wired

It seems obvious why Vanity Fair asked the esteemed Patricia Bosworth to write “a five-decade trajectory” piece about Paul Newman for the current issue. They obviously know the poor guy is on the ropes so they’ve decided to tribute him now instead of wait for the sad farewell and then give the go-ahead for a good-old-Paul piece.

I wonder why VF editor Graydon Carter didn’t contact Oregonian critic Shawn Levy to write the article, given Levy’s extensive research on a forthcoming Newman biography over the last couple of years. I’m told Levy has dug up some fascinating new material, including stuff about Newman’s formative early-on experiences.

If you don’t instantly recognize this main-title music, you don’t yet know your stuff. No offense.

Eight days ago Simon Pegg, Jessica Hynes and Edgar Wright visited Laser Blazer, easily one of the two or three best DVD stores in Los Angeles (and certainly the cleanest and friendliest), to sign copies of the 3-disc Spaced: The Complete Series box set. The DVD package came out 7.22. Okay, so I’m slow. A day doesn’t pass when I haven’t missed something.

Glenn Kenny‘s 7.30 riff about the Voight/HE/right-wing spitball kerfuffle on Some Came Running is very droll and enjoyable. I laughed out loud twice. (That’s saying something.) Thanks.

Why doesn’t Wild Bunch make this trailer available with English subtitles? Why isn’t there a bi-lingual Guerilla trailer? What’s the deal with Gregg Goldstein‘s mention in the Hollywood Reporter about “four indie offers being on the table” and still no distrib deal? The possibility that Steven Soderbergh‘s epic (which has had 14 minutes trimmed since Cannes) may not even play commercially until ’09 is ridiculous. What kind of a plastic, quarter-inch-deep moviegoing culture are we to have convinced distributors that buying Che rights is a sucide move?

“A few weeks ago I was in Las Vegas playing blackjack,” director Rod Lurie has written on the Huffington Post. “Two white-guy soldiers who were a couple of days away from being re-deployed to Iraq sat at the table with me. After a few minutes of conversation I asked them who they were voting for. They both said they were voting for Obama.

“When I asked them why, they very simply and honestly told me they want to vote for the guy that will get them out of Iraq. I think this year we will see, for the first time, the active-duty military voting for the Democratic candidate.” — from a piece called “Why The Military Is More Liberal Than You Think.”

Tom O’Neil‘s 7.30 slapdown of Frozen River star Melissa Leo (for pulling rank after arguing with director Courtney Hunt) has resulted in three friendly rebukes — one from myself, another from Thelma Adams and a third from Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone. Undaunted, O’Neil shoots right back, sticks to his guns, gives no quarter.

Yesterday 23/6 posted an alleged photo of Jon Voight’s “marked-up” copy of his Washington Times wing-nut opinion piece. Moderately funny stuff if you’re not one of, you know…”them.”

A terrible-quality bootleg video of the Wolfman trailer that was shown at Comic-Con. Some guy in the audience apparently shot it with a cell-phone camera. That aside, the vibe feels right and the content seems promising.

Benicido del Toro

The latest p.c. ding against Disney’s The Princess and the Frog, which won’t hit screens until ’09, is that it has a “toothless firefly” character who, according to Defamer’s description, “seems to have fluttered in accidentally from the set of Song of the South 2: Cajun Vacation.”

Here are two earlier You Tube videos — clip #1 and clip #2 — that explain other problems related to racial cliches and/or pigeonholing. Between this and the revolting Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Disney is seeming more and more bunkered down and 20th Century clueless about everything.

It’s not just the right-wing spear carriers who are slamming me, incorrectly, for allegedly advocating a Sen. Joseph McCarthy-esque response to Jon Voight‘s 7.28 Washington Times op-ed piece trashing Barack Obama. A liberal friend has taken me to task for this also. Obviously the McCarthy thing has gotten some traction, so let’s review the basics and examine what I actually said and meant.

