At least three SpoutBlog commenters will be happy to learn that Notoriousscreenwriter Cheo Hodari Coker is next adapting Bill Adler’s book on Run DMC, Tougher Than Leather. Two weeks ago, when I responded to the Biggie Smalls biopic with a list of 5 Dead Rappers Who Need a Biopic, I excluded Run DMC’s Jam Master Jay on account he was a DJ, not a rapper. But SpoutBlog readers nevertheless pointed out my error and suggested he and his group get a biopic anyway.
Another screenwriter goes from one bio to another: A Mighty Heart scribe John Orloff is next scripting the Ian Fleming film Fleming.
Two of this year’s Oscar nominees are teaming up for a movie that certainly won’t garner them future Academy attention: Slumdog Millionaire scribe Simon Beaufoywill rewrite the existing draft of the Amy Adams vehicle Leap Day, a lame-sounding romantic comedy that should appropriately only play in theaters on February 29, 2012 and then disappear for at least four years.
Who knew Bicycle Thieves screenwriter Suso D’Amico is still alive? The 94-year-old Oscar-nominee will receive the WGA’s inaugural Jean Renoir Award next month and will be celebrated at the WGA Awards, held February 7. Thank goodness she can finally belong to a club that would honor Diablo Cody before recognizing one of the greatest female screenwriters of all time.
Twenty years late, Ron Howard’s Parenthood is being adapted into an hour-long TV series for NBC. The network previously aired a short-lived TV version of the film in 1990 (it starred a young Leonardo DiCaprio in the young Joaquin Phoenix role), but this new show will have more time to focus on parenting challenges in “this post-Facebook, post-iPod world.”
The following comment came in last night on my post about the National Board of Review’s annual honors. It is anonymous, so don’t, like, bet the farm on it (although I don’t know why you’d be betting your farm on SpoutBlog comments anyway. Take your farm more seriously!), but I thought it was interesting:
I’m a member of the NBR (sort of, well, student, even though I’m not anymore… long story) and I’m consistently left in horror by the comments, questions and tastes of our unimaginative membership, most having been cloistered from the real world in there upper west side four bedroom apartments for millenia, rushing from Q&A’s to meet their 7pm reservations at Isabella’s to discuss just how uplifting The Great Debaters was. Anyone remember how Blood Diamond was the third best film of the year last year!? I promise you, the average membership is so old, feeble and generally unsavvy, that Ben Affleck is the only new director they can remember from the past 12 months.
I should also note that I wrote that post based on a partial list of the honors published by Variety. The Reeler has the full list, which includes the NBR’s Top Five Documentaries and Top Ten Indie Films (”indie”, in this case, seems to translate as “an excuse to lump A Mighty Heart in the same bucket as Once.”)
In the hopes of resuscitating box office loser A Mighty Heart, Paramount is trying something new. The idea is to cut down from over 1,300 screens, to about 600 - a “retroactive platform release” designed to spread word of mouth and keep the pic in theaters longer. The Variety story is of the “let’s just keep the exec talking and count how many outside forces he manages to blame” variety. My favorite part is when Paramount blames John Cusack for stealing their older women quadrant with 1408.
“With no new wide releases scheduled to open Friday, the weekend dynamics already are in gear,” writes Gregg Kilday at the Reporter. “[T]he threedominantholiday players [are] on track to extend their winning streaks.”
Sicko will screen at the first Iran International Film Festival, but it’s maker is not coming with. A Sicko rep claims that a “right-wing promoted” rumor Michael Moore would follow his film to Tehran is “an urban myth right up there with alligators in the sewers of New York City.”
Just before taking off for the weekend on Friday afternoon, I saw a blog post claiming that a film critic had died from a heart attack suffered during a press screening of A Mighty Heart. Returning to the computer this morning, it’s clear that the story wasn’t just a bad joke: Anderson Jones, formerly of E! Online and most recently of FilmStew.com, did indeed pass away sometime last week whilst watching the Angelina Jolie film at the Arclight in Hollywood.
As former editor of RoughCut.com, Jones was responsible for turning David Poland into a blogger. As an editor at E! Online, he frequently shared his expertise on-camera in various installments of the E! True Hollywood Story. Tributes to Jones are flying in from all corners of the web, although as Jeff Wells notes, E! has yet to comment, or even post a news item about the passing of their former employee. This might owe to the fact that Jones’ association with the site didn’t exactly end well. As FilmStew’s Richard Horgan puts it, the “always outspoken, proudly gay and often infuriating” Jones
…cried wolf so many times with E! Online that when he finally really did have a humdinger of a dog-ate-my-homework-scenario
Despite the fact that there was a fair amount of Evan Almighty doomcasting going into the weekend, most of this morning’s box office reports spin the sequel’s $32.3 million take as low enough to qualify as a shock.
