Spike’s Slam-Dunk

I haven’t seen the tracking on Inside Man (Universal, 3.24), but I’ll tell you one thing for damn sure. It’s going to be the top box-office dog when it opens five days from now. In fact, it’s quite obviously…hello?…the most commercial film ever directed by Spike Lee.
It’s going to to put arses in seats because it’s pretty much devoid of any African- American social concerns. And because it’s a deft, smooth and unpretentious big-studio thriller that’s always a step or two ahead of the audience (including those who pride themselves on being able to figure out plot twists). And because it’s a cleverly configured, Dog Day Afternoon-ish bank-robbery film with an edge.

Invoking Dog Day Afternoon might be the wrong way to put it. Inside doesn’t have the borough personality of that Sidney Lumet film, and its thieves aren’t oddball screw-ups.
Four super-organized hardcore pros (led by Clive Owen) hit a downtown Manhattan bank with military precision, and their first maneuver is to take hostages. The fuzz (led by detectives Denzel Washington and Chiwetel Ejiofor, and backed up by a uniformed Willem Dafoe) soon get wind and surround the building, and the usual tense negotiations and psychological stand-offs ensue.
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Seen it before? Same-old same-old with the deck reshuffled? Okay, maybe, to some extent…but Inside Man has the panache and blue-chip confidence of a slam-dunk enterprise, and is one of those nicely refined thrillers that keep you guessing and fully engrossed. Not especially violent or sensationalistic…just a good, gripping pulse-pounder.
Add to this the contributions of costars Jodie Foster (as a high-end fixer and financial consultant) and Christopher Plummer (as a loaded philanthropost and friends-of-powerful-people type) and…well, they definitely sweeten the pot.
It’s surprising at first to find the director of Do The Right Thing doing a genre thriller, although it’s clear early on he knows precisely what he’s doing.

Chiwetel Ejiofor, Denzel Washington in Inside Man

The action is centered on an old Wall Street-area bank — Manhattan Trust — owned by Plummer’s character. The action kicks in right at the start when Owen and his three conspirators kill the surveillance cameras and take over the bank and force everyone to put on identical jump-suits…
I don’t know if it’s such a good idea to run down the particulars.
The main thing is that Owen’s guy, Dalton Russell, is very steady and on top of things, and in no way some kind of hair-trigger asshole. The curious thing is that he doesn’t seem very interested in bagging the heaps of cash in the vault (like the guys in Heat were)…and the film doesn’t give any decent hints what he’s after for a good long while.
Washington’s detective, an old-fashioned guy with a thin moustache, a shaved head and a straw hat, doesn’t do all that much, preferring to watch and wait rather than attack and risk lives. He’s cool and not of a mind to upset anyone or anything. He tries a couple of times to trip up or fake-out Owen, but nothing radical….just fun stuff.
Then we start seeing portions of after-the-fact hostage interviews, shot with a grainier, half-sepia color scheme. This deflates the suspense a bit because it tells us early on the robbers were never identified, probably…although we’re not entirely sure. It’s still interesting, though. Everything in this film is. Nothing boring or numbing or flaccid.

I’m not going to spill any more. The only thing I feel compelled to mention are the strange sartorial choices made by Denzel’s detective. He dresses like it’s 1964 and Malcolm X is still alive and he’s the owner of an illegal Newark, New Jersey, bookmaking operation. Or a jazz club owner in Tennessee in 1958. Very strange. The idea seems to have been to make Denzel’s detective look like some kind of anachronism.
Washington is unexceptional but fine. Owen is icy, commanding and a very cool bad guy..even though he wears a mask for a good portion of the film. Ejiofor is sturdy, Dafoe is fine, Foster is cool and so is Plummer. Nobody is rewriting the book on great acting here, but they’re all pros and it all goes down like low-fat chocolate yogurt.
For a film that last 128 minutes, Inside Man whips right by. It seems to be over and done within 95 or 100 minutes, tops.
This is a first-rate shallow entertainment, and I can’t wait to see it again. It’s not a movie for munching popcorn through, or making lobby cell-phone calls or taking bathroom breaks while it’s playing. It’s a great film for saying “please be quiet” to the people sitting behind you because they’re won’t shut the fuck up and you really need to hear every line. It’s one of those “please, Michael Moses…can I come to the premiere party?” movies.

Enemies Watch

Last Friday night I read James Vanderbilt’s gripping, pared-to-the-bone screenplay of Against All Enemies, an adaptation of former terrorism czar Richard Clarke’s bombshell novel about the failures of the Clinton and Bush administrations to stop the terrorist plotters who eventually brought about the 9.11 attacks.
The script, yet another example of a fascinating run of political films being made by mainstream Hollywood these days, is the basis of an upcoming Columbia feature that Crash director Paul Haggis “[hopes] to shoot…this year,” according to what he told N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman in a piece that ran last Tuesday.

My first casting question, apart from the matter of whether or not Tom Hanks will agree to play Clarke, is who the hell is Haggis going to get to play President Bill Clinton? Damned if he isn’t right in the script, Arkansas accent, inquisitive mind and all. And in three good scenes.
Former National Security Advisor (and current Secretary of State) Condoleeza Rice is also a character with dialogue, and not a very sympathetic one. (No way around this — the facts are the facts.)
Vice-President Dick Cheney, National Security honcho Paul Wolfowitz and Clinton’s security adviser Anthony Lake are also characters, along with numerous other real-life figures. All with dialogue. Not as fictional stand-ins (as certain Clinton operatives were portrayed in Mike Nichols’ Primary Colors), but their literal selves.
Unfortunately, President Bush — who is certainly one of the villains of the piece, if you regard willful ignorance as a form of villainy — is an off-screen presence.
Against All Enemies is a riverting political drama — All The President’s Men meets Franz Kafka in the age of terrorism.

Every scene feels like it’s been chiselled and buffed to perfection (or at least my idea of that). And it has a sympathetic vulnerable hero (a government operator with no life who’s obstinate to a fault, and yet is a true vigilant soldier) and moments of warmth and humor and tragedy, and well-drawn secondary characters, and a finale that gives some 9/11 closure.
It’s about a dedicated hardcase lacking in certain diplomatic skills named Richard Clarke (Jason Robards would have been perfect in the mid ’70s, but right now Hanks-with-white-hair would be the absolute best choice) and his slow journey of discovery about what the Middle Eastern chess game is all about, play by play, and how the jihadists came to occupy and gradually rule the roost.
Scene by scene, act by act, Clarke keeps telling various government do-nothings what Middle Eastern terrorists might be up to, and nobody listens all that much. (Clinton’s people are more responsive than Bush II’s, but nobody acts brilliantly.) Then the Dubya do-nothings turn around after 9/11 and try to stick it to Clarke for being right.

Richard Clarke

It has a 24-page opening sequence that absolutely kills in terms of tension and psychological suspense, showing the White House staffers in turmoil on the morning of 9/11.
Then it rewinds back to start of Clarke’s government career in the late ’70s (when he was in his late 20s) and takes us on a journey of gradual discovery as Clarke learns more and more about the Mujahdeen, Islamic fundamentalists, offensive Jihad, “Usama” bin Laden and so on.
Then it’s back to 9/11 and Clarke’s confusion when the Bushies decide to use the attacks as an excuse to go to war with Iraq, and then his leaving the White House and writing his book and delivering his rant before a Congressional 9/11 committee, and finally his apology…even though he’s arguably the least guilty guy in the Washington establishment as far as 9/11 negligence is concerned.
Haggis told Waxman he hopes to turn Clarke’s book about “how we got ourselves into this mess” into a political thriller like All the President’s Men. “I don’t know how to do it, so that’s why I want to attempt it,” he explained. “It could be really embarrassing.”

If Hanks agrees to play Clarke (and he really should consider doing this — the film needs his good-guyness) and Against All Enemies is directed in the right way, with precisely the right pitch, it may indeed stand a chance of being compared favorably to All The President’s Men.
Okay, it’s a little wonky and it’s almost all about men and women in suits jawing with each other about intelligence and strategy, but it’s extremely tight and absorbing. I felt something hard, clean and special on every page.
The film is being produced by Haggis, John Calley and Larry Becsey with Colum- bia execs Doug Belgrad and Rachel O’Connor overseeing, as it were. Haggis didn’t give Waxman any hints about casting, but said “there’s a good list of people out there.”
Variety‘s Nicole LaPorte reported on 3.12 that Against All Enemies is “not necessarily” Haggis’s next project….but it should be. Nobody knows how long political films will continue to be hot in this own — better to strike when the iron is hot.

Clinton appears in three scenes between page 59 and 64, and he’s got a great scene on page 63 in which he comes off smart and resourceful and confident. And he laughs, and makes others laugh. He’s not the hero (that’s Clarke’s role) but Clinton is portrayed as a reasonably okay guy — a chief exec who gets it and sees the value in having a guy like Clarke nearby.
Vanderbilt’s script is so smart and sharp, and delivers so thoroughly in terms of authenticity, that the only actors on the planet who could sell the Clinton scenes would be either David Morse (a dead ringer) or John Tavolta, who of course played a character based on Clinton in Primary Colors . But even Morse or Travolta would feel a tiny bit wrong. To me, anyway.
I’m just going to say this: President Clinton should consider playing himself in this film. Seriously. He’d be great, he’d obviously be convincing and he’d be helping to recreate a very close approximation of the truth.
Besides the fact that a move like this would be the next logical step in the Holly- wood-Washington blender machine. Things have reached a point (remember those real-life Washingtonians taking to “drug czar” Michael Douglas in Traffic?) where a former President acting in a classy film like this would not be seen as all that curious. If you ask me it would have a kind of dignity.

Clinton cabinet

I asked for casting suggestions on Saturday, and here’s the best of them so far…
Richard Clarke: Tom Hanks, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, a slimmer James Gandolfini (looking to de-Soprano-cize his image by playing a wonky type).
Bill Clinton: Clinton himself, David Morse, John Travolta.
Dick Cheney: Jason Alexander (white hair, aged a little), Ben Kingsley.
Paul Wolfowitz: Alan Rosenberg, William H. Macy (a little make-up, hair coloring), Ron Silver.
Condoleeza Rice: Angela Bassett, Regina King, Merrin Dungey (from King of Queens/Alias/Curb)
Anthony Lake: Jude Ciccolella (excellent in 24 )

Havana Rap

To judge from three recent docs about bullet-dodging rappers living in volatile ‘hoods, the most intense and socially relevant rap music these days is coming out of the Caribbean area.
George Gittoe’s Rampage makes the case for the rap community in south Miami, Asger Leth’s Ghosts of Cite Soleil injects rap into the hell of Haiti’s poltical turmoil, and directors Jauretsi Saizarbitoria and Emilia Menocal show what the Cuban rap scene is about in East of Havana.

El Cartel’s Mikki Flow in Jauretsi Saizarbitoria’s East of Havana

Each film has its own style and aesthetic, but Saizarbitoria’s film is quite different than the other two, and not just because Charlize Theron produced it.
Caught earlier this week at South by Southwest by HE columnist Moise Chiullan, Havana is about the popularity of underground rap groups in Cuba and particularly three members of El Cartel, one of a small number of rapper groups in the suburbs of Havana.
There are two things that set El Cartel apart from standard-issue American rappers — gender equality (a relatively rare thing in hip-hop circles) and sharply political lyrics.
Instead of rapping about bitches, ho’s and flashing dough around, Cartel’s Mikki Flow, Soandry and Magyori (i.e., a female) tell stories about the daily struggle of living in post-Soviet Cuba .
The story surrounds the cancellation — censorship — of Cuba’s annual Rap Festival in 2004. Government representatives say it was due to hurricane damage, but the homie-in-the-street view is that The Man is keeping them down.

Magyori, also of El Cartel

The film says something quite interesting, which is that as much as Cuban citizens may fear the power of the government, the government fears its people and their freedom of expression exponentially more. Political unrest isn’t ebbing away. Poverty is worsening, economic resources are being more and more depleted, and Cuba’s long-standing dictator Fidel Castro is getting older every day.
Most Americans are unaware of the crushing effect of the Cuban embargo, and how 90 miles from the U.S. lies an island nation where there are computers but no internet and music but no iPods. But life moves along and things happen “por invento” — i.e., by invention.
Living life the Cuban way is a central concept to the poetry these rappers create: they use their passion and pain to distill literate, provocative lyrics that leave a profound impression on you. Their rap pounds to the rhythm of el corazon del barrio (the heart of the ‘hood) and uses this evolving art form to its pinnacle.
When word spread around South by Southwest crowds that Theron was Havana‘s producer, there was talk all over about her “doing it for credibility” or “trying to make it look like she cares.” Not quite so. The directors and producers of East of Havana have known Theron since she came to the U.S. from South Africa. They also acted as a surrogate family for her when she was “this little South African girl who didn’t speak any English.”

Denzel Lovett, a 14 year-old rapper, in George Giddoes’ Rampage

East of Havana almost didn’t happen, as the filmmakers made it into Cuba just a few weeks before President Bush further clamped down on travel to Cuba. Too bad — the El Cartel crew has expressed a strong desire to travel around and explore other cultures, given the opportunity.
Wim Wenders The Buena Vista Social Club showed us one side of Cuban music and culture, but East of Havana finally reveals the voice of contemporary Cuban youth and the rise of a very different new generation.
Look for more about this film in the coming months, as it was one of the most heavily-buzzed films of the festival.

Haiti, Sex, Death

Before last Sunday night I thought of Haiti as a hopeless Caribbean shithole, one of the worst places to live in the world because the government corruption and the politically-motivated beatings and killings never seem to stop, and because the poverty levels for most of the citizens are beyond belief.
I still see Haiti as an island most foul, but a knockout documentary called Ghosts of Cite Soleil, a kind of Cain-and-Abel story that was filmed just before, during and after the overthrow of Haitian president Jean Bertrand Aristide in March 2004, has added a new dimension.

The real-life 2pac and Lele as they appear in Asger Leth’s Ghosts of Cite Soleil

I now see Haiti as less of a Ground Zero for abstract political terror and more of a place where people on the bottom rung are trying to live and breathe and create their own kind of life-force energy as a way of waving away the constant hoverings of doom.
In short, this excellent 88-minute film, directed by Asger Leth (the son of Danish filmmaker Jorgen Leth), adds recognizable humanity to a culture that has seemed more lacking in hope and human decency than any other on earth. I saw it at the Wilshire Screening Room two and a half days ago, and it’s been a kind of growth experience for me. I feel like I almost “get” Haiti now, and I haven’t stopped telling people about it since.
Everyone will say that Ghosts is City of God but in ‘real’ verite terms…and it is that, of course. But it’s less about violent street crime than stink-from-the-head Haitian politics, and it explores an unusual romantic triangle between a white French female relief worker namd Lele and two gangster brothers, 2pac and Bily (not “Billy”), and it has a tragic ending that touches you as much as any well-crafted Hollywood tearjerker could…and yet it happened all on its own.
2pac and Bily are in no way the “good guys,” but in a way they are. They wave guns around and talk all the time about defending their territory or making an enemy back off or perhaps having to kill each other, but somehow the film makes them seem like half-sympathetic pawns…somewhat vulnerable sociopaths desperately trying to escape from their cage.

The brothers were leaders of gangs (there were five altogether, all of them known as “the Chimeres”, which is French for “ghosts”) who were being paid big money by the Aristide government to rough up or in some cases eliminate political oppo- nents. Director George Hickenlooper (Factory Girl), who invited me to Sunday’s screening in his capacity as one of the doc’s exec producers, said 2pac and Bily received “hundreds of thousands” of dollars.
When Aristide was finally forced out of office 2pac and Bily were suddenly targets of the new guys in power who wanted to get rid of all remnants of Aristide’s reign, including the “muscle.”
What was special in the making of Ghosts of Cite de Soleil was that Leth had totally open access to both brothers (as well as their government opponents), and also that life played out like a story written by a skilled dramatist.
This is precisely what Ghosts of Cite de Soleil could be the next time — a dramatic movie shot on location in Haiti with actors, a script, grips, electricians, etc.
On Monday I spoke with Cary Woods, the doc’s executive producer, who agreed that Ghosts of Cite Soleil could become a mainstream feature because (and this is primarily me talking) it has all the Shakespearean elements: poverty, political warfare, corruption, the cycle of violence, Cain and Abel, a romantic triangle, and a tragic finale.

And as a scripted feature it could get a bit more into the warring-brothers- sleeping-with-the-same-woman thing, which the doc doesn’t really run with.
Woods told me that a certain big-name actress has expressed interest in playing the Lele character if and when a script is written and a film is up and rolling, and then producer Seth Kanegis called me from somewhere in the Caribbean Tuesday afternoon and said Woods is looking to hire a distinguished, big-name writer to do the screenplay.
This would be a perfect feature for Oliver Stone, Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu, Werner Herzog…any director who could take the grit and social squalor of Haiti’s Cite de Soleil and reenact the story with feeling and realism.
The thing that needs to happen right now is for Ghosts of Cite Soleil to be accep- ted into the Cannes Film Festival’s Director’s Fortnight section so the festival-scout community can see it and talk it up. And then it should go to Toronto Film Festival in September, which would probably lead to some kind of distribution deal.
A film like this can only do what it can do. Film buffs and admirers of hot-button filmmaking and drama-in-the-rough will go for it, but some movigeoers would probably have a bit of difficulty with a film of this sort…a raw-looking, hand-held video piece about killings and squalor and interracial sex.

Ghosts executive producer Cary Woods

The feature that could come from this — that’s the thing. But there are miles to go before that happens…if it happens at all. Life is a gamble and movies are about rolling stones slowly uphill.
I haven’t mentioned the Wylcef Jean hip-hop on the soundtrack (the Haitian-born musician is also one of the film’s exec producers) and 2pac’s seeing himself as a burgeoning hip-hopper and his dream of becoming a musician-star. A Wyclef Jean soundtrack CD of some kind would, I understand, be part of the Ghosts package when and if it opens theatrically. I’m not 100% sure about this, but it would make sense.
Look for more about this film in the coming months, as it was one of the most heavily-buzzed films of the festival.

Spike’s Slam-Dunk

I haven’t seen the tracking on Inside Man (Universal, 3.24), but I’ll tell you one thing for damn sure. It’s going to be the top box-office dog when it opens five days from now. In fact, it’s quite obviously…hello?…the most commercial film ever directed by Spike Lee.
It’s going to to put arses in seats because it’s pretty much devoid of any African- American social concerns. And because it’s a deft, smooth and unpretentious big-studio thriller that’s always a step or two ahead of the audience (including those who pride themselves on being able to figure out plot twists). And because it’s a cleverly configured, Dog Day Afternoon-ish bank-robbery film with an edge.

Invoking Dog Day Afternoon might be the wrong way to put it. Inside doesn’t have the borough personality of that Sidney Lumet film, and its thieves aren’t oddball screw-ups.
Four super-organized hardcore pros (led by Clive Owen) hit a downtown Manhattan bank with military precision, and their first maneuver is to take hostages. The fuzz (led by detectives Denzel Washington and Chiwetel Ejiofor, and backed up by a uniformed Willem Dafoe) soon get wind and surround the building, and the usual tense negotiations and psychological stand-offs ensue.
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Seen it before? Same-old same-old with the deck reshuffled? Okay, maybe, to some extent…but Inside Man has the panache and blue-chip confidence of a big-studio enterprise, and is one of those nicely refined thrillers that keep you guessing and fully engrossed. Not especially violent or sensationalistic…just a good, gripping pulse-pounder.
Add to this the contributions of costars Jodie Foster (as a high-end fixer and financial consultant) and Christopher Plummer (as a loaded philanthropost and friends-of-powerful-people type) and…well, they definitely sweeten the pot.

Chiwetel Ejiofor, Denzel Washington in Inside Man

It’s surprising at first to find the director of Do The Right Thing doing a genre thriller, although it’s clear early on he knows precisely what he’s doing.
The action is centered on an old Wall Street-area bank — Manhattan Trust — owned by Plummer’s character. The jolt kicks in when Owen and his three conspirators kill the surveillance cameras and take over the bank and force everyone to put on identical jump-suits…
I don’t know if it’s such a good idea to run down the particulars.
The main thing is that Owen’s guy, Dalton Russell, is very on top of things and in no way sme kind of hair-trigger asshole. The curious thing is that he doesn’t seem very interested in bagging the heaps of cash in the vault (like the guys in Heat were)…and the film doesn’t give any decent hints what he’s after for a good long while.

Owens, director Spike Lee, Washington

Washington’s detective, an old-fashioned guy with a thin moustache, a shaved head and a straw hat, doesn’t do all that much, preferring to watch and wait rather than attack and risk lives. He’s cool and not of a mind to upset anyone or anything. He tries a couple of times to trip up or fake-out Owen, but nothing radical….just fun stuff.
Then we start seeing portions of after-the-fact hostage interviews, shot with a grainier, half-sepia color scheme. This deflates the suspense a bit because it tells us early on the robbers were never identified, probably…although we’re not entirely sure. It’s still interesting, though. Everything in this film is. Nothing boring or numbing or flaccid.
I’m not going to spill any more. The only thing I feel compelled to mention are the strange sartorial choices made by Denzel’s detective. He dresses like it’s 1964 and Malcolm X is still alive and he’s the owner of an illegal Newark, New Jersey, bookmaking operation. Or a jazz club owner in Tennessee in 1958. Very strange. The idea seems to have been to make Denzel’s detective look like some kind of anachronism.
Washington is unexceptional but fine. Owen is cool, commanding and a very cool bad guy..even though he wears a mask for a good portion of the film. Ejiofor is sturdy, Dafoe is fine, Foster is cool and so is Plummer. Nobody is rewriting the book on great acting here, but they’re all pros and it all goes down like low-fat chocolate yogurt.

For a film that last 128 minutes, Inside Man whips right by. It seems to be over and done within 95 or 100 minutes, tops.
This is a first-rate shallow entertainment, and I can’t wait to see it again. It’s not a movie for munching popcorn through, or making lobby cell-phone calls or taking bathroom breaks while it’s playing. It’s a great film for saying “shut up” to the people sitting behind you because they’re won’t shut the fuck up and you really need to hear every line. It’s one of those “please, Michael Moses…can I come to the premiere party?” movies.

Enemies Watch

Last Friday night I read James Vanderbilt’s gripping, pared-to-the-bone screenplay of Against All Enemies, an adaptation of former terrorism czar Richard Clarke’s bombshell novel about the failures of the Clinton and Bush administrations to stop the terrorist plotters who eventually brought about the 9.11 attacks.
The script, yet another example of a fascinating run of political films being made by mainstream Hollywood these days, is the basis of an upcoming Columbia feature that Crash director Paul Haggis “[hopes] to shoot…this year,” according to what he told N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman in a piece that ran last Tuesday.

My first casting question, apart from the matter of whether or not Tom Hanks will agree to play Clarke, is who the hell is Haggis going to get to play President Bill Clinton? Damned if he isn’t right in the script, Arkansas accent, inquisitive mind and all. And in three good scenes.
Former National Security Advisor (and current Secretary of State) Condoleeza Rice is also a character with dialogue, and not a very sympathetic one. (No way around this — the facts are the facts.)
Vice-President Dick Cheney, National Security honcho Paul Wolfowitz and Clinton’s security adviser Anthony Lake are also characters, along with numerous other real-life figures. All with dialogue. Not as fictional stand-ins (as certain Clinton operatives were portrayed in Mike Nichols’ Primary Colors), but their literal selves.
Unfortunately, President Bush — who is certainly one of the villains of the piece, if you regard willful ignorance as a form of villainy — is an off-screen presence.
Against All Enemies is a riverting political drama — All The President’s Men meets Franz Kafka in the age of terrorism.

Every scene feels like it’s been chiselled and buffed to perfection (or at least my idea of that). And it has a sympathetic vulnerable hero (a government operator with no life who’s obstinate to a fault, and yet is a true vigilant soldier) and moments of warmth and humor and tragedy, and well-drawn secondary characters, and a finale that gives some 9/11 closure.
It’s about a dedicated hardcase lacking in certain diplomatic skills named Richard Clarke (Jason Robards would have been perfect in the mid ’70s, but right now Hanks-with-white-hair would be the absolute best choice) and his slow journey of discovery about what the Middle Eastern chess game is all about, play by play, and how the jihadists came to occupy and gradually rule the roost.
Scene by scene, act by act, Clarke keeps telling various government do-nothings what Middle Eastern terrorists might be up to, and nobody listens all that much. (Clinton’s people are more responsive than Bush II’s, but nobody acts brilliantly.) Then the Dubya do-nothings turn around after 9/11 and try to stick it to Clarke for being right.

Richard Clarke

It has a 24-page opening sequence that absolutely kills in terms of tension and psychological suspense, showing the White House staffers in turmoil on the morning of 9/11.
Then it rewinds back to start of Clarke’s government career in the late ’70s (when he was in his late 20s) and takes us on a journey of gradual discovery as Clarke learns more and more about the Mujahdeen, Islamic fundamentalists, offensive Jihad, “Usama” bin Laden and so on.
Then it’s back to 9/11 and Clarke’s confusion when the Bushies decide to use the attacks as an excuse to go to war with Iraq, and then his leaving the White House and writing his book and delivering his rant before a Congressional 9/11 committee, and finally his apology…even though he’s arguably the least guilty guy in the Washington establishment as far as 9/11 negligence is concerned.
Haggis told Waxman he hopes to turn Clarke’s book about “how we got ourselves into this mess” into a political thriller like All the President’s Men. “I don’t know how to do it, so that’s why I want to attempt it,” he explained. “It could be really embarrassing.”

If Hanks agrees to play Clarke (and he really should consider doing this — the film needs his good-guyness) and Against All Enemies is directed in the right way, with precisely the right pitch, it may indeed stand a chance of being compared favorably to All The President’s Men.
Okay, it’s a little wonky and it’s almost all about men and women in suits jawing with each other about intelligence and strategy, but it’s extremely tight and absorbing. I felt something hard, clean and special on every page.
The film is being produced by Haggis, John Calley and Larry Becsey with Colum- bia execs Doug Belgrad and Rachel O’Connor overseeing, as it were. Haggis didn’t give Waxman any hints about casting, but said “there’s a good list of people out there.”
Variety‘s Nicole LaPorte reported on 3.12 that Against All Enemies is “not necessarily” Haggis’s next project….but it should be. Nobody knows how long political films will continue to be hot in this own — better to strike when the iron is hot.

Clinton appears in three scenes between page 59 and 64, and he’s got a great scene on page 63 in which he comes off smart and resourceful and confident. And he laughs, and makes others laugh. He’s not the hero (that’s Clarke’s role) but Clinton is portrayed as a reasonably okay guy — a chief exec who gets it and sees the value in having a guy like Clarke nearby.
Vanderbilt’s script is so smart and sharp, and delivers so thoroughly in terms of authenticity, that the only actors on the planet who could sell the Clinton scenes would be either David Morse (a dead ringer) or John Tavolta, who of course played a character based on Clinton in Primary Colors . But even Morse or Travolta would feel a tiny bit wrong. To me, anyway.
I’m just going to say this: President Clinton should consider playing himself in this film. Seriously. He’d be great, he’d obviously be convincing and he’d be helping to recreate a very close approximation of the truth.
Besides the fact that a move like this would be the next logical step in the Holly- wood-Washington blender machine. Things have reached a point (remember those real-life Washingtonians taking to “drug czar” Michael Douglas in Traffic?) where a former President acting in a classy film like this would not be seen as all that curious. If you ask me it would have a kind of dignity.

Clinton cabinet

I asked for casting suggestions on Saturday, and here’s the best of them so far…
Richard Clarke: Tom Hanks, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, a slimmer James Gandolfini (looking to de-Soprano-cize his image by playing a wonky type).
Bill Clinton: Clinton himself, David Morse , John Travolta.
Dick Cheney: Jason Alexander (white hair, aged a little), Ben Kingsley.
Paul Wolfowitz: Alan Rosenberg, William H. Macy (a little make-up, hair coloring), Ron Silver.
Condoleeza Rice: Angela Bassett, Regina King, Merrin Dungey (from King of Queens/Alias/Curb)
Anthony Lake: Jude Ciccolella (excellent in 24 )

Havana Rap

To judge from three recent docs about bullet-dodging rappers living in volatile ‘hoods, the most intense and socially relevant rap music these days is coming out of the Caribbean area.
George Gittoe’s Rampage makes the case for the rap community in south Miami, Asger Leth’s Ghosts of Cite Soleil injects rap into the hell of Haiti’s poltical turmoil, and directors Jauretsi Saizarbitoria and Emilia Menocal show what the Cuban rap scene is about in East of Havana.

