Can anyone see the logic in Miramax publicists restricting invites to press screenings of Shall We Dance? in the face of a massive sneak preview showing in theatres coast to coast last night (i.e., Saturday, 9.25)? Especially considering that the film is frequently heartening and spirit-lifting and is obviously going to win over the just-entertain-us crowd? It may not have critics doing cartwheels, but I’m a hard-ass and I had very few problems with it.

The latest title of that currently filming not-really-a-sequel-to-The Graduate romantic comedy under director Rob Reiner is (drum roll…) Rumor Has It. (Not a bad title. It was previously called Otherwise Engaged, which I also like.) As soon as he was hired in mid-August to replace director Ted Griffin on the Jennifer Aniston-Kevin Costner-Mark Ruffalo film, Reiner brought in North co-writer Andrew Scheinman to do a page-one rewrite of Griffin’s script. Scheinman, producer of several Reiner-directed films from The Sure Thing (’85) to Ghosts of Mississippi (’96), is apparently co-writing with his brother Danny, whose IMDB resume includes only acting jobs. Most of Griffin’s script has been wiped off the hard drive. The new script still uses the basic premise (Aniston’s relationship and/or impending marriage to Ruffalo is put on hold while she explores her identity and that of her grandmother, played by Shirley Maclaine, who was apparently the real-life model for the Mrs. Robinson character), but this is just being used as “a way in” to the new script and new sensibility, which is totally Reiner-Scheinman’s.

Legendary words from Alec Baldwin….seriously: “Movie marketers are taking actors and they’re kind of inserting them like suppositories into the cavities of the moviegoing public. The business is so kind of self-referential now. There’s a whole kind of industry now about the forensics of the business, so to speak, that wasn’t there 20 years ago.” So what’s a site like Hollywood Elsewhere in this rear equation? Not a lubricant…that’s E.T., People, Entertainment Weekly, etc. I don’t think I’m even wearing the plastic gloves.

Any talented 20-something web designers out there living on a trust fund with a little extra time on their hands? Two regular columns a week plus WIRED every day plus editing the other columnists plus assembling each page with jpegs and whatnot…I’m losing it. This isn’t whining — it’s fact. You could be from Botswana…I just need some help.

The first words…the first sound…in I Heart Huckabees is a rapid-fire obscenity spew from the mouth of Jason Schwartzman. It’s brash, funny…sets the tone. But it was probably borrowed. John Malkovich’s character in the original 1987 Circle Rep production of Lanford Wilson’s Burn This made his entrance with the very same bit. Did David O. Russell (then 29 years old) ever catch a performance?

Critical reactions to The Motorcycle Diaries have been mostly admiring (like mine), but the political legacy of the real-life Che Guevara is taking bites here and there. Daily News critic Bob Strauss complains that it’s “a feel-good movie about a guy who helped to establish the Castro dictatorship in Cuba, for which he killed many and ordered the executions of many more.” And Salon‘s Paul Berman laments that “the cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. [He] was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction in Cuba. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution’s first firing squads. He founded Cuba’s ‘labor camp’ system…that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims.” Yikes…

I forgot a likely development when I made some forecasts about ’04 Best Picture Oscar nominations a couple of days ago. I guess I didn’t want to consider it.
Almost every year there has to be one semi-awful, vaguely embarrassing Best Picture nominee. You know…a flick that people like me tend to despise or worse but the Academy tends to (a) emotionally support despite overwhelming taste considerations to the contrary and (b) is more than willing to risk tarnishing the Academy’s reputation in history books by actually giving it the Best Picture Oscar.
I’m talking about nominees like Chicago, Ghost, Babe, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Chocolat, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Mission or The Color Purple.
(Let’s acknowledge upfront that my including Return of the King on this list will provoke a torrent of letters calling me a rash and injudicious Peter Jackson hater. Okay? Now you don’t have to write them.)

If there’s a contender of this sort this year, it’ll most likely be Joel Schumacher’s The Phantom of the Opera.
It may turn out to be wonderful, devastating, heart-palpitating, etc. But with Schumacher at the helm the odds favor the likelihood of something overwrought and oppressive.
I know it’s imprudent to stick my neck out like this, but I feel I’ve come to know Joel, and I’m convinced that his directorial hand is generally something to be wary of.
I became a surprised Joel fan after Falling Down and The Client , but then he did A Time to Kill (an all-time Otto Preminger film from hell) and his two nipple ring-and-codpiece Batman movies (both awful) and I was off the boat.
Okay, Tigerland was a decent bounce-back effort and Phone Booth was a solid urban thriller with a good Colin Farrell performance, but Flawless was a wash and Veronica Guerin missed it big-time.
Phantom‘s chances may be upped by acting and tech credit noms. I was told last night that Emmy Rossum, who plays the lead Phantom role of Christine, will emerge with an enhanced rep…assuming she scores. She was last in Dan Ireland and Jim Jermanok’s Passionada, which I’d now like to finally sit down and watch just to see how she is.

