Let’s pretend that you’re Ridley Scott, just sitting around one day waiting for American Gangster to open. Wait, let’s be Brian Grazer instead. So much more fun. Anyway, you’re just minding your own business when Jay-Z walks in, drops an entirely new record in your lap. “See what you can do with this,” he says … Continue reading
Even though it’s been ten years since his last fiction film, James Cameron is still a commercial force to be reckoned with until proven otherwise. And while you think his forever-in-development 3-D opus, Avatar, is the film that’s going to demolish his bankability… well, just know that Jeffrey Katzenberg does not agree with you. At … Continue reading
"I make my films like you’re going to *die* if you miss the next minute." If there’s a finer encapsulation of the experience of watching an Oliver Stone film, I haven’t heard it. Love him or hate him (and no major American director has fewer in-betweens than perhaps Spike Lee), there is no denying the … Continue reading
Llewellyn Moss is in the sort of trouble you can’t even imagine. Out hunting one morning he comes across several shot-up pickups, a half-dozen stiffs and a case full of cash. Bales of heroin in one pickup leave no doubt that the cash is off-limits, just waiting to be reclaimed. Taking it seems so easy, … Continue reading
The Cormac McCarthy adaptation train is really rolling now. With the Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men one of the blazing highlights of recent film festivals (it topped the off the cuff Best Of lists of nearly everyone I talked to at Toronto last week, and will probably top mine as well) the reclusive … Continue reading
Thank God New Line’s publicity department sent an eight meg Sex and the City publicity photo, because my Outlook email box wasn’t behaving slow enough for my purposes. The image to the right is celebrating the start of shooting for the Sex and the City feature film and I must admit that I own the … Continue reading
When Kristen Stewart mentioned during today’s In the Wild press junket that she was set to star in Greg Mottola’s Adventureland opposite Ryan Reynolds and Jesse Eisenberg, I pretended that I already knew all of this. In truth, Eisenberg was the only actor I’d heard connected to this Pittsburgh-set comedy about a college graduate forced … Continue reading
Memo to Mark Waters and New Line: if you adopt the above title in favor of the banal Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, I will henceforth shower this production with ceaselessly positive coverage. Every casting choice and every shred of media (both official and "leaked") will be greeted as if it were the cure for dead. … Continue reading
I get no small amount of amusement from the fact that the latest films from Bela Tarr and the Coen Brothers share the same plot. It’s a tribute to the infinite variability of storytelling and cinema that, despite a common narrative spine, the films couldn’t be more different. Looking at No Country For Old Men … Continue reading
Sometimes you don’t know you’re even in the mood for a snack until you come across one.