LFM was invited to visit the set of an important and much-discussed new film last week. We had a wonderful time – and the cast, crew and production team could not have been friendlier.
We’ll be reporting on this in coming days … and breaking some news. So stay tuned.
Posted on July 19th, 2010 at 6:02pm.
By Jason Apuzzo. • In his review today, Todd McCarthy (formerly of Variety, and author of a very fine biography of Howard Hawks) confirms that re-born Russian communists – in the form of a long-dormant Soviet sleeper cell – are indeed the villains of the new film Salt. The goal of these Reds? To kill the current Russian president on American soil, and – I’m guessing here – take advantage of the resultant chaos to seize control back of Russia? The suspense in Salt apparently consists in the question of whether CIA agent Angelina Jolie, who was apparently captured and brainwashed in North Korea (shades of The Manchurian Candidate here), is part of the sleeper cell or not. I’m guessing not.
All of this may also suggest why, as we’ve reported here previously, Salt has already been banned in China.
I’m loving the sound of this, frankly, although I assume in penance for this neo-Cold War scenario the filmmakers will feel the need to take gratuitous pot shots at the CIA, and make them the ‘enemy lite’ of the piece. Still, you take what you can get, right?
We’ll be keeping an eye on all this. Here at LFM we’ve been documenting the return of Cold War fever (see here, here, here, here and even here), and I’m certainly looking forward to this latest outbreak. Jolie does an interesting interview on the film today, as does director Phillip Noyce (who did the early Jack Ryan films).
It’s hard not to have mixed feelings about Jolie at this point. What is undeniable, however, is that Jolie’s baroque, decadent personality in public is something that can work to her advantage on-screen in over-the-top-roles like this one. So few ‘stars’ nowadays actually have personalities; that’s obviously not a problem here. The question is whether middle America is really interested in following her any more. [By contrast, I expect this film to go gangbusters overseas.] We’ll find out, starting Friday.
The funny thing is how universally acknowledged it is (including by me) that Jolie is probably better at this stuff than 90% of the male action stars. That’s both a credit to her, and to some extent a rebuke of what passes for male action stars these days. I mean, I’ve been kidding a lot here lately about Adrien Brody being in Predators (he was also in King Kong, of course) – but this is the whole problem, isn’t it? Adrien Brody should not be battling aliens, unless you’re eager to have the aliens win. I’d feel more confident about Jolie under such circumstances. Wouldn’t you?
Oh, and one other juicy tidbit about the film from today: apparently Salt was originally intended for Tom Cruise … who opted instead for Knight and Day. Ouch.
Posted on July 19th, 2010 at 5:20pm.
By Jason Apuzzo. • No surprises here: due to the initial hype, Inception finished first at the weekend box office – but I suspect the drop-off on this one will be significant over the next few weeks. Opinions on the film continue to be sharply divided, of course. The New Yorker’s David Denby is the latest influential critic to pan the film, calling it “an engineering feat, and, finally, a folly.”
Momentarily setting aside my own highly sarcastic, upside down review of the film, I can tell you that I otherwise found Inception to be a perfect example of the soulless, technocratic filmmaking that we’ve all become accustomed to from Hollywood – although Christopher Nolan is very clever at disguising his film as being something else (i.e., upscale art house fare). Besides also being a deeply nihilistic and (as is so often the case with Nolan’s films) creepily misogynistic film, the film offers a dull, rationalist’s take on the fundamentally irrational dream state – and thereby misses the point of what dreams are actually like. The film is pedantic when it should be uncanny, too swift to get to the next explosion rather than actually explore a character. Basically the film’s a bore, put together with a slide-rule instead of inspiration. And I suspect audiences will grow cold on it over time.
I’d like to thank our wonderful readers for putting up with my upside down review, so to speak, and for keeping the debate on this film civil – something that (unfortunately) doesn’t always happen when Nolan’s films are being discussed. LFM’s readers are the finest out there.
• Will 50% of Hollywood’s box office take be coming from 3D films within the next 3 years? One major theater chain thinks so, and is putting its money behind that technology. And probably they’re right. The pressure to release in 3D is immense right now, and is already changing how movies are being conceptualized, even at the script stage.
