I was searching around and came across this thoroughly excellent Troggs song that I haven’t listened to in ages. I’d forgotten how scrumptious it is. Raw, honest, monaural, reverby.

Two British-produced films that were shot last fall and should by rights appear at the 2008 Toronto Film Festival are Gerald McMorrow‘s Franklyn, a kind of science-fiction fantasy piece costarring Sam Riley, Ryan Phillipe and Eva Green, and Beeban Kidron‘s Hippie Hippie Shake, an adaptation of Richard Neville‘s memoir about running Oz, the famed London counter-culture weekly, in the late ’60s. Cillian Murphy plays Neville; Sienna Miller plays significant other Louise Ferrier.

Sienna Miller in Hippie Hippie Shake.

Ryan Phillipe (reputedly) in Franklyn.

Both films are due to open in England later this year. and Hippie Hippie Shake, a Working Title production, is slated for release in the U.S. sometime in ’08 by Universal. Franklyn was mentioned in an Agence France Presse article as a possible Cannes 2008 selection, only it never happened.
The final Toronto Film Festival roster will be revealed on Tuesday, 8.19.

Hearty congratulations to voice actor Cedering Fox, a personal friend of this columnist whose Word Theatre shows have been mentioned on HE from time to time, for landing a great gig as the official announcer of the 2008 Democratic Convention in Denver.

Cedering Fox

Before I get to the point of this item, let’s take a quick gander at Andrew Fleming‘s Hamlet 2 (Focus Features, 8.27), which I’ve seen. It’s about a somewhat immature, emotionally imbalanced, self-loathing ex-actor and high school teacher (Steve Coogan) who stages an irreverent musical sequel to William Shakespeare‘s Hamlet co-starring himself and his students. Hamlet 2 was a comic hit at Sundance ’08, which led to its acquisition by Focus Features.

It’s two movies in one — an irreverent, somewhat downish comedy of manners and ineptitude about preparing the show (and fighting small-town elements who don’t want it performed) and the show itself, which turns out to be much slicker and professionally performed than you’re led to expect, and is fairly entertaining. And one of the big musical numbers [see You Tube clip below] is called “Rock Me Sexy Jesus.” Coogan — dressed in a dark beard, dark hippie hair and a white gown — plays the Christ figure in the number.
Yesterday, to finally get to the point, I received a tiny bobbing Coogan doll to promote the film — a mildly cute little thing. But there’s a little detail about it that seems…well, funny. Or weird. Even given the satirical “goof around with Jesus” tone that’s already part of the musical number.
The problem is this: look at the hands of the Coogan Jesus doll, and you’ll see he’s making the devil hand sign with his fingers (i.e., the index finger and the pinkie finger raised) and not the “hang loose” hand sign, which is conveyed with the thumb and the pinkie.
If you’re a football fan from Texas you’d say, “No, no, that’s just’ the ‘hook ’em, Longhorns’ sign.” Or if you’re a rock musician you’d say “No, no, that’s just a hand sign that all the rockers use.” But in a Jesus context (and particularly given the fact that Hamlet 2 takes place in Arizona, not Texas), the doll’s finger sign is still a little bit odd…no?
For clarity’s sake here are two images of the hang-loose sign — image #1, image #2.

“Go to the nearest Wal-Mart, line up 100 people and ask them whether they can relate to a man who owns eight houses and whose wife is a gazillionaire, or if they can relate to a man who represents the American melting pot — a man who just recently paid off his student loans — a man who was raised by a single mother — a man who is (shock horror!) still happily married to his only wife. Then tell us that Barack Obama is the more exotic or elitist of the two candidates.
“Irrespective of what white, upper-class Republicans or Mark Penn or Mark Halperin or Pat Buchanan might think, Senator Obama quite literally looks like 21st Century America. Mixed-culture, mixed-heritage, middle class roots. Senator Obama, in terms of his racial composition and family history, has more in common with average Americans than just about any modern Republican presidential nominee.
“The only way he’s not is if somehow we’ve been transported into an episode of Leave It To Beaver — or if by ‘America’ the Republicans and the barbecue media mean to suggest ‘Kentucky.’ Even with that as a qualification, half of Senator Obama’s racial composition is rooted in rural Kansas. His parents were divorced. He barely knew his biological father.” — from Mike Cesca‘s 8.13 HuffPost piece titled “The Exotic Candidate Is The One With Eight Houses.”

