The closer Barack Obama gets to the Democratic nomination, the uglier this thing is getting in racial terms. That Republican-funded North Carolina TV attack ad I saw today that tried to “Willie Horton” Obama was nothing sort of breathtaking. When was the last time in which the racial-attitude cards from the hunkered-down regions were laid more plainly on the kitchen table? The early to mid ’60s? As one MSNBC commentator said today, there are people out there who “made up their minds about [voting for an African-American candidate] back in 1957.”

Illustration by Tom Tomorrow

Is there any way to interpret Hillary Clinton‘s strategy but to say she’s clearly playing this situation (along with her ace-in-the-hole gender loyalty card) for all it’s worth? At the end of the day the ugly-duck reality is that Obama, who has to despise his opponent with every fibre of his being, may have no choice but to offer Clinton the Vice-Presidential spot. You don’t have to like or even respect someone to cut a deal with them. But would she take it?

A guy who knows a guy who’s on the Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull team has passed along #2’s impressions of the finished film. I’m not 100% comfortable running them, given the obvious fact that #2 is a coward, cowering like an eight year-old girl behind the creased khaki slacks of #1, as well as a shill and a spinner, but here goes anyway:

Bondage & discipline: Cate Blanchett‘s Agent Spalko

“I felt compelled to write, having just read Anne Thompson‘s 4.17 Variety column which states that ‘the advance buzz on Indy 4 is getting damaging enough that Lucas and Spielberg may want to reconsider the current strategy of waiting until May 18 to show the film…that’s a long way off.’
Composer John Williams, Guy #2 says, was initially correct on the Indy 4 running time of 140 minutes, but the film “underwent belt tightening and has been receiving customary tweaking for its final mix.”
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull “is the best of the Indy sequels,” he declares. “Steven Spielberg‘s helming puts the imitators (The Mummy, National Treasure) to shame. There are many breakneck set pieces, with a protracted jungle chase being particularly memorable. As well as being evocative of the truck chase from the first movie.
Harrison Ford, he claims, “gives his best performance in the role, not only physically belying his age but layering in welcome poignancy. More than before, audiences will be rooting for Indy. Shia LaBeouf makes essential contributions. Chemistry between he and Ford is palpable, yielding some nice character comedy.
“Jones is particularly beleaguered throughout the adventure, making his predicaments all the more entertaining.
“The film has the strongest supporting cast of the sequels. They all raise the bar. Ray Winstone amuses and fascinates, but the strongest impression is left by Cate Blanchett‘s Agent Spalko, a characterization that achieves instant cult status.
“Hopefully, the surprises in this film can continue to be guarded. Eventually, these spoilers will get out, but it would be shameful for reviewers and bloggers to reveal an ending that any longtime diehard fan of the films could only dream about. Expect a particularly resounding reaction in the theater.
“Kudos to screenwriter David Koepp for pulling all this together on the page. This will easily be the biggest hit of the year.”

Despite Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull composer John Williams having said in that recent You Tube video clip that the film is “seven reels long [with] each reel being 20 minutes,” and therefore 140 minutes give or take…it’s not. Producer Frank Marshall called Paramount publicity today to inform that the film is maybe a tad over two hours including credits. So Williams was blah-blahing…whatever.

Speaking of Peter Falk, the following is a true story, witnessed first-hand by myself: It was ’83 or ’84, and I was in a quality hardware store on a Saturday afternoon somewhere in deep Hollywood. And suddenly I heard laughing and joshing coming from two or three guys standing around the checkout counter, which was just out of sight. Then I heard some guy say, “Heyyy…detective!” with the other guys laughing like he’d just said something truly brilliant and inspired.

And then I saw Falk coming down the aisle next to mine, angry and exasperated at being ribbed in such a coarse and lunkheaded way. He said “Jesus!” at least twice, although it may have been three times. He said it with a mixture of agony and disbelief, as if to say “these assholes are unbelievable…really fucking unbelievable” And the chowderheads who were Colombo-ing him didn’t give a damn how rude they were being or how stupid they were making themselves look. All they knew or cared about was that Detective Colombo was in their midst and they were going to have fun with this while it lasted. They were like children having fun heckling a gorilla in a cage at a zoo.
There are guys like this all over, in every country. But the guys like this who live in Pennsylvania will probably be voting for Clinton or McCain.