El Cartel’s Mikki Flow in Jauretsi Saizarbitoria’s East of Havana

Each film has its own style and aesthetic, but Saizarbitoria’s film is quite different than the other two, and not just because Charlize Theron produced it.
Caught earlier this week at South by Southwest by HE columnist Moise Chiullan, Havana is about the popularity of underground rap groups in Cuba and particularly three members of El Cartel, one of a small number of rapper groups in the suburbs of Havana.
There are two things that set El Cartel apart from standard-issue American rappers — gender equality (a relatively rare thing in hip-hop circles) and sharply political lyrics.
Instead of rapping about bitches, ho’s and flashing dough around, Cartel’s Mikki Flow, Soandry and Magyori (i.e., a female) tell stories about the daily struggle of living in post-Soviet Cuba .
The story surrounds the cancellation — censorship — of Cuba’s annual Rap Festival in 2004. Government representatives say it was due to hurricane damage, but the homie-in-the-street view is that The Man is keeping them down.

Magyori, also of El Cartel

The film says something quite interesting, which is that as much as Cuban citizens may fear the power of the government, the government fears its people and their freedom of expression exponentially more. Political unrest isn’t ebbing away. Poverty is worsening, economic resources are being more and more depleted, and Cuba’s long-standing dictator Fidel Castro is getting older every day.
Most Americans are unaware of the crushing effect of the Cuban embargo, and how 90 miles from the U.S. lies an island nation where there are computers but no internet and music but no iPods. But life moves along and things happen “por invento” — i.e., by invention.
Living life the Cuban way is a central concept to the poetry these rappers create: they use their passion and pain to distill literate, provocative lyrics that leave a profound impression on you. Their rap pounds to the rhythm of el corazon del barrio (the heart of the ‘hood) and uses this evolving art form to its pinnacle.
When word spread around South by Southwest crowds that Theron was Havana‘s producer, there was talk all over about her “doing it for credibility” or “trying to make it look like she cares.” Not quite so. The directors and producers of East of Havana have known Theron since she came to the U.S. from South Africa. They also acted as a surrogate family for her when she was “this little South African girl who didn’t speak any English.”

Denzel Lovett, a 14 year-old rapper, in George Giddoes’ Rampage

East of Havana almost didn’t happen, as the filmmakers made it into Cuba just a few weeks before President Bush further clamped down on travel to Cuba. Too bad — the El Cartel crew has expressed a strong desire to travel around and explore other cultures, given the opportunity.
Wim Wenders The Buena Vista Social Club showed us one side of Cuban music and culture, but East of Havana finally reveals the voice of contemporary Cuban youth and the rise of a very different new generation.
Look for more about this film in the coming months, as it was one of the most heavily-buzzed films of the festival.

Haiti, Sex, Death

Before last Sunday night I thought of Haiti as a hopeless Caribbean shithole, one of the worst places to live in the world because the government corruption and the politically-motivated beatings and killings never seem to stop, and because the poverty levels for most of the citizens are beyond belief.
I still see Haiti as an island most foul, but a knockout documentary called Ghosts of Cite Soleil, a kind of Cain-and-Abel story that was filmed just before, during and after the overthrow of Haitian president Jean Bertrand Aristide in March 2004, has added a new dimension.

The real-life 2pac and Lele as they appear in Asger Leth’s Ghosts of Cite Soleil

I now see Haiti as less of a Ground Zero for abstract political terror and more of a place where people on the bottom rung are trying to live and breathe and create their own kind of life-force energy as a way of waving away the constant hoverings of doom.
In short, this excellent 88-minute film, directed by Asger Leth (the son of Danish filmmaker Jorgen Leth), adds recognizable humanity to a culture that has seemed more lacking in hope and human decency than any other on earth. I saw it at the Wilshire Screening Room two and a half days ago, and it’s been a kind of growth experience for me. I feel like I almost “get” Haiti now, and I haven’t stopped telling people about it since.
Everyone will say that Ghosts is City of God but in ‘real’ verite terms…and it is that, of course. But it’s less about violent street crime than stink-from-the-head Haitian politics, and it explores an unusual romantic triangle between a white French female relief worker namd Lele and two gangster brothers, 2pac and Bily (not “Billy”), and it has a tragic ending that touches you as much as any well-crafted Hollywood tearjerker could…and yet it happened all on its own.
2pac and Bily are in no way the “good guys,” but in a way they are. They wave guns around and talk all the time about defending their territory or making an enemy back off or perhaps having to kill each other, but somehow the film makes them seem like half-sympathetic pawns…somewhat vulnerable sociopaths desperately trying to escape from their cage.

The brothers were leaders of gangs (there were five altogether, all of them known as “the Chimeres”, which is French for “ghosts”) who were being paid big money by the Aristide government to rough up or in some cases eliminate political oppo- nents. Director George Hickenlooper (Factory Girl), who invited me to Sunday’s screening in his capacity as one of the doc’s exec producers, said 2pac and Bily received “hundreds of thousands” of dollars.
When Aristide was finally forced out of office 2pac and Bily were suddenly targets of the new guys in power who wanted to get rid of all remnants of Aristide’s reign, including the “muscle.”
What was special in the making of Ghosts of Cite de Soleil was that Leth had totally open access to both brothers (as well as their government opponents), and also that life played out like a story written by a skilled dramatist.
This is precisely what Ghosts of Cite de Soleil could be the next time — a dramatic movie shot on location in Haiti with actors, a script, grips, electricians, etc.
On Monday I spoke with Cary Woods, the doc’s executive producer, who agreed that Ghosts of Cite Soleil could become a mainstream feature because (and this is primarily me talking) it has all the Shakespearean elements: poverty, political warfare, corruption, the cycle of violence, Cain and Abel, a romantic triangle, and a tragic finale.

And as a scripted feature it could get a bit more into the warring-brothers- sleeping-with-the-same-woman thing, which the doc doesn’t really run with.
Woods told me that a certain big-name actress has expressed interest in playing the Lele character if and when a script is written and a film is up and rolling, and then producer Seth Kanegis called me from somewhere in the Caribbean Tuesday afternoon and said Woods is looking to hire a distinguished, big-name writer to do the screenplay.
This would be a perfect feature for Oliver Stone, Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu, Werner Herzog…any director who could take the grit and social squalor of Haiti’s Cite de Soleil and reenact the story with feeling and realism.
The thing that needs to happen right now is for Ghosts of Cite Soleil to be accep- ted into the Cannes Film Festival’s Director’s Fortnight section so the festival-scout community can see it and talk it up. And then it should go to Toronto Film Festival in September, which would probably lead to some kind of distribution deal.
A film like this can only do what it can do. Film buffs and admirers of hot-button filmmaking and drama-in-the-rough will go for it, but some movigeoers would probably have a bit of difficulty with a film of this sort…a raw-looking, hand-held video piece about killings and squalor and interracial sex.

Ghosts executive producer Cary Woods

The feature that could come from this — that’s the thing. But there are miles to go before that happens…if it happens at all. Life is a gamble and movies are about rolling stones slowly uphill.
I haven’t mentioned the Wylcef Jean hip-hop on the soundtrack (the Haitian-born musician is also one of the film’s exec producers) and 2pac’s seeing himself as a burgeoning hip-hopper and his dream of becoming a musician-star. A Wyclef Jean soundtrack CD of some kind would, I understand, be part of the Ghosts package when and if it opens theatrically. I’m not 100% sure about this, but it would make sense.
Look for more about this film in the coming months, as it was one of the most heavily-buzzed films of the festival.

Enemies Watch

Last Friday night I read James Vanderbilt’s gripping, pared-to-the-bone screenplay of Against All Enemies, an adaptation of former terrorism czar Richard Clarke’s bombshell novel about the failures of the Clinton and Bush administrations to stop the terrorist plotters who eventually brought about the 9.11 attacks.
The script, yet another example of a fascinating run of political films being made by mainstream Hollywood these days, is the basis of an upcoming Columbia feature that Crash director Paul Haggis “[hopes] to shoot…this year,” according to what he told N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman in a piece that ran last Tuesday.

My first casting question, apart from the matter of whether or not Tom Hanks will agree to play Clarke, is who the hell is Haggis going to get to play President Bill Clinton? Damned if he isn’t right in the script, Arkansas accent, inquisitive mind and all. And in three good scenes.
Former National Security Advisor (and current Secretary of State) Condoleeza Rice is also a character with dialogue, and not a very sympathetic one. (No way around this — the facts are the facts.)
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Vice-President Dick Cheney, National Security honcho Paul Wolfowitz and Clinton’s security adviser Anthony Lake are also characters, along with numerous other real-life figures. All with dialogue. Not as fictional stand-ins (as certain Clinton operatives were portrayed in Mike Nichols’ Primary Colors), but their literal selves.
Unfortunately, President Bush — who is certainly one of the villains of the piece, if you regard willful ignorance as a form of villainy — is an off-screen presence.
Against All Enemies is a riverting political drama — All The President’s Men meets Franz Kafka in the age of terrorism.

Every scene feels like it’s been chiselled and buffed to perfection (or at least my idea of that). And it has a sympathetic vulnerable hero (a government operator with no life who’s obstinate to a fault, and yet is a true vigilant soldier) and moments of warmth and humor and tragedy, and well-drawn secondary characters, and a finale that gives some 9/11 closure.
It’s about a dedicated hardcase lacking in certain diplomatic skills named Richard Clarke (Jason Robards would have been perfect in the mid ’70s, but right now Hanks-with-white-hair would be the absolute best choice) and his slow journey of discovery about what the Middle Eastern chess game is all about, play by play, and how the jihadists came to occupy and gradually rule the roost.
Scene by scene, act by act, Clarke keeps telling various government do-nothings what Middle Eastern terrorists might be up to, and nobody listens all that much. (Clinton’s people are more responsive than Bush II’s, but nobody acts brilliantly.) Then the Dubya do-nothings turn around after 9/11 and try to stick it to Clarke for being right.

Richard Clarke

It has a 24-page opening sequence that absolutely kills in terms of tension and psychological suspense, showing the White House staffers in turmoil on the morning of 9/11.
Then it rewinds back to start of Clarke’s government career in the late ’70s (when he was in his late 20s) and takes us on a journey of gradual discovery as Clarke learns more and more about the Mujahdeen, Islamic fundamentalists, offensive Jihad, “Usama” bin Laden and so on.
Then it’s back to 9/11 and Clarke’s confusion when the Bushies decide to use the attacks as an excuse to go to war with Iraq, and then his leaving the White House and writing his book and delivering his rant before a Congressional 9/11 committee, and finally his apology…even though he’s arguably the least guilty guy in the Washington establishment as far as 9/11 negligence is concerned.
Haggis told Waxman he hopes to turn Clarke’s book about “how we got ourselves into this mess” into a political thriller like All the President’s Men. “I don’t know how to do it, so that’s why I want to attempt it,” he explained. “It could be really embarrassing.”

If Hanks agrees to play Clarke (and he really should consider doing this — the film needs his good-guyness) and Against All Enemies is directed in the right way, with precisely the right pitch, it may indeed stand a chance of being compared favorably to All The President’s Men.
Okay, it’s a little wonky and it’s almost all about men and women in suits jawing with each other about intelligence and strategy, but it’s extremely tight and absorbing. I felt something hard, clean and special on every page.
The film is being produced by Haggis, John Calley and Larry Becsey with Colum- bia execs Doug Belgrad and Rachel O’Connor overseeing, as it were. Haggis didn’t give Waxman any hints about casting, but said “there’s a good list of people out there.”
Variety‘s Nicole LaPorte reported on 3.12 that Against All Enemies is “not necessarily” Haggis’s next project….but it should be. Nobody knows how long political films will continue to be hot in this own — better to strike when the iron is hot.

Clinton appears in three scenes between page 59 and 64, and he’s got a great scene on page 63 in which he comes off smart and resourceful and confident. And he laughs, and makes others laugh. He’s not the hero (that’s Clarke’s role) but Clinton is portrayed as a reasonably okay guy — a chief exec who gets it and sees the value in having a guy like Clarke nearby.
Vanderbilt’s script is so smart and sharp, and delivers so thoroughly in terms of authenticity, that the only actors on the planet who could sell the Clinton scenes would be either David Morse (a dead ringer) or John Tavolta, who of course played a character based on Clinton in Primary Colors . But even Morse or Travolta would feel a tiny bit wrong. To me, anyway.
I’m just going to say this: President Clinton should consider playing himself in this film. Seriously. He’d be great, he’d obviously be convincing and he’d be helping to recreate a very close approximation of the truth.
Besides the fact that a move like this would be the next logical step in the Holly- wood-Washington blender machine. Things have reached a point (remember those real-life Washingtonians taking to “drug czar” Michael Douglas in Traffic?) where a former President acting in a classy film like this would not be seen as all that curious. If you ask me it would have a kind of dignity.

Clinton cabinet

I asked for casting suggestions on Saturday, and here’s the best of them so far…
Richard Clarke: Tom Hanks, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, a slimmer James Gandolfini (looking to de-Soprano-cize his image by playing a wonky type).
Bill Clinton: Clinton himself, David Morse , John Travolta.
Dick Cheney: Jason Alexander (white hair, aged a little), Ben Kingsley.
Paul Wolfowitz: Alan Rosenberg, William H. Macy (a little make-up, hair coloring), Ron Silver.
Condoleeza Rice: Angela Bassett, Regina King, Merrin Dungey (from King of Queens/Alias/Curb)
Anthony Lake: Jude Ciccolella (excellent in 24 )

Havana Rap

To judge from three recent docs about bullet-dodging rappers living in volatile ‘hoods, the most intense and socially relevant rap music these days is coming out of the Caribbean area.
George Gittoe’s Rampage makes the case for the rap community in south Miami, Asger Leth’s Ghosts of Cite Soleil injects rap into the hell of Haiti’s poltical turmoil, and directors Jauretsi Saizarbitoria and Emilia Menocal show what the Cuban rap scene is about in East of Havana.

El Cartel’s Mikki Flow in Jauretsi Saizarbitoria’s East of Havana

Each film has its own style and aesthetic, but Saizarbitoria’s film is quite different than the other two, and not just because Charlize Theron produced it.
Caught earlier this week at South by Southwest by HE columnist Moise Chiullan, Havana is about the popularity of underground rap groups in Cuba and particularly three members of El Cartel, one of a small number of rapper groups in the suburbs of Havana.
There are two things that set El Cartel apart from standard-issue American rappers — gender equality (a relatively rare thing in hip-hop circles) and sharply political lyrics.
Instead of rapping about bitches, ho’s and flashing dough around, Cartel’s Mikki Flow, Soandry and Magyori (i.e., a female) tell stories about the daily struggle of living in post-Soviet Cuba .
The story surrounds the cancellation — censorship — of Cuba’s annual Rap Festival in 2004. Government representatives say it was due to hurricane damage, but the homie-in-the-street view is that The Man is keeping them down.

Magyori, also of El Cartel

The film says something quite interesting, which is that as much as Cuban citizens may fear the power of the government, the government fears its people and their freedom of expression exponentially more. Political unrest isn’t ebbing away. Poverty is worsening, economic resources are being more and more depleted, and Cuba’s long-standing dictator Fidel Castro is getting older every day.
Most Americans are unaware of the crushing effect of the Cuban embargo, and how 90 miles from the U.S. lies an island nation where there are computers but no internet and music but no iPods. But life moves along and things happen “por invento” — i.e., by invention.
Living life the Cuban way is a central concept to the poetry these rappers create: they use their passion and pain to distill literate, provocative lyrics that leave a profound impression on you. Their rap pounds to the rhythm of el corazon del barrio (the heart of the ‘hood) and uses this evolving art form to its pinnacle.
When word spread around South by Southwest crowds that Theron was Havana‘s producer, there was talk all over about her “doing it for credibility” or “trying to make it look like she cares.” Not quite so. The directors and producers of East of Havana have known Theron since she came to the U.S. from South Africa. They also acted as a surrogate family for her when she was “this little South African girl who didn’t speak any English.”

Denzel Lovett, a 14 year-old rapper, in George Giddoes’ Rampage

East of Havana almost didn’t happen, as the filmmakers made it into Cuba just a few weeks before President Bush further clamped down on travel to Cuba. Too bad — the El Cartel crew has expressed a strong desire to travel around and explore other cultures, given the opportunity.
Wim Wenders The Buena Vista Social Club showed us one side of Cuban music and culture, but East of Havana finally reveals the voice of contemporary Cuban youth and the rise of a very different new generation.
Look for more about this film in the coming months, as it was one of the most heavily-buzzed films of the festival.

Haiti, Sex, Death

Before last Sunday night I thought of Haiti as a hopeless Caribbean shithole, one of the worst places to live in the world because the government corruption and the politically-motivated beatings and killings never seem to stop, and because the poverty levels for most of the citizens are beyond belief.
I still see Haiti as an island most foul, but a knockout documentary called Ghosts of Cite Soleil, a kind of Cain-and-Abel story that was filmed just before, during and after the overthrow of Haitian president Jean Bertrand Aristide in March 2004, has added a new dimension.

The real-life 2pac and Lele as they appear in Asger Leth’s Ghosts of Cite Soleil

I now see Haiti as less of a Ground Zero for abstract political terror and more of a place where people on the bottom rung are trying to live and breathe and create their own kind of life-force energy as a way of waving away the constant hoverings of doom.
In short, this excellent 88-minute film, directed by Asger Leth (the son of Danish filmmaker Jorgen Leth), adds recognizable humanity to a culture that has seemed more lacking in hope and human decency than any other on earth. I saw it at the Wilshire Screening Room two and a half days ago, and it’s been a kind of growth experience for me. I feel like I almost “get” Haiti now, and I haven’t stopped telling people about it since.
Everyone will say that Ghosts is City of God but in ‘real’ verite terms…and it is that, of course. But it’s less about violent street crime than stink-from-the-head Haitian politics, and it explores an unusual romantic triangle between a white French female relief worker namd Lele and two gangster brothers, 2pac and Bily (not “Billy”), and it has a tragic ending that touches you as much as any well-crafted Hollywood tearjerker could…and yet it happened all on its own.
2pac and Bily are in no way the “good guys,” but in a way they are. They wave guns around and talk all the time about defending their territory or making an enemy back off or perhaps having to kill each other, but somehow the film makes them seem like half-sympathetic pawns…somewhat vulnerable sociopaths desperately trying to escape from their cage.

The brothers were leaders of gangs (there were five altogether, all of them known as “the Chimeres”, which is French for “ghosts”) who were being paid big money by the Aristide government to rough up or in some cases eliminate political oppo- nents. Director George Hickenlooper (Factory Girl), who invited me to Sunday’s screening in his capacity as one of the doc’s exec producers, said 2pac and Bily received “hundreds of thousands” of dollars.
When Aristide was finally forced out of office 2pac and Bily were suddenly targets of the new guys in power who wanted to get rid of all remnants of Aristide’s reign, including the “muscle.”
What was special in the making of Ghosts of Cite de Soleil was that Leth had totally open access to both brothers (as well as their government opponents), and also that life played out like a story written by a skilled dramatist.
This is precisely what Ghosts of Cite de Soleil could be the next time — a dramatic movie shot on location in Haiti with actors, a script, grips, electricians, etc.
On Monday I spoke with Cary Woods, the doc’s executive producer, who agreed that Ghosts of Cite Soleil could become a mainstream feature because (and this is primarily me talking) it has all the Shakespearean elements: poverty, political warfare, corruption, the cycle of violence, Cain and Abel, a romantic triangle, and a tragic finale.

And as a scripted feature it could get a bit more into the warring-brothers- sleeping-with-the-same-woman thing, which the doc doesn’t really run with.
Woods told me that a certain big-name actress has expressed interest in playing the Lele character if and when a script is written and a film is up and rolling, and then producer Seth Kanegis called me from somewhere in the Caribbean Tuesday afternoon and said Woods is looking to hire a distinguished, big-name writer to do the screenplay.
This would be a perfect feature for Oliver Stone, Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu, Werner Herzog…any director who could take the grit and social squalor of Haiti’s Cite de Soleil and reenact the story with feeling and realism.
The thing that needs to happen right now is for Ghosts of Cite Soleil to be accep- ted into the Cannes Film Festival’s Director’s Fortnight section so the festival-scout community can see it and talk it up. And then it should go to Toronto Film Festival in September, which would probably lead to some kind of distribution deal.
A film like this can only do what it can do. Film buffs and admirers of hot-button filmmaking and drama-in-the-rough will go for it, but some movigeoers would probably have a bit of difficulty with a film of this sort…a raw-looking, hand-held video piece about killings and squalor and interracial sex.

Ghosts executive producer Cary Woods

The feature that could come from this — that’s the thing. But there are miles to go before that happens…if it happens at all. Life is a gamble and movies are about rolling stones slowly uphill.
I haven’t mentioned the Wylcef Jean hip-hop on the soundtrack (the Haitian-born musician is also one of the film’s exec producers) and 2pac’s seeing himself as a burgeoning hip-hopper and his dream of becoming a musician-star. A Wyclef Jean soundtrack CD of some kind would, I understand, be part of the Ghosts package when and if it opens theatrically. I’m not 100% sure about this, but it would make sense.
Look for more about this film in the coming months, as it was one of the most heavily-buzzed films of the festival.

Havana Rap

To judge from three recent docs about bullet-dodging rappers living in volatile ‘hoods, the most intense and socially relevant rap music these days is coming out of the Caribbean area.
George Gittoe’s Rampage makes the case for the rap community in south Miami, Asger Leth’s Ghosts of Cite Soleil injects rap into the hell of Haiti’s poltical turmoil, and directors Jauretsi Saizarbitoria and Emilia Menocal show what the Cuban rap scene is about in East of Havana.

El Cartel’s Mikki Flow in Jauretsi Saizarbitoria’s East of Havana

Each film has its own style and aesthetic, but Saizarbitoria’s film is quite different than the other two, and not just because Charlize Theron produced it.
Caught earlier this week at South by Southwest by HE columnist Moise Chiullan, Havana is about the popularity of underground rap groups in Cuba and particularly three members of El Cartel, one of a small number of rapper groups in the suburbs of Havana.
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
There are two things that set El Cartel apart from standard-issue American rappers — gender equality (a relatively rare thing in hip-hop circles) and sharply political lyrics.
Instead of rapping about bitches, ho’s and flashing dough around, Cartel’s Mikki Flow, Soandry and Magyori (i.e., a female) tell stories about the daily struggle of living in post-Soviet Cuba .
The story surrounds the cancellation — censorship — of Cuba’s annual Rap Festival in 2004. Government representatives say it was due to hurricane damage, but the homie-in-the-street view is that The Man is keeping them down.

Magyori, also of El Cartel

The film says something quite interesting, which is that as much as Cuban citizens may fear the power of the government, the government fears its people and their freedom of expression exponentially more. Political unrest isn’t ebbing away. Poverty is worsening, economic resources are being more and more depleted, and Cuba’s long-standing dictator Fidel Castro is getting older every day.
Most Americans are unaware of the crushing effect of the Cuban embargo, and how 90 miles from the U.S. lies an island nation where there are computers but no internet and music but no iPods. But life moves along and things happen “por invento” — i.e., by invention.
Living life the Cuban way is a central concept to the poetry these rappers create: they use their passion and pain to distill literate, provocative lyrics that leave a profound impression on you. Their rap pounds to the rhythm of el corazon del barrio (the heart of the ‘hood) and uses this evolving art form to its pinnacle.
When word spread around South by Southwest crowds that Theron was Havana‘s producer, there was talk all over about her “doing it for credibility” or “trying to make it look like she cares.” Not quite so. The directors and producers of East of Havana have known Theron since she came to the U.S. from South Africa. They also acted as a surrogate family for her when she was “this little South African girl who didn’t speak any English.”

Denzel Lovett, a 14 year-old rapper, in George Biddoes’ Rampage

East of Havana almost didn’t happen, as the filmmakers made it into Cuba just a few weeks before President Bush further clamped down on travel to Cuba. Too bad — the El Cartel crew has expressed a strong desire to travel around and explore other cultures, given the opportunity.
Wim Wenders The Buena Vista Social Club showed us one side of Cuban music and culture, but East of Havana finally reveals the voice of contemporary Cuban youth and the rise of a very different new generation.
Look for more about this film in the coming months, as it was one of the most heavily-buzzed films of the festival.

Haiti, Sex, Death

Before last Sunday night I thought of Haiti as a hopeless Caribbean shithole, one of the worst places to live in the world because the government corruption and the politically-motivated beatings and killings never seem to stop, and because the poverty levels for most of the citizens are beyond belief.
I still see Haiti as an island most foul, but a knockout documentary called Ghosts of Cite Soleil, a kind of Cain-and-Abel story that was filmed just before, during and after the overthrow of Haitian president Jean Bertrand Aristide in March 2004, has added a new dimension.

The real-life 2pac and Lele as they appear in Asger Leth’s Ghosts of Cite Soleil

I now see Haiti as less of a Ground Zero for abstract political terror and more of a place where people on the bottom rung are trying to live and breathe and create their own kind of life-force energy as a way of waving away the constant hoverings of doom.
In short, this excellent 88-minute film, directed by Asger Leth (the son of Danish filmmaker Jorgen Leth), adds recognizable humanity to a culture that has seemed more lacking in hope and human decency than any other on earth. I saw it at the Wilshire Screening Room two and a half days ago, and it’s been a kind of growth experience for me. I feel like I almost “get” Haiti now, and I haven’t stopped telling people about it since.
Everyone will say that Ghosts is City of God but in ‘real’ verite terms…and it is that, of course. But it’s less about violent street crime than stink-from-the-head Haitian politics, and it explores an unusual romantic triangle between a white French female relief worker namd Lele and two gangster brothers, 2pac and Bily (not “Billy”), and it has a tragic ending that touches you as much as any well-crafted Hollywood tearjerker could…and yet it happened all on its own.
2pac and Bily are in no way the “good guys,” but in a way they are. They wave guns around and talk all the time about defending their territory or making an enemy back off or perhaps having to kill each other, but somehow the film makes them seem like half-sympathetic pawns…somewhat vulnerable sociopaths desperately trying to escape from their cage.

The brothers were leaders of gangs (there were five altogether, all of them known as “the Chimeres”, which is French for “ghosts”) who were being paid big money by the Aristide government to rough up or in some cases eliminate political oppo- nents. Director George Hickenlooper (Factory Girl), who invited me to Sunday’s screening in his capacity as one of the doc’s exec producers, said 2pac and Bily received “hundreds of thousands” of dollars.
When Aristide was finally forced out of office 2pac and Bily were suddenly targets of the new guys in power who wanted to get rid of all remnants of Aristide’s reign, including the “muscle.”
What was special in the making of Ghosts of Cite de Soleil was that Leth had totally open access to both brothers (as well as their government opponents), and also that life played out like a story written by a skilled dramatist.
This is precisely what Ghosts of Cite de Soleil could be the next time — a dramatic movie shot on location in Haiti with actors, a script, grips, electricians, etc.
On Monday I spoke with Cary Woods, the doc’s executive producer, who agreed that Ghosts of Cite Soleil could become a mainstream feature because (and this is primarily me talking) it has all the Shakespearean elements: poverty, political warfare, corruption, the cycle of violence, Cain and Abel, a romantic triangle, and a tragic finale.

And as a scripted feature it could get a bit more into the warring-brothers- sleeping-with-the-same-woman thing, which the doc doesn’t really run with.
Woods told me that a certain big-name actress has expressed interest in playing the Lele character if and when a script is written and a film is up and rolling, and then producer Seth Kanegis called me from somewhere in the Caribbean Tuesday afternoon and said Woods is looking to hire a distinguished, big-name writer to do the screenplay.
This would be a perfect feature for Oliver Stone, Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu, Werner Herzog…any director who could take the grit and social squalor of Haiti’s Cite de Soleil and reenact the story with feeling and realism.
The thing that needs to happen right now is for Ghosts of Cite Soleil to be accep- ted into the Cannes Film Festival’s Director’s Fortnight section so the festival-scout community can see it and talk it up. And then it should go to Toronto Film Festival in September, which would probably lead to some kind of distribution deal.
A film like this can only do what it can do. Film buffs and admirers of hot-button filmmaking and drama-in-the-rough will go for it, but some movigeoers would probably have a bit of difficulty with a film of this sort…a raw-looking, hand-held video piece about killings and squalor and interracial sex.

Ghosts executive producer Cary Woods

The feature that could come from this — that’s the thing. But there are miles to go before that happens…if it happens at all. Life is a gamble and movies are about rolling stones slowly uphill.
I haven’t mentioned the Wylcef Jean hip-hop on the soundtrack (the Haitian-born musician is also one of the film’s exec producers) and 2pac’s seeing himself as a burgeoning hip-hopper and his dream of becoming a musician-star. A Wyclef Jean soundtrack CD of some kind would, I understand, be part of the Ghosts package when and if it opens theatrically. I’m not 100% sure about this, but it would make sense.
Look for more about this film in the coming months, as it was one of the most heavily-buzzed films of the festival.

The Spirit of Radio

Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion (Picturehouse, 6.9), based on Garrison Keillor’s radio show with a script by Keillor, is a backstage look at the goings-on during the final broadcast of America’s most celebrated radio show.
The film played Friday night (3.10) at the kickoff of South by Southwest in Austin, and Moises Chiullan, author of HE’s “Arthouse Cowboy” column, was in the audience with his video camera. And he’s sent along some thoughts. Which I’ve refined and reshuffled to some extent.

Prairie Home Companion‘s Lindsay Lohan, Meryl Streep, Robert Altman and Woody Harrelson…not at South by Southwest but last month’s Berlin Film Festival

Altman always lets his actors cut loose according to their own whims and improvs, and the word from February’s Berlin Film Festival, where A Prairie Home Companion had its world premiere, is that the cast — Kevin Kline, John C. Reilly, Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Tommy Lee Jones, Woody Harrelson, Garrison Keillor, Lindsay Lohan, Virginia Madsen — has a good time with it.
I’ll get right to Moises in a second, but first a question that’s been bothering me. Why is it for the last several years that the PHC show and Keillor’s name, even, seem to constantly be about finality, signing off, winding down, bidding farewell? What’s wrong with keeping on and putting more wood on the fire? Is this some kind of death trip?
The flm’s highlights, Chiullan says, “include the radiant singing voice of Meryl Streep, the sharp and acerbic one-liners, and the recalling of the golden age of radio throughout the script.”
The narrative “is part radio show, part real, and the structure is unconventional, to say the least. But the combination works.

“The radio setting and the overlapping, Mamet-esque rambling from various characters immediately brought to mind a Mamet play called The Water Engine. That play began as a radio drama and shifted back and forth from the studio to a conventional stage play in much the same way that Keillor’s characters like Guy Noir (Kevin Kline) and the Dangerous Woman (Virginia Madsen) interweave into the lives of these ‘real’ people performing in a fictionalized version of A Prairie Home Companion.
“Altman’s film is conscious of the fact that radio variety programs have been out of style for decades, as this one always has been, but that’s not all of the point here. The film is basically saying that the passion and humor that used to be is not so out-of-touch as some of us might think.
“One of the first striking things about A Prairie Home Companion is the new, animated, and really snazzy Picturehouse logo.
“The film opens in Mickey’s Dining Car, with voice-over narration by Kline’s Guy Noir. Being a longtime listener of the radio show, I was impressed how undistracting it was having another voice saying the lines usually spoken by Keillor.
“John C. Reilly and Woody Harrelson bounce off one another so well it’s remarkable no one has used them together previously. Their song about bad jokes absolutely kills. There were moments of suspension and then uproarious laughter related to duct tape, Descartes, and Texans who ‘talk funny and whose eyes don’t focus.’

Meryl Streep, Lindsay Lohan

“And Streep lights up the whole room. She’s so ‘on’ and ‘in’…and continues to surprise me every time. There isn’t a moment in the film in which I remotely doubted any of her motivation or found her over-the-top.
“Streep and Lily Tomlin are just as well-matched as Harrelson and Reilly. Their interplay and overlap will be the subject of many rewatchings, since there was no way to absorb it all last night through the laughter.
“Maya Rudolph plays the Stage Manager from Noises Off!-type part well, the sensible link in a chain of chaos, and Tommy Lee Jones provides a wonderfully contrasting role compared to that of his recent turn as Pete in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.
“Even Lindsay Lohan shows some decent chops as Streep’s dismissive and withdrawn poet-daughter, Lola.
“So much of the film is symbolic and semiotic in its delivery, and it hits the right notes the whole way through, crackling with electric bits of wit and passion throughout.

South by Southwest director Matt Dentler doing the introductions at Friday night’s event (3.10.06)

“Screenwriter Ken LaZebnik was at last night’s screening, and I wish I could have shook his hand or bought him a beer or six. Few films talk about mortality as much as Prairie Home does and end up reaffirming your desire to get up the next day and change the world somehow rather than consider giving up.”
The video footage is of South by Southwest honcho Matt Dentler introducing Reilly and LaZebnik and bringing them to the stage.

The Less Bondy…

…Daniel Craig turns out to be in Casino Royale (Columbia, 11.17), the better for the franchise and movie culture. Okay? It’s an excellent thing that the fans of the old smoothie-type Bond — tuxedos, constant cocksman, shaken-not-stirred — are giving it to Craig for stepping into his shoes. In a way, their scorn is a badge of honor.
Advocates of sticking with old-school models just because they’re old-school models are never worth anyone’s time. They’re like the old-school Communists who tried to unseat Boris Yeltsin….like the people who said no to Elliot Gould’s Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye and that only a dick in the Humphrey Bogart mode would do.
Read Ian Fleming’s “Casino Royale” and Craig will pop into your mind. And good for Paul Haggis and Martin Campbell for keeping that ballsy torture scene (no pun intended).

Daniel Craig in a new still from /Casino Royale

Out with the old and in with the new blood, and good for Craig not being quite six feet tall and having blond hair, ice-blue eyes and a boxer’s nose.
I still haven’t thrown out my suggestion for getting rid of 007 producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson by kidnapping them, flying them to Thailand and keeping them in a deluxe-accomodation prison there for the next 20 years. That aside, Casino Royale has my vote just for the sake of agitating any and all fans of Diamonds are Forever and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
But the webmaster at Sony should junk that ancient Dr. No “James Bond theme” music that plays when you click on the Casino Royale site. Talk about sending the absolute worst message imaginable.

Marquee Value

It costs time and money, I’m sure, but how technically difficult can it be to show decent, convincing footage of what Times Square looked like in 1955? Whatever it required, it was too much for director Mary Harron when she was assembling The Notorious Bettie Page (Picturehouse, 4.14).
This is one of those technical-obsession pieces that I write every so often, and it shouldn’t be taken as an early volley against Harron’s film. I’m just one of those guys who can’t help cringing when directors of period films get Manhattan movie- theatre marquees wrong. This is Harron’s small but significant botch in the opening seconds of her ’50s-era biopic.

This famous shot of James Dean in Times Square in 1954 uses roughly the same vantage point as the footage used by director Mary Harron in the opening seconds of The Notorious Bettie Page

She starts with black-and-white newsreel footage of Times Square from a high-up perspective with titles proclaiming “New York City, 1955.” Then a second, lower- angled shot of Times Square from an approximate vantage point of 44th Street, looking north on Broadway. And on the left side we can see the marquee of the legendary Astor threatre, which has the names “Cary Grant,” “Myrna Loy” and “Melvyn Douglas” brightly displayed.
Of course, there’s only one film in which these three actors appeared together — Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, which was reviewed by New York Times critic Bosley Crowther on March 26, 1948. In its heyday the Astor was very strictly a first-run venue, which means, obviously, that Harron’s footage was shot in ’48. And that means she has to go stand in the corner and face the wall.
If I hadn’t brought this up maybe 25 or 30 people in the face of the earth might have spotted this mistake — I realize that. This is the sort of nitpicky issue that flabby- bellied movie buffs with no lives get incensed over. (Although I’d like it understood I’m not coping with either one of these traits.)
Thing is, I respected Harron’s last film, American Psycho, in part for how well she captured those late-1980s details, like hot shots talking in expensive restaurants on U.S. Army walkie-talkie four-pound cell phones.

Famous idiot photo titled “Times Square 1942,” with contradictory evidence screaming at you from three theatre marquees.

I was therefore amazed that Harron had managed to duplicate one of the most famous photo-caption blunders in world photographic history. I’m speaking of that stupid photo you can find online by Googling “New York 1942” and then “images.” You know…the one that clearly shows two 1949 films playing side by side — Carol Reed’s The Third Man and William Wellman’s Battleground — at the Astor and the Victoria theatres?
If Harron had wanted to get her footage right, all she needed to do was hire some NYU CG geek to paste fake marquee letters on the Astor marquee spelling out any 1955 release — The Rose Tattoo, East of Eden…whatever. (I could let Harron slide if the substitute film didn’t actually show at the Astor — there’s a limit to this kind of obsessiveness.)
This would have been a simple cut-and-paste job by today’s standards. Harron’s Astor marquee Blandings footage lasts maybe two or three seconds, not long enough for the eye to notice any technically crude touches. It would have been so simple for some kid to come in and fix it with the most rudimentary software on an Apple laptop.
If it’s any comfort to Harron, Billy Crystal made the same error in his HBO Roger Maris-and-Mickey Mantle film 61. He used a snippet of color footage of Times Square with the wrong film, Mutiny on the Bounty, playing at Leow’s State in the summer of 1961, even though this MGM Marlon Brando film opened in November 1962.

East side of Times Square between 46th and 47th Street in 1962

On the other hand, Mike Nichols got it just right in a scene he shot for Carnal Knowledge (1971) showing Jack Nicholson and Ann Margret in the back of a cab moving through Manhattan. Nichols used rear-projection color footage through the cab’s rear window that caught a glimpse of The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse playing at Leow’s State.
An inauspicious peek at a marquee touting this lousy Glenn Ford film, reviewed by Crowther in March 1962, told film buffs exactly when Nicholson and Ann-Marget’s budding romance was happening, and because it didn’t argue with any title cards (which Nichols didn’t use anyway) the shot was perfectly fine.

Brubaker Tribute

Over 450 Brokeback Mountain loyalists under the leadership of the “Ultimate Brokeback Forum” are incensed over last Sunday’s Best Picture defeat, and have managed to fund an ad in Daily Variety that will drive their point home.
Peter Greyson, who has chaired the campaign at the Dave Cullen site, says that over $17,500 dollars has been raised from around the world, and that the full-page ad [see below] will run in Friday’s issue of Daily Variety.
“The circulation people there tell us the issue is already sold out because the demand is so very high,” Greyson just told me (5:21 pm Eastern). “We just hope the people at Focus and all those involved with the film will see our tribute to them. It has been an all-volunteer effort involving over 200 volunteers.”

A friend from the N.Y. Daily News has sent me the page with all the information, links, visuals, comment. The ringleaders besides Greyson and author/journalist Dave Cullen are John Wells and Linda Andrews.
Their ad will basically be an emotional salute to Ang Lee’s film in the manner of the final moments in Stuart Rosenberg’s Brubaker (1980).
I’m speaking of the finale when prison convicts start slowly clapping in tribute to Robert Redford’s character, who’s been fired as warden for being too much of a political troublemaker. You may have failed in a political way, the cons are saying, but you’re made of the right stuff and we respect what you did.

Gardener in Nairobi

“More than six months after its U.S. release (and two days before Rachel Weisz took home an Oscar), The Constant Gardener finally opened in Kenya, the country which provided the majority of its locations.
“The Fernando Meirelles film opened to almost no public fanfare, and is now showing on exactly one screen in exactly one theater (alongside Zathura and Derailed), in a Nairobi suburb mostly populated by foreign diplomats and UN workers. It’s unlikely that more than a handful of Kenyans will ever see this movie on the big screen, though it has long been available on pirated DVD from the hawkers downtown.

Rachel Weisz, Ralph Fiennes in fernando Meirelles’ The Constant Gardener

“In late February I was invited to a benefit showing of Gardener with the proceeds going to the Constant Gardener Charity, an organization established by the producers of the film to provide assistance in the form of schools, water tanks and other necessities to impoverished residents of Kibera, the sprawling slum located near the heart of both the city and the film. The main draw of this screening was the presence of Constant Gardener actor Pete Postlethwaite and producer Simon Channing.
“The screening and the reception afterwards were sponsored by the British High Commission, which seems a bit surreal given that the film is a stinging critique of British diplomacy, and one in which the British Foreign Ministry (particularly the BHC in Nairobi) is depicted as aiding and abetting evil. It’s a little like the U.S. Embassy sponsoring a showing of Fahrenheit 9/11.
“I wasn’t at this screening but I would have loved to ask British High Commissioner Adam Wood aif his bosses in London were anything like Bill Nighy’s character.
“I sponsored my own showing of the Gardener DVD at my house last January, with the aid of a borrowed LCD projector. The reviews from my guests, all diplomats and aid workers living in Nairobi, were mixed tending to negative.

Somewhere in this photo is the marquee of the former Cameo Cinema in downtown Nairobi

“The aid workers found the Weisz character profoundly annoying and embarrassingly naive, and the diplomats were unable to swallow the love story. I enjoyed the top-shelf acting talent and the visuals, but having read the book I was disappointed to see that hundreds of pages of plot had been excised, including much of the intrigue involving Big Pharma.
“I guess this is understandable given that Mereilles was trying to avoid a three hour-plus running time, but I thought that this removed much of the book’s suspense and jittery paranoia. Mereilles turned a page-turning global-conspiracy potboiler into an often plodding, reflective character study, perhaps on purpose. And this is coming from someone who was head-over-heels over City of God.
“My other problem with the film is that it falls too easily into the old Hollywood paradigms about Africa. As with movies like Cry Freedom or Out of Africa, the African experience is only palatable to Western audiences if filtered through a well-meaning white protagonist. Actual Africans are relegated to supporting roles with few lines, and are not allowed more than two dimensions: they must play one of four acceptable roles: the desperate victim, the noble martyr, the loyal servant or the corrupt official.
“In The Constant Gardener, which has no major African characters, the only African who really registered with me was the great Kenyan actor Sidede Onyulo (also terrific in Nowhere in Africa), who plays the jaded UN pilot and is gone from the story all too quickly.

“The only Western-produced movies I’ve seen recently in which fully-drawn, articulate, complex African characters are put at the center of their own stories are Dirty Pretty Things and Hotel Rwanda. (Okay, so Don Cheadle’s not exactly African and Chiwetel Ejiofor was born in London.)
“Hope all is well stateside. I’m still in shock over the Crash win. That film was shown on another one of our LCD projector movie-nights showings, and my wife and I couldn’t stand the thing. Much unintentional laughter was had at the expense of that movie’s clumsy dialogue and poorly-drawn characters. Maybe you have to be an Angeleno to appreciate it.” — Peter McKenzie, Nairobi, Kenya.

Different Enough?

There’s a slightly longer “Director’s Cut” DVD of Paul Haggis’s Oscar-winning Crash hitting stores on April 4th. It’s just about three minutes longer than the 112-minute version that played in theatres. Extra dabs, clips and brushstrokes “integrated,” as a Lionsgate spokesperson put it this morning.
The two-disc package will have several deleted scenes and the usual featurettes, etc., but it’s too bad the slightly altered film on the DVD won’t be a little more so. A good 15 or 20 minutes longer, say, or maybe even a Wyatt Earp-sized three-hour cut. All those racist Los Angelenos, all those story strands…why not?

Terrence Howard

Or maybe a shorter, tighter version in the vein of Terrence Malick’s re-released version of The New World, maybe with substituted footage or all the same scenes but more streamlined. There’s no such thing as a film that can’t be just a wee bit improved with the right trims or reshufflings. I could go back to just about any article I’ve ever written and improve it with a few edits…easy.
I called Paul Haggis (through his publicist) to discuss the content of the extra stuff, but no callback. So I tried Bobby Moresco, who shared the Best Original Screen- play Oscar with Haggis two nights ago, and he didn’t get back either. I’m getting a distinct feeling that the 115-minute Crash doesn’t mean much in their world right now.
I get it…I do. Lionsgate suddenly has a Best Picture winner with brand-new earning potental so they’re trying to milk it every which way…fine. And I’m always up for a good milking if the package is right.
But if I’m a food critic and a chef says he’s got a whole new menu he’d like me to try, and it turns out the only thing different is that all the dishes have an extra spoonful of steamed carrots, I’m going to feel disappointed.
A special director’s cut of a well-liked movie means a rethink or a recall of some kind. It’s about having another go. My expectation when this happens is a juicier steak or extra mashed potatoes with gravy…something with calories.

The final cover will obviously tout the Best Picture Oscar triumph — this one was roughed out a few weeks ago

I’m sure the extras on the double-disc Crash will be fine, but the film is the matter at hand.
Sidenote: In looking into this story I noticed that three credible sources — Variety, N.Y. Times and DVD Empire — give three different lengths of the original Crash.
Variety‘s Toronto Film Festival review (September 2004) said Haggis’s film ran 112 minutes, A.O. Scott’s 5.6.05 Times review said it runs 107 minutes, and DVD Empire claims a running time of 122 minutes.
Somebody at DVD Empire probably just hit a “2” key when he was aiming for the “1” but that N.Y. Times estimate is…well, odd.

Happiness

Haiti, Sex, Death

Before last Sunday night I thought of Haiti as a hopeless Caribbean shithole, one of the worst places to live in the world because the government corruption and the politically-motivated beatings and killings never seem to stop, and because the poverty levels for most of the citizens are beyond belief.
I still see Haiti as an island most foul, but a knockout documentary called Ghosts of Cite Soleil, a kind of Cain-and-Abel story that was filmed just before, during and after the overthrow of Haitian president Jean Bertrand Aristide in March 2004, has added a new dimension.

The real-life 2pac and Lele as they appear in Asger Leth’s Ghosts of Cite Soleil

I now see Haiti as less of a Ground Zero for abstract political terror and more of a place where people on the bottom rung are trying to live and breathe and create their own kind of life-force energy as a way of waving away the constant hoverings of doom.
In short, this excellent 88-minute film, directed by Asger Leth (the son of Danish filmmaker Jorgen Leth), adds recognizable humanity to a culture that has seemed more lacking in hope and human decency than any other on earth. I saw it at the Wilshire Screening Room two and a half days ago, and it’s been a kind of growth experience for me. I feel like I almost “get” Haiti now, and I haven’t stopped telling people about it since.
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Everyone will say that Ghosts is City of God but in ‘real’ verite terms…and it is that, of course. But it’s less about violent street crime than stink-from-the-head Haitian politics, and it explores an unusual romantic triangle between a white French female relief worker namd Lele and two gangster brothers, 2pac and Bily (not “Billy”), and it has a tragic ending that touches you as much as any well-crafted Hollywood tearjerker could…and yet it happened all on its own.
2pac and Bily are in no way the “good guys,” but in a way they are. They wave guns around and talk all the time about defending their territory or making an enemy back off or perhaps having to kill each other, but somehow the film makes them seem like half-sympathetic pawns…somewhat vulnerable sociopaths desperately trying to escape from their cage.

The brothers were leaders of gangs (there were five altogether, all of them known as “the Chimeres”, which is French for “ghosts”) who were being paid big money by the Aristide government to rough up or in some cases eliminate political oppo- nents. Director George Hickenlooper (Factory Girl), who invited me to Sunday’s screening in his capacity as one of the doc’s exec producers, said 2pac and Bily received “hundreds of thousands” of dollars.
When Aristide was finally forced out of office 2pac and Bily were suddenly targets of the new guys in power who wanted to get rid of all remnants of Aristide’s reign, including the “muscle.”
What was special in the making of Ghosts of Cite de Soleil was that Leth had totally open access to both brothers (as well as their government opponents), and also that life played out like a story written by a skilled dramatist.
This is precisely what Ghosts of Cite de Soleil could be the next time — a dramatic movie shot on location in Haiti with actors, a script, grips, electricians, etc.
On Monday I spoke with Cary Woods, the doc’s executive producer, who agreed that Ghosts of Cite Soleil could become a mainstream feature because (and this is primarily me talking) it has all the Shakespearean elements: poverty, political warfare, corruption, the cycle of violence, Cain and Abel, a romantic triangle, and a tragic finale.

And as a scripted feature it could get a bit more into the warring-brothers- sleeping-with-the-same-woman thing, which the doc doesn’t really run with.
Woods told me that a certain big-name actress has expressed interest in playing the Lele character if and when a script is written and a film is up and rolling, and then producer Seth Kanegis called me from somewhere in the Caribbean Tuesday afternoon and said Woods is looking to hire a distinguished, big-name writer to do the screenplay.
This would be a perfect feature for Oliver Stone, Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu, Werner Herzog…any director who could take the grit and social squalor of Haiti’s Cite de Soleil and reenact the story with feeling and realism.
The thing that needs to happen right now is for Ghosts of Cite Soleil to be accep- ted into the Cannes Film Festival’s Director’s Fortnight section so the festival-scout community can see it and talk it up. And then it should go to Toronto Film Festival in September, which would probably lead to some kind of distribution deal.
A film like this can only do what it can do. Film buffs and admirers of hot-button filmmaking and drama-in-the-rough will go for it, but some movigeoers would probably have a bit of difficulty with a film of this sort…a raw-looking, hand-held video piece about killings and squalor and interracial sex.

Ghosts executive producer Cary Woods

The feature that could come from this — that’s the thing. But there are miles to go before that happens…if it happens at all. Life is a gamble and movies are about rolling stones slowly uphill.
I haven’t mentioned the Wylcef Jean hip-hop on the soundtrack (the Haitian-born musician is also one of the film’s exec producers) and 2pac’s seeing himself as a burgeoning hip-hopper and his dream of becoming a musician-star. A Wyclef Jean soundtrack CD of some kind would, I understand, be part of the Ghosts package when and if it opens theatrically. I’m not 100% sure about this, but it would make sense.

King of the Empties

I’m developing an idea that Matthew McConaughey is a kind of anti-Christ. I’m 35% to 40% serious. He may not be the Satanic emissary of our times, but I honestly believe if and when the real devil rises up from those sulfur caverns and begins to walk the earth, he’ll look and behave exactly like McConaughey.
He’s not just the absolute nadir of empty-vessel pretty boy actors. I’m talking about an almost startling inner quality that transcends mere shallowness. It’s there in McConaughey’s eyes…eyes that look out at the wonder and terror of life but do nothing but scan for opportunity…something or someone to hustle or seduce or make a buck off. Eyes that convey a Maynard G. Krebs-like revulsion at the idea that life may finally be about something you can’t touch, taste or own.

Matthew McConaughey and fan

He has the soul of a Texas bartender who dabbles in real estate and has an overly made-up and undereducated girlfriend who drops by at the end of a shift to give him a lift home, except that he tends to ignore her when there’s a good game on and all his empty-ass buddies are there…a bartender who will clean shot glasses for 20 minutes before looking in your direction…a guy with a thin voice and a hey-buddy Texas drawl who sorta kinda needs to be stabbed with a screwdriver.
I’ve known guys like McConaughey all my life, and I feel I’ve come to know them as a predator tribe. Guys with fraternity associations and shark eyes and quarter-inch- deep philosphies that tend to start with barstool homilies like “the world is for the few.”
Because of this I can easily wave away his respectable performances in Dazed and Confused and Reign of Fire and focus on the void. I agree about these standout performances and his being tolerable in one or two other films (U-571, etc.), and because of this I was able to handle his being in movies without cringing for years.
But then came the double-whammy of Two for the Money and Failure to Launch, and now the mere mention of his name…
McConaughey is the emperor of the so-called vapid squad. He can kick Paul Walker’s ass with one hand tied behind his back, in part because Walker is now off the shit list after his sweat-soaked danger-freak performance in Wayne Kramer’s Running Scared. Forget the unfairly maligned Matthew (a.k.a., “Matt”) Davis, who gave a genuine and unforced performance as a decent-guy football player in John Stockwell’s Blue Crush…next to McConaughey he’s almost Brando-level.

With Sarah Jessica Parker in scene from Failure to Launch, which earned $24.6 million this weekend

I forget who the other contenders are but none of them hold a candle to Matt because they haven’t got that deep-down emptiness, which is what it’s all about. Not a matter of craft or affability, but essence.
Here’s some of the reader commentary so far…
“All of McConaughey’s roles fit into one of two categories,” wrote Richard Swank. “He’s either ‘Happy Go Lucky Matt,’ playing a kind of blissed-out stoner that seems to be fairly close to his offscreen persona (Ed TV, Dazed & Confused, Failure to Launch), or he’s ‘Serious Matt,’ where he plays a toned-down version of same who’s a little more intense, but with no more depth ((U-571, A Time to Kill).
“However, there’s one exception that is so out-there that it turns the rule completely on its head: Reign of Fire. Seriously. It may be a goofy sci-fi b-movie about dragons, but McConaughey’s performance in it is so over-the-top, so obviously committed, that it really calls into question whether he has to be the crummy actor he is in everything else.”

McConaughey in Two for the Money

“McConauughey is Pauly Shore with better genes.” — Bill McCuddy, Fox News movie guy.
“McConaughey seems like an affable guy in real life, hosting the college football champion Longhorns and squiring the Ashley Judds around. However, like George Bush, he compensates for depth with a gigantic dose of Texas hubris. But women like him, and that’s the foundation of his popularity. And I agree with you about Don Johnson being just about the most vomitorious actor ever.” — Arizona Joe
“To me, Matthew McConaughey is the acting equivalent of a karaoke machine,” says Toronto Star critic Peter Howell. “The viewer projects into him what they want to get out, and the result is occasionally amusing, yet it always feels false. Remember that his fame started as a total fraud: a Vanity Fair cover when he’d done absolutely nothing to warrant such attention.”
“He’s the Bob Cummings of our age.” — Lewis Beale
Journalist James Sanford interviewed McConaughey during his Sahara tour “and found him to be a genuinely pleasant, dedicated and surprisingly insightful guy. If I had been able to look into the future to see Two for the Money and Failure to Launch at that time I would also have asked him why he has such bad taste in scripts, but what can you do?

“When I was a theater manager in 1994 and we were showing Dazed and Confused, I predicted he was going to become a major star — again and again people came out of that film asking who McConaughey was and what had he done before. He has a kind of effortless, laid-back cool that seems to drive women crazy. He can also be pretty funny (i.e., his crazed performance in Bill Murray’s Larger Than Life or the nutcase he played in the abominable Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre). But finding the right material for him seems to be difficult.
“It might be wiser to find projects for him that could challenge him to develop his dramatic skills. He also needs to work with a diction coach; he is also handicapped somewhat by his strong Texas accent, which makes absolutely no sense when he’s playing someone from Staten Island (How to Lose a Guy…) or Baltimore (Failure to Launch).
“One thing he definitely has going for him is honesty onscreen: For better or for worse, he can’t fake his emotions — as evidenced by his utter lack of chemistry with Sarah Jessica Parker (whom he reportedly did not get along with) in Launch.”
“I basically agree with you about McConaughey, but the guy pretty much gets a free pass from me because of Dazed and Confused . Hell, can you point to one minute in his career when Keanu Reeves was that fun to watch? And they still let him make movies. Maybe McConaughey should have packed it in after Dazed, knowing that he’d peaked and it was all going to be downhill from there.” — Phil Napoli, Clifton, NJ.

Different Enough?

There’s a slightly longer “Director’s Cut” DVD of Paul Haggis’s Oscar-winning Crash hitting stores on April 4th. It’s just about three minutes longer than the 112-minute version that played in theatres. Extra dabs, clips and brushstrokes “integrated,” as a Lionsgate spokesperson put it this morning.
The two-disc package will have several deleted scenes and the usual featurettes, etc., but it’s too bad the slightly altered film on the DVD won’t be a little more so. A good 15 or 20 minutes longer, say, or maybe even a Wyatt Earp-sized three-hour cut. All those racist Los Angelenos, all those story strands…why not?

Terrence Howard

Or maybe a shorter, tighter version in the vein of Terrence Malick’s re-released version of The New World, maybe with substituted footage or all the same scenes but more streamlined. There’s no such thing as a film that can’t be just a wee bit improved with the right trims or reshufflings. I could go back to just about any article I’ve ever written and improve it with a few edits…easy.
I called Paul Haggis (through his publicist) to discuss the content of the extra stuff, but no callback. So I tried Bobby Moresco, who shared the Best Original Screen- play Oscar with Haggis two nights ago, and he didn’t get back either. I’m getting a distinct feeling that the 115-minute Crash doesn’t mean much in their world right now.
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I get it…I do. Lionsgate suddenly has a Best Picture winner with brand-new earning potental so they’re trying to milk it every which way…fine. And I’m always up for a good milking if the package is right.
But if I’m a food critic and a chef says he’s got a whole new menu he’d like me to try, and it turns out the only thing different is that all the dishes have an extra spoonful of steamed carrots, I’m going to feel disappointed.
A special director’s cut of a well-liked movie means a rethink or a recall of some kind. It’s about having another go. My expectation when this happens is a juicier steak or extra mashed potatoes with gravy…something with calories.

The final cover will obviously tout the Best Picture Oscar triumph — this one was roughed out a few weeks ago

I’m sure the extras on the double-disc Crash will be fine, but the film is the matter at hand.
Sidenote: In looking into this story I noticed that three credible sources — Variety, N.Y. Times and DVD Empire — give three different lengths of the original Crash.
Variety‘s Toronto Film Festival review (September 2004) said Haggis’s film ran 112 minutes, A.O. Scott’s 5.6.05 Times review said it runs 107 minutes, and DVD Empire claims a running time of 122 minutes.
Somebody at DVD Empire probably just hit a “2” key when he was aiming for the “1” but that N.Y. Times estimate is…well, odd.

Happiness

For Shame

I don’t want to sound bitter or disrespectful, but Crash‘s Best Picture win last night didn’t exactly brighten my faith in the leanings of the human spirit.
I’m not saying it wasn’t a deserved triumph for some very good and talented people. Director and co-writer Paul Haggis and co-writer Bobby Moresco, principally, but also the fine ensemble cast, the below-the-liners (including dp’s James Muro and Dana Gonzales), producer Cathy Schulman, and executive producer and check- writer Bob Yari (whom I congratulated at the Crash celebration at the Chateau Marmont).

Crash producer Cathy Schulman, Jack Nicholson, director-writer Paul Haggis following last night’s awarding of the Best Picture Oscar to Crash

And most especially the vigilant, never-say-die Lionsgate marketers and publicists (along with the Dart Group’s Cynthia Swartz) who sold it like total pros.
But deep down, we all know why Crash won.
Kenneth Turan knows, Nikki Finke knows, the “Bagger” knows, and I suspect that even David Poland knows, despite his down-playing the reason in an otherwise fair- minded assessment posted last night.
Most of the pundits are going to try to sidestep or soft-pedal what happened, and if you’re looking for that kind of thing you know where to find it. This wasn’t a replay of Shakespeare in Love beating out Saving Private Ryan. It was worse…a whole lot worse.
Crash is a good film — an emotional, well-tooled, sometimes profound look at several racist and heavily bruised Los Angelenos who somehow manage to listen now and then to the better angels of their nature. They do this infrequently and haphazardly, but just enough at the end of the day (and the film) to earn our compassion.

Nice movie massage — now welcome to real life. The fact is that last night a lot of good-hearted people, bottom line, were essentially cheering the fact that a bunch of retro-graders and hang-backers in the Motion Picture Academy voted for Crash for the wrong reasons.
Is anyone besides me seeing the irony here…the irony that howled and flooded the skies above Los Angeles last night? The very thing that Crash laments — prejudice against people of different stripes and persuasions — is what tipped the vote and delivered the Big Prize.
Hell, this might have been more than a tipping factor. It may have been a friggin’ landslide for all anyone knows.
So let’s all keep it going and dig into our hearts this morning and extend some of that Crash compassion to the small minds and timid souls who voted against (and in many cases probably didn’t even see) Brokeback Mountain.

I’m not talking about those who love and respect Crash for what it is — they’re fine and approvable. I’m talking about the duck-and-hiders.
Squeamishness, old-fogeyism (not the kind you can measure in years but which can be found among people of all shapes, ages and nations) and puptent-phobia snuck into the room, and then slowed and stalled the Brokeback bandwagon and finally turned it down an alley.
I don’t have a recording of any Academy members talking about the sacrosanct John Wayne macho-cowboy tradition, or confiding their concerns about how it might feel it they watched one of the briefest, most darkly lit, most discreet coupling scenes in movie history, and what the cultural ratification that an Oscar win would mean for Brokeback and gay people everywhere, so I guess there’s no proving these views were a factor.
The anti-Brokeback banshee was swirling over and under Paul Haggis, Cathy Schulman and Jack Nicholson as they stood on the Kodak stage last night.

“If they want to be sour grapes about it, let ’em. We made a good film and people loved it and voted us in, and that’s that.”

And it wasn’t pretty and it ain’t pretty now. I live in tres gay West Hollywood and I was walking along Santa Monica Blvd. this morning and feeling the air, and I can tell you there’s no joy in Mudville this morning.
Earlier today in Salt Lake City, Larry Miller was having a quiet little chuckle over his coffee.
I imagine he was also probably feeling a bit surprised to discover, as Nikki Finke put it last night, that Hollywood “is as homophobic as Red State country…in touch, not out of touch.”

Show of Shows

Please, Oscar God…give us surprises. Any surprises. Anything.
Even if it means Crash winning the Best Picture Oscar, which I’d rather not see happen for a few reasons. At 4:45 pm Joel Siegel, sharing the black mike with his ABC co-commentators Leonard Maltin and Anne Thompson, said this is precisely what might happen.
Ladies, it’s okay with me. Crash is a very well crafted, socially resonant film. No, wait…March of the Homophobes!

George Clooney

That was an excellent CG intro with the classic scenes and characters all blended together in that CG sepia-tone dreamscape. Awesome work.
Billy Crystal, Steve Martin, David Letterman, Chris Rock, Mel Gibson. All declining to host the Oscar show…brilliant stuff. Halle Berry, George Clooney…”I just had the weirdest dream.” Starts things off with just the right note.
Hello, Jon Stewart! The Death to Smoochy joke died. The Angelina Jolie joke died. A chance to see all your favorite stars without having to donate any money to the Democratic Party. Hmmm. Night of a Thousand Sweatpants?
Stewart’s first good one: “‘Good night and good luck’ — the line that Mr. Clooney ends all of his dates with.” Not all homosexuals are virile cowboys — some are effete New York writers. (Naaah.) Stewart to Spielberg: Schindler’s List, Munich…I can’t wait to see what happens next. Trilogy! (Too New York?)
“Bjork was trying on an Oscar dress and Dick Cheney shot her.” “ Walk the Line — Ray with white people.”

Phillip Seymour Hoffman

The classic western gay subtext montage — another brilliant bit. The pre-prepared film assemblies so far are really terrific so far.
Best Supporting Actor: George Clooney. Predicted by all the smart guys (myself included) within the last two or three weeks. Clooney: “All,right, so I’m not winning director.” Good one. “I’m proud to be out of touch” — great line!
The Tom Hanks bit about Oscar-winners speaking too long was….okay. The Ben Stiller green-screen, green suit thing was…okay. And the Oscar for special effects goes to the King Kong guys. This was kind of expected, right? No? Whatever.
Stewart: “Ben Stiller and his amazing green leotard — proof that he’s Jewish.” I’m a goyim from Fairfield County. Help me out here. Oh…it’s about the visual evidence of being circumsized.
Wallace and Gromit (which I didn’t feel like seeing because animation doesn’t exactly levitate me (which doesn’t mean…uhm, you know…that I don’t respect it), has won the Best Animated Feature Oscar, or whatever the precise name of this pain-in-the-ass award is.
Dressed-in-white Dolly Parton is performing the Transamerica song. Bathroom break!

Reese Witherspoon

Superb Diet Coke commercial. End of a date, give in to the feeling. I’m going to find out who directed and wrote and scored it.
(By the way, the coming week is going to be great because the first four episodes of The Sopranos are arriving on Tuesday on DVD….yes!)
The Live Action Short Oscar is presented by the great Luke and Owen Wilson, recalling how the great Bottle Rocket — starring these guys, written by Owen and Wes Anderson with development guidance by James L. Brooks, and directed by Anderson — began life as a 13-minute short. And the Oscar goes to…Martin McDonagh’s Six Shooter! (McDonagh wrote the mind-bending play The Pillowman, which I saw and loved last summer in New York.)
Sorry, but I missed the winner of the Best Animated Short Oscar. Bathroom break. I stayed to watch Dolly Parton after all.
Colleen Atwood has won the Best Costume Design Oscar for her work on the dreadful Memoirs of a Geisha. Excellent kimonos! Shit movie!
Russell Crowe announcing the Oscar for achievements in…actors imitating/inhabiting the physical attributes of famous people? I’m lost. But I enjoyed the comparisons and whatnot. I’d better start drinking coffee. I’m sorry for not being faster on the draw.

Will Ferrell, Steve Carell

Will Ferrell and Steve Carell presenting the Best Makeup Oscar….with stains and white powder smeared all over their faces. Good bit! Carell: “Man, you smell really good too.” Ferrell: “It’s called Pineapple Bliss.” (No Oscar for Sith, please. Bad Sith…smack that bitch down!) Yes! The Narnia guys have won!
Stewart: “Cinderella Man…imagine the makeup needed to convince people that Russell Crowe got into a fight.”
Rachel McAdams needs to permanently die her hair brown. The ladies around me didn’t recognize her. “What’s she been in?” Uhhhm…The Notebook, Wedding Crashers, Red Eye. They were clueless. Blank-o.
Rachel Weisz has won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar! Totally predicted from Day One. Good for Rachel…totally deserved. Good lady. The credit, Dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves. No…that’s not right. What am I saying?
Lauren Bacall is doing okay at first, but begins to stumble a bit and is also, it appears, trembling a tiny bit as she introduces a montage of film noir clips. I don’t know what this is about. Too many people asking me questions, whispering…waiters hovering.
The mock political ads ads for Best Actress are great. Hilarious stuff.

A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin has won Best Documentary Short. I can add nothing to this fact. Nobody can.
Charlize Theron announcing the winner of the Best Feature Documentary Award, and of course the Penguins will win. And the Oscar goes to March of the Penguins. No. surprise. At. All.
Sandra Bullock, who co-starred in Speed 2, and Keanu Reeves, who was smart enough to avoid it, giving the Best Art Direction Oscar to John Myhre and Gretchen Rau for Memoirs of a Geisha. Another compensation-for-not-getting-better-reviews- or-making-more-money award.
Stirring montage of poltical anger, revolt and spitting-out-the-truth moments in respected films. Stewart: “And none of those issues were ever a problem again.”
Academy president Sid Ganis delivering a heartfelt eulogy/plea for the tradition of watching films in a big theatre with a big screen. The genius of the crowd.
Salma Hayek announcing the Best Original Score Oscar, which will most likely go to Brokeback Mountain…and it does. Everything is predictable. No surprises yet. (Is this an omen for a Brokeback Best Picture win? Like the HAL 9000 computer, my brain is saying, “I can feel it…I can feel it.”)

Chuck Workman‘s salute to big-screen thrills, scope, majesty. This is starting to feel like those early 1950s spots in movie theatres proclaiming the virues of theatregoing and the evils of television.
Stewart: “Oh, my God..we’re out of film clips! Send us film clips, please. Even if they’re on Beta.”
Eric Bana and Jessica Alba presenting the Sound Mixing Oscar, and again the prize goes to guys who worked on King Kong. (No women — sorry.)
Robert Altman‘s honorary Oscar tribute starts off amusingly and appropriately with Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin ad-libbing and overlapping each other’s lines as a way of explaining the system-rhythm of Altman’s life-like, loose-shoes dialogue.
Give it to ’em, Bob! Just a little! Altman takes the stage, standing trim and tall, and he goes all soft and kindly on us.
“I was really honored and willing to accept this award, even if I thought at first that it means it’s over. But it’s not over. I look at this award as a nod to all [things]. For me, I just made one long film.

Robert Altman

“Making a film is like making a sand castle at the beach. Enjoy this beautiful structure, and you sit back and watch the tide come in, and the ocean just takes it away. I’ve built about 40 of them, and I’ve never tired of them. No other filmmaker has gotten a better shake. I love filmmaking. It has given me an entree into the world and the human condition, and I’m forever grateful.”
“It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” the song from Hustle & Flow , was vigorously performed, although the choreography seemed a little all over the place. But damn! It just won the Oscar! Wanted to see it happen, didn’t think it would. Good stuff! The old farts no longer run it.
Stewart: “You know what? I think it just got a little easier out for a pimp.” And: “How come [36 Mafia, who wrote and performed the Oscar-winning song, are] the most exciting people here tonight?”
Another friggin’ King Kong Oscar…whatever…this one for Sound Editing. Every time the Kong guys win, it feels like the Return of Return of the King.
The Best Foreign Language Oscar will go to Tsotsi…been saying this all along, and it does. No surprise again, but hooray for director Gavin Hood!

Gavin Hood

Stewart: “Martin Scorsese, zero Oscars. 36 Mafia, one.” I’m getting the idea that Stewart isn’t much of a fan of 36 Mafia or “It’s Hard Out Here For a Pimp” or…
Hughes Winborne has won the Film Editing award for Crash. Is this a Best Picture omen? That HAL 9000 guy in my head is getting confused. He’s not sure if can feel it or not.
Hilary Swank is delivering the Best Actor Oscar, and for the last time I wish that Mr. Hoffman and Mr. Ledger could tie. It won’t happen…can’t happen. And the Oscar goes to Philip Seymour Hoffman. No surprise. Good man. Excellent moment. No barking. Hoffman’s tribute to his mom choked me up.
No surprises…no shake-ups at all…everyone following the script. I’m almost rooting for Crash to win. No, strike that.
John Travolta with too-dark, tennis-ballish short hair handing out the Best Cinematography Oscar, and…Dion Beebe wins for Memoirs of a Geisha? A surprise! Did anyone call this?
Jamie Foxx presenting the Best Actress Oscar, which of course was engraved with Reese Witherspoon’s name many weeks ago. And the Oscar goes to Reese Witherspoon. Hooray for that, and a pat on the back (“a very special thank you”) to director James Mangold. I teared up a bit with this one too.

Penguin guys

And here’s Dustin Hoffman to present the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar. Brokeback has this sewn up, and the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar goes to Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana for their adaptation of Annie Proulx’s short story of Brokeback Mountain . Good, richly deserved, long expected.
And Uma Thurman hands the Best Original Screenplay Oscar to Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco for Crash. Completely predicted, well deserved. Good work, hombres. (Whoops…Bobby Moresco’s thank-you sentiments were cut off by Bill Conti’s music before he could say them.)
Here comes Ang Lee’s Best Directing oscar, presented by Tom Hanks. Yup, it’s Ang Lee. Of course. Totally totally. Good good. Now there’s just one more…
Here we go — Tony Curtis vs. Brokeback Mountain!! Jack Nicholson, the presenter, sounds a tiny bit hoarse, and he just called Bennett Miller’s film Capotay.
And…oh my God…Tony Curtis wins! The Best Picture Oscar goes to Crash! Closet homophobes…yes! You’ve struck a blow for straightatude! Are you listening, Tony? John Wayne and Howard Hughes are alive and well.
No, seriously…congrats to the Crash crew, and it’s too bad the Academy and the Producers Guild wouldn’t let Bob Yari take the stage. And that’s it. I’m off to a party. More tomorrow.

Santa Monica Vibe

Saturday’s Spirit Awards felt like the Oscars, all right…but not nearly as much as tonight’s Oscar telecast will feel similar to the Spirits.
This was the year the Academy crowd gave in to the spirit of Santa Monica and said, “We get it, we’re going with it.” Because there was really nowhere else to go. Because the big studios weren’t interested in making Oscar-calibre movies that were quite good enough. (Even though they did manage this in a roundabout way, with Warner Bros., Universal and Sony’s indie “dependent” divisions funding Good Night, and Good Luck, Brokeback Mountain, The Constant Gardener and Capote).

Looking out from the parking lot in front of Shutters, the Santa Monica hotel where the IFP Spirit Awards after-party happens each year.

And I’d love to go with the spirit of these opening paragraphs, but already I’m losing interest. This is yesterday’s news and the Oscars are due to kick off only five hours from now and…all right, I’ll stay the course.
Brokeback Mountain, the odds-on favorite to take the Best Picture Oscar until the Crash surge of two or three weeks ago (is it real or is it Memorex?), won the Spirit Award for Best Feature while Crash won the prize for Best First Feature.
Brokeback director Ang Lee, totally favored to take the Best Director Oscar this evening, won the Spirit Award in this category.
Capote star Phillip Seymour Hoffman, the guaranteed winner of the Best Actor Oscar, took the same prize from the Spirits, and Capote screenwriter Dan Futterman, nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar (but not favored to win), was handed the Spirit Award for Best Screenplay.
And Transamerica star Felicity Huffman, nominated for a Best Actress Oscar (although probably fated to lose this evening to Reese Witherspoon), took the Spirit Award for Best Actress.

Transamerca star Felicity Huffman, winner of the Spirit Award for Best Actress, chatting behind the tent with ABC network film critic Joel Siegel

Coby/Netflix DVD player, one of the offerings in the celebrity swag tent

But enough with the facts. Here’s how some of yesterday afternoon’s soiree played out, catch-as-catch-can.
It was delightfully sunny and blue-skied, for one thing. It’s always this way on Spirit Awards day in Santa Monica, as if the Gods are in league.
I was graciously given a table by the Spirits producers (apparently due to the tent being larger), which meant being able to schmooze with some of the nominees and the various journos, distributors and agents who attend each year. A very cool vibe and hassle-free access all around, although I didn’t get to talk to my hero, Werner Herzog.
The mood is always relaxed and come-what-may at the Spirits, along with a feeling of community cohesion, which is nice. Most of the time I’m alone and half-dressed and struggling with sentence construction in front of my laptop. The only thing I struggled with yesterday was finding the discipline to consume only one Cosmo- politan (which made me feel half-bombed anyway).

Factory Girl star Sienna Miller with director George Hickenlooper

For at least four hours (six hours if you count the after-party at Shutters, which finished me off socially for the next two or three weeks), life was a series of billiard ball clack-chats with Peter Sarsgaard, Vin Diesel, Our Brand is Crisis director Rachel Boynton, producer Cotty Chubb, N.Y. Times “Bagger”-san David Carr, my ex-boss Kevin Smith, Picturehouse chief Bob Berney, and Christian Science Monitor critic Peter Rainer.
Not to mention Arianna Huffington, Fur director Steve Shainberg, Paradise Now director (and Spirit Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film) Hany Abu Assad, Chicago Tribune guy Mark Caro, First Look distribution chief Ruth Vitale, N.Y. Daily News columnist George Rush, Factory Girl director George Hicken- looper and his star, Sienna Miller.
This isn’t very hard-hitting stuff, but jabber stories are allowable every so often.
My table in the big tent was so far to the rear that I couldn’t tell if it was really Sarah Silverman doing the opening monologue or not, but it was. If you watched the show it’s no secret that her routine was pretty damn funny.

The Paradise Now crew after their win for Best Foreign Language Feature. Director Hany Abu Assad is second from right. The other three play the three main roles, but I don’t know which names go with which actors…sorry. Anyone?

Our Brand Is Crisis director Rachel Boynton

No…not funny. Profoundly funny, nervy, brilliant. She was better than John Waters, better than Kevin Pollak in the mid ’90s. She was on it, riding it, ruling it. Wicked stuff.
Behind the monster tent are a series of mid-sized tents — a press hospitality tent with food and drink, a TV interview tent, a print and online tent for post-award interviews (hanging out in front of the entrance to this one was the place to be), an Entertainment Weekly tent, a celebrity swag tent, and two or three others.
I had to visit the swag tent. The goods were only for celebrity presenters, not winners. Publicist Erika Cosentino,who gave me a goodie tour, said the merch- andise was valued at about $36,000 bucks. Fuck! They were giving away Palm Treo 650s, Invicta watches, Netflix DVD players (which look like your standard- issue CD player with an embedded video screen), diamond bracelets, clothes, footwear, health spa visit coupons, etc.
I mentioned the $36 grand figure to Peter Sarsgaard, who’s apparently used to being gifted this lavishly. (He reportedly brought his goody bag on stage with him a while later.) Sarsgaard’s agent claimed that the value of swag is always inflated by the publicists. Producer Sam Kitt used the term “swag wranglers” to refer to the twentysomethings who pass the stuff out.

Brokeback Mountain‘s James Schamus (producer), Diana Ossana (co-screenwriter, producer) and Ang Lee (director) after winning the Spirit Award for Best Feature

Capote screenwriter Dan Futterman after winning for Best Screenplay

Documentarian Garrett Scott, who died a couple of days ago from a reported heart attack at age 37, won the Truer Than Fiction prize for his Iraq film, Occupation: Dreamland. His co-director Ian Olds accepted the award. (I heard yesterday that Scott’s death had something to with a “swimming pool” in his mother’s back yard. How does a 37 year-old guy who isn’t Chris Penn die from a heart attack?)
It was interesting to see the entire Crash team (including producer Cathy Schul- man and her arch-enemy Bob Yari) sharing a stage in the press tent. Schulman is suing Yari for alleged unpaid fees, and Yari, who wrote the check that allowed Crash to be shot, has been denied producer credit and is suing the Academy and the the Producers Guild over this call.
A fellow reporter told me after the fact that Yari was snarly about the fact that a reporter asked him about the general rancor that’s gone down among them. News of Yari and Schulman’s lawsuits are all over the trades and it’s in bad taste to ask for a comment?
Each and every winner came back to the press tent for five minutes of questions. It was all good and agreeable to listen to it and take notes from, but nobody said anything that dropped my socks.

Big tent revelers before the start of the show

Phillip Seymour Hoffman after winning for Best Actor

I shook this guy’s hand, that guy’s hand. I patted about 58 people on the back and called them chief, bro, pal.
I asked Hickenlooper, whom I consider an actual friend, if he would show me Factory Girl sometime this summer after it’s done. (He said he hopes to premiere his Edie Sedgwick biopic at the 2006 Toronto Film festival.) I told Diesel, whom I first met in ’98 or thereabouts, that I greatly admire his acting in Find Me Guilty, and the film in general. Blah, blah…this sounds like filler.
The Shutters after-event totally finished me off. I’m good for about six hours of this crap and that’s it. Bob Berney threw a Picturehouse party at the Four Seasons, and I don’t think I would have gone even if he’d invited me. I didn’t attend the Wein- stein Co. party at the Pacific Design Center, which I begged to be on the list for, or Bob Yari’s party at Crustacean in Beverly Hills.
I’ll be tapping out my live Oscar reaction stuff if nothing screws up technically at Hollywood’s Rennaissance hotel, where I’ll be watching the show from. Until that moment…

(l. to r.) Crash producer Mark Harris, producer Cathy Schulman, director-co-screenwriter-producer Paul Haggis, co-screenwriter Bobby Moresco, executive producer Bob Yari

A somewhat pretentious way to eat popcorn, but whatever works

Show of Shows

Please, Oscar God…give us surprises. Any surprises. Anything.
Even if it means Crash winning the Best Picture Oscar, which I’d rather not see happen for a few reasons. At 4:45 pm Joel Siegel, sharing the black mike with his ABC co-commentators Leonard Maltin and Anne Thompson, said this is precisely what might happen.
Ladies, it’s okay with me. Crash is a very well crafted, socially resonant film. No, wait…March of the Homophobes!
That was an excellent CG intro with the classic scenes and characters all blended together in that CG sepia-tone dreamscape. Awesome work.
Billy Crystal, Steve Martin, David Letterman, Chris Rock, Mel Gibson. All declining to host the Oscar show…brilliant stuff. Halle Berry, George Clooney…”I just had the weirdest dream.” Starts things off with just the right note.
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Hello, Jon Stewart! The Death to Smoochy joke died. The Angelina Jolie joke died. A chance to see all your favorite stars without having to donate any money to the Democratic Party. Hmmm. Night of a Thousand Sweatpants?
Stewart’s first good one: “‘Good night and good luck’ — the line that Mr. Clooney ends all of his dates with.” Not all homosexuals are virile cowboys — some are effete New York writers. (Naaah.) Stewart to Spielberg: Schindler’s List, Munich…I can’t wait to see what happens next. Trilogy! (Too New York?)
“Bjork was trying on an Oscar dress and Dick Cheney shot her.” “ Walk the Line — Ray with white people.”
The classic western gay subtext montage — another brilliant bit. The pre-prepared film assemblies so far are really terrific so far.
Best Supporting Actor: George Clooney. Predicted by all the smart guys (myself included) within the last two or three weeks. Clooney: “All,right, so I’m not winning director.” Good one. “I’m proud to be out of touch” — great line!
The Tom Hanks bit about Oscar-winners speaking too long was….okay. The Ben Stiller green-screen, green suit thing was…okay. And the Oscar for special effects goes to the King Kong guys. This was kind of expected, right? No? Whatever.
Stewart: “Ben Stiller and his amazing green leotard — proof that he’s Jewish.” I’m a goyim from Fairfield County. Help me out here. Oh…it’s about the visual evidence of being circumsized.
Wallace and Gromit (which I didn’t feel like seeing because animation doesn’t exactly levitate me (which doesn’t mean…uhm, you know…that I don’t respect it), has won the Best Animated Feature Oscar, or whatever the precise name of this pain-in-the-ass award is.
Dressed-in-white Dolly Parton is performing the Transamerica song. Bathroom break!
Superb Diet Coke commercial. End of a date, give in to the feeling. I’m going to find out who directed and wrote and scored it.
(By the way, the coming week is going to be great because the first four episodes of The Sopranos are arriving on Tuesday on DVD….yes!)
The Live Action Short Oscar is presented by the great Luke and Owen Wilson, recalling how the great Bottle Rocket — starring these guys, written by Owen and Wes Anderson with development guidance by James L. Brooks, and directed by Anderson — began life as a 13-minute short. And the Oscar goes to…Martin McDonagh’s Six Shooter! (McDonagh wrote the mind-bending play The Pillowman, which I saw and loved last summer in New York.)
Sorry, but I missed the winner of the Best Animated Short Oscar. Bathroom break. I stayed to watch Dolly Parton after all.
Colleen Atwood has won the Best Costume Design Oscar for her work on the dreadful Memoirs of a Geisha. Excellent kimonos! Shit movie!
Russell Crowe announcing the Oscar for achievements in…actors imitating/inhabiting the physical attributes of famous people? I’m lost. But I enjoyed the comparisons and whatnot. I’d better start drinking coffee. I’m sorry for not being faster on the draw.
Will Ferrell and Steve Carell presenting the Best Makeup Oscar….with stains and white powder smeared all over their faces. Good bit! Carell: “Man, you smell really good too.” Ferrell: “It’s called Pineapple Bliss.” (No Oscar for Sith, please. Bad Sith…smack that bitch down!) Yes! The Narnia guys have won!
Stewart: “Cinderella Man…imagine the makeup needed to convince people that Russell Crowe got into a fight.”
Rachel McAdams needs to permanently die her hair brown. The ladies around me didn’t recognize her. “What’s she been in?” Uhhhm…The Notebook, Wedding Crashers, Red Eye. They were clueless. Blank-o.
Rachel Weisz has won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar! Totally predicted from Day One. Good for Rachel…totally deserved. Good lady. The credit, Dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves. No…that’s not right. What am I saying?
Lauren Bacall is doing okay at first, but begins to stumble a bit and is also, it appears, trembling a tiny bit as she introduces a montage of film noir clips. I don’t know what this is about. Too many people asking me questions, whispering…waiters hovering.
The mock political ads ads for Best Actress are great. Hilarious stuff.
A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin has won Best Documentary Short. I can add nothing to this fact. Nobody can.
Charlize Theron announcing the winner of the Best Feature Documentary Award, and of course the Penguins will win. And the Oscar goes to March of the Penguins. No. surprise. At. All.
Sandra Bullock, who co-starred in Speed 2, and Keanu Reeves, who was smart enough to avoid it, giving the Best Art Direction Oscar to John Myhre and Gretchen Rau for Memoirs of a Geisha. Another compensation-for-not-getting-better-reviews- or-making-more-money award.
Stirring montage of poltical anger, revolt and spitting-out-the-truth moments in respected films. Stewart: “And none of those issues were ever a problem again.”
Academy president Sid Ganis delivering a heartfelt eulogy/plea for the tradition of watching films in a big theatre with a big screen. The genius of the crowd.
Salma Hayek announcing the Best Original Score Oscar, which will most likely go to Brokeback Mountain…and it does. Everything is predictable. No surprises yet. (Is this an omen for a Brokeback Best Picture win? Like the HAL 9000 computer, my brain is saying, “I can feel it…I can feel it.”)
Chuck Workman‘s salute to big-screen thrills, scope, majesty. This is starting to feel like those early 1950s spots in movie theatres proclaiming the virues of theatregoing and the evils of television.
Stewart: “Oh, my God..we’re out of film clips! Send us film clips, please. Even if they’re on Beta.”
Eric Bana and Jessica Alba presenting the Sound Mixing Oscar, and again the prize goes to guys who worked on King Kong. (No women — sorry.)
Robert Altman‘s honorary Oscar tribute starts off amusingly and appropriately with Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin ad-libbing and overlapping each other’s lines as a way of explaining the system-rhythm of Altman’s life-like, loose-shoes dialogue.
Give it to ’em, Bob! Just a little! Altman takes the stage, standing trim and tall, and he goes all soft and kindly on us.
“I was really honored and willing to accept this award, even if I thought at first that it means it’s over. But it’s not over. I look at this award as a nod to all [things]. For me, I just made one long film.
“Making a film is like making a sand castle at the beach. Enjoy this beautiful structure, and you sit back and watch the tide come in, and the ocean just take it away. I’ve built about 40 of them, and I’ve never tired of them. No other filmmaker has gotten a better shake. I love filmmaking. It has given me an entree into the world and the human condition, and I’m forever grateful.”
He meant the words he said, and they were his and his alone. Let it go.
“It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” the song from Hustle & Flow , was vigorously performed, although the choreography seemed a
little all over the place. But damn! It just won the Oscar! Wanted to see it happen, didn’t think it would. Good stuff! The old farts no longer run it.
Stewart: “You know what? I think it just got a little easier out for a pimp.” And: “How come [36 Mafia, who wrote and performed the Oscar-winning song, are] the most exciting people here tonight?”
Another friggin’ King Kong Oscar…whatever…this one for Sound Editing. Every time the Kong guys win, it feels like the Return of Return of the King.
The Best Foreign Language Oscar will go to Tsotsi…been saying this all along, and it does. No surprise again, but hooray for director Gavin Hood!
Stewart: “Martin Scorsese, zero Oscars. 35 Mafia, one.” I’m getting the idea that Stewart isn’t much of a fan of 36 Mafia or “It’s Hard Out Here For a Pimp” or…
Hughes Winborne has won the Film Editing award for Crash. Is this a Best Picture omen? That HAL 9000 guy in my head is getting confused. He’s not sure if can feel it or not.
Hilary Swank is delivering the Best Actor Oscar, and for the last time I wish that Mr. Hoffman and Mr. Ledger could tie. It won’t happen…can’t happen. And the Oscar goes to Philip Seymour Hoffman. No surprise. Good man. Excellent moment. No barking. Hoffman’s tribute to his mom choked me up.
No surprises…no shake-ups at all…everyone following the script. I’m almost rooting for Crash to win. No, strike that.
John Travolta with too-dark, tennis-ballish short hair handing out the Best Cinematography Oscar, and…Dion Beebe wins for Memoirs of a Geisha? A surprise! Did anyone call this?
Jamie Foxx presenting the Best Actress Oscar, which of course was engraved with Reese Witherspoon’s name many weeks ago. And the Oscar goes to Reese Witherspoon. Hooray for that, and a pat on the back (“a very special thank you”) to director James Mangold. I teared up a bit with this one too.
And here’s Dustin Hoffman to present the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar. Brokeback has this sewn up, and the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar goes to Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana for their adaptation of Annie Proulx’s short story of Brokeback Mountain . Good, richly deserved, long expected.
And Uma Thurman hands the Best Original Screenplay Oscar to Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco for Crash. Completely predicted, well deserved. Good work, hombres. (Whoops…Bobby Moresco’s thank-you sentiments were cut off by Bill Conti’s music before he could say them.)
Here comes Ang Lee’s Best Directing oscar, presented by Tom Hanks. Yup, it’s Ang Lee. Of course. Totally totally. Good good. Now there’s just one more…
Here we go — Tony Curtis vs. Brokeback Mountain!! Jack Nicholson, the presenter, sounds a tiny bit hoarse, and he just called Bennett Miller’s film Capotay.
And…oh my God…Tony Curtis wins! The Best Picture Oscar goes to Crash! Closet homophobes…yes! You’ve struck a blow for straightatude! Are you listening, Tony? John Wayne and Howard Hughes are alive and well.
No, seriously…congrats to the Crash crew, and it’s too bad the Academy and the Producers Guild wouldn’t let Bob Yari take the stage. And that’s it. I’m off to a party. More tomorrow.

Santa Monica Vibe

Saturday’s Spirit Awards felt like the Oscars, all right…but not nearly as much as tonight’s Oscar telecast will feel similar to the Spirits.
This was the year the Academy crowd gave in to the spirit of Santa Monica and said, “We get it, we’re going with it.” Because there was really nowhere else to go. Because the big studios weren’t interested in making Oscar-calibre movies that were quite good enough. (Even though they did manage this in a roundabout way, with Warner Bros., Universal and Sony’s indie “dependent” divisions funding Good Night, and Good Luck, Brokeback Mountain, The Constant Gardener and Capote).

Looking out from the parking lot in front of Shutters, the Santa Monica hotel where the IFP Spirit Awards after-party happens each year.

And I’d love to go with the spirit of these opening paragraphs, but already I’m losing interest. This is yesterday’s news and the Oscars are due to kick off only five hours from now and…all right, I’ll stay the course.
Brokeback Mountain, the odds-on favorite to take the Best Picture Oscar until the Crash surge of two or three weeks ago (is it real or is it Memorex?), won the Spirit Award for Best Feature while Crash won the prize for Best First Feature.
Brokeback director Ang Lee, totally favored to take the Best Director Oscar this evening, won the Spirit Award in this category.
Capote star Phillip Seymour Hoffman, the guaranteed winner of the Best Actor Oscar, took the same prize from the Spirits, and Capote screenwriter Dan Futterman, nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar (but not favored to win), was handed the Spirit Award for Best Screenplay.
And Transamerica star Felicity Huffman, nominated for a Best Actress Oscar (although probably fated to lose this evening to Reese Witherspoon), took the Spirit Award for Best Actress.

Transamerca star Felicity Huffman, winner of the Spirit Award for Best Actress, chatting behind the tent with ABC network film critic Joel Siegel

Coby/Netflix DVD player, one of the offerings in the celebrity swag tent

But enough with the facts. Here’s how some of yesterday afternoon’s soiree played out, catch-as-catch-can.
It was delightfully sunny and blue-skied, for one thing. It’s always this way on Spirit Awards day in Santa Monica, as if the Gods are in league.
I was graciously given a table by the Spirits producers (apparently due to the tent being larger), which meant being able to schmooze with some of the nominees and the various journos, distributors and agents who attend each year. A very cool vibe and hassle-free access all around, although I didn’t get to talk to my hero, Werner Herzog.
The mood is always relaxed and come-what-may at the Spirits, along with a feeling of community cohesion, which is nice. Most of the time I’m alone and half-dressed and struggling with sentence construction in front of my laptop. The only thing I struggled with yesterday was finding the discipline to consume only one Cosmo- politan (which made me feel half-bombed anyway).

Factory Girl star Sienna Miller with director George Hickenlooper

For at least four hours (six hours if you count the after-party at Shutters, which finished me off socially for the next two or three weeks), life was a series of billiard ball clack-chats with Peter Sarsgaard, Vin Diesel, Our Brand is Crisis director Rachel Boynton, producer Cotty Chubb, N.Y. Times “Bagger”-san David Carr, my ex-boss Kevin Smith, Picturehouse chief Bob Berney, and Christian Science Monitor critic Peter Rainer.
Not to mention Arianna Huffington, Fur director Steve Shainberg, Paradise Now director (and Spirit Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film) Hany Abu Assad, Chicago Tribune guy Mark Caro, First Look distribution chief Ruth Vitale, N.Y. Daily News columnist George Rush, Factory Girl director George Hicken- looper and his star, Sienna Miller.
This isn’t very hard-hitting stuff, but jabber stories are allowable every so often.
My table in the big tent was so far to the rear that I couldn’t tell if it was really Sarah Silverman doing the opening monologue or not, but it was. If you watched the show it’s no secret that her routine was pretty damn funny.

The Paradise Now crew after their win for Best Foreign Language Feature. Director Hany Abu Assad is second from right. The other three play the three main roles, but I don’t know which names go with which actors…sorry. Anyone?

Our Brand Is Crisis director Rachel Boynton

No…not funny. Profoundly funny, nervy, brilliant. She was better than John Waters, better than Kevin Pollak in the mid ’90s. She was on it, riding it, ruling it. Wicked stuff.
Behind the monster tent are a series of mid-sized tents — a press hospitality tent with food and drink, a TV interview tent, a print and online tent for post-award interviews (hanging out in front of the entrance to this one was the place to be), an Entertainment Weekly tent, a celebrity swag tent, and two or three others.
I had to visit the swag tent. The goods were only for celebrity presenters, not winners. Publicist Erika Cosentino,who gave me a goodie tour, said the merch- andise was valued at about $36,000 bucks. Fuck! They were giving away Palm Treo 650s, Invicta watches, Netflix DVD players (which look like your standard- issue CD player with an embedded video screen), diamond bracelets, clothes, footwear, health spa visit coupons, etc.
I mentioned the $36 grand figure to Peter Sarsgaard, who’s apparently used to being gifted this lavishly. (He reportedly brought his goody bag on stage with him a while later.) Sarsgaard’s agent claimed that the value of swag is always inflated by the publicists. Producer Sam Kitt used the term “swag wranglers” to refer to the twentysomethings who pass the stuff out.

Brokeback Mountain‘s James Schamus (producer), Diana Ossana (co-screenwriter, producer) and Ang Lee (director) after winning the Spirit Award for Best Feature

Capote screenwriter Dan Futterman after winning for Best Screenplay

Documentarian Garrett Scott, who died a couple of days ago from a reported heart attack at age 37, won the Truer Than Fiction prize for his Iraq film, Occupation: Dreamland. His co-director Ian Olds accepted the award. (I heard yesterday that Scott’s death had something to with a “swimming pool” in his mother’s back yard. How does a 37 year-old guy who isn’t Chris Penn die from a heart attack?)
It was interesting to see the entire Crash team (including producer Cathy Schul- man and her arch-enemy Bob Yari) sharing a stage in the press tent. Schulman is suing Yari for alleged unpaid fees, and Yari, who wrote the check that allowed Crash to be shot, has been denied producer credit and is suing the Academy and the the Producers Guild over this call.
A fellow reporter told me after the fact that Yari was snarly about the fact that a reporter asked him about the general rancor that’s gone down among them. News of Yari and Schulman’s lawsuits are all over the trades and it’s in bad taste to ask for a comment?
Each and every winner came back to the press tent for five minutes of questions. It was all good and agreeable to listen to it and take notes from, but nobody said anything that dropped my socks.

Big tent revelers before the start of the show

Phillip Seymour Hoffman after winning for Best Actor

I shook this guy’s hand, that guy’s hand. I patted about 58 people on the back and called them chief, bro, pal.
I asked Hickenlooper, whom I consider an actual friend, if he would show me Factory Girl sometime this summer after it’s done. (He said he hopes to premiere his Edie Sedgwick biopic at the 2006 Toronto Film festival.) I told Diesel, whom I first met in ’98 or thereabouts, that I greatly admire his acting in Find Me Guilty, and the film in general. Blah, blah…this sounds like filler.
The Shutters after-event totally finished me off. I’m good for about six hours of this crap and that’s it. Bob Berney threw a Picturehouse party at the Four Seasons, and I don’t think I would have gone even if he’d invited me. I didn’t attend the Wein- stein Co. party at the Pacific Design Center, which I begged to be on the list for, or Bob Yari’s party at Crustacean in Beverly Hills.
I’ll be tapping out my live Oscar reaction stuff if nothing screws up technically at Hollywood’s Rennaissance hotel, where I’ll be watching the show from. Until that moment…

(l. to r.) Crash producer Mark Harris, producer Cathy Schulman, director-co-screenwriter-producer Paul Haggis, co-screenwriter Bobby Moresco, executive producer Bob Yari

A somewhat pretentious way to eat popcorn, but whatever works

Is It Crash?

Three or four weeks ago, the talk among Hollywood journalists about Crash nipping at the heels of Brokeback Mountain and maybe even surging ahead in the Best Picture race was about boredom. Nobody likes a locked-down situation and the tea-leaf readers wanted a horse race so they created one in their heads…or so I told myself.
Now I’m not so sure. One after another like falling dominoes, the prognosticators all seem to be saying, “It could be Crash, it could be Crash.” The horserace feels real, or at least real-er than before.

“So David Carr went for us, and then…what? He caved? You’re saying he changed his mind or…?”

I don’t know what’s happening, but I haven’t spoken to or read anyone in recent days who believes four-square that Brokeback Mountain is going to take the Big One. I think it damn well ought to and probably will, but even I’m starting to wonder.
Roger Ebert is an unqualified Crash admirer, but he’s also predicting it will win. Brokeback Mountain producer James Schamus told USA Today‘s Susan Wlosz- cysna that Crash “is a good movie, and a lot of people love it…there are always surprises.” Leonard Maltin is allegedly saying a Crash win is quite possible, or words to that effect. David Carr, a.k.a. “the Bagger,” predicted a Crash win two days ago then went into a spasm of “picker’s remorse.”
Maxim critic Pete Hammond gets around a lot, and what he said the other day put the fear of God into this Brokeback Mountain supporter like nothing else:.
“I keep talking to Academy voters, and whatever [Best Picture] nominee they voted for, it wasn’t Brokeback Mountain,” Hammond observed. “So either I’m talking to the wrong voters or there’s more of a horserace going on.
“Brokeback supporters are hard to find, other than people like [Dreamgirls director] Bill Condon. This is unusual for something that’s supposedly so far in front…the support doesn’t seem to be there. I’ve talked to people who are very adamant about Crash . Maybe it’s just that the Crash supporters are talking louder…I don’t know.

“Don’t think at all about what might happen on Oscar night. It’s not what matters now. You know that but I’m telling you anyway.”

“One indicator against Brokeback is that it didn’t get an editing nominaton, which best Picture winners usually get. The last time a film won for Best Picture without an editing nomination was Ordinary People 25 years ago. And Brokeback isn’t nominated in the technical departments…all the tech guilds have gone elsewhere.
“So this could be a split year — Crash for Best Picture and [Brokeback‘s] Ang Lee for Best Director.”
If Crash has taken the prize, it will be due to three tipping factors. One, people genuinely admire it and feel it’s simply a better film than Brokeback Mountain, which is a perfectly allowable view. Two, they feel good about its moderately upbeat message about Los Angelenos (we’re all flawed and angry, but we have our good sides too) and its portrait of L.A. being a cohesive society (hah!). And three, latent homophobia (i.e., the World War II generation’s discomfort with that pup-tent scene, not to mention giving the organizational seal of approval to a gay love story).
Crash is a solid respectable drama (I’ve liked it from the get-go), but the reason it’s caught on in recent weeks, to some extent (and you can wiggle around but you know this is true), is because it’s the strongest alternative to Brokeback, and squeamish Academy members need a banner to congregate under.

Onlooker #1: “You and your cowboy pop-tent posse thought you had it locked…hah!” Onlooker #2: “Gloating is unbecoming, and it ain’t over ’til it’s over.”

Brokeback, Ang, James, Larry, Diana, Heath, Jake, Michelle, Anne, Gustavo, Rodrigo…pullin’ for the team! And remember that if you lose tomorrow, you still made a landmark film. But if the tide goes against you it’ll be because of the Joe Aguirre’s out there. I mean, let’s be candid about this.
I’ll run photos and sound clips from the Spirit Awards later tonight or tomorrow morning (Sunday, 3.5), along with my final calls. And I guess I’ll run some kind of live-comment thing in the main column as it’s all happening Sunday night.

Guilty Surprise

Sidney Lumet’s Find Me Guilty (Freestyle, 3.17) isn’t just about the rebirth of Lumet’s career (at age 82!) and that of his star, Vin Diesel. It’s also a kind of Damon Runyon-esque joyride — an ethnic-Italian, New York-attitude sociopath movie for those who wink at the bad guys and chuckle when they manage to maneuver their way around the law.
Maybe I’m jaded or I’ve just been Godfather-ed and Soprano-ed into submission, but I bought into most of it and felt pretty much delighted with the care that went into the making of it, and the final ambiguity of it. I was also a bit troubled by it. And yet fascinated.

Vin Diesel as Jackie DiNorscio in Sidney Lumet’s Find Me Guilty (Freestyle, 3.17)

Guilty is unquestionably a marvel of old-fashioned (i.e., ’80s-style) craftsmanship — Lumet’s superb direction, T.J. Mancini and Robert McCrea’s’s finely structured screenplay and skillfully pared-down dialogue, and Diesel’s inescapably charming, sincerely felt performance that puts him back on the road map. (Really — all those mixed memories of XXX and The Pacifier are out the window.)
Plus there’s Peter Dinklage and Annabella Sciorra’s superb acting. I genuinely feel that Dinklage, playing a shrewd mob defense attorney with a gift for persuasive oratory, is the first serious contender for Best Supporting Actor for the ’07 Oscar Awards (or at least the ’07 Indie Spirits). And Sciorra almost does here what Robin Wright Penn did last year in Nine Lives, and that’s really saying something.
But there’s some mucky-muck going on. Shot in late ’04, Find Me Guilty has had distribution troubles (it was shopped around and nobody bit) and is being sold the wrong way — the trailer tries to tell you it’s a jaunty mob-guy comedy, a kind of farce, and the music toward the end of the film tries to convey this also, and this feels like a sell-out to the moron trade.
Is everyone listening? Ignore the advertising. The advertising is dishonest.
It’s not without its amusements and gag lines from time to time, but Find Me Guilty is a fairly serious, rooted-in-reality court procedural about wise-guy morality, or the urban mythology about same.

It’s clearly Lumet’s best film since Q & A (1990), and before that Prince of the City (1981). It’s a tight, no-nonsense court drama that’s not about legal maneuvers or discovering evidence or doing right by the system and justice being served, but mob family values.
In a stuffed-manicotti way, Find Me Guilty is as much of a values-based entertain- ment as The Passion of the Christ, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, The Thing About My Folks and Madea’s Family Reunion. I’m serious.
There’s more time spent in a courtoom in this thing than in Lumet’s The Verdict, and for good reason: Find Me Guilty is about the longest-lasting federal criminal prosecution in history. From March ’87 to August ’88, 20 members of the New Jersey-based Lucchese crime family, each represented by his own lawyer, were brought to trial in Newark, New Jersey, on some 76 charges (dope smuggling, gambling, squeezing small businesses…the usual mob stuff).
The feds felt they had an air-tight case, but when the verdict came down…well, let’s not say. But I’ll tell you right now that some people are going to have a problem with this film because of the ending, and especially the tone of it.

Peter Dinklage

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Kirk Honeycutt has already voiced this reservation in his review from last month’s Berlin Film Festival. The community values espoused (or at least given a fair examination) by this film are, from a strictly law-abiding perspective, totally goombah and wholly corrupt. And yet what’s being said here is not without a certain resonance, a certain sincerity of feeling.
These values can be summed up by the words “don’t rat,” “don’t roll” and “family is everything.” I’m no goombah but I sympathize with these sentiments, so I guess that’s part of the territory.
I’m talking about the values of a group of bad guys (i.e., men who live outside the law and occasionally enforce their ethical standards by whacking each other) who ostensibly care for and someitmes “take care of” each other, and about one particular bad guy — Diesel’s Jackie DiNorscio — who stood up for certain things over the course of this trial …loyalty, friendship, togetherness…even if the reality of Italian crime ethics, going by everything I’ve heard, is that everyone rats out everyone else sooner or later and a lot of these guys are just full-out sociopaths, or are viewed this way by the majority. And yet Guilty isn’t an invented story.
This, for me, makes it absolutely fascinating because Lumet, Mancini, McCrea and Diesel are making a moral statement that they obviously have some kind of respect for, and in a serious way. Diesel does his courtroom buffoon routine for entertainment value at regular intervals, but otherwise Find Me Guilty is a fairly sober piece that asks you to grapple with who and what DiNorscio is, and what he’s really saying.

Sidney Lumet, Vin Diesel

The story points and much of the dialogue in Find Me Guilty are taken from court records and based on hard facts, so there’s obviously a kind of imbedded truth in what we’re seeing, but let’s face it — if you were to show this film to Tony Soprano’s crew they would eat it up like baked ziti.
But show this film to a group of straight-arrow law officials from outside of the New Jersey-New York corridor who haven’t seen other ethnically-correct mob movies, and some of them will undoubtedly say, “What the hell is this? Has Hollywood gone totally corrupt?” And yet it happened.
What’s really striking is that Find Me Guilty is pretty much the precise moral opposite of Lumet’s Prince of the City (1981), which is about the emotional agony that a corrupt cop puts himself through when he decides to tell the absolute truth and rat out his equally corrupt cop friends, and ends up despised and lonely and broken.
Find Me Guilty is about a wise guy who refuses to rat out his wise-guy friends, even when most of them shun him and treat him like a leper because of his court behavior, but who nonetheless holds to his own moral ethical course. I’m not going to spill the ending but this is not a movie that ends with the clanking of prison-cell doors a la Goodfellas.

Has there ever been a major-league filmmaker besides Lumet who has made two films about the same culture — the New York-area criminal underworld — with both (a) based on a completely true story about courts and prosecutors and defendants, (b) both grappling with almost the exact same moral-ethical issue, and yet (c) coming to almost the exact opposite conclusions about ratting out your friends?
There are no almost double features these days except at L.A.s Beverly Cinema and New York’s Cinema Village, but Find Me Guilty needs to be paired next year on a double bill with Prince of the City. And when that happens I’m going.
The more I think about this film, which at times feels like a close cousin of William Friedkin’s The Brinks Job, at other times like an earnestly intended moral fable, at at still other times like Prince of the City‘s sociopathic, wise-assed younger brother with a fuck-you-John-Law attitude….the more morally curious and unto-its-own- realm it seems.
I think this is why the distribution community passed — they don’t know what to make of it, and are a little afraid of how the average moviegoer (i.e., those over-30s who will be persuaded to give an old-fashioned Lumet film a shot in the first place) might react.

A dish of cheese ravioli

The hard truth is that Find Me Guilty will most likely tank on its first weekend, but it shouldn’t. It’s a quality thing all the way, it isn’t the least bit boring and is easily among the best of the year so far (alongside Why We Fight, Fateless, Totsi, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and Neil Young: Heart of Gold).
There’s no denying that from a craft perspective Find Me Guilty is simply one of the Lumet’s best ever. Mancini and McCrea’s dialogue is sharp, honed, and perfectly seasoned. And his slightly fake-looking rug aside, Diesel is amazing. At times he seems to be just joshing around and more into charming the audience (along with the on-screen jury) that rendering a character, but it gradually seeps in that he’s really playing Jackie DiNorscio and capturing what made him tick and who he really was.
And the supporting actors…fuhgedaboutit. Dinklage (that very cool short guy from The Station Agent) delivers a pitch-perfect performance — an utterly believable incarnation of a fully-rounded hardball lawyer. Sciorra has only one scene with Diesel, in a tiny prison holding room, but the husband-and-wife vibe is dead-on with the old resentments and sexual current getting stronger and stronger — it’s a near-classic scene.
Also excellent are Ron Silver as the presiding judge, Alex Rocco as the viper-like head of the crime family being prosecuted, and Linus Roache as the steely-eyed, go-for-broke prosecutor.
There are fifteen or twenty other actors who are just as good — this film has been perfectly cast in the legendary Lumet-New York street guy tradition by Ellen Chenoweth and Susie Farris. Cheers also for the cinematography by Ron Fortunato, which is beautifully framed and lit all through.

Find Me Guilty is not as good or as interesting as Lumet’s two greatest New York dramas — Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico — because it feels a little too smug at times, a little too invested in trying to charm/amuse the audience with a yea-team finale (using swing music and that Louis Prima tune at the end really undercuts it…a Big Mistake), but it’s certainly in the same moral ballpark, delivers the same high-quality acting and has the same kind of precise and disciplined filmmaking chops that made Prince of the City a great New York drama.
I went in to last night’s screening expecting to see a movie with at least a few problems (given what I’ve heard about the distribution siutation), and I came out almost totally delighted.
Part of the satisfaction of this film is seeing that Lumet still has it together like he did 20 or 30 years ago. He’s been on the “over” list for the last ten years or so, but no longer.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to call Find Me Guilty one of the best films ever made by an 80-something director, which, in this light, puts it alongside John Huston’s Prizzi’s Honor and Robert Bresson’s L’Argent. And that’s good company.

Sidney Lumet‘s Find Me Guilty (Freestyle, 3.17) isn’t just about the rebirth of Lumet’s career (at age 82!) and that of his star, Vin Diesel. It’s also a kind of Damon Runyon-esque joyride — an ethnic-Italian, New York-attitude sociopath movie for those who wink at the bad guys and chuckle when they manage to maneuver their way around the law.

Maybe I’m jaded or I’ve just been Godfather-ed and Soprano-ed into submission, but I bought into most of it and felt pretty much delighted with the care that went into the making of it, and the final ambiguity of it. I was also a bit troubled by it. And yet fascinated.

Vin Diesel as Jackie DiNorscio in Sidney Lumet’s Find Me Guilty (Freestyle, 3.17)

Guilty is unquestionably a marvel of old-fashioned (i.e., ’80s-style) craftsmanship — Lumet’s superb direction, T.J. Mancini and Robert McCrea’s’s finely structured screenplay and skillfully pared-down dialogue, and Diesel’s inescapably charming, sincerely felt performance that puts him back on the road map. (Really — all those mixed memories of XXX and The Pacifier are out the window.)

Plus there’s Peter Dinklage and Annabella Sciorra’s superb acting. I genuinely feel that Dinklage, playing a shrewd mob defense attorney with a gift for persuasive oratory, is the first serious contender for Best Supporting Actor for the ’07 Oscar Awards (or at least the ’07 Indie Spirits). And Sciorra almost does here what Robin Wright Penn did last year in Nine Lives, and that’s really saying something.

But there’s some mucky-muck going on. Shot in late ’04, Find Me Guilty has had distribution troubles (it was shopped around and nobody bit) and is being sold the wrong way — the trailer tries to tell you it’s a jaunty mob-guy comedy, a kind of farce, and the music toward the end of the film tries to convey this also, and this feels like a sell-out to the moron trade.
Is everyone listening? Ignore the advertising. The advertising is dishonest.

It’s not without its amusements and gag lines from time to time, but Find Me Guilty is a fairly serious, rooted-in-reality court procedural about wise-guy morality, or the urban mythology about same.

It’s clearly Lumet’s best film since Q & A (1990), and before that Prince of the City (1981). It’s a tight, no-nonsense court drama that’s not about legal maneuvers or discovering evidence or doing right by the system and justice being served, but mob family values.

In a stuffed-manicotti way, Find Me Guilty is as much of a values-based entertain- ment as The Passion of the Christ, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, The Thing About My Folks and Madea’s Family Reunion. I’m serious.

There’s more time spent in a courtoom in this thing than in Lumet’s The Verdict, and for good reason: Find Me Guilty is about the longest-lasting federal criminal prosecution in history. From March ’87 to August ’88, 20 members of the New Jersey-based Lucchese crime family, each represented by his own lawyer, were brought to trial in Newark, New Jersey, on some 76 charges (dope smuggling, gambling, squeezing small businesses…the usual mob stuff).

The feds felt they had an air-tight case, but when the verdict came down…well, let’s not say. But I’ll tell you right now that some people are going to have a problem with this film because of the ending, and especially the tone of it.

Peter Dinklage

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Kirk Honeycutt has already voiced this reservation in his review from last month’s Berlin Film Festival. The community values espoused (or at least given a fair examination) by this film are, from a strictly law-abiding perspective, totally goombah and wholly corrupt. And yet what’s being said here is not without a certain resonance, a certain sincerity of feeling.

These values can be summed up by the words “don’t rat,” “don’t roll” and “family is everything.” I’m no goombah but I sympathize with these sentiments, so I guess that’s part of the territory.
I’m talking about the values of a group of bad guys (i.e., men who live outside the law and occasionally enforce their ethical standards by whacking each other) who ostensibly care for and someitmes “take care of” each other, and about one particular bad guy — Diesel’s Jackie DiNorscio — who stood up for certain things over the course of this trial …loyalty, friendship, togetherness…even if the reality of Italian crime ethics, going by everything I’ve heard, is that everyone rats out everyone else sooner or later and a lot of these guys are just full-out sociopaths, or are viewed this way by the majority. And yet Guilty isn’t an invented story.

This, for me, makes it absolutely fascinating because Lumet, Mancini, McCrea and Diesel are making a moral statement that they obviously have some kind of respect for, and in a serious way. Diesel does his courtroom buffoon routine for entertainment value at regular intervals, but otherwise Find Me Guilty is a fairly sober piece that asks you to grapple with who and what DiNorscio is, and what he’s really saying.

Sidney Lumet, Vin Diesel

The story points and much of the dialogue in Find Me Guilty are taken from court records and based on hard facts, so there’s obviously a kind of imbedded truth in what we’re seeing, but let’s face it — if you were to show this film to Tony Soprano’s crew they would eat it up like baked ziti.

But show this film to a group of straight-arrow law officials from outside of the New Jersey-New York corridor who haven’t seen other ethnically-correct mob movies, and some of them will undoubtedly say, “What the hell is this? Has Hollywood gone totally corrupt?” And yet it happened.

What’s really striking is that Find Me Guilty is pretty much the precise moral opposite of Lumet’s Prince of the City (1981), which is about the emotional agony that a corrupt cop puts himself through when he decides to tell the absolute truth and rat out his equally corrupt cop friends, and ends up despised and lonely and broken.

Find Me Guilty is about a wise guy who refuses to rat out his wise-guy friends, even when most of them shun him and treat him like a leper because of his court behavior, but who nonetheless holds to his own moral ethical course. I’m not going to spill the ending but this is not a movie that ends with the clanking of prison-cell doors a la Goodfellas.

Has there ever been a major-league filmmaker besides Lumet who has made two films about the same culture — the New York-area criminal underworld — with both (a) based on a completely true story about courts and prosecutors and defendants, (b) both grappling with almost the exact same moral-ethical issue, and yet (c) coming to almost the exact opposite conclusions about ratting out your friends?

There are no almost double features these days except at L.A.s Beverly Cinema and New York’s Cinema Village, but Find Me Guilty needs to be paired next year on a double bill with Prince of the City. And when that happens I’m going.

The more I think about this film, which at times feels like a close cousin of William Friedkin’s The Brinks Job, at other times like an earnestly intended moral fable, at at still other times like Prince of the City‘s sociopathic, wise-assed younger brother with a fuck-you-John-Law attitude….the more morally curious and unto-its-own- realm it seems.

I think this is why the distribution community passed — they don’t know what to make of it, and are a little afraid of how the average moviegoer (i.e., those over-30s who will be persuaded to give an old-fashioned Lumet film a shot in the first place) might react.

A dish of cheese ravioli

The hard truth is that Find Me Guilty will most likely tank on its first weekend, but it shouldn’t. It’s a quality thing all the way, it isn’t the least bit boring and is easily among the best of the year so far (alongside Why We Fight, Fateless, Totsi, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and Neil Young: Heart of Gold).

There’s no denying that from a craft perspective Find Me Guilty is simply one of the Lumet’s best ever. Mancini and McCrea’s dialogue is sharp, honed, and perfectly seasoned. And his slightly fake-looking rug aside, Diesel is amazing. At times he seems to be just joshing around and more into charming the audience (along with the on-screen jury) that rendering a character, but it gradually seeps in that he’s really playing Jackie DiNorscio and capturing what made him tick and who he really was.

And the supporting actors…fuhgedaboutit. Dinklage (that very cool short guy from The Station Agent) delivers a pitch-perfect performance — an utterly believable incarnation of a fully-rounded hardball lawyer. Sciorra has only one scene with Diesel, in a tiny prison holding room, but the husband-and-wife vibe is dead-on with the old resentments and sexual current getting stronger and stronger — it’s a near-classic scene.

Also excellent are Ron Silver as the presiding judge, Alex Rocco as the viper-like head of the crime family being prosecuted, and Linus Roache as the steely-eyed, go-for-broke prosecutor.
There are fifteen or twenty other actors who are just as good — this film has been perfectly cast in the legendary Lumet-New York street guy tradition by Ellen Chenoweth and Susie Farris. Cheers also for the cinematography by Ron Fortunato, which is beautifully framed and lit all through.

Find Me Guilty is not as good or as interesting as Lumet’s two greatest New York dramas — Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico — because it feels a little too smug at times, a little too invested in trying to charm/amuse the audience with a yea-team finale (using swing music and that Louis Prima tune at the end really undercuts it…a Big Mistake), but it’s certainly in the same moral ballpark, delivers the same high-quality acting and has the same kind of precise and disciplined filmmaking chops that made Prince of the City a great New York drama.

I went in to last night’s screening expecting to see a movie with at least a few problems (given what I’ve heard about the distribution siutation), and I came out almost totally delighted.

Part of the satisfaction of this film is seeing that Lumet still has it together like he did 20 or 30 years ago. He’s been on the “over” list for the last ten years or so, but no longer.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to call Find Me Guilty one of the best films ever made by an 80-something director, which, in this light, puts it alongside John Huston’s Prizzi’s Honor and Robert Bresson’s L’Argent. And that’s good company.

Great Oscar Debates

Nobody disagrees with the notion that Oscar campaigning has become a lot like running for the White House, so why not accept this and stage a special annual series of Academy-sponsored debates at the Academy theatres in Beverly Hills and New York?
Not so much in the manner of the big-candidate debates that (usually) happen in a Presidential election year, but those sometimes stirring speeches that are given at the Republican and Democratic nominating conventions by party leaders, political allies and friends.

Well-known filmmakers, industry figures, esteemed film critics and Academy members could get up in front of a mike and explain why they believe this film or that nominee is especially deserving.
The speakers would offer impressions, career histories, political considerations… whatever. The same views that are routinely shared after screenings and at parties, only with more people listening and with a bit more sobriety all around.
The idea would be to cut through the mental-cobweb impressions, through the party chit-chat and the DVDs and the trade ads and the hate rants.
You can argue that there’s no such thing as a Fog of War element in the various Oscar campaigns and discussions, but I think there is. And it seems to me that specific, impassioned, thought-out reasons to vote for this person or that film would sharpen the focus.
Presidential debates are about candidates trying to tell it straight and cut through impressions created by TV ads and prejudices thrown at the voters. Why shouldn’t the same goal at least be attempted in the Oscar realm? The town obsesses over this darn thing for three or four months out of the year and millions are spent on campaigns, so why the hell not?

The Academy could stage the debates over a two- or three-day weekend at the Academy theatre right after the nominations are announced. It could be a weekend-long festival atmosphere type of thing — food, mingling, film clips, and discussion groups along with the various speakers.
Every nominated person or film would be examined and toasted in some detail, and nominees would be forbidden — only friends, colleagues and publicists could do the pitching. And no negative stuff.
Oscar arguments happen left and right online, of course, but there’s something about live dialogue that cuts through the crap. Every time I get into a friendly dust- up with friends about this or that Oscar contender, I come away with a clearer head.
The whispering campaigns (like the one mounted this year against Paradise Now, or the one that went around a few years back about John Nash, the protagonist- hero of A Beautiful Mind) would almost certainly make less of an impression if the “issues” could be fully aired in a live setting.

People don’t fill out their Academy ballots after thinking things through to the bottom like a Yale mathematician — Oscar favorites are usually emotional gut calls. But perspective and examination can’t hurt the process, and a weekend of Great Oscar Debates would shed light on the short films and the sound-editing nominees and other low-profile contenders.
Imagine Roger Ebert stepping up to the mike and delivering a sharp argument for Crash, or Robert Towne offering an eloquent pitch for Capote , or Annette Bening explaining why she was deeply moved by The Constant Gardener, or David Poland or Tony Angelotti going to bat for Munich…whomever.

Les Girls

A big promotional press event for Bill Condon’s Dreamgirls (DreamWorks, 12.22) happened Monday evening in downtown Los Angeles at the Orpheum theatre and in a big black tent behind it, with rain coming down all over like cats and dogs and everyone coping with the damp overcoats, soaked shoes and matted-down hair.
A ’60s-era musical based on the saga of the Supremes, Dreamgirls has Beyonce Knowles, Jamie Foxx, Eddie Murphy, Jennifer Hudson and Anika Noni Rose in the lead roles. Smells like marquee value, but the Broadway show the film is based upon had its big run in the early to mid ’80s, and so DreamWorks is hoping to prime the potential fan base well in advance of the Christmas ’06 release, hence Monday’s gathering and this official site with basic info, a trailer and behind-the- scenes footage.

The first part of Monday’s soiree happened in the tent. Condon, the director-writer, introduced some of his below-the-line creative team to what looked like a couple of hundred press folk assembled in front of a small stage. He then showed a very brief clip of Foxx and two other guys (projected at a too-wide, not-tall-enough aspect ratio) dancing to a number called “Steppin’ to the Bad Side.”
And then everyone was guided out of the tent, into the rain, across the alley and into the Orpheum and seated in the orchestra section. The film has been shooting in this old-time venue for the past few weeks, with another four or five weeks to go. Three or four cameras were preparing to shoot a song-and-dance scene. A couple of dozen crew members were milling around in the front of the stage area.
As soon as everyone got settled Knowles, Hudson and Rose walked out on stage in sparkly red dresses and began to perform “Step Into the Bad Side” again. The real Supremes wouldn’t have gotten close to a number like this in actuality, but it played appealingly on its own terms.
It ended, everyone applauded and Jamie Foxx came out and said a few words about the film, about the energy of it, about how Murphy (who couldn’t be bothered to show up for the event) was “actually excited” about being in the film, etc.
What I saw and heard felt cool. It seemed to provide a bit more in the way of honest feeling than what Chicago gave up, or so I thought as I was drying off and taking it in.

Producer Craig Zadan told USA Today that “neither Phantom of the Opera, Rent nor The Producers went far enough to turn a stage production into a cinematic experience.”
Rent and The Producers, he said, “were loyal to a fault to Broadway audiences.” With the 10-year-old Rent, “they all looked 35 and were playing 18.”
The trick to a successful transfer to the big screen, Meron says, “is to honor the roots but do the movie.”
Condon, who was Oscar-nominated for his Chicago screenplay, is saying that instead of telling the story through song, like the Broadway show did, he’s added straight dialogue. “It is a realistic medium,” he told USA Today. “And Dreamgirls is a very emotional, somewhat gritty story grounded in reality.”
Knowles is playing Deena Jones, the Diana Ross character. Jennifer Hudson is Effie White, the one who gets shafted as their singing group, the Dreams, gets into the tangle of growing stardom, and who winds up singing, “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going.” Anika Noni Rose is Lorrell Robinson. Foxx plays their manager, Curtis Taylor, Jr., and Murphy is superstar James “Thunder” Early, whom the Dreams initially do backup singing for.

After the Orpheum performance was over it was back to the tent for drinks and food and more schmoozing time. Beyonce, Jennifer and Anika strolled around and said hello to everyone, but not Foxx.
Condon was hanging and chatting to the end, and talking with me and Pete Hammond and David Poland and DreamWorks marketing exec Terry Press and some others about what surprises, if any, might happen at the Oscars on Sunday. I said I’m hoping for anything along these lines, no matter who I personally want to win, just to make things exciting.
It was still raining like a bitch when I left. It was coming down as if a movie crew had two or three rain machines going at the same time to make sure my character was as soaked as Treat Williams was in that chasing-down-the-poor-junkie scene in Sidney Lumet’s Prince of the City.

Fine Madnesses

Too much love and success can be a bad thing for movie directors. It can lead to recklessness and ruin. Well, not necessarily. I’m not saying Ang Lee is going to lose his discipline or nice-guyness when and if he wins the Best Director Oscar next Sunday, but there’s at least the threat of this.
Look at the hopelessly over-worshipped Peter Jackson, whose Lord of the Rings trilogy (Oscars, millions, obsequious studio execs) led to the mad-royalty decision to transform King Kong into a three-hour film with a sluggish, borderline deadly 70-minute opening.

Eric von Stroheim (1885 — 1957)

I continue to believe that James Cameron lost his mind (or his nerve, or his will to unscrew tubes and throw paint at the canvas) after the success of Titanic eight years ago. He appears to be on the brink of actually starting a film within the next few months, but the poor guy is still futzing around about which project to do first.
Quentin Tarantino was psychologically done in, I feel, by the huge success of Pulp Fiction in ’94-’95. He stopped hustling, became a party animal, succumbed to some manner of intimidation over the expectations everyone had for his next film, all of which led to the respectable but underwhelming Jackie Brown in ’97.
Michael Cimino surely went mad after the huge success of The Deer Hunter in 1978-79, and from this the gross indulgence that was Heaven’s Gate, his very next film, almost certainly arose.
“At a certain point in their careers — generally right after an enormous popular success — most great movie directors go mad on the potentialities of movies,” Pauline Kael observed in a review of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 when it opened in the States in 1977.
“They leap over their previous work into a dimension beyond the well-crafted dramatic narrative; they make a huge, visionary epic in which they attempt to alter the perceptions of people around the world.”
Today’s directors can’t afford to be as indulgent as the industry allowed them to be in the auteurist playground of the ’70s, and so there’s a lot less flamboyance in the wake of big commercial successes and Oscar crownings.

Peter Jackson

But phenomenal success is still a kind of crippler, I think. It seems to nudge grounded or moderate directors in the direction of fanciful whimsy or big leaps, and if they’re half-mad to begin with they seem to lose it a bit more if they become convinced the world adores them absolutely.
The lesson seems to be that directors can be easily spoiled, like children of a certain age. Keep them on edge, wondering if they’re any good or not, and they’re fine. But beware the pitfalls of love, money, awards, long vacations and relentless kowtowings.
The adulation showered upon Steven Spielberg after Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind almost certainly led to the madhouse atmosphere of 1941 (which some oddball critics, I realize, feel is a work of genius-level choreography).
Orson Welles had a rough time with certain industry heavyweights as a result of making Citizen Kane, only one Oscar award came of it(Best Original Screenplay, which Welles shared with Herman Mankiewicz) and it didn’t make that much money. But he seemed to come away from that film with an arrogant, off-balance attitude that led to his leaving The Magnificent Amberson’s to be edited by RKO editors while he went to South America to shoot a documentary.

James Cameron

Billy Wilder never acted like an indulgent type, but something began to go slightly off in his work after the huge popular successes of Some Like It Hot in 1959 and The Apartment (which also won some Oscars, including Best Picture) in ’60-’61. He wasn’t “over” until Buddy Buddy in ’82, but something about his being a Man of Great Esteem and Accomplishment at the end of the Eisenhower administration didn’t agree with him.
Kael mentioned the madnesses of D.W. Griffith in the wake of Intolerance (1916) and Abel Gance after Napoleon, (1927), and she could have just as easily mentioned the notoriously egoistic behavior of director Eric von Stroheim in the mid 1920s, which led to the excesses of Queen Kelly and his wings being clipped soon after.
Which directors have succumbed to recklnessness (or given a good imitation of same) over the last ten years or so? Please send in names and stories and I’ll update this later tonight.

Losin’ It

I asked for responses yesterday to the “Fine Madnesses” piece, and Francis Coppola in his Apocalyose Now phase was mentioned most often by readers as an example of directorial indulgence. The big runners-up were William Friedkin when he made Sorcerer and the post-Bugsy Barry Levinson.
I disagree about Coppola and Friedkin. Apocalypse was just a brutally hard, financially arduous film to make. If Coppola went through a phase of mad indulgence (“leaping over previous work into a dimension beyond the well-crafted dramatic narrative,” as Pauline Kael once put it), it came with 1982’s One From the Heart. And I’m a huge fan of Sorcerer and see no madness in the way Friedkin shot and cut it.
Here’s a sampling of what came in…

“I’m one of the three people on the planet who liked Barry Levinson’s Toys, but I guess it’s an example of directorial indulgence after Levinson’s success with Bugsy. And of course, Peter Bogdanovich had three hits (The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, and Paper Moon) and then three flops (Daisy Miller, At Long Last Love and Nickleodeon).” — Michael Schlesinger
“Steven Soderbergh seems pretty level-headed, but the 2002 combination of Solaris and Full Frontal following the critical praise of Erin Brockovich and Traffic on top of the commercial success of Ocean’s 11 showed some hubris. I don’t think he’s gone around the bend though. And no one can deny that the Wachowski brothers went a little haywire after the success of the first Matrix.” — Chris Lee
“The drops that really interest me are John Hughes and John Landis. Hughes and Landis were some of the first directors whose style and techniques I could easily identify when I was a movie-crazed teen in the 80s, so it was doubly disconcerting when they suddenly crapped out (Landis after The Twilight Zone) or just quit (Hughes).
“There’s also a big ‘personal’ film that bombs. Would a Diner fan who unknowingly watched Toys ever guess it was made by Barry Levinson?” — Neil Harvey
“I’d argue that Peter Jackson crossed the line not after finishing the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but when the first one went over so well. The Fellowship of the Ring is the one with the horse-pills of exposition, but it’s also the shortest and tightest of the series. When it was a huge hit a scored a rack of nominations the pressure was off. The flabby over-confidence of The Return of the King is almost as maddening as it is in King Kong.” — Joe Greenia

Sequel

Promotional item delivered to my home today (Friday, 2.24), sent by friends at Fox publicity

Spark of Goodness

A little over six months ago I wrote that Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi had become “the big stand-out at the end of the Toronto Film Festival.”

A few weeks later Tsotsi was picked up by Miramax and is playing in theatres starting today (2.24). And it seems safe to say now that it’s the most likely winner of the Best Foreign Language Oscar on March 5th…unless a sufficient number of Academy members take leave of their senses and vote for Joyeux Noel.

Gavin Hood, director of Tsotsi (Miramax, 2.24), at the Four Seasons hotel — Tuesday, 2.21, 4:20 pm.

Based on a book by South African playwright Athol Fugard and set in a funky Johannesburg shantytown, Tsotsi (pronounced “Sawt-see”) is about a merciless teenage thug (Presley Chweneyagae) who discovers a small spring of compassion in himself when he starts to care for an infant boy he discovers in the back seat of a car he’s stolen.

Tsotsi‘s basic achievement is that it sells the notion in a believably non-sappy way that sparks of kindness exist in even the worst of us.

I knew Tsotsi would probably connect with general audiences when it won the Toronto Film Festival People’s Choice award, which followed a similar win at the Edinburgh Film Festival a month or two earlier.

But I wasn’t certain until my good Toronto friend Leora Conway saw Tsotsi at a Toronto Film festival screening and “was beaming when she told me about it afterwards,” I wrote, “and said it made her cry at the end.”

Tsotsi may sound sentimental and manipulative, but it’s not. But neither is it sadistic or repellent in some flashy, gun-fetish way. It has a raw authenticity, but not in any kind of derivative City of God way, which speaks well for its director, Gavin Hood.

Tsotsi star Presley Chweneyagae (l.) and Hood outside Toronto’s Sutton Place hotel — Friday, 9.16.05, 8:55 am.

Tsotsi proves that suppressed emotions…the feelings that a blocked-up person would rather not feel but which won’t leave him alone…are always a stronger, more poignant proposition than a film delaing with feelings fully expressed.

Hood told me in Toronto that he’s always been “terrified” of sentimentality and “being mushy” in movies, and says that his mantra during shooting was that “there’s always got to be more going on within a character than what he lets out.”

He said he wanted to use formal compositions and a slower editing style than the one popularized by City of God “because I didn’t want to seem like I was saying ‘me too’…I didn’t want to come in second.”

Hood says he feels more of an affinity with the shooting style of director Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) and particularly Sales’ Central Station.

I had another sit-down with Hood two days ago (Tuesday, 2.21) at the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills. Here’s a recording of most of it.

The Tsotsi gang

Tsotsi is one of those “it” films. You can feel the focus and the unique energy from the get-go…from Hood’s precise and well-organized direction and the elegant pho- tography to Chweneyagae’s mesmerizing performance as an ice-cold psychopath who now and then devolves into a terrified three-year-old.

It all comes together into something steady and profound. Which is why Hood will almost certainly be handed the prize on 3.5.

Spark of Goodness

A little over six months ago I wrote that Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi had become “the big stand-out at the end of the Toronto Film Festival.”
A few weeks later Tsotsi was picked up by Miramax and is playing in theatres starting today (2.24). And it seems safe to say now that it’s the most likely winner of the Best Foreign Language Oscar on March 5th…unless a sufficient number of Academy members take leave of their senses and vote for Joyeux Noel.

Gavin Hood, director of Tsotsi (Miramax, 2.24), at the Four Seasons hotel — Tuesday, 2.21, 4:20 pm.

Based on a book by South African playwright Athol Fugard and set in a funky Johannesburg shantytown, Tsotsi (pronounced “Sawt-see”) is about a merciless teenage thug (Presley Chweneyagae) who discovers a small spring of compassion in himself when he starts to care for an infant boy he discovers in the back seat of a car he’s stolen.
Tsotsi‘s basic achievement is that it sells the notion in a believably non-sappy way that sparks of kindness exist in even the worst of us.
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I knew Tsotsi would probably connect with general audiences when it won the Toronto Film Festival People’s Choice award, which followed a similar win at the Edinburgh Film Festival a month or two earlier.
But I wasn’t certain until my good Toronto friend Leora Conway saw Tsotsi at a Toronto Film festival screening and “was beaming when she told me about it afterwards,” I wrote, “and said it made her cry at the end.”
Tsotsi may sound sentimental and manipulative, but it’s not. But neither is it sadistic or repellent in some flashy, gun-fetish way. It has a raw authenticity, but not in any kind of derivative City of God way, which speaks well for its director, Gavin Hood.

Tsotsi star Presley Chweneyagae (l.) and Hood outside Toronto’s Sutton Place hotel — Friday, 9.16.05, 8:55 am.

Tsotsi proves that suppressed emotions…the feelings that a blocked-up person would rather not feel but which won’t leave him alone…are always a stronger, more poignant proposition than a film delaing with feelings fully expressed.
Hood told me in Toronto that he’s always been “terrified” of sentimentality and “being mushy” in movies, and says that his mantra during shooting was that “there’s always got to be more going on within a character than what he lets out.”
He said he wanted to use formal compositions and a slower editing style than the one popularized by City of God “because I didn’t want to seem like I was saying ‘me too’…I didn’t want to come in second.”
Hood says he feels more of an affinity with the shooting style of director Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) and particularly Sales’ Central Station.
I had another sit-down with Hood two days ago (Tuesday, 2.21) at the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills. Here’s a recording of most of it.

The Tsotsi gang

Tsotsi is one of those “it” films. You can feel the focus and the unique energy from the get-go…from Hood’s precise and well-organized direction and the elegant pho- tography to Chweneyagae’s mesmerizing performance as an ice-cold psychopath who now and then devolves into a terrified three-year-old.
It all comes together into something steady and profound. Which is why Hood will almost certainly be handed the prize on 3.5.

Sequel

Promotional item delivered to my home today (Friday, 2.24), sent by friends at Fox publicity

Non-Fan Lets Go

“I think some of these people are nothing more than knee-jerk reactionaries who use the Church as a cudgel or a weapon, and disguising it as ‘values.’ Perry is doing nothing more than cooning. shuckin’ and jivin’ for a slightly more conservative audience is still shuckin’ and jivin’. I’m pissed. I’m pissed that both of his movies were made, and I’m equally pissed that there was an audience for them.
“African-Americans are going to be split on this. More educated, more affluent African-Americans — like me, my friends and my family — are going to stay away in droves, for the most part. The more working-class, less educated segments of the African-American community will be a different story.
“As much as I despise Tyler Perry, he is not the problem here. He’s just a symp- tom. He’s like every fake preacher I’ve ever seen work over a crowd. He times his message to foster group-think agreement from his audience, getting his audience good and mad over whatever flavor of the month issue ‘they’ are doing to hurt decent people like them, the ’cause’ or the community.
“And then, with emotions whipped up, he or she asks for money, because he or she’s got an idea that will fix everything. Tyler Perry is obviously asking for his money up front, but more power to him.

“It’s Hollywood that I have a real problem with. I hate to say it, but I see racism in the decision to promote this fool. Hollywood is supposed to be a business with its only eye on the bottom line, yet it willfully and consistently ignores a segment of the audience.
“Why? It’s not like there’s no money to be made. Yet is it only the material that shows the worst of African-American culture that gets served first. What about the rest of us? We get plenty of comedies (on TV and in the Movies) with African- American casts. We still get John Singleton’s (to me, equally offensive) gangsta/pimp movies from time to time. But the serious dramas, with African- American casts and directors, like Antwone Fisher, come few and far between. Why?
“Denzel, an established movie star with two Academy Awards in his pocket and bankability on his side, had to wait ten years to make Antwone Fisher. This guy Perry comes along and they’re throwing money at. If that’s not racism…” — Malcolm Johnson, Burbank, CA.

Brilliant

Here She Comes!

It’s a little beside-the-point for a mildly snobby existentialist white-guy journalist like myself to put down Madea’s Family Reunion (Lionsgate, 2.24), Tyler Perry’s God-praising, conservative-values sequel to Diary of a Mad Black Woman.
It’s a fairly crude and clumsy film, but I don’t think this matters. Because on its own terms and with the right crowd, Family Reunion works. I felt it last night at a big splashy premiere screening at Hollywood’s Arclight theatre, and I didn’t say a single snide or contrary word to anyone at the after-party. That would have been impolite. And again, guys like me are so not the point.

Tyler Perry as Grandma Mabel “Madea” Simmons (l.) and excellent young actress (met her at after-party, can’t recall her name) in Madea’s Family Reunion (Lionsgate, 2.24)

Perry is a very popular brand-name entertainer and admired playwright among black audiences, Mad Black Woman made $50 million last year and Reunion , which is said to be tracking better and is opening in more theatres than its predecessor, is expected to earn at least $20 million this weekend (if not more).
Madea’s Family Reunion is a Christian-values family drama mixed with raunchy humor and by-the-numbers plotting and character building that are truly groan- worthy if you watch it with the wrong attitude.
Lionsgate has signed a deal with Perry to release a whole series of Madea films over the coming years. I mean, as long as they continue to be profitable.
Screw subtlety and finesse, Perry and this movie seem to be saying. We’re about right-thinking traditionalist values (flying straight, respecting family elders, not tolerating bad behavior or people who don’t get it), and at the same time giving our African-American target audience a good time.
Set in Atlanta and dealing with a large family who are all related to Perry’s Madea character, Reunion was performed as a play for about a year and a half before shooting late last summer. (The play version is viewable on DVD.) I’m imagining that the stilted, preachy dialogue feels like a better fit in a theatrical setting than it does in this film.

Blair Underwood, Rochelle Aytes

Madea’s Family Reunion isn’t a comedy but a serious-problem drama with laughs. It’s nominally (and very tediously) about family dysfunction and emotional wounds being passed along from generation to generation — themes that were dramatized with a lot more skill and finesse in Denzel Washington’s Antwone Fisher.
The saving grace is Perry’s performance as a tough-talkin’, occasionally ass- whoopin’ 68 year-old butch boss named Grandma Mabel “Madea” Simmons. Wearing a white wig, a housecoat and a pair of prosthetic boobs that look like swinging cantaloupes, Perry is hilarious as a proverbial Big Momma who sets things straight ’cause she’s good with God and knows what’s right and won’t take any noise.
This is a very Old Testament-type package, and I suppose there’s nothing terribly wrong with this. Life is chaotic without ethical discipline of some kind. Woe to the moral relativists!
It should be noted that Madea’s Family Reunion isn’t entirely anti-violence. It says beatings are horrific when it comes to husbands overpowering their wives (obviously) but righteous when you’re Madea and you need to straighten out some high-school kid. A lot of people get whupped and stomped on or at least yelled at when they defy Madea, or say or do something selfish or foolish, like not going to school or “smackin’ that chewin’ gum” or giving a young girl grief on a school bus.

