BizBuzz

For BizBuzz, the 4th of July means fireworks, the beach, and summer blockbusters.  Here’s a rundown of your options at the multiplex or the indie theater this weekend, check ‘em out and tell us your choice!

Wall-E - In the distant future, a small waste collecting robot that slowly begins to become sentient inadvertently embarks on a space journey that will ultimately decide the fate of mankind.  BizBuzz saw this one a few days ago, and adored it!

Hancock - Will Smith stars as a homeless man with superhuman powers that result in as much property damage as days saved.  After he rescues a publicist (Jason Bateman) from an oncoming train, the grateful flack helps him with an image makeover.

Wanted - Angelina Jolie tutors a slackery James McAvoy in the ways of vengance, turning him into an unparalleled “enforcer of justice” (pretty sure that means “killing machine”).

Get Smart - Michael Scott - oops, we mean Steve Carrell - and Anne Hathaway play the classic agents 86 and 99, bumbling their ways through baddie-thwacking and crime solving.

The Wackness - Summer of ‘94, and NYC is pulsing with hip-hop as city kid Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck) graduates high school, dealing drugs and pursuing his shrink’s stepdaughter (Olivia Thirlby).  Check this one out for the hot soundtrack, jam-packed with old-school hits guaranteed to give you a 90’s flashback.

Gonzo - this new documentary about Hunter S. Thompson is pretty fitting for the 4th of July.  The New York Times review sums it up by saying that both Thompson and director Alex Gibney “are both known for driving big dump trucks of truth toward power.”

Tim Roth will make his television series starring debut in “Lie to Me,” a 1-hour Fox series that will likely air in early 2009.  Roth is an Academy Award nominee for his role in Rob Roy, and has played many memorable film roles.  BizBuzz will always think of him as “Pumpkin,” the agitated criminal who attempts to knock off a diner in Pulp Fiction (the role was written for him).

Variety explains the show’s concept:

Roth will play Dr. Cal Lightman, a scientist who pioneered the field of deception detection. The doc is a human lie detector, skilled at reading the human face, body and voice to uncover the truth in criminal and private investigations. The fact that the character can apply the same skills to his personal life complicates his relationships. The science in the show is genuine, based on the work of Dr. Paul Ekman.

Interesting tidbit:  Fox will team with Imagine to produce “Lie to Me,” and the duo also collaborates to produce “24.”  Will Dr. Cal Lightman be the new Jack Bauer?

George Carlin passed away of heart failure yesterday, at the age of 71.  Carlin’s scathing comedy and social commentary made him a fixture in the comedy world for 35+ years.  He made waves, to put it lightly, in 1972 with his “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” routine, in which he listed and elaborated on the seven dirtiest words in the English language.  Carlin performed the routine in Milwaukee, and was promptly arrested.  The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, who ruled that the government could sanction broadcasters for offensive language. The counterculture comedian told the AP earlier this year: “So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I’m perversely kind of proud of.”

Carlin has always been a big influence for us here at BizBuzz - our whole family ventured out to his big HBO special taping a few years back.  You can see clips of his famous “Modern Man” speech here, look for BizBuzz in the audience!

Gothamist has a nice post devoted to the cynical and joyfully improper comic, check it out here.

Harry Shearer has also written a nice essay for the Huffington Post about Carlin, which you can read here.

Variety reports today that MCC Theater’s production Neil LaBute’s new play, Reasons to be Pretty, will transfer to Broadway.  Three of the producers responsible for the current Broadway hit (and Tony winner) August: Osage County
will produce in association with MCC.

Neil LaBute considers this play the final installment of a trilogy of thematically similar plays, the other two being The Shape of Things and Fat Pig.  All three plays deal with the idea of beauty as an unspoken currency necessary for success in life and love.

In his review for the New York Times, Ben Brantley said:

“Reasons to Be Pretty” is less condemning than questioning. And it’s shot through with compassion for four young working-class friends and lovers who are starting to realize that they are trapped in dead-end lives. The four immensely talented cast members — Piper Perabo, Thomas Sadoski, Pablo Schreiber and Ms. Pill — respond to this newly found empathy with some of the most sensitively shaded performances in town.

