In his story about the current proliferation of zombies in movies, N.Y. Times writer Warren St. John lists all the recent commercial manifestations required for a story like this to be approved by his Times editor, but he fails to mention one important geographical distinction. Zombie Nation is pretty much anchored in the eastern region of the U.S., the Caribbean islands, New Orleans, and most recently England (i.e., Shaun of the Dead). If anyone has written about, drawn a graphic novel or made any kind of exploitation-horror film about zombie armies in the Pacific Rim territories…Los Angeles, the California desert, Seattle, the Hawaiian islands, Japan, Taiwan, Shanghai, Alaska, etc….I’ve yet to hear about it. (You’d think that one of Japan’s horror-film directors would have taken a poke by now. Made a film, that is, a film about actual hordes of walking dead…and not just this or that individual ghost-zombie.) Jacques Tourneur‘s I Walked with a Zombie was set in the West Indies, George Romero‘s Night of the Living Dead films have all been Pittsburh and/or Pennsylvania-based, 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead happened in England, and Shadow: Dead Riot is, according to reviews I’ve read and stills I’ve seen, set in some generic women’s prison that’s not brand-spanking new. There definitely seems to be something about older cultures (places with longer histories, creakier homes, graveyards that go back to the 1700s) that zombies seem to like. Am I wrong? Has there ever been a movie about surfing zombies on Oahu’s North Shore? Or about zombies shuffling around San Francisco, Portland, Seattle or Vancouver? Think about it. I may be onto something here…

This is a
totally excellent trailer for Paul Greengrass‘s Flight 93 (Universal, 4.28)…you know, the 9/11 movie about the plane that went down in the Pennsylvania countryside because a few brave passengers stood up and did the hard thing. But what’s with the image on the one-sheet [see below]? Flight # 93 was nowhere near Manhattan after the towers got hit, but Universal’s ad guys…well, as the saying goes, “Leave it to the ad guys!” They obviously decided the folks wouldn’t get it unless the burning towers were front-and-center. Talk about clever, creative, Cleo-Award work.

Randy Quaid acted in Brokeback Mountain for peanuts, so you can understand why he’s pissed that he did that, given that the movie has taken in $160 million worldwide. He’s figuring that a portion of the dough ought to be passed around as a retroactive make-up thing. And yet it seems a mite strange that Quaid is suing Focus Features, Del Mar Prods., and Brokeback producers James Schamus and David Linde for $10 million on complaints of “intentional misrepresentation, “negligent misrepresentation” and “recisssion.” (The last term apparently refers to someone having “rescinded” or gone back on a deal point.) I don’t know about this stuff, but shouldn’t Quaid’s agent have stipulated in his contract that if the film turns into a surprise hit and makes, say, over $30 million that Quaid automatically gets paid this amount retroactively, and if it earns over $50 million he gets paid that amount retroactively, and so on? A studio-based person who knows something about contracts and indie-world financing has theorized that Quaid’s agent might have been rebuffed upon trying to even discuss putting such terms in the contract because “of Quaid’s standing…because he’s not big enough…if it had been Matt Dillon [Focus] might have said we’ll give you a bump after the film makes certain earnings,” but they may not have let Quaid’s agent even begin that conversation. Is it really “career suicide” for Quaid to do this, as a certain columnist has suggested? “Kind of,” the studio source said. It’s a rough world out there.

When he recently interviewed former pinup queen Bettie Page, whose life during the 1940s and ’50s is the focus of Mary Harron‘s The Notorious Bettie Page (Picturehouse, 4.14), L.A. Times staffer Louis Sahagun wrote that that “her face remains smooth and fresh, and one can still see the face of the young woman in the old. Her eyes, bright blue, still sparkle.” That’s good to hear because judging by Paige’s reported criticism of the film, she’s not that hip. After seeing the film at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles a few weeks ago, Page reportedly complained about the title. “Notorious? That’s not flattering at all,” she said. “They should have used another word.” The film’s producer Pam Koffler later told Sahagun that, of course, the title “was meant ironically…Bettie Page gained such notoriety for her modeling, but the real person and her life were exactly opposite of all that.” On top of this the New York Post‘s “Page Six” column reports that the 82 year-old Page was “overheard loudly snorting and sighing” during the Playboy Mansion screening. It’s probably a rule of thumb that most older people (especially the over-70 types) aren’t very comfortable recalling or re-living aspects of their foolish youth. Nobody likes to thinks about past mistakes, time wasted, opportunities missed, etc.

