True story: a conversation among three or four guys with film-industry ties happened a couple of days ago in a major southern-region city. Included was a sound mixer who’s been around a couple of decades. The subject was upcoming movies, and the sound mixer interjected at one point, “Guys, guys, I’ve seen the Best Picture Oscar winner, okay? And it’s Benjamin Button.” You’ve seen the whole thing? he was asked. “Most of it but that’s enough,” he answered. “Forget it, it’s over. It’s an eight-hankie movie and it’s going to win.”

Hurricane Season (Weinstein/MGM, 12.25) , a Lousiana-based sports saga with Forrest Whitaker as real-life basketball coach Al Collins who assembled a winning team composed of players who’d been displaced by Hurricane Katrina, has gotten the hook and been re-scheduled to open in early ’09.
Whitaker told a friend a day or so ago that the 12.25 release date has been scuttled due to the film being “not ready,” and that a tentative March 2009 release has been decided upon. The film was previously called Patriots.
The film costars Isaiah Washington, Bow Wow, Khleo Thomas, Courtney B. Vance, Lil’ Wayne and Taraji P. Henson.

As I’ve said before, Clint Eastwood‘s Gran Torino has the stuffings of a Best Picture contender because it appears to be a story about change and redemption, which is what most Best Picture nominees are about. But it also seems to have a little built-in momentum because it deals with racism, which has been been a bigger hot-button issue this year than any time since the Civil Rights era of ’64 and ’65.
Barack Obama‘s presidential campaign has obviously brought the issue to the fore. Everyone has been talking about it, particularly with those YouTube videos showing the ignorance and ugliness of rural Americans and people wondering about the Bradley Effect at the polls, etc.
And now a month and a half after the election will come a movie, directed by America’s most esteemed, long-running filmmaker, that will address this subject (if I know Eastwood) in plain, regular-guy, no-bunk terms. In short, Gran Torino may luck out. Just as The Road may not fit the cultural-political mood at the end of the year, it could be that Eastwood’s film will. Maybe. I obviously don’t know anything, but I’m feeling a certain current.
Eastwood was quoted about the plot particulars last week. Nick Schenk‘s screenplay is the story of snarly blue-collar racist, a Korean War bet named Kowalski (Eastwood), gradually working through dark and dismissive feelings about his neighbor, a Hmong teenager who early on tries to steal Kowalski’s ’72 Gran Torino.
As I wrote earlier, a drama of this sort is “right out of the change-redemption playbook.” The only thing that might work against Gran Torino are Academy members scratching their heads about Eastwood’s alleged admiration for Sarah Palin.
In Contention‘s Kris Tapley recently reviewed the Gran Torino script. He’s also posted a couple of Eastwood pieces about the film’s ensemble cast — article #1 and article #2.
The script “has some silly stuff in it,” he writes, “but according to those two pieces, Eastwood improvised on the set somewhat. That’s helpful.”

Weinstein Co. reps didn’t have anything to say this morning about whether or not they’re opening John Hillcoat‘s The Road, an adaptation of the post-apocalyptic Cormac McCarthy novel with Viggo Mortensen, Robert Duvall, Charlize Theron and Guy Pearce in the lead roles, in November or December or next year or what. I was told I’d hear something later today.

A release-date decision was supposed to be resolved yesterday, according to a 10.15 Stephen Zeitchik story in the Hollywood Reporter. Pic was originally skedded to open limited on 11.14 with an 11.26 wide release, but it was recently shifted to sometime in December (as this Coming Soon page states). Over the last couple of days there’s been talk that an ’08 release may be scuttled altogether.
Possible (purely speculative) reasons: (a) The Road isn’t playing as well as it could and needs more time to be “finished”; (b) The Weinstein Co. can’t afford handle two Oscar-angled campaigns at once (with The Reader presumably being priority #1); (c) It’s too gloomy for an end-of-the-year film and doesn’t it the mood of the country, especially in the event of a possible Obama triumph on 11.4.

N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis doesn’t claim that Oliver Stone‘s W. is outright fiction, but she seems to imply it’s the next thing to it. This doesn’t square with my understanding that 98% of W. is taken straight from verified historical accounts. There ‘s a certain amount of dramatic embroidery all through W., of course, but the only baldly fictional portions are the Cheney/Dreyfuss conference room speech (“There is no exit strategy — we stay”) and the Oval Office dream sequence at the end, or so I’ve understood.
“Mr. Stone’s take on the president, as comic as it is sincere, is bound to rile ax-grinders of every ideological stripe, particularly those who mistake fiction for nonfiction,” she writes. “History informs its narrative arc from Texas to Iraq, but it should go without saying that this is a work of imagination, a directorial riff on real people and places complete with emotion-tweaking music cues, slo-mo visuals and portentous symbolism. It says nothing new or insightful about the president, his triumphs and calamities. (As if anyone goes to an Oliver Stone movie for a reality check.).”
Where’s that scene-by-scene W. fact-resource site?

