A guy who hears things and is usually on (or close to) the money says that Mike Myers‘ conduct on The Love Guru “has once again raised the bar for nutty behavior and he’s driven everyone at Paramount over the edge. Crazy, crazy, crazy.” In short, the usual-usual. Eccentricity and exactitude sometimes go with the territory. If you want to deal only with moderate people and moderate behavior, work for the insurance industry. No surprise if what I’m hearing is even half true. I did some Entertainment Weekly reporting about Myers back in the Wayne’s World (and Wayne’s World sequel) heyday, and I heard plenty so don’t tell me.

Slate‘s Kim Masters has taken a poke at the Valkyrie postponement, reporting the United Artists position that the bump to the Presidents’ Day weekend “represented an opportunity to cash in, [although] many see the move as a very bad sign, and, indeed, the buzz on the film is not good.
“What’s not in dispute is that filming remains unfinished, which is remarkable for a movie that started shooting in September 2007. One piece not yet shot is a battle sequence that begins the movie. An insider says director Bryan Singer will film a scaled-back version of what was originally conceived as a Saving Private Ryan-type opening.
“According to this source, the sequence was abandoned at one time as a cost-saving measure — and this movie is racking up the bucks — but when it became clear that the film was too talky, the battle was reinstated.”

Nobody cares about Carol Reed‘s Outcast of the Islands, a 1952 adaptation of Joseph Conrad‘s novel with Trevor Howard in the lead role of Willem, a man who surrenders his dignity and civility for the love of a native woman. It’s a forgotten film and nobody cares at all. Except, I’m thinking, possibly those obsessive weirdos at the Criterion Collection. Those guys are just whacked enough to put out a remastered version of this British-produced film on DVD.

I saw it on the tube eons ago, and I’ve never forgotten a scene in which Robert Morley has been tied up inside a hammock with the hammock having been hung by a rope from a tall tree, and Morley, poor fellow, is shown swinging back and forth while being taunted by Howard and some local natives with sticks and spears.
The story mostly takes place in Malaysia. I don’t remember the particulars. I’ve never read the Conrad book, but I’ve been told it’s a bit grim. Ralph Richardson and Wendy Hiller costar in the film. The striking black-and-white cinematography is by Ted Scaife and John Wilcox.

The fact that you can’t rent or buy Larry Cohen‘s The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover on DVD, and that it hasn’t been shown in a Los Angeles theatre since ’83 or thereabouts makes the three-day booking at the New Beverly Cinema (4.13 to 4.15 at 9:25 pm) something of an event.

Mark Felt as “Deep Throat” over 25 years before the press broke the story. (Or so the press release claims.) Cohen will discuss this and other Hoover matters at a q & a following each screening.
Broderick Crawford plays Hoover, but isn’t shown engaging in curious intimacies with FBI agent Dan Dailey‘s Clyde Tolson. (Revelations about Hoover’s personal life hadn’t surfaced when the film was made.) The film costars Jose Ferrer, Dan Dailey, Michael Parks, Celeste Holm, Lloyd Nolan and Rip Torn. It features a classic musical score by Miklos Rozsa.
The film was shot at FBI headquarters, at the FBI Training Camp at Quantico and at Hoover’s own home — but without Bureau censorship.
The New Beverly Cinema (323.938.4038) is located at 7165 Beverly Blvd., LA 90036.

Yet another take on the slow eclipse of elite film criticism has been filed by L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein (“The Death of the Critic”).

