'Wichita' to film in Worcester

From today's Telegram and Gazette:

WORCESTER — What do you mean no one uses Worcester Airport?

How about Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz? The Hollywood superstars are sure to create a flurry of excitement at the underused airport when they breeze into the terminal in a week or two to shoot scenes for an upcoming movie.

Construction workers are building sets in the cavernous-but-almost-empty terminal building for “Wichita,” a 20th Century Fox action comedy in which Cruise plays a secret agent who weaves in and out of the life of a single woman.

According to IMDB, the movie Shuttle was the last to film at the Worcester Airport.

Shutter Island bumped to 2010

Here's a piece of Massachusetts movie news that I missed while on vacation...the release of Shutter Island, the latest Martin Scorcese/Leo DiCaprio film to be set in Boston, is being pushed out of October and into Early 2010. From Variety:

Speculation by kudos prognosticators and Hollywood gossips went into overdrive during the weekend after Paramount announced its shift of Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island” from Oct. 2 to Feb. 19.

Paramount insists that it was a simple business decision. In a statement, studio chairman-CEO Brad Grey said “Shutter” will be more profitable in February: “Our 2009 slate was greenlit in a very different economic climate and as a result we must remain flexible and willing to recalibrate and adapt to a changing environment.”

If so, it’s a sober reminder to the industry when such a high-profile pic (directed by Scorsese, starring Leonardo DiCaprio) is vulnerable to considerations of P&A in a tough economy.

On the other hand, conspiracy theorists wondered why Par made the decision only six weeks before the pic would have opened. Studio clearly tried to downplay the news as much as possible by announcing the date shuffle on Friday afternoon.

I fear that it is not as good as they hoped it would be.

Good Will Hunting

Lance: I'd read someplace (I can't for the life of me remember where I read it) that Good Will Hunting was one of those movies that didn't hold up well over time. The author suggested that it was a movie that was great for the '90s, but watching it 10 years later one was left to wonder what all the fuss was about. So I was expecting less form the movie than I should have. Perhaps that's a good thing; I actually liked the movie better this time than when I first watched it a decade ago.

Since this is about the most celebrated Boston movie of all time, I'm sure everyone knows the plot. But just to recap: Matt Damon is Will Hunting, a mathematical genius who is stuck in the rut that all poor boys from Southie are born into, and instead of being a student at MIT, he's a janitor. When a professor puts an unsolvable equation on the blackboard, it is Hunting that solves the problem. The professor bails Hunting out of jail and tries to make him into his own image. To do so (and to help keep Hunting out of jail), the professor brings him to a therapist (Robin Williams) who just happens to be a fellow Southtie boy who somehow found his way out of the rut. Can the therapist get through?

Scott: Am I the only one who sees the word "therapist" and thinks of Turd Ferguson? Anyway, I went into this a bit skeptical. I've seen the end of it before, so there's that; plus, it's a Robin Williams "beard" movie, which means he's being serious and could at any moment veer into Patch Adams territory, which is the film equivalent of setting the National Terror Alert at Orange. It's just... hide the kids, you know?

However, I was pleasantly surprised, mainly because Robin Williams is actually pretty darn good in this movie. And the romance element wasn't as bad as I was fearing it would be. Those sorts of things can go wrong in a big hurry (see: Wonderland) but while this wasn't the best young-people-falling-in-love movie I've seen (Before Sunrise kind of takes the cake on that aspect of things) it didn't make me want to slap everyone involved either, which is a bit of a moral victory. In other words, this movie could have been terrible on dozens of levels but managed to be pretty good all around, which is probably why relieved audiences and reviewers went so overboard on the praise. Everyone was just expecting it to be an indie film apocalypse.

