wired

In an 8.3 N.Y. Times piece about Judd Apatow and David Gordon Green‘s Pineapple Express (Sony, 8.6), writer Mark Harris notes that “pot comedies seem to be flourishing lately, so much so that the genre is subdividing. Those who will always view the Cheech and Chong ouevre (particularly 1978’s Up in Smoke) as archetypal can find their natural heirs in the high-and-higher flavor of the two Harold and Kumar comedies (with a third in the works).”

Harris mentions two or three others, but ignores Curtis Hanson‘s Wonder Boys, which I’ve long considered one of the most aromatic “light stone” pot movies ever made.
Getting ripped has been a standard youth rite since the late ’60s. Every generation of high-school or college-age students has been toking up since, at least on an every-now-and-then basis before growing out of it or deliberately putting it aside because, as anyone who’s ever turned on knows, pot “gets in the way” of having a semi-disciplined, semi-organized, semi-productive life. Still, the only people who have never turned on are the 65-and-older geezer generations, or the ones who grew up in the early 1960s, ’50s, ’40s and ’30s. And even a percentage of them have probably sampled here and there.
The population of the US of A is therefore 85% “experienced” these days, and there is nothing all that wild or provocative or envelope-pushy about pot comedies as a result. They’re funny (i.e., Pineapple Express) but in a “sure, okay, whatever” sort of way. They’ve acquired the taint of normality.

The more those oil guys suffer, the more likely the top-dog reactionaries are to eventually give up on denial and realize that global warming isn’t kidding around. It’s literally like Yul Brynner‘s Ramses refusal to set free the Jews and suffering one plague after another. “And yet Pharoah’s heart was not moved.”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn had 89 tough, proud years on this planet, and surely knew before his death earlier today that his legacy as one of the great all-time ballsy writers of the 20th Century was unassailable. The 1973 publication of The Gulag Archipelago, a scalding account of Soviet prison camps, led to the Soviet Union giving him the boot the following year. This eventually led to a decampment in Vermont and an 18-year period as a Russian expat. His BBC obit notes that “while living [in Vermont] as a recluse, he railed against what he saw as the moral corruption of the west”…hah! A malcontent and a truth-teller wherever he hung his hat.

David Gergen, a respected right-of-center establishment and political consultant, has said in so many words that in emphasizing the “other”-ness of Obama, the McCain campaign is making a “very intentional effort to paint him” in racially-coded terms. “The McCain campaign has been scrupulous about not directly saying it,” be began, “but it’s a subtext of the campaign…everybody knows it. There are certain kinds of signals. As a native of the south, I can tell you when you see the big Charlton Heston ad, ‘the one’…that is code for ‘he’s uppity, he oughta stay in the place.’

“You know…everybody gets that who’s from a southern background. We all understand that. When McCain comes out and starts talking about affirmative action, ‘I’m against quotas’…we get what that’s about. We understand where that’s coming from. That gets across.”
Cue the Hollywood Elsewhere naysaying righties to find some way to spin this in another direction. C’mon, guys — ball’s in your court. We know you can do it. Guys?

It’s fairly well known that in Tropic Thunder (Dreamamount, 8.13), Robert Downey, Jr. plays an extremely pretentious, Oscar-winning actor named Kirk Lazarus who decides to not just “play” a black guy but almost literally become one by changing his skin color and other physical attributes. One result has been is that some of the African-American “slow kids” have taken offense at his performance. Here’s an mp3 of Downey explaining the thinking behind the role, the genesis of it, and so on at today’s Tropic Thunder press junket.

Four Seasons hotel, 2nd floor, 11:20 am

A journalist at the round table actually asked Downey “how is this performance different from 19th Century blackface?” Downey said, “Well, first it’s entertainment set up by people who are high minded enough so the film won’t be racist or offensive. Second, the whole film is based on the idea that what [our characters] do on some level is offensive and who we are on some level is despicable and pathetic. Which is the truth and not the truth. But the part of it that’s the truth is entertaining. How far-reaching can someone’s narcissism go?”
Before accepting the Lazarus role, Downey sifted it all through. “You check your gut and ask, you know, do I feel like the universe is going to support this?” Going into a standup riff, he said that “for a moment I was thinking ‘fuck Ben Stiller…[here is coming to me saying] I want to do a great big movie with you, but I want you to have the highest risk factor and I want to maybe put you up for ridicule and have people, like, hate you for something you should have known was fucking wrong to do.
“We were in rehearsal and I said, if Kirk Lazarus has himself unde the imropession that he’s black but he’s coming up against an emotional interface with a black man….what’s entertaining about this? Just about nothing. So I said, the only thing he knows about black culture as an Australian…is what everybody who doesn’t know anything about black culture but has put themselves under the impression that they know, is that he knows some stuff from some shows…from the ’70s.” He meant The Jeffersons, characters in Across 110th Street, Isaac Hayes.
Downey also indicated his political leanings. To men, anyway. “I’m not a political person by design, but where we’re at as a country, which is often where things are on a global scale…we’re on a precipice where there can be a lot of healing and advancement or things can…out of fear or design or negligence, things can kind of go in a lousy way or stay stuck…and that’s kind of on the menu for the next few months.”
Again — here’s my recording of Downey’s chit-chat

