MSNBC’s Erik Lundegaard has a pretty good piece here about the best screen kisses, but unless I read it too fast he left out a whopper:
That late-in-the-second-act moment in Hustle & Flow when Terrence Howard walks back into the house and plants a real passionate one on Tarij P. Henson. A great kiss because it’s not about down-on-the-floor passion as much as Howard’s D.J. charatcrer having finally recognized the love and the loyalty he’d been getting all along from Henson’s “Shug.” Which, of course, makes it very hot.

“Interesting complaint about using World Trade Center as the title of Oliver Stone’s 9.11 film,” a very smart industry guy who knows a lot stuff wrote a few minutes ago. “Here a a couple of thoughts to add to the mix. Maybe he should’ve called it Wall Street II. Or, more seriously, made a simple edit which would make the title less plodding: World Trade. That makes it sound like an action picture, and yet it resonates. There was indeed a worldwide tradeoff that day.” Seriously…I think this is a great title.

Hollywood-based reader Dixon Steele is saying that closet homophobia regarding Brokeback Mountain is not a rumor. “I had dinner last weekend with my uncle, who is a senior level executive for one of the networks,” he writes. “We both see a lot of movies and talk about them at our occasional get-togethers. I was surprised when he told me he hadn’t seen BBM yet. Although he’s your typical mostly-liberal thinking person (post-middle-aged), he represents the typical Academy voter. And I know from our past talks he’s slightly homophobic. And this was confirmed when he told me he had no interest in seeing the film. When I asked him why, he couldn’t answer…but we both knew why.”

Oh, yeah…I was going to say something about Firewall, the new Harrison Ford thriller that opens today. Directed by Richard Loncraine, it’s a reasonably well-made programmer. Not boring or horrendous, and it moves along and does the job. Ford (a.k.a., “Uncle Festus”) is very good (as usual) at the non-visual stuff…at making you share the tension that his good-guy character is going through as he figures how to stick it to the bad guys who are holding his family hostage. There are about 18 movies that Firewall reminds you of — The Desperate Hours (both versions), Hostage (the Bruce Willis film), Air Force One, Don’t Say a Word, Trapped, etc. But the films it most closely resembles are British-produced — one made in 1961, the other in 1987. The former is called Cash on Demand, a Quentin Lawrence film with Peter Cushing as a bank manager whose wife and child by a criminal who’s looking to rob the bank by pretending to be an insurance investigator. The ’87 version is Loncraine’s own Bellman and True, which is about a computer expert [who’s been] bribed by group of bank robbers to obtain details of the security system at a newly-built bank, and is later re-accosted by the criminals when they invade his London home and take his son hostage. They force him to decode the information about the alarm and then to take part in the robbery.”

Embarassment Redux: “Often there are good movies that win, but it’s the movies that they beat which says it all,” says reader Mark Smith. “My personal hell is Dances With Wolves over Goodfellas in 1990. You tell me which movie has become a timeless classic and which has been forgotten about. The grandfucker of them all was in 1976 when Rocky beat Network, Taxi Driver and All the President’s Men .” C’mon, Mark…the Oscar always goes to the Best Picture contender that summons the strongest (i.e., weepiest) emotional response. You know it, I know it…par for the course.

That explanation from a “distribution insider” in yesterday’s (2.9) Variety story about Tuesday’s massive firings at Paramount due to the DreamWorks merger (109 out of nearly 129 employees — including “almost all senior execs [and] virtually all of former distrib president Wayne Lewellen‘s staff”) is fascinating because of the obvious parallels in male-lion behavior. “”They didn’t just get rid of high-level people,” the distribution insider told Variety‘s Ben Fritz and Chris Gardner. “Clearly, they didn’t want anybody from the old regime.” A nature website I’ve found says that “a male lion doesn’t tend to think in term of his species survival but in terms of his survival through his progeny, meaning that anything that gets in the way of this is a threat…even other cubs of his own species. If the male wants to procreate and encounters a female with cubs, his natural instinct is to get rid of the cubs of another lion so she’ll bear his cubs, thus insuring the survival of his progeny.”

New York Press critic and blogger Matt Zoller Seitz defending that grotesque Munich sex scene that was intercut with Munich airport shoot-out footage.

Reader Andy Smith is adding Cimarron (1931) to the list of Best Picture Oscar Embarassments. “Most people have forgotten it but it took the prize in 1931, beating out the likes of The Front Page, Public Enemy and City Lights,” says Smith. “Seems to have won primarily due to its scope and general ‘bigness’ (i.e., ‘must be a great…look how much it cost to make!’)”

More Best Picture Oscar Embarassments, submitted by reader Gabriel Neeb: (a) Mel Gibson’s Braveheart (let’s call this one a post-Passion of the Christ reassessment); (b) How Green Was My Valley (it beat out the political hot-potato Citizen Kane and the legendary The Maltese Falcon, which was seen in ’41 as a hardboiled genre piece and therefore not toney enough for a gold statuette); (c) 1940’s Rebecca (a strong piece, but this is the Hitchcock film the Academy went for because…hmmm, let me guess…because producer David O. Selznick was out there twisting arms and calling in the muscle and invoking favors?); (d) 1958’s Gigi (has anyone in the presently-configured world ever seen this curiously antiquted museum piece on DVD? There isn’t a single cultural echo in all of it); (e) 1932 and ’33’s Cavalcade (the year King Kong should have been at least nominated); (f) 1936’s The Great Ziegfeld and ’37’s The Life of Emile Zola .

I missed this one when it first went up on 2.3.06: Michael Moore is asking readers to send him their health-care horror stories so he can use some of them in his new doc Sicko, which he’s currently researching and shooting. “How would you like to be in my next movie?,” he begins. “Have you ever found yourself getting ready to file for bankruptcy because you can’t pay your kid’s hospital bill, and then you say to yourself, ‘Boy, I sure would like to be in Michael Moore’s health care movie!’? Or, after being turned down for the third time by your HMO for an operation they should be paying for, do you ever think to yourself, “Now this travesty should be in that Sicko movie!”? Or maybe you’ve just been told that your father is going to have to just, well, die because he can’t afford the drugs he needs to get better — and it’s then that you say, ‘Damn, what did I do with Michael Moore’s home number?!’ Ok, here’s your chance. As you can imagine, we’ve got the goods on these bastards. All we need now is to put a few of you in the movie and let the world see what the greatest country ever in the history of the universe does to its own people, simply because they have the misfortune of getting sick. Because getting sick, unless you are rich, is a crime — a crime for which you must pay, sometimes with your own life.”

Last Monday’s remark from Tony Curtis [go south about 12 items] about not having seen Brokeback Mountain and that he probably won’t between now and balloting time has led me to re-read Nikki Finke‘s Feb. 2 L.A. Weekly column and re-consider that she might have been on to something. It began with her saying that “this year’s dirty little secret is the anecdotal evidence pouring in to me about hetero members being unwilling to screen Brokeback Mountain. For a community that takes pride in progressive values, it’s shameful that Hollywood’s homophobia may be on a par with Pat Robertson’s. Despite the hype you’re reading in the press and on the internet about Brokeback, with its eight nominations, being the supposed favorite to take home the Best Picture Oscar on March 5, Crash could end up winning. The issue isn’t which film is better. The issue is more like which movie was seen by the Academy.”