Via Deadline.com.
UPDATE: This may be why it was so easy for Sheen to be gracious…
Category Archives: “Entertainment”
‘The Mill & the Cross’? Starring the Guy from ‘Blade Runner’?
Pieter Bruegel’s epic masterpiece “The Way To Calvary” depicts the story of Christ’s Passion set in Flanders under brutal Spanish occupation in the year 1564, the year Bruegel created his painting. From among the more than 500 figures that fill Bruegel’s remarkable canvas, The Mill and The Cross focuses on a dozen characters whose life stories unfold and intertwine in a panoramic landscape populated by villagers and red-caped horsemen. Among them are Bruegel himself (Rutger Hauer), his friend and art collector Nicholas Jonghelinck (Michael York) and the Virgin Mary (Charlotte Rampling). One of today’s most adventurous and inspired artists and filmmakers, Lech Majewski (screenwriter of Basquiat), invites the viewer to live inside the aesthetic universe of the painting as we watch it being created. Majewski worked for three years to complete the film, pioneering a new method to “enter” a painting and watch the characters come to life that leads to magical results. Like Russian Ark, the film is an unforgettable synthesis of art and life. It’s also a feast of stunning visual effects, a provocative allegory and a cinematic tour de force on religious freedom and human rights.
It too opens Friday and will run for one week. I’ll try and catch it either over the weekend or early next week, as it’s playing at one of the art houses in Philly. (I can’t be in two places at once on Friday! I’m not Padre Pio!)
I always imagined doing a Life of Christ set either in Han Dynasty China or 23rd-century Japan.
The Mill & the Cross has all the makings of a great contribution to Christ-inspired art — or an incredibly ponderous work of politically self-important, self-indulgent camp.
Here’s hoping for the former.
‘Machine Gun Preacher’ May Just Blow You Away
So it seems the upcoming film starring Gerard (300) Butler about a heroin addict who became a Christian with a special vocation is less realistic than the life of the man on whom the story is based. And the film already looks like a graphic novel you must be 18 or older to read:
Director Marc Forster – whose credits include “Finding Neverland,” “Quantum of Solace,” and “Monster’s Ball” – includes all the typical elements of an R-rated film: sex, drugs and violence. But screenwriter Jason Keller noted Thursday at the film’s Washington, D.C. screening that he couldn’t include some experiences in Childers’ earlier “bad-boy” life in the script because they were “too intense.”
Actor Gerard Butler, who portrays Childers in the movie, said in the production notes, “When I first read it (movie script), I thought, ‘Are you kidding me? This couldn’t all have happened.’ But it did and much more. The man has experienced more than most people would in 10 lifetimes.”
So who is Sam Childers and why would Hollywood A-listers care to make a movie about a Christian preacher who helps African children? Read the rest of this entry »
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Breakfast Links — UPDATED
Alec Baldwin walked out on the Emmys after FOX cut his Rupert Murdoch phone-hacking joke from the opening segment. Baldwin was replaced by Leonard Nimoy, and the audience walked out.
UPDATE: Alec Baldwin clarifies what really happened last night: “I did not attend the Emmys due to a long-standing commitment to Tony and Susan Bennett’s Exploring the Arts benefit, which I had agreed to host several months ago. In the intervening time, the Emmy telecast was moved from its previous date in August to a new September date. … Prior to last night, the Emmy producers flew me to LA to shoot a pre-tape for the show with Jane Lynch. In that routine, I made a joke about the News Corp. phone hacking scandal which the writers and producers had pre-approved before I made the trip. We shot the segment with the joke in. A couple of days later, I was informed that the producers had been told by some Fox entity that the joke had to be cut. I then asked that the entire piece be omitted, as I felt the joke was, perhaps, the funniest thing in it. I did not boycott the Emmys due to that edit.”
He’s right — FOX should have sucked it up and left the joke in.