Actress Fabiola Cayemitte, unknown friend of Madea costar Lisa Arrindell Anderson, and Anderson herself at post-premiere party — Tuesday, 2.21, 10:40 pm.

The mostly African-American industry crowd at Tuesday night’s screening was laughing in all the right places, and occasionally cheering Madea’s moral-ethical points with applause.
The plot is a homespun thing in which Madea helps some of her family get in touch with self-respect and moral backbone during a family reunion (the circumstances of which aren’t very well explained). The problems include domestic violence, money lust, incest, fear of intimacy and relentless farting on the part of Uncle Joe (also played by Perry).
The bulk of the film involves the emotional wreckage caused by abusive mom named Victoria (Lynn Whitfield), who’s managed to screw things up for her two daughters, Lisa (Rochelle Aytes) and Vanessa (Lisa Arrindell Anderson).
Lisa is engaged to Carlos (Blair Underwood), a moustachioed big-dick banker who beats her because she won’t mind and especially when she threatens to leave him. Vanessa is afraid of getting into an intimate relationship with any man even though a very good looking, almost too-good-to-be-true bus driver named Brian (Boris Kadjoe) is after her for a date.

Madea’s Family Reunion costar Boris Kodjoe at after-party following screening at Arclight Dome — Tuesday, 2,21, 10:25 pm.

The very good-looking Kadjoe is the most appealing actor in the film, and I’m now sorry I never caught The Gospel, which he starred in, when it played last October.
There’s a big family-values speech given by an elderly aunt character played by Cicely Tyson at the end of the second act that has to be seen to be believed. She speaks to the whole clan (including several young kids) about holding on to the good eternal things in life, etc. They all listen to her and nod and take it in, and then they hug each other when she tells them to. “Lacking a sense of reality” barely scratches the surface.
But this is nothing compared to a bizarrely designed wedding scene near the finale. The designer-within-the-film is a middle-aged woman who’s a bit full of herself, and she’s come up with an idea meant to suggest the aura of Paris, France. The two biggest elements are (a) a gold-painted Eiffel Tower and (b) young girls dressed in angel-like gowns and suspended from the ceiling by wires and pretending to strum harps. They look like they’ve been drugged. It’s like a scene from a Fellini or a Luis Bunuel film from the late ’60s or early ’70s, but without the wit.

Cicely Tyson (l.) during the family-clan speech scene, which she delivers outdoors without a microphone but is heard clearly by dozens, some of whom are standing a ways off. Costar, poet, historian and best-selling author Maya Angelou sits to the right.

Perry has been called a “retro-futurist with a natural knack for making audiences laugh.” When he’s onscreen playing Madea or Uncle Joe, he rules. He’s given himself all the funniest and wisest lines, and basically comes off as a suffer- no-fools and take-no-guff Groucho Marx.
Again, I have no disagreement with what’s being said in this film. The spirit of it is agreeably wholesome. The problem is that Perry is a barely competent filmmaker and a third-rate screenwriter. He needs to work with someone who can refine his material and make his films play better with people like me.
I would love to get with the Perry program and not be one of those pissy-fussy types, but I just can’t do it…sorry. Espousing good values ain’t enough. It’s the singer, not the song.
I’d love to hear some reactions if anyone goes on Friday or Saturday. However it hits you, don’t hold back.

Blue

Blast Off

Urban crime movies stopped touching the pavement a long time ago. They’re all about art-gallery aesthetics — color, flash, attitude, style — assembled for under-30 action geeks and comic-book fans who’ve been totally indoctrinated to the notion of urban shoot-em-ups as blood operas. Heightened, accelerated…John Woo on steroids.
The trick is not to fight it. Once you’ve totally given up on the idea of ’70s-style realism penetrating anything ever again, you’re free. That’s been my attitude since the Tarantino and Woo waves of the mid ’90s. No one’s ever going to make another Laughing Policeman or Get Carter or Bullitt, and the most we can hope for from this totally corrupted genre is energy, originality and, as far as it goes, hard work.

Paul Walker in Wayne Kramer’s Running Scared (New Line, 2.24)

Realism is out the window…a nostalgia trip…but comic-book smarts and directorial discipline are still possible. And this is what you get with Wayne Kramer’s Running Scared (New Line, 2.24).
This is a totally insane action film that’s very precisely parcelled, a gunshot-wound drama in which the pressure gets more and more intense and everything goes all to hell…but imaginatively.
At times it feels cohesively insane in the manner of Terry Gilliam and more and more Heironymous Bosch-like as it goes along. Running Scared is a car we’ve all driven around in before (the post-1995 genre rules demand what they demand) but souped-up and very finely tuned, thanks to a skilled mechanic.
The opening and closing credits alone (the latter, especially, is art gallery stuff supreme) are worth the ride.
Joey (Paul Walker), some kind of blond-haired, blue-eyed tough guy with a wife (Vera Farmiga) and a kid, gets himself into trouble over a shiny handgun — the MacGuffin of the piece. It’s been used by one of his criminal pals to blow away a corrupt cop (which happens as part of a horrific shootout), and Joey has been told to get rid of it.

Director-writer Wayne Kramer

He hides it in his cellar instead (asshole!), and it’s quickly stolen by a friend of his young son who lives next door, and then used to shoot (but not kill) the kid’s psychotic Russian asshole father. The kid runs off and the whole film is about Joey trying to find the kid, get the gun and toss it before his no-good pals find out he’s a screw-up and has put them at great risk. And we all know what that means.
I’m just going to run an e-mailed conversation I had with Kramer two or three weeks ago, right after I first saw the film.
Me: You’re a very talented guy, Wayne. Your movie is insane but very crafty. It was thrilling and all that, but I was laughing now and then too. Excellent chops all the way through (loved that bit with Walker picking up the .38 slug with the gum sticking to the sole of the boot), but my God…the cruelty, the bruisings, the rage. And the lousy luck!
Kramer: I’m a big fan of the hard-assed genre of filmmaking, and I wanted to make something that would entertain and shock at the same time. I remember having those experiences with films like Get Carter, The Long Good Friday, Scarface, Death Wish, Prime Cut, etc. But I also wanted to bring something a little more subversive to the table.
Me: When I think of the gentle rhyme and affection and poetic symmetry in the finale of [Kramer’s last film] The Cooler and then this….I said to myself ‘excellent chops and a helluva ride but…well, you know, Wayne got that out of his system!’

Kramer: Running Scared is definitely not The Cooler, and fans of that film will probably be quite taken aback. Running is is its own beast — an extremely hysterical film and very hallucinatory. Especially given that it inhabits a subtle Grimm’s fairy tale universe.
I’m glad you picked up on the Gilliam-esque quality to some of the scenes. And good call on the Bosch touches. But either audiences are up for the ride or not. It’s not the kind of work that’s going to change the world, but I think it will certainly entertain fans of the genre.
Me: Plus you’ve put yourself on the map with this film as a very high-octane hardball style guy. Anyone seeing this would have to respect the discipline that went into the story, the McGuffin of the snub-nosed .38. It’s a very tight thing all through.
Kramer: It’s not the kind of work that’s going to change the world, but I think it will certainly entertain fans of the genre. Most people need a stiff drink afterwards, I’m finding out.
I don’t know — I’m just sick to death of all the P.C. PG-13 crap out there. I wanted to remind audiences of the kinds of films that used to be made. This could never have been developed and produced with a big studo. It’s a minor miracle that a mainstream mini-studio like New Line is even releasing it. But they’re supporting it.
[Kramer and I spoke of a violent stand-out sequence involving Vera Farmiga and a middle-aged couple she runs into halfway into the film, plus a surprise revelation plus issues about the ending. Too many spoilers.]

Me: I loved the ice-hockey torture and shoot-out finale. The black lighting was pleasing and I have to say I laughed out loud when everybody started eating bullets.
Kramer: I guess I wanted to do something different with that. I haven’t seen the black-light effect done before and a lot of these amateur rinks are painting the ice and holding games under black light, or parts of the game.
I was also going for a bit of a spaghetti western vibe. You see the same old venues for gunfights in so many movies (like the deserted factory or warehouse, etc.), I just thought it would be cool to have an interrogation scene on a ultra-violet ice rink, and then to have exploding UV ice chips once the carnage started. It was enormously challenging to pull that scene off, especially on a fifteen million dollar budget. I think it cost about a hundred grand just to light.
Me: Anyway, an amazing film. Amazing control and discipline. Very well executed…and who’s the genius who did the end-credits sequence?
Kramer: I’m glad you appreciated the end credits. It was a fight to get the company to pay for them — the theory being that nobody stays to watch end credits anymore. PIC (Partners in Crime) did the work based on a concept I came up with. They’ve also worked on Van Helsing, Serenity and The Punisher.

Grabs

San Francisco’s over-photographed, totally-touristy Fairmount Hotel — Monday, 2.20, 9:45 pm

Coming into Oakland airport — Sunday, 2.19, 12:10 pm

Book sitting on checkout counter at City Lights bookstore —
Monday, 2.20, 8:35 pm

Sadness Seeps Out

With Oscar buzz sputtering and the new films barely worth a tumble (and I’m including Carlos Reygadas’ Battle in Heaven, which the Village Voice‘s Michael Atkinson is over the moon about but for me is utterly lacking a pulse), the coming weekend looks like a perfect stay-at-homer and a maybe a chance, if you’re so inclined, for a long nourishing sit in front of the tube.
Except it doesn’t feel long. Sit back and watch the recently re-released PBS Home Video DVD of David Grubin‘s LBJ, a 235-minute documentary about the triumphs and tragedy of Lyndon B. Johnson, and I swear to Christ it will lead you into a comfort zone that will hold you and make those four hours seem like 40 minutes.

Lyndon Baines Johnson, 36th president of the United States

You won’t just be glad you settled in with something this wise and grounded — it’ll put you in touch with what it is to strive and build and tap into a great inspiration, and then take a wrong turn for whatever reason and watch it all crumble and go to hell.
I’ve seen LBJ three times now, and there’s no question of it being one of the greatest American history docs ever made. If you’re boomer-aged it’s a haunting memory trip about the ’60s, and if you’re GenX or younger it’s an education that will give you the whole thing like nothing else ever has.
(For readers who don’t know zip about Johnson, here’s the Wikipedia biography.)
Widely praised by every credible TV critic in the country, LBJ was first seen on PBS in 1991 as part of the “American Experience” series. It was out on laser disc in ’97 or thereabouts, and it was available on DVD in an earlier package. I frankly don’t know why PBS Home Video has re-released it, but I’m glad they did because it gives guys like me a chance to riff anew.
Forget the documentary label — this is one of the greatest filmed epics ever made. I’m not exaggerating. It’s as good as Ken Burns The Civil War or anything like it that summed up a life or a culture or a common struggle, and made it fully under- standable from all angles.

LBJ gets me partly because my grandfather on my father’s side was a lot of like Lyndon Johnson — tall, Southern (from Kentucky), big of heart and a bit coarse. But the fundamental greatness of Grubin’s doc is that it reshapes a much-maligned politician’s life into the stuff of Greek tragedy.
I used to seriously despise Johnson — everyone I knew from any kind of liberal education over the age of 10 felt the same way in the mid to late ’60s — but Grubin’s doc turned me around. Now I think of LBJ’s life as one of the saddest stories ever told.
LBJ isn’t just about the rise and swift downfall of a flawed and complex and contradictory man of power. It’s about one of the most melodramatic ruinings of a once-brilliant political career in U.S. history…about how a man who finally found a great use for his gifts as a master politician and wheeler dealer by pushing through the greatest surge of social welfare programs since the New Deal, and then saw it all collapse like walls of Jericho.

The staggering ignorance on the part of Johnson and his cabinet in their handling of the Vietnam War led not just to awful devastation and the deaths of 58,000 U.S. servicemen (and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and Cambodian victims), but also to the destruction of Johnson’s Great Society and the undoing of aggres- sive social-welfare attitudes in the government that led to the rise of Nixon, Reagan and the Bushies.
Consider all this and it’s still fairly easy to think of Johnson as a very bad guy. But the watching of LBJ adds commonality and contour to the legend. It reminds you time and again that we’re all composed of contradictions and inspirations, and God help the man or woman who lets the wrong stuff guide because tragedy beckons at every turn.
Here are some of the things said by some of the Johnson confidantes interviewed in the first chapter (there are four altogether), and a final word from historian Ronnie Dugger.
“He had been scorned as an unscrupulous poltician…a vulgar wheeler-dealer driven by ambition and a lust for power,” McCullough begins. “But on January 20th, 1965, the night of his inaugural gala, Lyndon Johnson was a happy man. Overwhelmingly elected, he promised to wipe out poverty and segregation, and to protect the old and educate the young. That was his dream.

“Few presidents have ever known more triumph, or suffered such a swift and tragic fall.”
John Connally, Johnson’s longtime friend and adviser who later became a Texas governor (and who was sitting in front of JFK in the limo on 11.22.63), says that Johnson “was generous and he was selfish. He was kind, and at other times he was cruel. At times he was an earthy, crude-acting fella. At other times he could be incredibly charming. He could be whatever he wanted to be. He was a strange complex man who basically had almost a Jekyl and Hyde existence. He was two different people.”
“What was it that would send him into those fantastic rages?,” asks Johnson’s onetime press secretary George Reedy, “where he could be one the nastiest, most sadistic and insufferable S.O.B’s that ever lived, and then a few minutes later be a big, magnificent, inspiring leader?”
Historian Robert Dallek says, “What you have is a man who was a thoroughly American president. He was American from day one of his birth in south central Texas. This was a man who reflected American moods and attitudes and contradictions and trends, and when he failed it was America’s failure.”

And then Reedy returns, saying that “whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad. This was a man who was so big and reached so far and made it, and then let the whole thing crumble. I think it’s one of the great stories of history.”
And then at the very end is Dugger, a Texas historian and journalist:
“He was just interesting as hell. Compared to most people who kinda go through life making their dreadful moral points or condemning this or hoping for that or scratching the back of their head….Lyndon really moved. He was moving all the time.
“The few times I was with him he was just fun to be around. And you liked him, you liked him. I liked him when I was with him…more than I did than when I was thinking about him.” The laugh that comes out of Duggan after he says this has ironies and echoes in the realm of William Shakespeare.
The Associated Press’s TV critic called LBJ “a brilliant biography of a tragic hero …it is more than history. It is a fascinating story of a life as rich and colorful as fiction…LBJ is a gorgeous piece of cinema.”

Grabs

Corner of Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Heights, looking northwest — Wednesday, 2.15.06, 10:40 pm.

Cristina Comencini (r.), director of Lionsgate’s Don’t Tell (3.17) and manager-producer Victoria Wisdom (r.) at post-screening reception for Comencini and the film at Ferrari dealership on Wilshire Bouevard — Thursday, 2.16.06, 10:05 pm.

Sunset near Doheny — Wednesday, 2.15.06, 1:40 pm.

Horace Bristol photograph at Media Rare gallery

Producer Michael Besman (About Schmidt, The Opposite of Sex) at party at Laurie Frank’s Media Rare gallery at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica — Thursday, 2.16.06, 7:50 pm.

Wall sculpture at Laurie Frank’s Media Rare gallery — Thursday, 2.16.06, 8:02 pm.

12 year-old actress Hannah Marks (Danika, Acccepted) at Media Rare gallery — Thursday, 2.16.06, 8:10 pm.

Over-Analyze This

The close of Oscar season is near enough (two weeks and three days away) that a post-mortem is coming to mind: with all the new Oscar blogs that sprouted up this year (Red Carpet, The Envelope, USA Today‘s O-Factor, Anne Thompson’s Risky- Biz) Oscar-race riffing has been incessant and every wrinkle picked over to the point of total exhaustion, and there’s nothing more to say at this stage. Or damn little.
Which is why I’m doing a piece about how dry the well is. At least it’s honest and it mirrors the situation back into itself. I’m as much for keeping the ball in the air as the next guy (ad revenues at this time of year are good for me), but I’m turning the ignition key and the engine’s going “whah-hah-hah-hah-hah!”

I knew this was true this morning when I got excited over a friend saying that The Constant Gardener‘s Rachel Weisz might not have the Best Supporting Actress Oscar locked after all because he’s been having a premonition that a Marisa Tomei-like surprise could be possible for Capote‘s Catherine Keener or Junebug‘s Amy Adams.
Right after this a line that Keener said in Capote came to mind: “You’re pathetic.” I’m grasping at any straw I can find to keep my energy levels up about this damn thing, and I’m frazzled and frothing and that’s the truth.
I wrote yesterday that the only major-category race in question is whether George Clooney will beat Paul Giamatti for Best Supporting Actor.
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I believe in the Giamatti payback theory — he was fucked over when he wasn’t nominated for Sideways so winning this year will set everything straight.
But I also believe in the compensation argument that says Clooney won’t beat Ang Lee for Best Director and his script for Good Night, and Food Luck (penned with Grant Heslov) can’t beat Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco’s Crash script, so that only leaves giving Clooney the Best Supporting Actor award for Syriana, which a lot of people admired and would therefore like to support on some level anyway.
Brokeback Mountain has the Best Picture trophy, Ang Lee is locked for Best Director, and it’s solid also for Capote‘s Philip Seymour Hoffman for Best Actor (although it should ideally be a tie between Hoffman and Heath Ledger) and Walk the Line‘s Reese Witherspoon for Best Actress.

The Giamatti-vs.-Clooney showdown reflects on the Crash and Syriana situations, and Brokeback Mountain‘s Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana are pretty much assured the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, and Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi has the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in the bag. (The contenders in this category are discussed in a 2.17 Caryn James piece in the N.Y. Times.)
I’m sputtering again. It’s all in a Word item that I put up yesterday at 6:03 pm. I guess there’s always the possibility that some contender might be weakening in some way that I’m not feeling or discerning, but I doubt it. And so would you if you did what I do and you knew your shit.
On the other hand I just looked at Steve Pond’s Envelope piece on the live-action short nominees and this is good informative keep-it-going journalism. I wish I’d written it. I’m suddenly feeling ashamed for sounding so jaded.

Vendetta Dissent

I thought from the get-go that some kind of critical split might happen in response to V for Vendetta (Warner Bros., 3.17). It’s not the kind of movie that produces a fart and a ho-hum. You’re either for it or against it with feeling.
But I was expecting the first attack to come from Michael Medved or some enraged right-wing critic (i.e., someone who might contend that this Larry and Andy Wachowski film romanticizes 9/11-type terrorism), and not from a Variety stringer at the Berlin Film Festival.

There’s no “right” opinion about any flick, but Leslie Felperin‘s slam of Vendetta, which appeared on Variety‘s website Monday (2.13) and is in today’s print edition, is a bit of “whoa” thing.
She basically calls it turgid and tedious (“flat as a storyboard”) because she’s obviously decided it doesn’t do what good movies are supposed to do, which is grab you by the lapels and turn you around and send you out of the theatre saying, “Man, I just saw something!”
Trust me — V for Vendetta does this, so I’m having trouble figuring Felperin out. I don’t want to suppose anything but critics have bad days like anyone else so maybe she ate some bad sauerkraut.
I was slightly antsy during Vendetta‘s first 15 minutes and maybe in retrospect there should have been a solution to Hugo Weaving having to wear that mask and wig from start to finish, but basically I felt lifted off the ground by Vendetta. Not just for the cinematic punch, but the audacious political blood in its veins.
I may be in the minority, but so far I’m not alone. Movie City News‘s David Poland, the Hollywood Reporter‘s John DeFore, MTV’s Kurt Loder and Ain’t It Cool News Drew McWeeney’s are more or less on the same page.

Maybe the next wave of critics (their pieces should start appearing a week or two before the mid-March opening, or about three weeks from now) will be more on Felperin’s side of the aisle…who knows?
What bothers me about Felperin’s piece is that she’s basically gone after the form of Vendetta without dealing with the content of it, and that’s a big avoidance. Is Vendetta a piece of rousing, well-jiggered entertainment? Yeah…but it’s as much of a talking movie as an actioner, and what it’s saying is what it is.
Felperin says Vendetta “suffers from many of same problems as last two install- ments of [the Wachowski’s] Matrix franchise: indigestible dialogue, pacing difficulties and too much pseudo-philosophical info.”
You can debate the pacing issues (I had no problem with the unfolding after the first 15 minutes) but what Felperin seems to be saying deep down is that she finds Vendetta‘s political material either too complex (which seems unlikely since it’s presented in a way that any 12 year-old can understand) or disturbing (which is possible), or she simply doesn’t agree with what’s being said.
“In my book V is one of the most politically audacious mainstream Hollywood films ever made because it really lays it on the line,” I wrote a few weeks ago. “There are dark echoes of 9.11 and 21st Century neocon power dreams and hard-right fanatacism all through it, and yes…the good guy does blow up a building or two.

“And yet — trust me — this is a film that says and stands for all the right things. Which is why it’s going to get attacked.
“Look at all the inflammables…a terrorist hero, a sub-plot about a deeply-in-love lesbian couple (this plus those hot lezzie scenes in Bound tells you the boys definitely have a thing for girl-on-girl action), plus a huge fertilizer bomb under Parliament and that ’03 sex-change operation…forget it, the right’s going to have a field day.
“The bottom line is that V isn’t some simple-minded action flick trying to glorify the struggle of a lone terrorist against a repressive right-wing regime. It’s using a story that follows the contours of an action-thriller to push an allegory about some very real and threatening tendencies in our society today.”

Scent of Toast

I haven’t done any serious calling around about embattled Paramount Pictures president Gail Berman, but I received a letter this morning [Sunday, 2.12] from a woman who seems very knowledgable and connected to people in the creative community, and what she says about Berman and her situation (as well as the perceptions and management skills of Paramount chairman Brad Grey) is fairly damning.
The letter-writer feels that two big stories about Berman so far — Laura Holson’s piece in the N.Y. Times (which was mainly about Grey but touched on Berman) and Anne Thompson’s recent “Risky Business” column — have missed what’s really happening.

Paramount president Gail Berman.

I’ve spoken to the letter-writer and I’m convinced that she’s right in the thick of things and knows whereof she speaks. She has motives for saying what she’s saying, obviously, but who doesn’t? You can half-tell she’s credible by the insider-sounding information and her down-to-it prose style, but I wanted to make sure of this and now I’m 98% certain she’s legit.
The letter-writer feels that Thompson’s “flattering portrait of Gail Berman is quite one sided…towards Gail.
“The problem with Gail Berman is that not that she is overwhelmingly honest or intelligent or forthright, which are admirable qualities when used well. The problem is two fold — she is all these things but she doesn’t like movies. I repeat: film is not a language she speaks. And she is brusque and insensitive and not on the same page with people who do.
“Ask her what her favorite films are. She can’t tell you. Ask Stacey Snyder or Nina Jacobson or any of the other women who are running studios the same question, and they will talk for an hour about the first time they saw a film. They thrive on that connection made in the dark to a story on a big screen. That is not the case with Gail.
“I doubt she has ever seen a film she has ever loved. Or could let herself love. It is not in her DNA. She has no idea what a good script is. She doesn’t even like to read them.

“The other problem is that which Thompson refers to as ‘honesty.’ I refer to it as insensitivity, rudeness, and an unexamined loathing that lurks just under the surface when she deals with artists.
“Instead of learning the medium and the people she is to work with she comes in with zero experience and proceeds to rip projects apart that have been in development for years with no sensitivity to all involved. No sense that she may want to work with these people again.
“Brutish honesty and insensitivity are not the issues. If combined with good taste and a deep knowledge of film and the film business it means you are Scott Rudin. Berman being a woman is the least of her problems.
“The artists of Hollywood are not fools. They know when they are being treated horribly. Her cruelty to artists, her disrespect and ignorance of their body of work, her padding of her own resume…her need to use her power in unrelenting ways and then if you dislike her mask it behind ‘directors and agents are sexist’…that is the problem.
“Paramount was not in a horrible mess in terms of development when Gail arrived. Gail killed every project on the shelf because her ego didn’t allow for Donald Deline’s work to go forward and because she doesn’t have a feel for what is good and what isn’t.
[I was asked to delete three or four examples of Berman having killed some prrojects or pissed this or that person off, which I did.]

Paramount chairman Brad Grey, studio president Gail Berman

“As for Nacho Libre, Gail tried not to make that film left over from Deline’s development slate. She wanted to ‘redevelop it,’ which is what Gail is famous for. Only when Jack Black marched into her office and demanded she make up her mind — either make it or let it go in turn around — did she reluctantly agree to make it. Now she says in Variety, “I just want to make more films like Nacho Libre.” They were in hysterics down on the set in Mexico [when they heard] that.
“Ridley Scott almost imploded on the lot after a meeting with Gail. The stories are true and endless and yet [Thompson’s] article maintains it has to do with her honest and being a woman.
“As a woman who is honest in this industry I resent the implications. I have no problems working with either writers, agents, directors, executives and producers I encounter. I just know what I am talking about and treat others and their work with respect. I do my homework and I love movies.
“Gail needs some self examination before she starts trotting out ‘I’m a powerful woman and that is why people don’t like me.’ People have never liked her. They have had to endure and succeed in spite of her. She is also a deep grudge holder which has nothing to do with being a woman and is why Jeffrey Katzenberg doesn’t want to be in business with her.

“The underlying issue is why would [chairman and chief executive of Paramount Pictures] Brad Grey hire her at all.
“Here is one theory from someone who has worked with Brad for over a decade. If Gail succeeds, Brad looks like a visionary. If she fails it won’t reflect badly on him because she was so ignorant and inexperienced in movies to begin with. He took a chance and she let him down.
“The truth is Gail was so loathed at Fox she had become ineffective. She needed to move. Brad is in way over his head and didn’t know how to look for the right person and wanted someone quickly.
“After starting the Paramount job Gail went to the agents at the Big Five agencies with Brad Westin and Ali Shermur and held court. She brought out charts like they were at the Network Upfronts explaining where their clients projects stood. Graphs and charts, graphs and charts.
“The agents were horrified at the way she spoke to them and the way she spoke about their clients. Brad and Ali tellingly never said a word. Either it was because Gail wouldn’t let them or they were too embarassed. Again this behavior is going to engender hostility because it is so impersonal and condescending. It has nothing to do with being a woman. Or being honest. It has to do with being a jerk.
“If I was Gail I would get some good therapy. And take a class at AFI. And maybe subscribe to Netflix.”

This is a juvenile and cheap-ass thing to say in a caption, but doesn’t Grey look like a puppet next to his boss, chairman and chief executive officer of MTV Networks Tom Freston? Grey is so much smaller with such a smaller head, I mean.

The writer said the following when we spoke this morning. Here are portions of what she said:
“[Holson and Thompson] are not doing their job because all we’re reading so far is puff piece after puff piece, but what I’m hearing is a consistent stream of frustration.
“No one wants to dislike anyone who’s the head of production at a studio. You want to love them and for them to be your best friend. But everyone has met with this wall of nothingness and hostility, and she doesn’t have the guts to let things go or leave them alone. She has that need to put her stamp on things.
“When you have a competent executive [in the job], they know what to leave alone. And Berman doesn’t seem to understand that when a movie gets made that’s left over from anotehr regime, Berman gets the credit for it.
“She was a big credit hog at Fox. She’s come a long way so far because she’s strong and presents herself so beautiuflly, but she can’t build an individual relationship and understand what an artist does, and it’s really unfortunate.
“The creative community isn’t upset because she’s a woman or because she’s from TV. She doesn’t have movies in her bones. Scott Rudin is blunt and can be impossible, but he loves movies and he understands what artists are about. Gail is missing that piece in her DNA that would make this all really easy for her.
“Instead of firing her, people should help her do her job better, to admit she made a mistake.”

Berman with 24 star Keifer Sutherland (far right) when she was based at 20th Century Fox television.

I broke in during our chat and said that the Berman situation is mainly due to Grey’s not being all that perceptive. It makes it appear as if he didn’t give the matter of hiring her for the top Paramount job very much thought, and in fact makes him look like a thoughtless studio chief.
“Mike Ovitz was Grey’s mentor,” the letter-writer said, “and he doesn’t reveal who he is or where he’s coming from. It’s incredible that they handed him the job [that he has]. He doesn’t go out on a limb for anybody. Hiring Berman was easy for him. If it works out he’ll look like a visionary genius, but if she takes a fall it’s easy for him too.
“Relationships are everything in this town, and Berman doesn’t care about relationships. She only wants to discover people. She doesn’t want to deal with people who are already there. [When she’s in the room] it’s all about shutting down the conversation. I know a lot of people who are feeling crushed by her…and I’ve heard it across the board since she got the job. A lot of people have just given up on her.
“You can be an asshole in this town and do well if you have really good taste and you love movies and your instincts are really good. If you make the grade on these terms people will love you anyway. This business is about pushing rocks up hills, and when you have someone who doesn’t push rocks, who stops rocks….that’s a problem.
“Everyone has a learning curve. The Weinsteins are in a new learning curve, and Gail is in a community and she needs to take her place in it, and it’s a humbling process, but that sense of humility is missing at Paramount right now.”

