A Writer's Life

DiCaprio is Travis McGee

Variety reports that Leonardo DiCaprio has signed to portray Travis McGee in a movie version of John D.  MacDonald's THE DEEP BLUE GOODBYE . Dana Stevens wrote the script, and Peter Chernin will produce, but no director has been set yet. I have a hard time picturing DiCaprio as McGee, how about you?  

FAME Doesn't Live Forever

I got a laugh from the first paragraph of Betsy Sharkey's review of FAME in today's Los Angeles Times:

"Fame," it turns out, is not going to live forever. It's officially DOA. Call the coroner. Then call in the top teams from "CSI," and that sexy pair from "Bones" while you're at it, because if ever there was a crime scene that should be yellow-taped and relentlessly investigated this is it.

Bronson's Loose!

You don't have to be a DEATH WISH fan -- and I'm not -- to enjoy BRONSON'S LOOSE! THE MAKING OF THE DEATH WISH FILMS, a highly entertaining and informative book about the making of the cult classic Charles Bronson vigilante film and its lesser (and inevitable) sequels. Author Paul Talbot has done a remarkable job, interviewing all the major players behind the development and production of the DEATH WISH movies (including Brian Garfield, the author of the original novel), and delivering a tight little book that is packed solid with fascinating details and wonderful anecdotes. I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in screenwriting and movie-making. It's a lot of fun to read. 

This is not a new book -- it was self-published by Talbot in 2007 through iUniverse. I don't know if that's because it was rejected by every publisher in NY, or if he opted from the get-go to do it himself. Either way, it's a shame it wasn't picked up by a major publisher, its a book that deserves a wide distribution and critical recognition.

GUN MONKEYS on the rampage

Victor Gischler, author of GUN MONKEYS, alerted me that our in-the-works screen adaptation of his book is getting buzzed about this week on the net. We honestly have no idea what prompted all of this new attention, but I guess it can't hurt.

How To Sell a Deadlier Bond

How do you introduce audience to a new, tougher, more ruthless version of James Bond? I'm not talking CASINO ROYALE but LICENCE TO KILL. The Permission To Kill blog flashes back to 1998 and the aborted advertising campaigns to sell Timothy Dalton's second go-round as James Bond.

This is what they ultimately went with...

The Plan is Coming Together

Variety reports that the cast is shaping up for the big screen version of my buddy Steve Cannell's hit series THE A-TEAM. Liam Neeson is taken with the part of Hannibal (George Peppard's role) and Bradley Cooper is being wooed to play Faceman (Dirk Benedict's part). No word yet on who is being sought for the roles of Murdock (Dwight Schultz in the original) and "B.A." Baracus, played by Mr. T. Joe Carnahan is directing, and Ridley Scott is producing with Jules Daly and Cannell from a screenplay by Carnahan, Brian Bloom and Skip Woods.

 

Fascinating, Captain

Not only is the new STAR TREK a brilliant and exhilirating re-boot of the franchise, it could serve as a text book for writers on how to update a beloved media property. JJ Abrams and his writers manage to pay affectionate and respectful homage to the original series and all of its spin-offs...while at the same time cleverly and elegantly freeing themselves from all that has come before. 

Like CASINO ROYALE -- which successfully rebooted "James Bond," another beloved, enduring franchise -- the film is both comfortingly familiar and delightfully surprising. And like in CASINO ROYALE, you won't hear the franchise's iconic theme until the end, when the movie and its characters have earned it.  The one miss-step in the movie is Karl Urban as Dr. McCoy. He is the only actor in the cast who seems to be attempting an impersonation of the original performer in his part...and he does it badly. But that's a minor quibble. This is a terrific movie. 

I am already looking forward to the sequel.

Let's Make a Movie

My friend David Carren, with whom I worked on DIAGNOSIS MURDER and MARTIAL LAW, has written & directed a low-budget student film called THE RED QUEEN that features another good friend of mine, author/actress Harley Jane Kozak, who blogs today about her experience making the movie.

I loved making the film, working with students. Really talented, nice students. At least, I’m pretty sure they were nice. A lot of communication was in Spanish, Edinburg being on the Mexican border. I liked to think there were deep conversations on the works of Pedro Almodovar and Carlos Saura, but it’s possible they were saying, “If I ingest more vending machine Skittles, I shall go mad.”

I can't wait to see it.

There Have Got to be Easier Ways to Kill a Guy...

