I worked for three hours this morning on a piece about Steven Soderbergh‘s Che Guevara films, The Argentine and Guerilla, for another website, hence my silence. It feels like a funny thing to write something longish (1700 words) and send it off and then…wait. I’ve become accustomed to instant gratification.

Come the fall Steven Soderbergh will direct The Girlfriend Experience — a 14-day quickie about “the world of prostitution from the vantage point of a $10,000-a- night call girl” (according to Variety‘s Michael Fleming). This will probably be one of Soderbergh’s interesting sidelight films, most likely. Soderbergh, who “gets” women, hasn’t mined this turf enough.
But it’s a 2929 Entertainment whatsis movie (Mark Cuban, Todd Wagner, HD Net) so let’s keep things in perspective. I say this as a huge fan of Bubble, by the way. As far as I’m concerned Bubble was Soderbergh’s big comeback film after being in a slump for God knows how many years. Soderbergh will direct The Informant with Matt Damon for Warner Bros. before doing the Girlfriend thing,

As Defamer’s sum-up points out, Jon Cusack‘s War, Inc. has gone into the tank after showing at the Tribeca Film Festival. Reviews from N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick, Spoutblog‘s Karina Longworth and the Hollywood Reporter‘s Frank Sheck are viewable for all to see. But HE reader Joseph Kay has something interesting to say besides.

Jon Cusack, Joan Cusack in War, Inc.

“Apologies if you’ve covered/couldn’t care less about this, but John Cusack’s War, Inc. silently crept into theaters here in Toronto this week, and I believe nowhere else,” he writes. “The reason for the stealth, I’m guessing, having seen the film last night, is that it’s pretty much an unmitigated disaster, messy and all-over-the-place and largely nonsensical
“But it does have a point-of-view (albeit very on-the-nose) and in a world where every third major release is seemingly about the romantic chemistry generated by the metaphor of street dancing, at least Cusack and his partners were trying to do something interesting and different.
“The big problem is they were shooting for the darkly comic impact of Dr. Strangelove, obviously an impossible target for anybody except maybe Charlie Kaufman, and also the film is very weirdly grafted onto the template for Grosse Point Blank , a strange decision which seems to have the mutual effect of hurting War, Inc. while you watch it and Grosse Point retroactively.”

The trailer for Tim Burton‘s original Batman vs. one for Chris Nolan‘s The Dark Knight. The College Humor guys who put this up are using the headline “why so similar?” Indeed — these spots are remarkably alike.

Hollywood Chicago‘s Adam Fendleman is pointing to an ugly, cell-phone video of the new Dark Knight trailer — shot in a theatre with reddish tints and all the crappy ambient noise that you always get with these things. An official, much better looking version of this trailer will be viewable this Sunday.
The best thing about the trailer is Heath Ledger‘s voice. He’s speaking in a kind of raspy Midwestern twang. Nothing at all that sounds the least bit Ennnis del Mar-ish.

“With all that’s gone down between Washington and Hollywood, it’s a shame that politicians still don’t trust their showbiz supporters,” Politico‘s Jeff Ressner notes, observing that “for the most part, D.C. treats L.A. as a gigantic ATM machine and the movie business as a means to pick up campaign cool points — while trying to keep potentially radioactive celebrities at arm’s length.
“But as candidates exploit moguls and movie stars for cash and cachet, they often reject creative assistance from the artists and executives at Hollywood’s dream factories.”
Like — hello? — Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris? A director who has knocked out brilliant ad spots for years, and arguably put together the most convincing anti-Bush/pro-Kerry spots of the 2004 campaign? A couple of weeks ago I wrote that Morris (Standard Operating Procedure, The Fog of War), working with MoveOn.org, created a brilliant series of TV ads about ‘real people’ (mostly Republicans) who’d voted for George Bush in 2000, but had decided to vote for John Kerry in 2004.
“This year, there are many more Republicans talking about voting for Obama than were persuaded about Kerry four years ago. See where I’m going with this?” The Obama campaign should contract Morris to do a series of spots about Obamacans, and this time actually put them on the air — as opposed to what happened in 2004, which is that they were basically shelved for TV use and seen only at moveon.org and at errolmorris.com.
Ressner talks to “a top marketing vice president at one of the leading motion picture studios to explain just how he might help the three current candidates in each of their respective quests for the White House,” etc. And that’s fine. Except nothing this guy says is as interesting or persuasive as the cumulative effect of those ’04 Morris spots.

