Gray, Phoenix, 2929 reteam for "Two Lovers"

Variety's Michael Fleming has the story.

Bourne Owns the Trailer

The talented folks at Sony have put the new trailer for We Own the Night on prints of this weekend's opening of The Bourne Ultimatum. Go for Bobby Green, stay for Jason Bourne.

THE EX available for pre-order

The movie Scott Foundas (LA Weekly/Village Voice) compared favorably to Flirting with Disaster and found "insididiously funny" is now available for pre-order on Amazon.

Wahlberg: Life & Art

Attentive "Entourage" viewers may have caught the plug for our movie We Own the Night on last week's episode. Medellin, he movie-within-the-show, got into Cannes competition. We Own the Night was in competition at this year's festival. Hmm...

Let's hope Medellin is as well-received as We Own the Night was.

Is there an echo in here?

June 10, NYT: On Abortion, Hollywood Is No-Choice

July 20, LAT: Movies avoid talk of abortion

Standing Ovation

Mark has no problem exploiting the resource he regularly slams. So herewith, the rare youtube clip that doesn't infringe any copyright: a brief, grainy clip of the 8-minute standing ovation that our film WE OWN THE NIGHT received after its Cannes competition premiere.



Let's hope that cellphone didn't also pirate the film.

No rain on the 'plain'

The latest 2929 project is Guillermo Arriaga's "The Burning Plain," starring Charlize Theron. Read all about it here.

More raves...

...for our bosses' new project, The Landmark.

The Eva Mendes press echochamber

We should not have been surprised that, from a 40-minute press conference about our movie "We Own the Night," the only take-away was Eva's bit about how she calmed her nerves before her character's intimate scene with Joaquin's character:

Eva Mendes admits to screwdriver before sex scene

Eva's sexy secret

Vodka helped Eva's sex scene

Eva Mendes gets liquored up for sex

Eva Mendes' nervous sex scene, vodka greases wheel

Screwdriver helped Eva with sex scene

Eva Mendes' drunken sex with Joaquin Phoenix

Eva Mendes got a little drunk for sex scene with Joaquin Phoenix.

The rest of the movie is also worth the price of admission.

Easy and Breezy

It's not every day that one's boss gives a public exhortation to undergo a medical procedure but today's Friday, so why not? In fact, our boss makes the procedure sound so nice we wouldn't be surprised if people started doing it recreationally.

Save the Date

It's official: Columbia Pictures will be releasing We Own the Night wide on October 12th. (image courtesy of our aptly named French distributor Wild Bunch)

Shills

The 2929 Productions website now features super-convenient links to the Amazon.com pages where you can buy our movies. Buy movies like the incredibly underrated Turistas or the liberal thriller (and conservative horror flick) Good Night, and Good Luck.

A propos of nothing

The Albanian eBay site is about to feature a certain presidential timekeeper.

'Tragic Indifference' Developments

On our slate is an adaptation of Adam Penenberg's book about the Ford-Firestone scandals from a few years ago Tragic Indifference (bad title, great book), whose main protagonist, attorney Tab Turner, is in the news today: He's taking on Ford again, arguing that Ford marketed its roll-over-prone Explorer specifically to safety-conscious soccer moms. In this article from the Sacramento Bee, our project gets a brief shout-out. Look for it in theaters, 2008 (with a new title). Buy the book here.

Enhanced Laziness Through Technology

Note to all unsolicited submitters out there: Send us an MP3 of your script and it'll get to the top of the slush pile. A new service at iscript.com will turn any screenplay into an MP3 audio file. This reminds me of the urban legend about a certain super-heroic Warners-based producer who, rather than read scripts himself, would have one of his assistants read the script into a tape-recorder.

A TED conference highlight

An artifact from the bleeding edge technology conference, TED:



How long until someone uses this to render a CG environment from this communally derived cache of photos? Maybe the next Pixar movie can be set in a photo-real environment? But the biggest story here is that throw-away comment that the presenter makes about how the Notre Dame composite isn't on the internet because of "the lawyers." How does one track down and license millions of people's photos?

Landmark opening

Our bosses opened a new Landmark Theatre at the Westside Pavilion over the weekend and, apparently, it did huge business. It isn't hard to see why--this is the kind of cinema that raises the filmgoing experience from mere habit to full-blown spectacle. We always thought it was strange that the high-end multi-plex treatment was reserved for the younger less discriminating filmgoers--whereas 'arthouse' usually meant 'crappy legroom.' Now the adults who actually care about the amenities and the gourmet cuisine are finally getting it.

Click here to buy tickets. The excellent Away From Her and Once are both playing.

In addition to singing...

