wired

Yesterday’s collapsing-values, fall-of-the- Roman-empire statement came from former DreamWorks marketing ace Terry Press: “Everybody knows that culturally, kids rule the roost. The numbers for kids and the age they adopt things like iPods (and) cell phones…all show that kids are growing up faster. If you make records or something you want consumed in the culture, you have to resonate with kids.” She’s right, of course, but an entertainment culture that caters first and foremost to toddlers, tweeners and young teens has opted for dilution and marginalization and essentially removed itself from the hallowed circle. This is a tired old gripe. I know I need to grow up and embrace the infantilization process. Please forgive the foot-dragging.

Las Vegas used to be the last working refuge of performing scoundrels. It doesn’t seem as tainted these days, in part because the aesthetic of the culture has sunk down to Vegas’s level over the past 15 to 20 years, but the possibility of Michael Jackson committing to a long-term performing gig as a way of launching a possible comeback reiterates what Vegas and its audience are basically about.

No arguments with the choices of the Nerve.com team for the Most Important (i.e., brazen, influential, talk-stirring) Nude Scenes of all time, but most of us recognize that nude scenes are about “importance” second and erotic intrigues and arousals first. The good ones are, at least. And in this sense Ingmar Bergman‘s The Silence has almost no parallel. Sven Nykvist‘s black-and-white photography of the sultry, vaguely self-disgusted Gunnel Lindblom in various states of undress in that downtown hotel room (and bathroom) is the stuff that lifelong dreams are made of.

The just-posted trailer for Ocean’s 13, rated PG-13 for “brief sensuality.” And George Clooney has written directly to Radar and denied having anything to do, even indirectly, with getting those Huckabees clips circulated, and offers “a million bucks to anyone who can prove otherwise.”

I missed this Defamer echo (posted yesterday) about that disgruntled making-of-Transformers poem. My fault for going to a play yesterday afternoon (Liev Schreiber in Talk Radio) instead of staying at my desk at Starbucks on Lex and 85th.

Indiewire columnist Anthony Kaufman recently passed along a two-pronged statement from producer Ted Hope about The Hawk Is Dying, the somewhat morose Paul Giamatti movie that opens at Manhattan’s Cinema Village tomorrow (on 3.30). Hope said Hawk is now in better shape than when it played to lousy reviews at Sundance 2006, and that he’s so proud of it that “if you go and aren’t truly glad you went, I will personally refund your money…just send me your ticket stub at This is That in New York…I promise.”

Michael Pitt, Paul Giamatti

I saw the Sundance version of Hawk, and it’s nothing close to the kind of film that might prompt anyone to demand a refund. What it is, or was when I saw it, is a movie that lulls you into a nice meditative calm, and then (if you’re running on less than five hours sleep the night before) slumber. I started thinking about catching a snooze very soon after this film began, and the impulse was at least partly about content. It didn’t seem a huge concern — I’ve become disciplined enough at sleep- ing during festival films that I can make myself wake up every ten minutes just to keep up with the plot.

The Hawk is Dying is basically about delusional losers putzing around. It’s not an embarassment, and I don’t see it hurting Giamatti’s career. We all have to work and pay the bills, and sometimes we work with friends for the wrong reasons, and moviegoers understand this, I think.

Set in the south, Hawk is about an owner of an auto upholstery shop named George (GIamatti) who lives with his grotesquely fat sister and her mentally challenged son Fred (Michael Pitt). George is into training falcons, and the footage of him capturing and training a red-tailed falcon is…uhm, educational. And intended as a metaphor about finding vigor and passion and overcoming the mundane stuff.

But any movie that makes a Giamatti performance seem dull or running on empty is definitely doing something wrong, and Pitt really needs to play an average guy soon. Someone who smiles and wears clean clothes and brushes his teeth and talks in complete sentences. Pitt always plays barely articulate zone cases, and I’m starting to wonder if he can do anything else. And if you add a grotesquely fat character of either gender (even in an unobtrusive supporting role) you’ve got an oh-for-three situation.

“The film truly deserves to be seen on the big screen,” says the indefatigable Hope. “We are woefully close to a time when such films will only be available for download, but this, like many others, truly deserves to be seen with light passing through glorious celluloid. I know you know how crucial the early days of a film release are, so please if you don’t have plans for the end of the month, do all you can to get to Cinema Village (or wherever it is playing near you).

