That allegedly first-hand description in the Star of Angelina Jolie sounding like a “wounded animal, like someone being killed” during a gymnastic whatever during their stay at the Alfajari Villas beach resort in Kenya…man, I love that, and I don’t care if I read it first on Defamer. Item says the security guys became concerned, “grabbed their weapons,” rushed to Pitt and Jolie’s suite and “hammered furiously on the door with their clubs.” The screams suddenly stopped and a guy’s voice said, “Everything is cool guys. You can leave — we’re okay.”

Free and Clear?

On Friday, May 27, Tom Cruise took Katie Holmes to a town called Canadian, Oklahoma, partly to acquaint his newly beloved to a phase in her indoctrination into the Church of Scientology.
The Hollywood couple were in this remote corner of America’s heartland to visit a Scientology-backed drug rehabilitation center called Narconon Arrowhead, located about an hour from Tulsa on the shores of Lake Eufaula. And Tom basically took Katie through the whole this-is-Scientology, start-the-education-process thing.

Smiles and giddiness: Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes.

Cruise’s sister and press rep LeeAnne DeVette called from Germany early this afternoon (Manhattan time) to say “yeah,” the story is true.
Details of the visit were relayed by an anti-Scientology blogger named Dave Touretzsky, who’s been called a solid and trustworthy source by two journalists I know and trust — a reputable east-coast big-city journo I spoke to this morning, and a journalist pal and book author who knows the whole Scientology scene cold.
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I e-mailed the Pittsburgh-based Touretsky to get some more particulars but he didn’t respond by deadline.
The visit wasn’t denied this morning by Luke Catton, who works for Narconon Arrowhead’s public relations representative Gary Smith. “Tom’s a supporter, but I really can’t say anything and I think I should leave this up to LeeAnne to comment,” Catton said.
Holmes’ representative, Leslie Sloane of Baker Winokur Ryder’s New York office, said she’s “never been told” about the Oklahoma visit.

One of several T-shirts (among many different styles and colors) offered on www.freekatie.net.

According to Touretzsky, who wrote that the story came from “a hidden source” within the Narconon organization, Cruise and Holmes visited the facility for roughly four and a half hours. They left after Tom gave a speech at the weekly Narconon “graduation” ceremony.
The Hollywood couple’s brief visit ended when Cruise took Holmes by the hand and led her up to a hilly, sand-covered area next to an old wooden fence. Cruise released Holmes from his grip, an eerie Martian chorus came up on the soundtrack (“Uhhhaahhhhahhh!”), a hole in the sand appeared and suddenly Holmes was gone….
Sorry, but I felt I needed to throw in a laugh.
All Scientology inductees are sent through a “purification process,” which is apparently what Holmes is doing now.
DeVette says that Narconon Arrowhead “is not a Scientology center. It’s a secular program…it’s not a Scientology church.” She says one of the items on her brother’s agenda that day was showing the facility to a German journalist from Bild magazine.

Katie Holmes (l.), Scientology babysitter Jessica Rodriguez (r.) at London premiere of Batman Begins as they appeared in photo on page 26 of Tuesday’s N.Y. Daily News, adjacent to Lloyd Grove’s column.

According to the facility’s website, Narconon Arrowhead “offers not only a comprehensive model drug treatment program in a non-traditional, non-institutional setting, but also a full training and apprenticeship or internship program for professionals interested in this new and effective approach to drug rehabilitation and prevention.”
It also says that Narconon Arrowhead “houses the Narconon network’s International Training Center,” blah, blah…but it’s a Scientology operation, okay?
If you want to know more, here are two websites exploring the whole Narconon program and history in a thoroughly nasty and negative fashion.
The more I read about it, the odder the whole Cruise-Holmes-Scientology thing sounds. I can’t fully explain or articulate it, but those hairs on the back of my neck are picking up some curious vibes.
Cruise and Holmes may be genuinely in love (c’mon…you have to bend over and at least allow for this), and there’s certainly nothing wrong with a little spiritual focus and discipline to keep a relationship on track, and I don’t know about every last aspect of the Church of Scientology, although I’ve done some reporting about it and know the general lay of the land.

Rodriguez-free Holmes on Batman Begins red carpet at London premiere.

All I know is that after reading Lloyd Grove’s column yesterday in the N.Y. Daily News about Cruise and Holmes and that Scientologist baby-sitter Jessica Rodriguez, the one who’s been following Holmes around like a bodyguard as she does publicity chores for Batman Begins …for some reason Grove’s story has uncorked images from John Carpenter’s They Live and Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
By mentioning these famously paranoid thrillers I’m obviously casting a negative light upon the Church of Scientology. But they’re a very guarded and controlling organization with a penchant for paranoia and secretiveness, and if you ask me they’ve more than earned their reputation.
And I think there’s something seriously diseased about Cruise professing to love and honor and respect Holmes but at the same time arranging, according to Grove’s column, to have her followed around by a Scientology “minder” like Rodriguez.
I just know creepy vibes when I feel them.
On the other hand, at least one story about Cruise trying to control Holmes is apparently bogus. I’m speaking of the one that ran in the New York Post about Cruise allegedly telling Holmes not to play the doomed Warhol model Edie Sedgwick in George Hickenlooper’s Factory Girl.
Hickenlooper, a friend, wrote me about this a couple of days ago and referred me to a statement he put up on the IMDB about this (see next story).

