I’m commenting on this 4.24 New York “Vulture” piece about “Which Superhero Movie Will Suck?” because the art they created for it looks cool and I wanted a reason to re-size and re-post. Otherwise I would have ignored the post altogether. Nobody has any reason to believe that Ironman, The Dark Knight or Hellboy 2 are going to be problematic. At all. Not a whiff. A 75% dead story.

The word on Ironman so far has been strong, and there’s no reason to even intuit that Chris Nolan and Guillermo del Toro might not deliver in their usual rich-feast, intense undercurrent way. Only The Incredible Hulk has, according to general buzz, a semblance of Cecil B. DemIlle-like storm clouds swirling above. But nice collage!

Except for the cartoonish, over-the-top CG, I don’t have a problem with this Hancock tailer. So I don’t get the disdain and skepticism voiced yesterday by the New York “Vulture” guys. As long as the story is tight and the other basics (acting, dialogue, character, attitude) are nicely finessed, there’s a place (even in my sometimes sour universe) for good, empty, rambunctious fun by way of Will Smith, Charlize Theron and director Peter Berg.

Hancock (Sony) opens on 7.2.08 — a nice long holiday weekend, and a good empty fit. It could, as EW has predicted, become the summer’s third highest-grossing film, and perhaps even the second-highest, as I’m wondering for some reason about the legs of Prince Caspian. The only problem I’m sensing…. naah, leave it alone. Okay, I’ll mention it — the TV credits of the two screenwriters, Vincent Ngo and Vince Gilligan, are less than encouraging.

This spirited exchange between Vanity Fair Daily‘s Elizabeth Hurlbut and MCN’s David Poland about repeated schlong exposures in Judd Apatow movies — and particularly Jason Segel’s trifecta in Forgetting Sarah Marshall — is the most thoughtful and fully-considered exploration I’ve read anywhere.
HE regulars are sick of my posts about Segel’s physicality, but I may as well remind everyone that there’s a reason why Terry Southern sometimes used the term “gross animal member.” Wang shots are tolerable, depending, as always, on the how and why. My problem with Segel’s Marshall displays arose because I was simultaneously forced to contemplate his Michelle Pfeiffer-sized man-boobs. A double whammy.

For Republicans out to smear Barack Obama, no tactic is too low or slimey, as Floyd Brown‘s new Willie Horton ad attests. Brown created the original Horton ad that was credited with being one of the two big things that sank Michael Dukakis‘s candidacy in 1988. (The other was the video of Dukakis riding in that army tank wearing a Rocky-the-squirrel helmet.)

Jerzy Skolimowski‘s Four Nights With Anna will have its world premiere in Cannes as the opening film of the 40th Directors’ Fortnight showcase, according to Variety‘s John Hopewell.

Oddly (or perhaps not so), the IMDB doesn’t even list Anna on Skolimowski’s page (although it does list an ’08 project called America, a period drama written by Eyes Wide Shut‘s Frederic Raphael that’s based on a Susan Sontag work).
The Polish-born Skolimowski will turn 70 on May 5th. I will always revere his direction of Deep End (’71), The Shout (’78) and particularly Moonlighting (’82), which I saw at the New York Film Festival in September 1982. For me the world is divided into two camps — those who immediately think of Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepherd when they hear Moonlighting, and those who think of Skolimowksi and Jeremy Irons. At best, we’re talking about a 98% to 2% split.
Everyone regarded Skolimowski as a world-class helmer back in the day. (Not that he’s less admired now.) I was honored to interview him at the Algonquin Hotel just prior to Moonlighting‘s commercial debut. Things slowed down for him in the ’90s, but he’s been acting in recent years in films such as Eastern Promises, Before Night Falls, L.A. Without a Map and Mars Attacks!
Four Nights With Anna, which costars Polish actors Kinga Preis and Artur Steranko, is described as “a tale of amour fou, chronicling one man’s voyeuristic relationship with a woman as it evolves over four days.” That’s Skolimowski, all right — always the sensualist.
The full Directors’ Fortnight’s program will be announced Friday. Vareity’s speculation about the lineup includes Hunger, about IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands from British helmer Steve McQueen; and Francesco Munzi‘s Il resto della notte, an immigration phobia drama set in Italy’s wealthy northeast region.
Other titles being talked up are Acne, from Uruguay’s Federico Veiroz; Tony Manero from Chile’s Pablo Larrain (about “a serial killer obsessed with John Travolta’s Saturday Night Fever character), Argentine dierctor Lisandro Alonso’s Liverpool, Catalan Albert Serra’s El cant dels ocells, Radu Muntean’s Boogie and Claire Simon‘s Les Bureaux de Dieu, described as a “potentially polemical” French abortion doc.

