Hollywood Round-up, 8/12

By Jason Apuzzo. • SCI-FI GETS POLITICAL. Some of you may recall my recent exchange with the LA Times’ Patrick Goldstein on the political/ideological overtones of Hollywood’s current sci-fi craze.  I think the new trailer (see above) for the forthcoming alien invasion pic Skyline makes this point more vividly than anything I’ve seen, although the poster for Battle: Los Angeles certainly comes close.  [Is there some reason aliens are targeting LA, these days?  Is it the traffic?]

The trailer basically associates the film’s frightening alien invasion of Los Angeles with the ‘invasion’ of the New World by Europeans in the 15th and 16th centuries.  And these associations are spelled out in the trailer by … Dan Rather, and MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell!  [By way of quoting Stephen Hawking’s recent comments on the dark possibilities associated with alien contact.]  Talk about ‘on-the-nose’ filmmaking.

So it looks like Skyline will thematically be taking us directly into Avatar territory: i.e., sub-rosa critiques of White European Invaders as the metaphorical ‘aliens’ we really need to fear.  [Sigh.] That’s too bad, because the trailer otherwise looks promising … except for the fact that I’ve already seen this film before, when it was titled War of the Worlds.

One might potentially interpret Skyline as a reverse-riff on the theme of Christian ‘rapture,’ by the way.  Just a thought.

Alien invaders gobbling up innocent citizens of Los Angeles. Expect indigestion.

• In other sci-fi news, Disney/Pixar’s John Carter of Mars has a release date (June 8th, 2012, in 3D); Scarlett Johansson and Blake Lively are currently tussling over a role in the Robert Downey, Jr. sci-fi thriller Gravity (a role turned down by Angelina Jolie after they wouldn’t pay her $20 million fee); and there’s some colorful casting news for George Miller’s forthcoming 3D-native Mad Max: Fury Road – about which I’m getting quite excited.  It turns out that Elvis Presley’s granddaughter, model/actress Riley Keough, has been cast in the film – along with other babes like Zoe Kravitz, Teresa Palmer , Adelaide Clemens and Charlize Theron (of whom I’m not a fan, however).

Elvis' granddaughter up for "Mad Max: Fury Road."

By the way, according to Hollywood Reporter’s HeatVision blog, here’s Fury Road’s storyline: “Keough will play one of the ‘Five Wives,’ a group of women that [Mad Max] must protect from the bad guys.  Zoe Kravitz, Teresa Palmer and Adelaide Clemens are three of other wives.”  This film is looking better by the day – much more enticing than what I was expecting.  Book me in.  Incidentally, since Mad Max is actually protecting women in this film, it’s now obvious to me why Mel Gibson won’t be playing Max anymore.

• The Expendables is coming out soon, and Stallone says he’s already got a ‘radical’ idea for a sequel – provided this first film does well.  I’m guessing Stallone sends his team after Bin Laden.  You heard it here first.

• Actor James Caan tells Fox News that he’s an “ultra conservative” – which is ironic, given that Caan is currently in the news because he’s starring in a movie that more-or-less glamorizes the porn industry.  Just sayin’.

While on the Fox News front, incidentally … the network really earned its name today by having 3 Victoria’s Secret models on as part of a hard-hitting, investigative segment on a new line of brassieres.  It really was a great segment – I learned a lot.

• In a recent post entitled, “Christopher Nolan’s Dead Women,” Culture Snob’s Jeff Ignatius notes something that I’ve detected, as well:

In at least four of Christopher Nolan’s seven feature films, the plots and/or fixations are initiated or propelled by the death of a man’s spouse or girlfriend. Considering that Nolan’s primary thematic interest is obsession, isn’t this a little strange?

Yes, it is.  Ignatius later dances around the obvious question: namely, whether some, dark misogynistic impulse is at the imaginative core of Nolan’s work.  I wish more people would take note of this, because it’s a deeply disturbing aspect not only of Nolan’s work, but of the fandom that worships him.

• Want to see the Hollywood breakdown of who’s donating to Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown? Interesting oddity: Anschutz Entertainment giving $45,400 to Jerry Brown.  Also: Haim Saban giving $25,900 to Whitman, even though Saban’s perhaps the Democratic Party’s biggest donor.

• Nikki Finke talks with Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks today. Best exchange:

DH: Is it weird to be a sex symbol?

