Just as there seems to be a rule that every great filmmaker at some point must make a movie about making movies, there also appears to be an unwritten law that their career is not over until they make a Rolling Stones documentary. Actually there's little support for the latter claim. It's just that there are so many concert films and other non-fiction works involving the band, and a good amount were made by notable directors, including Martin Scorsese, Hal Ashby and Jean-Luc Godard. And another is currently being made by Johnny Depp, though it will primarily focus on Keith Richards.
With the most recent Stones film, Stones in Exile, hitting DVD recently, I thought I'd take a look at a few other related works, namely Albert and David Maysles' infamous classic Gimme Shelter and Robert Frank's little-seen, officially unreleased C**ksucker Blues. These two documentaries, neither necessarily concert films, both qualifying as examples of "Direct Cinema," form bookends to what you'll see in Stones in Exile, which is the latest from Stephen Kijak (Cinemania; Scott Walker: 30 Century Man) and which presents a history of the making of the band's masterpiece album "Exile on Main Street."
It would be fitting to also include Rollin Binzer's Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones in this Rolling Stones marathon, but I haven't yet managed to see it. Even though Frank's film is all but banned, it's easier to see that on the Internet than it is to see Binzer's film in any form until it finally hits DVD and Blu-ray this November. For now, the trio I present here is an adequate look at the Stones' American tours in '69 and '72 and a little of what they did in between. There are a couple years in there not documented in the following films, but few bands, or other famous figures, have such an overflowing time capsule for a specific era as this.
Jodie Foster's acting career has been steady and strong since she began her career as a child, but her attempts at directing and producing seem to be thwarted at every turn. She can push our buttons with a glance, whether as Iris the 12-year-old prostitute in Taxi Driver, Sarah the gang rape survivor who challenges the "she asked for it" defense in The Accused, or, of course, the seemingly unshakable Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs. However, things have been a bit quiet on the Foster front lately. The Brave One, a revenge thriller that she starred in and executive produced, didn't wow audiences or critics, and neither did the family friendly 2008 film she co-starred in, Nim's Island.
1991's Little Man Tate, which she also starred in, was a promising directorial debut, and Home for the Holidays was fair to middling, but since then she hasn't stepped behind the camera. As she told Entertainment Weekly in 2007, another movie she was set to direct, Sugarland starring Robert De Niro, "just fell apart again... That's the story in Hollywood. You make personal movies and they're really hard to get off the ground. S--- happens." Another passion project of hers, Flora Plum, was being shopped around to international distributors as early as 2000 by Good Machine, the company now known as Focus Features.
Lawsuits claiming such and such film stole so and so nobody's idea are a dime a dozen. But here's one that's more interesting than usual: unknown author Pamella Lawrence is suing Sony, Chris Rock, Frank Oz, Neil Labute, "White male" screenwriter Dean Craig and many others for stealing her ideas and turning them into Death at a Funeral. Both the UK original and the recent African-American-heavy remake. Specifically, they allegedly ripped off her 1995 book Caught on Video ... The Most Embarrassing Moment de Funeral, July 11, 1994, Jamaican Volume 1, as well as the actual embarrassing video the book is based upon, and also included inside jokes, such as one involving KFC's recipe, directly targeted at her.
Additionally, Lawrence is calling the act racist and sexist, arguing that she pitched a film adaptation to Columbia TriStar (a division of Sony) in 1998 but was sent on her way because she's a woman from the inner city. And then they went ahead and ripped her off instead of working with her. She later sued the studio and the case was settled out of court (which she believes is referenced through the KFC joke). Now that two films have been released, she's back for more -- $20 million, to be exact. Not just for copyright infringement, but also for "breach of contract," "fraud" and "theft."
You've no doubt heard Lindsay Lohan has been sentenced to 90 days in the slammer (and then 90 days in rehab) for violating her probation stemmed from a 2007 drunk-driving arrest. Prior to the ruling, while she was crying (she didn't Chris Brown it, either) and pleading with the judge for lenience, she mentioned that, "This is my life. It is my career. It is something I have worked for all my life." Did she blow it? Are both her life and career over? Not quite, and at the very least there will likely one day be a Tarantino in shining armor to save her from near obscurity (if not the Tarantino another director, maybe John Waters?). In the meantime, she's also not seeming to lose the few gigs she'd already lined up before heading back to court.
