Month: July 2008

Last week I decided against linking to Jeffrey Ressner‘s 7.23 Politico story about David Zucker‘s An American Carol because the basic plot — a documentarian named Michael Malone [read: Moore] finally sees the conservative light in the way Ebenezer Scrooge got beyond being a selfish miser — sounded sickening to me. Three or four graphs into Ressner’s story and I was muttering, “I don’t know want to know about this…I’ve read enough.”

Jon Voight as George Washington and Kelsey Grammer as Gen. George S. Patton in An American Carol

But people here and there started writing about Zucker’s film anyway, the latest being CHUD’s Devin Faraci. He was so struck by one of Ressner’s graphs that he ran it twice. “In a climactic scene, Malone finds political clarity at the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center,” it reads, “while the admonishing ghost of George Washington (played by Jon Voight) hovers nearby.”
This evening a reliable source passed along this verbatim quote from a friend who’s seen An American Carol: “This thing goes beyond heavy handed. It reminds one of the sensation of watching Burn, Holllywood Burn. It tries to be outrageous but just comes off as a paean from a Republican who wants to continue getting tax breaks. I rank it right out there with Skidoo and Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness as far as the WTF nature of it all. The laugh quotient is right up there with The Love Guru and confirms that David Zucker was always the Fredo of the ZAZ comedy mafia.”
Vivendi Entertainment will release An American Carol on 10.3. Keep in mind that the major distributors all saw it and passed, even the Weinsteins.

David Zucker

It seems obvious why Vanity Fair asked the esteemed Patricia Bosworth to write “a five-decade trajectory” piece about Paul Newman for the current issue. They obviously know the poor guy is on the ropes so they’ve decided to tribute him now instead of wait for the sad farewell and then give the go-ahead for a good-old-Paul piece.

I wonder why VF editor Graydon Carter didn’t contact Oregonian critic Shawn Levy to write the article, given Levy’s extensive research on a forthcoming Newman biography over the last couple of years. I’m told Levy has dug up some fascinating new material, including stuff about Newman’s formative early-on experiences.

If you don’t instantly recognize this main-title music, you don’t yet know your stuff. No offense.

Eight days ago Simon Pegg, Jessica Hynes and Edgar Wright visited Laser Blazer, easily one of the two or three best DVD stores in Los Angeles (and certainly the cleanest and friendliest), to sign copies of the 3-disc Spaced: The Complete Series box set. The DVD package came out 7.22. Okay, so I’m slow. A day doesn’t pass when I haven’t missed something.

Glenn Kenny‘s 7.30 riff about the Voight/HE/right-wing spitball kerfuffle on Some Came Running is very droll and enjoyable. I laughed out loud twice. (That’s saying something.) Thanks.

Why doesn’t Wild Bunch make this trailer available with English subtitles? Why isn’t there a bi-lingual Guerilla trailer? What’s the deal with Gregg Goldstein‘s mention in the Hollywood Reporter about “four indie offers being on the table” and still no distrib deal? The possibility that Steven Soderbergh‘s epic (which has had 14 minutes trimmed since Cannes) may not even play commercially until ’09 is ridiculous. What kind of a plastic, quarter-inch-deep moviegoing culture are we to have convinced distributors that buying Che rights is a sucide move?

“A few weeks ago I was in Las Vegas playing blackjack,” director Rod Lurie has written on the Huffington Post. “Two white-guy soldiers who were a couple of days away from being re-deployed to Iraq sat at the table with me. After a few minutes of conversation I asked them who they were voting for. They both said they were voting for Obama.

“When I asked them why, they very simply and honestly told me they want to vote for the guy that will get them out of Iraq. I think this year we will see, for the first time, the active-duty military voting for the Democratic candidate.” — from a piece called “Why The Military Is More Liberal Than You Think.”