Lance: Apparently most of official Boston was included in those thinking it would be a failure. It was interesting to see that Dunkin Donuts and the Red Sox are about the only two institutions that allowed their brands to be used. Instead of cars marked "Boston Police" the cops drove "Metro Police" cars, marked to otherwise look like Boston police. Affleck's character wears a Bruins jacket in a handful of scenes, with the Bruins and NHL logos taped over. (And isn't that just classic Bruins...a character in what would become a huge Boston movie wants to wear their logo and they don't give permission. Their marketing people have less foresight of a gaggle of cave bats).

Those little things help make this less of a Boston movie than it could have been. Sure, the movie is set at MIT and Harvard and the main characters are set in Southie, but would the movie really have been any different if it were set at Cal Poly, Stanford, and San Francisco?

Scott: Well, the Carlton Fisk segment would have been, I dunno, The Catch instead or something. But that actually might have made more sense. As we discussed when we were watching the film, the one seriously wrong note in the film is the idea that any Red Sox fan would have given up tickets to Game 6 of the 1975 World Series to talk to some stranger in a bar. No way on Earth that would ever happen. That's just not how Sox fans work. Hell, I met my soul mate once but I had to ditch her to get to an April game showcasing Matt Young pitching against the Detroit Tigers. You just have to have your priorities straight. Robin Williams's character may not have spent the rest of his life wondering what would have happened if he had talked to the girl, but he did spend the rest of his life wondering how awesome it would have been to be at Game 6 of the 1975 World Series. Which is worse, hmm?

Lance: Not to mention that Williams's character also mentions that he slept out over night to get the tickets. Well, game 6 was rained out three times, so did Williams camp out in the soaking October rain for four days to get tix? Or had he been holding onto the ducats for three days, waiting for the game to be played? Either way, it would make the idea of giving them away at the last minute that much more absurd.

Anyway, Good Will Hunting is a very good movie. I'm just not sure it's a very good Boston movie.

'The Maiden Heist' may not be released

The Worcester Telegram & Gazette reported this morning that The Maiden Heist, filmed in Boston and Worcester and set in Boston, may not be released. Instead, it looks like the film, which stars Morgan Freeman, William H. Macy, and Christopher Walken, will go direct to video:

It looks as if you won't be seeing the Worcester Art Museum on the big screen anytime soon … unless you have one of those giant wall-spanning plasma TVs at home.

Most of us will have to settle for a small screen viewing of “The Maiden Heist,” a comedy with several scenes shot in Worcester Art Museum's Renaissance Court and galleries. Financial problems at the film's distribution company mean the film likely will go straight to DVD without benefit of a theatrical run....

Things began to go wrong after the movie, produced by Yari Film Group (“Crash” and “The Illusionist”), wrapped in 2008.

Yari had sold the film's DVD and cable rights to Sony Pictures and Yari was going to do the theatrical release and finance the publicity, which would benefit both partners, said Rob Paris, the movie's producer.

Then, Yari's fledgling distribution arm went bankrupt, meaning there was no money for the all-important — and very expensive — publicity blast every movie relies on.

At that point, filmmakers were hopeful another distributor could be found. Then the financial markets tanked and money could not be raised to buy the DVD rights back from Sony.

“We couldn't go out and sell this movie to another distributor without those home video rights because, frankly, that's where your safety net is for profitability,” Paris said.

Since it already had the DVD rights, couldn't Sony just squeeze “The Maiden Heist,” a relatively small film made for just under $20 million, into its theatrical release calendar?

“Sony just considered it a loss,” Paris said. “Their home video unit is completely separate from the theatrical unit at Sony. The theatrical unit has plenty of movies for this year and plenty of movies for next year. They don't need an extra movie.”

Monument Ave.

Lance: I've got to be honest, I'm a little wary of all these Irish mob movies. I mean, how many different takes can there be on the Irish mob? It's kind of like a mad lib. Guy grows up in [Eastie, Southie, Charlestown]. He or one of his family members is a [car thief, enforcer, gun runner]. Someone [rats on the boss, kills a family member, sells out to a rival gang]. This pisses off the boss, so he sends his thugs to [break the guy's legs, shoot him, drive him around town and intimidate him into silence]. Something goes wrong, and the [Boston Police, State Police, FBI] start snooping around. Etc. etc. etc.