The key declaration in Hickenlooper’s statement is that the story about Cruise telling Holmes not to do Factory Girl because Sedgwick was a druggie and portraying such a person would go against Scientology beliefs is “blatantly untrue and stupid.”
“I don’t even know what Factory Girl is,” Cruise recently told an interviewer. He added, “The thing you’ve got to know about Katie is that she’s an incredibly bright and self-determined woman. She makes her own decisions.”
Okay, cool…but if that’s the case, why is Cruise allegedly paying Rodriguez, a 26 year-old Scientology upper-cruster (I’m told she’s on Cruise’s OT IV level within the organization) to “keep Katie on the path,” according to Grove’s source, as well as monitor her press interviews and encounters with people and, according to Grove’s story, give Holmes religious instruction from time to time?
In other words, Cruise believes there’s a chance that Katie might stray from the path and become…what?….infected by the skepticism of all those lurking non-Scientologists (journalists, etc.)?
There’s a report at Radar magazine’s website that refers to a Scientology magazine called Source in reporting that Rodriguez “ascended to the level of ‘New Operating Thetan IV’ (the same as Cruise) in January 2004.
“According to sources close to the Church, this means Rodriguez has joined the elite group of Scientologists who’ve been enlightened with the six-figure secrets of Xenu, the evil intergalactic ruler who implanted ‘thetans,’ or alien spirits, in earth’s volcanoes 75 million years ago, after which they escaped and invaded human bodies.

“As a ‘new OT IV,’ Rodriguez has the power to ‘control life, thought, matter, energy, space, and time,’ according to Scientology’s official site. Rodriguez has the ability to spot any ‘suppressive persons’ who interact with her celebrity charge.”
I know how strange this all sounds, but it gets a lot weirder than this…trust me. To really know and subscribe to the theology of Scientology after you get to OT III is to be suspended several feet above the earth’s surface with little Martian tentacles sticking out of your forehead.
Really…what kind of boyfriend hires someone to keep his girlfriend on the spiritually straight and narrow? I’ll tell you what kind of boyfriend does this. A control-freak boyfriend does this.
Cruise is extremely likable and engaging to all who meet him, but he is also very clenched and wired tight. He does terrific work and a few directors I know personally think he’s one of the greatest guys to work with. Nonetheless, I keep getting this sense of a guy who needs to obsessively micro-manage every last detail of his life, and who strongly believes in keeping the castle walls high and thick and well-fortified.
Maybe that’s necessary in these crazy tabloid times, but when you reach the point of hiring a twentysomething Scientology hardcase to keep tabs on your new girlfriend as a way of keeping her from saying or thinking the wrong thing, then I think you’ve really crossed the Rubicon.

Rodriguez “goes everywhere with Katie,” Grove’s source said. “She’s never more than a quarter-step behind her. When you ask her who she is, she says, ‘I’m Katie’s best friend.’ She’s known her for six weeks!”
Holmes announced at a London press conference on Monday that she’s officially converting to Scientology. Grove reported that this announcement “seemed to provoke a glare from her Batman Begins co-star Michael Caine.”
My anonymous big-city journalist friend, who’s been investigating and writing stories about Scientology for 25 years, says “there’s no such thing as conversion to Scientology. It’s a very gradual, step-by-step process. You have to do the basic communication courses, and then you have to eventually go ‘clear.’ And all Homes is right now is an initiate.
“But eventually the water will rise and she will eventually be a boiled frog. Drop a frog into boiling water and he’ll jump out. But if the frog isn’t aware that the water is slowly heating up, he gets more and more acclimated to the rising heat and then eventually he’s boiled and in the pot.”
I’d like to think Katie Holmes is going to wake up from this episode one day and roll her eyes and say to herself and hopefully everyone else, “What was I thinking?” After all, a lot of Scientology believers (not just beginners but people on upper levels) bail out.
And when she does, Homes is going to start to realize that all the Scientology skeptics and dissers — including people like Sheila Cameron, the creator of FreeKatie.net — were on her side all along.
Cameron launched the site after watching Cruise’s couch-bouncing appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show last month. She’s been quoted as saying she’s surprised by the amount of attention the site has attracted.

“I just wanted to make a funny comment on a poorly handled media storm,” she told E! Online. “No one can deny that there is a feeling of unease about many of the couple’s public appearances, and I’m happy to create a place where people can vent on the issue from whatever side they like.”
Holmes, needless to add, doesn’t feel as if she’s a prisoner and is just sailing on the enzymes that kick in when you really connect with someone, and that’s great. If she and Tom are really in love, fine.
Holmes being receptive to Scientology “isn’t necessarily about psychological fragility,” my east-coast journalist friend comments. “Maybe she just wants to have sex with Tom Cruise and be his girlfriend and so she naturally wants to go along with the program. She used to have his poster on the wall in her bedroom, and he’s richer than God and he’s the biggest actor there is.”
And maaaybe she felt her career needed a little boost.
Holmes has also been making some changes in her professional life. Last week she canned her CAA agent, Brandt Joel, and replaced him with Cruise’s CAA reps, Rick Nicita and Kevin Huvane. This week she fired her longtime manager, John Carrabino, according to a report on E! Online.