What’s the worst DVD commentary track ever recorded? Obviously a subjective call, but Rate That Commentary hands the booby prize to the usually very well-spoken William Friedkin and his commentary on Warner Home Video’s The Exorcist: The Version You’ve Never Seen, which came out in June 2004. Odd…Friedkin is usually very good on the mike. “A slow and uninformative comentary…one of the worst,” “the worst…non-informative and boring…the director is clearly uninspired [and] just describes the events we can see for ourselves. Actually, he also spends a lot of time in silence,” and”I don’t understand why this is the worst commentary ever! Was Friedkin forced into doing it? His commentaries for French Connection and Exorcist (original version) are excellent. Avoid this at all costs, unless you need a cure for insomnia.” I mention this only because Rate That Commentary is worthy scanning from time to time.

The coolest thing about John Anderson and Laura Kim‘s new how-to-sell-your-independent-movie book, “I Wake Up Screening“ (Billboard, 3.30), is, of course, the title…although it sounds more like a description of what it’s like to attend Sundance or Cannes or Toronto as a buyer or a journalist than anything else. It’s a how-to manual for emerging filmmakers “about how to (and how not to) get their films talked about, written about”…uhhm, the best way to do this is to get people like me to see it early. Anderson and Kim also “explain how to get their films evaluated, how to put together the perfect team, how to deal with the media” — flattery, early access, invitations to parties — “how to navigate the festival circuit, and how to win friends and influence people,” the press release says. Anderson is an L.A.-based critic who writes for Newsday, Variety and the New York Times, and Kim is a marketing vp at Warner Independent Pictures.

That server shutdown that happened around 10:30 am and lasted about fifteen minutes was one of those unfortunate incidents. Lunar Pages has offered their apologies, and I, too, am offering mine.

A little more than three years ago Variety‘s Michael Fleming reported that former bigtime auteur Lawrence Kasdan (Grand Canyon, The Big Chill, et. al.) was starting work (along with screenwriter Terri Minsky) on a U.S. remake of Sandra Nettlebeck‘s Mostly Martha for Castle Rock. There was moderate excitement about this since pretty much everyone with any taste was fairly taken with the ’01 German-made original. In June 2002, back in my Reel.com period, I ran a rave about Martha, calling it “a culinary Kramer vs. Kramer” about a female Hamburg chef with selfish tendencies (movingly played by Martina Gedeck) having to take care of her recently deceased sister’s young daughter — I also called it “the most succulent, sensually appetizing, food-trip movie since Big Night or even Babette’s Feast .” But Kasdan and Minsky, who wanted to set their film is some foodie city like New Orleans or San Francisco, ran into difficulty (I don’t know what kind) and their movie never happened. In May ’04, however, a moderately painful, obviously Martha-inspired confection called Raising Helen, directed by Garry Marshall and starring Kate Hudson and John Corbett, was released by Disney and wound up earning just under $40 million domestically. It had the same set-up (sister dies in car crash, selfish single professional woman suddenly has to take care of her kids, etc.) although Hudson’s Helen wasn’t a chef — she worked at a modelling agency. I thought that was the end of that saga, but no….there’s a second Mostly Martha knockoff currently rolling in Manhattan’s West Village, and this one is a little closer to the bone since it’s a resuscitation of the Castle Rock-Kasdan project. It’s being directed by Shine‘s Scott Hicks and stars the uber-capitalist, T-Mobile-hawking Catherine Zeta-Jones as the selfishly-inclined lead character (who this time is back to being a chef). The script is by Carol Fuchs, the boyfriend is being played by Aaron Eckhardt and the little orphaned girl is being played by Little Miss Sunshine‘s Abigail Breslin. CZJ’s character is called Martha but the IMDB is calling the movie an “Untitled Scott Hicks Film.” The IMDB chat boards about this film are hilarious — these are hardcore types, of course, but they all loved the original and despise the idea of a remake, they loathe CZJ and they all hope that it flops. I personally think it’s fine — Hicks is a pretty good director (putting aside the issue of Snow Falling on Cedars) and although the sweet European tone of Gettlebeck’s original Martha will almost certainly be lost, this Warner Bros. release may turn out okay. It’s just too bad that Kasdan’s version never happened (the IMDB says his next project is a Tom Hanks father-son relationship piece called The Risk Pool). And I think it’s unfortunate that the Gary Marshall-Kate Hudson version was made in the first place since it probably half-poisoned the well in terms of future audience interest. A fairly sizable crowd saw it, after all, and it’s probably safe to assume some of them will go, “Hey, isn’t this the same old thing?” when they start hearing about the Hicks version.

