Harrison Ford Can't Find a Pay Phone

As Scott Foundas is telling you in his review below, don’t miss the new “final cut”� of Blade Runner, which runs through Thursday, November 8 at the Cinerama. (The DVD box set arrives December 18.) The new print, which I just saw last night, is fabulous. And the effects, mise en scene, and smoky, rainy dystopia of it all are amazing—even more so when one considers that the 1982 film is entirely pre-digital, none of it created inside a computer. Director Ridley Scott and his visual effects team—notably including Douglas Trumbull, who worked on Close Encounters and 2001, and directed Silent Running—make the city of Los Angeles the most powerful character in the drama. It’s a permanently benighted, neon-lit, constantly steaming and dripping jumble of Aztec skyscrapers; people, most of them Asian, scurry like ants beneath 100-story towers that are rotting and empty. It seems most of the white, affluent, healthy population has emigrated to greener, undespoiled planets.

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The Office Goes to Bangalore

(Josh Hamilton and Ayesha Dharker. Courtesy of ShadowCatcher Ent.)

Outsourced, the plucky, well-reviewed little indie shot in India and produced by Seattle filmmakers, is poised to become a TV series. Unnoticed by other Seattle papers, the deal was recently sealed in L.A. and was reported this week in the Hollywood trade paper Variety. As we said of charming leading lady Ayesha Dharker in our coverage of SIFF (where Outsourced won the top audience prize), promote that woman to The Office already! Well, a similar yet better scenario may unfold: NBC has commissioned a pilot script from Outsourced’s writers, George Wing and John Jeffcoat, and they’re partnered with a high-profile Hollywood TV ace who directed the pilot for, yes, The Office. If NBC likes the script, the pilot will be shot this winter; and if NBC likes the pilot, the half-hour sitcom—beginning with 13 episodes—would debut next fall. TV works that fast.

As Wing told me today of his and Jeffcoat’s whirlwind August tour of the major TV studios: “‘The Office goes global’ was the basic pitch. We got three of them [studios] bidding on it.” That’s not all he had to say.

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Krakauer's Conspicuous Silence

(Photo: Paramount Vantage)

In case you missed his appearance on Oprah last week with Sean Penn, Jon Krakauer has offered few comments in conjunction with the generally acclaimed adaptation of his 1996 book Into The Wild (which opens this Friday, Sept. 28). He’s prominent in the credits; Penn is effusive in praising him (especially after escorting the writer-director on a hike to the bus where poor Chris McCandless starved to death in 1992); and he even attended the L.A. premiere of the film, surrounded by celebrities. Oddly, Krakauer is completely absent as a source—not even quoted, in fact—in a current Outside magazine feature story on the film. It was there, in January of 1993, that his journalism on McCandless was first so widely read—and got him a publishing contract for his first bestseller. (It was published in the spring of 1996, just before Outside sent him to cover commercial climbers on Mount Everest—resulting in his even bigger magazine feature and book, Into Thin Air.)

Today, according to Random House, some two million copies of Into the Wild are in print; and many more will surely be sold of the movie tie-in paperback edition. Yet, weirdly, apart from a cover photo of actor of Emile Hirsch (above, who plays McCandless), it appears to be the same book as the 1997 paperback. There’s no new postscript in my review copy, and the author’s preface still dates to April 1995, when Krakauer was living in Seattle (where, it should be noted, McCandless passed through en route to Alaska; and where resides Eddie Vedder, who contributed songs to the movie). (Not long after Into Thin Air made him wealthy, Krakauer and his wife decamped for Boulder, Colorado.) The author invested a huge amount of research—almost three years—into the book, talking to sources who turned up only after the Outside account was published, and creating a still somewhat controversial hypothesis on what killed McCandless.

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Outsourced: Alone and Without Matt Dillon

Josh Hamilton in a strange land. (Photo: Ayesha Broacha, ShadowCatcher and IFI, LLC)

The locally made film Outsourced was seemingly bound for a theatrical distribution deal after well-received screenings at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, and following SIFF this spring. (There it earned the top audience prize, the Golden Space Needle Award.) Instead it’s being “four-walled” next Friday, Sept. 28, with Seattle company ShadowCatcher Entertainment essentially paying to put it in theaters—initially in markets including here, New York, and San Francisco—then hoping to recoup its costs by selling the DVD directly from its Web site (www.outsourcedthemovie.com), before it’s available through Scarecrow, Blockbuster, and Netflix. (Our review will be online and in print next week, before it opens at the Majestic Bay and Bellevue Galleria.)

So, I asked the film’s executive producer, was this what he originally anticipated?

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Kong on Sunday

If you haven't yet seen The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, Sunday night would be a great opportunity. Locally raised director Seth Gordon will appear at the 7 and 9:10 p.m. shows at the Varsity, and conduct Q&A sessions after the screenings. We first told you about the film at SIFF, and it's since earned very nice reviews. And after the movie, you can play your own game of fantasy casting for the feature version of Kong (also to be directed by Gordon). Try to decide who should play mild-mannered Redmond schoolteacher Steve Wiebe and his nefarious Florida rival, Billy Mitchell. My current choices, respectively, are John Krasinski and a slimmed-down Jack Black.

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The Kingmaker

(Photo courtesy of Picturehouse.) 

We can’t get enough of Kong—as in The King of Kong, which we wrote about at SIFF and has, for this Friday’s opening, received nothing but nice reviews. In addition to being featured in last Sunday’s New York Times, amiable Redmond schoolteacher Steve Wiebe is drawing all kinds of favorable publicity for the documentary. In fact, he just attended the theatrical premiere of the film in New York, joining locally raised 31-year-old director Seth Gordon (pictured above). So, I asked Gordon, who attended Roosevelt and Lakeside for high school before graduating from Yale, how’d it go?

