wired

James Mangold’s Walk the Line (20th Century Fox, 11.18) is thought to be primarily a one-man show — a Johnny Cash biopic with Joaquin Pheonix supposedly giving an ace performance as the famed country singer and…you know, delivering the same kind of panache that Jamie Foxx brought to his portrayal of Ray Charles in Ray. What the film really is, I’m hearing, is more of double-header love story groove about the relationship between Cash and wife June Carter (Reese Witherspoon). I hear that Pheonix and Witherspoon tear it up equally, that Witherspoon gives as good as she gets…and they both do their own singing. The film begins and ends with Cash’s 1968 Folsom Prison concert and then starts sifting through the Cash-Carter story spanning from the mid ’50s to the late ’60s. The film is going to the Toronto Film Festival, perhaps to Telluride (or perhaps not), and definitely not to Venice. Telluride is pretty much the place to show a quality film to the media elite and start the ball rolling, so that sounds like the opening ticket…but one never knows how these things will shake down. The trailer tells me the film is on the same level as Ray and Coal Miner’s Daughter. It conveys the idea right away it’s going to be dramatically rich and visually refined.

It’s looking like Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion, based on a script by Garrison Keillor about various eccentrics taking part in the final broadcast of Keillor’s radio show, isn’t entirely a Robert Altman film. A 7.20 report by St.Paul Pioneer Press‘s Chris Hewitt suggests that the still-rolling production is some kind of collaboration between a somewhat weakened Altman and “ghost director” Paul Thomas Anderson. The director of Magnolia and Boogie Nights and a longtime Altman admirer and friend “has no official title, but he works mostly with Altman and the actors, and his director’s chair is labeled ‘Pinch Hitter,'” according to Hewitt’s story. Almost the entire movie is being photographed inside the Fitzgerald theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the word is that Altman, 80, isn’t feeling quite strong enough to run around like he used to, and so between takes he “belts directions over a microphone while Anderson runs up to stage and speaks with the actors directly.” There are other reports about this on Anderson’s own site and on a movie-news site called Cinema Eye. The cast includes Meryl Streep, Lindsay Lohan, Virginia Madsen, Woody Harrelson, Tommy Lee Jones, L.Q. Jones, Kevin Kline, Keillor (playing himself), John C. Reilly and Lily Tomlin.

Here, in my humble judgment, is the fairest, most fully considered, best-written review of Gus Van Sant’s Last Days that’s turned up anywhere…except, maybe, for the thing I wrote in Wednesday’s column.

Inquisitive, bored-with-the-usual Manhattan filmgoers, take note: The Century of the Self, a totally riveting BBC-produced documentary by Adam Curtis (The Power of Nightmares), will begin a run at the Cinema Village on 8.12, and it really must be seen. I’ve no qualms in calling it the most intriguing, audacious, and insightful study of publicity, mass psychology and Orwellian mind control ever put together. I’m going to re-run a May 2003 piece about it in next Wednesday’s (7.27) column — here’s the link for now. It’s the third story down…

In a 7.17 WIRED item [see below] I ran a list of the year’s best films so far (the total came to 22), but I should have included one more: Jon Gunn, Brian Herzlinger and Brett Winn’s My Date With Drew (DEJ, 8.5), a spritzy, surprisingly spiritual doc about Herzlinger, a struggling schlub in a one-bedroom apartment when the film was shot, trying to somehow arrange a date with Drew Barrymore. I first saw it at the Vail Film Festival in April ’04 and wrote about it as follows: “This hand-held camcorder movie plays like a frothy distraction…at first. Then it surprises the hell out of you. A disarmingly optimistic docu-romance, initially shot for roughly $1100, it manages to pay off — emotionally, metaphorically, mythically — in ways that are unexpected and curiously shrewd. It’s a little-engine-that-could movie that sends you out shaking your head with amazement, and wearing a big dumb grin.”