Once Again

So figure the five finalists will probably be selected from the following nine movies:
(1) Sideways, (2) The Aviator (although I’m starting to feel a little bit twitchy about this one), (3) possibly Alexander, (4) quite possibly Spanglish, (5) The Motorcycle Diaries (an increasingly big maybe, like I said two days ago), (6) probably Hotel Rwanda as a liberal guilt-trip nominee, (7) probably Closer if the alleged “plays a little cold” factor doesn’t overwhelm the content, (8) The Phantom of the Opera, and (9) if Bush loses (and we all know the odds at this stage), Fahrenheit 9/11.

I think it’ll be criminal if Sideways and The Motorcycle Diaries are left out, but that’s me.
If it was me alone choosing from the films released so far I’d make it these two plus Collateral and Touching the Void.
And oh, yeah…I haven’t even considered John Madden’s Proof (Miramax, 12.25), but the Broadway play was awfully good and playwright David Aubrey wrote the screenplay, so who knows?
There’s a concern in that Proof has the slight Gwynneth Paltrow curse factor to contend with. (Everything she’s done since The Talented Mr. Ripley five years ago has been mediocre, with the significant exception of The Royal Tenenbaums). On the other hand, one should never dismiss an end-of-the-year film starring the great Anthony Hopkins.

Blanket

I Heart Huckabees (Fox Searchlight, 10.1) shot right through my skull on Wednesday night and came out like some cosmic effusion and just sort of hung there above my head like a low-altitude cloud, sprinkling gentle misty rain.
No, that sounds too tranquil. A movie this funny and frantic and this totally off-the-planet (and yet strangely inside the whole universal anxiety syndrome that we all live with day to day) can’t be that cosmically soothing. That’s not the idea.
But it is soothing… that’s the weird thing. Huckabees makes you laugh fairly uproariously, but it leaves you in a spiritual place that feels settled and well-nourished. Variety‘s David Rooney said it was “largely an intellectual pleasure with a hollow core.” Rooney has probably never been wronger in his life. Not because he isn’t smart or perceptive, but because he failed to do a very important thing.
He didn’t see Huckabees twice.

This is one of those rare movies in which you have to double-dip it. You obviously don’t have to take my advice. Go ahead and just see it once and then say to yourself, “Well, that happened!” Just understand that Huckabees is, I feel, too dense and arch with too much going on to fully get it in one sitting.
On one level it’s a kind of psychobabble satire; on another it’s the most profoundly spiritual Hollywood film since Groundhog Day. And the amazing-ness of it may not come together in your head…if at all.
That’s how the first viewing happened with me, at least. I was initially into it on a “whoa…what was that?” level and for the antsy, pedal-to-the-metal pacing …but it goes beyond that. The first time is the eye-opener, the water-in-the-face, the violent lapel-grabbing; the second time is da bomb.
There’s something else that Rooney probably couldn’t help when he wrote his review. I’m guessing he’s not really a “blanket” kind of guy. Blanket acceptance is what this film is about (and is what passing through the doors of illumination usually entails…you can’t reason your way into a Godhead realization).
Huckabees is about the blanket, and you either get this and it makes you laugh and turns you on at the same time…or it doesn’t and you don’t.

Imagine sitting in a theatre and laughing in a half-chuckling, half-hysterical way. And mulling over some basic tenets of eastern mysticism at the same time. And also feeling amazed and throttled by the most relentlessly verbal machine-gun Hollywood comedy since His Girl Friday. And also doing that outboard-motor thing against your lower lip with your right index and middle fingers and going, “Bee, bee, bee, bee, bee…”
(Recognize that graph? I just plagiarized my own WIRED item.)
Huckabees is about movie stars and laughs and hyper-energy, but boiled down to basics it’s essentially about a philosophical feud between two schools of thought — one that says life is perfect, harmonious and essentially divine, and one that says that life is merely a series of random and disconnected occurrences that are more often than not painful, and sometimes much worse.
The more positive alpha view is articulated and passed along by an existential detective agency run by Bernard and Vivian Jaffe (Dustin Hoffma, Lily Tomlin). The darker, more nihilist approach is espoused by Isabelle Huppert’s Caterine Vauban, a former colleague of the Jaffes who’s crossed over to the dark side like Annakin Skywalker.
The guy in the middle of these two factions is an environmental activist named Albert Markovski (Jason Schwartzman). First he goes to the Jaffe’s for help in sorting out his life, then he takes up with Huppert (an alliance that carries a side benefit of great mud sex), and then….I’m not spilling the ending.

