Rahm Emanuel said this morning that Rep. Joe Barton‘s “shakedown” comment wasn’t a gaffe. Well, actually it was if you define “gaffe” as something you actually think (and that others like you actually think) but which you’re not supposed to say in front of a microphone.

Out of the blue, Ken Russell‘s controversial The Devils (1971), which Warner Home Video has remastered but refuses to issue on DVD for reasons no one can quite figure, has suddenly turned up on iTunes. This isn’t the full-boat, naked-nun, 111-minute version that played at the IFC Center on 1.25.10, and not the truncated 103-minute version either — it runs 108 minutes and 11 seconds.

And it looks awfully nice — crisp and painterly with that fresh-from-the-lab sheen. It hasn’t looked this spotless and vibrant since it first opened 39 years ago. And in 2.35 to 1, of course. It’s really quite amazing. It’s sitting on my iPhone as we speak. Not quite the format that I would have chosen — you can’t really savor some of the wide-angle compositions, which are quite detailed and contain information that is just too granular and microscopic when seen on such a small screen — but it’s better than nothing. Maybe a DVD will happen down the road.

It was probably remastered for that Warner Home Video DVD that was announced in early 2008 but reversed soon after. The Devils has always been a bit of a hot potato because of its blending of religious symbolism and iconography with scenes of sexual hysteria. It’s a highly intelligent, superbly acted, exquisitely designed historical drama but also one of the most vivid and super-creepy depictions of political evil and religious perversity ever released by a major studio.

So some WHV executive probably suggested in a meeting, “Hey, I know…let’s send it to iTunes! That way we don’t have to deal with packaging and duplication costs and…you know, we can sort of keep it under the counter so to speak as far as reactions from the religious right might be concerned.”

Here’s a 3.29.10 article I wrote about the confusing (or perplexing) Warner Home Video Devils DVD situation. And here’s a 5.26.10 article on the same subject by Adam Balz on Not Coming To A Theatre Near You.

An honorable guy named Sergio wrote about this today on his blog Shadow and Act.

I’m not one to talk given my shameless pluggings of my sons’ talents, but with all those critics out of work it’s nice to see that Cody Gifford, the son of Kathie Lee Gifford, will be doing movie reviews every Friday this summer during TODAY’s fourth hour. “Cody is currently studying film in college and wants to direct movies after he graduates,” the website copy says. “The TV reviews are part of his summer internship at TODAY.”

I think I’m done with war documentaries that make a point of not offering any sort of opinion about anything — no history or context, no political point of view, just “this is war, war is hell, taste it.” Well, I’m sick of that shit after seeing Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger‘s Restrepo, a bravely captured, technically first-rate documentary about a year under fire in Afghanistan’s Korangal Valley, a.k.a., “the valley of death.”

There’s no question whatsover that this movie lies through omission about what’s really going on in Afghanistan in the broader, bigger-picture sense. I found myself becoming more and more angry about this after catching Restrepo two nights ago at the Walter Reade theatre, and especially after doing some homework.

Hetherington and Junger spent a little more than a year (May 2007 to July 2008) with several U.S. soldiers in that besieged neck of the woods. They focused mainly on the grunts’ hilltop camp called Restrepo (pronounced res-TREP-o and named for a medic in their unit who’d been killed). The film does a clean and competent job of portraying their endless firefights with Taliban forces and their community dealings with the locals, and it acquaints us with various members of the hilltop platoon — their faces, lives, impressions — in what seems like a frank and forthright manner.

Except the kind of frankness that Restrepo is offering is, to put it mildly, selective. For realism’s sake Restrepo chooses to isolate its audience inside the insular operational mentality of the grunts — “get it done,” “fill up more sandbags,” “ours not to reason why” and so on. In so doing it misleads and distorts in a way that any fair-minded person would and should find infuriating. Is there any other way to describe a decision to keep viewers ignorant about any broader considerations — anything factual or looming in a political/tactical/situational sense — that might impact the fate of the subjects, or their mission?

Imagine a documentary about the day-to-day life of Steve Schmidt, John McCain‘s ’08 presidential campaign manager, that ignores how the campaign is going and instead focuses on Schmidt’s relationship with his family and his dentist and his kids’ homework and his visits to a local cafe and his dealings with the guy who mows the lawn once a week. What would you call that approach? Thorough? Honest?

