Anna Nicole Smith has died at the age of 39, after being found unresponsive in her hotel room today at the Seminole Hard Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Fla. She was rushed to a nearby hospital, but efforts to revive her were unsuccessful.
Smith gave birth to a daughter, Dannielynn, on September 7, 2006, but her 20-year-old son from her first marriage, Daniel, died of a suspected drug overdose just days later. A former exotic dancer who appeared in Playboy in 1992 and went on to become Playmate of the Year in 1993, Smith leaves behind a tangled legal battle over her octogenarian ex-husband J. Howard Marshall’s billion-dollar estate.
Category Archives: Ephemera
Jim Carrey on Valentine’s Day
The
Number 23, opening February 23 from New Line. There, amidst the usual
questions of character, career trajectory and, yes, hairstyle (he’s currently sporting
a longish, shoulder-length mane), Carrey was peppered with queries about Valentine’s
Day, past and present. He hemmed and hawed a bit, but was finally goaded into a
reflection in order to stave off specifics of this year’s celebration with current
beau Jenny McCarthy. His response? Classic.
act, and that’s a horrible thing to feel,” said Carrey. “I think Valentine’s
Day should be a moving thing — it should pop up when you feel the most loving.
But because it’s a set thing with a date, it doesn’t coincide with how people
feel most of the time.”
Tara Reid Takes a Tumble
Trying to put together the pieces of her adrift career, she took a red carpet tumble at a party/concert in Miami Beach on Saturday evening, in advance of Sunday’s Super Bowl. This Showbuzz/CBS piece gives a pretty comprehensive (and eviscerating) recap of her recent troubles and bad pub, but the sadly hilarious apex comes when Reid describes — in quotes from an October 2006 interview in US Weekly — a bout of “body contouring” gone bad, amazingly enough at the hands of the same surgeon who botched her boob job. Says Reid of her stomach: “[It was] the most ripply, bulgy thing …As a result, I couldn’t wear a bikini. I lost a lot of work.” Umm, sweetheart, I hate to break this to you, but it wasn’t just because you couldn’t wear a bikini that you lost a lot of work…
Wookie Street Performer Goes Nuts
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.
Alexis Arquette Signs DVDs, Avoids Pronoun Designation
 will be signing DVD copies of Alexis Arquette’s new movie, <a href=)
Killer Drag Queens on Dope, on
Different Light, a
two dolls who also happen to work as contract killers. I’m not sure what’s the day job and what’s considered the moonlighting, though…
On Film Touts and Self-Mockery
Another tangential thought on film credits and touts — hitching a movie’s prospects to the pedigree of its writers, producers or director is certainly nothing new. It’s almost as old as the movie business itself. But making fun of the filmmakers’ prior credits in self-effacing, post-modern fashion is becoming seemingly the latest trend in movie marketing.
Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer helped kickstart the development last year, with Date Movie, which was billed as “from two of the six writers of Scary Movie.” This was a canny realization of the opening paragraphs of any number of hack critical savagings, and a preemptive strike against the same. It took the piss out of the pooh-poohing, in other words; the film went on to gross almost $50 million Stateside and another $35 million abroad. Follow-up Epic Movie — a scatalogical recapitulation of scenes from other recent genre films, plus random digs at Paris Hilton and a rip-off of Saturday Night Live‘s “Lazy Sunday” sketch thrown in for good measure — opened atop the box office at $18.6 million last week, auguring good things for this trend of promotional self-mockery.
March’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters, meanwhile, raises the bar even further. The trailer for the feature-length adaptation of the “Adult Swim” cartoon bills
itself as “from the first assistant director of the 2nd unit of Hellraiser
III: Hell on Earth.” It’s not bullshit, either. That would be co-writer-director Matt Maiellaro.
On Wild Hogs’ Billing
Wild Hogs, opening March 2. Billed as being about four guys from the ‘burbs hitting the open road, the film’s poster touts stars Tim Allen, John Travolta, Martin Lawrence and William H. Macy, in that order.
