Bad Calls

I’m appalled (and I’m not alone) that two of the absolute finest, no-argument-tolerated docs of the year — Xan Cassevettes’ Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession and Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation — have been excluded from the list of 12 semi-finalists for the Best Feature Documentary Oscar.
One of the docs that made the cut is Stacy Peralta’s Riding Giants , an honest, open-hearted film about surfing that is nonetheless a bit too fan-maggish in toasting the champions of the sport. Sorry to sound harsh, but there’s no way this is a stronger, more accomplished work than Z Channel or Tarnation. Giants doesn’t begin to approach their realm in terms of passion, intelligence, soul.

And what about Kevin McDonald’s Touching the Void, a movie that has its roots on both sides of the aisle, making the cut? There is no bigger fan of Void than myself, but in an ideal world it should be a Best Picture nominee. I’ve had it on my Best Picture list in the Oscar Balloon section for months.
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I sympathize with the motives of those who put Void on the semi-final list, but it’s not a documentary. It’s mainly a docu-drama…a recreation. It uses actors who speak lines. It’s about a mountain-climbing adventure that happened in South America, and yet the bulk of it was largely shot in the Swiss Alps. The only thing that makes it feel like a doc is the talking-head footage of the real mountain-climbers.
Among the docs that made the short list are Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me (fully deserved), Mark Wexler’s Tell Them Who You Are (a tribute to Mark’s cinematographer dad Haskell, in the vein of last year’s My Architect), Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman’s Born Into Brothels and Jessica Yu’s In the Realms of the Unreal.

Other deserving hopefuls that got the shaft were Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, Robert Stone’s Guerilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst and Sara Price and Chris Smith’s The Yes Men.
Guerilla friend Fredel Pogodin said this morning that “given the monumental task that Stone went through to find the footage for this film, and to track down Russell Little and all the others, it is indeed a surprise that doc filmmakers who understand the difficulty in doing this did not put it on the short list.”
And yet, on the whole, “It’s a great time for documentaries. There’s an amazing amount of them that qualified this year. And the selection process has changed — the rules are now that only filmmakers in the documentary branch can name the semi-finalists. That’s an improvement from years before.”

Backstroke

I’ve been saying snide and dismissive things about the idea of The Phantom of the Opera being the strongest Best Picture candidate around right now, and because of this I feel I ought to say what I now believe, having seen it a couple of nights ago:
It ain’t my particular cup of tea, but Phantom delivers a big wham, regular folks are going for it, and it will almost certainly make the cut as a Best Picture nominee. Hell, it might even go all the way.

I’d rather not see that happen, being a Sideways man all the way, and (who knows?) maybe a Spanglish convert waiting to happen, as well as a Motorcycle Diaries) admirer, a worshipper of Maria Full of Grace, a Fahrenheit 9/11 protest-the-election-of-Bush guy and a devout believer in Collateral, not to mention Touching the Void.
If Phantom wins I will not be in pain, like I was when Chicago won two years ago. I will not agree, but I will understand.
I was down on the prospect of its Oscar ascension due to three factors. One, my general discomfort with emotionally bombastic films that send you over the waterfall (although I really liked Evita). Two, a reluctance to trust the notion that director Joel Schumacher has it in him to deliver a truly worthy Best Picture contender, given several disappointments with his past films. And three, stuff that I’ve been hearing over the past couple of weeks from colleagues.
I’m not saying the people who aren’t fans of this film are wrong, and I’m not going to get into a point-for-point review of any kind, but at least give Phantom this: it is not half-hearted.
You can bring up subtlety issues, and I’m sure some will address this down the road, but by any measure of committed filmmaking it takes Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stage musical and really rocks the house. Call it cornball, but it heats up the emotional essence of the piece and wears its heart on its sleeve. The actors hold their own, the musical sequences all swing for the fences, and John Mathieson’s cinematography is rich and painterly. The film plays like a Baz Luhrman musical on a mild sedative, and by that I mean it doesn’t make your head explode.

I suppose I sound like a square to some of you right now, but with that big 60-piece orchestra sawing away and the knockout production design and the sound cranked up and the film playing on a big screen with an appreciative crowd, the “whoa” factor is definitely there. In terms of the overall effort, I mean.
And so in the final analysis and various reservations aside, I’ve resigned myself to the likelihood of a Best Picture nomination because it satisfies the middle-class emotional criteria that Academy members tend to look for and respond to.
Picking over the particulars is for sometime next month. I just had to say this and set things straight. You can go with Phantom or not, but movies like this have their place. It’s not a crime to accept what they’re selling and go, “Yeah, I get it.”

Musical vs. Musical?

A friend thinks there’s some Academy mentality no-no about putting two musicals up for Best Picture in the same year. He says if this attitude holds it’s going to be an either-or between Ray and The Phantom of the Opera.
I don’t buy this. Ray is not a musical — it’s a biopic with a lot of musical numbers. And I reminded him that My Fair Lady was nominated for Best Picture against Mary Poppins in ’65, and Oliver against Funny Girl in ’69. (They were released in ’64 and ’68, respectively, but the nominations happen in January.)
And how strong a contender is Ray anyway? The talk I’ve heard all along is that Jamie Foxx is a lock for Best Actor, but that the film is an enjoyable and respectable thing but nothing to go out into the street naked and shout about.

Big Tinted Glasses

Last weekend I went up to Universal City Walk, a sickening corporate environment that mixes The Fall of the Roman Empire with Animal House, and shelled out $15 bucks to see The Polar Express in IMAX 3-D. It was worth it. However the movie plays in regular presentations (I hadn’t seen it before), this has to be better. This is a movie about digital technology first and all the other stuff second, but I didn’t mind because it looked so big and cool.

Okay, I had some quibbles. How many roller-coaster thrill ride sequences does this film have? Three? Four? It feels like one too many. The young African-American girl (the one with the leadership qualities) does look like she’s from Village of the Damned . And Manohla Dargis is right — that big red bag of gifts does look like a giant scrotum. But I have to say I thought Tom Hanks’ performance as the train conductor was note perfect. It’s not a big reach thing, but he handles it with just the right emphasis.

Prick Up Your Ears

Eddie Smith of Bainbridge Island, Washington, was the first to correctly identify all three of Friday’s (11.12) sound clips.
Clip #1 is Steve McQueen and Simon Oakland discussing the aftermath of a mob hit in Peter Yates’ Bullitt (’68) (b) Clip #2 is James Dean and Corey Allen standing on the bluff just before their chicken run in Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (’55); and (c) Clip #3 is Thomas Gomez talking to Humphrey Bogart in an early scene from John Huston’s Key Largo (’48).
Today’s Clip #1 is a philosophical riff that most over-40s will probably recognize in a heartbeat; (b) Clip #2 and Clip #3 are taken from the same scene in a relatively recent film; and Clip #4 is not from a Gene Kelly musical or an Adam Sandler comedy.
I’ll post the winner in the column in next Wednesday’s column.

Authorship

Too many people who write in fail to sign their names at the bottom of the e-mail. I copy and paste the letter into A Word file for a new column (which always includes letters), and the name of the writer isn’t there. I could afford a down payment on a new car if I had a dollar for every time I had to go back to an e-mail to search for the f***ing writer’s name. Spare me this exercise the next time you write a comment or whatever.

Hot Legs

“Why are you on your cell at Pavilions pontificating about the Oscars? This act is one of the reasons L.A. is the most shallow place on earth. As if you can’t go food shopping without cluttering people’s head with your thoughts, let alone a topic so useless as `what’s going to be nominated’?

“Have you no ability to see yourself from an objective angle? It’s so disspiriting that you can’t go about a normal errand without ranting about the friggin Oscars. Don’t you realize there are homosexuals trying to pick each other up there? They don’t want to be bothered with your Oscar jibberish — well, unless you were wearing short shorts.” — Larry Fisch
Wells to Fisch: Any hip gay guy at Pavilions with functional “gaydar” should be able to read me as one of those anguished hetero types from 100 yards off. I go to Pavillions partly for the hot 30ish women, if you really want to know.

Passion Fruit

“Like too many Oscar handicappers, you’re overlooking a big, ugly elephant in the room. There is one film that is a definite lock for a Best Picture nomination no matter what, and that is The Passion of the Christ.
“Not that it’s a good film, of course. In fact, it’s a lousy film. And not that the Academy is likely to have much affection for a nearly-plotless s&m-tinged propaganda film for pre-Vatican II Catholic regressionism/evangelical fundamentalism. But the Academy makes political nominations often enough, and I’m convinced that they’ll nominate Mel Gibson’s opus for just such a reason.
“A huge part of the volunteer marketing effort for The Passion was the spewing by religious-right media personalities of a baseless conspiracy theory that the film and Gibson were under attack by the liberal/gay/Jewish/secular media “cabal” that supposedly controls Hollywood and the media, and that it was believer’s Christian duty to get out and support the film to stick it to them.

“The Academy doubtlessly is aware of this, and even though they’ve surely got no intention of handing the Big Prize to this film, they are aware that if they don’t nominate Gibson’s vision the likes of James Dobson, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell will whip up an anti-Oscar media firestorm, claiming that the film is being denied a nod because the liberal Academy hates Christians!”
“It’l be too bad if of all the worthy films this year, at least one will be denied a place because of the Academy won’t risk the wrath of Evangelical extremists, and if I’m right it’s a depression situation indeed.” — Rufus T. Firefly
“I originally wasn’t very high on seeing The Incredibles because I wasn’t that nuts about Brad Bird’s Iron Giant and I thought The Incredibles would be more of the same. Instead, it’s a very witty take on superhero lore as well as the joys and foibles of family life. It’s one of the nuttiest movies I’ve seen about being normal in a long time but it works.
“The Polar Express, on the other hand, is an amazing bomb not only because it is really creepy. Who on earth dreamed up the North Pole stuff with Nazi elves? They reminded me of the African-American midget from Bad Santa. It’s also a crashingly boring and predictable movie.
“The Incredibles has people going back a second time to catch all the stuff they missed or enjoy it again. You see Polar Exprss once and that’s all you need, unless you do want to go catch it in 3-D, where it ought to be…well, incredible.” — M.

Predictions

“Some random thoughts on the Oscars…
“(1) Ray shouldn’t be seen as a serious contender for Best Picture. It offers a moderately good impersonation of Ray Charles by a moderately good actor but it’s a essentially a mediocre TV biopic. Why won’t anyone acknowledge this?
“(2) I know it will never get a nomination but Kill Bill Vol. 2 definitely deserves awards consideration in several categories: director, actress, supporting actor, cinematography, etc. Can somebody please make at least a modest push for this, the best crafted film of the year so far?
“(3) I Heart Huckabees won’t win or get nominated for anything. Too many people hate it.

“(4) As someone who has seen The Assassination of Richard Nixon, Sean Penn better get another nomination for this. It’s an infinitely better film and he gives a better performance in it than Mystic River but I assume nobody will see it.
“(5) Why does everyone assume that every Scorsese film is an automatic Oscar contender? This becomes the criteria by which they’re judged and some excellent movies (i.e. Casino) get dismissed because they don’t fit into the very limited Oscar package. I hope The Aviator is great and I hope it gets awards but I’d much rather see a solid, intelligent character study than a half-baked piece of Oscar bait like Ray.
“(6) I know there’s resistance to Sideways but don’t rule it out. It may not win best picture but it will definitely be nominated. Mark my words.
“(7) The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou should not be forgotten. Movies that win Oscars are always very showy in their use of the tools of filmmaking (photography, costumes, sets, locations, actors, music, etc.) because then they appeal to a broad range of voters. The main thing against Sideways is that it doesn’t show off in these areas as much as the Academy likes. The Life Aquatic does. Admittedly, it may be a little too weird for Academy voters but it’s making people cry and that’s important. I know a few people who cried like babies when they saw it. Plus, don’t forget that Anderson is obsessed with American movies from the 30s, 40s, and 50s, the same era of films that the influential older Academy members made and/or grew up with.
“And by the way, why haven’t you seen/written about Undertow yet? It’s a real 70s throwback and may be up your alley, although I fear it may be too poetic for your taste (i.e. Lost in Translation). Still, you should check it out. ” — Jonathan Doyle

Bad Calls

I’m appalled (and I’m not alone) that two of the absolute finest, no-argument-tolerated docs of the year — Xan Cassevettes’ Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession and Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation — have been excluded from the list of 12 semi-finalists for the Best Feature Documentary Oscar.
One of the docs that made the cut is Stacy Peralta’s Riding Giants, an honest, open-hearted film about surfing that is nonetheless a bit too fan-maggish in toasting the champions of the sport. Sorry to sound harsh, but there’s no way this is a stronger, more accomplished work than Z Channel or Tarnation. Giants doesn’t begin to approach their realm in terms of passion and intelligence.

And what about Kevin McDonald’s Touching the Void, a movie that has its roots on both sides of the aisle, making the cut? There is no bigger fan of Void than myself, but in an ideal world it should be a Best Picture nominee. I’ve had it on my Best Picture list in the Oscar Balloon section for months.
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I sympathize with the motives of those who put Void on the semi-final list, but it’s not a documentary. It’s mainly a docu-drama…a recreation. It uses actors who speak lines. It’s about a mountain-climbing adventure that happened in South America, and yet the bulk of it was largely shot in the Swiss Alps. The only thing that makes it feel like a doc is the talking-head footage of the real mountain-climbers.
Among the docs that made the short list are Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me (fully deserved), Mark Wexler’s Tell Them Who You Are (a tribute to Mark’s cinematographer dad Haskell, in the vein of last year’s My Architect), Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman’s Born Into Brothels and Jessica Yu’s In the Realms of the Unreal.

Other deserving hopefuls that got the shaft were Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, Robert Stone’s Guerilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst and Sara Price and Chris Smith’s The Yes Men.
Guerilla friend Fredel Pogodin said this morning that “given the monumental task that Stone went through to find the footage for this film, and to track down Russell Little and all the others, it is indeed a surprise that doc filmmakers who understand the difficulty in doing this did not put it on the short list.”
And yet, on the whole, “It’s a great time for documentaries. There’s an amazing amount of them that qualified this year. And the selection process has changed — the rules are now that only filmmakers in the documentary branch can name the semi-finalists. That’s an improvement from years before.”

Backstroke

I’ve been saying snide and dismissive things about the idea of The Phantom of the Opera being the strongest Best Picture candidate around right now, and because of this I feel I ought to say what I now believe, having seen it a couple of nights ago:
It ain’t my particular cup of tea, but Phantom delivers a big wham, regular folks are going for it, and it will almost certainly make the cut as a Best Picture nominee. Hell, it might even go all the way.

I’d rather not see that happen, being a Sideways man all the way, and (who knows?) maybe a Spanglish convert waiting to happen, as well as a Motorcycle Diaries) admirer, a worshipper of Maria Full of Grace, a Fahrenheit 9/11 protest-the-election-of-Bush guy and a devout believer in Collateral, not to mention Touching the Void.
If Phantom wins I will not be in pain, like I was when Chicago won two years ago. I will not agree, but I will understand.
I was down on the prospect of its Oscar ascension due to three factors. One, my general discomfort with emotionally bombastic films that send you over the waterfall (although I really liked Evita). Two, a reluctance to trust the notion that director Joel Schumacher has it in him to deliver a truly worthy Best Picture contender, given several disappointments with his past films. And three, stuff that I’ve been hearing over the past couple of weeks from colleagues.
I’m not saying the people who aren’t fans of this film are wrong, and I’m not going to get into a point-for-point review of any kind, but at least give Phantom this: it is not half-hearted.
You can bring up subtlety issues, and I’m sure some will address this down the road, but by any measure of committed filmmaking it takes Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stage musical and really rocks the house. Call it cornball, but it heats up the emotional essence of the piece and wears its heart on its sleeve. The actors hold their own, the musical sequences all swing for the fences, and John Mathieson’s cinematography is rich and painterly. The film plays like a Baz Luhrman musical on a mild sedative, and by that I mean it doesn’t make your head explode.

I suppose I sound like a square to some of you right now, but with that big 60-piece orchestra sawing away and the knockout production design and the sound cranked up and the film playing on a big screen with an appreciative crowd, the “whoa” factor is definitely there. In terms of the overall effort, I mean.
And so in the final analysis and various reservations aside, I’ve resigned myself to the likelihood of a Best Picture nomination because it satisfies the middle-class emotional criteria that Academy members tend to look for and respond to.
Picking over the particulars is for sometime next month. I just had to say this and set things straight. You can go with Phantom or not, but movies like this have their place. It’s not a crime to accept what they’re selling and go, “Yeah, I get it.”

Musical vs. Musical?

A friend thinks there’s some Academy mentality no-no about putting two musicals up for Best Picture in the same year. He says if this attitude holds it’s going to be an either-or between Ray and The Phantom of the Opera.
I don’t buy this. Ray is not a musical — it’s a biopic with a lot of musical numbers. And I reminded him that My Fair Lady was nominated for Best Picture against Mary Poppins in ’65, and Oliver against Funny Girl in ’69. (They were released in ’64 and ’68, respectively, but the nominations happen in January.)
And how strong a contender is Ray anyway? The talk I’ve heard all along is that Jamie Foxx is a lock for Best Actor, but that the film is an enjoyable and respectable thing but nothing to go out into the street naked and shout about.

Big Tinted Glasses

Last weekend I went up to Universal City Walk, a sickening corporate environment that mixes The Fall of the Roman Empire with Animal House, and shelled out $15 bucks to see The Polar Express in IMAX 3-D. It was worth it. However the movie plays in regular presentations (I hadn’t seen it before), this has to be better. This is a movie about digital technology first and all the other stuff second, but I didn’t mind because it looked so big and cool.

Okay, I had some quibbles. How many roller-coaster thrill ride sequences does this film have? Three? Four? It feels like one too many. The young African-American girl (the one with the leadership qualities) does look like she’s from Village of the Damned . And Manohla Dargis is right — that big red bag of gifts does look like a giant scrotum. But I have to say I thought Tom Hanks’ performance as the train conductor was note perfect. It’s not a big reach thing, but he handles it with just the right emphasis.

Prick Up Your Ears

Eddie Smith of Bainbridge Island, Washington, was the first to correctly identify all three of Friday’s (11.12) sound clips.
Clip #1 is Steve McQueen and Simon Oakland discussing the aftermath of a mob hit in Peter Yates’ Bullitt (’68) (b) Clip #2 is James Dean and Corey Allen standing on the bluff just before their chicken run in Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (’55); and (c) Clip #3 is Thomas Gomez talking to Humphrey Bogart in an early scene from John Huston’s Key Largo (’48).
Today’s Clip #1 is a philosophical riff that most over-40s will probably recognize in a heartbeat; (b) Clip #2 and Clip #3 are taken from the same scene in a relatively recent film; and Clip #4 is not from a Gene Kelly musical or an Adam Sandler comedy.
I’ll post the winner in the column in next Wednesday’s column.

Authorship

Too many people who write in fail to sign their names at the bottom of the e-mail. I copy and paste the letter into A Word file for a new column (which always includes letters), and the name of the writer isn’t there. I could afford a down payment on a new car if I had a dollar for every time I had to go back to an e-mail to search for the f***ing writer’s name. Spare me this exercise the next time you write a comment or whatever.

Hot Legs

“Why are you on your cell at Pavilions pontificating about the Oscars? This act is one of the reasons L.A. is the most shallow place on earth. As if you can’t go food shopping without cluttering people’s head with your thoughts, let alone a topic so useless as `what’s going to be nominated’?

“Have you no ability to see yourself from an objective angle? It’s so disspiriting that you can’t go about a normal errand without ranting about the friggin Oscars. Don’t you realize there are homosexuals trying to pick each other up there? They don’t want to be bothered with your Oscar jibberish — well, unless you were wearing short shorts.” — Larry Fisch
Wells to Fisch: Any hip gay guy at Pavillions with functional “gaydar” should be able to read me as one of those anguished hetero types from 100 yards off. I go to Pavillions partly for the hot 30ish women, if you really want to know.

Passion Fruit

“Like too many Oscar handicappers, you’re overlooking a big, ugly elephant in the room. There is one film that is a definite lock for a Best Picture nomination no matter what, and that is The Passion of the Christ.
“Not that it’s a good film, of course. In fact, it’s a lousy film. And not that the Academy is likely to have much affection for a nearly-plotless s&m-tinged propaganda film for pre-Vatican II Catholic regressionism/evangelical fundamentalism. But the Academy makes political nominations often enough, and I’m convinced that they’ll nominate Mel Gibson’s opus for just such a reason.
“A huge part of the volunteer marketing effort for The Passion was the spewing by religious-right media personalities of a baseless conspiracy theory that the film and Gibson were under attack by the liberal/gay/Jewish/secular media “cabal” that supposedly controls Hollywood and the media, and that it was believer’s Christian duty to get out and support the film to stick it to them.

“The Academy doubtlessly is aware of this, and even though they’ve surely got no intention of handing the Big Prize to this film, they are aware that if they don’t nominate Gibson’s vision the likes of James Dobson, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell will whip up an anti-Oscar media firestorm, claiming that the film is being denied a nod because the liberal Academy hates Christians!”
“It’l be too bad if of all the worthy films this year, at least one will be denied a place because of the Academy won’t risk the wrath of Evangelical extremists, and if I’m right it’s a depression situation indeed.” — Rufus T. Firefly
“I originally wasn’t very high on seeing The Incredibles because I wasn’t that nuts about Brad Bird’s Iron Giant and I thought The Incredibles would be more of the same. Instead, it’s a very witty take on superhero lore as well as the joys and foibles of family life. It’s one of the nuttiest movies I’ve seen about being normal in a long time but it works.
“The Polar Express, on the other hand, is an amazing bomb not only because it is really creepy. Who on earth dreamed up the North Pole stuff with Nazi elves? They reminded me of the African-American midget from Bad Santa. It’s also a crashingly boring and predictable movie.
“The Incredibles has people going back a second time to catch all the stuff they missed or enjoy it again. You see Polar Exprss once and that’s all you need, unless you do want to go catch it in 3-D, where it ought to be…well, incredible.” — M.

Predictions

“Some random thoughts on the Oscars…
“(1) Ray shouldn’t be seen as a serious contender for Best Picture. It offers a moderately good impersonation of Ray Charles by a moderately good actor but it’s a essentially a mediocre TV biopic. Why won’t anyone acknowledge this?
“(2) I know it will never get a nomination but Kill Bill Vol. 2 definitely deserves awards consideration in several categories: director, actress, supporting actor, cinematography, etc. Can somebody please make at least a modest push for this, the best crafted film of the year so far?
“(3) I Heart Huckabees won’t win or get nominated for anything. Too many people hate it.

“(4) As someone who has seen The Assassination of Richard Nixon, Sean Penn better get another nomination for this. It’s an infinitely better film and he gives a better performance in it than Mystic River but I assume nobody will see it.
“(5) Why does everyone assume that every Scorsese film is an automatic Oscar contender? This becomes the criteria by which they’re judged and some excellent movies (i.e. Casino) get dismissed because they don’t fit into the very limited Oscar package. I hope The Aviator is great and I hope it gets awards but I’d much rather see a solid, intelligent character study than a half-baked piece of Oscar bait like Ray.
“(6) I know there’s resistance to Sideways but don’t rule it out. It may not win best picture but it will definitely be nominated. Mark my words.
“(7) The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou should not be forgotten. Movies that win Oscars are always very showy in their use of the tools of filmmaking (photography, costumes, sets, locations, actors, music, etc.) because then they appeal to a broad range of voters. The main thing against Sideways is that it doesn’t show off in these areas as much as the Academy likes. The Life Aquatic does. Admittedly, it may be a little too weird for Academy voters but it’s making people cry and that’s important. I know a few people who cried like babies when they saw it. Plus, don’t forget that Anderson is obsessed with American movies from the 30s, 40s, and 50s, the same era of films that the influential older Academy members made and/or grew up with.
“And by the way, why haven’t you seen/written about Undertow yet? It’s a real 70s throwback and may be up your alley, although I fear it may be too poetic for your taste (i.e. Lost in Translation). Still, you should check it out. ” — Jonathan Doyle

Bad Calls

I’m appalled (and I’m not alone) that two of the absolute finest, no-argument-tolerated docs of the year — Xan Cassevettes’ Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession and Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation — have been excluded from the list of 12 semi-finalists for the Best Feature Documentary Oscar.
One of the docs that made the cut is Stacy Peralta’s Riding Giants , san honest, open-hearted film about surfing that is nonetheless a bit too fan-maggish in toasting the champions of the sport. Sorry to sound harsh, but there’s no way this is a stronger, more accomplished work than Z Channel or Tarnation. Giants doesn’t begin to approach their realm in terms of passion, intelligence, soul.

And what about Kevin McDonald’s Touching the Void, a movie that has its roots on both sides of the aisle, making the cut? There is no bigger fan of Void than myself, but in an ideal world it should be a Best Picture nominee. I’ve had it on my Best Picture list in the Oscar Balloon section for months.
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I sympathize with the motives of those who put Void on the semi-final list, but it’s not a documentary. It’s mainly a docu-drama…a recreation. It uses actors who speak lines. It’s about a mountain-climbing adventure that happened in South America, and yet the bulk of it was largely shot in the Swiss Alps. The only thing that makes it feel like a doc is the talking-head footage of the real mountain-climbers.
Among the docs that made the short list are Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me (fully deserved), Mark Wexler’s Tell Them Who You Are (a tribute to Mark’s cinematographer dad Haskell, in the vein of last year’s My Architect), Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman’s Born Into Brothels and Jessica Yu’s In the Realms of the Unreal.

Other deserving hopefuls that got the shaft were Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, Robert Stone’s Guerilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst and Sara Price and Chris Smith’s The Yes Men.
Guerilla friend Fredel Pogodin said this morning that “given the monumental task that Stone went through to find the footage for this film, and to track down Russell Little and all the others, it is indeed a surprise that doc filmmakers who understand the difficulty in doing this did not put it on the short list.”
And yet, on the whole, “It’s a great time for documentaries. There’s an amazing amount of them that qualified this year. And the selection process has changed — the rules are now that only filmmakers in the documentary branch can name the semi-finalists. That’s an improvement from years before.”

Backstroke

I’ve been saying snide and dismissive things about the idea of The Phantom of the Opera being the strongest Best Picture candidate around right now, and because of this I feel I ought to say what I now believe, having seen it a couple of nights ago:
It ain’t my particular cup of tea, but Phantom delivers a big wham, regular folks are going for it, and it will almost certainly make the cut as a Best Picture nominee. Hell, it might even go all the way.

I’d rather not see that happen, being a Sideways man all the way, and (who knows?) maybe a Spanglish convert waiting to happen, as well as a Motorcycle Diaries) admirer, a worshipper of Maria Full of Grace, a Fahrenheit 9/11 protest-the-election-of-Bush guy and a devout believer in Collateral, not to mention Touching the Void.
If Phantom wins I will not be in pain, like I was when Chicago won two years ago. I will not agree, but I will understand.
I was down on the prospect of its Oscar ascension due to three factors. One, my general discomfort with emotionally bombastic films that send you over the waterfall (although I really liked Evita). Two, a reluctance to trust the notion that director Joel Schumacher has it in him to deliver a truly worthy Best Picture contender, given several disappointments with his past films. And three, stuff that I’ve been hearing over the past couple of weeks from colleagues.
I’m not saying the people who aren’t fans of this film are wrong, and I’m not going to get into a point-for-point review of any kind, but at least give Phantom this: it is not half-hearted.
You can bring up subtlety issues, and I’m sure some will address this down the road, but by any measure of committed filmmaking it takes Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stage musical and really rocks the house. Call it cornball, but it heats up the emotional essence of the piece and wears its heart on its sleeve. The actors hold their own, the musical sequences all swing for the fences, and John Mathieson’s cinematography is rich and painterly. The film plays like a Baz Luhrman musical on a mild sedative, and by that I mean it doesn’t make your head explode.

I suppose I sound like a square to some of you right now, but with that big 60-piece orchestra sawing away and the knockout production design and the sound cranked up and the film playing on a big screen with an appreciative crowd, the “whoa” factor is definitely there. In terms of the overall effort, I mean.
And so in the final analysis and various reservations aside, I’ve resigned myself to the likelihood of a Best Picture nomination because it satisfies the middle-class emotional criteria that Academy members tend to look for and respond to.
Picking over the particulars is for sometime next month. I just had to say this and set things straight. You can go with Phantom or not, but movies like this have their place. It’s not a crime to accept what they’re selling and go, “Yeah, I get it.”

Musical vs. Musical?

A friend thinks there’s some Academy mentality no-no about putting two musicals up for Best Picture in the same year. He says if this attitude holds it’s going to be an either-or between Ray and The Phantom of the Opera.
I don’t buy this. Ray is not a musical — it’s a biopic with a lot of musical numbers. And I reminded him that My Fair Lady was nominated for Best Picture against Mary Poppins in ’65, and Oliver against Funny Girl in ’69. (They were released in ’64 and ’68, respectively, but the nominations happen in January.)
And how strong a contender is Ray anyway? The talk I’ve heard all along is that Jamie Foxx is a lock for Best Actor, but that the film is an enjoyable and respectable thing but nothing to go out into the street naked and shout about.

Big Tinted Glasses

Last weekend I went up to Universal City Walk, a sickening corporate environment that mixes The Fall of the Roman Empire with Animal House, and shelled out $15 bucks to see The Polar Express in IMAX 3-D. It was worth it. However the movie plays in regular presentations (I hadn’t seen it before), this has to be better. This is a movie about digital technology first and all the other stuff second, but I didn’t mind because it looked so big and cool.

Okay, I had some quibbles. How many roller-coaster thrill ride sequences does this film have? Three? Four? It feels like one too many. The young African-American girl (the one with the leadership qualities) does look like she’s from Village of the Damned . And Manohla Dargis is right — that big red bag of gifts does look like a giant scrotum. But I have to say I thought Tom Hanks’ performance as the train conductor was note perfect. It’s not a big reach thing, but he handles it with just the right emphasis.

Prick Up Your Ears

Eddie Smith of Bainbridge Island, Washington, was the first to correctly identify all three of Friday’s (11.12) sound clips.
Clip #1 is Steve McQueen and Simon Oakland discussing the aftermath of a mob hit in Peter Yates’ Bullitt (’68) (b) Clip #2 is James Dean and Corey Allen standing on the bluff just before their chicken run in Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (’55); and (c) Clip #3 is Thomas Gomez talking to Humphrey Bogart in an early scene from John Huston’s Key Largo (’48).
Today’s Clip #1 is a philosophical riff that most over-40s will probably recognize in a heartbeat; (b) Clip #2 and Clip #3 are taken from the same scene in a relatively recent film; and Clip #4 is not from a Gene Kelly musical or an Adam Sandler comedy.
I’ll post the winner in the column in next Wednesday’s column.

Authorship

Too many people who write in fail to sign their names at the bottom of the e-mail. I copy and paste the letter into A Word file for a new column (which always includes letters), and the name of the writer isn’t there. I could afford a down payment on a new car if I had a dollar for every time I had to go back to an e-mail to search for the f***ing writer’s name. Spare me this exercise the next time you write a comment or whatever.

Hot Legs

“Why are you on your cell at Pavilions pontificating about the Oscars? This act is one of the reasons L.A. is the most shallow place on earth. As if you can’t go food shopping without cluttering people’s head with your thoughts, let alone a topic so useless as `what’s going to be nominated’?

“Have you no ability to see yourself from an objective angle? It’s so disspiriting that you can’t go about a normal errand without ranting about the friggin Oscars. Don’t you realize there are homosexuals trying to pick each other up there? They don’t want to be bothered with your Oscar jibberish — well, unless you were wearing short shorts.” — Larry Fisch
Wells to Fisch: Any hip gay guy at Pavillions with functional “gaydar” should be able to read me as one of those anguished hetero types from 100 yards off. I go to Pavillions partly for the hot 30ish women, if you really want to know.

Passion Fruit

“Like too many Oscar handicappers, you’re overlooking a big, ugly elephant in the room. There is one film that is a definite lock for a Best Picture nomination no matter what, and that is The Passion of the Christ.
“Not that it’s a good film, of course. In fact, it’s a lousy film. And not that the Academy is likely to have much affection for a nearly-plotless s&m-tinged propaganda film for pre-Vatican II Catholic regressionism/evangelical fundamentalism. But the Academy makes political nominations often enough, and I’m convinced that they’ll nominate Mel Gibson’s opus for just such a reason.
“A huge part of the volunteer marketing effort for The Passion was the spewing by religious-right media personalities of a baseless conspiracy theory that the film and Gibson were under attack by the liberal/gay/Jewish/secular media “cabal” that supposedly controls Hollywood and the media, and that it was believer’s Christian duty to get out and support the film to stick it to them.

“The Academy doubtlessly is aware of this, and even though they’ve surely got no intention of handing the Big Prize to this film, they are aware that if they don’t nominate Gibson’s vision the likes of James Dobson, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell will whip up an anti-Oscar media firestorm, claiming that the film is being denied a nod because the liberal Academy hates Christians!”
“It’l be too bad if of all the worthy films this year, at least one will be denied a place because of the Academy won’t risk the wrath of Evangelical extremists, and if I’m right it’s a depression situation indeed.” — Rufus T. Firefly
“I originally wasn’t very high on seeing The Incredibles because I wasn’t that nuts about Brad Bird’s Iron Giant and I thought The Incredibles would be more of the same. Instead, it’s a very witty take on superhero lore as well as the joys and foibles of family life. It’s one of the nuttiest movies I’ve seen about being normal in a long time but it works.
“The Polar Express, on the other hand, is an amazing bomb not only because it is really creepy. Who on earth dreamed up the North Pole stuff with Nazi elves? They reminded me of the African-American midget from Bad Santa. It’s also a crashingly boring and predictable movie.
“The Incredibles has people going back a second time to catch all the stuff they missed or enjoy it again. You see Polar Exprss once and that’s all you need, unless you do want to go catch it in 3-D, where it ought to be…well, incredible.” — M.

Predictions

“Some random thoughts on the Oscars…
“(1) Ray shouldn’t be seen as a serious contender for Best Picture. It offers a moderately good impersonation of Ray Charles by a moderately good actor but it’s a essentially a mediocre TV biopic. Why won’t anyone acknowledge this?
“(2) I know it will never get a nomination but Kill Bill Vol. 2 definitely deserves awards consideration in several categories: director, actress, supporting actor, cinematography, etc. Can somebody please make at least a modest push for this, the best crafted film of the year so far?
“(3) I Heart Huckabees won’t win or get nominated for anything. Too many people hate it.

“(4) As someone who has seen The Assassination of Richard Nixon, Sean Penn better get another nomination for this. It’s an infinitely better film and he gives a better performance in it than Mystic River but I assume nobody will see it.
“(5) Why does everyone assume that every Scorsese film is an automatic Oscar contender? This becomes the criteria by which they’re judged and some excellent movies (i.e. Casino) get dismissed because they don’t fit into the very limited Oscar package. I hope The Aviator is great and I hope it gets awards but I’d much rather see a solid, intelligent character study than a half-baked piece of Oscar bait like Ray.
“(6) I know there’s resistance to Sideways but don’t rule it out. It may not win best picture but it will definitely be nominated. Mark my words.
“(7) The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou should not be forgotten. Movies that win Oscars are always very showy in their use of the tools of filmmaking (photography, costumes, sets, locations, actors, music, etc.) because then they appeal to a broad range of voters. The main thing against Sideways is that it doesn’t show off in these areas as much as the Academy likes. The Life Aquatic does. Admittedly, it may be a little too weird for Academy voters but it’s making people cry and that’s important. I know a few people who cried like babies when they saw it. Plus, don’t forget that Anderson is obsessed with American movies from the 30s, 40s, and 50s, the same era of films that the influential older Academy members made and/or grew up with.
“And by the way, why haven’t you seen/written about Undertow yet? It’s a real 70s throwback and may be up your alley, although I fear it may be too poetic for your taste (i.e. Lost in Translation). Still, you should check it out. ” — Jonathan Doyle

Obsessions

It’s said to be a problem when gifted filmmakers (and only the gifted fall prey to this) get caught up in the jib-jab of their brushstrokes and lose sight of the painting.
You know what I mean…movies that always seem to be emphasizing how hip and clever the director is, or how vast and ambitious his/her efforts were. There are more of these films in mainstream theatres toward the end of the year, naturally.

I love brushstrokes for their own sake. I can be half-sold on an entire film if there’s an exceptional contribution or two (photography, music, a performance). I’m not saying that excessive brushstroking isn’t distracting. I’m saying I find it easy to segregate my enjoyment of particular elements that work, even if the overall fails.
I just saw a movie that I can’t talk about yet, but I loved the main title sequence plus the dialogue in an epilogue scene at the very end. I will always feel warmly about this film for these two ingredients, regardless of any followup judgements I may render.
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The reigning example of this syndrome, according to what nearly everyone is saying, is Robert Zemeckis’ The Polar Express (Warner Bros., playing everywhere). The rap is that this $165 million feel-good Christmas movie has invested more heavily in digital performance-capture technology than in the story-telling, character-building aspects, let alone the imaginative fun so abundant in The Incredibles.
It’s being said in some quarters that Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Disney, 12.25) is caught up in cleverness and style issues here and there. To what degree I can’t say, but a Wes Anderson film without style issues wouldn’t be a Wes Anderson film. I totally worshipped those live, non-digital, opening-curtain shots he used to begin each chapter of Rushmore.
Jean Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement has a fair amount of stylistic archness, but so did Amelie and Delicatessen. A friend who thinks it’s a great banquet of a movie wrote a day or two ago asking why there isn’t more buzz about it. “[Jeunet’s] direction is stylish and exquisite, the production design is A-plus…is it because it’s French?” A certain know-it-all says the lack of excitement is over brushstroke issues.

There’s a certain self-referencing cleverness all through I Heart Huckabees, but like all credentialed art it’s steady and consistent, like the frenzied brushstrokes of Vincent Van Gogh. It’s all of a piece and I don’t care if it’s only made $10 million so far. This is one of those films that gets better and better the more you think about it, and one that absolutely improves if you see it a second time.
But the clever-dick aspects in Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind have always bothered me. I actually started to hate it because of this, despite my admiration for Charlie Kaufman’s script. It underlined my belief that when it comes to filming a Kaufman, Spike Jonze = good and Michel Gondry = less so.
Any other films that have bothered anyone for these reasons?

All Alone

I usually send these queries out by e-mail, but I’ll just plop this in. I was talking to a critic friend last night about the number of times he’s championed films that almost everyone else has hated. He had a fairly long list to recite from.
I don’t think a critic is worth much unless he/she experiences at least an occasional stand-alone episode. TV critics almost never do, and guys like Armand White and Jonathan Rosenbaum have these episodes every other week.
I remember admiring the crap out of Eric Blakeney’s Gun Shy, an early 2000 release with Liam Neeson, Oliver Platt and Sandra Bullock (and which Bullock helped to produce). Almost no one except New York Times critic Elvis Mitchell agreed.
It’s hard to get critics to admit to these episodes, but I’ll bet there are plenty of great stories to be told about what it felt like to stand all alone in the cold stiff wind with everyone (including your editor) looking at you like something’s gone seriously wrong because you stood up and led the charge for the “wrong” film.
If anyone wants to send in a recollection…

Down to This

There’s all this stuff happening in the Best Picture race suddenly. This film ascending, that film dropping out. And now our friend David Poland at Movie City News is saying “the only movie that can keep The Phantom of The Opera from winning Best Picture is The Aviator.”
No comment as I haven’t seen either film, but good God. Bush wins the election and now this. I’m just not a fan of any “lush, glitzy, over-the-top, overwrought” musical, which is how a friend has described Phantom. Is my friend the bringer of the last and final word on this Joel Schumacher film? No, and I could wind up liking it. It’s possible…but I don’t especially want to.
I keep hitting on this same point, which is that bigger and more grandiose and more thundering films are…aaah, forget it.
There’s no point. No point saying Sideways has it all because people keep saying nope, it’s not enough. It’s not enough to be insightful, adult, touching, funny, heartbreaking, emotional, soulful…and to be about average people living recognizable lives. No, cries the mob…we need more.

Poland emphasized in his Phantom prediction that this “is not about what I like.” For what it’s worth, he agrees with me about Sideways.
Best Picture Oscars are about emotion. The ones that deliver an emotional sandwich you can sink your teeth into and get a little choked up over or, failing that, say something simple but profound about life, something we all recognize as perceptive and truthful — these are the ones that tend to win it.
Why, then, did the awful Chicago win it two years ago? What did that film actually say? That we’re all users, abusers and bamboozlers, and that’s what makes the world go’ round?
American Beauty was the last people-sized movie to win the Best Picture oscar, but it was serene at the finish and said something bedrocky about our day-to-day, which is that we don’t pay enough attention to the beauty around us.
Sideways doesn’t quite choke you up, but it comes close when Paul Giamatti listens to Virginia Madsen’s voice message near the finish. And the knock on her door that directly follows says volumes about the life force, positivism, hope, love and refusing to fold up your tent.
Of course, it’s only a small masterpiece. Nothing to put your chips on. Broad and breathless is always better.

Prick Up Your Ears

Paul Matwychuck of Edmonton, Alberta, was the first to correctly identify all three of Wednesday’s (11.10) sound clips.
Clip #1 is Ben Kinsley hammering at Ray Winstone in Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast; (b) Clip #2 is Terrence Stamp speaking to John Hurt in Stephen Frears’ The Hit ; and (c) Clip #3 is the brilliant Oskar Werner presenting his case to an East German tribunal in The Spy Who Came in From The Cold.
Today’s Clip #1 is from an urban cop film (obviously); (b) Clip #2 has some ambient noise effects, but the dialogue is detectable; and (c) Clip #3 — my favorite — is from a film based on a play, if that’s any help.
I’ll post the winner in the column in next Wednesday’s column.

Radiant

The color and detail in the new Gone With the Wind DVD box set that hit stores last Tuesday is mouth-watering. It’s the ripest and most sharply focused version I’ve ever seen. It probably looks better than the version GWTW‘s producer David O. Selznick and director Victor Fleming knew. I’m not exaggerating.
Even the hardcore restoration master Robert Harris (Lawrence of Arabia, Vertigo, Spartacus), who’s always very tough when I ask him to size up this or that digital makeover, says this new Gone With the Wind is “perfect…absolutely perfect…the most beautiful rendition I’ve ever seen.”
I don’t have the time or space to get into the others merits of this four-disc set, released by Warner Home Video, but they’re plentiful, trust me.

The idea-guy behind this GWTW‘s new look is a Warner Bros. technology executive named Chris Cookson. Three years ago he came up with an idea called edge detection, which involved digitally scanning the three different film strips that Gone With the Wind‘s Technicolor cameras used to capture the red, blue and yellow elements in each scene. But there was always a very slight fuzzy element in prints if the three strips were not perfectly aligned.
“The realization was that if we could just get these things to align [more precisely], we’d find detail and information that’s always been there but never visible,” Cookson says on a disc #3 documentary called “Restoring a Classic.”
The people who wound up writing the software for this process, which is known as Ultra-Resolution, were image scientists Sharon and Karen Perlmutter of America Online. Warner Bros. Senior Systems Engineer Paul Klamer put the team together and made sure everyone was on the same page.
What they did with Gone With the Wind, says Klamer, “is like taking the walnut oil off the Rembrandt paintings.”
“Not only is it aligned at least as good as the film was when it was originally released,” says Warner Bros. senior vp of production technology Rob Hummel, “[but] we believe we’ve probably achieved a level of alignment and registration that probably has never seen before.
“The result is actually beyond what we had hoped to see,” says Cookson. “A degree of detail that we didn’t even know to expect.”

Kool Aid

I’m running this excerpt from Manohla Dargis’s review of The Polar Express in the New York Times because I couldn’t agree more with what she says about the influence of George Lucas and other powerful tech-head types, and because she says it well.
“Directed by Robert Zemeckis, who wrote the film with William Broyles Jr., The Polar Express is a grave and disappointing failure, as much of imagination as of technology. Turning a book that takes a few minutes to read into a feature-length film presented a significant hurdle that the filmmakers were not able to clear.
“Animation is engaged in a debate that pits traditional and computer-assisted animation against computer-generated animation. The idea that anyone loves Finding Nemo because it was made wholly on a computer is absurd, but behind this debate lies a larger dispute not only about animation, but film’s relationship to the world as well.

“On one side of the divide are Pixar visionaries like [The Incredibles director] Brad Bird and the Finding Nemo co-director Andrew Stanton, who either know they can’t recreate real life or are uninterested in such mimicry, and so just do what animators have always done: they imaginatively interpret the world.
“On the other side of the divide are filmmakers like George Lucas who seem intent on dispensing with messy annoyances like human actors even while they meticulously create a vacuum-sealed simulacrum of the world.
“It’s worth noting that two important contributors to The Polar Express Doug Chiang, one of the production designers, and Ken Ralston, the film’s senior visual effects supervisor, worked for years at Mr. Lucas’s aptly named company, Industrial Light and Magic. There’s no way of knowing whether they drank the company Kool-Aid.
“Still, from the looks of The Polar Express it’s clear that, together with Mr. Zemeckis, this talented gang has on some fundamental level lost touch with the human aspect of film. Certainly they aren’t alone in the race to build marvelous new worlds from digital artifacts.
“But there’s something depressing and perhaps instructive about how in the attempt to create a new, never-before-seen tale about the wonderment of imagination these filmmakers have collectively lost sight of their own.”

Thunder of Hoofbeats

“Glad to see you mention The Rapture. I saw it when it was first released at an early screening in Atlanta that included an invitation-only audience of local churchgoers. Mimi Rogers and Michael Tolkin were there to take questions from the audience at the end of the movie.
“In the South, of course, the Rapture is just a given. It’s not uncommon to see cars with bumper stickers that read `In case of rapture, this car will be unoccupied.’ When I was in Junior High, the big book that everyone was reading was a tome about the rapture by Ernest Angsley (you remember him, he’s the televangelist/faith healer Robin Williams used to parody — “Say Baaa–by! Be HEALED!”).
“Almost everyone in the audience spoke of enjoying the movie and its “message” (presumably the depiction of the rapture) but complained of the excessive nudity during the opening sequences. No one spoke of the decision of Mimi Rogers’ character to kill her daughter and finally reject God’s salvation. Michael Tolkin tried to get people to talk about religion, but that sort of thing just isn’t done down here.” — Reed Barker, Peachtree City, Georgia.
“That’s a pretty cheap shot to take at Christians in your little piece about The Rapture. I’m sorry that your guy didn’t win the election, but let it go. Before you start saying that you’re afraid of Christians, you’d better do some serious reading. I certainly missed the Bible passage that states “shoot your child to send them to Heaven.”

“The Rapture is a movie, just like The Omen or The Exorcist. Are these films thrilling and entertaining? Sure. Do these films represent Christian doctrine? Absolutely not. Honestly, I feel sorry for you if you would let one film “push you into permanent atheism.” It one thing to say “I read the Bible and just don’t buy it”, but its another to say “I saw this movie, made by a guy who might have his own agenda, and now I know that Christians are all creepy.” That’s really objective.” — Jeff Horst.
Wells to Horst: I can’t think of the last time I’ve gotten to know anyone who answered to being a Christian. I guess it’s the circles I’ve travelled in over the last 20-plus years. But I’ve known a few, and I think they’re nice enough but also a bit creepy. And 90% of them seem to be righties. Every time I meet them, I think of that Dustin Hoffman line in Straw Dogs: “There’s has never been a kingdom given to so much blood as that of Christ.”
I reject with every gram of brain matter and every fibre of my being the notion that our time on earth is all about what happens to our souls after we pass on, and Michael Tolkin’s film just seemed to solidify these feelings, or ratchet them up a notch. The basic tenets of Christianity are a blessing to anyone who understands them and takes them into his or her heart, but I despise how Christianity has somehow become culturally aligned in this country with bedrock conservativism.
I just hate their uptightness and rigidity and aura of fearfulness…and that repugnant smugness they all seem to have about being plugged into and receving the world of our Lord Jesus, and always delivered with those gleaming eyes and awful toothy smiles. If I were a Roman Emperor and this was, say, 200 A.D., I’m not sure I would overturn the practice of throwing them to the lions in the Colisseum.”
Horst back to Wells: I understand the type of Christian that you’re talking about. If those are the people that you are citing, then you need to say that. Just saying `born-again Christians’ is painting with a really wide brush, and encompasses a lot of those people who really do try to live by those basic tenets that you referred to in your reply. It’s an important distinction.
“I hope its clear that I’m not saying that you have to believe in anything. That’s where well intentioned people usually go wrong. Everyone needs to believe in what they feel is right, as long as it doesn’t harm others. That’s supposed to be the whole point of this country that we are fortunate enough to live in.”

Originality

“In anticipation of their 2004 recaps, entertainment blurb writers everywhere are trying to suitably illustrate the sludge that Tom Hanks√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ star has slammed into — the worst Coen Brothers movie ever, one of Spielberg√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s poorest conceptions, and now maybe the all-time epic Christmas dud (with apologies to Ben Affleck). Please, blurb writers — try and come up with something better than √¢‚Ǩ≈ìHanks Express Derailed: 3 Audience Killers leaves fan base looking Terminal.” — Mark Frenden