“The big question if Clinton stays in the race is this: Just how will she campaign? Yesterday, there were no negative TV ads or attack mailers. But Clinton did stress that she can win the general, implying that Obama might not be able to.
“‘I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,’ she told USA Today, citing her support with white working-class voters. It’s comments like that one that might drive more supers toward Obama pretty quickly. Why? Because they know the math, but they don’t want her to spend three weeks making a case that Obama can’t win. It will only weaken him.
“Here’s what Obama backer Chris Dodd said yesterday, per NBC’s Ken Strickland. ‘You’re going to be asking a bunch of people [in West Virginia] to vote against somebody who’s likely to be your nominee a few weeks later? And turn around and ask the very same people a few weeks later to reverse themselves and now vote for [Obama] on election day?'” — from this morning’s edition of MSNBC’s First Read.

I admire and respect the moves and the intent of Speed Racer (Warner Bros., 5.9), which I saw last night at the Leow’s IMAX near Lincoln Center. Right away I was saying to myself, “All right, this is out there….infuriating but brilliantly out there.” But it offers almost nothing in the way of genuine personal charm (except for the monkey, Chim-Chim) and I began looking at my watch starting around the 45-minute mark. Honestly? More like a half-hour in.

This is a deranged, steroid-cranked family-action movie…the work of madmen — undeniably brash and looney and, I feel, desperately in need of a quaalude. Speed Racer is a piece of very audacious, high-quality….I was going to say “torture” but it’s not. It’s extremely nervy filmmaking, clearly, but the Wachowskis are way too caught up in fulfilling their “we’re cooler than any of you!” vision and in being at least two if not three giant steps in front of everyone else in terms of creating a new film vocabulary in order to explore and shake the cage while ostensibly telling a story, and a lame-ass one to boot.
The Wachowskis are so zonked by the design dreams in their own heads that they’ve delivered a new kind of monster-budget insanity. They’ve made this movie for themselves, first and foremost, and for open-minded (or at least fair-minded) critics, and certainly for film history…but they haven’t concurrently “served the corporation” and made a film that people over the age of 8 or 9 can settle into very easily or comfortably. Or even settle into with some effort. I didn’t sit there consumed with loathing for this thing. It’s too fascinating for that. But it’s also a movie that’s saying over and over, “Look at us! Look at what we’re doing!” It’s too breathtaking to really entertain. And as pleased as I was by the verve-and-moxie element, I was dying for it to end.
You have to throw out the rule book and accept that this movie is using an entirely different kind of spaceship and orbiting the earth in a way that is going to vaguely piss you off but at the same time dazzle you. Or certainly intrigue you. The refusal to conventionally cut or fade or wipe from one scene to another — awesome. But it’s not done in a way that gives any sort of familiar, recognizable pleasure, and as square as this sounds, you really do need some of that in a movie. You have to keep feeding and massaging the square guy while introducing the new hipster, and there’s very little square-massaging going on in this thing.

Speed Racer certainly isn’t pleasurable to sit through, character-, theme- or story-wise. In subjecting their audience to the same old pure-hearted individual contender vs. the corrupt corporation horseshit, the Wachowskis are showing their elitist-sadist colors. If it was good enough for Japanese anime and and other graphic media in its day, they seem to be saying, it’s good enough for us right now…and if you don’t like it, tough! Watching it is a bondage-and-discipline game — you feel trussed up and bound with Andy and Larry (or whatever his name is now) applying the cool whip.
But it’s more than a little ironic that for a movie that trots out the evil-corporate-mogul business for the 189th time, Speed Racer is drenched in synthetic splendor that’s been bought and paid for by corporate cash. And it’s way, way too long. It should have been a 95-minute deal, tops, but it goes on for two hours and 9 minutes.
The racing sequences are insane. You never have any idea about what’s going on. Shots don’t build or match up or pivot off each other. They collide in a kind of surreal cartoon madness. The geometric/spatial relationships between the racing competitors are almost always a complete mystery. Off with the editor’s head! And the martial arts combat sequences are nothing — fatally boring, by my book.

The performances are okay, but I found more fascination in the face of Chim-Chim than anything the humans came up with. I loved that fucking monkey, and began to really dislike — hate! — the Wachowskis for only using him for typical animal-reaction cutaway shots. If they’d only dwelled on his facial reactions for seven or eight seconds at a time (or more!). But no — over and over they do a quick Chim-Chim laugh cut and then back to Emile Hirsch or John Goodman or Christina Ricci or Susan Sarandon or the mugging, heebie- jeebie supporting players. Fuck! (And I don’t like to use profanity unless it fits.)