Well, Monument Ave. has all of those, but it's more about life for the Townies in Charlestown than it is about the murder mystery. Denis Leary plays Bobby O'Grady, a low-level car thief in an Irish gang who is deeply conflicted when his boyhood friend and then his cousin Seamus get knocked off by the boss because they are accused of being snitches. The Charlestown way is to keep your mouth shut and look the other way (and there is truth to that, the neighborhood is well known for it's unsolved murders). But can Bobby O'Grady do that one more time? We get lots of close-ups of Denis Leary's mug as he tries to work that out.

Scott: This was an interesting movie. As you said, it's not really about mundane things like "plot" but more about what it's like for the characters to try and live in this environment. With that in mind, it was actually pretty good. If you're expecting a twisty thriller like The Departed, then you're going to be disappointed, but if you're just trying to locate a Denis Leary film that isn't disappointingly bad, then you're in luck. We did have some trepidation that the love interest would fall into the Carey Treatment trap of being totally superfluous, but since there's no real plot anyway, that's not a big deal. I'd also say that just by existing she turns up the tension between Leary and his rival, the local mob boss played by Colm Meaney (who, by the way, is great, but also in this film was the only person who had a suspect accent, which was a big surprise to me).

Lance: This movie wasn't at all disappointingly bad; it also wasn't at all popular. Looking at the box office numbers as reported on IMDB it lost so much money that I'm expecting a handwritten note from Leary thanking me for renting it. Just five million more rentals until he starts seeing residuals.

Oh, and congratulations on referencing The Carey Treatment again. I believe you do so in every review. Since we're referencing previous movies on the list, I'll take this opportunity to note that Monument Ave. also played a role in Mystery Street, as the wrongly accused suspect and his wife lived on Monument Ave.

One last note/question from me. There is a scene where the crew from Charlestown comes across a black man walking down the street and kidnaps him briefly in a successful attempt to intimidate him into leaving. In it, the O'Grady character showers the victim with all sort of racial epithets, including one that I don't think I'd ever heard until a Boston cop used it in reference to Henry Louis Gates. Is that just a Boston thing? Do you think this scene was even important? I'm not sure what it is supposed to say about Charlestown.

Scott: That was an interesting scene in that the character who was going nuts with the racial slurs and pointing a gun to the African-American guy's head was apparently doing it in an attempt to make the other guys in his posse realize how stupid their racism was. I think from a character point, it was mainly to expand upon the idea that O'Grady has outgrown Charlestown but doesn't seem to be able to find a way out of it. It comes right on the heels of the scene where he's trying to chat up the yuppie woman and instead gets completely undermined by all his townie connections butting in and ruining things for him. This scene is more of the same: he's sort of moved beyond this knee-jerk us vs. them mindset, but everyone around him is so stuck in it that they don't even realize what they're really saying or doing. In that sense I didn't have an issue with the scene even though on the surface it was pretty jarring.

The Brinks Job coming to TV this month

The Brink's Job, the only one of the 10 Memorable Boston Movies not available on DVD, is coming to the the HBO family of networks later this month and in September. Here is the schedule:

Sun 8/16 06:35 AM MORE MAX - EAST
Sun 8/16 09:35 AM MORE MAX - WEST

Tue 9/1 08:10 AM HBO COMEDY - EAST
Tue 9/1 11:10 AM HBO COMEDY - WEST

Sat 9/12 03:05 PM HBO COMEDY - EAST
Sat 9/12 06:05 PM HBO COMEDY - WEST

Sun 9/13 03:10 AM HBO COMEDY - EAST
Sun 9/13 06:10 AM HBO COMEDY - WEST

Wed 9/16 01:30 PM HBO COMEDY - EAST
Wed 9/16 04:30 PM HBO COMEDY - WEST

Sun 9/20 01:35 PM HBO COMEDY - EAST
Sun 9/20 04:35 PM HBO COMEDY - WEST

Mon 9/28 10:25 AM HBO COMEDY - EAST
Mon 9/28 01:25 PM HBO COMEDY - WEST

Tags: The Brink's Job HBO

Mystic River

Lance: Mystic River is one of the only movies on the Mass. Movie Project list that I had seen in the theater before starting this project. It also might just about be the only movie ever produced that I have seen and Scott has not. Scott came into the movie expecting that it would be "a downer." So what do you say, bro? Did Mystic River leave you morose?

Scott: Oh yeah, sure. I've pretty much spent my hours since drinking cheap wine and listening to the Dave Matthews Band while staring out at the specter of the merciless and unchanging ocean. Actually, it wasn't quite that bad in terms of morosity. It was a downer, but it was a well made downer, so that's good at least. I know Sean Penn has been accused in some circles of chewing the scenery like the world's biggest termite, but I didn't think he was too over the top. Maybe once or twice, but nothing terribly egregious. And it's nice to see Tim Robbins bringing his A game to something other than a charity hockey game.

Lance: I would be one of Sean Penn's accusers. I imagine it's hard to practice the way one would react if he found out his daughter had been murdered. But at least in the scene at the park he was over the moon, never mind over the top. (Perhaps it would be only fair to have director Clint Eastwood share the blame. You'll notice in the still from that scene that there are at least 11 uniformed officers holding Penn back. That's an awful lot of blue for one distraught Bostonian. Maybe Penn was told to be emotional enough to need 11 officers to restrain him).

Penn's occasional outbursts notwithstanding, I liked the film quite a bit. While the movie is ostensibly a murder mystery, it's more about three boys from East Boston who grow up to be three very different people, and who are never quite able to get past the kidnapping and molestation of one of them (the character played by Robbins).

The film begins in 1975 as the three boys are playing street hockey and causing a little mischief. A car pulls up and a man posing as police officer convinces Dave to get in the car so the cop can take him home. Once in the car, a second man who is posing as a priest (or who is a priest...here's another case where the knowledge of the Catholic Priest molestation scandals that were uncovered earlier this decade influenced the way I saw the film) flashes a ring and smiles a creepy smile and it's pretty obvious where this is going. The boy suffers through four days of sexual abuse before he's able to escape, his life to be changed forever. The three are thrown together again as Penn's daughter is murdered, Robbins becomes a suspect, and Kevin Bacon is the homicide detective assigned to the case. Even 25 years later, the incident shapes the way the characters relate (or don't relate) to each other.

Scott: I particularly liked the performance from Marcia Gay Harden as the wife of Tim Robbins. Even though I am usually a Laura Linney fan, though, I wasn't super thrilled with her character. She seemed just a little too Lady Macbeth there at the end and she also had the only accent that didn't quite work for me. I did think they did a particularly good job casting the kids for the young versions of each character though.

I don't know, I guess I don't have a heck of a lot to say about this one. It was good. Not great, but good. My quibbles with it were minor -- such as the fact that I thought they ended it at the wrong place (it should have ended with the phone call where Kevin Bacon's character finally talks to his wife). I also didn't think it was a fantastic mystery, though as you said that wasn't the point; it was borderline egregious that they had to resort to obscuring an obvious clue by having both police officers be just plain too stupid to do the most basic detective work on the case (seriously, wouldn't listening to the 911 call be just about the first thing you do on the case?). But overall it was fine I guess. Could have used a little bit of the Carey Treatment to liven it up if you know what I mean, but otherwise solid. Not as boring as Flags of Our Fathers, anyway.

Tags: Sean Penn Kevin Bacon Tim Robbins Clint Eastwood Mystic River 2003