koepp. “At this point, I don’t give much of a damn what George thinks,” says Darabont, “but I wouldn’t want to harm my friendship with Steven.”For the full piece, click here.
Props to Darabont for shooting so straight. Though puzzling, it’s hard to believe — despite the seeming 40 or so writers who have taken a crack at its script over the past half dozen years — that Lucas would completely shitcan a story that presumably he signed off on, especially if Spielberg loved the script. One would have to think that some trace elements of Darabont’s story might remain. Otherwise, is Spielberg suddenly that hard up for a franchise revisitation, sitting around, waiting to entertain whimsical new Indiana Jones yarns on the off chance that one might catch Lucas’ fleeting fancy?
Though he’s a writer I’ve long admired (hey, I even dig The Paper, what can I say?), we won’t know the success of Koepp’s script for a year or so (or until it leaks out all over the Internet). One thing is for certain, though: as evidenced by the Star Wars prequels, maybe Lucas’ story sense shouldn’t be the principal controlling force in the franchise reboot.
The year 2007 has already offered up some grade-A stinkers (I’m looking in your general direction, Premonition…), but some pals and I were recently perusing the summer slate, trying to suss out a few of the certain bombs-in-waiting amidst all those gaudy sequels and franchise pictures. One of my friends rightly seized on Element Films and MGM’s Mr. Brooks. To wit, he wrote:
“Okay, so here’s my pick for 2007’s WTF special: Kevin
Costner is a respectable businessman who has a secret life as a serial killer.
Demi Moore is the cop trying to bring him down. Already we’ve got that
delicious I Love the Early ’90s Halloween Reunion Special feel.
But! Add in William Hurt as the personification of Costner’s
murderous id that drives him to kill, script and direction by Bruce Evans (previous
writing credits: Cutthroat Island, Jungle 2 Jungle; only directing credit: Kuffs) and a June 1 release date, and
you start to see we really have something special here.”
And he’s right, you know. The trailer offers up some hilarious shorthand (why, he’s the Portland Chamber of Commerce man of the year!),
and very little to indicate a particularly deft or invigorating handling of the “personified id” element. Failing some sort of very fancy, purposefully convoluted hook (and I can only really think of two or three possibilities), this looks like a free money giveaway to a couple stars who maybe haven’t recently been offered quite as many cushy major studio flick paydays as in years past. (As for Hurt, well, I don’t begrudge him a mortgage payment or three, though it’ll be interesting to see if he conveys menace through trademark Whispery Solemn Hurt, or a slightly newfangled iteration of his zonked-out, Oscar-nominated crime boss in A History of Violence.)
Toss in the aforementioned talents of Evans and comedian Dane Cook as an amateur photographer with an apparent penchant for blackmail and yes, Mr. Brooks looks like it has some potential, all right. For a look at the film’s trailer, click here.
Forget, for a moment, television’s American Idol. We may have a new big screen pin-up, albeit one of a chatty, somewhat canted appeal. It was a good week indeed for Shia LaBeouf, who ensured that a lot more people will start to learn how to correctly spell his name, what with the strong opening of his Disturbia, a thriller which premiered to an estimated $23 million and change at just over 2,900 locations, good for tops at the box office. (Fellow wide-release opener Perfect Stranger, meanwhile, washed out with $11.5 million at 2,660 sites.) No mind that the movie was a slickly made but only moderately engaging, teen-inflected tweak on the central conceit of Rear Window, and that it ultimately ran out of things to say in the third act — the fact remains that LaBeouf put his stamp of personality on the film, and the under-25 set, leaning female within that group, made it a big hit.
LaBeouf’s hosting gig on Saturday Night Live was a further nice little showcase for him. It wasn’t a classic episode (a notion somewhat amusingly assayed in the show’s opener, where an enthusiastic LaBeouf was met with the shrugging reticence of cast members), but it did offer him a few nice moments. His impression of Tobey Maguire on The Prince Show was a push, but there were fun moments to be had in a public access-type Sofa King commercial (as in, “Our prices are Sofa King low!”) as well as a sketch in which an underage LaBeouf and Andy Samberg concocted a labyrinthine, unfolding scheme to purchase beer at a mini-mart. The best display of the sort of self-assurance that has helped catapult LaBeouf to the top of casting directors’ lists, though, came in the final moments of the show, in a throwaway meta-sketch in which Maya Rudolph aggressively hit on LaBeouf, apparently solely because their first names rhyme.
One of the worst kept secrets in Hollywood, meanwhile, finally was officially rolled out and confirmed — namely, LaBeouf’s casting in the fourth installment of the Indiana Jones series, in a yet-to-be-determined capacity. LaBeouf has a friend in Steven Spielberg — he helped place the young actor in Michael Bay’s Transformers, on which he’s an executive producer — so more good things are on the horizon for LaBeouf, to be sure, even if my girlfriend still refers to him as “that little Project Greenlight movie kid.”
Grease was the
word… being bandied about by a few elbow-rubbing journalists after a special 16-minute
preview screening of footage from Hairspray
earlier this week. As in, “Didn’t that remind you of Grease?” and, “That’s going to connect with audiences unlike any Hollywood
musical since Grease.”