Ain’t It Cool’s Drew McWeeny was on the record with his Speed Racer rave yesterday, before David Poland. I should have acknowledged this when I posted my 5.7 piece at 1:19 pm. “I think critics are forgetting that part of our job is to not only say what we like, but to review a film based on the intent of that film,” he says. “Comparing Speed Racer to Andrei Tarkovsky or serious adult cinema is a sucker’s bet. Of course they don’t compare. But it’s one of the most outrageous visions in kid’s cinema since George Miller‘s Babe: Pig in the City. A good thing, in my book.”
First Showing‘s Alex Billington also posted positively yesterday.
“I’m actually glad to hear that you mildly enjoyed it,” he wrote this morning, “as I was expecting most people to hate it, especially with all of the commentary you had written previously. I really do think it’s a hard movie to like if you can’t step out of your own age and attempt to appreciate it for the kids movie it is. But then again, it does have its flaws and it’s impossible to get around those especially when it brings the movie down in some big ways.”

“In his victory speech after the smashing North Carolina results came in, Barack Obama went directly after both John McCain and the media. ‘[McCain’s] plan to win in November appears to come from the very same playbook that his side has used time after time in election after election,’ Obama said. ‘Yes, we know what’s coming. I’m not naive. We’ve already seen it, the same names and labels they always pin on everyone who doesn’t agree with all their ideas, the same efforts to distract us from the issues that affect our lives, by pouncing on every gaffe and association and fake controversy, in the hopes that the media will play along.’

“In the end, Obama’s challenge to the media is as significant as his challenge to McCain. All the evidence — and especially the selection of these two apparent nominees — suggests the public not only is taking this election very seriously but is also extremely concerned about the state of the nation and tired of politics as usual. I suspect the public is also tired of media as usual, tired of journalists who put showmanship over substance…as I found myself doing in the days before the May 6 primaries.
“Obama was talking about the Republicans, but he could easily have been talking about the press when he said, ‘The question, then, is not what kind of campaign they will run; it’s what kind of campaign we will run. It’s what we will do to make this year different. You see, I didn’t get into this race thinking that I could avoid this kind of politics, but I am running for President because this is the time to end it.'” — from “Obama’s Game Change,” a 5.8 essay by Time‘s Joe Klein.

Come July 9th, this is the guy I want standing on my desk. I’m going to lay out the money right now. Heath Ledger wasn’t a friend (hardly) but he always smiled and gave me a “hey” wave when we made eye contact at parties or press gatherings, and he always gave me two or three minutes when he wasn’t being swamped. For what it’s worth and in a weird sort of way, having this guy on my desk will be, for me, a way of burning a candle for him.

Modest and likable and decent though he may be (okay, is), this is not the real John McCain. Or it is and it’s not enough. A charming, low-key guy selling misguided, outmoded, old-school medicine. Nice to talk to, but inwardly snarly and obstinate and, in a decent-American-on-a-Sunday-morning sort of way, blind.

There is nothing wrong or suspect about liking a film that almost everyone else hates. On the contrary, it is the mark of a critic who’s probably worth reading …as long as he/she doesn’t go all Armond White on disliked or discredited films too often. That said, it’s a bit of an eye-opener (or is it a dark omen?) that MCN’s David Poland has given a fairly hearty thumbs-up to Speed Racer (Warner Bros., 5.9)
With tracking looking dicey at best and a Rotten Tomatoes positive rating of 37% (as of Wednesday afternoon), this animated Wachowski brothers action film needs all the friends it can get. I do know that Poland has been totally in the Wachowski tank from the beginning, and that his enthusiastic and persistent praise for both The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions were divorced from the reality of those films that I came to know. (Yes, I was warm on Reloaded at first, but it faded upon reflection and then the curtains parted when I saw it a second time.)
For all I know Poland is on the money, and again, he has my respect for going against the grain. That said, I had a much better time (as I frequently do) reading Anthony Lane‘s New Yorker review, particularly this opening paragraph:
“Gluttons for Duck Soup will remember the scene in which Groucho is faced with an official document. ‘Why, a four-year-old child could understand this report,’ he says. ‘Run out and find me a four-year-old child.’ My sentiments exactly, as I sat in a cathedral-size auditorium, wreathed in the ineffable mysteries of Speed Racer. This is the latest offering from Andy and Larry Wachowski, bringers of The Matrix, and, if it is about anything, it is about the quest to overwhelm a particular stratum of the masses. A four-year-old will be reduced to a gibbering but highly gratified wreck; an eight-year-old will wander around wearing a look that was last seen on the face of Dante after he met Beatrice. But what about the rest of us? True, our eyeballs will slowly, though never completely, recover, but what of our souls?
“I reckon the M.P.A.A. should use the advent of Speed Racer to revive an old ratings symbol: a big Roman X, meaning ‘of no conceivable interest to anyone over the age of ten.'”

