I love the way Werner Herzog pronounces his “ohs,” as in know and though and so on. It’s a very special “ohheww” sound. He spoke the night before last about the casting of Eva Mendes in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (First Look, 11.20).

Amy Rice and Alicia Sams‘ By The People: The Election of Barack Obama will finally debut on HBO on Tuesday, 11.3 — precisely 365 days after the ’08 Presidential election came to an end. I reviewed the film in early August after catching a showing at the Sunshine Cinemas, and there wasn’t any way to be kind or charitable. It’s a political chick flick with no edge — butter wouldn’t melt in its mouth. And it’s way too easy in its depiction of Hillary Clinton ‘s campaign.

I began by calling it “a fairly bloodless portrait of one of the most fascinating, breathtaking, sometimes ugly, occasionally transcendent, up-and-down racial-tinderbox elections in our nation’s history. It’s up-close and somewhat intimate and sorta kinda dull at times. Not novacaine dull but glide-along, yeah-yeah dull.

“You’d never know what a heart-pumping ride Obama’s two-year campaign for the White House was by watching this nicely assembled but excessively mild-mannered film.

“Rice and Sams were given extraordinary close-up access to candidate Obama and his innermost circle (David Plouffe, David Axelrod, Robert Gibbs, etc.) as well as Michelle, Sasha and Malia. The co-directors caught some good stuff along the way (Obama tear-streaking when speaking about his recently-deceased grandmother, a ten year-old campaign worker patiently dealing with a contentious voter over the phone, etc.) but it almost seems as if Rice and Sams agreed to let Axelrod and Gibbs co-edit the film with an aim to de-balling and up-spinning the final version as much as possible.

“This seems especially apparent given the overly-diplomatic and toothless portrait of Hillary Clinton‘s campaign. Her current position as President Obama’s Secretary of State obviously means it would have been very politically awkward for a documentary to bring up her frequently ugly, race-baiting campaign tactics and so — I don’t mean to sound over-cynical and pat-minded but how else am I to process this? — Rice and Sams have given her a near-total pass.

“There’s no mention of Hilary’s incessantly playing rhetorical race cards, talking about how working white people support her, etc. There’s no footage or even a mention of Bill Clinton, and therefore no mention of his post-South Carolina primary remark that Obama’s victory in that state was somehow comparable to Jesse Jackson ‘s win there in the mid ’80s. There’s no mention of Hillary’s cynical campaign speech about how Obama “will bring us together and the heavens will part” speech, which she delivered, as I recall, during the Ohio-and-Texas primary campaign. There’s no mention of Hillary’s made-up Bosnia story about dodging bullets when she visited that country in the mid ’90s. There’s no mention of Samantha Power‘s “Hillary is a monster” comment. There’s no mention of Hillary’s bizarre refusal to concede when she should have (i.e., after Obama had his electoral-vote triumph sewn up) and how she had to be stern-talked into doing so by Congressional and Senatorial colleagues.

“It’s even more bizarre that the racial resistance factor among white voters — surely the central hurdle of Obama’s campaign — is only faintly acknowledged. We’re shown a clip of a couple of younger Bubbas stating that Obama’s ancestry is a problem, but that’s just about it in terms of Rice and Sams catching the backwater attitudes that were brought up by reporters and the political talk-show crowd nearly every damn day during the primaries and the general election,

“The Reverend Wright issue is raised (how could it not be?) along with Obama’s historic Philadelphia speech about racial relations. But there’s no mention of Michelle taking heat for saying that the positive response to her husband’s campaign was cause for her feeling proud of the U.S for the first time in a long time. There’s no mention of that idiotic terrorist fist bump flap. No YouTube clip of that West Virginia cracker lady on the back of that motorcycle expressing cultural shock at the sound of Obama’s name. There’s no mention whatsover of the fear of the Bradley Effect, a now-discounted concern that white voters might change their minds about voting for a black candidate in the privacy of the voting booth due to latent racism. And Obama’s decision to finally cut all ties with Reverend Wright is completely ignored also.

“And there’s very little mention of the general campaign against John McCain and Sarah Palin. It accounts for maybe ten minutes out of the film, which runs somewhere close to two hours. (I should have timed it but didn’t.) No right-wing stirring of the racial pot, no mention of McCain’s ‘The One’ ad (and no clip of David Gergen explaining that the racial coding of that ad was clear to anyone who grew up in the South), no expressions of bone-dumb ignorance (‘He’s…I think he’s an Arab’) and/or racial hatred at McCain and Palin rallies (‘Kill him!’).