The Emmy producers were pressured to drop the Charlie Sheen segment by Two and a Half Men creator and object of Sheen’s rage Chuck Lorre. Sheen went on anyway and shot himself live on camera, but not before dousing members of the auditorium audience in sulphuric acid and detonating a thermonuclear device that set half the world on fire. Then there was one of those quirky Geiko commercials.
Focus on the Family is laying off 49 more employees, which just goes to show you have to focus on the books if you want a family to focus on.
It’s illegal to make porn in Australia if you have small boobies, and you need permission from the Chinese government to get reincarnated. So please keep this in mind if you’re thinking of moonlighting during these tough times.
Apple wants you to re-purchase stuff you already own. Why didn’t anyone else think of that? Steve Jobs IS a genius!
Some journalists are arguing that Republicans aren’t making more of the Solyndra scandal because they’re guilty of the same kind of crony capitalism. Oh how I wish I had cronies … and capital.
If these seagulls had been around in 19th-century Russia, Chekhov’s play would have been a horror story. About poop. Melancholy Russian seagull bacteria-resistant poop. So I guess we’re lucky things worked out the way they did.
California’s unemployment rate will never be high enough until whoever is responsible for greenlighting Toddlers and Tiaras is begging on the streets with a bag over his head.
Barry Manilow Hearts Ron Paul. I Thought Barry Manilow Was Dead.
The Daily Caller has this:
Grammy-winning musician Barry Manilow told The Daily Caller that he agrees with “just about everything” 2012 Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul says, calling him a “solid” contender for the highest office in the land.
“I like him. I like what he says, I do. I like what he says. I think he’s solid,” said Manilow, who confirmed to TheDC in an interview at the Capitol on Thursday that he contributed to Paul’s last campaign for president.
“I agree with just about everything he says. What can I tell you?” Manilow added.
Well, at least the guy thinks for himself. Or it may be a strange side effect of all that Botox. Either way, here’s hoping this becomes Ron Paul’s campaign song:
Less Is Moore
Michael Moore has a new book out: Here Comes Trouble. I’m sure it will prove as reliable an interpretation of his personal history as his mockumentaries are of American history.
Which is not to say the guy still can’t be funny:
I had an unusually large-sized head, though this was not uncommon for a baby in the Midwest. The craniums in our part of the country were designed to leave a little extra room for the brain to grow in case one day we found ourselves exposed to something we didn’t understand, like a foreign language, or a salad.
Back in the immediate post-Roger & Me days, when Moore was far more tolerable, I remember his saying during a radio interview that he intended to continue to live on $35,000 a year despite his success, presumably so as to continue to identify with the working classes from which he sprang.
Those days are long gone. As he relates in his book (and as redacted by the New York Post):
[I] met with the head of the top security agency in the country, an elite, no-[bleeping]-around outfit that did not hire ex-cops, nor any “tough guys” or bouncer types … They preferred to only use SEALs and … due to the alarming increase of threats and attempts on me, I had nine of them surrounding me, round-the-clock.
You know you’ve made it when you can afford nine ex–Navy Seals to protect you from some wackjob angry enough to shoot you for stepping across his property line in Crazyland.
Now I don’t begrudge anyone a fat income if he or she works in an industry that generates fat revenues and produces something of value and does so reasonably honestly. And while no one with a dictionary would call Moore’s stuff documentaries, what he does is not illegal. But it is deceptive. A true documentarian, say, an Errol Morris, knows that one indispensable quality of the craft is patience. You have to give your subjects time and space to tell their stories without your interceding judgments, so that an audience can draw its own conclusions — even if in some cases those conclusions are pretty obvious (think The Thin Blue Line), though not always (think Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans). Can anyone say that Moore is even vaguely interested in an audience drawing its own conclusions?
But who isn’t on to him by now? His fans (of which there are many) don’t care what facts or perspectives he omits from his carefully constructed and painfully tendentious mislabeled parodies. As far as they’re concerned, he hates all the right people. And his enemies (of which there are many) usually avoid wasting their hard-earned cash on his product.
