Paul Weitz‘s American Dreamz (Universal, 4.14) opened the Bermuda Film Festival last night, and a friend who saw it there tells me it’s “D.O.A.” The performances in this political satire about an opportune alliance between the White House and a populuar televised game show host are, he claims, “one-note jokes…Dennis Quaid is Dubya, Hugh Grant is Simon Cowell of American Idol and Willem Dafoe appears dressed and head-shaven like Dick Cheney. The pacing is totally off, and most of the jokes lie flat like toss-offs from a bad Saturday Night Live sketch.” The costars are Chris Klein, Mandy Moore, Marcia Gay Harden and Jennifer Coolidge.

V for Vendetta is a box-office disappointment. Tracking on the Warner Bros./Wachowski Bros. release showed a projected $25 to $30 million, but Friday’s figures are indicating only a $21 million weekend haul, and it could wind up a bit lower. The reviews were mostly positive with some pans from major names mixed in, and the the film’s radical-leftist political metaphor probably isn’t playing as well in the boonies as it is the cities. Sidney Lumet’s Find Me Guilty has badly tanked, apparently destined to bring in less that $500 thousand in 439 theatres. (It did $156,000 on Friday, averaging $1100 a print.) Failure to Launch was off 40%…expected to do $14.7 million in 3117 theatres. The Shaggy Dog went up 11% from last weekend …a three-day $14,454,000 tally is expected by Sunday night.

I love how this totally chickenshit MSNBC account of the Tom Cruise-vs.-South Park censorship story doesn’t even mention the title of the satirical episode that Cruise prevented from being re-run last Wednesday night — “Trapped in the Closet.” I’m also enjoying the determination of old-media reporters to overlook the first-anywhere reporting about this episode by journalist Mark Ebner, a longtime Scientology critic who provided research for the controversial Matt Stone and Trey Parker-authored episode and was the first to post the story. (I ran what I believe was the first link to it, at 1:11 am on Thursday). At first the Associated Press referred only to the news having broken on “internet sites”, but then Ebner got AP’s Erin Carlson to credit Hollywood Interrupted. Variety columnist Michael Fleming declined to credit Ebner in his own story. Reuters, who didn’t credit Ebner either, explained that he had backed the story up with two sources of his won. It’s standard procedure, of course, for old-media reporters to try and downplay or ignore new-media reportings, particularly when it comes to breaking stories.

“Whilst I disagree with the calculated sneers towards V for Vendetta by U.K. critics, the film was a disappointment despite all the ideas bubbling beneath the surface. Visually it never really took off and too many of the supporting characters were one-note stereotypes. Halfway through I couldn’t help but wish the Wachowskis had ditched the Moore comic book and filmed the actual story of Guy Fawkes. And by the way: Basic Instinct 2, which previewed in London last week, contains very little that is controversial. It’s surprisingly tame in the sex department despite some embarrassing one-liners from Sharon Stone. Maybe they have some outtakes left over for the DVD.” — Ambrose Heron

I tend to like Hollywood righties on a personality/character level, and Ben Stein is basically correct in saying at a right-wing fundraiser last Thursday that Hollywood films would do better in the hinterlands if they weren’t so contemptuous towards mainstream American values. “Stop spitting in the face of Americans and maybe we will go to the movies,” Stein said. Copy that, but what a lame and simplistic way of looking at things. Los Angeles and New York creatives live in their own spiritual-philosphical realm, of course…an international blue world, really, that encompasses London, Paris, Prague, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, et. al. And the hard fact is that from the hip international perspective, American heartlanders are seen as sexually uptight retrograde conservatives with naive political perceptions (that’s putting it kindly) and almost laughably primitive religious convictions. It’s a cliche, but you really have to travel to Europe and meet the cultivated people over there to realize how much of a joke American yahoos seem to the older and more mature cultures. As much as some creative types would like to hang back and get down with the reds and try to capture that rural dignity thing (like Jim Mangold did when he directed Walk the Line or Lamont Johnson did with 1973’s The Last American Hero), it’s hard to just snap your fingers and do this.

