If and when the proposed $700-billion bailout is approved by the House tomorrow, Hollywood will receive “tax breaks worth more than $470 million over the next decade for movie and TV producers that shoot in the U.S.,” L.A. Times reporter Richard Verrier wrote last night.
“That’s not a lot of money, given that the average studio movie costs $106.6 million to make and market, but it could keep some low-budget productions — and jobs — from going offshore.
“Hollywood has long sought measures to curb so-called runaway production, which it blames for causing thousands of job losses in Southern California as filmmakers have fled to Canada and other foreign countries that offer cost savings through tax breaks and other incentives.
“Specifically, the legislation would allow filmmakers who shoot in the U.S. to qualify for a tax deduction granted in 2004 to domestic manufacturers that capped the top tax rate at 32% instead of 35%. Additionally, the tax package lifts the budget cap on the existing tax deduction, which was limited to movies that cost less than $15 million to make — in effect excluding most studio films, which cost a lot more.”

On 10.1 L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein ran his annual piece about how the Oscar handicapping racket is, as he put it yesterday, “wreaking havoc on high-end movies.” He also said that “the film industry’s obsession with chasing Oscar glory has created an insupportable financial model for quality films and quality filmmakers.”

Maybe, maybe not. Half of me agrees but the other half recognizes that Oscar season is gravy time for sites like mine so why should I bite the hand? Why, now that you mention it, is Patrick biting the hand after a fashion? He goes through this weirdness every year. “I write about the politics of Hollywood filmmaking, its key players and, yes, Oscar contenders for a living,” he’s more or less saying, “but I hate the ‘game’ of it — it’s unfair to the less well-funded contenders — so I’m going to call the whole system into question, even though I don’t really want it to change in terms of less studio spending because I need to pay the mortgage.”
I realize my position — it’s not a good system but leave well enough alone — makes me sound like a Bear Sterns executive defending sub-prime loans in 2006, but the getting is good so why pee in the lake? Because the lake — the indie lake — has been drained by too much Oscar-season spending, Goldstein is partly saying. He also seems to be saying that Oscar handicappers speculating now about possible or likely winners and losers are con artists.
He mentions at one point a “Hollywood Elsewhere post where blogger Jeff Wells said ‘a guy’ he knew had heard that Gus Van Sant‘s Milk was a solid contender.” Goldstein was clearly saying this sounded a little thin, and where is the merit or credibility in quoting a “guy” who’s says he knows something? Okay, let’s break it down and review what was actually written and why.
One, I know quite well and trust the taste buds of the guy (an exhibition exec) who passed along the tip about Milk. He knows what he’s talking about, he’s always talking to a very savvy and attuned industry crowd, and I don’t care if this satisfies Goldstein or not. Two, I only brought up the Milk opinion to dispute a passed-along publicist claim in Michael Cieply‘s Oscar-race piece in the 9.28 N.Y. Times that “some publicists who specialize in Oscar campaigns are privately predicting a year-end shootout between Bemjamin Button and Frost/Nixon.” And three, my dispute was (and still is) based upon my not hearing from anyone at all that Frost/Nixon is a “favored Best Picture contender.”

I’m not putting down Frost/Nixon here. I’m just trying to be upfront about what people have been saying about it. It’s said to be a smart, gripping, well-written film with a remarkable lead performance from Frank Langella. I just haven’t heard “definite Best Picture contender,” and certainly not “one of the top two contenders” a la Cieply.
Let’s remember also that the joys of Oscar season aren’t about predictions but convictions. For me it’s not about who wins as much as the impassioned arguments that happen from October through February about who should and shouldn’t be nominated, and then about who should or shouldn’t win. As David Poland said last year , “Each Oscar-season movie is its own little war.” What I love about this game is that they’re not just movie wars — debates about cinematic achievement, values, chops — but sword fights about culture, ethics, moral values, politics. I love these arguments. I live for them.
At the end of the piece, Goldstein asks “what would happen if someone Hollywood holds in high esteem — for example, Clint Eastwood, who has Changeling due later this month — threw his hat out of the ring? What if Clint told Universal to save its money and skip the Oscar campaigning, parties, gushy trade ads and all the other silliness?
“Imagine the hand-wringing if Changeling got just as many award nominations as it would have if it had spent all those millions? That would definitely let all the hot air out of the Oscar balloon. It might also give more quality films an opportunity to compete on a level playing field and actually make some money. It might even push the back the onset of Oscar mania a few months. Come on, Clint, make my day.”
One, I’m told that Universal isn’t spending very much (if anything) this year on online Oscar ads. (What are they going to put their money into, Variety print ads? Is Bill Clinton running against George H.W. Bush?) And two, if Eastwood is as astute as Goldstein and others believe him to be, he’ll be telling Universal to put their efforts behind Angelina Jolie‘s shot at a Best Actress nomination, and leave the Best Picture action to his other film, Gran Torino, which Warner Bros. is releasing in late December. Maybe. If it pans out.
My Gran Torino enthusiasm is obviously blind and meaningless (except for my general faith in Eastwood’s taste and chops), but I’ve seen Changeling and it’s a solid B plus or, if you want to be gracious, A-minus effort. But it’s not an A — not in my view — and it sure isn’t an A-plus, and you really do need to be A-plus to get into the Best Picture game.

