The raunchy R&B parody “Dick in a Box,” from Saturday Night Live, has scored an Emmy victory at the recently held Creative Arts Emmy Awards, besting a couple songs from a musical episode of Scrubs, among other competition.
Last December’s fake music video about ornately wrapping up a part of the male anatomy and presenting it to a loved one as a holiday present, certainly aided in the meteoric rise of SNL cast member Andy Samberg, but an astute friend of mine pointed out — and I believe he’s right — that the piece could ultimately end up most helping out crooner/episode host Justin Timberlake, because it gives him a credibility with guys that he couldn’t buy, no matter the number of Alpha Dogs that he does. What’s most brilliant about “Dick in a Box,” of course, is the kernel of devastating truth at its core: guys really do wish that, 1) we could put that little effort into gift shopping, and 2) that women would be that enamored with our junk.
Category Archives: Musings
Evan Rachel Wood Stands on 20
So Evan Rachel Wood turns 20 today, meaning that she’s just one year away from being able to take her first sip of alcohol. Ahh, who am I kidding… she probably takes absinthe body shots off of boyfriend Marilyn Manson on a semi-regular basis. (And worse.) There was a Spin cover story on him recently that more or less intimated this, what with its author getting wasted with the subject, and then partying with all three.
Ingénues don’t date rockers 18 years their senior and live to bat their eyes and strike kewpie doll poses, either in real life or their art. When young actresses become these out-there public-performance creatures, either with drugs, drink, sex tapes or party-hearty lifestyles, it erodes their believability in disparate projects (see: Lindsay Lohan), and thus their occupational margin for error, probably a lot more so than with guys (see: Colin Farrell).
I had a chance to interview Wood before Thirteen and The Missing came out in 2003 (i.e., when she was 16), and it was clear even then that she was intelligent, precocious, but also a bit of a firecracker, and quite possibly stuck on herself. (But hey, you say, what actress isn’t? Some, actually…) Since then, apart from Thirteen, in which she played the good girl corrupted, Wood has already played shades of rebellious in Down in the Valley and Running with Scissors, and an icy manipulative vixen in the brazenly off-putting Pretty Persuasion. I haven’t yet seen Across the Universe (I’ll catch it next week), but I have seen King of California, and Wood delivers a credible performance, opposite Michael Douglas, as a world-weary high school drop-out who gets sucked into a treasure-hunting scheme by her cracked, crazily goateed father. So the good news is that Wood has the chops to pull off plaintive, jaded, emotionally vacant and other shades of grey, in addition to strident (which is really no great shake for any young actor worth their salt). But those aren’t the required tones of most mainstream projects, and Wood still runs the risk of sanding down to oblivion any potential soft edges.
Did Eddie Murphy Bang All the Spice Girls?
Hey, so I was just thinking, I guess because I heard that the erstwhile Scary Space is going to be on the next installment of Dancing with the Stars, does her love child with Eddie Murphy mean that he had sex with all the Spice Girls? Because, ya know… I heard that if you wanna be her lover, you gotta get with her friends.
More Thoughts on Balls of Fury
In all the ways that movies are mis-marketed… errr, slyly peddled, one of the more curious disconnects in recent memory between elicited expectation and finished product has to be found in the new ping pong comedy Balls of Fury. Its title is vaguely juvenile (“Huh huh, he said balls…”), with an evocation of theatrical rage that stands as none-too-coincidental counterpoint to the recent hit Blades of Glory. If grandeur and achievement are part of sports, after all, so too are the flipside emotions — such as disappointment and anger — of presumed defeat.
