- Hey, we wish we had time to look at these more closely or bring in local copies, but in the meantime…Two new interviews with Kev are online…One from Reel.Com’s new beta site and another on the Borders website. We think they’re both on the Mallrats DVD, but they look kinda long, so we’re sure a lot’s covered. Enjoy.
Archive for August, 1999
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- Looks like Mad Magazine‘s catching on to the Jay-like character in “Detroit Rock City”, too. We hear in their parody of the flick that, when they show the character, they say “the idiot hanging out at a conveniece store was done before and better in Clerks.” You go, Mad.
- Another role for Joey Adams! She’s on fire! Variety reports that she’s in talks to join Minnie Driver in an upcoming flick called “Beautiful”, which starts filming in September and will be directed by Sally Field. We’ll keep ya posted. The Canoe website also ran a piece on the actress today, in which she talks about stuff like getting a role after ‘Amy’, and, yes, her voice:
She can speak Hollywoodese
Baby-voiced Joey Lauren Adams has learned that money talks
By JIM SLOTEK — Toronto Sun
HOLLYWOOD — It was one of life’s lessons for Joey Lauren Adams. You can get all the indie credibility in the world, but only money talks.
Adams — who’s the love interest in the Adam Sandler summer hit Big Daddy — had her face plastered all over the movie mags for her starring role in Chasing Amy, in which she played a cute, baby-voiced lesbian, falling in and out of love with a besotted guy (Ben Affleck).
The baby-voiced Adams fell in love with the director, Kevin Smith (a relationship that eventually ended), but that was all she got out of the movie when the applause died down.
‘ANYTHING I WANT’ “I thought after Chasing Amy, I would be able to do anything I want, which definitely wasn’t the case,” the 31-year-old actress says. “This small script came to me with James Garner attached, called Tuesday’s Letter. I really wanted to do it, but we all tried and couldn’t get it financed. I mean, I’d been nominated for a Golden Globe! Why couldn’t I get this movie?”
Then she foolishly took the best script available, rather than the most commercial. That would be A Cool Dry Place, an intelligent drama shot in Toronto for director John N. Smith (during which she and co-star Vince Vaughn became an item). There’ve been more Sasquatch sightings than reports of the film on theatre marquees. It now sits on video shelves.
“So I realized I had to do a film that makes money to do the projects that I want.” Which is a diplomatic way of saying she realizes there’ll be no Oscar noms for Big Daddy (in which Sandler plays an irresponsible bachelor who’s left to care for a five-year-old kid), and that, frankly, the female characters in a boys movie like this are not exactly deeply drawn.
But here’s what we want to know from Adams, who plays a goal-oriented, workaholic lawyer whose heart is melted by this big baboon. Why would an ambitious professional woman get caught up in a relationship with a case of arrested development of the sort Sandler plays?
Adams laughs. “My therapist says it happens all the time!” Therapist? “I started going about a year and a half ago, just when I have a crisis. I just started dealing with a lot of father issues this year (her father was a lumberyard owner in Arkansas), and dealing with the effect your upbringing has on you. I’ve started looking at my relationship with my father in a very honest way, and realizing how it affects the way I am with men. And you just kind of sit there and go, ‘Duh! Why didn’t I see this before? My father didn’t talk to me, so I feel men don’t understand me!’ ”
In fact, it’s been one long voyage of self-discovery for Adams since she left Arkansas at age 19, first to attend college in San Diego, and then to follow her star in L.A.
“My first job in L.A., I was hired as a backup singer for a county-western singer named Troy Cory, and we toured China. Well, we were supposed to tour China but we were kicked out. We were in Shanghai, and he would take uppers and then downers and sing the same verse over and over, and they’re very strict over there about that stuff. Tie A Yellow Ribbon was a show-stopper, and other than that they didn’t know any Western music except for Wham! It was just a nightmare. We’d have our little dances choreographed and Troy Cory would come up and try to rub against us onstage.”
‘NOT A NORMAL VOICE’ Up next? “I don’t know. I read one script I really, really, really like, but I think my voice might be a problem. The director doesn’t like it. I can talk a little deeper, but it doesn’t sound like me.
