Show me this cold and I’ll tell you with 85% to 90% certainty that this mobile-phone salesman from South Wales is lip-synching as he sings a portion of a famous opera. But it’s apparently real. The guy’s expression — his eyes — as he’s listening to the judges praise him makes the case. And yet there’s still a voice — a small-minded voice — inside saying it’s bullshit.

Former O.J. Simpson attorney Robert Shapiro has been defending and rationalizing the Paris Hilton side of the story during talk-show visits on MSNBC and CNN. Radar‘s Jeff Bercovici is reporting that he’s not only a paid shill, but that he hasn’t informed MSNBC producers of this fact. (A CNN spokesperson told Bercovici he/she “could not immediately say whether its producers had knowledge of the arrangement.”) Last Friday Shapiro was a guest on both MSNBC’s “Countdown” with Keith Olbermann and CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360″ to discuss the case.

I’m sorry for Tennessee-based projectionist Jesse Morrison (AICN’s “Memflix”) having been whacked for submitting a negative, embargo-breaking review of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, but whatever happened to the practice of subterfuge?
Morrison had to know he might run afoul of his bosses (he worked for the Malco theatre chain) if it became common knowledge that he’s been reviewing the same films he’s shown to the occasional test audience, and reviewing for AICN to boot. Morrison can’t be so dumb not to have known that.
If he was willing to risk his job by reviewing Fantastic Four/Silver Surfer a few days early, why didn’t Morrison simply submit it through a friend with a freshly created moniker, so the source couldn’t be traced? (Better yet — an out-of-state or out-of-country friend.) I’ll tell you why. Because he’s a known AICN quantity — he’s the one and only Memflix, a guy with friends and followers who’s enjoyed certain levels of attention and respect — and he didn’t want to write without the glory and the ego-boost, and so he was found out and paid the price.
AICN’s Drew McWeeny got angry at Fox yesterday (or was it Tuesday?) for “tracking Morrison down and getting him fired, threatening to pull their business from the entire chain over that review. Think about that for a minute… this is one megacorporation threatening to blackball another corporation because one guy didn’t like their movie and had the stones to say so. So fuck you, Fox. You have proven over and over that you not only hate your audience, but you don’t want to know what they think. All you care about is the filthy lucre.”
I say again — if you want to be a truth-telling crusader, at least do so with the basic Jack-and-Jill knowledge that there are corporate types out there who get angry when they decide that a certain truth-teller has affected their interests and security, and, being corporate types, will take steps to get you. Why do I feel as if I’m addressing a class of second-graders here? It’s a wild world out there, and the forest is filled with lions, tigers and bears. So be smart, assholes, and learn how to hide under bushes and behind trees.

A guy sent me an October 2006 script for the Farrelly Brothers‘ The Heartbreak Kid (Dreamamount, 10.5.07), which stars the rapidly graying Ben Stiller.
The cover page says “Most Recent Revisions by John Hamburg and Peter Farrelly,” and then “Revisions by Peter Farrelly, Bobby Farrelly and Kevin Barnett,” and then “From a short story by Jay Friedman” and “Adapted from the original screenplay by Neil Simon,” and then “Previous revisions by Leslie Dixon & Scot Armstrong.”
“Leslie Dixon did the first draft,” the guy explains, “and it was pretty good before it became Farrelly-ized. Her draft attracted Jason Bateman for the lead part, but the Farrelly drafts attracted Stiller. Although the movie tested higher than There’s Something About Mary, they went back to re-shoot the ending a few times to make it just right.”

The image is unnatural — squeezed into 1.37 to 1 when it should be 16 x 9 — but Variety columnist Anne Thompson has an exclusive on the new trailer for Joel and Ethan Coen‘s No Country For Old Men.

The Miramax marketing guys have made this marvelous film look like an action-horror flick about a stalking ogre with an early ’80s haircut (Javier Bardem‘s “Anton Chigurh”) out to kill and kill again like the most ungodly and merciless Jason/Freddy Krueger psychopath of all time. And he is that, yes, only much, much funnier. And the movie isn’t an action-horror film. It’s much deeper and darker than that.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has finally responded to storms of criticism that came down early this year when they declined to nominate Little Miss Sunshine producers Ron Yerxa and Albert Berger as recipients for the Best Picture Oscar because of a dumb-ass rule stating that only three producers can be eligible.

