I suggested yesterday that Envelope columnist Elizabeth Snead should have attempted an explanation why the Sex and the City is blowing off a big-ass debut screening at the Cannes Film Festival in favor of one in London, especially since Sarah Jessica Parker said Cannes was a possibility in a Snead article that ran on 3.14.
Today Snead ran a portion of an interview with an anonymous Warner Bros. insider, who offered at least a partial answer to the London-not-Cannes question. “A WB insider who refused to go on record told me, ‘One word: recession,'” Snead wrote,. “[The source added] that movie studios were feeling the pinch of a devalued U.S. dollar and that a Cannes fete done right would be far more costly than a red carpet event in London.”
I don’t believe this is the entire reason for one shaved millisecond. There’s no doubting the fact that Cannes is going to be horrifically expensive for everyone this year, but London is no cheap deal either. Everything hurts when you’re in London. I was there last March and I know. It’s just as bad as France. So if you ask me the “London is cheaper” explanation is at least partly bullshit.

Laments about the once-great Robert De Niro and Al Pacino having sold their souls for a series of straight-paycheck performances in a string of shitty films is an old tune ’round these parts. (I mentioned it in a recent item about De Niro’s humorous remarks at the Meryl Streep tribute, and in this March riff about the Righteous Kill trailer.) And now L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein has jumped on the bandwagon.

“[These] two icons of ’70s New Hollywood, heroes to a generation of young actors and filmmakers, have become parodies of themselves,” he writes, “making payday movies and turning in performances that are hollow echoes of the electrically charged work they did in such films as Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Mean Streets and Taxi Driver.
“I don’t envy Pacino or De Niro. They’re in a bind, having come of age at a time when actors could still get provocative dramas made without everyone having to work for peanuts. Today they’re grumpy old men, relegated to raking in loot from cartoonish comedy and generic thrillers.”

Last Thursday evening And The Winner Is blogger Scott Feinberg attended some kind of official North American premiere of Errol Morris‘ Standard Operating Procedure (4/25, Sony Pictures Classics) at Brandeis University. He posted an obviously positive reaction to the film this morning, but he also included what may be regarded in some circles as a sticky-wicket graph that gets into the fact that Morris paid the doc’s interview subjects — specifically the Abu Ghraib prison veterans who tortured and humiliated their Iraqi prisoners (and who were dumb enough to take dozens of photos of these acts).

I don’t have a problem with Morris having paid money to induce these people to talk. Notebook reporters can’t pay for information — that’s completely out and always has been — but documentaries are a different matter, I feel. As long as what the subject says to the documentarian can be verified to be a portion of absolute truth and nothing but, I don’t see the problem.
Everyone who talks to a journalist or TV reporter or a documentary filmmaker about an important or hot-button subject does so because they’ve decided there’s something in it for them. This is how it works every time. For some it’s wanting to be briefly famous. For some it’s wanting to elevate their media profile — to be regarded as a player of some importance. Others talk in order to make themselves look better, smarter or less odious if the story in question is some kind of negative expose. Others talk in order to settle a score with someone else — payback — or because the interview subject feels he/she was “right” and that persons they’re speaking about were “wrong” in a reported situation, and they want people to consider their viewpoint.
The Abu Ghraib veterans probably said to themselves, “Why should I talk? I’m just going to look like a fool and a degenerate and my grandchildren and great-grandchildren are going to see this film someday and they’ll see me in this light also, so why should I talk?” And then Morris (or somebody working for him) put some cash on the table to cover this or that expense and these people thought it over and said to themselves, “Okay, now I’m getting a little something out of this so I guess I’ll talk.”
Here‘s how Feinberg relates the issue and how it was answered: “I was a bit surprised by the answer that Morris gave to one question about the interviews after the film. The questioner, a noted journalist, asked Morris how he convinced these notorious figures to agree to be interviewed for his film, and specifically if he paid them at all, ‘which is not okay in my profession.’ Morris eventually acknowledged that he did, in fact, pay his interview subjects, jokingly explaining that he did so because ‘I have a lot of money and want to share it’; he did not disclose an amount of money or if this is his standard practice.
“I, frankly, don’t really have a problem with this — it got these people to sit down and talk about their behavior, and I don’t see how it would in any way encourage them to speak anything other than the truth — except for the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, this compensation was not openly acknowledged, as it should have been since this is a documentary that purports not to have any agenda other than seeking the truth, and in my estimation does not.
“Because Morris did not do so, those who wish to disparage SOP, for whatever reason,will latch onto this as evidence of some secret agenda, just as they have done in response to his use of re-enactments in his films, including this one.”
Here’s Morris’s statement on this:
“As documentaries have become more and more mainstream entertainment, people are aware that there is money involved. The more successful documentaries become, the harder and harder it is to get people to do them for nothing.
“People [are] aware of my success and respond accordingly. I never paid people for the interviews in The Thin Blue Line, but Stephen Hawking was paid a lot of money for the rights to his book and his participation in A Brief History of Time. Fred Leuchter was paid when I asked him to appear in several scenes, e.g., the scene of him riding up and down in a van de Graff generator at the Boston Museum of Science. I did not pay him for the interview, but if he had insisted I might have done so. McNamara was not paid a fee for The Fog of War, but of course we paid his travel and hotel. Why wouldn’t we?
“The professor who asked the question at Brandeis is a print journalist. I don’t know if she has ever done a seventeen-hour interview over two days, as I did with Janis Karpinski. I didn’t pay Karpinski, but we paid for hotel, travel and per diem. It is customary in the motion picture business. To do [otherwise] would be (I believe) unconscionable. It is difficult to ask people for such an investment of time without taking care of them in some way — and that may involve paying them.
“I paid the ‘bad apples’ because they asked to be paid, and they would not have been interviewed otherwise. Without these extensive interviews, no one would ever know their stories. I can live with it.”
There’s a discrepancy in that Feinberg has reported that Morris said last Thursday that he “paid” his subjects and Morris saying he didn’t “pay” them but covered their hotel, travel and per diem. I’m sure this will be cleared up later today but even if Morris had paid them a flat fee in exchange for spilling, it would be okay in my book because (a) documentaries are different than news stories and (b) everybody wants something — it’s the way of the world. What matters is whether or not the subject passes along a portion of verifiable truth.

