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Rough Cuts: Publicist Ronni Chasen Shot -- Remembering a Kind and Loyal Colleague

By Jack Mathews (Subscribe to Jack Mathews's posts), Posted Nov 17th 2010 6:20PM
Filed under: Columns
Ronni ChasenThe murder of veteran Hollywood publicist Ronni Chasen early Tuesday morning in Beverly Hills played out like a scene in one of the movies she may have promoted over her long career. While apparently on her way home from a post-premiere party for the upcoming Cher movie 'Burlesque,' Chasen had just turned left off famous Sunset Blvd. onto a side street heading toward Wilshire when someone fired five bullets into her chest. The shots shattered the passenger side window of her Mercedes, which then crashed against a residential light pole.

To those of us who worked with her over the years, news of Ronni's death would have come as a shock regardless of the cause. At 64, she was the same persistent bundle of energy that had been working the phones for her clients for decades. If memory serves, I first met her when she was arranging interviews with George Burns for the 1970 hit 'The Sunshine Boys.'

During the next 20 years, while I was moving from the Detroit Free Press to USA Today to the L. A. Times, she kept my phone numbers fresh in her Rolodex and on countless occasions, she managed to talk me into interviews with her clients and -- unusual among publicists -- gave me occasional tips for stories that had nothing to do with her.
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Rough Cuts: Will James Cameron Overcome the Curse of 'Cleopatra'?

By Jack Mathews (Subscribe to Jack Mathews's posts), Posted Oct 16th 2010 3:53PM
Filed under: Hot Topic, Columns
James CameronHaving become the first person to direct a worldwide $1 billion hit, is James Cameron about to become the first person to direct a movie with a $1 billion budget?

That's the chance that Sony Pictures and producer Scott Rudin will be taking if, as widely rumored, they get the King of the World to direct a 3-D biographical drama about Cleopatra and her lovers Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. While Cameron has delivered the goods on the mega-movies 'Titanic' and 'Avatar,' those films went way over schedule and over budget; and though his spending a billion bucks is highly unlikely, 'Cleopatra' would likely be his most expensive movie.
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Rough Cuts: 'Blue Valentine' Gets an NC-17 and It's Deja Vu All Over Again

By Jack Mathews (Subscribe to Jack Mathews's posts), Posted Oct 14th 2010 6:40PM
Filed under: Hot Topic, Columns


When I read this morning's news that the Weinstein Company is appealing the adults-only NC-17 rating given its upcoming 'Blue Valentine,' I felt like it was 1990 all over again. Early in that year, the Weinsteins, who had been fighting the MPAA's skull-and-crossbones "X" rating for years, hired controversial lawyer William Kunstler to sue the MPAA over its refusal to change the X rating given to Peter Greenaway's 'The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover.'

Reporting on that story as both a columnist and the Movie Editor at the Los Angeles Times, I found myself talking to Kunstler not about such heady clients as the Chicago Seven, Catonsville Nine and "Black Panther Party, but whether children under 17 should be prohibited by the MPAA from viewing a movie whose crucial dramatic scene is a dinner at which a mobster is forced to eat the baked flesh (the penis, to be precise) of a man he's just murdered.
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Rough Cuts: What's Wrong With Critics -- and Why Do They Love 'The American'?

By Jack Mathews (Subscribe to Jack Mathews's posts), Posted Sep 5th 2010 10:00AM
Filed under: Hot Topic, Columns, New Releases
The AmericanFor a critic, loving a movie means never having to say you're sorry ... for a review that makes no sense to the average moviegoer. That's the conclusion I came to after being swayed by rave reviews for the George Clooney thriller 'The American' such that I drove 25 miles to a theater to see it.

I didn't hate it; anything with Clooney in it is watchable, and the nudity provided by his Italian co-star Violante Placido was really watchable. But otherwise, I would advise the crowd lingering at the ticket window to "move on, there's nothing to see here."

Before I retired from regular movie reviewing two years ago, I was often at the answering end of the question, "What's wrong with you guys?" In other words, why do critics hate movies we love and love movies we hate? That's a gross exaggeration, of course. Collectively, critics and moviegoers are in agreement more often than not.

But there are instances where some critics have an entirely different experience from those of casual moviegoers and even from other critics. And on those occasions, which I believe includes that of 'The American,' they can forget who they're talking to and start dropping references that only a fellow cineaste would find useful.
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Rough Cuts: Bill O'Reilly's Slam of Jennifer Aniston Is Just His Latest Cultural Broadside

By Jack Mathews (Subscribe to Jack Mathews's posts), Posted Aug 21st 2010 5:50PM
Filed under: Hot Topic, Columns
Jennifer AnistonLike most paparazzi bait in American culture, Jennifer Aniston has wisely ignored the crazy things being said and written about her in supermarket tabloids and elsewhere. But when Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly attacked her on his TV show Wednesday night, she was taken aback. "I never actually thought that my name and [O'Reilly's] name would ever be in one sentence," Aniston told 'Good Morning America's' George Stephanopolous.

Aniston may have been urged to take up the fight with O'Reilly by publicists for 'The Switch,' the picture that sparked the commentator's ire. There's good publicity and there's better publicity; having one of the nation's loudest conservative foghorns calling her out for being "destructive to society" by playing a single, middle-age woman who chooses to have a baby via a sperm donor can do nothing but tantalize the film's target audience.
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Rough Cuts: Does 'Inception' Have a Shot at Winning the Oscar?

By Jack Mathews (Subscribe to Jack Mathews's posts), Posted Jul 29th 2010 8:30AM
Filed under: Hot Topic, Columns
With five months remaining in 2010, it may be folly to reserve a spot on the Best Picture Oscar ballot for Christopher Nolan's 'Inception.' But let's say it came to me in a dream; this multi-genre blockbuster is in, and may go all the way.

True, there are at least three dozen movies with Oscar potential yet to be seen, among them films by such admired directors as Terrence Malick, David Fincher, James L. Brooks, Peter Weir, Robert Redford, the Coen brothers and the always-peaking Clint Eastwood. But it will be a bigger Oscar surprise than an Ashton Kutcher nomination if there are 10 better movies coming than 'Inception,' or -- to acknowledge the film's small but vocal core of critics -- 10 with better reasons for Academy members to vote for them.

Like James Cameron's 'Avatar' a year ago, 'Inception' is a money-making spectacle that is priming the pump at the sagging multiplex, getting people back in the mood to spend their hoarded leisure bucks on movies. Unlike 'Avatar,' it is not the brainchild of an insufferable egotist. But a brainchild it literally is.
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Rough Cuts: Armond White vs. Roger Ebert - Whose Side Are You On?

By Jack Mathews (Subscribe to Jack Mathews's posts), Posted Jul 21st 2010 6:00PM
Filed under: Hot Topic, Columns
EbertArmond White, the controversial film critic for the New York Press, is back in the news. Not for trashing another popular movie like 'Toy Story 3,' but for trashing the best-known and perhaps most popular critic in the business, Roger Ebert.

White told reporters for the movie website SlashFilm that through the thumbs-up/thumbs-down edicts that Ebert and the late Gene Siskel expressed on their syndicated TV show, that "It is fair to say that Roger Ebert destroyed film criticism."

White also said that when Ebert became a critic for the Chicago Sun-Times in 1967 he didn't have the knowledge or foundation for that job. "I'm a pedigreed film critic," White said. "I've studied it. I know it. Ebert just simply happened to have the job ... He does not have the foundation."
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