Tom O’Neil‘s 7.30 slapdown of Frozen River star Melissa Leo (for pulling rank after arguing with director Courtney Hunt) has resulted in three friendly rebukes — one from myself, another from Thelma Adams and a third from Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone. Undaunted, O’Neil shoots right back, sticks to his guns, gives no quarter.

Yesterday 23/6 posted an alleged photo of Jon Voight’s “marked-up” copy of his Washington Times wing-nut opinion piece. Moderately funny stuff if you’re not one of, you know…”them.”

A terrible-quality bootleg video of the Wolfman trailer that was shown at Comic-Con. Some guy in the audience apparently shot it with a cell-phone camera. That aside, the vibe feels right and the content seems promising.

Benicido del Toro

The latest p.c. ding against Disney’s The Princess and the Frog, which won’t hit screens until ’09, is that it has a “toothless firefly” character who, according to Defamer’s description, “seems to have fluttered in accidentally from the set of Song of the South 2: Cajun Vacation.”

Here are two earlier You Tube videos — clip #1 and clip #2 — that explain other problems related to racial cliches and/or pigeonholing. Between this and the revolting Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Disney is seeming more and more bunkered down and 20th Century clueless about everything.

It’s not just the right-wing spear carriers who are slamming me, incorrectly, for allegedly advocating a Sen. Joseph McCarthy-esque response to Jon Voight‘s 7.28 Washington Times op-ed piece trashing Barack Obama. A liberal friend has taken me to task for this also. Obviously the McCarthy thing has gotten some traction, so let’s review the basics and examine what I actually said and meant.

The paragraph that led to the freak-out read as follows: “[Voight is] obviously entitled to say and write whatever he wants. But it’s only natural that industry-based Obama supporters will henceforth regard him askance. Honestly? If I were a producer and I had to make a casting decision about hiring Voight or some older actor who hadn’t pissed me off with an idiotic Washington Times op-ed piece, I might very well say to myself, ‘Voight? Let him eat cake.'”
I was just being honest about how I might theoretically react if I was in a position to hire or not hire Voight — big deal. That’s several football fields away from suggesting or even implying that producers should band together and deny employment to Voight because he wrote an idiotic op-ed piece. I hope it’s not a shock to anyone that people tend to hire according to whims and hunches, likes and dislikes, alliances and contretemps. Producers hire or don’t hire people all the time because an actor is liked or disliked, because a friend thinks he’s an asshole or a good guy, because the actor and the producer go to the same fitness club or their kids know each other, etc.
I was just indulging in a feeling that I might have — a momentary “fuck Jon Voight” impulse that I might feel or give voice to — if I were a producer. Admit it — it feels good to stick it to people you don’t like or strongly disagree with. (Again, I urge everyone to read Voight’s op-ed article — it’s certifiable.) As I said to an HE reader on the same page, “I didn’t say I had a shit list, or that I believe in the idea of one. I just said it feels good to think of shit-listing certain people. As a fun fantasy. Not that I think for a second that anyone would give a damn.”
I also said that “my own view is that you always work with the best people you can, regardless of political affiliation. Stanley Kubrick was absolutely correct to hire Adolf Menjou as the cynical French general in Paths of Glory, despite Menjou’s reprehensible right-wing views that included supporting the blacklist. Because Menjou was superb in the part. He wasn’t just giving a performance as that guy — he seemed to “be” him.
I also said “good for Cecil B. DeMille, that awful, sanctimonious, two-faced Bible-thumping vulgarian, for giving Edward G. Robinson a job on The Ten Commandments. Seriously — that was a good and compassionate thing he did, even if he was a prick and a bully at heart.”
It should always be about the work and the potential of this or that artist to be extra-sublime in the service of a movie, and not some political bullshit. At the same time we’re all human and prey to certain vengeance impulses from time to time. My error was in admitting such impulses exist within me. But they exist within all of us.
All the right-wingers who wrote me this morning calling me “a left-wing faggot” and whatnot can blow me.