The Jaffes quickly discover that Albert’s troubles are mainly stemming from a rivalry with a shithead executive named Brad Stand (Jude Law) who works for a retail chain store called Huckabees. Albert is pissed at Brad for challenging his authority as the head of an envuronmental actiivst outfit called the Open Spaces Coalition group. Albert is fervently anti-development when it concerns marshlands and whatnot while dickhead Brad is pro-development and pro-greed.
Then, weirdly, Brad hires the Jaffes to look into his own life. This in turn leads to his girlfriend Dawn (Naomi Watts), Huckabees’ sexy spokesperson/model, to hire the Jaffes to look into her life, which leads to her refusing to play the sexpot and to exploring her inner infinite self, an exercise that involves shunning makeup and wearing an Amish bonnet.
Albert eventually becomes disillusioned with the Jaffes and hooks up with a philosophically-driven firefighter named Tommy (Mark Wahlberg), another client of the Jaffes who’s drifted over to Vauban’s way of thinking. For a while they’re a kind of threesome, but then Tommy gets cut out of the equation. He rebounds when he couples with Dawn during a rescue mission at her home. For him (and unlike Law), her bonnet is totally cool.
Does I heart Huckabees get you emotionally? No…and yet, the more you let it in and the longer you think about it, yeah.
Wahlberg gives my favorite Huckabees performance (he’s really good as conveying that frenzied-spiritual-seeker quality), but the entire cast is fairly killer. They all do amazing stuff, and there are all kinds of fine actors (the great Richard Jenkins, for one) giving great supporting perfs.
Schwartzman has finally tied into a role as good as “Max” in Rushmore, and hail to that. Jason’s a very spirited and likable fellow. I’ve been running into him at parties and restaurants and whatnot going back to the Rushmore days.

Law is seven or eight times more intriguing here than he was in Cold Mountain . I love his unsuppressable vomiting in the Huckabees boardroom scene. There’s another bit in which he sticks his tongue out while looking in a bathroom mirror that’s oddly classic. I’m predicting right now it’ll be used for a Jude Law tribute reel when he’s in his late 60s or early 70s and being honored by the AFI or the American Cinematheque.
Tomlin’s performance is the best she’s given in years on-screen. Hoffman is mostly hilarious. Watts is tonally on-target in every scene she’s in. Huckabees allows everyone to stretch and wig out in such unusual ways it’s almost like a theatre high. It’s an unleash-your-inner-nutbag thing for everyone involved.
I might as well borrow from another WIRED graph for a wind-up…
Russell told the New York Times that I Heart Huckabees is “all an existential meditation.” You will go into this movie as one person, and come out a little less regimented, a little more free. In the final analysis any film that makes you want to find spiritual clarity or satori is, I think, a good thing. Or don’t you agree?

Buzzing

I went to the I Heart Huckabees premiere and after-party at the Grove the night before last (9.22). It happened inside a two-story retail space normally inhabited at the Grove by…I forget.
Like all parties, it got better the more everyone had to drink. There weren’t too many people, which was nice. All kinds of great food was served, most of it prepared in thematic harmony with the film.
I worked my way past the goons in the roped-off area and had friendly chats with David O. Russell, Lily Tomlin, Isabelle Huppert and Naomi Watts.

(l. to r.) Huckabees theme song composer Jon Brion, writer-director David O. Russell, unidentified brunette posing for photographers at end of Wednesday night’s Huckabees shindig

I especially enjoyed meeting songwriter-singer Jon Brion, who performed the Huckabees theme song “Knock Yourself Out” in front of the crowd before the screening began. I love this song. Hearing it made me want to badger the Searchlight publicists for a free Huckabees soundtrack. I’ve been told I should buy Brion’s CD “Meaningless.” If you’re in L.A. he performs at Largo on Friday nights.

Aspect Ratios

I asked two or three publicists at a recent press junket whether the film being promoted had been shot in Scope or widescreen (2.35 to 1) or standard Academy ratio (1.85 to 1), and nobody could answer. Two of them said words to the effect of “I’m not up on the technical side of things.” The aspect ratio of a film is pretty basic stuff. Why did I need to ask? Good question. I guess the movie was so absorbing for its inward elements that I simply didn’t notice.

