A Chandler-esque noir in the vein of Miller’s Crossing, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union will be the next Coen brothers film to be shot. (The comedic Burn After Reading is in the can and coming out later this year.) Based on the Michael Chabon novel and set in an imaginary Alaska that’s “been turned into a homeland for Jewish refugees displaced after the second world war, following the collapse of Israel, etc. A Guardian story about the project claims that the book’s plot suggests that the “murder victim may well have been the Messiah.”

Yesterday’s news but these conflicting-message videos need to be posted for future reference. Exhibit #1: MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann saying in an editorial rant last September that “in pimping General David Petraeus,” blah blah. Exhibit #2: Olbermann apologizing profusely for David Shuster‘s having used the same term in a question about the Clinton campaign’s use of Chelsea Clinton as a political emissary.

Vantage Point (Sony, 2.22), a possibly well-crafted Rashomon-type thriller, opens in ten days with a shot at some decent business. Monday’s tracking has it at 59, 38 and 7, but that should bump up. But I’m not hearing about any screenings from anyone (not even an all-media screening) so…you tell me. I called Sony publicity this morning to ask what’s up. I’ll tell you what’s up. “Silencio” is what’s up.

The trailer has an intense, mad-camera jolt quality but there seems to be something…I don’t know, facile and tricky-feeling about it. Something about the sell seems to say “paycheck.” I’d like to feel differently and just go with this thing and have a good time, but Sony is sending out signals that would give anyone pause. The stars are Dennis Quaid, Forest Whitaker, Matthew Fox, William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver.
Update: As several regional screenings are being reported here, I presume the Sony folks are just being their usual lovable selves as far as Los Angeles viewings are concerned.

Hillary Clinton‘s firing of campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, a Latina, is going to help Barack Obama with Hispanic voters in the March 4th Texas primary. The N.Y. Post‘s Maggie Haberman reported last night that Steven Ybarra, a California superdelegate who heads the voting-rights committee of the DNC Hispanic Caucus, has stated in an angry e-mail to fellow Hispanics that “loyalty is not a two-way street,” that the firing gives “Latino superdelegates…cause to pause,” and that whacking Solis Doyle, a child of Mexican immigrants, “just weeks before the Texas primary, [in a state] where 36 %of the population is Hispanic, was ‘dumb as a stump.'” In a 2.12 editorial, La Opinion wrote that “what effect Solis Doyle√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s resignation will have on Hispanic voters remains to be seen. But it cannot help [the Clinton campaign].”

Either your agent hammered out a contract/agreement that gave you profit participation and everybody signed off on this, or you agreed to just take a writing fee and you weren’t crafty or pushy enough to demand more. Nobody wants to hear about anything else.

An interesting observation on the Coen Brothers Wikipedia page, to wit: “Several of the Coen brothers’ films feature a character that embodies the archetype of ‘unstoppable evil.’ In many cases, it is hinted that these characters are inhuman, or feature demonic overtones.”
Example #1: Sheriff Cooley (Daniel von Bargen) in O Brother, Where Art Thou? matches the description of the Devil given by one of the characters. He further indicates his otherwordliness when, advised that it would be illegal to hang pardoned fugitives, he sneeringly opines that ‘the law is a human institution.’
Example #2: Eddie Dane (J.E. Freeman), the hitman in Miller’s Crossing.
Example #3: Leonard Smalls (Randall “Tex” Cobb) in Raising Arizona.
Example #4: Charlie Meadows (John Goodman) in Barton Fink also fit the description of this archetype.
Example #5: In No Country for Old Men, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) personifies the violence and death in a world that Tommy Lee Jones‘ Sheriff Bell tries to make sense of…but can’t.

Variety‘s Leslie Felperin reviewed Elegy out of the Berlin Film Festival two nights ago, but I somehow missed it until this morning. It isn’t a rave — I can feel a certain hesitancy — but it’s definitely a thumbs-up response. Key passage: “Scenes unfold in a series of near-musical dialogue duets, with Ben Kingsley offering finely-phrased arias of self-deprecation and despair. Despite the age difference, he and Penelope Cruz (who’s never been better in English) look somehow chemically balanced and credible as a couple in a way Nicole Kidman and Anthony Hopkins never did in The Human Stain.”
got it wrong Sunday morning when I wrote that the drama (which also stars Dennis Hopper, Patricia Clarkson and Peter Sarsgaard) was being called The Dying Animal, after the Phillip Roth book that the script is based upon. It’s a shame that it’s not. Elegy means nothing — it’s an all-but-meaningless, watered-down wimp title. I’ll bet they went with Elegy because Craig Lucas‘s The Dying Gaul was still-born at the box office when it opened in ’06. Any title with the word “dying”…forget it.