I concur 100% with Toronto Star critic Peter Howell when he says that “just one person saves Smart People from being completely wretched, [and] it’s the presence of Thomas Haden Church.”

The problem, unfortunately, is that Haden Church wears a truly wretched moustache in Noam Murro‘s film, and it wrestles with his performance. He’s still the film’s most winning actor (slightly more engaging than Ellen Page, and much more so than the growly and curmudgeonly Dennis Quaid), but every time you look at him your eyes go right to his upper lip and it’s like…why?
This led me to lament almost all moustaches everywhere. I realize that some actors look better with them. Or they did in the good old days. Clark Gable, Ronald Colman, William Daniels in The Graduate, John Hillerman in Chinatown, etc. Robert Redford’s ‘stache in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid looked terrific. But almost everyone who doesn’t have the kind of face that really and truly needs the augmentation of upper-lip hair looks awful when they grow one. I mean terrible and sometimes even comically miscalculated at times. The word doofusy comes to mind.
Black guys, for whatever reason, almost always look good with moustaches. Who can imagine Billy Dee Williams without one? Except for Denzel Washington — they don’t work for him at all.

Slashfilm’s Peter Sciretta has posted a piece about an alleged San Francisco backlash to the Forgetting Sarah Marshall slogan campaign. If any San Francisco HE readers notice any of these satirical knockoffs that Sciretta is referring to, please snap a photo and send it along.

Sciretta begins by explaining that he recently wrote “about Universal’s genius viral marketing campaign for the upcoming Judd Apatow-produced comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which had taken over San Francisco. Signs on buses, bus shelters and billboards with cryptic messages that read ‘I hate You Sarah Marshall’, “My Mom Always Hated You Sarah Marshall’ and ‘You Do Look Fat in Those Jeans, Sarah Marshall’, lead those who notice to ihatesarahmarshall.com.
“It’s actually a very cool campaign, maybe too good. There are so many of these advertisements around San Francisco that a backlash has begun. Last week flyers that look like the Sarah Marshall advertisements have started appearing on trees around the city reading ‘I’m So Over You, Tree’. Another person snapped the photo below of a tree-attached flyer which reads ‘You Do Look Fat in those jeans, tree”.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which I found personally painful to sit through (in part because of the film having forced me to contemplate certain aspects of Jason Segel‘s anatomy), opens on 4.18.

Lacking The Rhyme

As a would-be Oscar contender, Stranger Than Fiction (Columbia, 11.10) is dead. This fact was made resoundingly clear after today’s (9.8) press screening at the Toronto Film Festival. You and your friends can still pay to see it when it opens two months from now and chuckle and eat popcorn and discuss it afterwards… knock yourselves out. But forget the derby.

Maggie Gyllenhaal, Will Ferrell in in Marc Forster’s Stranger Than Fiction

The only reason anyone had reason to presume Fiction might be award-quality is that it’s a big-studio November release with quality-level people behind it (director Marc Forster, producer Lindsay Doran, screenwriter Zack Helm, costars Will Ferrell, Emma Thompson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Queen Latifah), and a pseudo-trippy storyline in the vein of Charlie Kaufman‘s Adap- tation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind .
But it’s a half-assed little failure — a middle-range mindfuck movie that isn’t that clever or funny or up to something that holds metaphorical water. That’s because the “imaginative” metaphysical scheme behind it doesn’t really add up or pan out. I almost hated it. In some ways I do hate it.
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I can’t explain what’s wrong with Stranger Than Fiction without discussing plot particulars so if you’re averse to spoilers, read no further.
It’s about a lonely, overly regulated IRS agent named Harold Crick…stop right there. Right away you can smell the whimsical tone. Giving a joyless, constipated character the last name of “Crick” is like calling a cowboy character “Dusty Rhodes” or a backwoods yokel “Clem Kadiddlehopper.” Having him portrayed by Ferrell is…well, not a bad idea. In theory. Ferrell is more restrained and character- contained here than in any film he’s ever been in, and I remember saying to myself early on, “Good for him, he’s subliminating his schtick.”
But fifteen minutes with Harold Crick was enough to make me nostalgic for Talladega Nights, and that’s bad. All Ferrell has to play here is confusion and timidity and befuddlement, and anhour’s exposure to these states of mind make you feel down and dreary.

