Jeffrey Wells

And so begins November 2nd, almost certain to be one of the greatest television-watching days in the history of the medium, and certainly among the most dramatic in the history of the country.

A thought recurs whenever I watch a Mike Leigh film, as I did Monday night (11.1) when I sat through Leigh’s latest, the touchingly performed and grimly dutiful Vera Drake. It is a realization that watching a Leigh film is like sitting in a dentist’s chair and having my teeth drilled. But there is some comfort in this, for as I sit and suffer I realize I am watching a thing of quality, and that there is considerable truth being rendered within. But I also thank God my life isn’t as drab or dreary as the ones dramatized in Leigh’s films, and that the colors in my environment aren’t so relentlessly gray and milky and blue-ish, and that the middle-aged faces I say hello to aren’t as homely and doughy and beset with such timidity, uncertainty and scared-church-mouse resignation. I respect Leigh, he’s a first-rate artist, and I would rather be worm food than be trapped in a real-life facsimile of one of his films.

A very good performance in a so-so or mediocre film usually means there’s not much hope of getting Oscar-nominated….right? But this will not be the situation, apparently, when it comes to Annette Bening’s performance in Being Julia. The movie is unquestionably second-tier, but Bening is spirited, funny and occasionally touching as a 40ish grand dame of the British theatre in the late 1930s going through a mid-life crisis of the heart. And for whatever reason(s) she’s likely to become the recipient of this year’s best-liked-local-girl sentiment, and is therefore a near-lock for a Best Actress nomination.

Entertainment Weekly editors can shill for Finding Neverland‘s Johnny Depp all they want, but he’s not going to be among the five nominees for the ’04 Best Actor Oscar….the resistance to his vaguely maddening performance is stronger than they realize. And Jim Carrey won’t make the cut either for his above-average-but-still-peculiar performance in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And neither will Sean Penn for playing a pathetic wack-jobber in The Assassination of Richard Nixon. Jim Caviezel was fairly riveting as a bloody-pulp Messiah in The Passion of the Christ, but director Mel Gibson didn’t give this talented actor enough to do. The talk supporting Jeff Bridges in The Door in the Floor subsided a long time ago, and a lot of people are going to be flabbergasted if Kevin Spacey gets nominated for Beyond the Sea.

Not too long ago Lions Gate was, I’m told, seriously thinking about releasing the R-rated horror flick Saw, a decent-enough entry that is nonetheless regarded in most circles as not quite the equal of The Ring, straight to video. But then former Revolution Studios marketing exec John Hegeman was hired as Lions Gate’s president of worldwide marketing in mid-August, and one of his first moves was to organize some Saw test screenings that encouraged him tremendously. He managed to convince his Lions Gate brethren that Saw would perform strongly in theatres, and it was saved from the grip of video. Last weekend Saw came in third with an $18.3 million haul, averaging $7,895 in 2,315 theaters. So hooray for Hegeman….right?

And by the way (and this is not a bracingly fresh observation), but does Hegeman’s departure from Revolution Studios two and a half months ago on top of Revolution marketing head Terry Curtin’s recent decision to leave Revolution early next year for a gig at Intralink Film Graphic Design…do these see-ya’s “mean” anything? Couple this with the marginal interest in Revolution topper Joe Roth’s latest stab at directing, Christmas with the Kranks (Columbia, 11.24), and I’m not the only one, trust me, to observe lately that the Revolution engine doesn’t seem to be cranking at full throttle.

Last weekend’s Zogby cell-phone poll of 18 to 29 year-old voters has Kerry way ahead of Bush. The degree to which the GenY-GenXers get out there and vote on Tuesday is what will finally win it for Kerry…or not. If they do this in sufficient numbers, the under-29’s will always have something to be proud of. But if they follow previous election patterns and sit on their ass in front of the tube and don’t show up in sufficient numbers, they will be known Wednesday morning as the Generation of Shame.

So what could have led Roger Michel, the obviously bright and perceptive director of Enduring Love, to take Ian McEwan’s 1998 novel about a bizarre romantic obsession and turn it into a “jokeless gloomarama?” wonders New Yorker critic Anthony Lane. “The ideas behind Enduring Love may be fascinating, but they don’t play, they sulk, and so it was during another annoying rant from Jed the Pest [i.e., Rhys Ifans’ thoroughly revolting stalker character] that I leaned over to the friend beside me and whispered, ‘All I really, really want at this moment, in the whole world, is to be watching Dodgeball.”

In Tom Wolfe’s scheme of things, reports a New York Times Magazine profile (11.31), social behavior is almost always determined by status consciousness — an instinct to preserve your place in the social pecking order. Pretty much all human endeavor “has to do with status,” says the 74 year-old author of “I Am Charlotte Simmons” (excerpted in Rolling Stone, in book stores November 9). “Or STATE-us, which is the way you say it if you want more status.” Our status awareness is so fundamental, Wolfe says, that “there may even be a specific place in the brain that creates it,” the article relates. “Status is neurological, in other words…people aren’t so much interested in scaling the social ladder as in clinging to their own, hard-earned rung.” For what it’s worth, I can say with some authority that Wolfe’s theory is observable in Los Angeles entertainment journalist circles.

Two days before the election, and there’s a definite downshift thing going on. Can you feel it? Whatever’s going to happen is going to happen, and that’s that. (Save for the last-minute lurches of the fence-sitters, of course…but they’ll never know who they are or what they really believe.) A lot of readers are telling me they’re sick of the whole thing and can’t wait, etc. I for one am ready and willing to get back into all-movies, all-the-time…unless there’s a Florida-style recount debacle-muddle of some kind. It’s clearly time to get our priorities straight and ask when exactly will the Farrelly’s make their Three Stooges movie? And what happened to that Russell Crowe-as-Moe thing?

Follow-up to my 10.27 item (see below): Wired magazine made the same call I did about not capitalizng the words “internet” or “web” two months ago. Is this clearly understood? I hope so. “Effective with this sentence, Wired News will no longer capitalize the ‘I’ in internet,” editor Tony Long wrote on 8.16. “At the same time, Web becomes web and Net becomes net. True believers are fond of capitalizing words, whether they be marketers or political junkies or, in this case, techies. If It’s Capitalized, It Must Be Important. [But] the simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words. Actually, there never was.”

An anonymous “Black Man, Husband, Father, Son, Actor, Producer, Director, Poet, Warrior,” et. al. who wrote in to Movie City News a day or so ago says he’s sick of a lot things in movies today, with all-around mediocrity among the offenders. One things that stick in his craw is Halle Berry’s role in Monster’s Ball,” a single mother who falls for the great white racist white man WHO PUT HER HUSBAND AND FATHER OF HER CHILD TO DEATH.” Okay, except Billy Bob Thornton’s death-row prison guard character (i.e., Berry’s love interest) isn’t a “great racist white man” — he’s a middle-aged cog in that great racist white-man machine/mentality who slowly divests himself of that ugliness and emotionally comes into his own, partly because he can’t stomach the pain of having driven his son to suicide, but largely and more simply because he’s fallen in love with Berry and wants/needs to redeem himself in God’s eyes through his feelings for her.