Jeffrey Wells

Wes Anderson will wade into ground-level sensibilities when he makes a personal appearance following a Wednesday, 10.3 screening of The Darjeeling Limited at Santa Monica’s Aero theatre at 7:30 pm.

The gay bars in William Friedkin‘s Cruising “are portrayed as a kind of hell, photographed in a near-monochromatic black-and-blue color scheme, with an emphasis on heat, humidity, human sweat and sulfuric cigarette smoke,” writes N.Y. Times DVD columnist Dave Kehr. “Though some scenes were fogged up to avoid censorship for the initial release, they are now presented [on the just-released deluxe edition DVD] as Friedkin shot them.

“The film seems to be moving toward a generalized guilt, proposing new suspects at every turn — a homophobic but secretly gay policeman (Joe Spinell), a police captain with a mysterious agenda (Paul Sorvino), the psychotically jealous roommate (James Remar) of a lovable theater queen (Don Scardino) and ultimately Burns himself — all contained in the faceless figure of a man in a leather mask who pops up at key moments” and who later, per Friedkin’s somewhat unfocused strategy, turns out to be “a disappointingly trite perpetrator.”

Great — now those links to Times Select columns that I’ve been posting all along with be accessible to every Tom, Dick and Harry. “I’m fairly liberal to a degree, I want every online newspaper to be free…”

Nuno Antunes, a staffer at Portugal’s Premiere magazine, reports that the editors announced yesterday that the magazine is shutting down. “We received the news Monday,” Antunes writes, “and were caught by surprise. We’ll be closing the October edition this Friday. Our editor-in-chief made an official statement at our blog. Portugal will [henceforth] be without a movie magazine.”

So what else is new? Magazines are dropping like flies everywhere due to internet incursion. But Artunes believes that the French edition of Premiere is next on the chopping block. The Paris-based publication is where the whole Premiere empire began, so this (if it turns out to be ture) is fairly big news. “It is apparently the intention of the French-based Hachette group to close [other] editions of the magazine, as they did with the U.S. edition,” Antunes writes. “Our internal information is that the French edition is next.”

Here are some links to Portugese news stories about the closing that you’ll need an on-line translator for — story #1, story #2 and story #3.

In keeping with the candid, sometimes hyper-dramatic tone of this column, the emergency appendectomy performed on MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann last Friday (which I read about this morning on Jossip.com) had a heavy effect upon yours truly because (and I’m just going with a gut feeling here in more ways than one) something similar may be happening right here at HE central. I’m just saying this in case the column suffers a item/story stoppage later this afternoon, but it seems really weird that I would (a) read about Olbermann’s episode and then (b) suddenly develop the notion (literally seconds later) that I, too, may have a similar concern.

HE reader James Kent saw Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead last night in Pheonix as part of a special screening series, and says that he came out believing that “pretty much everything” I’ve said about this Sidney Lumet film “is true. Intense, tragic, awesome direction, powerful performances…in a way that reminded me a lot of A Simple Plan. Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke were great. As a matter of fact, when was the last time Hawke was so good?

“The crowd was primarily over 60 (the over-60 crowd in Phoenix will go to anything that’s free), maybe 6 people in their 20s, and the rest, like myself and my wife, in their 30s.

“The guy running the program told us that this was the first U.S. screening of the film and that it had just played Toronto and was getting ready to play the New York Film Festival next. He warned the audience that there was sex and violence and that if anyone can’t handle that type of thing, they should probably leave. He warned that he expected a few people to walk out anyway due to the violence ( I guess he’s used to these namby-pamby Phoenix crowds or something), but that he hoped people give it a chance because it is an amazing and powerful film.

“A lot will depend on how the rest of the year end films shape up, but this one could nab Lumet another Oscar nod for director, and you may see Ethan, Phillip and Albert Finney up for awards too. I’d throw in the editing and screenplay in that pool as well. The marketing push should be all about the great critical reaction. I give this film three and a half stars out of four.”

Yesterday David Hauslaib, Debbie Newman and Rebecca Aronauer‘s Jossip posted what looks like most of Jill Ishkanian‘s $55 million lawsuit against Us Weekly and her old bosses, particularly Ken Baker and Janice Min.

Us editors Janice Min, Ken Baker with Jill Ishkanian

I searched The Smoking Gun and they don’t have this….derelict, slacking off.

The lawsuit makes for extremely icky reading. What a nest of vipers! Straight out of a tawdry TV soap opera. Some people laugh at this stuff; I was mainly shaking my head.