I mentioned something a while back about David Morrisey, Sharon Stone‘s costar in Basic Instinct 2 (Columbia, 3.31), not being “her sexual equal…his eyes are too small and his pale freckly face is a bit soft and puffy.” One presumes Morrisey was hired for the part because of this…because he would make Stone look good. Can anyone imagine Stone and director Michael Caton-Jones deciding to cast an exceptionally handsome and photogenic younger costar? This movie was Stone’s show…she‘s the one who had to look great, not the guy.

“As long as the leadership at the other agencies remains static, many Hollywood players are putting their money on Endeavor as the one that could mount a challenge to the CAA monolith. The solution for Endeavor would be to follow the CAA model of focusing on teamwork and efficiency — and bring in more top agents like ex-CAA agent [Patrick] Whitesell. ‘If they pick off a partner or two from the other agencies,’ one producer says, ‘the balance could shift pretty quickly. Pull over an Ed Limato and shake the power balance. CAA can’t handle everybody. One defection, and the ball will start rolling in Endeavor’s direction.” — from Anne Thompson‘s 4.24 “Risky Business“/ Hollywood Reporter column

If you’re mainly a WIRED reader (i.e., not into reading the feature stories in this column), I’ll reiterate the key point of today’s Snakes on a Plane story, which is that New Line Cinema’s 8.18 release date — five months from now — is a mistake at this stage, given all the excitement being generated right now. No movie company can orchestrate what’s happening with Snakes, and it’s folly to think that the present energy levels will keep up for another 19 or 20 weeks. If New Line’s distribution chief Russell Schwartz is smart, he’ll push Snakes into theatres sometime in late May or at least sometime in June — strike when the iron is hot! My New Line source says “there’s a heavy debate about this going on right now. Some want to stay with August because that gives you a couple of weeks free and clear…the competition isn’t too bad then. But others want to go sooner, for obvious reasons.”

Snakes! Snakes!

You’re in your too-small coach seat and speechless, eyes aglare and back arched. Reason? A dangling diamondback rattler (as opposed to a dangling participle), four or five inches in front of your face and hissing like any well-motivated serpent, is about to bite down hard.
This, in a nutshell, is New Line’s Snakes on a Plane (8.18). Combined with that hilariously idiotic title, it’s also behind a growing camp following and internet groundswell that appears to be turning this low-rent thriller into the first major movie phenomenon of 2006.

I wasn’t on the boat at first. For the last few months I’ve been going, “Okay, a goof, right…but crap nonetheless.” Nothing has changed on the artistic-estimation side, but suddenly the grass-roots enthusiasm levels are turning it into something else. Everyone’s into it, wants to see it the first weekend. Almost five months to go before the opening date and Snakes on a Plane is already (or so it seems) the new Blair Witch Project.
Go to Snakes on a Blog and you’ll see about 487 different songs, T-shirts, posters, marketing slogans. You can can choose which songs, slogans and posters strike your fancy.
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My personal turnaround happened when I heard this Snakes on a Plane talkin’ acoustic folk riff this morning. Then it all clicked into place. Not too strident or emphatic. A perfect laid-back attitude.
And nobody at New Line Cinema, which is opening Snakes on a Plane on August 18, has had much to do with this…not really. It’s all come from out there.
To the best of my knowledge, no one in Real People Land is composing and recording Da Vinci Code or Mission Impossible 3 songs, and why the hell would they?

