So we really need a color-changing lid to remind folks that coffee could be hot? Brilliant.
I like that the company touts that they specialize in “the commercialization of smart packaging solutions,” and that “specific thin plastic substrate testing was undertaken for five years in Australia, Switzerland and Japan.” Well, sure…
It’s not really that big of a deal in 30 Days of Night, as they get dispatched early on, but I just returned from a screening of that film tonight, and it made me wonder — is there a vampire or ghost movie where dogs don’t sense the otherworldly creatures? You know, in either a legit genre flick or some sort of Scary Movie parody thing that I’m forgetting? Because that would be a great reversal of expectation…
FilmStew has up an amusing piece today about the increase in grammatical laxness with respect to critics’ quotes and blurbs on movie ads. Among other bits, it rants about misplaced hyphens, ampersands, generally mangled sentiments and of course, words that don’t exist. I heartily second a lot of their points, and also would like to add that the recent poster for The Kingdom baffled me a bit, because of its mixture of fragment and sentence: “An elite FBI team sent to find a killer in Saudi Arabia. Now they have become the target.”
I live near a high school, and man do I hate their fucking early morning, inane and repetitive band practice! So much so that I’m considering creating an endowment for a silent poetry reading club…
Studios and publicists play convoluted games of keep-away with movies all the time — that’s just part of the business. A writer is only as powerful as their outlet and accrued reputation (sometimes the same thing, sometimes not), and even then that doesn’t always hold. When word comes down that the fix is in, the games of suppression begin. Still, the brazenness with which certain studios and PR companies are now… oh, let’s say dissembling in making sure that certain films stay off the radar of legit press (read: trades, weekly papers) is rather dispiriting.
Two of next week’s wide releases, Good Luck Chuck and Resident Evil: Extinction, are the most recent examples, among many, of this new culture. LionsGate and Sony subsidiary Screen Gems, respectively, are waging brutally aggressive campaigns of containment and repression with these movies; they don’t want them reviewed at all, but instead of just saying that, they’re playing around and trying to pull selective back-door strings, garnering feature coverage and a few free-pass (presumably friendly) reviews on power-demographic and/or fan-boy sites. They’re trying to stack the deck, in other words.
Sometimes these tactics take the guise of convenient lies of omission, which leave plausible deniability intact. (“Oh, that was a promotional screening, so our office didn’t know about it…”) Other times publicists will just lie, plain and simple. All of this, flat out, is an attempt to dumb down writing about film, to constrict and tamp it down. Studios and PR brethren won’t come out and say it, but they regard a handful of nouveau riche, Internet-only publications as more malleable, and thus less apt to offer criticism that could be perceived as hurting their product. There’s an element of truth to this, of course, but this is a short-sighted, loser’s game, predicated on symbiotic relationships that can’t and won’t continue forever.
I don’t begrudge studios the right to screen or not screen their product whenever they want, honestly, but such decisions really should be applied more evenly, and with an eye toward outlets that are reputable and fairly comprehensive in their coverage. Trying to “pre-screen” who you think is going to like a film is exhausting and stupid, for everyone involved. And for what it’s worth, I respect a lot more the publicists who are upfront about their complicity in executing decisions with which they might not agree.
So I (blissfully) missed this news from a few weeks back, but a friend informed me that an extended cut of Transformers will actually hit IMAX screens later this month, on September 21, just a few weeks in advance of the summer action hit’s DVD bow on October 16.
As my friend rightly pointed out, we can only hope that this means there’s a lot more footage of Shia LaBeouf trying to hide the robots while his parents think he’s masturbating — because that scene didn’t go on long enough. Either that or, alternately, John Turturro getting mock-urinated on by robots and a detailed explanation of the ridiculous cover-up that preserves the franchise prerogative of a sequel in which Transformers still somehow exist in secret.
I’m calling out Horror.com’s Staci Layne Wilson, who gets blurbed in ads in Saturday’s Los Angeles Times by saying, with regards to Rob Zombie’s Halloween, that it’s “even better than the original.” (By point of comparison, usual lover-of-all-moving-images Earl Dittman chips in with the
comparatively mild, “A shocking masterpiece, with twists and turns
around every corner!” Umm… by definition, isn’t that what corners
offer?)