CH: You know, the good part about that is maybe I’ve contributed to helping women appreciate themselves the way they are, that we don’t all have to be a Size 2 to be beautiful. Anything I’ve done to help change people’s minds about that is something to be proud of, I think.

We share her pride.

Kelly Brook of "Piranha 3D."

• The new trailer for the Christina Aguilera/Cher/Stanley Tucci Burlesque runs through about every biopic cliché in the book, but the funniest part to me is the ending when you learn that Burlesque is going to be out in time for Thanksgiving!  Yes, perfect Thanksgiving fare! I know I’ll be there, right after passing the gravy boat.

In related news, Katy Perry also has a new video out today for Teenage Dream, which somehow manages to be both racy and dull at the same time.

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … Piranha 3D’s Kelly Brook has a new interview out today in which she reveals that Piranha 3D’s French director Alexandre Aja discovered her in an LA restaurant … while she was eating fish and chips.

The fish get their revenge on August 20th.

And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood …

Posted on August 11th, 2010 at 3:52pm.

Mad Men Season 4, Episode 3: “The Good News”

By Jennifer Baldwin. One of the things I love about Mad Men is the tone of the show. It’s dispassionate, restrained, observant. In its first season, the show had a tendency to get a little condescending towards the era, but thankfully, show runner Matthew Weiner has managed to pull back on this tendency and just let the era “be” — he doesn’t flinch from showing the faults of these characters and their society, but he also doesn’t preach at us about how horrible these people and their world were. He just lets the world of the show play out, and it’s up to us how we judge things. Compared to other shows and movies set in the 1960s, Mad Men is one of the least preachy.

The increasingly detached, observant tone of Mad Men is what helps make it so fascinating, both as drama and as social commentary. This third episode of Season Four is no exception. The characters and their choices are given to us with very little commentary or editorializing from the writers and it’s up to us, the audience, to decide how we feel about them.

Anna and Don.

At its most basic, Mad Men is a character study. People who’ve tried just watching one episode here or there find they can’t get into the show, but that’s because it’s hard to jump in midstream when you’re watching the lives of fully developed people unfold before your eyes. It takes time to get to know someone, and the characters of Mad Men — the life blood of the show — are as multi-faceted and complex as fictional characters get. It takes time to get to know them.

This week’s episode, in fact, made me feel something I never thought I’d feel for a character I never thought I would like: Greg, Joan’s husband (a character I had previously nicknamed “Doctor McRapist Jerkface”). But somehow, just as they did with Pete over the course of the first couple of seasons, the Mad Men writers have made Dr. Greg sympathetic. When he bandages Joan’s finger after she cuts herself in the kitchen — the way he calms her down, comforts her, takes charge — it was endearing. Suddenly, a character that I couldn’t wait to leave for Vietnam so he could get killed was a character I kinda, sorta, unbelievably cared about. It was a moment that made me realize that Joan married him not just for the stability and because he was a good-looking doctor, but because he has a heart, that she saw something good in him, even though he had committed a despicable act against her (the rape scene from Season Two). It’s the kind of character moment that Mad Men excels at:  a seemingly “bad” character doing a good thing.

Lane.

Of course, that’s the whole appeal of a character like Don Draper; a character we’re fascinated by and care about, even as he does some pretty bad things. This week’s episode gave us the two sides of Don: the caring, sensitive, wounded Dick Whitman and the swinging, boozy, divorcee businessman Don Draper. When he visits Anna Draper in California and finds out she has terminal cancer (and that she hasn’t been told about it), we witness his heart breaking before our eyes.

But then Don returns to New York, takes recently-left-by-his-wife Lane Pryce under his wing, and the two go out for a night of drinking, excess, and eventually, prostitutes. Don echoes the line from last week — about the conflict between doing what we want versus doing what’s expected of us — and he encourages Lane to do what he wants and not what’s expected of him. Lane sleeps with the prostitute that Don has gotten for him; he’s chosen self over duty. Lane won’t be jetting off to England any time soon to try to repair his marriage.

And so, another thread in the fabric of a stable society is thereby cut. “Don Draper” seems to be winning out over “Dick Whitman” this season. And he’s bringing characters like Lane Pryce with him. It remains to be seen whether these two will find any lasting happiness on the path they have chosen. Welcome to 1965.

One final thought: Don and Lane really should have gone to see The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, one of my favorite films, instead of Godzilla vs. The Thing (or Gamera, or whatever Japanese monster movie that was). At least they didn’t go see It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

Posted on August 11th, 2010 at 12:20pm.