The piece is partly based on his having interviewed students from an entertainment reporting class at the USC School of Journalism, whom Goldstein and L.A. Times reporter John Horn visited last week at the invitation of instructor Charles Fleming.
“The internet has played a big role in [this process],” Goldstein writes. “It has promoted a democratization of opinion in which solo bloggers — most famously Matt Drudge — can outstrip mammoth news organizations. Whenever I spend time with young students, I see an even more intriguing concept at work. Although they are heavily influenced by peer group reaction to films or music, they do listen to critics, but largely as a group, not as individual brands.”
Key quote: “The age of the singular critical voice is ending — people prefer the wisdom of a community.”
Goldstein reports that “nearly [all the students] said that when they want to read up on a film, they often go to metacritic.com or rottentomatoes.com, websites that offer a healthy sample of critical consensus. As student Victor Farfan put it: “They put all the reviews in one easy, convenient, conglomerated source that gives you a breadth of opinions from trusted sources and some less familiar ones.”
“Other students acknowledge that they put little stock in critical opinion, lumping it in with the cascade of hype that accompanies today’s entertainment. ‘We tend to be wary of anything that seems over-hyped, whether it’s by critics or over-advertising,’ said Courtney Lear. ‘Personally, I trust certain actors, artists or directors from previous experiences. The Arcade Fire is playing in Hollywood? Their last album rocked my socks off. When do tickets go on sale? They’ve already gained my trust.’
“For a generation that lives on the web, even the most eloquent critics are distant thunder, rarely promoted well on newspaper websites and often reluctant to use blogs as a platform to spread their gospel. Even among savvy journalism students, it’s hard to find anyone who knows any critics by name.”

As I understand it, the MGM/UA rationale for bumping Bryan Singer‘s Valkyrie from October 3rd to February 13th (i.e., President’s Day weekend) is simple — they believe it will make more money on that date than it will in early October.

Conventional wisdom says that a twice-bumped movie that ends up opening in February of the following year has a problem. On the other hand we’re all on a moving train, and it’s necessary each and every day to hit refresh and ask, “Okay, what’s changed? What’s evolving? What is the reality of the situation right now?” Here are some thoughts and comments I’ve been processing since posting a brief item about this matter yesterday afternoon:
(1) United Artists publicity/marketing chief Dennis Rice says the reason for the switch was “real simple. The last three years of the first weekend in October produced roughly $85 million for top twelve pictures. For the last three years for President’s weekend, the top twelve have produced $150 million. We’re a small start-up company and we’re looking at the bottom line, and with the February opening we’re looking at a bigger opening, a holiday weekend and a longer playing time.”
(2) I recognize that the President’s Day weekend has delivered bonanza box-office for films like Jumper, The Spiderwick Chronicles, Ghost Rider, Bridge to Terabithia, The Pink Panther, Hitch, Constantine and so on. But all these movies were crap-level “audience” movies, and Valkyrie is a big-budget, class-A World War II thriller with a superstar lead (Tom Cruise), a blue-chip supporting cast (Kenneth Branagh, Terrence Stamp, Bill Nighy), a top-drawer director (Bryan Singer), an Oscar-winning screenwriter (Chris McQuarrie), etc.
(3) So yes, the money-making opportunity is obviously there, but it’s nonetheless unusual for an ostensibly classy, first-rate film of this sort to be bumped out of two release dates in a given year and then shifted over to February. How many films that have been twice bumped have turned into formidable critical and commercial hits?

(4) When I read an early version of McQuarrie’s Valkyrie script, it didn’t seem like an Oscar contender — I was thinking “smart thriller and leave well enough alone.” It could score in the acting categories, however, and certain films — Silence of the Lambs, Gladiator, Crash – have opened outside of the Oscar season fall-holiday weekend and gone on to get recognized. “If recognition comes, so be it,” says Rice.
(5) The February 23rd date was deemed especially attractive after Joe Johnston‘s The Wolf Man dropped out of that slot — fine. But what was Valkyrie facing on October 3rd? The Express, a football movie directed by Gary Fleder, plus Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Nights in Rodanthe and Possession. Obviously not much competition. The big competition the following week (Oct. 10th) would have been Ridley Scott‘s Body of Lies with Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe.
(6) “Actually, I heard the push-back of Valkyrie isn’t necessarily just to [postpone] the film,” a director-writer wrote this morning. “The motive is to give Cruise a chance to court other studios and get a commercial film on the boards, such as The Hardy Men with Ben Stiller or even another Mission: Impossible, before the Singer flick opens and possibly colors perceptions [on this or that level].”
(7) There’s a belief among this and that producer that October is “the new Dead Zone,” as one industry-watcher explained this morning. This is based on the disappointing or underwhelming box-office that several prestige-level dramas and dramadies encountered last October — among them Rendition, Reservation Road, Gone Baby Gone, Sleuth, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Things We Lost in the Fire, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Michael Clayton, Lars and the Real Girl, Dan in Real Life, Control, etc.
(8) “I heard that Singer was trying to shape [Valkyrie] into something like [Alfred Hitchcock‘s] Rope…a kind of intense suspenseful parlor drama,” the director-writer said this morning. “But it was apparently one of those things that was one thing on the page, something that read well, but it became something else when the actors starting saying the lines on the set and people started looking at it as something to watch and sink into. I’ve been told it plays like an HBO movie.” Is that a put-down? Not in my book.
(9) A small group has seen a cut of Valkyrie. A journalist friend says he knows two people who’ve seen it and have said that it’s ‘really good‘ and have said that UA pushed it back because they still have to shoot the big desert sequence.” (I answered that the movie may be fine, but this is early April — almost six months before the 10.3 opening, which is plenty of time to shoot a desert sequence and pop it into the front section.) Another guy I know was told a while back by a person not with MGM or UA that he might be invited to a screening of it, but then it didn’t happen. The vibe he got from this person was a kind of a “hmmm, what do we have here?”