Rest assured that if I was one of those Korangal troops I would ask a shit-load of questions about the general game plan, as in what the fuck are we doing there and how the hell do we ever get out? But nobody wants to go there, least of all Hetherington and Junger, and so Restrepo is just about cigarettes and weapons and wrestling matches and firefights and sandbags and a cow that got stuck in some barbed wire and had to be killed, and then had to be paid for in order to chill down the locals.

I’m of the view that the Afghanistan War is pure quicksand, and that we can’t help to prevail (i.e., defeat the Taliban or at least reduce them to insignificance) because we’re foreign invaders and sooner or later all invaders are out-lasted by the natives, and that natural organisms will infect and weaken them, and as a result they’ll eventually pack up and go home. Ask H.G. Wells or Ho Chi Minh.

We’re not stopping another 9/11 from happening by fighting there. We’re just fighting a series of skirmishes and offensives that will continue for years to come, perhaps even decades, and which can’t hope to lead to “victory.” It would be great if the Taliban could be finally defeated, sure, but it’s not going to happen and any military or intelligence person who claims otherwise is dreaming. The bottom line is that (a) we can’t win and (b) there’s no way out other than just quitting.

Quitting is un-American, you say? Shameful, unthinkable, cowardly? Well, two months ago U.S. forces up and quit the whole Korangal Valley offensive. That’s right — they shined it. The lives of 42 Americans who died fighting there over the last four years? Water under the bridge, U.S commanders decided. Better to cut bait than waste more lives.

(l.) Sebastian Junger, (r.) Tim Hetherington during filming.

In fact the general thinking (as expressed in this 4.16 N.Y. Times story) is that U.S. troops’ presence in the valley may have actually made matters worse by creating Taliban sympathies among once-neutral Korangalis.” Or so it says in the Times story as well as this Wikipedia summary.

This massive fact has been ignored by Restrepo — they could have easily added a tagline in the closing credits — and was not mentioned by Hetherington during the post-screening q & a.

I asked Hetherington if he could offer his civilian-observer, non-military perspective about whether he could foresee any circumstance that might allow U.S. commanders to decide, as they’ve done in the case of the Korangal Valley, that U.S. efforts to defeat the Taliban simply aren’t working and that it’s time to just pack it in. Hetherington got my drift, but he ignored it and blathered on about how the Afghanistan situation is different from Vietnam in the ’60s.

Hetherington has been a war photographer for years, and guys like him are basically action junkies — let’s face it. He seems almost invested in the Afghanistan conflict, perversely, because it provided him with a year’s worth of adrenaline rushes as well as the opportunity to create a noteworthy film and contribute great pics to Vanity Fair. In any case he’s apparently determined to follow the script set out by The Hurt Locker — i.e., our film isn’t preaching, not taking a stand, just showing how it is for the troops, etc.

(l.) Hetherington, Rachel Reid during Friday night’s q & a at Walter Reade theatre.

“What I’m asking,” I repeated, “is if there’s any way out of this conflict, or are we going to be there…you know, five or ten more years or indefinitely or what?” Rachel Reid, an Afghanistan researcher for Human Rights Watch who was sitting next to Hetherington, said that U.S. allies were getting a little fidgety and that the U.S. economy was impacting the situation and other generic blah-blah stuff.

Restrepo doesn’t tell you what’s going on and Hetherington and Reid weren’t in the mood, so consider the following:

A 12.22.09 CNN story by Peter Bergen reported that “a December 22 briefing, prepared by the top U.S. intelligence official in Afghanistan and obtained by CNN, concludes that the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan is increasingly effective.

“The briefing, which warns that the ‘situation is serious,’ was prepared by Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn last month. His assessment is that the Taliban’s ‘organizational capabilities and operational reach are qualitatively and geographically expanding” and the group is capable of much greater frequency of attacks and varied locations of attacks.

