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  • What’s with actors getting arrested in the South?

    Vince Vaughn\'s mugshot from 2001Remember back in 2001 when Vince Vaughn was arrested in North Carolina following a bar brawl in New Hanover county?  Poor Steve Buscemi was even stabbed several times in the process.  All in the service of “Domestic Disturbance.”

    Well now it turns out Josh Brolin and Jeffrey Wright have been taken to the slammer in Shreveport, Louisiana after refusing to leave a bar after closing time.  Refusing to leave a bar after closing time?  THAT’s what gets you yanked in the Bayou?  If they were going to go, they should’ve gone out swinging, I say.

    The actors were in the middle of production on Oliver Stone’s “W” and will probably be out of the big house in no time and back to work.  Brolin’s mug shot isn’t as stellar as Mr. Vaughn’s was seven years back, but he’s sporting a bald head that probably fit him right in at the Stray Cat bar (which sounds like countless dives I’ve frequented in my time…oh the South).

    I’m sorry, but every time I hear about an actor getting charged with “interfering with police” arrest, I get kind of irritated.  Doesn’t it always turn out this way?  Has a cop ever yielded to a movie star before?  Let alone those of the middle (but admittedly rising) stature of Brolin and Wright.

  • Gold Derby backs ‘Happy-Go-Lucky’

    All us awards-watchers know that Tom O’Neil’s Oscar prognostications can be a little wacky (let’s just forget that he predicted “Sweeney Todd” would sweep the top four awards last year, shall we?). Still, he knows the game better than most, and his mid-year list of frontrunners (with assistance from Pete Hammond) in the top three categories makes for interesting reading.

    All the usual suspects (“Benjamin Button,” “Frost/Nixon,” “Revolutionary Road,” etc) are present, though there are some surprising choices – he still has “Blindness” and “Synecdoche, New York” (still without a distributor) in his Best Picture shortlist, and “W” crops up there too.

    O’Neil clearly isn’t buying into “The Road,” though Viggo Mortensen makes an appearance in his Best Actor list. Meanwhile, two unexpected choices stood out for me in his acting lists: Eric Bana in the bestseller adaptation “The Time Traveller’s Wife” (a fairly unknown quantity that I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere), and the terrific Melissa Leo in Sundance champ “Frozen River.”

    What interested me the most, however, is that O’Neil singles out “Happy-Go-Lucky” for discussion, calling it:

    (The) film you may be most underestimating … Mike Leigh’s little flix are often big players (“Vera Drake,” “Secrets and Lies”) and this perky one could be the next “Little Miss Sunshine” or “Juno.” Sally Hawkins already won the Best Actress trophy at the Berlin Film Festival.

    I’ve been predicting big things for Leigh’s delightful film (which, incidentally, gets better the more I contemplate it) for a while now, so I’m pleased to see O’Neil shares my faith in it – though I’m not sure I quite agree with his comparison. It’s certainly a warm and very funny film, but there’s more melancholy and bite to it than either “Juno” or “Little Miss Sunshine.”

    Back in June, Kris wondered where “Happy-Go-Lucky” would land in Miramax’s awards priorities. Since then, the picture has cleared a little bit. With “Doubt” now seemingly the only other prestige contender on Miramax’s slate, Leigh’s film looks well-positioned to get an awards push from the studio – particularly in the event of “Doubt” disappointing. (I still don’t buy the latter as a Best Picture contender.) And with its profile further raised by its inclusion in the Toronto Film Festival lineup, the prospects for “Happy-Go-Lucky” are starting to look as sunny as its title.

  • Exclusive ‘Dark Knight’ clip from MTV

    For some reason this clip isn’t working on the MTV’s site (where it originated), but I found it on YouTube.  Holy, holy:

    httpv://youtube.com/watch?v=RFUFHepGu-g

  • Batman through the years

    Michael Keaton in Warner Bros. Pictures' BatmanDominic Wells of The Times has written a cross-section of Batman as seen on film through the past five decades.  I can’t believe I didn’t know this was being written under my nose.