Ben Stein also lamented that “not one prayer or moment of silence [was heard during the 3.5 Oscar show] for those who have given their lives” in Iraq. I hate this right-wing rhetorical tactic. Cheer our men and the women in the military who are mainly doing what they can to survive and nothing more (of course), and let them know they have our support (ditto) except that righties always twist this into a vote of support for the general effort in Iraq and the fact that what we’re doing over there right now is inspiring revenge-lust among who knows how many thousands of Muslims, and will most likely bring about another 9/11 down the road. And Stein’s line that men and woman in the military in Iraq have “given their lives” is crap. I know what giving is, and it has nothing to do with being shot or shrapnelled to death because your vehicle didn’t have the right kind of armor. My dad was with the Marines against the Japanese in World War II, and he says he never knew a soldier who gave his life for anything. Getting killed is about bad luck or getting sloppy or whatever, but nobody goes up to God or the enemy and says, “Here…take my life. It’s yours. Consider it a donation for the cause we’re fighting for.”

I wrote a short riff a while back about the slightly varying lengths reported for Crash, from the N.Y. Times‘s 107 minutes to Variety‘s 112 minutes out of Toronto to the 122-minute running time on the DVD jacket. Now comes a note from a Variety guy asserting that the N.Y. Times “has long been notoriously unreliable in this area. I’m attentive to this stuff because we time films very carefully at Variety, never relying upon publicists, studios or film festival catalogues but timing films with stopwatches or ultra-reliable watches. Especially during the Janet Maslin years, the NYT was almost always wrong — I never could figure out where they got their timings. Elvis [Mitchell] was no better, and we frankly I haven’t been monitoring Tony [Scott] or Manohla [Dargis] much in this regard. But when you see critics leaving films before the end credits finish rolling, you know they’re not making their own independent timings of films. I’ve discussed this occasionally with Leonard Maltin, who is careful about these matters because of his Movie Guide, and we agree you can never trust the NYT on this.”

I saw Jason Reitman‘s Thank You for Smoking at the Toronto Film Festival, and then again at Sundance ’06. And all that time I never wrote anything. This means something, obviously, although I’ve had fun with it each time. For a movie about lighting up, Smoking is in no way, shape or form a burn. And yet…let me try again. A very smart, fast-on-its-feet satire, Smoking appeals much more to my dry sense of humor than anything Jason’s dad, Ivan Reitman (i.e., “the king of tasteless comedy“), has directed or produced. And Aaron Eckhardt’s tobacco lobbyist guy is his best role (and best performance) since In The Company of Men, and everyone else in the large cast runs with the material in just the right way. (The exception is Katie Holmes, whose performance as a Washington, D.C., investigative reporter is impossible to roll with.) Smoking has exactly the right pitch and tone for delivering funny-cryptic social commentary. It has a calm deadpan center and lets Reitman’s screenplay (which is based on Christopher Buckley’s book) do the walking and talking. So why haven’t I posted? Because it’s a little too mild-mannered. Reitman never tries pushing his comedy into any kind of frenzied Preston Sturges mode, and that’s the charm of it, ironically…but it’s so smartly agreeable (as opposed to rousing, disturbing or challenging) that I somehow felt it didn’t need my two cents. It seems I can only get it up with films that I seriously love or hate (or with Oscar campaigns I love or hate, a la Munich). The irony is that I tend not to go with satiric comedies that shoot for the moon Sturges-style, because this sort of thing is very hard to do well and almost all directors who try for this wind up flubbing it. Reitman, wisely, hasn’t tried — he’s kept things within his own ballpark — which is why Thank You for Smoking “works.” I’m not saying wait for the DVD, but at the same time I can’t quite say you have to stop everything and run down to the plex to see it…and this isn’t some smart-ass attitude trip exercise. The subject is close to millions, obviously. I first started smoking when I was 14 or 15. My first serious quit happened when I was 25, but every now and then I’d relapse. I used to think of cigarettes as “little friends” (I loved that term) but no more and never again.

I would have posted the usual eight to ten items plus a fresh feature yesterday, but the old periodic burnout syndrome took hold on Thursday and some of Friday. I want to write and post away, but…but…but. I can feel it taking over like a flu (or like that red taffy invader in that Steve McQueen movie, The Blob) and I’m strangely unable to stop the lethargy. And then I wake up the next day and it’s gone.

In speaking with the Guardian‘s Suzie Mackenzie, Susan Sarandon says that “one of her strengths as an actor…is that she can look at a page of dialogue and tell in a flash if it’s authentic or phony.” That’s fast. Most people who read scripts say they know if one’s any good after five or ten pages. I can watch a movie for five minutes — less, really — and know if it’s on some kind of case and going somewhere, or not. Hell, most of us over the age of 25 or so have a pretty fair idea who and what most people are — the ones we’ve just met, I mean — after ten or fifteen minutes of conversation…right?

