The Screengrab : pirates of the caribbean

Dance with a Ranger; Johnny Depp and "Donnie Brasco" Director Break Out the Silver Bullets

Phil Nugent — Wed, 06 May 2009 14:30:00 GMT

It's been reported that director Mike Newell is in talks to direct a new movie about the Lone Ranger for producer Jerry Bruckheimer. This news confuses us. We go far enough with Newell that we will always think of him as a specialist in dark-toned, downbeat British films such as Dance with a Stranger, The Good Father, and An Awfully Big Adventure. That last one has a title that sounds kind of fun until you remember that it's Peter Pan's description of what death must be; even Newell's big romantic comedy hit, Four Weddings and a Funeral, had a funeral in it. It's not the kind of resume that one associates with high-spirited Western action, but Newell was allowed to direct a Harry Potter movie that Guillermo del Toro couldn't fit into his busy schedule, so apparently that makes him Howard Hawks. The big casting news about this picture concerns not who's playing the Ranger, but Johnny Depp's eagerness to play his faithful Native American sidekick, Tonto. Leaving aside the question of whether Depp intends to go traditional with the "Me Tonto, you kemo sabe" business or attempt something more multiculturally cutting-edge, there's the fact that his previous collaboration with Newell, Donnie Brasco, was a gangster movie that nobody has ever described as frolicsome.

The thing is, we've been here before. 1981's The Legend of the Lone Ranger was a heavily touted fiasco that, in attempting to revive the character, succeeded only in dumping mountain load of dirt on the heads of his resuscitators. It was directed for maximum pomposity by William Fraker, an artist best known as a cinematographer, though he had already directed Monte Walsh, a grotesquely depressive Western that seemed to run for half the lifetime of it dazed star, Lee Marvin, and that was lit with a 30-watt bulb. Fraker's Lone Ranger movie was most notable for the tsunami of bad publicity that hit it when the Wrather Corporation, which owned the rights to the character, sicced its lawyers on Clayton Moore, the actor who had played the Ranger on television, and who the company wanted to prevent from showing up at any grocery store openings in his die mask and cowboy hat. The company won in court, but in the process reaped more bad karma than Caligula. Some of it hit the new Lone Ranger, a fellow named Klinton Spilsbury, whose performance so dazzled the suits that they had his entire performance re-dubbed by the uncredited James Keach. Lone Ranger was Spilsbury's acting debut, and since he never got work again, he has the special distinction of being the rare star of a major motion picture of the talking era who seems likely to leave no evidence of what he sounded like behind for posterity. Spilsbury subsequently won Golden Raspberry Awards for Worst Actor and Worst New Star of the year, which means that he has twice as many Golden Raspberry Awards as he has movie credits.

On the plus side, the new Lone Ranger movie is being written by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, who wrote the ferociously whimsical Pirates of the Caribbean movies, so maybe their surfeit of jolliness will balance out Newell's natural dolor. That still leaves the question of how Depp will approach his role. In the Fraker movie, Tonto was played by Michael Horse, later of Twin Peaks, who went into the project with some trepidation and who seems to have wound up basically taking the attitude that he was just out there enjoying the scenery while some idiots shot a Lone Ranger movie around him. In an interview, Horse recalled telling the fillmakers "that in this day and age, if you portray Tonto with disrespect, there will be more Indians on your lawn than Custer saw." (Horse also recalled being bothered late one night because Spilsbury had gotten into a brawl, possibly with someone who made fun of whatever his voice sounded like: "Some guard called me at three in the morning to come and get him. I said, ‘whoa, that faithful companion stuff is only in the movies.'") As we've all been well-informed by now, Depp modeled his performance in the Pirates movies on his good buddy Keith Richards. Maybe he can model his Tonto on Jimmy Carl Black.

21 Stars We Hate (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 21:30:00 GMT

JESSICA ALBA

I’ll let you in on a little secret: I like sexy women. Sometimes, I like to hear them discuss foreign policy in a purring Greek accent (Arianna Huffington...mrowr!), while other times I've been known to enjoy a more prurient visual display of nubile hips and boobies. Fortunately, I’m not alone in this interest. Unlike, say, my lonely passion for Whit Stillman films, which can apparently no longer be satisfied, the demand for sexy women has glutted the market to the point where it’s nearly impossible to avoid them. Everywhere you look (in pop culture, if not my local gym) there are sweaty, well-toned H-O-T girls and women gyrating their pelvic muscles and shaking their butts in thongs and Daisy Dukes and whipped cream bikinis...so WHY, out of all the sexy women in the world, from Arianna to Miss November 2008, does Jessica Frickin’ Alba get to be in so many movies? Yes, she has a nice bod, and I enjoyed watching her undulate in Sin City as much as the next straight guy...until, that is, the camera panned up to her completely vapid expression, on a face completely devoid of mystery, personality or even the lusty carnality of supporting co-star Brittany Murphy. In real life, Alba may be a sweet, darling lass who bakes pies for orphans, but onscreen she’s got less acting talent and charisma than Ryan Gosling’s sex doll in Lars and the Real Girl...and yet Alba is somehow considered an A-list player, who gets to appear not just on the cover of Maxim, but in major motion pictures, in multiple genres, from action and horror to romantic comedy, while far more interesting and far sexier actresses like Murphy, Rosario Dawson, Mila Kunis, Thora Birch, Marley Shelton (and, no doubt, a huge percentage of the rest of the female S.A.G. membership) bob along under the surface, crossing their fingers in hopes of landing some of the high profile lead roles currently going to America’s favorite bleach-blonde void.

