Page Six has reported that Clint Eastwood “made clear” his feeling that Sarah Palin won the vice-presidential debate in a public interview he did last Saturday with writer Lillian Ross.
“‘One of the candidates the other night seemed more prone to telling the truth than the other,” Eastwood said. This was followed by Ross saying, ‘I liked her, too!’ Eastwood went on to talk about how well ‘she‘ did, although he stopped short of a ringing endorsement.
“The Post‘s Kyle Smith asked Eastwood, who describes himself as a libertarian, what qualities he believed would be ideal in a presidential candidate. Eastwood quoted James Cagney as saying, ‘Plant your feet and tell the truth.'”
With this Scott Feinberg/”Feinberg Files” piece about the odds of Angelina Jolie nabbing a Best Actress nomination for her Changeling performance, it is, I think, fair to say that the enthusiasm levels are neither low nor high. In part because Changeling has been taking hits. I’m sorry, but that’s how things seem to be tumbling as we speak. And Jolie — I think this is fair to say also — has Tom O’Neil to thank for this. Because he started the dialogue about whether the Academy has been unfair or stingy with her. He was looking to help, but look what happened.
According to Tom Tapp on the newly launched Daily Beast, Steven Spielberg has said he’d like to start this Lincoln project in “early 2009, because it’s Lincoln’s 200th anniversary.” And this is supposed to make sense to someone? Spielberg has been shilly-shallying on this thing for years but now he wants to “start” working on it — filming, I presume this means — because of a birthday in 1809? Which means the movie will come out in 2010 or ’11, or a year or two after Abe’s 200th anniversary. I have an equally brilliant idea. Why doesn’t Spielberg delay shooting until 2013 or early ’14 and then open it in 2015, or the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination?
“I was able to catch an early screening of Milk in Portland this weekend, and can confirm that it’s stellar,” a critic friend wrote last night. “It’s impassioned and immediate, with beautiful use of light. It looks as if Gus Van Sant shot every major scene around 4:30 pm — not the ‘golden hour’ but that especially crisp hour right before.
“I’m not much of a Sean Penn fan — I generally find his showiness distracting — but he disappears into Harvey Milk. I think he’s a lock for a Best Actor nomination. James Franco is also exceptionally subtle, though I suspect his low-key work will be ignored in favor of Josh Brolin‘s performance as Dan White, who gets a couple of emotive clips in, and Emile Hirsch, who plays completely against expectations as a street hustler who Milk convinces to politically organize his fellow tricks.
“The most interesting thing to me about the movie — and the reason why I thought I’d write you about it — is that I don’t think it would have been possible without Brokeback Mountain‘s mainstream success. This is a picture focusing on an activist gay man with a flamboyant streak and several lovers (mostly offscreen) and despite the poignant ending, it focuses less on gay suffering and more on the thrill of finding personal identity and a political voice. It isn’t afraid to come busting joyfully out of the closet, and I’m not sure it could have gotten the traction it will get, if not for Brokeback.”
It doesn’t include the Dan White trail and the twinkie defense, the subsequent aquittal and the White Night Riots at City Hall that followed, he says. “It ends at the candlelight vigil,” he explains. The other stuff is covered in a “where are they now?” text.
Say what you will about the matter-of-fact unfolding of Oliver Stone‘s W., about the inescapable intrigue coupled with a relatively rote approach, about the mild-mannered, low-style precision that if anything bends over backwards to be fair to our 43rd U.S. President, and about Josh Brolin‘s performance as George W. Bush being dead perfect but — and this, I believe, is a crucial distinction — appropriately hollow. Which means that on some level the performance, like the film itself, leaves you feeling a wee bit flat and wanting more. But wait.
This is part of a deceptive strategy, it turns out. You’re supposed to say “this is great but why isn’t it better?” Because it’s about a fairly shallow man, for one thing, and the facts are the facts. On top of which cagey Oliver is holding his cards to his chest and making you wait for the turnaround of the last ten or twelve minutes, which pays off (or at least paid off for me) in a way that — seriously, no jive — is something close to astonishing.
So bring out all the thoughtful complaints if you want (as Variety‘s Todd McCarthy and the Hollywood Reporter‘s Kirk Honeycutt have done this morning), but you have to give it this one thing, and for me it’s something that, in my eyes at least, makes W. one of the most startling and surprising films of the year.
The damn movie leaves you feeling sorry for this fucker at the finale, and that ain’t hay.
Compassion for a fiendish klutz? For one of the worst guys on the planet right now? For the chief enabler and architect of this country’s massive financial ruin? For the man who tarnished and shamed his country and took it on a moral and ethical downslide that will take years if not decades to turn around, if it’s not too late? Yes.
Which, being a Bush hater second to none, I didn’t think was possible. But that’s what it does, and you have to give Stone credit for an amazing sleight of hand. I came out saying to myself, as Bush himself says to himself at the finale, “What just happened?” By the last shot you are sold because the anger is gone and you’re left with this stunned and oddly tragic figure saying to himself, “This is how my life turned out?”
Stanley Weiser‘s screenplay is what it is — a no-frills portrait of a sad, limited and stubborn man who was never able to climb out of what he was given and born into from the moment he took his first breath. How, Weiser must have said to himself at the beginning, do you touch people’s souls with such a character? Richard III, he’s not. But he is George the 2nd, and that’s enough. Because all along it’s been about his relationship to his father, George H.W. Bush. What a mess. What a calamity.
“I’m not sure that we’ll succeed,” Stone recently told a British journalist. “But this movie is not for the 12 per cent who still approve of him – it’s for the other 88 per cent.” (I thought Bush’s approval rating was something like 26 per cent…no?) “On the other hand, I don’t think there’s anything in the movie that the other 88 per cent would have any reason to detest. It is a human portrait of a man, not meant to insult people who believe in what Bush believes in.”
This, Stone told the Brit, is why he made W. – “to understand, to walk in the man’s shoes. ‘It’s my job…if I’m dramatizing his life…to step above my hate,’ he says.'”
This is all I have time to write because I have to see W. again at 9 am and then go to the press junket and talk to Stone, Brolin and Weiser. I’ll write more about it later today and tomorrow.
Added note: W. was shot under the gun, 46 days of principal photography, only 300,000 feet of film exposed (as opposed to the normal million) and only a bit more than two months of post-production. I’m saying this because Stone — you do have to be fair about this — might have had time to burnish and refine and add some English here and there, and W. might have been a bit more than it is right now. I’m not making excuses. I’m just saying that the plain-deal flatness, given the circumstances, was inevitable, and yet, as I’ve said, it serves a purpose in that it reflects the depth of Dubya’s soul. And then along comes the ending and you go, “Oh, I see…now I get it. Wow.”
It seems that An American Carol director David Zucker is looking into a possible exhibitor conspiracy to switch tickets and pull other pranks in order to make it seem as if his film isn’t doing as well with ticket-buyers as it actually is. Not displaying Carol posters as prominently as they could be, misrepresenting the film’s rating (it’s PG-13, not R) , not giving it marquee space and so on.
“We have had heard” — the extra “had” is obviously a typo — “from numerous people across the country that there has been some ticket fraud when buying a ticket for An American Carol this past weekend,” says a special “fraud” page on the film’s official website.
“Please check your ticket,” the copy says. “If you were in fact one of those people that were ‘mistakenly’ sold a ticket for another movie please fill out the form below. Hold on to your ticket so we can have proof.
“If you have noticed other irregularities with the theatres in your area please let us know in the comment section below. For instance, Rated R film rating (when in fact we are rated PG-13), posters not being up, not being listed on the marquee, image or focus problems, sound issues, etc.”
Two anti-Obama hate epithets were shouted today at rallies for John McCain and Sarah Palin, one calling for his death.
In Albuquerque, New Mexico, McCain “pushed his campaign’s most recent line of attack against Obama: that the Democratic nominee represents a relatively unknown risk,” reports CNN’s Politicker Ticker.
“‘All people want to know is: What has this man ever actually accomplished in government?,” McCain said. ‘What does he plan for America? In short: Who is the real Barack Obama?’ Someone in the crowd responded by yelling: “Terrorist!” The crowd roared, and McCain seemed startled, but it is unclear whether he actually heard what the man shouted. He did not respond to the attack.”
The Washington Post‘ s Dana Milbank, filing from Clearwater, Florida, wrote that Palin went into her Obama-hangin’-with-Bill Ayers-the-terrorist riff in front of a large crowd. “And according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, ‘launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,'” she continued.
The crowd loudly booed, Milbank reports. “Kill him!” proposed one man in the audience.
“I’ve seen Gus Van Sant‘s Milk (Focus Features, 11.26),” a director-actor friend wrote about 18 hours ago. “It’s really really good. Sean Penn and Emile Hirsch are incredible. It’s romantic and sexy and intimate and totally moving.” I called the guy three times to try and get a little bit more, but no go. (Or not yet.) I was told today that the running time is just over two hours.
“A blogger is an ignorant, often times uneducated person. They are a member of a socially disadvantageous class of people. A blogger can soon become a legitimate journalist, but they don’t abide by any certain rule of grammar. Being a ‘blogger’ means you don’t get paid. It means being on the same evolutionary backporch step as a fetch-happy dog.