George Says…

Director-writer George Hickenlooper (The Man From Elysian Fields, The Mayor of Sunset Strip) has something to say about Tom Cruise and Katie Homes, and it’s all groovy and glowing.
Hickenlooper is in pre-production on Factory Girl , a biopic about the tragic life of model and Andy Warhol scenester Edy Sedgwick. The film will be produced by Bob Yari, and is based from a script by Captain Mauzner and Simon Monjack.
Holmes was going to play the lead role but now she’s not, but Hickenlooper want sit known the casting didn’t go south because Tom Cruise talked her out of it because of some Scientology objection.

Andy Garcia, George Hickenlooper, Mick Jagger on set of The Man From Elysian Fields.

George has posted the following on his IMDB site; here’s a slightly edited version of it:
“First let me say that Katie Holmes is one of the most elegant, intelligent and charming actresses I have met during my career in film. She’s a delight to talk to and has a real old-world sophistication that I find tremendously appealing.
“This is one of the reasons I thought she would be a wonderful Edie. Katie’s own charm would capture an early moment in Edie’s life when she was living in Cambridge, was still innocent, before she went to New York and began her downward spiral.
“At the same time, I thought it would be exciting for an audience to watch Katie Holmes (who has previously played strong, girl-next-door type roles) play a character who takes this dark journey. Katie thought it would be exciting too.
“Over the course of several months, we had almost half a dozen meetings where we talked extensively about the script. On one of those occasions in New York, Katie came dressed very much like Edie. She was breathtaking. I was convinced she was my girl for the role.
“About two weeks ago, the New York Post (which has become nothing more than a muckraking tabloid) wrote a very defamatory piece about why Katie decided to ‘drop out’ of Factory Girl. They claimed that Tom Cruise didn’t want her playing a role where she would be a drug addict because that would go against his Scientology beliefs. This is blatantly untrue and stupid.

Edie Sedgwick

“If Tom Cruise felt that way, would he have ever appeared in a film like Magnolia ? Come on… Katie dropped out of Factory Girl because her commitment to doing press for Batman is overwhelming. She has an extensive press tour over the summer in Europe and Asia that would cut in to our rehearsal time.
“Shooting for Factory Girl begins in two months. Both of us felt she couldn’t balance both and that she wouldn’t have the time to do the research to take on this very demanding role, which would be very different from anything else she has ever done.
“Katie is not doing my project because she is the consummate professional, and wouldn’t want to take on a role where she couldn’t give 100%. No actor would want that, no director would want that. Tom Cruise had nothing to do with it. Cruise is a true gentleman and I feel bad about how he is currently being treated in the press. Leave the poor guy alone. He’s in love. That New York Times piece that ran about him last week was a disgrace. It felt more like Star magazine.
“Anyway, I guess it just goes to show you how cynical the media has become about love. Journalists should get lives of their own and stop destroying other people’s.”
Hickenlooper adds at the end of his statement that a piece is supposed to run [this Friday] in Entertainment Weekly about all this. In case it doesn’t, he says, here’s the straight poop.

More Grabs

Late-night eats on Kenmare Street and Lafayette Street — Sunday, 6.12.05, 11:10 pm.

McDonalds sign located in a Polish neighborhood…just checking to see if anyone’s paying attention. The sign is actually located on Canal Street just around the corner from….Chinatown! (Brilliant guess.)

Nicely renovated, freshly-painted condos on Brooooklyn’s Montrose Avenue, just west of Bushwick and a stone’s throw from my summer apartment

View of Manhattan skyline from north 6th Street, which cuts into Bedford Avenue in the western section of Williamsburg, the hip Brooklyn neighborhood that’s been totally Anglicized and yuppified and made expensive for all concerned.

Myself, web designer and Samizdata creator Perry DeHavilland at Laurel Canyon party that happened sometime in late April. I just happened to run across this, and it has nothing to do with anything.

This sturdy, German-built contraption is called a Party Bike. It’s for hire in the Times Square-Rockefeller Center area for $150 per hour (roughly $21.40 per person), and it seats seven people. Everyone pedals while the commandant controls the steering and braking. Naturally, there’s a Party Bike website.

Relatively small, oddly located Party Crashers sign on 41st street between Broadway and 7th Avenue.

This very cheerful female MTA worker (right), working in a booth at the R station on Broadway and 40th, told me she felt she had no choice but to write this posterboard sign to help out the hundreds of tourists who’ve become totally disoriented once they walk down the subway entrance staircase.

This vertical cluster of signs, located at B’way and 43rd, looks much bigger and more…I don’t know, a lot more “whoa” than what this photo suggests.

Shot of Chicago’s downtown theatre district taken by Look magazine photographer Stanley Kubrick in 1949.

James Cameron has been futzing around with this and that project and not really doing anything feature-wise for so long (what’s it been, seven and a half years since Titanic came out?) that you really can’t pay attention to stories about his latest movie-to-be…I mean, this stuff is just in one ear & out the other. Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson and reporter Sheigh Crabtree have written that Cameron’s next film will not be Battle Angel, a pic based on Yukito Kishiro’s Japanese graphic novels about a “nymphette” who morphs into an action heroine, but another film called Project 880. No one at Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment is saying anything about what Project 880 is…and I’m not sure anyone cares. Cameron has stayed behind-the-scenes for so long he’s become The Man Who Can’t Pull the Trigger — a guy whose whole deal (apart from the TV projects and the underwater IMAX docs) is to prepare, research and develop movies to death, but never quite get around to making or releasing them. Thompson says that when and if Cameron makes either Project 880 or Battle Angel, both films would be shot in 3-D with custom-designed high-definition cameras. Well, whoop-dee-doo.

