Jeffrey Wells

Brokeback Mountain true and steady, Match Point rising and Munich falling. Walk the Line is everyone’s solid fallback, The New World is the esoteric Malicky forest-primeval fringe flick, and The Constant Gardener and Good Night, and Good Luck are darting in and out.

The great Richard Pryor, 65, has died at his home of cardiac arrest, his wife is telling reporters. The poor guy…multiple scherosis all those years and he only made one truly great film: Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, the 1979 doc about Pryor’s act (performed at the Long Beach auditorium, prior to his burning accident). Pryor’s performances in Silver Streak, Blue Collar and Stir Crazy were engaging, amusing, etc., but the ’79 concert film, directed by Jeff Margolis, was untempered genius.

Sad news about Pryor, but former U.S. Senator and Presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy has left also, at the age of 89.

Press enthusiasms have never been synonymous with Academy favors, but damned if Brokeback Mountain‘s Heath Ledger doesn’t seem to be edging ahead of Capote‘s Phillip Seymour Hoffman in the Best Actor race at this juncture. Ledger is great in Ang Lee’s film but I’ll be a Hoffman/Capote man to my dying day…it’s just how I see it. But the Brokeback reviews are fresh in everyone’s mind and the Ledger thing is blowing in the wind. I can feel it…I can feel it.

David Carr’s recently launched “The Carpetbagger” Oscar column in the New York Times has, for me, the right unpretentious attitude. He seems to be saying, “Maybe I know something about this racket, but maybe I don’t…who knows?” Carr’s items are fast and astute (i.e., he’s hearing the same stuff I am, and reporting it concisely and with a little perspective). And I loved his dopey little video walk-through asking Times Square passers-by if King Kong has a shot at being nominated for Best Picture. Surrrre!

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Anne Thompson paints an intriguing portrait of the tangled situation at Sony at the end of a year that reeked of under-performing films (Zathura, The Legend of Zorro, Stealth) on top of the sad failure of Rent, a movie that works beautifully but not enough people wanted to see. Sony is now bracing itself for the arrival of two December releases with difficulties — Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha, which is all but dead in the Oscar competition, and Dean Parisot’s Fun with Dick and Jane, which I’m hearing “doesn’t work.” (I don’t think this is a secret, is it? It doesn’t mean, of course, that Dick and Jane won’t make money.) There’s also the unfortunate postponement of All The King’s Men into late ’06, which carried the obvious implication when the delay was announced that this period drama (which earlier this year had been presumed to be a potential Oscar contender) had problems. Thompson seems to making the point that one reason things aren’t panning out is that Columbia’s vice chairman and production chief Amy Pascal doesn’t have an entirely free creative hand due to having to share things, so to speak, with Sony Pictures Entertainment chairman Michael Lynton…not to mention Sony’s constant problems with not being able to market its films with any particular pizazz. “The way they do things at Sony is very unwieldy,” a studio veteran comments. “Pascal is a very nice lady and very hard working, but the decisions she’s made on films plus the marketing of them have made things difficult for her. Because in the final analysis, the marketing people control your destiny.”

Munich is imploding for now, but maybe once it bottoms out it will arrive at some kind of bruised underdog status…did I just say that?

Viacom’s $1.6 billion purchase of DreamWorks SKG yesterday (Friday, 12.9) is so important a story and of such vital interest to the guy on the street …it’s so important that I’m jumping right on it, 16 or 17 hours after the story broke yesterday evening. The shifting of funds from one super powerful group of rich Hollywood elitists to another group of rich super powerful Hollywood elitists …if this isn’t earth-shaking news, what would be?

Another pellet dings the Munich hide in the form of David Halb- finger’s New York Times piece about the potential for Jewish/ Israeli blowback over concerns than Steven Spielberg’s film portrays the Palestinian plotters behind the 1972 Munich slaughter of Israeli athletes in too much of an equal light along- side those of Israeli Mossad agents who sought their deaths in retaliation. Halbfinger quotes Ehud Danoch, the Israeli consul general in Los Angeles, as complaining that Munich “[makes] it seem as if Israel’s response alone had caused an escalation in terrorism,” which Danoch feels is “pure fiction.” He argues, in Halbfinger’s words, that the film “unfairly drew a moral equivalency between the Israeli assassins and their targets — both explicitly, in dialogue in which the Israelis question their own actions and Palestinians defend theirs, and implicitly, as when the camera shifts from a television broadcast showing the names of the 11 athletes to an Israeli official showing the photographs of the 11 Palestinian targets. ‘And so it’s 11 for 11,’ Danoch points out. ‘It’s equal, it’s balanced. It’s these for those.’ But the Israeli athletes “were murdered in the most disgusting and horrible way, and [the Palestinians] were the guys who did it.'”

Any guesses about today’s Los Angeles Film Critics voting? Woody Allen’s Match Point is on the rise bigtime, but it’s gotta be Broke- back Mountain for Best Picture…right? And Heath Ledger for Best Actor? And maybe The Upside of Anger‘s Joan Allen for Best Actress? I would put money on these two if I were the betting type. I’m going to try and report the results by 3 pm or thereabouts…if the voting doesn’t go into extra innings.

It’s a Chronicles of Narnia weekend, all right. Families, church groups and the religious right poured coin into the Disney coffers to the tune of $22.7 million yesterday, and projections are that The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe will take in $75 to $80 million for the weekend…maybe a tad higher. Brokeback Mountain, platforming in just five theatres, did $133,000 per situation for a total of $691 thousand… upscale moviegoers and urban gays coming out in droves. Memoirs of a Geisha earned $99 thousand and change in eight theatres yesterday and is projected to take in $793,000 for the weekend. Mrs. Henderson Presents will take in about $48,000 in six thea- tres for the weekend. The World’s Fastest Indian opened in two theatres and did $2,000 a print.

Okay, I’ve got the wrong attitude. I’ve got to tone it down. The Munich pan by Variety‘s Todd McCarthy isn’t part of a burgeoning Spartacus-like revolt against the high-and-mighty Time-fortified Universal/Spielberg cabal…it’s just a review by one guy and we shouldn’t be talking about the threatening snowball getting big- ger and bigger…none of that neg-head people’s revolt stuff. Be fair.