21 (Sony, 3.28), the Kevn Spacey-Robert Luketic-Jim Sturgess-Kate Bosworth movie about MIT kids taking the casinos for millions, will be the only big performer among the new films this weekend. It’s tracking at 67, 48 and 23, which means $20 million and then some.
David Schwimmer‘s Run Fat Boy Run, which snuck last weekend, is at 39, 28 and 6. Kimberly Peirce‘s Stop-Loss, a vital, compelling, believably acted drama about an Iraq War veteran that’s running against the tide, is tracking at 62, 29 and 6. And Craig Mazin‘s Super-Hero Movie (MGM) is running at 72, 29 and 6

Huffington Post contributor Allison Hope Weiner has posted a recording of a 2001 conversation between Courtney Love and Anthony Pellicano. Love was calling from the Vancouver set of Luis Mandoki‘s Trapped (which came out the following year) and looking for help from Pellicano with (a) her then-boyfriend Jim’s divorce and custody lawsuit and (b) concerns over an ex-assistant having hacked into her email account and threatened to publish all kinds of personal correspondence.
Love: “I need everything from refinement to fucking baseball bats, and I need them all under one roof.” Pellicano: “Courtney, if you come to me, that’s the end of that. I’m an old style Sicilian. I only go one way. My clients are my family, and that’s it. You fuck with my family, you fuck with me.”
Pellicano did me a dirty in ’93 (i.e., tapped into conversations I was having on my cordless phone) but it as just business. He didn’t do this to blackmail me; he was being paid to do it so somebody else might be able to, you know, theoretically “influence” me. But several years later he did me a favor for free. On some level, I think, he was saying to me, “I didn’t mean anything by that ’93 thing, not personally, and just to show you I’m not all bad, or maybe to make up for the ’93 thing on some level, here’s a small gift.”
I respected that for what it was. Doing things “the Sicilian way” obviously didn’t work out for Pellicano, but I respect the guy for at least being, after a fashion, straight with me.
And I like this line that he says to Love during their chat: “Silence is a friend that will never betray you.”

Most depression-era gangsters had coarse features — puffy, rough-looking, scarred, pockmarked — with feral, pitiless eyes. Some were flat-out ugly. Movie stars tend to have appealing, often pretty faces and are pretty much unable to walk into a room without engaging audience empathy. So there’s a Hollywood b.s. factor going in when you cast anyone genetically gifted as a gun-totin’ psychopath.

Johnny Depp during filming of Michael Mann’s Public Enemies

Like, for example, when Bonnie and Clyde producer Warren Beatty cast himself as the short, dorky-looking Clyde Barrow. This worked, obviously, because the equally pretty Faye Dunaway played Bonnie — she and Beatty at least made for a balanced fantasy — and because the film sold them as a couple of rebellious ’60s kids. But the movie star-gangster thing is basically trouble.
Did anyone believe Tom Hanks as gangland assassin in The Road to Perdition? I was able to roll with it because director Sam Mendes and cinematographer Conrad Hall did a superb job together, and because Hanks gave it hell — but nobody bought it deep down.
I’m as willing to be suckered by Hollywood flotsam as the next guy, but I know right now I’m going to have trouble accepting the dark-eyed, still boyishly good-looking Johnny Depp as the notoriously impudent and snarly-looking John Dillinger in Michael Mann‘s adaptation of Bryan Burrough‘s “Public Enemies.”

John Dillinger

Nobody is a bigger fool for Mann films than myself. I fell for the fumes in Miami Vice, and took a lot of heat for that. And I’m fairly certain I’m going to love (or at least be impressed by) Public Enemies. But Depp-as-Dillinger seems almost surreal in its physical (and possibly spiritual) wrongness. The only ’30s gangster Depp could realistically play, maybe, would be Pretty Boy Floyd (who wasn’t that pretty, by the way).
The best Hollywood facsimile of all time was Warren Oates in John Milius‘ Dillinger (’73). He looked like the real McCoy, he had the internals, and he was Warren Oates. I never saw Lawrence Tierney‘s portrayal in Dillinger (’45), but I’ll bet it was fairly on the money. I don’t think you can’t “play” a gangster. On some level you have to actually be one, or the audience will smell it.
I don’t know what this says about Jude Law, but his most convincing screen role by far was a gimpy, twitchy, odd-looking assassin in The Road to Perdition.
George Raft, James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart totally looked and acted like real toughs. But some guys just don’t have it. Look at that shot of the real Dillinger above — there’s a world of hurt and rage and vengeance in that beefy Midwestern face. There’s a reason why Pat O’Brien or Franchot Tone or Jimmy Stewart almost never played villains. (Until they got older, I mean.)