“There’s some good B-roll footage of Obama playing basketball with friends, but the best photo-op basketball moment of the entire campaign — i.e., the moment when Obama made a near-perfect shot from outside the penalty circle in front of an audience of troops in Iraq — is missing. It leads you to suspect/presume that Rice and Sams didn’t cover last summer’s Middle East/European tour, and to ask why.

“In sum, For The People emphasizes emotionality and intimacy at the expense of the fierce melodrama and primal intensity that were fundamental aspects of the story. I could be mean and call it a puff piece and….you know something? It’s not being mean to say that because it more or less is that. I’m not saying that Rice and Sams were in fact emotionally entwined with the Obama campaign, but the doc makes it seem as if they were. And that’s a no-no. You have to step back and disengage and be merciless, if necessary.

“There are several little things in the film that are pleasing or revealing in this or that minor way. But the fact is that most of the film is not focused on Obama himself as much as his campaign staff, and much of this footage feels like B roll. The narrative emphasis in the doc is akin to the kind of backstory you might pass along to your grandmother as you show her your family photo album and explain this and that. It’s too kindly and considerate and smoothed over..

“It’s been pointed out by a friend of Rice and Sams that ‘the filmmakers made the film they wanted to make…it’s called By The People. And they captured the emotion of the campaign.’ On this last point I respectfully disagree.”

I don’t know what I was doing when this Matt Zoller Seitz video essay about Elia Kazan ‘s On The Waterfront went up almost a month ago. The more-or-less conventional view is that the story of Terry Malloy vs. Johnny Friendly is “a rat’s fantasy” or “a stoolie’s defense.” Seitz argues otherwise, or at least that a fairer, more perceptive reading is somewhere in the middle.

Kazan’s rep has long been tarnished by his cooperation with the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952 by agreeing to confirm names of Hollywood professionals who had named by others as having once had Communist affiliations. Seitz, however, says he agreed to “name names,” which isn’t quite the same thing and is therefore, to my knowledge, not precisely true.

Hollywood Reporter critic Ray Bennett, not exactly known for his no-holds-barred contrary opinions, shocked the film industry yesterday by calling Sam Taylor-Wood‘s Nowhere Boy, which had its premiere last night in London, a “passable look at the early life of John Lennon…quite a dull film.” If Bennett, who gave a pass to Amelia and Momma Mia!, can’t find a way to bend over for this film, it suggests that the U.S. critical consensus might be an issue down the road.

The British critics loved it. Of course, they usually roll over for British-produced films so you need to take their Nowhere Boy views with a grain of salt. Here’s the Telegraph guy, Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian, The Independent‘s Geoffrey Macnab and Time Out‘s Dave Calhoun.

With Hugh Jackman stating he’s not interested in hosting the 2010 Oscars, and the show’s new producers (Bill Mechanic, Adam Shankman) presumably aware that drawing younger viewers is a priority, let me repeat a truism voiced two years ago by Manhattan ad exec Shari Anne Brill, to wit: “Younger viewers live their lives pushing the envelope, breaking rules and bending rules. As long as the Oscars are perceived to have a certain rigidity, they’re not going to be relatable to young people.”

In other words, don’t hire another setttled smoothie. You don’t want your next host performing a 75 year-old Fred Astaire tune in evening finery — you want Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson (the most innovative/hilarious team to occupy the Oscar stage in recent years), or anyone for that matter with a post-9/11 fuck-all sense of humor and smarty-pants inclinations. I don’t care if Sarah Silverman‘s humor is of the LQTM variety — she’s da bomb. If the Vince Vaughn of the Wedding Crashers could host the show, the show would be instant gold. Suggestions? No more boomers, no more nods to boomer sensibilities…boomers are done.

No thanks to Matt Zoller Seitz for not sending me his latest video essay, a Zombie 101 tutorial; I had to hunt it down on Movie City News. One presumes he was inspired by the success of Zombieland. I know that George Romero‘s latest, Survival of the Dead, is still looking for distribution, and is showing next at the American Film Market.