Two New Columns

There’s a new front-page column starting today called “What Lies Beneath,” written by Dezhda Mountz. The focus is more or less the social-political issues that are highlighted by this or that film. It’s located just below the VERBATIM column on the lower right. Dezhda’s a good spirited writer, so please give her a read. There’s no e-mail link for her presently, but I guess we’ll fix that soon enough.

There’s also a new Hollywood Elsewhere DVD column debuting on the front page, on the left just under the navigation bar. It’s called DISCLAND: DVDs Are Crack. It’ll be up and running no later than Friday, October 1.
DISCLAND will be co-authored by myself and Hollywood Elsewhere columnist Kim Morgan on a weekly…I was going to say a weekly basis but we’ll probably bang it out as often as the passion strikes.
The deadlines and writing load will probably get overwhelming from time to time, so if anyone wants to submit a review of any upcoming or just-out disc, or if they have a think piece or investigative inquiry of any kind, send it on.

Dowd

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd during a discussion of her book, Bushworld, at L.A.’s Skirball Center on Thursday, 9.23. I arrived late and there were no seats, so I sat on the floor right in front of the stage. Dowd’s book is a brilliant Dubya dissection and well worth reading, and she’s a fascinating off-the-cuff speaker. However, she was a bit on the guarded, circumspect side when it came to probing questions from the audience. Dowd was interviewed for roughly 100 minutes by fellow Times columnist Alessandra Stanley

Sideways and Under 25s

“I have to disagree that adolescents will line up with anticipation for Sideways even if the buzz is outstanding. There is no chance teenagers and young adults will be able to relate to a wine tasting journey taken by two middle-aged men who are are coping with personal issues, etc.
“It doesn’t matter how much of a genius Paul Giamatti is — they still will not be persuaded. The majority of adolescents are not looking for a sophisticated, thoughtful, critically acclaimed film. They’re into cheap, easy-to-swallow crap.
“Hopefully the movie will be lucky and make as much as About Schmidt at the box office but that will only happen if Sideways gets substantial Oscar heat and word-of -mouth. Sideways should not rely or count on loyalty or support from the majority of the under 25 crowd.
“Since Payne’s Election was set in a high school and had teenage characters (okay, 25 year-olds pretending to be that age) in lead and supporting roles, and was conspicuously produced by MTV Films, it should have almost been a decentp-sized success at the box office. The movie regretfully turned out to be a flop. I went to see it in an almost completely empty theater on opening weekend.
“The sad reality is that if adolescents want to witness `guy rage’ on screen they’re going to go and seek out the latest Adam Sandler movie.
“For the record I can’t wait to see Sideways since I trust Alexander Payne to be immensely talented and skilled at his craft. I regard him as a truly exceptional director who consistently produces quality. From what I have read about Sideways I am sure it will be an incredible and [thing] and well worth waiting for. I’ve never been let down by Payne and I hope he this will continue.” — Laurence Price , Toronto, Canada.

Howling Man

“I have a friend who is a struggling film maker who certainly agrees with you that George Lucas is the devil incarnate, but I have a tough time agreeing with that. He’s just doing what he wants to do. I’m not saying that his recent stuff has been good, but its his dollar so he can make whatever he wants.
“The real blame has to fall on the viewing public. They’re the ones who pony up the cash to watch mind-numbing garbage like Van Helsing or The Day After Tomorrow. The fact that both Aliens vs. Predator and Resident Evil 2 opened up at number one says all that needs to be said.
“One other big point on George Lucas, I absolutely love both Empire and Raiders, and the fact that he produced those two films atones for all the other junk that he’s kicked out.
“By the way I was pretty impressed by your political analysis last week. You made me realize that Republicans and Democrats can agree on one thing — our candidates both suck! It also showed me how desperately we need a true third party in our election system.” — Jeff Horst

“Don’t think the irony of the Star Wars plot is lost on George Lucas either. He conveys this in a documentary called “Empire of Dreams” that’s included in the Star Wars Trilogy DVD set. (A one-hour version of the doc was aired on A&E before the DVDs came out, which has a two-hour cut). It has footage of Lucas ruminating on becoming the corporate empire he was trying to destroy, and a lot more.
“I guess you had to get a new George Lucas rant in on the new site (nice job, btw), but just let go of your hate. Or when Episode III: Revenge of the Sith comes out in May ’05, just run the same stuff you have up to now with a disclaimer at the top that this is a reprinting. It will save a lot of time for everyone. ” — Dave Murdock
“There is a tendency to look upon great artists the same way one looks upon one’s parents, which is that they have to be perfect. Any slight shortcoming is magnified as a horrendous flaw, and any mistep in motivation seems utterly evil.
“You can’t call George Lucas evil, though. He hasn’t done that kind of bad thing.
“Lucas’ only real mistake of late is to not bring in outside screenwriters to subdue the flaws in his more recent screenplays, thus disappointing millions of fans who expect to relive that moment of spellbinding trasfixtion with which the greeted the first Star Wars movie with every new one. But that’s not evil.
“Microsoft is evil. Their monopoly is so pervasive that word processing programs are no longer being improved through competition.
“Lucas, however, is working to expand the technology of filmmaking and share that expansion with his fellow artists. He has never tried to suppress a technological innovation, or prevented its development. You could make a case that by initiating Pixar he is responsible for the eventual death of traditional animation, at least on a feature scale, but that would be stretching things given the progress of technology outside of his control.
“It was the development of television, not Lucas, that brought forth the death of gradual roll-outs. While it took Hollywood a little bit to pick up on the trick, it has long been a staple of entertainment flim-flam that you try to fool as great a potential audience as possible before word gets out, and with network commercial buys and saturation bookings, any decent movie that receives that kind of treatment is going to get the blame for the turkeys that follow.

“‘Idiotic high concept movie formulas’ have been around since the 1910s. Any time there is a hit film, greedy movie companies try to get out their cookie cutters and profit from the scraps. They have also been dumbing movies down for just as long.
“How has Lucas possibly `maligned the idea that the making of quality movies had value in the Hollywood marketplace’? Not counting Howard the Duck and Radioland Murders, even his failures have been quality productions, and he has lent his support and reputation to numerous artists from Akira Kurosawa to B.W.L. Norton. He’s led the development of improved quality in sound systems and mixes in motion picture theaters and in home theaters, and he has hastened the development of the integration of animation and live action, opening a vast array of subject material to be tackled by the motion picture industry that has been beyond their grasp in the past, such as the outstanding Lord of the Rings trilogy.
“Nope, George Lucas’ supremely evil act was to make Star Wars in the first place, because it is such a good, wholesome, exhilirating and satisfying film that it made almost all other movies, including many of his own, seem inadequate; just as the supremely evil act parents make is to conceive the individual who then blames them for the disappointements brought on by life.” — Doug Pratt, editor, DVD Newsletter.
Wells to Pratt: “Outstanding” Lord of the Rings trilogy? You don’t have to say this stuff any more, Doug. Jackson has his Oscars and all you Rings lovers can come clean now and admit to the world what agony these films have always been to sit through. C’mon, man…you’ll feel better. Spill it.

George Butler’s Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry (ThinkFilm, opening soon) “brings to the surface a Kerry I didn’t know existed: charismatic, idealistic, eloquent. {So] who turned this brave leader in to a Stepford candidate?” writes critic B. Ruby Rich. “Activist groups like MoveOn.org could do worse than buy airtime to show Kerry’s historic testimony in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a passionate attack on failed foreign policies and warmongering. Yeah, just the kind of speech he ought to deliver now in 2004.”

There’s been a bit of a Huckabees dust-up in reaction to Sharon Waxman’s friendly-but-unflattering David O. Russell profile in last Sunday’s New York Times. The beef on the part of two Huckabees cast members I spoke to on Wednesday evening is essentially this: the dynamic between directors and actors during a shoot amounts to a special insiders-only thing with its own particular self-enclosed rules, and that it’s hard for a visiting journalist to understand this special camaraderie as fully and clearly as the filmmakers do. Hence Sharon’s overly matter-of-fact Huckabee’s set report (in the view of these actors) about Russell and his cast going through all kinds of emotional loop-dee-loops. Let’s just leave it at that.

The relentless energy coming off Michael Moore’s site (www.michaelmoore.com) is truly intoxicating right now, and is almost enough to dispel lamentable notions that Kerry has so hopelessly cocked things up that Bush has the election in the bag. Moore isn’t having any of this defeatist crap. His 9.20.04 message (“Put Away Your Hankies”) says, in part, “Enough doomsaying! Bush is a goner…IF we all just quit our whining and belly-aching and stop shaking like a bunch of nervous ninnies. Geez, this is embarrassing! The Republicans are laughing at us. Do you ever see them cry, ‘Oh, it’s all over! We’re finished! Bush can’t win! Waaaaaa!’ Hell no. It’s never over for them until the last ballot is shredded. They are never finished — they just keeping moving forward like sharks that never sleep, always pushing, pulling, kicking, blocking, lying. How do you think they’ve been able to [run the country] considering they represent only about 30% of the bvoting populace? It’s because they eat you and me and every other liberal for breakfast and then spend the rest of the day wreaking havoc on the planet.”

