An interesting Newsweek piece by Fareed Zakaria (dated 7.19) that carefully explains how the rap on Barack Obama (i.e., softheaded idealist who thinks that he can charm America’s enemies) is off the mark, and that his world view “is far from that of a typical liberal, [and] much closer to that of a traditional realist.” From an historical perspective, at least, Zakaria claims that Obama seems more “the cool conservative” — particularly given his reported admiration for the dispassionate foreign policy moves of the first Bush administration — “and McCain the exuberant idealist.”

“Putting a violent spin on the Superbad formula (envelope-pushing raunch plus unexpectedly sweet affirmations of male friendship), Pineapple Express emerges as a fitfully funny, tonally trippy but not entirely satisfying effort from the Judd Apatow comic fraternity,” writes Variety‘s Justin Chang in a review that went up last night. Chang is obviously hedging, fence-straddling, not sold. Is this an omen of reactions to come, or is Chang just some fickle Variety guy off on his own beam?

“Featuring Seth Rogen and a scene-stealing James Franco as two pot-addled losers on the run from a ruthless dealer, director David Gordon Green‘s first mainstream venture is an unruly, literally half-baked hybrid of bloody hijinks and stoner laughs.
“This is certainly one of the better-looking efforts to come off the Apatow assembly line, composed in crisp widescreen images by d.p. Tim Orr, whose poetic lensing in Green’s previous films helped earn the director comparisons to Terrence Malick. But production values are somewhat beside the point when the movie in question is more Harold & Kumar than Badlands.”
Interesting observation: “In addition to its many nasty instances of stabbing, shooting, groin-kicking and head-smashing, the pic offers perhaps the most graphic case of ear mutilation since Reservoir Dogs. [But] beyond that, neither the comedy nor the carnage warrant further Quentin Tarantino comparisons.
“Some choice lines aside, too much of the humor is predicated on the notion that watching others get high is inherently funny (unless the viewer happens to be in a similar state, it’s not). And while its genre-blurring may seem audacious by studio standards, in the end, Pineapple Express still feels too safe, too constrained by buddy-comedy uplift, to have any real bite. Ironically, the stakes seemed higher, the test of the central duo’s bond more wrenching, in the far less eventful Superbad.
“At the same time, the pic’s feel-good aura is undeniably part of its appeal, rooted in the chemistry of its two leads. As the more rational, stressed-out Dale, Rogen makes a perfectly panicky foil to Franco, who delivers a hugely likable turn as a genial bum who’s lonely at heart and loyal to the core. McBride also scores laughs as the corruptible but surprisingly resilient Red.”

The Dark Knight will do about $151.7 million by tonight. (Maybe more than that as the N.Y. Times is reporting $155 million and change.) It made $47 million yesterday, and about $66 million on Friday (counting Thursday-Friday overnight haul of $18. 5 million). Mamma Mia! did $9.8 million on Saturday, and will end up with about $27.6 million by tonight.
Hancock will make about $14.1 million — now at $191.6 million, sure to pass $200 million. Journey to the Center of the Earth, off 43% from last weekend, will end up with about $12 million. Hellboy II was absolutely killed by The Dark Knight, dropping a whopping 71% from last weekend, and this weekend taking it a lousy $10 million.
WALL*E will earn $9.8 milllon by tonight — it’s now at $182 million, will barely eke out $200 million. The seventh-place Space Chimps will make $7.3 million — disaster.

I paid money to see Mamma Mia! at the Grove last night. As the Grove crowd skews younger, it was no surprise that management was showing this hideously spirited goofaholic musical in one of their smallest theatres (and The Dark Knight in four much larger houses). But what a surreal trip this thing is. I started to quietly flip out within minutes. The mood was appropriately “fun” and spritzy and all, but at the same time it felt like bad mescaline. I probably had an “uh-oh” look on my face. Fearful deer eyes, mouth half open.

Ultra-bright sunwash sound-stage lighting….

