Tomorrow night’s Barack-vs.-Hillary debate at Hollywood’s Kodak theatre will be a political version of an American Idol season finale. Moderated by Wolf Blitzer, questions from L.A. Times reporter Doyle McManus and Politico‘s Jeanne Cummings, no time limits — 5 to 6:30 pm Pacific. Invited guests will be let in at 2:30 pm, doors close at 4 pm; cameras, cell phones and PDA’s verboten. This column will shut down around noon or so.
There’s a sublime tension and at the same time a kind of coming together in Lindsay Anderson‘s This Sporting Life (’63), which was re-issued last week on a Criterion DVD. A 1963 kitchen-sink drama about a somewhat loutish, emotionally needy rugby player (Richard Harris) blundering his way through an unexamined life, it has the usual elements — British working-class despair, rage, sex, banging into furniture..
But there’s such balm and tranquility provided by Denys Coop‘s black-and-white cinematography that it all seems strangely beautiful. Monochrome as luscious as Technicolor, sometimes moody and murky or fog-lit, sometimes pierced by odd shafts of light or reflections of same. A rough-and-tumble world lit and captured with tonal perfection.
“Barack Obama has now cut the gap with Hillary Clinton to 6 percentage points among Democrats nationally in the Gallup Poll Daily tracking three-day average,” today’s Gallup summary reads. “And interviewing conducted Tuesday night shows the gap between the two candidates is within a few points.
“Obama’s position has been strengthening on a day-by-day basis. As recently as Jan. 18-20, Clinton led Obama by 20 points. Today’s Gallup Poll Daily tracking is based on interviews conducted Jan. 27-29, all after Obama’s overwhelming victory in South Carolina on Saturday. Two out of the three nights interviewing were conducted after the high-visibility endorsement of Obama by Sen. Edward Kennedy and his niece Caroline Kennedy.”
The Weinstein Company will distribute Woody Allen‘s atrociously-titled Vicky Cristina Barcelona sometime later this year. Figure late summer/early fall. The romantic roundelay costars Javier Bardem, Patricia Clarkson, Penelope Cruz, Kevin Dunn, Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson and Chris Messina.
In the Jan. 14 issue of Maclean’s, the Canadian news magazine, Allen says this the following during a three-page interview: “I finished a film in Barcelona this summer that’s a romance. It’s serious in the sense of like Hannah and Her Sisters, [but] it’s not heavy at all, there’s no killing or life-and-death issues in it. It’s a relationship picture.”
For reasons no one fully understands, the forthcoming Hannah Montana concert movie is being called (ready?) Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour. The 3D Disney release comes out on 2.1.08, and Fandango’s Harry Medved has passed along the following:
(a) It currently accounts for 91% of all ticket sales on Fandango, (b) Although plenty of tickets are still available for midweek shows, over 1,000 showtimes are already sold out, (c) It’s the best-selling concert movie in Fandango’s seven-year history; (d) Exhibitors are regularly adding additional show times at their theaters, including Thursday midnight shows and Friday morning shows (as early as 8:00 a.m.).
Slashfilm’s Peter Sciretta has posted two shots of Sean Penn in bearded, early ’70s guise as the late, deeply mythologized San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk in Gus Van Sant‘s currently-rolling Milk. It appears as if Penn is trying to merge with Milk by wearing a prosthetic schnozz. His own nose has never been patrician or baloney-slice thin, but it does seem larger and more bulbous in the black-and-white Milk photo.
I dropped by Santa Barbara’s Marjorie Luke theatre yesterday afternoon to see four short films, but mainly to take a look at Josh Brolin‘s X, which he directed, wrote and self-produced. A 15-minute piece about a heavily-tattooed criminal dad (Vincent Riverside) and his hard-bitten, Bonnie Parker-like daughter (Eden Brolin) sharing a violent fate in the desert, X is a first-rate effort — well-shot, nicely paced, engagingly acted. 3 days of shooting, 96 set-ups. It convinces you that Brolin will probably be directing a feature within two or three years.
That said, X‘s like-father, like-daughter theme is depressing. Riverside’s character is a low-rent loser who has not only ruined his own life but, it seems, his daughter’s. The short has a certain scuzzy integrity, yes, but I wouldn’t want to see X expanded into a feature. It’s too bleak, the characters too doomed. It left me with nothing except a belief that Brolin can handle himself behind a camera. He’s a funny guy. Something tells me he’d be good with a sardonic comedy of some sort.
Gentlemen of the jury, there are many kinds of silence. Consider first the silence of a man who is dead. Let us suppose we go into the room where he is laid out, and we listen. What do we hear? Nothing — this is silence pure and simple. But let us take another case, a case put before us this very day.
Having decided to drop out of the Democratic primary race, John Edwards declined during his New Orleans speech to endorse either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. He offered, in a manner of speaking, silence, but as Cromwell in A Man For All Seasons pointed out, “Silence can, according to the circumstances, speak.”
What does Edwards’ silence betoken? He knows Clinton is polling well ahead of Obama in the big states and that his endorsing Obama might help to even things out. By saying nothing, he is, in effect, standing with Hillary — the sanctimonious lawyer-smoothie with the southern drawl and the $400 haircut, playing it safe and showing his true colors. The dominant theme, as always, being “let’s see what we can get out of this.” Card-shuffler, back-room dealer.
The Sean Young-Julian Schnabel DGA video from last Saturday night. You can barely hear Young saying “get on with it!”…just barely. It’s underwhelming. The irony is that Schnabel did take too long to get rolling. His on-stage behavior seems a tad affected, running his hands through his hair, pausing eternally. Not that this excuses Young’s behavior.
Amused last night by Julie Chen‘s account of the bombed-and-belligerent Sean Young telling Julian Schnabel to “get on with it!” at last weekend’s DGA Awards, David Letterman half-seriously stated (quote approximate) a hope that “this is the start of a new award-show trend — heckling winners.”
There are no rivers of Juno-hate. Stu Van Airsdale‘s rant aside, there never has been. There is only a sense of Juno proportion, which is where I’ve been coming from all along. Take shots but don’t throw grenades because it’s a good film about perk and snark and emotional conviction. It’s smart, appealing, likable. Just not Oscar-winning. And that’s not a putdown. Fox Searchlight is delighted with how it’s performed and been received. It’s all to the good. Count the money.
Update: Van Airsdale just wrote to say he’s being “misrepresent[ed]” as a Juno hater. “Read my rant again,” he writes. “We’re saying the same thing. I like the movie fine, I just want to keep its box-office and feel-good creds separate from its Oscar creds. If one is synonymous with the other, then maybe the bigger issue is not *what* the Academy recognizes as its ‘Best Picture’, but rather how it defines such. For people who care about the institution and its history — let alone the industry that banks on its imprimatur — it’s not an irrelevant matter.”