If only the second two-thirds of Shaun of the Dead (opening 9.24) were as good as the first third…
The geeks calling this thing a way cool horror-comedy are deluding themselves. The threat element is shit and the story tension goes south around the 35-minute mark. You can’t just say “it’s a spoof” and leave it at that because spoofs have rules. They’ve got to show the same levels of propulsion and credibility that the films they’re spoofing have, or the game falls apart.
I got into this briefly in a WIRED item, but the Shaun script (by director Edgar Wright and costar Simon Pegg) is about two London slacker-somethings in their late 20s having to contend with a sudden invasion of flesh-eating ghouls in their local neighborhood (and which is manifesting all over England, a la 28 Days Later.)
Shaun (Pegg) has fed-up-girlfriend issues and is resisting the growing-up process, and to call his fat layabout friend Ed (Nick Frost) emotionally retarded would be a form of understatement.

The funniest scene happens just as the ghoul plague has begun. Simon walks through the neighborhood on his usual run to the grocery store and doesn’t even notice what’s going on. Then he goes home, turns on the tube and surfs right past the horrific reports on the news channels.
The problem is that the zombies aren’t threatening enough. They walk and react way too slowly, so agile humans aren’t in any kind of serious peril and so the story tension suffers. The Shaun zombies are like the mummy in Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (’55). They rarely do anything that even a seven year-old would consider half-threatening.
The Shaun zombies catch and eat people on occasion, but they’re much slower and less ferocious than George Romero’s zombies in Night of the Living Dead or Dawn of the Dead.
And all you have to do is give them a hard blow to the head and they’re dead. What happened to having to penetrate the skull? The Shaun survivors use a repeat-action Winchester rifle to defend themselves at one point, but it seems silly to have only 32 shells at their disposal with 100 or more ghouls trying to get at them.

Shakedown

I’ve already mentioned how rich, flavorful and well-ordered Sideways is. It’s Alexander Payne’s best film since Election ; his most emotionally ripe and mature. It’s a candidate for Best Picture, Best Director…blah blah, I’ve said all this.
I’m getting the idea that Sideways‘ s Oscar chances are pretty fair, actually. Not just the film itself but Giamatti for Best Actor, Haden-Church for Best Supporting Actor and costar Virginia Madsen for Best Supporting Actress, et. al.
I obviously don’t know anything about films I haven’t seen, but I’m getting these queer premonitions about Oliver Stone’s Alexander and Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator. (Dan Fellman’s recent comment about Alexander (see WIRED) is the kind of thing I’m talking about. And I don’t trust Martin Scorsese with big budgets — he’s better when there’s less to paint with).

These films might be spectacular, pretty good’s or just so-so’s. It goes without saying there should be no assumptions about anything.
Taylor Hackford’s Ray is good but too long, I’ve read. Closer has been playing “a little cold,” I’ve heard, and we all know what that means when it comes to a certain brand of Academy voter. Others don’t seem to love and worship Collateral as much as me, but maybe I’m reading it wrong. And more and more people are telling me they were disappointed by The Motorcycle Diaries.
The Best Picture race may come down to Spanglish, The Motorcycle Diaries (an increasingly big maybe), Hotel Rwanda, Sideways and, depending how the election goes, Fahrenheit 9/11.
I was told last weekend that Sideways will probably take in $30 million, at best. But if word gets around in the right way, it’ll do better.
A good portion of Sideway‘s story is driven by adolescent behavior. This is catnip for under-25 crowds. My kids loved that scene in Election when Matthew Broderick throws the plastic container of Pepsi at the limousine (i.e., the one with Tracy Flick in it) and then runs when the limo driver hits the brakes. Payne gets adolescent guy-rage. He’s obviously tethered on some level.
There are three such scenes in Sideways, two of them gut-bustingly funny. They’re going to be word-of-mouth selling points when it opens. No descriptions. Just see it on 10.20.