…that I first saw in Steven Spielberg’s Hook

I’m not talking about the bubbly girlie vibe that wears you down like a happy jackhammer. That’s just the director, Phyllida Lloyd, trying to give the film a unified emotional tone. I’m talking about the incompetent look and substandard craft of Mamma Mia!. Top to bottom, this sucker is poorly shot, poorly lit, poorly cut, poorly green-screened. It’s been made for the mostly female “easy lays” (ABBA fans, musical fans, those who’ve seen the stage show) who aren’t looking for much more than tunes and buoyancy and “hah-hah!”
Even if you know nothing about good filmmaking craft, a film that looks as weird as Mamma Mia! creates an “off” atmosphere that is difficult to describe. You have to sit through to really get it, I think. It would lead anyone to ask a series of Hamlet-like questions, I would think. As in “What is this? What’s wrong? Why do I feel so badly? Why does this movie look and feel flagrantly fake?”
The most bothersome thing for me was the fake sunshine lighting, necessitated by Lloyd and her dp, Haris Zambarloukos, deciding to shoot portions of the story, which is set on a small Greek island, on a sound stage at England’s Pinewood Studios.
I hated this indoor hot-sunwash effect when I first saw it 17 years ago in Steven Spielberg‘s Hook, which was shot by Dean Cundey. It looks precisely like what it is — an artificial simulation of sunlight that mandates a sense of profound unreality, and in so doing drives you half mad.

Otherwise I agree that Meryl Streep has given her worst performance ever in this thing. She overdoes the frenetic high spirits, rolling around and mugging and eyelash-batting and shooting her arms and feet out out at every turn. As N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott said, “There is a degree of fascination in watching an Oscar-winning Yale School of Drama graduate mug and squirm, shimmy and shriek and generally fill every moment with antic, purposeless energy, as if she were hogging the spotlight in an eighth-grade musical.”
And yes, I still blame Osama bin Laden for this.
The crowd I saw it with was laughing, chuckling, into it, having a good old time. They laughed so loudly at times that I actually turned around and glared, partly confused (“what are you laughing at, for heaven’s sake?”) and partly annoyed. Mamma Mia! isn’t for people like me — I get that. I just don’t understand why someone in the chain of command didn’t say, “Why don’t we get someone who really knows from screen musicals to direct this thing?”

It is naturally assumed that the order of quality (i.e., the editorial estimation of same) in Entertainment Weekly‘s 25 Greatest Musicals rundown is indicated by numerical sequence. And so #1 is The Wizard of Oz — agreed, fine with me. And yet the lowest ranking (#25) is given to Once, one of the great genre-redefining musicals of all time? A movie with more straight-from-the-street soul and real-deal emotion in its left earlobe than Chicago (which EW has ranked seventeenth) has in its entire splashy-glitzy body?

John Travolta in Grease, which (believe it or not) came out 30 years ago.

And Robert Wise ‘s West Side Story (’61), which inexplicably won a Best Picture Oscar for having lacquered, stodgified and suppressed the New York spirit of one of the most electric-profound Broadway stage musicals of all time, ranks as the second greatest? Did the EW editors and writers really hash this list out? Because anyone who says with a straight face that West Side Story is the second greatest musical of all time has a serious internal problem.
Singin’ in The Rain, Cabaret…fine, deserved. Wait, Mary Poppins is ranked fifth? I don’t dislike it as far as Disney musicals go — the bright. slap-happy mood of it, the mix of animation and live action, etc. — but what about the Dick Van Dyke curse (i.e., any film that toplined Van Dyke during his brief star status reign in the mid to late ’60s loses more esteem with each passing decade)? And what about those revoltingly cute kids? It should been ranked…I don’t know, 15th or something.
Grease is ranked fourteenth. I remember vividly how I felt after first seeing it in ’78, coming out into the bright light of West 55th Street and ragging on it with a lady I was seeing at the time. We both felt the insipid gloss and plasticity factor trumped the Travolta-Newton John charisma element. And then it became hugely popular, of course, and then a massively successful Broadway musical, and so EW, obliged to kowtow to the commercially powerful cult of old-school rock nostalgia, has to pay tribute.