Now I know that Travolta has sullied his overall box office average (and sometimes reputation) by appearing in a fair amount of crap. And he’s also shown an occasional willingness to cede top-spot billing; in Ladder 49 to Joaquin Phoenix, for instance, and in Mad City to Dustin Hoffman. (On the other hand, he’s also taken top billing in a few films in which he wasn’t the lead, including A Love Song for Bobby Long.) But second billing to Tim Allen? Allen hasn’t had a live action hit outside of the Santa Clause franchise and, arguably, the utterly forgettable Christmas with the Kranks and the admittedly brilliant Galaxy Quest, which each grossed just over $70 million in their respective holiday frames. Is Wild Hogs‘ billing a sign of Travolta’s slippage, a concession/nod to Allen’s (perceived) appeal to the “Bubba crowd” — via his long-running sitcom Home Improvement — that would putatively support a motorcycle flick, or both? Probably more of the latter, but all I know is that the public at large has had their referendum on Allen as a robust, leading man movie star (e.g., For Richer or Poorer, Joe Somebody, Big Trouble), and they’ve shrugged their shoulders, saying, essentially, “Ehh, he’s fine for the kids, I guess.” I’m still baffled, but I’ll chalk this one up to Travolta’s magnanimity, I guess.
Elvis and Anabelle Set for SXSW
The South By Southwest Film Festival has announced that the locally filmed feature Elvis and Anabelle will have its world premiere on March 10, at
6:30 p.m., at the Paramount Theater in Austin, Texas.
Max
Mingella (Art School Confidential) and Blake Lively (Accepted) star as
the titular characters, a mortician’s son and town beauty queen, respectively. The film tells the story of “an unlikely love that blossoms between
[the pair] after she dies,” which I sincerely hope involves neither necrophilia nor you-just-gotta-believe enchantment. Mary Steenburgen, Joe
Mantegna and Deadwood‘s Keith Carradine round
out the supporting cast.
Elvis and Anabelle was shot in and around Austin in May, 2006, making SXSW the
natural fit for the world premiere, according to producer Carolyn Pfeiffer. “We’re delighted to premiere a wonderful hometown film at an
outstanding hometown festival,” she said. “South
By Southwest, which always draws tremendous audiences, is truly a great fit
for the film.”
Lynch Hits London, Inland Empire Bows in Santa Cruz
₤19.75. For directions and more information, from the National Film Theatre site, click here. For a chance to actually enter to win tickets to the Lynch interview, click here.
For those Stateside and on the left coast, meanwhile — more specifically, the Bay area — Inland Empire will bow in Santa Cruz on Friday, February 9 at the beautiful Del Mar Theatre, alongside a newly restored print of 1964’s Beckett, starring Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton. For directions and more information, click here.
Killer of Sheep Set for Theatrical Release
It’s great news for cinephiles, as after more than six years of toiling, Charles Burnett’s fantastic Killer of Sheep will enjoy its first-ever proper theatrical distribution this spring, 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, and was chosen by the National Society of Film Critics
as one of its 100 Essential Films. But, chiefly due to music licensing problems and rights issues, the
film has very rarely been publically screened, and then only typically in film school settings and occasional retrospective presentations.
On occasion of the movie’s 30th anniversary, Milestone cleared all the rights, and will
present the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s dazzling 35mm restoration of
this landmark film. Killer of Sheep will first screen at the
2007 Berlin Film Festival, and then premiere in
Angeles
Brad Pitt: “Strippers Changed My Life”
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.
Little Miss Sunshine: “We Can’t Handle the Truth”
Oscarwatch.com’s Sasha Stone pretty much nails part of the main reason for Little Miss Sunshine‘s popular groundswell of support when she points out the film’s rootedness in idealism in these turbulent times, and its contrast in this manner to the rest of the nominees. Still, while I’d agree with her analysis in respect to the film’s nomination, I’m not yet officially 100% sure this can be extended to a hypothesis that foretells a victory. Best Picture Oscar winners whose directors aren’t at least same-nominated for Academy Awards are few and far between.
