If you’ve never been to a press junket for a film, basically, the way it work is, the stars (or director or whatever) come in, and, for the better part of a day, they answer questions from reporters shuffled in for 20 minutes at a time. Inevitably, it’s either the same questions over and over again (“what was it like working with ____?” “Tell us about your character.”) or a zany reporter attempting to incorporate you into his/her shtick. And it’s pretty hard getting a bored person you’ve just met to play along with your shtick, trust me. It’s rare that I’ve gone to one where I haven’t wanted to c-punt at least one of the other reporters, and I wasn’t even the one who had to answer their lame questions. Basically, it’s a system almost perfectly designed to create testy exchanges, just like the one between Fusion reporter Romina Puga and Jesse Eisenberg the other day during the press tour for Now You See Me (a movie about bank-robbing magicians).

An exchange that led Puga to write:

Jesse Eisenberg is the quick-witted bully you think he is. He’s smart, sharp, and mean.

My goal at the press junket for his new movie Now You See Me was to loosen him up and have some fun — but I should’ve known better. He didn’t let me make him look like anything other than who he wanted me (or the public) to see. I caught him smirking at my attempts to be funny a few times, but he would immediately catch himself and insult me.

Yes, he compared my use of props to Carrot Top’s.

Having a conversation with Jesse Eisenberg was like having a conversation with my stubborn-as-a-mule older brother; he has to counter everything you say. But unlike my brother, who I am able to get up and walk away from, I had to sit through five minutes of tortuous conversation — scratch that, of arguing — with the 29-year-old New Yorker.

When the five minute “interview” (more like self-esteem butchering) were finally over I went behind a curtain to wait for the memory cards from the interview. I peaked around the curtain to ask Jesse about his neighborhood in New York (he lives a few blocks from where I used to live) and he immediately says, “You’re still here?”

UGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

I finally walked away.

As a junket reporter might say, meee-yow. You know a lady’s upset when she uses more than four consecutive Hs.

As it happens, I’ve actually done a junket with Jesse Eisenberg myself, back when he and Aziz Ansari were promoting 30 Minutes or Less. Obviously, I didn’t learn everything there is to know about the guy in the 40 minutes we spent together in a group setting, but I did come away thinking he seemed like a bit of a weird guy (especially compared to Aziz, who’s loud and outgoing and seems comfortable playing the host). Not weird-rude, just sort of uncomfortable and fidgety (in an uncomfortable setting). I think he was chewing on a piece of paper the whole time we were there. Basically, nice, but slightly shy and Asperger’s-y, like pretty much all the characters he’s played.

I definitely don’t think “bully” is accurate. But hey, don’t listen to me, LET’S GO TO THE GAME TAPE: (*pulls out telestrator and foam cowboy hat*)

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This is probably old news for you guys, since parts of this made it into my review of Mr. Angel from SXSW, but with Mr. Angel playing this year’s QDoc: Portland’s Queer Documentary Film Festival, I got to chat with Buck again for the Portland Mercury. Read it if you like!

To say Buck Angel, subject of Dan Hunt’s new documentary Mr. Angel, is “just a regular dude” is both 100 percent true and demonstrably false, which is part of his allure. As seen in Mr. Angel—one of the highlights of this year’s QDoc: Portland’s Queer Documentary Film Festival—Buck is a muscular guy with facial hair and tattoos, as well as female genitalia that he’s not shy about being photographed with. “I love my vagina, don’t you love your vagina?” he famously asked Tyra Banks on an appearance on her show depicted in Mr. Angel. (“I dunno, it’s aiiight, I guess” was her response.)

[check out the rest at the Portland Mercury]

Uwe Boll is disappointingly pleasant. His name strikes fear into the hearts of movie fans (and those who’ve watched Blackwoods at 2 a.m.), but when you’re in the same room as the most infamous of infamous directors, talking to him about his new film Assault on Wall Street, the most offensive thing about him is his German accent, and that’s only because all German accents are terrifying.