N.Y. Daily News columnist George Rush ran a lead item today about the Russell Crowe/Cinderella Man meltdown in today’s “Daily Dish” column…fine. (Especially since he quoted yours truly.) But in looking at how off-screen movie star shenanigans may be affecting box-office performance, Caryn James has summed up the whole celebrity-feedbag phenomenon rather nicely in today’s New York Times. She’s saying movies are no longer about the purity of the moviegoing experience — the tabloid-gossip crap is feeding into the watching of movies and vice versa. “For the average viewer in this celebrity-crazed culture, the hype and buzz are simply part of the baggage we carry into the theater along with the popcorn and the smuggled cans of soda,” she writes. “Whether Brad Pitt and Russell Crowe are playing characters in films, playing themselves on talk shows or are caught by paparazzi at unsuspecting moments, their fictional and nonfictional roles blend into one huge performance piece that affects how we watch their films, now more than at any time since the star-making business began.” This also: “Eons ago, when movie studios could fiercely control stars’ images, there was no Smoking Gun Web site to offer instant access to their arrest reports, no computers or camera-phones to spread unglamorous images. Now the media overload creates an ambient noise around movies, a sound so pervasive that even people who don’t pay attention absorb it.” In such a hot-house atmosphere, it is no stretch to acknowledge that Crowe’s real-life phone-tossing “hasn’t benefitted” Cinderella Man. It was more damaging than that, if you ask me.

Great news! After weeks and weeks of waiting and loads of political horseshit, it’s finally being announced that Clive Owen is committed to playing the lead role in Michael Davis’s Shoot ‘Em Up, a very hip-funny absurdist urban actioner fron New Line that will start shooting in January ’06. This is an excellent move on Owen’s part, and a major score for Davis. Anyone who doesn’t remember the 3.2.05 piece I wrote about Davis and Shoot “Em up, here it is.

The white-faced freak has walked…hooray for the white-faced freak. Celebrity wins! Paving the way for more friendships with boys, more “hand-holding,” more Jesus juice, etc.

Wanna know why Mr.and Mrs. Smith did as well as it did last weekend? Read this story by Maureen Story in today’s New York Times (“Forget About Milk and Bread. Give Me Gossip!”) I will say no more. Just read it. Remember how everyone was saying after 9/11 that the country and the culture will never be quite so frivolous again as it was before that tragedy?

Don’t you just love the American public? More specifically, the moviegoers (let’s just say it — those really deep women out there who read the tabs and are total fools for the Brangelina mythology) who just had to see the thoroughly rancid Mr. and Mrs. Smith to the tune of $51.1 million last weekend, and thereby rewarded director Doug Liman and stars Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie for making the biggest piece of shit of their careers?? (Variety said that “boosting Smith were older femme adults, who don’t usually turn out for actioners but do read the celeb weeklies and watch tabloid TV chronicling the are-they-or-aren’t-they star pairing.”) Let’s just be happy that the Smith success makes it that much easier for the next grossly expensive big-studio piece of shit to get greenlit. And also that all of those wise and perceptive American moviegoers (most of them under 35, I’m guessing) also decided to blow off Cinderella Man last weekend (it was down 48% from the previous weekend). The story of Jim Braddock is basically a corpse now, just waiting to get picked up and carried out of theatres because so many millions of American moviegoers didn’t show up over…what? Russell Crowe’s phone-throwing episode? Because Ron Howard’s boxing film is too quality-skewed to compete in the mindless summer season? Because Univeral didn’t push the family angle heavily enough in the ads? A good movie is a good movie, darnitall, and every indication is that those who’ve seen Cinderellla Man really like and speak well of it. It just doesn’t add up that a movie as worthy and emotionally effective as this one would just stumble and run out of gas like this.

Russell Crowe’s career as an A-list star — i.e., a guy who gets the $15 million-or-higher fees and a first-look at the best scripts — is on the ropes. Despite his latest film Cinderella Man having gotten a 99% favorable CinemaScore grade last weekend, which means it has fantastic word-of-mouth behind it, Crowe’s recent telephone-throwing incident has so turned people off, it appears, that they’re pulling away from the 1930s boxing flick. How else to explain the fact that last night’s Cinderella Man earnings (for Friday, 6.10) of $2,848,000 were down over 50% from last Friday (6.3), when the Ron Howard film took in $5,905,225 on opening day? (Last weekend’s total was a less-than-expected $18.3 million.) What other possible reason could there be for a first-rate, very well-liked film dropping this heavily on its sophomore session? On the day of the Mercer Hotel phone-throwing incident a journalist wrote and said, “There goes [Crowe’s] Oscar nomination.” Now that Crowe has single-handedly turned Cinderella Man into a financial disappointment, it’s hard to avoid a suspicion that his ability to demand the big bucks may be in great peril. Hollywood hardballers are going to look at what happened this weekend and draw some very blunt conclusions. Then again, he is Russell Crowe, a great actor and a guy who can bring real gravitas and authority to a part. But if audiences are going to look at his films when they open and say, “Screw it, I don’t want to pay to see that thug” — like they apparently did this weekend — then he’s going to be making a lot less and he won’t be as much in the running for the best parts, and that means Crowe will probably be attending the IFP Spirit Awards next February and trying out his new indie cred.

Yesterday’s tracking figures on War of the Worlds (Paramount, 6.29) are through the roof — awareness is over 90% and definite interest is over 50%. For a movie that’s two and a half weeks from opening, this indicates something really big about to happen. This is almost Star Wars-level. Who knows? The Steven Spielberg-Tom Cruise collaboration could do $90 to $100 million in five days time.

Best Batman

Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (Warner Bros., 6.15) is the smartest and most adult-minded superhero film Hollywood has ever made.
For the first time ever, a major studio has made a comic-book movie that plays it fairly straight and grown up without letting the usual downmarket distractions run the show.

Batman Begins is somewhere between exceptionally good and awesome during the first hour or so, which is what sold me and put me in a relatively placated and open-to-whatever place for the film’s slightly more conventional remainder, which — don’t get me wrong — is entirely decent and rousing and even spooky here and there.
I love the way Christian Bale’s Batman is always hunching over and scowling…this is one very pissed-off bat…and the general fact that Batman Begins is always a sharp, intelligent, well-written ride, and is exceptionally well acted by everyone.
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Especially by Bale (in the dual role of Batman/Bruce Wayne), Michael Caine (Alfred the butler), Liam Neeson (Zen criminal Henri Ducard) and Morgan Freeman (Batman’s congenial tech-support guy Lucius Fox). It’s just pleasurable as hell when a movie is as well-cast as this one and nobody drops the ball.
I was even excited by Katie Holmes, who nails her part as a childhood friend of Wayne’s and a Gotham City prosecutor so nicely and skillfully that I momentarily forget about the bogus offscreen show she’s been putting on lately with a certain couch-bouncing actor.
But then at the very end, after the bad guys have been wasted, Batman is told by his plainclothes detective ally, Lt. Gordon (Gary Oldman), that there’s a new troublemaker on the horizon, a guy with a flair for the theatrical…

Christian Bale, star of Batman Begins.

And Gordon hands Batman a business card that says “Joker” on it, and my heart sank.
Nolan has saved the Batman franchise by taking it seriously and treating every aspect and line of dialogue and character like they really and truly matter without any Joel Schumacher attitude mucking things up, and for his Big Follow-up he’s going back to the old Batman vs. Joker routine?
Screw that, Chris. Create new villains, new perils…the hell with the damn comic book.
I thought this was going to be the Nolan Way when I realized the big threat to Gotham in Batman Begins is, believe it or not, mass psychedelic insanity…a gas that sends people into a state of instant hallucinatory psychological torment. This is way darker and stranger than the kind of material that Bob Kane, the original Batman comic-book guy, used in the ’40s and ’50s.
Well, enjoy this installment anyway. Batman Begins is the only comic-book superhero movie I’ve ever truly admired and enjoyed. And for a crabhead like myself, that’s saying something. I know a tiny bit about the original Batman comics, and that they never smirked or screwed around or cracked wise. This movie gets that, honors that.
Especially in the how-Bruce-got-to-be-Batman section, which is edited in a not-entirely-linear, time-flipping way that, for me, improves the delivery. Cosmetic improvements can really enhance a film if they’re well applied, and this is one such occasion.
This section is about overcoming rage and cynicism…about channeling energy and facing one’s fears. About Wayne getting past his parents’ violent death by blowing town and ending up in some snow-blanketed section of what appears to be northern India or Tibet.

Here in Kundun-by-way-of-Insomnia country (surrounded by the same chunky bluish-gray ice fields that put the spell on Al Pacino) Wayne learns to be a hard-core opponent of evil from a team of gangster monks called the League of Shadows, led by Henri Ducard (Li am Neeson) and Ra’s Al Ghul (The Last Samurai‘s Ken Watanabe).
I love Nolan and co-screenwriter David S. Goyer’s decision to bring Neeson and his Zen goons back in the third act in a nicely symmetrical way. I guess what I really mean is that I love their not using some prancing-around supervillain to go mano e mano against Batman/Wayne.
I’m amazed, frankly, that a genre film this good came out of Warner Bros., a studio that encouraged and supported the anti-Christ Schumacher in the making of Batman and Robin and Batman Forever…movies that everyone despised and which showed, really, that Warner Bros. was kind of an anti-Christ movie studio, which is a harsh way of saying they couldn’t stop being clueless.
And then came all that ridiculous floundering around with Darren Aronofsky’s Batman: Year One and those different Superman movies (including one proposed with McG as director) and also that moronic notion of making a Batman vs. Superman film. It’s obvious these guys never had an idea what works, and still don’t.
Nolan’s pitch to Alan Horn about how to save the Batman franchise (which I read about recently) was probably approved with some kind of hunch on the way to lunch.
“Let’s see…everything we’ve tried to do to revive Batman and Superman has been a total embarrassment or a wipeout or has run out of steam,” Horn probably said to himself. “We look like total fools, the fanboys think we’re retarded…how badly can Nolan’s approach turn out, given our embarrassing track record?
“I don’t know if it’s a good or bad approach…I don’t know anything…but I know nothing’s worked so far so I might as well roll ’em.”

Batman Begins director Chris Nolan, Christian Bale, and Ken Watanabe.