CHRISTOPHER REEVE

Oh, boo yourself. In the years since his unfortunate death, it has become distasteful bordering on offensive to say anything even remotely critical about Christopher Reeve. And certainly, it’s not my intention to impugn him as a man – he was, by all accounts, a decent human being, a loving husband, and a fine father to his children. The tragic accident which cost him his health was an event to be lamented, and he became a hero in its wake by advocating relentlessly for the rights and dignity of the disabled; and the comeback he made from his paralysis was very nearly a miracle. But before he took that unlucky tumble from a horse, a lot of people already knew what no one is now willing to say: Christopher Reeve was a terrible actor. Wooden, clumsy, and extremely limited in range, he started out as a pretty boy who might have been a modest success if he’d stuck to what he was good at. But Reeve was an ambitious man who soon discovered that his ambition led him to places his talent wasn’t able to go. He was laughable in Somewhere in Time, embarrassing in Monsignor, and, matched up against genuine heavyweight Michael Caine in Deathtrap, he just looked like he wanted to go home. His reputation as an actor, such as it is, rests on the Superman movies he did in the 1980s, but a lot of that adulation is vested in the character he played, and a lot more in the man who was playing him; looking at Reeve’s actual performances in the movies, it’s hard to believe anyone got very excited over that.

HALLE BERRY

It must have taken a phenomenal amount of determination and perseverance for Berry to work her way up through decorative eye candy roles in such movies as Strictly Business, Boomerang, and The Flintstones to more challenging dramatic parts in Losing Isiah and Bulworth, and then to her landmark win as the first African-American recipient of the Academy Award for Best Actress for Monster's Ball and all the attention about her becoming the first black Bond girl in Die Another Day. But Monster's Ball is still a ridiculous movie, and Berry is hardly the least ridiculous thing in it. And her Bond girl made a great entrance, walking in from the surf, but then, as is so often the case with Berry's characters, wore out her welcome as soon as she started talking. Berry can be off-putting because, like Demi Moore, she seems to be less interested in entertaining the audience than in daring them not to respect her; at her worst, she radiates a defensive insistence on her own stature as an actress that is way out of proportion to her proven abilities, which in moments of high drama seem to consist mostly of a tremulous, anxious quality combined with a "Who farted?" expression. And that's when her mouth isn't even moving: her big line from the first X-Men movie ("Do you know what happens to a toad when it's struck by lighting? The same thing that happens to everything else.") has the special distinction of being both the lamest-written and the lamest-delivered line in the history of superhero movies. It's just too bad that her need to be taken seriously may preclude her from doing more comedy. Because if the clip above is any indication, we do have to give her props for having a sense of humor.

ORLANDO BLOOM

Did Peter Jackson have him grown in a lab? In the battle scenes in the Lord of the Rings pictures, most of the cast can be seen with hair and sweat flying while Bloom, as the elf Legolas, always looks as if his smooth plastic surface had just been wiped clean with a damp cloth. When I saw the movies, I assumed that he'd been CGI'ed to look that way, on the theory that elves never have a hair out of place even when they go on the flume ride at the water park, but Viggo Mortensen has since told interviewers that he used to stare at Bloom in disbelief while they were filming, wondering how the little bastard kept looking like a fashion spread no matter what got thrown at him or what exertions were required of him. Will Bloom ever find another role as perfectly suited to his lightweight, poreless quality as that of an arrow-shooting elf? He hasn't so far. He was cast as the romantic hero of Pirates of the Caribbean, only to have the movies use his inability to hold the screen with Johnny Depp or Keira Knightley as a running in-joke. It was fun getting to see Brendan Gleeson slap the pluperfect shit out of him in Troy, but the directors who've given him the chance to carry a picture -- in Kingdom of Heaven and Elizabethtown and the barely released Haven -- have only succeeded in putting nasty dents in their own careers. So far, he hasn't done enough damage to otherwise promising projects to qualify as a menace, but that could change: he's supposedly threatening to play the Alain Delon role in Hong Kong action master Johnny To's planned remake of Jean-Pierre Melville's 1970 French gangland classic Le Cercle Rouge. If he pulls that off, all will be forgiven. If he screws it up, film geeks of many kinds will want to lasso his balls and leave him hanging upside down from a Times Square billboard.

