Jeffrey Wells

You want surreal? Read Laura Holson’s New York Times story about the Universal-buying-DreamWorks negotiations that have fallen apart. Because two recent DreamWorks films — The Island and Just Like Heaven — respectively flopped and underperformed, NBC Universal executives involved in negotations to purchase the live-action filmmaking side of DreamWorks (along with the company’s 60-film library) “lowered their projection of the rate of return for DreamWorks” and therfore lowered their offer from $1.5 billion to $1.4 billion. This still would have handed about $900 million to DreamWorks’ partners and investors (David Geffen, Steven Spielberg, Paul Allen and…?). But because of the $100 million downgrade, Geffen, who was repping DreamWorks in the negotiations, said “forget it” and the deal has gone south. This what living in a fantasy membrane of sloth and corruption comes to…here is a portrait of men and women who are so far off the ground and so swaddled in mink and diamonds they’ve forgotten what it means to stand on the ground, smell the air and look reality in the eye. The DreamWorks library has a solid ascertainable value. The future-tense ability of the DreamWorks production team (including director Steven Spielberg) to bring in tens of millions more in revenue from the movies they might make is a very hazy proposition. The Spielberg brand is worth plenty with average-Joe audiences, but if you ask me the rest of the team isn’t worth a whole lot. 90% of the perceived value of a company’s future output is always about smoke and mirrors and hot air. My advice is for someone to purchase the library and let the DreamWorks apparatus scatter in the winds…break the company into a thousand pieces and let the life process recoagulate somewhere else. Are the DreamWorkers supposed to be some kind of golden-goose crew? Says who? Based on what? Take the needle out of your arm.

We all want to be recognized for our own accomplishments, but it still seems…well, funny that the mini-bio for director-writer Rodrigo Garcia in the Nine Lives press kit doesn’t mention that his dad is novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez(“One Hundred Years of Solitude”).

My advice is to brush aside David Poland’s dissing/dismissing of Tony Scott’s 9.25 N.Y. Times piece about Republican party pro-life talking points in Just Like Heaven, The Exorcism of Emily Rose , and even Michael Bay’s The Island. Libertas, the rightie website affiliated with the Liberty Film Festival, discussed the right-to-life issue in The Island with some enthusiasm last summer, and it seems to me that Scott’s observations about Heaven and Emily Rose are fairly astute, and a long way from wild ravings. To some extent, Hollywood is obviously winking at Bubba Nation with these films.

It was in the cards for several weeks, and now Miramax president Daniel Battsek has finally announced his acquisition of Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi, a profoundly gripping drama that I saw and wrote about during the latter stages of the Toronto Film Festival. More in the vein of Walter Salles’ Central Station than Fernando Meirelles’ City of God, Tsotsi has the chops to shoot right to the top of the list of Best Foreign-Language Feature hopefuls.

If you have the slightest appetite for good political theatre, reading this Daily News story about Warren Beatty’s anti-Arnold-Schwarzenegger speech in Oakland the other day will get your blood going. There are those who would love to see Beatty run against Schwarzenegger, but I there’s no way he’ll ever drop his Artful Dodger mentality and hang his hide over the side. It would be terrific, of course, if he did run. And I don’t agree at all with the view of Dick Rosengarten, co-publisher of California Political Week, that a Beatty candidacy wouldn’t fly. “I’m not sure two movie stars can run [against each other], not even here,” he told the News. Wrong — two former movie stars battling it out for the California governorship would be a totally natural and logical expression of the way Hollywood and politics have been bleeding into each other and upping the ante over the last 45 years.

The Great Liberal Hope who might actually pull the trigger some day will be Ben Affleck. Truth, Justice and the American Way will probably result in a career upsurge so it won’t happen any time soon, but when Affleck hits his next career pothole (five or ten years from now…who knows?) he might actually start making the moves. If you saw him on the political talk shows during the ’04 Democratic Convention in Boston, you know he’s got the makings.

You should have heard the crowd chortle with delight when Bill Hurt went into his irritated-older-brother shpiel in the last act of A History of Violence at the Grove yesterday afternoon. Hurt had them in the palm of his hand. He got a laugh with almost every line, every facial tic…and it was fantastic to feel a performance work as well as this. Being there put all doubts to rest: Hurt will be one of the Best Supporting Actor nominees when they’re announced in January. A performance that rocks as well as this one can’t not be recognized. Hurt nails it the way Beatrice Straight nailed it with that one marital-outburst scene in Network, opposite Bill Holden. There was a 4 pm and a 5 pm show on Saturday (I went to the latter), and nearly every seat was taken. And that ending…whoa.

Stephen Frears’ Mrs. Henderson Presents is a nicely confident British period piece…funny, ascerbic, touching at times. And it sinks in, yes, but not that deeply — it has that wry Frears sensibility, and satisfies only as far as it goes. If you’re looking for a delightful time at the Royal in West Los Angeles, it does the trick…but it’s not an A-list Best Picture contender. Why? It’s more of a chuckler than a feeler — it’s emotionally earnest and Judy Dench is terrific in the lead role (ditto Bob Hoskins as her stage manager), but even with the dead-son element it doesn’t quite put a lump in your throat. Almost, close…but not quite.

And yet Curtis Hanson’s In Your Shoes, dismissed by a certain columnist as a good commercial film but not an awards-calibre thing, has an emotional resonance factor (it’s not about shoes or bickering sisters but resolving family hurt) that might persuade some in the Academy to think about Oscar-ish distinctions. Maybe I’m alone on this one, but I don’t think so. It got to me (and I can be kind of a hard-ass), and I’ve felt how it plays with a crowd. If any- one catches In Your Shoes at one of those sneak preview screenings being held across the country this evening (Saturday, 9.24), I’d appreciate some reactions.

“A masterpiece of indirection and pure visceral thrills, David Cronenberg’s latest mindblower, A History of Violence, is the feel-good, feel-bad movie of the year,” N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis declared in her 9.23 review. “That sounds far grimmer or at least more relentlessly grim than this shrewd, agile, often bitingly funny film plays. The great kick of [it] — or rather, the great kick in the gut — comes from Mr. Cronenberg’s refusal to let us indulge in movie violence without paying a price. The man wants to make us suffer, exquisitely. Decades of mainlining blockbusters have, for better or perhaps for worse, inured us to the image of bullet-chewed bodies and the pop-pop-pop of phony weapon fire. For the contemporary movie connoisseur, film death is now as cheap as it is familiar. To which Mr. Cronenberg quietly says, ‘Oh, yeah?'”

A TV comedy show is usually two things — what the creators intend it to be in their heads as they’re fine-tuning the season opener, and what the creators change it into after they’ve shifted into panic mode after an initial bad review or two, or when the ratings are much lower than expected. So let’s see what happens with Comedy Central’s The Showbiz Show with David Spade from here on…

The instant a film is described as a “romantic comedy,” it’s dead to me. That’s why I wouldn’t watch Dirty Love on a plane…even if I was dead-bored. You can always depend on a “romantic comedy” to be arch, off-the-ground and phony as a three-dollar bill. There have been exceptions, yes, but 96% of the time the term means the movie will be farcical and dumb-assed. It will contain nothing angular or vaguely thoughtful, nothing perverse, no laughs… and it will have a juvenile and relentlessly hyper attitude about sex. It means loyal readers of Star, In Touch, People and Us will be there on opening weekend (maybe).