• And speaking of which, Tim Burton is apparently developing the board game “Monsterpocalypse” into a summer 3D tentpole project. And if it were still legal to trade movie futures, that would be the one to put your money on …
• Did you know Breck Eisner is developing a Flash Gordon project? What a shame. He hasn’t done enough penance yet for Sahara to get such an important franchise. What happened to Stephen Sommers?
• It looks like the new Maggie Thatcher movie might be a hit job. The family is apparently “appalled” at the project. Here’s the money quote from the UK’s Guardian:
“… the screenplay of The Iron Lady depicts Baroness Thatcher as an elderly dementia-sufferer looking back on her career with sadness. She is shown talking to herself and unaware that her husband, Sir Denis Thatcher, has died.
“Sir Mark and Carol are appalled at what they have learnt about the film,” says a friend of the family. “They think it sounds like some Left-wing fantasy. They feel strongly about it, but will not speak publicly for fear of giving it more publicity.”
What a shame … but completely predictable, since Streep is involved. Thatcher deserves so much better than this shabby treatment.
• … and speaking of dementia, the UK’s Guardian also does a long interview today with Oliver Stone, who is now apparently working on a new project called Oliver Stone’s Secret History of America. Stone is becoming something like the left-wing answer to Howard Hughes back in the day – except that before going insane, and producing some very bad films, Hughes actually had some serious accomplishments to his name.
• Avatar is apparently very big in the Amazon. Do they have 3D down there?
• Here’s Peter Jackson showing a childhood film of his that was inspired by Ray Harryhausen’s work … with Ray Harryhausen in the audience watching along. Great stuff. Ray is such an inspiration to everybody.
• Did you hear? Aaron Sorkin will be making a film about John Edwards, and casting has already begun. Given what a dud Edwards’ campaign was, does this pic have an audience?
• MUBI has some nice things to say today about Disco & Atomic War and 1428, two recent films from the LA Film Festival that we loved here at LFM (see our reviews here and here). Thanks to them for that.
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … there’s a new billboard out today featuring Tron: Legacy‘s Olivia Wilde as ‘Quorra.’ We’re looking forward to this film come December.
And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood …
Posted on July 19th, 2010 at 4:36pm.
By David Ross. I have previously commented on film’s mismanagement of the lives of authors (see here). Film does somewhat better with the works of authors, and indeed regularly eclipses its source texts. Who recalls that The African Queen was a 1935 novel by C.S. Forrester? Or that Rear Window began as a 1942 short story by one Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968), a second-tier crime novelist in the Hammett/Chandler mode? Or that Vertigo was a 1954 novel by Pierre Boileau and Pierre Ayraud, writing under the pen name “Boileau-Narcejac”? Or that Psycho was a 1959 novel by Robert Bloch?
Upstart movies supplant even relatively good novels. Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 come to mind. Between them, James Ivory and David Lean gave E.M. Forster a run for his money no less than four times. Poor James M. Cain, a gritty crime novelist of no mean talent, gave film a bountiful gift of storylines and wound up rendering his own works nearly irrelevant. Double Indemnity (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) were all adaptations of his largely forgotten novels. Even Ernest Hemingway has been outdone. Howard Hawks’ To Have and Have Not (1944) – the first film to pair Bogart and Bacall – turned Hemingway’s mediocre novel of 1937 into a kind of Caribbean Casablanca. As far as I know, nobody has read Hemingway’s novel since. Hemingway himself hated the novel, so we can hardly blame ourselves for ignoring it.
Truly great literature is typically too dense, intricate, linguistic, and interior to be anything but a celluloid fiasco. Melville, Dickens, Tolstoy, Joyce – they’ve all been made ridiculous by directors who believed they were up to the challenge of world-historical storytelling. Orson Welles tried to match wits with Kafka’s Trial (1962), but even he should have known better. Martin Scorsese brought the eye of a Dutch master to the period detail of Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence (1993), but in the end his film is undone per Hollywood formula: too much eye candy (Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder), not enough theatrical competence. John Woo, best known for realizing that tough guys look twice as cool with a gun in each hand, recently tried to bring the greatest of all Chinese novels, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, to the big screen. The resulting epic, Red Cliff, crams several thousand pages into three hours of film, a good two hours of which are devoted to shots of arrows whizzing in thick bunches. Those training to be Olympic archers will love it; students of Chinese literature not so much.
