Day: October 3, 2004

The perception that Kerry won last week’s debate has wiped out President Bush’s lead in the race, according to the latest Newsweek poll. In the first national telephone survey following last Thursday’s debate, the newsweekly found that the race is now statistically tied among registered voters, with 47 per cent favoring Kerry vs. 45 per cent for Bush. All this means is that swing voters are total jellyfish. They all tumbled for Bush after the well-produced macho swagger of the Republican convention, giving him an 8 to 10-point lead, and then Kerry “wins” the debate and they all swing in the other direction because…is it okay to say this? Because swing voters are impressionable little weather vanes who want only to follow whoever’s got the heat.

29 year-old Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance as Howard Hughes in The Aviator (Warner Bros., 12.17) is “stunning,” producer Michael Mann has told Empire magazine. “Particularly in the second half, when he’s playing an older Hughes. He’s pheonomenal. It’s a really excellent piece of work.” A draft of John Logan’s script that I read in ’02 strongly suggests that the $100 million biopic won’t be about Hughes’ romantic dalliances with Kate Hepburn, Ava Garner and Jean Harlow as much as his passionate devotion to the task of making machines do things the world’s never seen before. Director Martin Scorsese may well deliver a beautifully made film with superb performances, but I wonder if audiences will warm to The Aviator, given Hughes’ basic weirdness….he was really an odd duck.

So Shark Tale did just shy of $50 million on its first weekend…big deal. A movie can be a box-office leviathan and people can still hate it. Everyone says it’s mainly about other movies, it’s got no heart, and the only good voice-actor performance is Martin Scorsese’s. Last May I attended a big DreamWorks presentation for Shark Tale at the Cannes Film Festival (footage, luncheon, and personal appearances by Will Smith, Jack Black and Angelina Jolie) As DreamWorks honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg introduced the footage he called it “a movie with heart.” Heart was precisely the missing component in the footage they showed, and I asked several journo pals if they had the same impression, and every last one of them shrugged and changed the subject and ate their food.