Jack and Jill vs. The World is the worst movie title I’ve heard since the start of the 21st Century. It’s just awful — an AIM that goes right to the logic center of the brain and says, “Forget it.” This is no reflection of the film, of course, which Lantern Lane and Urbantone Media Group is opening on 4.11 (and screening for local press on 4.3). I’m not presuming anything but that title won’t step pecking me on the head like a crow. What could producer, director, co-writer and costar Vanessa Parise have been thinking?

Vanessa Parise

You could show this movie untitled to the three smartest marketing guys in the world and pay them to think up a title that would totally repel potential ticket buyers — a movie-title equivalent of Springtime for Hitler within the prism of The Producers — and I could imagine them coming up with titles that sound as bad as Jack and Jill vs. The World, but I can’t imagine them coming up with anything worse. It just says lame, contrived, forced, urban-eccentric, etc.
The film costars Freddie Prinze, Jr., Taryn Manning, Robert Forster, Vanessa Parise, Kelly Rowan and Peter Stebbings. It’s about a quirky-oddball romantic film about Jack, a youngish and “totally bored” Manhattan ad exec (Prinze) meeting and falling for Jill (Manning), a “fiery and adorable” type, etc. The plot has something to do with honesty and keeping secrets. It’s billed on the poster as “a love story for cynics.”
If it turns out that Jack and Jill vs. The World is sharp and amusing with a great ending…terrific. But if it turns out to be trouble of some kind (and I haven’t a thing to go on at this stage), no one will be able to say that they didn’t warn viewers in advance. You hear that title and you go “oh” and you just know.

HE reader Richard Huffman wonders if N.Y. Post reporters Kati Cornell and Samuel Goldsmith were “played” in the reporting of a 3.15 story about Ashley Alexandra Dupre, given an end-of-the-story quote attributed to defense attorney named Steve Zissou, the character played by Bill Murray in The Life Aquatic.
“What’s the likelihood that someone has that name outside of that Wes Anderson flick?,” Huffman wrote. The answer is that there are men and women with movie-character names all over this country. They’re ubiquitous. And they’ll probably have to deal with bad jokes about this the rest of their lives.
Switchboard has three Steve Zissous in New York alone, and one living at 1 Irving Place in Manhattan. There are two New York State guys called Frank Galvin, i.e., Paul Newman‘s drunken attorney character in The Verdict. There are four guys named Roger Thornhill, Cary Grant‘s adman in North by Northwest, in New York State also. The state is home to no less than seven fellows named Max Fischer, the name of Jason Schwartzman‘s character in Rushmore. There’s even a guy named Hans (not Han) Solo with a business address at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
And this is just from a casual scan of one state. There are probably scores of U.S. citizens going by every major character name in movie history except for eccentric Stars Wars names Boba Fett, Jar-Jar Binks and Lando Kalrissian. I wonder how many guys are named Charles Foster Kane? Or John Book, i.e., Harrison Ford‘s cop character in Witness?
Now that I think of it, I can definitely imagine Star Wars freaks (just starting their adult lives in ’77, now pushing or slightly over 50 with grown kids) with kids named Lando or Han or Obi-Wan. Lando Rodriguez. Obi-Wan Schwartzman.
Wait — there’s a guy named Frank Bullitt, Steve McQueen‘s detective in Bullitt, living on Rochester Street in West Los Angeles right now. Same two l’s and two t’s. What if it turns out he’s driving a dark green late ’60s Mustang fastback?

“Therein, the patient must minister to himself.”

Another story about the challenge that Paramount is facing in the selling of Stop-Loss, this version from the Hollywood Reporter‘s Steven Zeitchik.