I just wish he’d own up to the fact that he’s been poor and he’s been rich and rich is better. And being a rich socialist is best of all: you get all the goodies of the upper class and all the resentment of the lower. And the latter is the fuel you burns to continue to make the money to buy more and more of the former.
As Charlie Sheen would say, “Winning!”
Breakfast Links
The most influential British artist of the 20th century is dead. And no, I’ve never heard of him either. Although I do know the White Album. Brilliant stuff, two, three, four …
A film so revolting in its disgustingness that people are actually passing out during screenings has found a distributor. The Incident tells the moving tale of a couple of moonlighting cooks who find themselves trapped in a booby hatch just when the inmates take charge of the asylum. One of the more mesmerizing episodes involves a crazed denizen roasting one unfortunate alive atop a burning stove. Gordon Ramsay makes a cameo. (I may be mistaken on that last point.)
It’s official: So many people disapprove of President Obama’s performance in office that several pollsters committed suicide rather than tally the results. (The job was left to a security guard at Target, who stands by his count.)
Al-Qaeda psychopath releases message to the world on anniversary of 9/11: “People of earth, we come in peace. We wish only to annihilate everyone born in a month with an “R” in it. Also, the cast from Glee.“
Anthony Weiner, the gift that keeps on giving.
Tom Hooper, able director of The King’s Speech and the John Adams miniseries for HBO, is bringing the Broadway hit musical Les Misérables to the Big Screen. Two big questions remain: Who will play Les? And will it be in 3D? The other Miserables will be played by Seth Rogen, Will Farrell, Jonah Hill, Steve Carell, Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, and John C. Reilly.
The World Evangelical Alliance has set a date for its next assembly, 2014, guaranteeing that the Rapture will not happen before then. Among the memorable guest speakers are people with unpronounceable names who will make pronouncements so easily forgotten that attendees will spend most of their time setting a date for the next assembly, even as date setting is declared “unfortunate.”
The number of Americans who fashion their own religions to meet their personal needs is up, according to the New York Stock Exchange. Zeus futures are down, while “trusting the Universe” and Tower of Babel securities saw a slight uptick in modest trading. Among the needs that still need to be met after traditional religion has failed to meet them are financial security, a happy marriage, improved health, and eternal life.
That’s all for now. I’m Patty Hearst. Thanks for watching.
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Bobcat Goldthwait Says We Shouldn’t Know Who the Kardashians Are
And who can disagree? I mean, we shouldn’t know who 80 percent of the people who populate popular culture are. Most “celebrities” are nonachievers famous for being clueless, for living hermetically sealed lives in which Me, Myself & I are their closest companions. They only get on the teletube because no matter how rich or famous they become, and no matter how financially drained and universally ignored we remain, we can always feel superior to somebody.
But back to Goldthwait. He has a new movie coming out called God Bless America. Here’s a précis:
The movie itself is something of an oddball roadtrip comedy crossed with a furious social critique. After divorced office drone Frank (Joel Murray, recently of “Mad Men”) is told by his doctor he has a brain tumor, he sets off into a downward spiral. Having also lost his job and realizing his increasingly bratty daughter wants nothing to do with him, he projects his frustration out onto the world, setting off on a kill-spree rampage that targets meanness, rudeness and the coarsening of American culture.
Along the way he picks up teenage Roxy (Tara Lynn Barr, in a performance both sweet and psychotic) and takes her under his wing as the family he wishes he had.
Friday night’s audience loudly received Frank and Roxy’s rants on the state of what’s wrong in the world, which included the Kardashians, talk radio and anger-driven TV newcasts, people who say “literally” too much, phones in movie theaters, high-fives and other assorted annoyances. Even such unlikely targets as the writer Diablo Cody and her movie “Juno” come under fire. ”How can we be a civilization if we can’t even be civilized?” asks Frank at one point.