Depp is much more in the delicate, ethereal, sensitive-guy realm. There’s a reason why he was so good as Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood and Jack Sparrow, roles that are partly about tapping into a certain otherness (including a female side) that pretty much runs away from any sort of brawny machismo. This isn’t a precise analogy, but Depp is basically a 21st Century Franchot Tone with a little perversity and eye shadow on the side.
I’m mentioning this because AICN ran some shots last weekend of Mann, Depp and others shooting a bank-robbery scene somewhere in Wisconsin. (It happened in Columbus, Madison, Baraboo…one of those.) And your first thought is that Depp and his tommy-gun-brandishing cohorts look like actors playing gangsters in their 1930s hats and overcoats. Unfair to judge from a few cheap-ass snaps, I realize, but that’s what they look like.
Public Enemies is an adaptation of Bryan Burrough‘s book,” which is about the gangsters who shot up the midwest in 1933 and ’34 — Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Alvin Karpis and the Barker family. Mann’s film may be a full-on adaptation, although reports have so far suggested it’s mainly about the bloody and raucous crime career of Dillinger, which lasted a little less than 18 months (early ’33 until his death in July ’34).

Michael Mann during filming of Public Enemies

One synopsis says the focus is on FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) and his attempts to stop Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Pretty Boy Floyd. Marion Cotillard will play Dillinger’s girlfriend Billie Frechette. I’ve read about Channing Tatum playing Pretty Boy Floyd, Stephen Dorff as Homer Van Meter, Jason Clarke as John “Red” Hamilton, John Ortiz as Frank Nitti, David Wenham as Dillinger gang member Harry Pierpont, and Stephen Graham as Baby Face Nelson.
Principal photography on Public Enemies began in Columbus, Wisconsin on 3.17.08 and will continue in various Wisconsin and Chicago locales until late June. Some parts of the film will reportedly be shot in Crown Point, Indiana, the town where Dillinger escaped from jail.

I have an instant problem with scene descriptions of rottin’ dead dogs and mayflies and greasy spoons with good old truck drivers sayin’ where they’ve a’trucked to. I especially don’t like readin’ about some lowdown Robert Johnson tune playin’ as a title card says we’re in the southern Indiana lowlands in the year 1985. When Ronald Reagan was in the White House and scratchy 78 rpms of Johnson’s Delta blues songs were heard almost everywhere, and were cherished in the hearts of the people.

Colorful, sweaty, earthy, pre-corporatized

Hollywood sure loves the idea of rural Middle America bein’ a land where there ain’t no Walmart or Starbucks or nothin’ like that, and where workin’ men called Slim and Buck and Jethro sip from half-pint whiskey bottles and roll their own makins and order eggs, taters ‘n’ bacon as they wipe sweat from their brows with tattooed forearms.

Schemer#1: If I blundered like you, my head would roll.
Schemer#2: I dare say from a greater height than mine.
Schemer#1: You would?
Schemer#2: Yes. From the height of vaulting ambition.
Schemer#1: You have none?
Schemer#2: No.
Schemer#1: (Pause) Do you fear me, Rochefort?
Schemer#2: Yes, eminence. I also…hate you.
Schemer#1: I love you, my son. Even when you fail.

If you didn’t recognize this main-title music, you’d know right away it’s some kind of spunky chick flick about starting over after a divorce. I’m kidding. The point is that there’s no mistaking what you’re in for once you hear it. The Mina-title music for Tim Burton‘s Beetlejuice worked just as well this way; ditto Ed Wood. This track gets you excited and in the mood besides. There are dozens of others that have done this; perhaps some recently. Examples?

I finally clicked on that IFC/Red Bull ad, which I didn’t have a clue about since I don’t do the selling these days. The IFC guys want people to submit a trailer for a miniseries with an urban nocturnal theme. It can’t be any longer than six minutes and it has to tell some kind of story. That doesn’t seem too hard. As always, the thing to do is avoid the cliches. No stories about bartenders, waitresses, cabbies, cops. I got it, I got it — make one about a homeless cat. Or a dog. The lonely lives of vagrant animals.

I’ve been trying to refine my reactions to Amir Bar-Lev‘s My Kid Could Paint That, an ’07 Sony Classics release that came out on DVD earlier this month. And they won’t. It’s a documentary that nearly kills you with its refusal to say “this is this.” Life itself may have indeed refused to provide a clear answer to the film’s Big Question, which has to do with a possible art fraud, but that doesn’t make the film any less irksome.

Marla Olmstead

I only know that when Bar-Lev’s film was over, I put it out of my mind. Later! All movies are show-and-tell games, but this one, however open and probing and appropriately non-judgmental, shows and blows smoke.
The B.Q. concerns Marla Olmstead, an eight year-old from Binghampton who became moderately famous in ’04 for having painted (when she was four) abstract oil paintings that were striking enough to sell modestly, and then get atttention from more and more journalists, and then sell in the big-time market for five figures.
Average Joe types have been snickering at high-priced canvases for decades, dismissing the whole modern-art culture as a kind of con game, etc. Which My Kid Could Paint That toys with throughout its running time. But the film mainly follows the lead of a big expose piece that Charlie Rose and 60 Minutes aired in February ’05 about whether Marla”s canvases were entirely self-created or whether she was helped a bit by her dad, Mark, a Frito-Lay factory manager who paints on the side.
Mark and his wife Laura, a dental technician, don’t seem like con artists, but they do seem to enjoy the attention and wealth that comes through Marla’s celebrity. And we’re all whores in the sense that we all like to glide along when things are grooving along. I don’t think Mark deliberately duped the art world by standing nearby and specifically telling his daughter what to do with the paint and brushes, but who knows? Maybe he suggested a couple of ideas here and there. Or more than a couple. Or none at all.