Ever since last summer’s tanking of summer of A Mighty Heart and In The Valley Of Elah, the mantra is that American guys and gals don’t want to know from movies about the Iraq War and its combatants, and yet Kimberly Peirce‘s drama, opening 3.28, is “the first movie told entirely from [Iraq veterans’] point of view…a movie emblematic of how soldiers really feel,” she says.
And so the Stop-Loss trailers and ads are basically saying , “What, me Iraq?”
The story, directed and written by Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry), is about a soldier (Ryan Phillipe ) who finishes his tour in Iraq and returns home to Texas, only to be ordered right back to Baghdad under the Army’s stop-loss provision. Except he’d rather not. Should he say or should he go? Abbie Cornish costars.

I’m been led to believe, beyond the implication in this “Page Six” item, that Ben Quick, Billy The Kid, Brick Pollitt, Anthony Judson Lawrence, Harry Bannerman, David Alfred Eaton, Ari Ben Canaan, Eddie Felson, Ram Bowen, Chance Wayne, Hud Bannon, Lew Harper, Professor Michael Armstrong, Butch Cassidy, Rheinhardt, Hank Stamper, Joseph Rearden, Henry Gondorff, Doug Roberts, William F. ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody, Reggie Dunlop, Murphy, Frank Galvin, Harry Keach, Gen, Leslie Groves, Sidney J. Mussburger, Sully Sulllivan, Harry Ross, Dodge Blake and John Rooney may be facing a hard situation. But it’s almost as hard to think of any 83 year-old guy working out in an oncologist’s waiting room and “doing squat thrusts” as being anywhere close to on the ropes.
On one hand, I’m told, he was taken from his home in Westport, Ct. to Norwalk Hospital last week in an ambulance. But he also drove Barbara Walters around the track at Lime Rock (also in Connecticut) 10 days ago for a program she was shooting on the topic of longevity. A tough old bird and best wishes to a good fellow.

John Adams, the seven-part miniseries, has been airing for two hours now on HBO East, and the rave reviews, I now realize, were totally on the money. It’s awfully damn good — superbly acted, atmospherically correct, absorbing at every turn, great visual compositions, “important,” delicious.

It’s the kind of thing that feature films have obviously given up on. Unless, you know, Roland Emmerich is the director and every now and then a guy’s head gets blown off by a cannonball or a church full of American Christians is burned to the ground by British troops and we can hear the screaming and the agony.
A leader in the war for independence, principally in his role as diplomat and negotiator par excellence, Adams as the second president of the United States (1797-1801). He also served as America’s first Vice President (1789-1797). He was defeated for re-election by Thomas Jefferson.
I love that line in Jill Lepore‘s New Yorker piece about Paul Giamatti, who plays Adams, “scowling beneath fifty-seven different wigs.” And her observation, which is accurate, that the film, based on David McCullough‘s biography, “is animated as much by Adams’s many private resentments as by the birth of the United States. It is history, with a grudge.”

For me, it’s 18th Century history starring (I’m sorry) Miles from Sideways, but in a much more fierce and passionate guise. When Giamatti gets indignant, there’s that petty sound he makes with his voice, and I’m sorry but it’s all Miles. I just see him losing it at that winery and picking up that clay pot and sloshing down the “pours.” And I wish the producers had decided to give Giamatti a prosthetic nose like the one belonging to Real McCoy. John Adams (pictured above) looked English, and Giamatti simply doesn’t. And they could’ve fixed or modified this.
If you’re in the Pacific time zone, there’s plenty of time to catch this thing. It starts at 8 pm and last three hours. The subsequent episodes will be one hour each.

“I want to know what qualifies Hillary Clinton to be president? Is it because she was married to the president? If that were true, then Robin Givens would be heavyweight champion of the world. If Hillary’s last name wasn’t ‘Clinton,’ you know…she’d just be some crazy white woman with too much money and not enough lovin’. That’s where I come in. I know women like that. You don’t want them answering the phone at 3:00 in the morning.
“This, in conclusion. Three weeks ago, my friend Tina Fey, she came on the show and she declared that bitch was the new black, right? You know I love you, Tina Fey….you know you my girl. I have something to say. Bitch may be the new black, but black is the new president, bitch!” — from Tracy Morgan‘s SNL “Weekend Update” routine last night. (Here’s another location with the video embedded. The YouTube version has been removed for some reason.)

“We all have our own private hells. I hope his private hell is hotter than anybody else’s.” — Home Depot founder and former New York Stock Exchange director Ken Langone speaking a few days ago about former Gov. Eliot Spitzer.
People will be making cracks behind Spitzer’s back for the rest of his life because he’s an almost comical case of an unexamined life. A man brought down by a refusal to honestly examine himself and adjust his personal and political relationships accordingly. A man who was adamant about prosecuting and punishing a flawed world for the usual corruptions and lack of morality, not in spite of but precisely because he’d failed to come to terms with his own nature.
In the space of eight days the man has devolved into the status of a clown. If I were Spitzer I would agree to a divorce, move to Europe and and live alone in a small, sparely furnished apartment in a small town in Tuscany or Umbria, like Jeremy Irons‘ disgraced character does at the end of Damage.
Henry Miller addressed this very same trait or tendency in “romantic revolutionary” John Reed in Warren Beatty‘s Reds. Here’s the mp3.

Tim Murphy‘s New York magazine interview with Tony Kushner, who’s been working on the script of Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln movie, which is based on Doris Kearns Goodwin‘s “Team of Rivals,” has inspired a thought.

Steven Spielberg, Tony Kushner, Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama

Given Kushner’s observations about the parallels between Lincoln and Barack Obama (which, by the sights of certain wise HE talkbackers, automatically makes Kushner a rank sentimentalist who’s clearly lacking in seasoned judgment) and what Goodwin said about this topic to Tim Russert on TV this morning, doing a Lincoln movie would obviously be perceived on some level as a kind of Obama back-pat gesture. Which conceivably could be giving Spielberg, a Hillary Clinton supporter, a certain pause.
The Obama-Lincoln links are real, says Kushner. Two Illinois politicians. One a former president, one an aspiring one. Both skilled at reducing discord and inspiring people to find common ground. Asked what two books he would take with him in the Oval Office, Obama has named (according to Russert) the Bible and Team of Rivals. Is it that much of a stretch to wonder if Spielberg’s Clinton support may have affected his thinking about the Lincoln movie? Could he be saying to himself (and perhaps to others), “Well, let’s see what happens with the election and then we’ll pull the trigger…or not”?
Spielberg is just enough of dilettante on political matters (having to be prodded by Mia Farrow before bailing out of the Beijing Olympic Games, hemming and hawing about Aaron Sorkin‘s Chicago 7 script) and just enough of a flabby- minded side-stepper to respond this way to the Lincoln project. Why doesn’t he just walk away and wash his hands? Everything I know about him says he’s the wrong guy to make this film. He’s shown questionable aesthetic judgment when it comes his historical/political subjects (excepting movies about World War II and fighting the evil Nazis), and he has no real balls. Wouldn’t it be better all around let it go and bring in someone who’s up to the task to direct it?
If it’s not the Obama echoes, I would love it if Kushner or someone close to the project would help me to understand what Spielberg’s avoidance issues are with this thing. What is the man’s problem?
I spoke twice to Liam Neeson about this movie almost three years ago (summer of ’05), and Neeson was very, very excited. It would happen soon, he believed. Within the year or by early next, he said. But of course, Amistad and Spielberg’s (temporary) bailing out of the Chicago 7 movie taught us Spielberg is not to be trusted with historical/political films. One way or another, Spielberg’s uncontrollable sentimentality engulfs or compromises or leaves a stain. On top of which the odds are he’ll smother and artificially stylize the 1860s with that awful milky-white Janusz Kaminski light.
Note to HE trashtalkers: Yes, I just got into this topic a day or two ago but Kushner’s New York interview got me going again. If you don’t like it, tough. It’s Sunday, a catch-up day, and I’m just banging away on this and that.

