The Screengrab : michael cieply

Dreaming Towards James Cameron's "Avatar"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Michael Cieply at The New York Times reports on the escalating storm of hype and anticipation surrounding James Cameron's 3-D sci-fi movie Avatar, scheduled for a December release. To date, none of the images from the film have been released to the public, not even a single still. However, Time magazine's Joshua Quittner was shown fifteen minutes of footage and subsequently "fed the frenzy when he reported feeling a strange yearning to return to the movie’s mythical planet, Pandora.... Mr. Cameron, Mr. Quittner wrote, theorized that the movie’s 3-D action had set off actual 'memory creation.'” (He told Cieply, “It was like doing some kind of drug.”) Others online have been busting their buttons without access to any actual evidence that the film exists, never mind what it looks like: Cieply has fun with one worthy at the IMDB message board who had had a dream that he saw the movie--on bootleg, no less--and proceeded to share his impressions of how it played in his unconscious. ("The film was unfinished, and the special effects were mostly drawings and cartoons, but they looked 3d still. But it was the best movie I've ever seen, too bad it was only in my dream! I really hope the actual movie is at least half as good as the one I saw in my sleep.") Meanwhile, Dr. Mario Mendez, a behavioral neurologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine who has used "virtual reality therapy" in working with Iraq War veterans, "said it is entirely possible that Mr. Cameron’s work could tap brain systems that are undisturbed by conventional 2-D movies. One, he said, is a kind of inner global-positioning system that orients a person to the surrounding world."

Officially, Cameron and his studio, 20th Century Fox, are keeping their cards close to the vest while expressing a sanguine belief that it's only natural that people will be so excited about the chance to see something so awesome: “Jim Cameron," a studio flak opined, "is breaking new ground with this film. Like all movie fans, the studio is excited by the prospect of such an original piece of entertainment.” (The movie stars Australian actor Sam Worthington as a paralyzed man who, through an experimental process, is able to enter an alien world in a "genetically engineered" form that he controls with his mind. The cast also includes Zoe Saldana, Michelle Rodriguez, Giovanni Ribisi, and Cameron's Aliens star, Sigourney Weaver.) Cameron himself recently appeared at the ShoWest movie-exhibitors convention, in the form of a promotional video, where he said that watching his movie will be akin to “dreaming with your eyes wide open.” (Never mind that the phrase has been used by people trying to find a lyrical turn of phrase to describe the experience of moviegoing itself, going back at least to the Surrealists.) At the same time, though, even as they fuel the hype, Cameron (who did, after all, make The Abyss) and Fox must both be at least a little worried about setting a standard of rabid expectations that they can't possibly deliver on. “Whatever they think [the movie is] going to be," Cameron shrugged to an AP interviewer last year, "it’s probably not.”

Fat Actor Watch at New York Times: Paper of Record Alleges That When Russell Crowe Sits Around the House, He Really Sits Around the House

Phil Nugent — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Always looking for a fresh angle on the really important movie news of the day, Michael Cieply uses his perch at Thew New York Times to ask" what's with all the male movie stars who are porkers? Who does he have in mind, exactly? Russell Crowe and Jeff Daniels, sharing a screen in State of Play ("Two men. One notebook. Four chins."); Denzel Washington, going "cheek-to-jowl with the bulky John Travolta" in the trailer for the remake of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three; Hugh Grant; and "Even Leonardo DiCaprio, the young heartthrob from Titanic"--Photos from the set of Shutter Island, a thriller on tap from Paramount Pictures and the director Martin Scorsese in October, show a little bit more to love." Oh, snap! Are they handing out chocolate bunnies to whoever can be the biggest bitch at the Times these days?

