Daily

I don’t mean to sound like a shallow Hollywood guy, but Harrison Ford should consider dying his hair dark gray. Because it’s light gray in the new Crossing Over trailer and approaching white, and it just bothers me that Han Solo is looking this long of tooth. He’s only 66 and he looks 74. I just want him to look like a semi-credible middle-aged brawny stud, like he did in Firewall. Hold back the tide!

I’m not saying Ford needs to do a Walter Matthau or a Ronald Reagan. I just don’t want him to look like a guy who’s two or three moves away from a senior citizens home. Is that such a empty and rancid sentiment?

I took this on the corner of Broadway and 49th right after catching a noon showing of Paul Schrader‘s Adam Resurrected, a kind of Nazis-and-Jews Marat/Sade cinema-of-the-absurd concoction, based on a respected book by Yoram Kaniuk, about a man’s gradual recovery from the horrors of World War II.

I needed a moment to collect myself and for some reason locked in on Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow as a way back into my pre-Adam headspace.

Adam Resurrected played at Telluride but doesn’t open until late December, so there’s plenty of time to get into it. There’s no question about Jeff Goldblum having given one of those exceptional, out-there, once-in-a-career performances that too few actors in their autumnal years get a chance to rock out and kick ass with. But after you’ve acknowledged this (and many have thus far), the question is “to what end?”

The line I was saying to myself as I walked out of the Brill Building was, “I sink there iss maybe a little too much dog-barking in this film….no?”

This news is several hours old, but a liberal-wet-dream spoof edition of the New York Times was sold this morning at subway stations all over Manhattan. Maybe I can still snag a copy — it’s only 4:17 pm right now. If anyone has an extra copy I’ll meet them somewhere in Manhattan and pay good money.

The guys behind it are The Yes Men, about whom a 2003 doc was made. Here’s the press release that went out announcing it.

Dated July 4, 2009, the publication imagines a utopian, Obama-ized reality with the Iraq War over and done with, national health care established, a flush economy, taxation of the fat and loaded, the oil companies financing a study of climate change, and…wait, Thomas Friedman‘s resignation?

A portrait of London by a Red Bull-chugging, Guiness-slurping youngish guy who aimed his video camera solely at conventional tourist sites (Picadilly, Regent Street, Soho, the Underground) and felt only the juice, velocity and hoo-hah. A faux Michael Bay sensibility if I ever saw one.

.

Off to a noon screening of Adam Resurrected, some filing and walk-around time for three or four hours, and then Quantum of Solace at 7 pm.

“I saw Quantum of Solace last weekend,” says Jett in an e-mail this morning from London. “Great action movie. I liked it better than Casino Royale, although the plot wasn’t fantastic. I was stirred by seeing a hint of Bond’s personal struggle over that girl from Royale. Inner anguish makes Bond more human in this movie. Plus, I saw it with digital projection and great sound, and it kind of leaves you with a wow feeling at the end.”

In an 11.12 L.A. Times piece, John Horn speaks with I’ve Loved You So Long star Kristin Scott Thomas and observes that “if the audience detects that Scott Thomas doesn’t fully believe in the character, the whole thing could unravel in a maudlin mess.” And KST says, “I was terrified of that. If there was one thing that I am terrified of, it’s sentimentality.

“And I really didn’t want people to see an actress forgiving a character, saying, ‘I am going to show you this person but I am actually really nice.’ I wanted it to be raw.” Which is one reason, perhaps the reason, why her performance, for me, is the stuff of legend.

Last night The Envelope‘s Scott Feinberg managed to get on the phone with Australia director Baz Luhrman to discuss various reports about the troubled film, and in particular last Sunday night’s report from Australia’s Herald Sun that Luhrman — spoiler-averse, beware! — has been pressured to go with a “live Hugh” happy ending.

They spoke just before Luhrman boarded a flight from New York (where he and the cast had taken part in an 11.10 Oprah special on the film) back to Sydney, where he’s now completing post-production work on the film, which is set to open nationwide on Wednesday, 11.26.

I’ve read Luhrman’s answer about the live-dead ending twice and I’m still not entirely what he’s saying, but he seems to saying that in the struggle to finish the film in just the right way he found a theme that he believed in. And that somebody (not necessarily H.J., apparently) That’s how I’m reading it, at least.

“What’s interesting is [that] I wrote, I think, six endings in all the drafts I did, shot three, and I ended up concluding the film in a way in which I — probably more than anyone — least expected,” Luhrman begins. “And there is a death in the ending of the film, by the way — it’s a bit of a twist and I won’t give it away.

“And, incidentally, the two endings, by the way, tested completely the same essentially, you know? They really did in the numbers. But I came up with a third ending, and the ending that I’ve created about the film came from a place of a response, actually, to the thing that I wanted the movie to be — the important, big idea of the movie — how to amplify that big idea. And, essentially, that’s, as the little boy says, ‘The rain will fall. The grass grows green. And life begins again.’

