Monday, June 28, 2010

I'm sorry!

Movies 4 Men, Monday (today) at 1pm:

Steel Sharks

When a United States submarine is seized by terrorists, a rescue attempt by Elite Navy Seals goes awry. The submarine crew wages a silent war beneath the waves in this tense undersea thriller.

Sorry to everyone in the U.K. who may accidentally see this. To make up for it...

* Orson Welles' TOUCH OF EVIL restoration

* TOUCH OF EVIL review

- Bill

IMPORTANT UPDATE:

TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Someplace Cool - the world of your screenplay and TOY STORY 3's day care center.
Dinner: Ham sandwich at Togos.
Bicycle: Really short - and that was a mistake.
Pages: Not much got done. I usually take Sunday's off, but wanted to catch up a little on the script and do some blog entries. Was going to take a longer bike ride to downtown Van Nuys where my friend Eric's video store is - it was his birthday - but I was afraid I'd be too tired to write if I rode that far. So, short bike ride... and then didn't get anything done! Should have rode out to Eric's and hung out.

Movies: Friday - KNIGHT AND DAY - I went in with low expectations and liked it. Hey, not a great movie or anything, but I had a good time and thought it had many more character moments than a film like that needed. Was it full of illogical and convenient plot things happening and about a hundred really lucky breaks - cars that wreck so that they take out badguy's cars but miss Cruise by an eighth of an inch. The end explosion that was sledge hammer set up (hey, after the second time they talked about it being unstable, I knew the end... so why the 5 more mentions?), but I went in thinking this was going to be a stupid summer movie so I gave some of the stuff a get out of jail free card. It was fun, so the convient stuff wasn't a big deal.

Cruise has got to be the least sexual man on screen. I would find it easier to believe that Diaz would want to have sex with Rupert Everett before Cruise. He just seems cold and plastic. So the big kiss scene didn't seem real to me.

But lots of ROMANCING THE STONE type moments of mistrust, and I *loved* the Diaz black out action scenes where she wakes up in the middle of some unseen major action scene, then passes out again.

And stuff about Diaz's father's car and her sister were great character things... and the car ended up part of the story, too.

One good thing about him in this film - though everything is over the top (that's just the way the story works), Cruise manages to underplay it enough that he seems subdued and "real". No sofa jumping.

Diaz needs to figure out what she's going to do when her ass is no longer a movie star, and just being cute and perky isn't enough. I like her, I think her personality comes through the screen and you want to hang out with her for a couple of hours... but she isn't getting any younger. She needs to cultivate an older type of character to play and maybe do some edgy indie thing.

Kind of a silly glossy star vehicle kind of thing - fluff. I think if KNIGHT didn't have all of the competition it would have been #1 this weekend. It's an okay movie.

Movies: Saturday - THUNDER SOUL at Los Angeles Film Festival. Produced by Keith Calder, his blog is over there --> and a great documentary about a High School jazz band in the 1970s that won a bunch of awards and did some touring... who get together 30 years later to play a concert for their 90-something year old music teacher who is in poor health. Funny and heart warming and very emotional. A great movie... and it won the Audience Award at LAFF (hey, I voted for it!). After the movie, there was a *rockin'* concert by the band - a bunch of guys and gals in their 50s whose lives were changed forever by this music teacher. I had a great time!

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