Night of the Gun author and N.Y. Times guy David Carr paid a visit to MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” this morning to talk about his account of his turbulent druggy past. Asked how his confession of substance abuse in the ’80s squared with his present-tense employment with the straight-laced New York Times, Carr said his history was never “about journalistic malfeasance or professional degradation…I’m not one for missing deadlines or screwing up assignments.” Here, again, is my 7.19 piece on Carr’s book.

All is well in Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Weinstein Co., 8.15) when Penelope Cruz‘s neurotic firecracker is on-screen and having her way, and particularly when she’s arguing with Javier Bardem‘s compulsive seducer-slash-painter. These two provide the erotic blood-flow in this Woody Allen film, and thank the Movie Gods for that. VCB is certainly worth seeing for Cruz and Bardem alone, but if the film had been entirely about them I would have been 100% delighted.

As is, VCB is about a couple of American girls — Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) — getting romantically involved with Bardem (and to a lesser extent Cruz) during a summer in Barcelona, and the hard fact is that Johansson and Hall are nowhere near as interesting as their Spanish-born costars.
And yet Vicky Cristina Barcelona played better at Monday’s night’s premiere screening in Westwood than it did for me in Cannes, and I’m trying to figure out why.
One reason had to do with mere suggestion, I suppose. The crowd at Westwood’s Village theatre laughed heartily at just about every joke and visual inference, and the press people in the Grand Palais last May were much more subdued. Another persuader was the fact that I read David Denby‘s review of Allen’s film just before the Village screening, and an observation of his had a surprising effect.
One of my beefs against Vicky Cristina Barcelona when I reviewed it on 5.16.08 was the incessant narration. I described it as “persistent, obnoxious and thoroughly unwanted” and said that it made “this story of overlapping, off-and-on love affairs in present-day Barcelona so on-the-nose and over-explained that I was feeling actively hostile less than 15 minutes in.”

Denby, however, wrote the following: “Allen uses a narrator (Christopher Evan Welch) to explain who the women are, and, at first, it seems as if the director is just filling in backstory and telling us things we might have noticed ourselves. But this narrator does for Allen what narrators once did for Francois Truffaut — he allows him to skip merely functional exposition and jump from highlight to highlight.”
Truffaut! A light went on. Or rather, I found myself gradually succumbing to a cousin of the movie lover’s “Russian Tea Room syndrome.” Legendary critic Andrew Sarris described this back in the ’80s as a willingness to not only accept but applaud speed-bumpy things in a foreign-language film (precious-sounding dialogue, say, or a clumsily-composed narrative) that an American viewer might reject outright if included in an English-language film, and especially a Hollywood-produced one.
An hour or so after finishing the Denby review (which I read while sitting at Jerry’s Deli), the lights came down at the Village and I began watching Vicky Cristina Barcelona with the idea that it was, in fact, a French-language Truffaut film, and it played like a whole different animal. Not painful, not prickly. Not first-rate but a mostly agreeable thing.
I still preferred Cruz and Bardem’s scenes to everything else, but the narration didn’t get on my nerves because it was now the narration in Truffaut’s Two English Girls or The Woman Next Door,and that was okay.

It still felt as if Allen was faintly mocking his own writing style and penchant for having his characters forever going to musuems, chatting in cafes and talking about artistic longings…aaah, I’m blathering. My basic point is that it played better the second time so do what you will. Odds are you’ll have a pretty good time with it.
Of course, if you’re under-25 you won’t go at all because GenY audiences, to go by the box-ofice track record of Allen films over the last eight or ten years, are averse to the Allen sensibility.
I want to repeat one complaint from last May, which is Allen’s no-naked-breast- shot rule. “He’s telling a story that’s swimming in mad erotic currents,” I wrote, “and yet he’s clearly decided against boob exposure — not even a casual random glimpse. It’s obviously unnatural and un-European. Presumably this was about avoiding an R rating, but the oddly prudish vibe works against the story and the general mood, so why even pick up the brush if you’re afraid to paint a nipple?”

WhateverPineapple Express winds up making between today and Sunday night, it’s certain to benefit from good word because of that first 80%. (The finale doesn’t mess it up exactly — it just makes you wonder why they felt they needed to go that way.) Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason says it’ll earn $35 million; I’m hearing more like $33 or $34 million.

