Possibly as a result of catching yesterday’s Oprah tribute, Sumner Redstone has amended his position on Tom Cruise (or told his wife to stop kvetching) and has been laying down a welcome mat in hopes that a Mission: Impossible 4 might happen down the road. (S.R. and Cruise dined together in March, it says here.) “I consider Tom Cruise a great actor and a good friend,” Redstone said during a business conference in South Korea. “And if Paramount decides — and they will make the decision — to move ahead with him, I will not object.”

The Swedish Hancock trailer is supposed to be ruder than the American one? The beginnings and middle of both are pretty much the same. I’m not sure about the final thirds.

First, those stories about Heath Ledger/Joker dolls fetching $50 a pop on e-Bay don’t appear to be valid, as this e-Bay page makes clear. Second, 6″ Joker dolls are for eight year-olds. Serious collectors prefer the more detailed 12″ or 15″ tall models with their much better facial likenesses.

Either way, this is the first action figure I’ve wanted to own in a long time. I’ll admit it — it’s partly the macabre aspect of a dead actor being sold as merchandise. I have a James Dean doll at home. I’ve also had four Universal-crafted classic monster dolls on my desk for the last three or four years — the Wolfman, Dracula and two Frankensteins (one modelled on Boris Karloff‘s appearance in the original 1931 film, the other a copy of his look in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein).

No article has filled me with more trepidation and suspicion about Hancock than last Sunday’s N.Y. Times piece by Michael Cieply. It’s supposed to be about a superhero flick that pushes limits in terms of the main character’s behavior, but all I got out of it were a bunch of pretending-to-be-concerned-or-thoughtful comments from a lot of smug over-paid people who ride around in pricey cars.

I really don’t like that photo of producer Akiva Goldsman laughing uproariously while standing next to Will Smith. Too many people laugh in that man’s presence. Smith himself,now that you mention it, laughs and smiles too much also. I just don’t like the vibe coming off this film. The trailer was half-appealing, but Cieply has killed the vibe.

The Indiana/North Carolina basics: “At stake are a total of 187 pledged delegates — 115 in North Carolina and 72 in Indiana. Polls open in North Carolina at 6:30 am and close at 7:30 pm. In Indiana, most polls open at 6:00 am and close at 6:00 pm, but because some parts of the state are in the Central Time Zone, the official poll closing time is 7:00 pm eastern.
“And just to give you a sense of where the candidates think they’re the strongest, Clinton will hold her Election Night rally in Indianapolis, while Obama will hold his his in Raleigh, NC. Interestingly, however, Clinton seems to be on the upswing in North Carolina, and Obama seems on the upswing in Indiana. Yet both are likely to win on their ‘home’ demographic courts.
“So what would the Vegas lines be today? Our guess: five points in each state, which should already be considered a perception victory for Clinton. But given the closet superdelegate support Obama seems to have, he’s been given the benefit of the doubt with some if he simply wins North Carolina by, well, about five points. You’ll know it will be a mediocre to bad night for Obama if his campaign has to talk about who won the most delegates tonight, rather than by how much they won each state.” — from MSNBC’s “First Read” rundown, which arrived in my inbox at 9:14 am.

Indy 4 director Steven Spielberg recently told N.Y. Times contributor Terrence Rafferty that “he tries to cut as little as possible” in the Indy action sequences because “every time the camera changes dynamic angles, you feel there’s something wrong, that there’s some cheating going on.” Precisely. Too many movies feel like visual cheats from the get-go. So Spielberg’s goal is “to do the shots the way Chaplin or Keaton would, everything happening before the eyes of the audience, without a cut.”

Sounding a little bit like Werner Herzog, Spielberg explained that “the idea is, there’s no illusion; what you see is what you get. My movies have never been frenetically cut, the way a lot of action is done today. That’s not a put-down; some of that quick cutting, like in The Bourne Ultimatum is fantastic, just takes my breath away. But to get the comedy I want in the Indy films, you have to be old-fashioned. I’ve studied a lot of the old movies that made me laugh, and you’ve got to stage things in full shots and let the audience be the editor. It’s like every shot is a circus act.” Brilliant. I love this. No more Spielberg bashing until further notice.

