The latest Lewbowski Fest happened in NYC about ten days ago, on 10.20 and 10.21, and it just hit me: why was there no documentary about this home-grown phenomenon on the just-out The Big Lebowski Universal Home Video DVD (released 10.18)? They issued two different special editions (a regular-regular and an “achiever’s” edition, which cost $34 and change) and obviously spent a good amount of coin promoting them, but they couldn’t cut together a short piece about the Lebowski fans? Will Russell and Scott Shuffitt have been putting on Lebowskifests since ’02, and they’re obviously genuine and repeating. Fox Home Video’s Rocky Horror Picture Show special edition DVD (released in 2000) included a special feature about the fans showing up at midnight screenings, etc. When I ran my Lebowski Fest piece last March I reported there were three hand-made docs being assembled. One by a couple named Robin and Rose Roman. Another by a guy named John Nee, who has an outfit called Idiot Works and who also works for Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison production company. And a third Lebowski Fest doc called “Over the Line,” which was said by its maker, Eddie Chung, to be in post-production at the time. Universal Home Video couldn’t get in touch with these people and use their footage to throw together a little short? As Walter would say, “Kinda derelict, dude.”

I do believe in ghosts….I do believe in ghosts…I do, I do, I do, I do…I do believe in ghosts and always have, I swear. And be sure to click on the spooky audio slide show that accompanies this very ghostly story…sitting right there on the left margin.

Bob Berney’s Picturehouse Films has shelled out $3.75 million to be the distributor of Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion, a feature based on Garrison Keillor’s radio show. Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Lindsay Lohan, Tommy Lee Jones, Virginia Madsen, Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly costar. Berney caught the film at a distributor screening in Manhattan last Thursday. (Another screening happened Friday in L.A.) Variety‘s Ian Mohr reports there was a bidding war, hence the nearly four million dollar fee. An impression was passed along by a couple of set-visit articles that Paul Thomas Anderson informally co-directed Prairie Home Companion, as a favor to Altman having to do with insurance issues. Berney told Mohr that the almost-certainly- folksy film would come out between April and June, and that he would sell it in part to “people who don’t go to every movie but will come out if they find something — the underserved older audience.”

Here’s that snarky 50 Cent toon off Zipperfish…finally found the link. Very funny stuff. I’ll leave it to 50 Cent fans to determine how accurate and/or well researched.

Wow, did you read that undeniably dispiriting excerpt from Maureen Dowd’s forthcoming book in Sunday’s New York Times (“What’s a Modern Girl To Do?”). The book is called “Are Men Necessary?: When Sexes Collide” (G.P. Putnam’s Sons), and the subject is how today’s younger women have totally shunned feminism and have reverted back to a 1950s sensibility — catching a man, being demure, letting him pay and going shopping, etc. The subtext, of course, is basically Dowd’s coming to terms with the probable fact that she’s too intimidating to attract a suitably high-powered guy and keep him (i.e., persuade him to propose getting married), and that being a strong, whip-smart professional of a certain age, she’s more or less doomed to live a single life and that’s that. And that feminism has led her to this place and she’s not especially happy about this, and may in fact be livid. I love this photo of Dowd, taken recently at Manhattan’s Bar Centrale, that illustrates the piece on the main page. Here’s a montage assembled from photos I took of Dowd plugging her Bush-bashing book at L.A.’s Skirball Center in September 2004. She’s a very sexy and vivacious woman, but she’s not what you’d call a confessional type and she’s extremely mindful of power dynamics and political equilibriums. (Naturally, being who she is and who she writes for.) Notice that discerning, cold-blooded look she has in the lower-left photo of the montage? Imagine getting that look in her bedroom at four in the morning.

Spiritual Sell

Gotta love that Bob Berney marketing audacity. Lay it on the line, sell the movie you have and damn the torpedoes.
I’m referring to Berney’s decision to call a certain heart-warming, Israeli-produced film, which his company, Picturehouse Films, picked up for U.S. distribution a few months ago…a movie that, let’s be honest, very few people other than Orthodox Jews in New York and Florida will want to see no matter what it’s called…a movie that Berney, in his admirably mule-stubborn way, has decided to sell with its orig- inal title, which is…ready?…Ushpizin.

Shuli Rand, star and screenwriter of Ushpizin, enduring a moment of anti-rapture

I would have called it Holy Guests or Bad Company or something like that. Partly because the movie’s about a Jewish Orthodox couple playing host to a couple of ne’er-do-wells during a holiday, but mainly because these titles are more…goy- friendly?
But then I’m not Bob Berney. I’m just this guy typing away inside a modest Brooklyn apartment while Berney sits in regal poobah splendor inside his $17 million Park Avenue triplex, tabulating profits from his offshore investments and making and breaking careers with a slight raising or lowering of his eyebrows…a much-feared and much-envied “big op” renowned for great wisdom and shrewd business judgment.
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Okay, I’m kidding about the triplex and the eyebrows and the offshore investments, but Berney is a smart distributor so maybe he made the right call.
Let’s start with the Ushpizin basics, beginning with the correct pronunciation, which is oosh-peh-zeen.
Directed by Giddi Dar and written by the film’s star, Shuli Rand, Ushizpizin is about a poor Orthodox Jew named Moshe who lives in Jerusalem with his wife Malli and is trying to live by the spirit of the festival of Sukkot…I’m sorry, is this sounding too exotic already?

Moshe’s a nice pudgy middle-aged guy with a long squiggly beard, but he and his chubby wife Malli have no kids and he’s feeling a little bit blue about this and other matters.
And then these two jerky oddballs show up — Eliyahu, an old pal of Moishe’s from his pre-Orthodox, running-around days, and a pal called Yossef. They’re prison convicts on the run from the law, which eventually becomes known by Moshe and Malli, and from this complications ensue.
As with all spiritual fables, the visit by this unruly pair turns out to be a kind of blessing in disguise.
There’s a totally valid analogy between Ushpizin and David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence. You could also say it parallels Michael Mann’s Collateral, which is also about redemption arriving in the form of criminal behavior.
L.A. Daily News critic Bob Strauss, who doesn’t roll over for just anything, has called Ushpizin “one of the best character-based comedies of the year.”
Ushpizin has already played successfully in Israel for about a year. It just opened limited on Friday, 10.28, and is expanding on 11.4 to Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles and (I think I have this right) Florida. Basically anywhere there’s a heavy Jewish Orthodox population,okay?

Dar said that even in Israel he was told by distributors to change the title because “a lot of [Israelis] don’t know what it means.” (It means “guests” or “holy guests.”) But when he spoke to Berney about selling the film in the U.S., Berney said “let’s trust in God and keep it…let audiences break their teeth.”
Berney decided to stick with Ushpizin precisely “because it’s exotic. I just thought it made more sense to go with the original Hebrew name.”
Berney acknowledges that the interest in “small outside of New York City, but inside New York City it’s huge. We’re going to take it slowly, obviously playing to the core audience first….evangelicals, other faiths…it’s a film, after all, about belief and a test of faith. And there’s also the arthouse crowd.”
Berney and his wife Jeannie went to a screening of Ushpizin last week at a Brooklyn neighborhood called Borough Park.
“It’s a Hassidic, ultra-Orthodox neighborhood near Coney Island, and it’s really it’s own world. A very concentrated, ultra-Orthodox Hassidic community. It was at a high school auditorium and there were hundreds of people and many of them were coming up to me and telling me they were really pleased…it was mainly a 35 or 40 year-old crowd.”
Gadar agrees that the word “exotic” applies to the title of Ushpizin as well as the film itself, “but the interesting part is that when you cross the line and look at the world from Moshe and Malli’s point of view…you end up finding they’re very much like you.

Official Ushpizin T-shirt, available through official website.

Gadar says he’s “not religious at all” but says, “I think what this movie offers is that it’s a completely authentic movie about faith…teling a story which all faiths and cultures can identify with.”
When Ushpizin played in Isarel last year “everybody …secular, liberals, left- wing…saw it.” America is the first country outside of Israel to have theatrical playdates,he tells me.
“I showed the film to some Muslim people, but I don’t think Muslim countires will allow it to be played in their territories. I would like to show it in Iran…but it’s not that simple to put an Israeli film in Ian or even Egypt. It’s very hard. But the best thing about this movie is that it overcomes politics.”
And the best thing for Berney and Picturehouse Films, obviously, would be for Ushpizin to catch on with the goyim.
Honestly? I might not have gone to see this film if I hadn’t been given a screener. The title seems to be a statement that it isn’t for someone like me. But having seen it, I can say that it’s a film I respect for its heart and spiritual values, and that I feel a certain allegiance because of this.

Sunday Evening

Schiller’s Liquor Bar on Rivington, a couple blocks north of Delancey on Manhattan’s Lower East Side — Sunday, 10.30.05, 8:50 pm.

Ditto, exterior — 9:15 pm

Fuck Yoga, an attitude T-shirt boutique on Ludlow Street — Sunday, 10.30.05, 8:20 pm

Pseudo-hip discount Manhattan hotel…”only” $169 per night.

Walking back to good old ratty Brooklyn across Williamsburg bridge — Sunday, 10.30.05, 10:05 pm

Schiller’s again

Nothing There

If I wanted to just blurt it out and cut to the chase, I could say that Jarhead (Univ- ersal, 11.4) is nothing. But it’s not entirely nothing — it’s the fall’s first major what- the-hell-were-they-thinking? movie, and that ain’t hay. Trust me, it’s going to send tens of thousands of viewers out of theatres and into the street next weekend (it’s tracking…it’ll open) asking themselves this very question.
Oo-rahh…
Based on Anthony Swofford’s first-person account of his experience as a Marine during the 1991 Gulf War, Jarhead was probably pitched to Universal execs as the first GenX war movie…the Nirvana generation’s answer to Full Metal Jacket.

Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal) arrives at U.S. airbase in Saudi Arabia, ready to whoop ass.

It was probably also sold it as a kind of GenX woe-is-us movie…as a Douglas Coupland-referenced metaphor about feelings of impotence and powerlessness… about Gulf War grunts feeling robbed of immediacy and ground-floor opportunity during their Big Combat Moment.
Or maybe they (Mendes or producers Lucy Fisher or Doug Wick, or all three) sim- ply told Universal they would deliver an honest definitive portrait of what a letdown the Gulf War was for the combatants and how it felt to be bored out of your ass in the desert, and Universal execs listened, looked at each other and said in unison, “Cool, that’ll sell tickets.”
Universal bought the pitch, but Jarhead isn’t a movie. It’s about waiting in your seat for the movie to begin, and then waiting and waiting and eventually saying to yourself, “Oh, shit.” It doesn’t dig in or get down or manage to be any more than what Three Kings was during its first 15 minutes.
My respect for David O. Russell, the director and writer of Three Kings, is very much renewed. Great filmmaker!
Swofford’s book was fairly absorbing (I read about half of it), but the material that would make for a moderately absorbing movie simply isn’t there.
Jarhead is a series of scenes showing Marines being trained to be killers state- side, and then flying to Saudi Arabia in ’91 and waiting to go to battle against Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard troops, and then never quite seeing battle.
And to give things a generically haunting vibe it tells us (by way of narration by Jake Gyllenhaaal, who plays Swofford, or “Swoff”) that a grunt can never forget that rockin’ feeling of having his finger on a trigger. To which you will say…to which your friends will say…to which anyone with a mind will say…”So what?”

Gylennhaal, costar Peter Sarsgaard (r.) in Sam Mendes’ Jarhead

If Jarhead wasn’t a Sam Mendes movie, and wasn’t a big-studio early November release (and hence a presumed Oscar contender on some level)…if it had opened in, say, March or August without a lot of hoopla…it might have been seen for what it is — a nicely textured, maddeningly empty film about grunts coping with boredom, loneliness and disappointment — without people resenting what it isn’t.
It’s not terrible. It’s well made, well acted, convincing, etc. But $1.75 and a movie like Jarhead will get you a bus ticket.
And I’m not going to be sucked into saying what some critics are probably thinking right now, which is, “Whoa…ballsy! A hall-of-mirrors film about nothing happening that actually becomes what it’s about!”
Watch out for any critic who tries this one out on you, because that critic will be totally full of shit.
I was in my local Montrose Avenue grocery store after Monday night’s screening and the counter guy — Hispanic, early 40s, unmarried – asked me about it after spotting the program notes in my hand. “A Gulf war movie…been wanting to see this,” he said. I said, “Well, I don’t know…it’s fairly well made but no fighting.” And he said, “No fighting?”
Not even the genius of Universal marketing honcho Marc Schmuger can save this film.
It’s kind of Full Metal Jacket-y at times, but it mainly resembles that film’s floun- dering middle section. That means no character intrigue or simmering conflict (like Vincent D’Onofrio’s Pvt. Gomer Pyle being slowly tortured into animal madness by F.Lee Ermey’s drill sergeant), and no third-act battle-scene climax or a very young dying enemy soldier lying on the ground and whispering “Shoot me…shoot me!”… and no final ironic statement that comes close to Stanley Kubrick’s grunts singing the Mickey Mouse Club song with the hell-fires of Hue in the background.

It has one big scene toward the end that isn’t really a big scene…it’s kind of a final “sorry, son but this war won’t be happening for you” scene. You start to feel something when it happens but then it’s over and it’s back to the same old blah.
And there’s one really good line that Gyellenhaal says about not wanting to hear Vietnam music (i.e., a cut by The Doors) in the middle of an early `90s desert war.
So Kubrick wins and Mendes loses. (He never had a chance, really.) The British -born director, a good guy, started things off with a bang with American Beauty six years ago, and managed a stirring followup with Road to Perdition, but he didn’t have Connie Hall to punch things up this time and the material was too unfocused and insubstantial…and he failed. Jarhead is the suck.
No Oscar nominations for anyone except cinematographer Roger Deakins. No acting awards or nominations for Jake Gyllenhaal, although he’s pretty good (as far as it goes). No Best Supporting Actor nom for the great Peter Sarsgaard because the script doesn’t let him do or say anything except for a single emotional crackup scene near the end (and it’s nowhere near enough).
Universal will get its first weekend gross and then the word will get out and it’ll be down-the-toilet time.
Okay, it’s well-crafted. Yes, it has a certain high-visual distinction (occasional sur- real or dream-like flourishes) and (I keep mentioning this but there’s nothing else to mention) a streak of apparent honesty in its depiction of what boredom it can be to park your eager-beaver Marine ass in the Arabian desert for months and months, etc.
But the script never grabs hold of anything in the characters and tries to make something happen. Nothing means nothing. “Swoff” is nervous about what his girlfriend may be up to with some guy she says she’s met…who cares? Sars- gaard’s Troy is wired tight and born-to-fight…and that’s it. Jamie Foxx is a sergeant who loves the Corps and doesn’t shrink from handing out discipline…nothing. Chris Cooper gives two pep-rally speeches…showboating.

Marine Sergeant Jamie Foxx (l.) and the guys

There’s no narrative through-line to hitch your wagon to…no sense of gathering force or anything of interest approaching…nothing emotional. A lot of presumed disloyal girlfriend stuff, a little homoeroticism here and there…but it’s all Waiting for Godot-ish. The actors have zip to work with. They do moderately well with what they’ve been given, but moderately well doesn’t cut it during Oscar season.
Deakins’ photography is fine…okay, better than fine…and the CG of the burning oil wells in the third act is my favorite kind of CG, which it to say pretty much invisi- ble.
But a supposed war movie about not fighting a war — about the boring nothing bullshit stuff that happens when soldiers who’ve been trained to kill are just hanging around in the desert with their dicks in their hands…I’m really amazed. Jarhead‘s audacity would be startling if it didn’t feel so inert.

Mondo Kongo

Anyone who’s seen the Lord of the Rings trilogy (or, more to the point, has sat through the extended versions on DVD) knows Peter Jackson has never been into brevity. He couldn’t operate farther from a less-is-more aesthetic if he tried.
Eye-filling visuals, teary emotionalism, portentousness, sets and costumes that are just so, probing closeups, dialogue scenes that go on longer and are more exacting than necessary…Jackson loves to heap it on.

It should therefore come as no surprise that King Kong, his latest film which Universal will open theatrically on 12.14 (or six and a half weeks from today), is going to run three hours, according to a 10.27 story by New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman.
The obvious implication is that Jackson’s Kong is going to be a lot more about Jackson — his brushstrokes, I mean, and the absolute power and perogative he has to throw as much paint at the canvas as he deems fit — than anything else.
It also seems that Jackson’s indulgent streak has most likely overwhelmed any chance of audiences getting to savor a straight, clean re-telling of a classic tale about a dishy blonde and a big heartsick ape.
Take a look at the Kong stills and it’s obvious the film is going to look awesome. They’re clearly mouth-watering. But that aside, all bets are off.
I know how some of you are reading this. I have a case against Jackson and have hated everything he’s done since Heavenly Creatures, blah blah, so anything I say in advance about King Kong is a broken-record “here we go again” deal.

This poster is an unoffical fanboy thing, but thanks anyway to Jeremy Huggins for fixing the spelling of Adrien Brody’s name.

But ask yourselves this: has there ever been a remake of any kind — play, film, televised — that has been judged to be superior because it went on longer and used more words, sets, costumes and tubes of paint than the original leaner version?
I’m not saying this hasn’t ever happened (and I will honestly love it if Jackson outdoes the original in any way…really), but I’m having trouble thinking of an example.
The whole idea in Jackson making this film, according to his own proclamations when he began work on it a couple of years ago, was to pay some kind of tribute to Merian C. Cooper’s 1933 original film. Not in a Gus Van Sant/Psycho way, but to essentially re-do a classic movie…to re-experience and re-deliver to modern audiences what he loved about Kong when he first saw it as a kid on TV.
The project, which has swollen in cost to $207 million dollars, has apparently evolved into something more obsessive than personal.
The 1933 Kong runs 100 minutes, and Jackson is pretty much using the same story and situations, or so I’ve understood all along. So what could the extra 80 minutes be about? Only a few people know, but I’m fairly certain they’re about one thing and one thing only: Jackson’s power to make this film any way he damn well pleases, and about nobody at Universal being able to say boo.
In other words, the extra 80 minutes are about the auteurist “wheee!” factor…the same carte blanche E-ticket that has allowed all powerful directors at the apex of their careers to go for broke.

Given his huge success with the Rings trilogy, Jackson is certainly in no position, contractually or psychologically, to alter his modus operandi. And he’s in no way obliged to listen to anyone else’s opinions, be they practical brass-tacks sugges- tions or what-have-you.
“The film is substantially longer than Universal had anticipated and presents dual obstacles,” Waxman writes. “The extra length has helped increase the budget by a third…while requiring the studio, owned by General Electric, to reach for the kind of long-term audience interest that made hits out of three-hour movies like Titanic and the films in Mr. Jackson’s Rings trilogy.
“Hollywood blockbusters have increasingly relied on big releases that bring in as much as half of their ticket sales on the first weekend. But long films receive far fewer showings per day, and the most successful ones, like Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) by Mr. Jackson, which took in $315 million at the domestic box office for New Line Cinema, have remained in theaters for well over half a year.”
Asked about the length of King Kong, Universal executives told Waxman they saw it “as an advantage in an era when jaded moviegoers are hungering for something extraordinary.
“‘This is a three-hour feast of an event,’ said Marc Shmuger, vice chairman of Universal Pictures. ‘I’ve never come close to seeing an artist working at this level.'”

Waxman notes that “few elements of the film have been seen by the larger public, and even Universal executives saw a finished version of King Kong’s face — with its expressive eyes, broadly fierce nose and mane of computer-generated hair — only in recent days.”
“Expressive eyes”? Is that Waxman talking or something she was told by some other Universal exec? No telling yet, but a Golum-ish, Andy Serkis-ized Kong will be a very tough row to hoe.
“Exhibitors have long complained that very long films make it harder to draw audiences, though in this difficult year at the box office, they have complained louder about not having enough good films to show,” Waxman writes.
No one will be happier than myself if Kong kicks ass. And yet the indications are what they are. Snaggle tooth, Jack Black doing a half-comical spin on Carl Den- ham, three-hour running time, 11th-hour firing of composer Howard Shore, etc.
Talk me out of this. Tell me how I’m reading this the wrong way…I mean, without resorting to the usual you-can’t-see-straight-when-it-comes-to-Peter-Jackson argument.

Grabs

Lounge area on main floor of Algonquin Hotel — Monday, 10.24.05, 10:30 pm.

Tuesday, 10.25, 10:25 pm.

2004 Village Voice cover…never saw it before this week

Marilyn Monroe photo shoot, sometime around ’59 or ’60. (I think.)

Look at the photo of the bearded, bug-eyed guy wearing a flannel shirt on this Yahoo news site page, and answer the following question honestly. We all need to try and look within, to always try to empathize with what the other guy is going through, etc., but that aside and solely on a visual first-impression basis, does the look in this guy’s eyes freak you out? Just a tiny bit? Does he seem in any way, shape or form like the same guy who stuck a gun in his mouth in that phony mobile beach home in Lethal Weapon 18 years ago? (That freaks me out also…18 years ago?) There’s no question that Mel Gibson, who’s about to start directing Apocalypto in the jungles of Mexico near Veracruz, has gone from being on his own philosphical-religious trip to physically being someone else. That white streak in his beard…! He looks a little bit like abolitionist John Brown, or like some hills-of-Tennessee preacher in a 1930s period film directed by Michael Apted. He’s become very brawny looking in a backwoods, cut-your-own-fire- wood, have-sex-with-your-own-sheep “baaaah!” kind of way. I guess what I’m saying it that he looks completely gone and over- the-hill.

Jim Choma’s Florida-based Zipperfish site doesn’t have an onsite search engine, but a week or so ago there was an inspired animated riff about 50 Cent and Get Rich or Die Tryin’…and now I can’t find it and link to it. Very sharp stuff. Tell you what…watch this thing…a Zipperfish video clip of a newswoman having a Freudian slip moment. Choma (a.k.a. “Walrus”) has a Friday night live-radio talk show on his site, which inspired me to get in touch. Choma then turned me on to Jeff Beard, a tech guy who lives in the same Florida town, and now Beard is helping me launch “Elsewhere Live.”

Many thanks to the Toronto Star‘s esteemed movie critic and essayist Peter Howell for giving my upcoming internet radio show, “Elsewhere Live,” a mention in yesterday’s (Friday, 10.28) column. That said, I have no choice but to post a slight correction. “Elsewhere Live” — an easily thing to listen to as long as you have Winamp and follow the instructions — will begin on this site on Sunday, 11.20, and not tomorrow night, or Sunday the 30th, as promised by Peter’s item. (I mentioned the 11.20 date in a Wired item posted a couple of days ago.) I could start broadcasting as soon as tomorrow night, but I want to get the bugs out of the system first. Thanks again to Mr. Howell for the support.

The trailer for Ben Younger’s Prime (Universal, opening today) told you the film would be sitcommy and Nora Ephronish. And the trailer guys lied. (Big surprise!) They sold the set-up — Jewish middle-aged Manhattan therapist (Meryl Streep) realizes that the much younger man that her 37 year-old patient (Uma Thurman) is having an affair with is her 23 year-old son (Bryan Greenberg) — and, of course, ignored what the film is. Prime is, okay, slightly contrived but also an engaging, not boring, socially acute, well-performed New York adult romantic comedy. The issues are not just the difficulties in a hot love affair between a woman nudging 40 and a guy just out of college, but more fundamentally the difficulties in selling a possible long-term relationship with an older blonde shiksa to the younger man’s New York Jewish family. Craft-wise and in terms of the art of hitting the right emotional note in just the right way, Prime isn’t quite on the level of In Her Shoes, but it’s smart, fairly observant and open-hearted…not half bad. Streep is deliciously funny in some scenes, down-to-it earthy and solemn in others — she’s reason alone to see this thing. Thurman delivers a prickly, particular, up-and-down emotional portrait of a recognizably willful New York woman. And Greenberg is pretty good. (My problem is that if I were a woman or gay, he wouldn’t be my type…plus he doesn’t look like the son of Streep and John Rothman, who plays his dad.) I was more than a little surprised by this thing. Pay no mind to what some of those prick critics on Rotten Tomatoes are saying. The only thing I really didn’t care for is the ending — if Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins can make it work, why not others? It’s been five years since Younger’s last film, Boiler Room…where’s he been?

Nothing There

If I wanted to just blurt it out and cut to the chase, I could say that Jarhead (Univ- ersal, 11.4) is nothing. But it’s not entirely nothing — it’s the fall’s first major what- the-hell-were-they-thinking? movie, and that ain’t hay. Trust me, it’s going to send tens of thousands of viewers out of theatres and into the street next weekend (it’s tracking…it’ll open) asking themselves this very question.
Oo-rahh…
Based on Anthony Swofford’s first-person account of his experience as a Marine during the 1991 Gulf War, Jarhead was probably pitched to Universal execs as the first GenX war movie…the Nirvana generation’s answer to Full Metal Jacket.

Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal) arrives at U.S. airbase in Saudi Arabia, ready to whoop ass.

It was probably also sold it as a kind of GenX woe-is-us movie…as a Douglas Coupland-referenced metaphor about feelings of impotence and powerlessness… about Gulf War grunts feeling robbed of immediacy and ground-floor opportunity during their Big Combat Moment.
Or maybe they (Mendes or producers Lucy Fisher or Doug Wick, or all three) sim- ply told Universal they would deliver an honest definitive portrait of what a letdown the Gulf War was for the combatants and how it felt to be bored out of your ass in the desert, and Universal execs listened, looked at each other and said in unison, “Cool, that’ll sell tickets.”
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Universal bought the pitch, but Jarhead isn’t a movie. It’s about waiting in your seat for the movie to begin, and then waiting and waiting and eventually saying to yourself, “Oh, shit.” It doesn’t dig in or get down or manage to be any more than what Three Kings was during its first 15 minutes.
My respect for David O. Russell, the director and writer of Three Kings, is very much renewed. Great filmmaker!
Swofford’s book was fairly absorbing (I read about half of it), but the material that would make for a moderately absorbing movie simply isn’t there.
Jarhead is a series of scenes showing Marines being trained to be killers state- side, and then flying to Saudi Arabia in ’91 and waiting to go to battle against Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard troops, and then never quite seeing battle.
And to give things a generically haunting vibe it tells us (by way of narration by Jake Gyllenhaaal, who plays Swofford, or “Swoff”) that a grunt can never forget that rockin’ feeling of having his finger on a trigger. To which you will say…to which your friends will say…to which anyone with a mind will say…”So what?”

Gylennhaal, costar Peter Sarsgaard (r.) in Sam Mendes’ Jarhead

If Jarhead wasn’t a Sam Mendes movie, and wasn’t a big-studio early November release (and hence a presumed Oscar contender on some level)…if it had opened in, say, March or August without a lot of hoopla…it might have been seen for what it is — a nicely textured, maddeningly empty film about grunts coping with boredom, loneliness and disappointment — without people resenting what it isn’t.
It’s not terrible. It’s well made, well acted, convincing, etc. But $1.75 and a movie like Jarhead will get you a bus ticket.
And I’m not going to be sucked into saying what some critics are probably thinking right now, which is, “Whoa…ballsy! A hall-of-mirrors film about nothing happening that actually becomes what it’s about!”
Watch out for any critic who tries this one out on you, because that critic will be totally full of shit.
I was in my local Montrose Avenue grocery store after Monday night’s screening and the counter guy — Hispanic, early 40s, unmarried – asked me about it after spotting the program notes in my hand. “A Gulf war movie…been wanting to see this,” he said. I said, “Well, I don’t know…it’s fairly well made but no fighting.” And he said, “No fighting?”
Not even the genius of Universal marketing honcho Marc Schmuger can save this film.
It’s kind of Full Metal Jacket-y at times, but it mainly resembles that film’s floun- dering middle section. That means no character intrigue or simmering conflict (like Vincent D’Onofrio’s Pvt. Gomer Pyle being slowly tortured into animal madness by F.Lee Ermey’s drill sergeant), and no third-act battle-scene climax or a very young dying enemy soldier lying on the ground and whispering “Shoot me…shoot me!”… and no final ironic statement that comes close to Stanley Kubrick’s grunts singing the Mickey Mouse Club song with the hell-fires of Hue in the background.

It has one big scene toward the end that isn’t really a big scene…it’s kind of a final “sorry, son but this war won’t be happening for you” scene. You start to feel something when it happens but then it’s over and it’s back to the same old blah.
And there’s one really good line that Gyellenhaal says about not wanting to hear Vietnam music (i.e., a cut by The Doors) in the middle of an early `90s desert war.
So Kubrick wins and Mendes loses. (He never had a chance, really.) The British -born director, a good guy, started things off with a bang with American Beauty six years ago, and managed a stirring followup with Road to Perdition, but he didn’t have Connie Hall to punch things up this time and the material was too unfocused and insubstantial…and he failed. Jarhead is the suck.
No Oscar nominations for anyone except cinematographer Roger Deakins. No acting awards or nominations for Jake Gyllenhaal, although he’s pretty good (as far as it goes). No Best Supporting Actor nom for the great Peter Sarsgaard because the script doesn’t let him do or say anything except for a single emotional crackup scene near the end (and it’s nowhere near enough).
Universal will get its first weekend gross and then the word will get out and it’ll be down-the-toilet time.
Okay, it’s well-crafted. Yes, it has a certain high-visual distinction (occasional sur- real or dream-like flourishes) and (I keep mentioning this but there’s nothing else to mention) a streak of apparent honesty in its depiction of what boredom it can be to park your eager-beaver Marine ass in the Arabian desert for months and months, etc.
But the script never grabs hold of anything in the characters and tries to make something happen. Nothing means nothing. “Swoff” is nervous about what his girlfriend may be up to with some guy she says she’s met…who cares? Sars- gaard’s Troy is wired tight and born-to-fight…and that’s it. Jamie Foxx is a sergeant who loves the Corps and doesn’t shrink from handing out discipline…nothing. Chris Cooper gives two pep-rally speeches…showboating.

Marine Sergeant Jamie Foxx (l.) and the guys

There’s no narrative through-line to hitch your wagon to…no sense of gathering force or anything of interest approaching…nothing emotional. A lot of presumed disloyal girlfriend stuff, a little homoeroticism here and there…but it’s all Waiting for Godot-ish. The actors have zip to work with. They do moderately well with what they’ve been given, but moderately well doesn’t cut it during Oscar season.
Deakins’ photography is fine…okay, better than fine…and the CG of the burning oil wells in the third act is my favorite kind of CG, which it to say pretty much invisi- ble.
But a supposed war movie about not fighting a war — about the boring nothing bullshit stuff that happens when soldiers who’ve been trained to kill are just hanging around in the desert with their dicks in their hands…I’m really amazed. Jarhead‘s audacity would be startling if it didn’t feel so inert.

Mondo Kongo

Anyone who’s seen the Lord of the Rings trilogy (or, more to the point, has sat through the extended versions on DVD) knows Peter Jackson has never been into brevity. He couldn’t operate farther from a less-is-more aesthetic if he tried.
Eye-filling visuals, teary emotionalism, portentousness, sets and costumes that are just so, probing closeups, dialogue scenes that go on longer and are more exacting than necessary…Jackson loves to heap it on.

It should therefore come as no surprise that King Kong, his latest film which Universal will open theatrically on 12.14 (or six and a half weeks from today), is going to run three hours, according to a 10.27 story by New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman.
The obvious implication is that Jackson’s Kong is going to be a lot more about Jackson — his brushstrokes, I mean, and the absolute power and perogative he has to throw as much paint at the canvas as he deems fit — than anything else.
It also seems that Jackson’s indulgent streak has most likely overwhelmed any chance of audiences getting to savor a straight, clean re-telling of a classic tale about a dishy blonde and a big heartsick ape.
Take a look at the Kong stills and it’s obvious the film is going to look awesome. They’re clearly mouth-watering. But that aside, all bets are off.
I know how some of you are reading this. I have a case against Jackson and have hated everything he’s done since Heavenly Creatures, blah blah, so anything I say in advance about King Kong is a broken-record “here we go again” deal.

This poster is an unoffical fanboy thing, but thanks anyway to Jeremy Huggins for fixing the spelling of Adrien Brody’s name.

But ask yourselves this: has there ever been a remake of any kind — play, film, televised — that has been judged to be superior because it went on longer and used more words, sets, costumes and tubes of paint than the original leaner version?
I’m not saying this hasn’t ever happened (and I will honestly love it if Jackson outdoes the original in any way…really), but I’m having trouble thinking of an example.
The whole idea in Jackson making this film, according to his own proclamations when he began work on it a couple of years ago, was to pay some kind of tribute to Merian C. Cooper’s 1933 original film. Not in a Gus Van Sant/Psycho way, but to essentially re-do a classic movie…to re-experience and re-deliver to modern audiences what he loved about Kong when he first saw it as a kid on TV.
The project, which has swollen in cost to $207 million dollars, has apparently evolved into something more obsessive than personal.
The 1933 Kong runs 100 minutes, and Jackson is pretty much using the same story and situations, or so I’ve understood all along. So what could the extra 80 minutes be about? Only a few people know, but I’m fairly certain they’re about one thing and one thing only: Jackson’s power to make this film any way he damn well pleases, and about nobody at Universal being able to say boo.
In other words, the extra 80 minutes are about the auteurist “wheee!” factor…the same carte blanche E-ticket that has allowed all powerful directors at the apex of their careers to go for broke.

Given his huge success with the Rings trilogy, Jackson is certainly in no position, contractually or psychologically, to alter his modus operandi. And he’s in no way obliged to listen to anyone else’s opinions, be they practical brass-tacks sugges- tions or what-have-you.
“The film is substantially longer than Universal had anticipated and presents dual obstacles,” Waxman writes. “The extra length has helped increase the budget by a third…while requiring the studio, owned by General Electric, to reach for the kind of long-term audience interest that made hits out of three-hour movies like Titanic and the films in Mr. Jackson’s Rings trilogy.
“Hollywood blockbusters have increasingly relied on big releases that bring in as much as half of their ticket sales on the first weekend. But long films receive far fewer showings per day, and the most successful ones, like Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) by Mr. Jackson, which took in $315 million at the domestic box office for New Line Cinema, have remained in theaters for well over half a year.”
Asked about the length of King Kong, Universal executives told Waxman they saw it “as an advantage in an era when jaded moviegoers are hungering for something extraordinary.
“‘This is a three-hour feast of an event,’ said Marc Shmuger, vice chairman of Universal Pictures. ‘I’ve never come close to seeing an artist working at this level.'”

Waxman notes that “few elements of the film have been seen by the larger public, and even Universal executives saw a finished version of King Kong’s face — with its expressive eyes, broadly fierce nose and mane of computer-generated hair — only in recent days.”
“Expressive eyes”? Is that Waxman talking or something she was told by some other Universal exec? No telling yet, but a Golum-ish, Andy Serkis-ized Kong will be a very tough row to hoe.
“Exhibitors have long complained that very long films make it harder to draw audiences, though in this difficult year at the box office, they have complained louder about not having enough good films to show,” Waxman writes.
No one will be happier than myself if Kong kicks ass. And yet the indications are what they are. Snaggle tooth, Jack Black doing a half-comical spin on Carl Den- ham, three-hour running time, 11th-hour firing of composer Howard Shore, etc.
Talk me out of this. Tell me how I’m reading this the wrong way…I mean, without resorting to the usual you-can’t-see-straight-when-it-comes-to-Peter-Jackson argument.

Implied

That European poster for Steven Spielberg’s Munich (Universal, 12.23) confirms what I wrote about this film last March, which is that it’s not going to be about killing the Palestinian perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympic Games massacre as much as the feelings of guilt and futility that are the inevitable dividend of any such act.
Munich, which will star Eric Bana and Daniel Craig, is about a revenge operation planned and executed by Mossad, or Israel’s CIA. And, I gather, the moral and ethical mucky-muck that resulted. The script is by New York playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America).
The guy in the poster is sitting in a hotel room and holding a piece and obviously experiencing a moment of spiritual doubt of some kind. He’s not wondering what TV show to watch.

European one-sheet for Steven Spielberg’s Munich

Munich will be Spielberg’s second major-league feature having to do with lethal aggression against Jews, the first being Schindler’s List, and he knows this latest effort will be compared to his 1993 Oscar winner, so he’s got to…you know…make it complex, high-minded, morally probing.
The theme, I’m guessing, will be something along the lines of “if we all keep taking an eye for an eye, pretty soon the world will be blind.” This line comes from a 1986 TV movie called Sword of Gabriel, which was based on the same true-life story the Spielberg-Kushner film is apparently about.
Two athletes were killed during a hostage-taking and stand-off situation with German authorities at Munich’s Olympic village. Nine more were killed by a grenade blast at Munich’s Furstenfeldbruck airport when authorities tried to shoot it out with the terrorists.
I haven’t read Kushner’s script, but one of the film’s vantage points is that of “Committee X,” a high-ranking group of Israeli officials, chaired by Israeli premiere Golda Meir and Defense Minister Mosha Dayan, and the assassination campaign they ordered Mossad to carry out — to murder every strategist and supporter known to have in some way supported Black September’s Munich operation.

A member of Black September standing on balcony of Israeli athletes’ condo in Munich’s Olympic Village during September 1972 hostage stand-off.

The operation was known in some circles as Operation Wrath of God.
The idea behind the campaign, which was known as the kidon (Hebrew for bayonet) and run by senior Mossad agent Mike Harrari, was to strike terror in the hearts and minds of the plotters. It was primarily for the sake of revenge, I’m sure, but also to try and psychologically deter similar operations.
Mossad started with a list of 11 names, but the people they wound up killing numbered 18, by one count.
Harrari’s plan was to be absolutely precise and avoid collateral damage, and yet people who had nothing to do with the Munich killings — a Moroccan waiter, a Russian KGB agent, an Arab-looking bodyguard in Gibraltar, three Arab-looking guys who made the mistake of pulling out guns during a raid in Switzerland — died at the hands of the kidon killers. Seven in all.

Snob Aesthetics

My favorite flip-through book last summer was David Kamp and Steven Daly’s “The Rock Snob’s Dictionary” (Broadway Books), an incisive and tidy sum-up guide about the who, what and wherefores of elitist rock-music savoring.
And now I’m into “The Film Snob’s Dictionary,” which I scored an advance copy of last week. It’s less of an education than “Rock Snobs” — I’m obviously much more familiar with the turf — but I’m having just as good a time with the knowingness and wit and concise prose style.

“The Film Snob’s Dictionary” won’t be out until February ’06 (to tie in with seasonal Oscar frenzy), but I don’t think I’m blurbing it too early. You’ll be reading advance items and friendly mentions come November-December, and…I don’t know…time seems to whiz by faster and faster these days…torrents of information surging at hurricane-speed.
The authors are the Manhattan-based Kamp, a longtime Vanity Fair writer and sometime contributor to GQ, and another New York journo named Lawrence Levi, who first met Kamp when they worked together at Spy in…I think it was the late ’80s or early ’90s, when Graydon Carter was the editor.
Snobs are always hovering around any field of creative endeavor, and most of them are usually fringe wannabe types (i.e., producers, financial patrons, hangers-on) covering some insecurity.
Film Snobs are mostly fringe types also, but a certain number can be found among journalists and critics. Naturally, I exclude myself. I have this delusional idea that I’m an anti-snob, man-of-the-people type. The truth is that I know my stuff and feel no empathy for lowbrow ignorance, and I always go into fits when people refuse to support a film I know is intelligent, well-honed and suffused with honest emotion.
So maybe I’m a bit snobby, although for the sake of balance I try to ground myself in my middle-class, rubbing-shoulders-with-prole-types background. And I think Bollywood films are for the birds.

And yet I couldn’t help laughing when I read this line from the opening graph of “An Introductory Note by the Authors”:
“The Film Snob fairly revels, in fact, in the notion that The Public Is Stupid and Ineducable, which is what sets him apart from the more benevolent Film Buff — the effervescent, Scorsese-style enthusiast who delights in introducing novitiates to The Bicycle Thief and Powell-Pressburger films.”
I know film-snob attitudes quite well, or at least what it is to feel grossly insecure about not knowing enough about movies and therefore lacking the chops to qualify as a snob.
I felt this way when I first came to New York in the late ’70s to try and make it as a film journalist. I was acutely aware that I didn’t have the seasoning and the film knowledge to even stand in the same vicinity as the big New York guns of the time (Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, Stuart Byron, etc.), and it caused me no shortage of anguish.
This was compounded by the fact that writing articles at the time was doubly difficult because I couldn’t relax and just write what I knew and felt on my own terms.

Pauline Kael

I finally got past all this, partly out of a realization that certain elite critics lived on the planet Neptune. I came to realize that although they knew what they knew and had a brilliant way of saying it, their views weren’t any better than mine…although my respect for the elites and worshipping their prose all those years (as well as boning up on venerated critics like Andre Bazin, Otis Ferguson, Manny Farber, Dwight McDonald, James Agee, et. al.) had a cumulative effect.
I wrote last summer that I especially enjoyed “The Rock Snob’s Dictionary” because “it’s so exquisitely written. Every sentence is a Hope diamond, chiseled and honed and phrased to perfection with just the right seasoning of know-it-all attitude…aimed, naturally, at the snobs who initially created it.” The same goes with the new volume. It’s an immaculate, whip-smart read.
One difference is that “The Film Snob’s Dictionary” runs 114 pages, or 36 pages shorter than “The Rock Snob’s Dictionary.” I would have preferred a few more snob obsessions being thrown in (film snobbery encompasses a vast universe and at least 85 years of film history) …but since it’s aimed at people who don’t know this world at all, I guess the idea was to avoid getting too anal-particular.
Another difference is that knowing the film world as I do, a lot of what’s in the book is back-of-the-hand familiar. But I’m sure rock aficionados felt the same way last summer.

New York Press critic Armond White

The intro piece is pretty good…
“The Film Snob’s stance is one of proprietary knowingness — the pleasure he takes in movies derives not only from the sensory experience of watching them, but also from knowing more about them than you do, and from zealously guarding this knowledge from the cheesy, Julia Roberts-loving masses, who have no right whatsoever to be fluent in the works of Samuel (White Dog) Fuller and Andrei (the original Solaris) Tarkovsky.”
The graph about the public being Stupid and Ineducable follows, and then…
“The Film Snob’s Dictionary seeks to redress the knowledge gap between Snobs and non-Snobs, so that normal, nonsociopathic, movie-loving people may (a) become privy to some of the good stuff that Film Snobs zealously hoard for themselves; and (b) avoid or approach cautiously the vast quantities of iffy or downright crappy material that Snobs embrace in the name of Snobbery.
“This second service is especially valuable, because the Film Snob’s taste is willfully perverse, glorifying drecky Hong Kong martial-arts flicks and such misunderstood works of genius as Mike Judge’s Office Space and Michael Mann’s Heat for no rational reason whatsoever.”
(I read the preceding graph Sunday night to L.A. City Beat film critic Andy Klein, who isn’t a snob but surely knows his stuff as well as Jim Hoberman or Armond White. Klein laughed and said, “Obviously they’re trying to get a rise out of critics,” etc. He also declared that Heat, Office Space and, one inferred, a selection of his favorite Hong Kong chop-socky flicks “are all great.”)

“The authors of this book, in compiling its entries, have sought to strike the right balance between intellectual curiosity and Snob madness, so that the reader will feel less intimidated about renting a genuinely entertaining film such as Fritz Lang’s M just because it is ‘German Expressionist,’ but liberated from the burden of ever having to watch a Peter Greenaway film.”
The intro also says that “readers knowledgable about film will notice the conspicuous absence from The Film Snob’s Dictionary, apart from passing references, of such titans of foreign cinema as Federico Fellini (8 1/2), Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal), Akira Kurosawa (The Seven Samurai), and Satyajit Ray (the “Apu” trilogy).
“The Film Snob may indeed know a fair amount about these filmmakers (Fellini in particular, given that his movies’ soundtracks were often composed by Snob cause celebre Nino Rota), but he generally scoffs at them, deeming them to be mere name-drops for bourgeois losers wishing to seem cultured. Watching a Bergman film is so PBS tote-bag, so Mom-and-Dad-on-a-date-in-college, so baguettes-and- Chardonnay.
“The Snob prides himself on his populist, un-arty taste, favoring, for example, the soapy, over-emotive schlock of India’s Bombay-based `Bollywood’ film industry over the artful, nuanced films of the Calcutta-born Ray, and the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone and Corbucci over anything Fellini ever made. It’s a reverse Snobbery more powerful than the Snobbery it’s rebelling against.”

New York Observer critic Andrew Sarris

There are something like 250 capsule mentions. As noted earlier, there could probably be another 100 or so more if Kamp and Levi wanted to bulk up. Some of these have appeared in two past issues of Vanity Fair, and there’s a site that quoted a few of them in ’04, so it doesn’t seem like much of a spoiler to excerpt a few more.
The eight entries I’m running deal solely with critics and film magazines/sites. If it were my book I would have mentioned other Neptuners (B. Ruby Rich, Jim Hoberman, Ray Pride, Armond White, Robert Koehler, Emanuel Levy) — each of whom, it could be argued, are fascinating in their authority-exuding quirkiness.
There’s certainly no slight in saying these people should have been included. Film Snobbery is an excusable neurotic outgrowth of being an extra-passionate Film Buff, and every Neptuner I’ve mentioned in this graph is a fine writer and respected scholar, so let’s not have any arched backs.
Anyway…
Farber, Manny: Beloved alter kocker film critic emeritus, now working as a a painter in Southern California. Preceding his friend Pauline Kael by more than a decade as a nonconformist thinker about movies, Farber got his start writing reviews for The New Republic in the 1940s and proved as comfortable decon- structing Tex Avery cartoons and Don Siegel genre exercises as he was evaluating the French New Wave and Rainer Werner Fassbinder — in effect, inventing the prevailing critic vogue for high thought on low entertainment. A big influence of Snob-revered Jonathan Rosenbaum, Farber, more than Kael or Andrew Sarris, is the name to drop for instant Crit Snob credibility.

Retired film critic Manny Farber

Film Comment. Smug, aggressively elitist bimonthly magazine published by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Where Snobs go to read (or write) dithery articles about Bollywood and despairing critiques of popular cinema.
Film Threat. Surprisingly buoyant, unsmug Web ‘zine devoed to independent film. Where Snobs go to read fulsome appreciations of Sam Raimi and interviews with such Queens of the B’s as Debbie Rochon and Tina Krause.
Katz, Ephraim. Industrious Israeli-born film nerd who, in the 1970s, single- handedly undertook the task of compiling an encyclopedia of film. Published in 1979, after years of work, Katz’s The Film Encyclopedia quickly established itself as the definitive film reference for both Snobs who need to know what a “friction head” is (it’s a kind of tripod head that ensures smooth camera movement) and laypersons who can’t keep Linda Darnell straight from Joan Blondell. Katz died in 1992, and successive, expanded editions of the Film Encyclopedia have been produced by his proteges, though hard-core Snobs take issue with some of the cuts that were made from Katz’s original, and keep the ’79 edition around.
Kael, Pauline. Revered film critic (1919-2001) whose work, most of which appeared in The New Yorker, stood out for its bracing, provocative prose and its author’s loony, nonsensical taste; no one was smarter and more cogent about Cary Grant’s career and Steve Spielberg’s early films, yet no one was more reckless in overpraising grim 1970s murk and unbearably blowsy female performances (e.g., Elizabeth Taylor in X, Y & Zee; Karen Black in Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean; Bette Midler in Big Business). A tiny woman, Kael nevertheless inspired fear in her legions of movie-critic acolytes (known as “Paulettes”), full-grown men and women who tremulously sought her unforthcoming approval and pilgrimaged to her home in the Berkshires in the vain hope of being anointed her heir apparent.

Snob-favored New York Times critic Dave Kehr, flanked by two Russians with four-syllable last names

Kehr, Dave. Third- or possibly fourth-string New York Times movie critic. Though often relegated to reviewing DVD releases, he is preferred by Snobs over A.O. Scott, Manohla Dargis and Stephen Holden.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. Industrious but mirthless film critic for the Chicago Reader; one of the few important film writers of the post-Kael era. Given to chiding fellow Snobs about their ignorance of the Iranian New Wave.
Sarris, Andrew. Brooklyn-born film critic and theorist known for popularizing the Auteur Theory, and for arousing the ire of Pauline Kael with his totemic 1968 book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929 — 1968, in which he categorized directors by preference, prompting Kael to deride him, to his face, as a “list queen.” His gentlemanly, hypeless prose has remained consistent since 1960, when he began writing for the Village Voice. Married to the fellow film-critster Molly Haskell, Sarris now plies his trade for the New York Observer and as a trainee Snob-admired lecturer at Columbia University.
Reminder to Kamp and Levi: Montgomery Clift got drunk and slammed his car into that telephone pole in May, 1956. And the cool thing about Todd A-O in the 1950s wasn’t just the 70mm format — it was mainly the 30-frame-per-second rate of photography and projection (even though it was viewable in the big-city roadshow engagements of only two films — Oklahoma! and Around the World in 80 Days).
“The Film Snob’s Dictonary” is an essential, highly educational read for non- snobs, and snobs will have to buy a copy just to keep it on their bookshelves… something to leaf through and reflect upon as a kind of cautionary text.

Montgomery Clift

Grabs

Lounge area on main floor of Algonquin Hotel — Monday, 10.24.05, 10:30 pm.

Tuesday, 10.25, 10:25 pm.

2004 Village Voice cover…never saw it before this week

Marilyn Monroe photo shoot, sometime around ’59 or ’60. (I think.)

Mondo Kongo

Anyone who’s seen the Lord of the Rings trilogy (or, more to the point, has sat through the extended versions on DVD) knows Peter Jackson has never been into brevity. He couldn’t operate farther from a less-is-more aesthetic if he tried.
Eye-filling visuals, teary emotionalism, portentousness, sets and costumes that are just so, probing closeups, dialogue scenes that go on longer and are more exacting than necessary…Jackson loves to heap on the syrup.

It should therefore come as no surprise that King Kong, his latest film which Universal will open theatrically on 12.14 (or six and a half weeks from today), is going to run three hours, according to a 10.27 story by New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman.
The obvious implication is that Jackson’s Kong is going to be a lot more about Jackson — his brushstrokes, I mean, and the absolute power and perogative he has to throw as much paint at the canvas as he deems fit — than anything else.
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It also seems that Jackson’s indulgent streak has most likely overwhelmed any chance of audiences getting to savor a straight, clean re-telling of a classic tale about a dishy blonde and a big heartsick ape.
Take a look at the Kong stills and it’s obvious the film is going to look awesome. They’re clearly mouth-watering. But that aside, all bets are off.
I know how some of you are reading this. I have a case against Jackson and have hated everything he’s done since Heavenly Creatures, blah blah, so anything I say in advance about King Kong is a broken-record “here we go again” deal.

Note to eagle-eyed proofreaders: the misspelling of Adrien Brody’s name above is not my doing and I can’t figure how to Photoshop in a correction.

But ask yourselves this: has there ever been a remake of any kind — play, film, televised — that has been judged to be superior because it went on longer and used more words, sets, costumes and tubes of paint than the original leaner version?
I’m not saying this hasn’t ever happened (and I will honestly love it if Jackson outdoes the original in any way…really), but I’m having trouble thinking of an example.
The whole idea in Jackson making this film, according to his own proclamations when he began work on it a couple of years ago, was to pay some kind of tribute to Merian C. Cooper’s 1933 original film. Not in a Gus Van Sant/Psycho way, but to essentially re-do a classic movie…to re-experience and re-deliver to modern audiences what he loved about Kong when he first saw it as a kid on TV.
The project, which has swollen in cost to $207 million dollars, has apparently evolved into something more obsessive than personal.
The 1933 Kong runs 100 minutes, and Jackson is pretty much using the same story and situations, or so I’ve understood all along. So what could the extra 80 minutes be about? Only a few people know, but I’m fairly certain they’re about one thing and one thing only: Jackson’s power to make this film any way he damn well pleases, and about nobody at Universal being able to say boo.
In other words, the extra 80 minutes are about the auteurist “wheee!” factor…the same carte blanche E-ticket that has allowed all powerful directors at the apex of their careers to go for broke.

Given his huge success with the Rings trilogy, Jackson is certainly in no position, contractually or psychologically, to alter his modus operandi. And he’s in no way obliged to listen to anyone else’s opinions, be they practical brass-tacks sugges- tions or what-have-you.
“The film is substantially longer than Universal had anticipated and presents dual obstacles,” Waxman writes. “The extra length has helped increase the budget by a third…while requiring the studio, owned by General Electric, to reach for the kind of long-term audience interest that made hits out of three-hour movies like Titanic and the films in Mr. Jackson’s Rings trilogy.
“Hollywood blockbusters have increasingly relied on big releases that bring in as much as half of their ticket sales on the first weekend. But long films receive far fewer showings per day, and the most successful ones, like Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) by Mr. Jackson, which took in $315 million at the domestic box office for New Line Cinema, have remained in theaters for well over half a year.”
Asked about the length of King Kong, Universal executives told Waxman they saw it “as an advantage in an era when jaded moviegoers are hungering for something extraordinary.
“‘This is a three-hour feast of an event,’ said Marc Shmuger, vice chairman of Universal Pictures. ‘I’ve never come close to seeing an artist working at this level.'”

Waxman notes that “few elements of the film have been seen by the larger public, and even Universal executives saw a finished version of King Kong’s face — with its expressive eyes, broadly fierce nose and mane of computer-generated hair — only in recent days.”
“Expressive eyes”? Is that Waxman talking or something she was told by some other Universal exec? No telling yet, but a Golum-ish, Andy Serkis-ized Kong will be a very tough row to hoe.
“Exhibitors have long complained that very long films make it harder to draw audiences, though in this difficult year at the box office, they have complained louder about not having enough good films to show,” Waxman writes.
No one will be happier than myself if Kong kicks ass. And yet the indications are what they are. Snaggle tooth, Jack Black doing a half-comical spin on Carl Den- ham, three-hour running time, 11th-hour firing of composer Howard Shore, etc.
Talk me out of this. Tell me how I’m reading this the wrong way…I mean, without resorting to the usual you-can’t-see-straight-when-it-comes-to-Peter-Jackson argument.

Implied

That European poster for Steven Spielberg’s Munich (Universal, 12.23) confirms what I wrote about this film last March, which is that it’s not going to be about killing the Palestinian perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympic Games massacre as much as the feelings of guilt and futility that are the inevitable dividend of any such act.
Munich, which will star Eric Bana and Daniel Craig, is about a revenge operation planned and executed by Mossad, or Israel’s CIA. And, I gather, the moral and ethical mucky-muck that resulted. The script is by New York playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America).
The guy in the poster is sitting in a hotel room and holding a piece and obviously experiencing a moment of spiritual doubt of some kind. He’s not wondering what TV show to watch.

European one-sheet for Steven Spielberg’s Munich

Munich will be Spielberg’s second major-league feature having to do with lethal aggression against Jews, the first being Schindler’s List, and he knows this latest effort will be compared to his 1993 Oscar winner, so he’s got to…you know…make it complex, high-minded, morally probing.
The theme, I’m guessing, will be something along the lines of “if we all keep taking an eye for an eye, pretty soon the world will be blind.” This line comes from a 1986 TV movie called Sword of Gabriel, which was based on the same true-life story the Spielberg-Kushner film is apparently about.
Two athletes were killed during a hostage-taking and stand-off situation with German authorities at Munich’s Olympic village. Nine more were killed by a grenade blast at Munich’s Furstenfeldbruck airport when authorities tried to shoot it out with the terrorists.
I haven’t read Kushner’s script, but one of the film’s vantage points is that of “Committee X,” a high-ranking group of Israeli officials, chaired by Israeli premiere Golda Meir and Defense Minister Mosha Dayan, and the assassination campaign they ordered Mossad to carry out — to murder every strategist and supporter known to have in some way supported Black September’s Munich operation.

A member of Black September standing on balcony of Israeli athletes’ condo in Munich’s Olympic Village during September 1972 hostage stand-off.

The operation was known in some circles as Operation Wrath of God.
The idea behind the campaign, which was known as the kidon (Hebrew for bayonet) and run by senior Mossad agent Mike Harrari, was to strike terror in the hearts and minds of the plotters. It was primarily for the sake of revenge, I’m sure, but also to try and psychologically deter similar operations.
Mossad started with a list of 11 names, but the people they wound up killing numbered 18, by one count.
Harrari’s plan was to be absolutely precise and avoid collateral damage, and yet people who had nothing to do with the Munich killings — a Moroccan waiter, a Russian KGB agent, an Arab-looking bodyguard in Gibraltar, three Arab-looking guys who made the mistake of pulling out guns during a raid in Switzerland — died at the hands of the kidon killers. Seven in all.

Snob Aesthetics

My favorite flip-through book last summer was David Kamp and Steven Daly’s “The Rock Snob’s Dictionary” (Broadway Books), an incisive and tidy sum-up guide about the who, what and wherefores of elitist rock-music savoring.
And now I’m into “The Film Snob’s Dictionary,” which I scored an advance copy of last week. It’s less of an education than “Rock Snobs” — I’m obviously much more familiar with the turf — but I’m having just as good a time with the knowingness and wit and concise prose style.

“The Film Snob’s Dictionary” won’t be out until February ’06 (to tie in with seasonal Oscar frenzy), but I don’t think I’m blurbing it too early. You’ll be reading advance items and friendly mentions come November-December, and…I don’t know…time seems to whiz by faster and faster these days…torrents of information surging at hurricane-speed.
The authors are the Manhattan-based Kamp, a longtime Vanity Fair writer and sometime contributor to GQ, and another New York journo named Lawrence Levi, who first met Kamp when they worked together at Spy in…I think it was the late ’80s or early ’90s, when Graydon Carter was the editor.
Snobs are always hovering around any field of creative endeavor, and most of them are usually fringe wannabe types (i.e., producers, financial patrons, hangers-on) covering some insecurity.
Film Snobs are mostly fringe types also, but a certain number can be found among journalists and critics. Naturally, I exclude myself. I have this delusional idea that I’m an anti-snob, man-of-the-people type. The truth is that I know my stuff and feel no empathy for lowbrow ignorance, and I always go into fits when people refuse to support a film I know is intelligent, well-honed and suffused with honest emotion.
So maybe I’m a bit snobby, although for the sake of balance I try to ground myself in my middle-class, rubbing-shoulders-with-prole-types background. And I think Bollywood films are for the birds.

And yet I couldn’t help laughing when I read this line from the opening graph of “An Introductory Note by the Authors”:
“The Film Snob fairly revels, in fact, in the notion that The Public Is Stupid and Ineducable, which is what sets him apart from the more benevolent Film Buff — the effervescent, Scorsese-style enthusiast who delights in introducing novitiates to The Bicycle Thief and Powell-Pressburger films.”
I know film-snob attitudes quite well, or at least what it is to feel grossly insecure about not knowing enough about movies and therefore lacking the chops to qualify as a snob.
I felt this way when I first came to New York in the late ’70s to try and make it as a film journalist. I was acutely aware that I didn’t have the seasoning and the film knowledge to even stand in the same vicinity as the big New York guns of the time (Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, Stuart Byron, etc.), and it caused me no shortage of anguish.
This was compounded by the fact that writing articles at the time was doubly difficult because I couldn’t relax and just write what I knew and felt on my own terms.

Pauline Kael

I finally got past all this, partly out of a realization that certain elite critics lived on the planet Neptune. I came to realize that although they knew what they knew and had a brilliant way of saying it, their views weren’t any better than mine…although my respect for the elites and worshipping their prose all those years (as well as boning up on venerated critics like Andre Bazin, Otis Ferguson, Manny Farber, Dwight McDonald, James Agee, et. al.) had a cumulative effect.
I wrote last summer that I especially enjoyed “The Rock Snob’s Dictionary” because “it’s so exquisitely written. Every sentence is a Hope diamond, chiseled and honed and phrased to perfection with just the right seasoning of know-it-all attitude…aimed, naturally, at the snobs who initially created it.” The same goes with the new volume. It’s an immaculate, whip-smart read.
One difference is that “The Film Snob’s Dictionary” runs 114 pages, or 36 pages shorter than “The Rock Snob’s Dictionary.” I would have preferred a few more snob obsessions being thrown in (film snobbery encompasses a vast universe and at least 85 years of film history) …but since it’s aimed at people who don’t know this world at all, I guess the idea was to avoid getting too anal-particular.
Another difference is that knowing the film world as I do, a lot of what’s in the book is back-of-the-hand familiar. But I’m sure rock aficionados felt the same way last summer.

New York Press critic Armond White

The intro piece is pretty good…
“The Film Snob’s stance is one of proprietary knowingness — the pleasure he takes in movies derives not only from the sensory experience of watching them, but also from knowing more about them than you do, and from zealously guarding this knowledge from the cheesy, Julia Roberts-loving masses, who have no right whatsoever to be fluent in the works of Samuel (White Dog) Fuller and Andrei (the original Solaris) Tarkovsky.”
The graph about the public being Stupid and Ineducable follows, and then…
“The Film Snob’s Dictionary seeks to redress the knowledge gap between Snobs and non-Snobs, so that normal, nonsociopathic, movie-loving people may (a) become privy to some of the good stuff that Film Snobs zealously hoard for themselves; and (b) avoid or approach cautiously the vast quantities of iffy or downright crappy material that Snobs embrace in the name of Snobbery.
“This second service is especially valuable, because the Film Snob’s taste is willfully perverse, glorifying drecky Hong Kong martial-arts flicks and such misunderstood works of genius as Mike Judge’s Office Space and Michael Mann’s Heat for no rational reason whatsoever.”
(I read the preceding graph Sunday night to L.A. City Beat film critic Andy Klein, who isn’t a snob but surely knows his stuff as well as Jim Hoberman or Armond White. Klein laughed and said, “Obviously they’re trying to get a rise out of critics,” etc. He also declared that Heat, Office Space and, one inferred, a selection of his favorite Hong Kong chop-socky flicks “are all great.”)

“The authors of this book, in compiling its entries, have sought to strike the right balance between intellectual curiosity and Snob madness, so that the reader will feel less intimidated about renting a genuinely entertaining film such as Fritz Lang’s M just because it is ‘German Expressionist,’ but liberated from the burden of ever having to watch a Peter Greenaway film.”
The intro also says that “readers knowledgable about film will notice the conspicuous absence from The Film Snob’s Dictionary, apart from passing references, of such titans of foreign cinema as Federico Fellini (8 1/2), Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal), Akira Kurosawa (The Seven Samurai), and Satyajit Ray (the “Apu” trilogy).
“The Film Snob may indeed know a fair amount about these filmmakers (Fellini in particular, given that his movies’ soundtracks were often composed by Snob cause celebre Nino Rota), but he generally scoffs at them, deeming them to be mere name-drops for bourgeois losers wishing to seem cultured. Watching a Bergman film is so PBS tote-bag, so Mom-and-Dad-on-a-date-in-college, so baguettes-and- Chardonnay.
“The Snob prides himself on his populist, un-arty taste, favoring, for example, the soapy, over-emotive schlock of India’s Bombay-based `Bollywood’ film industry over the artful, nuanced films of the Calcutta-born Ray, and the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone and Corbucci over anything Fellini ever made. It’s a reverse Snobbery more powerful than the Snobbery it’s rebelling against.”

New York Observer critic Andrew Sarris

There are something like 250 capsule mentions. As noted earlier, there could probably be another 100 or so more if Kamp and Levi wanted to bulk up. Some of these have appeared in two past issues of Vanity Fair, and there’s a site that quoted a few of them in ’04, so it doesn’t seem like much of a spoiler to excerpt a few more.
The eight entries I’m running deal solely with critics and film magazines/sites. If it were my book I would have mentioned other Neptuners (B. Ruby Rich, Jim Hoberman, Ray Pride, Armond White, Robert Koehler, Emanuel Levy) — each of whom, it could be argued, are fascinating in their authority-exuding quirkiness.
There’s certainly no slight in saying these people should have been included. Film Snobbery is an excusable neurotic outgrowth of being an extra-passionate Film Buff, and every Neptuner I’ve mentioned in this graph is a fine writer and respected scholar, so let’s not have any arched backs.
Anyway…
Farber, Manny: Beloved alter kocker film critic emeritus, now working as a a painter in Southern California. Preceding his friend Pauline Kael by more than a decade as a nonconformist thinker about movies, Farber got his start writing reviews for The New Republic in the 1940s and proved as comfortable decon- structing Tex Avery cartoons and Don Siegel genre exercises as he was evaluating the French New Wave and Rainer Werner Fassbinder — in effect, inventing the prevailing critic vogue for high thought on low entertainment. A big influence of Snob-revered Jonathan Rosenbaum, Farber, more than Kael or Andrew Sarris, is the name to drop for instant Crit Snob credibility.

Retired film critic Manny Farber

Film Comment. Smug, aggressively elitist bimonthly magazine published by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Where Snobs go to read (or write) dithery articles about Bollywood and despairing critiques of popular cinema.
Film Threat. Surprisingly buoyant, unsmug Web ‘zine devoed to independent film. Where Snobs go to read fulsome appreciations of Sam Raimi and interviews with such Queens of the B’s as Debbie Rochon and Tina Krause.
Katz, Ephraim. Industrious Israeli-born film nerd who, in the 1970s, single- handedly undertook the task of compiling an encyclopedia of film. Published in 1979, after years of work, Katz’s The Film Encyclopedia quickly established itself as the definitive film reference for both Snobs who need to know what a “friction head” is (it’s a kind of tripod head that ensures smooth camera movement) and laypersons who can’t keep Linda Darnell straight from Joan Blondell. Katz died in 1992, and successive, expanded editions of the Film Encyclopedia have been produced by his proteges, though hard-core Snobs take issue with some of the cuts that were made from Katz’s original, and keep the ’79 edition around.
Kael, Pauline. Revered film critic (1919-2001) whose work, most of which appeared in The New Yorker, stood out for its bracing, provocative prose and its author’s loony, nonsensical taste; no one was smarter and more cogent about Cary Grant’s career and Steve Spielberg’s early films, yet no one was more reckless in overpraising grim 1970s murk and unbearably blowsy female performances (e.g., Elizabeth Taylor in X, Y & Zee; Karen Black in Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean; Bette Midler in Big Business). A tiny woman, Kael nevertheless inspired fear in her legions of movie-critic acolytes (known as “Paulettes”), full-grown men and women who tremulously sought her unforthcoming approval and pilgrimaged to her home in the Berkshires in the vain hope of being anointed her heir apparent.

Kehr, Dave. Third- or possibly fourth-string New York Times movie critic. Though often relegated to reviewing DVD releases, he is preferred by Snobs over A.O. Scott, Manohla Dargis and Stephen Holden.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. Industrious but mirthless film critic for the Chicago Reader; one of the few important film writers of the post-Kael era. Given to chiding fellow Snobs about their ignorance of the Iranian New Wave.
Sarris, Andrew. Brooklyn-born film critic and theorist known for popularizing the Auteur Theory, and for arousing the ire of Pauline Kael with his totemic 1968 book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929 — 1968, in which he categorized directors by preference, prompting Kael to deride him, to his face, as a “list queen.” His gentlemanly, hypeless prose has remained consistent since 1960, when he began writing for the Village Voice. Married to the fellow film-critster Molly Haskell, Sarris now plies his trade for the New York Observer and as a trainee Snob-admired lecturer at Columbia University.
Reminder to Kamp and Levi: Montgomery Clift got drunk and slammed his car into that telephone pole in May, 1956. And the cool thing about Todd A-O in the 1950s wasn’t just the 70mm format — it was mainly the 30-frame-per-second rate of photography and projection (even though it was viewable in the big-city roadshow engagements of only two films — Oklahoma! and Around the World in 80 Days).
“The Film Snob’s Dictonary” is an essential, highly educational read for non- snobs, and snobs will have to buy a copy just to keep it on their bookshelves… something to leaf through and reflect upon as a kind of cautionary text.

Montgomery Clift

Grabs

Lounge area on main floor of Algonquin Hotel — Monday, 10.24.05, 10:30 pm.

Tuesday, 10.25, 10:25 pm.

Marilyn Monroe photo shoot, sometime around ’59 or ’60. (I think.)