Pierre Morel‘s Taken (20th Century Fox, 9.18.08) is a thriller about an ex-spook (Liam Neeson) using his espionage skills to save his estranged daughter (Maggie Grace) from baddies who’ve kidnapped her and sold her into the slave trade. A rescue is necessary because once a beautiful young woman has been abducted and sold, she has no choice but to do what she’s been told to do, and is of course powerless to attempt an escape on her own.

“Hillary Clinton is taking a month off from her job as senator to rest up from her campaign. How does that work? You’ve been neglecting your job trying to get a better job. You don’t get that job, so you to take a month off from the job you were trying to get out of and go on vacation. Imagine if you tried that with your boss. ‘Hey boss, listen — I’ve been looking for another job, and I’m exhausted. I want to take a month off. Here’s where you can send my checks.'” — from a Jay Leno monologue delivered the night before last (i.e., Wednesday).

“Barack Obama is the most split-personality politician in the country today,” writes conservative-minded N.Y. Times columnist David Brooks. “On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side, there’s Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who’d throw you under the truck for votes.

“This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside.
“But he’s been giving us an education, for anybody who cares to pay attention. Just try to imagine Mister Rogers playing the Ari in Entourage and it all falls into place.
“I have to admit, I’m ambivalent watching all this. On the one hand, Obama did sell out the primary cause of his professional life, all for a tiny political advantage. If he’ll sell that out, what won’t he sell out? On the other hand, global affairs ain’t beanbag. If we’re going to have a president who is going to go toe-to-toe with the likes of Vladimir Putin, maybe it is better that he should have a ruthlessly opportunist Fast Eddie Obama lurking inside.

Paul Newman as “Fast Eddie” Felson in Robert Rossen’s The Hustler.

“All I know for sure is that this guy is no liberal goo-goo. Republicans keep calling him naive. But naive is the last word I’d use to describe Barack Obama. He’s the most effectively political creature we’ve seen in decades. Even Bill Clinton wasn’t smart enough to succeed in politics by pretending to renounce politics.”
Okay, Brooks — we all get the Fast Eddie analogy. But think about that Paul Newman character from The Hustler and the concept starts to fade a bit. Fast Eddie was a hustler, all right, but he was nothing if not morally and ethically bothered by who he was and what his life amounted to. He was obsessed with not being a loser, but guilt-wracked over having looked the other way when poor alcoholic Sara (Piper Laurie) begged hjim not to hang with the likes of Burt the operator (George C. Scott). And he ended up following her lead in the end, saying goodbye to the work of hustling and pool-sharking.
The truth is that we all have a little Fast Eddie inside of us. We’re all ambitious and opportunistic to varying degrees, but we all feel a little guilty about it, and the best of us take the high road at the end of the day.

Someone told me about a script that tells the story of when Robbie Robertson and Martin Scorsese lived together. It’s supposed to be pretty remarkable, but you can’t trust the talk. Does anyone know the title or the history of it? If it’s real and all it’s cracked up to be, does anyone have a PDF they can send along?

Has anyone seen a trailer for Hancock that has significant footage of Charlize Theron? I’m told by someone who’s seen it that she has a fairly large costarring role, but the trailers are entirely (or almost entirely) about Will Smith, his super-powers, his drinking problem, going to prison, getting well, etc.

I’ve never liked that Universal globe that appears at the beginning of their films. Not the one that was around in the late ’80s to mid ’90s (with the Universal logo orbiting the earth and coming to rest in front of the camera), but the luminous funny-looking one that’s been around for…what, eight or nine years?

The oddly intense colors on the continents look like a manifestation of some disease, like electric rashes or earth lesions. The real earth is such a beautiful thing; the colors and textures so soft and yet strong with all those browns and blues and gentle greens. The Universal gang should really think about dropping what they have and devising something new. Anything but the present version.

Sputblog’s Christopher Campbell does a goof piece on 10 Actors Who Changed Ethnicity Using Facial Hair, and doesn’t mention Hugh Griffith in Ben-Hur or Alec Guiness in Lawrence of Arabia?

Entertainment Weekly‘s list of Top Ten Films of the past 25 years isn’t posted online — not yet, at least — but it’s in the issue currently on the stands, according to HE reader Dan Gaertner.

First of all, what does “top” mean? Most popular? Most influential? Most frequently rented from Netflix? If you need further proof that enlightened film culture is withering and dying on the vine, look no further. Pulp Fiction, Blue Velvet and The Silence of the Lambs, okay, but the rest…? This is worse than any list put together by the American Film Institute. The EW editors who put this list together have officially left the planet. They’re floating above us as we speak, breathing air that’s obviously lacking some basic ingredient.
Right off the top we’re going to have deep-six the Lord of the Rings trilogy, for obvious reasons. The last 25 minutes of Titanic is heart-melting and transcendent, but the problems with the rest of it should automatically exclude it from a list of this proportion. I love Toy Story is it but one of the top films of the last 25 fucking years? Neither Crimes and Misdemeanors or Husbands and Wives are as funny or heart-warming but are certainly better and more important than Hannah and Her Sisters in the Woody canon.
Saving Private Ryan is disqualified for the “cheat” fade that suggests that the old man at the Normandy cemetery is Tom Hanks on the landing craft. Die Hard is a beautifully well-oiled thriller and the best thing Joel Silver has ever produced, but again — it deserves to be on a list like this? Moulin Rouge gets the hook because the first 20 to 25 minutes of this Baz Luhrman film made my head feel as if it was going to explode.

“Like it or not, Wanted pretty much slams you to the back of your chair from the outset and scarcely lets up for the duration,” writes Variety‘s Todd McCarthy in a just-up positive review. Get the implication? “Like it or not” means that if you’re afflicted with a modicum of taste you might have a difficult time with the beefy blunt fisticuffs of director Timur Bekmambetov.

Digitally enhanced wham-bam action is akin to the digital spectacle found in The Incredible Hulk. Which, in the view of New Yorker critic David Denby, “is both too much and too little, and it’s beginning to put some of us in a funk of disappointment and boredom. When you’ve seen one half-ton piece of metal flung through the air, you’ve seen them all.” Or one utterly ridiculous car chase or idiotic spiralling-bullet sequence or whatever, working you over like slugs to the rib cage.
Wanted is one of the rankest, crudest, least artful impact-for-impact’s-sake thrillers of all time — certainly one of the least original and most vulgar I’ve ever suffered through. Alll thrust and fists and taunts, it reeks of brute grotesque Russian machismo through and through. It seems to have been made for the goons and gorillas who, some filmmakers feel, need to be gut-slammed by sound and eye-flash so they’ll pay attention or “get” anything.
All good action films have a system of logic (causes and effects and conditilons, like The Matrix had) that they adhere to — this has none at all. It has no grace or wit and style; certainly none of its own. The beginning (the bones & the set-up) is so similar to The Matrix that the Wachowski should at least be irate.

Earlier today an HE reader wrote that Wanted is “a solid piece of entertainment”? I answered by asking how, then would you rate truly first-rate action thrillers like Collateral, The Matrix and The Bourne Supremacy on this scale? You have to have some sense of proportion, some concept of good and bad…some kind of standard of measurement or nothing means anything.
For me it was pure agony to sit through — another sledge-hammer rocket slam to the castle of Good Cinema.
Plus it trots out Morgan Freeman as the wise older guy for the 14th time over the last five years. It flaunts crude CG at the drop of a hat, and uses sound as a blunt and aggressive instrument. It believes (as did the Mark Millar/J.G. Jones six-part graphic novel) that an ancient order of assassins is a good thing that promotes justice and righteousness. (In what realm is this true?)
Bekmambetov, the Russian behind the two Nightwatch movies, is another Michael Bay acolyte who believes in one rank assault after another. He isn’t fit to shine Michael Mann or Paul Greengrass‘s boots.

“Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: The Abridged Script,” written by The Editing Room’s Rod Hilton. Not bad, but at least two weeks too late.

The Envelope‘s Mark Olsen is reporting that two rule changes have been instituted for the upcoming 81st Academy Awards. One, only two songs may be nominated from a single film henceforth. And two, the philistines on the foreign film committee who notoriously declined to vote Cristian Mingiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days onto the short list last year have lost a large portion of their power. The new rules will allow the 20-member Foreign Language Film Award Executive Committee (i.e., friends/allies of Mark Johnson with a more sensitive point of view) to determine three of the nine films on the shortlist. The other six titles will be determined by the boobs.

The Tim Russert media wake ended yesterday with the Kennedy Center tribute, but at least one more columnist — Variety‘s Brian Lowry — has written about the overkill factor, and in so doing has joined the merry band.
“At a certain point [during the Russert tributes], even a modicum of recognition about relativity and propriety should have kicked in, as ‘Remembering Tim Russert’ essentially blotted out coverage of anything else in the world — from flooding in the Midwest to the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“By doing so, MSNBC√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s maudlin repetition of platitudes finally performed a genuine disservice to the late Meet the Press host√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s memory by beginning to take on an unsavory aura of self-promotion. Inevitably in the painful process of padding out the hours, there were so many references to the ‘NBC family,’ the network√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s enduring commitment to his example, and parading by correspondents and contributors sharing personal memories to qualify as back-patting.”