Jeffrey Wells

Okay, we’ve figured out the best actors to play director Nicholas Ray in Phil Kaufman’s I Was Interrupted, which will cover Ray’s final decade. Candidate #1: Nick Nolte. Candidate #2: Liam Neeson. Candidate #3: Sam Shepard, but Ray’s voice was deep and bellowing so Shepard would have to do something about that aw-shucksy twangy thing. Candidate #4: Geoffrey Rush, but I don’t think so. And Candidate #5: Ian McKellen…maybe.

An amusing, appealing teaser for Kevin Smith‘s Clerks 2 (Weinstein Co.), which may turn up at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival…or so I’ve been told.

Brokeback Mountain star Heath Ledger, currently in Australia and interviewed at the Melbourne premiere of Ang Lee’s film, had a couple of things to say about Larry Miller‘s refusing to show it in Salt Lake City last weekend. But Ledger’s claim that West Virginia had lynchings “only 25 years ago” appears suspect. According to this June 2005 Washington Post article about Democratic Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia (who was a former member of the Ku Klux Klan), the last lynching in West Virginia was in 1931.

The salivating ambition of the Broadcast Film Critics Awards aside, the awards they handed out early Monday evening were right down the middle of the bowling alley — Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture, Ang Lee for Best Director, Philip Seymour Hoffman for best Acotr in Capote, Reese Witherspoon for Best Actress in Walk the Line, et. al. The only hiccups were (a) naming the bizarrely over-rated The 40 Year-old Virgin as Best Comedy, and (b) giving John Williams the Best Musical Score award for Memoirs of a Geisha instead of Gustavo Santaolalla’s for Brokeback Mountain.

No one has ever been able to explain any kind of easy-to-sort- through criteria by which a regular guy can decide that the sound editing on this film is better than the sound editing on that film. It’s always been a total mystery to me…to everyone. And why is is that only the expensive big-noise films with elaborate costumes and weaponry seem to get nominated for the sound editing Oscar? This year’s nominees, in alphabetical order, are The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, King Kong, Memoirs of a Geisha, Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith, Walk the Line and War of the Worlds. Do it differently this year: scratch all the behemoths and give the Oscar to Walk the Line, the only medium-sized guy.

The Broadcast Film Critics — the new whores on the block, the KY Jelly conquistadors said to be determined to out-glitz and out-fellate the Golden Globes — are handing out their coveted awards tonight. Be sure and watch and see which of their ten Best Picture nominees — Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Cinderella Man, The Constant Gardener, Crash, Good Night, and Good Luck, King Kong, Memoirs of a Geisha, Munich and Walk the Line — walks off with the prize. That’s right — they’ve listed Memoirs of a Geisha as a nominee for Best Picture of 2005. It starts at 5 pm at the Santa Monica Civic and the WB (channel 5 in Los Angeles) will air on a delayed basis at 8pm.

Steven Spielberg is one very hip and cool guy, or at least he was a year ago. A piece in the February issue of W says that comic Kathy Griffin is still agog that Spielberg’s attorneys threatened her for joking during the 2005 Golden Globes awards ceremony that Dakota Fanning “had entered rehab.” (And imagine…this anecdote just collected dust for eleven months!!) A Page Six sum-up says that “lawyers for Spielberg, who directed Fanning in War of the Worlds, contacted Griffin after the awards and demanded that she apologize for the crack. When she refused, Spielberg’s legal lackeys warned that she would end up on the powerful director’s ‘shit list.'” Griffin told W that “Spielberg has a lot of fucking nerve. I don’t care how big you are, you will not trample on my, or anyone else’s, First Amendment rights. That makes me furious.” Spielberg spokesperson Marvin Levy told Page Six that “it was a very upsetting thing for a young child and her family. Obviously, to Kathy Griffin it was a joke, but why make a joke out of [Fanning]? She’s a terrific young lady who was there with her family, and it was very upsetting.” Maybe (if you want to be a milquetoast about it), but what adjective best describes Spielberg’s response?