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Buy This Coffee, or the Polar Bears Die!

(Photo: Paul Nicklen/Paramount Vantage)

Since Akeelah and the Bee, Starbucks really hasn't had great luck with its movie promotional efforts. (Especially compared with in-store music sales, which are doing quite nicely.) But still, the company keeps trying. The latest tie-in flick is Arctic Tale, which seeks to combine March of the Penguins with An Inconvenient Truth. (Our Ella Taylor's review says it only half-succeeds on both counts.) But what I love is the helpful marketing-by-guilt on the corrugated cardboard heat sleeve—made from 60% recycled paper!--that bears the slogan "The change in their world impacts us all." The phrase "global warming" isn't used, of course, since it might be too controversial in the red states.

But we can all get behind "change," that favorite watchword of politicians, since it neatly straddles the pro and the con. It's neutral, like the helpful environmental tip—not actually called an environmental tip—also printed on the sleeve: "What can we do at home to help save theirs? Shave two minutes off our shower time." How are shorter showers are connected to the environment? Why are longer showers bad? How is our home connected to that of the adorable, cuddly polar bears? How is change analogous to global warming? And how does "impact"—another carefully neutral word choice—differ from, say, "is also the result of our selfish consumer behavior returning to destroy"? (Granted, that much verbiage might require a bigger heat sleeve, or two of them, which would also be environmentally suspect.)

So many questions from one little heat sleeve. Pondering them will require buying another cup of coffee, although Starbucks doesn't provide any special tip jar or donation fund for the polar bears being so curiously impacted. For them I guess the implicit message to so many marketing vagaries may be, "Keep the change."

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The Simpsons Movie: WooooHooooo!

Photo by Chris Kornelis (who still hasn't seen the movie.)

It took me longer than I wanted to see The Simpsons Movie, but it sure was worth it.In fact, I had the chills from the first frame of the first preview.

First of all, I'd like to know why no one told be two months ago about Cinerama, where I saw the flick. A giant single screen with a balcony! My pre-multiplex heart almost couldn't take it. "You are too young to remember single screen theaters," you are saying. Au contraire, I say. I spent my "formative years" (0-5) at a single screen that my grandfather managed. Anyway, back to the movie.

So far, no one else I've talked to saw the teaser for The Dark Knight that I saw. Yes, it is only one real visual, but listen to the voices. Heath Ledger's Joker voice sounds like the perfect meeting between Nicholson and Romero.

OK, really, the movie now. 

Don't be late and don't leave until you see Gracie Films. And that's all I'm going to say because I HATE people who spoil movies for me. 

Just kidding. Here's a little teaser in the form of a past Homer quote:

"Wow, the Grand Canyon. What a grand canyon."

If you still aren't convinced, how about another trailer?

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The Peanut Ultimatum

(Photo: © Jasin Boland/Universal)

Judging from last night's press screening and sneak preview for The Bourne Ultimatum at the Guild 45, that spy thriller has huge buzz behind it and should be a massive summer hit. It also helps that this trilogy-ender is so much better than the tepid Spider-Man 3 and bloated Pirates of the Caribbean III. (See our glowing review by Nathan Lee.) The line was around the block to the Guild 45's east theater—that's the older, larger one without stadium seating; the one that, frankly, has terrible sight lines, looks awfully threadbare, and smells funny. (Didn't the roof catch on fire three summers back as the result of a nearby apartment blaze? Water damage, perhaps.) Not that anyone was complaining, despite fans patiently enduring a wait exceeding an hour (for some) out in the heat. Meanwhile, for once, we pampered journalists and critics were even more cooped up and uncomfortable—penned in the lobby (even hotter than outside), because the prior showing of Rescue Dawn ran long. (Just like the Vietnam War, come to think of it.)

Usually we elitist members of the MSM are ushered in early to claim all the best seats. But this was a "mixed" screening, and one should never complain about judging a movie with the instant feedback of an appreciative live audience—instead of a cavernous hall with a half-dozen mirthless fellow journos. Everyone settled down nicely to enjoy the show, with only a few empty seats. And everyone seemed to dig the movie, which met my sole criterion for a good summer flick: more and better ways to smash up cars, which Bourne supplies in spades. Only amid the sound of crunching metal, breaking bones, beeping computers (Bourne 3 is very heavy on computers and electronic surveillance), gunshots, and explosions, I kept hearing this weird organic crunching sound next to me. When the lights went up after two satisfying hours of espionage and payback, I saw why.

The dude sitting next to me had eaten and shelled about 10 pounds of peanuts, and left the casings in a huge pile on the floor. (Along with all his other garbage—classy!) So, yes, this is a summer movie you definitely want to see. But this is not the way, or the theater, in which you want to see it. This Friday's options include the Metro, Meridian, Oak Tree, Columbia City, Factoria, Majestic Bay, Kirkland Parkplace, and Lincoln Square. And in none of those cinemas, I hope, do they sell peanuts by the pound. Yes to Bourne, no to peanuts.

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D'oh! Simpsons Movie Preview Notes

(Image courtesy 20th Century Fox)

I have been to Springfield, and though I can't tell you in what state it's located, both Maine and Kentucky lie adjacent. At least that's the way geography works in the imaginative universe created by Matt Groening all the way back in 1988. Our full review from Scott Foundas of The Simpsons Movie will be online tomorrow (Wednesday), but I'll offer a few observations from today's press screening after the jump...

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