Bjork in Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark

Hairspray, which boasts a vaguely similar musical attitude, is right behind Grease at #15. What can anyone who truly loves musicals say? Standards are sinking, cracks are appearing in the foundation beams, the world is slowly going to hell and EW is leading the charge…tah-rah, tah-rah.
EW has further determined that Lars von Trier‘s Dancer in the Dark, easily the equal of Bob Fosse‘s Cabaret in terms of presenting a musical in startling new terms, doesn’t rank at all among their top 25. How very deep of them. Dancer had a story and a scheme that gave a new sense of realism to the idea of breaking into song (i.e., the singing and dancing is happening inside the head of a dreamer who can’t deal with life and is therefore a kind of neurotic escape). And then Von Trier delivered on the escape-from-life idea by dramatizing (and musicalizing) the darkest imaginable result.
[HE reader “btwnproductions” has acccurately pointed out that Herbert Ross‘s Pennies From Heaven used the same idea back in ’81 or thereabouts.]
And speaking of tragic musicals, where is Henry King‘s Carousel? It’s not that great a film — Gordon MacRae‘s performance as Billy Bigelow almost single-handedly sinks it — but the basic idea behind the material (i.e., an attempt by an angry and bitter ghost to express the love and kindness he was unable to summon when mortal) is quite devastating, and the final ten or twelve minutes is an emotional grand slam.

So what’s with the Great Variety Blackout? The trade’s website has been down since sometime around 9 pm or so, possibly earlier. I’ve been zapped by technical problems four or five times since launching in August 2004, but never for twelve hours. Well, maybe once. Update: Variety has been up since the late morning, but it feels sluggish. Something definitely “happened.”

Barack Obama made two long hoop shots on a basketball court in front of cheering U.S. troops in Kuwait a few hours ago. The bad-bowler rap from the Pennsylvania primary has been wiped clean.

In a Huffington Post piece called “No Country for Batmen,” Washington Post editorial assistant Alex Remington says that “it turns out [that The Dark Knight is] closer to the bleak Westerns that cleaned up at the Oscars this winter than to the candy-colored creampuffs that we’re used to seeing in July, a bleak cry of despair cloaked in the garb of a comic book action movie, No Country For Old Men with a Batmobile.
“In many ways, it’s the feel-bad movie of the summer: it’s hard not to stare into Ledger’s eyes and come away profoundly shaken. Though in the end good emerges at least slightly victorious — a temporary armistice against the forces of darkness — it’s one of the least happy endings for a mainstream American action movie in quite a while.”

Terry Gilliam‘s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which will open in England and Australia in early ’09, will contain the shards of Heath Ledger’s very last performance, although his character of Troy will also be played by three other actors — Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law. Nonetheless, and no matter how Gilliam-esque Parnassus turns out out to be, Ledger’s name on the marquee will certainly boost business. Especially given the excitement associated with his Dark Knight/Joker performance.

And yet Gilliam has told The Telegraph‘s Tim Walker (a.k.a. “Mandrake”) that the idea of a Ledger Oscar campaign as “nothing more than a cynical publicity stunt” by Warner Bros. Has Gilliam lost his mind? A Best Supporting Actor Oscar campaign on Ledger’s behalf would probably be the best commercial godsend that could happen to Dr. Parnassus. And Warner Bros. wouldn’t be mulling a campaign if the support wasn’t there among fans, press and industry. What could Gilliam be thinking?
Warner Bros. “will do anything to publicize their film,” Gilliam told Walker. “That’s just what they do and you can’t get upset because it’s bullshit. They’re like a great white shark which devours whatever it can.”
Gilliam directed Ledger in some outdoor London scenes for Dr. Parnassus just two or three weeks before the actor’s accidental death last January.

