“Iron Man is a mixed bag. Slick, snappy, wonderfully witty, and at times more of an irony-man than just plain Iron Man. (‘It’s actually titanium-alloy man,’ says Robert Downey‘s blase Tony Stark). Yet at times it’s also a routine action movie with no real inventiveness, plot-wise,” says Israeli blogger Yair Raveh‘s in his review on Cinemascope. Uh-oh…the first sign of Iron Man political backlash!

“Politically it tries to be liberal-minded at first,” Raveh says, “putting the blame for wars on profiteering by arms manufacturers — but in fact this is a conservative old-fashioned picture, about a nation looking for a dude to fight its wars for it, abroad and at home, and do it with as little accountability as possible.”

This Bill Maher “New Rules” clip is only nine days old — is that so bad? Yes, yes…I should have posted it earlier. But the riff about class and elitism that Maher delivered at midpointabout the Barack Obama/Reagan Democrats “bittergate” scandal is, for my money, gospel. Best line: “You know who is bitter in America? I am. Because shit-kickers voted twice for a retarded guy they wanted to have a beer with, and everybody else had to suffer the consequences!”

I can’t believe I’m planning to pay money out of my own wallet — the fruit of extremely hard and grueling day-to-day effort — to see Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay (New Line, 4.25) sometime later today. I know what I’m in for. It’s going to make me want to to kill myself Khmer Rouge-style with a blue plastic bag. But I missed the damn press screening and I need the ammunition that will derive from being able to know and say “yes, I’ve seen it.”

Especially knowing what I do about Kal Penn, which is that he’s an animal. I know of no other youngish actor who conveys chronic brain-cell blockage and open-mouthed slovenliness like Penn does time and again. I’m not saying he’s literally an unbridled idiot off-screen, but he’s relentless at trying to convince audiences that his characters are low-born and dumb as fenceposts, and after a while the effort carries over.
I didn’t realize Penn had the bona fide ape gene until I caught Mira Nair‘s The Namesake (’06), in which Penn played the son. I thought I might be treated to some other aspect of his personality, that working with Nair would allow him to shake off the low-rent moves and attitudes that he’s used in Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle and all the other 20-something TV shows and crap-level movies he’s been in.
But within minutes of his first appearance in The Namesake, Penn went into this standard routine, which boils down to that clueless-asshole expression plus that open-mouthed thing he does in nearly every scene. What a creep, I told myself then and there. He can’t class himself up for even a single role. Penn plays it fairly straight and restrained throughout most of The Namesake, but I didn’t believe for a second that he wasn’t a major dumbass beneath the skin.
The only time I half-believed a Penn character might actually have something going on upstairs was during his brief performance in Mike Binder‘s Man About Town.
Penn’s decision to teach two current undergrad courses at the University of Pennsylvania — “Images of Asian Americans in the Media” and “Contemporary American Teen Films” — in no way belies or undercuts what I’ve said here. He doesn’t just “play” morons convincingly — he convinces you that it goes deeper than that.
“The Asian American Studies Program is delighted that Kalpen Modi, a.k.a. Kal Penn, chose our program to host his teaching engagement at Penn,” Grace Kao, director of the Asian American Studies Program at Penn, said last year. “Mr. Modi is one of the leading Asian American actors of his generation and is particularly aware of how his racial and ethnic identification has affected his professional experiences.” And that’s supposed to mean what exactly?

N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick recently caught a Tribeca Film Festival screening of Brian Hecker‘s Bart Got a Room, and was pleasantly surprised. “I didn’t have enormous expectations,” he writes, “for this autobiographical story about a teenager trying to find a prom date in a south Florida town with the help of his newly-divorced parents, played by William H. Macy (in a Jewfro!) and Cheryl Hines.

Macy, Kaplan in Bart Got a Room

“But it’s hilarious, quick-paced (80 minutes!) with lots of smarts and heart and a terrific lead performance by newcomer Steven Kaplan and, unusually for a teen comedy, a big-band score. Some smart distributor should snap this up quick.”

Too many photos from M. Night Smyamalan‘s The Happening (20th Century Fox, 6.13) show the principals — Mark Wahlberg, Zoey Deschanel, John Leguizamo — either (a) staring with stern but alarmed expressions at a TV screen, (b) staring with stern but alarmed expressions at some piece of physical evidence that indicates something strange is going on, or (c) staring into space with stern but fatigued (or numbed out) expressions. The Fox publicity team needs to hand out stills that are more varied, less predictable. I’m starting get bored. (Latest photos are posted at JoBlo.com)

Adding to my dissenting view of Guillermo del Toro‘s official contracted commitment to spend four years making two Hobbitt movies for New Line/ Warner Bros. and the oppressive poobah Peter Jackson, Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir yesterday riffed and elaborated about the regret many are feeling about a great filmmaker preparing to lie down with dogs.

O’Hehir’s best score is quoting Del Toro from a 2006 Cannes interview he did with the guy, to wit: “I was never into heroic fantasy. At all. I don’t like little guys and dragons, hairy feet, hobbits — I’ve never been into that at all. I don’t like sword and sorcery. I hate all that stuff.” I knew it…knew it! A brother under the skin. Guillermo, homie…I’m with you all the way.
Second best O’Hehir graph: “And where did the brilliant idea to make a ‘Hobbit’ sequel — a movie that will presumably cover the 60-year gap between the stories told in ‘The Hobbit’ and in ‘The Lord of the Rings’ — actually come from? If you read all the back-and-forth stories closely, it becomes clear that New Line executive Mark Ordesky at some point told Peter Jackson that the studio had acquired rights to make both ‘The Hobbit’ and a sequel, presumably based on Tolkien’s fragmentary back-story information about what happens in his fictional universe between the two novels.
“A less kind way of saying this is that any ‘Hobbit’ sequel won’t really be a Tolkien adaptation; Jackson and Walsh and Boyens and del Toro and Ordesky and, I don’t know, some guy in the Warner Bros. lunch room will be making the shit up.”