Cieply briefly notes that there's a gender-based double standard regarding the weight and age rules in Hollywood so far as leading players are concerned, but after dropping Kathleen Turner's name, he seems to feel that he's discharged his duty, as if the subject bored even him. He seems more taken with the idea that this is an utterly new phenomenon, but despite the historical examples he digs up, that may be a non-starter. "Photos of midcentury stars — Humphrey Bogart, James Stewart, Clark Gable and others — show them to have remained rather gaunt at an age when many of the current crop are anything but." Good thing those photos are handy, since it's not as if movie actors left behind filmed records of their performances so we'd be able to remind themselves what they looked like. That said, it seems a little callous to drag Bogart, one of the best-known victims of cancer sticks ever to go down coughing, into a discussion of how movie stars used to keep themselves svelte. (One well-circulated story has it that, when illness had left Bogie too weak to handle the stairs in his own home, he used to navigate from one floor to another by stuffing himself in the dumb waiter.) It's also worth remembering that Gable, who died of a massive heart attack after completing his last film, The Misfits, had lost 35 pounds on a crash diet to get his weight below 200 before shooting began. If there's any less of that sort of thing going on nowadays because more stars feel comfortable about appearing in public looking something other than whisper-thin, surely it's for the better.

It's also true that, as Cieply would have known if he'd put down the "photographs" and spent a couple of days watching Turner Classic Movies, there have always been counter-examples one could offer to his role call of manly waifs. Wallace Beery never looked as if he'd had trouble locating the desert cart, Spencer Tracey rolled into his onscreen middle age looking as if he'd swallowed a tether ball, James Cagney was getting pretty squared-off by the time of Yankee Doodle Dandy, Robert Mitchum often had an amorphous mass surrounding his midsection that he used to abruptly suck up into his chesticological region whenever he was required to take his shirt off, Gene Hackman's weight always flunctuated, sometimes wildly, depending on just how regular his latest "regular guy" character was supposed to be, and as for Jack Nicholson, in his mid-forties when he more or less officially entered his "middle-aged" period with Terms of Endearment--please. Of course, with movies as with everything else, memory can be a great deceiver. Lawrence Turman, "a veteran film producer who is chairman of the Peter Stark producing program at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts", told Cieply that "“John Wayne always looked a bit portly." I find it disturbing that the Peter Stark producing program at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts can do no better for its chairman than a guy who's never seen Stagecoach. It may be a tribute to the lingering effect of the image that Wayne cast from around the mid-1950s until his death in 1979 that even some professionals think he always looked like that, but I would propose that, unlikely though it may seem, that if Wayne had looked in his youth like a guy who was fated to someday look the way he did in True Grit, he never would have gotten the chance to grow into that later incarnation--at least, not on movie screens.

This still leaves the question of whether some of these stars, heavier though they may undeniably be, are as hideous to behold as Cieply seems to be implying they are. I will confess that when I saw Travolta, say, in the trailer for Pelham, I did not catch myself thinking, "Here comes Wide Load." (I did catch myself thinking, "Get a load of Weird Hairline with his Fu Manchu mustache. Each of us has his issues.) One possibility worth considering is that such stars as Travolta, Washington, and Hanks, who came up in the 1980s, when a perfect storm of society-embraced body issues and new technology in the gym led to a new species of Americans who seemed to be armor-plated in their own skin and muscle, some of whom hastened to show off their new packaging on the covers of magazines, such as that infamous shot of Travolta on the cover of Rolling Stone to promote Stayin' Alive, looking as if his abs were about to jump out of his torso and his brains had already leaked out of his ears. Maybe, having fallen for that when you had the energy and free schedule to pursue it all the way, you have to let yourself go a little later on or else you'll explode. But then, in the interests of full disclosure, I should concede that I am from The South, where we deep fry our veggie plates and the lost causes that we love to get misty-eyed about include our own arteries in their pre-clotted state. Because of my own cultural conditioning, if I had my way, every other movie made since 1984 would have starred Joe Don Baker, and the others would have been divided between Randy Quaid and the late Dub Taylor, with the result that Michael Cieply would be even more confused.

