That story about Mike Nichols doing a low-budget film in the Hamptons is a bogus embarassment. It started with Dark Horizon’s‘ Garth Franklin linking to a column item by Hamptons.com’s Jennifer Tuesday claiming that the “Oscar-winning” Nichols is about to shoot a “teen horror film” in the Hamptons area called Breadcrumbs. It turns out that (a) it’s another Mike Nichols (a guy who happens to have the same name) directing this thing and (b) Tuesday is a brilliant reporter. It feels wonderful to have wasted time on this thing.

“There’s been a lot of talk lately about film critics who’ve lost their jobs and their prestige, but there are worse things that can happen to a writer,” The Oregonian‘s Shawn Levy has written. “And, unfortunately, one of these more serious fates has befallen D. K. Holm, the longtime Portland film and book reviewer, curmudgeon, gadfly, and boulevardier who finds himself battling cancer without the security of medical insurance to help him with the gargantuan bills that his care entails.

“Doug’s medical prognosis is, thankfully, hopeful. But his economic situation remains dire. This is where you and I come in.
“On April 27 at Cinema 21, a benefit will be held to help provide Doug with a financial cushion. Various of Doug’s many Portland friends — including Thomas Lauderdale of Pink Martini, filmmaker Patti Lewis, and bluesman Steve Cheseborough — will perform or present their work, and assorted artworks and dining and entertainment packages will be auctioned off. And donations will be accepted at the door and afterward.
“For complete information about Doug, his writing, and the benefit, as well as details about how you can help if you can’t be there on the 27th, visit this page. And keep thinking good thoughts, yeah?”

Two days ago former Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Entertainment Weekly and L.A. Times journalist Anita Busch testified at the Anthony Pellicano wiretapping trial about the heavy intimidation she received in ’02 (the “stop” note, the dead fish, etc.) at Pellicano’s behest to back off from writing a tough story about one of his clients. Variety‘s Anne Thompson filed a story about it early Wednesday evening.
Busch, thought to be a pretty tough and shrewd reporter in her day, wept a bit, talked about how scared she was about her life back then and whether or not she could financially survive, declared that she “stopped writing” and that she’ll never write a book about the threats, and so on. I never had a dead fish put on my car windshield, but my phone was tapped by Pellicano in ’93 and he tried to shake me up psychologically during the same period. It was unpleasant as hell, and I was angry for a time, but I got over it. You ride it out and you move on.

Keanu Reeves‘ portrayal of his ragged-edge L.A. detective in David Ayer‘s Street Kings is one reason I wasn’t very comfortable watching it. Forrest Whitaker‘s performance, as I explained on 4.5, is another. There’s a costar I did like, however — took to him immediately, decided he was cool. I’m speaking of 26 year-old Chris Evans, who plays a younger cop who pools forces with Reeves around the beginning of the third act.

Chris Evans in Cellular

I was therefore doubly irate at this film when…how can I put this? If you have a strong character with natural charisma, a director should introduce him early and keep him around until the end.
Evans has had decent roles in ’05’s Cellular and Fantastic Four and ’07’s Sunshine, Rise of the Silver Surfer and The Nanny Diaries. But these and Street Kings are second-tier audience movies directed by B-level directors (or, in the case of Sunshine, an A-level director off his game.) Evans has the stuff, I believe, that can move him up the ladder. But it won’t happen if he doesn’t hook himself up with A-level guys — Paul Thomas Anderson, Michael Mann, Wes Anderson, Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu, Alfonso Cuaron, Steven Soderbergh, the Coen brothers, etc.
It seems odd, also, that in her half-joshing review of Street Kings, Manohla Dargis doesn’t even mention Evans. She’s one of the sharpest critics around and I’m not wrong about Evans, so what’s the explanation? I know what I know and I’m right. Evans is the guy you like in this film.
The only problem is that he needs to lose the U.S. Marines haircut, which he had during the Street Kings junket.

