Nikki Finke reported about two hours ago that original DreamWorks partner David Geffen is moving on after 14 years. She got this from an early look at a press release “to be issued about the formal separation of DreamWorks and Paramount,” blah blah. It also says that “a decision on who will be the new distributor for DreamWorks 2.0 will be made at the beginning of the week by Steven Spielberg. No suspense about this as everybody’s figuring Universal.
Why don’t I care more about this? Because I’ve always chosen to regard the comings and goings of powerful rich guys as a corporate parlor drama that doesn’t really affect my realm. Many journalists feel differently. They get wet over this stuff. You have to be up on who’s running what, of course, but that’s as far as it goes with me.

Sometimes car accidents can be…well, not too bad. Sometimes they can be shrugged off with no cops, no insurance, no injuries, no nothin’. I learned this around 5:30 in the morning on the Hutchinson River Parkway when I was 18 or 19, and I’ve never forgotten the lesson. Not everything that goes badly needs to be catastrophic.
Three of us had done an all-nighter in Manhattan, wandering around the streets on mescaline, the usual West Village-East Village walk-around, not much cash, soaking up the energy. We drove back to Connecticut around 5 am, the light starting to break. And somewhere around Rye, or right before the Connecticut border, we came around a curve and there was this beige Volkswagen Beetle lying on its side, the owner standing nearby, looking more or less unruffled and going “hmmm.”
We immediately pulled over, put on the flashers, got out and ran over and helped the guy right it. One, two, three…done. Quick thanks, hand shake, the bug (which had no serious marks or dents) started right up and he took off. Then we did the same. It was semi-dangerous standing around near a curve, of course. The whole deal took maybe 90 seconds…okay, two minutes. My friends and I hardly spoke of it later, that morning or during the weeks and months that followed.

A 10.5 Columbus Dispatch poll of 2262 likely Ohio voters favors Obama over McCain by 49-42. The poll covers 9.24 to 10.2, doesn’t reflect the Biden-Palin debate effect, and has a two-point margin of error. And the N.Y. Times is calling Ohio a toss-up state? I’d at least call it a “leaning Obama” light blue state…no?
“Falling far behind in Ohio is a nightmare scenario for McCain,” the New Republic‘s Michael Crowley wrote today. “He almost surely can’t win without it. And remember, absentee early voting has already started there. Obama’s support among African-Americans in Ohio: 94-2.
“Update: I had thought this was Obama’s best showing in Ohio, but I forgot that (a) Quinnipiac showed him +8 here last week and (b) the Real Clear Politics spread is Obama +3.”

“It is intellectually slovenly to demean religion based on what goes wrong in secular society,” writes N.Y. Press critic Armond White. “Bill Maher‘s one-sided view never looks deep enough to respect other people’s views. Robert Bresson‘s Diary of a Country Priest hit greatness in its mysteriously ambivalent repentance scene. And Christopher Durang‘s classic play, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, conveyed the anguish of a lifetime spent in moral contemplation.
“Neither art nor philosophy, Religulous highlights Maher’s sourpuss for nearly two hours of flimsy barroom rhetoric. ‘Religion must die for man to live,’ he summarizes. Maher became a theology expert around the time Jon Stewart became a political analyst; it’s a hoodwink akin to the moment the Reagan administration registered ketchup as a vegetable in public school cafeterias.”
There’s nothing slovenly about applying rational thought to absurd religious mythology, which is all that Maher’s doing. What is missing in Religulous, I feel, is an acknowledgement by Maher that most of the great thinkers of the last 1000 years have gone into the mystic, sensing in one way or another a certain cosmic order or universal design. Albert Einstein spoke of this, and he wasn’t exactly given to Christian superstition. You can’t just say that widely shared notions of some kind of celestial harmony within and without are nothing. You can’t just wave them off.

“The [Vice-Presidential] debate’s most telling passage arrived when Joe Biden welled up in recounting his days as a single father after his first wife and one of his children were killed in a car crash. Sarah Palin‘s perky response — she immediately started selling McCain as a ‘consummate maverick’ again — was as emotionally disconnected as Michael Dukakis‘s notoriously cerebral answer to the hypothetical 1988 debate question about his wife being ‘raped and murdered.’ If, as some feel, Obama is cool, Palin is ice cold. She didn’t even acknowledge Biden’s devastating personal history.” — from Frank Rich‘s 10.5 N.Y. Times column, titled “Pitbull Palin Mauls McCain.”

Jason Sudeikis‘ “Joe Biden” riff about Scranton, Pennsylvania (begins around 6:10) was the single funniest bit in last night’s Biden-Palin debate on SNL. Second best line: “God love hm, but he’s a raging maniac and a dear friend.” In my humble judgment, the most appealing thing Queen Latifah has ever done.

“John McCain‘s campaign has decided it can’t hold back on the serious mudslinging any longer. Sarah Palin tipped their hand today by spinning the David Ayers thing into “palling around with terrorists.”
“This is only the beginning. It’s going to get much, much worse. McCain has already shown he will trash his reputation for this in small ways, and now the big guns are coming out as it dawns on McCain, Schmidt and the others that the polls are going the wrong way and this is his last shot at the Presidency. We’re about to see the depths the GOP rottweilers are willing to sink to when pushed into a corner.
“The nation would have been better served had the election remained close until the end.” — posted by HE reader “Deathtongue Groupie” at 6:10 pm today. (Edits added.)