“Ultimately zombie films aren’t about the zombies, which have no conscious mind and therefore no personality,” he begins. “They’re a collective menace — rotting emblems of plague, catastrophe, war, and other world-upending events. The films depict representative social types wandering amid the ruins of the civilization they once took for granted, trying to reconcile their pre-zombie moral code (do unto others as you would have them do unto you) with the harsh necessities of the present (‘If you’ve got a gun, shoot ’em in the head,’ a sheriff tells a TV reporter in Night of the Living Dead, adding, ‘If you don’t, get yourself a club or a torch. Beat ’em or burn ’em, they go down pretty easy’).

“If there’s no military, no police force, no law, no justice, and no hope, what’s the point of being decent as opposed to selfish? Might it be possible that, under such unimaginably awful circumstances, selfishness is decency? And if your mom is bitten by a zombie, at what point is it all right to stop treating her like your mom and reach for the 12-gauge? Dear Abby never had to ponder such questions. To quote the alternative title of a 1974 Werner Herzog movie, in zombie films it’s every man for himself and God against all. And as survivors sift through the rubble, weighing selfish imperatives against kinder, gentler impulses that might get them and everyone around them killed, the genre pulls off a nifty bit of creative jujitsu, defining civilization, morality, stability, and decency by depicting their opposites.”

L.A.Times/Gold Derby columnist Tom O’Neil has recalculated his Best Picture Oscar prediction poll with input from 16 pundits. Only The Hurt Locker and Invictus are supported by the whole crew. Precious and Up in the Air got 15 votes, two blew off Up and three blew off Nine. Ten voted for An Education and Avatar. And four have now joined me in supporting A Serious Man — O’Neil, Robert Osborne, Steve Pond and Peter Travers.

“Here’s why we’re here…because this little gray rock sells for $20 million a kilo. Their village happens to be resting on the richest deposit and they need to be relocated. Those savages are threatening our whole operation, we’re on the brink of war, and you’re supposed to be finding a diplomatic solution.” — Giovanni Ribisi‘s yuppie scumbag to Sigourney Weaver‘s Grace Augustine, a good-gal botanist, in a clip from the latest Avatar trailer. I saw this last night at the Chelsea Clearview before This Is It.

Giovannbi Ribisi, Sigourney Weaver in Avatar.

Having leafed through a print edition of Variety, New Yorker‘s Richard Brody reported today that Noah Baumbach ‘s Greenberg, a relationship drama with Ben Stiller and Greta Gerwig, and Sofia Coppola‘s Somewhere, which I know zip about but which costars Stephen Dorff, Elle Fanning and Michelle Monaghan, will screen at the American Film Market (11.4 to 11.11). I’m thinking I could wangle my way in if I was out there.

Even I, a Roman Polanski apologist and let-it-go-already arguer, don’t agree with some of what Gore Vidal has told The Atlantic‘s John Meroney about the Samantha Geimer case in an 8.28 posting. There are, however, slivers of truth here and there.

Meroney: “In September, director Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland for leaving the U.S. in 1978 before being sentenced to prison for raping a 13-year-old girl at Jack Nicholson‘s house in Hollywood. During the time of the original incident, you were working in the industry, and you and Polanski had a common friend in theater critic and producer Kenneth Tynan. So what’s your take on Polanski, this many years later?

Vidal: “I really don’t give a fuck. Look, am I going to sit and weep every time a young hooker feels as though she’s been taken advantage of?”

Meroney: “I’ve certainly never heard that take on the story before.”

Vidal: “First, I was in the middle of all that. Back then, we all were. Everybody knew everybody else. There was a totally different story at the time that doesn’t resemble anything that we’re now being told.”

Meroney: “What do you mean?”

Vidal: “The media can’t get anything straight. Plus, there’s usually an anti-Semitic and anti-fag thing going on with the press — lots of crazy things. The idea that this girl was in her communion dress, a little angel all in white, being raped by this awful Jew, Polacko — that’s what people were calling him — well, the story is totally different now from what it was then.

“Hollywood once provided protection for some of its people. For example, Rock Hudson was heterosexual to the public until 1985, when he announced he had AIDS.

“Studios protect big moneymakers. The movies with Rock Hudson and Doris Day were profitable. Each star was given the Sheriff’s telephone number to say, ‘Lay off.’ The Sheriff wasn’t going to go fucking around with the talent. They were the income of Hollywood.”

Meroney: “During the 1970s, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, and producer Robert Evans were celebrated for lifestyles of sexual extravagance.”

Vidal: “Well, they’re all virgins, every last one of them. I can testify to that. And the last one you mentioned, he’s a super virgin.”

Meroney: “They’ve certainly never been criticized and condemned for their sexual excesses. But Polanski was condemned even before he pled guilty to raping a girl.

