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Fellini, Bergman, Gilroy

So we really liked "Duplicity." It's smart, sly, fun to look at and even more fun to try to piece together. It's persuasive entertainment that's stylish and somehow even feels edifying. But no accolades we came up with come close to A.O. Scott's gush in today's New York Times. His piece just may be the most enthusiastic review of a non-fall movie (not named "The Dark Knight") in a long time. To wit.

Cannes looking Up

By Steven Zeitchik

There had been a lot of talk about what would would open Cannes -- for its kickoff showing, many watchers always say, the fest needs stars, it needs filmmaking chops, it needs a big-time director, it needs a global feel,  it needs a lot of things that one film can rarely provide.

Would it be Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds? Stephen Frears' Cheri? Something yet to determined/announced?

Thierry Fremaux et al broke the suspense this morning when the festival announced its selection, and it's a bit of a surprise: the Pixar pic "Upp." And in news that might make make Jeffrey Katzenberg happy/forget it's happening to an archnemesis, the pic will be shown in digital 3D.

Studio animated movies have made appearances in high-profile slots before -- "Shrek" was in competition in 2001 (and of course "Kung-Fu Panda" got an out of competition slot last year) -- but opening night, where a red carpet filled with recognizable faces has been de rigeur, is sort of another matter. This one does have some names in its voice cast -- Christopher Plummer, for instance -- but it's hardly a star-studded roster. The biggest star, in fact, may be 3D itself, which gets a big stamp of artistic legitimacy with this choice.

Creatively there's plenty to be happy about with the selection. Pete Docter's movie centers on an old man who, after the loss of his wife, fixes balloons to his roof so he can float away on a trip to South America (which he and his wife had planned on taking) without literally leaving his living room, and the adventures that he meets along the way (including a stowaway in the house).

Vibrant, whimsical, melancholy and a stunner to look at, footage from the film pretty much blew us away when we saw it at Comic-Con. It looked unlike pretty much anything that had been done even by the groundbreaking Pixar -- it contained the whimsy that recent artistic achievements like "Wall-E" and "Ratatouille" had, but it also had some pretty genre-defying elements, not the least of which is a sad, slightly crusty old man as its main character.

Some Disney execs had quietly been saying, when the big push for "Wall-E" was on last year, that they saw their big release next year ("Up") s a big commercial play but not necessarily as an awards/prestige one. Look for that to change now that the Cannes has been opened.

One widower's grief, and another's tribute

By Steven Zeitchik

Actor Liam Neeson has been coping with the horrors of the sudden and unexpected death of wife Natasha Richardson after a seemingly unremarkable incident on the ski slopes. Richardson, a prolific actress who starred in films such as "Nell" and "The Parent Trap" as well as countless television shows and plays, had been continuing to pursue a multi-pronged career on screens big and small. 

The longtime actress had won a Tony for her perfomrance as Sally Bowles in "Cabaret" and also recently starred on the stage with mother Vanessa Redgrave for a one-night only benefit of Stephen Sondheim's "A Little Night Music." On the film side, she had last wrapped the boarding-school dramedy "Wild Child," which was released in many territories. The film, in which Richardson plays an English headmistress who must corral and discipline a spoiled American teenager (Emma Roberts), is actually set for a U.S. release from Universal this spring; it remains to be seen how the pic is handled.

Richardson had also been signed on for the culture-clash pic "Lucy," in which she was to play an Upper East Side mother who hosts a West Indies immigrant nanny; there's no word at press time on the status of that production.

It's early in the grieving process and thus difficult to know how Neeson will keep his late wife's memory alive, but it's easy to imagine a host of charitable and other honors that carry on the legacy of the actress.

One man who's already doing that with great courage and nobility more than two years after he lost his wife is Andy Ostroy, the widower of actress, writer and director Adrienne Shelly. Shelly was killed in her New York office in late 2006, and Ostroy had devoted his life to maintaining and furthering her legacy.

Coincidentally, we caught up earlier this week with Ostroy in the New York office of the marketing firm he runs, an office, needless to say, filled with pictures, and imbued with the spirit, of his late wife.

Ostroy has started All about A films (a reference to Shelly's first name), and partnered with Night and Day pictures' Michael Roiff to get her work to the screen, first with "Waitress," her directorial debut that posthumously became a hit for Searchlight, and now with "Serious Moonlight," a dark comedy based on a Shelly script that was financed independently.

Ostroy also said he was working  on developing another script of Shelly's, a multigenerational family drama called "The Morgan Stories."

As for "Moonlight," Timothy Hutton and Meg Ryan star as a dysfunctional couple facing a crisis in the pic -- which Cheryl Hines (a co-star of Shelly's in "Waitress") chose to make her directorial debut. Ostroy himself even as a cameo (he utters a few lines a police officer) in what he says was in fact a gift from his late wife, who several years ago had written a small part for him.

The movie will make its world premiere at Tribeca next month. Ostroy and Roiff are weighing options on which studio to release their pic -- "I'm taking exactly the same meetings that I think Adrienne would have taken because i want to do it exactly as she would have done it," he said -- and the marketing exec also spoke movingly about seeking to imagine how she would have done things as he goes forth with business decisions for her projects.

But he also had a lighthearted view of his budding career as a producer, which he says will not go further than his late wife's work. "I mean, I think it could be fun. But i also think it could be fun owning a bowling alley," he said. "This is all about Adrienne, just like the name of the company says."

Maybe Paramount can turn him into a machine

By Steven Zeitchik

We knew something was a little zealous about the dating for the next Transformers -- we mean, the next next Transformers -- when Paramount announced Monday it would keep on the bi-annual schedule and make a third picture in the reborn franchise for July 2011.

After all, when we interviewed director Michael Bay back in February, he sounded genuinely tired of the car-slash-robots -- and he was still working feverishly in post on this one. Bay said in the interview that Par and DreamWorks were wondering if he might be up for a summer date even as early 2010 (hmm, someone needs a franchise) and he was basically telling them hold on a minute, I'm not sure I want to push that hard.

He was, he said, working on the "Cocaine Cowboys" series that he and Jerry Bruckheimer are making for HBO, and that once he emerged from postproduction madness, he wanted to concentrate on that.

Now apparently this little push-pull Bay was having with the studio has spilled out in public. The director said on his blog Tuesday that "Paramount made a mistake in dating Transformers 3 - they asked me on the phone - I said yes to July 4 - but for 2012 - whoops! Not 2011!!!

So someone really misheard something...on the phone? And a press release was issued without any further consultation? Very odd. Someone either got hasty (on the Par Side) or a change of heart (on the Bay side).

Either way, what all this shows is that perhaps the best negotiating tactic when a studio's pushing you to work on a movie you don't want to work on is simply your old friend Typepad. (And you thought it was CAA.)

Besides giving a whole different meaning to Paramount's tagline for Transformers 2, seen on the poster here, of "We are here, We are waiting," the kicker in all this is Bay's comment for why he didn't want to deliver for 2011. "My brain needs a break from fighting robots," he said.

When even _Michael Bay_ is saying that...

Away it goes

If Zach Braff decided to do make a sequel to "Garden State" and have everyone grow beards and get pregnant, if Nick Drake could come back to life and imagine the precious thirty seconds of his posthumous, late-90's Pink Moon Volkswagen commercial extended into a full-length movie, if "Revolutionary Road" flashed forward fifty years to a time of modern mores and forms of transport, if the dude who wrote "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" spent one too many nights with his little brother watching "Parenthood" back there in their San Francisco apartment (the last two we think may actually have some grounding in reality) it would probably look something like John Krasinski-Maya Rudolph pic "Away We Go," this year's summer specialty counterprogrammer, from Sam Mendes and Dave Eggers, which Focus will release right after Memorial Day. Dysfnctional-family comedy? Yuppie can-do heartwarmer? Planes, Trains and Automobiles for hipsters? It's got it, um, all.

Julia Roberts' Duplicity: A fictional version of AIG?

By Steven Zeitchik

There's a strange feeling one has watching a picture like "Duplicity" at the same time that, out in the real world, big corporations are being exposed for their greed and misdeeds.

Like other recent movies (and, given similar themes in "The International," other recent movies starring Clive Owen), there's a creepy timeliness to seeing movie-world sharpies hire spies to cheat and steal and line their own pockets while the real-life versions are basically out there doing the same.

