The Hot Blog Archive for February, 2010

In This Case, I'm With Sean Penn…

… And the idea that a bankrupt state is wasting its time and our tax dollars prosecuting him for treating an asshole like an asshole is begging to be treated is a travesty. We can’t educate our kids, but we are spending money on trying to put Sean Penn in jail for getting pissed at a papp? Crazy shit.

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Why I Didn't Ask To Speak To Kristen Stewart Yesterday

I actually think Ms Stewart is a sincere, honest person in a publicity universe of madness. (She’s also a young, shy woman and behaves accordingly.) But when the invitation to attend a junket for The Yellow Handkerchief came into the inbox, I thought to myself, “Why would I want to be in that weird position where all the pressure is there to talk about things other than the movie she is choosing to promote?” She’s game. But even after having done that to her a little on some level in a DP/30 for Adventureland, I decided that it was a bit disrespectful. She was making time to use her celebrity to promote a small film she cares about and she was sure to spend a significant percentage of her time being prodded about vampires and celebrity.
But it is the game we are in.
So, no surprise this morning when Cinematical ran, “William Hurt Discusses Hulk Futures” and HitFix rushed out, “Kristen Stewart thinks ‘Breaking Dawn’ would be a ‘trip’ in 3-D.” (She didn’t seem to mean it in a good way, btw.)
I don’t blame the authors of these pieces, both of whom I quite like. And I understand that pressure. When I shot Penelope Cruz for Broken Embraces, we ended up discussing Nine a bit. And when I found out that The Weinstein Company was playing reindeer games with the junket screenings the next day, I ran that clip on its own, beating the junketeers to the punch. it was petty. And indeed, it upset the publicists on the Almodovar film, who had expended time, effort, and money for me to be able to spent time in a hotel room with Ms. Cruz taking about that work.
So, I just decided to not ask for any time with Stewart… and even had I asked, I surely would not have gotten my DP/30 time frame. I hope to spend some time on Runaways, when that time comes. But that film speaks so closely to her personal experience – and that of Ms Fanning – that it feels like a more natural fit… an appropriate conversation.
I did, however, ask for William Hurt and that DP/30 will land soon. And indeed, we didn’t talk much about this movie… because that is where the talent took the conversation. The same was true when I sat with Hurt in an untaped conversation about A History of Violence a few years ago. His conversational focus is just wider than any movie. But I forgot to ask him about working with Matt LeBlanc, Heather Graham, or The Hulk. Oops.
I know that some of you believe that I write pieces like this as some assertion of moral superiority. I don’t. I know how lucky I am that I don’t serve that media master the same ways others must to put food on the table, though I have other unfortunate masters at times too. But I do think that people who consume a lot of media and are interested – as any person reading me must be…. it would bore anyone else to tears – need to remember to have the conversation about what we are all consuming and how and why. We may indulge ourselves… that is human nature. But we must try to be conscious that we are doing it… that it is a choice and it has meaning, however frivolous on the surface… that is being an adult.

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A Tale Of Two Reviews

(2/21 – ED NOTE: This Tread Seems To Have Evolved Into A SPOILER THREAD… please read or don’t read accordingly.)
“Mr. Scorsese in effect forces you to study the threads on the rug he is preparing, with lugubrious deliberateness, to pull out from under you. As the final revelations approach, the stakes diminish precipitously, and the sense that the whole movie has been a strained and pointless contrivance starts to take hold.”
“He

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Box Office Hell Says No Shutter Is An Island

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20 Weeks To Oscar – 16 Days To Go.

It

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DP/30 – A Very Political Double Feature

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Daniel Ellsberg gave The Pentagon Papers to The NY Times and later, a series of other papers across America, in order to expose the lies of the escalation in Vietnam. That was 38 years ago. Last year, Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith delivered their documentary on this historic event, focusing not just on the politics, but on the personal experience of Ellsberg and his family, particularly his wife, Patricia. The film – The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers – is nominated for Best Documentary this year.
mp3 of this interview

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Oliver Stone, who became a documentarian on a pretty regular basis a few years ago, is back with South of The Border, a look at Hugo Chavez and the socialist uprising across South America. The film’s American premiere was at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival last weekend. As always, Stone has a lot to say about the state of the American union.
mp3 of this interview

DP/30 – The Young Victoria costume designer Sandy Powell

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Sandy is also the costume designer for Shutter Island. For The Young Victoria, she received her eighth nomination and she took home the gold guy for both Shakespeare in Love and The Aviator.

mp3 of this interview

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Valentine's Day = Love American Style

It finally hit me where I had seen Valentine’s Day before… which is not really seeing it before since I haven’t actually seen Valentine’s Day at all and never will…
It’s Love American Style: The Motion Picture.
Of course, Garry Marshall wrote the episode of that show, Love & the Happy Days, that became a pilot for the show that made him insanely successful, Happy Days.
Of course, Love American Style would later be the template for The Love Boat, which essentially was L.A.S. with a regular cast and structure.
Anyway…

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My First Screening Post-Baby – The Ghost Writer