Sipping Sideways

Fox Searchlight invited several press people up to Santa Barbara last weekend for a Sideways film junket. I accepted at the drop of a hat. I reside in a nice minimum-security prison with privileges (cable TV, music, food, evening screenings), and any time away from my work space is prime.
The deal included a suite at the Bacara hotel and spa in Goleta (about 12 minutes west of Santa Barbara, just past Isla Vista), a complimentary T1 line in the hotel room, too much food, a wine-tasting party, moonlight walks on the beach, all kinds of beautiful women everywhere, more food, and chats with Sideways writer-director Alexander Payne and costars Thomas Haden Church and Virginia Madsen.
I drove up late Saturday afternoon. About 90 minutes, give or take. I checked into the Bacara around 6 pm. Swanky, expensive, built four years ago. Spanish mission style. A series of two-story buildings sloping downhill and all of it landscaped to death. The cheapest rooms go for $400 a night. The vibe felt a bit too rich for my blood.
The drive back to Santa Barbara for the wine party felt longish. (If the Bacara were farther away it couldn’t be in Santa Barbara. It’s out there.) Publicists at the door told me I’d missed a 5 pm screening of Sideways, which nobody told me about. I’d like to catch it again soon.
Alexander Payne was there without his wife, Sideways costar Sandra Oh. I asked him why his usually longish hair was cut short. “You have to cut back the rose bush every fall,” he replied. I spoke briefly to Madsen. Paul Giamatti wasn’t there due to a family situation. I saw Church but didn’t approach.

Top to bottom: At the Bacara Hotel round tables : Sideways producer Michael London (l.) and director Alexander Payne; Thomas Haden Church (in blue shirt); Virginia Madsen; Payne again (below Church); my hotel room at the Bacara; view from the terrace

There wasn’t enough food but plenty of wine. Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling was there and friendly, as always. Marina Zenovich, who’s making a doc about Roman Polanski, was sitting at a table with producer Jasmine Kosovic (The Adventures of Sebastian Cole).
I would say a great majority of business cards you hand to people at these parties end up in the garbage can. I would say that a great majority of things people say to each other at these parties are insincere or flat-out false. But I like going to them anyway.
I wandered around the Bacara bar area when I got back. The hotel is nicely designed, but it gives off a strange feeling of segregation. I’ll bet the same vibe existed in the ruling-class-only Palatine section of Rome during the reign of Tiberius.
I’m going to run the interviews I recorded with Payne, Sideways producer Michael London, Church and Madsen in the VERBATIM section starting next week.
I’m a particular fan of Church’s performance as Jack, an actor friend of Paul Giamatti’s Miles who’s due to be married in a few days but is determined to get laid during their wine-country safari any which way he can. It’s one of those last-gasp, go-for-the-gusto-before-surrendering things. Jack is a small child, but Church gives him a kind of dignity because he takes hound-dogging very seriously.
You should have heard the journos at the table imparting their p.c. sentiments about what a despicable misogynist Jack is. Bullshit — he’s like 80% of all the engaged guys I’ve ever known or heard about. (And for what it’s worth, I’ve been lucky twice with women who were about to get married. I know that the main reason they waved me in was because they knew this was their last shot before reciting marriage vows.)

The Sideways shoot had been described by Payne as extremely pleasant. I asked Payne and London if there’s anything analogous between on-set alpha vibes and first-rate final cuts. I’m not saying everyone has to miserable during shooting in order for a film to turn out well, but creative endeavors of consequence are rarely a slap-happy thing. Distillation — compressing, honing — is not a day-at-the-beach activity.
There’s no fixed rule. Bad films have been made on happy sets and superb ones have come from sets in which everyone hated each other. I just know my guard always goes up when I hear how much fun it was to make this or that film. Nobody seemed to get what I was saying. They all said, “You don’t have to be miserable to make a good movie.” I didn’t say you had to be miserable. I said…forget it.
There was a journalist from About.com who brought up the issue of Virginia Madsen’s performance being a comeback, but he did so in a chickenshit way by remarking she’d never really been away. Madsen said thanks, smiled and corrected him. Her last big hit, she said, was 1992’s Candyman.
Madsen said her career has been up and down, but has basically been okay. She said she’s proud of her performance opposite the late James Coburn in the unreleased American Gun. And of course she’s heartened that people are talking about her Sideways performance as being award-worthy, etc.
“But I’ve already won,” she said. “Just getting a role as good as this in a film as good as this one…this will never happen again.”

Separated at Birth?

Does anyone see a vague similarity between the Fox Searchlight’s Sideways one-sheet and the cover of Kenji Hodgson and James Nevison’s wine-appreciation book, “Half a Glass: A Modern Guide to Wine” (Whitecap)?
Nevison pointed this out to me at the Sideways junket last Sunday. I don’t see how Fox’s ad department can sidestep charges that their poster is…what’s the polite term?…an homage of some kind.