I’ve “known” (i.e., been phone-chatting with) director Rob Cohen since the early ’90s, and have always found him bright, affable, witty, open. He’s a Harvard University grad and a very good gabber. I remember what a terrific job he did seven years ago on The Fast and The Furious, and how he recaptured that old Sam Arkoff-ian, American International Pictures B-movie vibe, and particularly how he fought to end it on a note of justice rather than legality.

But everything Coen has done since has been (and it pains me to say this) either cheesy or bloated or forced or otherwise problematic. And now comes his latest, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, which, to go by a couple of friends who’ve seen it and particularly by the word of Variety critic Todd McCarthy, looks like a piece of shit. T
The cretins, I’m sure, will pay to see the new Mummy movie in droves anyway. It is immaterial to me and mine whether financial profit ensues. If you haven’t made a movie with genuine spirit and spunk and a semblance of originality, you’ve dishonored the movie gods and deserve to be punished.
Here‘s a January ’07 assessment about how and why Cohen got the Mummy job some eighteen months ago. It’s a tough world out there with the once-respectable Universal churning one groaner after another in recent months and loathsome hacks like Stephen Sommers always ready and eager to soil and pollute. I’m sorry things are like this. I feel badly for everyone, truly. I would rather feel love than vent hate.
Here‘s an excerpt from an interview piece I ran about Cohen and The Fast and the Furious back in ’01, when I was writing for Reel.com:
“One of things I liked best about TFatF is its ending. It feels earned, justified, ‘right.’ In my book, a good ending is at least 50% of the game. I won’t spoil Cohen’s finale, but it involves a cop letting a criminal slide because friendship and mutual respect have developed between them over the course of the film.

“The last two lines before the film goes to credits are ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ and ‘I owed you a ten-second car.’ As endings go, it’s damn near perfect. I was somewhere between 75% and 80% positive on the film before it happened. Afterwards, I was totally sold.
“Cohen says, ‘There was a lot of nervousness from Universal execs about [the ending], and I had to fight for it. One thing I said is that the honor among these characters is what’s going to work on a heart level. There’s a difference between legality and justice…and we opted for justice. We went out on a note of honor.”
“The fact that it ends without the bad guy getting cuffed or killed is a certifiable plus for the sheer fact of its unusualness. ‘Some of the best movies end with a delicious ambiguity,’ Cohen explains. ‘Ending it this way was the perfect thing…it was like cutting a diamond.
“I knew what I was doing [with this film],” says Cohen. “I was after a B-movie with style and heart about a world and a subculture that is true to the world and not some rainbow-coalition Gap ad. My greatest hope was that a multi-ethnic audience would show up…and that’s what happened last weekend. I was happier that this happened, more than the $40 million…but I’ve gotta tell you, this is one fucking happy day.”
See what I mean? Cohen is no dummy. He gets it and then some. He understands that movies are nothing without the internals. Then why has the poor guy been out of the groove since ’01, or at least not found one as good or satisfying? It’sd puzzling.
The IMDB says that Cohen’s next film, which he’ll direct and produce, may be King of the Nudies, a dramedy based on the life of Russ Meyer. That sounds like a good ‘un. Here’s hoping.

N.Y. Daily News columnists Rush & Molloy went with a story today about a $250 million lawsuit against Scientology bigwigs (including Tom Cruise), filed by ex-church member Peter Letterese over harassment tactics used against him when he resigned. The catchy aspect is that Letterese is using the RICO statute as a weapon. As R & M explain, he’s “calling the church a ‘crime syndicate‘ and wants it broken up under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization law, just as the feds have broken up Mafia families.”

Uploaded 14 days ago on Flickr, forwarded last night by Oregonian critic Shawn Levy. “This is an actual photo — not Photoshopped — of a second-run Portland movie theater, the Cinemagic, changing its marquee over from Hancock to TDK. As the fellow who sent it to me said, ‘Sometimes it’s better to work right to left.'”

The Journal Sentinel‘s Duane Dudek reported yesterday that Woody Allen‘s next film, the Larry David-Evan Rachel Wood relationship thing, will be called Whatever Works. Allen called it a “a blackish comedy.” I think it’s fair to say that the title doesn’t imply this in the slightest. Generically speaking, of course.

