Month: May 2008

Nick Broomfield‘s Battle for Haditha (Hanway Films), which is playing at Manhattan’s Film Forum from now through 5.20, is arguably the best Iraq War foot-soldier drama to have been released thus far. Mostly because it uses the POV of all the sad victims in this wretched episode and presents the particulars in a way that straddles the line between judgment and lament.

Shot in purposefully ragged docu-drama style with non-actors and deserving, I feel, a solid 8 on a scale of 10, Haditha will certainly be avoided en masse by those brave citizens who don’t want to know from that conflict, and who will absolutely dodge a dramatization of the infamous November 2005 Haditha massacre in which 24 Iraqi men, women and children — 15 of whom were confirmed non-combatants — were slain by U.S.Marines on a revenge bender.
As the Wikipedia page explains, it has been alleged that the killings were retribution for the attack on a convoy of United States Marines with an improvised explosive device that killed Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas.
I won’t strenuously argue with the belief of Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir that it’s “the closest thing this conflict has produced to a Paths of Glory or an All Quiet on the Western Front” or Robert Koehler‘s view that it summons memories of Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers.” It does visit similar tragic turf, and does, for the most part, offer a convincing simulation of the hell fires consuming that cursed country right now as well as those that propelled several regular guy GIs to do what they did two and a half years ago.
The only serious beef I had after seeing in Toronto last September was that “the improvised dialogue feels a little too blunt and on-the-nose at times,” although I said without qualification that it’s “absorbing, bracing stuff.” But because of some of the actors’ delivery and my resistance to some of the dialogue, I wasn’t completely swallowed by it and so the the emotionality didn’t quite kick in.
Coming Soon‘s Ed Douglas has posted a straightforward q & a he did with Broomfield a few days ago.
Interested New Yorkers might want to catch tonight’s 8 pm show at the Film Forum, as it will be followed by a q & a between Broomfield and actor/former U.S. Marine Elliot Ruiz.

Huge exhale and good riddance. Barack Obama wailed in North Carolina and lost Indiana by a nose hair, and that, ladies and gentlemen and undecideds, is finally the end of Hillary Cinton. Tim Russert said this morning that every political player now accepts that Obama will be the party’s nominee in Denver. Politico‘s Mike Allen wrote this morning that Obama “won’t push her out — he’ll let her get her coat, and walk to the door. But he’s talking to the whole country now — not just to Democrats, and not to individual states.”

In the wake of this morning’s breaking news that Clinton has loaned her faltering campaign another $6.4 million on top of the $5 million loan she admitted to earlier this year, her perplexing determination to push on (clearly obnoxious, arguably sociopathic in nature) will only hurt her future prospects. As Politico‘s Roger Simon wrote late last night, “She has options, but only if she manages her endgame carefully. If she becomes known as the candidate who was willing to destroy her party in order to gain the nomination, she is likely to lose not just the nomination but also her political future.”
In the meantime, here’s irrefutable proof of the validity of my earlier suggestion that a Dumbass Amendment be added to the Constitution requiring states to give prospective voters short written quizzes to make certain they’re at least somewhat knowledgable and semi-intelligent before being granted a voice in choosing the nation’s leadership.
Chicago Sun Times reporter Lynn Sweet has reported that yesterday morning “about 50 people were eating breakfast at [the Four Seasons] restaurant in Greenwood when Obama walked in at 7:40 a.m. He went from table to table, chatting briefly with patrons about the economy and gas prices before sitting down to breakfast.

“One of his first encounters went poorly. He approached a man sitting alone at a table and was waved away. The man told me afterward he had no interest in meeting Obama. ‘I can’t stand him,’ he said. ‘He’s a Muslim. He’s not even pro-American as far as I’m concerned.'”
Cue John Mellencamp‘s “Ain’t that America?”

Forced to simulate indications of seasoned intelligence and sensitivity during a recent visit to Keith Olberman‘s “Countdown,” Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo star Kal Penn was, by any fair standard, fairly convincing.

Possibly as a result of catching yesterday’s Oprah tribute, Sumner Redstone has amended his position on Tom Cruise (or told his wife to stop kvetching) and has been laying down a welcome mat in hopes that a Mission: Impossible 4 might happen down the road. (S.R. and Cruise dined together in March, it says here.) “I consider Tom Cruise a great actor and a good friend,” Redstone said during a business conference in South Korea. “And if Paramount decides — and they will make the decision — to move ahead with him, I will not object.”