“It captures a tour de force performance by Paul Giamatti, raw and incredibly human. [Director Julian Goldberger’s expressionistic style is so well suited to Harry Crews’ tale (his first novel to make it to the screen), both are reinvented in the process. Ten years ago, this would be a film celebrated by the entire industry, but now that indie means something synonymous with the ‘cinema of quality’ that the French New Wave rebelled against so long ago, it gets marginalized precisely because of the wonderful risks it takes — the same very risks that made me and the great team that worked on it want to collaborate with Julian in the first place.

“I do love the phrase (perhaps slightly ironically) ‘vote with your dollars’, but I do think a ticket here is a vote against a steady diet of Norbits and Wild Hogs,” Hope adds. “I truly struggle every day on how we can make sure there is a business that can work that embraces challenging films, films that dare to aim towards art, that involve risk as part of their design. And of course, the key part is all of us buying tickets.”

Read more

Stuck all day in JFK-to-LAX jet, and the first thing that kicks in back in the office is M.C. Rove. It’s almost breathtaking. Here’s another version with some awful lead-up patter.

The people who run Soho House, a private club in the West Village, see themselves as the keepers of an elite but very delicate environment that can be harmed and/or diluted by photos of the club’s interior. I posted an award-level shot of the dining room in this space on Wednesday afternoon, and I was asked by Soho House management this morning to take it down. This episode plus that throughly-unto-itself Soho House vibe I described the other day (i.e., Londoners trying to keep the rude energy of New York outside while maintaining their idea of a certain clubby corporate serenity within) speaks for itself. I am at peace with never going there again. I think I could live with that very nicely.

Mia Farrow and her son Ronan, in their capacity as UNICEF Goodwill Ambassadors, are accusing Steven Spielberg of indirectly aiding and abetting the genocide in Darfur by cuddling up to Beijing government in his upcoming capacity as a 2008 Olympics visual pageant organizer.

“Is Mr. Spielberg, who in 1994 founded the Shoah Foundation to record the testimony of survivors of the Holocaust, aware that China is bankrolling Darfur’s genocide?,” Farrow wrote in today’s Wall Street Journal. “Does Mr. Spielberg really want to go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games? Do the various television sponsors around the world want to share in that shame?

“Because they will. Unless, of course, all of them add their singularly well-positioned voices to the growing calls for Chinese action to end the slaughter in Darfur.”

The news that Dreamgirls Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson has been cast as Forest Whitaker‘s daughter in Winged Creatures, which Hollywood Wiretap’s Pete Hammond reported exclusively earlier today, is supposed to quicken our pulses. I’m stilll trying to understand why this film is called Winged Creatures. (Sorry, but I naturally flashed back to Larry Cohen‘s Q — a film about the winged serpent called Quetzlcoatl.)

Winged Creatures is about a group of disparate people who are commonly affected by a “tragic shooting” in a diner. Question: has there ever been such a thing as a benevolent, easy-going, positive-minded or good-time shooting? Aren’t all shootings, including the shootings of animals, inherently tragic?

Other Winged costars are Jackie Earl Haley (playing another abused/abusive, fucked-up guy), Guy Pearce, Kate Beckinsale, Dakota Fanning, Embeth Daviditz and Josh Hutcherson. The director is Rowan Woods (the somewhat dull Little Fish); the producer is Robert Salerno (Babel).

“Sources” — i.e., more than one person — have told Radar‘s Jeff Bercovici that George Clooney, who got into some kind of hostile shoving or fisticuffs with David O. Russell during the filming of Three Kings, was somehow involved in circulating those Russell vs. Lily Tomlin I Heart Huckabee video clips that got around a week or so ago.

Stan Rosenfield, Clooney’s p.r. guy, told Bercovici that it’s a bullshit rumor, but the Radar guy is speculating — emphasis on the “s” word — that a sound mixer named Edward Tise (who worked on Three Kings, Good Night and Good Luck and I Heart Huckabees) may have overly sent the video around at Clooney’s behest. Question: why did the person who sent the videos around wait until just recently to make his/her move, when the videos were making the rounds of the talent agencies last fall?)