With Wrestler star Mickey Rourke talking these days about how his career went plop into the toilet in the ’90s, I found this Entertainment Weekly piece I filed from the ’92 Cannes Film Festival interesting. It was just a few days after the L.A. riots when I came across a Rourke quote about those he felt were responsible. A few hours later I ran into Spike Lee at a party, showed him the clipping, and he grabbed my tape recorder and said what he said.

Late May 1992 EW clipping

You are not a true film person unless you know what CRM-114 means — what film it’s from, what its function was, who first mentions it, etc.

Everyone regards MSNBC’s Chuck Todd as a brilliant political pulse-taker, but he and his First Read team are consistently the most cautious and conservative estimators around.

Today, three weeks from Election Day, Todd & Co. are only giving Obama a modest 101 electoral vote lead over McCain, 264-163, with 111 votes (Nevada, Colorado, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida) in the toss-up column. This at a time when almost everyone else regards Ohio, Colorado, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida as leaning-Obama states, at the very least. (Okay, one or two polls indicate Ohio is only slightly leaning to Obama.)
Fivethirtyeight has only Missouri and Indiana in the toss-up column, and is projecting Obama over McCain 351 to 187. The toss-ups at Pollster.com are Nevada (actually slightly leaning to Obama), Missouri, Indiana, West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina (again, slight Obama). They’re giving to Obama over McCain 320 to 158 with 60 electoral toss-up votes. And the Yahoo Dashboard is projecting Obama over McCain 344 to 167 with only one toss-up state — North Carolina.
So what’s up with Todd? What is he seeing that others are missing? Are the others all doing the wildly speculative spitball thing — slapdash, guesstimating — while only Todd is taking stock of the actual numerical realities? I don’t think so. I think there’s an element inside MSNBC that’s become cautious to a fault. I’ve pretty much come to think of Todd and his team as the “hold-back guys” — i.e., the last ones to admit that something’s happening here, Mr. Jones. It’s as if Tom Brokaw is tugging at their jacket sleeves and going, “Hold on, hold on…not so fast, don’t jump to conclusions.”

Jamie Stuart again grapples with existential conundrums, an unfaithful (or at the very least weak and malleable) woman, phantom creeps on the street and other stuff that feels a little too poised and over-considered. Sooner or later all artists accept the fact that an orange is an orange is an orange.
And oh yeah, Wrestler star Mickey Rourke talking about his movie-career detour is cut into all this.
Here’s a flattering assessment of Stuart and his work by the Washington Post‘s Ann Hornaday, posted yesterday.
I love the brief Mac screen shot of an entry or password code: “CRM-114.” You are not a true film person unless you know what CRM-114 means — what film it’s from, what its function was, who first mentions it, etc.
“You think people are stupid and don’t pay attention today? You should see it fifty years from now.”

Marlon Brando out-gunning Karl Malden at the end of One-Eyed Jacks is, by my yardstick, the second most satisfying drilling of a bad guy in the history of westerns. (The most satisfying is still Alan Ladd pulling faster than Jack Palance in Shane, and the third most satisfying is Kevin Costner and Robert Duvall ‘s third-act triumph in Open Range.)

It’s a shame that One-Eyed Jacks, which was issued on a decent-looking laser disc in the ’90s, is available only on crummy-looking public domain DVDs these days. Charles Lang‘s cinematography is vivid and striking and handsomely framed, and Monterey’s turbulent seaside backdrops give the film a grand and painterly distinction. It seems to be in need of a Robert Harris restoration (if the original elements haven’t been lost).
In March 2007, Moon in the Gutter’s Jeremy Richey wrote of the power in the shot in One-Eyed Jacks when Brando’s Rio realizes Karl Malden’s Dad “has betrayed him. He’s alone on top of a hill and a dust storm is developing around him, the wind is blowing and we see him looking and then we see the realization on his face that he’s been left behind. It is one of the loneliest and most isolating moments in all of American cinema.”
Richey’s piece was later re-run by Amplifier in early ’08 — here‘s a link.
The only film directed by Brando, One-Eyed Jacks “has been hailed by Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino,” he wrote, “one that signaled the rise of a more violent and cynical cinema, but for some reason it’s never really gotten its due.
“The main reason for its continuing dismissal in some circles is that it remains a compromised film. After a gruelling six months worth of shooting Brando either ran out of steam while editing, or the film was finally just taken away from him or most likely, both. It is known for sure that Brando’s original five hour cut was whittled down to the 141 minutes we have now, and the incredibly bleak ending (Pina Pellicer being shot and killed by Karl Malden during the final gun battle) was changed.

