Patience is a virtue, of course, but it rarely comes into play when an old dog is learning a new trick. Courtesy of the 23/6 guys, who posted this yesterday.

HE reader Salvador Perez wrote this morning to complain about a nearly three-week-old remark in my Toronto Film Festival review of Kevin Smith‘s Zack and Miri Make a Porno. I felt it was a mistake for Elizabeth Banks to be apparently wearing jeans (or a jean skirt) right after having on-camera sex with Seth Rogen. Who wears anything while shooting a sex scene in a low-rent amateur porn film, which is what the shot is? Perez said what I saw “wasn’t a mistake [because] Miri was wearing a denim miniskirt that was hiked up during sex.”
“Yeah, Kevin Smith pointed that out to me also,” I replied. “Of course, no woman in the history of softcore or hardcore porn has ever, ever had sex with a jean skirt on. Or a Hugo Boss business suit or a hoop dress or a soccer outfit or overalls. The point of softcore or hardcore, after all, is to turn the viewer on to some extent, and in a way that is obvious to the dumbest viewer out there. And altogetherness is generally more arousing than flesh covered with garments.
“That said, a woman wearing a jean skirt during a sex scene is an interesting way to go about things if you’re shooting such a scene in a real movie. It’s realistic in a sense and even mildly hot if you think about it. David Fincher, Kathryn Bigelow, Lars von Trier, Sam Mendes, Carlos Reygadas or Martin Scorsese might conceivably a shoot a sex scene in which the woman hasn’t taken off her jean skirt. But no way would a group of improvising non-pros looking to make a popular porno do this. No. Way. At. All.”

Cheers and salutations to Matthew Belinkie, who posted this video on overthinkingit.com earlier today. One shot doesn’t work but otherwise it’s nearly perfect. And the speed in which it was composed! Bush only spoke last night.

First Showing.net’s Alex Billington posted a first-anywhere trailer for Steve McQueen‘s Hunger (IFC, sometime in ’09) earlier today. You can tell in an instant that McQueen is a first-rate visual composer. The art of Hunger is not open to question. What is open to question (to nausea-prone middle-class guys like myself who have problems with the idea of being stuck in small prison cells with fecal matter smeared on the walls) is whether or not you want to sit and meditate and tough it out with some IRA guys in a British-run prison for the better part of two hours. Otherwise Hunger is the shit. Photographically, I mean.

I know this is about as lowbrow as it gets and I’m sorry for that, but this is mildly funny, largely due to the Borat-styled voicing.

I read with interest Tom O’Neil‘s salute to Bill Condon and Laurence Mark, the new Oscar show producers whom I know personally and like enormously. Excellent fellows, touch of class, taste buds, cool tuxedos, etc.
Do I agree with O’Neil’s suggestion that Will Smith would be a great choice to host the Oscars? Uhhm…sorry but no. No offense, but to me Smith is Mr. Easy, Mr. Bucks-Up Hah-Hah. He doesn’t exude anything except exuberance, perfect teeth and postivism. He lacks discrimination and is accomodating to a fault — he’ll throw his head back and laugh at anything, radiate positive energy about anything and everything except Saudi terrorists, smile until he dies from old age. He’s the 21st Century Sammy Davis, Jr. All he wants to do is entertain and be loved…zzzzzzzz.

“Let me take you back to 1997, and a conversation I had with Paul Schrader, author of Taxi Driver, director of Mishima and American Gigolo. He told me that after Pulp Fiction, we were leaving an existential age and entering an age of irony.
“‘The existential dilemma,’ he said, ‘is ‘should I live?’ And the ironic answer is ‘does it matter?’ Everything in the ironic world has quotation marks around it. You don’t actually kill somebody; you ‘kill’ them. It doesn’t really matter if you put the baby in front of the runaway car because it’s only a ‘baby’ and it’s only a ‘car’.”
“In other words, the scene isn’t about the baby. The scene is about scenes about babies.” — from Roger Ebert‘s 9.23 article that explains his 9.21 creationism piece, which I didn’t link to earlier because I didn’t think it was interesting or funny enough.

An offical announcement came down late today that Cloverfield helmer Matt Reeves will re-write and direct the American adaptation of Let the Right One In, the Swedish-made tweener vampire film that I wrote about earlier today. The producers are Overture Films and the London-based Hammer Films.