So much for ex-United Artists marketing guy Dennis Rice‘s contention that it’s better to release Valkyrie on 2.13.09 than in late ’08 because it’ll make more money that way. A half hour ago it was announced, almost concurrent with the news about United Artists CEO Paula Wagner being in talks to leave the company, that Valkyrie has been given a 12.26.08 release date, instead of the Feb. 13 date that was previously announced.
This is the fourth release date that Valkyrie has now had. There’s no reason for me to think, having read the script and knowing Bryan Singer to be a very strong and focused director, that there’s anything seriously wrong with Valkyrie, but the release-date shuffling has been incessant and the fumes coming off this thing are malignant at this point. MGM has literally been putting out smoke signals since last summer saying “troubled! whoopsy daisy! uh-oh!”
MGM needs to stop the hemmorhaging on this thing. HE is hereby repeating its suggestion to new MGM marketing guy Mike Vohlman to screen this sucker for a few choice columnists and long-leaders (including myself, of course) and let them spread the word.
Variety wrote that “sources close to events said the move was made for purely commercial reasons, after a screening of the film went well. The studio sees it as a holiday pic and award consideration was not a factor, they say.”

Variety is reporting that Tom Cruise‘s longtime partner Paula Wagner is in talks to abandon her CEO berth at United Artists, which she’s held since 11.2.06 when she and Cruise took hold of the UA reins, and despite her being a co-owner of UA with Cruise and MGM. Obviously there’s been friction and rancor and she’s leaving under some sort of duress, but what are the particulars?

I have calls out to a few people, but until some real answers come in I have to presume that the factors behind the sudden upheaval are (a) the general Titanic-like vibe at MGM/UA, (b) adverse relations between Wagner and MGM worldwide motion picture group chairperson Mary Parent, (c) the MGM suits allegedly not liking Wagner either, (d) Valkyrie, (e) the de facto actor’s strike slowing everything down and to some extent getting in the way of Cruise-Wagner greenlighting anything. This, at least, is how an agent friend summarized it a few minutes ago.
A rival studio chief didn’t have any fresh or hard information, but observed/speculated that “they’re imploding over there…they lost Jeff Kleeman, they lost Dennis Rice….there’s a lot of tension between [Wagner] and Harry Sloan and Tom and the whole thing….everybody’s second-guessing them in the press…there’s been a lot of in-fighting …it’s certainly not like Paramount, where they were treated like royality…and Paula’s got plenty of money and probably just threw up her hands and said, the hell with this, I don’t need it.”
Nikki Finke‘s report seems to have a good handle on the situation. Sample graph: “The behind-the-scenes rupture of any reasonable relationship between UA and MGM really became evident this week. That’s because no one outside of those two companies knew that Wagner’s inability to pull the trigger on projects is now threatening to kill part of the $500 million financing from Merrill Lynch. I’m told specified start dates and release dates haven’t been met, so UA could lose a goodly portion of that credit line. The only solution is now for MGM to step in and immediately greenlight two UA motion pictures by the trigger dates. But Wagner’s camp is trying to spin this as MGM usurping UA’s independent authority so that MGM boss Harry Sloan can finally get his hands on UA’s money since he hasn’t been able to score financing of his own.”
Wagner and Cruise have been producing partners since ’93 and now, unless I’m misreading or misunderstanding, they’re technically parting company as well.
Wagner “will produce projects under her independent shingle,” the Variety story says, and also with UA, working with Cruise and MGM on various films she has already developed, including Guillermo del Toro‘s film version of the British TV adventure series Champions, among others.
Cruise and Wagner formed Cruise/Wagner Productions in 1993. They made Vanilla Sky, The Last Samurai, War of the Worlds, the Mission: Impossible series, Without Limits, The Others, Narc, Ask the Dust and Elizabethtown.

A New York-based publicist wrote with the usual questions about my planned activities at the Toronto Film Festival. I said I’ll seeing and doing everything I can for 18 hours daily for nine or ten days, Wednesday, 9.3 to Friday, 9.12. “Big essential screenings aside, I tend to improvise and shuffle around as the mood directs,” I said. “I absorb every film, every event and every person I meet. I take pictures, I record interviews, I shoot video, I review films, I report reactions, I eat free food at parties and sip the free white wine,” blah, blah. As ever.

The subject turned the other day to movies that were barely seen when initially released, and will almost certainly never be seen by anyone on DVD and therefore never remembered by anyone, ever. Dead, buried, finito. And I came up with one — Saul Swimmer‘s The Black Pearl (1978), which you can’t find on VHS and never was issued on DVD.