Don’t get the idea that Batman Begins is anything more than a very smart and well-made programmer. It’s not Tokyo Story or highbrow suggestive like Val Lewton’s Cat People or anything in that realm, but it is high-quality merchandise because it digs in and tells a mythical, hyper-real story about people who think and behave with logic and reason.
Aside from Tom Wilkinson’s Falcone, a grossly mannered gangster guy, and 28 Days Later star Cillian Murphy as a double-dealing (make that drug-dealing) psychopath called Scarecrow. Both are a bit mannered, but then criminals in a comic-book movie can’t act like notary publics.
There’s plenty of action in this film, but it all flows from Wayne’s pain. I liked Bale for the first time in this role, and I say this having never warmed up to him before this. Nolan’s decision to have him bend over and get all raspy-voiced and rodent-like when he puts on the suit was inspired. Bale’s character is no smoothie. The ground he’s standing on is never that solid, and he’s just waiting for the next trap door to fall through.
Batman Begins is definitely breakthrough material. The fanboys are going to love it. It’s going to be fairly big and stay that way for, I don’t know, five or six weeks….maybe longer.
I’m glad I finally found a comic-book film I could stand behind. It’s a relief. I’m just sorry I was too backed up by Wednesday’s column to go see the IMAX version, which will surely be a trip in itself.

Bad Collars

I’m shocked — shocked — that there are guys out there who will walk into a Banana Republic tomorrow or next week and look at these shirts and go, “Cool…gotta pick these up.” Or a wife or girlfriend pointing them out to a significant other and saying, “Look…perfect for you.”
I shot these utterly revolting dress shirts two days ago at a Banana Republic in the West Village, on the corner of Bleecker and Sixth Avenue. I would go to jail before putting one of these on. It’s the bulky collars. They’re getting close to the size of those elephant collars of the `70s, so named for their resemblance to elephant ears.

Collars are for the wearing of ties. Without a tie they’re the stupidest and most pointless fashion accessory of all time, unless you’re X-factor and wearing some cool Italian-designed thing and the collars are narrow and delicate or in some way unobtrusive.
Clunky collars prove nothing, add nothing, accomplish nothing…and they’re ugly.
Tell this to the Ed Norton-Brad Pitt generation. These guys wet themselves over collars and zippers and shirts with absolutely horrible designs and rancid color schemes. I’m tellin’ you, men’s stuff was in a much cooler phase back in the late `80s…before the tastes of GenX Fight Club-bers started running the show.

Country Guy

“Thanks for mentioning my contribution to The Beautiful Country , since the Writer’s Guild arbitrated me out of credit, and when Pressman and Malick listed me as a producer they were threatened with a lawsuit for the sin of offering ‘consolation credit.
“That’s the Writers Guild for you, harming its own membership for as long as I can recall, but that, as they say, is another story.
“The project began as an idea of Terry Malick’s and was developed by Sunflower Films, a company belonging to Malick and [producer] Ed Pressman. I believe they had a low-budget overhead deal with Sony.

The Beautiful Country screenwriter Larry Gross.

“Sabina Murray, a published writer of fiction, had worked with Terry as a consultant on The Thin Red Line because of her expertise concerning events in Asia during WWII. She worked initially on the Wonderful Country script under the guidance of Zhang Yimou (Hero, House of Flying Daggers).
“Around this time Terry was offering Zhang post-production assistance on some of the smaller films he made in cooperation with Sony Classics. After a couple of drafts Zhang Yimou stepped away.
“Then Wayne Wang came on, and suggested that I rewrite Sabina’s script. I wrote a couple of drafts for Wayne, and then he stepped away too.
“Pressman, however, finally had a script everyone now liked. He had a list of indie and foreign directors with English-speaking experience or credentials, and Hans Petter Moland was on the list.
“I had just been at Telluride and seen Moland’s superb Aberdeen, a dysfunctional family drama, with Stellan Skaarsgaard, Lena Heady and Ian Hart. Moland had also been responsible for launching Skaarsgaard’s movie career in Scandinavia with a naturalistic period action film called Zero Kelvin.

The Beautiful Country director Hans Petter Moland, star Damon Nguyen during filming.

“Moland is a filmmaker of wide humane interests and tremendous skill I recommended him avidly to Pressman. Terry screened Aberdeen and promptly told Ed that Hans Petter Moland was the guy who should do this.
“It took two years to get the money. And it was a ridiculously tiny amount of money to make so physically arduous a film.
“The element that stayed firm and true to the project from before my involvement, I`m forgetting to mention, was Nick Nolte. I think his fifteen minutes at the end is some of the finest work in his glorious career. The most recent bit of comparable stature was his superb part in The Thin Red Line. Obviously he and Terry have a connection;
“Again, thanks for supporting the work.” — Larry Gross (also screenwriter of We Don’t Live Here Anymore, the excellent Gunshy, Crime and Punishment in Suburbia, 48 HRS.

Rent

“Great riff on the new Rent trailer, although I have to say I share your fears about Revolution Pictures (i.e., the can’t-get-it-right Joe Roth) and Chris Columbus having their mitts on this one.
“This was arguably the best musical of the 90s. It helped to push the boundaries of what the mainstream could digest in that wonderful pre-millennium time. The rawness of the piece just might be best suited for the dreary Nederlander Theatre. Time will tell if it translates to the screen.

Adam Pascal, Rosario Dawson in Rent, due Nov. 11 from Columbia.