This College Humor-produced trailer, an impression of a Disney film about an Alaskan hockey mom who becomes Vice President “in the wackiest family comedy of the year,” went up on 9.25. But the embedded YouTube version only became available today. The piece was inspired by Matt Damon’s quote about Sarah Palin‘s candidacy being something out of a Disney film, or words to that effect.

I don’t own Con Air (why is that?) but I’ve always loved the double-tracking thing it has going on — a blend of ultra-slick action-movie chops along with an attitude of subversive genre parody. I’ve said before that Con Air is primarily a wickedly funny and (at times) almost surreal conceptual comedy, and secondarily an action thriller. Or is it the other way around?

I remember calling it “Hellzapoppin” after I first saw it. A movie that plays the action thriller game — it’s a very handsomely shot and well-edited thing — while mocking and toying with big-budget machismo at every turn. Not in a silly spoof way but using a kind of flip, inside-baseball attitude. As if the people who were paid to put it together — gifted, too-hip-for-the-room writers with jaded nihilist attitudes — felt vaguely befouled for working on a project so caked with cynicism and Hollywood corruption, and decided to inject snide, subversive humor as a form of therapy.
The marvel of Con Air is that the mixture of this attitude with cold action-movie efficiency (this being one of those happy-accident movies that occur every so often) also worked as entertainment because the movie included you in — it made you feel as if you were laughing with it, not at it.
I love John Malkovich’s performance as Cyrus the Virus — every line and body gesture says “this time out I’m a total paycheck whore, but you’ll also notice I’m very good at this sort of dry attitude comedy.” I always chuckle at the buffed-up Nic Cage at his most comically stalwart and sincere. And at John Cusack’s smarty-pants dialogue and his dopey sandal shoes. The body dropping from the sky and landing on the old couple’s car. “Don’t mess with the bunny.” Steve Buscemi defining the word irony. Colm Meaney’s muscle car getting dropped from 2000 feet up. The idiotic Las Vegas plane-crash finale. Ridiculous but all fun, all the time.

Con Air is a remnant of an era in which Jerry Bruckheimer movies briefly flirted with with this special signature attitude (mocking the big-budget action genre and at the same time kicking ass with it), which partly came from the top-dog writers (Scott Rosenberg was the credited screenwriter but others contributed) he was using back then, partly from Jerry’s own attitude at the time (as he hadn’t yet come into his own and was still working to some extent with the legacy and attitude of late partner Don Simpson ), partly from the Clinton era zeitgeist, partly from the luck of the draw, partly good fortune.
The Jerry Bruckheimer who made this film in ’96-’97 would have howled at the absurdity of making a Lone Ranger movie starring Johnny Depp as Tonto.
l will defend Con Air until the cows come home. It’s expensive guy-movie junk in a sense — one that simultaneously chokes on its own cynicism and yet makes you laugh at the absurdity of making movies of this sort, and yet put together with great care and precision and polish. Bruckheimer used to say I make guy movies but I don’t serve hamburger — I serve first-rate steak. Con Air is like a pricey, perfectly cooked marbled T-bone in a great restaurant in old town Buenos Aires or downtown Chicago or in the east 50s in Manhattan.
I hold Gone in Sixty Seconds and The Rock in the same regard. All three are among my all-time favorite guilty pleasure movies. Those were the days. Jerry doesn’t make ’em like that any more.

“Just saw Body of Lies,” an industry friend wrote last night. “I thought it was a really terrific, smart studio movie for grownups. Very astutely directed with a strong central performance from Leonardo DiCaprio (albeit with unfortunate facial hair – though perhaps needed because he still has serious babyface). Russell Crowe is serviceable as the fatty neo-con who isn’t actually the main villain, which is what I was expecting. Very much the sum of its parts – great script, great director, great cast. Bullseye.”

“I was at a Best Buy the other day trying to pick up a double disc of Citizen Kane on sale for $10, but I couldn’t find it. So I asked the girl in the department for help and she said she’d never heard of Citizen Kane or Orson Welles. I almost asked her if she was retarded. Instead I wept openly and asked her to just point me to the latest Kate Hudson crapfest. Full Disclosure: I am 39, and she said she was 24.” — posted at 5:09 pm by HE reader Buck Swope.