It basically alleges that Baker, Us‘s former West Coast bureau chief (and then West Coast executive editor) occasionally marginalized and undermined Ishkanian while she worked at Us as a news reporter, and then, after Ishkanian left to former Sunset Photo Agency,may have been part of an information chain that led to the FBI raiding the offices of Sunset Photo Agency out of concern that Ishkanian may have taken or used contact information owned by Us (or so the lawsuit seems to imply). And yet no actions of any kind resulted from information gathered by this FBI raid.

For what it’s worth, I occasionally worked with Baker at People magazine during my stint there from ’96 to ’98. We did field reporting together in the Pacific Grove area after John Denver was killed in a plane crash in October ’97. He’s a good writer, a sharp and very thorough reporter, and a first-rate human being.

Watch the video that accompanies this 9.18.07 Gainesville Sun story by Jack Stripling about a 21 year-old University of Florida journalism student who was subdued and then tasered by campus cops during a speech sometime yesterday by Sen. John Kerry, and you’ll probably come to two conclusions. I did, at least.

One, the student, Andrew Meyer, put a three-part question to Kerry about the 2004 election (he maintained that victory was stolen by Bush loyalists..imagine that!) in a rude, boorish and overly strident manner — he seemed utterly lacking in basic disciplinary social skills. And yet he was still just asking questions. It was up to Kerry to take charge and say to the kid, “Okay, hold on, let’s address these questions one at a time”…and in all fairness, he started to do that. But he mainly just stood there and let the storm troopers have at it.

And two, the campus cops who manhandled Meyer off the floor, wrestled him to the ground and then tasered him acted like major brutes. They revived thoughts of the 1994 Rodney King beating in Los Angeles and the Chicago police riot during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Can I just say it like Abbie Hoffman used to? They acted like Nazi pigs. And then Kerry made a joke about it from the podium (i.e., something about asking the kid up to the podium so he could swear Kerry in).

Here’s the same story plus two more video feeds on rawstory.com — the one from Live Leak follows the cops and Meyer out to the downstairs lobby.

Kerry has passed along a statement to ABC News’ Rick Klein that more or less condemns the campus fuzz.

“In 37 years of public appearances, through wars, protests and highly emotional events, I have never had a dialogue end this way. I believe I could have handled the situation without interruption, but I do not know what warnings or other exchanges transpired between the young man and the police prior to his barging to the front of the line and their intervention. I asked the police to allow me to answer the question and was in the process of responding when he was taken into custody.”

“I was not aware that a taser was used until after I left the building. I hope that neither the student nor any of the police were injured. I regret enormously that a good healthy discussion was interrupted.”

I’m trying to think of a more shallow and contemptible attitude toward the Iraq War movies than “they don’t ring my bell — I’d prefer something more entertaining.” The Iraq War is our national (and international) tragedy, and about half of this country voted for a man they knew had fabricated reasons for invading in the first place, which means those people bear major responsibility. And here we are living our insular, complacent, doped-up lives in this plastic shopping-mall nation of ours, and we can’t be bothered to absorb, much less consider, movies about what’s going on in Iraq because it’s not entertaining enough? Dylan said it best in Tombstone Blues: “Tell me great hero, but please make it brief/Is there a hole for me to get sick in?”

Sally Field was bleeped at the Emmys for saying “goddam,” but the entire statement — “And let’s face it — if the mothers ruled the world, there wouldn’t be any goddam wars in the first place!” — is straight, plain, dead-on. What blue-nose biddy would bridle at that adjective in that context?

This demo reel of CG effects that went into Zodiac makes me respect David Fincher‘s film even more.

I failed to link last Friday to a pair of downbeat articles about the Iraq-Afghanistan films — a 9.14 Wall Street Journal piece by Peter Sanders, and another by Variety‘s chief critic Todd McCarthy.

“No matter the specific qualities of the writing, filmmaking and performances,” writes McCarthy. “The problem for me is that all these films emanate from precisely the same mindset, the safest, least provocative attitude it is possible to have: the war sucks, Bush sucks, America is down the tubes.”

“Critics say Hollywood, with its distinct liberal bias, lacks credibility when it comes to making political films,” Sanders observes. “Some executives say they wonder if moviegoers confronted with grim realities on the nightly news will want to see fictionalized versions of them as entertainment. ‘I am concerned about viewer fatigue,’ says Chris Carlisle, president of domestic theatrical marketing at New Line Cinema, which is releasing Rendition on 10.19. ‘A lot of people don’t want to hear another thing about what’s wrong with the government.'”