Gregg Kilday’s writeup for the Hollywood Reporter arrives with the headline “Low tide for Universal’s ‘Almighty’ bow”; the story goes on to acknowledge that Universal is in the odd of position of “battling a perception” that the weekend’s number 1 film is a failure. “[W]hile the movie might have represented the best showing ever for newly minted star Carell — surpassing the $21.4 million opening of The 40-Year-Old Virgin in 2005 — Evan now must prove itself in the face of those who already are pointing to it as the first big-budget victim of the summer.”
Box Office Mojo directly contrastedEvan’s debut to Bruce Almighty’s record-setting $68 million bow, ultimately blaming Evan’s “all wet” performance on its lack of fantasy appeal–who wants to live vicariously through a dutiful subject of God?
Besides [Jim] Carrey, Bruce Almighty had a broadly-appealing premise
New in theaters, Rolf de Heer’s Ten Canoes and Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart, Angelina Jolie’s passion project. Both deal with marginalized people and raise the question, “Can westerners make a movie to help us understand non-western people?”
When word got out that Angelina Jolie would be playing the French/Afro-Cuban Mariane Pearl in A Mighty Heart, a small but very vocal segment of the population jumped to decry the casting as racist. Labeling Jolie’s work in the film sight unseen a”blackface performance”, the blog Racialicious declared that Jolie (who is, you know, trying to save the world by adopting a bunch of kids of different races) should have known better than to accept the part. “Given that Jolie has two children of color, I would have thought that she might have been more sensitive to issues of race and the place of women of color instead of following in the footsteps of Al Jolson.” Even actress Thandie Newton (who was last seen in a paragon of cultural responsibility called Norbit) jumped into the debate, telling a UK tabloid that she was “shocked” Jolie had “been blacked up to play a black woman.”
Anyone who really knows the history of Hollywood blackface understands that it’s ridiculous to compare Jolie (who appears in Heart wearing a wig and a healthy dose of bronzer) to Jolson, who smeared shoe polish on his face in caricature of Black performers (a caricature that, it must be noted, was not generally considered racist at the time). Still, it’s been interesting to see how mainstream critics deal with the issue in their Mighty Heart write-ups. Newsweek devoted an entire paragraph to the issue:
The studio releasing Heart, Paramount Vantage, insists that Jolie’s makeup was not darkened for the role, and that any complexion variation is caused by the film’s lighting. If they are lying–which is probable–it’s only by a little. In costume and under natural light, Jolie looks, at most, a shade or two duskier than her natural complexion. Regardless, both Jolie and Pearl say they were blindsided by the charges. “I know that people are frustrated at the lack of great roles [for people of color], but I think they’ve picked the wrong example here,” Jolie says. Pearl is more pointed: “This is not about skin color. I wanted her to play me because I trust her.” She sighs. “Aren’t we past this?”
I haven’t found a review yet that professes Jolie’s makeup to be a problem. On the contrary: most high-profile film critics are male, and for them, a new Angelina Jolie movie is, like, the event of the year. Jolie dressed up as Mariane Pearl is not so much an opportunity to contemplate racial and cultural dynamics as it is an opportunity to fantasy role play. Anthony Lane, whose New Yorker review is devoted primarily to the “problem” of Jolie’s schizophrenic sexpot/saint split, contemplates Jolie’s “corkscrewed hair [and] tinted skin,” but is far more interested in her lips, which he dubs “the world\’s most recognizable mouth.” (He also makes the laughable suggestion that Jolie would have been somehow better suited to the career of blonde bombshell Jayne Mansfield.) Certainly, no one seems to be getting more pleasure out of this than New York’s David Edelstein, who comes close to crossing the line of common decency by suggesting that Jolie has been “dipped in caramel.”
On the whole, A Mighty Heart is very much a film about reflection, perception, and projection. As a star, Jolie often functions as a blank screen for the projection of the audience’s desires. As usual, despite Jolie’s efforts to generate interest in the issues that she deems important, it seems to be much more interesting to talk about what’s it’s like to look at her.
We’ll have more Mighty Heart chatter on Friday’s edition of FilmCouch.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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At least three SpoutBlog commenters will be happy to learn that Notorious screenwriter Cheo Hodari Coker 
The following comment came in last night on my post about the National Board of Review’s annual honors. It is anonymous, so don’t, like, bet the farm on it (although I don’t know why you’d be betting your farm on SpoutBlog comments anyway. Take your farm more seriously!), but I thought it was interesting:
