Jay Leno asked John McCain the other night about how many houses he owns, and McCain — boldly, absurdly — went into the prison-cell routine again. Let the word go forth from this time and place to friend and foe alike that McCain’s Hanoi Hilton answers are hereby over, invalid, spent. McCain’s honorable history hasn’t been used up — it’s been vandalized.

Two days ago Times Online guy Matthew Syed posted the most unusual and amusing article I’ve read anywhere about the Beijing Olympics, called “Sex and the Olympic City.” It’s actually a kind of a history piece — an acknowledgement of the “furnace of sexual energy” that Olympic athletes have revelled in for decades, and perhaps (who knows?) centuries.
“Why do sportsmen and women have such explosive libidos?,” he asks. “I am not implying, for one moment, that every athlete in Beijing is at it. Just that 99 per cent of them are.” Would the TV guys ever touch this subject with a 20-foot pole? Would MSNBC’s bubbly right-wing Olympics anchorperson Tamron Hall even joke about it?
“It is worth noting an intriguing dichotomy between the sexes in respect of all this coupling,” Syed writes. “The chaps who win gold medals — even those as geeky as Michael Phelps — are the principal objects of desire for many female athletes. There is something about sporting success that makes a certain type of woman go crazy — smiling, flirting and sometimes even grabbing at the chaps who have done the business in the pool or on the track. An Olympic gold medal is not merely a route to fame and fortune; it is also a surefire ticket to writhe.”

It’s a little bit of a deflater when you go to a film that’s been buzzed up, or which you’ve been buzzing up in your head, and then it turns out to be, like, less than that. I had two such experiences yesterday. What happens is that in order to work through your reactions you wind up calling everyone you know who’s seen them and bat it around. That eats up an hour or two, easy. Especially when you’ve got two films to discuss.
I’ve learned from experience to tap something out right away or you’ll forget where you put the fuel. One easy way to get rolling is to bounce of someone else’s reaction, and one thing I heard this morning is that a certain earlybird fellow suspects that one of the films I saw yesterday may be a “near masterpiece.” Yeegodz.

Early yesterday afternoon I sat down with Jordi Molla, a bearded, blue-eyed, remarkably serene Spanish actor who plays a Bolivian commander in Steven Soderbergh‘s Che. No one in Soderbergh’s four-hour-plus epic has any real “movie moments” — it’s a movie about being there and hanging with Che Guevara during the two most vivid dramatic chapters in his life — but he’s basically a bad guy who has a lot of Guevara’s men shot.

Jordi Molla at Le Pain Quotidien — Thursday, 8.20.08, 12:25 pm

Molla still hasn’t seen Che, and won’t see until it premieres in Spain. Molla was shooting a film in Cannes during the festival and therefore could have seen Che when it showed at the Grand Palais, but the shooting days were long and demanding and he likes to get a good eight hours sleep when he’s working.
There was immediate comfort for me because of Molla’s European attitude — settled, moderate energy, not eager to project positiveness or buoyancy like most actors (but at the same time not sour or downish), okay with the flow of the tide, low-key, que sera sera. Due to his attitude or whatever, the L.A. vibe around us seemed to recede on some level, and I began to feel if I was sitting in an outdoor cafe in downtown Barcelona.
Molla was initially cast by Terence Malick four years ago to be in his Che film, which Malick had been looking to shoot for years although it eventually became Soderbergh’s after Malick fell out. Molla has been in tons of Spanish-produced films (including one for Pedro Almodovar) but his big appearances stateside have been in Blow, The Alamo and Elizabeth: The Golden Age. He’s been in the game since he costarred 16 years ago with Javier Bardem in Jamon Jamon.
I said something about having visited Cadaques, Spain, which isn’t too far from Barcelona, where he first studied acting. I think he said he’d visited there as a youth. If he didn’t say that then whatever, but Cadaques is a great little town either way.
Molla paints well enough to have had his work exhibited at Sotheby’s Gallery, Madrid (’07) and Galeria Carmen de la Guerra in Madrid. Molla has also directed two short films (Walter Peralta and No me importaria irme contigo) and written two books (Las primeras veces and Agua estancada).

