wired

Give Constantine this much: after who knows how many hundreds of mainstream films over the last 60 or 70 years that have essentially served as advertisements for the existential coolness of sucking in cigarette smoke, here’s a flick in which the hero (Keanu Reeves) is presented as inescapably doomed because he’s been smoking since he was 15. I stopped smoking eons ago, but I’ve gone back to it now and then, and this movie made me feel horrible about this. I can’t remember a more effective anti-smoking argument projected on a big screen.

How’s this for a Howard Hughes triple bill at the American Cinematheque somewhere down the road? Open with Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, follow up with Edward Dmytryk’s The Carpetbaggers (1964), featuring the always-icy George Peppard as a cold, misogynistic movie mogul-slash-industrialist, a character based on Hughes, and conclude the evening with Jonathan Demme’s Melvin and Howard (1980), mostly about a middle-class American schlub (Paul LeMat) but featuring an inspired Jason Robards cameo perf as a rickety, weather-beaten, half-looney Hughes.

The mentality of those 77 year-olds who’ve bristled at Oscar Awards emcee Chris Rock’s comments about the show (“It’s a fashion show” that’s “mostly for gay people”) and who are muttering that he’s “not suitable for the job” (according to Hollywood Reporter columnist Martin Grove)…this harumph-y attitude is precisely why the Oscar Awards are seen as going downhill and increasingly irrelevant. Especially now that the specifics of Rock’s comments in the Entertainment Weekly interview (offered here as a link to a Movie City News transcript) make it clear that what Rock actually said (without the quotes taken out of context) are perfectly valid and have been articulated before by others, including George C. Scott 30-something years ago when he called the Oscar show “a meat parade.”

A non-scientific Newsweek/MSNBC poll has asked readers which super-expensive popcorn movie they’d most like to see in 2005, and right now (Tuesday, 2.15, 9:37 am) the most eagerly awaited (favored by 32% of voters) is George Lucas’s Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith (20th Century Fox, 5.19). Mike Newell’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (WB, 11.18) is the second most anticipated with 18%, Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (WB, 7.15) is third with 11%, and Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (Paramount, 6.29) is fourth with 10%. Peter Jackson’s King Kong (Universal, 12.14) got 4%, but it’s early yet. Adam Sandler’s The Longest Yard (Paramount, 5.27) gathered a 3% rating…hmmmm.

“When you say ‘no’ a lot as an actor, you’re going to go broke, and that’s been the hardest thing to go through in the last ten years,” Sideways costar Virginia Madsen says in a recent Guardian interview. Such confessions will not stop junket-press journos from asking actors “what artistic motives led you to play this role?” when the truthful answer, more often than not, is “I have two kids and brutal mortgage payments.” Or “I could have taken this far more interesting role in this indie film, but I’ve become lazily accustomed to my lifestyle and my kids like their I-Pods and their wardrobes, so I took the slightly dumber and shittier role in this big-budget genre film.”

So Lewis Beale and his New York Times editors plugged me, Variety‘s Pete Hammond, Gold Derby.com’s Tom O’Neill and blogger Emanuel Levy in Sunday’s (2.13) piece about Oscar prognosticators …but they cut Movie City News’ David Poland, which, by anyone’s barometer, makes it an incomplete presentation.

“There’s a difference in how I vote on my ballot and how I vote in the office pool,” an Academy voter tells Fade In writer Nelson Handel. It would be better if the Oscar awards were only voted upon by peers “but it’ll never happen,” the voter admits. “Everyone enjoys voting, and won’t be dissuaded by the fact they they’re ignorant.” The entire piece, which has been getting a fair amount of attention over the last week or so, can be found here .

Eucalyptus is the title of a Jocelyn Moorhouse-Fox Searchlight film that was recently put on hold because the script isn’t ready yet. Actually, because star and executive producer Russell Crowe had problems with it. The film, which would have costarred Nicole Kidman, is about “an Australian widower who plants hundreds of eucalyptus trees on his land,” according to a Reuters news story “He tests his daughter’s suitors by making them identify every species. One succeeds, but by then Ellen (Kidman) already has lost her heart to a handsome stranger (Crowe).” I’m sorry, but that sounds like fanciful chick-movie horeshit.

My most affecting Arthur Miller moment was seeing Death of a Salesman in ’84 on Broadway, with Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman and a 30 year-old, totally-on-fire John Malkovich as Biff. Miller led an amazing life in an incredibly rich and turbulent time, and now, at age 89, he’s no longer among us. Nothing recedes likes success, but rest comes to us all.

David Poland has written about Martin Scorsese’s tribute to the spirit that propelled Howard Hughes: “Better than any of the other movies nominated, The Aviator offers a look at us…at the power of outrageous daring…not just of one man, but of a culture that shouts our aspirations across the globe.” To which I must reply, “Better than any of the other movies nominated, The Aviator offers a look at our willingness to swallow rankly phony CG images that violate any sense of organic, first-hand reality…that promote the negligible effect of CG sequences that blatantly announcing themselves as such…all to celebrate not just a single willful man, but a culture that shouts our aspirations across the globe.”

The obiter dicta (i.e., words in passing) in Brian Lowry’s recently posted Variety review of Constantine (Warner Bros., 2.18) sounds somewhat predictable: “Pic does win a few points for style if not substance.” The opening graph, though, has a strong alliterative punch: “Keanu Reeves’ latest man-in-black fantasy is slightly better than The Matrix sequels, which is tantamount to damnation with faint praise. Casting its star as a chain-smoking exorcist — someone who’s literally been to hell and back — this adaptation of the graphic novel “Hellblazer” blazes few new trails and bogs down in a confusing narrative muddle. Atmospheric and noirish in the manner of a poor man’s Blade Runner, pic possesses powerful imagery but lacks feature-length substance and will need a bountiful harvest of opening-weekend souls before a stench resembling brimstone dowses its box office flame.”

I’m a little concerned about Cate Blanchett winning the Best Supporting Actress trophy at the SAG Awards last night. Did she beat out Virginia Madsen (far and away the most deserving contender, as almost all the critics’ groups have proclaimed) because the SAG membership had some kind of collective understanding that the ensemble acting award would go to the cast of Sideways? Or does a majority of the Academy’s largest branch really and truly believe that Blanchett’s performance as Kate Hepburn (undeniably rich, but relatively narrow in scope and clearly lacking in terms of emotional/spiritual depth) is more worthy than Madsen’s? Or is this some kind of oddball, turned-around thing about people wanting to pay some kind of tribute to The Aviator? I don’t get it.