The Tyranny Of Likeability


By The Joker. Studio note number 63: “The protagonist isn’t likeable enough.”

My response: “Likeability?  That didn’t stop the studio from hiring you.”

Welcome to The Tyranny of Likeability.

You’ve just read a very common studio note that suggests the basic problem with today’s compulsive over-tinkering on comedies. Sometimes characters aren’t supposed to be likeable. Sometimes that’s why they’re funny.

Take Dinner for Schmucks. Based on the vastly superior French film, Le Diner de Cons (“The Dinner Game”) – written and directed by Francis Veber – Dinner for Schmucks is about a group of mean-spirited executives who invite idiots over for dinner in order to make fun of them.

In other words, the film is about a group of actual schmucks.

"Please like me."

Surprise, surprise, after the French film was remade by the studio, test audiences found the executives to be “too unlikeable.”  The studio panicked, the film was recut, and voilà, the characters were suddenly redeemable.

Too bad the movie wasn’t funny anymore.

Part of the problem here is relying on test audiences and focus groups.  A studio questionnaire will literally ask, “What was your least favorite scene?” Invariably, audiences choose scenes in which something bad happens. (I’m sure if they had NRG screenings in the 1970’s, the audience’s least favorite scene in Rocky would have been: “when Rocky loses the fight.”) The studio interprets this as a scene that needs to be fixed instead of a scene that merely evokes negative emotions (perhaps masterfully). And since the studio is afraid of films testing badly, they force absurd changes on the story.

Because as I mentioned previously, fear is what rules Hollywood.  And when people are afraid, they want to be liked.  Call it The Tyranny Of Likeability.

Posted on August 11th, 2010 at 10:02am.

New Villain for Nikita: The CIA!

By Jason Apuzzo. Does the poster on your left grab your attention?  It certainly caught mine, although perhaps that had to do with the fact that there was an approximately 100 foot high version of it draped over a building I drove by recently here in LA.  I have a great interest in firearms, you understand, and seeing an automatic rifle that large immediately caught my attention.

I’m being facetious, of course – at least with respect to the relative appeal of firearms.  Nikita, for those of you who may not have heard, is the CW’s reboot of a TV show – La Femme Nikita – that was actually once run by an acquaintance of mine, 24 producer Joel Surnow.  And Joel’s show, in turn, was based on the 1990 Luc Besson film of the same name, about a young criminal babe recruited to work for French intelligence – and to otherwise fire guns while wearing 4-inch heels.

There was a so-so American remake of Besson’s film that followed in 1993, called Point of No Return, starring Bridget Fonda.  Then came Joel’s gritty, noirish and very successful show in the late 90s – until that show ran its course, roughly around the time he was developing 24.

And whereas the specific plotlines of these various Nikitas have changed, one element has remained constant: a sexy young misfit woman, who must be able to fire semi-automatic weaponry while wearing cocktail dresses, is recruited by mysterious intelligence forces to fight … somebody.

Perhaps you already see where I’m going with this.

In Joel’s version of La Femme Nikita, sexy young Nikita (played by Peta Wilson) is recruited by a shadowy government organization to fight terrorism.  [Bear in mind that this anti-terrorist plotline was developed prior to 9/11 – as was 24‘s original plotline, incidentally.]  Some of La Femme Nikita’s basic plotline and vibe eventually got rolled into 24 – with fantastic results, of course.

Now would seem to be a good time to go back to that anti-terror storyline, what with Al Qaeda still lurking around, right?  With, for example, young terrorist guys trying to set off bombs in Time Square, or gals like Jihad Jane trying to recruit young people into Al Qaeda.

And incidentally, let’s not forget Salt in this context.  In that very recent film, sexy spy Angelina Jolie battles retro-communist sleeper agents here in the U.S. – in a clever, Rubik’s Cube storyline seemingly ripped from current headlines (i.e., the capture of Russian spy babes like Anna Chapman and Anna Fermanova).  The worldwide grosses on Salt are currently topping $150 million, so now would seem to be a good time to send Nikita after some infiltrating, ideologically driven baddies, yes?  Russian agents … Al Qaeda moles … perhaps even a Chinese communist superspy or two (cue Hawaii Five-O theme).