“And that idea — that in a world that is so full of fear, and things are falling down, and people are somewhat concerned — sending a movie out there that can leave people with a sense that, despite it all, you can go back to Faraway Downs, or that you can go on, and a sense of hope, is something I really felt personally I wanted the movie to give out.”

“But I think the big story is how the actual ending I came up with — which is quite unusual, it’s not easy to say it’s ‘the happy one’ or ‘the death one’ — it’s something quite surprising. And it found itself, really.”

“You can go back to Faraway Downs” sounds like a little bit of a push-back on “you can’t go home again.” Which I know from life experience to be absolutely true. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding.

I get it. I know why the mostly female audience (literally young or young at heart) is expected to flock big-time to Twilight (Summit, 11.21). It’s because they’ve read Stephenie Meyers‘ books (or book) and they basically expect the film to be Wuthering Heights with fangs. Fine — no problem with that.

And I know for sure that the vast majority of this audience doesn’t care very much about Meyers’ Mormon background. And that fans who are aware of this probably haven’t noticed (or cared to notice) what themes or metaphors in the books and the film express some aspect of Mormon culture.

But once the film is finally screened for people like me (which will be…what, two days before it opens?) and once it opens commercially, I’d like to read a concise and knowledgable piece that explains it all without going on and on. The Mormon Undercurrents in Twilight for Dummies. I’m not looking to bash the film because of any possible Mormon tissue within. Like I said, most of the fans don’t know or care about the undercurrents, and I have other fish to fry.

But if there’s any kind of theological Mormon presence in Twilight, I’d like to clearly understand what it is. Even if there’s just a faint aroma, I’d like to sniff it with forearmed knowledge.

Spoiler-Sensitive Types Beware: Baz Luhrman‘s Australia, which will have its first screening on or about 11.18, or eight days before it opens, is perceived in some quarters to be a little too broad and big-screen schmaltzy to warrant major interest. (That’s strictly a reaction to the trailer, of course.) Well, I have a suggestion for upping the intrigue. But before I mention it, though, the spoiler whiners need to stop reading right now.

Sunday’s news from Down Under was that Luhrman “has bowed to studio pressure for a happy ending by letting Hugh Jackman‘s character live instead of die.” My idea (and I think it’s inspired) is that 20th Century Fox should release the “dead Hugh” version in a small number of big-city theatres — 15 or 20 or 25 prints, tops — while mass-releasing the “live Hugh” version to mainstream theatres coast to coast.

What am I saying in essence? That Fox’s theatrical plan simply imitate the multiple version DVD aesthetic in the roll-out plan. We’re all familiar with alternate versions and Director’s Cuts and seeing different formats (35mm vs. IMAX) in different theatres, so why not follow this lead during the initial theatrical opening? I would frankly rather see the “dead Hugh” version, which I gather is the one Luhrmann favors. Who wouldn’t?

If I was Fox chairman Tom Rothman I’d release the “live Hugh” version wide so as to protect the film’s potential revenue, but where’s the harm in letting particular people see the director’s cut at the same time in a few select theatres? Obviously people like me would want to see both to compare. The film would take on a certain intrigue if this was to happen.

Hollywood honchos used to believe that putting out different versions of a film was an indication of weakness and indecision. I don’t think people see it that way any more. We all know there are different versions of everything — it’s par for the course. Show it all, let it all hang out.

All right, that’s it — Twilight author Stephenie Meyer gets a permanent cultural demerit for telling Entertainment Weekly that Robert Pattinson‘s performance in the upcoming movie version is “Oscar-worthy.”

Twilight author Stephenie Meyer

Pattinson has a bright future ahead, but only a shameless and unrestrained egotist would call his performance, no matter how affecting or dynamic, a piece of Oscar bait, given that Twilight is generally considered to be gothic-romantic teen-girl trash and is therefore automatically out of consideration. On top of the fact that Summit Entertainment is barely screening Twilight and pissing journalists off as a result, or certainly making them suspicious.

Meyer “realizes that the hope of Twilight getting Oscar respect may have the blood drained out of it by the fact that this is a vampire romance and it’s basically aimed at teens,” according to Entertainment Weekly, but “when they see the movie — oh, my gosh — there’s no way not to love him!”

Maybe so — Patinson is obviously a good-looking guy and we’re all partial to Brits besides — but in what diseased realm does puppy-goth lovability translate into Oscar-worthiness? Meyer has to learn that without certain Oscar criteria agreed to and enforced by the filmmaking and film-reporting community, nothing means anything.

Oh, and Meyer gets another demerit for spelling her first name “Stephenie.”