Filed under: Comedy, Celebrities and Controversy

I'm very sad to say that it's not looking good for Nailed. ... again ...

After a slew of shutdowns and a whole heap of monetary problems, it looked like David O. Russell's strange comedy was on the up and up. Earlier this month, the production struck a deal with Comerica Bank, and things seemed to be back on track, at least, until filming shot and post-production began.

Still, just two days shy of wrapping principal photography, Variety reports that the production has once again been halted. Some "below-the-line" crews refused to work on Friday when they weren't paid and IATSE told them not to show up. I guess Comerica didn't fork over enough cash. However, a Variety source says that the hope is to finish up the last two days this week, which includes "a key restaurant scene." I'm not sure where they're getting the cash for the final two days, but I hope they find it.

So, should things go smoothly this week, we can expect the filming to be wrapped, and then we can look forward to a long line of post-production money troubles. I just hope we get to see it in the end.

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S**t. P**s. F**k. C**t. M*********r. C********r. T**s.

That pretty much sums up my feelings (such as the Globe will allow me to, ironically) on the matter of the great Carlin's passing. The stand-up comedian who made good on Lenny Bruce's promise -- you can make people question everything if you can swear creatively enough -- managed to make the transition from squeaky-clean 60s one-liners (see below) to brilliant hippie arias of scatalogical filth in the 1970s (see above) to an unexpected late-inning career as our generation's Wise Old Crank (follow this YouTube link, please).

Because I was 15 when his seminal album "AM/FM" came out and scorched the ears off my adolescent head, I have entire Carlin monologues encoded in my DNA. Better, I and millions of others have that nasal, singing voice forever sowing doubt about the dominant culture and its all-encompassing blandness. At his worst, Carlin promoted cynicism, but at his best he made you truly, thoughtfully angry, and between his razor-sharp wit and his genuine love of language, he always made you laugh.

Oh, and points for taking on the Supreme Court and, in the long run, winning.

The people have spoken: Steve Carell as Maxwell Smart beats Mike Myers as Guru Pitka. Not that it wasn't much of a contest. Reviews for "Get Smart" (including my own) were mixed to pretty good, whereas the fumes of overripe cheese gone fungoid emanating from the trailer for "The Love Guru" extended to the critics and audiences. "Get Smart" pulled in a very tidy $39 million at nearly 4,000 theaters (for a healthy $10,000 per-theater-average). Compare that with "Guru," which came in fourth -- behind "Kung Fu Panda" and "The Incredible Hulk" in their third and second weekends respectively -- with $14 million at 3,000 theaters (for a paltry $4,600 PTA -- not much "want to see" there).

Message: Give the people what they want (a serviceable bit of retooled nostalgia), not what Mike Myers wants (a chance to work his way back into our good graces with copulating elephants).

In other B.O. news, "The Happening" no longer is happening: Down two-thirds from its opening weekend. Why? This may be best illustrated by the following word-of-mouth anecdote. Scene: The men's room of the AMC Boston Common. Time: Last Thursday night. The personnel: Guys doing their business, irate moviegoer. Irate Moviegoer:"Everybody, I just saw 'The Happening,' and I've taken it as my personal mission to warn you. Do. Not. See. This. Movie."

Way down the box office charts there was a limited five-theater release of "Kit Kittredge: An American Girl," the Abigail Breslin period movie that means nothing to you if you don't have daughters who've read all the "American Girl" books and collected the absurdly expensive dolls and accessories (I have some experience here). The total take was just over $200,000, but the real story is in the per-theater-average: a whopping $44,600 that bodes well for the film's wide release next Friday. As with "Sex in the City," another hint of the underserved female audience, no matter what age we're talking about. Also, along with good returns for the expanded "Mongol" ($8,000 PTA at 94 theaters), "Kit Kittredge" is a sign that releasing company Picturehouse maybe shouldn't get absorbed by parent company Warner Bros.

More number twiddling at Box Office Mojo and Movie City News.

Filed under: Documentary, Independent, Deals, ThinkFilm, Celebrities and Controversy, Distribution, Newsstand, Movie Marketing, Cinematical Indie

Last week, indieWIRE ran a provocative piece by Anthony Kaufman about the financial woes of THINKfilm, one of my favorite indie distributors. Kaufman detailed the cash flow problems at THINKfilm, which were causing acrimony between the distrib and many of its filmmakers, who were alleging that the distributor hadn't paid what it owed to them, as well as to advertising companies charged with marketing films under THINKfilm's banner.