And yet in a time when corporations seem more bumblingly avaricious instead of connivingly so, there's also something out-of-sync with watching characters move with such deft criminality. These characters are people unfettered by their own stupidity -- no clueless private jetting to Capitol Hill here -- or, for that matter, by the authorities. Villains sit in vast, sleek fortresses, plotting the takedown of their rivals with the intensity and immunity of a national security agency.

But in a time when every act of executive cluelessness is fodder for political speeches and evening newsclips, can we really buy it? There's barely a single sign of law enforcement here, let alone political grandstanding.

Putting aside current events for the moment, the Clive Owen-Julia Roberts picture, which we caught Monday at its Ziegfeld premiere in NY,  is actually quite effective, offering a delicious tangle of  intrigue even as it moves along at a bouncy clip (a belief shared by THR's reviewer).

The basic idea is that a Procter & Gamble-like corporation headed by Paul Giamatti has hired a stealth espionage team, of which Owen and Roberts are a part, to spy on and steal secrets from a similar company headed by Tom Wilkinson, with the twist that Owen and Roberts may or may not be in a romantic relationship,  and may or may not be in cahoots with each other, and may or may not be looking to scam the espionage team they're working for.

There are a lot of may or may nots here, and for good reason. Tony Gilroy's more densely plotted (but equally cynical) follow-up to "Michael Clayton" is the rare movie that requires an elaborate diagram to map out, yet never strays too far from the spy-vs-spy pillow banter that defines its best scenes.

Indeed, if "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" (an undeniable influence) got together with "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" and had a cute little celebrity baby, it would look something like this. "Duplicity" takes great joy in the high-stakes mischief between two parts of a couple while also, in Scoundrel-like fashion, continually pulling the rug out from under you about who you can trust. Something's always struck us as a little manipulative about this sort of move, because it derives its suspense from constantly changing the rules. But in building the crosses and double-crosses into the romance, "Duplicity" also does something fresher: it turns the betrayals of a con-man picture into a metaphor for relationship trust issues. "Everyone thinks this way," Owen's character says "We're just the only ones who cop to it."

Owen's and Roberts' poker act is so good they mislead not only their bosses but each other and even themselves.

The problem, though, likes precisely with the skillfulness of this deceit. The background of Owen's character (and the texture of the milieu) is very British intelligence, which seems like a far more likely place that globetrotting rogues might act out their Alias fantasies than, say, the sundry matter of a new over-the-counter product.

The stakes, too, feel equally off-key. When billions of dollars of our savings are being lost by inept and blinkered bankers, can we really get this caught up in two companies fighting over supermarket-shelf supremacy? When it comes to AIG and its many imitators, the pejorative we may want to use may be duplicity. But the more accurate one may be stupidity.

A gleeful ride to Hell

By Daniel Carlson

Amid a sea of exuberant screenings at SXSW, the midnight showing Sunday of Sam Raimi’s “Drag Me to Hell” has been the most exuberant by far. Others -- like "I Love You, Man" and "Observe and Report" -- have gotten plenty of media attention, but it was Raimi’s film that created the most energy in the Paramount Theater.

Three different tiers of viewers — badge-holders, film-pass holders, and those just hoping to buy tickets at the boxoffice — were lined up around the block late Sunday night, and the theater’s doors were clogged with security, random famous people (Alan Tudyk and Adrienne Palicki breezed by like it was the most normal thing in the world for them to be hanging out dressed up in downtown Austin with hundreds of film geeks in March). It was almost 12:45 a.m. by the time the screening began.

The film? It's billed as Raimi's return to a kind of darkly comic horror he did earlier in his career. And indeed, it’s got plenty of blood and guts — it's probably the first time a corpse has ever vomited — but it’s also gleefully schlocky, the kind of brightly colored, pulp horror flick that helped Raimi make his name in the genre (and the polar opposite of the overdone torture flicks that have assaulted us these past few years).

The film stars Alison Lohman as a bank loan officer who (in a timely nod to the economic downturn) refuses to extend the home loan for a weird old gypsy woman, who subsequently puts a curse on her that ensures she’ll be haunted for three days before a devil comes to drag her soul to hell. It’s basically a mashup of “Thinner” and “The Ring” mixed in human eyeballs pop out of cakes. It’s fun, creepy, well-made, and features a demon-possessed talking goat.