“Jann Wenner isn’t the only one who finds Barack Obama ‘Lincolnesque in his own origins, his sobriety and what history now demands,'” writes New York‘s Tim Murphy. Kushner, now working on a screenplay about Abraham Lincoln for the indecisive Steven Spielberg [see above], notes that Lincoln “could bring together people of wildly disparate ideological bents and remind them of the moral core of their visions.” And he believes that Lincoln would endorse Obama. “They’re both from Illinois,” Kusher says. “You can really trace a line from the politics of Lincoln through American pragmatism to the politics of Barack Obama.”

My 19 year-old son, a Syracuse sophomore, doesn’t converse in Valley-speak, but my younger son, who’s much smarter than me, does somewhat. In a dry, white-ebonics sort of way. He’s an exception. Most Val-speakers do it mall-style. The fact is that tens of millions of under-30s talk in this profoundly irritating dialect — unashamedly, kind of flamboyantly — as if they’re all from the same genetically-afflicted sub-species.
Valley-speak is about conveying sincerity and a lack of pretense, and vocalized with the exact same tonalities no matter what part of the country the speaker lives in. It involves the usual Jeff Spiccoli vocabulary along with a trait that drives me insane, which is an absolute insistence on speaking every word group, phrase and sentence as if it’s a question. (Judge: “Uhm, okay…dude? Dude? This court, like, finds you guilty? And, like, sentences you to a minimum term of, well, pretty much ten years?”)
I’m not doing an old-crank routine by complaining about this. Nobody but nobody uses Valley-speak in the business world, and certainly not among jourmalists. The second I hear it, I assume that the speaker is under-educated, a slacker pothead or mentally challenged in some way. (Sales girls at Urban Outfitters use it.) A Valley-speaker is essentially conveying to the listener, in short, that he/she is, like, totally not in the game? And that you should, like, not even think about hiring them when they come looking for a job because the chances are they’re ditzoids?
What I’m wondering is, when a Valley-speaker decides to try out a more adult dialect, how do they go about this? Do they just turn off the attitude and mindset like a faucet, or do they take a language class or find a private Henry Higgins-like tutor or what?

Because I disliked his tweedly-deedly performance as the Lord of the Rings “Gollum,” and because he seemed so closely allied with the grand designs of Peter Jackson, I had a kind of negative-reflex thing going with Andy Serkis. That changed when I saw his quietly menacing portrayal of British psychopath and child-killer Ian Brady in the ’06 HBO drama Longford. I was totally on the team from then on.
In any event, I read in an Indie London interview piece this morning that Serkis is about to start on work Tintin, an animated feature about the Belgian comic-strip character “and his faithful dog Snowy.” (Good God.) Bagging paychecks as co-directors are Steven Spielberg and Jackson. (Spielberg is “directing the first one, Jackson the second…the bulk of the shoot starts in September but things got a little bit moved around after the writers√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢ strike.”)
Spielberg, I decided after reading this, has become a kind of delaying sadist regarding the Abraham Lincoln film with Liam Neeson. Chicago 7 this, Tintin that…and we never hear diddly about the Lincoln project. It’s a classic avoidance syndrome thing (a kid avoiding a homework assignment, a guy who keeps putting off doing his taxes). If a benevolent God took any kind of interest in human affairs, Spielberg would (a) officially abandon the Lincoln film and (b) arrange for another esteemed director to step in so it can finally move forward.
Spielberg would just screw it up anyway. He wouldn’t do a Schindler’s List to the story of the nation’s 16th president from 1861 to ’65 — he’d probably Amistad it. I’ll never forget the way John Williams‘ musical score almost overwhelmed the voice of Anthony Hopkins during his big courtroom oratory scene. I remember watching this in a screening room some 11 years ago and saying to myself, “Yep…Spielberg is at the controls, all right.”