So much for my dream that Oliver Stone‘s W, Jim Sheridan‘s Brothers, Gerald McMorrow‘s Franklyn and Beeban Kidron‘s Hippie Hippie Shake might play the 2008 Toronto Film Festival.

George Clooney, Frances McDormand in Burn After Reading

None of ’em made this morning’s final list which means the first two weren’t submitted and that issues of one sort or another are afflicting the second two, since both are expected to open in England later this year. I don’t mind saying I’m damn disappointed.
Especially about the W no-show. The 10.17 opening, just over a month after the close of TIFF, would make the festival an ideal launch site by giving the film its first big blast of attention. But it only wrapped in July so this morning’s absence presumably means it’s not quite in “ship-ship-shape!,” as Tony Curtis‘s Jerry once said in Some Like It Hot.
The seven new world premiere galas include Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Burn After Reading (the script tells you it’s a can’t-miss comedy in a dry slapstick vein), Rod Lurie‘s Nothing But The Truth (which I reviewed last night); Gavin O’Connor‘s Pride and Glory, the top-tier crime drama with Ed Norton and Colin Farrell that WB honcho Alan Horn is reportedly willing to dump for the right price; and Neil Burger‘s The Lucky Ones, a stateside Iraq War vet drama costarring Rachel McAdams, Tim Robbins and Michael Pena that Lionsgate has delayed the release of over concerns about the failure of other Iraq War dramas.

Michael Pena, Rachel McAdams and Tuim Robbins in The Lucky Ones

Rear-guard galas will include Dean Spanley starring Peter O’Toole; Jodie Markell‘s The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, from a rediscovered Tennessee Williams screenplay (title sounds way too precious); Caroline Link’s A Year Ago in Winter, Jerry Zaks’ Who Do You Love with Alessandro Nivola; Anne Fontaine‘s La Fille de Monaco, Jean Francois Richet‘s Public Enemy No. 1 with Vincent Cassel as legendary gangster Jacques Mesrine, and Singh Is Kinng, a romantic comedy (forget it!) from director Anees Bazmee.
The Masters program will show Paul Schrader‘s Adam Resurrected, about a charismatic patient in a mental institution for Holocaust survivors with Jeff Goldblum and Willem Dafoe. (Does anyone expect Schrader to even hit a strong double these days? I wish it weren’t true, but with each succeeding effort the Schrader balloon seems to leak more and more air.) The festival will also preem Werner Schroeter‘s Nuit de chien.
What fresh insights, I’m asking myself, can possibly come from Adria Petty‘s Paris, Not France, an “examination of the Paris Hilton phenomenon” that’s “modeled after 1960s pic Darling“? Does the latter statement mean it was shot in black and white? Or that it reveals the presence in Hilton’s life of an older British lover who resembles Dirk Bogarde?

Bulked-up Vincent Cassel in Jean Francois Richet’s Public Enemy No. 1

Special Presentations includes the work-in-progress omnibus New York, I Love You, composed of 12 shorts directed by Brett Ratner, Allen Hughes, Shekhar Kapur, Joshua Marston, Mira Nair, Fatih Akin, Scarlett Johansson, Ivan Attal, Natalie Portman, Shunji Iawi, Jiang Wen and Andrei Zvyagintsev.
25 titles were added to the Contemporary World cinema lineup, including Nigel Cole‘s$5 a Day with Christopher Walken, John Stockwell‘s Middle of Nowhere with Susan Sarandon and Anton Yelchin; Ole Christian Madsen‘s Flame & Citron (a sort-of Dogma movie, apparently) and Olivier Assayas‘ L’Heure d’ete.

I am a strict Roman Catholic as far as movies are concerned. To me this means that the spirit of the form — the poetry, the art, the highs, the transcendence, the sublime craft aspects, the things I’ll remember about them until my dying day and perhaps even beyond — is what matters above all. Roman Catholics don’t “like” or “enjoy” movies; they need them like food and sex and air. No idol-worshipping, no cheap crap. Total committment to the cloth.

