I need to walk back last night’s “Low Renters” rant. A good portion of the people I saw on the streets on Washington, D.C. alarmed…okay, bothered me by way of their appearance, manner, etc. Some looked related to the hillbillies in Deliverance. Naturally I was saying to myself, “What is this?” But all the cool, educated, well-groomed, tastefully dressed people came out for today’s Restore Sanity rally. I guess they hide in their homes and apartments unless otherwise motivated.
I must have spoken with a good 30 or 35 people at the rally over the last six or seven hours, and each one was cool, agreeable, nice to chat with, witty, good-humored and creme de la creme-ish. Parents, couples, singles, GW students, nutters, septugenarians, etc. I was proud to participate alongside them. “I don’t know what this really actually amounts to, but it feels good to be here,” I told myself, “and that’s in large part due to the mood and the vibe of a very mellow and likable and relentlessly polite group of people.” Group! More like…what, 200,000?
So I guess I should’ve counted to ten before flying off the handle last night, but if you’d been with me roaming around Dupont Circle and up and down K Street you’d understand where I was coming from.
The problem, of course, with the forthcoming production of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is that while Tim Burton is producing (a good thing), the director is Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted). I don’t have to explain why if you’ve seen Wanted. Bekmambetov’s creative DNA is coarse, to put it mildly. His instincts are to go extreme comic-book steroid. He’s going to turn early 1860s Washington into a lurid pulp thing. It’s going to be bad, bad, worse than bad.
The way to do this film right is to shoot it in the style of John Ford‘s Young Mr. Lincoln. Well, almost. But you have to believe, really believe, in Honest Abe’s determination to exterminate vampires. You know…like a deceptively sly jack-legged Illinois attorney would. A joke-telling guy with a pipey voice, but with plenty of sharp stakes in his satchel and possessed of a steely resolve.
“There she was, thrown to the pavement by a Republican in a checkered shirt. Another Republican thrusts his foot in between her legs and presses down with all his weight to pin her to the curb. Then a Republican leader comes over and viciously stomps on her head with his foot. You hear her glasses crunch under the pressure. Holding her head down with his foot, he applies more force so she can’t move. Her skull and brain are now suffering a concussion.
“The young woman’s name is Lauren Valle, but she is really all of us. For come this Tuesday, the right wing — and the wealthy who back them — plan to take their collective boot and bring it down hard on not just the head of Barack Obama but on the heads of everyone they simply don’t like.
“Teachers union? The boot!
“Muslim-looking people? The boot!
“Thinking of retiring soon? The boot!
“Living in a house you can no longer afford? The boot!
Doing a bit better with your minimum wage? The boot!
“Stem cell research, the bullet train, reversing global warming? Ha! The boot for all of you!
“What? You like your kids being covered by your health plan ’til they’re 26? The boot for them and the boot for you!
“In love with someone of your own gender? A double boot up the ass for every single one of you sick SOBs!
“Hoping there’s a few jobs left here in the U.S. when you graduate? How ’bout just a nice boot to your head instead?
“And most importantly, the last boot is saved for the black man who probably wasn’t born here, definitely isn’t a Christian and possibly might be the Antichrist sent here to oversee the destruction of our very way of life. A boot to your head, Obama-devil!
“Yes, one big boot is poised to stomp out whatever hopey-changey thing we might have had two years ago and secure this country in the hands of the oligarchs and the culture police.
“And if they win on Tuesday, they plan to show no mercy. They will not speak of bipartisanship or olive branches or tolerate any filibuster threats. They will come in and do the job with a mandate they’ll perceive the electorate will have given them. They will not fart around for two years like the Democrats did. They will not ‘search for compromise” or ‘find middle ground.’ They will not meet you halfway on the playing field. They know that touchdowns aren’t scored at the 50-yard line. Unlike our guys, they’re not stupid or spineless.
“Make no mistake about it, my friends. A perfect storm has gathered of racists, homophobes, corporatists and born-agains, and they are on fire. Two years of a black man who secretly holds socialist beliefs being the boss of them is more than they can stomach. They’ve been sick to death since the night of 11/04/08 and they are ready to purge. They won’t need a rope and tree this time to effect the change they seek (why bother when a nice shoe on another’s skull will do just fine, thank you).
“They simply need to get their base to the polls (done), convince enough people Obama is responsible for the fact they don’t have a job or a secure home (done), and then hope enough of us Obama-voters are so frustrated, disappointed and downright mad at the Dems (done) that we’ll either stay home Tuesday or, if we vote, we won’t be carpooling with 10 others to the polls.
“Done? Or not?
“These Republicans mean business. Their boots are all shined and ready. But they’ve got one huge problem:
“The majority of Americans don’t agree with them.
“The majority want the troops home. The majority want true universal health coverage. The majority want the thievery on Wall Street to be stopped. The majority believe that global warming is happening, that social security shouldn’t be privatized and that unions are a good thing.
“Too bad the majority party has done precious little to bring about the change for which the majority voted. Yes, change takes time. But try telling that to someone who hasn’t worked in two years. Or who hears the knock of the foreclosure sheriff at the door. The booted-up minority knows how to make hay in a situation like this. All they need is us, the disappointed, dismayed, disgusted us.
“What say you? Stay home and punish the weak-kneed, sell-out Democrats? Or spend every free moment you have between now and Tuesday trying to protect what little progress has been made so we can live to fight another day (even if it is with ‘allies’ like a Democratic Party that will more than likely still not get the message of what they need to do–and has, in fact, spent much of the past two years giving progressives the boot)? Perhaps our job, post-election, is to provide a gentle but swift boot in the bee-hind of the party whose mascot is an ass.
“Right now, we’ve got 72 hours. Seems like enough.” — Michael Moore.
