As the Bagger points out, the somewhat unwitting and definitely appalled Borat costar Cindy Streit is more than a killjoy. She’s also not very hip. And she may not be all that smart. Of all the angry reactions from Borat participants who didn’t get what was really happening when the cameras rolled, this may be the funniest.

46 years ago, or roughly 35 years before Harvey Weinstein began rewriting the Oscar campaign book, Burt Lancaster voiced some angry allegations to the Saturday Evening Post about certain unsavory practices involving Oscar award balloting and politicking. (Thanks to Michael Bergeron for sending this along.)

Three months after winning the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Elmer Gantry (i.e., when it was safe to do so), Burt Lancaster let loose.

A trailer for Evan Almighty (Universal, 6.22.07), the most grossly expensive CGI comedy of all time with the least funny, most tiresome premise in the world. The mere threat of this film seems to have undone all the good vibes that Little Miss Sunshine extended to poor Steve Carell, who’s clearly playing to the cheap seats in this apparent Tom Shadyac monstrosity. God’s (i.e., Morgan Freeman‘s) decision to cover the earth in flood waters is clearly an expression of displeasure with how man has ruined it (which he most certainly has). But how is that, you know, “funny”?

Pat Broeske has written a N.Y. Times piece about a couple of planned duelling biopics about the legendary jazz trumpeter Miles Davis… fascinating. The movie world certainly needs another biopic (or two) about a troubled genius musician who had drug problems and wasn’t the most likable or admirable guy in the world. I mean, that’s a story that absolutely needs to be told.

The Davis film most likely to get shot is called Miles and Me (shitty title!); the other one is being assembled by the Davis estate and may star Don Cheadle.
Curiously, Broeske doesn’t mention that the Davis mystique was re-energized a couple of years ago by a scene in Michael Mann‘s Collateral in which Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx visit a Los Angeles jazz club owner (Barry Shabaka Henley) who recalls a vivid encounter he had with Miles in the mid ’60s.
Davis was known to some as “the Prince of Darkness, [partly becasue] he ranted so much about race and prejudice that some acquaintances believed he was the one with racial prejudice. (Even though he never balked at working with white musicians, and he was romantically involved with several white women.) He often performed with his back to his audience, and berated fans who dared approach him.
“Famously fond of cool cars and hot women, Davis had an erratic personal life that included heroin addiction, cocaine addiction, pimping and spousal abuse,” Broeske writes.
“‘I actually left running for my life — more than once,√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ǭù his former wife Frances Davis recalled in a telephone interview. A onetime Broadway dancer, she said her own career faltered after she left the hit musical West Side Story because Davis told her, ‘A woman should be with her man.’ She now says any screen depiction must be truthful about both his artistry and his rage. ‘There√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s got to be full treatment of his genius, as well as his shortcomings,’ she said.”
Forget that quality coming through from the Davis estate version — familymembers always protect their own.

Much admired screenwriter Eric Roth is making the rounds to raise awareness about his work on Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd (Universal, 12.22), which, as he promised in a phone chat a few days ago, has a lot more in the way of adult texture than most of the films out now. Here’s a N.Y. Times interview piece by Kris Tapley, out today.

Here’s a 39-minute portion of yesterday’s conversation with Children of Men director-cowriter Alfonso Cuaron. A lot of it won’t add up for those who haven’t seen the film, but Cuaron’s obvious intelligence and his very precise choice of words deliver a kind of contact high if you listen for a few minutes. That and his laughter, which has a wonderful eruption and spontaneity.

Cuaron really knows his stuff, and he obviously respects to the nth degree and swears by the great Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, his director of photography who refused to use any sort of artificial lighting or green screens in the making of Children of Men. This is a film that uses CG visuals allthrough it, but with one or two exceptions it’s very hard to identify them.

Cuaron’s long experience making Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban provided a master course in state-of-the-art visual effects, and strengthened his hand in discussing what was possible or not possible in the making of Children of Men. But I’m delighted that he and “Chivo” were dead-set against using anything that looked in the least bit like a visual effect. (One surprise for me is that a bit in which Clive Owen and Julianne Moore play a mouth-to-mouth game of “catch” with ping-pong balls is digitally composed.) And I love that Cuaron values (along with “Chivo” and their collaborator and unofficial co-writer Clive Owen ) the on-camera benefits of minor filming accidents.

