Less Than Zero is obviously bad, and we don’t need to talk about why that didn’t work. And American Psycho—that is, I think, an impossible book to adapt. But whatever, it was the greatest hits from the book, more or less. Mary did a very good job of keeping that movie together, as did Christian Bale, and I think Roger did a terrific job. And with The Informers, I think there is really an outstanding movie floating out there somewhere, and I hope one day people might be able to see it. But it’s very interesting. I am not comparing The Informers to The Godfather on any level, but there’s that famous story where Paramount asked Coppola to cut like an hour out of the movie, because they didn’t want to release a three-hour movie. And Coppola did, and showed it to the executive, and it was terrible. It moved very slowly at two hours. And then when he put the other hour back in, it moved very quickly. And that’s all I want to say about The Informers.
Scott Tobias has a very interesting interview with Bret Easton Ellis at the A.V. Club, in which the author/screenwriter of this week’s The Informers admits to not liking the cut of that film that’s being released, and assesses the other filmic adaptations of his work, concluding that Roger Avary’s The Rules of Attraction is the only one that “fully works.” He also describes the upcoming American Psycho musical as “like a multimedia rave situation,” so take that for what you will…
In better news for the legacies of Andrew McCarthy and James Spader, there’s a new Pretty in Pink video game, and it’s apparently awesome. Or, at least, better than a Clueless video game made by the same people. It also allows complete lunatics with a thing against upward mobility to rewrite history by having Andie end up with Duckie instead of Blaine. Insert mid-80s version of “FAIL” here.
There is a good reason Hollywood continually makes Animal House wannabes and avoids producing films that actually focus on academia. Kids prefer their college movies to be about the fun stuff. And so a movie like Old School grossed $75 million while another Luke Wilson comedy called Tenure currently lacks a distributor. The latter film may also be hilarious, as a satire of the tenure process, but if it doesn’t concentrate more on beer bongs and naked co-eds, it won’t attract as big an audience. And according to some scholars, it may not even resonate with them, because it couldn’t possibly be what the process is really like. Film blogger and associate professor Chuck Tryon was quoted about the film last year as saying, “my ongoing pursuit of tenure typically involves me sitting in front of my laptop until 1 a.m., I don’t know how interesting that would be to watch.”
And evident by the scathing reviews from Sundance of John Krasinski’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, it appears another film about academia has failed to make a strong case for the subject matter. Too bad for the late David Foster Wallace, whose stories were adapted for the film, that Gus Van Sant wasn’t at the helm. A decade ago, in an interview with Van Sant, Wallace pretty much gushed that Good Will Hunting is the most accurate film about academia ever made. Do we agree with him? Let’s just say there’s not a whole lot of competition for such an honor. But in our attempt to recognize the ten best films about academia, Good Will Hunting doesn’t quite make the top spot. …Read more
Weird. Leo DiCaprio will produce a live-action, “two-part epic” based on the classic manga/anime Akira. The story will be adapted to take place in New Manhattan, “a city rebuilt by Japanese money.” The HR story actually doesn’t specify whether or not Leo will star in the thing, but if so, I imagine they’ll also “adapt” this skull-head getup so that Warner Brothers can actually see what they’re paying for.
Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman will adaptBlack Hole, a graphic novel about promiscuous teens passing around a mystery STD (hot), for David Fincher to direct.
Isn’t it a little weird that Variety editor Tim Gray doesn’t actually make a Best Picture prediction in the Best Picture prediction video above? Does this give credence to the “Juno is the new Crash” nightmare scenario that’s been floating around? Or is he just contractually not allowed to disappoint his advertisers?
IFC is expanding their efforts to bring film festival hits to the masses by developing a second video-on-demand label. Called Festival Direct, it will bring international festival favorites directly to cable boxes, skipping the middleman theatrical run afforded films on the IFC FirstTake program. Already on the slate: Ken Loach’s It’s a Free World…, and the Icelandic festival hit Jar City.
Roger Avary’s publicist issued a statement yesterday, apologizing for the screenwriter’s role in the accident that killed a friend and seriously injured his wife. “Words cannot express how sorry he is, and this tragic accident will always haunt him,” the statement read in part. Avary is due to be arraigned on charges of vehicular manslaughter on Friday.
Charlize Theron will star alongside Viggo Mortensen in the upcoming adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Mark Cuban’s 2929 Entertainment is producing the film, for distribution by Weinstein subsidiary Dimension.
Guatemalan Handshake director/Hannah Takes the Stairs co-star Todd Rohal, True/False Film Festival director David Wilson, and IFP’s Amy Dotson are some of the familiar names on the recently-announced Slamdance jury.
Roger Avary, who won an Oscar for co-writingPulp Fiction with Quentin Tarantino, and who also collaborated on the script for Beowulf with Neil Gaiman, was booked on charges of vehicular manslaughter and felony drunken driving, after crashing into a telephone pole late last night in Ojai, CA. According to reports, a friend of Avary’s was fatally injured in the crash, while Avary’s wife was thrown from the car but survived. Avary himself was apparently not injured. More info here.
The tabloid sites are clouding this story with speculation pretty rapidly as the morning progresses, but I’m posting it here because I know several people who used to participate in the forums on Avary’s website, which was something of a destination in the early days of film-bloggery, so I figured it would be of interest.
Co-writers Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman introduced a reel of fully-rendered footage from Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf last night at Comic-con, and the reviews are rolling in.
It is very easy to imagine, based on this small amount of footage, that Beowulf could be a huge smash that critics can actually get behind and that it could be a serious Academy player in the way Lord of the Rings was. Though this is not a trilogy, it seems ready to break even more ground in a real way. (The issue of acting nominations was something Avery & Gaiman considered out loud in the room tonight. With big names like Hopkins, Jolie, and Malkovich, one thinks they might actually turn that trick if all the pieces come together. The great Ray Winstone, who doesn’t look like himself, might have trouble on that basis alone.)
IGN’s Todd Gilchrist says that although Beowulf relies on the same motion-capture process Zemeckis used for The Polar Express, the director seems to have avoided the major failing of that film:
The main problem director Robert Zemeckis’ Polar Express faced was its (literal) absence of life behind the CGI characters’ eyes, and Beowulf appears to have conquered this technical challenge: all of the characters act and react with a palpable sense of reality, not to mention a febrile kind of unpredictability, creating a much more authentic and evocative emotional backdrop for the larger-than-life story. Meanwhile, the general proficiency with which computer-generated imagery is rendered has evolved by leaps and bounds since those earlier films, creating an increasingly believable but nonetheless spectacularly melodramatic universe in which Beowulf’s adventures are concrete and also fantastic.
The Post Chronicle’s naked-Angelina Jolie-centric write-up is just creepy:
Brad Pitt’s lover Angie shows her sexy side once again as her naked body emerges from a dark pool of water, with little droplets of water dripping down her every curve.
The film’s trailer is now on Apple, so skip over there if these reports have made you salivate.
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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IFC is expanding their efforts to bring film festival hits to the masses by developing 