Warners DVD Keeps John McCain Interview Under Lock and Key

Phil Nugent — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Warner Brothers is fending off reports that they are keeping promotional materials for the November 11 release of the 1987 film The Hanoi Hilton on DVD under wraps rather than using them to stir up interest in the movie rather than advertise any connection to Republican presidential hopeful John McCain. The movie, which was released during the same wave of Reagan-era Vietnam films that included Platoon and Full Metal Jacket (as well as such gung-ho popcorn entertainments as Rambo: First Blood Part II and the Chuck Norris Missing in Action films), is a sympathetically intended treatment of the American presence in Vietnam that is set among the prisoners of war being held at the Hoa Lo prison where McCain served his time as a P.O.W. (The movie is not meant to depict any actual person's experience. However, it does make room for an appearance by an idiotic American movie star and war protester, played by Gloria Carlin, who is called "Paula" but is obviously meant to be Jane Fonda.) Earlier this year, McCain filmed an interview about his own prison experience which was to be included on the DVD. Now, reports Michael Cieply in The New York Times, Warner Brothers has "moved quietly over the last few weeks to block any promotional showing" of any part of that interview, for fear that it "might embroil the project in electoral politics." A spokesman for Warners' home enterttainment division describes its decision as "just us trying to be cautious and not affect the election one way or the other.” In response, Lionel Chetwynd, the British-born Canadian-American writer-director of The Hanoi Hilton, has fired back that "Finding someone in Hollywood who says they don’t want to affect the election is like finding a virgin in a brothel.” And you thought that British-born Canadian-Americans never got off any good ones!

Released by the infamous Golan-Globus/Cannon Film company, and starring Michael Moriarty in his Method-space alien phase, with a supporting cast that includes David "Hutch" Soul, Jeffrey Jones, Paul Le Mat, John Diehl, and Doug Savant, The Hanoi Hilton originally managed to bring together people of all different political beliefs and attitudes about the war in brotherly agreement that this was one shitty movie. A barely detectable blip on the radar screens during its brief spell in theaters (despite attempts by some commentators to pull in conservative moviegoers by hailing it as the anti-Platoon), it has since found an audience of appreciative veterans and nostalgic military hawks who discovered it on videocassette and late-night showings on cable TV. Chetwynd, a self-styled Hollywood conservative whose screenplay credits include the TV films The Siege at Ruby Ridge and DC 9/11: Time of Crisis and who had a hand in Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain... Begins to Die, a "documentary" feature, intended as a back-atcha to Michael Moore, has recently had his attempts to arrange screenings of the movie squelched by Warners lawyers, although Daniel P. Tokaji, an associate professor at the Ohio State University law school, told the Times that “I don’t immediately see what law they would violate.” Chetwynd, who points out that another studio, Lions Gate, doesn't seem to be keeping the pre-election day release of W. under a barrel, probably sees all this as a part of a liberal-Holywood conspiracy to keep his movie from doing its part to propel John McCain into the White House. Those who've taken a look at McCain's latest poll numbers may suspect that it has more to do with Warners not wanting to damage DVD sales by tying their product to a failing brand.

Saying Goodbye to Bernie Brillstein

Phil Nugent — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Last week marked the passing of one of the most important behind-the-scenes figures in American comedy of the last forty years, Bernie Brillstein. Brillstein, who was 77, had a rare combination of taste, people skills, and bulldozing smarts, all of which he applied to his job as an agent and manager. (He was also, not incidentally, one of the best interview subjects on the West Coast.) Eager to embody every cliche of the classic talent-agent success story, Brillstein worked his way up from the mail room at the William Morris Agency, after anti-Semitism kept him from entering advertising in the Mad Men era. ("I loved them," he later said of the WASP agency heads who advised him that he was wasting his time trying to break in, "for being honest.") While he was still at William Morris, Brillstein met his first meal ticket in the form of a gangling, painfully shy young puppeteer from the Washington, D. C. area: Jim Henson. The two were quick to recognize what each could do for the other, and after Brillstein set himself up in private practice in 1970, Henson and the Muppets were his first steady star clients. Another was Lorne Michaels, which explains not only how the Muppets came to be regular cast members during the first season of Saturday Night Live--an arrangement probably best remembered for having inspired Michael O'Donoghue's remark, "I don't write for felt."--but how Brillstein came to guide the careers of many of SNL's stars and to score producing credits on some of their biggest movie successes, including the Ghostbusters films. In 1990, he joined forces with producer Brad Grey. As packagers of talent, their TV credits would include The Larry Sanders Show, The Dana Carvey Show, NewsRadio, Mr. Show, Politically Incorrect, The Steve Harvey Show, Primetime Glick, and the Tea Leone vehicle The Naked Truth, which would go some way to balancing out the fact that Brillstein also had a hand in Alf. (Once you've made a few bucks off puppets, it's hard to go cold turkey.) He also wrote a book called Where Did I Go Right?

