Because it’s always good to remember that when you’re judging famous people on Twitter , they sometimes read it (and weep), Jimmy Kimmel corralled a gaggle of comedians and comic actors to read some of the meanest Tweet-critiques they’ve received for the camera. I think we can all take a few universal lessons from this video: Namely, that celebrities like Jason Bateman , Presidential candidate Roseanne , and Andy Dick really are like the rest of us little Tweeters — well okay, maybe not Andy Dick. Also: Will Ferrell reads his @ messages while on the can, too! If that can’t bring us together as a Tweeple, what will? [via Jimmy Kimmel ]
While Johnny Depp, Armie Hammer and director Gore Verbinski are working to turn Disney’s rudderless blockbuster ship around with The Lone Ranger , Hollywood megaproducer and Twitter mainstay Jerry Bruckheimer has been busy dropping clues about and glimpses at the the making of the film from behind the scenes. If you are even the least bit interested in how this one’s coming together, you could do worse than keep an eye on Bruckheimer’s tweets. Not that there’s anything especially Earth-shattering going on here, but for those wondering about how and where this thing is being shot, the era of the film or even — ahem — what Verbinski’s birthday cake looks like, then Bruckheimer is your guy! Director Gore Verbinski breaking down a scene to The Lone Ranger crew twitter.com/BRUCKHEIMERJB/… — JERRY BRUCKHEIMER (@BRUCKHEIMERJB) March 22, 2012 Here’s another classic car on set of The Lone Ranger … Anyone know what this one is? twitter.com/BRUCKHEIMERJB/… — JERRY BRUCKHEIMER (@BRUCKHEIMERJB) March 20, 2012 Some cool cars from the set twitter.com/BRUCKHEIMERJB/… — JERRY BRUCKHEIMER (@BRUCKHEIMERJB) March 19, 2012 Celebrated Gore’s birthday on set last night twitter.com/BRUCKHEIMERJB/… — JERRY BRUCKHEIMER (@BRUCKHEIMERJB) March 17, 2012 And then there’s crap like this, but it’s at a minimum so far: Shooting a cool scene today, can’t tell you any more than that! — JERRY BRUCKHEIMER (@BRUCKHEIMERJB) March 16, 2012 Anyway, now you know. [ @bruckheimerjb ] Follow S.T. VanAirsdale on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Finally, Dr. Uwe Boll is making a movie America actually wants to see! According to The Hollywood Reporter, Boll will start filming in April on Bailout , his 27th film — a feature-length thriller that follows an everyman New Yorker “who loses everything in the wake of the 2008 Wall Street financial crisis, and who strikes back by killing investment bankers.” I don’t know about you, but I think this one’s got a shot at gaining the cultural foothold that Ollie Stone missed with Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps , nein ? [ THR ]
If Stephen Dorff’s career never soared as high as he might have liked, the fact that it’s getting more interesting all the time must be some consolation. For someone who might not be considered a big movie star, Dorff has the distinct movie-star habit of seeming to play himself, even when he’s playing a big movie star. In Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere and now in Brake , he appears to be the same flannel- and faded jeans-clad heartbreaker from the Aerosmith years. Dorff had the persona in place from the start; it’s the pictures that got small. Maybe never smaller than Brake , a claustrophobic thriller set almost entirely in a clear plastic box. But small finally feels big for Dorff, who plays a government agent named Jeremy and has both the film and its coffin-like quarters to himself. Director Gabe Torres, working from a script by first-time feature writer Timothy Mannion, opens the film with a mystery: Jeremy doesn’t know where he is, why he’s there, or what the meaning of the digital clock that keeps counting down and resetting in front of him might be. We react with Dorff, who is bathed in the deep red glow of the clock, for the first 10 minutes of the film: Is this a dream? Existential art film? Kidnapping melodrama? Elaborate torture-fetish flick? A little bit of all of those, actually, though Jeremy’s sharp distrust of a second victim he communicates with through a conveniently supplied CB radio makes it plain that he’s some kind of government agent and has become embroiled in a terrorist plot. It does not give too much away to say that he is being tortured to forfeit the location of the president’s emergency bunker, and dude is not about to crack. Within the first half hour he’s branded