The marketing team for Speed Racer (Warner Bros. 5.9) is facing an ironic challenge. It’s basically “a kid’s movie,” as a critic friend recently confided, but the tracking, according to Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason, says the biggest interest levels so far are with the over-25 crowd who grew up on the animated versions in various media.

There is therefore “every reason for Warner Bros to be concerned” about the Wachowski Brothers latest, Mason writes. Total awareness is at 77%, but un-aided awareness is sitting at a mere 5% and definite interest is only at 29% — certainly an issue of concern. As Mason points out, even 20th Century Fox’s What Happens in Vegas, another 5.9 opener that feels to me like a whatever thing, is doing better on this score.
Kids never show up on tracking very strongly, of course, but Speed Racer is a very costly event picture that’s kicking off the summer season. It needs to generate a lot more interest among younger males over the next two weeks or the crestfall factor will be huge.
I for one am fascinated by the visual textures in this thing and therefore consider it a must-see, but I don’t count very much in the big scheme. The target audience is going to pay to see this thing or not based on the ads and trailers alone…or not.

The closer Barack Obama gets to the Democratic nomination, the uglier this thing is getting in racial terms. That Republican-funded North Carolina TV attack ad I saw today that tried to “Willie Horton” Obama was nothing sort of breathtaking. When was the last time in which the racial-attitude cards from the hunkered-down regions were laid more plainly on the kitchen table? The early to mid ’60s? As one MSNBC commentator said today, there are people out there who “made up their minds about [voting for an African-American candidate] back in 1957.”

Illustration by Tom Tomorrow

Is there any way to interpret Hillary Clinton‘s strategy but to say she’s clearly playing this situation (along with her ace-in-the-hole gender loyalty card) for all it’s worth? At the end of the day the ugly-duck reality is that Obama, who has to despise his opponent with every fibre of his being, may have no choice but to offer Clinton the Vice-Presidential spot. You don’t have to like or even respect someone to cut a deal with them. But would she take it?

This isn’t much, but the new trailer or Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is done and should be debuting with Iron Man (Paramount, 5.1) if not before. I presume it will turn up online concurrently. The exact running time is 1 minute, 49 seconds.

Older guys can be ornery. They can be grumpy, irascible. Sometimes they lose it. My father, well into his 80s, has succumbed to this syndrome recently. Whatever it was that was bothering Peter Falk, running a story like this is predatory journalism at its worst.

Nobody in the world — nobody — throws brilliant, super-analytical lightning bolts from his own incredibly fickle and ferocious orbit like New York Press critic Armond White. Judgment! Judgment! He’s immensely readable, fearless, provocative. Film criticism today would be in a much poorer and less observant state without him. But he’s so alone now. He’s so up there and out there that he’s barely seems to be breathing the same common air or standing on any kind of recognizable terra firma. Not as currently constituted. You know what I mean by that.

In a perfectly reordered universe White would have written and ruled in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, when impassioned, super-charged eccentricity was more readily absorbed and in fact valued. In certain ways White’s writing reminds me of Manny Farber‘s, or the Cahier du Cinema scribblings of Francois Truffaut, Bertrand Tavernier and Jean-luc Godard. He’s a fascinating madman. Only White can say stuff that I find almost appalling (but always amusing) in its hermetic and secluded considerations, but at the same make points that I know deep down to be true, or at least worthy of serious consideration.
Read this presumably recent (but undated) White piece called “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Movies,” the title of which reminds me of Jerry Maguire‘s manifesto called “The Things We Think But Do Not Say.” Indeed, it feels like something White wrote in the wee hours, driven by fury and righteousness and disdain. It’s a slam at what he feels are the facile, go-along, hipper-than-thou and (in their own way) sometimes coarse judgments of internet critics. If you don’t feel like reading it, at least read these three paragraphs:
“The new inclination is to write esoteric criticism. Post-Tarantino cinema has wrung the pop aesthetic dry, so the new gods of criticism have made totems of movies so unwatchable and so unappealing that they prohibit the basic pleasure and amazement of moviegoing. Critical babble doesn’t talk about what matters, but it sustains Ten Current Film Culture Fallacies.” Here are White’s fallacies with my reactions:
(1) ‘The Three Amigos’ Inarritu, Cuaron and del Toro are Mexico’s greatest filmmakers while Julian Hernandez is ignored. HE reaction: Julian Hernandez?
(2) Gus Van Sant is the new [Luchino] Visconti when he’s really the new Fagin, a jailbait artful dodger. HE reaction: Is this a reaction to Van Sant’s lost period when he made Finding Forrester and the Psycho remake?

