wired

MCN’s David Poland has ripped into Sam Raimi‘s Spider-Man 3 with a fervor that I haven’t picked up from one of his reviews since he thrashed Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle in ’03.

“There is so much incredibly expensive CG action in this film that many will get through it, not really dislike it, but have a vaguely displeased gut feeling,” Poland concludes. “I can’t really say it is a horrible movie. But it is quite a mess — a mess of good intentions gone terribly wrong.

“And it does, indeed, feel like the end of this franchise as we know it. Given the rote nature of this one, almost hidden by the flailing of attempted drama — flailing like a marlin on a 300 lb test line — it’s probably time to cash those checks and move along.”

I have to catch a jet back to Burbank…no more filing until the late afternoon.

“In the Electric Mist With the Confederate Dead,” a cult novel written by James Lee Burke, has been adapted into a screenplay and is now being directed by the great Bertrand Tavernier — his first English-language film since ‘Round Midnight — in Louisiana. The problem is that the movie is going to be called In The Electric Mist, which obviously doesn’t get it.

We all know that eight words don’t fit on a marquee but they should stick with the book title anyway because it sounds right. Chopping the title in half is a crude dumb-down procedure.

I’ve read the script, an atmospheric detective story about the hunt for a serial killer of women, and it’s very high quality. Tommy Lee Jones (who co-wrote the screenplay with Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski) is playing the lead role of Robicheaux, a small-town policeman and an ex-alcoholic Vietnam veteran doing the old Phillip Marlowe-Hercule Poirot routine. Peter Sarsgaard is playing an over-indulged Hollywood star who’s shooting a film in the area.

The San Francisco Film Festival gave a forum yesterday to theatre director, opera-creator and impresario Peter Sellars to deliver a “State of Cinema” address inside a large theatre at the Kabuki 8 plex. Sellars is a man who lives in his own mystical-energy field and within his own ecclesiastical realm, but who sees and shares everything from within it. It was a stirring, touching, soul-lifting thing to sit in the fourth row and just absorb every brilliant thought, whether you agreed with every last word or not.

Peter Sellars during yesterday afternoon’s speech at the Kabuki 8 — Sunday, 4.29.07, 4:35 pm

I recorded most of what he said, in two sessions. Here’s the second part. The sound is low and it would be best to listen with headphones, but this will give you an idea of what it was like.

What did Sellars say? That deliberately cruel and heartless things are inflicted upon the poor by the well-to-do, and that film is perhaps best considered as an agent of consciousness-raising and social change, and that art’s highest function is to prepare the public for what is possible, even if it may seem impossible at the time.

Sellars is professor of World Arts and Culture at U.C.L.A., where he teaches “Art as Social Action” and “Art as Moral Action.” Yesterday’s talk was an extension or expression of these themes.

At one point in discussing some institutional cruelty Sellars began to weep, and although I wasn’t feeling the moral outrage as acutely as he was I was moved by that fact that he was feeling it and then some — his emotionalism is one serious torch. Immense artistic accomplishments, worldwide respect, orange shirt, blue beads, spikey hair, Harvard education…the man is a trip.

Sellars talked a lot about the last year of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and what he was really consumed with as his life drew to a close, and that this was far more fascinating than the “frat-boy ” shenanigans that Milos Forman and Anthony Shaffer’s Amadeus depicted.

Again, here’s a 22-minute portion of what he said.

In yesterday’s item about an Academy Oscar-buzz survey that will soon be received by Academy members, I said that the questionaire will ask where Academy members get their Oscar-race information and to what degree…”from the trades or online sites like this one (or Hollywood Wiretap, The Envelope, Nikki Finke, Movie City News) or Patrick Goldstein‘s column or David Carr or what-have-you?”

It was just a dash-off thing, but I failed to mention Sasha Stone‘s Oscar Watch.com, which is perhaps the comprehensive and longest-running site about Oscar-race analysis. And boy, did I hear about this! I felt like a Navy pilot flying over North Vietnam and suddenly six telephone-pole-sized SAM’s were surging up from the ground.

Gee, I don’t know…is it possible that some kind of suppressed emotional blockage was a factor? Because she seems to — I want to be careful to use the best word — urinate on me and my writings every time she posts anything here? Example: I said I’d be running video reports from Cannes and possibly before, and she wrote “why does everyone feel the need to impose themselves on the general public?” Now, that’s a pissy, cranky-ass thing to say, and 90% of the time she’s coming from a similar place.

I truly respect and admire Sasha and her site, but I think it’s understandable why Oscarwatch didn’t immediately come to mind when I tapped that item out.

“I think we have a really hard time culturally with what happens to love after the first year,” says Away From Her director Sarah Polley in N.Y. Times piece by Katrina Onstad. “It is difficult, and it is painful, and it is a letdown. [But] that first year is so much less profound than what happens when you’re actually left with each other and yourself in an honest way. It was interesting to me to make a film about what love looked like after life had gotten in the way, and what remained.”

The ballad of the sad arthouse — i.e., the struggling and (for now) still-hanging-in-there Brattle Street theatre in Cambridge, as reported by the Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell.

Go the the N.Y. Post site and Reed Tucker‘s laundry-list piece about summer threequels — neutral attitude, no opinion of any kind, and focusing almost entirely on the horse-race aspect (which will make the most money?) and ignoring the certainty that the only tolerable ones will be The Bourne Ultimatum and Ocean’s Thirteen.

A letter has been sent out to Academy members telling them to expect a survey about their media-reading habits by way of the Oscar race. The survey won’t be sent from the Academy but from a publication that the letter doesn’t identify. A publicist friend who told me about this last night knows nothing concrete, but speculated that it’s probably from one of the trades, or possibly from the Los Angeles Times.

She said that the survey will ask where Academy members get their information and to what degree. How often do they read the trades or online sites like this one (or Hollywood Wiretap, The Envelope, Nikki Finke, Movie City News) or Patrick Goldstein‘s column or David Carr or what-have-you? As soon as I get hold of a copy of the survey I’ll scan it and post it here and HE readers can respond on their own.

“‘There has been much, much more demand from producers, distributors, directors — from people in every branch of filmmaking,’ a festvial staffer told Variety‘s Alison James a few days ago. ‘Everyone wants to come to Cannes this year.’ Journos, however, report a bigger struggle to get that all-important press badge this year. “They are being much more finicky about what publication you write for, how big its circulation is and how many articles you are intending to write,” a freelancer told James.