Heady predictions, sure, but not entirely undeserved or
irrational speculation based on the high-energy, song-and-dance clip-fest which
director Adam Shankman introduced as a sort of “Frankentrailer.” Gushing that
the movie was the best thing that had ever happened to him professionally, Shankman
very briefly attempted a Roberto Benigni impression — standing astride two screening
room chairs, on the armrests — before wisely returning to terra firma for the rest of his short introduction. Shankman
went on to effusively praise composer Marc Shaiman’s work on the score, and say that he hoped his adaptation of Thomas Meehan and Mark O’Donnell’s
musical stageplay adaptation of John Waters’ 1988 film could serve as an
antidote to what he views as “a summer of three-quels” and franchises.
Based on what screened, there’s reason for optimism. Set in
1962 Baltimore, there was sock-hop and
bandstand shimmying aplenty in the footage, to go alongside trademark, deliciously
zonked, zealously imploring line readings from Christopher Walken, as well as
some grade-A belting from Queen Latifah. Newcomer Nikki Blonsky (above right),
as pleasantly plump inveterate dreamer Tracy Turnblad, really made an
impression, even if it was John Travolta (above left), in heavy make-up as insistently
cautious matriarch Edna Turnblad, who had many folks in stitches. It seems like there’s also an anti-segregation march musical number, which has to be some sort of first.
Marketing the period to those for whom the ’90s is, like, so
yesterday may certainly present its own set of challenges, but the quality of
the merchandise at least looks up to snuff, which is great news. Distributed by
New Line, Hairspray is currently set
for a wide release on July 20. For more information, click here.
So I’ve expressed my rage at big screen architects before, and now it seems that Adam Sandler didn’t get enough of the ultimate hot-shit, white-collar, oh-I’m-so-stressed occupation in Click. He’ll be headlining director Adam Shankman’s Bedtime Stories, a fantasy-comedy project which centers around how the life of a busy architect takes a crazy turn when the nighttime tales he tells his niece and nephew start to come true. Vomit. Just… vomit.
It’s been a while since Rattle
and Hum stoked ridiculous criticisms that U2 were messianic rock fabulists
out to somehow co-opt the heritage of American music. Those for whatever reason
still invested in such convoluted detestation will get an extra dimension of
ammunition with the release of this fall’s concert flick U2
3D.
The feature-length film, shot during the band’s visit to South
America on the Vertigo Tour, is directed by Catherine Owens, with
additional direction from Mark Pellington (Arlington Road, The Mothman Prophecies). Produced by Los
Angeles’ 3ality Digital, the movie will appear exclusively
in specialist 3-D cinemas in the autumn, exact date(s) to be determined.
Owens, a longtime collaborator with U2 on live-show visuals dating back to the groundbreaking Zoo TV Tour, predicts U2 3D will startle audiences. “There
is no comparison with a traditional concert film seen in 2-D,” she says. “One
minute you are on stage with the band and the next you are at the back of the
stadium. …The best way I can describe it for the viewer, is that it’s like
being on the wings of a bird flying around the concert stadium — it’s really
something else.”
The 3-D shoot took place over the course of seven shows in Mexico, Brazil, Chile
and Argentina
in February of last year, with Tom Krueger serving as the “conventional” director
of photography and Peter Anderson scoring the title of director of three-dimensional
photography. A wow-za! theatrical trailer has just begun airing alongside 3-D presentations of
Walt Disney’s Meet the Robinsons, but for a two-dimensional glimpse, click here.
Richard Gere just had to do it, didn’t he? After my review of the roguish and spry, rooted-in-murky-truth caper flick The Hoax, in which I praise a nimble Gere that we haven’t seen in a long time, if at all, that old shamanistic earnestness kicked in during a Thursday appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and Gere had to make sure that potential ticket buyers knew of the very serious underpinnings and parallels in the film, which tells the story of novelist Clifford Irving, who fakes an autobiography of billionaire Howard Hughes.
“This small lie connects to a much larger lie,” says Gere, slowly and pointedly, at the end of a long-ish monologue of narrative explication. “Which was the Vietnam War, Nixon, the Supreme Court, money laundering — it was all kinds of crazy stuff. To me what was interesting was the resonance between that time and that war and that president who lies, and this time and this president who lies and this war that didn’t have to happen.” At this point DeGeneres replies, blankly, “Yeah.”
However much one might agree with Gere about our current president being a serial molester of facts who led us into an awful and entirely unnecessary morass, the fact is that The Hoax, even in its more fanciful flights of speculative inclusion, has nothing to do with, and makes no claim on, the Vietnam War, and Gere’s attempt at linkage was pompous and maladroit — perfectly illustrative of why almost everybody outside of Hollywood looks at this guy as their buzzkill uncle.
Give credit where credit is due, however. Though her show was undeniably hijacked, and had the potential to plunge dourly and in headlong fashion into the next commercial break, DeGeneres showed why sunny aplomb is her greatest weapon of comedic return, gracing Gere with a TiVo, which was apparently part of some earlier referenced joke, inclusive of previous visit(s) to the show. And it was a 40-hour TiVo, just for those wondering…
to make the doughnuts, immediately discover three or four problems in your inbox, before your first shots of caffeine have even really had a chance to work their way through your system, and then you get a ray-of-comic-sunshine email like this, which has you checking your calendar to see if it’s not April 1 instead of May 1:
Jack Valenti has passed away at the age of 85, after suffering a stroke in March that hospitalized him for several weeks. A special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson when he
Legally Blonde,
