It’s a measure of Stanley Kubrick‘s exactitude that he had this New York State driver’s license made up for Tom Cruise‘s William Harford character, which might have conceivably been used for an insert shot in Eyes Wide Shot. (No such shot turned up in the final cut.) Except if Kubrick was really a detail freak, he’d have made the expiration date on the license the same year as EWS‘s expected release date (i.e., 1999) or beyond, and not October 1997.

And the fact that license says Harford’s height is 5’10” while most celebrity height sites put Cruise’s stature at around 5’7″ tells you Kubrick was not above sacrificing reality on the altar of flattery.
The Harford license is one of the hundreds of items in the currently viewable Kubrick Archives in London.

A Tom Toles cartoon in today’s Washington Post, passed along by HE reader SpinDozer:

The Playlist author[s] have come up with some reasonably on-target casting suggestions for Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglorious Bastards. Except for one that’s sounding less and less right plus one flat-out wrongo. They also contain one amazing suggestion, which is Werner Herzog playing Adolf Hitler. A master stroke, genius, stuff of instant legend…especially if Herzog plays Hitler with his own voice and manner and doesn’t try to be Bruno Ganz in Downfall.

Potentially the most audacious casting all of the 21st Century.

As I wrote a few days ago, I’m starting to think that Brad Pitt as Lt. Aldo Raine is a mistake. As a sage HE reader-whose-name-I’ve-forgotten pointed out, Pitt needs to play Landa, the German Colonel “Jew Hunter.” Aldo has a strong presence in the first act, but then becomes a secondary character, and Landa is the best part in the script, hands down. How hard will it be to learn to say 40 or 50 lines in convincing German? Even if Pitt can’t do it well enough to fool German-speaking natives, who cares? This is a “movie” that cares nothing for genuine realism.
The others with comments:
3. Marion Cotillard as Shosanna Dreyfus / HE comment: perfect. 4. Isaach De Bankole as Marcel, the black projectionist / HE comment: Samuel L. Jackson instread. 5. Michael Madsen as Sgt. Donny Donowitz, a.k.a. “The Bear Jew” / HE comment: Perfect casting if this was 1987, but Madsen will be 50 in September, and he’s had some very strange facial work done besides. I like Madsen as much as the next guy, but the Jews in the platoon have to at least be in their 30s…no? 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10. Alexandra Maria Lara as Bridget Von Hammersmark, John Hawkes as Pvt. Hirschberg, August Diehl as Frederick Zoller, Catherine Deneuve as Madame Mirieux, Tim Roth as Lt. Archie Hicox, Julie Delpy or Audrey Tatou as Francesca/ HE comment: all fine.

The new JibJab presidential campaign spot (which aired on Leno last night) is a retrograde, woefully cornball, second-tier thing at best. “My Land” was a huge phenomenon four years ago, but this time out the JibJabbers guys are mainly trying to recycle and photo-copy. What kills it for me is (a) a yokel-cornball streak a mile wide and (b) a sophmoric and simplistic anti-Obama attitude.

The new spot is called “Time For Some Campaignin'” (a riff on Bob Dylan‘s “The Times They Are A Changin'”). The rhetorical point is that politicians do the same dance every year, telling us what we want to hear, and we pay for it to the tune of billions. Generically cynical, no edge or innovation, over and out.
Flaw #1: they’ve used a twangy-ass banjo again, aping the country tone of the “My Land” spot. Flaw #2: the JibJab guys have no specific Barack Obama vs. John McCain point to make except for a standard contest of a hearts-and-flowers liberal vs. a snarly-voiced warmongering conservative, which is a fairly sloppy observation at this stage of the game. Flaw #3: a good 50% to 60% of the spot uses old or so-what? material — i.e., the Bushies are on their way out, a recap of Hillary’s failed campaign (an allusion to her 2012 ambitions, Bill’s randy-ness with a Monica-resembling brunette) and so on. Flaw #4: it depicts Obama as a Snow White or Bambi fantasist living in an animated Polyanna world — an allusion to the criticisms of his “Yes We Can!” phase that BHO didn’t offer specific policies — which shows the spot to be at least three or four months out of date. Flaw #5: the guy who voices Obama doesn’t sound like him in the least. Flaw #6: the guy who voices McCain sounds like a mixture of Brian Dennehy, Louis Armstrong and Foghorn Leghorn.
And the interactive online software that supposedly allows you to put your own head shot in the animated cartoon doesn’t work. I clicked on the damn green button eight or nine times.

Illustration by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer‘s David Horsey.

An interesting hit job on WALL*E by the New Republic‘s Ben Crair, dated 7.14. The slant is indicated in this graph: “WALL-E‘s conservative critics are right to identify a problem with its message. Unfortunately, they’ve misdiagnosed it. There’s nothing wrong with the film’s anti-corporatism, which is just a variation of the anti-totalitarianism that’s requisite to the genre. More troublesome is the film’s complicity in the commodified culture it ostensibly critiques. This isn’t about Disney, whose external merchandise and marketing are extraneous to the film’s artistic vision. Within the movie itself, WALL*E betrays its true corporate overlord, and it isn’t Mickey. It’s Apple.”
I’m not going to re-phrase or condense this article in any way. It’s too dense and well-sculpted for me to attempt that. Just read it.

