wired

An interesting theory has surfaced as to why Slate‘s David Edelstein, Salon‘s Charles Taylor and New York Press critic Armond White all hate Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby. Ready? They’re all Paulettes — i.e., disciples of the late, legendary film critic Pauline Kael — and Kael had a case against Eastwood in her day, and her acolytes have continued to occasionally channel her from the grave. Kael was four-square against Eastwood’s early films. She famously called Dirty Harry a “fascist” movie, and while Eastwood didn’t direct that film, the label stuck. There’s some juicy stuff in Richard Schickel’s Clint Eastwood biography about that hatred. Indeed, one of the entries in the index is actually titled “animus against Eastwood.” If Edelstein, Taylor or White would like to respond or kick this around in any way, get back to me and we’ll thrash it out in Wednesday’s column.

A new trailer for Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (20th Century Fox, May 6) is up and running, and it seems…well, like a class act, certainly, but also damned familiar. It’s Gladiator again with a sword-and-arrow battle in a shadowed, blue-tinted forest and those same CG snowflakes in the air. It’s Alexander again with a massive army on horseback charging across a dusty desert plain. It’s Troy again with Orlando Bloom, playing Balian of Ibelin, a young blacksmith in Jerusalem, helping to defend his besieged city. Let’s hope the Fox marketers can push their way past this, because I want this film to make it. It’s about what we’re doing in Iraq now, of course. That’s a given.

This has nothing to do with my head space or the concerns of this column, but New York Daily News columnist Lloyd Drive (a.k.a., “The Lowdown”) deserves a round of applause for vowing in his 12.23 column to never again write about Paris Hilton. “If she discovers a cure for cancer, wins the Nobel Peace Prize, launches herself into outer space — or even gets her high- school diploma — I’ll be happy to revisit the issue,” Grove wrote. “But until then, this is the last time you’ll see Paris in Lowdown.”

All right, everybody calm down: the $68.5 million earned by Universal’s Meet the Fockers since last Wednesday is not an American tragedy. The first weekend is always about marketing, never the film. It’s about people being too lazy to read the reviews or, in this instance, to consider Dustin Hoffman’s referring to the film as “this thing.” (I ran this quote twice.) Always listen to words in passing…they always tell the tale. No one out there loves this film, everyone was disappointed, and it’s the big mega-movie of the moment. Ain’t that America?

I have to do something about Discland — DVD’s Are Crack. I’ve tried to keep up and can’t, and I need someone to take this column over. Not contribute — run it. Each and every week, covering the new DVD’s. Get in touch…

Is Oscar-show producer Gil Cates planning any kind of special tribute to the late Marlon Brando for the 2.27 telecast? You’d think this would be a no-brainer (the guy was easily the most influential and iconic actor of the last 55 plus years) and maybe Cates has decided to do the right thing. But Oscar-show editor extraordinaire Chuck Workman (the fast-montage guy who also directed A House on a Hill and the brilliant ’50s doc The Source) hadn’t been told a thing as of 12.26. Mike Shapiro, the guy who usually cuts the Oscar death-tribute reel, wasn’t reachable on Sunday morning (imagine that!) and Cates was in Mexico, but let’s hope Cates is planning a special Brando salute of some kind, as he did for Bob Hope and Katharine Hepburn.

“‘We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement…inside our own lonely skins for as long as we live in this earth,’ muses Val, the drifter Brando [played] in Tennessee Williams’ The Fugitive Kind. As a statement of majestic desolation, it seems a fitting epitaph for a man who never quite escaped his own raw presence.” — Daphne Merkin on Brando in the 12.26 New York Times Magazine.

“What happens now? It’s just too early to tell. I’m at a crossroads. And I feel good. I feel like I’ve got something out of my system. I feel that I achieved a mountain for myself. A mountain. No matter what, I feel very proud of what I’ve written. I’ve achieved something I’ve wanted to achieve all my life. Whether it’s understood or not — maybe there’s a degree of mysticism in the movie that’s meant to be. And maybe it will be understood better over the years. I’m not sure. But I felt moved. I don’t feel the need to do that thing — that big thing. There’s other ways to go. Maybe more to the self, more personal. You know, retreating to where filmmakers in Europe — Truffaut and Fellini — went: inside. And they dramatized themselves. The question is, would the Americans tolerate that? No.” — Oliver Stone to the New York Times A.O. Scott.

Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset (Warner Independent) has been named the year’s finest film (or the #1 film) by the Village Voice 6th Annual Film Critics Poll. The two-character dialogue piece set in Paris had far and away the highest number of points (564), compared to the 4th place Sideways (381)and the eleventh-place Million Dollar Baby. Great for Linklater, great for his costars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy…great all around.

I don’t mean to sound like I’m sounding, but an awfully high percentage of the folks queried for the Village Voice Film Critics Poll, although they know their stuff cold and are undeniably brilliant and independent minded…not very many of them seem like average-Joe, salt-of-the-earth, Boston-Red-Sox-fan type guys. Know what I’m saying? A tiny bit snobby and elitist, wouldn’t know what to do or say in a working-class bar, pencils up their butt, etc. Dave Kehr and John Anderson are okay, and David Sterrit’s got a little Aaron Copeland, fanfare-for-the-common-man in him, but how come Matt Zoller Seitz isn’t in the group?

All I want for Christmas is a quality-transfer DVD of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, with any extras they can throw in with it…commentaries, making-of doc, Robert Mitchum interview, anything. That’s all I want…and that’s not much to ask for.

Notice to marketing guys and trailer editors: if you cut together 50 or 60 snips from a film and shoot them out machine-gun style, like 90% of the trailers do these days, you can make a film seem interesting or sexy or whatever. Except this trick has used so often it’s not interesting any more. To me, rapid-fire machine-gun cuts in trailers are a coded message that says, “Watch out, this film may have something to hide.”