The cleanest summary of the Pennsylvania situation is from the MSNBC’s First Read guys (Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, Domenico Montanaro) who always deliver neat, comprehensive and super-astute summaries of everything that’s going on in the political world.

“There seem to be four possible outcomes to tonight√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s contest, and two of them will need little spin because the media won’t need the ‘help’ to interpret their meaning: 1) a double-digit Clinton victory in which she beats Obama by a greater margin than she beat him in Ohio; and 2) an outright Obama victory. But here are outcomes that will force the campaigns to go into spin overdrive: 3) a Clinton victory by less than five points, which would give Obama an opening to declare ‘victory’ of sorts and create renewed pressure on Clinton on the future of her campaign; and 4) a Clinton victory by more than five but less than 10, which is the most likely result if some of the better polls are to be believed.
“[The last scenario] would be considered a solid victory, but would it be big enough to fundamentally change the dynamics of the race? Could Clinton claim Obama was losing ground if he performed better in Pennsylvania than he did in Ohio? This is why Axelrod and his team and Wolfson and his team will earn their money today. The Clinton campaign is desperately trying to ratchet back expectations.
“Early on, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell and his folks were predicting an easy victory. Those predictions, however, are what created this expectations-game problem for Clinton today. She’s now in a position where only a blowout is going to give her the momentum she needs to make folks believe she still has a shot at the nomination.”

Joachim Trier‘s Reprise (Miramax, 5.16), a Norweigan drama about two young friends and authors going through the convulsive effects of love, depression and burgeoning careers, is finally opening stateside after playing the festival circuit for nearly two years.

I’ve yet to see Reprise, but something in me rebels at the idea of seeing a “new” film that was in its prime vintage state 22 months ago, and was probably shot in ’05. Movies are the opposite of wine in that their potency and maturity are not enhanced by sitting in the bottle. I’m generally cool with a film that’s anywhere from ten to fifteen months old, but anything beyond that feels delayed. The fresher, the better.

Taking time out from his promotion tour for his latest book, “The Woman Who Wouldn’t,” (St. Martin’s), author Gene Wilder offers consolation to Barack Obama about the voters of western Pennsylvania.

“There are gags and scraps of action in Baby Mama (Universal, 4.25) that give the movie fits of buoyancy, and these tend to come not so much from the younger, eager performers as from the old hands. If you want to see scene-stealing turned into grand larceny, watch Sigourney Weaver, as the owner of the surrogacy service, or, better still, Steve Martin, as the presiding genius of Round Earth.

Tina Fey, Steve Martin

“Hand the guy a thick hank of ponytail, relieve him of the burden of a central role, aim him squarely at the bull√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s-eye of eco-smugness (‘I√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢ve toasted pine nuts on the edge of an active volcano’), and you find him happier onscreen than I have seen him in years. Who cares whose baby is inside which mother, when the laughs come from the grown man doing business with his inner child?” — from Anthony Lane‘s 4.28 New Yorker review.

