1) Quality's In
The damn thing got a lot of good reviews, plus had monumentally good word-of-mouth ever since Christian Bale flipped over that Joker card at the end of Batman Begins. Christopher Nolan is a smart director, with wholly entertaining, if moody and grim, sensibilities. Bryan Singer's two X-Men movies were similarly literate (well, for superhero movies) treats that thrilled fans and impressed critics (especially the second one.) Both of these directors had strong indie backgrounds before they made the leap to big budget fantasias, and it shows in nearly every frame. I mean, look at the execrable mess that was Brett Ratner's X-Men: The Last Stand. It may have barreled through the box offices successfully enough, but that particularly hacky hack's ruining of the trilogy will never be one for the books. It's already forgotten. People can recognize quality. Good is good.

2) The Joker & The Dead Gay Cowboy
Yes, Heath Ledger is in the movie. Yes he's wonderfully good in it. Yes he is also dead. And the Joker is one of America's favorite villains—funny, menacing, very macabre. Ledger's performance is a grim triumph, and his untimely death only emboldened his Joker's lurching creepiness. It was almost like watching a zombie. A terrifically talented actor zombie. And c'mon, who isn't curious to run out and see that on opening weekend? Whether your curiosity was morbid or artistic or some combination of both (which I suspect it was for most of us), it was a must-see performance, especially this first weekend. You just had to form your own opinion so you could herald it to friends and neighbors, didn't you? God knows I did!

3) Dark Indeed!
Frankly, people like a little dark meat once in a while. Look at the apocalyptic angst of Wall-E or the shaky-camera personal emotion of Hancock. People have been gravitating toward murkier fare this summer. And in the case of a comic book movie, darker is usually better because, well, nerds think it's cooler. Who the hell wanted to see Speed Racer this spring, with all its bright candy colors and clapping monkeys? Even the Hulk couldn't get past his inherent cheesiness to make much of a dent in the summer season. Really, in terms of chatter and impact, only Iron Man and TDK were bona fide smashes this season. Iron Man because of the way it mitigates its inherent darkness (gun running! the Middle East!) with stark (heh heh) humor, and TDK for how it embraced the darkness wholly and sort of fell into a pit with it (albeit a glorious, zippy pit). These are dark times, blah blah, etc etc.

OK, so that's that. Big movie. We'll see if it has a major Cloverfield-style second weekend drop-off, or if it will blunder on, crushing The X-Files and other sorry, misguided pieces of August detritus that lie in its path. Either way, can we stop talking about it now?

The essential problem here is not one of taste or decorum, it's one of practicality and basic fucking humanity. People die. Sometimes, when people are lucky, it's at an advanced old age and one shuffles off surrounded by a wealth of memory and progeny's progeny, and it's merely like closing a book softly, having loved it to the last word. Other times it's quick and messy and ugly and brief, as was the case with Mr. Ledger. But to pussyfoot around, to be so scared to acknowledge death and dying, to wring our hands and say "oh no, what sacred and protected decency will we be violating if we acknowledge this fact" is stupid and obtuse. Frankly, I'm surprised Warner Bros. didn't market this movie as the chance to see Heath Ledger's Last, Greatest Performance. I mean, in essence they have, but in a respectably subtle way. I know that they stand to make a gargantuan sum of cheddar on this chamber piece of a superhero movie, but I think the most important thing is that Ledger's memory is being honored in the biggest, most laudatory way an actor could hope for. The wise and sexy Christian Bale (Santa Fe!) says of the whole foofaraw:

This is a celebration of what he did best - entertain people. Why would any actor not want that to be appreciated? I know he would have. The bottom line is it would be totally rude not to. Respect the man. This is what he did. This is what he wanted to do.

And I think that's the issue boiled down to its simplest and plainest truth. Here is a great thing that someone did once. It's not exploitation, in any way, to recognize that. Sure Warner Bros. may be coolly counting their millions, like business folks do, but they'll be grateful. They are people. Maybe they'll even applaud.

So hush up naysayers and Stevie Sensitivies. Why so serious indeed.

