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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

If It's Wednesday, It Must Be BYOB

The Bermuda International Film Festival continues apace…
We’re getting a live performance by a rising band, Langhorne Slim & The War Eagles tonight. The sun, which was supposed to be hiding, is out in force. And the movies are pretty good, though as in a lot of festivals, some of the ideas are better than the execution. Still, the festival, a little downsized this year, has a lot of filmmaker attendees from across the globe… a bit of a return to the good ol’ days, when the festival had fewer celebs and a more grounded, filmmaker-focused feel… as it should be.
As always, here is some room for y’all to play…

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28 Responses to “If It's Wednesday, It Must Be BYOB”

  1. doug r says:

    Ohh, a fresh clean sandbox to play in!
    I’m bummed because I Am Legend with the alternate ending is only on the 2-disc SE (not for rent) or Blu-ray.
    I don’t want to pay $30 for a movie that I’m probably going to want on Blu-ray in about 2 years-right after I buy my 1080p 67″+ TV.
    I hate this upsell pushy crap.

  2. Me says:

    Yeah, I was upset when I got my rental and it didn’t have the alternate ending. Of course, by that point I wasn’t really all that wowwed by the movie anyway, so I just went to IMDB and had the other ending spoiled for me.
    Then I watched 30 Days of Night and realized that it was another of those great movies in concept that sort of gave up trying beyond the good concept. What a really dull, unscary vampire movie.
    Then, for a little high-brow action, I watched Lust, Caution – the R version at Blockbuster. It was a little better than the other two movies, but it didn’t really grab me either.
    All in all, it was a meh day on DVD for me.

  3. LexG says:

    Is “Boarding Gate” worth my time?
    And by “my time,” I mean that I consider just about any movie, good or bad, worth my time… I just don’t enjoy driving across town all that much, especially on a gloomy night.
    Assayas is interesting though… good to Madsen in a non-DTV every once in a while.

  4. IOIOIOI says:

    Where was Nikki Finke’s support of the Canadian strike? We see how she rolls.

  5. Noah says:

    LexG, Boarding Gate is fine…but definitely not worth a drive across town. You’re better off renting Clean, Demonlover or Irma Vep.

  6. LYT says:

    IOIOIOI: She’s not your buddy, guy.

  7. LexG says:

    OK, SON, come one, come all, to check out none other than LEX MOTHERFUCKING G on THE TUBE. You’ve been waiting, you know you’re stoked, so gather round, cuz your dream has come true and he’s finally posted a video rant!
    GET READY TO HAVE YOUR ASS OWNED.
    http://youtube.com/watch?v=eBGIQ7ZuuiU

  8. jeffmcm says:

    I would have preferred a rant.

  9. movieman says:

    LOVE Assayas! My personal favorite is “Les Destinees:” definitely worth checking out.

  10. Dave Vernon says:

    Yeah, I was bummed about not being able to rent the disc of I Am Legend with the alternate ending–but then my 12 year old nephew went on the internet and in about 3 minutes found a website that had the alternate ending for us to watch.

  11. Hopscotch says:

    Caught Leatherheads last night.
    The film’s heart is in the right place. There are a few genuinely funny moments, unfortunately many more “trying to be funny” moments. No one falls flat on their face, per se. But the 3rd Act of the movie just drags.

  12. montrealkid says:

    Not sure where you guys have been, but the alternate ending to I Am Legend has been online for almost a month now.

  13. LexG says:

    Jeff got RICK ROLLED! Who else?
    Clooney OWNS, I respect his interest in paying tribute to retro genres, but Leatherheads kinda just looks like pure hambone shtick.
    But even the negative reviews, I’ve noticed, are POLITE to a fault. Seems like if any other major leading man unveiled a period mug-fest like that (say, McConaughey), critics would be RELENTLESS, even if it was the exact same movie.
    Has Clooney officially entered the Oprah/Hanks/Spielberg level of royalty then?

  14. storymark says:

    I don’t know that he’s royalty, but he’s a damn sight closer to it than McConaughey.

  15. Eric says:

    I suspect they’ll go easy on Leatherheads because you don’t sense much arrogance behind it. I seem to recall Confessions of a Dangerous Mind getting slapped a little harder, possibly because it was a little more ambitious.
    Either way, I thought it was pleasant but forgettable. It seems like Clooney has gotten a particular sense of comic timing from working with the Coen Brothers, and that’s a good thing.

  16. LexG says:

    McCONAUGHEY OWNS YOUR ASS.
    JOHN ANTHONY 4 LIFE.
    “THE MILLION DOLLAR MAN WITH THE BILLION DOLLAR PLAN.”
    JOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHN ANTHONY!!!!!!!!
    (2nd only to BLACK DAHLIA as the funniest movie of the decade.)

  17. SJRubinstein says:

    I found “Leatherheads” pretty inoffensive, though not wholly entertaining. It has its charming moments, a surprising lack of football for a sports movie, but Clooney is really, really fun to watch in the film. Kind of has a “Sweet & Lowdown” vibe to it at times for a modern screwball bit.
    Doesn’t really stick the landing, but after getting delayed out of Oscar season and hearing all about re-shoots, it’s not so bad in an off-year Coens-type frame.

  18. TuckPendleton says:

    Re: Tropic Thunder – today’s NYT had a piece about the big “surprise cameo” in the movie (which I won’t reveal here), which I guess for those of us here is not a big surprise, since it was leaked a while ago…but was anyone else surprised to see the Times put that info so blatantly out there? Or did they figure the goose was so far gone out of the bag it didn’t matter…just seemed like an amateur move for the Times to me, and certainly not justified by the nothing story it was attached to.

  19. leahnz says:

    i asked about this in one of the older threads and got nothing so thought i’d try again here where people are still reading: do any of you movie-type people know when ‘surveillance’ is opening in the US? i’m hanging out for it, it looks like my cup of tea and i’m curious to see if david l’s daughter is as weird and twisted as her dad, but i’ve hunted around and the only release date i can find is ‘2008’. does anyone know anything?

  20. Tuck, didn’t the NYT article feature an image that was seen by a lot of people on the net moooonths ago? I know I had seen it.

  21. jeffmcm says:

    Leahnz, did you miss Boxing Helena?

  22. movieman says:

    Good Assayas choice, Joe.
    Truth be told, there aren’t any Assayas movies I don’t like.

  23. leahnz says:

    i did miss boxing helena, and i’ve never seen bh on dvd or video or cable tv or tvtv here… was that jennifer l’s last movie? wasn’t that way back in the nineties? i guess she couldn’t be described as prolific, if so. didn’t kim basinger get sued on account of dropping out of bh, or is that something else i’m thinking of? that’s a lot of questions. bring on ‘surveillance’.

  24. Joe Leydon says:

    I was in the grocery store tonight, buying some snacks for my son and his buddies — they’re in his room, playing video games on his big-screen TV — when I heard The Beatles singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on the piped-in music. I smiled — but only until I did the math in my head, and figured that the first time I heard that song was 44 years ago. That’s when I went over to the wine section, and picked up a bottle of Merlot.

  25. leahnz says:

    don’t sweat it joe, i pick up the vodka.
    ‘hold your hand’ is a bit before my day, but there’s nothing like a tune from back in the day to bring on the misty-eyed nostalgia. a tipple or two helps one look back with fondness AND dull the knowledge that an artificial hip and mobility scooter probably figure somewhere in your future

  26. frankbooth says:

    Re: Boxing Helena — talent is not necessarily hereditary. Especially in this case.

  27. jeffmcm says:

    That song is one of the only good sections of Ms. Taymor’s film Across the Universe, so there’s that.

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon