wired

Last weekend’s Zogby cell-phone poll of 18 to 29 year-old voters has Kerry way ahead of Bush. The degree to which the GenY-GenXers get out there and vote on Tuesday is what will finally win it for Kerry…or not. If they do this in sufficient numbers, the under-29’s will always have something to be proud of. But if they follow previous election patterns and sit on their ass in front of the tube and don’t show up in sufficient numbers, they will be known Wednesday morning as the Generation of Shame.

So what could have led Roger Michel, the obviously bright and perceptive director of Enduring Love, to take Ian McEwan’s 1998 novel about a bizarre romantic obsession and turn it into a “jokeless gloomarama?” wonders New Yorker critic Anthony Lane. “The ideas behind Enduring Love may be fascinating, but they don’t play, they sulk, and so it was during another annoying rant from Jed the Pest [i.e., Rhys Ifans’ thoroughly revolting stalker character] that I leaned over to the friend beside me and whispered, ‘All I really, really want at this moment, in the whole world, is to be watching Dodgeball.”

In Tom Wolfe’s scheme of things, reports a New York Times Magazine profile (11.31), social behavior is almost always determined by status consciousness — an instinct to preserve your place in the social pecking order. Pretty much all human endeavor “has to do with status,” says the 74 year-old author of “I Am Charlotte Simmons” (excerpted in Rolling Stone, in book stores November 9). “Or STATE-us, which is the way you say it if you want more status.” Our status awareness is so fundamental, Wolfe says, that “there may even be a specific place in the brain that creates it,” the article relates. “Status is neurological, in other words…people aren’t so much interested in scaling the social ladder as in clinging to their own, hard-earned rung.” For what it’s worth, I can say with some authority that Wolfe’s theory is observable in Los Angeles entertainment journalist circles.

Two days before the election, and there’s a definite downshift thing going on. Can you feel it? Whatever’s going to happen is going to happen, and that’s that. (Save for the last-minute lurches of the fence-sitters, of course…but they’ll never know who they are or what they really believe.) A lot of readers are telling me they’re sick of the whole thing and can’t wait, etc. I for one am ready and willing to get back into all-movies, all-the-time…unless there’s a Florida-style recount debacle-muddle of some kind. It’s clearly time to get our priorities straight and ask when exactly will the Farrelly’s make their Three Stooges movie? And what happened to that Russell Crowe-as-Moe thing?

Follow-up to my 10.27 item (see below): Wired magazine made the same call I did about not capitalizng the words “internet” or “web” two months ago. Is this clearly understood? I hope so. “Effective with this sentence, Wired News will no longer capitalize the ‘I’ in internet,” editor Tony Long wrote on 8.16. “At the same time, Web becomes web and Net becomes net. True believers are fond of capitalizing words, whether they be marketers or political junkies or, in this case, techies. If It’s Capitalized, It Must Be Important. [But] the simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words. Actually, there never was.”

An anonymous “Black Man, Husband, Father, Son, Actor, Producer, Director, Poet, Warrior,” et. al. who wrote in to Movie City News a day or so ago says he’s sick of a lot things in movies today, with all-around mediocrity among the offenders. One things that stick in his craw is Halle Berry’s role in Monster’s Ball,” a single mother who falls for the great white racist white man WHO PUT HER HUSBAND AND FATHER OF HER CHILD TO DEATH.” Okay, except Billy Bob Thornton’s death-row prison guard character (i.e., Berry’s love interest) isn’t a “great racist white man” — he’s a middle-aged cog in that great racist white-man machine/mentality who slowly divests himself of that ugliness and emotionally comes into his own, partly because he can’t stomach the pain of having driven his son to suicide, but largely and more simply because he’s fallen in love with Berry and wants/needs to redeem himself in God’s eyes through his feelings for her.

The breeze is now blowing in John Kerry’s direction. Can you feel it? I can. The tightening of the national poll numbers, the strengthening of the looted weapons depot in Iraq story by eyewitnesses and video footage, the just-announced FBI investigation into Halliburton contracts, etc. The breeze was blowing for Bush a week, week and a half ago….but now it’s not.

Some day, somehow, major-publication editors are going to give up and start spelling the word “internet” without that fucking capital “I.” However you want to define the worldwide web — an environment, a digital information delivery system, an intergalactic atmosphere — “internet” is a generic term like “highway” or “radio” or “television.” I got into the same kind of idiotic dispute with a writer at the Hollywood Reporter in the early ’80s who insisted that every time a mention was made of CDs that they be referred to as “Compact Disks.” (Or was it “Discs”?) I argued that this was like insisting that anyone writing an article about Michelin or Goodyear be required to write “Rubber Tire.”

New York magazine critic Peter Rainer√ɬ≠s review of Alexander Payne’s Sideways is, to me, really quite beautiful. An exquisitely cut stone. Fully in tune with the film itself. I√ɬ≠d like to see Ken Tucker, Rainer√ɬ≠s recently-hired replacement, write something as good. Perhaps he will. Here’s hoping Rainer finds a new berth sometime soon…hopefully a berth with an editor who will respect his talents more than New York editor Adam Moss apparently does.

I haven’t been invited to see The Polar Express (Warner Bros., 11.10), the $200 million-plus, digitally groundbreaking, Christmas storybook flick made by director Bob Zemeckis and star-producer Tom Hanks, despite being invited to the product-reel, dog-and-pony show at the Warner lot a few weeks ago. I suppose there’s a reason for some concern now that Variety‘s David Rooney has called it The Bi-Polar Express and complained that the story doesn’t pay off particularly well. Along with an emerging view that the digitally-composed kids are “dead-eyed” and resemble the alien tykes from Village of the Damned. Plus David Poland declaring that “this thing is one of the most expensive films ever made, and it will not gross [back] its cost at the domestic box office.” All contributing to the basic consensus that November’s big animated feature isn’t The Polar Express but….drum roll….

Brad Bird’s The Incredibles (Disney/Pixar, 11.5)!! This animated comedy about a family of gone-to-seed superhero parents and their two kids, ducking their enemies under the Witness Protection Program but looking to get those old juices flowing again, is looking like a monster hit with all ages. A friend who went to an Academy screening on Monday, 10.25, said, “I loved it…it’s funny…people applauded the especially good parts…it runs about 115 minutes but feels like 80 or 90…and it’s a crowd-pleaser, a blockbuster…it’ll make $200 or $300 million.” I could’ve gone, but I went to the Tom Cruise tribute thing instead. Choices, choices.

New Yorker critic David Denby on Paul Giamatti’s sublime performance in Sideways, from a 10.18 posting : “Giamatti has no chin to speak of, a round-shouldered physique, an adenoidal snarl, and the nervous grin of a craven dog. He√ɬ≠s the national anti-ideal, and he√ɬ≠s making a brilliant career out of it. In American Splendor, as the cartoonist Harvey Pekar, he dragged his miseries around the deserted lots and slag heaps of Cleveland [and was] a genuine oddball. Miles is closer to common dreams and chagrins, and in this role Giamatti gives his bravest, most generously humane performance yet. Women may be repelled, but men will know this man, because, at one time or another, many of us have been this man.”