Little Miss Sunshine producers Albert Berger, Ron Yerxa at last January’s Santa Barbara Film Festival

Now the Academy will consider more than three producers if and when the situation involves “a rare and extraordinary circumstance.” The new decision was “adopted by the film academy√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s 43-member board of governors on Tuesday night,” according to N.Y. Times reporter Michael Ciepley.

It’s been eleven months since I ran my first piece on Asger Leth‘s Ghosts of Cite Soleil, a jolting doc about sex, violence, death and politics in 2004 Haiti, and now ThinkFilm is finally putting it into theatres on June 27th.

“This excellent 88-minute film adds recognizable humanity to a culture that has seemed more lacking in hope and human decency than any other on earth,” I wrote early on.
“Everyone will say that Ghosts is City of God but in ‘real’ verite terms…and it is that, of course. But it’s less about violent street crime than stink-from-the-head Haitian politics, and it explores an unusual romantic triangle between a white French female relief worker named Lele and two gangster brothers, 2pac and Bily (not “Billy”), and it has a tragic ending that touches you as much as any well-crafted Hollywood tearjerker could…and yet it happened all on its own.”

Somewhat older people (i.e., thirtysomethings) have always looked back on their early 20s with unequal blends of nostalgia and regret, and movies about same are of course permissible and expected, but you can’t just “remake” The Big Chill in a present-day context. If you want to remake a movie of this type, pick on Kenneth Branagh‘s Peter’s Friends.

Lawrence Kasdan‘s 1983 classic was about a bunch of middle-class people in the early ’80s who’d lived together and gotten high and enjoyed bacchan- alian sex in the late ’60s, and 15 years later were coming to terms with not just adult life, but adult life as influenced by a culture that had abandoned and moved on from the pseudo-rebellious atmosphere of the free-form ’60s. A Ronald Reagan culture that had become “chillier.” A society more invested in status and income levels and less about heart, spirit and discovery.
This changeover spirit hasn’t manifested between, say, the early ’90s and today, or the mid ’80s and today. There’s just no analogy that fits so forget it. Just make an old-friends-getting-together-ten-of-fifteen-years-later movie and make it your own.

Allan Murray and Sean Haines‘ “Paris in Jail” parody video is…not bad. Amber Hay, who plays the jailbird heiress and voices the vaguely catchy song, is slightly more hoochy-kooch than Hilton herself. Here’s the “Hurry Up!” version of same.

Pop Machine‘s Mark Caro rips into the Farrelly Brothers‘ The Heartbreak Kid (Dreamamount, 10.5.07) with Ben Stiller in the Charles Grodin role.

Going by the trailer, Caro suspects the feature may be a cowardly, slapstick-shallow, hopelessly dumbed-down non-echo of Elaine May‘s original The Heartbreak Kid (1972), which was funny but at the same time traumatic, angst-y and occasionally cruel. My favorite scene was the abrasive after-dinner confrontation between Grodin and Eddie Albert (i.e., playing Cybil Shepherd’s dad), in which Albert tried to buy Grodin off.
Caro understands, of course, that every remake of a film made in the ’60s, ’70s or ’80s has to be cruder and dumber than the original. He realizes that today’s under-35 moviegoer need things to be broader, louder, blunter, etc. “Hit me with it!…no, pour it over my head!” works much better than “nudge me in the ribs” or “whisper it in my ear.” Nonetheless, Caro is pissed.

It’s always somewhat depressing when a masterful older actor who’s enjoying one of those rare late-period career grooves accepts a straight paycheck job as a villain in an empty-ass franchise flick.
I mean, just reading the damn trade stories about same deflates your world. Oh, that’s right, you tell yourself — I forgot that what a pleasure it is to watch amazingly talented performers punch a clock and debase themselves. Every so often, life requires us to bend over and hold our noses in order to pay the bills, but it’s extra-gloomy when guys like William Hurt succumb.
Here’s an indication of what Hurt is facing and why he’s more open than usual to straight-paycheck jobs.

I’m trying to imagine the mass incomprehension and shock waves that would result if a U.S. President were to deliver such a speech in today’s paranoid climate. Forget the nostalgic aspect — just try to imagine a U.S. President actually speaking these words. The mentality behind it is so far above and beyond the realm of the current White House occupant that the speaker sounds almost like someone from another planet, or certainly like a being created from a wholly different gene pool.