Incredibly, the people behind Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a right-wing documentary that uses Ben Stein to try and sell the idea of “intelligent design” (i.e., creationism in new clothes), are opening it in godforsaken Los Angeles on 4.18 and have hired Rogers & Cowan to flack for it and arrange for press screenings (one on Monday, 4.14 and another the following day).

The downside is that the film’s only booking is at Mann’s Beverly Center, an old-style shoebox plex (built in 1981) where little movies go to die.
Here’s the best passage in my initial piece about this film, which was posted on 3.10.08: “The irony is that I happen to believe in intelligent design also, in a sense. There is obviously a unified flow and an absolute cosmic commonality in all living things and all aspects of the architecture. The difference is that I don’t attach a Bible-belt morality to this overwhelming fact. To me God is impartial, celestial, biological, mathematical, amoral, unemotional, miraculous and breathtaking.
“However you define the altogether, He/She/It has absolutely zero ‘interest’ in whether you or your great-uncle or next door neighbor are adhering to the Ten Commandments or having an abortion or helping a homeless person or what-have-you. The molecular perfection and mind-blowingly infinite implications of God are way, way beyond ground-level morality.”

Indiewire’s Eugene Hernandez has written that buyers have told Cinetic Media that one reason they’re not interested in Tia Lessin and Carl Deal‘s Trouble The Water, a doc about the Katrina disaster that showed at Sundance ’08, is that it’s “too black.” He also quotes an unnamed distribution exec having allegedly asked, “Why aren’t more white people in the film?”

Defamer‘s Stu VanAirsdale has jumped into this one also, writing that “we’ll take a swag epidemic any day over a gang of rich assholes passing racism off as caution.”
Hold up there, Eugene and Stu. I saw Trouble The Water at Sundance myself, and I wouldn’t pick it up if you held a gun to my head and threatened to strangle my dog with your bare hands. Not because it’s “too black,” but because the blackness in the film — the look of it, the visual language, the cultural vibe and atmosphere — is too low-rent.
I’ll watch a doc at the Park City Library about people who are on the edge of destitution and struggling to hang on, but you can’t seriously expect Average Joes to pay to see this thing….c’mon. It’s one of those “lemme outta here” docs that well-meaning but sadistic film-festival programmers are sometimes attracted to.
On top of which Hernandez and VanAirsdale ignore the thing in this film that makes you want to leave immediately, which is the godawful nausea-inducing shakycam photography that occupies a good part of the opening half-hour or so. I described it thusly last January:
“I’ve almost never felt queasy from jiggly, hand-held photography (I eat films like Dancer in the Dark for breakfast), although I’ll admit that Cloverfield has more than its share. Yesterday, however, I saw the King Kong of hand-held nausea jiggle movies — Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s Trouble The Water, a doc about the Katrina disaster.” (Since racism is part of this very p.c. discussion, I’ll say here and now that I chose the term “King Kong” instead of saying “the Citizen Kane of hand-held nausea jiggle movies” because I wanted to convey a feeling of something that’s (a) much stronger than the viewer and (b) definitely to be feared.)
“Half of it was shot by Lessin and Deal in the usual fashion and is no big challenge,” I wrote, “but the other half is shakycam footage of Katrina’s devastation shot by one of the film’s main subjects, Kimberly Rivers. (The other non-pro photographer is her husband Scott.) The footage is so scattered and whip-panny that I was starting to think about bolting less than ten minutes in.”
I was thinking as I sat there in the second row that Rivers is a complete moron in terms of the visual knack that any photographer needs to bring to shooting anything. She shoots her neighborhood/Katrina footage with an almost malicious disregard for what her audience (either a friend watching it in her living room or a congregation of 600 or 700 Sundance festivalgoers) may be experiencing down the road. Some people just don’t get it and should never, ever pick up a camera, and Rivers — God help Cinetic, Lessin and Deal — is one of them.
If I were running a New Orleans Cinematography School and Rivers tried to enroll, I would smile and put my arm around her and say, “Kimberly, I love you but you’d be throwing your money away. Your gifts lie elsewhere.”