The enthusiasm that MGM is showing for Robert Weide‘s How To Lose Friends and Alienate People (Friday, 10.3) is clearly not what it could be. A friend says he hasn’t seen any TV ads, but the main indicator for me is that 42 West, the agency hired to screen HTLFAIP for MGM, has barely screened it. On top of which I never received an invite for last Monday afternoon’s screening at 4 pm. And when I wrote asking why earlier today, it took them six or seven hours to reply.

There was one other L.A. screening two or three weeks ago, but this seems to be the way of the world these days. You need to chase publicists for invitations to screenings. You have to hound them, corner them and sweet-talk them into inviting you. Not each and every time but more and more often. Unmistakably. And it’s not just me.
The reason 42 West hasn’t shown How To Lose Friends, of course, is that it appears to be a problem movie, as in, like, way too coarse and aimed at the apes.
In Weide’s defense, I’m told by a guy who knows him that he was pressured all through filming to dumb it down, and that he had to fight this pressure day after day, tooth and nail. If Todd McCarthy‘s 9.30 Variety review is an accurate indication of how the film plays, it seems that Weide lost the battle.
“‘How to lose friends and alienate audiences’ is the lesson taught by this cleverly titled but noxious British comedy about a Limey scribe trying to carve a notch for himself in the glam world of high-end New York publishing,” McCarthy begins. “Despite being based on the popular 2001 memoir of former Vanity Fair contributing editor Toby Young, How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, features a protag so uncouth and inept it’s impossible to believe he’d hold his job for more than a week.
“Producers may have been inspired by The Devil Wears Prada to think a male variation could cause B.O. lightning to strike twice, but it’s not going to happen, even if Simon Pegg‘s presence rouses a certain interest, especially in the U.K.

“The diminutive, blond-tressed Pegg, who cut a comic bigscreen swath in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, is nothing short of malodorous as Sidney Young, a desperately striving, celebrity-chasing London journo whose embarrassing disruption of a BAFTA Awards party unaccountably earns him a job offer from Gotham-based Sharps magazine honcho Clayton Harding (a very long-haired Jeff Bridges).
“Turning up for work in a vulgar T-shirt, arrogantly considering his initial assignments beneath him and freely admitting he regards Con Air the greatest film of all time, Simon rubs everyone the wrong way; he manages to annoy Pat Kingsley-like PR maven Eleanor Johnson (Gillian Anderson), repulse rising editor Lawrence Maddox (Danny Huston) and accidentally kill the beloved Chihuahua of this year’s hot young thing, Sophie Maes (Megan Fox).
“Perhaps scenarist Peter Straughan was entitled to some license to exaggerate, but he goes too far when, in a sudden spasm of sincerity, he audaciously tries to encourage a rooting interest in a romance between the terminally boorish Sidney and his lovely office supervisor Alison (Kirsten Dunst), despite her entirely justified initial distaste for him. The further this story strain is pursued, the more of a turn-off the whole enterprise becomes.”

Leonardo DiCaprio, Forest Whitaker, Benicio del Toro, Sarah Silverman, Dustin Hoffman, Ellen DeGeneres, Jonah Hill, Jamie Foxx, etc., have made a plea to the self-absorbed sociopaths out there who haven’t yet registered to vote. That would mainly be, of course, the under-25 hoo-hoos, also known as the Generation of Shame. I love how Leo, Benicio and friends are clearly talking down to this crowd. As if it’s clearly understood that these people are infants who can’t see one centimeter beyond their little personal dramas, attitudes, whims and appetites.

Toward the end the team asks each viewer to send the URL to five friends, which is why it’s called…uhmm, hold on…”Five Friends.”
As MSNBC’s First Read noted this morning, “One potential sign of worry for Obama in this NBC/WSJ/MySpace poll is that these new/lapsed voters aren’t as interested in the election as your average voter is. In the poll, 49% of them say they’re very interested, but that’s compared with 70% of all registered voters who said this in the most recent NBC/WSJ survey. ‘Obama still has a significant challenge to get [these new voters] to the polls,’ Newhouse observes.
“One note about the methodology in the poll: It was conducted partly online and partly by phone, the online portion was a poll of a panel survey. That said, the results are consistent with our normal crosstabs from our NBC/WSJ poll.”

“I mean, if I knew it would take me 15 years to get back in the saddle and work again because of the way I handled things, I really would have handled things differently. I just didn’t have the tools. I’m doing things differently this time around — understanding what it is to be a professional, be responsible and to be consistent. Those are things that weren’t in my vocabulary back then. Change for me didn’t come easy; I didn’t wanna change until I lost everything, until I realized that you better change, or, you know, blow your fucking brains out. Either you change and go on with life, or you’re just a piece of shit.” — Wrestler star Mickey Rourke speaking this morning in a Manhattan press conference, as passed along by Defamer‘s Stu Van Airsdale.