    He takes us back to the serials of the mid-to-late 1940s and into the “Pow!” and “Bam!” psychedeliq of the 1960s TV series, through the Michael Keaton protests of Tim Burton’s re-imagining as well as Joel Schumacher’s disintegration of the franchise, before bringing us up to speed with Christopher Nolan’s vision of the character.

    I especially liked this bit of insight following an aside on Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns” (and the subsequent push for a film adaptation):

    The book was a critical and commercial smash, and plans were laid for a film. Adam West, now 58, lobbied to reprise the role, which would have suited the Dark Knight Returns storyline. I met him in 1988, when Britain was again gripped by Batmania (TV-am’s ratings leapt 25 per cent after screening the Sixties episodes), and he sounded as though he’d given it considerable thought: “In the final scenes of the film, if it’s bizarre and mysterious, you can still have Alfred the butler driving the old Batmobile to the rescue. We’d have been using all hi-tech, wonderful slick new stuff, and at the critical moment, there’s Alfred, driving the old Batmobile. People would stand up and cheer.”

    But he kind of gets testy with me on this assessment of Burton’s 1989 elseworld take:

    Even so, it’s not particularly good. There are strange holes in the plot where the producer Jon Peters and Tim Burton didn’t see eye to eye, and Kim Basinger, then the producer’s real-life girlfriend, is a waste of space.

    Easy now, Dom.

    Read the rest here.  One of the commenters mentions Sandy Collora’s “Batman: Dead End,” which has always been a fun watch.  If you’ve never seen it, have a look:

    httpv://youtube.com/watch?v=Hjp0I_okX0w

  • Clint Eastwood: the unlikely Oscar favorite

    Clint Eastwood at the Academy Awards in 2005Had anyone said to me in the 1970s that Clint Eastwood would in time become one of the finest and most important American directors in modern cinema, I would have laughed — quite loudly — in their collective faces.

    The star of “Dirty Harry” and “Every Which But Loose?”  The guy who shares the screen with apes?  Are you kidding???  Yet here we are, 37 years after he first pulled that 44-Magnum (“The most powerful hand gun in the world”), and things have changed.  He has won four Academy Awards — two as director, two as producer.  He has been nominated for each on two other occasions and has two Best Actor nominations to his credit as well. He has twice been honored by the Directors Guild of America for and won countless critics awards.

    Eastwood is indeed among the filmmaking elite.  And with the upcoming releases of “Changeling” and “Gran Torino,” he looks primed to flirt with the film awards season yet again.

    While researching my book “Clint Eastwood: Evolution of a Filmmaker,” my respect and admiration for the man has grown considerably. Obviously there was a great deal of admiration to start, otherwise I wouldn’t even begin a bhook on the subject.  But leanring more and more about Eastwood and his work has, understandably, taken things up a level.

    Eastwood challenges himself each time he makes a film.  His choices to act in films such as “Any Which Way You Can” were driven by the fact that he knew the studio would then finance a personal project such as “Bronco Billy.”  What really astounds me, though, is his growth as an actor through the years.

    (more…)

  • Bond song battle goes on… and on

    Alicia KeysI’m taking yesterday’s news that Alicia Keys is the “top contender” to sing the theme song for “Quantum of Solace” with a grain of salt. I’ve had my eye on this story for a while, and since initial frontrunner Amy Winehouse became a hazy prospect, any number of names have been thrown into the pot.

    First it was (God help us) Beyonce. Then the Bond producers were apparently “set on” Leona Lewis. Then Duffy, a soul revivalist in the Winehouse vein, began dropping hints that she had the gig. Then Duran Duran. (You tell me why.) Then Annie Lennox. Even Jack White’s name has been bandied around. Now Keys.

    The Keys rumour appears moderately more credible than some of the others, but if so, she strikes me as an odd choice. All the best Bond themes (“Goldfinger,” “You Only Live Twice,” “Nobody Does It Better,” since you asked) project a sense of danger, sex appeal even, amid the lush arrangements. Keys’ edgeless, uber-earnest R&B just doesn’t fit the bill, to my mind.