Vidal: “Well, believe it or not, anti-Semitism is very strong out here, even though this is a Jewish business. L.B. Mayer was the worst anti-Semite of all.”

Meroney: “But he was Jewish.”

Vidal: “Well, Mayer’s view was, ‘The public will turn on all of us if they know that one of us has done anything.'”

Meroney: “You think anti-Semitism is motivating the prosecution of Polanski?”

Vidal: “Anti-Semitism got poor Polanski. He was also a foreigner. He did not subscribe to American values in the least. To [his persecutors], that seemed vicious and unnatural.”

Meroney: “What are ‘American values’?”

Meroney: “Lying and cheating. There’s nothing better.”

Meroney: “So you’re saying that a non-Jewish director wouldn’t have to worry about getting caught up in a sex crime scandal? Such a thing wouldn’t be an issue for Martin Scorsese?”

Vidal: “Well, he’s an absolutely sexless director. Can you think of a sex scene that he ever shot?”

Meroney: “Errol Flynn stood trial for raping underage girls in 1943, and was acquitted. Was he treated differently than Roman Polanski?”

Vidal: “Everybody liked Errol Flynn.”

Responding to a fierce putdown of the late Robert Altman by Time‘s Richard Schickel in a review of Mitchell Zuckoff‘s Robert Altman: The Oral Biography, director Alan Rudolph has written an equally stern rebuke.Earlier today L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein posted the Rudolph letter and laid into Schickel also.

“The power of a major artist is that he or she is a force, standard, guide,” Rudolph wrote. “What [Schickel] doesn’t grasp is that great artists always lead the way. The torch gets passed, the message out, the influence permanent. You don’t have to be aware of originators to be modified by them.

“Bob’s insistence on doing things his own way was essential. It’s the major struggle. And Altman won. Which is the ultimate defeat for the studio ruling class and establishment apologists. [Schickel] uses Jules Feiffer‘s troubles with Bob as an example of overindulgence, but glibly dismisses Feiffer’s description of Altman as a genius. In the critic’s mind, Bob wasn’t the right kind of genius.

“Altman never changed. To have ‘comebacks’ shows he never went away. Some of his films might have been less than others, but each had the stuff of brilliance, and was part of a larger collection. Bob knew that continuously working in the rough was the best way to find the jewel. His biting humor never spared reality nor himself. The painful absurdity of it all. There was nobody like him during his professional peak, and there isn’t now.”

For what it’s worth, Hollywood Elsewhere stands with Rudolph and Goldstein.

Schickel wrote that “none [of Altman’s films] whatsoever will survive as anything more than historical curiosities. [They] do not transcend their times; even the best of them remain trapped within those times.” And that, for me, is glorious enough. Because those times — the ’70s, mainly, when Altman had his great creative run — delivered a rich and flavorful kind of filmmaking (and film-watching) that has inspired and nourished tens of thousands of film lovers, and will continue to do so. I didn’t say “millions” because the Altman movies never reached…okay, were never intended to reach the popcorn multitudes, even when they were firing on all eight cyclinders. But what a delicious feast they are, and always will be.

Schickel states that Zuckoff’s book “provides massive evidence that people had lots of fun making” Altman’s films, the implication being that relatively few these days have fun watching them. The above clip from Altman’s California Split (which I initially posted last February) disproves Schickel’s suggestion and then some. It isn’t just funny but exhilarating. It makes you smile at everything and everyone. I laugh every single time I see it, and if Altman had done nothing more in his career than create moments like this, he would still be in my pantheon with a gold star next to his name.

I only wish I could be in LA for the upcoming UCLA Film and Television Archive Robert Altman tribute, which begins on Sunday, 11.1. Included will be an 11.13 screening of Altman’s The Long Goodbye, which Goldstein calls “a personal favorite.” Me too, and for two reasons in particular.

The first is a scene in which Mark Rydell, playing a vicious and oily gangster, mentions to Elliott Gould‘s Phillip Marlowe that he was always afraid of getting undressed in the locker room at the end of gym class because he “never had any pubic hair until I was 15 years old,” and Gould deadpans “Oh, yeah? You musta looked like one of the Three Little Pigs.” The second is a third-act scene in which a small-town Mexican official refers to Marlowe’s friend, a sociopath named Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton) who may have committed suicide, in heavily accented English as “the deceased,” and Gould — probably improvising — says, “The diseased…yeah, right.”