Bits for the Day/Week

[Rutger Hauer, Daryl Hannah, and Edward James Olmos at the premiere of Blade Runner: The Final Cut at the Venice Film Festival. Picture courtesy Reuters.]

Blade Runner: The Final Cut has premiered in Venice, and Ridley Scott's been his typically forthcoming/cranky self, declaring that science fiction cinema is dead because nothing new is being done, and that movies on mobile phones are a massive detriment to the nature of cinema.

While I agree with him on the latter point, I think the former is a little miserly. Originality is pretty tough after all, and while he should be hard on blatant, thoughtless imitation, he shouldn't decry the SF films that are really trying, like Children of Men, Sunshine, The Fountain, and A Scanner Darkly. The Guardian has a gentle retort that takes similar opposition.



The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford has begun screening for critics and at the Venice Film Festival, and the reaction is polarised. Emanuel Levy and Variety's Todd McCarthy adore it and proclaim it a masterpiece, as do others yet to publish complete reviews, yet David Poland and The Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt find it an underwhelming, pretentious mess. It's probably too Malickian to have a decent shot at the Oscars, but this is clearly not a misfire, rather a film so elusive that it divides opinion.

A second trailer has also appeared shortly after the first, and it's an ideal encapsulation of how a film can be marketed in completely different ways. Whereas the trailer posted last week is contemplative and soulful, the new one positions the film as a Western thriller. Not since The Weather Man have I seen such a markedly inaccurate promotion for a film, if the advance word about it is to be believed. It's a safe assumption that one of these trailers is for the arthouses, the other for the megaplexes, if the studio deigns to open it wider into them.



The Wire has wrapped filming on its fifth and final season, and The Washington Post has a terrific article and a poignant video of the last day on the set, with comments from David Simon and members of the cast. Although I'm lucky enough to have two whole seasons of this masterwork still to savour, it's nonetheless a shame that this show is ending, albeit a triumph that it garnered the full five seasons that Simon wished for. I think it will be many years before this show is fully appreciated by the many who would have if they had merely known of it.

Incidentally, I'd suspected that the fifth season theme of the media would produce a new character to anchor the exploration, like Carcetti in season 3 and the four kids in season 4, and this article reveals him, and it's nice to hear that he'll be played by Clooney repertory player Tom McCarthy, from Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck, and writer/director of The Station Agent. Good snag, Wire.



AICN's Moriarty has some portents about what the hell the new Star Trek movie is about. Don't read if you want to remain utterly pure, but there's nothing hugely spoilery except in a conceptual way. Just think Ultimate... [And CHUD's Jeremy Smith has had confirmation that this is indeed the plot, or part of it. It's an interesting move, but I have to tenatively agree with Devin's editorial - we don't need any anchoring to the past franchise if you're just going to reboot it anyway. But then, it's also nicely audacious.]



There's ominous talk from cast members at a convention that Sci-Fi will be splitting up the fourth and final season of Battlestar Galactica, with 10 episodes to air early in 2008 and 10 held over until early 2009!! It makes a kind of sense to get the most critical love for the longest time, but a lot of people are going to be pissed off too - it's fairly tight. Not yet confirmed, though.

And also, vote for the cover for the DVD of the "Razor" BSG TV movie, if you give a crap. I picked the C. Sadly, as I discovered, the "exclusive clip" you get as reward for your efforts won't play if you're outside America. Nuts.



The new Lost cast members are: Ken Leung (Rush Hour, The Sopranos), Lance Reddick (The Wire), Jeremy Davies (Solaris, Saving Private Ryan), Jeff Fahey (The Lawnmower Man), and Rebecca Mader (er... dunno).

Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse speak to Entertainment Weekly's Lost guru Jeff Jensen about the new additions here. Fahey sounds like an interesting guy. He only acts occasionally, which explains his patchy filmography. Instead, he recently ran an orphanage in Afghanistan!



Oliver Stone is returning to Vietnam with Pinkville, a film about the My Lai massacre and subsequent inquiries and scandals, to star Bruce Willis and Channing Tatum. It's set up at Cruise/Wagner's new United Artists, which will soon face its first test with the release of Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs.