    The names put forward so far suggest that the producers are looking for more of a throwback sound after the last two attempts at modernising the formula (Chris Cornell’s oddly dated-sounding “You Know My Name” and Madonna’s plain dismal “Die Another Day”) didn’t exactly set the world alight. The arrival of the Bond theme used to be an event in itself – the amount of press over this installment’s vocalist suggests the producers are trying to recapture that level of anticipation.

    You’d expect the year’s most discussed movie song to be a cinch for an Oscar nomination, whoever lands the gig, but history suggests otherwise. Only three Bond themes (“Live and Let Die,” “Nobody Does It Better,” and – ugh – “For Your Eyes Only”) have ever been nominated, all unsuccessfully. But with the slate of Best Song contenders this year looking sparser than usual, and “Casino Royale” having given the franchise a major boost in cred, the odds of a nomination look better than usual. The producers should therefore be especially canny about who they choose.

    (more…)

  • Funniest part of ‘Inglorious Bastards’ so far

    Poor Tarantino keeps mistaking “mein Fuhrer” for “mine Fuhrer,” in addition to all the other 4th grade-level typos.  Maybe Jeff Wells is right about the “borderline illiterate” thing.  But Vulture really should have included this follow-up gem of a retarded segment in their recent reaction to the Nazi scalps bit:

    Excerpt from Quentin Tarantino\'s Inglorious Bastards

    Gold for the gold, QT.  Oh, and Adolf Hitler (yes, that Adolf Hitler) is reading on the page like Kim Jong-il in “Team America.”

    Try to stay open minded…that’s what I have to keep telling myself.

  • “It means, Dave, you haven’t closed a good one in a month, none of my business, you want to push me to answer you.”

  • Miller on Comic-Con

    Variety’s Anne Thompson interviewed “Twilight” director Catherine Hardwicke and “The Spirit” helmer Frank Miller for her latest column in the build-up to this year’s San Diego Comic Convention.  But Miller pegged this overblown, over-infested blight when he offered:

    It’s now turned into Disneyland, a multimedia congress astonishing in its scale.

    No doubt.  And sad, too.

  • Last day at The Times

    And two more days to go before its back to the other side of the pond. Not that the readership is meant to care, but hey, this blog is the victim of my brain leakage from time to time.

    I can’t, however, say that time seemed to fly by.  These last two months have been very long indeed. I’m not entirely sure why, and I certainly had my fair share of fun. Sometimes, it’s just time to go home, I guess.  And your mind knows it.

    I’ve had a blast at The Times, one laid-back and classy atmosphere in which to work.  If anyone has a passing interest in some of the stuff I cranked out while parked at the desk here at News International, have a look here.  A lot of press release stuff, plenty of entertainment stories (and to think — I had hoped to peel away from that somewhat).  Fun times throughout.

    Cheers.

  • New Toronto films announced

    Miramax Films\' Happy-Go-LuckyThe press office of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF for future purposes) announced some new titles for the line up at this year’s festival yesterday.

    Two Gala Presentation announcements include “The Secret Life of Bees” with Dakota Fanning, Paul Bettany, Jennifer Hudson and Queen Latifah, and “The Duchess” featuring Keira Knightley in the biographical role of a woman who brought sweeping political change to England with her progressive attitudes.

    In the Special Presentations Program we have “Every Little Step,” looking to be a fascinating documentary about the making of the Broadway sensation “A Chorus Line,” which dominated American Theatre in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was royally screwed up as a film by the vastly over-appreciated Sir Richard Attenborough.

    From the great Wong Kar-Gai comes “Ashes of Time Redux,”  while Mike Leigh brings to us the highly anticiapted “Happy-Go-Lucky”. Guy Ritchie will unveil “RocknRolla” to audiences here with Larry Charles bringing to our fair city his new picture “Religulous”.

    “Ghost Town” sounds promising, as the story follows a man portrayed by Ricky Gervais who dies unexpectedly and is revived with the powert to see ghosts. And as expected, “Waltz with Bashir” will make its North American premiere here at TIFF.

  • Gawker to Tarantino: “Have some respect for yourself.”