“That’s a fragment of something Andrei Tarkovsky said. He said that art is different than life because art is a representation of life and therefore it doesn’t contain death. Life contains death. So making art is life-affirming. So even if the art is tragic, it’s still optimistic. There can never be pessimistic artists, there can only be mediocrity.” — from John Del Signore‘s 5.5 piece for the Gothamist about Lou Reed and Julian Schnabel discussing Berlin, a film about Reed’s 2006 revival performance of his 1973 album at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.

Berlin will open in Manhattan at Film Forum on July 18th. (Who’s the publicist? I’d love to be able to see it this week sometime.) The Schnabel-Reed sitdown concluded the Tribeca Film Festival’s “Conversations in Cinema” series.

A movie is only as good as its weakest creative link — as clever or knowing or visually alive as the stodgiest, most old-fashioned, least-hip person in the inner creative circle. So if it turns out that there’s something a little bit wrong with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull — something a wee bit underwhelming about the story, something rote or cornball or ill-considered — we all know who the big Blame Guy is probably going to be. This is so widely understood I don’t even feel the need to say his name. I presume it’s obvious I’m not talking about Steven Spielberg or screenwriter David Koepp.

Speaking of the fight scenes in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Harrison Ford has told The Australian‘s Chrissy Iley that “we didn’t shoot it like a Matrix style where if you hit somebody they end up in this big space and you didn’t feel the hurt, you don’t feel the fear. I feel you very quickly lose emotional connection with the character if it’s like that. We are more old school.”
Exactly. The thing I’ve always disliked about martial-arts fight scenes is that nobody ever gets hurt. We all realize, of course, that martial arts fights are intentionally stylized and not operating under a realistic tent. But the patience ceiling for this sort of thing is low. (For me, at least.) It is the essence of boredom to watch guys slamming each other without end. All ballet and no wincing or groaning makes Jack a dull boy. Totally ignoring the fact that the human body is vulnerable and that duke-outs always bring pain and woundings is a short route to the grotesque.
The blame for this tedium, of course, lies entirely on the shoulders of Asian martial-arts films. I remember bitching about this when I saw my first Bruce Lee film in the early ’70s, and here it is 35 years later and the form is pretty much unchanged. The worst fight scene of all time in this vein? The battle between Neo and all the Smiths in The Matrix Reloaded. And I say that having loved some of the fight scenes in the original Matrix.
The shoe has just dropped. The page has just turned. Martial-arts combat scenes have taken a bullet in the chest. They may continue, but they’ll never have the same punch from this moment on. A voice is telling me this. And we have Harrison Ford to thank for leading the charge, or at least sounding the trumpet.

This teaser for Beverly Hills Chihuahua (Disney, 9.26) obviously promises a spirited family entertainment. Chihuahuas are Mexican dogs, of course, and Mexico, of course, was the seat of ancient Aztec and Mayan culture many centuries ago. But what could this have to do with a present-day story about a rich Beverly Hills chihuahua named Chloe (voiced by Drew Barrymore) getting lost during a Mexican vacation and looking for a way home? Obviously she gradually gets past being a spoiled and arrogant bitch by connecting with her ancestral roots, etc.

I’m being too literal-minded, I realize, but I really don’t get it. If little chihuahuas can make head-dresses and put them on their heads, that means director Raja Gosnell and the Disney animators have also given them all kinds of human-level abilities and skills. They can weave fabric and lay adobe bricks and throw spears and make swords so they can stage the occasional sacrifice ceremony. (Remember all those bouncing bloody heads in Mel Gibson‘s Apocalypto? And the fact that it was released by Touchstone, a Disney distributor?) Except we all know what chihuahua paws look like so how can they grip anything? See where I’m going with this? If the dogs weren’t shown wearing the Aztec-Mayan head-dresses I could deal with it.
I love that the Disney marketers felt the need to provide a pheonetical pronounciation — “chee-WOW-wa.” They’re clearly wondering if pronouncing “chihuahua” might be over the heads of the people they’re trying to sell tickets to. What does that tell us? The voices of Salma Hayek, Jamie Lee Curtis, Piper Perabo, Edward James Olmos, Andy Garcia and Cheech Marin costar.

I feel horrible about what may happen tomorrow in Indiana and North Carolina. Terrified. It could all finally start to be over (please!) if Barack Obama finishes slightly ahead of the Hildebeest among the Hoosiers and takes her, say, by eight or ten points among the tarheels. But it could go badly too, and the agony could well continue. Just ignore it, I’ve been telling myself today. Or at least don’t fret. At least until tomorrow.

