Some thoughts on Vanity Fair’s Bright Young Hollwood thing: the only people I recognize besides for Jonah Hill and the kids from The Wackness are on this page, but that’s because I don’t watch Gossip Girl, right? Also: is Kat Dennings, like, wearing a bat suit?
Considering similar lines in Wanted and Jumper that each put the audience member in the unfavorable position of being condescended to by a pretty-boy unlikely action star, Glenn Kenny wonders, “Have screenwriters become so defensive/resentful on account of churning out quasi-nihilistic, faux-convoluted, graphic-novel-mytho-Babel tripe like this that they feel compelled to lash out at the audience that laps their nonsense up?”
An addendum on this post noted that War, Inc, the satire co-written by and starring John Cusack which I loathed but which has become something of a surprise spring hit, was scheduled to come out on DVD tomorrow after just seven weeks in theaters. I wrote:
War Inc['s DVD release] is notable only because First Look’s ridiculously tight seven week window from theatrical premiere to DVD street date looks, in retrospect, like another in a line of smart moves designed to capitalize on the film’s surprise cult appeal. Of course, the film’s box office potency faded as its release expanded, and if it had done less well in its first weeks, this would look a lot like a dumping, but that’s fodder for another, far more bitter post…
Ah, but then the target moved: shortly after that post was published, I got an email from David Hudson informing me that the film’s DVD release has been bumped to October. …Read more
Two quotes just popped out of my feed reader and clubbed me over the head; when I came to, I recalled a couple of other soundbites from my week in LAFF that sort of seem related. First, from David Poland’s eye-roll at “Tom & Jerry On Crack cartoon” Wanted:
Wanted is more like the last of big budget porn, throwing around endless style along with massive fake boobs and enough smoke to choke a Scott. Guys still get off on it - guys can get off on anything that tells them it wants to get them off - but one simply has to wonder, “Doesn’t anyone just f*** anymore?”
The most notable DVD release of the week* has to be the first season of Mad Men, which hits the street tomorrow just in time for newbies to get caught up on the AMC series before season two premieres in late July (it’s been available on iTunes for quite some time). I went on YouTube looking for clips from my favorite episodes and found the above fan vid, which focuses on Betty Draper (January Jones), the miserable model-turned-housewife of mysterious ad man Don Draper. I love it, if for no other reason than that it really draws out the way the show takes mid-century cinematic archetypes and weds them to real-seeming, endlessly multi-faceted characterizations.
This clip specifically highlights Mad Men’s Hitchcock allusions: the slate-gray, Madeline Elster-esque suit that Betty wears to therapy; Don’s spying, here symbolized by his employment of a home movie camera like something out of a cross between Peeping Tom and Rear Window; and my favorite, Betty’s fateful encounter with a flock of birds.
If Sony’s looking to woo the people who loved Casino Royale, shouldn’t they have put all the action shots up front? Or am I the only guy who thought the last Bond film was a little underwhelming after that awesome opening chase sequence? Considering its ranking as the second best (as far as critics are concerned) action movie of this decade, I’m probably in the minority, but I was honestly bored throughout most of the movie.
Fortunately, Quantum of Solacelooks like it might have a little more action. It’s the usual 007 movie stuff — lots of running, speedboats, hand to hand combat — but better familiar spectacle than extensive poker sequences. And so, just as I’m super-excited about The Dark Knightdespite being a little bored with Batman Begins, I’m looking forward to Bond 22 despite my feelings about the previous installment.
Have you been following The Hollywood Temp Diaries? It’s an anonymous Blogger blog with the tagline, “I am one of those barnacles on the hull of the good ship ‘Hollywood.’ These are my stories.” Good stuff, especially if you subscribe to that dirty secret that most Hollywood jobs are just as glamorous and exciting as, like, working anywhere else. The blog’s author, known only as Temp X, has been drawing a direct line between the impending SAG strike and total global apocalypse for awhile. A couple of days ago, s/he posted a “videotorial” to hammer home her/his case, and for people like me who haven’t been able to get it up to care much about an actor’s strike, it’s the perfect vehicle for impressing the seriousness of the situation. More here.
Friday at LAFF brought back-to-back screenings of two very different documentaries about how sexual politics and policies within two individual communities come to define these worlds-apart spaces. Sarah Friedman and Esy Casey’s Thing With No Namefollows two women in sub-Saharan African villages as they controversially begin a program of anti-retroviral drugs after having been diagnosed with full-blown AIDS. Undeniably beautiful to look at and powerfully poetic in its depiction of a community of women stricken with poverty and sick with a virus that they don’t fully understand, the film ironically and sadly fails at its propagandist mission when tragedies of timing and fate intervene. Meanwhile, Trinidad offers a portrait of the titular “sex change capitol of the world,” a frontier town in Colorado where a male-to-female post-op transsexual rockstar surgeon named Marci is pioneering the art and science of genital reassignment surgery. In tone and content these films couldn’t be more different, but they still constitute a sort of double feature of films about real people living lives impacted by scientific attempts to customize fate.
Wanted opened to $51.1 million over the weekend, which is, you know, a fantastic boost for Angelina Jolie’s live-action bankability, but it wasn’t enough to beat Wall-E‘s $62.5 mil for first place. Speaking of boosts: The Last Mistress made $17,596 on each of its screens, which is roughly $17 for every time Asia Argento shows her debatably authentic boobs in it.
SAG says they’re not going on strike and any suggestions in that vein coming from the AMPTP are merely “scare tactics.” The AMPTP says SAG is responsible for The End of Hollywood As We Know It. Or, more accurately: “The industry is shutting down because SAG’s Hollywood leadership insisted on 11th-hour negotiations and dragging these talks into July so they can continue attacking AFTRA.”
Prince of Broadway and Loot took the big narrative and documentary prizes, respectively, at the Los Angeles Film Festival over the weekend. The Wackness and Man on Wire won the audience awards. In other fest news, Wim Wenders, director of the most maligned competition film last month at Cannes, will head the jury at the Venice Film Festival.
I’ve had a bit of bad luck with the screenings over the past few days, so when it comes to movies I have very little new to report. But the film festival karaoke trainrolls along, as evidenced by these pics. This time around, it went down in a private room in a place in a strip mall on Sawtelle. That same strip mall also housed an establishment called Mousse Fantasy; I assume this place either serves dessert or has something to do with hair, but I couldn’t figure it out one way or another. If you’re familiar with the place and have the answer, do leave a comment. Above, that’s Your Blogger, Michael Lerman and Medicine for Melancholy producer Cherie Saulter. More after the jump.
An addendum on this post noted that War, Inc, the satire co-written by and starring John Cusack which I loathed but which has become something of a surprise spring hit, was scheduled to come out on DVD tomorrow after just seven weeks in theaters. I wrote:
Wanted