This was an odd weekend to open Polanski’s new film, The Ghost Writer. After all, putting it up against a Scorsese minor-key masterpiece like Shutter Island, which actually feels similar to the creepy discomfort and even story ideas that Polanski is after here, defines the phrase “pale by comparison.” (I haven’t been on top of the Shutter reviews, but I hope there is a lot of discussion of the intentional mismatched shots, POVs from inanimate objects, and other fresh and masterful touches by Scorsese and Schoonmaker.)
The thing about The Ghost Writer that is so frustrating is that you can see that Polanski still has the chops to make a great movie. But besides often feeling like architectural directing, in which Polanski literally sets the film in a modern-living bomb shelter that mimics a post-modern haunted house, the film suffers from a sense that it is saying something profound in its political tale when there is actually more content in any 10 minutes of Fox News, MSNBC, or CNN (which is the network of choice in the film, even if it never looks like CNN, except for the logo).
Seriously… can “Hatherton” ever be quite as scary as Haliburton? And the central surprise of the movie… I think I saw it on a season of “24” between 8:23p and 9:45p.
The casting is fine, though I can’t believe that Ewan McGregor is still willing to accept roles that include women’s panties dropping to the floor on first look at him. The one unaccountable disaster is Kim Cattrall, who is The Sex-cretary, but suffers from trying to work an English accent and is a sore thumb against the subtleties of Olivia Williams. And she still doesn’t offer more that TV skills as an actress… and she never turns up covered in sushi, so I really don’t get the hire when there are so many good Brit actresses who would work with Polanski.
But the reason we all filled the theater tonight was for Polanski. Child rapist that he is, he is still one of the world’s great directors. But this one played more like Coppola doing Jack than as a great little surprising gem. In fact, The Matador was a lot more surprising and memorable, sharing only strong performances by Pierce Brosnan.
All the mood is still there. Polanski knows how to load a still frame with foreboding. But there is no payoff… over and over again… work the audience up… fail to deliver the big bang. Tom Wilkinson and Robert Pugh seem to have the work-three-days-and-steal-a-movie roles and all they end up being is great actors doing okay. Blech.
The filmmaking often reminded me of Polanski’s Death & The Maiden, a tough play made into a movie that allowed strong performances but, for me, just doesn’t work as a film. But this film doesn’t even have those stakes to work with… not even cynicism vs sincerity… just “aha!”s that play like “uh-huh”s.
That said, almost no one is going to walk out of the movie angry that they went… just disappointing. There are worse things they could do.

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Where The Wild Costumes Are


FIDM, Los Angeles, Today

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Roger by Esquire

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DP/30 – The Hurt Locker Triple Feature

Screenwriter Mark Boal, who also sat with us with Kathryn Bigelow a few months back, focuses on his work behind the word processor this time. Where did this work come from? (In a few days, look for another DP/30 with Boal and another of the Oscar-nominated producers of the film… a different hat for Mark.)
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mp3 of this interview
Composers Buck Sanders & Marco Beltrami sit down in their studio to discuss the music for the movie… a score that neither really expected to get nominated because of its embedded sound. And the tale of how they got where they are today – Oscar nominees – Betrami from horror scores (including Mimic) and Sanders from behind the counter at Lazer Blazer.
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mp3 of this interview
The amazing sound of this film keeps up with the amazing images all the way. Two of the men responsible for this are twice-nominated Paul Ottosson, who both edited and designed the sound, and Ray Beckett, the Ken Loach veteran who caught every sound he could on-set so that the intensity would remain completely authentic.
This is a bit of an experimental DP/30, with Ray Beckett coming in via Skype. For the first few minutes, there are some lighting issues. And it takes a bit over 10 minutes for us to unfreeze Ray from a Skype coma, though you can hear him fine. Many thanks to both men for putting up with our experimentation… which I suspect will lead to some interesting places in the near future.
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mp3 of this interview

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4-Day Weekend Estimates by Klady – Dead Presidents Of Love

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The domestic 4-day on Valentine’s Day is impressive, but to me, the estimated $34.4m overseas for the film is a much more important number. Comedy doesn’t generally travel well. But this one has. Stars, stars, stars, stars, stars. It’s fascinating how things cycle… we’re back to Irwin Allen territory here.
The market for this kind of Valentine’s film is clearly strong, from Hitch to 50 First Dates to He’s Just Not That Into You. Interestingly, WB opened the NL star fest last year a weekend before the holiday and by the end of V-Day weekend, they had almost the same exact domestic gross as V-Day’s opening 4 ($57.8m). The film only did another $36m domestically. How will this one play out over the weeks to come? It will be interesting to see.
Do kids love Percy Jackson? That will be the question in weeks to come on that Fox release. A $39m domestic 4-day doesn’t suck,,, but it’s no Harry Potter. But then again, no one should have expected Harry Potter. The proof of the pudding will be in the target market’s word of mouth. if this leads to a $150m+ domestic gross, it could be the start of something real. If not, not.
The car wreck that people assumed to be The Wolfman was not either. And the release date was no on their side. Between Avatar hang and both a big kid picture and a chick flick, they really had to thread the needle. Historically, even good versions of this kind of film lose steam quickly. But people – not critics – seem to be having some fun at the movies with this one. So again… we’ll see.
Good to see The Hurt Locker get a re-release of some kind… though once again, too timid. 125 screens seems more like a screening program than a re-release. Summit seems determined to half-ass this movie all the way to Oscar. And it may happen, in spite of Summit.

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The Hot Blog

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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