I was suitably intrigued by Wilson’s bold (and patently false) proclamation, so I went to check out her review; it’s not as bad as one might surmise from the blurbed bit, though the gist of Wilson’s praise seems to be that Zombie is a “potential genius” (her words) for the manner in which he makes his Halloween both similar to and different from John Carpenter’s original film. Brilliant, that! Also, I have no idea what she means when she starts talking about soul-mirrors.
All this will pass, naturally, but Wilson’s comments will in my mind cling to her, kind of like the time Fred Topel got blurbed by calling Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows the “best sequel ever.”
The deluge of Good Luck Chuck posters need to stop. Like, seriously. First there were the separate teaser posters, then there was the bizarre John Lennon-Yoko Ono air-quote parody poster, which was I believe was crafted by a 12-year-old part of a Photoshopping outreach exercise in an eastern Kentucky juvenile delinquent facility. Now there’s this poster, below, another stitched-together conceptual reimagining of the film’s narrative — and this one pitched a bit more toward the ladies. as Ben Stiller’s forthcoming <A href=)
The Heartbreak Kid (Paramount, October 5), and out here at the Laugh Factory on Sunset Boulevard — where a giant promotional spread covers half the eastern side of the building — as well as at various bus stops near me, new one-sheets make one more desperate, last-ditch effort to position Good Luck Chuck as a descendant to There’s Something About Mary. I can’t find the art online with a quick, cursory search, but these posters have Jessica Alba in a billowing dress — a cross between Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch and Cameron Diaz’s flirty, forward-leaning look for the aforementioned film — and Dane Cook standing off to the left side. If someone has a screen cap or photo, send me a link. Otherwise, I’m going to try to go break into LionsGate’s Santa Monica offices and steal all their key art for the film…
The Saw series is always good at stirring up controversy, be it of the mock, pre-release variety or irritation in the critical community through some inane attempts to enforce an after-release review embargo. Its latest stirring of the pot falls in the former category, and comes from returning series director Darren Lynn Bousman and producer Mark Burg, in advance of Saw IV, releasing October 26.
Images from the film had previously been leaked, but I was talking with a colleague who’d been to the recent panel presentation at Comic-Con with the above, and he passed along how they said that the first cut of the film had been given an NC-17 rating by the MPAA, and that therefore the producers and distributor LionsGate had to decide whether to make trims or release the film with that rating. <roll of the eyes> Please… come on. This bit may or may not be true (it’s actually immaterial), but the fourth installment of a hugely commercial franchise will not be rated and released in NC-17 form, thereby drastically limiting its earnings potential. This is a completely transparent attempt at the manual stimulation of its hardcore audience, but one that should be recognized even by that set. I mean, is there anything “shocking” left for them to say? Other than maybe they’re setting up Saw V to be a full-fledged musical? For an in-depth description of the clip previewed at Comic-Con — a sort of nouveau human quartering, it seems — click here.
At the recent press day for Stardust, I asked former Warner Bros. executive turned independent producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura (Transformers, Shooter) about the phenomenon of the runaway producer’s credit, and how the moniker is now passed out seemingly willy-nilly, to every actor’s manager, studio vice president, star’s family member or what not. It was unusual and a very big deal a decade ago when Face/Off had nine producers; now that runs about standard for big studio projects and genre fare. Recently, Material Girls had 19 credited producers, for Chrissakes.
Still, despite the gold-foil-star absurdity of it all, di Bonaventura doesn’t see a way to fit the genie back in the bottle. “I don’t think there’s anything that can be done about it,” he says. “A lot of people are granted producers’ credits for different parts of the function, so what’s happened is that there’s been a sort of dilution of what it means to be a producer. …It was resolved in terms of how many people could go up and be presented an Oscar, but in terms of how many people get credit on a movie, there’s no contractual limitation on it.”
“There’s vanity credits, sure,” di Bonaventura continues. “But the truth is that there are a lot of people who don’t go on set who make great contributions to movies. So it’s a tricky [situation], because it’s not clear-cut who’s doing what. If you bought the project and you put the director and star into it, you did pretty good, right? So you mean you’re not a producer if you don’t at least go to the set? It’s one of those arguments where you can argue any side of it unfortunately.”
He’s right, of course, except that the dilution of other Hollywood credits (just like any out-of-work yahoo can call themselves an actor, director or writer) doesn’t typically engender the ability for one party to materially take advantage of another. A dodgy producer who’s amassed a passably legit credit list can leverage that cachet into option windows on written works or, ya know, sex with stupid aspirant starlets or other favors. The charlatans and jerk-offs may certainly be known within the industry’s core, but Hollywood does its second-class citizens no favors by not addressing the issue more aggressively.
Good Luck Chuck‘s set of teaser posters, but its one-sheet takes misguided idiocy to a whole other level. I know this shot has been out for a while now, and I’ve meant to tackle it sooner; I even had the photo saved and loaded. But I just couldn’t pull the trigger.
Where to begin? First, yes, of course I know it’s a riff on the famous John Lennon/Yoko Ono Rolling Stone cover shot. But this appropriation of it is wrong on so many levels. First and foremost, it reveals more of Cook’s haunches than I ever wanted or needed to see. Secondly, how does it advance the actual plot or conceit of the movie in any legitimate way? Finally, it’s just awful, awful Photoshopping. If you’re going to do something like this, stage the goddamned thing in a one-setting shoot with both parties. The fact that you didn’t merely confirms the obvious — that this is a desperate, see-through ploy, conceived long after the wrapping of principal production, to try to polish a turd and sell some tickets.
Every other day or so, there’s news out of Hollywood that makes me want to claw my eyes out, and today’s irritant comes in the form of casting news surrounding a Jessica Simpson film that I heretofore didn’t know existed. In a piece in The Hollywood Reporter announcing the addition of other actors, it was noted that she’s toplining Major Movie Star, about (and I quote here) “a somewhat clueless movie star who impulsively enlists in the U.S. Army Reserve after discovering her boyfriend is gay and her cousin/accountant has stolen all her money.”
Clearly the classic target with this project is Private Benjamin, the 1980 comedy starring Goldie Hawn. But that movie was co-scripted by Charles Shyer and Nancy Meyers, who, whatever one thinks of the films they’ve gone on to direct, know both structure and quality quips. It also can’t be stressed enough that in no way, shape or form does Simpson have one-tenth of Hawn’s talent or comic timing as an actress. Vivica A. Fox, Steve Guttenberg, Ryan Sypek, Saturday Night Live alum Cheri Oteri, High School Musical‘s Olesya Rulin and Gilmore Girls regular Keiko Agena will also be picking up paychecks for this trainwreck-in-waiting. Steve Miner (err… let’s say My Father the Hero) directs.
The 20th Century Fox Vs. Critics (Temporary Subsets: Chicago, and Online) kerfuffle — ably elucidated and summarized by Hollywood Elsewhere, as well as David Poland over at Movie City News — is all over the internet, and certainly the hot chatter in entertainment journo circles these days, but I can’t really be bothered (at least quite yet) to wade into the breach with my full opinion, and not just because it’s apparently so toxic. A lot of this is also tied up in the current handling of The Simpsons Movie, but the fact remains that this is old shit, re-heated.
I talked off the record with a sympathetic Fox publicist who claimed that a showdown with “online desperados” (read: reckless embargo breakers and other assorted flame-throwers) has been brewing for some time and that its dovetailing with the Chicago Film Critics Association dust-up is coincidence, but the fact is that Fox has a fairly clearly established recent history of hide-the-cookie, dating back at least to last year’s utterly perplexing handling of the release of Borat, and likely much longer. Their screening schedule (Wednesday, week of release) for the Fantastic Four sequel was another recent point of contention. Even so, there are multiple admittance lists and points of entry at every major studio, with matters often complicated by the fact that some writers, like myself, write for trade, international, print and online outlets. So it’s a fuckin’ wild and wooly world… what’re ya gonna do? Things might get interesting, we’ll see. Some sort of stand-down seems more likely, only to have this flare up again next summer, when movies with $80 million-plus budgets start rolling down the pipeline.
I’ve written a good bit on Transformers, and last week touched in passing fashion on the idiocy of its ending, but it’s worth pointing out again the
destroying huge swathes of a city, including a scene in which planes fly through buildings, killing, conservatively, dozens of people — via an utterly jaw-dropping coda which asserts “the president ordered Decepticon
leader Megatron’s body dumped into the ocean, where the pressure destroyed
it.” So this is what allows the Transformers to remain on Earth and live in secrecy
among us. What a cover-up… brilliant, just brilliant.
It’s a happy birthday… sigh… to Jessica Simpson, who turns 27 today, probably celebrating by making some comically misguided and dunderheaded malapropism. I’m going to endeavor to avoid saying anything needlessly cruel and misanthropic, but Simpson’s appeal escapes me, always has. Sure, she’s got a huge rack, but she’s an awful screen performer, and endearing only insomuch as one appreciates those who aren’t in on the fact that everyone’s laughing at them instead of with them.
How to be as delicate as possible, here? Umm… some women are not meant to speak, really. (Before anyone gets up in arms, I’d certainly say the same thing as well about an equal percentage of men, many of whom I believe appear in Abercrombie & Fitch ads.) Simpson’s allure, as it were, dates back to another era — she’s a Betty Grable pin-up queen, tantalizing only as an unknowable commodity. The second she opens her mouth, the illusion is shattered. Both on screen — with her forcedly, faux-sexy twang — and off, Simpson is play-acting what she’s been told is sexy, and the dimness and swallowed panic come through in equal measure.
There, that wasn’t mean, was it?
So… random, and certainly quite small in the grand scheme of things, but I have it on good authority that Jonathan Spinks and famously penitent actor Stephen Baldwin
will be appearing at the Pentagon for a prayer breakfast (“scheduled for 0700 hrs”) on August 8. Quoth the interdepartmental email posting/invite: “Jonathan has traveled throughout the United States with the OSU Tour, providing care for our troops and families. Stephen is a Hollywood
celebrity, who loves God and our country too! …Come join us for prayer and a meaningful message.”
Those thinking the phrase “culture wars” is so much empty theater, designed to stoke the flames of partisan politics… well, they’re right, actually. But they do also exist, and are ongoing. Sometimes a single word says a lot. Take the above tag “too,” for instance. It ostensibly refers back to Spinks, but its juxtaposition works two ways — the second and somewhat unnerving implication, of course, being that big ol’ liberal celebrities and shady Hollywoodites certainly don’t love God or country.
It’s a happy birthday to Tom Cruise, I reckon, who, despite what Oliver Stone might have you believe, was born on the 3rd of July. My gift to Cruise, who turns 45 today, is that I’ll not mention more than once his DVD review of Dawson’s Creek, and also change the site’s banner for a few days, to commemorate his upholstery dancing on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Glancing forward at Cruise’s filmography, the teaser trailer for Lions for Lambs is up, a bunch of war-on-terror speechifying driven by bizarre music (one feels like a rave might break out at any moment). And Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie — a rooted-in-truth drama about an assassination plot against Adolf Hitler during World War II — is in the news, all because German officials won’t let production use a key historical site, owing to Cruise’s beliefs as a Scientologist.
Of more dire consequence, though, is the threatened 2009 pairing of Cruise and Ben Stiller in 20th Century Fox’s comedy The Hardy Men, about grown-up versions of the Stratemeyer Syndicate’s intrepid Bayport boy investigators. Long a pet project of sorts for Stiller, this used to be a vehicle for he and Jim Carrey, and I read an awful, awful draft of it more than a half dozen years ago. That Simon Kinberg (Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the last X-Men installment, the forthcoming Jumper) is apparently the latest to tackle a full-commission rewrite gives the project a flickering chance, but the choice of Shawn Levy (Cheaper by the Dozen, Night at the Museum) to direct tells me that even if Cruise eventually does commit to it (giving birth to all the stories about how he “really wanted to do a comedy for [his] kids,” blah, blah, blah), this will be a clamorous, one-note pairing, full of cheap physical mimicry and a creaky mystery plot likely driven by smuggling, land-use, corporate takeover or the like. Instead of just being intense, Cruise will try to be mock mock-intense, and Stiller will ape Cruise’s trademark laugh ad nauseam.