A Man with True Grit

Variety reports that the Coen Brothers next movie will be an adaptation of Charles Portis' western novel TRUE GRIT, which became a classic movie starring John Wayne, who won an Oscar as the ornery bounty hunter Rooster Cogburn.

Not a traditional remake, the Paramount film will be more faithful to the Charles Portis book than the 1969 pic [...]Portis' novel is about a 14-year-old girl who, along with an aging U.S. marshal and another lawman, tracks her father's killer in hostile Indian territory. But while the original film was a showcase for Wayne, the Coens' version will tell the tale from the girl's p.o.v.

I'm already looking forward to it.

Heroes in Costumes

I've been approached to adapt a superhero comicbook so I've been catching up on a lot of superhero movies lately. I went to see a noon show of WATCHMEN this week and I was the only person in the theatre for the entire 27 1/2 hour running time. That should have told me something. 

I've never read the graphic novel, so I came into this cold, without any expectations or preconceptions. Bottom line: I thought it was a bloated, dreary, cliche-ridden, self-important mess. The only thing I enjoyed was the main title sequence. I hated everything else about it.

The truth is, I have grown weary of these dark, dismal, and yet ultimately simplistic superhero movies that substitute CGI-laden, over-the-top set-pieces for character and ingenuity. IRON MAN is my favorite of the bunch lately because at least it had a sense of humor and an unpredictable central character who wasn't wallowing in self-pity all the time. THE DARK KNIGHT was energized by Heath Ledger's brilliant performance as The Joker.

The only remotely interesting character in WATCHMEN was The Comedian, but, sadly, the movie wasn't really about him. It was about an all-too-obvious, supercilious James Bond bad guy and a glowing nude-guy with delusions of God-hood. Yawn. There wasn't a single character the audience could relate to...and the only "regular" people were either psychotic killers or innocent victims. It's hard to give a damn about a bunch of one-dimensional characters in silly costumes. And I thought the violence was gory simply for the sake of being gory...it added nothing to the movie. If anything, it detracted from it. The sex scenes were so clunky and awkward it was as if the actors, and the director, had never actually had sex before...but had simply read about it. The trailer for UP was more erotic.

WATCHMEN movie was preceded by a trailer for WOLVERINE, which also looks like another $150 million montage of CGI stunts (though it seems more entertaining than WATCHMEN). How many variations of superheroes tossing cars at each other can Hollywood churn out before the audience grows tired of it?

One of these days it would be nice to see just one superhero movie that doesn't revolve around morose people in ridiculous costumes tossing cars at one another and bemoaning their emotional isolation from an unappreciative populace. 

The Skinny on Gun Monkeys

You may have noticed that I haven't talked much here lately about my TV and screen work. That's because I don't feel comfortable talking about projects that are in development and not yet a certainty. But since CrimeSpree broke the news about me scripting the movie version of GUN MONKEYS, I've been getting a lot of emails asking about me about the project.

I've always been a huge fan of Victor's book. In fact, we first met at the Edgars, where GUN MONKEYS was up for an award, and have been good friends ever since. About a year or so ago, I optioned the book and wrote a spec screenplay adaptation, which my agent then shopped all over town.  The script was strong enough that it got me "meet and greet" meetings at studios and production companies everywhere...and nearly got me a gig rewriting a Major Studio Action Movie, but that fell through (however, the aborted Major Studio Action Movie rewrite got me into business with the Director, with whom I have been out pitching TV series concepts). More on that whirlwind experience another time...

Eventually Two Hot Young Producers with deals all over town eventually optioned my GUN MONKEYS script, and with it my underlying option on Victor's book. They spent several months in negotiations with A Major Hollywood Star who was interested in directing the film...but not starring in it. That deal fell through at the last minute. 

Now the producers have attracted the interest of a Major Distributor and a Major Hollywood Agency is packaging GUN MONKEYS. They've also signed director Ryuhei Kitamura, who has an astonishing visual style but is better known in Japan than he is here (his only U.S. film was last year's horror flick "Midnight Meat Train"). That will change soon, whether it's with GUN MONKEYS or another film. I'm told that the script and the director make an attractive package and, for the last few weeks, another Major Hollywood Star has been circling the project. If he signs on, things should come together very quickly...but that's a big IF.  

I don't know whether all of this will lead to the movie finally getting made, but it has been a interesting ride for Victor and me. It has also given me a refresher course in the feature film business, which I've discovered is a completely different planet than the TV world that I have been living on for so long. More on that some other time...