Harold’s problem is that he’s begun to hear his life being narrated by a woman with a British accent. Literally, like a DVD narration track. And it’s driving him nuts. We gradually learn that the voice belongs to a chain-smoking writer named Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson), who is having lots of trouble finishing her latest book, which is largely about an IRS agent named Harold Crick. Yup…same.
Anyway, Kay is planning to kill Harold off and doesn’t quite know how. (She’s murdered several of her characters, we’re told.) And Harold, once he gets wind of this, seeks her out and pleads with her not to kill him because for the first time in his life he’s starting to feel love and joy, having fallen for a cookie lady (Gyllenhaal) whose tax returns he’s auditing, and because he’s just begun to learn to play guitar.
An interesting idea…at first. Anyone who’s written fiction knows that sometimes the characters tell you what they want to do. You may have had a plan for this or that to happen to them, but every so often characters talk back and say, “Hold up, man…this is my life, okay? And this is what I want to do.”
Except — and this is the Big Problem — the movie never makes it clear that Harold Crick is or isn’t living inside Kay Eiffel’s head. It never makes a case for the fact that he’s existing in some imaginary realm Kay is creating as she moves along with her book, or, assuming he’s real, how and why Kay’s imaginings have any power over him.

The bottom line (I think ) is that Harold is as real as you or me or Piers Handling or Paris Hilton…or so it seemed to me. And yet Harold believes he’s a character in Kay’s book and he’s afraid that Kay will have him killed, etc. On top of which Kay is unaware that Harold is a real-life physical creature who is being guided and provoked by her words.
Desperate, Harold turns to help from a quirky English professor, Dr. Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman), who listens with interest but also a kind of strange indifference to his tale. Very strange. Hilbert tells Howard at one point that if Kay has decided he has to die, he may as well accept it because the manner and circumstance of his death that she’s dreamt up will somehow be more enobling than an average death. Or some such hooey.
On top of which there’s Queen Latifah as some kind of soother-smooth talker type who’s been ordered by Eiffel’s publisher to help her circumnavigate the writer’s block. Can anyone imagine an ordeal more terrible than having to deal with Queen Latifah more or less moving into your home or workspace and sitting on you (all 250 pounds of her) until you start writing again?
I know this sounds like a tiresome, half-baked, full-of-holes story idea, and it may feel tedious just reading about it in this space, but seeing the film is much, much worse….trust me. Stranger Than Fiction is one of those movies that makes you shift around in your seat and squeeze the armrest of your chair and whimper and grit your teeth. After an hour or so it makes you feel like your head is going to explode.

Dustin Hoffman, Will Ferrell

Zac Helm’s script was widely admired before this film was made, and I still can’t figure why that was. I tried to read it twice and couldn’t get through it. The damn thing doesn’t echo because the system of the story hasn’t been thought out or explained in a way that really “works”. It’s stuck on its own deadpan cuteness and quirkiness and other-ness. Talk about flames licking your feet.
I’m not saying Fiction won’t have its fans here and there, but it’s finished as far as any kind of derby points are concerned because there will be enough detractors like myself throwing its value into question. Average Joes, trust me, are going to go “later” and shine it after the first showings on Friday night.

Triumph of Others

That Telluride Film Festival hype about Florian Henckel- Donnersmarck‘s The Lives of Others (Sony Classics, 2.07) was based on serious substance. This is one of the most penetrating German-made “heart” films I’ve ever seen — the love story at the center of it is tender and impassioned and ripely erotic — and yet it’s also a very chilling and gripping drama about political terror.

