Eleven or twelve years ago Robert Evans shared an unfortunate biological truth with me, which is that “when you get older your nose gets bigger, your ears get bigger and longer and your teeth get smaller.” This is what came back to me, in any event, when I read Elizabeth Snead‘s photo-comparison article about nose jobs.
Snead puts it thusly: “Ears and noses are made mostly of cartilage that may continue to grow as we age. So when a person’s nose is perceived by others to be getting smaller and more refined over the years, it raises question for the eagle-eyed star watchers.”
Cheers to Owen Wilson for holding back, standing his ground and not going with the flow.

I’m one of the many people in this town who are grieved to hear about manager Joan Hyler‘s traumatic accident last Friday night. She was hit by a car while crossing Pacific Coast Highway. She sustained “severe and multiple injuries” and lost a lot of blood. I called the UCLA hospital where she’s being cared for and was told to go to www.carepages.com — my first internet attempt to check up on someone in a hospital and wish them well. My best wishes to Joan. She’s always been a good egg and a kind soul.

In response to hopes that the recently finished W will show up at the Toronto Film Festival, HE talk-backer Rodrigo called this an unlikely scenario. He’s forgetting that W director Oliver Stone is a very fast editor (he whipped JFK together in near-record time). He also needs to be reminded of the production schedule of Otto Preminger‘s Anatomy of a Murder, which began shooting on 3.23.59, wrapped on 5.15.59 and opened on 7.2.59. It was later nominated for seven Academy Awards.

As one who’s reported on the shortcomings of movie-ad campaign decisions by Lionsgate marketing vp Tim Palen (such as Dane Cook‘s 8.12 complaint about the one-sheet for My Best Friend’s Girl) and voiced my own issues from time to time (like the gay-metrosexual ads for 3:10 to Yuma), I have to take my hat off and say “job well done” regarding those new W ads.

The slogan, in particular, is a bulls-eye: “A Life Misunderestimated.” (And it’s not finessed. About.com’s Daniel Kurtzman has reported that Bush said “they misunderestimated me” in Bentonville, Arkansas, on Nov. 6, 2000.) Crew Creative was hired to turn out the ads, but the final creative call always rests with the top in-house marketing guy.
Ad Age‘s Claude Brodesser-Akner is reporting that the W posters will be billboarded in Denver and Minneapolis during the respective Democratic and Republican conventions. The piece doesn’t make clear if the more swaggering poster image of Josh Brolin‘s Bush (look of calm and confidence, cowboy boots up on desk) will be used in Minneapolis while the more doofusy-looking one will be used in Denver, or if the posters are meant to be regarded side by side.
It would be great, of course, if W is on tomorrow morning’s list of the final Toronto Film Festival titles. Here’s hoping. W is opening on 10.17, or slightly more than a month after the festival concludes.
Sidenote: A page on Crew Creative‘s website takes credit for the much-maligned poster for My Best Friend’s Girl….whoops.

I’ve been looking at some of my old Mr. Showbiz columns for the last half-hour or so and was struck by this particular “What’s My Line? query. They were fun, these things. But a pain in the ass to select and transcribe.
Guy No. 1: Are you a beer drinker, sir, or would you like to share a martini with me?
Guy No. 2: A martini? Oh, that would be… I’d love a martini.
Guy No. 1: I think you’ll find these accommodating. They’re quite dry.
Guy No. 2: Don’t you use olives?
Guy No. 3: Olives? Where the hell d’ya think you are, man?
Guy No. 1: We do have to make certain concessions to [the situation we find themselves in].
Guy No. 2: Yes, but a man can’t really savor his martini without an olive, you know? Otherwise, you see, it just doesn’t…quite…make it. (Plop.)

Both The Atlantic‘s Andrew Sullivan and Daily Kos‘s “rickrocket” wondered aloud today about the origin of John McCain‘s “cross in the dirt” story, which the presumptive Republican candidate repeated yesterday during his Saddleback Church discussion segment. Sulllivan and “rickrocket” aren’t making firm claims, but they’re both noting that the story is remarkably similar to one recounted by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago (or perhaps in Burt Ghezzi‘s The Sign of the Cross — one or the other).

