NBC’s Tom Brokaw is sounding more and more like a cautious milquetoast place-holder with an excessively deferential, go-along attitude. Good old avuncular, seen-it-all Tom, nostalgic sentimentalist and author of “The Greatest Generation.” But where is the honor in lobbying to put a lid on two respected MSNBC colleagues (Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews) who have a passion for cutting through the bull, and in accomodating the disreputable liars and smoke-blowers in the McCain campaign?
Two days ago Brokaw (a) reportedly cited false disparaging poll data about Barack Obama, (b) recently conducted some shuttle diplomacy between NBC and the McCain campaign, seeking to assure the candidate’s aides that — despite some negative on-air commentary by Keith Olbermann in particular — McCain could still get a fair shake from NBC News,” and (c) “advocated” last summer within NBC News to modify the anchor duties of Olbermann and Matthews on election night and presidential debate nights.

This high-def version of the new trailer for Sam Mendes‘ Revolutionary Road (Paramount Vantage, 12.26) tells you pretty much what the film is without the particulars or the last two beats. Miserable, lost and sinking in surburbia. Richard Yates, John Cheever, John Updike, etc.

I understand the whole flight-to-the-suburbs mentality of the ’50s as well as the female nesting instinct, but why would Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Frank Wheeler, a guy who says he loves Paris because “the people are alive there…unlike here,” want to buy a house in Cheever Land in the first place? Is he a man or a mouse? He’s supposed to be about…what, 30 and he doesn’t know what kind of life he wants? If you don’t have a pretty good idea of who you are and what you want by 24 or 25, you’ll probably never know. And if you haven’t made your big “this is who I am, take it or leave it” move by the time you’re 30, you might as well move to Mexico and drink tequila.

“A filthy-rich fantasy for these cash-strapped times, Beverly Hills Chihuahua features the voices of Drew Barrymore and much of the industry’s top Latino talent in a live-action talking-dog lark that should please young pups. At the same time, it peddles tacky stereotypes in thick Hispanic accents, effectively ceding whatever dignity the breed regained since the ‘Yo quiero Taco Bell’ campaign went off the air. One thing’s for sure: The Mouse House will realize a fine balance of trade on this one.” — from Peter DeBruge‘s 9.29 Variety review.

“The film paints Mexico as a dangerous place full of conmen and criminals. Shivering in her custom pink booties, with only a surly German Shepherd named Delgado (Andy Garcia) to help her, Chloe must contend with a dog-fighting Doberman (Edward James Olmos), a sticky-fingered street rat (Cheech Marin), an immigrant-smuggling coyote (Ed F. Martin) and a sinister-looking thug (Jose Maria Yazpik) who aims to ransom Chloe back to her owner. Kids won’t pick up on the politically incorrect subtext, of course.”
Do you think all these Latin actors are proud of helping to keep alive cultural stereotypes about dangerous predatory Mexicans? DeBruge’s review seems to confirm what I’ve been sensing all along, which is that BHC is a movie about Mexico aimed at people who like Cancun or Acapulco but wouldn’t touch the “real” Mexico with a ten foot pole. People who love to hang out in malls for the immaculate if ungenuine sensation that malls convey of being surrounded in luxury. A group, in short, that probably likes the idea of John McCain a little more than they do Barack Obama if only because of their cultural xenophobia.
Another thing to bank on, or certainly a truism that I swear by: a real-life singing Chihuahua is infinitely preferable to digital ones with headdresses, singing and dancing and swarming over a Mayan pyramid like ants.

The map on the Yahoo Political Dashboard has the most accessible state-by-state poll numbers, and I’m pleased, naturally, with the electoral vote projections favoring Obama over McCain, 278 to 227. But I’ve come to expect greater comfort and assurance from the guys at fivethirtyeight.com. They have Ohio and Virginia as lean Obama states, and an electoral vote projection of 329 to 208. Why the discrepancy? Split the two and Obama is projected to win just over 300 to McCain’s 217.

Another Jamie Stuart short about the New York Film Festival has been posted on the Filmmaker website. Per custom it hasn’t much to do with the Lincoln Center happenings. It’s another dry surreal thing. The term that comes to mind is “Bunuelian wackjob.” It contains a clip of Che director Steven Soderbergh defining what a political film is, but is mostly about strange noirish dreams in Stuart’s head. I watched it the first time with my amplified speaker system attached, and couldn’t hear most of the dialogue because of a bass guitar going “thwong, thwong, thwong, thwong.” And what does “this one’s for Matilda” mean?

“After I spent 2 1/2 hours laying on a stretcher, not being able to breathe, I thought to myself — what a waste. I’ve got a ton of money in the bank, I’ve got this hotshot job at DreamWorks and it’s all meaningless. I’ve just been living through my ego. From that minute, I promised myself that if I managed to survive, I’d live the life I wanted to live, not the way I thought other people wanted me to live.
“And however well I end up doing as a writer, whether I just eke out a living or win a bunch of awards someday, I’ll be happy because, to use the sports analogy, I’d feel like I left it on the field.” — Eagle Eye screenwriter Dan McDermott relating thoughts after almost dying from heart failure (caused by nitrogen poisoning from a scuba diving excursion), posted four days ago in Patrick Goldstein‘s “The Big Picture” bloggy-blog.

What can you say about a tough-minded, hard-nosed political drama that tells the truth, doesn’t mince words or pull punches, rekindles the viral excitement of a bygone era, offers several gripping performances and leaves you with a taste of ashes in your soul?