Show & Tell

Saturday’s Santa Barbara Film Festival panel discussions — one featuring writers and the other producers — were intriguing and stirring with a fair supply of zingers. Tectonic plates didn’t exactly shift under our feet and nobody poured a pitcher of ice water over anyone else’s head, but some interesting truths came through.
The funniest panelist was 40 Year-Old Virgin director-writer Judd Apatow, with Good Night, and Good Luck writer-producer Grant Heslov a close second. The most heartfelt and straight-shootin’-est testimony came from Brokeback Mountain cowriter-producer Diana Ossana. And the wisest and most perceptive comments came from Crash co-wroter Bobby Moresco.
These three all scored during the writer’s panel, which was sagely moderated by Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson.

Portions of Crash co-writer Bobby Moresco, Brokeback Mountain co-writer Diana Ossana, Memoirs of a Geisha screenwriter Robin Swicord, and History of Violence writer Josh Olson — Saturday, 2.11.06, 11:35 am at the Marjorie Luke theatre.

I can’t honestly say that the riffs and confessions in the producers panel, hosted by Patrick Goldstein, the industry columnist for the L.A. Times, were quite as memorable, but that’s because the thing that really stood out during this session (and it’s strange to admit this but some observations just stick in your brain and others don’t) was a technical problem involving the sound.
I was sitting in the front row at the Victoria Theatre as Goldstein started the session, and right from the start you could hear rock music coming faintly out of a speaker on stage right…not loud enough to make it difficult to hear the panelists, but just loud enough to be irritating, like a mosquito that won’t stop flying into your ear. Goldstein and the panelists seemed oblivious, but I was saying to myself, “What the…?”
I went out to the lobby and asked what was going on, and they said, “We’re work- ing on it.” So I went back in and waited and waited, and then somebody from the audience finally said, “Will somebody please turn that music off?” and suddenly the dam burst — people had been suppressing their frustration for about 15 minutes — and revolt was in the air. “Unplug the speaker, please!”…”C’mon!”…”this is very irritating”…”we can’t hear you!”

L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein (far right) and producer panelists (Walk the Line‘s James Keach and Brokeback Mountain‘s Diana Ossana are to his immediate right) during the people’s uprising over the sound problem that slightly marred the discussion at Santa Barbara’s Victoria theatre — Saturday, 2.11.06, 2:25 pm.

Suddenly a “whoa” look came across Goldstein’s face. A situation! Everything would have been fine if Goldstein had just unplugged the offending speaker, but for some reason he didn’t want to so finally a young tech guy came up on stage and just shut everything off, and the session continued without microphones.
I could hear much of the what was said after this (Diana Ossana, who had just finished the writers’ panel an hour earlier, kept forgetting to project from the diaphragm) but I had to cup my ears from time to time.
The only real producers’ zinger came when The Chronicles of Narnia producer Mark Johnson chided Goldstein “and your friend John Horn” (i.e., the formidable Los Angeles Times industry reporter) for passing along what Johnson felt were inflated reports of Narnia‘s budget.
Why don’t we forget the producers and go back to the writers? Better material, functioning equipment.
Apatow said The 40 Year-Old Virgin worked “because I knew the terrain of being a 40 year-old virgin [in my own life] all too well.”
At one point Thompson asked Heslov to tell how he met and bonded with Good Night partner George Clooney, and he replied, “Don’t you think that’s a little personal?”

Walk the Line screenwriter Gill Dennis, Good Night and Good Luck writer-producer Grant Heslov, The 40 Year-Odl Viring director-wrter Judd Apatow at Santa Barbara’s Lobero theatre — Saturday, 2.11.06, 11:50 am.

I loved the recollection by Josh Olson, screenwriter-adapter of A History of Violence, about his first time seeing the David Cronenberg-directed film with an audience at the Lumiere theatre in Cannes, and how it went over like gangbusters with everyone cheering at the closing credits.
Ossana talked about the feelings of enormous relief and satisfaction that she and partner Larry McMurtry have gotten from the widespread acceptance of Brokeback Mountain since it opened in early December. “We had hoped before it opened that we might get into 400 theatres,” Ossana said, “but right now it’s playing in about 2000 theatres.”
Ossana said because of the Brokeback heat a script she and McMurtry wrote a long time called Pretty Boy Floyd was “back from the dead” or something along those lines.
Apatow facetiously said he saw parallels between The 40 year-old Virgin and Memoirs of a Geisha. With a bit more sincerity he also explained the story, character and thematic parallels between Virgin and Brokeback Mountain. The second analogy sounded reasonable, but don’t expect me to repeat it….too much work.
Apatow’s next film, he said, “is about a guy who gets a woman pregnant on the first date,” and will therefore “be a little more grounded” than The 40 Year-Old Virgin. “It’s a tragedy,” commented Geisha screenwriter Robin Swicord.

(l. to r., top row) Backstage at the Marjorie Luke: Walk the Line‘s Gill Dennis, writers’ panel moderator Anne Thompson, Brokeback Mountain co-writer Diana Ossana, Memoirs of a Geisha screenwriter Robin Swicord, A History of Violence screenwriter Josh Olson, and a talented and well-respected Italian screenwriter whose name temporarily escapes me (and I don’t mean this as a slight); (l. to. r., bottom row) Crash co-writer Bobby Moresco, Good Night, and Good Luck‘s Grant Heslov, The 40 Year-Old Virgin‘s Judd Apatow.

There was one other bizarre occurence on top of the sound problem at the Victoria, and that was getting thrown out of the outdoor luncheon for the writers after the Marjorie Luke theatre session.
Festival director Roger Durling has made a gracious habit of inviting me to sit down and schmooze with the talent after these discussions in years past, but a certain SBFF publicist was strongly opposed to this and said, “You’ll have to leave.” It was no biggie so I did, but sheesh.
We live in a damaged and dysfunctional world, and every now and then you’re going to meet someone who’s had it a bit tougher than others, and you’re going to find yourself staring into a look of unfettered rage.

Scent of Toast

I haven’t done any serious calling around about embattled Paramount Pictures president Gail Berman, but I received a letter this morning [Sunday, 2.12] from a woman who seems very knowledgable and connected to people in the creative community, and what she says about Berman and her situation (as well as the perceptions and management skills of Paramount chairman Brad Grey) is fairly damning.
The letter-writer feels that two big stories about Berman so far — Laura Holson’s piece in the N.Y. Times (which was mainly about Grey but touched on Berman) and Anne Thompson’s recent “Risky Business” column — have missed what’s really happening.

Paramount president Gail Berman.

I’ve spoken to the letter-writer and I’m convinced that she’s right in the thick of things and knows whereof she speaks. She has motives for saying what she’s saying, obviously, but who doesn’t? You can half-tell she’s credible by the insider-sounding information and her down-to-it prose style, but I wanted to make sure of this and now I’m 98% certain she’s legit.
The letter-writer feels that Thompson’s “flattering portrait of Gail Berman is quite one sided…towards Gail.
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“The problem with Gail Berman is that not that she is overwhelmingly honest or intelligent or forthright, which are admirable qualities when used well. The problem is two fold — she is all these things but she doesn’t like movies. I repeat: film is not a language she speaks. And she is brusque and insensitive and not on the same page with people who do.
“Ask her what her favorite films are. She can’t tell you. Ask Stacey Snyder or Nina Jacobson or any of the other women who are running studios the same question, and they will talk for an hour about the first time they saw a film. They thrive on that connection made in the dark to a story on a big screen. That is not the case with Gail.
“I doubt she has ever seen a film she has ever loved. Or could let herself love. It is not in her DNA. She has no idea what a good script is. She doesn’t even like to read them.

“The other problem is that which Thompson refers to as ‘honesty.’ I refer to it as insensitivity, rudeness, and an unexamined loathing that lurks just under the surface when she deals with artists.
“Instead of learning the medium and the people she is to work with she comes in with zero experience and proceeds to rip projects apart that have been in development for years with no sensitivity to all involved. No sense that she may want to work with these people again.
“Brutish honesty and insensitivity are not the issues. If combined with good taste and a deep knowledge of film and the film business it means you are Scott Rudin. Berman being a woman is the least of her problems.
“The artists of Hollywood are not fools. They know when they are being treated horribly. Her cruelty to artists, her disrespect and ignorance of their body of work, her padding of her own resume…her need to use her power in unrelenting ways and then if you dislike her mask it behind ‘directors and agents are sexist’…that is the problem.
“Paramount was not in a horrible mess in terms of development when Gail arrived. Gail killed every project on the shelf because her ego didn’t allow for Donald Deline’s work to go forward and because she doesn’t have a feel for what is good and what isn’t.
[I was asked to delete three or four examples of Berman having killed some prrojects or pissed this or that person off, which I did.]

Paramount chairman Brad Grey, studio president Gail Berman

“As for Nacho Libre, Gail tried not to make that film left over from Deline’s development slate. She wanted to ‘redevelop it,’ which is what Gail is famous for. Only when Jack Black marched into her office and demanded she make up her mind — either make it or let it go in turn around — did she reluctantly agree to make it. Now she says in Variety, “I just want to make more films like Nacho Libre.” They were in hysterics down on the set in Mexico [when they heard] that.
“Ridley Scott almost imploded on the lot after a meeting with Gail. The stories are true and endless and yet [Thompson’s] article maintains it has to do with her honest and being a woman.
“As a woman who is honest in this industry I resent the implications. I have no problems working with either writers, agents, directors, executives and producers I encounter. I just know what I am talking about and treat others and their work with respect. I do my homework and I love movies.
“Gail needs some self examination before she starts trotting out ‘I’m a powerful woman and that is why people don’t like me.’ People have never liked her. They have had to endure and succeed in spite of her. She is also a deep grudge holder which has nothing to do with being a woman and is why Jeffrey Katzenberg doesn’t want to be in business with her.

“The underlying issue is why would [chairman and chief executive of Paramount Pictures] Brad Grey hire her at all.
“Here is one theory from someone who has worked with Brad for over a decade. If Gail succeeds, Brad looks like a visionary. If she fails it won’t reflect badly on him because she was so ignorant and inexperienced in movies to begin with. He took a chance and she let him down.
“The truth is Gail was so loathed at Fox she had become ineffective. She needed to move. Brad is in way over his head and didn’t know how to look for the right person and wanted someone quickly.
“After starting the Paramount job Gail went to the agents at the Big Five agencies with Brad Westin and Ali Shermur and held court. She brought out charts like they were at the Network Upfronts explaining where their clients projects stood. Graphs and charts, graphs and charts.
“The agents were horrified at the way she spoke to them and the way she spoke about their clients. Brad and Ali tellingly never said a word. Either it was because Gail wouldn’t let them or they were too embarassed. Again this behavior is going to engender hostility because it is so impersonal and condescending. It has nothing to do with being a woman. Or being honest. It has to do with being a jerk.
“If I was Gail I would get some good therapy. And take a class at AFI. And maybe subscribe to Netflix.”

This is a juvenile and cheap-ass thing to say in a caption, but doesn’t Grey look like a puppet next to his boss, chairman and chief executive officer of MTV Networks Tom Freston? Grey is so much smaller with such a smaller head, I mean.

The writer said the following when we spoke this morning. Here are portions of what she said:
“[Holson and Thompson] are not doing their job because all we’re reading so far is puff piece after puff piece, but what I’m hearing is a consistent stream of frustration.
“No one wants to dislike anyone who’s the head of production at a studio. You want to love them and for them to be your best friend. But everyone has met with this wall of nothingness and hostility, and she doesn’t have the guts to let things go or leave them alone. She has that need to put her stamp on things.
“When you have a competent executive [in the job], they know what to leave alone. And Berman doesn’t seem to understand that when a movie gets made that’s left over from anotehr regime, Berman gets the credit for it.
“She was a big credit hog at Fox. She’s come a long way so far because she’s strong and presents herself so beautiuflly, but she can’t build an individual relationship and understand what an artist does, and it’s really unfortunate.
“The creative community isn’t upset because she’s a woman or because she’s from TV. She doesn’t have movies in her bones. Scott Rudin is blunt and can be impossible, but he loves movies and he understands what artists are about. Gail is missing that piece in her DNA that would make this all really easy for her.
“Instead of firing her, people should help her do her job better, to admit she made a mistake.”

Berman with 24 star Keifer Sutherland (far right) when she was based at 20th Century Fox television.

I broke in during our chat and said that the Berman situation is mainly due to Grey’s not being all that perceptive. It makes it appear as if he didn’t give the matter of hiring her for the top Paramount job very much thought, and in fact makes him look like a thoughtless studio chief.
“Mike Ovitz was Grey’s mentor,” the letter-writer said, “and he doesn’t reveal who he is or where he’s coming from. It’s incredible that they handed him the job [that he has]. He doesn’t go out on a limb for anybody. Hiring Berman was easy for him. If it works out he’ll look like a visionary genius, but if she takes a fall it’s easy for him too.
“Relationships are everything in this town, and Berman doesn’t care about relationships. She only wants to discover people. She doesn’t want to deal with people who are already there. [When she’s in the room] it’s all about shutting down the conversation. I know a lot of people who are feeling crushed by her…and I’ve heard it across the board since she got the job. A lot of people have just given up on her.
“You can be an asshole in this town and do well if you have really good taste and you love movies and your instincts are really good. If you make the grade on these terms people will love you anyway. This business is about pushing rocks up hills, and when you have someone who doesn’t push rocks, who stops rocks….that’s a problem.
“Everyone has a learning curve. The Weinsteins are in a new learning curve, and Gail is in a community and she needs to take her place in it, and it’s a humbling process, but that sense of humility is missing at Paramount right now.”

Show & Tell

Saturday’s Santa Barbara Film Festival panel discussions — one featuring writers and the other producers — were intriguing and stirring with a fair supply of zingers. Tectonic plates didn’t exactly shift under our feet and nobody poured a pitcher of ice water over anyone else’s head, but some interesting truths came through.
The funniest panelist was 40 Year-Old Virgin director-writer Judd Apatow, with Good Night, and Good Luck writer-producer Grant Heslov a close second. The most heartfelt and straight-shootin’-est testimony came from Brokeback Mountain cowriter-producer Diana Ossana. And the wisest and most perceptive comments came from Crash co-wroter Bobby Moresco.
These three all scored during the writer’s panel, which was sagely moderated by Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson.

Portions of Crash co-writer Bobby Moresco, Brokeback Mountain co-writer Diana Ossana, Memoirs of a Geisha screenwriter Robin Swicord, and History of Violence writer Josh Olson — Saturday, 2.11.06, 11:35 am at the Marjorie Luke theatre.

I can’t honestly say that the riffs and confessions in the producers panel, hosted by Patrick Goldstein, the industry columnist for the L.A. Times, were quite as memorable, but that’s because the thing that really stood out during this session (and it’s strange to admit this but some observations just stick in your brain and others don’t) was a technical problem involving the sound.
I was sitting in the front row at the Victoria Theatre as Goldstein started the session, and right from the start you could hear rock music coming faintly out of a speaker on stage right…not loud enough to make it difficult to hear the panelists, but just loud enough to be irritating, like a mosquito that won’t stop flying into your ear. Goldstein and the panelists seemed oblivious, but I was saying to myself, “What the…?”
I went out to the lobby and asked what was going on, and they said, “We’re work- ing on it.” So I went back in and waited and waited, and then somebody from the audience finally said, “Will somebody please turn that music off?” and suddenly the dam burst — people had been suppressing their frustration for about 15 minutes — and revolt was in the air. “Unplug the speaker, please!”…”C’mon!”…”this is very irritating”…”we can’t hear you!”

L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein (far right) and producer panelists (Walk the Line‘s James Keach and Brokeback Mountain‘s Diana Ossana are to his immediate right) during the people’s uprising over the sound problem that slightly marred the discussion at Santa Barbara’s Victoria theatre — Saturday, 2.11.06, 2:25 pm.

Suddenly a “whoa” look came across Goldstein’s face. A situation! Everything would have been fine if Goldstein had just unplugged the offending speaker, but for some reason he didn’t want to so finally a young tech guy came up on stage and just shut everything off, and the session continued without microphones.
I could hear much of the what was said after this (Diana Ossana, who had just finished the writers’ panel an hour earlier, kept forgetting to project from the diaphragm) but I had to cup my ears from time to time.
The only real producers’ zinger came when The Chronicles of Narnia producer Mark Johnson chided Goldstein “and your friend John Horn” (i.e., the formidable Los Angeles Times industry reporter) for passing along what Johnson felt were inflated reports of Narnia‘s budget.
Why don’t we forget the producers and go back to the writers? Better material, functioning equipment.
Apatow said The 40 Year-Old Virgin worked “because I knew the terrain of being a 40 year-old virgin [in my own life] all too well.”
At one point Thompson asked Heslov to tell how he met and bonded with Good Night partner George Clooney, and he replied, “Don’t you think that’s a little personal?”

Walk the Line screenwriter Gill Dennis, Good Night and Good Luck writer-producer Grant Heslov, The 40 Year-Odl Viring director-wrter Judd Apatow at Santa Barbara’s Lobero theatre — Saturday, 2.11.06, 11:50 am.

I loved the recollection by Josh Olson, screenwriter-adapter of A History of Violence, about his first time seeing the David Cronenberg-directed film with an audience at the Lumiere theatre in Cannes, and how it went over like gangbusters with everyone cheering at the closing credits.
Ossana talked about the feelings of enormous relief and satisfaction that she and partner Larry McMurtry have gotten from the widespread acceptance of Brokeback Mountain since it opened in early December. “We had hoped before it opened that we might get into 400 theatres,” Ossana said, “but right now it’s playing in about 2000 theatres.”
Ossana said because of the Brokeback heat a script she and McMurtry wrote a long time called Pretty Boy Floyd was “back from the dead” or something along those lines.
Apatow facetiously said he saw parallels between The 40 year-old Virgin and Memoirs of a Geisha. With a bit more sincerity he also explained the story, character and thematic parallels between Virgin and Brokeback Mountain. The second analogy sounded reasonable, but don’t expect me to repeat it….too much work.
Apatow’s next film, he said, “is about a guy who gets a woman pregagnt on the first date,” and will therefore “be a little more grounded” than The 40 Year-Old Virgin. “It’s a tragedy,” commented Geisha screenwriter Robin Swicord.

(l. to r., top row) Backstage at the Marjorie Luke: Walk the Line‘s Gill Dennis, writers’ panel moderator Anne Thompson, Brokeback Mountain co-writer Diana Ossana, Memoirs of a Geisha screenwriter Robin Swicord, A History of Violence screenwriter Josh Olson, and a talented and well-respected Italian screenwriter whose name temporarily escapes me (and I don’t mean this as a slight); (l. to. r., bottom row) Crash co-writer Bobby Moresco, Good Night, and Good Luck‘s Grant Heslov, The 40 Year-Old Virgin‘s Judd Apatow.

There was one other bizarre occurence on top of the sound problem at the Victoria, and that was getting thrown out of the outdoor luncheon for the writers after the Marjorie Luke theatre session.
Festival director Roger Durling has made a gracious habit of inviting me to sit down and schmooze with the talent after these discussions in years past, but a certain SBFF publicist was strongly opposed to this and said, “You’ll have to leave.” It was no biggie so I did, but sheesh.
We live in a damaged and dysfunctional world, and every now and then you’re going to meet someone who’s had it a bit tougher than others, and you’re going to find yourself staring into a look of unfettered rage.

Grabs

Admittedly crappy photo of Phillip Seymour Hoffman at the podium after receiving the Riviera Award from the Santa Barbara Film Festival at the Marjorie Luke theatre — Saturday, 2.11.06, 9:55 pm.

Los Angeles nightscape view from elegant home of cool-cat Lionsgate vice-chairman Michael Burns — 2.11.06, 10:25 pm.

Crash and Ali costar Nona Gaye at Friday night’s Crash party at Burns’ party — 2.11.06, 10:25 pm.

Cuba Gooding and costars after Santa Barbara Film festival screening of Lee Daniels’ Shadowboxer — 2.9.06, 9:15 pm.

Cute little Santa Barbara restaurant, sitting on a quiet street away from the action.

Manhattan’s east 6th Street, sometime earlier today (2.12). [Due apologies, but this shot was borrowed — okay, stolen — from the N.Y. Times website.]

Gong Show

If you go to a movie this weekend chances are you’ll run into the poster for Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (Paramount, due in late summer or early fall) hanging in the lobby.
And if you’re at all like me, you may experience a slight involuntary twitching when you stand there and take it in. Not out of disdain for the visual concept (which is okay), but that godforsaken title. The wretched sound of it, I mean.

World Trade Center just keeps needling me. I’ve tried to get used to it, but that generically odious Jack-and-Jill quality (every time I hear it a J. Arthur Rank gong goes off in my head) makes it one of the worst big-studio movie titles of all time.
It seems to me that a movie set in lower Manhattan on 9.11.01 would have to be direct, honest and dignified…and yet try for a touch of the poetic. If you believe that titles should somehow correspond to content, the name of Stone’s movie should be about an echo of some kind…not about a redundant fact, but soul particles lingering in the air.
The title World Trade Center is about duhh-level marketing…about snagging the lowest common denominator, and the hell with poetic import.
You can hear somebody on Gerry Rich’s advertising team saying to a colleague, “Nobody will look at this one-sheet and not know right away what it’s more or less about…nobody. And no one will be able to point their finger at any of us after the opening weekend and say we made it seem too oblique.”
Try offensive. World Trade Center isn’t “overkill” as much as idiotkill. All good titles work on at least two levels, and World Trade Center doesn’t even work in terms of pure one-note simplicity. It sounds like a compromise produced by a committee of scared people.

A portion of Paramount World Trade Center one-sheet, as it appears in USA Today story out today (Friday, 2.10)

The image of two guys standing side by side between the Twin Towers is a little dumb-assed (the 9.11 disaster wasn’t a personal/intimate experience for anyone, including the two Port Authority guys who were covered and trapped in rubble), but it’s tolerable.
USA Today‘s Anthony Breznican has written that Paramount “hopes the image reflects that filmmakers are trying to approach America’s greatest modern tragedy with respect.”
Breznican says the studio “decided to emphasize mood, while the stars’ and director’s names are downplayed. There’s an abstract reminder of the twin towers instead of an actual photograph of the buildings intact, or in ruins. The red, white and blue colors imply it’s an American story — not a tale of terrorists or politics.”
The true story of Port Authority police officers John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno (i.e., the guys who were bured and eventually rescued), World Trade Center costars Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena along with Maggie Gyllenhaal, Maria Bello, Frank Whalley, Nicholas Turturro and Thomas Mapother.

Gooney Bird

Several weeks ago I wrote a little thing about how Mel Gibson looked like a totally wacked John Brown with that flannel shirt and wild-ass beard in that flash-and-he’s- gone appearance in his Apocalypto trailer.
And now following the posting this morning of Gabriel Neeb‘s letter that called Bravheart‘s Best Picture Oscar win an embarassment(i.e., “a post-Passion of the Christ reassessment”), some guy has written in to set me straight:

Mel Gibson

“Did you know you’re being laughed and mocked in movie websites all over the internet because you didn’t realize that it was a joke when Mel Gibson appeared in his trailer? Of course it was a joke, you silly hypocritical prick! Anyone who knows anything about show business, knows that Mel Gibson is the biggest prankster in the business.
“And you should have also known that his beard was being grown in for a part in Under and Alone, but you just wanted to make judgments because you don’t like his politics and because you don’t understand his religion. And now you want to take away the honor of his Oscar win for Braveheart, because you don’t care for The Passion. Again, you’re a stinking PRICK!!” — Jeremy Cohen .

Measure of Ledger

Heath Ledger submitted to a friendly dog-and-pony show at the Santa Barbara Film Festival last Wednesday night. He was interviewed by Pete Hammond on the stage of the Lobero theatre, watched several film clips, and accepted the festival’s Breakthrough Award…and the whole thing left me feeling a bit stumped.
It was a nice evening…pleasant, heartening…and Heath seems like a right guy, but I don’t know what to say about him that doesn’t sound cliched or repetitive or flat.

Heath Ledger, Pete Hammond on stage of Santa Barbara’s Lobero Theatre — Wednesday, 2.8.06, 8:25 pm.

He’ll be around for a long time, I think. That seems like a fairly safe bet. He’s 27 now — he’ll probably still be acting 40 or even 50 years from now, and in quality vehicles, given his standards and talent. I’ll be dead (probably) and he’ll still be acting. Nice thought.
I’ve never written a damn word about Ledger’s performance as “Skip” in The Lords of Dogtown because I never gave a shit about watching it (due to laziness…I had nothing against the film), but after watching him in a clip or two last night I now want to see it whole.
I think Ledger may be a bit like Laurence Olivier and Alec Guiness, which is that without a role to play (or a fake nose or an exotic accent to hide behind) he con- geals and stammers on a bit and isn’t quite up to the charm levels of Jay Leno or Conan O’Brien or Jimmy Kimmel in front of a crowd.
Ledger is a gently spoken sort with what feels like a fairly strict sense of integrity. It’s no secret that he has one of those serious light-up-the-room smiles. Being Australian and somewhat expressive and non-taciturn, his voice isn’t the least bit Ennis del Mar-ish, but it does have a deepish timbre and a kind of rolling tonality.

Heath Ledger — Wednesday, 2.8.06, 8:32 pm.

He’s a gifted, probably genius-level actor who right now seems to be about sixteen times more into spending time with his infant daughter than making new movies and pocketing huge paychecks, and is actually planning on not working at all for roughly a year. (He said something about living in Amsterdam when we spoke at the Focus Features after-party following the Golden Globes.)
I liked it that there was a loose tab or some kind of mini-tongue sticking out of the heel of his lace-up shoes, and I was staring at this thing for a while and thinking, “Yeah, funky- ass shoes…but I guess that’s Ledger and his I’m-not-your-father’s- idea-of-an-uptown-actor attitude.
He was pretty good at fidgeting around in his seat last night as he spoke to Hammond about this and that. He sat on his hands for a bit. His legs were kind of tucked under the chair, a bit like a British school kid doing detention. He said that auditions have always been awkward because he doesn’t like the feeling of being examined and judged.

Heath Ledger’s shoe — 2.8.06, 8:40 pm. See that little doo-dad thing sticking out of the heel? That’s intentional, right?

Here’s that Manohla Dargis riff about Ledger’s Brokeback Mountain performance that I ran in WIRED last week: “I’ve almost always liked Ledger, but I didn’t think he had anything going on as an actor until Monster’s Ball. But while he was amazing for the ten seconds he was in that film, I wasn’t prepared for Brokeback, where he creates a world of pain with a tight mouth and a body so terribly self- contained it’s a wonder he can wrap his arms around another person.
“But here’s the thing,” she concluded, “and this is the part that’s hard to explain — I don’t just admire the performance on the level of craft, I am also deeply moved by it, just as I am by the film.”
SBFF director Roger Durling said the following at the end of the evening: “Movies reflect who we are, and in going to the movies we identify with the heroes and protagonists. When I saw Brokeback Mountain and Heath Ledger’s performance, I felt as if somebody had punched the wind out of me.

Wednesday, 2.8.06, 9:55 pm.

“It took me a while to understand that never before I had seen a character in a major Hollywood film that portrayed all the loneliness, self-loathing, the need to be loved and give love back that a gay man like me goes through, and I felt a personal form of catharsis watching Heath’s performance. He was kicking a door open that had been long shut, and for that I’m very grateful.”
I’m still stuck about the Best Actor contest because I feel exactly the same degree of admiraton for Philip Seymour Hofman’s performance in Capote as I do for Heath Ledger’s in Brokeback. I’ve called for this before and it makes no sense and it’s highly unlikely from a mathematical perspective, but there should be a tie and they should both win. This really, really should happen.

Wednesday, 2.8.06, 8:25 pm.