RENÉE ZELLWEGER

Where did Renée Zellweger come from, and what did she ever do to earn her keep in the gallery of semi-major starlets? She has the acting abilities and charisma of a lutefisk. There is little that is redeeming about her in any of her movies. Especially not her uhm, "method" act as "fat" in Bridget Jones's Diary. Whose hand she greased to win an Oscar for Cold Mountain we will never know. And speaking of Oscars, a nomination for her role in Chicago? You must be joking. Just about every other actor in that movie swept the floor with her. And that includes Mr. Cellophane. All this is quite aside from the fact that she perpetually looks as if she just bit into a lemon.

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: STEVEN SEAGAL

There’s a certain amount of humor in the notion of a big fat guy playing an indestructible martial arts machine. But Steven Seagal isn’t laughing. Ever. In fact, he may not even have the physical capability. And if watching close-ups of his portly mug intercut with shots of an obviously thinner stunt man kicking ass on the roof of a speeding train in Under Siege 2 didn’t get the man to laugh out loud, I guess he never will. Which is probably all for the best: based on the witty one-liners in his godawful body of work (as evidenced in the clip above), the only thing worse than Seagal’s “enlightened” action flicks would be a string of inspirational Zen comedies. Speaking of which...

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: MIKE MYERS

According to a recent Entertainment Weekly profile, Mike Myers (despite his loveable Wayne’s World and Austin Powers personas) is a hellacious douche, largely despised in Hollywood for both the right and some of the wrong reasons, by good and evil people alike. As if beating the Powers franchise to death and helping Jim Carrey and Theodore Geisel’s money-grubbing widow to destroy the wonder and magic of Dr. Seuss’ legacy weren’t enough, Myers actually said The Love Guru was “a delivery system for some wonderful ideas,” a statement that’s actually funnier than anything in the movie.

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent, Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Saw: Ride the Torture!

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

A long, long time ago -- no, really! It was five whole years ago! We'd just won the war in Iraq! -- a movie came out called Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Professional movie watchers like myself were a tad taken aback, largely because we had severe doubts about the quality of a movie based on a theme park ride. As it happens, the movie was actually pretty engaging, and for a few years, before Pirates of the Caribbean went to hell and became as bad as we thought it was going to be in the first place, people got to cluck their tongues at us and go "See? You never know."

Unfortunately, that's not entirely true. Sometimes you know. For example, I know that, even though amusement park rides based on movies are far more common, and generally of higher quality, than movies based on amusement park rides, the recently announced Saw: The Ride is going to go down in history as nothing but one more step towards the ultimate humilation, degradation and sad, slow death of the human race.

No, we're not kidding: there really is going to be such a thing as Saw: The Ride. Based on the depressingly popular torture-porn horror series, it's set to open at Surrey's Thorpe Park in Britain in March of 2009. Alleged to be the first roller-coaster to be based on a horror movie, the ride features a 100-foot vertical drop in free fall, which is so scary that it induced Saw producers Lionsgate to release a suicide-inducing press release claiming that "Saw: The Ride is a reflection of how thoroughly the Saw franchise has crossed over into pop culture at large." The rides will evoke the nausea-inspiring horror caused by serial killer Jigsaw as he systematically murders people for your amusement. Bring the kids!

If that was the worst of it, we probably wouldn't care so much; but with Saw V (there have been five of these already? Seriously?) opening worldwide, it's almost a certainty that by the time the franchise drags out to its ninth or tenth installment -- and assuming no one has actually been killed on the ride -- the idea-bereft producers are sure to release a flick in which Jigsaw menaces people on the roller-coaster, confronting innocent human beings with Saw: The Ride: The Movie. When will the suffering end?

Related Posts:

Take Five: Take Four

ARRR! Another Pirate Movie

Morning Deal Report: Keira Knightley’s Last Night

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Keira Knightley re-teams with The Jacket screenwriter Massy Tadjedin, who will make her directorial debut with Last Night. Per Variety, “Story follows a married couple, apart for a night while the husband takes a business trip with a colleague to whom he’s attracted. While he’s resisting temptation, his wife encounters her past love.” Tadjedin is also at work on an untitled project for Steven Spielberg.

The new family-friendly version of The Rock, who would really appreciate it if you’d call him Dwayne Johnson, will star in a movie based on everyone’s favorite section of Disneyland – Tomorrowland. Or will he? This self-contradictory Variety report first says, “After turning the theme park ride Pirates of the Caribbean into a blockbuster film trilogy, Disney is circling an entire segment of its theme park — Tomorrowland — as inspiration for a space movie that will star Dwayne Johnson.” But two paragraphs later: “Disney denies the film has been titled Tomorrowland or is dedicated to the park’s section, a futuristic area of the Magic Kingdom that includes such attractions as Space Mountain.” Hey, just as long as it’s not based on It’s a Small World, we’re happy.

Robert Zemeckis can’t get enough of that motion-capture technology. He is once again teaming with Monster House collaborator Gil Kenan for “a big-screen version of Airman, a children's adventure book by Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer.” Incidentally, Colfer is now at work on a sixth installment in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series called And Another Thing. Anyone familiar with this guy’s work? I’m wondering if I should be intrigued or appalled.

