Film Archive for January, 2009

Brutal Day

Layoffs hitting Variety today, good friends are affected.
What to say? It’s just brutal out there.

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Stylin' at Sundance

I just got into Salt Lake City a while ago, and I’m sitting here at the airport with Gregg Goldstein waiting for the rest of our team to arrive. My Sundance adventure this year got off to a rip-roaring start yesterday with me injuring my ankle (I know, smart, right?) so I’ll be schlepping around Park City with my foot in a very attractive walking cast. I decided to forego the option of crutches on the theory that a chick clumsy enough to screw up her foot a day before a big trip just by walking does not need to increase the odds of further injury by hobbling on snowy/icy pathways with crutches while carrying a laptop backpack.
Fortunately, Vicodin dulls the pain enough to get me by. I’m thinking, this being a ski town and all, that I need a sexier story about why I’m wearing a walking cast than “Yeah, I was walking, and then there was this patch of gravity and I fell” — something involving me doing some incredibly cool moves while snowboarding or something. If you have suggestions for a better injury story, put them in my inbox. If you have the most creative suggestion, and you’re here at Sundance, I’ll buy you a drink at the Yarrow Bar or some bad Chinese buffet.

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Bad Movie! Bad, Bad Movie!

Just got in from a pre-Sundance date night with the hubs … he bought us tickets to go see Gigli! Yes, yes, it’s one of the worst movies ever made. I’m not sure which was worse: the tragic cameos by Christopher Walken and Al Pacino? The endless gratutious shots of JLo’s midriff and ass? The yoga scene? The “gobble-gobble” moment? The mockery of the disabled guy? The lesbian cat fight?
Or perhaps the whole bit about JLo, who’s supposed to be an intelligent lesbian, being magically turned onto men by Gigli, after he’s spent their entire time together showing her what a completely misogynistic moron he is? Or could it be the schizophrenic tonal changes, the ghastly lighting, the glacial pacing, the bizarre musical score that seems to have been written for a completely different film? Or should we just blame the dreadful script? If your answer is (D) All of the Above, you win.

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Teen Wolf

Good news for all you Twilighters out there … according to Twilight Lexicon, New Moon director Chris Weitz says that Taylor Lautner will, in fact, return to play the role of wolf-boy Jacob Black in the sequel to Twilight. Well thank God for that, now I can sleep tonight.
Seriously, I think it’s a good call on the part of Summit, Weitz and book series author Stephenie Meyer (who apparently had a hand in the decision-making process, good for her) to leave Taylor in the part, even if he’s not nearly seven feet tall, which Jacob is supposed to be in New Moon. Weitz noted in this statement on Twilight Lexicon: “it was my first instinct that Taylor was, is, and should be Jacob, and that the books would be best served by the actor who is emotionally right for the part.” Couldn’t agree with him more.
Taylor was one of the better things about Twilight. He gets the part of Jacob, the girls who comprise a large chunk of the fanbase seem to like him, and he’s charming, cute, and has a gorgeous smile. What more could they want? When he was in our room’s rotation at the Twilight junket, he came across as a genuinely nice, smart, enthusiastic kid; good to see him finally move past the wretched Sharkboy, and I’m looking forward to seeing what he brings to the role in New Moon, which is a very Jacob-centric novel. Team Edward’s gonna have to take a backseat to Team Jacob for this film, but I bet a lot of those fickle teens will switch hit for New Moon.
Now, if only brisk sales of Team Jacob t-shirts at Hot Topic could stimulate the economy …

Different Strokes

Compare and contrast Manohla Dargis’ extraordinarily well-written piece on Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, NY to this review of the same film by Rex Reed, which has been sticking in my craw since he wrote it in October.
It doesn’t even sound like these two are reviewing the same movie. I personally thought Dargis’ piece was logically thought, insightful, and beautifully wordsmithed, whereas Reed’s, though meticulously written in its own way, is just so incredibly vapid that I can only hope he actually slept through half the movie.

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New Years Confession #1

Every time the Gran Torino trailer comes on behind me (fourth time today) and Clint growls, “Gettttt offff myyyy laaaaawn,” I break into uncontrollable giggles.
Yes, I am a bad person. Sorry.

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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