Pages tagged “sean penn”

There's a surprisingly gargantuan Internet faction dedicated to predicting who will be up for film's most coveted prize, the Academy Award. Publications like Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Entertainment Weekly, Los Angeles Times and New York Times all have Oscar blogs that obsessively trail the fluctuations in buzz amongst the year's top films. That's not to mention stand-alone sites like Awards Daily and In Contention, or well-known bloggers like Jeff Wells, Dave Poland and Anne Thompson. Even Roger Ebert has devoted a wealth of recent ink on the subject. But, the truth is, no matter how much someone knows, it's still just a wild guessing game.

The irony of Bay Shore Furriers and Leather Salon is that, while it’s the only building on the block that survived a fire six years ago, nobody seems to remember the lanky kid whose parents opened the store in the 1940s. He played linebacker for the junior-varsity team in the then-prosperous south-shore Long Island town, boxed groceries, graduated in 1947 and never really returned.

Director Gus Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black must have made a good team on the upcoming political biopic Milk, because the two have already made a deal with Fox Searchlight to reunite.

Release Date: Oct. 3
Director: Barry Levinson
Writer: Art Linson
Cinematographer: Stéphane Fontaine
Starring: Robert DeNiro, Bruce Willis, Sean Penn, Catherine Keener, Stanley Tucci, Robin Wright Penn, Michael Wincott
Studio/Run Time: Magnolia Pictures, 102 mins.

Harpooning Hollywood hijinks

Given Hollywood’s proclivity for epic narcissism, it’s not particularly surprising that there’s such a rich history of self-satire in film, from The Player to The Kid Stays in the Picture. Barry Levinson’s What Just Happened? is based on producer Art Linson’s 2002 memoir (Linson’s credits include The Untouchables: Capone Rising, Fight Club and Into the Wild), fictionalized here as a story about Ben (Robert De Niro), a Bluetooth-toting, fire-extinguishing producer with a fractured family, a massive SUV and a cabal of eager assistants. Ben’s got all the power but no control: Bruce Willis, playing himself, threatens to shut down Ben’s new film with his scraggly “Grizzly Adams beard” and 30 pounds of paunch, while studio exec Lou (Catherine Keener) insists that Ben convince director Jeremy (Michael Wincott) to transform an art-house tragedy into a blockbuster. Miraculously, Levinson (Diner, Rain Man) manages to spin familiar power plays (the studio wants something more commercial; the actor is difficult) into genuinely charming vignettes, and What Just Happened? ultimately transcends a potentially disastrous same-old-story/same-old-town conceit.

Read our issue 46 feature on Zach Galifianakis here.

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...Sean Penn:
"He called my cell phone and was like, 'Hey, it's Sean Penn.' And I'm like, 'Uh-huh...' He's like, 'What are you doing next week?' And I said, 'I'm going to Arby's.' Then I kinda realized it was him. I didn't audition [for Into the Wild]; I just showed up to South Dakota. It was me and him and Vince Vaughn and Emile Hirsch in a hunting lodge together for two weeks. But when I first got there, I said to Sean, 'How do you know me?' and he said he'd seen Out Cold about 17 times. His son is a snowboarder, it's not like he's studying the works of Lee Majors."

...Fiona Apple:
"I first met Fiona at a club in Los Angeles called Largo. It's a place where musicians and comedians perform together. There would always be musicians hanging out at a comedy show and vice versa. I remember going up to Fiona and saying something like, 'I have diarrhea.' Something I didn't think someone like Fiona Apple would ever care to hear with that persona she has, I guess. She giggled at it, and we always had these weird sentences in exchange. I handed her this music video I'd done for this Anita Baker song ['You Bring Me Joy'], and we were kinda friendly. Then we made her video [for 'Not About Love']."

Watch Zach in Fiona Apple's video for "Not About Love" here. Zach's version of Anita Baker's "You Bring Me Joy": 


...Kanye West:
"I met Kanye through Largo as well, and he had also seen the Anita Baker video. He came to see me do stand-up, and that night he asked me to do a music video. I said, 'If you don't tell me what to do, I'll do it.' I think some people would be intimidated that it's Kanye West, but that shit doesn't impress me, that cockiness. It never has and it never will. The more cocky people are, if you act cocky back to them, they respect it. But he was quite nice about it. I just shot [the video for 'Can't Tell Me Nothing'] at my farm. Will Oldham happened to be visiting me, so we drank some whiskey and shot it. That was basically it."

Zach and Will Oldham' video for Kanye West's "Can't Tell Me Nothing":

Sean Penn adapts and directs 1996 bestseller

Director/Writer: Sean Penn (Based on the book by Jon Krakauer)
Cinematographer: Eric Gautier
Starring: Emile Hirsch, William Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden, Jena Malone, Vince Vaughn
Studio/Run Time: Paramount Vantage, 140 mins.

Based on Jon Krakauer’s acclaimed nonfiction book, Sean Penn’s film adaptation of Into The Wild traces the post-collegiate wanderings of Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch), a rich kid who graduates from Emory, donates his entire life savings to charity and hitchhikes his way deep into the Alaskan wilderness. McCandless isn’t particularly sympathetic—he’s unbearably self-righteous; he blames all his problems on his bickering, millionaire parents (sublimely played by William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden); he changes his name to Alexander Supertramp; he devastates his friends and family—and without the skepticism and broad, young-man-in-the-wilderness context Krakauer’s book provided (Krakauer interspersed McCandless’ story with comparable narratives from naturalists like John Muir). It’s hard to stomach McCandless’ arrogance. Sean Penn may have wanted to school his viewers on the toxicity of capitalist society, but his script (which relies far too heavily on voiceovers) feels more didactic than edifying. Ultimately, the only true, uncontestable lesson Into the Wild offers is this: Don’t swallow fistfuls of weird berries, and always pack more than ten pounds of rice. Turns out humans can’t survive on hubris alone.