Related:
Keira Knightley Wants to Be an Actress When She Grows Up
Every Which Way to Witch Mountain

Morning Deal Report: Johnny Depp, Household Pet

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Don’t tell the newly pious Joe Eszterhas, but his old partner in crime Paul Verhoeven is in talks to direct another erotic thriller. Variety says the untitled script by Wendy Miller “centers on a college intern who finds himself trapped in a dangerous affair with the boss’s wife. Project is described as Risky Business meets Fatal Attraction.” So…Fatal Business? Risky Attraction?

What is the terrifying secret of The Steam Experiment? I certainly can’t wait to find out, as Val Kilmer, Armand Assante and Eric Roberts team up for the indie suspense thriller. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the plot concerns “six people trapped and terrorized in an urban Turkish bathhouse.” Just imagine being trapped in a bathhouse with Val Kilmer, Armand Assante and Eric Roberts and you can already smell the suspense.

Johnny Depp reunites with Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean) for the animated feature Rango. Per Variety, “Depp will voice the lead character, a household pet that goes on an adventure to discover its true self.” Really, that’s what it says – a household pet. As if revealing whether he’s a dog or cat or gerbil would be giving too much away.

Related:
Saint Joe: "Showgirls" Writer Finds Jesus
Depp vs. Murray: Dueling Gonzos

ARRR! Another Pirate Movie

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 19 May 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Can you believe it’s only four months until Talk Like a Pirate Day? Time sure flies when you’re not talking like a pirate. Soon you’ll have another opportunity to brush up on your doubloons and pieces of eight and whatnot. According to Variety, Dreamworks is going forward with a new pirate movie – not a fourth installment of Pirates of the Caribbean, but a film based on another legend of the seas. For your edification and enjoyment, I’ve run the announcement through the official English-to-Pirate translator:

“DreamWorks be brin'in' a project on t' life o' legendary pirate Blackbeard t' t' big screen. David Franzoni, who wrote Amistad and Gladiator for t' studio, will pen Blackbeard, which delves into t' life o' British buccaneer Edward Teach. Barry Josephson (Enchanted) be producin' alongside motivational speaker and former Philadelphia 76ers prexy/co-owner Pat Croce, who wrote Pirate Soul, a book that chronicled t' golden era o' piracy, which spanned 1690-1730…Croce, who owns a pirate museum in Key West, Fla., be collaboratin' closely with Franzoni on t' screenplay.”

Okay, that wasn’t anywhere near as fun as I thought it would be. But then, neither are pirate movies.

Keira Knightley Wants to Be an Actress When She Grows Up

Phil Nugent — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

You want to talk about life experiences? Keira Knightley is twenty-three years old and has already starred in three very long movies based on a Disney theme park ride. "I mean, it was really fucking embarrassing and we all thought it was going to be total shit anyway," she told Matthew Rhys. "But then suddenly I was kissing Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom and bang, there you go, instant bloody stardom. I'd always wanted to be an actress, always dreamt of it, but I don't think you're ever quite prepared for being a movie star." Maybe not, but it's probably a good sign that she recognizes that the two positions are not the same, though they sometimes overlap. "I know that when Bend it like Beckham came out and it was quickly followed by Pirates, suddenly people were looking at me and thinking, 'Well she's not very good, she's just a pretty face, don't know what all the fuss is about'. But I wasn't really ready to be scrutinised. I wasn't any good at my job yet. But with Pride and Prejudice, yes, I was at least trying to say: look, see, I can learn, and I can do this, or at least give me the right director and I'll give it my best shot. So since those first films, I've always been looking to be stretched - it doesn't always mean I'm going to be good, but I'm trying to become a good actress, really I am."

Knightley, whose acting in the Jane Austen picture and for that matter in Bend It Like Beckham the Pirates movies was actually pretty good, really it was, is growing up, and she'll soon be seen playing the "childhood sweetheart" of Dylan Thomas (Cillian Murphy) in "a very sexy piece", The Edge of Love. (Sienna Miller co-stars as Thomas's wife, who is presumably the edge of the title.) The role called for her to do a little singing, and to help psych herself up for it, she turned to Marlene Dietrich, "She couldn't really sing, not properly, but she had such a ballsy, fuck-off quality to her voice that it didn't matter if she hit the right notes, so I thought well I'll try that approach." Dude, Keira Knightley just said "ballsy, fuck-off quality." Can youn imagine what she's going to sound like after she's had a couple of husbands and stints in rehab behind her? Honestly, if more Hollywoos starlets woulf talk this way in interviews instead of saving it for the hired help, it would make it so much easier to forgive so much.