Then I came across this 5.4 Kurt Andersen piece in New York (“About That Crush on Obama”) that perfectly describes everything I’ve been feeling and sensing over the last three or four weeks, and somehow this has brought some comfort. If a modest but decisive Obama triumph is not in the cards for tomorrow, there is at least solace in knowing that the relatively recent news media animus towards Obama, the never-the-twain-shall-meet attitudes that starkly separate Hillary and Barack supporters and the standard loathing I’ve been feeling for the Hillary hinterlanders for months has been well captured and understood.
Please read the whole piece — it hits it dead center — but here’s the best part:
“Yet the flip side of all this is why Clinton’s demographically determined constituencies haven’t felt the Obama magic, why for them he’s an acquired taste, like espresso. It’s not only that the people who create and run the media — and who love Obama — occupy the social and cultural upper rungs. The world depicted in ‘the media,’ broadly construed — not just straight journalism but everything we watch and read and hear — is overwhelmingly a bright, shiny, upscale, youngish world.
“Uneducated white people, residents of the so-called C and D counties, and the elderly — in other words, Hillary Clinton voters — are seldom allowed into the mass-media foreground, and when they appear it’s usually as bathetic figures, victims or losers. (And working-class black pop culture is considered part of the sexy mainstream in a way that working-class white pop culture is not.) The shocking eclipse of Hillary (an eight-figure net worth, maybe, but at least she’s got a normal American name and a Wal-Mart shopper’s bad hair and big bum) by this fashionable (black!) media darling is one more slap in the face for the people chronically excluded from the pretty mediascape version of America, one more damn new thing that they don’t really get. It makes them…bitter, and the bitterness makes them cling to the Clintons.
“The media didn’t see this coming. Back in February, when the new prince was gliding thrillingly up and up toward nomination, a part of the thrill for the media was their happy astonishment that they were no longer cosmopolitan outliers but finally (unlike in 1984 with Gary Hart) in sync with America: Regular folks, white people in Iowa and Virginia and Wisconsin, were actually voting for Obama!
“That was then. With the ten-point loss in Pennsylvania, the latest Reverend Wright eruption, and the shrinkage of Obama’s leads in the polls, the media are feeling lousy, and not just because their guy is taking a beating. If Obama is deemed to be an effete, out-of-touch yuppie, then the effete-yuppie media Establishment that’s embraced him must be equally oblivious and/or indifferent to the sentiments of the common folk.
“Uh-oh. As the cratering of newspaper circulations accelerates (thousands a week are now abandoning the Times) and network-news audiences continue to shrink, for big-time mainstream journalists to seem even more out of touch makes some of them panic. And…so…it’s all…his fault, that highfalutin Obama! Certain journalistic stars these last few weeks (hello, George Stephanopoulos!), instead of copping to the ‘elitist’ sensibilities they obviously share with him (and the Clintons and McCain) — we travel abroad and read books, we have healthy bank accounts and drink wine; so shoot us — reacted by parroting the Clinton campaign’s faux-populist talking points about Obama’s condescension toward the yokel class.
“But pandering to the yokels, pretending to share their tastes and POV? That goes pretty much unchallenged. If the wellborn New England Wasp George W. Bush (Andover ’64, Yale ’68, Harvard ’75) could be successfully refashioned as a down-home rustic, why shouldn’t Hillary Clinton (Wellesley ’69, Yale ’73) be talkin’ guns and drinkin’ Crown Royal shots and droppin’ all the g’s from her gerunds whenever she speaks extemporaneously these days? Naked disingenuousness apparently isn’t as off-putting as, say, failing to pin a tiny metal American flag to one’s lapel.
“For all I know, the Clinton voters find Obama’s spazzy bowling and Jay-Z referencing just as irritating. Like I said, the Democratic race has become for many of us an intense playoff simulacrum, and fans love their team and curse the opponents blindly and faithfully. I can’t quite believe that I have been driven to baseball-geek analogies…but here I find myself nevertheless, feverishly hoping that the story ends not in the fashion of last year’s awful, amazing Mets, but like the Yankees in 2000, when they nearly blew their big lead in the season’s final weeks before straightening up and winning the World Series.”