The interview, for me, went clearly haywire right about here:

“I’ve tried to stay fit, you know, because it’s my instrument, this is my violin,” he said, gesturing over his body. “I play the violin. So I want to keep it tuned up …. So I work out there during the day, and then I write.”

This is my instrument? Surely profile author Spencer Morgan left out a "with a chuckle" or "jokingly" somewhere. Like, say, at the end of this:

“I go in spurts,” he said. Upcoming Goot pictures include Mojave Phone Booth, about a phone booth in the middle of the desert, and Major Movie Star, in which he plays Jessica Simpson’s dad. “I guess that’s just an artist’s life,” he said, gazing out over the park [and making that jack-off motion with his fingers?? and ironically holding up a copy of Police Academy 4: Citizens Patrol and grinning like a maniac?].

Guttenberg also says, seemingly appropos of nothing, after calling himself a "seducer," that "the meek will inherit the earth... so be nice to the meek. The old man spitting on the corner. The janitor cleaning up. The man behind the counter at the convenience store. Those are our people—that guy driving that truck—they make the world go."

That non-sequitur is still ringing in your ears (along with the cheesy, swelling orchestral score you'd expect to accompany Guttenberg's soliloquy at the end of some cornball flick from, yes, the 1980s) when the actor starts spilling his guts about his drinking:

“I indulge in wine, and I love vodka, I do,” he said. “And I love scotch, you know. And I love weed. And I love women. And I do have, you know, those … Addiction is such an overused word."

Um....

I’ll go out with women, because it’ll make me feel better. Women that I shouldn’t be around, but maybe they’ll make me feel better.”
He estimated that he’s dated some 600 women, but still hasn’t found Mrs. Right.

Steve, maybe you should end the interview before you dig yourself in any dee...

“I’ll lie to make myself feel better,” he said. “If I feel shitty, and someone says, ‘What are you working on,’ I’ll get really pissed off and go, ‘Yeah I’m doing a thriller with, you know, George Clooney.’ I make myself feel better by that—that’s an addiction to whatever that is, to make myself feel better, to take the pain away.”

OK, well, it's time to update Wikipedia or something, because none of this is in there. Anyway, Steve, it's been nice catching up, great seeing you, catch you maybe at the 30-year reunion and, hey, don't ever change old buddy!

[Observer]

The success of Sex and the City has convinced execs that film versions of beloved 90's sitcoms are a good idea, so a Friends movie is on the way. The article emphasizes Jennifer Aniston's role in the decision making process and speculates she's jealous of Sarah Jessica Parker's recent success. We should put together a magazine exclusively dedicated to speculating about Jennifer Aniston's emotions. It seems to be a popular preoccupation these days.

This is a horrible idea. Sex and the City was pay cable and it was classy. Watching it always felt like you were getting a little gem. Sometimes the gems sucked, but the irregular production schedule and HBO gloss made you feel like it was special. Also, partial nudity!

Friends was sharp, sure, but it was mass produced. We've got 238 episodes of it, and we've spent the past 10 years catching re-runs of it at 6:30 because we had nothing better to do between the gym and dinner. The characters are definitely beloved, but I don't know if a movie feels appropriate to it.

One issue is that Friends was a old-school three-camera sitcom. The genre leads to an unusual level of reality that can be hard to could be hard to bring to the screen. Also, they're old. Do we want to see Phoebe Buffay in her late 40s?

The biggest question, though: Can they get Marcel the monkey to sign on?

[Daily Mail]

Most of the classics make it: Princess Leia in the gold bikini, Ursula Andress in the white bikini, Phoebe Cates in the about-to-be-removed bikini. There were some real surprises, too. Shirley MacLaine in John Goldfarb, Please Come Home? I had no idea! But the egregious omission was Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, a fine film about a mad scientist who attempts to take over the planet using really, really hot robots.

And, also, Jane Fonda in On Golden Pond. Yes, it is a movie about dementia, but it's a movie about dementia with some nice bikini shots.

Any others missing?

(And is it just coincidence that Pam Anderson's birthday falls in National Bikini Month?)