Why exactly has this one-third goof, one-third “piece of shit” genre film (i.e., not an out-and-out bad movie but one that plays with the idea of being one), and one-third horror flick been adopted by a home-grown marketing movement?
Probably because it’s easy to get and to laugh at it. (The more I say that title out loud, the more genius-level it sounds.) And because it’s easy to pass around the goofy humor online.
I only know that Regular Joe’s out there are embracing the damn thing and celebrating the jerk-off attitude way before the opening.
Directed by David R. Ellis (Cellular — he also worked as a stunt man and actor for years) and written by Sebastian Gutierrez, David Loucka and John Heffernan, Snakes is about an FBI agent (Samuel L. Jackson) escorting a captive witness to a court date, and then suddenly has to deal with a planeload of poisonous snakes that have been put there by Cale Boyter’s assistant…excuse me, a bad guy who doesn’t want the witness to talk.
Jackson has at least two money lines — “I’ve had it with these snakes!” and “I want these motherfucking snakes off the plane!”

FBI agent Samuel L. Jackson (l.) and a passenger obviously concerned with some nearby movement

I admit it — my first reaction was to shake my head and wonder what was wrong with Jackson’s judgment, or that of his agent. Now he looks like some kind of genius, or at the very least one very lucky mo-fo.
The phenomenon that has lifted Snakes, an exploitaton B-movie if there ever was one, out of the realm of derision and into that of a pop legend is extremely rare. This one, in fact, is damn near close to unique.
As Borys Kit put it in his 3.23 Hollywood Reporter story, “Intense fan reaction to movies most often is associated with titles that have established themselves in other media, such as comic book movies or fantasy novels, before making their way to the screen. Or it becomes attached to surprise hits, like the original Star Wars, that develop massive cult followings [after] they are released.”
On one hand, New Line seems to be on top of what’s happening due to their decision to shoot five extra days of photography earlier this month on “the Lot” (i.e., across the street from Jones) in order to make the film into a hard R — more sex, nudity, graphic violence. They know what they have and they’re cranking it up some.

A New Line source told me this morning that they’ve added, for one example, a shot of “a guy being bitten by a snake on his Johnson.” How does that happen exactly? He’s taking a leak or…? “Mile-High Club,” he answered.
We both agreed that if the movie tips too much into self-parody, the fun of it will dissipate after 20 or 30 minutes. Nobody wants to see Airplane. It has to sit right on the edge between serious horror and wink-wink. Too much in either direction and the conceit falls apart.
We also noted that on the cyber-marketing side, New Line Cinema — ostensibly Ground Zero or Snakes Central — seems to be behind its own curve. Their official website isn’t even up and rolling yet — all it is is a title card and some ominous-bad-stuff-about-to-happen music.
And if you ask me, their 8.18 release date — five months from now — is a mistake at this stage. No movie company can orchestrate what’s happening with Snakes right now, and it’s folly to think that the present energy levels will keep up for another 19 or 20 weeks.
If New Line’s distribution chief Russell Schwartz is smart, he’ll push Snakes into theatres sometime in late May or at least sometime in June — strike when the iron is hot!

My New Line source says “there’s a heavy debate about this going on right now. Some want to stay with August because that gives you a couple of weeks free and clear…the competition isn’t too bad then. But others want to go sooner, for obvious reasons.”
A New York journalist friend wrote this morning and said, “I don’t get it…it sounds so terrible (the movie, I mean).” And I replied that terribleness is part of the friggin’ point. It’s about everyone being in on the joke…about the beginnings of a Rocky Horror coast-to-coast toga party.
If it turns out to be half as good as some of the promotion ideas have been so far, and if it doesn’t end up with too much of a self-mocking attitude, Snakes on a Plane could turn into one of the great communal theatre experiences of 2006.
Did anyone at Showest, the exhibitor convention that just happened in Las Vegas a while back, even mention this? (If so, I didn’t read about it.)