That Guy!: Jonathan Pryce

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 07 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Almost as deadly for an actor as a face made for radio is a style made for theater. An actor who is thought of primarily as a stage presence will often be considered either too overblown and theatrical for film, from years of playing to the back row, or too subtle and mannered to have the kind of dynamic charisma one looks for in the image-intensive medium of motion pictures. Occasionally, though, a highly praised stage actor breaks through in film and establishes himself as the class of his field, and if Wales' Jonathan Pryce lacks the good looks and intensity of a Laurence Olivier, he has at least managed — largely due to his longtime association with the troubled, talented director Terry Gilliam — to become one of the most skillful and reliable character actors working today. A veteran of RADA (on an acting scholarship) and the former artistic director of the celebrated Liverpool Everyman Theater, Pryce's stage credentials are impeccable, but he's also a stalwart movie veteran who's appeared in everything from James Bond movies (he played the main villain in 1997's Tomorrow Never Dies, opposite Pierce Brosnan) to summer blockbusters (he's been the Don Knotts-esque governor of Jamaica, Weatherby Swann, in all three installments of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise). But despite these occasional gestures at superstardom, he's most at home assaying highly distinctive and memorable character roles, even imbuing his occasional lead performance with a nervous energy and sublime competence that comes straight out of his theatrical training and perfectly feeds into his on-screen persona.

Pryce (the son of a Welsh shopkeeper, and originally named Price; the reason for the name change is murky and doubtless irrelevant) still keeps extremely busy with stagework, and even his big-screen roles maintain elements of the theatrical: one of the few times he broke away from his normal roles as precise and deliberate, almost timid, characters is when he played Argentine strongman Juan Peron opposite Madonna in the 1996 big-screen adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita. But despite the moneymaking blockbuster roles he takes, and the occasional foray into television work, he still wins his highest praise for independent or 'little movie' screen work, and in 1995, he received what he's described as one of the highest honors of his storied career, winning the Best Actor award at the Cannes film festival for his sensitive, powerful and emotional portrayal of British novelist Lytton Strachey in director Christopher Hampton's little-seen Carrington. Recently, Pryce got the chance to fulfill a lifelong dream and portray Sherlock Holmes on British television, but he's been taking less work recently to spend time with his family. He'll be appearing (as the president of the United States, no less!) in the upcoming G.I. Joe movie, although his devotees are much more excited about next year's My Zinc Bed, where he'll be playing the lead in a new David Hare adaptation. Pryce just recently turned sixty, and with a few more choice roles (and, well, a few less G.I. Joes, he's still got a good chance at following in Olivier's footsteps as a Grand Old Man of British cinema.

Where to see Jonathan Pryce at his best:

SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES (1983)

Though it wasn't the breakout role that would come his way two years later, Pryce's performance as the sinister Mr. Dark in this spotty but entertaining adaptation of a Ray Bradbury novel is incredibly compelling. As the proprietor and ringleader of a curious and somewhat menacing circus that comes to visit a small town, Pryce strikes a perfect balance of sophistication and terror; throughout his entire time on screen, it's hard to take your eyes off of him, and he swills Bradbury's ripe dialogue around in his mouth like a fine wine, making the moments when he loses control all the more effective. A stunning performance from a nearly forgotten film.

BRAZIL (1985)

The movie that really thrust Jonathan Pryce into the public eye was his performance as the hapless and ultimately hopeless Sam Lowry, best described as Winston Smith with even more British repression. It would be the first of many collaborations between Pryce and Terry Gilliam, and while it made quite clear the reasons why he wasn't cut out to be a typical romantic lead, it was a brilliant piece of acting, aided and abetted by the clever and theatrical scripting of Tom Stoppard. Gilliam and Pryce would work together several more times, from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen to The Brothers Grimm, but it would never be this magical again.

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (1992)

As the terrified and uncertain would-be real estate investor James Lingk, Jonathan Pryce not only gets the chance to act in one of the most powerhouse ensemble casts in recent memory (including getting to play the majority of his scenes off of Al Pacino at the very last moment in his career when he did any actual acting, as opposed to just yelling at things), but he also played the unusual role of the film's moral center, getting to act like a normal human being among these amoral Type-A monsters. Curiously enough, Pryce went on to play Shelley "The Machine" Levene -- portrayed here by Jack Lemmon -- in a London revival of the David Mamet play.

Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Hollywood Accountants

Phil Nugent — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Moviemaking is "still a very challenging business," says media analyst Richard Greenfield. "The average movie still loses money." The question is, will Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull turn out to be an average movie? In a piece calculated to make you break out the crying towels, Claudia Eller of the Los Angeles Times reports on "the new economic realities of the movie business" and how they're reflected in the deal that Paramount Pictures cut with director Steven Spielberg, star Harrison Ford, and fount of contemporary mythology George Lucas in order the get the fourth Indiana Jones picture up and running. The franchise is different from most of the more recently forged brand-name pictures (such as your Spider-Mans and your Pirates of the Caribbeans) in that the producer, Lucas, rather than the studio, owns the property, which puts Paramount more in the position of a distributor than a proud parent who can expect the movie's long-term revenue potential to take care of it in its old age. After it became clear that the picture was going to cost much more than originally projected--not an unheard-of occurrence in Hollywood--the major participants agreed to sweeten things for them by forgoing their upfront salaries. Eller reports that the studio "spent about $185 million to make the movie and will pay at least $150 million to market it worldwide. The studio will earn a distribution fee of 12.5% of the revenue it receives from the film's release in all media, including theaters, DVD and television." Lucas, Spielberg, and Ford will stand to make 87.5 cents off every dollar the movie makes after the studio has been fully reimbursed for the cost of the movie and been paid their distribution fee, but that means that they won't start to clear anything until after Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has made $400 million.