I’ve been walking around Washington, D.C. for the last three and 1/2 hours, mostly near the Dupont Circle area and along K Street and N Street and that general thing, and I’m just not feeling that old pin-striped, power-elite, uptown-and-connected vibration that I recall from my visit here in ’94. There are too many tourist-schlub types, and most of them are poorly-dressed with ordinary faces and (I’ll bet) not all that much to say. It doesn’t feel right. Being here has made me want to fly to Vienna or Paris.
Friday, 10.29, 8:25 pm.
Friday, 10.29, 7:10 pm.
There used to be a kind of hush all over Washington — a vibe that told you “like it or not, this is where the power is, and where the best minds and the great statesmen and the slickest hustlers and wheeler-dealers live and operate.” Now the vibe says, “Haw! Yo, dude, three Blue Moons and two Jack Daniels neat!”
This is Washington D.C. — a place that used to stand for something. Now it looks like a town that Senator John Blutarsky took over and remade in his own image. America has largely become a nation of mallbilly pudge-bottoms and commoners with meager educations, and dressed in ugly-ass T-shirts and man-shorts and bad pigtails and grotesque Foot Locker cross-training shoes.
A barrel-chested guy got out of a taxi on Pennsvlvania Avenue and he looked like Akim Tamiroff with a Van Dyke beard, and the woman with him looked like a Las Vegas slut with too much make-up. Even the storied Tabard Inn felt just a tiny bit downmarketed. Pudgy middle-aged people were hanging out in the bar and going “blah, blah, blah, blah” — they looked and sounded like real-estate agents from Trenton.
If you’re not “in” with the connected government crowd (like me), Washington, D.C. is basically a hick town with large boulevards and big government buildings and tens of thousands of beefy-bodied, T-shirt-wearing, under-dressed dorks walking around and slurping beers. It’s not cool. It’s turned into Fairfax, Virginia or…whatever, Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Where’s the Washington of lore and legend? If the ghost of Jack Kennedy was to return here for one day in the manner of Billy Bigelow, he would say, “This is what America has come to? Get me out of here. I want to be dead again.”
You can’t be rude and coarsely sexual with women. It’s vulgar and insensitive, and it never works. But I dearly loved — love — this moment. Lightning usually strikes only once, but filmmakers haven’t even tried to make this sort of guy — raunchy, paunchy, borderline infantile but civilized — into a cliche.
We reached the outskirts of Baltimore (spiritual home of John Waters, Barry Levinson and The Wire) around 5 pm, after leaving midtown Manhattan around 1:13 pm. The Megabus schedule pledged a four-hour, 30-minute journey, or an approximate 5:30 pm arrival in Washington, D.C. It’s now 5:40 pm, traffic on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway is crawling in fits and starts, and we’re looking at 40 to 45 minutes more, bare minimum.
“Cathy I’m lost I said though I knew she was sleeping / I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why / Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike / They’ve all come to look for America.”
London Boulevard, director-writer William Monahan‘s romantic crime drama with Colin Farrell and Keira Knightley costarring, finally has a trailer. I’ve been writing about this groaning wounded bear of a film for months, tracking how it went from being a high-expectation British noir (based on Monahan’s exalted Departed rep + his very good screenplay) to a “what happened?” disappointment looking for a way out of hell.
London Boulevard will presumably be released stateside sometime next spring, or perhaps during the dumping ground of late August, by FilmDistrict, a “multi-faceted acquisition, distribution, production, and financing company” co-run by GK Films chief Graham King, former Apparition leader Bob Berney and GK Films president Peter Schlessel.
On 8.22 I ventured a guess “that Monahan’s superb screenwriting talent hasn’t fully translated over to directing, and that his inexperience combined with anal tendencies caused problems on the set (or so says a London source), and that reactions to the unfinished film were such that extra shooting was deemed necessary (ditto), and that King has decided to pull the plug on a fall awards-campaign release and punt instead for 2011. Again, some reporting but I’m mainly guessing.”
London Boulevard is a London-based crime drama about an ex-con named Mitchell (Colin Farrell), just out of the slammer, who falls in love with Charlotte (Keira Knightley), an actress who’s fallen into a odd kind of career slumber, while running afoul of some gangster guys (Eddie Marsan or Ray Winstone or both). Costars include David Thewlis, Anna Friel, Ophelia Lovibond, Ben Chaplin, Sanjeev Baskhar and Jamie Campbell Bower.
“We’re in hell, gentlemen…that’s where we are. In hell.”
Yesterday I wondered aloud why a screening of Peter Weir‘s The Way Back had happened in Los Angeles on Tuesday, 10.216, but no options to see it in NYC had been offered by the film’s p.r. reps. Well, it turns out that the screening was arranged independently by Deadline‘s Pete Hammond for his KCET Cinema Series.
“It wasn’t set up by 42 West as an official screening but directly with the producers by me,” Hammond explains. “In fact the publicists wanted it to be shown much later [in the season] but it was the only date I had available as my series is way overbooked and the producers were terrific in letting me make it happen so early since the film doesn’t even open for Oscar consideration until Dec. 29th.
“In fact when I initially set it up that opening date wasn’t even set and it was still expected to open wide Jan. 21st. It played extremely well for my group, and we had exec producer and writer Keith Clarke, producer Joni Levin, exec producer John Ptak and star Ed Harris for the q & a.”
So how’s the film?
“It was second time I’d seen it,” Hammond replies. “I think it’s a great epic in the David Lean tradition, the kind they don’t make anymore. Weir did a remarkable job considering it was made on an indie budget ($29 million) which is amazing for a film of this scope and ambition. Stunning and challenging. fine Russell Boyd cinematography and a great, spare score too.”