This year's crop includes the cast of Gossip Girl

The Jonas Brothers

And a passel of Judd Apatow finds like Jay Baruchel

and Jonah Hill

The interviews are essentially questionnaires with hard-hitting questions like "Jimmy Choo or Christian Louboutin?", but the accompanying article manages to achieve levels of inanity previously thought beyond the reach of man. Setting the scene to catalogue the survivors of V.F.'s first young Hollywood article in 2003, James Wolcott reminisces,

It was... a more innocent time in America... the Web site Gawker, that celebrity garbage-disposal unit, hadn’t yet left its snot mark on the culture; its best worst years lay ahead.

Thanx!



The carnage from the 2003 article was grim: Lindsey Lohan, Mary-Kate Olsen, Evan Rachel Wood, Amanda Bynes. It's a veritable parade of rehab and stalled careers, but the Vanity Fair curse doesn't start there. The lone success was Shia LeBeouf. The health of his career is presumably due to his supernatural ability to make monkeys fight with Russians.

All the way back in November '95, Vanity Fair declared Julia Ormond was the face of the future. It only took that and Smila's Sense of Snow to decimate her career.

Then Gretchen Mol was similarly featured in September '98 with the headline "Is She Hollywood's Next 'It' Girl?" We haven't heard much from Gretchen since then.

So, to Vanity Fair's class of 2008, our condolences.

[via LA Times]

Independent film exec Mark Gill went all Old Testament prophet at the LA Film Festival, predicting a funding famine for small and mid-sized films. A famine we haven't noticed yet because of the wealth of successful big budget films in theaters this summer. More fire, brimstone and Robert Downey Jr. after the jump.

The party responsible for the death of the small and mid-budget film, according to Gill, is democracy. The digital revolution has put the power to make films into the hands of every helot, resulting in a ten-fold increase in the number of submissions to Sundance every year. There has not been an corollary increase in quality.

Most of the films are flat-out awful,” said Mr. Gill, the head of the independent company The Film Department. “Trust me, I have had to sit through tons of them over the years. Let me put it another way: the digital revolution is here,” he said, and boy, is it underwhelming.

Similarly skeptical was one Robert Downey Jr.

What is creepy and obvious is that the market was suddenly flooded with morons who thought, ‘If I’ve got $500,000, I can make a baseball cap that has a company name on it and say I’m a filmmaker.

His bitterness is understandable.

So apparently this means seven years of famine for insightful dramedies about families reuniting for thanksgiving and any movie about lesbians.

While Gill's predictions may not be a complete revelation after the collapse of indie video ventures like Super Deluxe, he does manage to get the burning bush tone down pretty well.

The strongest of the strong will survive and in fact prosper. But it will feel like we just survived a medieval plague. The carnage and the stench will be overwhelming.

I think we all know what that'll smell like.

[NYT]

Ropeofsilicon.com has an early review of Batman:The Dark Knight which does its best to add to the swelling consensus that Australian James Dean is pretty effing great in his last movie. Clips and freakishly early Oscar buzz after the jump.

Brad Brevet's review is enthusiastic about all aspects of the film, but saves his strongest praise for the man behind the Joker make-up.

Ledger's descent into what is and has become The Joker makes Jack Nicholson's interpretation look like nothing more than a simple clown. "Wait until they get a load of me," says Jack... Wait until you get a load of Heath

The language occasionally borders on the hagiographic, but his well measured appraisal of the rest of the film makes it believeable.

In terms of comic book film adaptations this is the pinnacle. The argument saying this is The Godfather Part II of comic book movies would insinuate that Batman Begins is on equal terms with the original Godfather, which is far from true. However, if we could call this The Godfather of comic book movies I wait anxiously for what may/will become the film that caps off the trilogy.

I really, really hope this is true. Some critics have suggested Heath might snag an Oscar nod, but I'm just praying for a good Batman movie.

Let's keep fingers crossed, the trailer looks promising enough.

And if not, we've always got Jack.

And, while we're tossing clips around: Batdance. Yes, Batdance.

The actress is in talks with Warner Bros. to star in "The Ivy Chronicles," a story of class and the single woman in contemporary New York. It centers on Ivy Ames, an Upper East Side woman who, after losing her high-powered job and getting divorced, starts over again in a less ritzy downtown apartment. After pulling her children from private school, Ames starts a business to help upper-middle-class women get their children into elite kindergartens.