And perhaps “maybe” is all one can say about this situation. Maybe a definitive bust or exoneration is out of the question. But I don’t want fucking maybes when I go to see a movie. The only way I’ll accept them is when the filmmaker somehow conveys what he/she really thinks, and persuades me to come to the same gut conclusions. If there’s no clarity or closure or at least some kind of ending that has a discernible undercurrent, then whadaya whadaya?
I didn’t hate My Kid Could Paint That. It’s not boring, it’s intelligent and well made, it had me start to finish. But there’s a part of me that is mildly pissed at Bar-Lev for making a film good enough to get a 95% positive from the Rotten Tomatoes elite, and persuade Sony Classics’ Tom Bernard and Michael Barker, a couple of shrewd hombres, to pick it up and release it, and at the same time make me feel the way I did after it was over, which was more or less “what the fuck?”
The only clear conviction you come away with is a good feeling about Marla herself. She’s a character, mature beyond her years, robst of spirit. She may continue to paint or not. But I wonder what she’ll say about all this hoo-hah 10 or 15 years hence. Whatever and whenever she spills, it’ll probably be more intriguing than Amir Bar-Lev’s film.
If you want a satisfying dissection of the art world, something that provides a genuine sensation of curtains parting, some kind of semblance of the “aha!” phenomenon, read Tom Wolfe‘s “The Painted Word.”

Hillary Clinton‘s “Walter Mitty Moment” — an apparent fabrication about the non-dangerous circumstances of a 12 year-old state visit to Tuzla, Bosnia — is reviewed in this 3.22 Daily Kos posting and this Washington Post Fact-Checker report. Very Weird. Busted, in any case…and for what?

There are two grabbers in Katrina Onstad‘s 3.23 N.Y. Times profile of Stop-Loss director-writer Kimberly Peirce. One is a blunt comment from Peirce about her career, the second is her non-response to a cheap-shot question by Onstad (and a cheap-shot collusion on the part of her editors).

Stop-Loss director-writer Kimberly Peirce, Ryan Phillipe.

The first, following a statement that “after almost a decade in the Hollywood wilderness trying to find a project that would equal her first film, she earned just a single directorial credit, for an episode of the television series The L Word,” is Pierce saying “Yes, I should have made a movie sooner…yes, I should be a lot richer than I am….mea culpa.√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ǭù
I’m not going to quote from or describe the second thing, but check it out and tell me what you think. I think it’s an icky paragraph.

Today’s Gallup tracking poll shows Barack Obama retaking the national lead over Hillary Clinton “after the Jeremiah Wright scandal had badly damaged his numbers and put him behind for nearly a week,” says a 3.22 Talking Points Memo report. Obama is now at 48% (up 3) to Clinton’s 45% (down 2). Obama’s Philadelphia speech last Tuesday combined with Bill Richardson‘s endorsement “have gone a long way in fixing his poll numbers for now, but he still has yet to fully recover the six-point lead he had in Gallup a little over a week ago.”

Last weekend’s Philadelphia speech is what finally convinced Gov. Bill Richardson to endorse Sen. Barack Obama. He was leaning in this direction, but the speech is what did it.
“The decision by Mr. Richardson, who ended his own presidential campaign on Jan. 10, to support Mr. Obama was a belt of bad news for Sen. Hillary Clinton,” writes N.Y. Times reporter Adam Nagourney and Jeff Zeleny. “It was a stinging rejection of her candidacy by a man who had served in two senior positions in President Bill Clinton‘s administration, and who is one of the nation’s most prominent elected Hispanics.
“Mr. Richardson came back from vacation to announce his endorsement at a moment when Mrs. Clinton’s hopes of winning the Democratic nomination seem to be dimming.
“But potentially more troublesome for Mrs. Clinton was what Mr. Richardson said in announcing his decision. He criticized the tenor of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. He praised Mr. Obama for the speech he gave in response to the furor over racially incendiary remarks delivered by Mr. Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.
“And he came close to doing what Mrs. Clinton’s advisers have increasingly feared some big-name Democrat would do as the battle for the nomination drags on: Urge Mrs. Clinton to step aside in the interest of party unity.
“‘I’m not going to advise any other candidate when to get in and out of the race,’ Mr. Richardson said after appearing in Portland with Mr. Obama. ‘Senator Clinton has a right to stay in the race, but eventually we don’t want to go into the Democratic convention bloodied. This was another reason for my getting in and endorsing, the need to perhaps send a message that we need unity.”