No question that Vanessa Grigoriadis’ excellent piece in the current New York magazine about unbalanced, seemingly unhinged celebrity behavior (“Celebrity and Its Discontents: A Diagnosis”) is going to sell a lot of copies and get talked about all over…especially due to that hilarious cover showing Tomkat in straightjackets. But somewhere in the piece, shouldn’t Grigoriadis have acknowledged Andrew Breitbart and Mark Ebner’s Hollywood Interrupted, which was the first published diatribe about the trend of celebrities melting down and wacking out? Published in the spring of ’04, the book was lively and punchy, but also taken to task here and there for being too vitriolic and right-wingish…but it was still the first attention-getting diagnosis of this trend. Breitbart is back working for Matt Drudge after serving as the web guy/editor for the launch of www.huffingtonpost.com, and Ebner works for Bonnie Fuller out of L.A. I’m not saying Vanessa or New York were obliged to tip their hat to Breitbart and Ebner, but it would have been good manners…no? I mean, especially since she seems to have more or less “borrowed” a portion of a paragraph taken from an online promotional book description written by Ebner/Breitbart and provided to the press by their publisher (“…celebrities somehow believe that it’s their god-given right to inflict their pathology on the rest of us. Hollywood, Interrupted illustrates how these dysfunctional dilettantes are mad as hell…and we’re not going to take it any more”), and used it for her lead paragraph.

Kelefa Sanneh has written a dissection of Jessica Simpson’s “These Boots Are Made For Walkin'” video in a New York Times piece (“These Musical Genres Are Made for Mashing”). The verdict is that this musical Dukes of Hazzard promo is an “odd” collision of musical genres and performers with country fiddles “sawing away over that electronic beat [and a] honky-tonk chorus giving way to a rap section that evokes Gwen Stefani.” Sanneh compares Simpson’s cut to the Nancy Sinatra/Lee Hazelwood hit single from ’65 or thereabouts, and notes that Simpson’s “has new verses that turn a scorned woman’s vow into something not quite so dire: now the song is about how to beat a speeding ticket. ‘You believe you stopped me for a reason,’ she sings, ‘and I’m pretending my bending’s just for fun.'” I guess I’m used to seeing links to stuff within the body of a story, which is why I didn’t spot the link to the Simpson video next to the online version of Sanneh’s story on the Times website. Ah, well….

Serious DVD fanatics with the ability to write concisely and with style should drop a line to HE’s Discland editor Jonathan Doyle at jd@storefrontdemme.com. My apologies to Jon for not getting this announcement up sooner.

It’s strange that an eagle-eyed New York Times writer like Caryn James would write a piece about how it’s totally common these days for journalists to be depicted as slimeballs in movies these days (Cronicas, Paparazzi, Cinderella Man). And note that the last time journalists were shown as heroic or even respectable was nearly 30 years ago in All The President’s Men. And yet fail to mention that a fairly major film called Good Night. And, Good Luck (Warner Bros.), due in November, will tell a stirring story of a very noble and moralistic journalist by the name of Edward R. Murrow (David Straitharn). And in so doing observe that this film will probably underline or reiterate by example the blemished reputation that today’s journalists are grappling with. How could James and her editors not take note of this? It obviously would have fit right into her story.

Johnny Depp is saying he didn’t base his Willy Wonka character on Michael Jackson. “It never entered my mind,” Depp allegedly told an interviewer. “Michael Jackson loves children but Willy Wonka doesn’t.” The actual inspirations, he said, were kiddie TV hosts Captain Kangaroo, Mr. Rogers and Uncle Al. To which I say, trust the art but never the artist.

Check out this Hustle & Flow pay-attention promo thing. Not a trailer — it just lays out what Craig Brewer’s film (Paramount Classics, 7.22) is from an inward thematic perspective. Sums it up, gets it all. But Anthony Anderson, man…cat’s gotta get on that treadmill and cut down on whatever he’s eatin’ ’cause there’s a surplus.

Here’s Lewis Beale’s assessment in today’s issue of Newsday about the summer slump. He agrees that admissions have been down since ’02 (how can he not agree to a fact?) and acknowledges that exhibitors are getting hurt the most, but he also explains how moneybags Hollywood is doing fine. I’m quoted saying the following: “The issue isn’t that movie attendance is soft this summer. The issue is that the fundamental idea of ‘going out to the movies’ is losing its hold on the moviegoing public. Seeing movies in theaters is being slowly depopularized and retired by different groups for different reasons.”