“According to the unclassified briefing, the insurgency can now sustain itself indefinitely because of three factors: (a) The increased availability of bomb-making technology and material; (b) The Taliban’s access to two major funding streams, one from the opium trade and the other from overseas donations from Muslim countries, which reach the Taliban by courier or through a system of informal banks known as ‘hawalas’ that operate across much of the Islamic world; and (c) the Taliban’s continuing ability to recruit foot soldiers based on the perception that they ‘retain the religious high-ground,’ and factors such as poverty and tribal friction.

This morning N.Y. Times columnist Frank Rich reminded that Gen. Stanley McChrystal “is calling the much-heralded test case for administration counterinsurgency policy — the de-Talibanization and stabilization of the Marja district — ‘a bleeding ulcer.’ And that, relatively speaking, is the good news from this war.”

That quote came from a 5.24.10 McClatchy story by Dion Nissenbaum that read as follows:

“U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top allied military commander in Afghanistan, sat gazing at maps of Marjah as a Marine battalion commander asked him for more time to oust Taliban fighters from a longtime stronghold in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand province.

“‘You’ve got to be patient,’ Lt. Col. Brian Christmas told McChrystal. ‘We’ve only been here 90 days.’

“‘How many days do you think we have before we run out of support by the international community?’ McChrystal replied.

A charged silence settled in the stuffy, crowded chapel tent at the Marine base in the Marjah district.

“‘I can’t tell you, sir,’ the tall, towheaded, Fort Bragg, N.C., native finally answered.

“‘I’m telling you,’ McChrystal said. ‘We don’t have as many days as we’d like.'”

“It’s only been a couple of weeks since Nikki [Finke] last threatened to sue me, using the full might of Jay Penske‘s attorneys,” David Poland wrote three days ago (6.17). “Unfortunately, what I tweeted about her was factually accurate (as every factual statement that I have ever written about her has been), so her claim was limited to the notion that she is not a public person and therefore I was… well, I don’t even know what legal leg she was pretending to stand on.

“I don’t actually expect as much as a call from the mighty Mail.com attorneys, explaining how she made them call and they know they don’t have a case, and would I please try not to anger her again so they don’t have to take her calls. That’s how Village Voice Media handled her rages against me and others who didn’t care about her threats for years. It’s how most people seem to handle Nikki when they aren’t using her to shill…’just make it go away!!!!’

“So I don’t care much for Nikki or her playground games. And I disagree with Joe [Carnahan] that no one knows her east of Bundy. Old media is also obsessed with a gossip who has so many people willing to go along with her rage. They respect the fact that she got money from someone, and they don’t really pay much attention to how she operates. They just tend to shrug and talk about the results as though there is no cost for indulging her. As is so often the norm in show business, the costs are deferred, to be paid by the next administration(s)…just so long as she’s not shitting on their carpet.”

Does anyone else besides Poland regularly slap Finke around like this?

I tried to write something a couple of days ago about the passing of director Ronald Neame, but it wouldn’t come. Not with the right tone of respect and regret, I mean. Because, frankly, his films persuaded me long ago that Neame was at best a mediocre talent. I hear his name and I think “middling,” “congenial,” “status-quo lazy.”

And yet he nearly lived to be 100 while at the same time drinking like a fish, and for that he has my respect. Not that I’d consider following in his footsteps.

I’m referring to a 2006 interview in which Neame said that the secret to his longevity is “two large vodkas at lunchtime and three large scotches in the evening. All my doctors have said to me, ‘Ronnie, if you would drink less, you’d live a lot longer.’ But they’re all dead, and I’m still here at 95.”

Neame’s favorable rep rests upon his having made two moderately respectable films with Alec Guiness, The Horse’s Mouth and Tunes of Glory, along with the likably so-so-ish The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie with Maggie Smith .

In my view those films were negatively counter-balanced and then some by The Poseidon Adventure — a rank whore job — as well as Gambit, Mr. Moses, Meteor, Prudence and Pill, Hopscotch, First Monday in October and all the rest.

Why did Jonah Hex die such a humiliating death this weekend? My guess is that nobody wanted to hang for 100 minutes with a hero whose face has been torn up this badly. It wasn’t the lousy reviews — people pay to see crappy movies all the time. And you can’t blame Josh Brolin — he just showed up and did the work.