But again, Little Miss Sunshine carries the impression of weight or substance, and it’s all pitched in such a heightened fashion as to make audiences feel both that their lives aren’t quite as screwy and/or depressing, and that there’s a profundity at its core. This is why many folks who don’t typically bite on traditional comedies really like the movie. And Fox Searchlight has run a very smart, shrewd awards campaign. So in the end it doesn’t matter that the seams of its story show, or that the characters are willfully colorful responses to the
sort of stale, cardboard characters we see in many broadly pitched,
mainstream comedies — atypical, therefore, but just as flatly
two-dimensional and in blind service to the contrivances of plot as
their less original contemporaries. No, Little Miss Sunshine is beloved because we all want to believe in goodness. It would be interesting to ponder the film’s reception, though, in a parallel universe in which the disasterous quagmire of the Iraq War didn’t exist.
Lynch Gives a “Wootch”
David Lynch is flitting to and fro in support of his latest film, Inland Empire, and while this brief interview from AVClub.com, mostly full of general query softballs, doesn’t offer much in the way of new material, it does proffer the proper pronunciation (according to Lynch) of the city of Lodz, Poland, as well as his thoughts on both transcendental meditation and sound design. For the straight Q&A, click here.
On The Amateurs, Now Moguls
For several years, when I was editor-in-chief at the Los Angeles paper Entertainment Today, the venerable Brad Schreiber covered the Palm Springs International Film Festival for us in his bi-weekly column, Development Hell, and did a slam-bang job, it’s worth mentioning.
Two
hours from the city, the Palm Springs Festival has earned its international status by way of including the majority of films
offered up for nomination for the Best Foreign Film Oscar at the Academy Awards. This year’s festival, its 18th incarnation, screened 254 films from 74 countries, and offered plenty of star-gazing into the clear, desert night sky, as well as at its
annual awards gala, where honorees included Sydney Pollack, Kate Winslet, Todd Field, Cate Blanchett, composer Philip Glass and Babel director Alejandro
Gonzalez Inarritu.
Schreiber caught over 30 films, but it was his thoughts on writer-director Michael Traeger’s The Amateurs, which has since been retitled The Moguls, that caught my eye. This film has had its own hellish post-development track, well chronicled, but this was my first run-in with someone who’d seen it firsthand, in completed form. To wit, Schreiber’s review, redacted below:
“Perhaps
it is not surprising that the release of The Amateurs has been long in
the making. It is, after all, a sweet comedy about pornography and its premise
is enough to melt the synapses of your average filmgoer. To be honest, we in
America have a strong puritanical streak, despite the accessibility of adult
entertainment and its remunerative power.
It
is just that financial lure that guides loveable loser Andy Sargentee (Jeff
Bridges) to hit upon the idea of gathering a group of friends in the bucolic
town of Butterfield Faces to make a blue movie and cash in. Andy’s ex Thelma
(Jeanne Tripplehorn) bears his lack of money, discipline and goals, even when he
shows up to give their son a basketball, one that Andy pretends, unsuccessfully,
is signed by Michael Jordan.
Andy is
good-natured. But he just seems incapable of doing anything. He brings in on his
scheme his closeted gay friend Moose (Ted Danson), nerdy locals Barney
Macklehatton (Tim Blake Nelson) and Otis (William Fichtner), who claims he just
wants to watch, and thus, is made an executive producer. There’s lovelorn Helen Tatelbaum (Glenne Headley),
cinematographer Emmett (Patrick Fugit) and Some Idiot (Joe Pantoliano) who is
writing the script, such as it is. “Hollywood has a lot of people like me,” he
trumpets, “who are multi-gifted.”
The
wrong vernacular is the least of their troubles. Learning it is not enough to
simply get a group to pony up $2,000 apiece, Andy has to entice two girls
working at a fast food restaurant and then a few black guys who he assumes are
well-endowed. This reverse-racism results in a shockingly funny argument in a
café and The Amateurs, written and directed by Michael Traeger, certainly
has its charms in portraying the doltish production of a porn flick into goofy
fun, rather than a seamy indictment of society’s underbelly. Pantoliano is
hilarious in his conviction as a great screenwriter and artist and sad sack
Bridges is priceless when reading aloud narrative like, “Boris gives it to
Bianca in the butt as she defuses the bomb.”
