Writer guy Bob Westal was literally born in Hollywood and has commented on the worlds of movies, popular culture, politics, and food ever since. His interest in cocktails is more recent, but he made up for lost time with hundreds of “Drink of the Week” blog posts for Bullz-Eye. In addition to writing and editing, Bob also talks a lot.
Tonight’s quickie movie news notes have been called off in commemoration of the fact that this is Akira Kurosawa‘s 100th birthday.
What follows, then, is a fairly random assortment of trailers and scenes from key films, some personal favorites, and a couple of lesser known films by the Emperor. If you’re not familiar with the great Japanese director, one of the movies’ strongest storytellers and masters of imagery who was also the first Asian director to become widely known in the west, you might start with that Wikipedia entry I linked to above. Or, simply take a look at what follows. Pay just a little attention and I think you may be intrigued.
We’ll start with the worldwide art-house hit that made first made Mr. Kurosawa’s name outside of Japan way back in 1950.
It’s apparently been making the rounds all day but, while being derided for my lack of expertise in American mainstream cinema of the 1980s, I have just learned that Funny or Die has a trailer up for one biopic of a pop music legend I’d definitely pay to see. And with a cast that includes Aaron Paul, Olivia Wilde, Gary Cole, Academy Award™ winner Mary Steenburgen, and Patton Oswalt, in the role he was born to play — Martin Landau in “Ed Wood” has nothing on this guy — you know you’re in for a memorably powerful, and powerfully memorable, film-going experience.
* The big breaking news around the film geek blogosphere is that THR’s Heat Vision blog is reporting that Chris Evans will, indeed, play Captain America. I’ve only seen Evans in the first half-hour of “The Fantastic Four” (that was as far I made it through that one) but let’s say that, for the time being, I’m having a very hard time getting excited about this news.
* Moving from a project I’m interested in with some casting I’m not finding so interesting right now, we move on to some very interesting casting for a project I’m really not that personally interested in except to root for it to do as little business as possible because of the kind of filmmaking it symbolizes. It appears that John Malkovich, Francis McDormand, and Ken Jeong will all be in…wait for it…”Transformers 3.” Christopher Campbell has the predictably cynical and amusing blog reactions. I should add that I have absolutely no criticism of them for being in it. If Michael Bay wants to give me a few hundred thousand to do something connected to one of his films, I’m taking it. Now, if he wants me to say something nice about the flick, that’s going to cost a whole lot more.
* The bidding deadline has been extended a bit for the sale of MGM to make room for an offer from Time Warner. I imagine that would put the classic-era and later MGM library all under one corporate umbrella, which could make life a bit less confusing for us film buffs.
* I love spy movies. Also, in theory, I have no problem with movies based on video games — apart from the fact that I can’t think of one that people actually like very much, much less that I’ve personally seen and liked. Still, with all the great spy novels of all shapes and sizes that there are, the thought of a spy movie based on a video game does not make me very happy.
* I’m confused, is “Everything Must Go” starring Will Ferrell, which starts production this week with financing direct from its producers, really going to be an entirely non-comedic film, or is it being billed as a “drama” simply to distinguish it from Ferrell’s usual ultra-wacky comedies? To me, the premise sounds laden with a potential for dark humor, though I don’t know the Raymond Carver story, I do know he occasionally indulged in that.
* Previews begin the day after tomorrow on Broadway of the new stage musical, “American Idiot.” With a book by Green Day singer and lyricist Billie Joe Armstrong, the show’s “dialogue” is, as I understand, almost entirely sung. It ran to mixed-to-positive reviews last year in the main theatrical venue of the Green Day’s California Bay Area hometown, Berkeley Rep. While not all the critics were high on the NoCal edition of the show, apparently Tom Hanks and his producing partner Gary Goetzman like it and are “in talks” to turn the production into a feature movie. I love some of the music on the highly acclaimed original album, so I’m intrigued by this one, though I could easily see it turning out horribly. (The music video featured by Kevin Jagernauth of the Playlist shows one way example of how a film version could go rather badly wrong.)
One thing this is not is a “jukebox musical” along the lines of “Mamma Mia!” but a concept album adaptation closer in spirit, I imagine, to “Tommy” and “Pink Floyd’s The Wall.” Still, one hurtle all these movies rarely overcome is the difference in energy between a live performance of a great rock and roll tune and the inevitably more packaged version you’ll get in a movie. Personally, I’ll be impressed if anything in the film version, if there ever is one, matches the intensity of the performance below.
It’s the late 1980s in South Africa. The most important political prisoner of the 20th century, Nelson Mandela (a miscast Clarke Peters), is being readied for his release as brutal violence and unrest are reaching a boiling point. Realizing that civil war is very bad for its African interests, a powerful English gold trading firm sends a conscientious PR flack (Jonny Lee Miller) to set-up secret negotiations. Will Esterhuyse (William Hurt), a centrist Afrikaner academic, is dragooned into going into those negotiations to act as a spy for the brutal neo-fascist white supremacist apartheid regime. Eventually, however, he finds himself actually forging common ground and heroically comes clean to the leader of the ANC delegation, future South African President Thabo Mbeki (Chiwitel Ejiorfor).
Unfortunately, director Pete Travis (“Vantage Point“) tries to make what actually should be a rather traditional PBS production into an over-amped action thriller, despite the reality that the real “action” of this story amounts to several white guys and black guys sitting around talking. Travis’s disinterest in the actual content of the story, his irritating and pointless reliance on jarring editing and sound effects, and a hideous audio mix which often makes the dialogue impossible to understand without turning up the volume to painful levels, destroys the inherent drama of the story as well as strong performances from some great actors. It’s a crime because, “Invictus” notwithstanding, the story of how apartheid ended without the catastrophic bloodbath the world fully expected still demands to be told on screen.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but the premise of this quasi-sequel to “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” from director Nicholas Stoller is a direct lift from the very funny 1982 period comedy hit, “My Favorite Year.” That film had a pre-“Perfect Strangers” Mark Linn-Baker as a schlubby, young not-Mel Brooks, circa mid-1950s, trying to ensure that Peter O’Toole as a middle-aged and almost perpetually drunk not-Errol Flynn shows up in front of live television cameras on time for a show which is not Sid Ceasar’s “Your Show of Your Shows.”
Now it’s 2010, and British comic Russell Brand’s perpetually stoned rock star, Aldous Snow, has gone downhill a bit since his Hawaiian vacation of ’08 and needs some help in getting to a crucial live performance. This time, it’s coming from Jonah Hill as an ambitious music biz neophyte in way over his head.
This is fairly similar to an earlier trailer, which was an equal mix of funny to less-than-hilarious, but with far more penis references and all-around cursing.
Some of the gags could be sharper, but I’m still interested. Sean Combs is even funnier than his choice of nick-names. I’ve seen more than enough lame trailers for movies that turned out to be comedy gold, and vice-versa, that for all I know this could turn out as funny as the film it borrows its premise from.
“My Favorite Year” was no classic, but it featured a real performance-for-the-ages from O’Toole while Linn-Baker held his own, which was achievement enough. The interesting switch is that, this time, Hill and Russell are fairly evenly matched talents and viewers of “Sarah Marshall” know the two have an unusual chemistry. I just wish they could have figured out a way to have Hill be reprising his character from the earlier movie the way Brand is. Why couldn’t Matthew the musically obsessed waiter become Matthew the budding A&R guy?