Christian Bale Goes Batty

TMZ has a audio tape of Christian Bale's insane tirade after the Director of Photography of Terminator Salvation accidentally walked into the star's eye line during a shot. The recording was apparently sent to the film's insurance company in case Bale bailed on the movie mid-production. I don't get why the director didn't step in and try to save his DP -- and the crew -- from Bale's tirade. Was McG just sitting there and watching? This was a much as insult to the director's control as it was a humiliation for the poor DP.

The sad truth is that Bale is so successful that he can get away with this repugnant, unprofessional behavior like this -- nobody wants to offend a guy who makes the studios this much money, no matter how offensive he might be. I've worked with a couple of actors like that -- but they weren't big enough stars to get away with it and didn't. It's not pleasant. 

A Bourne Again Holmes

Somebody is going to write a book on how the Bourne movies have reshaped action heroes. First James Bond got Bourne Again (in CASINO ROYALE), now it's Sherlock Holmes' turn. The new Holmes, portrayed by Robert Downey Jr., is going to be as brawny as he is brainy. The New York Times reports:

Sure, he will still be smarter than everyone within a three-planet radius, and he will retain his uncanny ability to intuit whole life stories from the tiniest speck of dust on a shoe. But he will do those things while being a man of action, a chaser, shooter and pummeler of criminals — “like James Bond in 1891,” Joel Silver, one of the film’s producers, said last fall. [...]The new Holmes is rougher, more emotionally multilayered, more inclined to run with his clothing askew, covered in bruises and smudges of dirt and blood. [...]But when he applies himself, Holmes is as fast with his body — he is a bare-knuckle boxer, a crack shot and an expert swordsman — as he is with his mind.

Can a Bourne Again Robin Hood, Tarzan, and Popeye The Sailor be far behind?

Financing a movie...one dollar at a time.

Actress Amy Walker, one of the performers in the MAPES FOR HIRE stage & audio play, produced a video that went viral last year and logged millions of hits. She realized that if just a fraction of those viewers gave her a dollar, she'd have the money she needed to finance the movie she's been developing. So that's exactly what she's doing.

Best Crime Movie in Ages

Add me to the chorus of people who are raving about THE LAST LULLABY, a terrific, l0w-budget indie crime movie directed by Jeffrey Goodman and starring Tom Sizemore as an insomniac hitman on his last assignment. It's based the novel THE LAST QUARRY by Max Alan Collins, who co-wrote the script with Peter Biegen.  It isn't yet another in a seemingly endless spew of pop-culture-referencing, amped-up, martial-arts, dizzyingly-edited action montages masquarading as movies. This is the real deal, a genuine, character-based noir tale that packs a surprising punch. No bells and whistles. No CGI. No explosions. But plenty of mood, atmosphere, emotion and startling, unromanticized violence. And a touch of romance, too. This is a crime movie for adults who don't have A.D.D.  Goodman says:

"I guess Lullaby is a smattering of things I like," explains its director Jeffrey Goodman.  "If I have combined them in a way that feels fresh I will be happy.  There's a dose of playfulness from the French New Wave, a bit of slowness of some art films, the naturalistic style of early seventies American film, and a strong commitment to narrative taken from film noir.  Yet, in all honesty, more than anything, I just wanted to get away from irony and cynicism and try to put something on screen that was sincere."

He succeeded. Brilliantly. I loved it. Best indie crime movie I've seen since, oh, DIAMOND MEN.

Taking Pride & Glory in Cop Cliches

The movie "Pride & Glory"  has taken a long, troubled road to the screen. Among its problems, according to critics, is that its steeped in cliches. So much so, that the New York Times used it as a primer on NY cop movie cliches that just won't go away:

THE CONFLICTED POLICE OFFICER, who is torn between enforcing the law and watching the backs of his relatives or buddies in homicide/narcotics/missing persons/the seven-six. By the way, he has “seen some things.” Not things like traffic on the Belt Parkway or a matinee performance of “Mamma Mia!” But things that he really, really doesn’t want to talk about. Just leave it alone. O.K.? Just leave it.

THE POLICE OFFICER’S FATHER, who is either on The Job or just retired from The Job and who talks about honoring the family — though that family could be the one in the seven-six in Brooklyn or the one in a split-level out on Long Island. (It helps if the father drinks too much, so that someone at some point can reach for his glass and gently say, “Hey, Pop, you’ve had enough.”)