The
film is not without its moments best left on a cutting room floor, including a
final product that looks a lot better than it would have, based on the group’s
ineptitude. Talented performers like Headley and Lauren Graham are
underutilized. And there’s a feel-good ending that pushes our acceptance of this
whole porno-as-empowerment premise. But Bridges, as always, is an actor who
provides not only believability but a cohesiveness. He struggles to put into
words his benevolence when he tells his collaborators, earnestly, touchingly, “I’ll give anything if someone can get some destiny from this.” And there is
something very desirable about wholesome, smalltown folks who refuse to see
anything wrong with filming sex in their local Softy Freeze.”
For more of Schreiber’s writing, check out his site, A Critical Moment, by clicking here.
The Scars of Oscars
Nikki Finke’s piece in L.A. Weekly, “The Scars of Oscars,” correctly assays that Hollywood is agenda driven, and awards circuit voting is as often about the demerits of certain films as all the positive aspects, but I’m not sure that it correctly pinpoints the reason for Dreamgirls‘ demise, if that can be said of a film with eight Oscar nominations.
Finke blames things on Hollywood jealousy of producer David Geffen, and reasons, “Individually, none of the Oscar voters would dare take on David. But there’s safety in numbers, so they figure, what the hell.” I’m not buying. I think it was simply a case of that film being outpaced in the home stretch. Babel had multi-culti support, and could be both a sociopolitical statement as much as an artistic one, at least in the minds of voters. Widely embraced by both critics groups and audiences predisposed to respectively attend, The Queen and The Departed (the latter despite a weak campaign) were too good to ignore, and the shrewdly marketed Little Miss Sunshine was easily slotted as this year’s indie darling/belle of the ball, a la The Full Monty. The remaining slot, then, came down to a resurgent Clint Eastwood’s Letter from Iwo Jima — would it be too of a piece, sociopolitically speaking, with Babel? — and Dreamgirls. The fact is, on the latter, there was simply a lot of noise about there not being enough substance, enough “movie,” in the last third of the film. It didn’t stick with you. And while Letters might not either, except for Ken Wantanabe’s performance, in a nomination dogfight, you can’t bet against the war movie. Maybe some voters resented the manner in which the film was being rammed down their collective throats as a breathless inevitability (I’m sure all the right restaurants were booked for celebratory lunches), but I don’t think that’s necessarily a David Geffen problem. That’s a hype > reality problem…
Forest Whitaker Exhales
I caught Forest Whitaker on The Late Show last night (gracias, TiVo!), and he certainly seems more at ease now than maybe I’ve ever seen him before. He’s always been a soft-spoken, very reserved guy, but it’s obvious that there was at least some tenseness or trepidation leading up to the Oscar nominations themselves. I’d had a chance to talk with Whitaker a few times with regards to The Last King of Scotland, both at its proper press day and since, and at any sort of mention of a positive reception to or surprise at his performance in relation to his persona, he would always “turtle.” It helped, certainly, chatting to the much more low-key, relaxed David Letterman — who exudes a naturalness that Jay Leno still can’t match — as well as the fact that Whitaker was rehashing stories he’s told a thousand times or more now. Still, it’s nice to see him seeming to enjoy the whole Academy Awards “ride,” and all the praise coming his way after a career of some very notable work.
On Monster Mania 7
For those on the East Coast and with a predilection for all things horror, Monster Mania will be held in
on the weekend of February 16 through 18. The Saw series’ Tobin Bell and Shawnee Smith will both be on hand, and Chainsaw Sally director Jimmy O and
stars Gunnar Hansen and April Monique Burril have been confirmed, to meet genre fans
and introduce a screening of their film, which releases February 27 on POPcinema’s
Shock-O-Rama Cinema label.
guests, screenings and the like, visit Monstermania.net by clicking here.
Yes, Click Is Oscar-Nominated…
Click here (ha!) for the entire list of Oscar nominees, listed by film, and to settle that bet. Click here for a list nominees by category.
