Two YouTube files containing refreshers on that original 20/20 Chris Gardner profile that led to the making of The Pursuit of Happyness — part #1 and part #2.

With the exception of his performances in Enemy of the State and Ali, I’ve been fairly averse to Will Smith for years. He’s a calculating performer who always leans on his shtick and charm. Too smooth, too ready with a line and a smile. Some critics feel Smith has to pay for past sins (The Wild Wild West and chomping on that cigar and saying “now that’s what I call a close encounter!” in Independence Day ) and that he needs to just be still — just settle into himself and stop looking for love.

So when I began hearing about his being a presumed Best Actor nominee in Gabriele Muccino‘s The Pursuit of Happyness (Columbia, 12.15), I wasn’t buyin’ it. Then a week or two ago I watched the trailer and damn if he doesn’t win you right over, especially playing a father and a real-life figure with the older-guy makeup and the sideburns and all.
Now comes word from a guy who’s seen the film that Smith is restrained and focused all through it (the guy actually used the word “stoical”), and that the story — how businessman Chris Gardner went from homelessness and sleeping in bathrooms with his young son to great strength and wealth — holds back on the emotion until the final ten minutes. And at this point, the guy says, he succumbed. He choked up.
Smith is “a guaranteed lock for Best Actor,” the guy says. “It’s between him and Peter O’Toole.”
Between this guy and another guy, the two-man consensus is that Forrest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland) peaked too early, Derek Luke (Catch a Fire) is good but may not deliver enough voltage to warrant a nomination, and that people are now snickering at Leonardo DiCaprio‘s South African accent in Blood Diamond so that one’s up in the air too. Fuck that, I said. It’s enough that DiCaprio kills in The Departed.

If the general critical barometer means anything, Flags of Our Fathers — despite the flaws, despite grousing from a few “name” critics, despite a director I know telling me that people who’ve seen it have been going “naah” — is going to wind up as a Best Picture Oscar nominee. The Academy doesn’t exactly look to film critics for guidance, but the Clint legend and Clint kowtowing are very powerful forces in this town, and critical huzzahs backing this up are always part of the dynamic.

The Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic averages for Flags of Our Fathers are about the same — 75% and 78% positive, respectively. One out of every four critics going “sorry, but not this time” doesn’t exactly constitute a mixed response, but it’s not anyone’s idea of a thundering critical consensus either. It basically means Flags of Our Fathers is no Million Dollar Baby.
One indicator is that within some the allegedly positive reviews, you’ll find some half-hearted statements. “The flaws in Flags of Our Fathers are at least partly attributable to Eastwood’s attempts to do too much,” wrote red-tomato raver Stephanie Zacharek of Salon. John Venabale of Supercalafragalistic.com, another supposed raver,says “it’s good, great in spurts, but overall leaves one longing for a story better suited for film.” L.A. Daily News critic Bob Strauss says that “making a movie like [Flags] is totally honorable, even pretty heroic. I just wish that it had moved me more.” Joshua Tyler of Cinemablend says Eastwood’s film “raises interesting questions about heroism and the uses of propaganda, but it left me hungering for more about the battle.”

Fact is, most of the unqualified raves are from the top-dog elite — Dargis, Turan, McCarthy, Puig, Roeper, Rea, Matthews — and I have a feeling that some of these critics are doing a subtle little dance. I’m not saying they’re shading or modifying their true opinions, but I know that Clint has a fraternity of film critic fans who are part of the faith and “on the boat” — and if you know anything about human nature you know we all like being on the boat rather than off it. I also know that almost every over-40 critic worships the Eastwood career metaphor (i.e., the older you get the better you get), and that admiration for an artist’s general body of work always slips into this or that particular review.

The Venus trailer…not sure when it went up and who cares in the great scheme, but I hadn’t clicked on it before tonight.

The new Dreamgirls trailer is good stuff, but it doesn’t deliver the same pizazz I’ve gotten out of those 20-minute reels shown at those special press presentations — one several weeks ago at the Pacific Design Center, and an earlier one at the Cannes Film Festival last May. The unspoken fear is that the original Dreamgirls stage musical in the early ’80s had a weak story (a friend who saw it way back when says this was the main complaint from the New York theatre critics), and that if Bill Condon‘s feature runs into any kind of flak, it’ll be from this.

In honor of today’s limited opening of Sofia Coppola‘s Marie- Antoinette, a link to my 5.24.06 Cannes Film Festival review.

City Beat’s Andy Klein has suggested that Clint Eastwood‘s Flags of Our Fathers is “The Americanization of Emily without jokes.” That sounds like a smart-ass thing to say but it’s not. Okay, it is somewhat, but not really. I happen to love and respect the latter film, written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Arthur Hiller, and I feel the analogy is valid, although obviously only in the broad strokes.

Both films are essentially about the fraudulence that goes into selling war to the public, and how the lies and the bullshit role-playing weigh upon the souls of U.S. military men who are ordered by higher-ups to play the role of p.r. spokes- persons.
And both are about the power of a single combat photo to advance and strengthen the agenda of the U.S. military, and about how this photo, when published in just every newspaper and magazine in America, amounts to a visual distillation of the fakery involved, and how the men in these photos — a London-based Naval Lieu- tenant played by James Garner in Emily, and two Marines and a sailor played by Adam Beach, Jesse Bradford and Ryan Phillippe in Flags — are repulsed by the charade, even though all but one decide in the end to swallow this feeling and move on.
The hard fact is that The Americanization of Emily is more succinct that Flags of Our Fathers in making these points. It is also spunkier and more persuasive. I respect Flags — Eastwood has made a war film that says something solemn and truthful about the men who are forced or persuaded to fight our nation’s enemies — but I like Emily more.