“I am encouraged that 90% of the original cast is back to do the movie. If they can bring one tenth of the energy to the screen that they brought to the stage, they might just push the film to the fresh side.
“I will say this: the Rent trailer is the best music video I have seen this year. (Not that I watch them anymore.) You are 100% right — Jonathan Larson wrote a beautiful song in ‘Seasons of Love.’ The cast knows it, the audience knows it — I just hope Columbus can do the whole thing justice.” — Brendan Noone

Smith Shame

The only significant addition to the Mr. and Mrs. Smith roster of shame, announced two days ago in this space to try and hold certain critics accountable for liking or giving even a mixed pass to Doug Liman’s action thriller, is Jamie Bernard’s review in the N.Y. Daily News.

Smith Agonistes

“I was so happy to read your reaction to Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Perfect. I haven’t seen the film itself, but I saw the trailer, and that was all I needed to see. Ever.
“I’m so tired of films that not grounded in reality. It seems like 90% of all action movies have to have The Matrix style of effects, without being in a sci-fi world that would allow any of it to be remotely plausible. The action is so ludicrous that it takes me right out of the picture.
“The real stunner is that Doug Liman would resort to the McG school of filmmaking. Why, why, why?!? There are so few directors that can lay down a quality, gritty, realistic action picture, and Liman is, or at least was, one of those guys. It’s an awful waste of talent, and it’s disgraceful for him as a filmmaker.
“I know that people eat this crap up, as I always hear the classic line `the story was o.k., but the effects were really great.’ It kills me. I really, really hope this thing tanks.” — Jeff Horst

“I’m beginning to develop this theory that marquee-level critics in the last 10 years seem to have resigned themselves to the realization that certain films are critic-proof and to attack them is a fruitless Tar Baby exercise.
“Films like Mr, and Mrs, Smith may have their merits, but we all know if they starred the guy from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and one of the chicks from Charmed instead of Brangelina then all those 13 to 35 year olds would deny it the $45 million opening it will most probably earn and just make it an X-Box weekend.
“Certain critics apparently have a `choose your cinematic battles carefully’ attitude when it comes to major studio releases. The worst offender seems to be Roger Ebert who has given a pass to a veritable sewer of shitty films.
“I mention this because I was thinking of the reaction to the Mr. and Mrs. Smith trailer I witnessed on opening day of Revenge of the Sith. In a crowd of Summer ’05 blockbuster-to-be trailers that included War of the Worlds and Fantastic Four, the loudest reaction was for the Smiths, so be prepared for more positive reviews.” — Steve Coppock
“The overriding thought I have whenever I see a promo for Mr. and Mrs. Smith is not that it’s about gorgeous people acting out their fantasies — shooting guns, doing stunts, not acting but play-acting the way children do. What I think of is what Hitchcock could’ve done with the same basic premise.
“Instead of allowing Carole Lombard to hornswoggle him into directing a rather tepid domestic comedy, imagine he and, say, Ernest Lehman, coming up with a black comedy centered not around big guns and explosions, but a couple surreptitiously and cleverly trying to kill each other, all the while remaining polite to each other’s faces and never admitting openly what they’re up to.

Brad Pitt

“Of course, at the end, after one of them finally, perhaps even accidentally, dispatches the other, he or she sits down to eat the sandwich and glass of milk the other one so courteously laid out for them.” — David Ludwig.
“I agree with you on this movie. There is no way I am seeing this thing. It seems to me that the director knew of the happenings between Pitt and Jolie, and he used that chemistry (if there is any) to try to make the movie slicker, because people are going to see it just to check out said chemistry between the two.
“I also can’t help thinking about True Lies. They just made the Jamie Lee Curtis part as a spy. How many people would like to see Ms. Jolie in the bedroom dance scene from that movie?” — Gil Padilla, Dayton, Ohio.

Alien Confusion

Werner Herzog

“It’s been a while since I’ve actually laughed out loud at something I had read online, but your piece about that War of the Worlds picture made me do just that this morning. Thanks for that — made my day. ” — Jeremy Wockenfuss
“I always love your stuff, but there’s something wonderful and, I dunno, vaguely magical about your breakdown of that War of the Worlds publicity photo in [Wednesday]’s column. Every face you describe just makes the description you’re writing a little more perfect, until you’re no longer just making a point, you’re creating a perfect little work of art. That’s really beautiful writing, man.” — Name lost in the shuffle
“Your description of that War of the Worlds still is hilarious! I love that you caught that girl smiling behind Tom Cruise. Also love the NYC shots you’re putting in – I miss it there. ” — Sharon Mann, Paris, France.

Grabs

Not an all-girl restaurant, appearances to the contrary. Tartine on West 4th Street — Wednesday, 6.8.05, 7:35 pm.

West 4th Street near Charles — Wednesday, 6.8.05, 7:20 pm.

There’s a Whole Foods on 14th street in Union Square — full of exquisite pickings and a great salad bar and costly as hell. (The nickname, I’m told, is “Whole Paycheck.”) I was there the other night and filled up one of those plastic trays full of salad and vegetables, and was told by the cashier that I owed them $20. I’ve never paid $20 for a salad in a restaurant. Le Basket (pictured above) is about four or five blocks south of Whole Foods with a nice salad bar of their own, and they only hit you for about $10, so Whole Foods can bite me.