If you’ve never seen Goldthwait’s World’s Greatest Dad, starring Robin Williams, I highly recommend it, as the caustic humor that turns people’s expectations and assumptions upside down is very appealing to me (albeit in small doses, and depending on the nature of the critique the author/director is making). I mean, how many times do you get to enjoy a movie about a slacker, loner teen who dies young — and you’re not only OK with that, you’re doing the Rocky dance all the way home from the theater?
God Bless America sounds a little like Falling Down, if that film had had a sense of humor. Or a point.
The casting of Joel Murray is interesting. Obviously, star power is not going to be the draw here, merely the sensibility and, presumably, the yucks. We’ll see if Goldthwait can pull this off with a larger audience than that crammed into a theater at the Toronto Film Festival, many of whose members were probably just compensating for the fact that they weren’t able to get into a screening of Coriolanus — which I CANNOT WAIT TO SEE.
You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o’ the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you;
And here remain with your uncertainty!
Let every feeble rumour shake your hearts!
Your enemies, with nodding of their plumes,
Fan you into despair!
Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha! AH AH AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA—crrccccccccckkkk.
Ugh, phew…swallowed my gum…
A Strange Review: Contagion
“Blogging is not writing. It’s just graffiti with punctuation.”
So says medical researcher Elliot Gould to crank blogger Jude Law in Contagion, directed by Oscar-winner Steven Soderbergh and opening today in a bacterium-infested theater near you.
The contagion is a virus that threatens to wipe out a good 1% of the population. The earth’s population. It seems to have originated in Hong Kong, in a casino, and because of the way people interact—casually, unreflectively, and extremely tactilely—it has spread quickly.
Of course, in any major crisis, panic is feared as much as whatever is posing the immediate threat. Which is why the other contagion of the film is information. And misinformation. And rumor. And in the Internet and text-messaging age, that contagion can spread even faster than the viral kind. In fact, one of the bad guys of the piece is an anti-vaccine, conspiracy-mongering blogger (Law) who is pushing the use of a homeopathic cure, which he claims the CDC—and Big Pharma—are deliberately neglecting because it can’t be patented. He’s the epitome of the anti-greed holistic type who’s as materialistic and cracked as the CEOs he despises.
Disease has a distinctly democratic character, while cures are far more privileged. That is the other message of Contagion: Even if you concoct a cure, how do you decide who gets it first? There are powerful people, including do-gooders in the medical establishment, who have ready access when children far away are dropping like tse-tses. Is this fair? Or just inevitable, because life is unfair? Read the rest of this entry »
Mel Gibson May Direct Film About Judah Maccabee, Because the Only Good Hebrew Is a Dead…
Oh, I just couldn’t resist. (You know how I get…) Now I have no interest in kicking a Mel when he’s down, especially because when this Mel gets mad, we’re in Hannibal Lecter territory. He’s a gifted guy, and a funny guy, who’s also a tormented guy, with a proclivity to torment others, it seems.
But this item about Gibson’s directing or producing an epic tale of how the Maccabees threw off Seleucid rule in Judea in order to restore right worship of the one true God can be read one of two ways:
1. Gibson wants to show people that he is not anti-Semitic by casting ancient Hebrews as heroic and faithful and true.
2. Gibson wants to use the Maccabees as a stand-in for his own Braveheartish traditionalist battle against the pagans in the MSM (and the cowardly liberals within the Church).
If he really wanted to accomplish #1, he could have made a film about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising or, better yet, how about adapting David I. Kertzer’s The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, and in such a manner that Pius IX is not depicted as the hero of that story?
That Joe Eszterhas is writing the script for the Maccabees story is sorta interesting, and by interesting I mean terrifying. He is the famous/infamous screenwriter of Showgirls and Flashdance and Basic Instinct. He is also a recent revert to Catholicism, a process he wrote about in The Crossbearer.
We shall see what we shall see. It could be great. Or the Seleucids could come off as just misunderstood. Good dancers, but with daddy issues.