The deranged smear jobs that have characterized the McCain campaign’s anti-Obama ads — misleading or shamelessly false, aimed at the dopes — bear the stamp of Steve Schmidt, a protege of former George Bush operative Karl Rove. And Rove was a protege of the late and infamous Lee Atwater, the godfather of the right-wing culture-war smear and arguably one of the most demonic mentalities to exert a profound influence upon the American political process.

And yet Stefan Forbes‘ Boogie Man, a portrait of Atwater’s life and career which I saw last summer at the L.A. Film Festival, is, believe it or not, not a smear job. It doesn’t sidestep the facts and doesn’t blink at the hard stuff, but it’s relatively fair-minded. Call me left-biased, but it seems to bend over backwards to give Atwater a fair shake. Really.
InterPositive Media will be releasing Boogie Man this Friday (9.26) in New York and Washington, D.C. and in L.A. on Friday, 10.3, at the Sunset 5. The idea is to open in about 20 additional markets “immediately thereafter,” says a release.
Consider this 9.19.08 N.Y. Times piece by Eleanor Randolph called “The Political Legacy of Baaad Boy Atwater”:
“For all the nastiness of this year’s presidential campaign, the downward spiral into ever-meaner electioneering really started about 20 years ago,” she begins. “The political Magus who ushered in our new muddier era was Lee Atwater, best known for engineering George H.W. Bush‘s win in 1988. Mr. Atwater became such a mythic figure in American politics that he was praised at his funeral in 1991 for being Machiavellian ‘in the very best sense of the word.’
“As many Democratic victims could attest, Mr. Atwater was Machiavellian in the actual sense of the word. Boogie Man, a new film by Stefan Forbes, details Mr. Atwater’s impish, strangely seductive charm, his mean boogie guitar and mostly his political chicanery. A lot of the latter sounds very familiar to anyone following the 2008 campaign.

“For starters, Mr. Atwater knew how to seduce the news media. He could wink and laugh and drop a fake story on the best of them. Lee Bandy, a respected political journalist for The State newspaper in South Carolina, recalled the time that he accidentally helped one of Mr. Atwater’s candidates, former Gov. Ronald Reagan of California. Later, Mr. Bandy recalled that ‘Lee laughed and said, ‘Bandy, you got used.’
“Using the news media apparently was not the hard part for Mr. Atwater. The real trick was finding the way to get inside peoples’ heads.
“One of the cruelest examples of this maneuver involved former State Senator Tom Turnipseed, a South Carolina Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1980. As a youth, Mr. Turnipseed had shock therapy for depression, which he talked about on occasion.
“Mr. Atwater, who was working for the Republican, was not sympathetic. He went around the state telling people that the Democratic candidate had once ‘been hooked up to jumper cables.’ No matter how much Mr. Turnipseed talked about education or crime or dirty tricks after that, voters only saw the jumper cables.
“For the 1988 campaign to elect then-Vice President Bush, the indelible image that helped defeat Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts was a black man named Willie Horton. Willie Horton committed rape while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison under a program that was actually started by another governor, a Republican.

“Despite his public denials that he had anything to do with an anti-Dukakis commercial featuring Mr. Horton, this film has Mr. Atwater encouraging an outside group to spread the word. The tactic worked. Mr. Atwater and friends managed to turn Willie Horton’s face into the only thing some voters could remember about the Democratic nominee.
“Struck with brain cancer in 1990, Mr. Atwater began to repent. He apologized to Mr. Dukakis and Mr. Turnipseed, among others. He tried to get his former acolytes, like Karl Rove, to back off. But, by then, it was too late.
“Many of today’s third-party ads like the Swift Boat attacks that helped defeat Senator John Kerry in 2004 are linear descendants of the Willie Horton campaign. A supposed slip of the tongue that in fact gets some truly nasty tidbit on the record — that tactic is straight from the Atwater manual. As are nasty blog items, quickly denied by candidates who know full well that their supporters are behind them.
“These tricks contribute to voter apathy. They destroy good people. They make it harder for candidates and their families to brave the campaign trail. But too many of today’s political strategists forget Mr. Atwater’s final appeal. They are out there looking for something else — more jumper cables.”