And I loved that when I mentioned the apparent influence of Stanley Kubrick‘s Full Metal Jacket in Men‘s final battle sequence, Cuaron said that the bigger visual references in the making of this film were Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (because of the futuristic-but-battered London settings) and F.W. Murnau‘s Sunrise.

We talked about how some older viewers have expressed dismay or outright dislike, even, for the sense of futility that, in their opinion, the film imparts. It’s obvious to me that anyone who comes away with this view isn’t paying attention. “This film has gotten very strong reactions — younger people find the film hopeful, older people find the film very depressive,” Cuaron admits.

“I’ve heard people say this is just another chase movie. It’s like people are so jaded about the telling of pictures. As opposed to have to engage with the specific cinematic elements and different approaches. I have a very bleak view of the present, but a very hopeful view of the future. For me the film is about hope in the end, but you cannnot dictate a sense of hope in a viewer because that is very personal and internal. [In our film] we basically allow audiences to fill in the blanks and make their own conclusions.”

I mentioned that the head of a distribution company who saw Children of Men at the Venice Film Festival recently complained that it departed significantly from the P.D. James novel. “We used the premise…only the premise of female infertility,” Cuaron responded. “But we received a statement from [original author] P.D. James, saying she fully admires and is pleased with the film and is very proud to be associated with it. For which I’m very thankful.

“I was not interested in constructing a back-story [about what caused female infertility],” Cuaron says. “Because if I did that, a lot of the movie would then have to be about that. For me, female infertility was basically a metaphor for the fading sense of hope. And the Human Project…if I have to explain who they are and the whole background of that, that also would have consumed a significant portion. The Human Project is a metaphor for human understanding. For me that was sufficient.”

“It’s kiddie season at the movies, and children are everywhere you look: brandishing machine guns in Blood Diamond, fighting for their lives in the desert in Babel, suffering from mortal wounds in Pan’s Labyrinth, being blown to bits in Deja Vu, sleeping in public toilets in The Pursuit of Happyness and getting massacred in The Nativity Story,” John Horn and Chris Lee’s 11.19 L.A. Times piece begins.
“Hollywood historically has steered away from depicting children in peril, typically limiting any life-or-death struggles to cartoonishly violent genre films such as The Shining, Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. But as this new batch of movies underscores, the old rules of childhood engagement are rapidly evolving. Instead of consigning children to the periphery of horrific realities, these films are dragging kids — preteens to toddlers — right into the middle of the mayhem.”

There’s no question that Guillermo del Toro‘s Pan’s Labyrinth (Picturehouse, 12.29) is his best work to date — a finely woven, emotionally haunting fairy tale of the first order. It’s one of del Toro’s semi-realistic films in the tradtion of Chronos and The Devil’s Backbone, but a very dark one also. I meant to write a longish piece after seeing it in Cannes last May but I didn’t. Now I’m figuring the right time will be a week or two before it opens in late December.
The reason why I delayed on writing a Pan’s review last May finally hit me yester- day during an interview with Children of Men director Alfonso Cuaron. It’s because the ending of del Toro’s film embraces a notion that death is a doorway to a kind of deliverance — to a wondrous realm in which the deceased is reunited with loved ones and finds ultimate peace. I used to be certain of the cosmic continuity of life (i.e., the constancy of the spirit, death being merely a transition point, etc.) but now I’m not so sure. And that’s why I had trouble with the finale. And why, I suspect, audiences will have trouble with it also.
It doesn’t undermine the exquisite balance and beauty of the whole — Pan’s Laby- rinth is thought to be one of the year’s best for some very good reasons — but it leaves you with a troubling “hmmm” as you’re leaving the theatre. In all honesty, if I were del Toro I would have ended it another way. I recognize that the ending is a subjective one (it’s happening in the head of Ivana Baquero‘s adolescent lead character), but it still bothers me.
Here, in any event, is a tour of del Toro’s idea-and-sketch book that appeared in Friday’s (11.17) Guardian.
Guillermo and I did a late-night interview toward the end of the Cannes Film Festi- val (on 5.25.06) at the Martinez Hotel, at which time he let me shoot his note-and- sketch journal, from which he wrote the screenplay and used to draw the first images from the film. Here are the shots again — image #1, image #2 and image #3.

