wired

Nothing further on Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s political sympathies needs to be said, but here’s New York Times critic Tony Scott riffing on them anyway: “A number of commentators have discerned a pronounced conservative streak amid the anarchy of South Park, a hypothesis that Team America to some extent confirms. Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins and other left-leaning movie stars are eviscerated (quite literally — also decapitated, set on fire and eaten by house cats), while right-wing media figures escape derision altogether. It seems likely that [Stone and Parker’s] emphases and omissions reflect a particular point of view.”

It was George Bush ’41, not President Bush, who was quoted Friday as having called Michael Moore a “total ass” and “slimeball” for pushing “outrageous…lies about my family” in Fahrenheit 9/11.

A reader named Mark Zeigler says he’s having doubts about my enthusiasm for Sideways (Fox Searchlight, 10.22) because Salon critic Charles Taylor has mostly panned it and called its director-cowriter, Alexander Payne, “a pretentious wiseass.” First, it’s okay for Taylor to trash Sideways. He’s going to feel pretty lonely with that viewpoint, but fine. But second, Zeigler may want to consider what New York Times critic Manohla Dargis has said about the criticism that Payne treats his characters with condescension, which she calls “a puzzling assessment.” She adds that “it’s hard to understand the genesis of this discomfort” except to note that “like Sideways, Payne’s films cut close to the emotional bone and even movie critics can get squirmy when the screen turns into a mirror.” She adds that “since the late 1970’s we have been under the spell of the blockbuster imperative, with its infallible heroes and comic-book morality, a spell that independent film has done little to break. In this light, the emergence of Mr. Payne into the front ranks of American filmmakers isn’t just cause for celebration; it’s a reason for hope.”

Howard Stern said yesterday morning (Friday, 10.15) that Chris Rock’s hosting of the Oscars Awards will be a “disaster.” What he really meant to predict is that Rock will fizzle like David Letterman did. Funny and brilliant as Rock may be, Stern feels he’s too much of an irreverent grenade-tosser to be a hit with the Academy crowd, which takes the Oscars half-seriously and wants more respect and affection from Oscar emcees than Rock is willing or able to provide. I think Stern is wrong, and that Rock will be hilarious — he always is — and that people recognize the Oscar show needs a jolt every now and then. Academy producers were right to finally give the emcee slot to a GenXer — it might pull in younger viewers.

Figuring the specific reason iNDEMAND decided to bail on airing “The Michael Moore Pre-Election Special” will be an interesting pursuit. The company, owned by Time Warner, Cox and Comcast cable companies, announced Friday it wouldn’t be showing “The Michael Moore Pre-Election Special” due to “legitimate business and legal concerns,” which is apparently a euphemism for political pressure. Moore has stated that he and iNDEMAND signed a contract to air the special (which would have included a showing of Fahrenheit 9/11) in early September, and that he believes that pressure from “top Republican people” caused the turnaround. Moore is considering taking legal action against the company, he said. An iNDEMAND spokesperson said any legal action Moore might take against the company would be “entirely baseless and groundless.”

Some of you might be tempted to look at Jeannot Szwarc’s Somewhere in Time in tribute to Christopher Reeve, who gave one of his better performances in it. I happen to be a sucker for this film, not for the “all” of it but because of a closing sequence that I saw at critics’ screening some 24 years ago….but which I haven’t seen since. I asked about this when I happened to run into Somewhere in Time√ɬ≠s cinematographer Isadore Mankofsky a few months ago at the Newport Beach Film Festival. I told him how much I admired this final sequence — a longish, ambitiously choreographed, deeply moving tracking shot that’s meant to show the viewer what Reeve’s character is experiencing on his passage from life into death. Mankofsky told me that as the film was about to be released some executive at Universal decided that the shot went on too long and trimmed it with a couple of fade-edits. This was vandalism, pure and simple. Mankofsky said as far as he knew the original cut of this closing sequence no longer exists…but he wasn’t entirely sure.

Anyone looking at Wes Anderson’s upcoming The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Touchstone, 12.25) and saying it’s not Oscar material….as a fairly well-connected journalist friend suggested last weekend…is missing the point. Wes Anderson films are about their own state of mind and nothing further. They simply are, and the crowd doesn’t have stand up and throw their hats into the air for this cosmic fact to be legitimized. The peculiar psychology of a typical Anderson character is mother’s milk for X-factor types, but has always been a bit too skewed in a brainy Glass-family sense for mainstream audiences. And Anderson’s low-key, unforced sense of humor is far too subtle and referenced to play big in the hinterlands.

I’m watching the Rock (a.k.a., Dwayne Johnson) talk about shooting a bizarre action scene in The Rundown in which he and Sean William Scott were hanging upside down in the jungle while being attacked by monkeys. He’s talking about the physical and psychological stress of shooting this bit, and I’m surprised because I’d assumed the monkeys were CG, and maybe even that Johnson and Scott’s upside-down position was also created on a hard drive. CG effects have become so widespread and passe that none of us believe there’s any kind of taken-from-real-life reality to any kind of action scene in movies today. Everythg is digital paint, cartoon-ish…fake. The only thing we totally trust as being organically genuine are ordinary dialogue scenes, and even those will some day be suspect.

For me, Richard Eyre’s Stage Beauty is a so-so, hit-and-miss thing, and the most glaring error is the casting of Billy Crudup as a kind of lady. He plays a 17th Century London stage actor named Ned Kynaston, whose was renowned in the early stages of his career for playing female roles (since women were forbidden to play women in those days). The diarist Samuel Pepys called Kynaston “the most beautiful woman on the London stage,” except that Crudup’s sharp nose and jutting chin make him look pointedly un-feminine or at the least unattractive by any sort of hot-girl standard. If I were to run into a “woman” who looked like Crudup at a party, I’d do a fast 180. Gael Garcia Bernal is very pretty (sort of Julia Roberts-like) when he appears in drag in Pedro Almodovar’s Bad Education, and the young Mick Jagger was quite attractive when he did his bisexual womanly thing in Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance some 34 years ago. I didn’t even find Crudup’s high-pitched inflections and girly hand gestures very affecting. Jack Lemmon was more womanly in Some Like it Hot…really.

Certain taste-maker journos around town are telling me Dylan Kidd’s P.S. (Newmarket, 10.15) isn’t good enough and therefore that Laura Linney’s shot at a Best Actress nom for her work in this film is in peril. I really think they’re wrong about this. This obviously smart, curiously romantic film is alive and originally plotted, it never drifts or bores, and Linney is radiantly readable in every frame.

Christopher Reeve was a symbol of undying hope, fortitude and courage. What did he die of exactly? A New York Times story said that Reeve fell into a coma Saturday after going into cardiac arrest while at his home in Pound Ridge, New York. Reeve “was being treated for a pressure wound, a common complication for people in wheelchairs,” the Times story explained, adding that “these wounds result from constant pressure in one spot, reducing the blood to that area and finally killing the affected tissue.” Reeve had been suffering from a pressure-wound infection which had spread through his body, which eventually brought on the heart attack and then the coma.

Sorry I dropped out for three days, but I had a mild neurological freakout on Friday morning. In plainer terms, I kind of, heh-heh, “lost it” and thereafter decided on some primal deep-down level that I needed to re-charge for a day or two. Sorry — I’ll try not to let it happen again. Do I really mean that? Sure I do…as far as it goes.