“One more example of Chris Nolan‘s squeaky-clean ineptitude [is The Dark Knight‘s] Hong Kong subplot that culminates, after much zigzagging between HK and Gotham, with a corrupt corporate executive being hauled back to the states by Batman (Christian Bale), then kidnapped by the Heath Ledger‘s Joker, who sits with him on top of an enormous pile of money the Joker stole from a bank in the opening sequence.
“The Joker slides down to the bottom, douses the cash with gasoline, and there isn√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t so much as a cut from Nolan√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s camera back up to the man who√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s going to be burned alive. No reaction shot, no futile attempt at escape, not even an off-camera scream, lest we be made aware a life is being taken. The Dark Knight, with its sanitized, hollowed-out approach to the most outre violence, would seem to be the movie that Bush√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s Abu Ghraib America deserves. ” — a portion of the most scathing Dark Knight review I’ve so far read, written by Movies Into Film‘s N.P. Thompson.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has told Der Spiegel that he supports Barack Obama‘s proposal that U.S. troops should leave Iraq within 16 months. “We think [that] would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes,” Maliki said. And that’s it — the tide has fundamentally gone against John McCain. He’s been basing his candidacy on toughing it out and staying the course in Iraq, and now what does he say?
The Atlantic‘s Marc Ambinder has written that this “could be one of those unexpected events that forever changes the way the world perceives an issue. Iraq’s Prime Minister agrees with Obama, and there’s no wiggle room or fudge factor. This puts John McCain in an extremely precarious spot.”
Ambinder also quotes an e-mail reaction sent by “a prominent Republican strategist who occasionally provides advice to the McCain campaign , [saying] simply, ‘We’re fucked.'”
Time‘s Joe Klein is basically agreeing that McCain has been dealt terrible cards with this statement, and that it’s hard to imagine how it won’t hurt him big-time. In a piece called “Big Deal? No…Bigger,” TPM’s John Marshall has written that “Maliki has cut McCain off at the knees in a way I’m not sure his campaign strategy can recover from.”
Update: A CNN report says that “a spokesman for al-Maliki said his remarks ‘were misunderstood, mistranslated and not conveyed accurately.'” As Charles Durning ‘s politician sang in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, “Oooooh, I like to do a little sidestep!”
“Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said the possibility of troop withdrawal was based on the continuance of security improvements, echoing statements that the White House made Friday after a meeting between al-Maliki and U.S. President Bush.
The following graph appears in the original Der Spiegel interview: “Maliki was careful to back away from outright support for Obama. ‘Of course, this is by no means an election endorsement…who they choose as their president is the Americans’ business,” he said. But then, apparently referring to Republican candidate John McCain’s more open-ended Iraq policy, Maliki said: ‘Those who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic. Artificially prolonging the tenure of US troops in Iraq would cause problems.”

I used to recreate with drugs (pot, hallucinogens, opiates) in my 20s, I had a vodka problem in the early to mid ’90s, and I had an alcoholic dad who passed along a good amount of emotional misery before joining AA in the mid ’70s, so I know a little something about substance-abuse pitfalls. Addiction is the banshee that could have taken me to hell but shrugged and gave me a “get out of jail” card instead. I was spared, grew past it, whatever…and yet there but for the grace of God.

I’ve therefore been very interested for some time in reading a forthcoming book by N.Y. Times columnist David Carr called The Night of The Gun, which is about his former life as a drug user and coke dealer (in the ’80s), and his struggles with alcohol addiction more recently.

Night of the Gun (Simon and Schuster) has an Amazon.com publishing date of August 8th.

I got the book yesterday and read most of it right away. If you know Carr’s media column or his Oscar-season writings as “the Bagger,” it should come as no surprise that it’s exquisitely written. I love Carr’s voice, which is at once flip and candid and yet elegant and wise. But the book is also a gripping, dead honest and well-reported confessional. And at the same time — no mean feat — dryly entertaining.

Night of the Gun is one of those “I did this and whoa…I’m not dead!” books, but of a much higher calibre. Much. Carr is a man of immense steel balls to have written this, and particularly to have gone back into the damp muddy tunnels of the past and fact-checked everything for three years. He did some 60 interviews with the witnesses and participants. He pored over the depressing documents (arrest reports, medical sheets) that all drug-users accumulate sooner or later. It must have revived nightmares. But Carr went and did it and bravely wrote this book, and did a bang-up job of it. Hat off, head bowed.

David Carr

Carr offers this succinct sum-up on page 16: “WHAT I DESERVED: Hepatitis C; federal prison time; HIV; a cold park bench; an early, addled death. WHAT I GOT: A nice house, a good job, three lovely children. WHAT I REMEMBER ABOUT HOW THAT GUY BECAME THIS GUY: Not much. Junkies don’t generally put stuff in boxes; they wear the boxes on their heads, so that everything around them — the sky, the future, the house down the street — is lost to them.”

A truly first-rate website has been put together to explain the book and the story and the whole thing. Tomorrow’s N.Y. Times magazine (in the 7.20 Sunday edition) will contain an excerpt from the book titled “Me and My Girls.”

