Just ’cause I’m sick and I’m missing the first day of the film festival, that doesn’t mean I can’t provide some more news links.
1. FilmStew.com has a really interesting interview with A History of Violence director David Cronenberg. In some ways I think reading his thoughts about the movie can be more interesting or rewarding than watching the movie itself; or perhaps his thoughts will help me to appreciate the film even more, the next time I see it. I particularly like the way he discusses the film’s mix of genres, and the lack of truly mature men and women (as opposed to overgrown adolescents) in American cinema and culture.
Meanwhile, on a related note, ContactMusic.com reports that Cronenberg and his wife acted out the sex scenes in front of the actors so that co-stars Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello would know what to do. To my mind, this is marginally better than having the director actually get on the bed and kiss you — as Arnold Schwarzenegger once said Paul Verhoeven did, to show Sharon Stone how to kiss him in Total Recall (1990) — but I gotta agree with Viggo: “Instead of putting us at ease, we actually were kind of freaked out… Maybe some things ought to stay private.”
2. Reuters, the Associated Press, and E! Online report that flight attendants are ticked off at Flightplan. “Three different unions representing over 80,000 flight attendants on 23 airlines are calling for a boycott,” says one story. Be warned: to explain why the flight attendants are ticked off, the stories must give away certain spoilers — and two do so in their very first paragraphs.
Me, I wonder if they were similarly upset over that hilarious scene in Anger Management (2003), starring Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson, which in its own way also mocks the rudeness and uptightness of flight attendants and air marshalls.
3. Reuters reports that Sony has decided not to distribute Albert Brooks’s Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, which concerns a comedian who is sent by the State department to India and Pakistan to find out what makes people over there laugh, and therefore to find out how we can all get along better:
Brooks says most of the jokes in the movie are aimed at Americans and there are no religious references at all, even though he was allowed to film in a mosque in India.
“I steered clear of religion in this movie. There’s no mention of the Koran — the whole point of the movie is looking for comedy, not looking for God. I was allowed to film in the biggest mosque in India and when I told the imam the plot of the movie he started to laugh.”
Brooks added studio executives at Sony were not as supportive as the imam. “One told me that if a mullah in Iran saw a poster for the movie and took it the wrong way, I could be in deep trouble. I told him that I have trouble getting posters put up for my movies in Sherman Oaks,” a Los Angeles suburb.
The film is now being distributed by Warner Independent.
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