The project, based on Karen Quinn's eponymous novel, is described as following in the vein of "The Devil Wears Prada" and "The Nanny Diaries" as well as Gigi Levangie Grazer's "The Starter Wife," which became a successful limited series on USA. Jerry Weintraub is set to produce.

Though, I must confess, I find some of the little "Mini-Sutras" on the movie's YouTube page kinda funny. And "Mariska Hargitay" is funny, too! But the rest of it? Ugh. I mean, Mike Myers is a funny guy. And he's had years to put something together that could match, if not better, his Austin Powers success. And yet he chose... a comedy about his own spiritual enlightenment? After his father passed away in 1991, Myers became despondent. His depression eventually led him to the writing of spiritual salesman Deepak Chopra. The two became fast friends and Myers has been on a journey of awakening since, to hear him tell it. Which is fine. We're all entitled to a little happiness, obviously, but a whole tent-pole summer comedy based on a character and experience that is completely unrelatable to most audiences seems... a little misguided. It just seems wildly out of touch at best and self-indulgent and preachy at worst. One who wonders just who the hell greenlit this thing. Paramount must be awfully trusting of Myers. Or, they're scared.

Myers has developed a reputation for being extremely difficult on set. He's gotten away with it, mostly, because he's been such a proven box office draw. But many in Hollywood actively hope for his downfall. His Wayne's World director absolutely despised him, saying he was demanding and arrogant and rude on set. Apparently his Love Guru costar Jessica Alba had a terrible time with him. Some say he's just very passionate and intense about his work, and they can forgive it. But the sentiment that he's a megalomaniacal prick seems to have permanently tarnished his reputation. Could this film — which, based on advanced word (only 15% on RottenTomatoes), could be the biggest bomb of the summer — finally slay the ogre?

«JeffieJeff» I get tickets to the red carpet, I’m happy. Photos of me and Cruise smiling ends the war. Last thing I will say.
«cockysoldier [the Scientologist]» i hate the fucken war guy
«cockysoldier» take care
«JeffieJeff» Cruise calls - I’ll answer
«cockysoldier» he is starting his cable compnay
«cockysoldier» are you pissed at me

If Cruise were, indeed, starting a cable network, it would most likely be through United Artists, the studio he helps operate and co-owns, along with MGM and Paula Wagner, the former CAA agent who formed a production company with Cruise.

MGM, the biggest owner of United Artists, is, indeed, launching a big cable channel to compete with Showtime. But the official announcement of the deal does lists United Artists as a content supplier, not a full partner. That leaves open the intriguing possibility that Cruise is busy assembling something else on his own, perhaps packed with enthusiastic lectures on the adrenaline rush that comes from rescuing car-accident victims.

More likely, as with the United Artists deal, Cruise has been given a role that plays as much to his vanity as to any legitimate business interest, and he is bragging accordingly.

[Jeff Barea]

Ms. Decker, 27, one of the movie’s directors, seemed a little embarrassed by her own limited experience.

“The sad thing is, I desperately need to get with a girl,” she said, adding that a few stolen kisses was all she could count on the female side of her sexual ledger. “I just didn’t want it to be some random woman.”

At least Decker is honest about her "desperate" attempt to jump on a trend. Given the tenor of the launch party for her documentary, it would have been hard for her to bill the film as a serious examination of female sexuality:

At the after-party for the screening, at Vlada on West 51st Street, the culture seemed to be shifting in several directions simultaneously. A woman in Ziggy Stardust makeup, wearing a prosthesis cast from a man’s penis, participated in a simulated sex act. A while later, the woman, Amy Ouzoonian, a dancer and performance artist, made out on a couch with a mannish woman in a black suit.

The documentary apparently does throw out some mildly interesting facts as it retreads the old idea that women, like men, tend to find women more stimulating to look at.

What really matters to women, Dr. Chivers said, at least in the somewhat artificial setting of watching movies while intimately hooked up to a device called a photoplethysmograph, is not the gender of the actor, but the degree of sensuality. Even more than the naked exercisers, they were aroused by videos of masturbation, and more still by graphic videos of couples making love. Women with women, men with men, men with women: it did not seem to matter much to her female subjects, Dr. Chivers said.