Martina Gedek, Sebastian Koch in The Lives of Others

And yet it’s very much of an interior thing — emotional at every turn and at times quite sad. Gray and dispiriting at other times, but with a touching “up” element at the end.
The Lives of Others is a political thriller with compassion — a movie about spying and paranoia and the worst aspects of Socialist bloc rigidity and bureacratic thug- gery, and yet one that delivers a metaphor that says even the worst of us can move towards openness and a lessening of hate and suspicion. Ugliness need not rule.
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It’s about the turning of a bad guy — a Stasi secret policeman (Ulrich Muhe) who is first seen as a bloodless and fiendish bureaucrat, but whose determination to spy upon and mangle the lives of a playwright (Sebastian Koch) and his actress wife (Martina Gedek) for the sake of career advancement gradually weakens and erodes, and then flips over into something else entirely.
Call it a fable or (if you’re German) unrealistic in an historical political sense, but I bought it and so did everyone else at last night’s packed screening at the Elgin. The crowd stood up at the end of the 9 pm show — clapping, cheering, woo-wooing. Muhe and Henckel-Donnersmarck, the 33 year-old director-writer, left their seats and went up on stage and took bows — several bows. They waved and smiled as the cheers kept coming, and then they turned to each other and hugged. Quite a moment.

Ulrich Muhe and Floridan Henckel-Donnersmarck taking bows on the stage of Toronto’s Elgin theatre last night around 11:15 pm.

The Lives of Others a one-week qualifying run in New York and Los Angeles, and then open it in February to coincide with the Oscar nominations. It’s all but guaranteed to be nominated as one of the five Best Foreign Films. It won 7 Lola Awards (Germany’s equivalent of the Oscar) — for Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor (Muhe), Best Supporting Actor (Ulrich Tukur) and Best Production Design.
Set in Berlin, the story mostly takes place in 1984 and ’85, although it jumps to ’89 (the year the Berlin Wall came down) and then to ’91 and ’93. During the 50-year history of the German Democratic Republic (’49 to ’89), the thugs who held the reins of power kept the citizenry in line through a network of secret police called the “Stasi”, an army of 200,000 bureaucrats and informers whose goal was “to know everything.”
Captain Gerd Wiesler (Muhe) is a highly placed Stasi officer who is prodded by a superior, Lieutenant Colonel Anton Grubitz (Tukur), to dig up anything negative he can on a famous playwright named Georg Dreyman (och) and his actress wife Christa-Maria Sieland (Gedeck, best known for her starring role in Mostly Martha).

Ulrich Muhe in The Lives of Others

At first the suspicions are baseless — Freyman is a dedicated socialist who believes in the GDR. But his loyalties evolve when he discovers that his wife has been pressured into a sexual relationship with a government bigwig, and especially after a theatrical director pal commits suicide due to despondency over his being blacklisted and prevented from working. Eventually Wiesler, who has had their apartment thoroughly bugged, has evidence that Wiesler is working to undermine the state.
And yet his immersion in the lives of this playwright and his actress wife leads, ironically, to a gradual bonding process — a feeling of identification and sympathy for the couple as human beings, artists…people he’d like to know and perhaps share passions with, despite his constricted personality and shadowy Stasi ways. He knows he’s not in their league and probably not worthy of their friendship, but he feels what he feels regardless.
I have to get downtown and hit the Varsity plex, but I’ll be speaking with Muhe and Henckel-Donnersmarck at their hotel tomorrow afternoon. Not counting Pedro Almodovar’s ,em>Volver< .em>, which I saw yeserday for the second time yesterday for reasons of pure pleasure, this is the first super-fine film I’ve seen at the Toronto Film Festival so far.
Later today is Venus and then Candy and then a Michael Moore thing at the Elgin, and finally a Volver party starting around 10:30 or 11 pm.

You’re Fired, Tom!

Paramount Pictures has shown Tom Cruise the door, and it’s top executive has explained why in a blunt and unflattering way. “Lo, how the mighty have fallen” is one way of reacting to this, but the real question is why has Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone spoken so curtly and dismissively of a once all-powerful superstar?

