wired

Legendary words from Alec Baldwin….seriously: “Movie marketers are taking actors and they’re kind of inserting them like suppositories into the cavities of the moviegoing public. The business is so kind of self-referential now. There’s a whole kind of industry now about the forensics of the business, so to speak, that wasn’t there 20 years ago.” So what’s a site like Hollywood Elsewhere in this rear equation? Not a lubricant…that’s E.T., People, Entertainment Weekly, etc. I don’t think I’m even wearing the plastic gloves.

Any talented 20-something web designers out there living on a trust fund with a little extra time on their hands? Two regular columns a week plus WIRED every day plus editing the other columnists plus assembling each page with jpegs and whatnot…I’m losing it. This isn’t whining — it’s fact. You could be from Botswana…I just need some help.

The first words…the first sound…in I Heart Huckabees is a rapid-fire obscenity spew from the mouth of Jason Schwartzman. It’s brash, funny…sets the tone. But it was probably borrowed. John Malkovich’s character in the original 1987 Circle Rep production of Lanford Wilson’s Burn This made his entrance with the very same bit. Did David O. Russell (then 29 years old) ever catch a performance?

Critical reactions to The Motorcycle Diaries have been mostly admiring (like mine), but the political legacy of the real-life Che Guevara is taking bites here and there. Daily News critic Bob Strauss complains that it’s “a feel-good movie about a guy who helped to establish the Castro dictatorship in Cuba, for which he killed many and ordered the executions of many more.” And Salon‘s Paul Berman laments that “the cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. [He] was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction in Cuba. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution’s first firing squads. He founded Cuba’s ‘labor camp’ system…that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims.” Yikes…

George Butler’s Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry (ThinkFilm, opening soon) “brings to the surface a Kerry I didn’t know existed: charismatic, idealistic, eloquent. {So] who turned this brave leader in to a Stepford candidate?” writes critic B. Ruby Rich. “Activist groups like MoveOn.org could do worse than buy airtime to show Kerry’s historic testimony in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a passionate attack on failed foreign policies and warmongering. Yeah, just the kind of speech he ought to deliver now in 2004.”

There’s been a bit of a Huckabees dust-up in reaction to Sharon Waxman’s friendly-but-unflattering David O. Russell profile in last Sunday’s New York Times. The beef on the part of two Huckabees cast members I spoke to on Wednesday evening is essentially this: the dynamic between directors and actors during a shoot amounts to a special insiders-only thing with its own particular self-enclosed rules, and that it’s hard for a visiting journalist to understand this special camaraderie as fully and clearly as the filmmakers do. Hence Sharon’s overly matter-of-fact Huckabee’s set report (in the view of these actors) about Russell and his cast going through all kinds of emotional loop-dee-loops. Let’s just leave it at that.

The relentless energy coming off Michael Moore’s site (www.michaelmoore.com) is truly intoxicating right now, and is almost enough to dispel lamentable notions that Kerry has so hopelessly cocked things up that Bush has the election in the bag. Moore isn’t having any of this defeatist crap. His 9.20.04 message (“Put Away Your Hankies”) says, in part, “Enough doomsaying! Bush is a goner…IF we all just quit our whining and belly-aching and stop shaking like a bunch of nervous ninnies. Geez, this is embarrassing! The Republicans are laughing at us. Do you ever see them cry, ‘Oh, it’s all over! We’re finished! Bush can’t win! Waaaaaa!’ Hell no. It’s never over for them until the last ballot is shredded. They are never finished — they just keeping moving forward like sharks that never sleep, always pushing, pulling, kicking, blocking, lying. How do you think they’ve been able to [run the country] considering they represent only about 30% of the bvoting populace? It’s because they eat you and me and every other liberal for breakfast and then spend the rest of the day wreaking havoc on the planet.”

Topher Grace (Traffic, Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!) has delivered his first exceptionally skillful, star-level turn in a quality film. It’s on view in Dylan Kidd’s P.S. (Newmarket, 10.15). The 26 year-old Grace plays a talented young painter who becomes an object of intense romantic obsession when a 40ish Columbia University employee (Laura Linney) becomes 98% convinced he’s some kind of reincarnation of a boyfriend she had when she was 18 or 19, but who was killed in a car crash. Based on Helen Schulman’s novel, and written and performed from a woman’s emotional perspective, this is Kidd’s answer to those who thought Roger Dodger meant he was the new Neil Labute. I don’t want to say this is some kind of woman’s film; it’s not. But it’s anchored in Linney’s performance, and she visits some amazing places in this thing.

This is strictly an L.A. deal, but Maureen Dowd will be at the Skirball Center on Thursday, September 23, to chat about her book Bushworld with New York Times colleague Alessandra Stanley. Writers Bloc is organzing the event. It’ll start at 7:30 p.m.

Oops…sorry. My earlier WIRED line about “L.A. Times TV writer Carina Chocano taking Manohla Dargis’s slot as second-string film critic under Kenny Turan” was wrong. I’m not clear what Chocano’s position is, but Dargis was never Kenny’s second. She was explicitly hired as a lead critic (as she subsequently was for her current slot with the New York Times), and equal in position to Turan.

I love the startling use of a seemingly honest appraisal in Warner Bros. distribution president Dan Fellman’s statement last Monday to Variety‘s Michael Fleming about why the release date of Oliver Stone’s Alexander is being bumped from November 5th to November 24th. “We took a good look at the movie in rough form,” said Fellman, “and if it’s not the best film he’s ever directed, it’s close.” [Italics mine.] A more typical distribution-chief statement would be something along the lines of “it’s awesome…I think it’s his best work ever.” Instead, Fellman is saying Alexander is an extremely fine film, but perhaps not quite on the level of Salvador or Platoon or [insert your favorite Stone film]. You could interpret Fellman’s remark as an “obiter dicta” — words in passing — that reveals more than the speaker intended, or simply a case of unusual (and very refreshing) candor.

L.A. Times reporter Robert Welkos has written an anecdotal piecemeal story about Marlon Brando’s last days and how his family intends to make money (tastefully and respectfully, of course) off his image and legacy. For some reason it was run on the front page of Wednesday’s L.A. Times print edition, and not in the more customary Calendar section. Welkos quotes a Brando friend named Joan “Toni” Petrone about the family’s intention to put out a series of DVD’s based on Brando’s “Lying for a Living” acting classes. Digital tapes of those classes (which involved improvs and drop-by’s by Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Jon Voight and others) sat around Brando’s house for two or three years without Brando or anyone else taking any kind of stab at editing them together. But now that he’s dead and gone, the family is on the case because it’s time to rake in the dough. A day or so after his death Brando’s body, dressed in a Japanese robe and his favorite red scarf, was put on view at a local mortuary, Welkos reports. A portion of Brando’s ashes (mixed with those of his longtime friend Wally Cox) were scattered in Death Valley, the story reports. The most intriguing thing I learned about Brando post-mortem was the location of a private driveway on Wonderland Avenue that Brando and neighbor Jack Nicholson used to get to and from their respective homes, because it afforded more privacy than using a fairly well-known, security-gate entrance to their estates on Mulholland Drive.