It’s worth noting that V for Vendetta, a flick I’ve loved twice (especially in IMAX) and would see a third time in a snap, has been almost universally killed by critics in London, where the film takes place. London Times critic James Christopher said he’s “never seen so many respectable, mostly British, actors in such a deranged satire.” The Guardian ‘s Peter Bradshaw called it “V for Valueless gibberish…weird and bizarre and baffling, but in a completely boring way.” The Telegraph critic panned it. The Independent‘s Anthony Quinn says “anyone who bothers to read newspapers will scorn [the film’s] allegorical intentions, while popcorn-munchers in search of a thrill will wonder why the dude in the mask does so much talking.” And yet stateside it’s gotten a 75% positive Rotten Tomatoes rating thus far, and a 65% rating with the creme de la cremes.

Havana Rap

To judge from three recent docs about bullet-dodging rappers living in volatile ‘hoods, the most intense and socially relevant rap music these days is coming out of the Caribbean area.
George Gittoe’s Rampage makes the case for the rap community in south Miami, Asger Leth’s Ghosts of Cite Soleil injects rap into the hell of Haiti’s poltical turmoil, and directors Jauretsi Saizarbitoria and Emilia Menocal show what the Cuban rap scene is about in East of Havana.

El Cartel’s Mikki Flow in Jauretsi Saizarbitoria’s East of Havana

Each film has its own style and aesthetic, but Saizarbitoria’s film is quite different than the other two, and not just because Charlize Theron produced it.
Caught earlier this week at South by Southwest by HE columnist Moise Chiullan, Havana is about the popularity of underground rap groups in Cuba and particularly three members of El Cartel, one of a small number of rapper groups in the suburbs of Havana.
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There are two things that set El Cartel apart from standard-issue American rappers — gender equality (a relatively rare thing in hip-hop circles) and sharply political lyrics.
Instead of rapping about bitches, ho’s and flashing dough around, Cartel’s Mikki Flow, Soandry and Magyori (i.e., a female) tell stories about the daily struggle of living in post-Soviet Cuba .
The story surrounds the cancellation — censorship — of Cuba’s annual Rap Festival in 2004. Government representatives say it was due to hurricane damage, but the homie-in-the-street view is that The Man is keeping them down.

Magyori, also of El Cartel

The film says something quite interesting, which is that as much as Cuban citizens may fear the power of the government, the government fears its people and their freedom of expression exponentially more. Political unrest isn’t ebbing away. Poverty is worsening, economic resources are being more and more depleted, and Cuba’s long-standing dictator Fidel Castro is getting older every day.
Most Americans are unaware of the crushing effect of the Cuban embargo, and how 90 miles from the U.S. lies an island nation where there are computers but no internet and music but no iPods. But life moves along and things happen “por invento” — i.e., by invention.
Living life the Cuban way is a central concept to the poetry these rappers create: they use their passion and pain to distill literate, provocative lyrics that leave a profound impression on you. Their rap pounds to the rhythm of el corazon del barrio (the heart of the ‘hood) and uses this evolving art form to its pinnacle.
When word spread around South by Southwest crowds that Theron was Havana‘s producer, there was talk all over about her “doing it for credibility” or “trying to make it look like she cares.” Not quite so. The directors and producers of East of Havana have known Theron since she came to the U.S. from South Africa. They also acted as a surrogate family for her when she was “this little South African girl who didn’t speak any English.”

Denzel Lovett, a 14 year-old rapper, in George Biddoes’ Rampage

East of Havana almost didn’t happen, as the filmmakers made it into Cuba just a few weeks before President Bush further clamped down on travel to Cuba. Too bad — the El Cartel crew has expressed a strong desire to travel around and explore other cultures, given the opportunity.
Wim Wenders The Buena Vista Social Club showed us one side of Cuban music and culture, but East of Havana finally reveals the voice of contemporary Cuban youth and the rise of a very different new generation.
Look for more about this film in the coming months, as it was one of the most heavily-buzzed films of the festival.

Haiti, Sex, Death

Before last Sunday night I thought of Haiti as a hopeless Caribbean shithole, one of the worst places to live in the world because the government corruption and the politically-motivated beatings and killings never seem to stop, and because the poverty levels for most of the citizens are beyond belief.
I still see Haiti as an island most foul, but a knockout documentary called Ghosts of Cite Soleil, a kind of Cain-and-Abel story that was filmed just before, during and after the overthrow of Haitian president Jean Bertrand Aristide in March 2004, has added a new dimension.