The Swedish Hancock trailer is supposed to be ruder than the American one? The beginnings and middle of both are pretty much the same. I’m not sure about the final thirds.

First, those stories about Heath Ledger/Joker dolls fetching $50 a pop on e-Bay don’t appear to be valid, as this e-Bay page makes clear. Second, 6″ Joker dolls are for eight year-olds. Serious collectors prefer the more detailed 12″ or 15″ tall models with their much better facial likenesses.

Either way, this is the first action figure I’ve wanted to own in a long time. I’ll admit it — it’s partly the macabre aspect of a dead actor being sold as merchandise. I have a James Dean doll at home. I’ve also had four Universal-crafted classic monster dolls on my desk for the last three or four years — the Wolfman, Dracula and two Frankensteins (one modelled on Boris Karloff‘s appearance in the original 1931 film, the other a copy of his look in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein).

No article has filled me with more trepidation and suspicion about Hancock than last Sunday’s N.Y. Times piece by Michael Cieply. It’s supposed to be about a superhero flick that pushes limits in terms of the main character’s behavior, but all I got out of it were a bunch of pretending-to-be-concerned-or-thoughtful comments from a lot of smug over-paid people who ride around in pricey cars.

I really don’t like that photo of producer Akiva Goldsman laughing uproariously while standing next to Will Smith. Too many people laugh in that man’s presence. Smith himself,now that you mention it, laughs and smiles too much also. I just don’t like the vibe coming off this film. The trailer was half-appealing, but Cieply has killed the vibe.

The Indiana/North Carolina basics: “At stake are a total of 187 pledged delegates — 115 in North Carolina and 72 in Indiana. Polls open in North Carolina at 6:30 am and close at 7:30 pm. In Indiana, most polls open at 6:00 am and close at 6:00 pm, but because some parts of the state are in the Central Time Zone, the official poll closing time is 7:00 pm eastern.
“And just to give you a sense of where the candidates think they’re the strongest, Clinton will hold her Election Night rally in Indianapolis, while Obama will hold his his in Raleigh, NC. Interestingly, however, Clinton seems to be on the upswing in North Carolina, and Obama seems on the upswing in Indiana. Yet both are likely to win on their ‘home’ demographic courts.
“So what would the Vegas lines be today? Our guess: five points in each state, which should already be considered a perception victory for Clinton. But given the closet superdelegate support Obama seems to have, he’s been given the benefit of the doubt with some if he simply wins North Carolina by, well, about five points. You’ll know it will be a mediocre to bad night for Obama if his campaign has to talk about who won the most delegates tonight, rather than by how much they won each state.” — from MSNBC’s “First Read” rundown, which arrived in my inbox at 9:14 am.

Indy 4 director Steven Spielberg recently told N.Y. Times contributor Terrence Rafferty that “he tries to cut as little as possible” in the Indy action sequences because “every time the camera changes dynamic angles, you feel there’s something wrong, that there’s some cheating going on.” Precisely. Too many movies feel like visual cheats from the get-go. So Spielberg’s goal is “to do the shots the way Chaplin or Keaton would, everything happening before the eyes of the audience, without a cut.”

Sounding a little bit like Werner Herzog, Spielberg explained that “the idea is, there’s no illusion; what you see is what you get. My movies have never been frenetically cut, the way a lot of action is done today. That’s not a put-down; some of that quick cutting, like in The Bourne Ultimatum is fantastic, just takes my breath away. But to get the comedy I want in the Indy films, you have to be old-fashioned. I’ve studied a lot of the old movies that made me laugh, and you’ve got to stage things in full shots and let the audience be the editor. It’s like every shot is a circus act.” Brilliant. I love this. No more Spielberg bashing until further notice.

“That’s a fragment of something Andrei Tarkovsky said. He said that art is different than life because art is a representation of life and therefore it doesn’t contain death. Life contains death. So making art is life-affirming. So even if the art is tragic, it’s still optimistic. There can never be pessimistic artists, there can only be mediocrity.” — from John Del Signore‘s 5.5 piece for the Gothamist about Lou Reed and Julian Schnabel discussing Berlin, a film about Reed’s 2006 revival performance of his 1973 album at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.

Berlin will open in Manhattan at Film Forum on July 18th. (Who’s the publicist? I’d love to be able to see it this week sometime.) The Schnabel-Reed sitdown concluded the Tribeca Film Festival’s “Conversations in Cinema” series.