Day: January 2, 2008

I tapped out a brief thing yesterday about the ’09 award-level films, one of them possibly being Clint Eastwood‘s Changeling (Universal, 11.08)…except I called it The Changeling, which was and still is incorrect, according to Universal publicity.

Angelina Jolie, Clint Eastwood during shooting of Changeling.

I used the “The” was because Red Carpet District‘s Kris Tapley called it The Changeling and because the IMDB is calling it The Changeling, which, I’m sure, is at least partly due to Peter Medak‘s The Changeling, a 1980 film with George C. Scott, using the “The” in its title.
In any case we were all wrong. Eastwood’s film, which costars Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich and Amy Ryan, is called Changeling…one word, not two. Issue settled.
I hate that word, by the way…”changeling.” It means “a child unintentionally or surreptitiously substituted for another” but that’s a fairly bizarre thing to have happen, no? Why is there a word for something like this? Why isn’t there a word for a dog that has had a bucket of red paint spilled over its body? Why isn’t there a term for a man who has had his suit tailored and discovered that the tailor has sewn up rear slit in the jacket? I understand calling a young tree a sapling or a very young horse a yearling or brothers who puts on circuses with rings in the center of the tent being called Ringling. But “changeling” bugs me for some reason.

“I’m in my second cut, which means I’ve put the movie together and I’ve seen it. I usually do about five cuts as a director. The best news is that, when I saw the movie myself the first time, there was nothing I wanted to go back and shoot, nothing I wanted to reshoot, and nothing I wanted to add.” — Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull director Steven Spielberg to profiler Jim Windolf in the just-out Vanity Fair.

“Set in 1957, the new film pits Indy against Russian Cold Warriors, including Cate Blanchett, whose character, Agent Spalko, looks like the toughest Soviet customer since Lotte Lenya’s Rosa Klebb took on Sean Connery in From Russia with Love.”

Spielberg also notes that he screened the first three Indiana Jones films for Indy 4 cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, renowned and dreaded for his repeated use of oppressively milky, white-sunlight-saturated color in film after film.
“I needed to show them to Janusz,” Spielberg says, “because I didn’t want Janusz to modernize and bring us into the 21st century. I still wanted the film to have a lighting style not dissimilar to the work [that original Indy dp] Doug Slocombe had achieved, which meant that both Janusz and I had to swallow our pride. Janusz had to approximate another cinematographer’s look” —thank God! — “and I had to approximate this younger director’s look that I thought I had moved away from after almost two decades.”

Two Obama-favoring assessments of what may/will happen at tomorrow night’s Iowa caucuses — one by Washington Post reporters Shailagh Murray and Anne E. Kornblut, another by Des Moines Register columnist David Yepsen.
Noteworthy Yepsen passage: “On Monday night at a New Year’s Eve party in Ames, hundreds packed the Great Hall at Iowa State University and waited for more than an hour to hear Barack Obama deliver his well-polished stump speech.
“In that speech he does something interesting. He always asks for a show of hands of those who’ve never been to a caucus. (More than half the hands go up.) He always asks for a show of hands of those who are undecided. (Maybe a third of the hands are in the air.)
“Now, I assume here that someone who would devote their New Year’s Eve to attending a political speech might just be a little predisposed to go out a few nights later to caucus for the candidate who delivered it. Just a guess.”

“Has Hillary truly changed, and grown from her mistakes? Has she learned to be less stubborn and imperious and secretive and vindictive and entitled? Or has she merely learned to mask her off-putting and self-sabotaging qualities better? If elected, would the old Hillary pop up, dragging us back to the dysfunctional Clinton kingdom?

“She is speaking in a soft, measured voice in these final days, so that, as with Daisy Buchanan, you have to lean in to listen. But is she really different than she was in the years when she was so careless about the people around her getting hurt by the Clinton legal whirlwind that she was dubbed the Daisy Buchanan of the boomer set?
“The underlying rationale for her campaign is that she is owed. Owed for moving to Arkansas and giving up the name Rodham, owed for pretending to care about place settings and menus when she held the unappetizing title of first lady, owed for enduring one humiliation after another at the hands of her husband.” — from Maureen Dowd‘s 1.2.08 N.Y. Times column, “Deign or Reign?”