THE POLICE OFFICER’S SPOUSE OR GIRLFRIEND, who has left him because he is torn between her and The Job. Yes, he is really, really torn; leave it alone. But you know what? Jimmy, Billy, Timmy, Tommy, Sean, whatever your name is? She can’t take it anymore. She has to get on with her life. After an awkward hug, Jimmy, Billy, Timmy, Tommy, Sean, or whatever leaves to see some more things.

THE POLICE OFFICER’S FRIEND OR RELATIVE, whose behavior on The Job will place the protagonist in a no-win situation; he gets “jammed up,” a phrase you are welcome to use. They confront each other in a station house’s locker room, a split-level’s living room or a bar, where their feelings are such that words fail and only fists will do.

CORRUPTION, of course: the kind that, once exposed, will blow the lid off this town, and everybody, but everybody, gets jammed up. And finally, this:

ENOUGH REFERENCES TO IRISH AMERICA TO DRIVE YOU TO DRINK. But that’s a stereotype. Yeah, but I’m Irish-American, so it’s O.K. Or is it? Just leave it alone. Just leave it.

Nobody Does it Worse

The London Times lists some of the worst James Bond movie moments. I disagree with a lot of their choices, especially when there are so many truly awful moments to choose from.

For me, the worst moments were in "Moonraker" (Jaws flapping his arms, trying to fly as he fell from an airplane; Bond riding a horse to the theme from "The Magnificent Seven"), "A View to a Kill" (Bond skiing across an ice-lake to a Beach Boys song; getting into bed with Grace Jones and looking like a dirty old man),  "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" (007's arch-nemesis Blofeld doesn't recognize Bond because he's wearing a kilt!), "Diamonds Are Forever" (Bond tooling around the desert in a moon buggy), and "Die Another Day" (the invisible car and a ridiculous CGI Bond surfing a tidal wave).

(Thanks to Bill Crider for the link)

Remakes and Sequels A-Go-Go

Variety reports on a slew of remakes and sequels today. Disney has signed Johnny Depp for a fourth PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN movie and he will play Tonto in a new LONE RANGER flick (honest, he will!).  Warner Brothers is bringing back Will Smith in a prequel to I AM LEGEND. And Sony TV and Geffen Records are developing a remake of THE PARTRIDGE FAMILY, which will be written by Jeff Rake of CASHMERE MAFIA.

Frank Sinatra Dies Hard, Baby

One of Frank Sinatra's best dramatic performances was as NYPD Detective Joe Leland in the gritty cop thriller THE DETECTIVE, which was based on the Roderick Thorpe novel of the same name (the movie also starred Lee Remick, Jaqueline Bisset and Robert Duvall). Thorpe wrote a sequel called NOTHING LASTS FOREVER, again featuring Det. Leland...only this time, most of the story unfolds in a Los Angeles skyscraper taken over by terrorists. Sound familiar? It should. The book was adapted into the movie DIE HARD. So, in other words, Bruce Willis took over the role originally played by Frank Sinatra (can you imagine him swinging from the Fox Tower screaming "Yippee Ka-yaa Motherf****r"?). This is old news, but news to me nonetheless... I only just stumbled on it today, going through some old books of mine. It was like discovering that Sean Connery wasn't the first actor to play James Bond on screen (Barry Nelson was) or that Peter Falk wasn't the first Columbo on TV (Bert Freed was)...

Tempest in an A Cup

Over the last two days, I've received hundreds of hits on a four year old post about Disney giving Keira Knightly bigger boobs in the KING ARTHUR publicity stills and poster art. So why the renewed attention? It turns out that Knightly has refused to let another studio do the same thing for her new film DUCHESS:

"Keira Knightly is essentially giving young women permission to stand up in their communities and their schools and their families and say, 'Look, this is the way I look and it is OK," said "Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters" author Courtney Martin.

The 23-year-old's chest has been the subjected to scrutiny before. In promotions for "King Arthur" in 2004, the actress' A-cup was morphed into a C-cup on posters. At the time Knightly admitted, "those things weren't really mine," though she still went along with the publicity campaign. "I think that's incredibly brave and could have a huge impact on young women," Martin said of Knightly's decision.

You Can't Beat The Original

LA FEMME NIKITA was a fantastic French thriller that was remade, scene for scene, in the American POINT OF NO RETURN and the Chinese BLACK CAT...as well as a USA Network pilot/series. But none of the remakes could match Luc Besson's original.

Here's the amazing "restaurant" scene from the original LA FEMME NIKITA (broken down into two clips) and the same scene in the U.S. remake.