On Monday, clients and well-wishers got together for a memorial service honoring Brillstein, and from the sound of it, it was a suitable testimonial to a man who sounds a lot like Santa Claus if Santa would have cut your throat with a broken bottle if it were, you know, in the best interests of the talent. Describing the action, Michael Cieply reports that "Martin Short, master of ceremonies for the event at Royce Hall on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, set the tone when he described a man who had no enemies and always spoke well of others. 'It would be so much easier tonight,' Mr. Short said, 'if we were memorializing someone like that.'” Getting into the spirit of things, Jon Lovitz "got in his own jab at a former manager when he prayed, 'Why, why, why couldn’t it have been Marc Gurvitz?' Mr. Short, on taking back the stage, noted that the well-tanned but still portly Mr. Lovitz did not look bad 'for someone who let himself go.'”

Indiana Jones and the Internet Critics' Pre-emptive Strike: Ain't It Cool News Sandbags Spielberg and Co.

Phil Nugent — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull makes its official debut with a press screening at the Cannes Film Festival on May 18, four days before it opens wide theatrically. The picture has been immersed in a protective bath of secrecy; Steven Spielberg likes his intended surprise to, you know, surprise. But, perturbingly enough, the first reviews have started trickling in, thanks to that bastion of cutthroats and jacka;s known as the Internets. The initial "quick reaction" was posted to Ain't It Cool News last Thursday evening by "ShogunMaster." The spoiler-heavy review reports that Harrison Ford "has a few lines that work and a million that don't", trashes the other performers, laments the last of tension or suspense "During the whole of the movie, there was not a single moment that I thought our hero ... was in any sort of peril or even significant inconvenience. In most cases, you were so many steps ahead of the characters that it was really just an arduous wait for them to get through it.. He just never shows signs of worry or distress."), and sums up the proceedings with the judgement that this is "the Indiana Movie that you were dreading."

Not having seen the movie ourselves, we have no way of verifying these claims, but the truest thing in the review (which has since been joined on the site by what Michael Cieply describes as "two other less critical, but less than sparkling, reviews") is probably its author's admission that "it doesn't matter what I say, you will see this movie regardless." Still, you have to wonder who the fellow is and how he managed to be one of the first people on Earth to see the movie. Now Cieply reports that "ShogunMaster", "reached via the Web site, said he is a theater executive who saw the film at an exhibitors’ screening this week." Cieply notes that "Such screenings are required in about two dozen states that have laws against blind-bidding, a practice in which theater owners were once asked to bid on films they had not seen. As a practical matter, there is little or no actual bidding in the contemporary theater business, which relies instead on negotiations between distributors and theater owners. But distributors continue to hold screenings for theater company executives in the weeks before a film’s release, whether as a courtesy or as a way to avoid conflict with a patchwork of state laws. Theater executives may have an incentive to play down a movie’s prospects after such a screening, to get better terms." If that's what ShogunMaster is all about--trying to dampen the perception of public enthusiasm for a sure-fire hit as a negotiating ploy--then Ain't It Cool News' participation for the sake of a scoop might threaten the good name of on-line film criticism, if it had a good name. As everybody keeps reminding me, it kind of doesn't, but still!