Now indieWIRE has a follow-up piece up by Eugene Hernandez, which says that director/producer Alex Gibney, whose film Taxi to the Darkside won the best documentary Oscar this year and was supposed to receive a major theatrical push by THINKfilm following its win, is seeking more than $1 million in damages from the ailing distributor.

While THINKfilm did pay the film's producers the minimums guaranteed by their contract on May 5, Gibney's complaint alleges that THINKfilm failed to disclose that it did not have the financial resources to support the film's theatrical push following its Oscar win, and "jeopardized the success of the film by failing to abide by the terms of contracts it entered into with public relations firms and advisers and failed to pay such firms for work done and expenses incurred."

Continue reading Discuss: Should Filmmakers Give THINKfilm a Break?

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Unlike many other people, I am not going to jump on the bandwagon and tell you how historically inaccurate this film is. My reasons are simply this : 1) marco evolution is still a theory, 2) this film is pure popcorn fantasy anyway and should not be taken too seriously and 3) it’s directed by Roland Emmerich, a talented filmmaker who usually sells himself short and is more likely to have a good vision and a ton of overused ideas that tend to sabotage whatever story there is. There is no mistaking that Emmerich is good with a huge cast, and will usually bring out dramatic, yet sometimes cliched themes, and most of the time he can make them work. Because of that, his films tend to be surprising successes. Since the two leads in BC are of good looking stock (especially Camilla Belle), the cheese factor should be on high dosage. So what went wrong here? (more…)

Filed under: Celebrities and Controversy, Newsstand, Fan Rant

Here's the set up: Folks have been a bit puzzled over the alarming rise in teen pregnancies at North Shore High School in Gloucester, Massachusetts. In the past year alone, 17 girls have tested positive for a little bun in the oven, and officials (as well as school administrators) were baffled as to why, all of a sudden, the girls in Gloucester were all sorts of knocked up. Crazy, right? And weird. I'll fully admit that to wind up with 17 girls pregnant in one high school at the same time seems a bit strange, especially when it's four times the level from the year before. Four times!

Completely baffled, officials turned to the only feasible explanation: Blame the movies. And when they looked around at popular movies within the past year -- whaddya know -- there was an Oscar winner with teen pregnancy scribbled all over it. Juno ... written by that teen pregnancy supporter Diablo Cody, and directed by a pregnant teen himself, Jason Reitman. Of course! The ridiculous rise in pregnancies had to do with Juno -- a film that made teen pregnancy look about as comfortable and enjoyable as stuffing yourself in a piece of old luggage and rolling down a mountain. There's the answer!

But should we talk to the girls? Maybe see if there's another explanation for all this? Nah. Leave it all on Juno ... after all, Fox Searchlight didn't hand out condoms outside movie theaters screening Juno (I sure as heck never got any condoms!), so, really, it's their fault for not paying closer attention. Right?

Ahem, and that's when the twist comes in ...

Continue reading Fan Rant: School Blames 'Juno' for Rise in Teen Pregnancies

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My advice for the weekend's two big dogs is pretty straightforward: "Get Smart," sure, go ahead, just don't expect anything you haven't seen many, many times before. "The Love Guru," only if you relish the cinematic equivalent of having your nose hairs yanked out one by one. Mike Myers and M. Night Shyamalan are now both in danger of seeing their careers vanish -- maybe they should make a movie together?

If you're looking for a good old-fashioned movie, on the other hand, you could do much worse than head to the Coolidge or the Waltham Embassy to see "Mongol" (above), an epic tale that could be subtitled "Genghis Khan: The Early Years". By Wesley's report, it has all the stirring pageantry and Classics Illustrated magnificence that the studios have largely given up in favor of CGI.

Smartest movie of the week? That might be "Operation Filmmaker" at the Brattle, a documentary about an Iraqi film student hired to work on a Hollywood production and the many ways in which this goodwill gesture implodes in everyone's faces.