The rest of what constitutes life in this town — the personalities, the advertising income, the politics, the unions, the arguments, the nuts and bolts, the begging — eat up much or most of our time, and are obviously necessary to keep the ball in the air and the wheels turning, but if you don’t have that Roman Catholic blood to begin with, you’re not really “of the spirit” and you’re basically just leeching off the passion of others.
The leechers are the Philistines, of course, and they, I believe, are the ones who have 90% or 95% of the big-studio jobs and almost all the jobs in the talent agencies and the big p.r. agencies. Some of my best friends are Philistines, but the cancer that’s plaguing this industry today is directly attributable to the fact that there are way too many Philistines in too many positions of power today. All they seem to recognize or respond to are remakes and cheap highs and CGI and fast money. If Irving Thalberg or Dore Schary or even Daryl F. Zanuck were to come back to earth and take a reading of this town as it really is right now, they’d be appalled. They’d be staggering around and holding their throats.
Say what you will about Harvey Weinstein, but he’s a Catholic through and through. How many serious Catholic producers do we have these days? Bob Berney is a Catholic; so are Michael Barker and Tom Benard; so are Eammon Bowles and John Sloss. There are several Catholic publicists out there (Fredel Pogodin, Michael Lawson, Melody Korenbrot, etc.), but they’re very much in the minority. Certainly if you include the ones who personally represent talent. Catholic studio execs are even fewer and farther between. Nina Jacobson was one. Michael London may have been one all along, but he didn’t seem to really walk and talk Catholic until he left his big-studio job with 20th Century Fox. Who else?
Is Quentin Tarantino a Philistine or a Catholic? He obviously began as a Catholic, but now? With plans to make Faster Pussycat Kill Kill! with Britney Spears? (Which I can’t wait to see, I’m ashamed to say.)
I’m saying this because a friend of some decades who knows the big-studio psychology backwards and forwards said last weekend that the big-studio guys are so completely Philistine in their attitudes that it isn’t funny any more. They’re a completely cloistered culture, and their values haven’t taken them any farther than caring about the next quarterly earnings report and the bonuses that will result from this. They don’t give a damn about anything except fortifying themselves, and they regard serious Catholics the way ancient Romans used to regard Christians in the days of Androcles and the Lion — as if they’re slightly touched in the head.
The climate in the big studios has always been predatory (ask Budd Schulberg or Rod Serling about that) but these days it’s really about “get yours and cash out” and too bad about the smell of lizard or elephant farts in your wake. To these guys a Catholic life is for simps and suckers. If you ask me the souls of big-studio Philistines are reflected or perhaps embodied in the absolute spiritual emptiness of so many big-ass movies today.
My friend said that corporate Philistines know only one thing — fear. Not just fear about what movies to make, but about the generational-values divide between the boomers and older GenXers and the under-35 YouTube/gamer/comic-book generation, whose leaders have their own way of perceiving the culture and have fashioned their own spiritual-religious creeds that they live and work by.
One result is that experienced filmmakers — particularly those over 45 or 50 — are terrified that they might one day be regarded as clueless or redundant by the up-and-coming YouTubers, and so they’re scampering to the tune of terror being played by the 45-and-older big-studio execs. And it’s hell — it’s an atmosphere made in hell because nobody knows what to say or do. Fear has always been an undercurrent in this town, but the vibe has reached breathtaking new levels in the 21st Century.

