wired

In a piece honoring the recently deceased Janet Leigh, L.A. Times critic Carina Chocano says in today’s edition (10.5) that Leigh’s best films — Touch of Evil, Psycho and The Manchurian Candidate — amounted to “a dark trilogy, [in which she played] an icy, un-settling and alienated woman, a cynically tragic ur-feminist.” I’d leave room for a fourth character in this vein: the embittered ex-wife of Paul Newman’s down-at-the-heels shamus in Jack Smight’s Harper (1966), which boasted a finely-tuned script by William Goldman. The angry and wounded Susan Harper was surely a more substantial part than Leigh’s bizarre Candidate character, Eugenie Rose, who did little more than dab Frank Sinatra’s bruised face with a handkerchief and tell him how wonderful and adorable he was.

After nine submissions, the MPAA ratings board has finally given Matt Parker and Trey Stone’s political satire Team America: World Police (Paramount, 10.15) an R rating. The org had been threatening to label the Scott Rudin-produced film with an NC-17 rating over a simulated oral-sex scene between puppets. The board had presumably been adamant about this because any puppet movie will presumably attract a good number of minors, but of course it can’t be legally seen by minors with an R or NC-17 rating, so what are they on about? Do they think in this day and age that any 12 or 13 year-olds who manage to slip in regardless aren’t completely jaded about (and in some instances engaging in) sexual behavior of this sort?

The perception that Kerry won last week’s debate has wiped out President Bush’s lead in the race, according to the latest Newsweek poll. In the first national telephone survey following last Thursday’s debate, the newsweekly found that the race is now statistically tied among registered voters, with 47 per cent favoring Kerry vs. 45 per cent for Bush. All this means is that swing voters are total jellyfish. They all tumbled for Bush after the well-produced macho swagger of the Republican convention, giving him an 8 to 10-point lead, and then Kerry “wins” the debate and they all swing in the other direction because…is it okay to say this? Because swing voters are impressionable little weather vanes who want only to follow whoever’s got the heat.

29 year-old Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance as Howard Hughes in The Aviator (Warner Bros., 12.17) is “stunning,” producer Michael Mann has told Empire magazine. “Particularly in the second half, when he’s playing an older Hughes. He’s pheonomenal. It’s a really excellent piece of work.” A draft of John Logan’s script that I read in ’02 strongly suggests that the $100 million biopic won’t be about Hughes’ romantic dalliances with Kate Hepburn, Ava Garner and Jean Harlow as much as his passionate devotion to the task of making machines do things the world’s never seen before. Director Martin Scorsese may well deliver a beautifully made film with superb performances, but I wonder if audiences will warm to The Aviator, given Hughes’ basic weirdness….he was really an odd duck.

So Shark Tale did just shy of $50 million on its first weekend…big deal. A movie can be a box-office leviathan and people can still hate it. Everyone says it’s mainly about other movies, it’s got no heart, and the only good voice-actor performance is Martin Scorsese’s. Last May I attended a big DreamWorks presentation for Shark Tale at the Cannes Film Festival (footage, luncheon, and personal appearances by Will Smith, Jack Black and Angelina Jolie) As DreamWorks honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg introduced the footage he called it “a movie with heart.” Heart was precisely the missing component in the footage they showed, and I asked several journo pals if they had the same impression, and every last one of them shrugged and changed the subject and ate their food.

“The most powerful moments are so realistic that they’re almost excruciating. A good half dozen sequences are so intensely acted and so deeply involving that audiences will forget they’re watching a movie until the scene ends and exhaling can recommence. Yet [the director] knows how to increase the overall effect by interlacing quieter, more tender scenes as well.” I’m definitely intrigued by this excerpt from Peter Brunette’s review of Crash, the Paul Haggis-directed drama due from Lions Gate in early ’05. “One specific scene, involving [Thandie] Newton and [Matt] Dillon at the scene of an accident, is simply unforgettable,” Brunete continues. “Music also works some major magic here, with Mark Isham’s wonderfully eerie score often playing in disturbing counterpoint against what we’re seeing on the screen.”

The “impartiality” being shown by news channel spinsters in assessing what happened during last night’s Presidential debate is slightly odious. Ask anyone on the street and they’ll tell you Kerry did much better than Bush. He had it together and attacked with dignity, precision and a crisp delivery style. Bush didn’t blow himself up, but (a) he seemed frustrated (i.e., irked by Kerry’s criticisms, at times comically), and (b) he seemed slow, primitive of thought and fumbling at times. I don’t know if this impression is going to turn things around for Kerry, but he was the clear victor. For some reason (any goofy theories?), this impression is being slightly mucky-mucked and loop-dee-looped in the post-debate coverage on CNN or MSNBC.

I was in a hair styling salon yesterday (9.29) and, for the first time in a fairly long while, actually sat in a chair and read recent issues of People, Us, the Star and In Touch cover-to-cover. We all know they’re essentially the same rag aimed at a not-terribly-bright female readership. (I worked as an in-house freelancer for People from ’96 to ’98, when it occupied a slightly higher editorial station than it does today, so I have a certain insight.) And we all know they’re essentially glamour porn. What’s changed is that they’ve gone from being hard R to XXX, and it’s nauseating. It makes you want to wash your hands. These rags distort, degrade and generally vulgarize the lives of celebrities (not to mention the human condition) as surely as gynecological X-rated films pass along some extremely rancid imressions about what goes down between men and women they get close and naked together.

I take back my theory about Team America: World Police creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker possibly being closet righties — they’re a couple of proclaimed Republicans and KY Jelly Bush bitches. In 2.3.01 news story written by E Online’s Emily Farache about their then-controversial Comedy Central series That’s My Bush, it was said to be “ironic that [Parker and Stone] are getting so much flak, because they’re both Republicans and — believe it or not — they don’t plan on ridiculing Bush. ‘What we’re trying to do is way more subversive,’ Parker said. ‘We’re going to make you love this guy.'” They also copped to their Republican loyalties in a Fox News story that ran in late ’01.

“Life’s hard…but it’s a lot harder if you’re stupid.” — spoken by Steven Keats’ “Jackie Brown” character in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (’73), reading from Paul Monash’s script which was based on the novel by George V. Higgins.

“There’s a revolution going on,” the legendary cinematographer Christopher Doyle (Hero, The Quiet American) tells the Guardian‘s Zoe Cox, “and the world’s changed. Kids these days have so much visual experience they don’t think in literary or narrative terms. They’re constantly online or playing computer games or fiddling with their phones. These things may not be sophisticated, but they are realigning the parameters of visual experience. It’s almost like the death of the talkies.”

I’m somewhat surprised to say that Charles Shyer’s Alfie (Paramount, 10.22), a remake of the 1966 Michael Caine original, is a sure hit, a likely Oscar contender and (did I forget to say this?) a very fine film — touching, truthful, emotionally supple. The Oscar part of the equation certainly includes a Best Actor nomination for Jude Law. His performance as a smoothly charming womanizer (a limousine driver in present-day Manhattan) is more shaded and varied than Caine’s, and gets deeper and more affecting as it moves along. Alfie has loads of big-studio gloss and panache, but it pays off inwardly with obvious skill and finesse. Coming from the director of the schmaltzy Baby Boom, Father of the Bride and I Love Trouble, Alfie feels like some kind of life-change movie. The old Shyer movies (which he co-wrote with former wife Nancy) were massage-y and conventional in their audience-pleasing ambitions. Alfie obviously intends to please also, but it does so in a much more measured and subtle fashion and without copping out with a feel-good ending (which Shyer was pressured to deliver by Paramount production executives). It’s one of the best confections of its kind I’ve ever seen. After the failure of Affair of the Necklace, Shyer knew it was do-or-die time…and he did. Hail to the script (by Shyer and Elaine Pope), photography (Ashley Rowe), editing (Padraic McKinley), production design (Sophie Becher) and original music (Mick Jagger, John Powell and David A. Stewart).