wired

Reporters I’ve spoken to are saying the Miramax farewell-to-the-past, hello-to-the- future party last Saturday at the Pacific Design Center was some kind of downbeat, desultory affair. It was fine — a spirited, informal, family-type thing. A spunky, slimmed-down Harvey Weinstein said the new company that he and his brother Bob will be launching sometime next fall (after the Disney contract comes to a close in September) will “kick up a lot of dust.” Looking forward….

As Slate critic David Edelstein claims to have written in his hard-hitting book, When Awards Lie, “Oscars are not about merit blah blah but how the Hollywood establishment blah blah politics blah blah middlebrow blah guilty liberal blah old blah blah Valenti blah no Citizen Kane blah blah no Hitchcock blah blah Gladiator…” Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Hooray for Palm Pictures for having convinced the MPAA’s ratings appeals board to roll back on that R rating they gave Gunner Palace a few weeks ago, and give it a PG-13 instead. The R rating was all over language. The doc, produced and directed by Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein, is about grunts doing the day-to-day in Iraq. The title refers to a bombed-out pleasure palace once owned by Saddam Hussein’s son Uday, but occupied by the “gunners” after the U.S. occupation.

Why would a snarling Lionheart like Hunter S. Thompson end it all with a bullet? I feel for his family, and especially the guy’s pain and sorrow, but how could anyone not reflect upon the equation of alcohol, guns and despair upon hearing the news? Obviously Dr. Gonzo didn’t pull the trigger out of a sense of ecstasy over things, but there was a special, thundering energy that pushed him up sheer craggy cliffs and over the top of many plateaus, and throwing that spirit away, even if only a remnant of it had survived at the end of his 67 years on the planet, was harsh and extreme and not the thing to do. Not for the author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which I used to carry around with me like a Bible. But then I didn’t get Ernest Hemingway’s suicide either, or Abbie Hoffman’s.

Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson, writing under her old L.A. Weekly moniker of “Risky Business,” says that Vanity Fair cover girl Cate Blanchett “certainly…has an edge in the supporting actress category and should grab The Aviator’s one acting Oscar for her brilliant impersonation of Katharine Hepburn.” Whoa, whoa…hold up. Blanchett will win the Oscar because she does a good impersonation? Virginia Madsen’s straight-from-the-heart, soul-stirring performance in Sideways is going to lose out to Blanchett’s fluttery little Hepburn laugh (“Haaah…hahahaha!”) that everybody remembers from Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story?

It’s hard to tell if Gold Derby.com’s Tom O’Neill caved on his support of Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator two weeks ago or just a day or two ago, but in any case he’s finally folded his tent and admitted that Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby is the more likely Best Picture Oscar winner. The Gold Derby team (Anne Thompson, Dave Karger, Pete Hammond, Gene Seymour, Thelma Adams, et. al.) is giving Clint’s film 4-to-5 odds to win. I called it for M$B over two months ago (“Game Over”), but I guess I don’t need to point that out.

As long as we’re doing turnarounds, allow me to offer one of my own (although it’s way too late in the game for it to mean anything): Clint Eastwood delivered a finer thing with M$B than Scorsese did with The Aviator, but it would be really nice all around if Scorsese were to win the Best Director Oscar. I just watched those making-of docs by Laurent Bouzerau on the new two-disc Raging Bull DVD, and even though Scorsese has been off his game for the last decade or so, the greatness of who he once was should be wholeheartedly acknowledged. He was a spellbinding director and (let’s hope and wish and cross our fingers) may be once again.

Those one-sheets and web ads announcing Gore Verbinski’s The Weather Man (Paramount) as an April 1st release are now officially redundant . The Nic Cage/Michael Caine/Hope Davis drama about a Chicago TV weather man with personal problems galore has been bumped to the fall. The idea, apparently, is that a strong drama with prestige elements will have a better shot in September or October. There’s also some new thought being given to the Weather Man ad campaign image (i.e., Cage with a splattered milk shake dripping from his left shoulder), which obviously suggests comedy.

A Warner Home Video press release issued a couple of months ago about the upcoming double-disc “special edition” Heat DVD said that disc #2 would offer “11 additional scenes.” Bunk. These “11 additional scenes” amount to less than 10 minutes of deleted footage, and while there’s one scene that lasts a little over two minutes, most of the “additional scenes” are snippets lasting 30 or 40 seconds. A snippet is like a phrase or a sentence, and a scene is like a paragraph. Warner Home Video’s p.r. department should know the difference, and it shouldn’t sell one as being synonymous with the other.

I always feel better when HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher is up and rolling…kind of rounds out my sense of all being right with the world. Anyway, it preems tonight (Friday, 2.11) at 11 pm. But what to make of the new Robert Evans talk show thing on Sirius? For this to be semi-interesting, Evans would have to be paying attention to what’s doing right now — he’d have to be up on things. The President’s Day debut is on Monday, 2.21, at 6 pm ET. The regular show will play on Saturday. It starts on March 5th, 6 pm.

“You may recall that in the Matrix trilogy, Keanu Reeves played a haunted, expressionless traveler between metaphysical realms whose mission was to unravel a vast, complicated plot to…well, to do something very bad involving a lot of computer-generated imagery,” New York Times critic A.O. Scott begins in his review of Constantine. “It may therefore not surprise you to learn that Mr. Reeves, in [this film], a new theological thriller from Warner Brothers, plays a haunted, expressionless traveler…but you get the idea. The thing is, this time his character, John Constantine, wears a skinny tie, white shirt and dark suit combination almost exactly like the one worn by Agent Smith, who was Mr. Reeves’s archnemesis in the Matrix pictures. I’m still trying to get my mind around that.”

Here’s a Chris Rock observation from that same Entertainment Weekly/Josh Wolk interview that started all the trouble…or rather, the interview that gave Matt Drudge the opportunity to selectively quote from and ignite all the trouble out of context. Wolk asks Rock if he thinks movies are “better or worse than they used to be?” and Rock answers, “Definitely worse. Studios used to make visions. When a director has control, what you’re seeing on the screen is a vision. Now what you see is a consensus. There’s a big difference. Sideways is a vision. The Day After Tomorrow is a consensus. It’s 30 people agreeing.”