ABC News and the Washington Post‘s Pete Yost have jumped into the John Edwards extramarital-affair-and-fathering-a-baby story, and Edwards has admitted to an affair with, according to Yost’s report, a “42 year-old woman,” although her name is Rielle Hunter. The ABC story, written by Rhonda Schwartz and Brian Ross, names Hunter and says her age is 44.
Edwards, however, is denying he’s the father of her child. He “told ABC News that he lied repeatedly about the affair with a 42-year-old woman but said that he didn’t love her” and “said he has not taken a paternity test but knows he isn’t the father because of the timing of the affair and the birth.”
I can understand an operator like Edwards lying about the paternity issue (if in fact he is lying, which many believe is the case) but to say in so many words that he doesn’t “love” Hunter strikes me as an inelegant and dismissive way to put it. It’s something a cad would say in this kind of situation. A guy proclaiming that he doesn’t “love” a woman he’s had relations with (and possibly fathered a child with) implies he doesn’t consider her worthy of a serious relationship and that he’s basically been seeing her for sex. That’s a pretty flagrant putdown.
Slate‘s Rachel Larimore has written that while she “may be proved wrong,” she’s not buying Edwards’ claim that he’s not the father. “He and Andrew Young, the ‘admitted’ father, both had an affair with Hunter? Possible, but yuck. And if Young is not the father, and Edwards is not the father, then who the heck is Young covering for? And why was Edwards visiting Hunter and the baby at 2:45 in the morning?”
Edwards won’t be going within 500 miles of the Denver Democratic convention later this month. And don’t expect every mainstream media publication to admit that this story was broken by the National Enquirer.

After hearing for years about Quentin Tarantino‘s affection for Enzo G. Castellari‘s The Inglorious Bastards (1978) and how it led to QT’s writing his own version, I was naturally into catching the just-out DVD of the 1978 original. I was presuming that something strange or kinky would pop out — some facsimile of that battlefield Sam Fuller vitality, strange freewheeling dialogue, servings of left-field perversity…something.

So I popped it into the player last night, and in less than 90 seconds I was faced with the inescapable fact that Quentin Tarantino‘s affection for ’60s and ’70s exploitation fare is essentially a con as far as people with actual taste in movies is concerned, and that The Inglorious Bastards was and is a waste of time, celluloid and general expenditure.
I want the minutes I spent watching this DVD last night back. I felt rooked, polluted, flim-flammed. It’s not one of those so-bad-it’s-kinda-good B pics that you can sort of get off on if you’re in a loose and joshing mood. It’s just third-rate crap in every way imaginable way. I’m talking lazy and sometimes ludicrously bad performances, unconvincing violence, way-too-bright lighting, dubbed dialogue, absurd haircuts, zero character involvement, careless plotting, and rifle fire that sounds like amplified cap guns.
Even the skinny-dipping scene with the SS girls in the country stream, which I was looking forward to, is ruined by being too hasty and over-before-you-blink. Why didn’t Castellari decide to have the “bastards” somehow melt the hearts and turn the allegiances of the SS women and have them all team up in a common effort? Why not? It’s just a stupid B movie anyway.
I was thinking that the two stars, Bo Svenson and Fred Williamson, might at least deliver a little warmth and comfort with their natural charisma, but they haven’t a chance against Castellari’s clunky story and fourth-rate Sgt. Rock dialogue.

In a story that appeared yesterday (8.6) in La Stampa, Maria Elena Finessi reported that the late Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, who passed last July at age 94, was so bummed by “his gradual loss of sight” that he starved himself to death, but in an elegant mystical way that was a kind of “masterpiece” of finality.

Enrico Fico, Michelangelo Antonioni

Finessi got the story from Enrico Fico, the widow of the legendary helmer (L’Avventura, Blow Up, L’Eclisse). Antonioni would not have taken his life by shooting or poison “because I still represented his link with the world,” Fico told Finessi. “But certainly he asked for help. To die was his only wish. To go away, in order not to fall into darkness and live as a blind man”.
Fico, who married Antonioni in the mid ’80s, said that with “incredible willpower” he had “simply stopped eating.” He had eaten little or nothing from September 2006, [a little less than] a year before he died, she told La Stampa. “He came to the table with me, to keep me company, but only ate a few spoonfuls”. He had proved that “one’s body continues to live even if you go month after month without eating”.
She said that like the mystics who had similarly starved themselves, Antonioni had acquired “extraordinary mental lucidity” towards the end. He had put up with his decline and illness “gloriously,” but “not to be able to see was for him truly unacceptable”. He had wanted to die “to free himself not so much from pain as from the body which was the origin of his suffering.” She said his death “was a masterpiece as much as his cinematic works. He went in absolute peace, embracing the absolute, as if he were a mystic. He wanted to de-materialize.”