No matter what problems Bryan Singer and Tom Cruise‘s Valkyrie may be grappling with, there is nothing worse than postponing a major film’s release date for the second time and, as MGM and United Artists announced this morning, pushing the opening from October 3rd to February 13th.
I’m sorry to say this but today’s announcement was tantamount to throwing in the towel. MGM and UA have more or less said to the world, “This movie has problems so insurmountable that they can’t be fixed even over the next six and a half to seven months…even with the benefits of extra shooting, even with the opportunity to constantly tweak and refine and even write and shoot an extra scene or two…this film is so not working that the only thing we can do is give it a dump release in mid-February.”
Things may not be as bad as this. I haven’t seen the film. It could be an okay or so-so thing. The point is that MGM and UA have convinced everyone that they’ve got a real stinker on their hands, or something dangerously close to that. They should have stuck to the October release date, come hell or high water.
I’m not saying I agree with any of the smart cracks that have been passed around today, but a smart director-writer wrote me earlier today with the following: “I just heard someone refer to Valkyrie as “Tom Cruise’s The Day The Clown Cried.”

Thanks to Chicago Sun Times blogger Jim Emerson for calling attention to my 3.12.08 “Eclipse of the Hunk” piece, which basically observed that due to the films of Judd Apatow, “marginally unattractive guys — witty stoners, clever fatties, doughy-bodied dorks, thoughtful-sensitive dweebs and bearish oversize guys in their 20s and 30s — can be and in fact are the new ‘romantic leads’ (for lack of a better or more appropriate term) in today’s comedies.”
Of course, Emerson uses the occasion to ridicule me, and of course his talk-backers follow suit. Emerson says I sounded “like a Dixieland racist spouting off about miscegenation in the 1950s…it’s an outrage, a threat to the species!” Exactly. Galumphy Guys becoming the new romantic leads are a threat to the species — they represent an evolutionary downgrade, the beginning of the death of the Cary Grant gene in U.S. males.
I would like Emerson to tell me precisely how the following three graphs are wrong:
“Ten years ago female moviegoers, I believe, would have totally rejected [galumphy romantic leads]. Twenty or thirty years ago mainstream audiences would have walked out of theatres in confusion (if not disgust) if guys who look like Rogen, Segel, Hill or Mintz-Plasse got the girl. If filmmakers had tried to push this concept in movies of the ’40s or ’50s the House Un-American Activites Committee would have held Congressional hearings. If films of this slant had been made in the 1920s or ’30s people would have seen them as tragedies or grotesque oddities in the vein of Todd Browning‘s Freaks.
“When you think about it, the last time Hollywood said to the moviegoing public ‘hold on…guys who look like this can get the pretty girl and in fact do this in the real world’ was 41 years ago, when the short, dweeby-Jewish Dustin Hoffman connected with Katherine Ross and bedded Anne Bancroft in The Graduate (’67).
“Before that landmark Mike Nichols film male romantic leads had all been pretty much cut from the same three cloths — traditional standard-handsome smoothies a la Cary Grant or Rock Hudson or Clark Gable, good-looking troubled moodies like Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift or Frank Sinatra, or all-American sunny-personality guys like James Stewart or Van Johnson. Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock was something very new — nice-looking but anxious, neurotic, not tall and of the Hebrew persuasion.”