The paragraph that led to the freak-out read as follows: “[Voight is] obviously entitled to say and write whatever he wants. But it’s only natural that industry-based Obama supporters will henceforth regard him askance. Honestly? If I were a producer and I had to make a casting decision about hiring Voight or some older actor who hadn’t pissed me off with an idiotic Washington Times op-ed piece, I might very well say to myself, ‘Voight? Let him eat cake.'”
I was just being honest about how I might theoretically react if I was in a position to hire or not hire Voight — big deal. That’s several football fields away from suggesting or even implying that producers should band together and deny employment to Voight because he wrote an idiotic op-ed piece. I hope it’s not a shock to anyone that people tend to hire according to whims and hunches, likes and dislikes, alliances and contretemps. Producers hire or don’t hire people all the time because an actor is liked or disliked, because a friend thinks he’s an asshole or a good guy, because the actor and the producer go to the same fitness club or their kids know each other, etc.
I was just indulging in a feeling that I might have — a momentary “fuck Jon Voight” impulse that I might feel or give voice to — if I were a producer. Admit it — it feels good to stick it to people you don’t like or strongly disagree with. (Again, I urge everyone to read Voight’s op-ed article — it’s certifiable.) As I said to an HE reader on the same page, “I didn’t say I had a shit list, or that I believe in the idea of one. I just said it feels good to think of shit-listing certain people. As a fun fantasy. Not that I think for a second that anyone would give a damn.”
I also said that “my own view is that you always work with the best people you can, regardless of political affiliation. Stanley Kubrick was absolutely correct to hire Adolf Menjou as the cynical French general in Paths of Glory, despite Menjou’s reprehensible right-wing views that included supporting the blacklist. Because Menjou was superb in the part. He wasn’t just giving a performance as that guy — he seemed to “be” him.
I also said “good for Cecil B. DeMille, that awful, sanctimonious, two-faced Bible-thumping vulgarian, for giving Edward G. Robinson a job on The Ten Commandments. Seriously — that was a good and compassionate thing he did, even if he was a prick and a bully at heart.”
It should always be about the work and the potential of this or that artist to be extra-sublime in the service of a movie, and not some political bullshit. At the same time we’re all human and prey to certain vengeance impulses from time to time. My error was in admitting such impulses exist within me. But they exist within all of us.
All the right-wingers who wrote me this morning calling me “a left-wing faggot” and whatnot can blow me.

I’ve “known” (i.e., been phone-chatting with) director Rob Cohen since the early ’90s, and have always found him bright, affable, witty, open. He’s a Harvard University grad and a very good gabber. I remember what a terrific job he did seven years ago on The Fast and The Furious, and how he recaptured that old Sam Arkoff-ian, American International Pictures B-movie vibe, and particularly how he fought to end it on a note of justice rather than legality.

But everything Coen has done since has been (and it pains me to say this) either cheesy or bloated or forced or otherwise problematic. And now comes his latest, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, which, to go by a couple of friends who’ve seen it and particularly by the word of Variety critic Todd McCarthy, looks like a piece of shit. T
The cretins, I’m sure, will pay to see the new Mummy movie in droves anyway. It is immaterial to me and mine whether financial profit ensues. If you haven’t made a movie with genuine spirit and spunk and a semblance of originality, you’ve dishonored the movie gods and deserve to be punished.
Here‘s a January ’07 assessment about how and why Cohen got the Mummy job some eighteen months ago. It’s a tough world out there with the once-respectable Universal churning one groaner after another in recent months and loathsome hacks like Stephen Sommers always ready and eager to soil and pollute. I’m sorry things are like this. I feel badly for everyone, truly. I would rather feel love than vent hate.
Here‘s an excerpt from an interview piece I ran about Cohen and The Fast and the Furious back in ’01, when I was writing for Reel.com:
“One of things I liked best about TFatF is its ending. It feels earned, justified, ‘right.’ In my book, a good ending is at least 50% of the game. I won’t spoil Cohen’s finale, but it involves a cop letting a criminal slide because friendship and mutual respect have developed between them over the course of the film.

“The last two lines before the film goes to credits are ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ and ‘I owed you a ten-second car.’ As endings go, it’s damn near perfect. I was somewhere between 75% and 80% positive on the film before it happened. Afterwards, I was totally sold.
“Cohen says, ‘There was a lot of nervousness from Universal execs about [the ending], and I had to fight for it. One thing I said is that the honor among these characters is what’s going to work on a heart level. There’s a difference between legality and justice…and we opted for justice. We went out on a note of honor.”
“The fact that it ends without the bad guy getting cuffed or killed is a certifiable plus for the sheer fact of its unusualness. ‘Some of the best movies end with a delicious ambiguity,’ Cohen explains. ‘Ending it this way was the perfect thing…it was like cutting a diamond.
“I knew what I was doing [with this film],” says Cohen. “I was after a B-movie with style and heart about a world and a subculture that is true to the world and not some rainbow-coalition Gap ad. My greatest hope was that a multi-ethnic audience would show up…and that’s what happened last weekend. I was happier that this happened, more than the $40 million…but I’ve gotta tell you, this is one fucking happy day.”
See what I mean? Cohen is no dummy. He gets it and then some. He understands that movies are nothing without the internals. Then why has the poor guy been out of the groove since ’01, or at least not found one as good or satisfying? It’sd puzzling.
The IMDB says that Cohen’s next film, which he’ll direct and produce, may be King of the Nudies, a dramedy based on the life of Russ Meyer. That sounds like a good ‘un. Here’s hoping.