wired

I’m looking for readers to send in some tight 75 to 100-word reactions to Hustle & Flow, which is sneaking tomorrow night (Saturday, 7.16) in, I’m guessing, mostly urban areas. I’m wondering how “ethnic” everyone thinks this film actually is. I think Hustle & Flow is basically a feel-good formula thing that anyone can get into…it’s about finding your groove, spiritual discovery, emotional openings and happy endings. And please share how it seems to play with whatever kind of audience (ethnicity, presumed income levels, etc.) you happen to see it with…thanks.

“As Jeremy Klein, a cad who crashes weddings for those available, single women, [Vince Vaughn] is a cad and a half. And he can motormouth like a machine gun, spraying men, women and children with manic, rat-a-tat outbursts of toxic insincerity. It’s often dirty, yes. But it’s also manic and inspired.” — Washington Post critic Desson Thomson on Vaughn’s phenomenal performance in The Wedding Crashers.

DreamWork’s The Island still isn’t tracking — the hoped-for boost from last Saturday night’s nationwide sneak simply didn’t happen. Everything has been tried, loads of TV ad money has been spent trying to get it off the runway and it’s just not taking. Awareness and interest is also on the low side for Rob Cohen’s Stealth (Columbia, 7.29), according to recent data…despite Jamie Foxx (a costar along with Josh Lucas) being front-and-center in the trailer. Opening tracking figures on Warner Bros.’ The Dukes of Hazzard showed a 72% general awareness, a 36% definite interest and 5% first-choice…which is pretty good for a movie three weeks away from opening. However, it also got a very high “definitely not interested” rating from urban respondents.

I’m repeating myself but I want to be clear that a source in Laura Kim’s office at Warner Independent didn’t tell me when I spoke to her on Wednesday that Douglas McGrath’s Truman Capote biopic, which isn’t being released until September ’06, has been retitled Have You Heard? and is therefore no longer being called Every Word is True.

Former Dukes of Hazzard costar Ben Jones (a.k.a., “Crazy Cooter”) can tut-tut all he wants about the upcoming Warner Bros. film version having too much sex and profanity and trashing the legacy of the TV series…nobody’s listening. The first taste of tracking data on The Dukes of Hazzard (8.5) will be available later today, but I can smell the wanna-see from here. For me, it’s the latest Al Qeada recruitment film disguised as the Return of the Stupid Redneck Movie. Burt Reynolds starred in nearly all of these dumb-ass things (in fact, making too many of them is what killed his career, which makes it heavily ironic that he’s costarring in the new film) and Jerry Reed, the most irritating and affected redneck second-tier stooge of all time, co-starred in a lot of them. White Lightning, Smokey and the Bandit (and the sequels and spinoffs), Stroker Ace, W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings, Gator, Hooper, Convoy and several others flaunted the usual backwoods stereotypes — souped-up cars, stupid cops, southern-fried machismo, hot-to-trot Daisy Mae chicks, corrupt local politicians, etc.

All of those ’70s Burt Reynolds redneck movies and their relations were shit, of course…and of course no one remembers or would dare to think about remaking a certain Lamont Johnson flick that did it first and best and pretty much inspired the blue-collar, wild-ass, hot-babe-riding-shotgun, moonshine-in-the-trunk, outrunning-the-local-fuzz genre. I’m speaking of a quality film about a scrappy southern guy with an appetite for speed and souped-up cars — a dude who makes a semblance of a living smuggling moonshine before becoming a famous stock-car racer — called The Last American Hero (’73). It starred Jeff Bridges, Valerie Perrine, Ned Beatty, Gary Busey and Art Lund (who gave a wonderfully moving performance as Bridges’ bone-weary dad) and it really captured the whole southern rural aesthetic without turning it into a pile of cheap cliches, like the Reynolds films did. A genuine classic and a huge Pauline Kael favorite, Hero was a film with vigor, heart, humor and dignity about hard-striving, sometimes hurting rural Americans. A good way of getting people to take another look would be to release it on DVD to coincide with the opening of The Dukes of Hazzard on 8.5. Are there any plans to do this? Appparently not. The Last American Hero was released only on VHS by Fox Home Video in 1997.