Plus, as if all that isn't enough, Justin Long plays a Ph.D. What more could you want?

Bruno: It's Borat funny, only Austrian

Our man on the ground at SXSW, Daniel Carlson, has seen the first footage of "Bruno."

The basic sequence of events in Texas (where some of the picture was also shot):  Alamo Drafthouse co-founder Tim League took the stage and introduced the twenty minutes of footage, which then played to a vocally appreciative crowd. (It actually played twice, first at 10:40 pm and then at 11:00 pm, to a total of several hundred people.)

Sacha Baron Cohen was not there, Carlson reports, though he did appear on screen over the course of the footage several times, as himself, to introduce the skits and caution these were extended bits that would be condensed for the final film. (Universal releases the MRC-financed production on July 10.)

Bruno -- who of course began on "Da Ali G Show" as the flamboyant Austrian host who makes right-wingers and fashionistas alike squirm with his direct and clueless questions -- begins in the footage by saying he wants to be the biggest Austrian celebrity since Hitler. ( Like Borat, he too is a correspondent from another country.) There were then three segments.

The first involved Bruno telling eager parents he was doing a baby photo shoot, and would they be willing to do outlandish things, like drop their baby several stories, in order to be in the shoot? (Of course many were.)

A second segment also involved a baby shoot, and Bruno asking parents if their baby could lose some weight or even go through liposuction because he's too fat. in a third, he hosts a mixed-martial arts competition, which seems to be going well until he begins making out with another man, earning the boos of the crowd.

By showing both his own outrageousness and the foibles of the American public, Carlson says, the pic had the feel of Borat redux. Funny, in other words, but familiar. "You'll laugh and groan in all the right places, but it will never not feel familiar," he said. "It's funny deja vu, but it's still deja vu."

More from the screening later on Monday.

Austin tells Jason Segel they love him, man

By Daniel Carlson

They may call his movie a "bromance," but don't tell that to "I Love You, Man" star Paul Rudd, who said he hates that word "almost as much as the word 'closure, adding to us that, "It's one of those words that kind of came about in the past year, and then it'll go away. I hope so."

Rudd, along with star Jason Segel and writer-director John Hamburg were among the talent to turn out for the premiere of "I Love You Man" at opening night at SXSW.

The pic -- of course about a man with no close male friends who, at the prodding of his fiance, begins seeking them out before his wedding -- is a good choice to kick off SXSW, which over the last few years has become a launchpad for smart, young-skewing male comedies (See under: "Knocked Up" a couple years back.)

With plenty of laughs and a genuine heart, "I Love You, Man" is another in the long line of solid comedies that mixes frank sexuality with grinning immaturity. Basically, the aura of Judd Apatow hovers over the thing, even though the godfather of modern male comedies didn’t have a thing to do with it.

The film played to a packed house at the Paramount Theater in the Texas capital, and the festival crowd — admittedly jacked up on hype and margaritas — of course loved every minute.

At the post-screening Q&A, co-star Rashida Jones was the first one to comment on co-star Jason Segel's frontal nudity in "Forgetting Sarah Marshall," a hit at last year's SXSW. There are no such displays in I Love You, Man," and a good thing, too, Jones said. "You didn't see enough (last time)?" she said. "Wasn't that enough for you?"

At SXSW, fans and Trolls

(Ed note: We'll have a dispatches from the goings-on in Austin all weekend. The fest kicked off Friday night with a screening of the well-reviewed  "I Love You, Man" (more on that shortly) and continues today with, among other things, the premiere of the doc "Best Worst Movie," a look at the phenomenon of a movie called "Troll 2" -- an abysmal genre effort that has been embraced, Rocky Horror Picture Show-style, by a new generation -- from its child star Michael Stephenson.  THR's Daniel Carlson is on the ground in Texas and offered his take on the doc and the oddball phenomenon it documents.)