Carr’s book reminded me of the “farewell, my dignity” aspect of drug use. Constant assaults on your self-esteem, stains on your sheets and your soul, humiliations unbridled. One way or another, if you do drugs you’re going to be dragged down and made to feel like a low-life animal. Because that’s what you are as long as you let drugs run the show.

Drugs didn’t exactly “run the show” when I was 22 or 23, but they sure were my friends. I saw my life as a series of necessary survival moves, spiritual door-openings, comic exploits, adventures, erotic intrigues — everything and anything that didn’t involve duty, drudgery, having a career and mowing the lawn on weekends. Pot, hashish, mescaline, peyote buttons, Jack Daniels and beer were my comrades in crime.

(I’m going to leave aside discussions of my Godhead Siddhartha discoveries with LSD, and I’d just as soon forget my relatively brief encounters with blithering idiot marching powder from the late ’70s to mid ’80s.)

The particular story that David Carr’s book brought back was me and my upper-middle-class friends’ flirtation with opium and, for a brief time, heroin. The way we saw it, smack was much hipper than your garden-variety head drugs. Opiates were more authentic, we figured, because guys like William S. Burroughs and Chet Baker did them. Where today I see only the danger, the depravity and the recklessness, back then we saw only the contra-coolness.

I was never much of a user, but I did flirt from time to time. I was a candy-ass in junkie circles because I confined myself to snorting and smoking the stuff. One thing I learned pretty quickly is that “chippers” (casual users) have to be careful because heroin will make you throw up if you smoke or snort too much because your body isn’t used to it. Which mine never was because I wasn’t…you know, dedicated.

I was living in a crash pad in Southport, Connecticut. My sole source of income at the time was working part-time for a guy who ran a limousine driver service. Business guys looking to go to Kennedy or LaGuardia or Newark airports would call and I’d come over and drive them to the airport in their car, and then drive it back to their home. Doesn’t sound like much of an idea, but there were definitely customers calling from Westport, Weston, Easton, Wilton, Georgetown, Redding, Southport and Fairfield.

My deal with my boss, Peter, was to be on call at all times. A guy leaving for the airport in a couple of hours would call Peter, he’d call me, I’d drive over and so on. So one afternoon — a Sunday, possibly — a friend and I happened to have some of that snort-smoke stuff, and had retired to a barn out back for a little indulgence. We rolled a nice fat joint and soon I was royally Baker-ed. But just as we got back to the house the phone rang. It was Peter telling me to dress nicely and be at a certain client’s home in 45 minutes if possible, certainly no later than an hour. A trip down to Kennedy.

If I were less of a fool I would have said then and there, “Sorry, Peter — no can do.” But I was broke and needed the money. Go for it, I told myself. I figured I’d take a quick shower, change into a dress shirt and sport jacket, and be relatively straight by the time I got to the client’s house. But the shower didn’t help and I looked like a wreck. My pupils were little black micro-points. So I put on a pair of deep-black shades and then had the inspiration to put on a cowboy hat, the idea being that the manly-conservative cowboy vibe might rub off and make me look less drugged out.

But I was feeling way too wasted as I got into my car so I got my friend to drive me over in his. I figured the stuff would wear off sooner or later and I’d be okay.

I started to feel more and more nauseous as we drove over. When I realized with a jolt I was going to be sick, I rolled down the window and lurched halfway out and spewed. Except we were moving at a good clip — 40 or 45 mph — and so the vomit splattered along the side of my friend’s bright red car.

You need to imagine yourself raking leaves on the front lawn of your beautiful Southport home, blue sky, your toddlers playing nearby, birds chirping in the trees, when all of a sudden you see this ratty red Impala rolling along with some guy leaning out the passenger window and spraying clam chowder. You have to think of it in those terms.

It was all we could do to keep the client from calling the police once he saw me — pasty-faced, straw cowboy hat, unable to stand straight, slurring my words, flecks of vomit on my sport jacket. I was screamed at and, of course, fired by Peter. Never before had I felt like such a piece of detritus, and nothing has happened since to equal this. It was so humiliating that the opiate-usage thing ended very soon after. I told myself I was the rebellious but capable son of suburban middle- class parents who led productive, organized, reasonably moral lives, and here I was acting like a complete degenerate.

The purple rage on Peter’s face, the look of contempt in the client’s eyes, my own self disgust. If these things didn’t wake me, nothing would have. But they did.