“Over the past two months, the actions and words of Hillary Clinton have gone from being merely disappointing to downright disgusting. I guess the [Pennsylvania] debate last week was the final straw. I’ve watched Senator Clinton and her husband play this game of appealing to the worst side of white people, but last Wednesday, when she hurled the name ‘Farrakhan’ out of nowhere, well that’s when the silly season came to an early end for me. She said the ‘F’ word to scare white people, pure and simple.
“Yes, Senator Clinton, that’s how you sounded. Like you were a bigot stoking the fires of stupidity. How sad that I would ever have to write those words about you. You have devoted your life to good causes and good deeds. And now to throw it all away for an office you can’t win unless you smear the black man so much that the superdelegates cry ‘Uncle (Tom)’ and give it all to you.
“I want [also] to say a word about the basic decency I have seen in Senator Obama. Mrs. Clinton continues to throw the Rev. Wright up in his face as part of her mission to keep stoking the fears of White America. Every time she does this I shout at the TV, ‘Say it, Obama! Say that when she and her husband were having marital difficulties regarding Monica Lewinsky, who did she and Bill bring to the White House for ‘spiritual counseling?’ The Reverend Jeremiah Wright!”
“But no, Obama won’t throw that at her. It wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be decent. She’s been through enough hurt. And so he remains silent and takes the mud she throws in his face. That’s why the crowds who come to see him are so large. That’s why he’ll take us down a more decent path. That’s why I would vote for him if Michigan were allowed to have an election.” — Michael Moore on his website today (4.21).

Michel Shane and Anthony Romano (I Robot, Catch Me if You Can) managed to get Variety‘s Dave McNary to write about how they’re developing Lifeboat 13, which is based on the WWII story of the four chaplains of different faiths who gave their lives during the 1943 sinking of the Dorchester after it was torpedoed by a German sub.

Read these two summaries of the four chaplains saga — — Wikipedia’s and this other hokey one — and tell me where the movie is. Wartime self-sacrifice deservedly wins medals, but a willingness to die so that other might live does not make for an interesting story in and of itself. Touching, yes, but certainly sad, but in a generic wartime sense. Their sacrifice lacks intimacy and therefore meaning, I would argue. Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Jack Dawson realizing Kate Winslet‘s Rose has to float on the wooden chest alone or they’ll both die of hypothermia has that element. Four men of the cloth helping and saving others from death is the stuff of war monuments, not movies.
On top of which the basic bones of the four chaplains story are nowhere near as interesting as the story used for Abandon Ship! (or Seven Waves Away), a 1957 black-and-white Tyrone Power film about a shipwrecked captain forced to order survivors out of an overcrowded lifeboat in order to save most of the others. Now that‘s a story! And there’s no way this sappy four chaplains movie will be half as interesting as Alfred Hitchcock‘s Lifeboat. Walter Slezak‘s character alone makes that film play nearly as well today as ti did in ’43.
So no intended offense but my advice to Shane and Romano is to pull the plug on their project. Forget it. The only people who might want to see a movie about the four chaplains being God’s good samaritans and then willingly freezing and drowning to death so that some of their fellow soldiers might live (even though dozens died anyway from hypothermia when they went into the water) will be the over-60 crowd and John McCain voters…maybe.

AICN’s “Moriarty” has linked to a major MySpace spoiler site that uses the extremely unfascinating acronym KOTCS as a handle. As it says on the very top of the page, “Watch out! If you are at all scared of spoilers, this is not for you…”

The Envelope‘s Elizabeth Snead ran a “Dish Rag” story Friday about Warner Bros./New Line’s Sex and the City apparently planning its first big premiere in London sometimes between May 13th and 16th, with the New York premiere set for May 27th.

Okay, but shouldn’t Snead have at least explained why the Cannes Film Festival debut notion, which Sarah Jessica Parker said was a possibility in a Snead article that ran on 3.14, has apparently been deep-sixed? If this is the case, I’m not convinced, as Defamer‘s Stu Van Airsdale wrote last Friday, that this means SATC has been jilted or pink-slipped by Cannes.
My guess is that the Warner Bros. handlers simply decided against the Cannes option because they didn’t want to endure a DaVinci Code-like pummeling by festival correspondents and figured London would offer more of a slurpy kiss-ass reception. There’s also the possibility that the film is quite good or at least satisfying on its own terms and that the Cannes sidestep means nothing at all in terms of “uh-oh” indications. I’m only saying that Snead should have addressed this.