How bad was the Hex debut? Opening yesterday on 2825 screens, it took in a lousy $1,955,000 for a per-screen average of $692. If it makes it to $5.5 million by Sunday night it will have an average of about $1982. That’s bad, but many other films (as this chart shows) have performed much worse.

Was this the worst opening ever for a film based on a comic book?

Noting that Ryan Murphy‘s Eat Pray Love is based on the chick-lit memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert, Awards Daily‘s Ryan Adams advised yesterday that “it doesn’t make you a girl if you think it looks charming as hell.” Well, it actually kinda does. If you’re panting to see this you’re female, a travel nut (like myself) or a guy who relates to female perspectives in this or that way.

I’ll be seeing Eat, Pray, Love for the exquisite scenery and the back-up performances (from James Franco, Viola Davis, Billy Crudup, Richard Jenkins and Javier Bardem). But few real men will pay to see it on their own — let’s be honest.

Plus I wonder why it’s opening on 8.13. I suppose it dates me to say that a mid-August opening feels like a little bit of an “uh-oh.” But it’s not. I should wake up and get with the new thinking about August. What is that, by the way? In the ’90s mid-to-late August was seen as a dumping ground, and opening a major film on 8.13 or 8.20 was like throwing in the towel. It was like saying “we’re dead and we know it.” No longer!

Yesterday Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone riffed on Gregg Kilday‘s 5.18 Hollywood Reporter piece about how the 2010 Oscar field is shaping up at the half-year mark. So premise- and structure-wise I’m going to tee off on them , but with thoughts and suggestions of my own. I can pretty much do anything I want within the bounds of reason and rationality.

The best 2010 films I’ve seen thus far for their own merits (i.e., forget the awards race) are Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Biutiful (Cannes), Doug Liman‘s Fair Game (Cannes), Olivier Assayas‘ Carlos (Cannes), Aaron Schneider‘s Get Low, Noah Baumbach‘s Greenberg, Roman Polanski‘s The Ghost Writer and Philipp Stolzl‘s North Face.

The best documentaries I’ve seen so far are Charles Ferguson‘s Inside Job (Cannes); Kate Davis and David Heilbroner‘s Stonewall Uprising; Vikram Jayanti‘s The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector; Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington‘s Restrepo; and Don Argott‘s Art of the Steal.

The leading Best Picture Oscar candidates at this stage appear to be Inception, Toy Story 3, Fair Game, Tree of Life, Biutiful, The Social Network, Get Low, Hereafter, True Grit and maybe London Boulevard. If there was justice and fairness in the universe Greenberg and The Ghost Writer would be likely nominees also, but of course they won’t be.

Stone put her Best Picture contenders into certain categories that I’ll adhere to also.

ALREADY SEEN:

Toy Story 3: I don’t care how good it is or how much money it makes or how many people say it deserves to be Best Picture nominated. (Which it may well be.) In the final analysis it’s a “Mexican” animated feature that needs to stay on its side of the Rio Grande, and there’s nothing the least bit wrong with that. Actual Mexican films and filmmakers (Bunuel, Inarritu, Cuaron, Del Toro) are as good as cinema gets, in my view, and animated features, in turn, also have their own distinctions and their own realm to maintain.

Shutter Island: Forget it.

Winter’s Bone: The award potential here is for Jennifer Lawrence in the Best Actress category.

Fair Game: “A stirring, suspenseful and immensely satisfying adult drama, brilliantly directed by Doug Liman and acted by Sean Penn and Naomi Watts,” I wrote in Cannes. “The complexity and intelligence brought to bear upon the story of Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame vs. the Bush administration — a tale of courage, cowardice, betrayal and bureaucratic denial all wrapped up into one — still came as a surprise. I really and truly wasn’t expecting it to be quite this deft and assured. It seems to me like a revival of the spirit of the paranoid Alan Pukula of the ’70s with governmental-spook flavorings that harken back to Costa-Gavras and John LeCarre (or, more particularly, the British TV adaptation of Smiley’s People). This is Liman’s best film by far, and a Best Picture nomination waiting to happen.”