Where to begin with Boll? Do you start with him often being next to Ed Wood in the list of the worst directors of all-time, except unlike Wood, he doesn’t have a great Tim Burton movie to polish his legacy (yet…?)? Or maybe his string of awful to there-is-no-God-awful video game adaptations, including In the Name of the King (4% on Rotten Tomatoes), BloodRayne (4%), and naturally, BloodRayne 2: Deliverance (unrated; direct to DVD)? Or possibly his suing a film festival for $170 (and Billy Zane for $170,000), or his blogger boxing matches, or Blubberella, or Auschwitz, or the time he called Michael Bay and Eli Roth “f*cking retards”? OK, that last one was pretty great, but otherwise, it’s been a whole lotta nothing from the man whose middle finger picture will be on his tombstone.

So I regret to inform you that Assault isn’t terrible. Unlike most of Boll’s work, it’s meant to inspire. Inspire those who’ve been f*cked over by bankers to get violent revenge, but inspire nonetheless. Assault stars Dominic Purcell (Prison Break) as a blue-collar security guard with an extremely ill wife (Erin Karpluk) whose life is upended when…you get where this is going…and then there’s an absolute bloodbath. The film isn’t subtle in the least and spends too much time drowning in its nihilistic misery, but its anger is genuine; it never feels like Boll’s taking advantage of something terrible for his own personal gain (unlike his previous work). He’s genuinely pissed at what happened and all too happy to talk about it, as he did during our 10-minute interview in New York last month.

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In honor of today yesterday’s DVD/Blu-Ray release of Jack Reacher (much better than most people gave it credit for, in my bro-pinion), the residing publicist reached out to see if I’d be interested in interviewing the stunt driver who worked with Tom Cruise on the movie, Joey Box. Naturally, I jumped at the chance. How could I pass up the opportunity to interview a guy who sounds like a Soprano’s character?

“It’s actually the name I was born with, but yeah, I get that a lot,” Joey Box told me, sounding like a guy who gets that a lot.

I reached Joey Box by phone a few days ago as he was in the middle of some paperwork.

VINCE: So how did you originally get into stunt driving?
BOX: I had been a stunt man in motion pictures for 25 years now, and doubled many actors over the years. And, you know… as a stunt man you start out mostly hitting the ground, doing stunt falls. Unless you’re a racecar driver and you start out that way. But for the most part, driving’s something that you evolve to.

I don’t know what Drive world I was envisioning where stunt drivers are plucked from the motorcycle spheres at the Schenectady County Fair, but I was hoping for a better story than “it’s something you evolve to,” no matter how true it might be. Here’s the thing about stuntmen, plus a broader generalization about people who do crazy shit for a living: to them, it’s not crazy shit. To them it’s a job, and for a lot of them, talking about it is about as fascinating and you or I talking about filling out TPS reports. You kind of have to take them outside themselves, because in their world crashing cars is pretty banal.

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(picture via)

I’m scheduled for a phone interview with Christopher McDonald at 9 am. Probably best known to those of my generation as Shooter McGavin, Happy Gilmore’s preening nemesis who likes to repeat his favorite joke about spending more time in the sand than David Hasselhoff, McDonald is the archetypal “that guy,” a character actor with 160-plus IMDB credits who’s more recognizable as his characters than himself, a household face if not a name. He specializes in pompous with an air of menace, plays a lot of newscasters and lawyers. It’s that voice, the kind of boomy baritone you imagine radio guys practicing in their bedrooms, that gives everything he says an air of the theatrical. On this particular week, he’s promoting Lucky Guy, a play Nora Ephron wrote that she was working on up until her death last June. Based on Ephron’s experiences as a New York Post reporter in the “scandal-and-graffiti-ridden New York” of the early 80s, Tom Hanks stars as tabloid columnist Mike McAlary, with McDonald supporting as Eddie Hayes, a litigator and “New York personality,” known for his expensive suits (above, right). The production just extended its run through July.

At 10 till nine I get a phone call. “Hey, it’s Chris. I was wondering if we could push the interview. I’m in the middle of trying to get a library card.”

Interviews almost never happen on time, but as far as excuses go, that’s a new one. That he called me himself, ahead of schedule, is also anomalous. I tell him sure, I’ll call him back at 9:15. At 9:17, I call him back from my Skype account and get his voicemail. As I’m leaving the message I get a call back on my cell. “Hey, man, what gives? You were supposed to call me three minutes ago.”

There’s that air of menace. I can tell he’s not really angry, but I can also sense that if he was, he and that voice could probably make me piss my pants. I tell him I called him back on a different number so I could record. “Are you in any way affiliated with the actor Nick Mancuso?” he asks, probably the weirdest question I’ve ever been asked.

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