Sunday NYT in 60 Seconds »
Brokeback Feelings and Vendetta Venom: The New York Times In 60 Seconds
Filed under: Awards, Celebrities and Controversy, Box Office, Sunday NYT in 60 Seconds, Newsstand, Politics
- Some Brokeback Mountain fans are so outraged that Crash won for Best Picture that they've spent $24,000 (I saw another piece that said it was as much as $26,000) on a full page ad.
- Speaking of Brokeback: can you see it in China?
- A Hollywood private eye tale that reads like something out of a movie.
- Who is going to take over the reins of Universal Pictures?
- Alan Moore isn't happy with V for Vendetta. Nope, not at all.
- Check out the last edition (this year, anyway) of David Carr's special Red Carpet video reports from Times Square (scroll down). It's his "end of the awards season" report. My favorite line involves William Shatner and a horse.
Oscar, Oscar, Oscar: The Sunday New York Times in 60 seconds
Filed under: Awards, Casting, New Releases, RumorMonger, Celebrities and Controversy, Box Office, Sunday NYT in 60 Seconds, Newsstand, Movie Marketing, Lists, Oscar Watch
Is Jon Stewart ready for hosting the
Oscars?- Speaking of the Oscars, Robert Altman is finally getting one.
- Another 15 minutes for an Andy Warhol girl.
- What happened to the career of Cuba Gooding, Jr?
- Photographs of 26 Oscar nominees, including the strangest picture of George Clooney you've ever seen.
Temporary sociopathy: Sunday NY Times in 60 Seconds
Filed under: Celebrities and Controversy, Sunday NYT in 60 Seconds, Scarlett Johansson, Politics, Games and Game Movies
The recent nomination of Ron Silver to the board of the U.S. Institute of Peace sparks a tense exchange between the actor and Deborah Solomon about his politics, Bush cronyism and the difficulties of being an outspoken Republican in Hollywood: "I think people in Hollywood are not thrilled with me. I have no direct
evidence that a crime has been committed against me. At best I can only
indict on perjury and obstruction of employment."- "I find that right now I'm totally sociopathic," Says Sundance co-programmer Caroline Libresco, one of the stars of John Clark's profile of the festival's process of weeding. "I can't talk to my friends. With so many images coming in, I've been wanting someone to do dream-type analysis on Geoff Gilmore's brain or Shari Frilot's brain."
- Tony Scott tries to define mid-century modern as the hot new target for "period" filmmaking, via Good Night and Good Luck, Capote, Walk the Line and others. "Watching these movies, with their painstaking detail and their trompe l'oeil leading performances, we may also wonder how we got from there to here, a line of inquiry that the pictures frustrate by means of their elaborate visual fidelity. The difference between a period film and a historical film, in other words, is that while a historical film implies a continuity with the present, the period film, far more common in Hollywood, seals the past in a celluloid vitrine, establishing a safe distance between then and now."
- Inspired by XBox 360 mania, John Leland asks, "Can games be something more than games? In other words, can they move people emotionally or intellectually in the manner of great art?"
- "If you're working hard at any job, you have to treat yourself. Nobody's really taking care of you, so it's a good idea to buy yourself a piece of jewelry or a cashmere blanket. It's like, I earned this. If you wait around for someone to give you wonderful socks, you may miss out. Shopping is a great way to pat yourself on the back when no one else will." And with that, Scarlett Johansson inspires me to spend the afternoon at Bloomies ... or, at the very least, Crazy Loco 99¢.
- David Carr, who writes a culture column for the Times' Business section, will begin his own version of The Envelope on Tuesday, called The Carpetbagger.
The revolution will not be distributed: Sunday NYT in 60 Seconds
Filed under: Gay & Lesbian, Independent, Critical Thought, Distribution, Sunday NYT in 60 Seconds, Newsstand, Cinematical Indie
You may not be able to see their film in a multiplex, but with today's Sunday Times, Arin Crumley and Susan Buice have hit some kind of big time – they, and Four Eyed Monsters, are Charles Lyon's local in for a piece on the dire state of indie distribution. "If the result was going to be this," Crumley says, "a film with no
distributor, no way for anyone to ever get a chance to see it beyond
those who saw it at a few festivals, would I have done it? ... The answer is, 'no'." Lyon's also talks to Lloyd Kaufman (Troma), Emliy Morse (star of I Am a Sex Addict and director of See How They Run), and others.- Caryn James on this year's most popular awards bait stunt: playing gay. A great deal of her argument centers around the fact that we know just enough about, say, Heath Ledger's private life, to be able to simply appreciate his performance in Brokeback Mountain as Good Acting, and not a threat to the dominant paradigm: "Our awareness of these nonfiction roles makes it easier and maybe more acceptable for middle-class heterosexual viewers - a group that does, after all, include most of us in the audience - to embrace characters whose sexual preferences we don't share."
- Franz Linz files a long profile on Nick Goosen, whose Grandma's Boy – a stoner comedy about video game testers – is about to hit theaters. Goosen, the son of an LAPD detective who worked the Black Dahlia case, got his big break playing basketball with Adam Sandler.
- Andrew Adam Newman reports on the International Dog Film Festival. No comment.
Coyote, and other monsters: Sunday NY Times in 60 Seconds
Filed under: Foreign Language, Horror, Sunday NYT in 60 Seconds, DIY/Filmmaking, Newsstand, Cinematical Indie
Michael Joseph Gross tracks Richard Linklater's attempt to shoot Fast Food Nation – I'm sorry, Coyote – in real locations on the low pro. Though one of the film's producers maintains that the fast food industry shouldn't be worried ("We're just using the fast food industry as a backdrop for a multitude
of characters. It's not a polemic. It's a character study,
set in the world of the fast food industry"), they apparently are. The president of the Colorado Restaurant Association frets: "If people are willing to lie about what they're doing, they can
probably talk their way into most anywhere, and that could be a
problem."- Mick Garris makes a strange analogy to explain the genesis of the Masters of Horror anthology that premiered last night on Showtime: "Whenever our paths would cross at horror conventions and screenings, we would always talk about getting together for dinner, but no one made a move. After a few years of this, I decided to play Dorothy Parker and organize the Algonquin Round Table West."
- Are Asian countries – Japan and Korea, in particular – "breeding a new generation of cinematic sadists"? Park Chanwook doesn't think so, but as he admits to Dave Kehr, "I don't want the viewer to stop at the mental or the intellectual. I want them to feel my work physically. And because that is one of my goals, the title 'exploitative' will probably follow me around for a while."
- Bruce Weiss is planning to produce a series of DV remakes, to be directed by actors Bob Balaban, Stanley Tucci, and Steve Buscemi, of films made by Theo Van Gogh, the controversial Dutch artist who was assassinated by a disgruntled moviegoer earlier this year. Christian Moerk reports, "They are movies that aim to tap the all-around rambunctiousness that made van Gogh what Mr. Weiss calls "an equal-opportunity offender."
Road Trips and Wild Things: Sunday NY Times in 60 seconds
Filed under: Critical Thought, Sunday NYT in 60 Seconds, Newsstand
A.O. Scott uses Wim Wenders and Cameron Crowe's latest efforts as an "in" to talk about road trip movies. "If nothing else, these movies serve to remind us that we inhabit an
endlessly photogenic nation. But they also acknowledge the anxious
distance that the film industry perceives between itself and the rest
of the country. The movie road trip is at once an acknowledgment of the
artificiality of movies and an imaginary antidote to it."- It looks like Spike Jonze will be the man to bring Where the Wild Things Are to the big screen. The Adaptation director has written a script with Dave Eggers, and both "exotic locations" and animatronics (presumably equally exotic) are under negotiation. But don't hold your breath just yet – as Charles Fleming reminds us, "To date, the film has done a very good job of not getting made."
- Campbell Robertson dines at Bette with Dita Von Teese, world-famous burlesque dancer and Marilyn Manson's fiancee. "Everybody asks me, 'Can I wear black?' " Ms. Von Teese said. "I said: 'Of course you can wear black. Whose wedding do you think you're going to?'"
- Mary Gaitskill, the author of the short-story on which Secretary was based, has written a new novel called Veronica, and it sounds awesome. "One of the great ancillary pleasures of Veronica is its portrait of what's happened to the participants of Manhattan's downtown arts scene of the 1980's, the first generation to come of age in an era of AIDS - a kind of "where are they now" for the Nan Goldin crew." Meghan O'Rourke has more.
Waxy Visits Weitz's Dreamz: Sunday NYT in 60 Seconds
Filed under: Critical Thought, Sunday NYT in 60 Seconds, DIY/Filmmaking, Waxing Hysterical
Sharon Waxman reports from the set of Paul Weitz' latest, American Dreamz, a Bush administration satire starring Dennis Quaid and Marcia Gay Harden. As usual, Waxy's "expose" isn't exactly as earthshattering as it seems to think it is, but there's some interesting political stuff here, particularly if you can make it to the third page. Also: details on Hugh Grant's midlife crisis. - A feature on the rise of the Slavic gitterati in New York City has a blurb on (but, sadly, no quote from) Eugene Hutz, star of Everything is Illuminated and Gogol Bordello.
- Fiona Ng profiles the Beijing Film Academy, the largest school of its kind in Asia, and alma mater of Zhang Yimou and Jia Zhangke.
- Noel Lawrence, one of the driving forces behind San Francisco's Other Cinema, is going around trying to ressurect the lost work of a guy named J.X Williams, an "RKO mail-room flunky, closet Communist, abortive House Un-American Activities Committee witness, Mafia gofer, pioneer of mobbed-up stag loops, ghostwriter of some of the blacklist era's greatest films and incidental avatar of experimental cinema." The only problem is, some people are having a hard time believing that Williams ever existed.
Joss Whedon the Fanboy: Sunday NY Times in 60 Seconds
Filed under: Sunday NYT in 60 Seconds
"I am - and always will be - the biggest fanboy. I write from a fanboy place." On the eve of the Serenity premiere, creator Joss Whedon explains how he got Universal to help him turn a cancelled TV series into a $45 million sci-fi epic.- Another Canadian tax break miracle: Arjun Sablok's Neal n' Nikki is the first singing/dancing Bollywood extravaganza to be shot entirely outside of India.
- "While Just Like Heaven is content with a vague, ecumenical supernaturalism, Emily Rose wants to tell you, like the old Louvin Brothers song, that Satan is real." A.O. Scott examines the recent rise of religious conservatism in unlikely Hollywood places.
- Mr. Scott then takes us through an Audio Slide Show on highlights of this year's New York Film Festival, which is happening now.
- Director Bennett Miller, screenwriter Dan Futterman, and actor Philip Seymour Hoffman discuss the birthing process behind their NYFF entry, Capote. "Before he'd written one word," says Miller, "[Futterman] described a scene where Capote is on an airplane, going back from Kansas knowing he'll never write another book. And I thought, I like that."
Cronenberg, Clooney and the Real-Live Shopgirl: Sunday NYT in 60 Seconds
Filed under: Sunday NYT in 60 Seconds
"Is there any director more entitled than [David] Cronenberg to put his feet up
and make a few bucks directing a nice popcorn movie for a change?" Jonathan Dee on Cronenberg's best.- Allyson Hollingsworth's art is featured prominently in Steve Martin's Shopgirl; her life is featured prominently in the novella on which it was based. In this profile, she frustratingly refuses to dish on her real-life relationship with Martin, but she talks about pretty much everything else.
- "[George] Clooney seems to be the one Big Star, give or take a Bono, who has managed to have his cake and credibility, too." David Carr talks to the triple-threat on the eve of Good Night, and Good Luck's premiere at the New York Film Festival.
- "This is the best thing I ever did," says Joaquin Phoenix, explaining his decidedly non-anonymous participation in AA. "It takes a lot of courage to look at yourself in a rigorously honest way. And I like rigor.''
- Joe Queenan calls Marlon Brando's Fan-Tan a "thrilling example" of the curious genre of celebrity art side-projects: "Ultimately, the question of whether these oddities cut the mustard becomes irrelevant. The only thing worth asking is: "Gee willikers! What occasioned this?"
The NYT Fall Film Preview in 60 Seconds
Filed under: Critical Thought, Celebrities and Controversy, Sunday NYT in 60 Seconds
Reese Witherspoon didn't want to do her own vocals in Walk the Line,
so much so that she reportedly whined to director James Mangold, "Can't
you just hire someone who sounds good?" She eventually relented.- A.O. Scott wonders if movies have moved too far away from the real concerns of their audience: "Perhaps this summer's much-discussed box-office slump is a sign that American audiences are becoming as disengaged from the movies as the movies are from us. Are we beginning to look elsewhere not only for amusement, but also for the significance - the dreams, the insights, the challenges, the utopian projections - that movies used to provide?"
- Manohla Dargis looks at the trend of films about Americans - "Ordinary, smiling, guilty Americans" - made by non-American directors.
- Proof, a movie about a second-generation genius trying to break out of her father's shadow, stars two second-generation Hollywood stars. Coincidence? Gwyneth Paltrow ignores her crying baby long enough to give a few evasive answers.
- Five performances to watch: Tom Hollander in Pride and Prejudice, Damian Lewis in Keane, Robert Patrick in Walk the Line, Emily Mortimer in Match Point, Dina Korzun in 40 Shades of Blue.
- Stuart Klawans on Wallace and Gromit's Hollywood debut.
- The challenge behind shilling King Kong? Selling to rabid nerd-fans without giving them the impression that they're being sold.
Tom Cruise and J.J. Abrams Reunite for 'Mission Impossible 4'
'Big Top Pee-Wee': The Original Benicio Del Toro Wolfman
Spin-ematical: New on DVD and Blu-ray for 2/9
Watch This: Brilliant Oscar-Nominated Short 'Logorama'
Chris Nolan to Lead 'Superman' Reboot!?
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