The real-life 2pac and Lele as they appear in Asger Leth’s Ghosts of Cite Soleil

I now see Haiti as less of a Ground Zero for abstract political terror and more of a place where people on the bottom rung are trying to live and breathe and create their own kind of life-force energy as a way of waving away the constant hoverings of doom.
In short, this excellent 88-minute film, directed by Asger Leth (the son of Danish filmmaker Jorgen Leth), adds recognizable humanity to a culture that has seemed more lacking in hope and human decency than any other on earth. I saw it at the Wilshire Screening Room two and a half days ago, and it’s been a kind of growth experience for me. I feel like I almost “get” Haiti now, and I haven’t stopped telling people about it since.
Everyone will say that Ghosts is City of God but in ‘real’ verite terms…and it is that, of course. But it’s less about violent street crime than stink-from-the-head Haitian politics, and it explores an unusual romantic triangle between a white French female relief worker namd Lele and two gangster brothers, 2pac and Bily (not “Billy”), and it has a tragic ending that touches you as much as any well-crafted Hollywood tearjerker could…and yet it happened all on its own.
2pac and Bily are in no way the “good guys,” but in a way they are. They wave guns around and talk all the time about defending their territory or making an enemy back off or perhaps having to kill each other, but somehow the film makes them seem like half-sympathetic pawns…somewhat vulnerable sociopaths desperately trying to escape from their cage.

The brothers were leaders of gangs (there were five altogether, all of them known as “the Chimeres”, which is French for “ghosts”) who were being paid big money by the Aristide government to rough up or in some cases eliminate political oppo- nents. Director George Hickenlooper (Factory Girl), who invited me to Sunday’s screening in his capacity as one of the doc’s exec producers, said 2pac and Bily received “hundreds of thousands” of dollars.
When Aristide was finally forced out of office 2pac and Bily were suddenly targets of the new guys in power who wanted to get rid of all remnants of Aristide’s reign, including the “muscle.”
What was special in the making of Ghosts of Cite de Soleil was that Leth had totally open access to both brothers (as well as their government opponents), and also that life played out like a story written by a skilled dramatist.
This is precisely what Ghosts of Cite de Soleil could be the next time — a dramatic movie shot on location in Haiti with actors, a script, grips, electricians, etc.
On Monday I spoke with Cary Woods, the doc’s executive producer, who agreed that Ghosts of Cite Soleil could become a mainstream feature because (and this is primarily me talking) it has all the Shakespearean elements: poverty, political warfare, corruption, the cycle of violence, Cain and Abel, a romantic triangle, and a tragic finale.

And as a scripted feature it could get a bit more into the warring-brothers- sleeping-with-the-same-woman thing, which the doc doesn’t really run with.
Woods told me that a certain big-name actress has expressed interest in playing the Lele character if and when a script is written and a film is up and rolling, and then producer Seth Kanegis called me from somewhere in the Caribbean Tuesday afternoon and said Woods is looking to hire a distinguished, big-name writer to do the screenplay.
This would be a perfect feature for Oliver Stone, Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu, Werner Herzog…any director who could take the grit and social squalor of Haiti’s Cite de Soleil and reenact the story with feeling and realism.
The thing that needs to happen right now is for Ghosts of Cite Soleil to be accep- ted into the Cannes Film Festival’s Director’s Fortnight section so the festival-scout community can see it and talk it up. And then it should go to Toronto Film Festival in September, which would probably lead to some kind of distribution deal.
A film like this can only do what it can do. Film buffs and admirers of hot-button filmmaking and drama-in-the-rough will go for it, but some movigeoers would probably have a bit of difficulty with a film of this sort…a raw-looking, hand-held video piece about killings and squalor and interracial sex.

Ghosts executive producer Cary Woods

The feature that could come from this — that’s the thing. But there are miles to go before that happens…if it happens at all. Life is a gamble and movies are about rolling stones slowly uphill.
I haven’t mentioned the Wylcef Jean hip-hop on the soundtrack (the Haitian-born musician is also one of the film’s exec producers) and 2pac’s seeing himself as a burgeoning hip-hopper and his dream of becoming a musician-star. A Wyclef Jean soundtrack CD of some kind would, I understand, be part of the Ghosts package when and if it opens theatrically. I’m not 100% sure about this, but it would make sense.
Look for more about this film in the coming months, as it was one of the most heavily-buzzed films of the festival.