Gold Derby’s Tom O’Neill, writing on the L.A.Times-owned site “The Envelope,” is projecting Peter Jackson’s King Kong as a credible Oscar nominee for Best Picture because director-writer Peter Jackson has taken three hours to “flesh out the love story between Naomi Watts and Adrien Brody” and “expand the psychological complexity of the movie’s lead characters, thus giving them more substance, while also fleshing out the plot so it can better explore the theme of commercial man exploiting innocent beast.” Uh-huh…and the 100-minute 1933 original didn’t address this theme sufficiently?

It’s not just me any more. New York Press critic Armond White has stood up and strongly praised Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, which recently came out on a Fox Home Video DVD. Lifeboat shows Hitchcock using “suspense tactics to reveal spiritual and philosophical mystery, [and] thus achieves profundity akin to The Birds. Hitchcock’s famous toying with psychological dread [in this film] has a complexity that also speaks to the present political moment. Contemporary critics feel no relation to John Steinbeck’s story, to judge by the DVD’s recent reviews; they simply dismiss it as WWII sentimentality. [But] Lifeboat deals with moral and sexual compulsion no less effectively than Vertigo. Hitchcock looks deeply into the circumstances of human crisis and creates in your mind (before your eyes) the essence of their terror, passion, vitality and horror. The reason Godard called Hitchcock ‘the greatest poet among us’ was to point out this gift for imagining the depth of human experience in the most deceptively simple, ‘popular’ ways. Between silent Griffith and Spielberg/DePalma, Hitchcock stands as the finest exemplar of genre filmmaking. But actually, his best films transcend genre and become strangely poetic visions”.

An interesting coincidence that the three biggest take-down movies of the holiday season — The Producers, King Kong and Munich — are all Universal releases. Did I just say that? I just know that prior to every holiday season a journo consensus forms about which of the big hoo-hahs are cruisin’ for a bruisin’ in the biggest, most self-aggrandizing way…movies coming in with such high expectations that’s probably a good idea to smack them down on general principle. I don’t want to hate anything or anyone, but if I had to predict which of the Big Three will give forward-thinking moviegoers the most difficulty, I would have to presume The Producers, closely followed by King Kong. I’ll be surprised if Munich is a problem on its own terms, but the teaser trailer (see item below) suggest that expectations are way overblown.

Has the big emotional fight scene between Anthony Rapp’s Mark and Adam Pascal’s Roger, one of the big emotional highlights of the Rent stage show, been cut from the Chris Columbus film? Rent has begun screening and there are issues…people having trouble with this and that…the staging of certain numbers, the infamous Columbus sugar-touch. Wait, there are good things. Rosario Dawson handles the singing and dancing pretty well. Pascal holds his own. Some of it works. Is it commonly known that Sarah Silverman has a brief, comedic, non-singing role? She told me so yesterday during our Boston interview. Her character is called Alexi Bright.

Saturday morning and the Munich trailer…er, teaser…is up. No surprises, no oddities…precisely the focus and tone anyone who’s been following this project might expect. Impressions can be misleading, but the teaser is telling us that Munich will totally adhere to the mode of a typical hard-wired procedural about some Israelis agents killing Palestinians and then feeling guilty about it. A hard-wired procedural directed by a relentlessly praised, obeisance-before-power, affluent-bubble-dwelling, 58 year-old director named Steven Spielberg. A teaser is obviously its own thing, and usually bears a catch-as-catch-can relationship to the film it’s selling…at best. But even with this acknowledgment, I’m starting to feel what this film (probably) is…I can feel the radio-antennae vibrations from the raised hairs on the back of my neck. The fact that the teaser starts off front-and-center with clips from Jim McKay’s “Wide World of Sports” coverage of the Munich tragedy speaks volumes about the apparent sensibility behind the film. (McKay’s Munich coverage is legendary, and therefore the most generic, least-imaginative, what-else-is-new? way to pass along what happened there.) I’m telling you…I’m telling Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea….that while Munich may turn out to be good or thrilling or rich in morality, the whole “wait for Munich….this is the big one…Oscar, Oscar!” drumbeat is based on little more than a generic kneejerk Spielberg kowtow. (There is also, to some extent, the Jewish-entertainment- journalists-who-want-to-see-Israel-kick-ass factor.) Watch the teaser and explain to me how it makes Munich look even a little bit challenging or startling..a bringer-of-the-next-thing aesthetic. It looks like a guilty license-to-kill so-whatter. A decent man with a family (Eric Bana in a ’70s haircut with sideburns) accepts the charge of Israel’s Mossad (his “M” is played by Geoffrey Rush) to lead a team of four (including a guy played by Daniel “007” Craig) to assassinate the Palestinian perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre of Israeli athletes. Ohhh, we have to do this for justice’s sake but I feel a little bit bad. Ohhh, mistakes are being made and innocent people are being killed along with the terrorists. Ohhh no…was that a little girl’s voice? Ohhh, I hope my daughter still loves me after the mission is accomplished. Am I a good man or a bad man? Honey, did you leave some pasta in the refrigerator that I can put into the microwave when I come home at 3:30 ayem? Ohhh, what a holiday muddle.