The Wall Street Journal has a story up about Paramount severing ties with Cruise/Wagner Prods., and it’s a whopper. The money quote is Redstone explanation for why Paramount is ending its 14-year relationship with Cruise’s film production company, to wit: because the actor’s “offscreen behavior” which “was unacceptable to the company.”
It’s astonishing that Redstone would say this because it wasn’t really necessary to spell things out. The usual Hollywood routine in explaining a parting of the ways (creative or otherwise) is to use polite respectful terms, which Redstone obviously decided against. He’s clearly disdainful of Cruise’s eccentric Scientology-driven antics and has made a very public show of flipping him the bird.
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Why didn’t Redstone just say “we wish Cruise and Paula Wagner well” and let it go at that?” What could have brought this on? “It seems as if Redstone is acting on a belief that Cruise has become box-office poison, or is starting to become that,” an insider with ties to Paramount said this afternoon.
Cruise’s partner Paula Wagner told Variety earlier today that Redstone’s comments about Cruise were “outrageous and disrespectful.” Wagner also asserted that CAA, which reps Cruise, terminated discussions with Paramount earlier in the week. The studio had had been offering a sharply reduced annual funding commitment for C/W Prods., down from $10 million to something like 20% of that, according to an earlier report.
It was also annouced that Cruise and Wagner have raised $100 million from two hedge funds and are striking out as indies while looking for a housekeeping deal at another studio. “‘This is a dream of Tom and mine,’ Wagner told the Wall Street Journal.
Still, could anyone have imagined even two or three years ago that Cruise would be in effect be pushed off the Paramount lot? It’s one thing for Paramount to cut C/W’s annual deal down from $10 million to $2 million, but for its chairman to effectively say “you’re fired’ is a mind-blower.
Between Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic wipeout of a few weeks ago and Cruise being booted off a big-studio lot due to “unacceptable behavior”, we’re once again reminded that studio chiefs are being less and less accomodating to big-star salaries.
And also that big-star meltdowns are becoming more and more common these days. The difference this time is that a major corporate figure has given this bizarre syndrome as a reason for ending a deal. This is significant. And it seems fair to re-acknowledge that Andrew Breitbart and Mark Ebner‘s “Hollywood Interrupted” called this syndrome a long ways back.
Free Katie. Free Suri.

Laughed Some, Seen Worse

The consensus is already getting around: Snakes on a Plane is sorta kinda tolerably entertaining. As in sometimes hilarious, amusingly cheesy here and there, never out-of-this-world brilliant, fitfully amusing…a guiltless B movie all the way.

Rachel Blanchard in David Ellis’s Snakes on a Plane (New Line, 8.18)

Make that a B-minus. Watching cheeseball thrillers can make you feel like you’ve got a virus of some kind, and this one definitely put something in my blood. But it has maybe seven or eight good laughs (okay, nine or ten), and a good ending with Keenan Thompson (the cool fat-ass in the orange shirt) delivering some funny lines. And I loved it when Gerard Plunkett, playing a snarly-ass middle-aged businessman…I’d rather not spoil. But Plunkett does two things that are quite funny.
It’s significant that Snakes didn’t irritate me all that much. It’s also significant, however, that watching it felt so uneventful that I couldn’t make myself write a review last night after I got home around midnight. It’s hard to get it up when all you have to say is “I wasn’t in pain.”
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I was shaking my head at times at the some of the over-acting and tepid dialogue. The first 15 or 20 minutes (i.e., set-up sections shot on one of the Hawaiian islands) is on the level of, say, a Charlie’s Angels episode from the early ’80s, and that’s pretty damn awful. Byron Lawson’s performance as Eddie Kim, the criminal who arranges for a big crate of poisonous snakes to be unleased on a Honolulu-to LAX jet, is the worst element by far.
The damn thing is overlit for the first 25 to 30 minutes, in the manner of big-studio movies of the mid to late ’60s. Director David Ellis knows, I’m sure, that when planes take off the really bright lights in the cabin (i.e, the ones that are turned on when a plane lands) are never used, and also that most of us know that. But he flood-lights the hell out of these scenes anyway, and this just takes you right out of it.

