In her review of Roger Donaldson‘s The Bank Job, N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis has written a flattering graph about costar Saffron Burrows, describing her “Martine” character as “a pulpy femme fatale who’s been sensitively shaded.”

Safron Burrows

Noting her modelling background, Dargis describes Burrows as an “angular, melancholic beauty [who], after making the usual independent rounds — Mike Figgis directed her in his screen adaptation of the Strindberg play Miss Julie — [has] slowly and somewhat unexpectedly emerged as an actress to watch.
“Sadness clings to Ms. Burrows: it hoods her eyes, tugs at her mouth and wraps around her like a gossamer shawl. It gives her mystery and, like the hints of age edging her face, blunts the impact of her beauty, making her character more human and emotionally accessible than she might register otherwise.” Nicely put.

Responding to Robert Downey‘s upcoming portrayal in Ben Stiller‘s Tropic Thunder (DreamWorks, 8.15) of an Oscar-winning actor who gets a massive makeover in order to play an African American character in a war film, a complete boob posted the following yesterday on Just Jared: “I’m not black and I find it offensive. Are there not any talented enough black actors out in the world that they feel the need to hire a white guy to do a black guy?”

There’s no limit when it comes to the human capacity for massive cluelessness and stupidity. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Tropic Thunder is “about five actors who go on location and find themselves, through a series of freak occurrences, relying on their boot camp experiences when they get stuck in a real war-like situation,” etc.

Tropic Thunder costars Jack, Black, Downey, Ben Stiller

Downey has been quoted by Entertainment Weekly that if the performance is “done right, it could be the type of role you called Peter Sellers to do 35 years ago. If you don’t do it right, we’re going to hell.”
I think this aspect of Tropic Thunder is one of the funniest ideas to come along in this vein since James Whitmore starred in Black Like Me (1964). The other films in this vein are the much less entertaining Watermelon Man, with Godfrey Cambridge (’70), and Soul Man (’86) with C. Thomas Howell.

Two portions of yesterday’s Anne Thompson 3.6 Variety column about the legacy of Bob Shaye and New Line Cinema caught my attention. One is a statement that Bob Berney‘s Picturehouse “is likely to merge with the floundering Warner Independent Pictures,” which seems to confirm suspicions that Warner Independent may be done as a stand-alone unit. (I’ve made calls about this, etc.) The other is her observation that “there was always an aura of the dysfunctional family around New Line.” I wrote about this very aspect a few days ago in my own looking-back-at-New Line article.

There are plans afoot to make a movie based on the Color Purple musical on Broadway that closed two months ago, starring Fantasia Barrino. I never saw it but I probably would have refused an offer of free tickets. This is no reflection on the show (which was said to be quite good), but recollections of Steven Spielberg‘s film of the same name.

Fantasia Barrino

Exceptional trauma burns into one’s consciousness and remains like a scar. I saw this Oscar-nominated fiasco in a Burbank screening room 23 years ago, and it’s like it happened yesterday.
We all go into films with our mollecular constitutions intact, but the chemistry changes if the film has a spiritual current of any force. We begin to feel more awake, alive, aroused if the film is on the right track, and we start to feel more and more depleted and nauseous if it’s not. The gross theatricality of The Color Purple made me feel as if the oxygen levels in the screening room were being slowly emptied.
I came out numb and staggering. It caused me to completely reevaluate Spielberg, whose films I had mostly admired and even worshipped up to that point. In my head the name “Spielberg” became permanently damaged after this. I came out of it despising Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover, Oprah Winfrey…everyone in the cast. Composer Quincy Jones, producers Kathy Kennedy and Frank Marshall…everyone came out tainted.
No, I’m not going to explain my reservations in detail. I only know that I’ve never felt so smothered and assaulted by a sense of falseness and auteurist pretense in my entire moviegoing life.

When I was three or four I somehow became terrified of a big color illustration of a badger in a children’s book. I was so fearful of this image this that my parents promised to throw the book into the garbage in order to calm me down. (I later learned that they only hid it in the bottom of a bureau drawer.) The Color Purple became the near-equivalent of that badger in my adult life.

From Peggy Noonan‘s latest (3.7) “Declarations” column in the Wall Street Journal: “What do I think is the biggest reason Mrs. Clinton came back? She kept her own spirits up to the point of denial and worked it, hard, every day. She is hardy, resilient, tough. She is a train on a track, an Iron Horse. But we must not become carried away with generosity.
“The very qualities that impress us are the qualities that will make her a painful president. She does not care what you think, she will have what she wants, she will not do the feints, pivots and backoffs that presidents must. She is neither nimble nor agile, and she knows best. She will wear a great nation down.”
In a recent Elle magazine interview, Natalie Portman dismissed much of what offends the Hillary haters as “sexist.” What is her response, I wonder, to what Noonan and Maureen Dowd have been writing all along about Clinton?
Noonan ends her column with a ghastly quote from Christopher Hitchens spoken during an interview with Hugh Hewitt, to wit: Hillary will eb the next president because “there’s something horrible and undefeatable about people who have no life except the worship of power…people who don’t want the meeting to end, the people who just are unstoppable, who only have one focus, no humanity, no character, nothing but the worship of money and power. They win in the end.”

Samantha Power, described as a “key foreign policy aide’ to Barack Obama, told The Scotsman that Clinton “is a monster….she is stooping to anything. You just look at her and think, ‘Ergh’. But if you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive.”