Received today at 4:57 pm Pacific: “You think you have blacklisted John Voit but he is better off away from the coke sniffing, wife swapping and vile of hollywood and the likes of you. Be carefull what you do and say to hurt people that are not of the same mind set as you and the Demacrates the evil people that you are GOD will protect his own and he will take care of business in his own time and in his own way so from a proud conservative to a progressive socialist have a wonderfull day.” [Spelling exactly as received.]

Politico‘s Jonathan Martin writes that Barack Obama today praised T. Boone Pickens, the right-wing Texas oilman who contributed millions in ’04 to the effort to swift-boat John KerryJohn McCain.” Here’s Pickens’ alternative energy plan.

Posted exclusively at www.funnyordie.com a little after 2 pm today.

This Canadian one-sheet for Religulous is much grabbier than the rather soft versions that have come out of Lionsgate (example #1 and example #2).

“I don’t know what your thoughts on George Lucas are, but I talked to him yesterday and cornered him on why he hasn’t made one of those art films he’s always going on about,” writes CHUD’s Devin Faraci. ” It seems like the guy has the resources and ability to make pretty much any movie that strikes his fancy. He sort of blew off the question, but I think the way he blew it off was interesting.”
My thoughts on Lucas are basically that he’s the devil, which is to say a very real metaphor for total corruption of the spirit. He began as Luke Skywalker, and has been described by biographer Dale Pollock as a kind of a brave and beautiful warrior when he was under the gun and struggling to make it in the ’60s and into the early ’70s. But once he got fat and successful he slowly began to morph into an amiable corporate-minded Darth Vader figure. Obviously not an original observation, but I’ve been saying this since the late ’90s.

Friend-of-HE Alfred Ramirez recently compressed “The Killing Joke,” the graphic novella that The Dark Knight was mostly/largely based upon, into an rar file which can be accessed here.

In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter‘s Alex Ben Block, ThinkFilm’s David Bergstein seems to acknowledge that several lawsuits have been filed against ThinkFilm this year by partners claiming they were stiffed. “Some of what is out there is true,” Bergstein tells ABB. “The vast majority is not true. And for the stuff that is true, my answer is, ‘So what? So what if X, Y or Z might be owed money?’

Bergstein said that? Holy moley. Ben-Block muffles it somewhat when he says that Bergstein’s attitude “has some in the creative community fuming.” But he scores a bulls-eye with the title: “Has ThinkFilm Lost Its Mind?”
“‘He’s the biggest disgrace in the film business,’ said producer Albie Hecht, formerly president of Nickelodeon, who produced the Oscar-nominated ThinkFilm documentary War/Dance and claims he still has not seen the small advance ThinkFilm promised. An arbitration is pending.
“‘This is someone who goes around making deals and looks like he has no intention of fulfilling his obligation to filmmakers and artists,’ Hecht added. ‘Not only is it disgusting, but downright immoral.'”

The late ’70s hair and moustaches worn by the American actors in Enzo G. Castellari‘s The Inglorious Bastards sent a clear signal to those moviegoers who were actually willing to pay money to see this World War II exploitation flick. The message was that Bastards would be very much set in in the era of Jimmy Carter, disco, cocaine and flexible sexual attitudes. The hell with period — we’re here to rock out and kick ass.

I don’t think Castellari really thought this aspect through, of course. I think his actors (Bo Svenson, Fred Williamson, etc.) simply didn’t want to get World War II haircuts for six or eight weeks’ worth of work and whatever he was paying them. It wasn’t worth the hassle so they said “sorry, Enzo — at these prices, we’re not getting haircuts that will make us look uncool when we go looking for our next gig, or when we go out to clubs.”
“For long stretches Bastards seems less a war movie than a teen idyll,” writes N.Y. Times DVD columnist Dave Kehr, “and its most fantastical sequence arrives when the gang stumbles across a group of female SS officers skinny-dipping in a stream. The interlude looks like a lost sequence from a Russ Meyer peeping Tom nudie of the ’60s, and Mr. Castellari seizes the opportunity for some classic exploitation imagery: busty blond frauleins blasting away with automatic weapons.”

Inglorious second-raters (one with 1969 Woodstock Music Festival hair and moustache) eyeballing skinny-dipping SS girls.

All screen grabs stolen from DVD Beaver’s Inglorious Bastards page.