So the movie looks, on the surface, to be another down-market tale of alpha male behavior on the fringe, with wildly colorful characters and plenty of slapstick situations. Yet overall Balls of Fury plays things surprisingly straight; it’s a rather shockingly low-energy treatment of such a colorful, willfully silly concept. Despite its advertising campaign (with shots of a weeping little girl punching a guy in the groin in heavy rotation), it really isn’t a comedy of rote physical debasement. But neither is the movie wholeheartedly about the competition at the core of its story, in a manner that would (potentially) allow it to blossom as a satire of muscle-bound sports flicks. No, instead, it’s not feelings of outrage that the movie most summons forth… just deep sighs of puzzled indifference. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.
Also, while this holiday weekend looks to be a box office battle between Rob Zombie’s Halloween, Saw director James Wan’s Death Sentence and Balls of Fury, as well as an extra serving for big-budget holdovers, there are plenty of other, smaller, better films still at cineplexes that would love the vote of confidence that your dollars confer upon them. Narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, The 11th Hour is an important movie, definitively showing how the Earth is giving off symptoms of an infected organism, and how just unnatural many of our natural disasters and current weather patterns really are. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Meanwhile, Justin Theroux’s pleasantly barbed Dedication is still in limited release, I know, but Jeffrey Blitz’s Rocket Science is a great, skewed coming-of-age tale, and the documentary The King of Kong is deliciously fun — a reminder that high school’s shadow never completely disappears, it just stretches longer. Oh, and 3:10 to Yuma sneaks on Saturday night, I believe, in advance of its September 7 bow. All are definitely worth checking out.
Teabagger Vance, Anyone?
Hey, I just thought of something: if there’s any imagination left in the adult industry at all, there really should be a porn flick called The Legend of Teabagger Vance, right? I mean, I know it’s a dated reference by today’s standards, but still, if ever a legit title were perfectly suited to filthy send-up…
UPDATE, 9/1: Ahh, this sucks. I queried a friend in a position to know and he responded thusly: “This is strange, because I literally just this morning read a thing online that listed that as one of the WORST porn titles in history, but now I can’t find proof anywhere that it actually exists.” For now, the mystery continues…
Good Luck Chuck Is Pissing Me Off…
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…
Happy Birthday, Cameron Diaz
It’s a happy birthday to Cameron Diaz, who turns 35 today. To celebrate, let’s go with, say, this photo, which is probably a bit air-brushed, but certainly better than this picture.
I missed Diaz’s turn for Curtis Hanson in In Her Shoes (so sue me), and though a screener sits on my shelf (OK, in a box in my closet), in all honesty it’ll probably be another 20 years or so before I get around to it. What? I’m a busy guy. This is all to say, the above movie potentially excepted, that I’m not sure Diaz has really been challenged in a long, long time; maybe she will be in Richard Kelly’s forthcoming adaptation of The Box. But probably not. And hey, at the rate things are going, that movie might actually see the light of day before Kelly’s much re-cut Southland Tales.
The Nines Trailer, Thoughts
The trailer for John August’s directorial debut, The Nines, is up and live, in both regular and high-definition versions. A full-form review will follow later this week, but the movie — three short films with incongruous, overlapping parts and three actors playing different roles that may or may not be connected to one another — is most readily filed in the “interesting failure” bin. August (Go, Big Fish) has worked with a cousin of this sort of triptych structure before, and he has two things going for him here: 1) a good cast, and 2) a smart sense of avoiding dialogue clichés. But The Nines, born of the writer-director’s own artistic and personal frustration on the shortlived WB series D.C., doesn’t work one’s id into a tizzy like François Ozon’s Swimming Pool or the best work of David Lynch. The Nines releases later this week, August 31, from Newmarket Films.
More Thoughts on Resurrecting the Champ
A lot of times, studios will go out of their way to “oversell” a movie. By this I mean not just showcasing the funniest or brawniest bits in an effort to entice filmgoers into theaters, but featuring a certain out-of-left-field hook or mid-film twist (say, like Ransom’s televised upping of the ante by Mel Gibson) as a centerpiece of the movie’s promotional campaign.