By Daniel Carlson

Watching "Troll 2" is an experience like no other. It’s regarded as one of the worst films ever made, and there’s no way to make it through without drinking. The acting, directing, and writing could not even remotely be considered mediocre, and for a while it was ranked No. 1 on IMDb’s Bottom 100.  Directed by Italian filmmaker Claudio Fragrasso from a script he wrote with Rossella Drudi, the film is an all-out assault on logic, taste and basic comprehension.  The plot, such as it is, involves a family of four who engage in some kind of house exchange with a family from a little town called Nilbog that turns out to be populated by goblins disguised as people. It's that kind of movie.

But all that is exactly what also makes the movie so much fun to watch. There’s an undeniable earnestness to the performances, and in the same way you can’t really hate kids for putting on a bad school play, it’s hard to hold anything against the actors.

Relegated to late-night cable upon release in 1990, the film did nothing but haunt its stars, including Michael Stephenson, who played the ttle character in the film and who wanted nothing more than to grow up outside its shadow. “I couldn’t get away from it,” Stephenson told us in an interview. “I had kids at school that would scream my lines out at me.”

But, as so often happens, what was reviled by one generation came to be loved by another. A few years ago, Stephenson started getting emails and MySpace messages from Troll 2 fans that praised the movie and described parties thrown in its honor. Road-show screenings also sprung up (that's one in the photo, of Stephenson and co-star George Hardy posing with fans)

So, lying in bed one morning, Stephenson came to a realization: he was the star of the star of the worst movie ever made. “And I thought, I’ve got to make a documentary of this called Best Worst Movie.”

The resulting documentary is a fantastic and sweet-natured look at the people who love the film and the people who made it. Stephenson captured sold-out screenings of Troll 2 at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in New York and the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin and also focused on the actors, especially Hardy, the man who played his father -- a low-key and genial sort who is now a dentist in Alabama. "It wasn’t about fandom to me. I really wanted it to be character-driven," Stephenson said.

The movie will be shown as part of a double bill with "Troll 2," in what will make a neat set of bookends that encapsulates both the awfulness itself and the reflection on said awfulness. What festgoers will probably feel will be an appreciation, if not of the quality of the movie, at least of the intentions of those who made it.

Said Stephenson: “I think in our generation, there’s so much stuff that’s produced that is so similar, or the same, or so cynical, that when young people see something like this that’s very genuine and honest and heartfelt, it seems fresh." He added,  “Bad is completely relative. There are ‘good place’ bad films and ‘bad place’ bad films, and Troll 2 is a ‘good place’ bad film.”

Cooking up a cameo

By Borys Kit

In a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment, Dick Cook has a cameo in Disney's "Race to Witch Mountain."

Not only is it the first time ever the Disney chairman has appeared in one of his studio’s movies, he endures a rough fate -- he gets blown up.

Cook, who began his career at Disney as a steam-train conductor at Disneyland, plays a locomotive conductor whose train enters a tunnel and crashes head on into a U.F.O., causing a fiery explosion. (Added clever inside ref: The name of the conductor is D. Walt, kind of like Walt D.)

So how and why did the Disney honcho land a bit part in the pic? According to filmmakers, early on in the production process, Cook and Disney Motion Pictures president Oren Aviv would frequently pop by the “Witch Mountain” production offices to look at designs, models and storyboards. When Cook saw toy tracks for the train sequence, he reminded director Andy Fickman of his Disneyland roots.

Fickman recalls joking back in return, “You know, I’m going to need a train engineer…” Producer Andrew Gunn says Fickman stayed on Cook by reminding him with a “I’m going to put  you in the movie” each time he saw him.

“And by the time we got to that scene, I emailed him and said, ‘You know, in my mind we cast you,’” said Fickman.

Cook was game. Under a veil of secrecy. wardrobe and makeup got Cook ready in his office, then got him to Stage 2, where the set was closed to everyone except the director, the producers and the Disney execs on the film, Brigham Taylor and Casey Wolfe. 

“He came out, we shot it,” says Gunn. “ It was all high secrecy. We managed to do it on the lot, on a soundstage, without anyone at Disney except for a handful knowing about it.”

(The movie is actually filled with  Easter egg cameos -- Gunn is on screen for a split-second as a driver of a convertible while Taylor is seen as a member of the crowd at a sci-fi convention, dressed in a Tron outfit, a nod to the new Tron movie which is about to go into production. Also seen briefly as part of the sci-fi fan congregation are members of the online geek community including Drew McWeeney, formerly of Ain’t It Cool News and now with HitFix.)