It’s July 3, and you know what that means. No, not the release of Transformers, silly!
That means it’s only one month and one week away from the release of Bratz, the live-action movie based on the big-eyed, slutty little play-dolls of the same name! For the past several months I’d been trying to convince myself that this movie didn’t actually exist, that my previous posting on it was merely the result of a publicist somehow lacing my email with peyote. (Don’t laugh, I think the CIA’s been working on that…) The above production picture seems to confirm its existence, though, and now I can’t wait to see and review it.* Hey, at the very least we’ll be able to see if your roommate’s band made the soundtrack…
* – not true
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.
Why do I get the feeling that President Bush probably has a little cheat sheet of issues and their concomitant language, stuff that (in theory, at least) reminds him which side of a debate he’s on, what’s “right,” and what words (and only what words) he’s supposed to be saying?
So it’s tilling old Earth, perhaps, but I just stumbled across Paul Davidson’s piece about the Live Free or Die Hard rating controversy, from June 8 in the Los Angeles Times, in which he talks about Bruce Willis taking to the Internet to connect directly with fans and address their concerns over the movie, etcetera. All fine and good… one big qualm, though.
The second paragraph of his piece reads, verbatim: “To know why fans are up in arms, you have to go back to how 20th Century Fox tackled this question: How does a studio take a money-making franchise such as Die Hard ($740 million worldwide to date) that’s been missing in action for more than 10 years and position it as a summer blockbuster that a new generation of moviegoers will clamor to see? If you’re Fox, you take what was once an R-rated, foul-mouthed, thrill-ride of carnage and mandate a friendlier, gentler PG-13 rating from the start.”
The problem is that Fox very clearly didn’t communicate this wish, to either Willis (who initially lashed out at the rating in a Vanity Fair interview) or director Len Wiseman. Or if they did, Wiseman is perhaps one of the worst directors working today — one who kept his actors in the dark and took a terrifically awful chance, somehow thinking he could call his bosses’ bluff. The fact is that Live Free or Die Hard‘s action is suitably “hard,” but the movie has several scenes in which characters very clearly drop F- and MF-bombs. The editorial circumvention in these scenes, both visually and aurally, is very poor; if the film truly was mandated PG-13 from the beginning, instead of being massaged down, this kind of slipshod filmmaking wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, be evident.
In air-quote honor of Paris Hilton‘s release from prison, and no doubt her transformation into a paragon of virtue and intellectual and spiritual pursuit, let’s pause to celebrate the inescapable Paris we all know (if not love) with the above photo, allegedly snapped in Amsterdam a while back. I know, I know… she’s changed. She read The Secret while in jail. Big whoop. Good to hear, by the way, that Michael Moore has been bumped from Larry King Live to talk about his health care documentary Sicko this evening to make way for Paris. Nice. Just fantastic.
On an appearance on The Tonight Show last night in support of his so-so thriller 1408, John Cusack — characteristically dressed like the extra Reservoir Dog — was asked by Jay Leno if he was a fan of Stephen King stories growing up, if he liked scary movies when he was young.
Cusack’s reply: “I love good films, any kind of good films at all, but I do remember The Exorcist, The Shining, 28 Days Later… there’s a lot of terrific films.”
The only problem, of course, is that, The Exorcist came out in 1977, The Shining (which Cusack went on to talk about being freaked out by as a teenager) in 1980, and 28 Days Later in… 2003. The question, then: did Cusack simply ignore the root of Leno’s question in mentioning movies he liked, or did someone prep him with a studio-vetted list of similar genre product that he mindlessly plugged in as a reply (in which case the latter still doesn’t really pass muster)? 1408 is based on a Stephen King short story, and Cusack dutifully cited The Shining, Misery and The Shawshank Redemption in answering another question about King’s work. But… 28 Days Later?