Wall Street 2: Not a chance. The Fox guys themselves will tell you it’s just a movie and not an awards contender. No shame in that. (Opening 9.24)

Blue Valentine: Deserves a Best Hairdressing Oscar for the way it simulates baldness in Ryan Gosling‘s character when he’s “older.” Acting-class acting by Gosling and Michelle Williams will gather support. It’s a very cool Cassevetes-type personal pic, well directed by Derek Cianfrance, that drove me up the wall when I saw it in Sundance. (Weinstein Co., 12.31.)

Another Year: Missed Mike Leigh‘s film in Cannes. Heard it was good but a bit slow and boring, even. But Leigh always knows what he’s doing. No comment beyond that.

The Kids Are All Right: Stone says it’s a “maybe” in terms of Best Picture contention. I’m here to tell you this film has no chance in that regard. I know what Best Picture contenders walk and talk and sound like, and I’m sorry but this one, as well-liked as it is, just doesn’t have it. (Opening 7.7.)

Biutiful: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s film “is a sad and deeply touching hard-knocks, lower-depths drama in the tradition (or along the lines, even) of Roberto Rosselini‘s Open City or Vittorio DeSica‘s The Bicycle Thief,” I wrote in Cannes. “It’s about love and caring and continuity and carrying on among those who have it toughest, and dealing with guilt and tradition and the approaching of death and all the rest of the stuff that we all carry on our backs. Every actor is exactly right and spot-on in this film, but Javier Bardem gives a truly magnificent performance in the title role of an illegal migrant labor and street-vendor manager-facilitator.”

PICS WITH MOST PROMISE, SIGHT UNSEEN:

Inception: Definitely Best Picture material, partly for what it may be and partly as a payback for the Dark Knight Best Picture snub. (Opening 7.16)

The Social Network: Definite Best Picture possibility….maybe. Or not. You can obviously only tell so much from a script. But the theme is strong, and the pedigree of everyone involved is top-of-the-line. (Opening 10.1)

Secretariat: Period horse-racing drama starring Diane Lane from director Randall Wallace. Could be fine on its own terms, but no chance on awards circuit. (Opening 10.8)

Hereafter: Word around Peter Morgan‘s script, which deals with after-vibes and possible communions with death, has been a bit soft. Clint Eastwood directing, Matt Damon and Bryce Dallas Howard costarring. Nobody knows anything. (Opening 10.22)

Morning Glory: I don’t know anything. (Opening 11.12)

Love and Other Drugs: Definite likelihood for a Best Actress nomination for Anne Hathaway as a Parkinson’s disease sufferer. She and Jake Gyllenhaal play lovers in this Pittsburgh-set period drama (set in the ’90s) about the pharmaceutical industry. (Opening 11.14)

Next Three Days: Doesn’t appear to be an award-calibre thing — seems like a straight “movie.” Paul Haggis wrote and directed this remake of a 2008 French film called Pour Elle, about a husband trying to free his wife who’s been jailed on a bum rap. Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks costar. (Opening 11.19)

The Extra Man: Barring a miracle, Kevin Kline is out, over, not in the room. (Opening 7.30)

Middle Men: Forget it. (Opening 8.6)

Eat, Pray, Love: Too chick-flicky, too gay, too escapist, too travelogue-y. Big box-office but forget the awards circuit. (Opening 8.13)

The American: A possibly first-rate genre thriller from the esteemed director of Control, Anton Corbijn. If it was seen as awards quality it wouldn’t be opening on September 1st.

The King’s Speech: Directed by Tom Hooper, costarring Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, Helena Bonham Carter. Weinstein Co. is distributing. No comment but feels a bit minor. A speech impediment? (Opening 11.26)

The Fighter: directed by David O’Russell, Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale costarring. Know nothing, no comment. Paramount. (Opening 11.26)

The Tree of Life: Does Terrence Malick do Oscar movies? Maybe, maybe not. But you damn sure know he won’t campaign. The film is said to be quite good, possibly Malick’s best since Badlands. Sean Penn, Brad Pitt, dinosaurs. (Opening in November)

Everything You’ve Got: James L. Brooks directing; Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd and Owen Wilson costarring. Read half of Brooks’ script & stopped. No comment. (Opening 12.17)

Somewhere: Sofia Coppola apparently delivering an Antonioni-esque mood piece about a jaded actor (Stephen Dorff) and a daughter he’s just getting to know (Elle Fanning) within the sundry realms of West Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont and…uhm, northern Italy. Reserving comment. (Opening 12.22).

