The late summer doldrums are over and awards season is about to start, so I hope you brought your movie-watchin’ pants (mine have an extra-absorbent crotch). One of our first post-Labor Day trailers comes from David Gordon Green and producing partners George Clooney and Grant Heslov, and probably has the fall season’s coolest title: Our Brand Is Crisis.
Based on the documentary of the same name, which followed James Carville and his political consulting firm, Greenberg Carville Shrum, as they tried to win a Bolivian presidential campaign for dubious candidate Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, this version (scripted by Peter Straughan) stars Sandra Bullock as a (presumably more good) Carville rival named ‘Calamity’ Jane Bodine, with Carville fictionalized as a bald Billy Bob Thornton character “Pat Candy.” It sounds like Peter Straughan went to the Christopher Buckley school of character naming, which is fitting, since James Carville has always seemed like a Chris Buckley character come to life.
Anyway, David Gordon Green has been a busy boy lately, and while I wasn’t as taken with Joe as everyone else seemed to be, I will go to my grave defending Your Highness, and hopefully I’ll be able to tell you whether this one’s worth a sh*t this week when I see it at TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival). I might have to skip The Danish Girl to see it! Oh no! I’m already hearing that Eddie Redmayne’s performance is so, so brave.
I do think it’s interesting that the Argo producing team took a story that seems to be about Americans being kind of terrible and turned it into what looks like a feel-good American story (Argo-esque, say) with the simple addition of Sandra Bullock. Someday they’re going to study this in Hollywood producing school.
“Yer changin’ those Bolivians’ lahfes.”
“Nope. Those Bolivians’re changin’ mahn.”