At the movie's premiere, Cook played down his appearance. “Oh, you know, it was just fun to do,” he said in his trademark aw-shucks manner.

The train sequence ends with an earth-shattering explosion, the kind that no human being can walk away from. Yet iIn a throwaway line, a government operative surveying the scene says something along the lines of, “Luckily the engineer survived with only a few cuts and scrapes.” That no human can walk away from...unless you have the powers of a Disney chairman.

A New Voyage?

By Steven Zeitchik

A long-planned "Fantastic Voyage" remake may finally be prepping for a new journey.

The classic medical thriller has been mired in development for over a decade at Fox, where James Cameron's Lightstorm Entertainment is producing.

But even after Roland Emmerich -- the tentpole director who has been attached on two occasions -- has fallen off, the project appears to be gaining some momentum.

Producers have issued an open directing assignment for the pic, with number of helmers now being considered, including Tarsem Singh, the commercial and film director who most recently directed the multi-continent epic “The Fall.”

Of course, there’s a caveat: there already have been a number of stops and starts for the revival of the anatomical actioner. The project appeared to get a jolt  back in 2007 when "National Treasure" scribes
Cormac and Marianne Wibberley offered their on take how they’d update the Cold War tale (that’s the draft being used now), which prompted Emmerich to come back aboard before later falling off.

But there's reason to think it could work this time. There’s a logic, after all, to Tarsem: the Indian helmer directed the Jennifer Lopez thriller "The Cell," New Line’s $60 million grosser which shares plenty of similarities with "Fantastic Voyage:" It, too, centers on a doctor who goes on a mission inside someone else’s body (in this case, the mind of a comatose serial killer).

The original "Voyage," which Fox released in 1966, of course revolves around a team of scientists who are shrunk to atomic size and sent on a miniature submarine to save the life of a defecting Soviet scientist. The movie then follows the biological adventures the team encounters in trying to save the scientist and themselves.

The pic, which won Oscars for art direction and visual effects, also inspired an animated series. Whether he gets the gig or not, Tarsem is busy with a movie that’s on about as big a canvas as “Voyage” is small:   he’s directing the 300-like epic “War of the Gods” for Relativity.

Fox shakeup turns film execs into television ones

By Steven Zeitchik

This one's big. Fox is completely tearing up the playbook -- and its management structure -- on both the film and television side. The takeaway: Television and film are going to get a lot closer together.

That's because television production is being subsumed under Tom Rothman and Jim Gianopulos, with Twentieth Century Fox Television toppers Gary Newman and Dana Walden now reporting to R&G. (Areas like cable and news will continue reporting straight to Murdoch.) But here's the kicker -- Peter Rice is leaving Searchlight and will now over see network programming for Fox -- the job that had been held by Peter Liguori, who's leaving the company.

Rice deputies Nancy Utley and Steve Gilula will take over Searchlight; they've been, along with Rice, among the key architects of the Searchlight success so don't expect big ripples there.

But Rice and the TV side is an eye-opener. A Slumdog Millionaire scripted series? A Juno mini-series? This is post-Chernin shuffling at its juiciest. It's extremely rare for a film exec to move to TV; even less common is the trajectory Rice has followed -- studio golden boy to wildly successful specialty president to TV topper. (And the success is pretty evident, not only with the recent Juno-Sumdog axis but also with earlier hits like "Bend It Like Beckham" and "28 Days Later" -- though as with anyone, there has also been the occasional miss, in this case with "Street Kings" or "The Darjeeling Limited.")

Rice joined Searchlight in early 2000 as president of production, after rising through the ranks in the previous six years at Fox, eventually ending up as a senior v-p at the studio. While he's known first as a business-minded exec, he's also earned a reputation as a filmmaker-friendly personality who cultivated relationships with (and oversaw movies of) filmmakers like Danny Boyle and Alex Proyas earlier in their careers -- skills that could be useful as he begins anew in the television world.

Still, it's uncharted territory going from features to serialized dramas -- not to mention a whole new group of writers and directors.Few have tried it. Rice did the improbable with some of the Searchlight movies. The next act awaits.