“An internet media journalist is not a blogger, but a blogger can be an internet journalist. I am far too intelligent and well educated to be classified as a blogger.” — from a Movieweb rant by an established guy (I’ll leave everyone to guess who) that was up earlier today, but then removed. For me the best thing about it was (a) the fact that I feel the same disdain toward some bloggers and therefore partly agree (but with a bit less vitiriol) and (b) the art. Has Devin Faraci weighed in on this?
Tomas Alfredson‘s Let The Right One In (Magnolia, 10.24) is easily the most strikingly unusual vampire pic that anyone’s seen in I don’t know how long. The fact that Overture Films and Spitfire Pictures are developing a U.S. remake with Cloverfield‘s Matt Reeves on board to direct speaks volumes. It’s one of the standout originals of ’08.
Let The Right One In director Thomas Anderson — Monday, 10.6.08, 11:55 am.
I spoke to Alfredson earlier today — here’s the mp3 file
Let The Right One In doesn’t compose with the usual brushstrokes. The vampire (Lina Leandersson) is a tweener girl and the male lead, a mortal, is a wimpy blond male (Kare Hedebrant) who’s in love with her. It has about 50 CG shots but very few are “noticable.” The violent moments happen suddenly and sometimes off-screen. And it hasn’t been shot like a typical horror film (i.e., in a spooky-sexy-dreamscape way) but with a flat, over-bright, industrial texture. And everything in the film is surrounded — blanketed — with lots and lots of snow.
I spoke with Alfredson earlier today, and if the film doesn’t make clear it hasn’t been directed by a horror film buff, Alfredson repeatedly emphasizes this. He’s not Guillermo del Toro , not by a long shot. The only significant Dracula movie he’s seen, he says, is the old Bela Lugosi version from the early ’30s. That means he hasn’t seen Francis Coppola‘s Dracula or any of the Hammer Dracula films of the ’50s and ’60s or anything else along these lines.
Just listen to our conversation — you’ll understand where he’s coming from soon enough.
The only problem, as I said before, is the title. Who in hell is going to remember Let The Right One In or associate it with tweener vampires? Talk about a title that means nothing — nothing at all! — to anyone. Movie titles should be aimed at the dumbest person in the room. Leo Tolstoy knew this when he called one of his novels War and Peace. Although Alfredson’s, which is taken from a Morrissey lyric, does sound cooler and cooler the more you say it.
This morning director John Hancock (Bang The Drum Slowly, Weeds, Prancer) got in touch about a screenplay he’s written about Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, based on Ayers’ memoirs “Fugitive Days.” McCain-Palin has made Ayers is a hot topic over the least couple of days but I was buried at the time, so I hooked him up with Politico‘s Jeffrey Ressner and here’s what resulted.
Bill Ayers young annd old — former Weatherman activist, currently professor of education at the University of Illinois in Chicago.
Hancock finished Fugitive Days “over the summer with longtime partner Dorothy Tristan, and his agent has just begun sending it to producers and production companies,” Ressner reported. “Adapted from Ayers’ 2001 memoir of the same name, the script has received ‘nibbles but no bites,’ said Hancock, who is hoping to direct the film if it is eventually produced.
“Hancock told Politico that he optioned the book about a year and a half ago and spent about 40 hours interviewing Ayers and Dohrn in Chicago. The two were founding members of the Weather Underground and together helped plot some of the most violent domestic protests of the Vietnam War, including bombings of the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol.
“Near the end of the screenplay, Ayers discusses his political activism in a scene with his father and says, ‘Yeah we did some foolish things. I can’t quite imagine putting a bomb in a building today, but the way things are in the world, I can’t imagine entirely dismissing the possibility either. What if the government is killing a bunch of innocent people and just won’t listen? And knowing now that trying to make a better life can lead to the guillotine, and the gulag, I still can’t imagine a fully human world without utopian dreams.'”
Perhaps the most dangerous, Obama-threatening paragraph in recent weeks was posted yesterday by New Republic columnist Howard Wolfson (a.k.a., “The Flack”). “Perpetually fretting Democrats will not want to accept it,” it begins. “The campaigns themselves can’t afford to believe it. Many journalists know it but can’t say it. And there will certainly be some twists and turns along the way. But take it to a well capitalized bank: Bill Ayers isn’t going to save John McCain. The race is over.”
He may well be right, but there are at least five reasons why these words shouldn’t be spoken.
One, it ain’t over until it’s over. Two, there are millions of Obama-supporting but fundamentally lazy and distracted under-25 voters who will leap at any excuse not to vote, and reading that political insiders believe that “it’s over” is just the excuse they’d like to hear. Three, McCain going ugly between now and 11.3 could notch things down a point or two. Four, something bad could still happen (like a terrorist October surprise). Five, however far ahead in the polls Obama may be the night before election day, the Bradley Effect (i.e., racial-minded whites getting cold feet in the election booth) will probably drop that margin 3 to 4 points.
Here’s a sixth reason:
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