By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
Reeler Link Dump: Catastrophically Slow News Week Edition
These pre-holiday industry standstills always inspire an acute sense of underachievement around Reeler HQ. What better way to work through the blahs than with a lightning round of fluff and flummox from the poor bastards whom the long weekend left behind?
–The latter part of Charlize Theron’s “three or four for them, one for me” work cycle appears to be coming due. As The Reeler noted in January, Theron is reteaming with Picturehouse honcho Bob Berney to produce and star in the drama The Ice at the Bottom of the World, and now she has roped Alan Parker out of his post-Life of David Gale exile to direct. Still no word on when shooting will begin, but it might be a while yet: Theron needs time to get suitably skeevy for her role as a heroin-addicted single mom, and Parker has to find a suitable back-up and complete a 12-step program for unrelenting hackery before insurers will underwrite the project.
–Some Massachusetts screenwriter has accused Jim Jarmusch of ripping off the idea for Broken Flowers. A million relieved Jarmusch fans sigh mightily and redirect their disappointment to the Boston area. (Via Cinematical)
–Sydney Pollack is ready for his close-up. Make that close-ups: Cingular Wireless evidently thinks enough of him as a pitchman that he will appear in a new spot advising moviegoers to silence their mobile phones. Meanwhile, Pollack and Sidney Lumet will be the subjects of tributes at this year’s Deauville Film Festival, and Anne Thompson notes that Pollack is co-producing (with Anthony Minghella) the next film by the Devil Wears Prada team of Aline Brosh McKenna and David Frankel (who are, in Thompson’s priceless words, “beavering away on their next chick lit adaptation”). We should all be so busy this time of year.
–Fuck this NYPD press credential; the next time I want to crash a film set, I am borrowing the neighbor’s kid.
–Speaking of Parker and Pollack, neither make the cut in Dave Kehr’s lament for aging auteurs posted this week on Slate:
The new MBA masters of Hollywood push seasoned (and proportionately expensive and hard to handle) talents aside in favor of inexpensive and pliable young filmmakers straight from Sundance or the film schools. I want to see Walter Hill’s Rio Lobo and I want to see John Milius’ 7 Women—but where is the studio that would finance them, when Justin Lin (The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift) and J. J. Abrams (Mission: Impossible III) are available?
I don’t know about you, but I am a big fan of Kehr’s paeans to entitlement. Last month’s blog screed condemning publications where “experienced critics are being kicked out in favor of glorified interns” was a little more glass-shatteringly melodramatic, but this new one has an irreproachable bitterness that only a seasoned veteran can summon and sustain. Not yet 30 myself, I am grateful for the influence, and I hope that someday my prose is as alienating to my next generation of readers as Kehr’s is to his own–those Sundance filmmakers in particular. Ryan Fleck? Goran Dukic? Carlos Reygadas? Hilary Brougher? Rian Johnson? Ramin Bahrani? Kelly Reichardt? Fucking hacks.