Power was forced to resign for understandable reasons. One of the most fundamental rules of public relations is that you can’t bluntly say what almost everyone believes deep down. In my book she’s a truth-speaker likeRobert Ryan‘s John the Baptist in King of Kings. King Herod ordered his head cut off for pointing at Brigid Bazlen‘s Salome and calling her a “daughter of abomination,” but John was at one with God’s heart. I am standing (well, sitting) here and telling, as God is my witness, the truth, which is that Power (a) should have been more careful but (b) she said it straight and true.

The spirited Hector Elizondo did a q & a following last night’s Aero screening of Joseph Sargent‘s The Taking of Pelham 123. Elizondo plays the coarse, dryly menacing “Mr. Gray,” one of four disguised men who hijack a subway train in this 1974 classic. I didn’t know Elizondo would be visiting until I arrived, but it was a real pleasure to absorb his humor and energy and rascally wit.

Born in 1936 and raised in southwest Harlem, Elizondo gives off a kind of sophisticated street schwing that feels highly infectious. His basic attitude is a combination of “what’s next?,” “keep moving,” “look deeper” and “never stop with the jokes.” You can take the man out of Manhattan (I presume Elizondo lives out here) but you can’t the Manhattan out of the man. I didn’t take his picture but I applauded with vigor when the interview ended.
The Taking of Pelham 123 looked great — no scratches or color deterioration, although the sound felt weak. Charley Varrick, which went on at 10 pm after Elizondo signed off, came from a very clean and well-tended print, but the images seemed too dark at times. The DVD delivers more visual value. Too many scenes last night seemed underlit in a way that couldn’t have been intended by director Don Siegel.

“How is it that Clinton became the one who’s perceived as more equipped to answer that 3 a.m. call than the unflappable Obama? He, with the ice in his veins, who doesn’t panic when he’s losing or get too giddy when he’s winning, who’s as comfortable in his own skin as she’s uncomfortable in hers. There have been times in this campaign when she seemed so unhinged that I worried she’d actually kill herself if she lost. Every day, she reminds me more and more of Adele H., who also had an obsession that drove her insane.” — Larry David in a 3.6 Huffington Post.

The Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell has passed along a clip of the only completed footage of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, the 2000 Terry Gilliam project with Johnny Depp that folded after a week of shooting. It runs about six minutes: Neither Howell nor myself are sure if this ended up in Lost in La Mancha, the ’02 doc about the aborted attempt to make this movie, but neither of us remember it.

“It becomes theatrically important, after you die, what your last few days are like.

“For me, it was just like any other weekend in my life. I didn’t eat a last meal, I didn’t jerk off any more or any less, I didn’t climb a mountain or end up swinging from a noose with Mozart’s Requiem in the background. But suddenly it’s important exactly what I did, because they are the last few days, and what you do in the last few days, down to your last lunch, becomes a fairy tale.
“If you force me to make my last weekend a microcosm of my existence, and what my existence means to you, then I’ll tell you how it went and who I played. But first things first: It was an accident. I’m not some fucked-up star who couldn’t deal. I could deal; I just couldn’t sleep.” — from Lisa Taddeo‘s fictional, diary-like riff on Heath Ledger‘s final days, written as if it came from the “other side” (i.e., William Holden-in-Sunset Boulevard-style), in the new Esquire magazine.

Now we’re hearing it was somebody from the Clinton camp, and not Obama’s, who said to take their candidate’s anti-NAFTA speeches with a grain of salt. Water under the bridge, right?

McCain lite is a pretty good retort to Hillary right now. So is “what the hell did she really actually do during the ’90s that involved 3 am courage”? So is “where are her tax returns”? For anyone with a modicum of perspective, the fact that Clinton is not only willing but eager to play it butt-ugly and burn the house down in order to take the Democratic nomination is ample damnation.

[Photo montage borrowed from Huffington Post]

The dynamic will change — it’s already changing — but I can’t shake this godawful sensation I have in my stomach that Pennsylvania’s Reagan Democrats have bought into the fear card that Hillary has thrown into the center of the table, and that the die is cast The older white women love her, and their shlumpy husbands — in Pennsylvania and perhaps elsewhere — may be thinking it’s better to have a combative battle-axe with a fierce glare and puff-bags under her eyes than the other guy with a new, turn-the-page hymnbook.
It’s awful — a downer of massive proportions — but Obama is in a situation now and something has to happen. He has to somehow get it on with the Pennsylvania lowbrows and make the vote in their state close…or there may be trouble. He has to at least keep a strong edge in the overall popular vote or certain spineless superdelegates could fold and Clinton could storm the convention and make a tough case, despite the delegate math that she can’t win on.
God save us from the timidity, sluggish thinking and pathetic malleability of the Dunkin’ Donuts Democrats.
Is there not a certain analogy between the older white women who are standing by Hillary and the “downtown” jury that found O.J. Simpson not guilty in his 1994 murder trial? Did the mostly African-American jury not set a murderer free out of logic-free loyalty because they felt they had to stand by a black man in order to defy, for once, decades of prejudicial handling of African American defendants by a one-sided justice system? What is the difference, deep down, between this and millions of older women standing by Hillary despite her contentious cat-scratch vibe and monstrous negatives that will give not only pause but indigestion to millions of voters in the general election out of a sense of profound loyalty to a woman candidate, regardless of her brief?