“I loved The Prestige but didn’t understand The Dark Knight,” Robert Downey, Jr. said to a Moviehole correspondent two weeks ago. “Didn’t get it, still can’t tell you what happened in the movie, what happened to the character and in the end they need him to be a bad guy. I’m like, ‘I get it. This is so highbrow and so fucking smart, I clearly need a college education to understand this movie.’ You know what? Fuck DC comics. That’s all I have to say and that’s where I’m really coming from.”

As the intensely despised Stars Wars: The Clone Wars opened this weekend to a kind of half-dud response ($15 million and change), and since it’s been called the absolute end of the road by many a longtime Star Wars fan, I thought it appropriate to rewind nine years and three months to the first major display of Star Wars prequel-mania.

I was off the boat like that after seeing The Phantom Menace, but to think that it took others nine years to come to the realization that bloated Beelzebub George Lucas had spiritually destroyed his own franchise while making money hand over fist is amazing. Nine years of holding on and keeping the faith, and for what?
I’ve scanned five pages of my Mr. Showbiz article, which ran in early May 1999 and which I called “The Fandom Penance.” Here are page #1, page #2, page #3, page #4 and page #5.

Here’s hoping or presuming that Enrique Rivero‘s Parque Via, which today won the top prize at the Locarno Film Festival, will turn up at the Toronto Film Festival. If it’s already been programmed or listed, great — I just haven’t found it yet. Which means nothing. Here’s Derek Elley‘s Variety review.

Parque Via helmer Enrique Rivero

Be an American Caroler — sign up, take the pledge, support your country.

The old Siskel and Ebert movie-review show was the first to teach hoi polloi film lovers that “the argument was the thing — that art itself was arguable, and that was okay,” Chicago Tribune guy Christopher Borelli said today.

“Ebert still writes dazzling reviews for the Sun-Times that make complicated points in approachable language, as does [Michael] Phillips, for the Tribune. Richard Roeper continues as a Sun-Times columnist. And there are more than a few thoughtful voices left in criticism, of course — outside Chicago, even.
“But it’s hard to overstate the importance of a nationally syndicated TV show that speaks up for small fine movies without marketing budgets and reinforces names such as Werner Herzog, Robert Altman and Spike Lee and, oh, say, a David Gordon Green. Indeed, it wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that for a generation or two of moviegoers, it was Siskel and Ebert who introduced the idea that good criticism is not about finality or consensus or putting your thumb up or down.
“It’s about argument itself.
“The irony, of course, is that it wasn’t so long ago that Ebert and Siskel themselves and those opposing critical digits were often raised as the primary catalyst in the dumbing down of film criticism. But I bet for the average everyday moviegoers who rarely think beyond ‘I liked it’ or ‘I hated it’ and who rarely consider aesthetics or polemics or politics when they go to a multiplex, the end of the original incarnation of At the Movies will feel like the finale of film criticism itself.
“The argument has ended. The informed movie review can be placed officially on the endangered species list. On TV, let’s just declare it extinct.”

I keep expecting Barack Obama to say something electric or wowser when he’s interviewed, as he was yesterday by Pastor Rick Warren during yesterday’s Saddleback Church civil forum. It’s not that he lacks charm or feeling when he speaks, or that he fails to express his beliefs plainly or concisely. I guess I’ve just heard him speak so often that he holds no surprises. He can’t not be careful. Not that I expect him to be cavalier. Not in this rancid predatory climate.
I know he’ll probably make history when he delivers his big closing-night speech in Denver, which will happen a week from this coming Thursday. I guess I’m just easily bored because whenever he speaks off the cuff, he always seems to go for the bunt. What I’d like to hear him say, I suppose, is something Eric Rothian or Tom Stoppard-esque or early David Mamet-level. Zappers, zingers, sliders. As it is now I feel like I know what he’s going to say before he says it, and it’s always right across the plate. And more often slow than fast.
As for the content of yesterday’s Saddleback discussion, I’m more or less with Zennie Abraham.