Have there been any reliable surveys that show definitively that the majority of gay guys are siding with Hillary Clinton? I’ve been sensing this all along but I’ve never seen it proved. If it turns out to be true, the easy or obvious explanation is that gay guys love tough, suffering battle-axe types (Joan Crawford, Eva Peron, Bette Davis, Judy Garland, etc.) — women who’ve been around the rodeo and won’t take no guff. If true, I think it’s deplorable that gay men would go for Clinton because she fits the definition of a certain admired “type.” It’s lazy emotional thinking of the lowest order. I almost regard Gays for Hillary in the same light as Log Cabin Republicans.

Can a case be made for the Curse of the Hawaiian Movie? Not films shot in Hawaii (although these sorta kinda count) as much as ones that take place there. If you remove From Here to Eternity, Blue Crush and Punch Drunk Love from the equation, you’re looking at one problematic, mediocre or flat-out bad movie after another for the last 50 or 60 years. With perhaps a few other exceptions, the general rule is “Hawaii movies = watch out!”

When I saw those hot hula girls in grass skirts handing out leis before a critics’ screening of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, I knew it was going to be a problem. (And it was — it’s a lazy comedy about a witty but basically morose man with a big chubby ass and fleshy-milky man-boobs.) The word is that Ben Stiller‘s Tropic Thunder, shot on Kaua’i and the Big Island, may join Eternity and Crush in the exception column. Here’s hoping.
There’s something about the laid-back island vibe that gets into the blood of filmmakers and makes them lazy or unfocused or whatever. Obviously it hasn’t happened each and every time (Point Break and the first two Jurassic Park films make the grade), but dozens of good people have fallen victim.
Moving backwards from Forgetting Sarah Silverman, HE’s list of Bad or Fairly Bad Hawaiian Movies: (1) 50 First Dates, (2) Along Came Polly, (3) The Big Bounce, (4) Lilo and Stitch, (5) The Time Machine, (6) Dragonfly, (7) Jurassic Park III, (8) Windtalkers, (9) Pearl Harbor, (10) Six Days, Seven Nights, (11) Godzilla, (12) Sphere, (13) Mighty Joe Young, (14) Waterworld, (15) North, (16) Exit to Eden, (17) Surf Ninjas of the South China Sea, (18) North Shore, (19) Farewell to the King, (20) Karate Kid II, (21) Black Widow, (22) The Day the World Ended, (23) Final Countdown, (24) The Deep, (25) Islands in the Stream, (26) Midway, (27) The Hawaiians, (28) Tora Tora Tora, (29) Bikinis in Paradise, (30) Paradise, Hawaiian Style, (31) None But the Brave, (32) In Harm’s Way, (33) Ride the Wild Surf, (34) Diamond Head, (35) Donovan’s Reef, (36) Girls Girls Girls, (37) Gidget Goes Hawaiian, (38) Blue Hawaii, (30) The Devil at Four O’Clock, (31) The Wackiest Ship in the Army, (32) Big Jim McLain and (33) Bird of Paradise.

Turtle Bay Inn on Oahu’s North Shore — a resort that’s been permanently maligned by Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Grass will never grow under the feet of Turner Classic Movies when it comes to tributes to just-deceased actors. The programmers probably started calling each other late Saturday night after hearing of Charlton Heston‘s death, and they had a date — Friday, April 11th — and a lineup locked by this morning if not sometime yesterday. But they chose to show The Hawaiians (’70) along with The Buccaneer, Ben-Hur, Khartoum and Major Dundee.

All actors wind up costarring in mediocrities like The Hawaiians from time to time, but their biggest nightmare as they pocket the paycheck is that, God forbid, TCM might show one or more of them as part of a televised tribute after they die. At least TCM isn’t showing Diamond Head (’63), an even worse Hawaii-set film which Heston starred.

What’d I say?