He also gets singled out (or rather duo-pentagoned out) for his screenwriting. From the forthcoming "10 Screenwriters to Watch" feature in Variety:

MICHAEL BACALL, "Psycho Funky Chimp"
DANA FOX, "What Happens in Vegas"
KELLY FREMON, "Ticket to Ride"
EVAN GOLDBERG & SETH ROGEN, "Superbad"
JESSICA GOLDBERG, "Absent Hearts"
JASON DEAN HALL, "Rodney on the Roq"
CHRISTOPHER LANDON, "Disturbia," "The Flock"
PETER STRAUGHAN, "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People"
DANNY STRONG, "Recount"
JOSH ZETUMER, "Villain," "The Infiltrator"

And as bonus, Michael Bacall is working on 2929 project "Generation Dead." So we're two for ten (and this is without the $90 million/year that Warner Bros spends on development).

The Lincoln Bedroom

Screenwriter Josh Zetumer (who wrote VILLAIN, which will be 2929's next movie) is multi-talented--he writes harrowing and complicated screenplays and also performs larky upbeat alt-country tunes with his band the Lincoln Bedroom. Click here for a representative sample.

For starters

What better way to inaugurate the 2929 Productions blog than to link to a glowing review of WE OWN THE NIGHT from our friends across the pond at Le Monde (France's equivalent of The New York Times). For the non-francophone readers, below is a translation:

WE OWN THE NIGHT: A lawless and fatherless world

What a great title and what a great film! The former is taken from the NYPD slogan, the latter is one of the great triumphs of this year's Cannes competition. After LITTLE ODESSA (1994) and THE YARDS (2000), James Gray, who makes films only rarely, has made with his third film a dazzling new work in the cop genre.

We'll recognize the principal obsessions of the film: fractured brotherhood, the impossibility of true vengeance, the conflict between the law of the family and the law of the urban landscape. In this way, James Gray's work revitalizes the profound affinities between film noir and Greek tragedy, and in the process (under the conflicting auspices of the American Dream, the Russian Mafia, and the Jewish destiny), deals subtly with the problem of the search for identity.

"We Own the Night" brings back the universe of 1980s New York. That's where Bobby (Joaquin Phoenix) manages, in the company of of his girlfriend Amada (Eva Mendes, the ideal synthesis of grace and feminine sex appeal), a prosperous nightclub, for the head of a Russian family. Everything would go well if two irredeemably opposed forces didn't cross their weapons--under the sign of familial blood and fatalism--against Bobby's nirvana of hedonism and cocaine.

In the New York of that era, these two forces are represented by a police force with declining prestige and a Russian mafia that is less hemmed in and more aggressive. It's on Bobby's territory, not to mention by his very own flesh and blood, that these two forces will meet, in the form of a familial conflict.

You see, Bobby is, on one side, the actual son and the brother of two figures of the crime unit, Burt (Robert Duvall) and Joseph (Mark Wahlberg) Grusinsky, but on the other side, he's the adoptive son of his employer, the peaceful Russian patriarch, and a kind of hostage to the latter's nephew, Vadim, a pitiless drug trafficker.

MORAL GANGRENE

The plot of "We Own the Night," which we'll keep ourselves from saying a single more word about, is nothing more than the story of the choice that Bobby makes between these two filial obligations: the side that he's embarrassed about and has kept a secret to better free himself from the shackles of his integrity; and the side that opens the doors to the American Dream, which itself is starting to change, under the light of the disco ball and with easy drugs and easy money, into a nightmare of moral gangrene.

Having renounced his European heritage to become Robert Green, Bobby and his name represent this dilemma and the film uses him to pose the question of Kind in which Bobby, though aware of this European heritage, is inscribed at the same time by his American identity--juggling his kinships with both the Old and New Worlds.

This moral imperative that James Gray is outlining and the political incorrectness of the response to that moral imperative, are remarkable--even though they elicited some hooting in the screening. This imperative and its response suggest to us that a world without father and without law wouldn't be livable, that there's no new foundation that would allows us to assume its yoke and pay its price. Further, they tell us that fidelity to the family wouldn't even be able to oppose loyalty to the urban landscape in a world without faith and without law--and that the model of "We Own the Night" is closer to Abraham Polonsky's "Force of Evil" (1948), with its Biblical references that entangle two brothers on opposite sides of the law, than to Coppola's "Godfather."

From the actors' dazzling performances to the way that both spirit and flesh are dramatized, from the ideas and to the action, this film--in which the final word, sanctioning the inauguration ritual of the NYPD, is "amen"-- reminds us that James Gray is one of the greatest American directors of our time.