Director Rod Lurie’s Resurrecting the Champ, on the other hand, is being sold in relatively straightforward fashion, and pleasantly so. Part of that might have to do with the fact that the movie is being distributed by Yari Film Group, a relatively upstart company that has experienced critical and to-scale commercial success with somewhat unlikely fare like the Oscar-winning Crash and Neil Burger’s The Illusionist, starring Edward Norton and Jessica Biel. The manner in which the subversion of expectation aids in and deepens one’s appreciation for Resurrecting the Champ is directly related to its television and print advertising, which reduces the story to the simple theme of uplift.
That’s legitimate enough. It’s not that the movie is being sold as something it’s not. It is a story about a forgotten old boxer living on the streets, and a struggling young journalist who tries to make his name by telling this man’s remarkable story. But it’s also a throwback film of sorts that, like the self-established parameters of life that everyday living reliably destroys, is about several things at once, and the manner in which our judgments and actions both reflect and belie us.
What Resurrecting the Champ most has going for it is a certain lived-in quality that strikes you as an antidote of sorts to all the saccharine and-or carefully prescribed plot tracks of many more conventional dramas. Like the recent Bourne films, actually, the drama in the movie flows from decisions made by its lead character(s), but also how others interpret and react to those choices. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.
On Hatchet’s Trailer, Web Campaign
Its trailer is only so-so — scream-stab shenanigans under a creepy narration from a little girl that lays out the movie’s back story — but the low-budget horror flick Hatchet, releasing September 7, has a pretty solid web site and an ingenious, parallel interactive recruitment site (“Join the Hatchet army!”), all of which could help it siphon off some business from horror aficionados who may or may not be disappointed by Rob Zombie’s reboot of the Halloween franchise. The film stars Joel David Moore (Dodgeball), Tamara Feldman, Deon Richmond, Joleigh Fioreavanti, Joshua Leonard and Kane Hodder, the latter of whom “stakes his reputation” on the fact that this is the best movie he’s been involved with. So… you know, there you have it — the reputation of Kane Hodder is on the table, suckers. Raise or fold?
On Feast of Love’s Nudity
So there have actually been a couple email queries about Robert Benton’s forthcoming Feast of Love and its nudity content, and who am I to disappoint eager readers?
. <strong>Stana Katic is also very briefly topless, as is Selma Blair</strong>, whose part is probably the smallest of the main ensemble. Morgan Freeman and Jane Alexander, you ask with bated breath? Thankfully not nude, though they do share a passionate clinch. The big news, I guess, is that <strong>Mitchell and Burke are also without bottoms</strong> in a crucial scene of confrontation; she goes full-frontal, he doesn’t. <em>Feast of Love</em> opens on September 28, from MGM. <a href=)
For the film’s trailer, click here.
On Diane Lane’s Untraceable
At the press day yesterday for Feast of Love, writer Allison Burnett — who’s been happily pumping out material for Lakeshore Entertainment and producer Tom Rosenberg — talked about the upcoming movie Untraceable, directed by Gregory Hoblit, and starring Diane Lane as an FBI agent who’s tracking down a high-tech serial killer.
“It’s an Internet thriller, it’s a nightmare vision of an Internet murder, and the way that our voyeuristic bloodlust [drives] it,” says Burnett. The idea? “Basically, what would happen if there’s a web site where people are being murdered live, and you knew that the more people that logged in, the faster the person died? So if you log in to watch, you’re contributing to the speed of their death? And millions of people are watching it. It’s a bit like Network, with the intensity of The Silence of the Lambs, but it also has a social aspect to it. It’s an indictment of our voyeurism.”
OK, the actual nuts-and-bolts plot slugline sounds totally down-market, to be honest, but Hoblit has a nice touch with material, as well as getting performances ranging from really solid to flat-out great from young actors. For those reasons, and not its “indictment of voyeurism” (doesn’t Hollywood actually thrive on voyeurism?) I’ll be looking forward to this one. Oh, and because of Diane Lane. She totally rocks. Colin Hanks, Billy Burke and Joseph Cross (Running with Scissors) also star; Untraceable is currently set for release January 25, 2008 from Sony’s Screen Gems division.