Forever partial to the films of Abel Ferrara, the Cannes Film Festival is offering a special screening of his latest, a doc about a certain storied Manhattan hotel called Chelsea on the Rocks. Screening on Friday,. 5.23, it’ll include “interviews with residents past and present” such as Milos Forman, Ethan Hawke, Dennis Hopper and R. Crumb, plus vintage music, archival footage and re-enactments of famous Chelsea episodes — Nancy Spungen and Sid Vicious, Janis Joplin — performed by Bijou Phillips, Jamie Burke, Adam Goldberg, Giancarlo Esposito and Grace Jones.

The press screening is at 11:30 am at the 60th Anniversary Theatre inside the Palais, the press conference is at 3:15 pm, and the official screening is at 7:45 pm. Ferrara, Phillips, Burke and Hooper will attend.

“GOP heavyweight James Baker III and Democratic strategist Ron Klain couldn’t have been more at odds than they were during the disputed Bush v. Gore 2000 election battle in Florida,” writes Politico’s Jeffrey Ressner. “So it’s no small irony that as HBO’s telefilm Recount (debuting 5.25) was being readied, the two men both signed off on a completely fictional scene in which their characters meet briefly on an airport tarmac.”

(l.) James Baker; (r.) Ron Klain

I’m glad Strong made it up. The scene isn’t confrontational or slam-bam, but it hits the right note. It happens at the finale, and after all the haggling and spinning over vote counts for the previous two hours, the viewer is looking for some kind of reflective sum-up. What you get is a few choice words between rivals — a formal but friendly hello, a foreshadowing of dark things to come from Klain (Kevin Spacey) and a suggestion by Baker (Tom Wilkinson) that there’s no right or wrong and that it all boils down to loyalty.
I enjoyed that director Jay Roach made sure that Wilkinson closely resembles Baker, which is mainly accomplished by his wearing a gray-hair wig. It’s a little odd, therefore, that despite the real Klain (above) obviously having a decent head of hair, Roach decided to let Spacey play it with his own sparse follicles, which have been retreating like the French Army out of Russia since the days of American Beauty. Why not wig out if it creates a slightly closer resemblance?
Here again is my 4.30 review of Recount.

We’ve all felt that peculiar irritation that kicks in when news of yet another “special collector’s edition” DVD of a classic film (single or double-disc…same difference) is announced. I say to myself “no, I won’t fall for it…screw those greedy DVD distributors trying to milk me for the second or third or fourth time.” Then I read that the new release will provide a “restored” and presumably improved transfer, and I’m hooked. Even if the transfer on a DVD of the film that I own looks perfectly fine. Because I’m a sucker for any upgrade.

Especially, I should add, if the film is in black and white. I’m a total fool for that luscious silvery sheen. My biggest orgasm in this regard is that Columbia/TriStar Home Video release of Anatomy of a Murder, which came out eight years ago.
Lionsgate’s new two-disc DVD release of High Noon has “what appears to be a reliable report, though unconfirmed, that it will include a new transfer of the film, restored by Paramount,” according to a posting on the Amazon page by DVD aficionado “Sanpete.” He writes that “lack of agreement between Paramount and Lionsgate prevented the earlier release of a restored transfer,” adding that “the current and older DVDs are only of average video and audio quality.”
I haven’t verified the new transfer assertion, but knowing deep down that I’ll probably spring for this disc when it comes out on 6.10 is a real bee in my bonnet. To my fairly sophisticated eyes, there’s nothing the least bit problematic about the version that I presently own, a “collector’s edition” mastered by Republic Home Video and issued in ’02. But I know myself and what’ll happen when I see this on the shelf. I’m a junkie without brakes or discipline.

Cinemorgue, which features listings and descriptions of thousands of death scenes that are alphabetized by the names of actors and actresses, is grim and exhaustive and…valuable, I guess, but also kind of strange. I’d forgotten how many times Elke Sommer has been gruesomely killed on-screen. Two skiiing accidents, shot three times (machine gunned in 1969’s The Wrecking Crew, the Dean Martin-Matt Helm movie), blown up, and bludgeoned to death.
Almost all movie deaths, it seems, are brutal, bloody, sudden, ghastly, traumatic and otherwise unpeaceful. Nod-off deaths — like Sir Cedric Hardwicke ‘s passing in The Ten Commandments — have been few and far between over the last 40 years. Is real-life death ever smooth and easy? Only if you do yourself in with pills. James Toback said during a phone chat, which is that (paraphrasing) “almost none of us are going to die as pleasantly as we’d like to…it’s always under circumstances we can’t foresee, much less plan for, and sooner than we’d like.”
Note: all present and future mentions of cinemorgue.com are permanently indebted to Movie City News because Poland linked to it earlier today or last night.

“The Republican brand has been so badly damaged that if Republicans try to run an anti-Obama, anti- Reverend Wright…campaign, they are simply going to fail.” — a declaration made yesterday by (believe it or not) Newt Gingrich on Human Events, a conservative website.