(3) Documentaries ought to be partisan rather than reportorial or observational. HE reaction: Yes, that’s correct — partisan documentaries have made the genre alive and vital and more popular than ever. Adam Curtis‘ The Century of the Self and The Power of Nightmares are sterling examples.
(4) Chicago, Moulin Rouge and Dreamgirls equal the great MGM musicals. HE reaction: Of course they don’t, but Dancer in the Dark and Once were two permutations I was fully delighted and enthused about.
(5) Paul Verhoeven‘s social satire Showgirls was camp while Cronenberg’s campy melodramas are profound. HE reaction: My understanding is that Verhoeven has admitted he went way off the rails with Showgirls, and that he wouldn’t for a second suggest that it deserves to be called “social satire.”
(6) Brokeback Mountain was a breakthrough while all other gay-themed movies were ignored. HE reaction: I don’t know how many gay-themed movies I’ve seen, but Ang Lee‘s film touched me like no other. What’s so bad about believing or saying that?
(7) Todd Haynes‘ academic dullness is anything but. HE reaction: I was thrilled to the bone by I’m Not There. I found it anything but dull. A little academic, okay, but this approach, given the underpinnings of the Dylan phenomenon, fit the subject.
(8) Dogma was a legitimate film movement. HE reaction: Yes, it was. And is. I don’t give a damn what the know-it-alls say about Dogma movies (and how the whole movement was a put-on). To me they carry a feeling of unfettered realism and raw behavioral truth. Too bad if this isn’t to everyone’s liking
(9) Only non-pop Asian cinema from J-horror to Hou Hsiao Hsien counts, while Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou and Stephen Chow are rejected. HE reaction: I don’t know enough about Asian cinema to have a worthwhile opinion. I only know that certain J-horror films have penetrated deeply, and that the balletic vitality of martial arts films has become, for me, tedious.
(10) Mumblecore matters. HE reaction: Not knowledgable or hip enough to have an opinion.
Back to White’s piece and the final two excerpted graphs:
“These delusions derive from an elitist, art-for-art’s-sake notion. It’s the ‘Smart About Movies’ syndrome allowing bloggers and critics to feel superior for having suffered through Dead Man, Ye-Ye, Gerry, Inland Empire — movies that ordinary moviegoers want no part of and that hardly reflect a community of citizens or the New Millennium’s political stress. It may be a coincidence of social class that most movies are made by people espousing a liberal bent, but it is the shame of middle-class and middlebrow conformity that critics follow each other when praising movies that disrespect religion, rail about the current administration or feed into a sense of nihilism that only people privileged with condos and professional tenure can afford.
“Routine reporting from Cannes and Sundance is another expression of journalists’ perks that encourage a sense of elitism. Fact is, those fests are remote from how most people experience or relate to film culture. Like the weekend grosses list, it promotes a false sense of being informed — not art interpretation or feeling. And festival favorites aren’t discussed in fundamental terms. Critics talk around what’s happening inside Pedro Costa or Apichatpong Weerasethakul movies. Instead, they call the latter ‘Joe — proof of their in-group shamelessness. They’d rather make xenophobic jokes about Weerasethakul’s exotic name than actually deal with the facts of his Asianness, his sexual outlawry and his retreat into artistic and intellectual arrogance that evades social categorization.
“Such hipoisie canonizing is as unhelpful as TV’s pop reviewers who only respect banal Hollywood blockbusters. They also, consequently, discuss the Oscars as a plebiscite that readers must dutifully and mindlessly observe. It’s entertainment — weakly.”

5:02 pm Update: Fernando Meirelles‘ Blindness was missing from this morning’s official Cannes Film Festival lineup. And yet it was reported as a definite Cannes possibility by Variety‘s Todd McCarthy, the Hollywood Reporter‘s Stephen Zeitchik and Agence France Presse last month.
I gather it will be shown at Cannes under some aegis. I haven’t been told this in so many words, but a person in the Blindness camp has written that this morning’s official Cannes list, as we all know, omitted “a few key announcements that are yet to be made.” The implication seems clear.
These stories — #1, #2 and #3 — presumably had some basis in fact. Blindness is a September 19th release from Miramax and is (also) going to Toronto.