What’s profoundly depressing about the current chapter in the presidential election race is that the smart, informed, semi-educated segment has pretty much made up its mind about Obama vs. McCain, and from here to November the race is necessarily about appealing to the asleep-at-the-wheel types — under- educated podunks, racists, citizens of Bumblefuck, slow on the pickup.
And these people — say it, admit it — have a way of bringing everyone down that is truly relentless and numbing. They’re basically the slow, scowling pudgy guy in the back of the class who rarely does his homework, is always scratching himself and smells like he’s just scarfed down some fast-food chicken.
In her 8.3 N.Y. Times column, Maureen Dowd has portrayed this sinister situation by the lights of Jane Austen:
“In this political version of Pride and Prejudice, the prejudice is racial, with only 31 percent of white voters telling The New York Times in a survey that they had a favorable opinion of Obama, compared with 83 percent of blacks.
“And the prejudice is visceral: many Americans, especially blue collar, still feel uneasy about the Senate’s exotic shooting star, and he is surrounded by a miasma of ill-founded and mistaken premises.
“So the novelistic tension of the 2008 race is this: Can Obama overcome his pride and Hyde Park hauteur and win America over?
“Can America overcome its prejudice to elect the first black president? And can it move past its biases to figure out if Obama’s supposed conceit is really just the protective shield and defense mechanism of someone who grew up half white and half black, a perpetual outsider whose father deserted him and whose mother, while loving, sometimes did so as well?
“Can Miss Bennet teach Mr. Darcy to let down his guard, be more sportive, and laugh at himself?”

Roger Ebert was mixed on the original The Mummy (’99), which I hated with with every last fibre of my being. Ebert was “not pleased with The Mummy Returns (’01). And yet he recently called the latest version, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, “the best in the series.” At the end of his review, he writes, “Now why did I like this movie? It was just plain dumb fun, is why. It is absurd and preposterous, and proud of it.”
I really and truly consider all three Mummy movies (the first two directed by Stephen Sommers, who produced the current installment) a blight upon our souls. It is industrial-strength pollution in the American cultural river. Giving a pass to these movies is like blowing a kiss to the devil himself.

Yesterday morning’s calculation was that The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor would nudge out The Dark Knight by $2 million or so — a slight but decisive margin. That equation has now gone south. The Bat is king again.

Fantasy Moguls Steve Mason has reversed his cards and is now saying The Dark Knight will finish the weekend with $44.8 million (a mere 40% drop) vs. $42.5 million for the Mummy. What happened, it would appear, is that the negative Mummy word started to spread on Friday night and that’s what took it down.
The unfunny Step Brothers has come in third with $15.5 million for a cume of $62.16 million. Mamma Mia is up to $88 million with a with $13.1 million haul and a fourth-place showing. Swing Vote has died with a $7 million haul, which, barring a groundswell miracle, means won’t even make $20 million by the end of the domestic run.

“This raucous, low-down commentary on Hollywood filmmaking, war movies, narcissistic actors and the thin line between make-believe and reality is the most giddily entertaining, wickedly smart and cinematically satisfying comedy in a season overloaded with yuk-’em-ups. If there’s any justice, Tropic Thunder should be the breakthrough moment for Stiller as a director.” — from David Ansen‘s review/interview piece (dated 8.2) in Newsweek.

Having seen Tropic Thunder (twice), Michael Cieply‘s statement in an 8.2 N.Y. Times article that Paramount executives are facing “the delicate task of selling what may be the raunchiest comedy yet in a summer that has seen more than its share” seems bizarre. The film isn’t raunchy at all; it’s merely extreme. And that’s an appropriate tone given (a) the necessity of any comedy to push the envelope to at least some degree, and (b) the extremities (emotional, psychedelic, whatever) that are expected from any film dealing with the Vietnam war.
The scene in which director-cowriter-star Ben Stiller “slurps gore from a human head” is, no lie, fairly funny. Ditto Robert Downey Jr. wearing blackface throughout (although the humor is in Downey’s vocal attempts to sound “black”). And the extended gag about “Hollywood’s weakness for what they impolitely call retards,” as Ceiply puts it, is about the rules that actors and Hollywood directors have followed in portraying characters with disabilities.
How are the Thunder guys supposed to refer to these characters? As mentally or emotionally “challenged”? As “handicapped”? The word “retard” is funny; the others are not.

This Valkyrie website promo reel is fine and so is Bill Nighy‘s statement to MTV.com that Bryan Singer‘s film is “honest and serious” and rarin’ to go on the next Valentine’s Day (“Take your date to see a movie about killing Hitler!”). But if you ask me…okay, nobody’s likely to ask me anything but if they did I’d say newly arrived MGM/UA marketing chief Mike Vohlman needs to do two things to keep the fire going over the next six and a half months.

One, he needs to release more Valkyrie stills to the various sites as I’ve been looking at the same three Valkyrie photos for I-don’t-know-how-many-months. And two, he needs to start showing Valkyrie to some friendly columnists and top-tier critics sometime in the mid fall with the understanding that if they like it, it might be cool to post an early review (or two or three) in late November or early December.