with a cigarette lighter (turns out he’s in the trunk of a vehicle), shot in the leg during a police stop, and swarmed by bees. Dorff, whose pug boyishness never quite wore off, is often shot from between his knees or up his nose; at times ours feels like the vantage of a trusty canine sidekick — alert but helpless, searching our hero for a sign of what will happen next. If we’re never drawn in far enough to wonder what we might do in a Plexiglass box at the end of the world, Dorff can sell stock action-hero lines (“Somebody’s fucking with us” he tells his co-victim. Why? “That’s what I’m going to find out”) with enough moody grit to hold our attention. Torres sets himself a trap with this conceit, one he only half outwits. The sense of confinement is never overwhelming but neither is it particularly well-defined. The direction is clear and assured but instead of notching upwards, once it is established the intrigue of the situation begins to wane. When Jeremy gains access to a cell phone a pattern develops: Calls are made — to his estranged wife, fellow agents, a 911 operator — and then cut off, often after a plea is made for Jeremy to just tell the terrorists what they want to know. By the time he’s shouting about having taken a government oath the central dramatic tension — will he or won’t he? — has been fully wrung out. As it becomes clear that a horrific, systematic attack is unfolding just outside of the box, the story’s organic tensions get mixed up with its allusions, which sometimes — specifically the desperate, doomed 911 conversations — feel a little cheap. A national security breach playing out like a personal security nightmare is a great premise with lots of places to go. Confining them to a Lucite casket might have concentrated the themes into a higher potency, but Mannion’s script doesn’t feel quite up to the task. Although we can practically smell Jeremy, and Dorff’s vague, faded diva vibe works well for him as the long-suffering hostage, as written the character is too distant and unresolved to make such an intimate story work — never moreso than when Jeremy’s personal life is invoked. Instead of dazzling, the twisty double ending sets the slight but ultimately critical emotional detachment of the preceding ninety minutes into greater relief. It wouldn’t go so far as to say it feels like you went through Jeremy’s ordeal for nothing, but I did wish I had come to know as much about Dorff’s character as I did about the size and shape of his nostrils. Follow Michelle Orange on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
What’s the Film : The Sitter (2011), new on DVD and Blu-ray via 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment Why it’s an Inessential Essential : Director David Gordon Green’s transition from being an American indie darling to a reviled slacker-comedy pumper-outter is kind of astonishing. One minute, he’s being praised for being the Terrence Malick-inspired director of such films as George Washington and All The Real Girls ; the next he’s being put down for making lazy pot comedies like Your Highness and The Sitter . But the thing of it is: Green’s comedies don’t deserve to be compared to good movies. The Sitter in particular is a goofy, strange and very sloppy comedy that also happens to feature frequently inspired comedic performances from Jonah Hill and Sam Rockwell. It’s also a rare slacker comedy where a slovenly ditz who only succeeds in spite of himself never lets us forget that he’s an “asshole” (“Come on, Ricky Martin, let’s get out of here”), a “pussy” (“No, I’m a whole different pussy now”), and a total spaz (“Let that debris fall across your face, girl.”). Consistency is no longer (and I’d argue never was) Green’s strong suit. But in the realm of the slacker comedy, The Sitter is actually all right . Hill stars as Noah Griffith, a nerd too self-absorbed to see that his girlfriend Marisa (Ari Graynor) is stringing him along. To help his divorcee of a mother go out on a date, Noah reluctantly elects to baby-sit three of the most grating problem children ever committed to screen: Rodrigo (Kevin Hernandez), a cherry bomb-dropping psychopath; Slater (Max Records), a histrionically repressed blueblood; and Blithe (Landry Bender), a “celebutante”-obsessed prima donna. But on top of that, Noah also has to buy cocaine from Karl (Rockwell), a body-builder-obsessed drug dealer, and avoid being arrested. How the DVD/Blu Makes the Case for the Film : The “Totally Irresponsible” edition of the film confirms a lot of my suspicions about why The Sitter ’s 81-minute theatrical cut is so all over the place. The bloopers and outtakes reels show that Green cut out a number of superior improvisational scenes. But on top of that, the already-brief 86-minute “unrated cut” actually features some footage that helps to foreshadow later scenes, such as a deleted scene where [ SPOILER ALERT ] Noah realizes Slater’s sexuality after seeing the boy stare furtively at a gay couple on the subway. [ END SPOILER ALERT ] More importantly, the deleted scenes and outtakes are a good reminder that The Sitter wouldn’t even be bearable were it not for Jonah Hill — and, to a lesser extent, Sam Rockwell’s — performances. Hill’s reactions to the film’s pint-sized terrors really carries the film. Some of the unused scenes that he and Rockwell improv are gut-bustingly random, like when Hill bitches out an effete-looking valet who loses Noah’s minivan (long story) by whining, “You didn’t lose your Vin Diesel poster,” and “You didn’t lose your Stray Cats box set!” As bad as Green’s instincts may have been when it came to The Sitter ’s kiddy-centric humor, you really can’t say that he didn’t get a good turn out of Hill — when he gave him enough space to work, that is. Other Interesting Trivia : In the “Sits-and-Giggles” outtakes reel, there’s shots of an unused green-screened sequence where Sam Rockwell and Jonah Hill fight on a carousel. At one point, Hill jokes about needing a safe word, though it’s unclear whether he’s in character or not. I bet that scene was funny. PREVIOUSLY : Inessential Essentials: The Last Temptation of Christ on Blu-ray Simon Abrams is a NY-based freelance film critic whose work has been featured in outlets like The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Vulture and Esquire. Additionally, some people like his writing, which he collects at Extended Cut .
Or the, uh, “Wocka Wocka” fame: “Several Muppets were on hand to receive the star including Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Fozzie, Gonzo, Animal, Pepe, Sweetums, and Walter, the newest Muppet, who made his debut in Disney’s 2011 film,” reports a press release just over the transom at ML HQ. “The Muppets’ star is the 2,466th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and is located in front of the historic El Capitan Theatre.” Nice real estate! And nice timing — The Muppets is out on DVD and Blu-ray today. The honor comes 57 years after Kermit’s first TV appearance. No rush! And congrats to all. [Photo: Getty Images] Follow S.T. VanAirsdale on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Monday we unveiled the American poster for the Tribeca-bound import Death of a Superhero , and now it’s time for a first look at the film’s trailer. It’s got it all: Live-action, animation, death-defying stunts, the irresistible Aisling Loftus on a scooter, and no less than Andy Serkis demanding to see young star Thomas Brodie-Sangster’s war face. Rahhhr! Read on and have a look. As noted yesterday , Superhero debuts April 17 on cable VOD, iTunes, Amazon and Vudu, then splashes down at the Tribeca Film Festival before a limited theatrical roll-out commences May 4 in Seattle. [Photo credit: Allen Kelly] Follow S.T. VanAirsdale on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Now that Piranha 3DD finally has an official release date , it’s time to roll out a very, very NSFW new red-band trailer for your viewing consideration. It is base, oversexed, gory, cheap-looking and patently disgusting in pretty much every conceivable way, featuring such steps down as stripper lifeguards, midcoital piranha attacks, and Gary Busey chewing the head off a live fish. It’s all just stupid enough to be kind of awesome. I mean, David Hasselhoff is invoking Darwin here! We must be on to something. [via IGN ] Follow S.T. VanAirsdale on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
“Sony Pictures Classics announced that on June 22 it will release Woody Allen’s latest film, the newly titled To Rome With Love . To Rome With Love was a name selected as an homage to the eternal city of Rome where the film was shot on location last summer. This will be used for its worldwide release. The film’s former title, Nero Fiddled , while an appropriate and humorous phrase in the U.S., is not a familiar expression overseas and many international territories preferred a more globally understood name.” [ SPC ]