There’s a pet expression that too many people use if they’re excited and delighted about something very positive that’s just happened — meeting an old friend, running into a good friend by coincidence on the street, hearing good news, etc. They open their mouths, bug out their eyes, put their hands to their faces (or the sides of their heads) and say, “Oh, my Gawd!” Except they say it almost like a question, as if to say “if God is listening, will He/She hear my immense joy?”
I didn’t really mean “people” because I’ve never once heard a straight guy say this — ever. The expression is used solely by spirited, open-hearted women (younger women mostly, Carrie Bradshaw types, not very educated mall women, 20 something borough girls) and…I was going to say gay guys but now that I think of it I’m not sure they use it either. Do they?
I’m not exactly putting certain folks down for using this expression, but every time I hear it it’s like chalk on the blackboard. I literally convulse. I look over at the person saying it with daggers in my eyes and say to myself, “I’m not going to mention this to your face, but you’ve just given yourself a huge demerit in my book.”

Near the end of this clip (which is mainly about Bill Clinton lying in trying to defend his wife’s Bosnia lie, which she stated three or four times), Matt Lauer brings up yesterday’s Associated Press-Ipsos national poll numbers showing McCain and Obama tied at 45-45.

In what way is ’08 a change year when the red staters are standing by McCain to this degree? An old guy who promises Bush III, an indefinite Iraq conflict, is dug in deep with the lobbyists, same old lower taxes for fat cats, etc. The levels of ignorance in this country gush like foothill rapids fed by melted mountain snow. Just when you think there might be a serious turn in the road, Ma and Pa Kettle think again and decide it might be better after all to stick with another saber rattler. People sense a certain maverick integrity in McCain, the “Honest John” straight-shooter thing, but my God…the lack of examination! It’s going to be a very rough and infuriating campaign.

Prom Night, opening today in roughly 2700 theatres, is tracking at 70, 31 and 17 — obviously the film to beat this weekend. What kind of coarse jungle genes do you need in your system to be looking forward to this thing? Don’t the under-25s realize that buying a ticket to it is tantamount to stenciling the words “shameless moviegoing cretin” on their foreheads?

As critic Brian Orndorf has observed, “Stop me if you’ve read these ingredients before: a PG-13 horror picture, a remake of an 80s cult classic, directed by nondescript filmmaker, pathetically kept from critics to avoid unpleasant opening-day reviews, and starring a roster of insipid young actors? Surely this means only the finest quality Hollywood has to offer!”
David Ayer‘s Street Kings (Fox Searchlight) is running just behind at 50, 38 and 15. Opening in roughly 2500 theatres, it’ll be nipping at Prom Night‘s heels all weekend. They’ll both do moderately well. The final tallies will be what they will be. What do you really care…am I right? What does the modest box-office fate of Street Kings have to do with anything, much less the price of rice? What does it mean at the end of the day?
Smart People, the relationship movie starring Dennis Quaid (sporting a beard and a pot belly) and Sarah Jessica Parker, will be bringing up the rear. It’s tracking at 48, 26 and 6.
I should have posted this yesterday, but the action on left-click button on my primary computer has been getting worse and worse so I finally took it into the shop yesterday morning, and in so doing left the latest tracking data on the C drive without a copy.

According to this 4.10 Yahoo article by Jeanna Bryner, the Judd Apatow fantasy of schlubby galumphs hooking up with hot mommas isn’t that much of a fantasy.
“Women seeking a lifelong mate might do well to choose the guy a notch below them in the looks category,” she writes. “New research reveals couples in which the wife is better looking than her husband are more positive and supportive than other match-ups. The reason, researchers suspect, is that men place great value on beauty, whereas women are more interested in having a supportive husband.”
I still think this is horseshit. Birds of a feather tend to flock together. Nine tend to hook up with nines, eights hook up with eights, sevens with sevens, etc. And smart guys never, ever marry women who are nines or tens because they’re more trouble than they’re worth.

