Ewan McGregor‘s apparent decision to play “a powerful Vatican insider” in Ron Howard‘s Angels and Demons, the sequel to The DaVinci Code, is the latest in a long series of straight-paycheck roles for this once-adventurous actor.
On 4.16 I asked “what’s happened to McGregor over the last five or six years? It’s almost as his soul was poisoned by playing Obi Wan Kenobi three times for George Lucas (The Phantom Menace in ’99, Attack of the Clones in ’02, Revenge of the Sith in ’05). He’s become Mr. Paycheck — a young Robert De Niro who will make any questionable or lackluster film as long as the money’s right or it fits his schedule. Or maybe he just has terrible taste.”

In a mostly rote summer-preview piece, Wall Street Journal reporters Lauren A.E. Schuker and Peter Sanders devote two interesting graphs to New Line’s upcoming Sex and the City flick:

“These women are the ultimate female superheroes,” says exec producer Michael Patrick King. The original HBO show “was made to correct the myth that if you were single at a certain age, you were a leper. Its four characters are heroes to a lot of women; they run around New York, or Gotham — but they have fancy shoes instead of capes.”
“But the ladies, too, are a little older than the last time we saw them,” the article states. “In the film, they’re in their 40s,” which, in King’s words, is a “different, somewhat-tougher time” than their 30s,” which the television series focused on. “If you want to see the girls at 34, you can turn on your television every night or rent the DVDs,” he says. “I knew the one mistake I could make in the film was to freeze-dry them and pretend they weren’t in their 40s now.”

Like many others I’ve spoken to, Variety‘s Todd McCarthy is impressed with Jon Favreau‘s Iron Man, which he saw at Paramount studios on 4.18. Here are two choice graphs from his 4.25 review, which went up 25 minutes ago:

“It’s refreshing, for a start, that the character suddenly endowed with superpowers isn’t a dweeby teen, but rather a pushing-middle-age genius who is himself entirely responsible for the advanced means he acquires to combat his adversaries; even more than the latest incarnation of Batman, he’s a self-made superman. And while we’ve seen plenty of masks and gravity-resistant heroes before, the outfit sported by the main man here, which looks as though it was made by a top ski-boot manufacturer, is striking and capable of great things.
“Snapping off lines as crisply as Bugs Bunny might bite into a carrot, the sculpture-bearded Downey invigorates the entire proceedings in a way no other actor ever has in this field. Initially conveying Tony’s Matt Helm lifestyle as if it’s second nature, Downey possesses a one-of-a-kind intensity that perfectly serves the character’s second-act drive and obstinacy. His Achilles’ heel is his heart, at first threatened by shrapnel and later central to his superpower and his submerged romantic relationship with ever-loyal assistant Pepper Potts, who Gwyneth Paltrow, in an unexpected casting move, endows with smarts and appeal.”

The best thing about this segment is Richard Lewis‘s off-screen “oh, come on!” as an MSNBC video report relays a John McCain comment that Barack Obama “doesn’t get what we’re about,” or words to that effect.

From this morning’s MSNBC First Read: “Two new Indiana polls are out that show the race there to be as close as we have expected it to be. Per a South Bend Tribune/Research 2000 poll (conducted April 21 to April 24), it’s Obama 48%, Clinton 47%. And an Indy Star/WTHR poll — conducted (April 20 to April 23) by Ann Selzer, who famously got Iowa right — has it Obama 41%, Clinton 38%.
“The biggest surprise in the Selzer survey is Obama’s strength against McCain — he leads him in Indi-freaking-ana! Clinton’s basically even with McCain. Is the GOP brand in that bad of shape in reliably red Indiana? According to these and other polls, this race doesn’t look like Ohio or Pennsylvania at all, where Clinton had significant leads two weeks out. Rather, it looks like a jump ball.
“Meanwhile, the Washington Post cements the CW about North Carolina: To change the race, Clinton needs to upset Obama here, or get awfully close to it. “North Carolina, with its large African American population, has long been seen as a firewall for Obama after contests in Ohio, Pennsylvania and elsewhere that favored Clinton. A win here and in Indiana, which also votes May 6, could cement his status as the front-runner.”

The problem with Baby Mama is that Tina Fey should have written it instead of director Michael McCullers. I say this presuming that Fey wrote some of her own dialogue (just as I know she wrote “bitch is the new black” for that SNL Hillary skit), but the film, I suspect, would have been at least 50% better if McCullers, who directs Baby Mama with the steady but cautious approach of a 68 year-old chess player, had just removed himself period. The writing feels reined in, conservative, middling.

I’m not going to pass along the plot particulars. Everyone knows them from the trailer, or you can always read the Wall Street Journal‘s Joe Morgenstern or..well, anyone.
I seriously hate the careful, tidy, corporatized vibe of big-studio comedies that have been directed by veteran hacks in their getting-on years. You know…guys from the Adam Sandler, Austin Powers or SNL talent families looking to please their clueless corporate employers so they can cover their various loans. The result are always films that seem utterly alike. Smart but never clever, well acted but lacking that lift-off feeling, pleasantly shot, predictably plotted. Smooth, professional-level swill.
Except for two or three mild titters (which are less than chuckles and nowhere close to guffaws), I watched Baby Mama with the face of Ramses as he looked upon Moses. Maybe Fey should have directed as well. She’s a real-life superwoman — why not?
The irony is that I didn’t hate Baby Mama despite all this. I stayed with it (i.e., I didn’t walk out, which is a signficant thing in my book) because of Fey. I’ve had this…you know, mild thing for her since her SNL days. It has something to do with the glasses and the semi-conservative dark haircut and…I don’t know. Smart women turn me on, and on top of this Fey reminds me of my girlfriend. The difference is, my girlfriend loves Obama.

I didn’t think Amy Poehler was all that believable as a commoner. She seemed to be “playing” the part every step of the way, which is not an impression most actors want to convey. Dependable Gregg Kinnear is fine as the predictably nice boyfriend who owns a struggling independent Jamba Juice-type store.
Tom McCarthy, the director of The Visitor and The Station Agent, has a short bit as a guy out on a dinner date with Fey. His character is quickly overwhelmed by Fey’s frank talk about wanting a baby before she gets too much older., etc. He excuses himself to go to the bathroom but is seen jumping into a cab 10 seconds later. The scene isn’t funny because McCullers, shmuck that he is, has directed McCarthy poorly. Any guy looking to run away from a dinner date would be hugely ashamed of himself, and would therefore do his level best to convince the woman in question that he really does need to take a leak, so he can get away clean. McCarthy doesn’t do that — he’s lying with pathetic obviousness. And the escaping man would certainly never look at the his abandoned date through the restaurant window as he jumps into the cab. If anything, he would pointedly look away so as not to confront his own cowardliness.
Baby Mama is tepid and lame. It’s not even a DVD rental. It’s a 35,000 foot altitude plane-watch thing.

The time has come for Barack Obama to throw Reverend Jeremiah Wright under the bus and walk away and wash his hands. Wright is an arrogant egotist and — I’m sorry but it’s true — a major asshole who doesn’t give a damn about Obama’s presidential candidacy. If he did he would never have succumbed to the ego stroke of a Bill Moyers Journal interview and said what he said, which is that — in Wright’s own words! — Obama is a politician who feels or believes one thing and says another.

“He’s a politician, I am a pastor,” Wright tells Moyers. “We speak to two different audiences. He said what he had to say as a politician, I say what I have to say as a pastor. [We’re speaking to] two different worlds. I do what I do, he does what politicians do. What happened in Philadelphia [referring to Obama’s great speech], he had to respond to the soundbites, and he responded as a politician.”
This it. The man is incorrigible. A menace. Obama has to slap him down and cut him off cold and say so. If he doesn’t do this within 24 to 48 hours, he’s in real trouble. He can’t pussyfoot around. Do this or die. Cut all ties. Renounce. This is a personal betrayal. A friend who supports Obama told me an hour ago, “If he doesn’t do this, he doesn’t deserve to win.” I wouldn’t go that far, but sometimes being hard and strong is the only thing that will do.

Mark Urman has been named president of ThinkFilm, replacing the recently departed Jeff Sackman. (What’s the story behind this, I wonder? There’s always a story.) A co-founder of the company, Urman had been chief of theatrical distribution since the company’s launch in September of 2001. Urman will continue to work out of the company’s New York City offices, which is the new ground zero. Congratulations to a very bright and shrewd fellow.

Because four guys working for Quantum of Solace, the currently rolling James Bond film, suffered three accidents over a five-day period — the Aston Martin accident last Saturday, another car accident on Monday, and a third one yesterday involving a near-fatality — the producers have shut down production?
Why — to wait for the curse to lift? To give the producers time to bring in a Catholic exorcist? Either the drivers were drinking, they don’t know how to drive, or it’s just bad luck. If guys are getting into car accidents and you want to “do” something about it, doesn’t it make sense to go to the guy who hired them and cut him loose? Fire this person and at least you’ve “done” something …even it it doesn’t seem to make much sense. But you don’t shut down the shoot.
This reminds me an incident during my tenure as manager of the Carnegie Hall Cinema in ’78. My boss was the late Sid Geffen, known affectionately in New York exhibition circles as an eccentric fellow. One day the ticket-seller, a pretty woman in her 20s, was held up while sitting inside the street-level booth. Terrified, she passed whatever money she had to the thief, slipping it through the slot. Two days later the same thief came back and robbed her again. Sid’s response was to fire the ticket-seller. He figured she was either a jinx or in on the deal. Either way Sid has “done” something about the problem. The person who replaced the girl, by the way, never got hit.
This reminds me of another Sid Geffen employee-relations story. Sid was a gifted b.s. artist who liked to use high-falutin’ blah-blah to mask his basic agenda. One day he called an employee into his office and said, “I’ve come to realize that I’m holding you back…I’m standing in your way…I’m keeping you from the progress you need to make in your life.” The guy listened for three or four minutes and said, “So Sid…you’re firing me, right?” Geffen was adamant. “No,” he said, “I’m graduating you!”

Deception isn’t very good and will probably tank ($5 million give or take) when it opens this weekend, but 20th Century Fox is releasing it anyway it was produced by and costars Hugh Jackman, with whom the studio has a good relationship with a future (X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Australia). This, in a sentence, is the gist of John Horn’s 4.24 L.A. TImes story about this unfortunate (for audiences) dynamic.

I’m commenting on this 4.24 New York “Vulture” piece about “Which Superhero Movie Will Suck?” because the art they created for it looks cool and I wanted a reason to re-size and re-post. Otherwise I would have ignored the post altogether. Nobody has any reason to believe that Ironman, The Dark Knight or Hellboy 2 are going to be problematic. At all. Not a whiff. A 75% dead story.

The word on Ironman so far has been strong, and there’s no reason to even intuit that Chris Nolan and Guillermo del Toro might not deliver in their usual rich-feast, intense undercurrent way. Only The Incredible Hulk has, according to general buzz, a semblance of Cecil B. DemIlle-like storm clouds swirling above. But nice collage!