On Chasing Ghosts
A friend sent me this link to Roger Moore’s piece in the Orlando Sentinel, about the Sundance doc Chasing Ghosts, and I have to say… it sounds kinda awesome. I’m a sucker for looks back at optimism and naivety through the busted lens of melancholic maturation, and the use of the superb Dogtown and Z-Boys as a sort of leaping-off reference point is shrewd and spot-on. (Michael Apted’s Up series, meanwhile… not so much.) Still, if this flick gathers indie cool cachet like there’s every reason to believe it will, are we going to have to sit through a masturbatory procession of explorations of every fringe American adolescent pastime?
On Newsweek’s Oscar Roundtable
annual Oscar roundtable, but this year they were forced to submit to a live audience of ticket buyers — a potential antidote for candor if ever there was one — at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood.
That said, the above awards contenders still had some fun during the two-hour session; celebs talking amongst themselves is the new black. Among the confessions? “We’re all in it for the free food,” jokes Helen Mirren. Cate Blanchett, meanwhile, got in a nice, tangential Battlefield Earth dig, which makes me wonder… did she really watch the movie? I mean, when she and husband Andrew Upton were making it a Blockbuster night, did someone actually pick that up? For the entire Oscar roundtable, click here.
Razzie Nominations Announced
The final nods are in for the 27th annual Razzie Awards, and while these anti-Oscars are always generally more about celeb-slagging than actually rooting out the worst of the year in film, it’s telling, isn’t it, that Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa rated no nomination. That’s its own sort of high achievement, actually — a sign of respect for its accomplishments and solid critical notices.
In case anyone’s keeping score, in a very crowded field, the nominees for Worst Film of the Year are BloodRayne, Basic Instinct 2, Little Man, Material Girls and Lady in the Water. (Jessica Simpson got some love, too, unsurprisingly — though there’s little doubt that she could never top Halle Berry’s acceptance speech for Catwoman.)
All things considered, that’s a nicely diverse slate of lowbrow fare, adult-pitched hooey and technical ineptitude. Somehow I became a member of the Razzie’s “nominating body” (I use that phrase very loosely — mailing list is more like it) many years ago, and I actually do put some thought into their painstakingly open-ended ballots, so it’s heartening to see a spread of films that trends away from at least some of the easier big targets. For more on the Razzies, click here.
Criterion Announces April Slate
Criterion has announced its titles for April release, and a history of violence is on its mind. From the bloodiest struggles of World War II to a cutthroat
battle of wills behind bars to the high racial tension of contemporary
the consummate boutique DVD label surveys war and aggression in its many forms with its latest trio of films, all set to bow on April 17. Joining the collection
are Stuart Cooper’s blistering evocation of D-day, 1975’s Overlord, which mixes newsreel footage with its fictionalized story; Jules Dassin’s
raw, ruthless 1947 prison melodrama Brute Force; and Mathieu Kassovitz’s gritty, in-your-face La Haine, a notable early effort for actor Vincent Cassel
Oscars of the Damned
Dark Water? And didn’t American Pie Presents Band Camp receive a qualifying run?
Onward, Slagging of Sundance!
David Lynch, above, who turns 61 years old today.
Meanwhile, though I’m chained to a desk in Los Angeles, it’s the second day of the Sundance Film Festival, and the inevitable trickle of the usual “worst year ever?” pieces has started. The latest is from Movie City News’ David Poland, though it does stoop to include a bit of backhanded friendliness and credit. One thing’s for sure: Grace Is Gone does sound like a snug fit for John Cusack, who never met an interview he couldn’t dispassionately grind his teeth through. (If you want to get him to open up, try asking about the Cubs — sometimes it works, sometimes not.) The film is about an emotionally detached father who loses his wife in the Iraq War, and goes on a roadie with his two daughters. Word is that the Weinstein Company is circling as a potential distributor…
Lindsay Lohan Rehab Update!
So, umm… the Wonderland Center where Lindsay Lohan is seeking treatment specializes in treating addictive disorders such as… love addiction? Whatever. But: props to you, James Franco, props to you.