Time for this week's episode of Jack's Persistent Delusional Hopes: After a disheartening August 20 blog post recounting a demoralising chat with David Milch, Deadwood actor W. Earl Brown (Dan Dority) offered a little hope to Remote Access, and encouraging news that even the in-demand Ian McShane and Timothy Olyphant are keen as mustard for more Deadwood. While the prospect is highly tenuous and only comes from one source, for Deadwood salivators like myself, it's better than nowt, and things do seem to be happening; from a subsequent, brighter conversation with Milch, Brown speculated that "the next couple of weeks should let us know for sure".

Like Brown, I also had the naive hope that with John from Cincinnati capsizing, Deadwood's chances would be much brighter, but I shouldn't be surprised that this is not necessarily the case. HBO seems to be far more business-oriented these days, increasingly resembling the networks in its programming decisions even through subscribers, not advertisers, provide their revenue. And that's just in the case of the movies. If the series were mooted to return (as Brown still has hope for, curiously, and I can't help but irrationally root for), the original financial problems that led to its demise likely remain, now with the added factor of a renewal seeming like a step back, a capitulation for all concerned.

However, HBO is facing a major image problem at the moment, with its commercial and critical successes dropping like flies while rival Showtime reaps the rewards, to the point where The Guardian and The New York Times have published articles on its woes ("HBO-ver is a popular catch-cry in the industry). Perhaps the proper return of the last moderate commercial and massive critical success it had whose creator actually wants it to return could rehabilitate its reputation. The question would be whether the move would be likened to a renaissance, a triumphant heeding of the people's wishes or a resuscitation, a warming-over of past glories.

Regardless, this show still gets talked about a lot, surprisingly so for a show cancelled over a year ago. And I'm currently watching the show for the first substantial time since it ended (I have yet to re-watch the third season), and it's only reminded me how this show leaves absolutely everything - save The Wire - in the dust. It has fully exposed for me how John from Cincinnati did not just fail to match Milch's predecessor, but it never came close.

Deadwood was a finely crafted, exquisite jewel laden with beautiful coarseness and a pulsing, vibrant soul. I think HBO could do a lot worse than bring it back. Continuing down its current path clearly isn't working for them. Hopefully the next couple of weeks will yield something.



Sky One and AMC's remake of The Prisoner isn't happening. I was in a wait-and-see posture, but am shedding absolutely no tears.



The first review in English that I'm aware of of the Rebuild of Evangelion movies.



The New York Times on the long delay of John Turturro's musical comedy Romance and Cigarettes, with James Gandolfini and Kate Winslet.



There's a feature-length documentary out called The Pixar Story. WANT!



Keanu Reeves will be playing humanoid alien messenger Klaatu in the remake of Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still, to be directed by Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose).

....

GODDAMN REMAKES!!!!!! For the love of God, leave them alone.



The budgetary disputes and studio bafflement about Watchmen clearly haven't soured Warner executives on Zack Snyder: they've signed him to direct a new version of The Illustrated Man, an anthology film based on the stories of Ray Bradbury, to be produced by Frank Darabont (who's still trying to get his version of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 off the ground). Anthologies are usually commercial poison - will this one change that course?



Brandon Routh has work! Yes, the unthinkable has happened. Gregor Jordan has returned from post-Ned Kelly respite/exile to direct The Informers, a intersecting drama based on short stories by Bret Easton Ellis that will star Billy Bob Thornton, Kim Basinger, and Routh... as a vampire! Interestink. The interweaving ensemble drama is very old-hat right now, but vampires and Ellis source material should give the genre a much-needed and hopefully satisfying creative enema. And Jordan's Buffalo Soldiers was really good.



Newsarama has a serialised chapter from premier comics scholar Douglas Wolk's new book Reading Comics, which could be quite the authoritative text for the foreseeable future. The chapter focuses on Grant Morrison, particularly The Invisibles and Seven Soldiers - a nice coincidence since Morrison is bloody fantastic if utterly mad.