Endeavor agent John Lesher has taken the Paramount Classics job..the one that Ruth Vitale and David Dinerstein shared all those years. Whenever a hip, priveleged, high-strung white person leaves a job, he/she is always replaced by another hip, priveleged, high-strung white person…which is why I rarely report about Hollywood hires. That said, it’s always been said of Lesher (and I’ve always liked the “idea” of Lesher because of this) that he doesn’t think or act like a typical suit. He has the personality of a frazzled director, a struggling screenwriter…he’s very much like the guys (Alejandro Gonzales Innaritu, etc.) he used to represent at Endeavor. So in that sense he’s cool…or so I’ve always heard. Is this “real” or some bullshit pose? If anyone has any first-hand observations…

Boston bus travel is going to get in the way of timely filings for the next few hours. I’l throw up what I can later today…

The failure of Jarhead to stir any primal chords about anything …to make anyone feel anything about what happened 14 years ago in Kuwait, or sound any echoes about what’s going on in Iraq today…I think this absence of content is going to build respect for a film that dealt very precisely with young soldiers coping with an often boring war situation in a very real way. I’m speaking of Michael Tucker’s Gunner Palace, a credible contender for a Best Feature Documentary Oscar. It isn’t easy to go out and film an unpopular war, and the conflict in Iraq is something that’s happening right now…even though it’s a war that few people want to pay attention to. The funny thing about Jarhead is that it appears to wrap itself in “clever” postmodernism. Everybody is writing about the grunts watching the Vietnamese-village-attack scene in Apocalypse Now and the similarites to Full Metal Jacket. Like…surprise!…soldiers watch war movies, look at porn and masturbate. All of this stuff is part of Gunner Palace — Kubrick, Apocalypse and porn…but because Gunner Palace‘s soldiers are real, it’s being absorbed in a diffferent context.

Steven Spielberg is rushing to get Munich finished in due time …well, of course…yeah. John Williams is only just starting to get his musical score into shape, but pic will be done and screenable by early December. It has to be. Universal will be putting the Israeli Mossad eye-for-an-eye revenge drama in theatres on 12.23. Eric Bana, Daniel Craig and Geoffrey Rush costar.

I can feel and hear the Oscar air hissing out of the Jarhead balloon….sssssssssssssss. I’m not just talking about my own opinion of Sam Mendes’ Gulf War non-drama — it’s being written off across the board. It was noted last Friday (10.28) in a lead-in to a blog-riff by Steve Pond on the L.A. Times Oscar site “The Envelope”, that Jarhead may be the first Oscar casualty of the season. “Reviews are starting to come in and so far it’s not looking good,” wrote Pond. “While Jarhead was assumed to be a strong contender as well, initial reviews in both the Hollywood trade papers were lukewarm enough to cast serious doubts on the movie’s Oscar chances.” There are admirers, granted (Maxim‘s Pete Hammond and someone else…Joel Siegel?…are calling it the Cat’s Meow), but the tide is clearly running against Jarhead at this stage.

I ran my enthusiastic review of Woody Allen’s Match Point (DreamWorks, 12.25) from the Cannes Film Festival five and half months ago. I opined, in part, that it’s Allen’s “darkest and strongest film — certainly his most moralistically bitter and ironic — since 1989’s Crimes and Misdemeanors….somewhat stiff and artificial here and there, and at the same time scalpel-like in its social observations, this mixed-bag drama deals the same kind of cards and has its footing in more or less the same philosophical realm as Crimes and Misdemeanors, and it has a finale that absolutely kills.” It’s not opening until Christmas Day (seven weeks hence) but the appearance of Peter Biskind’s Allen profile in the current Vanity Fair (and a piece about Biskind’s article in the 10.31 USA Today) means it’s now in active psychological play with forward-thinking entertainment journos. The general impression, however, is that DreamWorks isn’t interested in screening it…yet. Maybe they don’t want too much buzz out there about Match Point being the latest Woody. The consensus among Hollywood marketers seems to be (judging by the trailers and one-sheets for Anything Else and Melinda and Melinda) that a key strategy in selling a Woody Allen film is to play down the fact that it’s a Woody Allen film.

Is this definite? Peter Jackson has told Empire magazine that King Kong’s snaggle tooth hasn’t been eliminated but reduced in size. (Recent reports/indications had suggested the dreaded s.t. had been eliminated altogether…not!) And that the basic look of Kong is that of a big grandpa ape with craggy features and silver hairs sprouting all over…the apparent equivalent of a 65 or 70 year-old. In other words, given Kong’s libidinal longings for Naomi Watts’ Ann Darrow, Jackson basically sees him as a dirty old ape. Other Empire divulgings: (a) As of last Thursday, Jackson was putting finishing touches on the editing, sound mix and music; (b) The three-hour length is due to an emphasis on “character, especially the relationship between Ann and Kong on the island” (80 extra minutes of character?); (c) Jackson has always regarded Kong as “a wild animal [and] not a friendly gorilla,” wanting to avoid any kind of cutesy-poo Mighty Joe Young-type moves that might soften or humanize the beast; (d) Jackson changed Kong after the teaser trailer came out, “making him older and craggier, reducing his snaggle tooth in size and making his face narrower”; (e) One of the most difficult scenes was the Kong vs. three T-Rex’s scene “which ended up about 300 shots long, or about nine minutes…it has taken us the entire duration of the project to do…the fight sequence ended up very elaborate, involving Kong and the dinosaurs swinging like a pendulum over the chasm, entangled in these vines, and Ann is also entangled and Kong is trying to protect her…it all ends up in a swamp”; (f)
the final Empire State Building sequence was also difficult “psy- chologically because it is such an iconic sequence”; (g) replacing Howard Shore was “a horrible thing” but the composter simply “didn’t click”; and (g) Jackson’s team “built a complete 1930s version of New York City, using aerial photos and archive material, in order to have as much freedom to move around as possible.”