Barack Obama has finally thrown the Rev. Jeremiah Wright under the bus. A friend said Obama needs to throw Wright under the iron wheels of a subway train — which I think he’s now done. Less than an hour ago Obama said he was “angry,” “outraged,” “saddened” and “appalled” by “the spectacle that we saw yesterday,” describing at one point some remarks Wright said last weekend as “ridiculous.”

“At a certain point when a person contradicts what you believe fundamentally, and then he questions whether you believe it in front of the press corps…that’s enough. It’s a show of disrespect to me, and an insult to what we’ve been trying to do in this campaign.”
Obama said that Wright “obviously hasn’t shown much concern for me.” He said he had heard that Wright had given “a performance” and when he watched tapes, he realized that it more than just a case of the former pastor defending himself.
“What became clear to me was that he was presenting a world view that contradicts what I am and what I stand for,” Obama said. “What he said directly contradicts everything about my life. I am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened by the spectacle that we saw yesterday,” Obama told reporters at a North Carolina news conference.

The Cannes Film Festival has officially announced that Fernando Meirelles‘ Blindness (Miramax, 9.12) will open the festival on Wednesday, 5.15. Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover and Gael Garcia Bernal costar.

Gwynneth Paltow during shooting of Two Lovers

On top of which a third French film — Laurent Cantet‘s Entre Les Murs, with Francois Begaudeau — has been added to the Competition:
An American film has also been added to the Competition slate: James Gray‘s Two Lovers, a Brooklyn-set romantic drama about a guy (River Phoenix) torn between the good woman his parents wish he would marry and his beautiful but volatile new neighbor (Gwynneth Paltrow).
As tipped earlier by Variety, Steve McQueen‘s Hunger will open Un Certain Regard on Thursday, 5.15.
French actress Jeanne Balibar and the Iranian author-director Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis) have joined the jury, which will be led this year by Sean Penn.
And finally, it turns out that Barry Levinson‘s What Just Happened? — the Sundance bomb costarring Robert De Niro, Bruce Willis, Catherine Keener, Robin Wright Penn, John Turturro and Sean Penn — will close the festival after all. De Niro will present the Palm d’Or at the closing night ceremonies.

Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason is projecting Iron Man, which I saw earlier this evening, to earn $8 million Thursday night and $103 million over the weekend for an $111 million total. Made of Honor, the counter-programmed, female-angled wedding movie with Patrick Dempsey, is looking at a decent $15 to $18 million.

Paramount publicists made the media wait in line to get into Iron Man at the Arclight this evening. Not unheard of, certainly not an outrage…but it doesn’t happen very often.

An over-examined subject, agreed, but The Australian‘s Eddie Cockrell has nonetheless interviewed yours truly, USA Today and Talk Cinema’s Harlan Jacobson, and Hopscotch Films’ co-owner Troy Lum about the uniform snubbing in this country of all the Iraq War movies. And he’s done a good job of mapping it all out in very precise detail. The piece ran two days ago.
Explanation #1: “Iraq war movies have all been guilt-trippers about an ongoing conflict, whereas the Vietnam movies were all made after the last helicopter left the roof of the American embassy.” Explanation #2: “There have been no surreal, eye-popping, epic-scaled Iraq war movies along the lines of Apocalypse Now or anything that has attempted to sum up the tragedy of the war, except for one, In the Valley of Elah, which deserved a better reception.” Explanation #3: “Everyone is waiting for a facsimile of the last 40 per cent of Stanley Kubrick‘s Full Metal Jacket, which is arguably the best Vietnam War film.”

“Yet Segel’s flaccid member looks pathetic and laughable, especially because it’s attached to a body that is doughy and pallid. It can’t seriously be accused of being capable of anything, let alone of breaking a taboo. So obviously devoid of sexual intent, it symbolizes not so much his character’s abject emotional condition at his girlfriend’s rejection of him, but the sorry state of masculinity in American movies today.” — from still another galumph rant, this one by London Times‘ staffer Christopher Goodwin in yesterday’s issue. Straight out of the HE playbook. He gets it, all right.