Day: September 14, 2004

A Tuesday New York Post story says Harvey and Bob Weinstein are looking to stay with Disney now that Michael Eisner’s agreed to step down (and you can bet he’ll be gone well before ’06). The brothers are no longer considering splitting up, the Post story reported, and are looking for a way to stay within the fold. Miramax spokesman Matthew Hiltzik told the newspaper that the Weinsteins “remain dedicated to achieving an amicable resolution that will allow Miramax to perpetuate Eisner’s legacy, and their own.”

Val Kilmer will soon begin performing his singing role as Moses in The Ten Commandments, a “spectacular pop stage musical” that “tells the 3,3000 year-old story of Moses’ exodus from Egypt and his journey towards happiness, life and rebirth,” according to Broadway World.com. (It’s apparently based on the DreamWorks animated musical feature.) Moses was happy? The only time Charlton Heston’s Moses smiled was when he embraced Anne Baxter. This sounds like horseshit for the tourists. And Kilmer is doing this for…the money?

I’m feeling more and more enraged at John Kerry for emulating Michael Dukakis, blowing his lead and forcing his campaign into a last-ditch catch-up mode. There’s now a very real possibility that Bush-Cheney will be in for another four, and this is no one’s fault but Kerry’s. I’m so pissed at him I’m having to calm myself down with cups of Buddha Broth. Kerry is something like 6 to 10 percentage points behind Bush, largely, it seems, because he took the advice of campaign strategist Bob Shrum to not go overly negative against the Swift Boat and Vietnam atrocity sound-bite charges, in defiance of the general feeling that Shrum himself was a huge problem. My Presidential campaign feelings used to be focused on a basic anti-Bush posture. Now they’re half anti-Bush and half Kerry-is-an-indecisive-jerkwad.

You shoulda seen the 20-somethings congregated around Book Soup on the Sunset strip last night (Monday, 9.13) to catch a glimpse of Paris Hilton, who paid a visit to the book store around 7 pm to sign copies of “Confessions of an Heiress: A Tongue-in-Chic Peek Behind the Pose” (Fireside). Men and women were looking to catch a peek through the window on the sidewalk, and a bunch of grungy guys were hanging around with digital cameras in the rear parking lot. Paris Hilton is just a rich ditz; people oohing and aahing her is a disease that really needs to be cured.

“September is way too early to declare an Academy Award winner,” admits N.Y. Daily News critic-columnist Jack Matthews, “but the Oscar engraver would do well to remember the spelling of Taylor Hackford’s star in the biographical drama Ray — it’s Jamie Foxx, with two Xs.” Foxx, he says, was “the talk of the town over the first half of the [Toronto Film Festival]. He gives such a complete performance as the late Ray Charles that you almost immediately forget you’re watching a performance by anyone other than Charles himself.” And yet Mathews also said that one of his big festival faves has been DreamWorks’ Shark Tale, and I haven’t been hearing that at all from other Toronto troopers. I’ve been hearing flip, facile, so-what and Will Smith can go diddle himself with his own fish tail (or words to that effect).