wired

An arrangement was made in late November or thereabouts by an Oakland school teacher to have me come up for a discussion lecture thing in one of her classes during the first or second week in January. She left a message a week or two ago but I lost the number and I’ve forgotten her name…so now what?

Ever since hearing about Paul Greengrass’s Flight 93 (Universal), which is either wrapped or close-to-wrapping with an opening date set for 4.28.06, I’ve become more and more convinced that this is the 9/11 movie that will pack the strongest punch and be the best of all of them (including Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center and those TV-movie projects). Pic is based on the hijacking of United Airlines flight #93 on 9.11.01, which led to some kind of confrontation between terrorists and passengers (as imagined in Neil Young’s “Let’s Roll”). This resulted in the plane crashing into a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. Every passenger on the plane became instant hamburger, but the terrorists were prevented from crashing the plane into God knows what Wash- ington, D.C. landmark and killing who knows how many others. I really love that it’s being shot in real time (i.e., the actual length of the flight from the time of initial boarding to the crash). If you’ve seen Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday, you know what I’m saying. This New York Times piece by Heather Timmons in England lays it all down.

Here’s another Oscar-hosting idea. What offbeat comic team has performed the most consistently funny and inventive bits on previous Oscar telecasts and generally been the most out-there and in-front-of-the-crowd? Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson. Now let’s go one better…make the Oscars into a three-way gig between Stiller, Wilson and Wilson’s Wedding Crashers partner Vince Vaughn. Are you kidding me? These guys would kill, and again they’d get the younger viewers. Think of it…The Wedding Crashers crash the Oscars! Think of the level of the writing! Think of the nerve element!

So who’s gonna host the Oscars? No Chris, no Billy…Steve Martin has passed. (Hosting the Oscars would be a great way for Martin to recover from the debacle of The Pink Panther and Shopgirl and people thinking there must something wrong with him for having done those Cheaper by the Dozen movies.) Nathan Lane would be great, but he has a scheduling problem since he’s in the completely-sold-out The Odd Couple on Broadway until April, and to do the Oscars he’d have to bag a lot of performances (at least a week’s worth) because he’d want to come out to L.A. to rehearse, so…ready for my suggestions?

Someone who’d be great hosting the Oscars? Seriously great? In all serious-ity? Look to The Aristocrats. Or rather, look to the Zeus of The Aristocrats…the Big Man…the 4’11” Killer in the Baby-Blue Tuxedo…the potty-mouthed tornado…The Man They Could Not Hang…look to none other than the great Gilbert Gottfried. That would be such an insane choice…the world would be totally on its ass over the Oscars hiring a truly criminal mind…totally side- ways….or, as a fallback, book three Aristocrats as a triple-threat tag team — Gottfried, Sarah Silverman and George Carlin. Or how about a George-and-Gracie thing…a smart-funny man and a smart-funny woman who go out together in real life and would draw the same under-30s Chris Rock did. And I mean, of course, Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman.

Oh, yeah…I might as well say “Happy New Year” to everyone. A lot of people said this to me last night, and I said it right back. And as far as it went, I meant it.

Manhattan’s Film Forum flim-flammed in claiming that their just concluded projection of Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder in the original double-system NaturalVision form (i.e., two projec- tors synchronized to give maximum brightness, color and depth) would look better than “an inferior single- projector process” that was used in the early 1980s. Hell, I saw Dial M projected at the Eighth Street Playhouse in ’81 or thereabouts, and it looked a little bit better then than it did at the Film Forum on New Year’s Eve. All during last night’s showing two thoughts kept repeating: (a) the 3-D is cool but the colors are murky and brownish, and (b) the Warner Home Video DVD flat version looks much better, 3-D or no 3-D.

Another amusing New York Times piece, this one by Charles McGrath, saying that talking back to the screen is an allowable people’s-movement thing if you happen to be watching really lousy films like Aeon Flux or really gruesome bloody ones like Wolf Creek. The best talk-back action I ever had in my life was during a viewing of Irwin Allen’s The Swarm at the Quad Cinema on West 13th in 1978. I didn’t say much myself, but the hoots and catcalls and groans got louder and louder as the film went on. The Swarm is a classic stinker. Michael Caine, who is awful in the lead role, once described it as “a bee movie.”

Here’s an amusing New York Times piece by Peter Edidin about typographers and graphic designers complaining about period movies (like George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck) using the wrong typeface for signs and such. It mentions a similar obsession that hairdressers probably have about the wrong styles used. I used to complain about movies using the wrong (or slightly fudged) period haircuts, but I stopped thinking about it. Jack Black and Adrien Brody’s early 1930s haircuts in King Kong are way too hairy. Haircuts were quite short and tidy back then, but Black and Brody are wearing hair styles that would have been considered a little bit too long in the early 60s. Five’ll get you ten Black, Brody and director Peter Jackson figured that too-short early 1930s hair would make them look dorky, so they all said, “Screw it.”

I don’t like the trailer for The DaVinci Code at all. Does anyone? Ron Howard’s thriller (due 5.16.06 from Columbia) might be a clas- sic, but the trailer makes it seem like shameless formulaic dreck. That shot of an alarmed Tom Hanks and Audrey Tatou running together and holding hands…is there a more detestable action- thriller cliche in the book? I still say Hanks looks too old and too big for Tatou — she’s this little French Tinkerbell and he’s this tall, hulking guy with crow’s feet. And that naked bald guy lying dead on the floor of the Louvre, a victim of a sacrifical killing… c’mon! They’re obviously aiming at devout Christians who are still invested in the legend of Yeshua’s divine avoidance of female companionship, blah, blah. I don’t live on that planet. I don’t live in that solar system…proudly.

I’m now using Dada Mail to send out the column, and some who’ve asked to be unsubscribed are going to have to tell me again… sorry. I couldn’t figure how to cherry-pick their names and remove them.

November and early-December tracking figures indicated The Family Stone wouldn’t do terribly well, but that hasn’t been the case. The campaign was clumsy but the word-of-mouth saved it. The Thomas Bezucha-Michael London film will be up to $45 million (it did $2.747 yesterday, up 16%) by weekend’s end and will probably end up with $60 million at the end of the run. The only unfortunate factor is that Stone distrib 20th Century Fox is opening Grandma’s Boy on Friday, 1.6, which will likely result in Stone losing 500 or so theatres. Fox should have opened it in November, as originally planned. They could have made $15 or $20 million more if they had.