Very different films, separated in almost every stylistic way imaginable…but pushing very similar talking points
Come to think of it, I might have felt more supportive of Flags if one of the three guys had been a cynical wiseacre like Garner’s Charley Madison and if he’d mouthed off all through the film’s war-bond tour with irreverent Chayefsky zingers about the guilt he was feeling and the absurdity of selling war as a noble activity, etc. At least it would add a little seasoning from time to time.

A London journalist friend tells me it was a bit of a touch-and-go thing about whether Oscar hopeful Peter O’Toole, 74, would attend tonight’s London Film Festival “Mayor of London” gala screening of Roger Michell‘s Venus, but word came down late yesterday that he’d be dropping by after all, although probably not for long.

It’s not touch and go, however, about whether O’Toole will attend the AFI Film Festival’s special screening on 11.7 or the 11.10 Los Angeles Venus junket — he’s flat-out not coming. These two no-shows on top of O’Toole being too sick to attend the Toronto Film Festival’s festivities for Venus last month (i.e., his doctor said no), and you can’t help but wonder and ask questions.
The answer, apparently, is that O’Toole’s doing okay — he works a lot (Stardust, One Night with The King, Romeo and Me, Lassie, Venus and a TV Casanova in just the last year and a half, and another film — La Fenice — in the wings) and apparently he just hates flying back and forth to Los Angeles and is going to concentrate his Oscar-promoting chores to a period between December-January.
The flying aversion has something to do with the fact that O’Toole fell and busted his hip on 12.26.05 during the shooting of Venus, which led to surgery and a three-week filming delay, and because it’s painful for a guy with that kind of recent history to sit on a nine-hour flight.
Being 74 years old doesn’t automatically mean a withered lifestyle and cutting back. I know about guys in their late 70s and 80s who play tennis and go out to dinner and ride bicycles and everything else. The great Norman Lloyd, whom I met last year when he was 90, was driving a Jaguar around town and playing doubles tennis at the time. On the other hand it’s no secret that heavy imbibing in the prime of one’s life will often lead to a withered condition or an early check-out when you’re older. It’s called paying the piper.

Clint Eastwood‘s Flags of Our Fathers will be the #1 film this weekend — 83 general, 43 definite interest, 14 first choice. Look for a decent opening ($20 million or so) but not a spectacular one. Chris Nolan‘s The Prestige, a turn-of-the-century duelling magician flick that doesn’t quite work all the way around the track, will be #2 with about $15 million, give or take. (Nolan-heads will be out in force, but regular-guy reactions will probably result in a sharp dropoff next weekend.)
20th Century Fox’s Flicka — 53, 23, 7 — is looking like it’ll do fair business with families. The odd thing is that it’s not a typical family entry, to judge by Todd McCarthy‘s review in Variety. No screening invitations have come this way from Fox (decisions are apparently made in advance whether you’re going to like something or not, and then you’re invited accordingly) but this appears to be another Lassie.
There was some mystification earlier this morning about how many theatres Marie-Antoinette is going to open in tomorrow (check back after lunch) but the numbers — 65, 28, 8 — suggest moderate levels of interest. Among the long throws, Stranger Than Fiction (Columbia, 11.10) is the only one with any real apparent strength.

Director Bill Condon locked the final edit of Dreamgirls last week and is now working on the sound mixing. The final critic-ready print won’t be ready until 11.10 at the earliest, so there won’t be any earlybird screenings before then. The first showing will probably happen on or about 11.14 or 11.15…just a guess. The Dreamamount release opens in N.Y. and L.A. on 12.15, and goes wide on 12.25.

MSNBC’s Dave White begins his monstrous-movie-moms piece, naturally, with Annette Bening‘s diseased hell-hag in Running With Scissors (Columbia, 10.20). Based, naturally, on someone real and still living — book author Augusten Burroughs‘ mom — Deirdre Burroughs’ neuroses are so extreme and curdled she seems to be suffering from a kind of leprosy of the soul. She’s too much by my standards, but excessiveness, clearly, seems to be the point. Gay guys will probably wet themselves over Bening’s performance the way they went ga-ga over Faye Dunaway’s in Mommie Dearest . They’re both gargoyles for the ages.

(l. to r.) Leopoldine Konstantin, Bergman, Rains

Because of my straight-guy affinity for personalities and performances of a more naturalistic leaning and partly because my maternal grandfather was German, my all-time bad mom trophy goes to Leopoldine Konstantin ‘s elfin Nazi housefrau in Notorious. (White mentions her but almost half-heartedly, lumping her together with Angela Lansbury ‘s mom in The Manchurian Candidate in the same graph.) Bad because she’s recognizably human, unlike Bening, and yet malevolent and willful and and always ready to pounce — a formidable spider.
That early-morning scene in the bedroom when Konstantin’s son Alex (Claude Rains) confesses that he’s just learned he’s married to an American agent (i.e., Ingrid Bergman) is her magic moment. The way she props herself up in her bed, takes a cigarette from a case, lights it…that look of scheming concentration. Alex mentions a colleague named Mathis who is “very sharp” and will spot what’s happening, and she answers, “Yes, he dislikes you. But his criticism of your talents wouldn’t go that far to imagine that you are married to an American agent. You are protected by the enormity of your stupidity. For a time.”