What a Difference Acting Ability Makes

Many years ago, Michael Mann wrote and directed a flop pilot for NBC called LA TAKEDOWN, starring Scott Plank and Alex MacArthur. The pilot would be a forgotten footnote in Mann's career if not for the fact that he pulled off an amazing feat -- he manged to remake it, almost word-for-word, scene-for-scene, as the big-budget feature film HEAT, starring Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro. This may be the one and only time a busted TV pilot has been remade as a feature film...with hardly any changes. Here is the original "restaurant" scene from LA TAKEDOWN and the same scene in HEAT.  Same words, better actors. What a difference acting ability makes...

This and That

My wife and daughter are in France for a month, so I'm all alone at home...unless you count my daughter's dog, the hamster and the fish. I feel like a zoo keeper...my life has become BORN FREE in a tract home. But the solitude has given me the chance to catch up on some books and movies, when I'm not cleaning backyards, cages and fish tanks...

 OSS 117: LE CAIRE NID D'ESPIONS

This French spy spoof is everything GET SMART wanted to be and AUSTIN POWERS should have been. It perfectly mimics the look, feel, sound, fashion and acting style of the 1960s spy films down to the smallest, lovingly crafted detail. And on top of that, it's hilariously funny, too.

  IN BRUGES

This a bloody, dark comedy about two hit men who are sent by their boss to chill out in Bruges, Belgium after an assignment goes bad. I loved everything about this film which, in terms of tone and violence, is sort of a cross between PULP FICTION, JACKIE BROWN and SEXY BEAST. I don't understand why this movie didn't generate some attention...it's seemed to open and close in a weekend here in L.A.. It's a shame, because this may be one of the best movies I've seen all year.

WANTED

Sure, the stunts and effects are cool, but this movie left me cold. I just never got into the characters or the story. I found myself glancing at my watch, biding my time until the next stunt. It badly wants to be THE MATRIX or BOURNE IDENTITY, but to me it felt like I was watching a video game instead of an actual movie.

SERAPHIM FALLS

A post-Civil War western starring Pierce Brosnan and Liam Neeson, both of whom were totally miscast. Not that it mattered. It's a strange cross between OUTLAW JOSEY WALES, JEREMIAH JOHNSON, and RAMBO, and not a fraction as entertaining or fresh as those movies. Brosnan plays a former Union soldier (who apparently has Navy SEAL survival training) relentlessly pursued through snow-capped mountains and parched deserts by vengeance-seeking former Rebel soldier Neeson. Neither man is a villain or a hero which is, of course, the point of the movie, which is driven home with the subtlety of a wrecking ball. The movie seems tired, familiar, and pointless.

THE GARGOYLE

This isn't a movie, but rather one of the hot galleys from BookExpo. It's by first-time author Andrew Davidson and it's a breath-taking, though problematic, debut. The story falls into what is becoming something of a genre unto itself:  the "wounded man finds redemption and love with the woman who nurses him back to health" and who endures his agony by escaping into a fantasy world of imagination and flashbacks. The story, as a result, shares some similarities to THE ENGLISH PATIENT, THE SINGING DETECTIVE and THE WATERDANCE, to name a few. Despite some familiar motifs, this is a brilliant, compelling, and darkly funny novel...at least for the first two-thirds. It's about a coked-up porno actor who is in a terrible car accident that nearly burns him alive. It's in the burn ward that he meets a woman who is either a schizophrenic or his lover from several past lives. To say more would ruin things. I was enthralled for the first two thirds of the book, as much by the story as the prose. Davidson is a master storyteller, and I don't say that lightly. I can't believe this is his first novel. The writing and structure evokes John Irving, Robertson Davies, and Susanna Clarke...with several "side trips" that could stand alone as mini-novellas (something Irving has done in several of his books by having his "author" characters share their stories or by using extended, anecdotal flashbacks). The book fumbles in the finale third, with an extended dream sequence and a limp, pointlessly drawn out conclusion that doesn't satisfy on any level. It doesn't matter. That small disappointment is more than outweighed by the brilliance of what precedes it. The characters, images and stories in this amazing book will stay with you long after you've finished reading. I strongly recommend it.