The thing is, if the movie makes less than $400 million, Spielberg, Lucas, and Ford will have spent a year of their lives killing themselves--well, Ford, anyway--just for the exercise. Is there a chance in hell they'll go home empty-handed? Eller: "Although the "Indiana Jones" franchise is considered one of Hollywood's surest bets -- the first three pictures amassed $1.2 billion in worldwide ticket sales -- there is no guarantee that younger moviegoers will turn out in droves to see a now 65-year-old action hero in a fedora dust off his trademark leather jacket and crack his bullwhip. Today's under-25 action junkies are wowed by computer-generated effects spectacles, such as Spider-Man, Harry Potter, 300 and Fantastic Four." Stress the age of the leading man (and the franchise) and the fact that the movie is built around old-school physical stunts instead of CGI, and it starts to sound more and more like Live Free or Die Hard, a movie that did better than respectably at the box office (and not half bad with the critics) but that has yet to clear the $400 million hurdle. Hollywood: where success has a thousand fathers, and failure sometimes clears $3,999,999 in profits.

The Summer of Downey

Phil Nugent — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

A fresh wave of media attention, including a profile in Time magazine by Rebecca Winters Keegan and a New York Times piece by David Carr, make it clear that this summer is penciled in to be the one that takes Robert Downey, Jr. to the next level. It is hard to think of a reason to root against him. Downey, who was born in 1965, first appeared on-screen in movies directed by his father, who didn't used to have be called Robert Downey, Sr. to avoid confusion: the 1970 Pound, in which the actors pretended to be caged dogs and young Bob was supposed to be a puppy, and the 1972 Greaser's Palace, in which he was a shot dead in a Western setting, and for which he was prepared form his challenging role with a speech about how he was being pressed into service because dad wasn't really into the child-labor laws. In 1985, he was invited to join the cast of Saturday Night Live at the insistence of the then-hot Anthony Michael Hall, who Lorne Michaels wanted badly for the show, and who Downey subsequently smoked. In the fall of 1987, he starred in James Toback's The Pick-Up Artist, which confirmed that he could carry a lightweight comedy on the strength of his talent and charm, and played the fast-sinking buddy of the hero in Less Than Zero, which confirmed that he could take on a thinly written role in an unwatchable mess of a movie and use it to burn an indelible mark in a corner of the screen. The scale of Downey's talent was no secret by the time he starred in Richard Attenborough's Chaplin, but the Oscar nomination he got for that performance made it "official." Attenborough has been quoted as referring to Downey as "a little Brat Pack gadfly" with no formal training but a willingness to "work his arse off," a neat way of giving himself credit for his star's performance. With regard to his lack of "formal training," Downey, talking to Rebecca Winters Keegan, recalls "hanging around and smoking weed in the stairways with my friends who had just gotten back from class. They'd tell me the exercises. It seemed like inevitably they wound up screaming and crying—screaming at each other and crying at what was screamed. I would just call that Thanksgiving."

Back in 2001, NPR's All Things Considered set aside two whole minutes of precious airtime to allow something called Stephen Lynch--it wrote for the Orange County Register, and I'm sure it's mama is proud of it--to take note of Downey's then-latest brushes with the law and the rehab centers and insist that Downey's reputation as a tragically misguided bullet of talent was inflated by the supposed glamour of his messy personal life. As an actor, Lynch declared, "He wasn't"--note the use of the past tense--"that good." What had this keen observer been smoking? One of the surprises of the recent interviews with Downey is the unexpected but not illogical connection he now draws between his triumph in Chaplin and the tabloid slide downhill. He tells Winters Keegan that he knew that he had "just knocked one out of the park", a feeling that carried an expectation that everything about his life was about to change. When everything didn't, it led to "this huge anticlimactic thing that basically took on different shades of awe, wonder, acceptance, bitterness or disassociation for the next—-what year is it?—-17 years. There was this kind of lull, and I never really found any momentum to focus my creative energy after that, so pretty expectable things happened." Cut to a few years down the line, and Downey was capable of accepting a recurring role on Ally McBeal for his next comeback, and further capable of getting himself written out of the series when his comeback was followed by more tabloid headlines, this time involving an arrest "in a hotel room with cocaine and a Wonder Woman costume". What's striking about Downey's rough patch is that, even with his troubles, he was a dependable hire in terms of getting the role done; there are very few duff performances in his resume--one of them is in U.S. Marshals, a sequel to The Fugitive that he credited with pushing him once more over the edge, because, he once said in an interview with Mike Figgis, he wasn't in the best psychic condition to spend a few weeks running around playing "Johnny Handgun"--and he was assured of some kind of comeback every time he gave a performance that was widely seen. No one less stupid than Stephen Lynch--a select group that includes Mel Gibson and a dog I used to have that was killed trying to shake hands with an eighteen-wheeler--could fail to detect how much talent was there. The problem, in an industry where there are insurance forms to fill out, was getting someone to hire him at all.

