Tuesday, 2.3.09, 4:55 pm. Snow, cold, wind, wet, etc.

45thstreet from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo.

[Update: Most of the following applies even if the Lionsgate/Summit story is b.s.]. I’ve just been told by a reliable source that Kathryn Bigelow‘s The Hurt Locker — despite everything I wrote yesterday about Summit dodging a release-date commitment, and despite the two film fest/series showings happening in March — will not be opening in March or April. Unfrigginbelievable. It’s not a summer movie so they’re probably thinking the fall. A full year and then some after the Toronto ’07 debut that got everyone so excited! Unless they’re thinking of summer as a counter-program strategy.

My choice for the three best Annie Leibovitz photos in this month’s 2009 Hollywood Portfolio section in the just-out Vanity Fair.

Gran Torino‘s Clint Eastwood

Doubt‘s Meryl Streep, John Patrick Shanely

Revolutionary Road‘s Sam Mendes, Kate Winslet.

“Despite its layer of darkness, He’s Just Not That Into You is a fantasy,” writes Variety‘s John Anderson. “No one has a problem except romance. Neil sails a yacht. Ben and Janine are giving their Baltimore apartment an overhaul that would embarrass Architectural Digest.

“Perhaps that’s the point. No one has anything to distract them from the minutiae of their love lives, which they proceed to incinerate through overanalysis. It’s a moral fable, maybe, if you make half a million a year.”

Money fantasy issues aren’t restricted to He’s Just Not That Into You. 90% to 95% of all relationship dramas and comedies ignore financial profiles and purchasing power. The last film that dared touch this topic was Friends With Money (i.e., Jennifer Aniston playing a house-cleaner with pals who were either reasonably well off, well off or loaded). The irony, of course, is that while women often say they choose guys based on their warmth, kindness and ability to make them laugh, the truth is that a prospective boyfriend’s income level (i.e., ability provide some degree of financial security) is usually a deal-maker or -breaker with the vast majority of the girls out there.

The last romantic drama that even flirted with acknowledging this? Beats me.

Anderson says that HJNTIY “may also be the first contemporary escapist comedy that feels fully aware of its place in the economic vortex. The lushness, the leisure, the vicarious wealth are all balms to soothe our savaged selves as we look away from the news and onto the screen. Given the state of things, such a movie almost seems like an act of charity toward the public. It’s not screwball comedy, but the underlying sentiments are the same.”

Some have the impression that I’ve turned into some kind of Benjamin Button hater. I haven’t. I’ve always respected David Fincher‘s film as far as it goes. It just never got me that much. I’ve more or less been a half-and-halfer from the moment I first saw it. But I love the way that New Yorker critic David Denby tears it apart. Denby’s wrath is so strong and urgent that he’s just posted an Oscar summary piece in which he takes it down again.

“Brad Pitt‘s modesty when he comes into his own handsome flesh is becoming, yet his eyes are unforgivably blank. Where is Benjamin’s exhilaration at shedding his infirmities? He tells us very little of what we want to know, which is how he feels about what has happened to him. Perhaps if you’re born old with an infant’s brain and get younger, you never know much of anything (including the ardencies and the anxieties of youth), but that kind of mental void doesn’t yield much of a protagonist.

“Benjamin leaves his loving girlfriend (Cate Blanchett) and travels all over the world and announces, ‘It’s never too late, or in my case too early, to be whoever you want to be.’ Someone at Paramount Pictures must imagine that this sentiment is a gift to the world, because a full-page ad that the studio took out in the Times, on Inauguration Day, proclaims it as such. (The quote continues, ‘I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.’)

“Courage is definitely a good thing to have; lots of money (which Benjamin inherits) helps, too. It seems that Roth has gone back to the fatuous simplicities of his screenplay for Forrest Gump, with its dopey hero who conquers the world. Whatever else it might be, Benjamin Button is a celebration of ignorance; it could be a wan kiss goodbye to the Bush era.”

Denby isn’t very appreciate of Slumdog Millionaire either, now that I’ve read the piece again. Here’s his final graph:

“Almost every movie, of course, is a fantasy, or a fable, or a fairy tale of one kind or another. In a great movie, though, narrative and technological magic combine to produce heightened intimations of the real, and that ecstatic merging of magic and reality is what imprints the movie on our emotional memory. Besides the children, what I will remember of Slumdog Millionaire is a disorderly exploitation of disorder, a kind of visual salad of glowing rotten fruit, constantly tossed. The envelope, please — I guess.”

I wrote a note this morning to the other journos (Kim Voynar, James Rocchi, Jen Yamato) who will also be visiting the Oxford Film Festival this weekend. “Sometime between Thursday and Sunday, I’m going to rent an Enterprise car and drive 40 miles to Tupelo, Elvis Presley‘s birthplace and the presumed geographical inspiration for Van Morrison‘s ‘Tupelo Honey.’

“Does anybody want to split the rent/gas expense and come along? Can’t be much. There’s also a Rent-a-Wreck in Oxford.

“I also want to visit Rowan Oak, the William Faulkner homestead in Oxford. Tupelo and Rowan Oak together should take maybe four or five hours, I’m guessing.

“I briefly considered driving all the way the fuck down to Philadelphia, the town where the Mississippi Burning civil-rights murders happened in ’64, but 150 miles down and back again would eat up the whole day so I guess not.

“I’d like to have breakfast or lunch in a really out-of-the-way mom ‘n’ pop diner somewhere between Oxford and Tupelo. Someplace really small and run-down with good food. Like the little joint Clint Eastwood was sitting in at the end of Million Dollar Baby. An HE reader wrote me yesterday and said to have a meal of fried catfish at the Taylor Grocery in Taylor, Mississippi which is about 5 miles south of Oxford. “Look for Jimmy Buffett‘s autograph scrawled on the wall there,” he wrote.

“How times have I visited rural Mississippi in my life? Donut. How many more times am I likely to visit rural Mississippi, given my profession and tendencies?

“And one way or another I want to work in a visit to the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where Dr. King was killed. And what about visiting the legendary Sun Records? I think we need to make it a three-fer in Memphis on Thursday before driving down to Oxford — Graceland, Sun Records and the Lorraine motel. It’ll probably take two or three hours. Okay, three. So we arrive in Oxford a little later than expected…big deal. You only live once.

“If the Oxford Film Fest driver doesn’t want to do the Memphis trifecta, maybe it would make sense to rent a car in Memphis airport and keep it for the three and a half days (and obviously work in the Tupelo thing in the bargain).

“I realize you can’t do everything so I’m foregoing a visit to the Memphis locations used in Sydney Pollack‘s The Firm, specifically the Mud Island footbridge and monorail and the Peabody hotel at 149 Union Avenue.”

A Connecticut lady once told me a story once about judging a guy’s character. She’d just met this fellow on a train in Europe somewhere (Switzerland, I think) and at the end of a day, having become friendly, they decided to share a hotel room. There was a bit of a romantic vibe between them but she didn’t want to go there right away. At the same time she wasn’t sure how things would unfold once they were in the room. She started to wonder if she’d done the smart thing by sharing with this dude.

Anyway, it got really late and was time for dousing the lights and turning in. Would the guy try anything? The lady wasn’t sure. Then the guy went into the bathroom and closed the door and turned on the sink faucet before using the toilet. As soon as the lady heard the water running, she relaxed. Any guy who would try to aurally camouflage the sound of his urinating, she decided, could be controlled and wouldn’t be a problem. That’s what she told me. A word to the wise.

“The problem with [all Oscar] formulations, and the reason they tend to stumble over themselves almost as soon as they emerge from a would-be-Oscar analyst’s cortex, begins with the phrase ‘the Academy’, and its implicit assumption that each year’s nominations represent an act of coherent collective will that is designed to reflect a particular set of truths.

“In fact, the Academy is, much like its home country, a hydra-headed agglomeration of different constituencies, often in fierce conflict, and the electoral decisions it makes can in different years reflect fearfulness, defensiveness and retreat, or a kind of split decision that denotes a compromise between the past and the future, or, on certain delightful occasions, an unexpected surge of thoughtfulness, good taste and high aspiration.” — from Mark Harris‘s impressively well-written assessment of the ‘098 Oscar race that appeared in Sunday’s Observer.

Hats off to RevoLucian, the guy who threw this techno-vid together so quickly and so well. (Thanks to In Contention‘s Kris Tapley for alerting.)

“After [last] Saturday’s Mickey Rourke tribute, at which he received the American Riviera award, Academy voters woke up Sunday morning to a big color photo of the star and a front-page headline in the Santa Barbara News-Press blaring ‘The Comeback King.’ Can it influence their thinking at crunch time? Studio consultants must think so, or they wouldn’t keep coming back year after year with major contenders.” — from Pete Hammond‘s 2.2.09 Envelope column about his Santa Barbara adventures.

Mickey Rourke, Pete Hammond.

A big-city film critic friend told me tonight why he doesn’t do South by Southwest any more:

1. “No press screenings, or none that I recall from when I was there from 2003-07, or maybe just a handful. They think it’s more ‘democratic’ to have the press line up with the public for almost every movie, which can take literally hours for popular screenings.

2. “The movies mostly suck. We started doing SXSW because we figured it was the new Sundance — and it was, like the way Sundance was 20 years ago (or so I’ve been told). But most movies SXSW takes have been tossed into the delete bin by Toronto and/or Sundance. The few good ones it runs tend to be Sundance hits making their next festival stop. There is rarely a premiere of note — Knocked Up in 2007 was the only SXSW premiere I recall that made any kind of impact out of that fest.

3. “The press office is a joke. Beyond a joke. Nobody knows anything, the pass they give you is almost useless, and they will kick you out of the press office once the much bigger SXSW Music Festival starts — which it does smack-dab in the middle of the film festival, thus turning the film festival into a complete waste of time. Oh, and the film press office won’t help you if you want to check out a couple of the music events. You’re on your own, and on your own dime.

“Have I succeeded in changing your mind?”