The only major author to emerge smelling something like roses is Jane Austen. While no film is likely to rival her novels, which may be the greatest – and are certainly the most charming – ever written, the BBC’s 1995 miniseries is a marvelous effort, perhaps the most faithful adaptation of a canonical literary work in the history of film. Jennifer Ehle (a North Carolinian no less) is the perfect Elizabeth Bennett. She shifts with liquid ease between sense and sensibility without upsetting the comfortable equilibrium of Elizabeth’s personality. This is indeed the trick: Elizabeth must be dual without being divided; her different sides must be integrated and seamless; she must be both things at once. In terms of craft, Ehle, who was then twenty-six, throws looks like some character actress of the 1930s cannily drawing on the stage experience of six decades. Her every shift of expression has logic and purpose; this is not method acting, but something like sculptural creation, each gesture like the tap of the chisel. It’s a testament to Ehle’s performance that her looks grow upon us just as they are supposed to grow upon Mr. Darcy. We begin by overlooking her unassuming loveliness; by the end, her dark ringlets and mischievous smile have thoroughly captured our attention. If there is a quibble to be made, it’s only that Ehle is likely to invade our mind’s eye next time we read Pride and Prejudice. Continue reading Pride and Prejudice: 1995 vs. 2005
By Jason Apuzzo. • A Star is Born is coming to Blu-ray. This gorgeous film – still, alas in incomplete form – is really the perfect sort of film for high definition viewing. A Star is Born takes its place among the very best films made about the culture of filmmaking itself – surpassed only, in my opinion, by 8 1/2 and Sunset Boulevard. (Another now-forgotten classic of this genre is Josef von Sternberg’s The Last Command.)
• The Criterion Collection is finally putting out more of Yasujiro Ozu’s work onto DVD. Avail yourself of Ozu’s films if your tastes run toward the quieter, more contemplative moments of domestic life – particularly in terms of how parents relate (or are sometimes incapable of relating) to their children.
• Did you know that this is the 75th anniversary of the release of Merian C. Cooper’s classic fantasy-adventure film, She? Neither did I. I recommend the newly colorized version of the film, the colorization of which was supervised by Ray Harryhausen.
• I recently posted on the new exhibit of Norman Rockwell’s work taking place in Washington D.C., which features the Rockwell paintings owned by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. MUBI, one of my favorite movie blogs, recently did a post on Rockwell’s movie poster art. I hadn’t been aware that Rockwell did the posters for so many famous films – including Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (weirdly fitting). Click on over for more. MUBI also reports this week on the forthcoming San Francisco Silent Film Festival, one of the world’s finest such festivals.
• And speaking of silent film, a long-lost Charlie Chaplin silent short film called “A Thief Catcher” has just been discovered. In this 1914 film Chaplin makes a brief cameo appearance as a Keystone cop. Turner Classic Movies also reports this week on restoration efforts involving Alfred Hitchcock’s early work, efforts you the public can assist in with your donations. [ We’ve spoken here previously at LFM about the importance of preserving our film legacy.] We encourage LFM readers now to donate toward the restoration of Alfred Hitchcock’s silent films.
• Ilene Woods, the voice of Cinderella from Walt Disney’s classic film, has died at the age of 81. We mourn her passing; her delightful voice, however, will certainly live on for generations to come.
• Turner Classic Movies has an interesting blog post up this week on the Clint Eastwood Cold War classic Firefox; on a somewhat related note, there was an interesting article over at The Wrap this week on the recent evolution of the action film. Click on over for more.
• And finally, Greenbriar Picture Shows, another one of my favorite classic movie sites, has some wonderful posts up this week (see here and here) on Orson Welles’ classic, Touch of Evil.
Posted on July 18th, 2010 at 12:39pm.
[Editor’s Note: Jason Apuzzo has decided to review Inception upside down. If you are unable to grasp the complex paradox this represents, it’s possible that you are simply a philistine.]
Posted on July 16th, 2010 at 11:43pm.