Samuel L. Jackson, Flex Alexander

But Snakes never turns bad-bad. It’s lazy, goofy and often sloppy. Ellis isn’t a terribly clever action director — not in my book. But he’s not incompetent and the film isn’t horribly crafted. It’s just not very hip.
I just wish Ellis had gone more nutso. I wish that someone had gotten sucked out of the window as the plane is approaching the coast of Los Angeles and that the camera had stayed with this person as he/she splashes into the Pacific…and lives. I was hoping one of the really big snakes would eat the baby. I wanted to see one of the big snakes act like a phallus and sexually invade one of the terrified females. (Elsa Pataky, I was hoping.) Well, why not? This movie isn’t about logic or sensitivity — it’s about pushing the bounds and making the fans howl. As long as we’re talking about snakes-as-penises, why not have one of the fat black guys get anally penetrated by a python?
Most of the snakes are CGI-ed or substandard animatronic. I didn’t believe anyone was being threatened, not for a second. It’s about cartoon snakes on a plane. And stupid sound effects with the snakes hissing and growling and whatnot. A lot of this film is really quite lame.

Elsa Pataky

I would have had a better time if Ellis and New Line has done a shot-for-shot remake of Tobe Hooper and Piers Haggard’s Venom. Seriously — that’s a pretty good deadly-snake exploitation flick. It’s just about a single black mamba and when one of those babies bite you, forget it.
There is one totally brilliant moment when Flex Alexander is chatting up Rachel Blanchard and he’s interrupted by the sound of a guy sitting nearby blowing snot out of his nose. Flex and Rachel look at this guy and we see him wiping his pants with his snot in order to get it off his hands. I usually despise gross-out humor but the absolute lunacy of this bit is inspired. Why show a passenger doing a point- lessly gross thing? The fact that Ellis does it anyway is a stroke of mad genius. He should be proud of this bit…seriously.
Samuel L. Jackson is pretty good, not great — but the moment when he yells out the big line (“I’ve had it with these mothahfuckin’ snakes,” etc.) is very neat. Todd Louiso is a very subtle and gifted actor who’s under-utilized here. (Naturally.) David Koechner and Bobby Canavale…forget it. They’re fine but in a film like this all performances are a losing battle.

Keenan Thompson

I hope Elsa Pataky lands more roles in U.S. films. She’s hot and fetching and I liked her in that Maxim spread. Her eyes say dirty things.
The flatness of much of this film is conveyed in the opening titles. First of all, it’s a mark of mediocrity when a film begins with a helicopter shot of a big scenic locale. It’s the director saying to the audience, “All right, relax…I have no imagination and you’re not the brightest bulbs on the planet for paying $10 bucks to see this thing, but that aside, here’s the scenic area where our story begins.”
Sure enough, Snakes starts with a lame helicopter shot. Sun, surf…breaking waves! Then we see a title card that says “SNAKES” (beat, beat) and then comes the addition of “ON A PLANE” — and as soon I saw this, I knew what I was in for. This, sadly, is the predominant Ellis touch rather than some guy wiping snot on his jeans.

O’Toole Scores Again?

As everyone presumably knows, Miramax has swapped the release dates of Stephen Frears‘ The Queen, a drama about Queen Elizabeth (Helen Mirren) grappling with the death of Lady Diana, and Roger Michell’s Venus, based on a script by Hanif Kureishi about septugenarian sex, romance and parenting. Queen was advanced up to 10.6, and Venus was pushed back to 12.15. The motive was to put Venus into a better position for an Oscar campaign, but not necessarily for the film itself.
The main beneficiary of the Venus campaign is going to be Peter O’Toole, who reportedly plays the lead role — a randy, very straight 70ish actor named Maurice — with exceptional gusto, tenderness and O’Toolean panache.