One of those projects is the biopic Inferno: A Linda Lovelace Story, in which she is still cast as the titular former porn star. According to 24 Frames, the film's director, Matthew Wilder, says he'll wait for La Lohan to finish out her punishment and will not re-cast her part, despite being fully financed and ready to begin shooting now. Some of his willingness to delay filming for the troubled former child star may be that financiers put up money because she was attached. You also have to figure that anyone who wanted to work with her before the sentencing was already okay with her reputation, work ethic and other factors that could potentially hurt the production anyway. It's hard to imagine Inferno losing any of its initial audience because of Lohan's jail time, and it's also hard to imagine Inferno keeping its initial audience with another actress in the lead.
Do you remember watching Fraggle Rock when you were growing up? Then you're the target market for the new Weinstein-produced Fraggle Rock movie, because it's aimed at an edgier, adult audience. That was the verdict of The Weinstein Company, according to director Cory Edwards in blog posts last month, as reported by Cinematical here.
According to the director of Hoodwinked! fame, the Weinstein Co. had sought a screenwriter to bring an edge to the material that would appeal to moviegoers most likely to be familiar with the property, an audience which has grown up in the nearly 30 years since the show aired.
We speculated at the time that the Weinsteins wouldn't have been happy with Edwards's comments. Talking to You Bent My Wookie, Edwards explains that things have changed. "Since then, I've been able to sit down with Weinstein's new VP of Development and really talk about their issues with the movie. We've had some very good conversations about what they think 'edgy' is and what I think 'edgy' is."
It's the rare person who's seen every Woody Allen movie. Woody Allen may not even be that person. How else explain "Alice" or "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion"? Anyway, I'd never seen "Celebrity" until this weekend. That's the one in which Kenneth Branagh plays a free-lance writer who manages to get romantically entangled, to one degree or another, with Melanie Griffith, Judy Davis, Winona Ryder, Charlize Theron, and Famke Janssen. Can you tell he's the Woody stand-in?
Watching Branagh channel his inner Woody is kind of amazing. There's this whine he gets in his voice, along with a physical tentativeness, the hesitation, and general stop-and-go rhythm, that's like a RADA version of Alvy Singer. This is no small feat. Four years earlier, John Cusack played the Woody stand-in in "Bullets Over Broadway," and there's no comparison. That's just a good actor playing an underdeveloped role rather than a good actor (maybe even a great one) doing an inspired impersonation.
This got me to thinking about actors imitating other actors onscreen -- not playing them in a biopic, like Robert Downey Jr. as Charlie Chaplin, say, or in "Ed Wood" Vincent D'Onofrio's cameo as Orson Welles (with vocal assistance from Maurice LaMarche). No, I mean taking over another actor's style and manner and making it his or her own. Between the cult of originality in this culture and actors' egos being what they are, this is a fairly rare occurrence. Offhand I can think of maybe half a dozen other examples beside Branagh/Allen.
Today's New York Times has a front-page story about the survival of movie theaters in small North Dakota towns. The photo at left shows the Roxy Theater, in Langdon. Rural population loss is a major concern in North Dakota, and the idea is that keeping these theaters as going concerns is a way of providing de facto community centers for these towns.
Even today, when the popularity of flat-panel TVs at home and ubiquity of DVD drives on laptops and netbooks have made the multiplex seem like a dinosaur, the idea of vintage single-screen theaters remains very much a part of the romance of moviegoing. It's not the sturdiest part, to be sure. ("The Last Picture Show," which takes its title from the closing of the only theater in a Texas town, is set in 1952.) Movie theaters have been shutting down almost as long as there have been movies. But so long as teenagers want to get out of the house on a Friday night, and people want to share an emotional response in a darkened auditorium with others similarly inclined, there will be movie theaters.
There's a terrific website, CinemaTour.com, whose self-described mission is "to research and
document the locations and histories of cinemas throughout the world." Check it out.
Update: Shock 'Til You Drop has learned that Williamson is still around, but just busy with The Vampire Diaries, so Kruger is helping out. That's marginally better, but still not the best news for Scream fans.
If you were skeptical about the return to Woodsboro and Scream 4, prepare to rejoice. And if you were optimistic, hold on to your seats -- a pretty troublesome bit of information has hit the wire. While covering the latest bits of casting news, Zap2It has been offering up some context. It seems that, first, Lauren Graham left because rewrites had substantially reduced her role. This isn't so shocking -- you sign on for a good part, it gets diminished, you leave. Roles get axed from films all the time.
But that's only the start of the script woes, which continue with more star unrest and one hell of a pinch-hitter replacement shocker ...