I predict a Tony nod next year for Pablo Schreiber, whose performance is the finest of the four.  Hopefully this also means good things will happen for Tom Sadoski, a very fine theater actor who hasn’t yet gotten the attention he deserves.

Everyone is saying that In The Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s fun, sexy tribute to his uptown neighborhood, is a shoo-in for the Tony on Sunday. The NY Post’s Michael Reidel, resident instigator of Broadway, isn’t so sure:

“Passing Strange” seems to be gaining quickly on the Best Musical front-runner, “In the Heights.” You hear the same thing from voters: “I think ‘In the Heights’ will win, but I’m voting for ‘Passing Strange.’ “

The conventional wisdom was that “In the Heights” would triumph because (1) it’s doing better at the box office and (2) being energetic and bland, it can tour the country more readily than its edgier, rougher rival.

But “Passing Strange” has a trump card that’s been well-played: Stew, its charismatic creator and star.

Reidel’s hypothesis is turning heads all over the theater scene. New York Magazine doesn’t put much stock in his prediction, saying:

It’s one thing to give the Best Musical award to a show like Spring Awakening, which is rockish and fun but is still made by people who love musical theater and Broadway. It’s another thing to give the award to a show that consciously rejects Broadway tradition — to great effect, it must be said — written by and starring a guy who’s made it clear he doesn’t really care for, well, Broadway…

…Contrast this to In the Heights, whose Lin-Manuel Miranda speaks enthusiastically about his love of musicals, and whose show embraces those traditions even as it spices them up with a touch of reggaeton and hip-hop.

Bizbuzz’s blogger pal Moxie the Maven chimes in in the comments, saying that In the Heights will win the big Best Musical prize, but Passing Strange will take home a lot of the other awards.

Check out the LA Times for a rundown of the major press outlet predictions for Sunday night’s Tony Awards.

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Here’s a fun site to browse: The A.V. Club picked the 25 best documentaries about ambitious outsiders, and put them all in one place with youtube trailers.  They are weird and wonderful, and sure to inspire everyone, kooky artist or not.  Check out #25, The Nomi Song:

The zenith of Klaus Nomi’s brief, weird career was singing backup and dancing mechanically behind David Bowie on Saturday Night Live in 1979. Still, the outlandishly made-up and costumed Nomi looked somehow like Forrest Gump haplessly out of his league on the stage behind the Thin White Duke. Video footage of the SNL performance, as well as many other heart-stopping concert clips on the 2004 documentary The Nomi Song, cement Nomi’s own fabricated image—that of an androgynous, alien android somehow marooned in the New York club scene during the new-wave era. Nomi, a diminutive German emigrant with an ethereal operatic tenor, rose to cult acclaim quickly in the late ’70s before succumbing to bad record deals, ego, and ultimately AIDS in 1983. His few amazing minutes on the 1981 post-punk documentary Urgh! A Music War barely hint at the loneliness and strangeness of the elfin being beneath the robotic tuxedo—but The Nomi Song shows its subject to be one of the most unique, quixotic, and simultaneously ironic and innocent figures in pop-music history.

Another day, another london theater production coming to Broadway.  Playbill announced today that the West End production of The Seagull will be flying across the pond this fall.  Kristin Scott Thomas’s performance is one of the most raved-about theater performances in years, so we can expect lots of hubbub here in New York.   I can feel the 2009 tony buzz already…

Everyone will be talking about catching Kristin Scott Thomas in the Chekhov classic, but I’m hoping that Mackenzie Crook reprises his role when the production moves stateside.  Crook played Gareth Keenan (the British counterpart to Dwight Schrute) on the BBC’s original version of The Office, and his sad, trod-upon brand of comic genius is perfect for Chekhov.

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Jezebel weighs in today on the sexist backlash against Sex and the City: The Movie.  Between bitter critics snarking their way through their reviews, and that unbelievable cover of Time Out depicting the fabulous four gagged with tape (below), more than a few folks are unhappy with the press coverage of the film.