“Women physically don’t seem to differentiate between genders in their sex responses, at least heterosexual women don’t,” she said. “For heterosexual women, gender didn’t matter. They responded to the level of activity.”

So, generally-straight women like watch women masturbating and having lesbian sex. Interesting. Someone should do a study on the sexual appeal of a video of two disingenuous women going through the motions of a lesbian fling and then rushing to exploit the affair for cash and/or bragging rights. Who knows, maybe that'll still be hot! And bankable.

[Times]

"Has he ever studied the history?" he asks, in that familiar near-whisper...

"He was complaining when I did Bird [the 1988 biopic of Charlie Parker]. Why would a white guy be doing that? I was the only guy who made it, that's why. He could have gone ahead and made it. Instead he was making something else." As for Flags of Our Fathers, he says, yes, there was a small detachment of black troops on Iwo Jima as a part of a munitions company, "but they didn't raise the flag. The story is Flags of Our Fathers, the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn't do that. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people'd go, 'This guy's lost his mind.' I mean, it's not accurate."

Lee shouldn't be demanding African-Americans in Eastwood's next picture, either. Changeling is set in Los Angeles during the Depression, before the city's make-up was changed by the large black influx. "What are you going to do, you gonna tell a fuckin' story about that?" he growls. "Make it look like a commercial for an equal opportunity player? I'm not in that game. I'm playing it the way I read it historically, and that's the way it is. When I do a picture and it's 90% black, like Bird, I use 90% black people."

Eastwood pauses, deliberately - once it would have provided him with the beat in which to spit out his cheroot before flinging back his poncho - and offers a last word of advice to the most influential black director in American movies. "A guy like him should shut his face."

Knowing Lee and how much he hates confrontation, I'm sure he'll let these comments about "a guy like him" just slide right off, and this whole "controversy" will fizzle out quietly.

[Guardian]

“In the big picture, this is not important, but there is a relationship between the entertainment industry and fashion,” Parker said on Thursday evening, adding. “We’ve watched sales dwindle and we’ve watched people be less inclined to spend money on clothes.” To Parker, these are reasons for companies to take particular care with their relationships. “Look, my affection for the dress hasn’t changed,” she said, “but what they did was so short-sighted. It’s just unethical and disappointing that they would allow the dress to be worn again.”

Interesting. But, um, also unethical? Using your biggest fans as unwitting publicity props by giving the worthless tickets, having them line up for hours and then sending them home without the promised movie, all because your production company was too incompetent to secure the thousands of available extra seats.

And they don't have a $56 million, twice-as-good-as-expected opening weekend box office to cushion the slight.

[Times]

In a montage of wedding-dress fittings, [Parker's "Carrie"] honors "new friends like Vera Wang and Carolina Herrera and Christian Lacroix, Lanvin and Dior," and so on; what I object to is not the name-dropping—think of it as a chick response to American Psycho—but the montage itself, which is shot in lazy veils of schmaltz. Compare the quick-change sequence in Funny Face, with Audrey Hepburn robed in one Givenchy masterpiece after another, and you sense not merely the greater snap in Stanley Donen’s direction (with more than a hand from Richard Avedon), and the hotter bloom of the coloring, but the way in which Hepburn herself outglows the frocks, with her smile and her imperious shout—“Take the picture, take the picture!” No thoroughbred was ever just a clotheshorse.

The women in Sex and the City, by that standard, are little better than also-rans, and their gallops of conspicuous consumption seem oddly joyless, as displacement activities tend to be.

You know, Anthony, beating the dead horse of the Sex And The City movie is fine because you do it so well, but trotting out insensitive language like this will only saddle you with criticism.

[New Yorker]

"The movie studio gave out way more promotional tickets than could fit in the orchestra," said one insider. "Radio City managers told the New Line people, 'You can solve this by opening up the mezzanines, which have 2,700 more seats - but they wouldn't do it."

However, a New Line source countered, "It was Radio City Music Hall making that decision. They took control of the fan line. They turned the fans away."