Peter O’Toole in two cruddy-looking stills from Roger Michell’s Venus (Miramax, 12.15)

However good O’Toole turns out to be, there’s a great comeback story to be told if and when he goes on the promotion trail.
A story about a great and colorful actor, 73, being back in the saddle with a good role after years of wandering in the desert. About his flamboyant past as one of the big-time acting kings of the early to mid ’60s (Lawrence of Arabia, Becket), and as one of the great party animals of that era. About going flat in the ’70s and then briefly resurging in the early ’80s with plum roles in Richard Rush’s The Stunt Man and Richard Benjamin’s My Favorite Year…before going flat again. About the legend who came close to refusing an honorary gold-watch award from the Academy’ in 2003 because he didn’t want to be thought of as over-the-hill, and then got lucky right after this and nabbed a juicy part and hit a home run with it.
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Or so I’ve heard and read. You never know and you can’t trust anyone.
A certain Dart Group publicist in the employ of Miramax has been pushing O’Toole’s Venus work, yes, but I came across some pretty encouraging stuff on my own last May from some IMDB posters who claimed they’d seen Venus at a Convent Garden screening in very late April and then at a Manhattan screening three or four days later.
These postings inspired me to call Charles McDonald of the London p.r. firm McDonald + Rutter just before leaving for Cannes. I was hoping to get information about any Cannes market screenings of Venus, but McDonald said he didn’t know of any.

O’Toole in Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy

There are no prints of Venus in the States, I’m told, so maybe Michell and Kureishi have been adding or refining. It would be great to catch it in Toronto, but who knows?
The Venus log line reads, “Life for a pair of veteran actors gets turned upside down after they meet a brash teenaged girl.” Leslie Phillips, Jodie Whittaker (the young and the brash), Vanessa Redgrave and Richard Griffiths costar. The word on the film last spring is that it was good or pretty good (as in “good beginning and middle, so-so ending”). But the word on O’Toole was something else.
After seeing Venus at the Convent Garden showing, a Scottish-sounding guy named Phil Concannon wrote on 4.29 that “the real attraction [of the film] is the chance to see Peter O’Toole in a leading role once again, and he is very good indeed. He’s funny and touching, and occasionally uncomfortably lecherous, and it’s terrific to see him getting a role he can really sink his teeth into. There’s one scene in which O’Toole recites Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?’, and his sheer charisma, along with that great voice, makes the scene breathtaking.”
You know what would help the O’Toole campaign, assuming he’s as good in Venus as everyone says? If that low-life, ass-dragging video company MPI Home Video would finally get it together and put out that restored Becket DVD they’ve been holding onto and embarassing themselves by not releasing for the last couple of years.

O’Toole in the opening moments of Peter Glenville’s Becket

If this Becket DVD were to hit the market in the mid-fall, say, people would obviously be reminded what a great performance O’Toole gave as Henry II (he should have won the 1964 Best Actor Oscar but Rex Harrison took it for My Fair Lady), and the general awareness about O’Toole having been a world-class actor for the last 45 years would be that much higher.
O’Toole’s Becket performance “is one of the most exciting ever seen in a main- stream movie,” I wrote early this year. “O’Toole takes your breath away half the time, and the other half he makes you grin with delight.”
O’Toole recorded a narration track for MPI in the fall of ’03 that lasts throughout the 149-minute film, and, according to MPI Home Video’s Gregg Newman, is quite entertaining to listen to. If I were a Miramax marketing exec I would contact MPI and ask them what the hold-up is and, you know, can Miramax help in some way?
Becket addendum: I didn’t even call the MPI Home Video people Wednesday about the Becket DVD situation. MPI reps have flown their colors with baldly disengenuous statements about their release plans for this DVD in the past, always saying they intend to have it out “later this year” or “soon” and never living up to these pledges. That said, an MPI spokesperson named Christie Hester ( I spoke to her during the writing of one of my previous Becket DVD articles) posted a message on an IMDB board on 5.30.06 that said “MPI Home Video intends to release Becket on DVD during the first quarter of 2007.”
Obviously, any prepared statement about a forthcoming company initiative that contains the word “intends” is not to be trusted. Hester was obviously qualifying in case things don’t pan out. (Trust me, Warner Home Video has never announced it “intends” to release anything — their p.r. releases always say flatly and unambiguously that WHV will release this or that title on this or that date, and no monkeying around .) Then again Hester’s “first quarter of 2007” is a more date-specific pledge than anything ever stated by any MPI Home Video exec about their Becket plans, so maybe the DVD will come out sometime before 12.31.07. Maybe.