Advance Thoughts on December Boys
 is supposed to be older than the other kids, but the film handles this rather awkwardly, and is late in making good use of it. Though the film finally comes around a bit in its final third, <STRONG>Marc Rosenberg’s screenplay is extremely problematic, and Rod Hardy’s direction seems to count heavily on an audience being predisposed to find this coming-of-age tale both utterly fascinating and somehow stirringly original</STRONG>. Neither is the case. Also, and I’ll have to check on this, but I think the movie probably had to have a fly wrangler. <EM>December Boys</EM> opens September 14 in New York and Los Angeles, from Warner Independent, and expands nationwide on September 28.</DIV></p>
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Jessica Biel To Go Nude
So the Internet is abuzz — and old media, too, as I already heard this on two drive-time morning shows on my recent coffee, post office and tire-slashing jaunt — with news that Jessica Biel has apparently agreed to bare breasts and ass for her role as a single-mom stripper in the now-instantly-more-popular indie flick Powder Blue. Egotastic and other sites have up production photos of Biel wandering around the streets of Los Angeles looking like some sort of Flashdance street urchin (let’s hope that’s not her stage costume), but hornballs should note the potential flaccidity factor of the fact that Biel’s character is working the pole to provide care for a terminally ill son.
The pleasantly jiggly bra-and-panties shots from I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry were certainly the best thing about that strikingly unfunny hunk of crap, and while I don’t know that Powder Blue is the right vehicle for this apparent newfound courage regarding screen nudity (his Oscar win notwithstanding, co-star Forest Whitaker has also not exactly made the most discerning choices lately), this is what I’ve been saying for months now needs to happen, as there have been movies and moments with Biel (particularly in the excremental London) where nudity would or should have flowed naturally from the scenes, only to be awkwardly shot around. Not to mention the possibilities of an erotic thriller that this opens up…
More American Gangster Gossip
The gathering storm on American Gangster, its developing general consensus, seems to be quite good, but there’s still the question of its running time. Universal hasn’t yet been screening the movie that openly, but I had a colleague who caught a recent screening in Las Vegas react with an “ugh,” chiefly (though not completely) because of its length. “It’s 40 minutes too long,” said colleague opined, stressing that point twice. This version was supposedly the final cut, but more tinkering may ensue, who knows.
Still, the performances were there, the source admitted. So with Crowe’s excellent turn in 3:10 to Yuma as well, he’s looking to have a Leonardo DiCaprio-type problem come awards time. For which film would he be more likely to snag an Oscar nomination? It’s hard to say, having not yet seen the former film. Most people would likely lay money on American Gangster, but Yuma director James Mangold has some residual heat from Walk the Line, LionsGate has dumped the movie’s wrongheaded initial marketing scheme, and recent history may be on Yuma‘s side as well. After all, The Departed was more widely embraced than Blood Diamond, yet DiCaprio was nominated for Best Actor for the latter. So even if American Gangster shows box office legs, 3:10 to Yuma may be seen as more of a triumph of “simple,” streamlined storytelling, with the praise flowing more directly downhill to its actors.
Advance Thoughts on 3:10 to Yuma
Again, I’ve been remiss about pumping out some quick thoughts on both the good and bad of what I’ve seen long lead, but James Mangold’s remake of 3:10 to Yuma , the 1957 western starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin, is a very, very good film… like, go-ahead-and-start-the-Oscar-derby good. Starring Russell Crowe, Christian Bale, Ben Foster and
Peter Fonda, the movie is a slow (pleasantly so), protracted chess match of wills.