Downey has said that he wanted to star in Iron Man in part so that he'd be in the kind of movie he could take his son to, but then, he said the same thing about U.S. Marshals. He's also said that he was tired of making movies that nobody sees, and it's bracing to hear someone intimate that he might regret having been in A Scanner Darkly or Zodiac, or at least that he'd be happier if they'd done better business. Elsewhere, Downey has cited Johnny Depp's success in a series of films based on a Disney theme park ride--"If Depp is on a Slurpee, I want to be on a Slurpee"--in a tone that seems to suggest that they amounted to giving him a kind of permission to headline a franchise for Marvel Comics. The fact is, both Pirates of the Caribbean and Iron Man point up what it is that, in a world where the media is as obsessed with box-office numbers as the studios, just what a Johnny Depp or a Robert Downey, Jr. might someday find himself being forced to prove. Nobody who's been paying attention can be in doubt about Downey's being a major actor; what he has to show, if he wants to have the power in terms of freedom and the options he must crave, is that he's a movie star. Which doesn't just mean the ability to command the screen or even the additional ability to put asses in seats but the control to show up and do the press junket and repeat the necessary drivel to reporters over and over without throwing a vase at somebody's head. And, yes, to look right on a Slurpee.

DVD Digest for February 5, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week: some recent favorites premiere on DVD, numerous classic films arrive in new editions, and I double back to cover a new release we overlooked last week.

DVD Ripoff of the Week: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was one of the best-reviewed films of 2007 and garnered Oscar nominations for Casey Affleck and cinematographer Roger Deakins. However, the film performed well below expectations at the box office, due in no small part to Warner Brothers completely bumbling its theatrical rollout. Due to its low gross and artsy rep, the brainiacs at Warner Home Video will release the film this week in a bare-bones edition. How bare-bones are we talking? Try these features on for size: widescreen, subtitle and language options, and 5.1 audio. And that's all, folks.

Not.

Even.

A.

Trailer.

You know, seems to me the DVD companies have it all backwards. It's mainly the hits that get splashy, extras-packed special editions, when it's the ambitious flops that could really benefit from them. Honestly, does a movie like Pirates of the Caribbean really need a boatload of bonus features to sell more DVDs? I don't think so. But The Assassination of Jesse James might attract more buyers if the DVD had commentary, some interesting featurettes, and so forth. At least the Blu-Ray edition has a documentary. How hard would it have been to put that on the regular DVD as well?

Of course, we know what this release really means: Warner is trying to make some quick bucks from opening-week impulse buyers, with the possibility of a super-sweet edition later on, possibly with Andrew Dominik's cut of the film included as well. Really, it's like they're not even trying to disguise it anymore. It's as though we're back in VHS days, when the studios would release tapes at higher prices to be sold primarily for rental, then lower the prices later on for buyers. The difference is that DVD is much more of a buyers' medium, thus collectors would piss and moan if they had to spend $100 on a new DVD. It's a money-grubbing ploy, but it must be working or else the studios wouldn't keep doing it, right?

Other new releases coming to DVD include: Jodie Foster in Neil Jordan's The Brave One (Warner, also Blu-Ray), Julie Taymor's Beatles-scored folly Across the Universe (Sony, also Blu-Ray), the Cate Blanchett-starring disaster Elizabeth: The Golden Age (Universal, also HD-DVD [!]), the Julie Delpy-directed 2 Days in Paris (Fox), Robert Benton's Feast of Love (MGM), and The Jane Austen Book Club (Sony, also Blu-Ray). Because when I think of the folks who own Blu-Ray players, I think Jane Austen.

No noteworthy classic films coming to DVD for the first time this week, but quite a few new editions of previously released films, including: Midnight Express: 30th Anniversary Edition (Sony), The Apartment Collector's Edition (Universal), The Aristocats Special Edition (Disney), The Wiz: 30th Anniversary Edition (Universal), Tootsie: 25th Anniversary Edition (Sony), and You've Got Mail: The Deluxe Edition (Warner). Fox is also releasing a two-disc set featuring both versions of Imitations of Life, for those of you who crave a Stahl vs. Sirk showdown. In addition, this week sees Blu-Ray only releases of Crimson Tide (Buena Vista), Me, Myself & Irene and Wall Street (both Fox).