“It’s not a normal voice. It doesn’t fit into people’s preconceptions about what a woman’s voice should sound like. My mom doesn’t think I have an unusual voice, though. I’m sure it’s helped me get some roles. But Chasing Amy, I almost didn’t get. There was concern the voice would grate on some people — which some critics said it did.”
Commentary…
- So. Wow. Here we go…The start of yet another exciting week here at News Askew. Ya never know what’s gonna happen, and we guess that’s part of the fun. As for the new server, we’re hammering it pretty hard, and we’re told they’re not used to this high volume of a site. Oh well. Hopefully they don’t kick us off, it’s the first we’ve heard of this. That’s a good sign that we’re getting mondo hits, and that makes us happy! Speaking of that, you may have noticed the counters crashed yesterday. Neither us OR our new hosts could tell us why. We reset the main counters, but got rid of many of the counters on our subpages to try and prevent it from happening again. Now, there’s only counters on News Askew and Dogma RC.
As for other stuff, yes, we still have some ideas up our sleeves, but it’s all been happening so slowly around here with the switch that we can’t introduce stuff as quickly as we’d like. Bear with us. Hopefully all of you are finding us at the new server by now, but if you’re STILL getting that white forwarding page, let us know. Otherwise, the old server will go completely offline, sometime this week we believe.
Alright, at this point, not much more to say, except…On with the show!
View Askew NewsBites™
- In the spirit of keeping up with stuff and making it exclusive to RC, we’ve added a few new articles on our Dogma site. Mostly summaries of stuff we know already, as the press gets caught up on all the latest (The Lions Gate stuff especially). Check them out here and here.
- DVDexpress has made a list of the top 25 DVD’s based on content of deleted scenes. Not surprisingly, the jam-packed View Askew DVDs have ranked incredibly well. Mallrats is number 1 and Clerks is number 8.
- Finally, on the lighter side of things…What if the battle of Mr T. vs. Clerks took place? Find out here. We can just see it now. “I pity the fool that don’t give me a pack of cigarettes!”.
Commentary…
- Phew…The weekends go by alllllll too quickly, we gotta say. Anyway, welcome to a very small sunday update. Not much goin’ on at all around here, but we’ve got a few tidbits, as always. Just for the sake of putting SOMETHING on the site. The poll topic’s here as well, just to allow YOU all to decide the order in which we give out the raffle prizes on our September 1st chat…(Best prizes first OR last, basically). Top choice is gonna be the way we do things. Remember, though, you CAN win more than once if you got a lot of entries, so the order really shouldn’t matter too much. Okay, here we go now…
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- Comic book artist Jim Mahfood who did Clerks, Scud, Zombie Kid and GRRL Scouts is doing a signing at the Fantasy Shop in St. Charles in St. Louis, Missouri on Sat. August 21st from 1 to 4 p.m. Jim will have most of his material on hand to sign/sell and will be selling original sketches on request. Stop and say hi, Jim’s a good guy.
- Here’s that new Dogma pic from the Entertainment Weekly piece. We’ll throw it over on our RC pix section, too.
- Reminder: “Chasing Amy” is playing at the AMC South Barrington 30 tonight at 12:15am in Illinois. Past our bedtime, but some of you nite owls may wanna check it out. We gotta work tomorrow!
Commentary…
- Incredibly late update today, so if it seems rushed we apologize – I don’t even think I may take the time to hyperlink it…Well, let’s just see how long it takes to do. Regardless, there won’t be a Saturday update, it’s party time! Perhaps late, late Sunday, after sleeping off a nasty hangover, there’ll be the strength to type a few words for you good folks. We FINALLY got the DNS stuff straighted, so now, if you’re STILL not seeing the new page first (and you get the forwarding white page before the News Askew frontpage), let us know…We wanna see how bad the problem still is. If it’s gone, we’ll take the old server completely offline.
As always thanks for visiting today, we appreciate it…Hope you enjoy the news we’ve got for ya:
Dogma Selected For New York Film Festival!