This sounds interesting…kind of. Variety is reporting that Philip Kaufman (Quills, The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being) has signed to direct a biopic of legendary cult director Nicholas Ray called I Was Interrupted, based on a script by Oren Moverman (Jesus’ Son). It’s about the last decade of Ray’s life (he died of cancer in ’79), during which time he played an art forger in Wim Wenders’ The American Friend (’77) and co-directed (with Wim Wenders) Lightning Over Water, a documentary about his last days. The film will reportedly focus on Ray’s relationship with Susan Schwartz, whom he met when she was a teenager and eventually married. (Schwartz placed an ad in the Soho Weekly News in 1980 or ’81 looking for the right someone to share the Spring Street loft she’d lived in with Ray, and I was one of those who came by to look it over.) I wonder what middle-aged actor Kaufman will hire to put on that signature black eyepatch and play Ray? He’ll have to be tall and lanky with craggy features…I’m drawing a blank.

I was right, of course, in presuming that Last Holiday (Disney, 1.13), the Wayne Wang-Queen Latifah remake of the 1950 Alec Guiness comedy, would discard the finale of the original British version, which was written by J.B. Priestley. (Soon after Guiness is told his fatal illness diagnosis was a mistake, he gets into a car crash and is killed.) I won’t be seeing the new film until tomorrow night’s all-media screening (which I’m thinking of blowing off), but in his Variety review Joe Leydon said “it’s not at all surprising that the remake eschews Priestley’s audacious ending.”

The Chicago Film Critics have honored Crash as Best Picture and gave the pic’s co-authors Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco their Best Screenplay award…great.
And Philip Seymour Hoffman won the Best Actor award, of course, for Capote, and Joan Allen won for Best Actress again (yay!) for her acting in The Upside of Anger. (She’s won something like two or three critics awards so far, right?) Cheers to Brokeback Mountain‘s Gustavo Santaolalla for winning the Best Original Score award, and to Werner Herzog for winning the Best Doc award for Grizzly Man.

Brokeback Mountain is playing well in the heartland, “averaging $10,000-plus per screen in such markets as San Antonio, Nash- ville and Columbus, Ohio,” says a Scott Bowles story in Monday’s (1.9) issue of USA Today. A neighboring story by Marco R. della Cava says Ang Lee’s drama is also becoming a popular date movie.

The first-anywhere big-media blowjob for Larry and Andy Wachowski’s V for Vendetta (Warner Bros., 3.17) is in the current February issue of Vanity Fair, and has been written by renowned media/political columnist Michael Wolff, of all people. This London-based political tinderbox of an action film will be screening before long, and I guess it’s about time to dive in. I’m guessing Warner Bros. is feeling fairly nervous about it, which, in my book, makes this grimy-and-desexualized-Natalie Portman-with-a-tennis-ball- haircut flick seem preemptively cool. Wolff, who’s seen it, says the film’s “punch line” is that “some of the world’s most famous towers are blown up — by the good guys.” Talk about running counter to mainstream post-9/11 sentiments, or about a film that seems destined, if not determined, to out-do Fight Club in terms of setting off tremors. I’m not saying this will happen, but if there’s an incendiary political-alarm potential in this film (and I do say “if”), who will be the first journo or essayist to launch an Anita Busch-like “first strike”? V for Vendetta is a big-metaphor flick with some kind of impassioned portrait of violent revolution as a brave and heroic thing. The passage that got me is when Wolff invokes and compares it to the gunfire-from-the-rooftops finale of Lindsay Anderson’s If… — the greatest mythological 1960s revolt movie ever made. However good or intriguing or deliberately alarming V for Vendetta turns out to be, I’m presuming right now that all kinds of political horseshit will be part of the process leading to decisions by Warner Bros. publicity about who in the media gets to see it first (or at least early)…just wait. (Yes, yes…I’m aware that James McTeigue is the credited director and I’m sure he’s a consummate pro and knows how to say “cut” and “once more, please” and all that, but we all know he was basically hired to be a flunkie stand-in for the Wachowskis.)