Moritz Bleibtreu, Johanna Wokalek

This is the reality of The Baader Meinhof Complex — Uli Edel‘s 149-minute drama about the famed German radical leftist group. I caught it last Friday night at the Aero along with L.A. Times guy Mark Olsen, The Envelope‘s Pete Hammond and two or three publicist pals who may be working on the film’s Academy campaign for Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar, as it was recently named as Germany’s official entry.
It’s a strong but bleak account of the impassioned but self-destructive insanity that took hold among radical lefties in the late ’60s and ’70s, and which manifested with a particular ferocity and flamboyance among the Baader-Meinhoffers. Edel’s chops are fine, the story is the story, what happened is what happened, but my God…what do you do with a history of this sort? And where in this saga is a semblance of a common cultural current? It’s not as if a willingness to kill or be killed for one’s political beliefs is something that comes up these days on Sunday mornings at Starbucks after you’ve had your morning run.
Maybe more of us should think and act in terms of life-or-death commitments. Maybe we’d be better off if more of us had the cojones to stand up and fight evil in a way that gives no quarter. But the film mainly sinks in as a revisiting of a time in which a small but dead-serious sector of the left-liberal community temporarily lost its bearings and in some cases jumped off a cliff in order to stop what they saw as a form of absolute establishment evil.

The Baader -Meinhof gang may have have had their hearts (if not their heads) in the “right” place, but what are you supposed to do with their example in the age of Barack Obama, financial meltdown, global warming, the SUV pestilence, middle-class obesity, the cultural tumor that is Beverly Hills Chihuahua and rampant plasticity and vapidity in almost every corner of the globe (especially among younger women who sit in groups of four or five in bars and cafes and laugh loudly, squealing like little piglets)?
I’m glad I saw it, I’m glad it was made, I respect and admire the contributions of everyone on the team (Edel, producer-co-writer Bernd Eichinger, exec producer Martin Moszkovicz and cast members Martina Gedeck, Moritz Bleibtreu, Johanna Wokalek, Bruno Ganz, Nadja Uhl, Jan Josef Liefers, Stipe Erceg, Niels Bruno Schmidt, Vinzenz Kiefer, Alexandra Maria Lara), and I’m glad it’s doing well commercially in Germany and elsewhere.
But I don’t think it has a prayer in hell of being nominated for Best Foreign-Language Feature. Not because it’s a bad film but because it leaves you shell-shocked and saying “what the fuck?” And because of that feeling of ashes. And because the blue-hairs are going to come out of screenings of this thing going “good Lord!”
I’m sorry to say this, but The Baader Meinhof Complex is a gripping but awfully strange and even weird story about some very extreme, go-for-broke people who didn’t know when (or how) to chill out and seemed, in the final analysis, to be more than a little in love with death. Call me a political dilletante, but as much as I admire the nerve of people willing to risk death for their political beliefs I want to live and share love and spread the word about good movies and play with my cats until I’m 97 years old.

Here‘s Mark Olsen’s reaction, which appeared yesterday in Patrick Goldstein‘s bloggy-blog “Big Picture” column (as opposed to the online remnant of the weekly print column). And here’s Boyd Van Hoeij‘s Variety review, posted on 9.25.
When and if this worthy film obtains U.S. distribution, it should be called The Baader Meinhof Gang and let it go at that. You have to think in popcorn terms when you’re thinking up a title, and popcorn munchers don’t know from complexes. This is basically a high-voltage shoot ’em up about a political-minded Barrow gang that ends in jail and suicide.

In the remarkable, deeply penetrating I’ve Loved You So Long (Sony Classics, 10.24) , Kristin Scott Thomas gives an immensely sad but highly sensitive and attuned performance that you just know, minutes into it, will be with you the rest of your life. She draws you in like some sad-eyed lady of the lowlands, but she never sells anything. Start to finish, she dwells in this fascinating zen-grief space that just “is.” She owns it…and from the moment the film begins, owns you.

Warning to first-time viewers: Watch this YouTube trailer, obviously, but don’t go to the Apple page which (a) offers it in various sizes and formats but (b) offers an absurdly over-explicit spoiler synopsis that can only serve to diminish intrigue and/or interest.

I was just depositing some cash into a Washington Mutual account an hour ago, and the atmosphere was unmistakably edgy. A long line of people, anxious looks on some of the faces, a vaguely nervous undercurrent of one form or another. Washington Mutual went under a few days ago and was bought up by JP Morgan Chase on 9.26. There was a fat guy jabbering excitedly to a friend and making no attempt to hide his anger at bank employees behind the glass who were sitting at desks and not at teller windows. The vibe was on the sullen side. No jokes, no smiles, no chit-chat.

The Envelope’s Buzzmeter software is currently being overhauled and redesigned, so in the meantime The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil has tallied some 2008 Oscar predictions. Nobody agrees on anything…too early for that. The contributors are O’Neil, Anthony Breznican (USA Today), Edward Douglas (Comingsoon.net), Scott Feinberg (AndTheWinnerIs, The Feinberg Files at The Envelope), Pete Hammond (The Envelope), Dave Karger (Entertainment Weekly) and myself.

“The biggest robbery in the history of this country is taking place as you read this,” Michael Moore wrote today. “Though no guns are being used, 300 million hostages are being taken. Make no mistake about it: After stealing a half trillion dollars to line the pockets of their war-profiteering backers for the past five years, after lining the pockets of their fellow oilmen to the tune of over a hundred billion dollars in just the last two years, Bush and his cronies — who must soon vacate the White House — are looting the U.S. Treasury of every dollar they can grab. They are swiping as much of the silverware as they can on their way out the door.
“This so-called ‘collapse’ was triggered by the massive defaulting and foreclosures going on with people’s home mortgages. Do you know why so many Americans are losing their homes? To hear the Republicans describe it, it’s because too many working class idiots were given mortgages that they really couldn’t afford. Here’s the truth: The #1 cause of people declaring bankruptcy is because of medical bills. Let me state this simply: If we had had universal health coverage, this mortgage ‘crisis’ may never have happened.”