How Rhodes Scholar-ish is Kirsten Dunst? I’ve always suspected she’s not that intellectually agile but I’ve never cared enough to get into it. I’ve never seen any indications of same. But now I have, courtesy of MTV.com’s Josh Horowitz. Unless, you know, Dunst was putting him on. But I doubt it.
Horowitz recently interviewed Dunst and her How to Lose Friends and Influence People costar Simon Pegg, and decided at one point to digress into a minor two-question Star Trek quiz. Pegg, an ostensibly nerdy type, blew his answer and then Horowitz turned to Dunst, who explained before answering that “I like nerds I’m still a girl at the end of the day.”
Horowitz (switch to present tense) says he understands that so he’s going to toss her an easier one. So he asks “who’s the captain of the Enterprise is, as played by William Shatner?” And Dunst quickly answers “Spock” and then realizes that may not be right. Then she laughs to cover up her inability to remember the correct answer. And then Pegg leans over and says “Kirk, Kirk” and she says “Kirk!”
You can be a “girl” all you want, but not knowing Captain Kirk is like not knowing who Jesus Christ, Barack Obama, Superman or Abraham Lincoln are. It’s not a nerd term — it’s a term known to tne entirety of Western Civilization. The name “Captain Kirk” is a primal, fundamental concept that anyone with a semblance of an education can identify. I’ll bet $50 bucks that even that idiotic drunken Kentucky woman in that YouTube video that I posted two days ago knows who Captain Kirk is.

Jim Sheridan‘s Brothers, which I’ve been very much looking forward to, being a fan of Jim’s work and Susanne Bier‘s original 2004 film, is being bumped into ’09 — possibly a late summer release, or possibly one in the fall. MGM had planned it to open it on 12.4.08, but now they’ll be taking it to next May’s Cannes Film Festival. Draw whatever conclusions you want, but the implication is that it’s not a quality issue as much as a concern that it might suffer against the heavy year-end competition.

Brothers director Jim Sheridan, costar Jake Gyllenhaal

This despite test-screening responses that seemed (emphasis on the “s” word) to indicate possible Oscar contention. Particular praise has gone to the performances of costars Jake Gyllenhaal, Tobey Maguire and Natalie Portman.
The MGM team wasn’t in the building from 9:15 to 10:45 am (even the receptionists didn’t answer) so I called Brothers producer Mike DeLuca, who confirmed the news. The decision to hold was basically due to the “crazy full fall for serious movies” this year, he says. “We love Brothers and want to blitz in Cannes, but it’s just too crowded this year for a wide fall release and an Oscar campaign.”
A key factor in the decision, he says, is that costar Jake Gyllenhaal is unavailable for year-end p.r. due to filming on Prince of Persia and “we can’t promote this movie without jake. So Cannes makes most sense. I’m super proud of the movie and a major unveiling on the Cote d’Azur with all cast present is too good to pass up.”

Tobey Maguire, Natalie Portman and mystery man on Brothers set.

An MGM source said that a mid to late summer release could conceivably happen due to next summer looking relatively weak,
As noted three or four times before on HE, Brothers is a remake of Susanne Bier’s 2004 Danish-language original about a younger “bad” brother (Gyllenhaal in Sheridan’s version) stepping into the familial shoes of his older “good” brother (Maguire) after the latter disappears during an enemy skirmish in Afghanistan.
Natalie Portman plays the wife-mother whose loyalties shift, or at least adapt to new realities. Sam Shepard plays the gruff and disapproving pater familias, the father of Gyllenhaal and Maguire. David Benioff (The Kite Runner, The 25th Hour) adapted the screenplay.
In a relatively recent interview with DGA magazine’s F.X. Feeney, Sheridan (or was it Feeney?) alluded to Brothers as a kind of Cain and Abel story.
Sheridan “had been very moved by that film when he first saw it, intrigued by the themes of intense love and lethal jealousy between two polar opposite brothers — one a career military man, the other a lifelong screw-up who only comes into his own by caring for his brother’s family after his super-achieving sibling goes missing in Afghanistan and is declared dead.

“Sheridan realized transposing a Danish drama for an American audience could be risky. ‘You can’t just microwave something,’ he says emphatically. ‘You can’t just reheat it.’
“The challenge is to find what works best in the story about Americans, for Americans. ‘There are rules that apply to American cinema that don’t apply to other forms of cinema,’ he explains. ‘In a Danish film, people can get drunk with impunity. They can leave their kids at home unattended while they go pick up their brother in the bar. In an American movie, you’re not allowed. Americans are different and the rules are different. So all the time I’m consciously working within a framework of American storytelling.'”