True Grit: A rich and savory western stew, to go by the script. No telling anything. Blank slate, no judgment except for the always assured stamp of the Coen brothers. (Opening 12.25)

The Conspirator: “A shooting draft of James Solomon‘s The Conspirator, the Robert Redford-directed drama about Surratt’s trial, [is] obviously a sturdily-written, high-calibre thing. And there’s no missing the grace and gravitas woven into Surratt’s character, which represents a fine acting opportunity for Robin Wright Penn.”

The Way Back: Is Paramount going to release this Peter Weir film in ’10 or ’11? I talked to a guy who saw a research screening three months ago, as I recall.

London Boulevard: William Monahan‘s London-based crime pic reads very nicely. Really nicely. That’s all I know — the rest is air.

The Descendants: Will this Alexander Payne-directed, Hawaiian-set drama come out before 12.31.10?

Conviction: The Betty Anne Waters go-to-law-school, get-your-brother-out-of-jail drama with Hillary Swank.

There’s usually one Best Actress Oscar nominee every year who receives attention as the token newcomer — someone relatively fresh and young like last year’s Gabourey Sidibe or Carey Mulligan. 2010 has another six months to go (duhhh), but there’s a feeling right now that Jennifer Lawrence‘s performance as a determined Ozark teenager in Winter’s Bone — a young woman of exceptional steel — has a better-than-reasonable shot at landing a Best Actress nomination seven months hence.

Applauding acting talent is the basic criterion, of course, but nominating young actresses for an Oscar tends to be about values — about the Academy’s approval and respect for the characters they play. Mulligan’s Jenny, the lead in An Education, was celebrated for being plucky, spirited and eager for cultivated experience; Sidibe’s performance in Precious was embraced because she played such a hopeless, put-upon sad sack — obese, AIDS-afflicted, Downs Syndrome baby — that everyone (except Mo’Nique‘s Mary) wanted to comfort her.

Lawrence’s character, a 17 year-old named Ree Dolly, is about intestinal fortitude . Her goal in Winter’s Bone is to find her character-deficient criminal dad who put the family’s backwood home up for his bail bond and then skipped. If he stays gone Ree and her family will be homeless. The film is basically about Ree asking questions of several grungy Ozarkians — where is he?, you know anything?, just trying to care for my family. They all lie, glare, threaten, stare her down and dance around the truth, but she won’t back off. Ree is strong and unafraid, which you can’t help but admire.

Which is why she’s looking good for a nomination. We all want our kids to be tough and determined, and celebrating such a character will be a way of saying “see? This is what we’re talking about…life isn’t easy and you have to show a little mettle.”

On top of which Lawrence is damn good in the role — clearly, obviously. There’s also the fact that Lawrence is (please forgive) hot stuff, and voting for her will be a way for Academy geezer types (i.e., the Lorenzo Semple, Jr. types) to keep their hand in, so to speak.

I’ve been asked by two publicists why I haven’t posted an mp3 of my Lawrence interview. It’s because I made the mistake of recording it with an iPhone app called iRecorder, which is a huge pain in the ass in terms of uploading sound files onto my hard drive, and which rebuffs all attempts by Wavepad, my audio-manipulation software, to permit the files to be converted into mp3. I just gave up after an hour or so of messing with it, and for whatever reason I didn’t record my Lawrence chart on video.

Winter’s Bone is straight, sturdy, “real.” But my primary thought after catching it at last January’s Sundance Film Festival was that I’m glad I wasn’t born to poor white Ozark trash — a fate equal to the one that befell poor Precious, or worse? — and that I’d be grateful if the Emperor of the Universe told me I’ll never visit this region ever again for the rest of my life. In actuality, I mean.

I spoke to a 20-something lady at a recent Knight and Day screening who’d seen Winter’s Bone and didn’t like it because of the cruelty shown to Lawrence’s character, and because of the general Ozarkian scuzziness. I said “okay, I hear you, but Jennifer Lawrence…” And she finished my sentence before I got the words out: “Oh, I know, she’s great! Totally.”

It’s not a rumor — twentysomething women really do have a thing for the word “totally.” They use it a lot.