N.Y. Press critic Armond White is calling W. “the best example of American filmmaking courage since Munich.” Intriguing thought, but the remainder of the graph indicates that White, incredibly, is in the tank for Bush. I’ve heard about White’s pro-Iraq War positions from a colleague, but hadn’t really read one of his political testaments until just now. It takes balls of steel to be a Bush guy at this stage of the game, especially for someone working in a liberal racket like film criticism.
“Our mainstream media’s vindictiveness toward George W. Bush has dismantled even the illusion of fairness,” he says. “For the past eight years, the media elite have fought back against Bush winning the presidency in 2000, corrupting the purpose of journalism and entertainment by being vehemently partisan and ferociously illiberal. By opposing the mob mentality that would hang Bush in effigy, W. imaginatively sympathizes with the most maligned president in modern history. It might be too late to restore respect for the office, but Stone knows that until we learn that Bush is like us, we learn nothing.”

I got about ten to twelve seconds of face-time with Senator Joe Biden at last night’s Pacific Design Center $5000-per-person fundraiser (which I was invited to but didn’t pay for). I asked him if he’d seen Oliver Stone‘s W. and he said nope, not yet, how is it? And I told him it’s more or less a Greek tragedy with a little comedy thrown in, and well worth seeing. Biden is obviously a little busy these days. I knew the drill before asking, of course, but I asked anyway.

Sen. Joe Biden during his Pacific Design Center speech at last night’s fundraiser — Thursday, 10.16.06, 8:05 pm

I loved a line in a speech Biden delivered to a sizable crowd in the open-air plaza area. It’s from Irish poet Seamus Heaney, and expressed a dream that if things go well on Nov. 4th, “hope and history” might “rhyme. The exact line: “History forbids us to hope this side of the grave. But once in a lifetime, the longed-for tide of justice can arise and hope and history rhyme.” Here’s a partial mp3 of Biden’s remarks.

Biden, Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (l.) during Biden’s open-air speech — Thursday, 10.16.08, 8:02 pm

Given the word about Joe Wright‘s The Soloist possibly being a bit “schmaltzy” and boilerplate concerns about Ed Zwick‘s Defiance that I presume don’t need explaining, I wasn’t completely surprised to read a 10.17 story by the Hollywood Reporter‘s Carl DiOrio that both pics have had their wide-release dates delayed into ’09.
The Soloist‘s postponement seems particularly dramatic with its 11.21.08 wide opening being pushed back to 3.13.09. Defiance, which had a previous release date of 12.12.08, will now open wide on 1.16.09.
Defiance will be given a late-December Oscar-qualifying run, reports DiOrio, and it’s possible (though not likely) that The Soloist might be given a similar limited unveiling. But from HE’s perspective it’s looking as if both films have been all but yanked from the Oscar race by their respective distributors, DreamWorks/Paramount and Paramount Vantage.
The Shine-like story of Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez‘s relationship with a homeless musician, The Soloist — a DreamWorks/Universal co-production — was looking at the very least like a possible uptick opportunity for costars Robert Downey and Jamie Foxx regarding possible year-end acting honors and distinctions.

I’m afraid there’s something I don’t understand, Alexsei. It’s widely believed (though not absolutely dead confirmed) that there was a test screening of Zack Snyder‘s Watchmen last night at the Regal Lloyd Center 10 theater in Portland, Oregon. And yet there are no reader reviews posted at AICN yet. What’s up with that?
Any notepad-and-shoe-leather reporter might regard this silence as an indication that reports of the alleged test screening were incorrect. If the screening happened, though, this is inexcusable fan-boy behavior. How long does it take to sit down and post a quick-draw response? Man up, grim up, turn on the Powerbook, tap something out (but make it thorough) and send it off.
Update: A Portland guy informs that “people seem to have been pre-invited and needed to show up with some sort of document they’d been asked to print out. Plus the local rep who works for the Seattle office of the WB reps and who routinely checks the press into screenings here was working the door. So none of the usual media guys got anywhere near the place, and the theater showing the film was locked down and guarded well before 7pm.”

Max Payne (20th Century Fox, opening today) “is a nap-inducing special-effects fest, minus even the excitement of watching someone else play a game. Mark Wahlberg, who appears to have been hypnotized before each scene, plays Max, a cop whose family has been murdered by junkies. Or so it appears: In fact, his wife was eliminated for knowing too much about a new drug being manufactured at the corporation where she worked. Max spends his days filing in the cold-case department and his nights tracking her killers. Until he finds them. Yawn. This is as cardboard as action-movie-making gets: slo-mo bullets and breaking glass, big explosions, rows and rows of dead bodies.” — Marshall Fine at Hollywood and Fine.

At last night’s Al Smith Memorial Dinner in Manhattan:

And last night’s crazy McCain rally lady skit on SNL’s Thursday show. And some real-life rocket scientists at a recent political gathering in Ohio, dated. 10.13.08.