I’m serious…this is not a DVD thing. Everyone is going to have to go to a theatre with their friends and bark like seals at the jokes and the shrieks and fangs-sinking-into-penis moments.
I’m hoping it’ll be like the vibe at the Rivoli theatre in 1985 when I was working at New Line (as a publicist, believe it or not) and we all went to see Reanimator on opening night. That show was one of the best movie-theatre highs I’ve ever sampled…the kind of rave experience that high and low types can enjoy from the same place.

Regarding Fathers

There isn’t anyone out there who doesn’t expect Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers (DreamWorks/Paramount) to rank as a probable Best Picture contender later this year, but it won’t be screened for another four or five months or so why not chill and write about something else?
Then I figured, “Naaah.” I knew I could at least get an idea of how this World War II tone poem will play if I would just focus and sit down and read a March 2005 draft of Paul Haggis’s script that’s been sitting on my desktop for the last month or two. So I did that last night, and I have to say, in all candor…

Clint Eastwood during the shooting of Flags of Our Fathers last year on a black-sand beach in Iceland, which subbed for Iwo Jima.

I’m not saying it’s not a likely Oscar favorite, or that it doesn’t have the earmarks, in fact, of a presumptive front-runner. But all I can really say for sure, having slept on Haggis’s 119-page script, is that I’m genuinely impressed, but at the same time I’m wondering how much broad-based appeal the film will turn out to have.
Put bluntly, the script reads like Saving Private Ryan‘s artier, more glum-faced brother. It has a lot of the same battle carnage and then some, a bit of the old- WWII-veteran-looking-back vibe and minus the manipulative Spielberg tearjerk factor but also with less of a narrative through-line.
Fathers is a sad, compassionate, sometimes horrifically violent piece that’s essentially plotless and impressionistic and assembled like a kind of time-tripping poem — a script made from slices of memory and pieces of bodies and heartfelt hugs and salutes from family members and politicians back home, and delivered with a lot of back-and-forth cutting.
So it’s basically a montage thing that’s obviously more of an art film than a campfire tale, and that means that the sector that says “give us a good story and enough with the arty pretensions” is going to be thinking “hmmmm” as they leave the screening room.
Unless, of course, there’s more to Eastwood’s film than can be gleamed from Haggis’s script, in which case fine and I can’t wait.

The characters and the cast

Flags of Our Fathers is about the loneliness and apartness of young soldiers living in two worlds — the godawful battle-of-Iwo-Jima world where everything is ferocious and pure and absolute, and the confusing, lost-in-the-shuffle world of back home, where almost everything feels off and incomplete.
There are many, many characters in Flags but it’s basically about three of the six young Marines who raised the American flag on a pole atop Mt. Surabachi during the Iwo Jima fighting in early 1945, resulting in a photo that was sent around the world and came to symbolize the valor of U.S. soldiers.
Three of the flag-raisers died in battle soon after, but the three survivors — John Bradley (Ryan Phillipe), Ira Hayes (Adam Beach) and Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) — were sent home to take bows and raise funds and build morale on a big public relations tour arranged by the military.
And the film — the script, I mean — is primarily about their vague feelings of alienation from their admirers and even, to some extent, their families. And vice versa.

(l. to r.) Ryan Phillipe, Adam Beach, Jesse Bradford

Heroes, a narrator says at the end, are something we need and create for ourselves. But the soldiers don’t get it or want it. They only feel for each other. They may have fought for their country, but they died for their friends.
Fathers will be what it will be, and if it’s not a big Oscar thing at the end of the day, it’ll certainly settle in with a lot of us as a mature, respectable meditation piece with its head and heart in the right place, and Eastwood and Haggis with another big feather in their caps.
And maybe Adam Beach, who has the meatiest role, with a Best Supporting Actor nomination…who knows? Ira Hayes, portrayed by Tony Curtis in a 1961 Delbert Mann film called The Outsider, is an emotionally unruly Native American who is far less able to deal with the guilt of being called a war hero than the other two, and it eventually takes him down.
As ridiculously early as this may sound to the tut-tutters out there, the early front-runner status for Fathers comes from four headwind factors:

(1) It’s been directed by Eastwood, a two-time Best Picture Oscar winner (Million Dollar Baby , Unforgiven) who’s made plenty of genre-type films but when he’s in his pared down poetic mode, look out. Especially now that’s reached a kind of Bunuelian master stage in his career.
(2) The writing hand of Haggis, arguably the hottest and most Oscar-awarded screenwriter around these days, having just won the Original Screenplay Oscar for Crash after his Million Dollar Baby screenplay was Oscar-nominated in the Best Adapted category the year before.
(3) The whoa-he’s-directing-two-movies-about-the-same-subject factor, which is about Eastwood shooting a second Iwo Jima film, called Red Sun, Black Sand, that takes the perspective of Japanese soldiers during the conflict, and particularly that of a Japanese general to be played by Ken Watanabe. This is roughly the DGA equivalent of a top-drawer actor gaining 40 pounds or playing a handicapped person in an Oscar-bait performance. The sheer effort — the audacity — of making two Iwo Jima movies and releasing them both this year (within three or four months of each other) means attention will certainly be paid.

(4) The “I love you, Dad” or “I miss you, Dad” emotional factor among all the 40ish and 50ish baby-boomer Academy members whose fathers either served in World War II or were part of that generation, and have either passed or are not far from this. The Academy declined to give the Best Picture Oscar to a half-great World War II film when they blew off Saving Private Ryan. Even if it’s not unanimously adored, Flags of Our Fathers will probably be the last ambitious and high-pedigree film to be made about that conflict, and support will come from that. World WWII stories are fading out along with the men who fought it, so Flags is most likely going to be the last big hurrah.
And all in all, Fathers is a hell of a three-course meal and a very ambitious film (especially coupled with the currently rolling Japanese variant) for a 75 year-old director to grapple with. I love Eastwoood’s energy and ambition, but let’s see what happens as far as industry acclaim and awards and all that.

Spike’s Slam-Dunk

I haven’t seen the tracking on Inside Man (Universal, 3.24), but I’ll tell you one thing for damn sure. It’s going to be the top box-office dog when it opens five days from now. In fact, it’s quite obviously…hello?…the most commercial film ever directed by Spike Lee.
It’s going to to put arses in seats because it’s pretty much devoid of any African- American social concerns. And because it’s a deft, smooth and unpretentious big-studio thriller that’s always a step or two ahead of the audience (including those who pride themselves on being able to figure out plot twists). And because it’s a cleverly configured, Dog Day Afternoon-ish bank-robbery film with an edge.

Invoking Dog Day Afternoon might be the wrong way to put it. Inside doesn’t have the borough personality of that Sidney Lumet film, and its thieves aren’t oddball screw-ups.
Four super-organized hardcore pros (led by Clive Owen) hit a downtown Manhattan bank with military precision, and their first maneuver is to take hostages. The fuzz (led by detectives Denzel Washington and Chiwetel Ejiofor, and backed up by a uniformed Willem Dafoe) soon get wind and surround the building, and the usual tense negotiations and psychological stand-offs ensue.
Seen it before? Same-old same-old with the deck reshuffled? Okay, maybe, to some extent…but Inside Man has the panache and blue-chip confidence of a slam-dunk enterprise, and is one of those nicely refined thrillers that keep you guessing and fully engrossed. Not especially violent or sensationalistic…just a good, gripping pulse-pounder.
Add to this the contributions of costars Jodie Foster (as a high-end fixer and financial consultant) and Christopher Plummer (as a loaded philanthropost and friends-of-powerful-people type) and…well, they definitely sweeten the pot.
It’s surprising at first to find the director of Do The Right Thing doing a genre thriller, although it’s clear early on he knows precisely what he’s doing.

