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Gonzalo Arijon‘s Stranded, which knocked me down at last January’s Sundance Film Festival, is finally opening today. It deserves full consideration as an Oscar contender for Best Feature Documentary (unless it’s ineligible). I’m sorry but it’s much more spiritual and primal than Trouble The Water (the King Kong of amateur-video jiggle docs) or Alex Gibney‘s Gonzo. In my head it’s second only to James Marsh‘s Man on Wire.

This deeply moving doc about the Uruguyan plane-crash survivors who were forced to resort to cannibalism after landing in the snow-covered Andes mountains in October 1972 and being stuck there for 72 days, opens today at Manhattan’s Film Forum, at L.A.’s Nuart on 11.7, and then in various U.S. cities between now and mid-December.
Stranded is partly a first-hand, looking-back, talking-heads doc, partly a revisiting of the crash scene piece and partly a grainy, dialogue-free re-enactment. It’s touching from the start, and holds you all through its 122-minute length.
This famous saga, dramatized in Frank Marshall‘s Alive (’93) as well as Piers Paul Read‘s “Alive: Sixteen Men, Seventy-two Days, and Insurmountable Odds–the Classic Adventure of Survival in the Andes,” is about how 16 young men (most members of a rugby team) managed to survive the ordeal by eating the flesh of those who’d been killed.

It’s as good as — certainly in the realm of — Kevin McDonald‘s Touching The Void. Right away you sense this is no run-of-the-mill deal. The emotionally delicate tone and complex layers and shadings imply from the get-go that Arijon has the hand of a poet-maestro.
The doc’s unique aspect is not only talking to many of these survivors (kids at the time, now in their 50s and 60s), but also joining them on a trip back to the site of the crash for some reliving and reflecting. It’s a real

If it’s a Kate Hudson movie, there’s a good chance it’s going to be shallow, retard-formulaic and repulsively chick-flicky. (As I explained in a 9.22 piece called “Lady Has No Taste.”) Make that an excellent chance. I’m sorry but that’s the bed she’s made. So the uh-oh vibe that emanates from the trailer for Bride Wars (Fox 2000, 1.9.09), her latest, is no surprise.

This, clearly, is just what the world needs now — a glossy girly-girl catfight comedy about duelling weddings at the Plaza condo-mart. The bottom has truly fallen out of empty subject matter for the under-30 female movie market. As a species they have no soul, nothing inside of any substance, nothing that looks inward or beyond the ADD ego-cravings of the moment.
Worse, Bride Wars has Candace Bergen playing the wedding planner. Good God.
The director is Gary Winick, the indie-world director-producer whose winning, nicely written Tadpole was the toast of Sundance ’02. By the Tadpole standard, Bride Wars — or the movie that the trailer seems to be selling — appears to be a straight hold-your-nose paycheck gig for the poor guy. Down in the saltmines with a hard hat and a pick-axe. I suppose we all have to bend over from time to time so we can make our accountants happy.
And what’s with Bride Wars costar Anne Hathaway making three wedding movies in a compressed time span — Rachel Getting Married, Bride Wars and The Fiance? As MTV.com’s Elizabeth Rappe wrote this morning, “If I was in the gossip magazines every other week thanks to my (possibly) criminal ex-boyfriend, I would run as far away from romantic comedy scripts as I could. But she’s boldly signing on to anything involving the highs and lows of romance. Maybe it’s her form of therapy.”

David Thewlis, star of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (Miramax, 11.14), speaking earlier this evening to Pete Hammond following a screening of the film at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. The film, directed and written by Mark Herman, is a World War II-era drama told from a child’s point of view. It has a hell of an ending.