Get Smart Isn't

I loved the TV series GET SMART and I still do. You could pick any episode from the first three seasons of GET SMART and it would be ten times funnier than Steve Carrell's new movie version. The GET SMART movie is a listless, laughless remake that makes THE NUDE BOMB, the last GET SMART feature film, look like brilliant comedy. But while I was sitting there, fighting sleep and debating whether to walk out or not, it occurred to me that GET SMART has a lot of the same problems as Steve Martin's THE PINK PANTHER remake. In both cases, someone made the inept decision to make the bumbling heroes smart and capable...and very good at what they do. Maxwell Smart and Inspector Clouseau were lovable, clueless, idiots who thought they were brilliant at what they did...and were far, far from it. That was what made them so funny. So why change the key aspect of their characters? The two Steves are extraordinarily funny guys -- but have their egos become so big they are hesitant about playing morons? That wasn't a problem for either one of them in the past (see THE JERK or ANCHORMAN).  If they didn't want to play Maxwell Smart and Inspector Clouseau as we know and love them...then why bother playing the parts at all? They even screwed up the "Would you believe" and "missed it by that much" jokes.

The only thing I liked about the GET SMART movie was the very, very, very in-joke of seeing Carrell use all three of the cars that Maxwell Smart drove in the series opening title sequence (cameos by Bernie Kopell and Leonard Stern seemed awkwardly shoe-horned into the movie). But that one moment was hardly worth the agony of watching the rest of the movie.

Can Dirty Harry be far behind?

Over the last year or so, Rambo, Rocky, John McClane, and Indiana Jones have all emerged from their bungalows at the Motion Picture Home after decades in retirement to do battle in the box-office once again, Geritol in one hand, a syringe full of botox in the other. Now comes the news that Eddie Murphy is returning as Beverly Hills Cop, who was last seen in 1994. Brett Ratner is directing, no writer is set yet.

Which WANTED Do You Want?

German screenwriter Torsten Dewi has posted two radically different trailers for the new movie Angelina Jolie WANTED on his blog. One trailer is from America, the other from Russia. Regardless of which trailer you think does a better sales job, they illustrate how you can take the same footage and edit it to convey whatever tone, point-of-view, or feeling that you want.

Never Sing Never Say Never Again

The Rap Sheet clued me into the recently "rediscovered," rejected theme for the 1983 Bond movie NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN sung by Phyllis Hymann and composed by Stephen Forsyth. To be honest, I don't think it's any better than the bland Lani Hall/Michel Legrand tune (performed in the video below) that the producers ended up using... but you can decide for yourself.

Michael Clayton

I finally saw MICHAEL CLAYTON...it was my test drive using the Amazon Unbox to rent a movie on my TiVo (a service which I liked). If you haven't seen the movie, you can stop reading now, because I'm going to spoil some things.

I thought George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson and Sydney Pollack were terrific and some of the dialogue really crackled, but  the simple plot was inexplicably and needlessly hard to follow at times and there were some logic flaws that pulled me right out of the movie, ultimately ruining it for me.

The bad guys did a slick and professional job of killing  Wilkinson's character and making it look like a suicide, thus establishing them as formidable opponents. But then they put a  car bomb in Clayton's Mercedes.  Why!?  Why not stab him  in an apparent "mugging gone bad" or run him over as he's crossing the street? Why kill him in a manner that will draw an enormous amount of attention -- the exact opposite of what the bad guys wanted? It was stupid and sloppy writing, made worse when Clayton is able to fool them (and apparently the police) into thinking he's dead even though there's no charred corpse in his car... just his wallet and his watch. Did his body get vaporized?

There was also one niggly detail that bugged me, too. At one point they say Clayton was born in 1959. Then, a few scenes later, Clayton says that he's 45. The math just doesn't add up (and the movie clearly takes place in 2007, sine he's driving a brand new SL).

I also don't get how Tilda Swinton got nominated for an Oscar, much less won the thing, based on her small role...

Movies A-Go-Go

I'm on strike...and on Christmas break...and I'm a lazy ass, so I have been catching up on my DVD awards screeners (one of the perks of being in the WGA, but I'm sure the AMPTP will roll that back on us, too).

LARS AND THE REAL GIRL - Cute and enjoyable, though the central conceit wears thin after awhile.
I'm looking forward to the USA Network series in which Lars and the Real Girl become a private eyes.

MARGO AT THE WEDDING - What a mess...but just when you are about to give up on it and watch BOSTON LEGAL on the Tivo instead, there will be a great line or a good performance. Jack Black is always fun, but he seems to be performing in an entirely different, and much better, movie.

CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR - It's one of the better first season episodes of THE WEST WING.

THE BOURNE SUPREMACY - Even better the fifth time. I loved it.  And I admire the creative choices. It takes really guts to have the third movie take place, chronologically, in the final act of the second film....and real skill to actually pull it off.