Former Rolling…sorry…Hitsville‘s Bill Wyman, a former NPR and Salon arts editor, has posted a strong argument against Errol Morris‘s payment of interviewees for Standard Operating Procedure (Sony Classics, 4.25), largely in response to this morning’s N.Y. Times story.
My view of this, posted last Tuesday, is that “notebook reporters can’t pay for information — that’s completely out and always has been — but documentaries are a different matter, I feel. As long as what the subject says to the documentarian can be verified to be a portion of absolute truth and nothing but, I don’t see the problem.”

When I first spotted Jon Favreau in his semi-hilarious breakout role in Doug Liman‘s Swingers (’96), it was obvious he’d be looking at weight issues later in life. Sure enough he gradually went there as the years went along, finally achieving Orson Welles-ian proportions two years ago when he appeared as Vince Vaughn‘s best friend in The Breakup. But recent photos from Iron Man, which Favreau directed and costars in, as well as interview footage show that he’s obviously gotten religion.

(l.) Favreau as currently constituted; (r.) as he looked during filming of The Breakup in mid to late ’05

Four days after an initial revealing by And The Winner Is editor-columnist Scott Feinberg, N.Y. Times reporters Michael Cieply and Ben Sisario have finally posted a story about Errol Morris having either paid or covered expenses for some of his interview subjects in his Abu Ghraib doc Standard Operating Procedure (Sony Classics, 4.25).

That’s a pretty slow response. In today’s fast-breaking world, first-rate print journalism is generally known for (a) examining a subject fairly thoroughly with solid quotes from reliable people, and (b) being a day late as far as print readers are concerned. Sometimes a thoroughly covered and vetted story from a major publication may take 24 to 36 hours to even show up online after the initial break. But four days…?
Last Tuesday morning Feinberg posted a longish article that disclosed,in part, that Morris had either paid or covered expenses for some of his interview subjects. I followed up later that morning with a piece that included a written statement from Morris.
I was thinking about the Times in particular when I wrote last Tuesday that the Morris payment thing “may be regarded in some circles as a sticky-wicket” issue. I suppose I should have written “slightly sticky,” as the Times obviously feels it’s a second-tier deal. (Which it is but still…) I’d been their editor I would have had it in the Times the next day, if possible, or certainly by Thursday.

Baby Mama will win the weekend with a projected $18,538,000 by Sunday night. Runner-up Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay will earn about $14,558,000. Forgetting Sarah Marshall will be third with $10,900,000 — a drop of 38% from last weekend (a semi-decent hold), a Sunday-night cume of $35 million, and a resonable bet to finish with $60 million, give or take. The Forbidden Kingdom, suffering from word-of-mouth, will be off 51% from last weekend for a $10,398,000 haul.
All well and good for the top five, but the lion’s share of the business next weekend will be vacuumed up by Iron Man and Made of Honor. Enjoy the earnings and the attention while they last. All glory is fleeting.
Prom Night will come in sixth with $4,570,000. Nims Island will make about $4,511,000 for a seventh-place showing. 21, a success, will bring in $3838,000 for a $75,600,000 cume. 88 Minutes, the Al Pacino embarassment, will earn $3,263,000. Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who will take in $2,476,000.
In tenth place is Hugh Jackman‘s Deception, a piece of shit costarring Ewan McGregor that will earn $2,181,000 (L.A. Times reporter John Horn predicted $5 million….hah!) and $1100 a theatre.

Buncha stuff to do today requiring organic physical movement (driving, signing things, shaking hands, eyeballing people and movies) so that’s it for a few hours. But before I take off, there’s this apartment at the Hotel Miramar in Cannes — right on the Croisette, possible Mediterranean view, two buildings down from the Carlton — that sleeps four festivlalgoers (questionable) and, from 5.13 to 5.24, is going for “only” 4600 euros, or close to $7000 U.S. dollars. Or so I was told yesterday.

The $7000 rental, not mine

Even if I had that kind of scratch…I don’t know. Four people crammed into what looks like two bedroom apartment? I could buy a better motorcycle for $7000. I’m paying $1500 U.S. for a nice apartment share at 14 rue Juliette, right off the rue d’Antibes. Europe is a rip right now.

Ewan McGregor‘s apparent decision to play “a powerful Vatican insider” in Ron Howard‘s Angels and Demons, the sequel to The DaVinci Code, is the latest in a long series of straight-paycheck roles for this once-adventurous actor.
On 4.16 I asked “what’s happened to McGregor over the last five or six years? It’s almost as his soul was poisoned by playing Obi Wan Kenobi three times for George Lucas (The Phantom Menace in ’99, Attack of the Clones in ’02, Revenge of the Sith in ’05). He’s become Mr. Paycheck — a young Robert De Niro who will make any questionable or lackluster film as long as the money’s right or it fits his schedule. Or maybe he just has terrible taste.”