From jezebel.com:

The Time Out New York cover portraying the ladies of Sex and the City with duct tape over their maws isn’t the only media coverage of the fabulous foursome that has the whiff of sexism about it. Newsweek critic Ramin Setoodeh discusses the near-violent dislike for Sex in the City that many men, particularly male movie critics, have shown. “Movie critics, an overwhelmingly male demographic, gave it such a nasty tongue lashing you would have thought they were talking about an ex-girlfriend,” Setoodeh says.

Although Bizbuzz found the movie underwhelming at best, that Time Out cover is just inexcusable, and this is just plain mean.

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After Sydney Pollack’s death on Monday, journalists and industry pros are recounting the many ways they were inspired by the director and actor.  In case you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past couple decades, Pollack directed Tootsie, The Way We Were, and won the Oscar for Out of Africa, also acting in many films including Michael Clayton and Eyes Wide Shut.

New York Magazine’s David Edelstein says “Reacting, not acting, was the key to Pollack’s manifesto.”  Here’s just a sample of Edelstein’s insight into Pollack’s long and varied career:

Of course, Hoffman’s and Pollack’s creative tension is one of the reasons that Tootsie is so flabbergastingly great: It was good for Hoffman to be reined in; it was good for Pollack to be shoved out of his comfort zone. After the supremely tasteful Out of Africa took home all those statuettes, no scene in a Pollack-directed film would have anything like the distinctive neurotic drive of Tootsie, of Streisand in The Way We Were, or of the great moment in Absence of Malice when Paul Newman gets in close to Sally Fields and hisses in her face. The canvases seemed larger than the emotions.

But if we lost Pollack the vital director, we gained an actor whose performances were lessons in the art of screen acting. It began with Tootsie, a role that Pollack stepped into reluctantly, and the reluctance is right there onscreen, in a good way: The agent, George, just wants to do his job, eat his lunch. (That’s his motivation.)

Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic also has a more personal account of his own dealings with Pollack as he attempted to advise Goldberg on a script he was working on.  It’s a great read, full of personal anecdotes about Pollack:

He was a wonderful storyteller, and also a world-class obsessive. He took a fifteen-minute break to explain how he packs for overseas trips. I started writing down the monologue, it was so captivating: “You see, fellas, what I do is I check the weather averages for each place I’m heading, and that way I can know exactly what sock I’m going to need for each destination, so I don’t pack any more socks than necessary, just the socks of appropriate weight for the prevailing weather conditions…” And so on. The business with the socks struck me as unnecessary, by the way, because he flew his own plane and could bring three suitcases of socks, but never mind.

This memorial day weekend is going to be sunny and beautiful, but you don’t have to spend the WHOLE time outside, and there are some great indie movie events going on that are totally worth checking out.  Via Cinematical, here’s your Indie Film Calendar for the weekend:

Brooklyn: This month 125 years ago, construction on the Brooklyn Bridge was finished. In honor of the NYC landmark that’s featured in literally *every* movie and tv show set here, BAMcinématek is hosting a free screening Saturday of Brooklyn Bridge (1981), the first documentary ever made by celebrated documentarian Ken Burns. He went around saying, “If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge I’d like to … show you a movie about.”

NYC: At the Walter Reade Theater this week, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is hosting a series called “Charles Boyer and the Art of Seduction”. Films include: La Bonheur (1934), Gaslight (1944), and History Is Made at Night (1937), and more.

Check out these independent films opening this weekend:

War, Inc., starring and co-written by John Cusack, is a scathing political satire about war profiteers. Opens in New York and L.A. today.

Postal is a video-game-based film from German attention whore Uwe Boll, whose most recent shenanigans involve declaring his inability to secure wide release for the film a “conspiracy.” It’s opening today in just four theaters, in New York, L.A., Denver, and Austin.

[big thanks to cinematical, a constant source of info and insight on all things film]

P.S. Everyone is talking about this, the trailer of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”.  Check it out.