Nobody Here but Us Chick Flicks

Phil Nugent — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

There have always been "women's pictures"--or "chick flicks", to use the self-referential, lightly mocking phrase that Tom Hanks barks out in Sleepless in Seattle as he watches his own off-screen wife, Rita Wilson, tear up while relating the plot of An Affair to Remember. The ever-evolving problem of the chick flick--what Michael Cieply calls "a label that is increasingly viewed as a marketplace trap"--is how to court women without alienating potential male viewers, a big part of your audience if you're hoping to hit date-movie gold. (You also want to hit women in their soft emotional receptors without making them feel stupid about it. Nora Ephron, who wrote and directed SIS after some fifteen years as a journalistic essayist whose specialty was finding smart ways to negotiate her own relationship to the zeitgeist, was well suited by experience and temperament to pull this off. Incidentally, filmmakers pitching their work squarely at the male demographic don't have nearly as hard a time of it. Many men do appreciate it when someone like Tarantino finds a way to serve up shootouts draped with wisecracks in a way that makes us feel smart, but that doesn't mean that a lot of us won't still clomp off to see Rambo, and have no trouble going by themselves if no dates will humor them.) Now chick movies are being wrought from "chick lit" books, a relatively new development in publishing, or maybe just a standard development with a new name. This new wrinkle has yielded such hits as Bridget Jones's Diary and The Devil Wears Prada, as well as duds such as last fall's non-starter The Nanny Diaries. That last one may have revealed something about the precarious nature of chick-flick chemistry. It starred Scarlett Johansson, who, I have reason to believe, doesn't have as many female fans as she does male admirers. And while a quick scan of the box-office returns on most of Johansson's starring vehicles begs the question of just what it is the guys would pay to see her do in a movie, I'm guessing that tucking in Paul Giamatti's kids isn't it.

Right now, two past masters of the chick flick are working on projects with roots in the genre: Ephron with Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep (as Julia Child) and Amy Adams, and Confessions of a Shopaholic, which is based on a book by Sophie Kinsella and is being directed by P. J. Hogan, the Australian filmmaker who made the Julia Roberts hit My Best Friend's Wedding. As Cieply observes, part of the fun of talking to the people whose beach houses are riding on the fate of these movies is watching them try to avoid being pigeonholed in the chick-flick ghetto. Jerry Bruckheimer, who is one of the producers working on Shopaholic, actually had the brass to liken it to "another Wedding Crashers," which, given the source material, is kind of like saying that, with enough slow-motion in the action scenes, the next Harry Potter film will be hard to tell apart from Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. (As for the Julia Child movie, one of its [male] producers will only say, "We hope this will be a movie for everyone who likes eating.") In the end, writes Cieply, "Trying to pin down what, exactly, constitutes a supposed chick flick is more of a parlor game than a science. An Affair to Remember, in which Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr played star-crossed lovers, clearly makes the cut. Knocked Up, in which Ms. Heigl and Seth Rogen played a star-crossed couple of another sort, probably does not."

"Leatherhead"s Extras Stage Their Own Damn Premiere

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

"“Decade after decade, for well over a century now, the lowly movie extras have been ignored," Robert McClure tells Michael Cieply of The New York Times. Cieply should know; when he's not working as a paramedic, he's a lowly movie extra who has a dual role in the forthcoming George Clooney comedy Leatherheads. The movie was shot on location in the Carolinas, and the local population, which was thrilled to be a part of it all, does not expect to see Mr. Clooney or his co-star Renee Zellweger again in this lifetime. (Not that they don't think Clooney is a nice guy who isn't always welcome down at the barber shop. Tom Ervin, a disability lawyer who appears in the movie as a football official, recalls that Clooney would allow the extras to watch him watch fresh footage: "He'd turn around to us and say, 'Do you guys like that?'") After all, There Will Be Blood, which was shot in Marfa, Texas, didn't even play within twenty-five miles of Marfa, Texas. So, as Cieply reports, the enthusiastic micro-supporting cast of Leatherheads threw together their own premiere of the picture in Greenville, South Carolina, a real nice place to raise your kids up. Tickets go for $25, with proceeds earmarked for a charity fighting starvation in Darfur. (Truly the do-gooding spirit of George Clooney takes root wherever he goes.) What the local premiere lacks in star power it gains in timely edge: it takes place on April 4, four days before the stars are expected to see the fruit of their labors at the "premiere" at Grauman's Chinese Theater. (The proceeds for that one go to the American Film Institute. All this charity is a fine thing, but when is the studio expected to start making some of its money? No wonder Hollywood is going under.) Of that wingding, the good-natured Mr. McClure simply notes: "None of us were invited."