“Even in it’s compromised state One-Eyed Jacks remains a visionary film and a totally unique one. It’s impact can be felt in the American Westerns that followed by Sam Peckinpah, Monte Hellman and Arthur Penn; and also in the European westerns that would gain prominence just a few years later.
“One-Eyed Jacks seems like a clear precursor not only to Sergio Leone but to a breed of mystical European Westerns like Sergio Corbucci‘s The Grand Silence and Enzo Castellari‘s Keoma.”
I love this scene between Brando and Timothy Carey. A crude racist drunk, Carey is beaten up by Brando for treating a Latino woman with cruelty and brutality, and then is shot three times when he tries to plug Brando with a shotgun. Best line: “You get up now, you big tubba guts!” Second best line: the bartender saying “Mister, you really killed him,” to which Brando shrugs with a guttural “aawww,” as if to say, “Hey, that’s my style — three shots in the chest, take it or leave it.”

“Much of the atmosphere and the action of Body of Lies is familiar [with] director Ridley Scott flipping back and forth from Washington to the Middle East, from drone surveillance to the street, from explosions and scenes of torture to men tearing across the desert with guns blazing. But the movie is smart and tightly drawn; it has a throat-gripping urgency and some serious insights, and Scott has a greater command of space and a more explicit way with violence than most thriller directors.” — from David Denby‘s New Yorker review, dated 10.13.08.

I sat through this thing unperturbed and for the most part unaroused. I love high-craft thrillers, and you know Scott will always be a master of this sort of thing. But there’s nothing going on in this film — nothing that seems to really matter beyond the fact that it’s hard not to like and care about Leonardo DiCaprio‘s CIA character, named Roger Ferris. But that’s mainly a loyalty-intrigue thing I have for DiCaprio, the actor. I’ll pay to see him in just about anything. (I suspect he’ll be giving the big go-to performance in Sam Mendes‘ Revolutionary Road.)
All I know is that I’ve tried to write a Body of Lies review three times since Friday, and it just wouldn’t come. That’s not my fault. There’s just not very much there, although at no point was I bored or bothered. BOL was somewhere between mildly and marginally satisfying every step of the way, but I doubt if I’ll ever watch it again. Unless I’m on a plane next year and dead bored. It’s a tweener — no love, no hate. Nothing kicking in or kicking out on the way to the parking lot.

Elia Kazan‘s Viva Zapata (1952) is the only Marlon Brando film that hasn’t been decently mastered for DVD. Why? I love and miss this film. It’s one of Bud’s three golden-era Kazan collaborations, two years before Waterfront and a year after Streetcar. And he’s truly great in the part. Ditto Anthony Quinn and Joseph Wiseman. (I love how Wiseman shouts in a crazy manic stream, “Zapata, in thenameofeverythingwefoughtfor don’t go!”) And Brando’s death scene near the finale (i.e., getting shot 112 times) is a classic of its kind.

Guillermo del Toro once told me he won’t watch it. “How would you feel,” he said, “if Mexico made a film about Abraham Lincoln starring a Mexican actor, and speaking English-accented Spanish?” He has me there, but the craft, heart and political conviction in Viva Zapata still feel genuine to me. (Even if it’s a little too simplistic and sentimentalized at times.) Kazan was coming to terms with ratting (i.e., confirming names) when he made it, but he was still an old leftie from the ’30s and knew about the emotion behind a rebellion.

“We wanted to focus on the mind-set of this man. We don’t change anything in his true story. Don’t have to, because it’s a great story. Dickens would do it. Mark Twain would write a great book. This guy who is basically a bum becomes president of the United States.” — W. director Oliver Stone speaking to N.Y. Times writer Richard L. Berke.

I wouldn’t have paid attention to this 10.4 SNL clip if Mark Wahlberg hadn’t recently complained about it. I think it’s mildly funny. The guy doesn’t sound like Wahlberg, but he has his speaking style down pat.

Another expression of down-home rural attitudes, this one captured outside of a Sarah Palin rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania yesterday — 10.11.08. And here‘s a story about the incident from CBS News’ Scott Conroy. And here’s a story about a weaselly McCain worker named Jeffrey Frederick in Gainesville, Virginia. (Imagine what it must be like to be that guy.) The racial pus is seeping out more and more, I think, because it’s been hitting the rightwing rurals that Obama might actually win and some are starting to freak out, which leads to acting out.