I’ve always thought that the word “chimerical” alludes to shamanry and hocus-pocus. Websters says it means “unreal, imaginary, visionary, wildly fanciful,” etc. Either way I can’t say I’ve used it with any regularity in daily conversation. Nonetheless, Slate‘s Kim Masters has used it to describe the Writers Guild’s alleged victory (i.e., “big win”) over the producers.
The just-about-concluded WGA strike was punishing but, in the words of Michael Clayton director-writer Tony Gilroy, “clearly necessary.” He tells N.Y. Times reporter David Carr (a.k.a. “the Bagger”) that writers and directors “have our nose in the tent for real for the first time” and that “we would never be in [this] position”without the strike. “Anybody who says the strike was a bad idea is dead wrong.√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ǭù
Carr notes, however, that the strike “was bad for writers in the short term. The delays caused by the strike prompted the studios to ask themselves a fundamental question about the need to finance all manner of pilots for a traditional upfront extravaganza followed by a traditional introduction in the fall. That system, fairly unchanged through the years, has historically been lucrative for writers.
“Emboldened by the strike, the studios severed existing contracts with writers, successfully turned over more of their prime-time schedules to reality programming and vowed to hold the line on filming new shows for next season.”
L.A. Times “Big Picture” columnist Patrick Goldstein,meanwhile, has declared that one of the biggest losers o the strike was teh HFPA and the Golden Globes.
“Does anyone remember that Johnny Depp won a Globe a few weeks ago?,” Goldstein asks. “Strip away the red carpet, the movie stars and some reliably antic behavior at the ceremonies and what do you have? An award show that no one in Hollywood paid the slightest attention to. Reduced to a 35-minute press conference by the refusal of actors to cross WGA picket lines, the Globes were revealed to be what they’ve tried so hard to disguise, a collection of awards concocted by 83 obscure foreign journalists, not an actual Hollywood institution.”

Defamer‘s Mark Lisanti has resigned his post and will be gone as of Friday. He doesn’t say why, of course. The burnout factor is pretty high with this kind of work. I would love to grow HE’s audience by contributing to Defamer in some modest but daily way (there have been discussions along these lines) but…but…but….a voice is telling me such a move would shave two or three years off my life. But maybe not.

Penn Jillette, the bigger, longer-haired and more garrulous half of Penn and Teller, tells a hilarious story about how a Hillary Clinton joke went down within the last couple of days. Great way to start the day off. I laughed, I convulsed.

I’ve been my usual sloppy and lazy self in attempting to catch the the Oscar-nominated live action and animated shorts. So far I’ve seen exactly one animated entry — Josh Raskin‘s I Met the Walrus. It reminds me a bit of portions of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, which may be deliberate because it’s based on an actual tape-recorded chat with John Lennon during his 1969 bed-in for peace in a Toronto hotel. It played at Sundance and the Santa Barbara Film Festivals, and, for what it’s worth, has HE’s seal of approval to point to.

Sen. Hillary Clinton “has to win both Ohio and Texas comfortably, or she’s out,” an unidentified Democratic superdelegate tells N.Y. Times reporter Patrick Healy in a piece that will appear in tomorrow’s (Tuesday, 2.12) edition. The source adds that the Clinton campaign “is starting to come to terms with that.” Campaign advisers have also “confirmed this view,” Healy writes.
Clinton and her advisers “increasingly believe that, after a series of losses, she has been boxed into a must-win position in the Ohio and Texas primaries on March 4, and she has begun reassuring anxious donors and superdelegates that the nomination is not slipping away from her, aides said Monday.
“Mrs. Clinton held a buck-up-the-troops conference call on Monday with donors, superdelegates and other supporters; [although] several of them said afterward that she sounded tired and a little down, but determined about Ohio and Texas. And these donors and superdelegates said that they were not especially soothed, saying they believed she could be on a losing streak that could jeopardize her competitiveness in Ohio and Texas.”