I spoke this morning with Tom McCarthy, director-writer of The Visitor (Overture, 4.11 limited). He was calling from a train from Boston to New York. The reception cut out at one point, but is otherwise audible. The chat runs about 25 minutes.

Tom McCarthy‘s The Visitor (Overture, 4.11 limited) is easily among the best films of the year so far — right up there with The Bank Job, Young @Heart, Shine a Light, In Bruges, Taxi to the Dark Side and 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days. If I’d been more on my game I would have seen it at last January’s Sundance Film Festival, but something obstructed. (I’m telling myself it was the 72-hour flu that got me the night before Heath Ledger was found dead.)

Richard Jenkins, Hiam Abbass

Set mostly in Manhattan, The Visitor is about a dull middle-aged academic (Richard Jenkins) discovering a pair of illegal immigrants (Haaz Sleiman, Danai Gurira) living in his barely-visited New York City apartment (due to a subletting by a con artist), and how he gradually comes to care for them and help out when Sleiman’s character, a Syrian, gets into trouble with the INS.
It’s also about the dull bird, who is called Walter Vale, gradually falling for Sleiman’s beautiful dark-haired mom (Hiam Abbass) when she visits New York to try and help with her son’s situation. The last third of the story is about coping with the threat of a deportation while love gently blooms — a mixture of Kafka and alpha.
Shot on a shoestring, The Visitor is a modest but fully realized middle-aged love story that’s about a lot more than just a man and a woman finding each other. It’s about heart and music and beating a native drum. It’s also about post-9/11 bureaucratic paranoia, and about the shedding of crusty skin. It’s exceptional in the way that it unfolds with elegance and simplicity from start to finish. It touches precisely because it doesn’t seem to try all that hard. McCarthy just ladles it out, pouring by pouring.

Haaz Sleiman (top), Jenkins.

And it has two award-quality performances from Jenkins and Abbass that will almost certainly be remembered at year’s end. Jenkins’ name may not ring a bell, but you definitely know his bald head, lean face and sadly creased eyes. He plays it way down at first — curt, glum , inexpressive — but gradually the pores open. His emotionally muffled college professor experiences one of those spiritual growth spurts that small movies specialize in — ones that enploy just the right amounts of skill and suppressed feeling. Jenkins has achieved the same kind of thing that Peter Reigert managed in Local Hero; ditto Marianne Sagebrecht in Baghdad Cafe.
The Israeli-born Abbass is almost as much of a revelation. She radiates warmth, hurt, sadness, maturity, sensuality.
Almost every critic has fallen for The Visitor, which, of course, means nothing in terms of your average moviegoer wanting to see it or not. The situation is further complicated by the fact that McCarthy’s decision to give the lead role to Jenkins, a character actor whose best role before this was the gay FBI agent in Flirting with Disaster, is both an inspiration and a problem.
You know that the Average Joe is going to go “Richard who?” Jenkins has achieved a career triumph here, but Jack Nicholson in Terms of Endearment he’s not. The Visitor isn’t that kind of movie, and Walter Vale isn’t that kind of role. How interested are you in seeing a love story starring the balding clerk from your local DMV or the manager of the supermarket just down the street? When it comes to stories about older folks scratching that itch, moviegoers tend to respond more easily to middle-aged actors with rascally vigor and charm. And yet what happens in The Visitor really and truly kicks in. You’ve got to see it to believe it.

Overture is facing an uphill marketing struggle, but The Visitor has the kind of heart and craft that mature moviegoers are always looking for. Here’s hoping that the ding-dongs who refuse to read reviews or consider the recommendations of online columnists like myself will at least listen to their friends who will hopefully see The Visitor and tell them to get off their backsides and go. Unless, of course, their friends are just as determined to avoid reading about movies as they are.
This is McCarthy’s sophomore effort following ’03’s The Station Agent, which he also wrote as well as directed. He’s a fine actor also. He played the journalist Scott Templeton in The Wire and the dutiful Bradley son in Flags of Our Fathers. Besides his promotional chores on The Visitor, he’s currently filming Tony Gilroy‘s Duplicity.