Wrong!  In the new Nikita series, we’re the villains.  Or at least, the C.I.A. and American intelligence services are the villains (see here and here or the video below).  Angry, pinch-faced W.A.S.P. bureaucrats in cheap suits are the villains.  [And I’ll bet they have bad aftershave, too!]

This irritates me.  I would like to be able to watch this show, for reasons I presumably don’t need to explain (at least to the male readers of this website).  Doing a series like this should be so easy – a breeze, actually.

Peta Wilson, from the original series.

You find some good looking gal, and have her hunt down, say, a snarling member of the A.Q. Khan smuggling network who’s trying to get nuclear materials into Miami … while he enjoys a few martinis at the Skybar.  Maybe he’s a Russian mobster with a weakness for Incan quinoa and Fantasy Football.

Our delectable heroine pulls up to the club in a Lamborghini Murcielago (CUT TO: camera capturing her shapely leg as the doorman helps her out of the car); after some perfunctory banter, and few snappy and/or inane quips (“Next time, make sure my salmon is served cold!”) she pulls a Glock out of her garter and has a shootout with the Russian and his gang, and escapes from a fireball or two – just in time to make it back home to her charmingly oblivious boyfriend in the suburbs, who just got back from a sale at Ikea.

I mean, the story writes itself.

Instead, the CW has decided to make us the villains.  What a drag.  These kinds of shows are being made all the time (e.g., Alias, Dark Angel, Painkiller Jane), and there are many different ways to go with the material.  CW is making the most idiotic decision imaginable by making our own intelligence services into the bad guys.

Why idiotic?  Because your garden variety Hollywood liberal – one thinks here of, say, Jeffrey Wells – isn’t going to watch this series anyway just because there’s a snarky, leftie-conspiratorial plotline. They’ll consider this show too déclassé to begin with … while potential viewers like me get alienated.  And again, why?  What’s the purpose?  Because the producers want to make some asinine point about U.S. foreign policy?

Is that really why they think we watch this stuff?

Posted on August 10th, 2010 at 1:57pm.

Review: Cairo Time

By Patricia Ducey. Time in Cairo is slow. Very slow. Glances are exchanged. Background concertos are heard. Sparks, however, are not ignited, ever, between Juliette (Patricia Clarkson), an American magazine editor and Tareq (Alexander Siddig of Syriana), her supposed Romeo in Cairo Time.

This is not Shakespeare, or even English Patient (a great weepy if ever there was one). This is one nuanced love affair.

Juliette and Tareq represent archetypes of the East and West, yet they are actually more alike than different: both inhabit internationalist circles – Tareq just recently retired from the U.N., where he came to know Juliet’s husband (a UN operative in Gaza), and Juliet herself a feminist women’s magazine editor. Not much of a culture clash here. At a few points in the film Tareq lightly (and rightly) scolds Juliet for her easy outrage over a few social problems in Egypt. This hints at further story is to come, perhaps a real discussion of custom and culture, but nothing develops. (The Last King of Scotland, by contrast, brilliantly portrayed the deadly consequences of feckless liberalism in its main character.)

Juliette arrives in Cairo to await her husband’s arrival from Gaza so they can enjoy a long dreamed of vacation together. He is delayed, though, by trouble in the refugee camp he manages – so he asks his old friend Tareq to see after his wife until he can join her. Juliette seems anxious, tentative and tongue-tied from the start – odd behavior for a successful magazine editor. We wonder why – middle age crisis, bad marriage, illness? – but we never find out. She loves her husband, children, and her job. Tareq tries to draw her out but she rebuffs him. Later, though, she mystifyingly shows up at his men-only coffeehouse to visit him – not once but twice.

This fog of ambiguity never clears, and slows the movie down to a crawl. Juliette wanders the streets alone, inexplicably tossing aside her husband’s warnings about women traveling alone. Naïve, self-destructive? One can only ponder. This behavior does reveal the only people who seem to know who they are, sadly: the bands of leering men on the Cairo streets who consider her, a Western woman alone on the street, as something south of “available.”

Juliette finally takes action after her husband is delayed again and again. She hops a bus to the border and to Gaza to find him, but the Egyptian police stop the bus and send her back to the hotel; they realize the situation in Gaza is dangerous.  As Juliette follows the police, her seatmate – a young Egyptian woman – stuffs an envelope into Juliette’s hands and implores her to deliver it to her lover back in Cairo. Again, hints at a story: tension, mixed up in politics, danger – but this too goes nowhere. She gives the letter to the young woman’s lover.