Slim Pickens’ spirited farewell near the end of Dr. Strangelove.

For years my ideal self-obliteration fantasy (if I was facing imminent death anyway and wanted to end it on my own terms) was to go out like William Holden‘s Pike Bishop in The Wild Bunch. But getting shot several times (and in the back!) would hurt. It therefore might be better and kind of cooler, I used to tell myself, to go out like Slim Pickens at the end of Dr. Strangelove — vaporized in a millisecond in a hot flash of light, and so quickly that my body wouldn’t have time to send the pain messages to my brain.
But I don’t feel that way anymore. I believe in raging against the dying of the light and holding on to the very last. I want to go like William F. Buckley, slumped over at my computer, a sentence half-typed. Or I want to collapse on a busy street as I’m thinking about (or trying to get the attention of) a beautiful woman, like Omar Sharif in Dr. Zhivago.

In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter‘s Alex Ben Block, ThinkFilm’s David Bergstein seems to acknowledge that several lawsuits have been filed against ThinkFilm this year by partners claiming they were stiffed. “Some of what is out there is true,” Bergstein tells ABB. “The vast majority is not true. And for the stuff that is true, my answer is, ‘So what? So what if X, Y or Z might be owed money?’

Bergstein said that? Holy moley. Ben-Block muffles it somewhat when he says that Bergstein’s attitude “has some in the creative community fuming.” But he scores a bulls-eye with the title: “Has ThinkFilm Lost Its Mind?”
“‘He’s the biggest disgrace in the film business,’ said producer Albie Hecht, formerly president of Nickelodeon, who produced the Oscar-nominated ThinkFilm documentary War/Dance and claims he still has not seen the small advance ThinkFilm promised. An arbitration is pending.
“‘This is someone who goes around making deals and looks like he has no intention of fulfilling his obligation to filmmakers and artists,’ Hecht added. ‘Not only is it disgusting, but downright immoral.'”

Here it is August 3rd and Hollywood Elsewhere, a reasonably hip, zetigeist- appraising, industry pulse-taking site, is only just waking up to Don’t Forget to Validate Your Parking. I’m speaking of the brilliant, extremely well written webcomic by screenwriter and “movie executive” Mike Le that’s been going since last December. I missed Cory Doctorow‘s Boing Boing link last January because I don’t read Boing Boing so whatever, sue me, I do what I can.

All I know is that Le’s dialogue feels natural and well-timed in a deadpan, GenY-ish Doonesbury vein, and that he knows from Hollywood suck-up psychology. And from bitterness, cynicism, hunger and desperate, under-educated phonies. I laughed out loud twice this morning, and I’m not a laugh-out-louder. (Mainly a heh-heh type.)
“Don’t Forget To Validate Your Parking is a webcomic written and illustrated by Mike Le, the American screenwriter and movie executive,” says the DFTVYP Wikipedia page. “Officially launched on December 11th, 2007 and published roughly once a week, the webcomic is loosely based on the author’s experiences working in Hollywood. Don’t Forget To Validate Your Parking’s initial popularity was limited to Hollywood insiders as it was passed around through internal work emails and private tracking boards”
“The only main character is a drawn version of the author sitting behind his laptop and on the phone. All supporting characters are expressed through dialogue, usually as a voice on the phone. The tone of the webcomic is comedic, satirical, and ironic.”
22 words to have, keep and hold: “You can tell how far your life and career will go based on the five people you spend the most time with.”

With the exception of Heath Ledger‘s performance, which they love, Lorenzo Semple, Jr., and Marcia Nasatir, a.k.a. the “Real Geezers,” have come down pretty hard on Chris Nolan‘s mega-hit. “There seems to be an attempt to say we’re living in some kind of fascist state,” says Nasatir. “The Joker seems to rule supreme the same way Osama bin Laden does…I think the director intended it to remind us of what happened to the twin towers…[but] the reason I think it’s such a success, tragically, is because of the death of Heath Ledger.”