For those who haven’t seen Marina Zenovich‘s Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, it’s playing in New York (at the Quad Cinema on West 13th Street), and will open Friday in Boston and Los Angeles. If you haven’t yet seen this essential and riveting legal drama, here’s another way.

It’s been on HBO, but I first saw it at a theatre in Park City, Utah, last January, and I got a bit more of a jolt from the communal experience (leaning forward in my seat, sensing the concentration of others) than from the HBO viewing that I allowed myself two or three weeks ago. This is a very sharp and absorbing doc that doesn’t miss a trick, and which leaves you filled and fortified. Before seeing anything like this I always go to the club for the treadmill and weights, and then I’ll down a Red Bull and a double cappuccino kicker. Docs always play better when you’re cranked.
I wonder how many of the hellfire-and-brimstone Polanski haters who visit this site have seen it?

Earlier this morning director Rod Lurie (Nothing But The Truth, Resurrecting The Champ) e-mailed some friends with a couple of graduation pics taken at his alma mater, Honolulu’s Punahou High School — himself accepting the big diploma from P.H.S. president Roderick F. McPhee in June 1980, and some clean-cut kid named Barack Obama doing the same a year earlier. 2:05 pm: A link from Politico‘s Ben Smith.

“I don’t want to blow a gasket over this thing because it’s just a good British popcorn film,” I wrote last March 5th about Roger Donaldson‘s The Bank Job. “But entertainments of this sort — tight, tough, well-honed — are few and far between.

“It isn’t a classic drama, but it’s not a whammy-chart action film either. No car chases, no explosions and star Jason Statham only beats up one guy (or is it two?) in the whole thing. But it’s the best crafted and most gripping low-key suspense thriller I’ve seen in ages.” Easily among my favorite ’08 films so far. And out today on DVD.

“When The Last Picture Show came out, in 1971, it was acclaimed not only as the breakout hit of a young gun (the director, Peter Bogdanovich, was still in his early thirties) but also as a dusty remembrance of things past,” writes New Yorker critic Anthony Lane.

“The movie was set twenty years before, in a small Texas town, where even the young folk — played to perfection by Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd, Timothy Bottoms and others — bore the look of natural-born elegists, and where the quest for sexual services (led by Cloris Leachman, as the wife of a sports coach) seemed less a matter of lust, let alone joy, than a desperate bid to delay the dying falls of love.
“Nowadays, we are the nostalgists, and it is Bogdanovich’s film (which the director David Gordon Green selected for a July 20 screening at BAM) that asks to be treasured as the product — indeed, the standard-bearer — of a faded age. There was a time when movies themselves felt like small towns: rooted fast in their environments, and alive to the wistful chatter of minor characters as they crossed paths and then went on their way.”
And the most small-towny moment in the entire film was Ben Johnson‘s soliloquy about change and “gettin’ old” and a love affair he had about 20 years back with a girl, and a silver dollar she probably still has.

“You wouldn’t believe how this country’s changed. First time I seen it there wasn’t a mesquite tree on it. First time I watered a horse at this tank was more than 40 years ago. I’m probably just as sentimental as the next fella when it comes to old times.”

Today’s hit films are having shorter runs in theatres than they did 20 and 25 years ago, says this 7.14 Gregg Kilday piece in the Hollywood Reporter. I had suspected as much before reading it. The burn rate on everything is faster today than it was during the Reagan-Bush era.
The most interesting portion of Kilday’s article notes that while Iron Man and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull lasted in theatres for eight and seven weeks respectively — the ’08 summer’s two longest runs so far — 1984’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom spent 12 weeks in the top 10, and ’89’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade spent 10 weeks in the top 10.
“Today, eight weeks in the top 10 — which generally requires that a movie is playing in at least 1,000 locations — is a significant achievement,” writes Kilday.
In the good old days of the mid to late ’80s computers were using Flintstones-level technology and IBM Selectrics were the writing device of choice. The interactive darting-eye video-game aesthetic was in its nascent stages. Attention spans were probably longer back then, and the across-the-board instant gratification principle hadn’t yet taken over. Some GenXers were in their early 20s, but most were in their teens. GenYers were toddlers and tweeners and GenD kidz — those born in the early ’90s and later, easily the fastest-information-processing generation of all — hadn’t been conceived.
So yes, it was a somewhat slower, almost entirely analog world back then, and so, yeah, of course, hit movies tended to hang around longer.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the general pattern for the average super-hit movie of 2020 will be five or six weeks and out. I wouldn’t be surprised if all movies, big and small, were to open everywhere in all media simultaneously. I wouldn’t be surprised if we have no DVD or Blu-ray retail stores whatsoever by 2020 — and it’ll be a profoundly sad thing when this happens, whether it’s five or ten years from now. Stop what you’re doing and shed a tear for the future of the DVD and Blu-ray community of movie lovers worldwide.

Edited and posted this morning by The Jed Report.