Non-doomed lovers.

The narrative of any melodrama demands some rupture of the moral code. English Patient’s doomed love story was played out on the canvas of a World War, when the old world order was collapsing in England and the Middle East. The lovers in English Patient violated every norm of class, race, gender and sexual orientation and died in agony for their transgressions. Patricia Clarkson’s protagonist, on the other hand, is a modern Western woman and thus is left with no moral code to rupture whatsoever. What will she lose if she betrays her husband, what would happen if she did betray him with Tareq? Not much. Tareq is an Egyptian Muslim who is kind of secular, kind of not. We are not quite sure what his moral code is either, or if he has one. Perhaps this is why the greatest doomed love stories take place at least pre-1950.

Canadian writer/director Ruba Nadda has underwritten both the characters and the story. The characters’ physicality – walking, talking, eye gazing, walking, talking – as well as their sparse dialogue reveal little. Clarkson and Siddig do their best but have little to work with.

My inner writer asks, what do these characters want? Apparently not each other. Or at least not very much. Perhaps Juliette will remain faithful to her husband, perhaps not, but it is of no real import to a woman in the grips of such anomie. Tareq was content pre-Juliette and is content post-Juliette.  I am not asking for these characters to outrun a fireball or gun down CIA assassins – I just want to know why their lives and loves matter.

Posted on August 10th, 2010 at 9:36am.

Who Needs Movie Stars? I Do!

By Jennifer Baldwin. It’s August and that means Stars. Movie Stars. August is the month when TCM airs its annual “Summer Under the Stars” festival — 31 days of movie stars — with each day devoted to the films of a different star. This year’s schedule includes days devoted to Basil Rathbone, Norma Shearer, Errol Flynn, Ann Sheridan, Olivia De Havilland, Clint Eastwood, John Gilbert, Warren Beatty, Thelma Todd, and many more. Thanks to “Summer Under the Stars,” August has become a month that classic movie fans can’t help but love.

But why do we love it? First of all, we love the posters. Seriously, TCM does a phenomenal job with their advertising when it comes to the “Summer Under the Stars.” Last year’s promotional art posters were so good, in fact, that I wish TCM had sold them as full-sized glossy posters that I could put on my wall. This year, graphic artist Michael Schwab has designed eye-popping silhouettes for each of the thirty-one stars.

Why else do we love the “Summer Under the Stars”? Well, there’s the chance to see films rarely shown on TCM. When you’ve got twenty-four hours devoted to say, the films of John Gilbert, there’s bound to be a lot of movies that don’t normally make the TCM rotation. This year’s rarities include films starring Gilbert, Thelma Todd, and Woody Strode. Also, days devoted to Gene Tierney, Julie Christie, Ann Sheridan, Bob Hope, Kathryn Grayson, Lee Remick, and Robert Ryan offer the opportunity to dig a little deeper into the filmographies of stars who don’t get as much play as some of the perennial heavy hitters like Flynn, Bergman, and Hepburn.

But beyond the promotional art, and the rare films, the biggest reason we love the “Summer Under the Stars” is because we love the stars themselves. Sure, TCM shows a Katharine Hepburn movie at least once a week (and that’s on a slow week), but there’s something about watching an entire day’s worth of her films (or Errol Flynn’s, or Paul Newman’s, or Ingrid Bergman’s) that’s just… special. A big part of loving old movies means loving old movie stars.

That’s why I’m distressed to see a few articles on the web recently claim we don’t need movie stars anymore (and even more radically, that we never really needed them in the first place). Sure, the annual “Are Movie Stars Dead?” article is as predictable as the old “Did Jaws and Star Wars Kill the Movies” article. But this new trend – to not just lament the death of movie stars but to say “good riddance” as well – is a bit disturbing. Who are these people who think that movies don’t need movie stars?

It’s an idea that’s utterly foreign to me. I got into old movies because of the movie stars. I wouldn’t have become the crazy, obsessive classic movie fanatic that I am today if it hadn’t been for the movie stars I came to love. I was first introduced to old movies by my mom: folding laundry with her on the couch, a rainy Saturday afternoon, an old Hitchcock film or 1940s romance on the TV. I enjoyed these old movies well enough, but they didn’t mean all that much to me. I hadn’t fallen in love with them yet. Continue reading Who Needs Movie Stars? I Do!