Finally, I can't believe I neglected to mention in last week's column the second DVD release from our friends at Benten Films, Quiet City and Dance Party USA: Two Films By Aaron Katz. Founded last year, Benten is a decidedly small operation specializing in non-mainstream fare. Katz's work is a good match for the Benten label- a DIY filmmaker, Katz has been acclaimed by many as the most talented of the director comprising the movement that's usually labeled "mumblecore." With DVD mastering becoming cheaper and more widespread, there are many mom'n'pop DVD operations that have popped up on the scene, but Benten feels special to me, not least because founders Andrew Grant and Aaron Hillis are online cinephiles of long standing. Here's hoping for many successful years for the Benten team.

S-Horror?

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

As we gear up for another spring full of rampaging monsters and psychopathic serial killers, Desson Thompson in the Washington Post wonders if something elemental to the whole concept of the horror movie isn't missing: the victim.

After the usual handwringing over the 'torture porn' generation, the artist formerly known as Howe goes on to make some pretty compelling points: the horror films of today — even the stylized, artsy ones influenced by or coming from the J-horror movement — tend to focus entirely on the means by which the victims are dispatched: intricate traps, complex schemes, gruesome tortures, gigantic monsters. Very little attention, on the other hand, is given to providing the audience with an identification figure: while in previous horror films we were at least able to identify with the person going through such terrifying treatment (as in Rosemary's Baby) or with the person doing the terrorizing (as in Psycho), the modern-day horror film has lost its focus, one way or another, on humanity and gives us precious little to care about beyond the novelty of learning how the next victim will snuff it. "When we think of the horror classics", says Thomson, "we don't recall the gruesome acts so much as the people who weathered them. Think of Rosemary Woodhouse, the determined mother in Rosemary's Baby, who faces the prospect her baby has been fathered by the Devil. Remember Regan MacNeil, the sweet pre-teen of The Exorcist, whose satanic transformation forces heroics from two soft-spoken priests. Even Jack Torrance, the demented murderer at the heart of The Shining, affects us because he's a husband and father gone horribly awry, not some abstract ax wielder."

Providing a much-needed antidote for this alienating inhumanity in the horror genre, he claims, are a new wave of Spanish horror directors, presaged by Guillermo del Toro in the disturbing Pan's Labyrinth and followed up by two of his proteges, director Juan Antonio Bayona and screenwriter Sergio G. Sanchez, whose dark, moody The Orphanage is enjoying limited release in the U.S. They both cite the Spanish cultural heritage of the Day of the Dead (which is "not something that you look upon as horrifying or sad or terrible but as a way to conciliate with death; you bring death home instead of trying not to think about it", according to Sanchez) and the country's all-too-recent emergence from the shadows of fascism as reasons why this brand of non-gory, emotionally powerful, human-centered horror is hitting home with their audiences.

Whether or not The Orphanage will trigger a string of "S-horror" hits in the U.S., they're doing quite well at home; the movie was last year's highest-grossing film in Spain, outstripping even the blockbuster foreign imports like Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.

How Bad Will "G.I. Joe" Be?

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 15:30:00 GMT

As Paramount slowly dribbles out information on who will be involved in its megagabudgeted toy adaptation and why, we eagerly make note of each new announcment and work it into a complex mathematical formula that will help the Screengrab to scientifically determine whether it will merely stink, stink on ice, stink to high heaven, totally reek, or actually be just good enough to sneak in and catch five minutes of on the way to the snack bar. (Your humble author is particularly interested as to the potential quality or lack thereof of G.I. Joe, since it is set to release on his 40th birthday, and he is anxious to learn whether going to see it will constitute a celebration or a punishment.)

So, based on what we know so far, how bad is it likely to be?

ONLY SORT OF BAD: The screenplay is being written by Stuart Beattie, who has done acceptable blockbuster work in the Pirates of the Caribbean series and in 30 Days of Night.

PRETTY BAD: A previous version of the script was written by the man responsible for Swordfish.

BAD: The director is Stephen Sommers, who brought us all three Mummy films and Van Helsing. And Van Helsing was really, really bad.

QUITE BAD: Sienna Miller, who is not nearly as good an actress as Sienna Miller thinks she is, is involved. So is Rachel Nichols, who holds the astonishing distinction of making Alias viewers long for the return of Jennifer Garner's mastery of the thespian arts.

NOT SO BAD: Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, who was perfectly fine in Lost and Oz is in the cast.

ACTUALLY GOOD: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, one of the finest young actors in Hollywood, is also in the cast.

ALARMINGLY, IRREDEEMABLY BAD: Marlon Wayans, who is two billion times more bad than Joseph Gordon-Levitt is good, has a leading role.

Morning Deal Report: There is Power in a Union

Peter Smith — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 15:00:00 GMT

Looks like this Writers' Guild strike could actually happen. Now, the top-grossing films so far this year are Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Harry Potter 5, Spider-Man 3, Shrek 3, and Transformers. Who needs writers?

While Peter Jackson waits on his next big-budget sci-fi action flick (Halo), he's planning a more personal project: a big-budget sci-fi action flick called District 9.

Speaking of departures, David Fincher will adapt a graphic novel about a detective chasing a killer.

— Peter Smith