The inspiration for Lamont Johnson’s film was, of course, Tom Wolfe’s legendary 1965 Esquire article about famed stockcar racer Junior Johnson (“The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!”). It’s a great piece and the whole article is right here. Please read it…it’s fantastic. Articles like this one and films like The Last American Hero make me momentarily forget about red-state attitudes and even inspire admiration for the vitality of working-class types and blue-collar culture. They make me briefly ashamed of having used terms like “redneck.” It’s not genuine Americana that I hate — it’s the degraded, stupid-ass, hee-haw stuff peddled by downmarket opportunists and turned into corporate-brand jackoff diversions like The Dukes of Hazzard TV series and motion picture. What galls me is that most consumers out there don’t even know what genuine backwoods Americana is — they just know the Happy Meal-kind that corporations have sold to them.

It’s a good thing, of course, that AMC Theatres has decided not to show Thinkfilm’s The Aristocrats in Atlanta and Chicago, as stories about this will up the want-to-see among people who otherwise might not have paid any attention. Everyone needs to see this thing. It’s not what I would call hugely funny at first, but it gets funnier and skankier and more creative as it goes along, and gradually you just succumb. Not a movie that enobles the human experience, exactly, and yet it is that in a certain way…it’s a celebration of particularity most perverse.

This is just an industry thing, but the other shoe finally dropped at Paramount today when it was announced that Rob Friedman is leaving his job as Paramount’s COO and vice chairman “to pursue other interests,” which basically means he’s been shown the door. The reason, I’m told, is because Tom Freston, the Viacom president and COO who hired Brad Grey as Parammount’s chairman and CEO and who basically calls the shots, has a “history” with Freidman from the era when he ran the Viacom-owned MTV Networks. “When Freston was running MTV and he was trying to get stuff done under Sherry Lansing,” a studio source says, “the two obstreperous forces were Friedman and Jonathan Dolgen. When Freston took over [Paramount] it was just a matter of when Friedman would go…there was no way he could have stayed on.” Friedman is a notorious hardballer who created the extremely defensive (as far as the media was always concerned) garrison- state mentality at Paramount. He fostered that attitude at Warner Bros. when he was running things there also. But he’s always been straight and upfront with me. For what it’s worth and as far as it goes, I think he’s a relatively okay guy. He should go to Tuscany and chill out before taking the next job.

Warner Home Video deserves a hearty thanks for making Arthur Penn’s Night Moves available and looking spiffy on DVD starting today. WHV made another excellent move last Tuesday (7.5) when they released a first-rate DVD of John Boorman’s highly-respected noir Point Blank. It’s truly an excellent thing that these long-absent classics are finally out and gettable…even if I was told “sorry, we don’t have it” seven times last weekend during a painstaking search to find and buy the Point Blank DVD. (More about this in a piece running Wednesday, 7.13.)

Let me get this straight: the perfectly dreadful Fantastic Four, a film so awful it makes you briefly toy with the idea of never going to a movie again, made $56.1 million last weekend and because people just blindly paid to see to this piece of shit despite overwhelming indications they were in for a bad time…this means the slump is over? The forces driving The Big Fade are not going to turn on the fortunes of a single crappy movie, trust me. I’ll say it again — it’s not the money, it’s the attendance. ’05 theater admissions are down about 10.4% from ’04 and just shy of 8% from ’03. Summer admissions are off almost 14% from 2004 and roughly 9.5% from 2003.

For the first time since this site launched last August, I’m posting two new hot links sections — “Essentials” (around 50 of the usual-usuals) and “Eye-Openers” (striking, different, noteworthy…whatever) on the lower-right margin, below the fold. They’ll be up in the early evening. I’m open to any suggestions from anyone about any new links I should be posting, etc.