It starred Gilbert Roland, Carl Anderson and Mario Custodio , and was basically about a hunt for a large black pearl located off the Baja California coast. The money scene was about the young hero having to grapple with a giant manta ray that guards the treasure.
The reason I remember The Black Pearl is not because I liked it all that much. It’s because I was close with a lady who lived on West 13th Street named Elaine who told me something about a certain producer of The Black Pearl — he was young so maybe he was just an associate producer — that has always stayed in my mind. And only now, nearly 30 years after the fact, can the story finally be told.
Elaine and I were boyfriend-girlfriend for as little less than a year, sometime between mid ’78 and early to mid ’79. We remained semi-friendly after we broke up, and she told me one night that she was going out with a guy named something Harris, who’d produced or co-produced The Black Pearl. I’d seen her having a drink with him at the Village Bistro — nice looking, dark hair, nice sweater — and asked her a day or two later if he was a nice guy and she said yes, etc.
And then somehow I managed to get her to tell me how their first night of amour had gone, and she told me that they’d hardly slept at all due to his having made love to her eight times from midnight to the crack of dawn. Wow, I said, and let it go at that. And yet deep down I was impressed. A night of typical grand passion might include three or four go-rounds, but eight? Harris was either very athletic or very full of feeling, or a combination of the two.
The take-away thing is that Elaine got a little bit angry with me the next time we spoke because — I was actually being respectful in a roundabout way — I referred to the Black Pearl producer as “Eight Times Harris.” She was actually more like half-pissed and half-laughing. But that “Eight Times Harris” remark is the reason I still remember The Black Pearl.
And now there are a few more in the world who will forever remember this film. Right? If I hadn’t written this The Black Pearl would be the same dead movie it’s been for the last 28 or 29 years, but now there’s something to remember it by. Am I right or wrong?

A friend asked me to suggest a nice PG-rated disco movie for her daughter’s 10th birthday party because (a) her daughter likes disco and (b) Saturday Night Fever is rated R and considered too adult by some of the parents of the girls coming to the party. I sent her an A.V. Club posting with with a piece called “Six Films That Helped Kill Disco,” and then I added the following:

“Disco is bad for the soul — then, now, forever. You’re fine with [your daughter] and her friends revelling in the most soul-less and mechanistic mainstream music ever created in the history of civilization, but you want to shield her from semi-adult content at all costs. You’re basically telling her, ‘Empty plastic entertainment is fine, but anything that smacks of artful depictions of actual reality…well, that may not be appropriate.’
“My boys were into the worst TV garbage imaginable when they were 9 and 10 and 11 years old, but I always told them they were polluting their brains with that stuff and tried to get them to sample good movies every so often. And they finally grew out of their garbage phase. [Your daughter] is in a girlie-synthetic phase now. That’s what being ten is about (i.e., early tweener) but you’re doing her no favors by facilitating a disco party.
“My basic point is that there are things that are far, far worse than honest ‘adult content,’ and disco music is certainly one of them.”
While writing this I was playing the Who’s Sister Disco in my head.

The final list of Toronto titles will be announced six days from now — on Tuesday, August 19th — so today’s list of Special Presentations is not the be-all and end-all. The word from one Toronto insider is that TIFF is cutting down on the overall number of films being shown, which last year was around 300. Variety and others have complained that Toronto is a crap-shoot because they show too many films, so they’re trimming the tally back to 280, give or take. But a whole lot of titles are going to be announced next Tuesday.
Darren Aronofsky‘s The Wrestler will make it there in addition to its NY Film Festival showing. My facial-trauma Mickey Rourke moment is definitely coming and I’d better toughen up and get ready for it. And Steven Soderbergh‘s slightly shortened Che (4 hours and 5 minutes, give or take) will be presented as a single entity with a 15-minute intermission as well as two separate films — they were once called The Argentine and Guerilla but who knows what the current thinking may be? — being shown at different times.
Clint Eastwood√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s Changeling will be the centerpiece of the New York Film Festival, but Angelina Jolie wouldn’t commit to attending so forget Toronto.
Other top-tittie titles include Kevin Smith‘s Zack and Miri Make a Porno with Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks; Guillermo Arriaga‘s The Burning Plain with Charlize Theron and Kim Basinger; Barbet Schroder‘s Inju; and Charlie Kaufman‘s smartly written but deeply morose and deterioration-obsessed Synecdoche, New York.
Other highlights of today’s announcement include Rian Johnson‘s The Brothers Bloom with Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel Weisz, Rinko Kikuchi, Maximilian Schell and Robbie Coltrane; Stephan Elliott‘s Easy Virtue with Colin Firth, Jessica Biel, Kristin Scott Thomas and Ben Barnes; Christophe Barratier‘s Faubourg 36, Michael Winterbottom‘s Genova with Colin Firth, Catherine Keener and Hope Davis.
As well as John Crowley‘s Is There Anybody There? with Bill Milner and Michael Caine; Bruno Barreto‘s Last Stop 174; Stephen Belber‘s Management with Jennifer Aniston, Steve Zahn and Woody Harrelson; Richard Linklater‘s Me and Orson Welles with Zac Efron, Claire Daines, Ben Chaplin and Christian McKay; Danny Boyle‘s Slumdog Millionaire; Marc Abraham‘s Flash of Genius with Greg Kinnear, Lauren Graham, Dermot Mulroney and Alan Alda.