In a piece that’s largely about Dorothy Fadiman‘s Stealing America: Vote By Vote (opening Friday at NYC’s Quad Cinemas and spreading out in August), Politico‘s Jeffrey Ressner quotes Ion Sancho, a Florida-based election supervisor who was involved in the Florida recount situation during the 2000 presidential race, as saying that Pennsylvania and Indiana are expected to be “problem areas” (i.e., states with potential incidents of vote fraud) in the coming November election.
“Pennsylvania and Indiana are jurisdictions with partisan election administrations, and that’s one of the things that the film tries to illustrate,” Sancho tells Ressner. There is a particular concern about an Indiana law that requires voters to show government-issued photo identification. “Senior citizens, young people, low-income and minority voters often lack photo IDs and, as a result, they may potentially be disenfranchised,” Sancho says.

After seeing and loving Tropic Thunder I figured Pineapple Express (which opens one week before Thunder, on 8.6) couldn’t be quite as funny, despite the many months of advance praise. I trusted the buzz about James Franco being a revelation, but that “meh” Variety review by Justin Chang lowered the expectation factor a notch or two. I finally saw it last Monday night at the Grove, in any event, and about 20 or 30 minutes in I said to myself, “Wow, this is a wee bit funnier than Ben Stiller‘s movie.”

One reason is that Pineapple Express is a classic Cheech-and-Chong-meet- Laurel-and-Hardy stoner comedy. Thunder has a flaky-surreal, stoned-in-Vietnam weirdness thing going on, but Pineapple Express is just funny-funny in a character-chemistry way, although it takes a weirdly violent detour over the last half hour or so. They’re both great rides but their funny bones have different DNA.
The reason for the infectious Pineapple humor is the dumb rapport between Franco’s Saul, a low-rent pot dealer, and Seth Rogen‘s Dale Denton, a 25 year-old joint-sucking process server who’s reasonably bright but is also fairly silly and clueless at times, especially when the heat’s on. The best parts of this film are simply about Rogen and Franco talking to each other in a room. Their back-and-forths are beautifully acted. Franco plays the sweet, not-educated, not-very-bright Stan Laurel character and Seth Rogen does the blustery, somewhat more assertive but almost-as-clueless Oliver Hardy thing. Some of their scenes together are inspired. I was levitating out of my seat.
I also love how even the bad guys in this film (i.e., big-time drug dealers and their gun-toting goons) are given quirks, personalities, back-stories, odd traits and whatnot. Everybody has a bit of a story to tell and some weirdness to spread around.
I have to split for the afternoon, but I’ll have more to say about Pineapple Express over the coming days. It’s easily the best Judd Apatow-produced comedy since Superbad. It almost erased my memories of Jason Siegel‘s jiggly man-boobs in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. If it’s legit to suggest Robert Downey, Jr.’s performance in Tropic Thunder is Oscar-worthy (and I do feel that way), it also has to be cool to talk about Franco in the same light. As a Best Supporting Actor contender, I mean. The man is dead perfect in the role. It’s easily the best thing he’s done since that TNT James Dean biopic…what was that, seven years ago?
I was interviewed Monday morning by a Washington Post writer about stoner comedies, and today she wrote back to ask my feelings about Pineapple Express. “The first three quarters makes for a bona fide classic — I would go so far as to say legendary — stoner comedy,” I wrote back.

Due respect to The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil, but I don’t think it’s fair to characterize an argument or miscommunication between Frozen River star Melissa Leo and first-time director Courtney Hunt as evidence of Leo having had a “diva fit.” It’s fine to argue, misread, blow off a little steam. If above-the- liners don’t argue now and then during a shoot it’s probably an indication that the film will be mediocre.

O’Neil’s ire was triggered by Leo’s account of the argument in a q & a between herself and Us critic Thelma Adams in this 7.29 Huffington Post-ing. I think Tom, good fellow that he is, has made a mountain out of a molehill. I’m sorry, but there will be no dinging Melissa Leo on this site about anything. She’s too talented, too phenomenal, too world-class.