The entertainment world is still buzzing over yesterday's revelation that Oksana Grigorieva -- mother of Mel Gibson's youngest child -- captured racist and misogynistic tirades directed at her by the actor on tape. RadarOnline had the exclusive on that -- and shared some of the lowlights, including such gems as "You look like a f***ing pig in heat, and if you get raped by a pack of n***ers, it will be your fault," and "I am going to come and burn the f**king house down ... but you will blow me first." Gibson, whose image was still taking a beating from his infamous 2006 DUI arrest (he went on a rant about Jews that time), might have just hammered the final nail into the coffin of his career.
If that's the case, Gibson has no one to blame but himself. However, if he does go down for good, it looks like he might take at least one project with him.
Gibson, who's been largely absent from the screen since that arrest, was hoping to resuscitate his career in 2010. He appeared in Edge of Darkness earlier this year and is starring in Jodie Foster's absolutely bizarre sounding comedy The Beaver. In that film, Gibson plays "a depressed CEO who finds a new lease on life when he begins to communicate with friends and family via a beaver hand puppet." The question now is, what do you do with this film?
This weekend at the movies, it's the death of American screenwriting! Neither of the two major July 4th releases, "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse" and "The Last Airbender," have what you might call an actual screenplay. In both movies, characters blurt exposition at each other in endless, unwieldy chunks of monologue, Bella and Edward and Jacob disgorging unedited emotions of teen-diaryspeak, and the anonymous brats of "Airbender" laying down the history and rules of the craptaculous fantasy world in which they move as though they were compiling a user manual.
Children, it's called subtext, and in the craft of screenwriting, you hide what the characters want to say to each other beneath what they actually do say. Or, failing that, you give them something interesting to discuss that isn't baldly about getting from point A to point B in the storyline. "Eclipse" is actually an improvement on the narcoleptic "New Moon" -- I still say Catherine Hardwicke's intelligently swoony direction made the first "Twilight" the best so far -- but it hasn't been written so much as mediated. With "Airbender," the lousy non-script is just one more rancid tomato in the stew. Please, if you have to see this movie, save your money and buy tickets for the 2D version -- otherwise Hollywood will get the message that we're sheep who deserve hideous post-production 3D conversions.
Maybe "I Am Love" ain't so hot on the screenplay front, either --but only because the characters are too busy sublimating and then giving into their most carnal culinary and sexual urges. (If "Eclipse" is all text, this one's all subtext.) It's another showcase for Tilda Swinton (in photo above), here playing a cosseted Milanese wife who falls rapturously in love with a young chef, but the chief pleasure of the movie is the sybaritic delight taken in clothing and architecture and, above all, food, all of which are somehow all about sex and lead there forthwith. Watch this on a very big screen, please, and, as Wesley says, you probably don't want to see it hungry or horny.
"Restrepo" is the latest embedded documentary from Afghanistan, courtesy of co-directors Tim Hetherington and "Perfect Storm" writer Sebastian Junger. I have yet to catch it, but it made a splash at Sundance and has glowing notices at Metacritic. It's at the Kendall Square, as is Michael Winterbottom's "The
Killer Inside Me," a well-made and purposeless adaptation of the notorious Jim Thompson pulp novel. (Consumer warning: the violence toward the film's female characters is extra-extra brutal.) At the MFA is a heartbreaking work of Iranian magical realism called "Women Without Men." And the Dennis Hopper retrospective continues at the Brattle with two genuine oddities from opposite ends of the actor's career: 1961's "Night Tide" (Hopper's first lead and a romance between a guy and a woman who may or may not be a mermaid -- hey, it's "Ondine" forty years early!) and 1994's "Witch Hunt" (HBO movie set in an alterna-noir Los Angeles where everyone can do magic; Hopper plays grizzled detective H. P. Lovecraft, "Phil" to his friends, of which he has none).
Here's the trailer for "Night Tide" -- come to think of it, this could be viewed as a proto-"Twilight" with the genders reversed and even worse screenwriting, if that's possible. Man, I miss the old, weird Hollywood.
Jodie Foster's acting career has been steady and strong since she began her career as a child, but her attempts at directing and producing seem to be thwarted at every turn. She can push our buttons with a glance, whether as Iris the 12-year-old prostitute in 
Lawsuits claiming such and such film stole so and so nobody's idea are a dime a dozen. But here's one that's more interesting than usual: unknown author 
You've no doubt heard Lindsay Lohan 
Update: 
The entertainment world is still buzzing over yesterday's revelation that 