    Quentin TarantinoMore often than not, I find Stu VanAirsdale to be a world class champ at blowing hot air.  But even I have to admit he’s writing exactly what I’m thinking with this open letter to Quentin Tarantino.

    The key excerpt, which sticks the landing:

    Meanwhile, in a move pulled unusually early from the dogeared Weinstein Textbook, the press is doing your fundraising for you. We’d give you Provincetown if not for the embarrassing leaks that followed this week, one after another — the kickdowns to Nikki Finke (“Quentin Tarantino is talking to Brad Pitt”!) and now this Inglorious Basterds [sic] script over at Vulture, itself the venerated “basterd” offspring of your insolvent patron’s public studio-shopping. Mission accomplished, we suppose, if overexposure is what you had in mind. The anonymous media saturation is supposed to come just before the release, not just before the money runs out.

  • Did Hector Babenco really get his Hurts confused??

    William Hurt in Kiss of the Spider WomanI’m not too privy to the behind-the-scenes drama of Hector Babenco’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”  I haven’t even seen the film in close to a decade and it’s one of those that slips my memory more often than not, maybe because it hasn’t been available in any home medium for so long, but likely because I didn’t respond to the material originally.

    I couldn’t deny William Hurt’s affecting (and Oscar-winning) performance, however.  Ditto Raul Julia’s concentrated work.  Regardless, I’ve been meaning to give it another look ever since.

    Anyway, I was reading through Lou Lumenick’s recounting of the film’s rocky road to the screen (as detailed in the documentary “Tangled Web: Making ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’”), and my head was spinning.  I never knew there was such turmoil going on off-camera.  But nothing could have prepared me for this bit:

    [Leonard] Schrader’s screenplay originally attracted the attention of Burt Lancaster, who wanted to play Luis, and consequently of the major Hollywood studios. But Lancaster left the project after Weisman refused to use a different script written by Lancaster himself — who had done his own costume test in drag.

    [Producer David] Weisman went with Hurt, then an up and coming leading man. Hurt clashed repeatedly with director [Hector] Babenco, who thought he was going to be working with the British actor John Hurt.

    W…T…F?  And there’s more.  I encourage you to give it a read if you weren’t already aware of all of this (something tells me I should have been).

    “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is finally getting a DVD release this month, by the way.  It hits the market as a two-disc collector’s edition and on Blu-ray (both of them apparently Amazon exclusives) on July 22.

  • Sean Penn defends ‘Che’

    Benicio Del Toro in CheBritish film magazine Sight & Sound has a nice new tradition of interviewing the jury president of the most recent Cannes Film Festival, which makes for interesting reading. (Last year’s prez, Stephen Frears, presciently predicted in his interview that “No Country for Old Men” would “do really well,” despite not winning anything at the festival.)

    Unsurprisingly, 2008 president Sean Penn is rather more candid in his interview with  Richard T. Kelly. After admitting that he had four clear favourites in the competition (two of which, “The Class” and “Che,” were unanimously awarded their respective Palme d’Or and Best Actor prizes), he then launches into an impassioned defence of Steven Soderbergh’s polarising opus, as well as an attack on the journalists who dismissed it:

    Right through the festival I had no awareness of what the ‘buzz’ was, and I shut people down if they tried to talk about movies in front of me. But when I did a little bit of catch-up browsing afterward I read some of the stupidest, ugliest, most cynical responses to what had gone on, and I had the front-seat to be aware of their inconsistencies.

    “Che” is a great example. I pray it finds distribution in the four-hour-plus form I saw, because otherwise people will be missing out.  The film-making is stellar: there are so many details in the execution of that huge story. Every sentiment about Guevara I’ve heard passionately expressed when I’ve travelled in Cuba and South America was not only dramatised, but without exposition, seamlessly, fulfilling the narrative. Then you have one of the first tour de force performances in film history that doesn’t rely on the close-up.

    This is a film, I later find, that had some negative responses…I was in a jury room of nine people with more expertise in their big toenails than any of the people writing in these papers: nine out of nine wanted to go out and change the world afterwards.

    (more…)

  • Viral marketing pays off for ‘Dark Knight’ committed

    WhySoSerious.comI stumbled onto this today at /film, but it turns out the “Dark Knight” viral marketing campaign, thoroughly concocted and carried out by 42 Entertainment, has paid off in spades for Bat-fans who stuck it out.

    A wave of Tuesday noght screenings across the country was announced on the WhySoSerious.com viral site, and each of them: free.  So if you’ve been huffing it about your metropolitan area participating in those crazy scavenger huts and paying close attention to every nuance the viral sites have put out there, now’s your chance to step up and get your cookie.

    Personally, the viral stuff wore out on me long ago.  It became something of a burden to even feel informed at one point, and the overall depth kind of left me for wanting.  But maybe I’m getting old.  All of that said, I’m actually very happy to see the end result pay off for loads of committed fans who clearly have a passion for this character and this franchise.  It’s a special symbiosis.

    And in a strange sort of way, the whole episode rings as a nice au revoir to Heath Ledger.  The Joker has been “behind” all of the viral shenanigans, after all.  So congrats to all the fans who stuck it through.  Enjoy the early show (and come on — when you’re just a fan and not stuck in the cynical world of film criticism and journalism — an early screening is pretty much the greatest thing on earth).

  • Favreau returns

    Jon FavreauSo according to Deadline Hollywood Daily, Jon Favreau is officially directing “Iron Man 2.”

    While I may not have been as gung-ho for “Iron Man” as most, I’m more than glad to see him come back. The first film, to me, felt like a good movie begging for a great sequel, and I think the same could be said of Favreau as a director. He’s been improving from picture to picture and I think “Iron Man 2” could be the moment where he really comes into his own as a filmmaker.

    With “Iron Man” currently the highest grossing film of the year (probably just for a few more days until “Crystal Skull” finally overtakes it) and Robert Downey Jr. undeniably becoming the A-lister we all knew he could (and should) be, it was simply ignorant of Marvel to think they could get away with anyone but Favreau in the director’s chair.

    I’m wondering when Marvel will start moving the pieces more definitively in place for the rest of the inevitable “Avengers” flick. Edgar Wright is the only confirmed director (for “Ant-Man,” which he’ll go into post-“Scott Pilgrim,” and which I’d guess Marvel will want to throw into “The Avengers” just for gluttony’s sake).  But for anything beyond “Iron Man 2,” I think we’ll be hearing announcements in the coming months, specifically at Comic-Con.

    On a side note, it looks like “The Incredible Hulk” will narrowly sneak past “Hulk” at the box office some time this month. I’m guessing that’s probably not good enough for another sequel

  • ‘Le Chevalier Noir’

    Sweet:

    The Dark Knight poster on the streets of Paris

  • John picks the greatest leading performances of all time

    As a film critic, the questions most often put to me concern performance, especially when folks find out I have a background in acting.  I was a terrible performer, but I think I can spot talent, which has helped me in my work as a stage director.

    However, film was where my heart was and all I really wanted to do was write about the silver screen.  And performances make the greatest impact on me — always have.

    So with that, I thought I’d offer up my picks for the greatest lead performances of all time:

    Male
    1. Daniel Day-Lewis in “There Will Be Blood”
    2. Robert Duvall in “The Apostle”
    3. Marlon Brando in “Last Tango in Paris”
    4. Jack Nicholson in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”
    5. Dustin Hoffman in “Tootsie”
    6. Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront”
    7. Robert De Niro in “Raging Bull”
    8. John Wayne in “The Searchers”
    9. Denzel Washington in “Malcolm X”
    10. George C. Scott in “Patton”

    Female
    1. Meryl Streep in “Sophie’s Choice”
    2. Jane Fonda in “Klute”
    3. Katherine Hepburn in “Long Day’s Journey into Night”
    4. Vivien Leigh in “Gone with the Wind”
    5. Holly Hunter in “The Piano”
    6. Gloria Swanson in “Sunset Boulevard”
    7. Charlize Theron in “Monster”
    8. Elizabeth Taylor in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
    9. Anjelica Huston in “The Grifters”
    10. Ellen Burstyn in “Requiem for a Dream”