California may have spent the last five years under the rule of a Republican movie star, but news that major industry players are anything but super-lefty liberals still seems to strike many as a surprise. Responding to a story in which it’s casually mentioned that Dennis Hopper is expected to attend the Republican National Convention, Defamer’s Kyle Buchanan writes, “Did we miss the memo that said the countercultural director of freaking Easy Rider was a Republican? We’d assumed his appearance in the right-wing Zucker film An American Carolwas a strict paycheck gig…”
I’m not sure when the “memo” first went out, but Hopper has been a registered Republican for over 25 years. …Read more
“Did everybody see the film?” Abel Ferrara cried at the jump of the Cannes press conference for Chelsea on the Rocks, compulsively putting on and pulling off a pair of black wraparound sunglasses, sipping on a can of Budweiser. Several journalists coughed in response. Said Ferrara: “What is this, avian flu? Everybody cough, yeah. We got a Howard Hughes complex as it is.”
The press conference as a whole was a woozy, half-sickly, half-populated affair…maybe typical of anything involving Ferrara meeting journalists, but definitely emblematic of the Festival itself at this point. But! But! Ferrara twice talked about Werner Herzog’s alleged Nicolas Cage-starring remake of his Bad Lieutenant––once in response to a question from a reporter, and once just because he apparently felt like he needed to vent.
At GreenCine Daily, David Hudson rounds up the reviews of Stop-Loss, which are, surprisingly, pretty positive (Peter Keough and Bill Weber are the exceptions that prove the rule). My favorite pullquote comes, as usual, from Armond White’s mixed review: “Peirce conflates war tragedy with her own sense of melodrama, making Stop-Loss a coincidentally sexy polemic. It could be worse.”
The Tribeca Film Festival continues its mission to wow us with quantity over discovery by booking a full sidebar of festival leftovers like Savage Grace (which will have been on the festival circuit for about 50 weeks by the time it hits lower Manhattan courtesy of Robert DeNiro and American Express) and The Wackness(which will make its multiplex debut via Sony Classics a month or two after its Tribeca screening). But, as always, the festival’s Restored and Rediscovered program offers hope, including screenings of new prints of Fellini’s Toby Dammit, and Curtis Harrington’s Cat People–inspired, young-Dennis Hopper-starring Night Tide.
While we’re on the topic of festival exports: Nanette Burstein’s American Teenwill open the 2008 edition of Sundance at BAM on May 29.
Would it even be news that a new Patrick Swayze movie is having its world premiere in Austria, if Swayze’s battle with cancer wasn’t currently grade-A tabloid grist, and if his health didn’t preclude his attendance? Yes––but only because Uwe Boll is distributing the movie.
Trailers for novels aren’t the newest idea in the world, but I still think they’re a neat concept. Unfortunately, they can sometimes actually do harm to a book’s appeal, as in the case of Amanda Goldberg and Ruthanna Khalighi Hopper’s Hollywood-set novel Celebutantes, which arrives in stores tomorrow. The book has four dramatized “trailers”, or clips, pulled from its pages, the best of which is viewable above. Yes, I said the best of which. And if you think that one is bad, then check out the three other truly embarrassing clips at the book’s MySpace page.
So if they’re so bad, why am I sharing them (and possibly helping to promote the book)? Because I wanted to point out that these are the work of McG, who directed the two Charlie’s Angelsmovies and is currently working on the next Terminator sequel, titled Terminator Savlation: The Future Begins. The actors in these “trailers” are Katrina Begin (featured in the above spot), Cloverfield’s Mike Vogel, My So Called Life’s “Rickie”, Wilson Cruz, and TV actresses Autumn Reeser (The O.C.), April Bowlby (Two and a Half Men) and Michelle Borth (Tell Me You Love Me). None of these people are completely talentless (yes, even McG is better than this), so I’ll state the fault is with the writing of the two authors.
After four seasons of Entourage, could this novel be any less interesting to fans of film-industry-set fiction? Celebutantes seems even dumber and less relevant an Oscar-themed satire than Christopher Guest’s recent disappointment For Your Consideration. It’s no wonder that Entertainment Weekly called the book “silly” and gave it a “C+” grade (it was reviewed alongside another Hollywood-themed novel titled Oscar Season, which fared a little better with a “B”). The magazine also notes that the book’s authors are the offspring of producer Leonard Goldberg (Charlie’s Angels) and actor Dennis Hopper. You’d think they would have a little more insight.
The Guardian published a long, bizarre story yesterday on Dennis Hopper. The story seems to have been spun out of a brief meeting over chocolate cake at the Serpentine Gallery in London (which, as author Stuart Jeffries puts it, “has managed to seduce Hollywood’s most enduring screen psychopath to greet guests to its [annual] fundraising party”), and is thus suitably heavy with Hopper’s musings on art. But there’s one very strange paragraph right in the middle, in which the actor/filmmaker/photographer/Ameriprise shill responds to a question about his involvement in a heretofore-unannounced franchise film:
[Hopper] certainly isn’t in the mood to discuss any of the half a dozen films he is due to appear in this year, a roster which is due to include a performance in Speed 3, even though I have plenty of questions about that. Surely his character Howard Payne died in a decapitation incident in the last reel of Speed 1? “It’s a river of shit,” he tells me pleasantly but firmly, “from which I have tried to extract some gold.”
I’m sure no one would be surprised to hear that Hopper (who long-ago abandoned any allegiance to hippie ideology and now considers himself a Republican) would take a role sheerly for the “gold.” I also wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the geniuses who brought us Speed had come up with a way to bring Howard Payne back from the dead. What is a little surprising, is that this topic would come up casually in an interview, considering that there’s really been no legitimate indication that Speed 3 is actually being made.
For starters, it’s *not* one of the half-dozen films on Hopper’s slate, as per his IMDb profile–in fact, there’s no IMDB entry for Speed 3 whatsoever. There’s been no item about a third Speed movie on any reputable blog or in either of the major Hollywood trades. The *only* source I can find that backs up the idea of a third Speed is an unattributed item tacked onto the end of Hopper’s Wikipedia profile, which reads:
Jan DeBont, director of Speed and Speed 2: Cruise Control, has enforced Hopper’s contractual obligation to star in the third and final installment of the trilogy Speed 3: Highway to Hell, ressurecting [sic] the legendary character Howard Payne. Shooting begins this October. Speed 3: Highway to Hell is set to release in the summer of 2009.
So tell me if I have this right: a Guardian reporter went into an interview with Dennis Hopper, quoted a mysterious unsourced (and poorly spelled) Wikipedia entry, got a “no comment”, and then ran the no-comment it as if it confirmed the Wikipedia non-story? Is that even legal?
“Did everybody see the film?” Abel Ferrara cried at the jump of the Cannes press conference for Chelsea on the Rocks, compulsively putting on and pulling off a pair of black wraparound sunglasses, sipping on a can of Budweiser. Several journalists coughed in response. Said Ferrara: “What is this, avian flu? Everybody cough, yeah. We got a Howard Hughes complex as it is.”
At 
The Tribeca Film Festival continues its mission to wow us with quantity over discovery by booking 