Set in
the late 1800s, it centers on captured outlaw Ben Wade (Crowe), and his date with a train that will take him to justice. Bale plays Dan Evans, a broken down Civil War veteran struggling to keep the respect of his headstrong son (Logan Lerman) and the support of his wife (Gretchen Mol), as well as merely hold onto control of his drought-plagued ranch. Needing cash, Evans volunteers to help deliver Wade, but is set upon by the latter’s vicious gang.
The script is tight, the acting and production value top-notch, and Crowe — speaking in a low, hypno-masculine purr — drives this well-oiled baby inexorably forward in charismatic bad-boy fashion. Bale’s performance, meanwhile, is a master class in measurement and subtle reaction. Looking to beat Warner Bros.’ The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford out of the gate, LionsGate has moved the film’s release date up to September 7, nationwide; to visit its web site, click here. More to soon follow.
On James Gunn’s Belcoo Experiment
I missed this from last week or so, but some word about Slither writer-director James Gunn’s The Belcoo Experiment apparently leaked (oozed?) out at Comic-Con recently. On his eponymous (and frequently hilariously profane) site, Gunn talks a good bit about the movie, describing it thusly:
“It’s a script I wrote on spec [and] an ultra-violent thriller with a lot
of action. It has to do with a group of 83 American expatriates who
work in a building in Sao Paulo, Brazil. At the beginning of what is at
first a regular, boring day, walls close up around the building,
trapping them inside. A voice emits over the speaker system, forcing
them through a series of murderous moral decisions.”
Sounds a bit like Chris Gorak’s forthcoming Right at Your Door, but writ large, and with spicy pinches of Saw, Entombed and maybe Turistas thrown in for good measure. Still, Gunn says he’s not sure The Belcoo Experiment will in fact be his next directing project. “The acting in the film is heavy, there is a large cast, and we need to
find actors who meet the needs of myself, my producers, and Universal/Rogue,” he writes.
“A lot of things need to fall into place for the casting to be perfect,
and I don’t want to do the film until that’s the case.”
Death Race Satisfies Joan Allen?
In light of her recent, rumored casting in Paul W. S. Anderson’s remake of Roger Corman’s Death Race, originally reported by The Hollywood Reporter last week, I thought it would be interesting to reflect on some of Joan Allen’s comments regarding her career and the path of women in Hollywood in general at the press day for The Bourne Ultimatum a few weeks back. To wit:
“I feel fortunate because I’ve gotten to do some interesting things in the past four or five years. But it’s not like I’m getting 50 scripts
a week and turning down all of them, or 49 of them — it’s really not like that,” says Allen.
“I’ll go through periods where I get a few scripts a week and then I go no, this
isn’t the right thing. So it’s not like the choices are voluminous. But within
that I still have gotten enough to satisfy me. I have a 13-year-old daughter, I
can’t work back-to-back, I can’t be away from her that much. It’s kind of great
for me if I do one film a year or even one film every two years, or year and a
half. Because I spend all my time with her then. I save my money and I put
it away and I don’t overextend myself, and I’m sort of personally gratified that
way.”
television series, with Glenn Close and Holly Hunter and Kyra Sedgwick, and I
think that’s very exciting, because I think a lot of them are more interesting
parts for them,” continues Allen. “I see that as opening up more, for women of a certain age to
have another… employment opportunity. Because sometimes the roles you get
are someone’s mom, and it’s not very interesting, or you’re getting dumped by
your husband so he can go off…”
Or sometimes those roles are in Death Race, you know? Allen supposedly joins Jason Statham, Tyrese Gibson and Ian McShane in what seems to be an exceedingly well cast piece of Hollywood rib-nudging, however desultory it may turn out to be. (After all, Rollerball didn’t exactly wow dystopian futurists.) It remains to be seen whether the film can top or add anything to the social commentary provided by Daniel Minahan’s Series 7, which came out six years ago, seven by the time Death Race sees the light of day.
The King of Kong Thoughts
Chiefly because I have yet to find a way to create an extra
24 hours within a single day, I’ve been remiss in dropping advance nuggets on
some of the best in forthcoming indie flicks. One standout in particular,
though, is The King of Kong: A Fistful of
Quarters, a documentary about the battle for the Guinness Book of World Records-recognized high score on the arcade
classic Donkey Kong, chiefly between an unassuming middle school science
teacher and a smarmy hot sauce mogul. (I personally think the filmmakers should
have gone with just the last title, but I understand both the relevance and the
zeitgeist pop of the former tag as well.)
Though it sounds wonkish and severely defined by its subject
matter, director Seth Gordon’s movie is anything but. Family man Steve Wiebe (above right) is
the upstart hero of the piece, a straightforward, earnest guy who sets the
record for Kong — notoriously the most difficult of all the early arcade games
— and submits it via videotape, to a recognized governing body. The old
record-holder, though, doesn’t plan on going quietly into the night. That would
be Billy Mitchell, a silver-tongued and (frequently) self-proclaimed Jedi
Master of gaming, who unleashes a fascinating scheme of proxy psychological
warfare. I’ll get into it more next week, but the movie is quite funny and even a bit heartrending at times — and
consequently, like the fascinating cultural curio Dogtown and Z-Boys before it, it’s already been tapped to be remade
into a narrative feature film. The King of Kong releases from Picturehouse on August
17 in
Angeles
On Lars and the Real Girl’s Trailer
The trailer for Lars and the Real Girl, starring Ryan Gosling, is up, and it looks to be a quirky little affair. Penned by Six Feet Under scribe Nancy Oliver and directed by Craig Gillespie (the mysteriously shelved Mr. Woodcock), the movie is described as a
heartfelt comedy, centering around Lars
Lindstrom, a loveable introvert whose emotional baggage has kept him
from fully embracing life. After years of almost complete solitude, he
invites Bianca, a friend he met on the Internet, to visit him. Lars even introduces Bianca to his brother Gus (Paul Schneider) and his wife
Karen (Emily Mortimer). The catch? Bianca is a life-size doll, not a real
person.
Gosling, of course, plays it straight and sincere in the trailer, and so a lot of the comedy lies in the reactions of those around him, chiefly Schneider, whose All the Real Girls, in all its small town quietude, seems somewhat of an influence here. The comedic elements will help this play a bit more broadly, but these dinged, nervous-guy protagonist movies — like James Mangold’s Heavy, Wayne Kramer’s The Cooler, and the forthcoming Dedication, off the top of my head, though I know I’m forgetting a couple better examples — are uphill slogs commercially without a mitigating plot point.
Now would seem to be the time where I say something like the clock is ticking on Gosling, and that he has to embrace more overtly commercial fare (what about one of these half dozen goddamned brooding comic book hero parts?) if he wants to capitalize on chance and jump aboard the stardom train. The thing is, that’s what the rather excellent Fracture was, after all — a piece of commercial work — and where did it get him? Even costarring Anthony Hopkins, the movie didn’t crack $40 million, domestically. Ergo, I’m totally on board with Gosling’s plan of avoidance. As he told me in an interview earlier this year, “My representation has pretty much given up on ever making much money on me.”
For Gosling, his choices matter heartily. He’s prepping his own directorial debut and he’s got Peter Jackson’s King Kong follow-up, an adaptation of Alice Sebold’s spare, haunting The Lovely Bones, coming up next year. Just like Johnny Depp, stardom will find Gosling when it’s damn well ready; he’s that talented. Thanks to the conviction of his performances, word-of-mouth on the guy
is sincere and lasting, so mainstream audiences will eventually come
around. And in the interim, I certainly don’t mind the adventurousness of his choices. Lars and the Real Girl releases October 12.
Daddy Day Camp DOA
I’ve written before about Cuba Gooding, Jr.’s ongoing debasement, and this was without even seeing Daddy Day Camp, which a couple publicists made repeated (and unsuccessful) entreaties for me to cover — even going so far as to (gasp!) phone, an extreme rarity in this digital age, and certainly so after a chain of email correspondence. Apparently, America pretty much agrees with my no-need-to-see assessment, as the aforementioned film arrived in theaters Wednesday with a thud, delivering just over $770,000, a $354 per screen average. It’ll conceivably pull in some family business this weekend, but the Wednesday opening was an attempt to expand and tap that market, to get them into theaters on less crowded off days before school started back up, and it failed miserably.
As for Gooding, deserved or not, he’s toxic, quite frankly. He has a dramatic supporting role in this fall’s hotly anticipated American Gangster, but the commercials and all the down-market crap are killing him. In fact, I had a fairly respected comedic actress tell me last year — off the record, but in no uncertain terms — that she pulled out of a project that turned an eye toward casting Gooding, tendering him an offer.
Dedication Thoughts
Justin Theroux (above right). It’s a sort of barbed love story about the pathologically bitter author of a popular children’s book series (Billy Crudup, above left) forced to team up with a new illustrator (Mandy Moore) after his best friend and creative collaborator (Tom Wilkinson) suddenly passes away.
It’s well directed, very idiosyncratic but totally genuine, and the characters
leave deep footprints. I’m a big fan of Crudup’s, and while the neurotic
misanthrope is a tried-and-true character of a certain brand of cinema, I
thought there was a sincerity and attention to detail in his performance that helps make the entire movie really sing. And Moore was
great too; she was good in American Dreamz, but definitely more in her comfort zone. This is flat-out her best performance… one so good that it made me forget
she was ever “first” a singer. Dedication opens in late August in New York and Los Angeles, and goes wide September 14, from the Weinstein Company.
Eddie Murphy Goes to NowhereLand
At the recent press day for Stardust, in addition to
asking him about runaway producer credits and Beverly Hills Cop IV,
I asked former Warner Bros. executive turned independent producer Lorenzo di
Bonaventura (Transformers) about his forthcoming NowhereLand, pegged for a September 10
start date with star Eddie Murphy and director Karey Kirkpatrick, (Over the Hedge,
Charlotte’s Web).
have great ambition to make a movie in the vein of Big or Jerry Maguire,
where it’s comedic but very, very heartfelt. It’s about a man who’s having some
issues, can’t connect with his daughter, doesn’t really understand her, and also
doesn’t really understand what’s happening to himself at work. And she has an
imaginary world that begins to intercede in his work, so he begins to value her
imaginary world not for her [before] he then comes to his senses.”
So basically it’s another in the vein of moralizing family movies that Murphy used to mock, except with the lack of a space between the title’s two words, to further irritate me. But isn’t this also basically just like the episode of The Simpsons where Homer takes
an interest in Lisa because she suddenly can do no wrong in picking weekly
football winners? Maybe Murphy’s taking these sorts of movies so that he can get paid and then just give bundled DVD sets of this, Daddy Day Care and The Haunted Mansion to all the kids that he fathers out of wedlock.
Brett Ratner on Gay Blowjobs
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.
On Lions for Lambs’ Trailer
The trailer for Lions for Lambs, set for release November 9 through MGM, is up and running, and thankfully gone is the awful music from its first pass, in teaser form. It doesn’t look like quite Frank “T.J.” Mackey territory for Tom Cruise, but he is playing another silver-tongued aggressor, this time a hot-shit U.S. Senator. (Anyone else think Cruise could topline the David Vitter story if he so chose?) It’s no great fleshing out of the narrative, particularly. In fact, with Robert Redford barking, “Rome is burning, son,” and the trailer’s hammering home of terrorism being “the quintessential question of our time,” Lions for Lambs is certainly going to no significant lengths to sell itself to the hoi polloi; right now it’s The Charlie Rose Show and Meet the Press crowd or bust. Watch for at least a bit of a narrative expansion of sorts in probably about a month or six weeks.