Tom O’Neil‘s 7.30 slapdown of Frozen River star Melissa Leo (for pulling rank after arguing with director Courtney Hunt) has resulted in three friendly rebukes — one from myself, another from Thelma Adams and a third from Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone. Undaunted, O’Neil shoots right back, sticks to his guns, gives no quarter.

Yesterday 23/6 posted an alleged photo of Jon Voight’s “marked-up” copy of his Washington Times wing-nut opinion piece. Moderately funny stuff if you’re not one of, you know…”them.”

A terrible-quality bootleg video of the Wolfman trailer that was shown at Comic-Con. Some guy in the audience apparently shot it with a cell-phone camera. That aside, the vibe feels right and the content seems promising.

Benicido del Toro

The latest p.c. ding against Disney’s The Princess and the Frog, which won’t hit screens until ’09, is that it has a “toothless firefly” character who, according to Defamer’s description, “seems to have fluttered in accidentally from the set of Song of the South 2: Cajun Vacation.”

Here are two earlier You Tube videos — clip #1 and clip #2 — that explain other problems related to racial cliches and/or pigeonholing. Between this and the revolting Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Disney is seeming more and more bunkered down and 20th Century clueless about everything.

It’s not just the right-wing spear carriers who are slamming me, incorrectly, for allegedly advocating a Sen. Joseph McCarthy-esque response to Jon Voight‘s 7.28 Washington Times op-ed piece trashing Barack Obama. A liberal friend has taken me to task for this also. Obviously the McCarthy thing has gotten some traction, so let’s review the basics and examine what I actually said and meant.

The paragraph that led to the freak-out read as follows: “[Voight is] obviously entitled to say and write whatever he wants. But it’s only natural that industry-based Obama supporters will henceforth regard him askance. Honestly? If I were a producer and I had to make a casting decision about hiring Voight or some older actor who hadn’t pissed me off with an idiotic Washington Times op-ed piece, I might very well say to myself, ‘Voight? Let him eat cake.'”
I was just being honest about how I might theoretically react if I was in a position to hire or not hire Voight — big deal. That’s several football fields away from suggesting or even implying that producers should band together and deny employment to Voight because he wrote an idiotic op-ed piece. I hope it’s not a shock to anyone that people tend to hire according to whims and hunches, likes and dislikes, alliances and contretemps. Producers hire or don’t hire people all the time because an actor is liked or disliked, because a friend thinks he’s an asshole or a good guy, because the actor and the producer go to the same fitness club or their kids know each other, etc.
I was just indulging in a feeling that I might have — a momentary “fuck Jon Voight” impulse that I might feel or give voice to — if I were a producer. Admit it — it feels good to stick it to people you don’t like or strongly disagree with. (Again, I urge everyone to read Voight’s op-ed article — it’s certifiable.) As I said to an HE reader on the same page, “I didn’t say I had a shit list, or that I believe in the idea of one. I just said it feels good to think of shit-listing certain people. As a fun fantasy. Not that I think for a second that anyone would give a damn.”
I also said that “my own view is that you always work with the best people you can, regardless of political affiliation. Stanley Kubrick was absolutely correct to hire Adolf Menjou as the cynical French general in Paths of Glory, despite Menjou’s reprehensible right-wing views that included supporting the blacklist. Because Menjou was superb in the part. He wasn’t just giving a performance as that guy — he seemed to “be” him.
I also said “good for Cecil B. DeMille, that awful, sanctimonious, two-faced Bible-thumping vulgarian, for giving Edward G. Robinson a job on The Ten Commandments. Seriously — that was a good and compassionate thing he did, even if he was a prick and a bully at heart.”
It should always be about the work and the potential of this or that artist to be extra-sublime in the service of a movie, and not some political bullshit. At the same time we’re all human and prey to certain vengeance impulses from time to time. My error was in admitting such impulses exist within me. But they exist within all of us.
All the right-wingers who wrote me this morning calling me “a left-wing faggot” and whatnot can blow me.