TomKat’s wedding — a gala affair that happened yesterday inside Odescalchi Castle in Bracciano, Italy — reportedly cost a whopping $2.5 million. It seems a wee bit harsh for a N.Y. Post story to report that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes “pledged to live a wacky life of Scientology“..but the fact is that the ceremony was carried out by a Scientology minister, and that the secretive David Miscavige, the top dog in the Scientology church heirarchy, was Cruise’s best man. I love this shot of early evening fireworks in the wake of a huge afternoon rainstorm….nice.

And this graph from the Post story totally cracked me up: “The bride had an escort of security guards dressed in medieval uniforms — all of whom had been given strict orders to have ‘a shave, haircut and sunlamp session‘ — and a roll of drums played as she entered the former stable where they exchanged vows.” I wonder if the instructions included specifics about minimum sunlamp exposure time, and if the guards were asked to submit to a full-body sunlamp exposure or if it was just a face-and-neck thing.
If I were running the Cruise-Holmes nuptials I would have further insisted that the guards have enemas beforehand. For years Miss Manners has recommended enema treatments — — a measure ensuring that one’s appearance will exude the ultimate natural healthy glow — for all guests, family members, caterers, guards. In fact, I would have arranged for a team of enema specialists to be flown over so their services could be provided gratis to the guests.

The gap closed yesterday between Casino Royale and Happy Feet. The two are going to end up so neck-and-neck this evening — one studio’s estimate has Bond finishing the weekend with $41,122,000 and the Birds grabbing $41,254,000 — that their respective distributors, Sony/Columbia and Warner Bros., will probably be inflating the figures so as to position their film as the winner.
Right now, the Birds appear to be ahead of the Bond by $132,000…a nose-hair…but let’s see if the Bond spinners try to b.s. their way into a victory of some kind. Today’s (Sunday’s) figures will have to be very closely tallied down to the last dollar. Is it conceivable that the Birds will falter slightly and the Bond will pick up slightly also? Yeah, it could happen…but it’s not likely. This is definitely a squeaker, though. It’s Kennedy-Nixon in 1960.
The temptation for Sony and Warner Bros. to try and juggle each other on the reporting to the trades will be close to irresistable. Question is, how do you anticipate what the other guy is going to claim? It’s going to boil down to a question of who’s ballsier and who wants to lie more.
As expected, Happy Feet benefitted yesterday from a big family-trade surge, going from a Friday tally of $12,153,000 to a Saturday figure of $17,118,000. But Casino Royale also upticked — its Friday earnings of $14,904,000 increased by $800,000 the following day when it took in $15,779,000. Saturday business for sequels rarely increase — obviously a sign of unusual strength for the new 007.

A heartbreaking N.Y. Times story by Alex Mindlin about the closing of Movie Palace, a locally-owned Upper West Side Manhattan video store (105th and Broadway) that’s been run in a very neighborhood-friendly way by the same impassioned semi-ecentric, Gary Dennis, since 1984. The building has been sold and the new money-grubbing owner, a guy named Ralph Braha, more than doubled Dennis’ rent. And we all know the name of that tune.

“Like the movie theaters that preceded them, video stores are fast becoming relics, and their signs may soon join those unlighted movie marquees (with a vestigial letter or two) that dot various neighborhoods and remind passers-by of what once was,” Mindlin writes.
“But the decline of the video store is more than a story of small merchants undone by technological change. Like movie theaters, and unlike delis or drugstores, video shops in a city as film-saturated and film-savvy as New York emerged as centers of neighborhood life. Their selections mirror the people they serve, and their proprietors, like Mr. Dennis, can be beloved figures with a deep knowledge not only of local inhabitants’ film tastes, but also of other aspects of their lives.
“Salvatore Ierardo, the liquidation director for Video One Liquidators, a Florida company that sells off video stores’ inventories on site, sees the deaths of these shops firsthand. The stores are like “the guy that used to deliver ice,” he said, adding, “He worked hard and everything, but the refrigerator was working while he was sleeping.”
“Compared with some other video stores, Movie Place has not fared badly. For years, it resisted the forces that have been sweeping away many of the city’s other mom-and-pop video shops. Nationally, the number of privately owned video rental shops, as opposed to huge chains, fell to roughly 13,000 in 2005 from about 22,000 in 1996, according to Tom Adams, president of Adams Media Research, which tracks the entertainment industry.”
In short, almost half of the individually-owned video stores have gone bust in the last 10 years. The killers are the big video-store chains, Netflix, video-on-demand. Bit by bit, lease by lease, the neighborly human element in the DVD-renting experience is being squeezed and starved.