Chiwetel Ejiofor, Denzel Washington in Inside Man

The action is centered on an old Wall Street-area bank — Manhattan Trust — owned by Plummer’s character. The action kicks in right at the start when Owen and his three conspirators kill the surveillance cameras and take over the bank and force everyone to put on identical jump-suits…
I don’t know if it’s such a good idea to run down the particulars.
The main thing is that Owen’s guy, Dalton Russell, is very steady and on top of things, and in no way some kind of hair-trigger asshole. The curious thing is that he doesn’t seem very interested in bagging the heaps of cash in the vault (like the guys in Heat were)…and the film doesn’t give any decent hints what he’s after for a good long while.
Washington’s detective, an old-fashioned guy with a thin moustache, a shaved head and a straw hat, doesn’t do all that much, preferring to watch and wait rather than attack and risk lives. He’s cool and not of a mind to upset anyone or anything. He tries a couple of times to trip up or fake-out Owen, but nothing radical….just fun stuff.
Then we start seeing portions of after-the-fact hostage interviews, shot with a grainier, half-sepia color scheme. This deflates the suspense a bit because it tells us early on the robbers were never identified, probably…although we’re not entirely sure. It’s still interesting, though. Everything in this film is. Nothing boring or numbing or flaccid.

I’m not going to spill any more. The only thing I feel compelled to mention are the strange sartorial choices made by Denzel’s detective. He dresses like it’s 1964 and Malcolm X is still alive and he’s the owner of an illegal Newark, New Jersey, bookmaking operation. Or a jazz club owner in Tennessee in 1958. Very strange. The idea seems to have been to make Denzel’s detective look like some kind of anachronism.
Washington is unexceptional but fine. Owen is icy, commanding and a very cool bad guy..even though he wears a mask for a good portion of the film. Ejiofor is sturdy, Dafoe is fine, Foster is cool and so is Plummer. Nobody is rewriting the book on great acting here, but they’re all pros and it all goes down like low-fat chocolate yogurt.
For a film that last 128 minutes, Inside Man whips right by. It seems to be over and done within 95 or 100 minutes, tops.
This is a first-rate shallow entertainment, and I can’t wait to see it again. It’s not a movie for munching popcorn through, or making lobby cell-phone calls or taking bathroom breaks while it’s playing. It’s a great film for saying “please be quiet” to the people sitting behind you because they’re won’t shut the fuck up and you really need to hear every line. It’s one of those “please, Michael Moses…can I come to the premiere party?” movies.

Enemies Watch

Last Friday night I read James Vanderbilt’s gripping, pared-to-the-bone screenplay of Against All Enemies, an adaptation of former terrorism czar Richard Clarke’s bombshell novel about the failures of the Clinton and Bush administrations to stop the terrorist plotters who eventually brought about the 9.11 attacks.
The script, yet another example of a fascinating run of political films being made by mainstream Hollywood these days, is the basis of an upcoming Columbia feature that Crash director Paul Haggis “[hopes] to shoot…this year,” according to what he told N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman in a piece that ran last Tuesday.

My first casting question, apart from the matter of whether or not Tom Hanks will agree to play Clarke, is who the hell is Haggis going to get to play President Bill Clinton? Damned if he isn’t right in the script, Arkansas accent, inquisitive mind and all. And in three good scenes.
Former National Security Advisor (and current Secretary of State) Condoleeza Rice is also a character with dialogue, and not a very sympathetic one. (No way around this — the facts are the facts.)
Vice-President Dick Cheney, National Security honcho Paul Wolfowitz and Clinton’s security adviser Anthony Lake are also characters, along with numerous other real-life figures. All with dialogue. Not as fictional stand-ins (as certain Clinton operatives were portrayed in Mike Nichols’ Primary Colors), but their literal selves.
Unfortunately, President Bush — who is certainly one of the villains of the piece, if you regard willful ignorance as a form of villainy — is an off-screen presence.
Against All Enemies is a riverting political drama — All The President’s Men meets Franz Kafka in the age of terrorism.

Every scene feels like it’s been chiselled and buffed to perfection (or at least my idea of that). And it has a sympathetic vulnerable hero (a government operator with no life who’s obstinate to a fault, and yet is a true vigilant soldier) and moments of warmth and humor and tragedy, and well-drawn secondary characters, and a finale that gives some 9/11 closure.
It’s about a dedicated hardcase lacking in certain diplomatic skills named Richard Clarke (Jason Robards would have been perfect in the mid ’70s, but right now Hanks-with-white-hair would be the absolute best choice) and his slow journey of discovery about what the Middle Eastern chess game is all about, play by play, and how the jihadists came to occupy and gradually rule the roost.
Scene by scene, act by act, Clarke keeps telling various government do-nothings what Middle Eastern terrorists might be up to, and nobody listens all that much. (Clinton’s people are more responsive than Bush II’s, but nobody acts brilliantly.) Then the Dubya do-nothings turn around after 9/11 and try to stick it to Clarke for being right.

