Month: October 2008

A day after speaking with Errol Morris about Standard Operating Procedure on or about 4.11.08, I wrote a piece titled “Morris Should Sell Obama.” The idea was to re-boot Morris’s brilliant spots for John Kerry in ’04, which focused on “real people” (mostly Republicans) who’d voted for Bush in 2000, but were going for Kerry that year.

Three days ago a funny New Yorker piece by David Sedaris about undecided voters appeared. “For as long as I can remember, just as we move into the final weeks of the Presidential campaign the focus shifts to the undecided voters,” it begins. “Who are they?” the news anchors ask. ‘And how might they determine the outcome of this election?’

“Then you’ll see this man or woman — someone, I always think, who looks very happy to be on TV. ‘Well, Charlie,’ they say, ‘I’ve gone back and forth on the issues and whatnot, but I just can’t seem to make up my mind!’ Some insist that there’s very little difference between candidate A and candidate B. Others claim that they’re with A on defense and health care but are leaning toward B when it comes to the economy.

“I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?

“To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. ‘Can I interest you in the chicken?’ she asks. ‘Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

“To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.”

I’m attending the big Doubt screening at tonight’s AFI Fest kickoff, but because it’s being digitally projected I was asked — told — not to review it until I see it on a clean 35mm print in Manhattan sometime late next week. That’s the aesthetic exactitude of the film’s producer, Scott Rudin, talking.

In line with this, Variety‘s Anne Thompson has reported that Rudin “was so appalled at the way the digital projection looked on the curved giant Cinerama Dome screen that he made sure the film will show on three flat screens at the Arclight.”

Correct again. That ultra-curved Cinerama screen is okay for watching revivals of How The West Was Won and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, but terrible for almost anything else. Alan Parker, some may recall, was so appalled at Evita — shot in 2.35 widescreen — playing there in ’96 that he had a special flat screen installed.”

Doubt was shot in 1.85, and “gorgeously!,” I’m told. “Roger Deakins‘ work is stunning.”

An “editor friend” recently sent Variety‘s Anne Thompson a note about from the first long-lead screening of Sam Mendes‘ Revolutionary Road: “The word from me is wow!….very powerful,” the guys starts off.

“[It’s a] two-hander for Leo and Kate, all grown up now as a married couple, unhappy but still in love. They go at it fiercely and you can sense the real-life bond that lets them really go for it, all defenses down.

“It’s powerful and also beautifully written and filmed. [American Beauty director] Sam Mendes doing suburban angst again, but this time in the 1950s. I daresay it may be a modern classic. The screenplay race this year is unusually light on adaptations, so this being an adaptation of the Richard Yates novel, I’d look for a nomination.”

The Weekly World News is reporting that the Alien has switched his endorsement from Barack Obama to John McCain, which they call “a shocking reversal with major implications for the U.S. presidential election.” Both political camps “are buzzing about the implications,” the newspaper reports, “as the Alien has correctly predicted the winning president in every election for the past 28 years.”

Federico Fellini‘s La Strada delivers one of the saddest and most fully satisfying endings in cinema history (providing you see the entire film before it), and surely one of the most penetrating moments ever from Anthony Quinn. He’s hearing words as clearly as Charlton Heston did when he knelt before the burning bush in The Ten Commandments. Did Lars Von Trier “steal” from this in a sense when he decided on the heavenly bells visual at the end of Breaking The Waves?

Barack Obama‘s half-hour infomercial Wednesday night didn’t teach us a lot we didn’t already know, ” Slate‘s Christopher Beam wrote tonight, “except that an Obama administration would likely feature immaculate stagecraft.

“The spot opened with a shot of — I’m not making this up — amber waves of grain. Obama reiterated his plan to cut taxes for families making less than $250,000 in a softly lit room in front of an oak desk. He explained his Social Security plan to moist-eyed retirees in what could have been a church vestibule. Then a guy behind a register tells Mark Dowell, a laid-off auto worker, the price for groceries. The camera cut to Dowell, scowling, in a way that could not have possibly been live. Not to mention the well-coordinated switch to Obama’s live address in Florida, with sweeping cameras straight out of a Rolling Stones concert movie.

“Improved artifice easily fits under the banner of ‘change.’ Some of President Bush’s worst political moments came from poorly executed stagecraft. Dressing up as a fighter pilot and standing before a ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner was the epitome of tone deafness. Bush’s team also goofed in allowing him to be photographed looking down at post-Katrina New Orleans. Optics aren’t everything, but Bush’s visual flops were especially damaging.

“And it’s not just choreography that matters: It’s making the choreography look effortless. Tonight’s episode featured all sorts of shots that simply had to be rehearsed: a couple praying before dinner, a mother walking out of a grocery store toward a fixed camera, a woman with arthritis massaging her knuckles. You can imagine the cinematographer saying, ‘Can you pray a little longer this time? OK, now try moving your mouth a little.’ It’s heavily choreographed.

“But the production quality is high enough that the transitions are almost invisible. It’s the opposite of George H.W. Bush‘s famously clunky statement to the people of New Hampshire in 1992: ‘Message: I care.’ The trick is not to let the seams show.

“Smart propaganda does not a smart administration make. If anything, it means we have to be more vigilant in calling out theater when we see it. But whatever the next four years may bring, we’re in for some damn good camera angles.”

And finally, on a note of emotional maturity, identify the actor and the film. I’m sorry, but this line has never failed to make me chuckle or at least smile, and we’re talking at least 15 or 20 viewings over many, many years.

In Benjamin Schwarz‘s Atlantic website review of David Thomson‘s Have You Seen…? (Knopf, 10.14), the book’s basic prejudice is explained. That is, the single-page entries are Thomson’s favorites. “But he also writes about many pictures he can’t stand,” says Schwarz, “including the 1959 Ben-Hur (“Has anyone made a voluntary decision to see [it] in recent years?”), Kramer vs. Kramer (a work of “inane studied gentility”), and Rain Man (“the smug movie of a culture charging down a dead-end street”).

“All of these films won the Oscar for Best Picture, so the reader might assume that Thomson has gathered both movies he esteems and ones he judges influential commercially, culturally or otherwise.”

I have willfully watched Ben-Hur at least twice over the past year, and would gladly see it again if I could catch it in 70mm in Berlin. Rain Man is a tolerably okay film, partly due to Tom Cruise‘s performance, especially in the last act. And I can watch Kramer vs. Kramer anytime and not have an enema. It’s got Dustin Hoffman‘s most likable performance, Howard Duff as the attorney with the silver-tapped cane (“Well, does she talk to walls?”), the guy who fires Hoffman at lunch (forgot his name), Jobeth Williams in an affecting little cameo, Jane Alexander in a near-great supporting part, etc.

Politico‘s Jeffrey Ressner reported a little while ago that Joe the Plumber — i.e., Samuel Wurzelbacher — is “being pursued for a major record deal and could come out with a country album as early as Inauguration Day.” Don’t stop there! What about using Joe to play Mr. Clean in TV ads? (Seriously.) How about a reality show about Joe trying to make his way? Trying to pay back taxes, raise the dough to buy the business, etc.

Wurzelbacher has “just signed with a Nashville public relations and management firm to handle interview requests and media appearances,” Ressner adds, “as well as create new career opportunities, including a shift out of the plumbing trade into stage and studio performances.”