- Big news comes down today for Dogma…It’s going to be playing at the prestigious New York Film Festival!!! This is another excellent nod from the film community for Dogma, and we’re glad to see it. The fest is also showing “Being John Malcovich”, a flick you may have heard us mention before and that we’re just dying to see after reading Corona’s reports on the thing. Sounds weird. Anyway, both indieWIRE and The Hollywood Reporter ran a story on the films selected for the festival today…we’re just going to share with you the opening paragraphs of each piece, which mention Dogma, to keep this short. First indieWIRE, then Hollywood Reporter:
The lineup of this year’s New York Film Festival is dominated by controversial fare, including Kevin Smith’s satire of Roman Catholicism, “Dogma,” Harmony Korine’s Dogma 95-style “Julien Donkey-Boy” and Frenchman Léos Carax’s “Pola X,” which was booed at its Cannes premiere.
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The Film Society of Lincoln Center has confirmed the lineup for the 37th New York Film Festival. After opening with Cannes critics’ favorite, Pedro Almodovar’s “All About My Mother,” the 37th New York Film Festival gets under way on September 24 with a collection of highly anticipated international films. Harmony Korine’s digitally shot Dogma 95 entry “Julien Donkey Boy” will bow in New York after its world debut in Venice. As will Mike Leigh’s Festival Centerpiece “Topsy Turvy,” a biopic about British composers Gilbert and Sullivan, to be released this fall by USA Films. The distributor formerly known as October Films will also unveil music video director Spike Jonze’s first film “Being John Malkovich,” which will also show at Venice. Other domestic highlights include Kevin Smith’s religious comedy “Dogma,” Kim Pierce’s fictionalized version of the Brendan Teena Story, Fox Searchlight’s “Boys Don’t Cry” (formerly titled “Take It Like A Man”) and Robinson Devor’s “The Woman Chaser.”
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- Even more, Harley had become a pop icon of sorts within the comics community, her popularity guaranteed for long into the next generation thanks to things like Kevin Smith naming his daughter after the character (“How cool is that?” Dini asks) and upcoming Detective Comics writer Greg Rucka sporting a Harley Quinn tattoo on his arm, something he’ll have a fun time explaining to his children.
EDITORIAL: Should Dogma Appear Earlier?
- Is anyone else worried about Dogma’s release date? Sure, we’re happy to finally have one, but we couldn’t help but think that Dogma’s month to shine would have been October. There’s ALWAYS going to be competition out there at the box office, but we wonder if this release date choice is just a time factor, to give Lions Gate time to build a campaign, or rather just a business decision. It looks like Tim Burton’s “Sleepy Hollow” may see release on the EXACT same day as Dogma, a film which has its own cultish status due to Burton himself (though not NEARLY as attention-getting a cast as Dogma’s, if you ask us), plus you’ve got the new Bond flick just one week later (which ya know is going to take the number one slot THAT week, no matter how good or bad a film it is. Hey, if “Wild Wild West” can be number one at the box office, ANYTHING can, remember that.) But we digress. The point is, Dogma’s a damn fine film, and one that deserves to be seen by a large audience theatrically. There’s no doubt in our minds that, once Dogma hits home video down the road, it will become a cult favorite like the Jersey trilogy, top the charts, and receive much praise. We’re just hoping for this flick to be the big, mainstream, high box-office breakout feature that Kevin deserves so much.
So we ask…Lions Gate, Weinsteins, & Crew Askew: Perhaps you’d consider bumping Dogma up a couple weeks? At least releasing in the major cities a few weeks prior to going wide? You’ll please the eager fans as well as increase chances for some big box office before the onslaught of other genre films that risk stealing Dogma’s audience. Or even better, rush out a release on September 1st, when possibly one of the worst films to ever see wide release, “The Astronaut’s Wife”, streets. Wow, we can smell the money from here. But seriously, for us, October’s wide open except for “Fight Club”, and a sure-fire win for Dogma. As the weeks go by, it just seems like things are gonna get more crowded out there.
Dogma is a fantastic, highly original, entertaining film, and thus has that Blair Witch word-of-mouth potential going for it. It’d be great to hit the ground running and build a solid following for the flick before it gets lost in the Bond’s explosions and Burton’s latest.Something to think about, anyway.