“In a campaign of almost continual surprise, shock, and even awe, we have just turned a corner that might prove Barack Obama either a political genius or someone very close to that,” writes Daily Beast columnist Stanley Crouch. It may sound at first like Crouch is carrying water, but he’s a very sharp observer and he seems to be onto something here.
“The Republicans may have mistaken their adversary for just another Democrat sleeping under a shade tree and looking like a mark. Not. In real terms, that assumption might prove as costly to them as Robert E. Lee underestimating Ulysses S. Grant. This man is a brawler but a quiet one. He may use a scalpel instead if a broad sword but the jugular doesn’t know the difference
“This past Friday, Obama made a decision that either he had conceived himself or recognized the importance of with the sudden kind of clarity necessary for superior leadership. Bob Bauer, the foremost legal representative of the campaign, fired off a letter to the Department of Justice asserting that all of the recent hissing and howling about ACORN by Republicans in many places, and John McCain specifically in the final presidential debate, should be taken off of life support.
“U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey was advised to put Nora Dannehy, special prosecutor, in a position to investigate the possibility of collusion between the Republican Party and the Justice Department. This could clear away all of the claims of voter fraud that might result in gumming things up with unnecessary investigation.
“If this Obama brings this off, we will have witnessed an exceptionally shrewd part of a grand strategic vision.”

It’s been written about before, but over the last couple of days industry people here began receiving Entertainment Weekly‘s “Recall The Gold” ballots via snail mail. They’re being asked if they’ve changed their minds about the Oscars handed out in ’03, ’98, ’93, ’88 and ’83. I have to cut out for a few hours, but if anyone wants to put up some suggestions for reevaluation, fire away. Don’t tell me — Titanic, right? But it deserved the Best Picture Oscar because of those last 20 minutes.

“The creative process for me is a process of elimination and distilling something to an essence that can be expressed in one or two notes, but those one or two notes have been infused with the meaning of everything else that surrounded it for most of the creative process. In the end you have to just strip it away and the last step is to just get rid of everything. That’s the key.” — Ballast director-writer Lance Hammer speaking to Vanity Fair.com’s Julian Sancton.

“Wondering if you’re really a Democrat?,” writes Tucker Carlson on the Daily Beast. “Here’s a quick way to find out: Given everything the Democratic party has going for it this year — the overwhelming financial advantage, the legions of new voters, George W. Bush — do you believe the Obama campaign could still somehow, in the final moments, find a way to blow it and lose this election?
“If you answered yes, you’re a Democrat.
“Two weeks out, only the Democrats in Washington think Obama might not win. That’s not the result of a scientific study, but instead the conclusion I’ve reached after many lunches, dinners and elevator rides with DC Democrats. Against all evidence, a good number of them have convinced themselves that John McCain is going to be the next president.
“Republicans have no master plan for victory, no October Surprise. [But] you’ll never convince most Democrats of that.
“Partly this is superstition, like throwing salt over your shoulder when you spill the shaker: predictions are bad luck. But it’s also the voice of experience.
“‘We’re the Cincinnati Bengals,’ says Jay Rouse, a longtime Democratic political consultant. ‘Democrats are used to losing, not winning.’

I decided for the nowhere hell of it to upload this clip of a bed-and-breakfast in Tuscany that Jett and I stayed in after the ’07 Cannes Film Festival. It’s in the small village of San Donato, some 25 or 30 kilometers south of Florence.

Untitled from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo.

We’ve all read about the similarities (or at least the comparisons) between David Fincher‘s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Robert Zemeckis‘ Forrest Gump. The lifespan story of an oddball guy with an unusual but charmed condition, following him from childhood to maturity and all around the mulberry bush. And both films written, of course, by Eric Roth.

Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump; Brad Bitt as Benjamin Button.

But I’d prefer not to go there because of my still-lingering resentment of the Zemeckis film, which I and many others disliked from the get-go for the way it kept saying “keep your head down,” for its celebration of clueless serendipity and simpleton-ism, and particularly for the propagandistic way it portrayed ’60s-era counter-culture types and in fact that whole convulsive period.

Every secondary hippie or protestor character in that film was a selfish loutish asshole and every man and woman in the military was modest, decent and considerate. These and other aspects convinced me that the film was basically reactionary Republican horseshit, and led me to write an L.A. Times Syndicate piece called “Gump vs. Grumps,” about the Forrest Gump backlash. So I’d rather not consider it alongside whatever Benjamin Button may or may not be offering. No offense to Roth, who’s a good fellow and a brilliant writer.

“You know what hurts a movie like Max Payne is the success of the Batman franchise. That obviously is about story and character so they think for all films of the genre it’s gotta be about story and character and this whole backstory of him losing his wife. I don’t care about that. I wanna see Max Payne shoot people. That’s all I want from a movie like this.” — a quote attributed to “At The Moves” co-host Ben Lyons by Criticwatch’s Erik Childress.