The Howling Man

As with all DVD box sets, there’s an understory to the just-out, superbly-remastered Star Wars trilogy. Or an undersaga, rather.
Star Wars is an efficently made space-myth movie that still plays pretty well and which I have no problem with. (Except for Lucas’s tinkering with Greedo shooting first. Is is true that the latest version has Greedo and Han shooting simultaneously?).
The Empire Strikes Back is, as we all know, the very best Star Wars film ever made. It’s the only big-budget fantasy flick in which the characters lose at every turn and end up worse off than when they started. Every step of the way Luke, Han Solo, and Princess Leia are ducking and running for cover and trying not to get killed. That’s all they do — they never get the upper hand. Plus it’s the best-looking (i.e., most lovingly lighted) Star Wars film ever.

Return of the Jedi was a travesty, a dud….a signaling of the corruption and the banality that was evolving in Lucas’s creative soul.
Lucas, of course, was Luke Skywalker at first — a lonely-kid dreamer who marshalled his resources and went up against the empire, succeeded hugely, and wound up creating his own kingdom. But once this power was firmly in hand, Luke started to devolve into a benign, flannel-shit-wearing Darth Vader figure — a technically-obsessed enemy of anything resembling organic creativity, a toymaker rather than a filmmaker, a digital remixer and reviser ad infinitum.
It’s the story of how a good guy grew into a kind of ogre….a demonic figure, really. A demonic figure with a mild-mannered personality, hundreds of employees who think he’s terrific, and two kids he loves and raises like any deeply devoted dad.
Remember how Albert Brooks’ character said in Broadcast News that William Hurt’s character was the devil? Meaning he was a guy who was helping to bring about degradations of standards in the TV news business and in the culture at large?

Lucas was a once-interesting filmmaker who almost singlehandedly (along with Steven Spielberg) managed to infantilize the film industry (in terms of the movies the bottom-line guys were willing to finance after the success of Jaws and Star Wars), and who also helped bring about, again with Spielberg, the first-weekend blockbuster mentality.
Lucas didn’t deliberately set out to undermine the art and wonder of film, of course, but the blockbuster mentality (a) killed the idea of gradual roll-outs, (b) brought about the idiotic high-concept movie formulas of the ’80s and ’90s, (c) maligned the idea that the making of quality movies had value in the Hollywood marketplace, and (d) helped launch the idea that to succeed big you had to dumb movies down.
Is there any one person out there who’s more responsible (on a symbolic as well as literal level) for these things than Lucas? I’d like to hear arguments.

Russ Meyer, R.I.P.

“I had dinner with Russ Meyer in Glendale back in the 1980s when I was living in Los Angeles. A friend of mine from Philly knew him, and Russ wanted to meet me since he wanted to meet everyone who’d ever mentioned him in print, and I’d mentioned him in a Siskel-Ebert Calendar story I did for the L.A. Times.
“Russ lived in a sort of Swiss chalet-like A frame somewhere in, I guess, Burbank, or in the vicinity of the Hollywood sign. Inside the house was filled from top to bottom with memorabilia, including framed stories about him, nudie pix of his wives and girlfriends, and special plaques featuring photos of certain lovers with the phrase “to the precious exchange of bodily fluids” etched into them.

“Russ was a guy’s guy. We went to eat in one of those darkly lit man’s type restaurants that featured leather banquettes and steaks, and discussed — what else? — photography and women.
“But what I really loved about him was, first, he was a real WWII man, a combat
photographer who’d seen it all. And secondly, he may have been the only truly indie filmmaker in the business (William Goldman said this about him), considering that he had total creative and marketing control over his work. He was also a stylist of some note, and had a great sense of humor.
“My friend Irv thinks Meyer’s life would make a great movie: the war, the titty movies, the studio productions, the obscenity fight, the many lovers. I really hope someone out there in Hollywood sees the dramatic possibilities here.
“RIP, Russ — you were a true original.” — Lewis Beale

Topher Grace (Traffic, Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!) has delivered his first exceptionally skillful, star-level turn in a quality film. It’s on view in Dylan Kidd’s P.S. (Newmarket, 10.15). The 26 year-old Grace plays a talented young painter who becomes an object of intense romantic obsession when a 40ish Columbia University employee (Laura Linney) becomes 98% convinced he’s some kind of reincarnation of a boyfriend she had when she was 18 or 19, but who was killed in a car crash. Based on Helen Schulman’s novel, and written and performed from a woman’s emotional perspective, this is Kidd’s answer to those who thought Roger Dodger meant he was the new Neil Labute. I don’t want to say this is some kind of woman’s film; it’s not. But it’s anchored in Linney’s performance, and she visits some amazing places in this thing.