A weekend of Lina Wertmuller at the Harvard Film Archive. The director herself was originally supposed to show but cancelled; that's okay, since the films are worth seeing on their own. For those of you too young to remember, Wertmuller was the Italian filmmaker whose funny, ornery fables of sex and politics were the thinking couple's date movies in the 1970s. (Maybe you've seen the Madonna remake of "Swept Away"? By all means, give the original a chance.) In many ways, Wertmuller's films have badly dated -- the fate of all topical pop culture -- but their energy and intellectual stroppiness remain undimmed.

New Spanish film at the MFA all weekend -- a strong program anchored by the scratch-card satire "The Contestant" and the moody generational drama "DarkBlueAlmostBlack"

Also: "Son of Rambow" is still around and you still haven't seen it. Shame on you. It's at the Capitol Theatre in Arlington.

Filed under: RumorMonger, Celebrities and Controversy, Fandom, Quentin Tarantino, War

Anyone kind of wish Quentin Tarantino would chill and experiment with actually releasing a single, standalone movie rather than bizarro omnibuses and multi-part sagas? Well, too damn bad. Harry Knowles has a fairly lengthy piece on an interview with Tarantino that will be included for the forthcoming DVD release of the original Enzo Castellari version of Inglorious Bastards, which Tarantino is currently remaking/expanding/tributing. (Remember when he announced that he planned to have it ready for Cannes 2009? That was awesome.) In it, Tarantino discusses his plans for the film, including the fact that while writing the script (which he's still polishing), he did so much research that his story bubbled over into a second movie. In other words: here we go again.

Look, I'm happy to indulge the guy; really, I am. I sit through most movies anyway, and I have no problem sitting through an extra one by a filmmaker as interesting and skilled as Tarantino. He's bursting with ideas; fantastic. But there's a lot to be said for brevity and storytelling efficiency too.

The original Inglorious Bastards will hit DVD in a lavish 3-disc edition -- wait, make that "3-disc explosive edition" -- on July 29th. I note without comment that the Castellari film itself runs 99 minutes.

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Filed under: Celebrities and Controversy, Fan Rant

I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess. Clad only in garter belt and one dress shield, I held off the entire elite of the Trobriand Islanders, a race who possess no words for "why" or "because." Wielding a stone axe, I broke the arms, the limbs, the balls of their finest warriors, my beauty blinding them, as it does all men, unmanning them in the way that King Kong was reduced to mere simian whimper by beauteous Fay Wray whom I resemble left three-quarter profile if the key light is no more than five feet high during the close shot.

The above is the opening to Myra Breckinridge, which instantly sucked me into the world of Gore Vidal. I was a teen bored with the literature at school, as well as the fluff young-adult horror I was reading in my spare time, when I somehow stumbled on his book. Vidal's words were a beacon of light. Sure, there is more to Myra than rabid, powerful, and Amazonian femininity, but that was irrelevant because Vidal's novel was a gateway into the world beyond rural suburban life -- women with power, intelligence mixed with pulp, a crumbling gender barrier, Hollywood, and the vast world beyond cows and K-Mart.

Continue reading Fan Rant: The Big Screen Needs More Gore Vidal

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Lovely article here on the late actor/director's linchpin performance in Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut," written by David Schwartz for the Museum of the Moving Image's Moving Image Source website.

From the article: "The power of Kubrick's direction?and Pollack's performance?in the billiard scene comes from the contrast between Cruise's understated (and underrated) performance as Bill, and Pollack's blustery, mannered style. Cruise, the biggest box office star of his time, is brilliant in an uncharacteristic role; his character is passive, naïve, insecure, introverted, and unhinged. Ziegler is the opposite. Everything with him is show and surface; his power is derived from his understanding and command of how the world works. This is a man with no need for introspection.

"Yet if we were to come away believing that Ziegler has all the answers, the scene?and the film?would lose its remarkable ambiguity. For the scene to work?as it does?it must pretend to be explanatory while raising more questions than it answers. What Pollack does so commandingly is create the impression that every hesitation, every smile, every gesture by Ziegler is calculated and artificial, while at the same time making him so charming and convincing that everything also feels genuine. Ziegler seems to be lying and telling the truth at the same time, and Kubrick has no interest in resolving this tension."

"Eyes Wide Shut" has always had its quixotic defenders, but Schwartz is the first writer to make me want to actually see the film again.