Richard Clarke

It has a 24-page opening sequence that absolutely kills in terms of tension and psychological suspense, showing the White House staffers in turmoil on the morning of 9/11.
Then it rewinds back to start of Clarke’s government career in the late ’70s (when he was in his late 20s) and takes us on a journey of gradual discovery as Clarke learns more and more about the Mujahdeen, Islamic fundamentalists, offensive Jihad, “Usama” bin Laden and so on.
Then it’s back to 9/11 and Clarke’s confusion when the Bushies decide to use the attacks as an excuse to go to war with Iraq, and then his leaving the White House and writing his book and delivering his rant before a Congressional 9/11 committee, and finally his apology…even though he’s arguably the least guilty guy in the Washington establishment as far as 9/11 negligence is concerned.
Haggis told Waxman he hopes to turn Clarke’s book about “how we got ourselves into this mess” into a political thriller like All the President’s Men. “I don’t know how to do it, so that’s why I want to attempt it,” he explained. “It could be really embarrassing.”

If Hanks agrees to play Clarke (and he really should consider doing this — the film needs his good-guyness) and Against All Enemies is directed in the right way, with precisely the right pitch, it may indeed stand a chance of being compared favorably to All The President’s Men.
Okay, it’s a little wonky and it’s almost all about men and women in suits jawing with each other about intelligence and strategy, but it’s extremely tight and absorbing. I felt something hard, clean and special on every page.
The film is being produced by Haggis, John Calley and Larry Becsey with Colum- bia execs Doug Belgrad and Rachel O’Connor overseeing, as it were. Haggis didn’t give Waxman any hints about casting, but said “there’s a good list of people out there.”
Variety‘s Nicole LaPorte reported on 3.12 that Against All Enemies is “not necessarily” Haggis’s next project….but it should be. Nobody knows how long political films will continue to be hot in this own — better to strike when the iron is hot.

Clinton appears in three scenes between page 59 and 64, and he’s got a great scene on page 63 in which he comes off smart and resourceful and confident. And he laughs, and makes others laugh. He’s not the hero (that’s Clarke’s role) but Clinton is portrayed as a reasonably okay guy — a chief exec who gets it and sees the value in having a guy like Clarke nearby.
Vanderbilt’s script is so smart and sharp, and delivers so thoroughly in terms of authenticity, that the only actors on the planet who could sell the Clinton scenes would be either David Morse (a dead ringer) or John Tavolta, who of course played a character based on Clinton in Primary Colors . But even Morse or Travolta would feel a tiny bit wrong. To me, anyway.
I’m just going to say this: President Clinton should consider playing himself in this film. Seriously. He’d be great, he’d obviously be convincing and he’d be helping to recreate a very close approximation of the truth.
Besides the fact that a move like this would be the next logical step in the Holly- wood-Washington blender machine. Things have reached a point (remember those real-life Washingtonians taking to “drug czar” Michael Douglas in Traffic?) where a former President acting in a classy film like this would not be seen as all that curious. If you ask me it would have a kind of dignity.

Clinton cabinet

I asked for casting suggestions on Saturday, and here’s the best of them so far…
Richard Clarke: Tom Hanks, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, a slimmer James Gandolfini (looking to de-Soprano-cize his image by playing a wonky type).
Bill Clinton: Clinton himself, David Morse, John Travolta.
Dick Cheney: Jason Alexander (white hair, aged a little), Ben Kingsley.
Paul Wolfowitz: Alan Rosenberg, William H. Macy (a little make-up, hair coloring), Ron Silver.
Condoleeza Rice: Angela Bassett, Regina King, Merrin Dungey (from King of Queens/Alias/Curb)
Anthony Lake: Jude Ciccolella (excellent in 24 )