In some of his films director Jonathan Demme has revealed a profound affection for Caribbean culture and music, and occasionally for African-American characters and subject matter. Examples include his two Haiti docs — 1988’s Haiti: Dreams of Democracy and ’03’s The Agronomist. His 1998 adaptation of Toni Morrison‘s Beloved. That Hannibal Lecter-in-the-Bahamas scene at the end of The Silence of the Lambs. The end-credit singing of “Wild Thing” at the close of Demme’s Something Wild by Jamaican singer “Sister” Carol East.

Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt

So it feels very Demme-ish that the union that’s endlessly celebrated in Rachel Getting Married, his latest feature, is between a very alabaster lassie (Rosemarie DeWitt, playing Rachel) and a handsome Afrique-ebony guy (musician Tunde Adebimpe, playing Sidney the groom). It’s also a very Demme thing that nobody so much as mentions this.

You can say “well, why would anyone mention it?” and I’d take your point, of course. We all like to see ourselves as color-blind. My point is that in real life someone in the wedding party would at one point or another throw some kind of slider ball — something anecdotal, flip, netural, whatever– into the proceedings. In the same way someone would say “oh, it’s raining” if a cloudburst were to happen. My other point is that such a remark (which wouldn’t necessarily be coarse or gauche ) is verboten in a Demme film because it doesn’t reflect his values or sensibilities.

You may have noticed that movie critics haven’t come within 20 feet of mentioning this in their reviews. That’s because it’s not cool, dude. If you do you open yourself up to being called a subliminal racist of some kind. Just wait — someone is going to say this about me in the comments.

But if the blunt-spoken alcoholic played by Howard Duff in Robert Altman‘s A Wedding (1978) had been invited to Rachel and Sidney’s wedding, he would have said something or other, trust me. Because he was the kind of wealthy middle- aged guy who didn’t give a shit because he was always half in the bag.

Tunde Adebimpe, DeWitt

I was hoping that Demme had decided to include one character like this in Rachel Getting Married. Someone who wouldn’t necessarily say the wrong thing, but who might say the right thing in a slightly wrong way. Someone who doesn’t quite fit the sensitive mold. Demme doesn’t, of course. It’s not in him.

Rachel Getting Married, written by Jenny Lumet, is mainly about how Rachel’s older sister Kym (Anne Hathaway), a longtime alcholic and drug-user now living in a rehab facility, screws things up by being her natural attention-grabbing self, scheming to make most of the conversations about her, only sometimes letting the happy couple have the spotlight. Me, me, me, me. me.

It’s wonderfully shot in a darting, hand-held, Dogma-like way, making everything feel very loose and random and catch-as-catch-can. It’s also magnificently acted by Hathaway and De Witt.

But a friend has observed that the way Demme portrays the African-American and Jamaican characters — Sidney, his Army-serving younger brother, his parents and the various musicians and guests who float in and out — is a form of benevolent reverse racism. He does this, my friend argued, by making certain that only the white characters — Rachel and Kym and their parents, played by Debra Winger and Bill Irwin — are the screwed-up ones. Antsy, haunted, angry, nervous, gloomy. But the darker-skinned characters are all cool, kindly, radiant, gentle, serene.

Jonathan Demme

I was a little surprised when I first heard this view, but I’m starting to think she may have a point. It does seem a little phony. I would have invested myself a little bit more in Rachel Getting Married if, say, Sidney has been a wee bit obnoxious or an obsessive-compulsive or a relentless pot smoker — anything but the dull block of wood that Demme, Lumet and Adebimpe have created. Everyone everywhere has conflicts, problems, insecurities, regrets. Except in films like this one.

All to say that I never really believed Rachel Getting Married. I enjoyed the craft and random energy of it, but I never believed that I watching real-life people. Every step of the way I felt Exiled in Demmeville.

Last night I saw Mark Brecke‘s They Turned Our Desert Into Fire, an intelligent, impassioned, well-sculpted doc about the horrors of the Darfur genocide, which apparently will never be stopped by anyone because it’s not in their economic interest to do so. Pic was shown to a modest-sized crowd under the auspices of the Artivists Film Festival at the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian.

They Turned Our Desert Into Fire director Mark Brecke (center); his wife stands to his right; friend-supporter Svetlana Cvetko to his left.

How does it compare to Ted Braun‘s Darfur Now and Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern‘s The Devil Came on Horseback? Favorably. Brecke, a war photographer, lays out the facts, the whys and the wherefores with clarity and fervor. It’s a rough film to watch here and there, but impossible to turn away from.
The following wasn’t included in the doc: (a) interview footage of Sudan president Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, who was alleged on 7.14.08 by the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to bear criminal responsibility for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes committed since 2003 in Darfur; (b) a hard-hitting interview with rebel leaders and their feelings about the mass slaughter; (c) an interview with a representative of the Chinese government, which has financed the slaughter, in a sense, by being a principal purchaser of Khartoum’s oil without demanding humanitarian conditions; (d) an interview with a rep of the American news media, which has paid scant attention to the Darfur genocide since it began in 2003; and (e) a review of the Darfur-related events from late ’06 to mid ’08.