Northeast corner of Broadway and 47th — Thursday, 6.9.05, 6:10 pm.

Dragon

“I remember seeing Year of the Dragon when it came out and enjoying it. It became a guilty pleasure of mine. I rented it a couple of times over the years and always enjoyed the performances of some of the supporting actors (Raymond Barry, Caroline Kava).
“Mickey Rourke’s hair is quite strange, but what also is curious is the noticeable sore on his nose, which changes shape and size depending on the scene.
“And Ariane, giving the worst performances by an actress in the history of movies.
“And Rourke’s salty language in front of couple of old Nuns. And the old character actor who I remember being on Barney Miller speaking through what Howard Stern calls a ‘cancer kazoo.’
“And Rourke interrogating a chinese gangster girl that he’s just shot (‘Look, you’re not gonna make it.’) It’s the gift that keeps on giving.” — Sean Griffin

Litter

“As a lifetime New Yorker, I was amused by your comments about the garbage littered sidewalk … Please realize, nobody in NY gives a crap about anyone or anything but themselves. The only ones who can be nice (and its rare) are the tourists who don’t know any better.” — Ron KofflerCinderella Slogan
“When the country was on its knees, he threw a telephone at its face.” — Kevin Kusinitz, New York, NY.
“I think the real problem is the title. Cinderella Man reads to your average moviegoer like a film about a transvestite. People equate Cinderella with the fairy tale who’s main character happened to be a female. It’s not that people are stupid but in today’s headlines about Michael Jackson it subconciously has a negative vibe.
“I don’t care for the title either mainly because it comes off too cloying or clever.” — Steven Hanna, brother of Detective Vincent Hanna, LAPD….keeping on the edge, with his angst, where he needs to be.

Werner Herzog

“The problem with the punchdrunk ad syntax for Cinderella Man is that it goes from a generalization to a specific, in essence choosing one out of many possible paths, and calling undo attention to itself as a result.
“Simply by switching it so the specific flows into the generalization, there is no subliminal ‘surprise’ and it is less disorienting, such as: When America was on its knees, he brought the country to its feet. Although, that said, ‘When America was on its knees, he brought the nation to its feet,’ is somewhat better focused, and ‘When America was on the ropes, he found the strength to inspire the nation,’ gets rid of that bothersome sexual double entendre.” — Doug Pratt DVD Newsletter.
“The reason for the repetition of `country’ and `America’ in the Cinderella Man slogan seems pretty straightforward to me. The marketing guys want to make the movie sound as broadly-appealing as possible and connect it to a certain patriotic sentimentality, so the word `America’ has to be in there somewhere. But at the same time, people don’t want to think of `America’ as being on its knees, implying that America is weak. So they have to make it abstract, substituting a pronoun, and making the sentence awkward.” — Jason Edgecombe

Herzog

“Just read your excellent article on Werner Herzog. I’ve been an authentic fan of his ever since seeing Aguirre, the Wrath of God many years ago in San Diego. I lend this movie out whenever I can and to whomever I can, but always with the caveat that the movie be watched without interruption at a time when there is no chance of being too tired to pay adequate attention.
“But I’m writing to say how pleased and surprised I was to read the following which you wrote, `Herzog’s films should not be rented — they should be owned and pulled out every few months and not just watched in a social way with friends but seriously absorbed in a state of aloneness…like meditation, with incense burning.’
“Never were there truer words said on any subject under the sun. I thought I was strange admonishing my friends the way I described, but you’ve given me vindication. The paragraph above perfectly describes how I feel about Herzog and Aguirre especially. It took me by surprise, it was so on the mark.” — John Rosen.

Werner Herzog

“Thanks for the piece on Werner Herzog. Thank God that there are filmmakers like him — filmmakers with vision and passion still plugging away. In this age of loud, empty, mindless, obscenely expensive, loud, dumb films there is at least one filmmaker who, as you say, `cares more about getting viewers to trust their eyes … or more importantly their dreams.’
“How many filmmakers today are as obsessive, or crazy as Herzog to follow their vision to completion, like he did with Fitzcarraldo? I’ve been a fan ever since Aguirre, the Wrath of God, but unfortunately haven’t seen any of his documentaries. I’ll take your advice and head to the video store to purchase one of his docs and relish it. Then I’ll have to decide which of his narrative films to purchase; one that my family, who don’t care for foreign language films, should see. If they only knew the glut of riches they were missing out on.” — Edward Klein, Salem, Oregon.
“Cheers for your Herzog plug. I’d also recommend some other of his older documentaries, particularly Lessons of Darkness. On the feature film front, the recent Herzog/Kinski box set is a showcase for the (arguably) greatest director/actor pairing ever.” — Laura Clifford, Reeling Reviews.

Grabs, Part 2

Extra Virgin, 259 West 4th Street. Appetizers, $6 to $12, Entrees from $17 to $19. All major credit cards.

Waiting for L train in Union Square station — Thursday, 6.9.05, 10:05 pm.

West 4th near Jane — Wednesday, 6.8.05, 7:50 pm.

Thanks to the good, gracious and supportive readers who’ve tossed me some loose change over the past three or four days, in response to my request for help (see upper left ad box) in getting through a proverbial bad patch. For those of you who can’t pitch in, don’t sweat it…your steady readership is what really counts. For those thinking of doing so …well, whenever and whatever. But thanks again to everyone.