People get upset about Sex And The City selling vacuous lies — about New York, about relationships, about sex, about life — but now the enterprise has gone and done something that really will, for once, help hundreds of its most fervent fans start behaving more independently.

[Post]

So my friend and I had tickets to the SATC premiere tonight. We left work early and booked it over there. When we got there, there was a line spanning from 50th and 6th to 50th and 5th around to 51st between 5th and 6th. We realized there probably wasn't much of a chance everyone would fit but it was Radio City sooo lots of seats. Some photographers took pics of the line and once that was done they told EVERYONE to go home. Not one ticket holder entered the theater. There were probably a couple of thousand people all decked out having travels from who knows where to get there holding their tickets and told to leave. There was a near riot of Louboutin clicking girls to the security windows in the front. I had gotten the tickets recently so I wasn't as emotionally invested but I thought it was really wrong. Some were in near tears waving their tickets and yelling into their cells. There were some people who had been there for hours and had missed work. They told us later that they didn't open the mezzanine so basically the tickets were for show. Just mean - all for a PR shots...

It seems Sherman won't get to go to a promised event featuring Sex star Kim Cattrall, a party that would likely have figured prominently in the story she's freelancin for some big Asian magazine.

"It was the after-party that was the big thing for me," she told the Post.

Oh please, Ella. You don't need to go to that. You've clearly soaked up the naive, entitled, psuedo-feminist striving at the heart of Sex And The City better than virtually every person at this little "after-party," assuming it ever existed in the first place.

[Post]

(Photo via Post)

(Michael Clayton clips via 29Guide.)

• "Helen Malani, an online shopping expert [in Los Angeles]... has already bought seven tickets to an opening-night showing on May 30. One guest is coming from as far away as Arizona... the chance to 'hoot and holler' at the screen with a like-minded sisterhood has been lacking in her years of devotion to the series."
• "In Vail, Colo., Bonnie Vesey plans to go one better, with cosmopolitans and an Asian fusion dinner party for 10 at the Beaver Creek resort before a 9 p.m. screening at a nearby theater... 'We’re all going to dress fabulously... I’m the Kim Cattrall of the group.'"
• "In Manhattan, On Location Tours sold out 300 tickets, at $130 each, for a special 10-hour tour of “Sex and the City” hot spots. The night peaks with a group viewing of the movie at a reserved theater auditorium in Midtown, followed by a party at a club in Chelsea."
• "A spokesman for... an online ticket service said... 26 percent of those who responded planned to see the film 'with the whole gang.'"
• "Approximately 20 'beautiful females have all decided to meet for the event starting at Mangia e Bevi then out for a stroll to the movies with our man Manhattan...'"

On the bright side, this will be a huge, huge money night for cat-sitters.

[Times]

(Photo via EveryStockPhoto)

"Blindness" tracks the utopian ups and dreadful downs of various people — a strong Mark Ruffalo is the Doctor, and a nearly as good Julianne Moore plays the Doctor's Wife — who are interned after a national outbreak of contagious blindness. One bad thing leads to another (it's a Hobbesian world after all), including mass rape, exceptional production design (Toronto looks a mess) and a lot of acting from Danny Glover (the Man with the Black Eye Patch), Gael García Bernal (the King) and Maury Chaykin (the Accountant). Curiously, the film's carefully calibrated racial and ethnic demographics echo those of the central castaways in "Lost," though any given episode in that show's best seasons is far better. Smarter too. A maximalist who never made a shot he didn't seem to want to tweak, Mr. Meirelles, with his heavy hand, is a poor fit for a story already heavily burdened by an allegory that's at once obvious (we're blind!) and elusive (because of ...?). It isn't enough that people turn blind here without rhyme or reason, or that the blind are soon leading the blind with no end in sight, both literally and figuratively. Mr. Meirelles also has to flood the screen with a sizzling (blinding) white, which causes your pupils to constrict. That's a cool enough trick the first five or six times, but it grows wearisome when you realize that Mr. Meirelles is capable only of bopping the audience on the head, not engaging what's inside those heads.

Shaking Up the Crowd at Cannes [NYT]