There’s a pet expression that too many people use if they’re excited and delighted about something very positive that’s just happened — meeting an old friend, running into a good friend by coincidence on the street, hearing good news, etc. They open their mouths, bug out their eyes, put their hands to their faces (or the sides of their heads) and say, “Oh, my Gawd!” Except they say it almost like a question, as if to say “if God is listening, will He/She hear my immense joy?”
I didn’t really mean “people” because I’ve never once heard a straight guy say this — ever. The expression is used solely by spirited, open-hearted women (younger women mostly, Carrie Bradshaw types, not very educated mall women, 20 something borough girls) and…I was going to say gay guys but now that I think of it I’m not sure they use it either. Do they?
I’m not exactly putting certain folks down for using this expression, but every time I hear it it’s like chalk on the blackboard. I literally convulse. I look over at the person saying it with daggers in my eyes and say to myself, “I’m not going to mention this to your face, but you’ve just given yourself a huge demerit in my book.”

Near the end of this clip (which is mainly about Bill Clinton lying in trying to defend his wife’s Bosnia lie, which she stated three or four times), Matt Lauer brings up yesterday’s Associated Press-Ipsos national poll numbers showing McCain and Obama tied at 45-45.

In what way is ’08 a change year when the red staters are standing by McCain to this degree? An old guy who promises Bush III, an indefinite Iraq conflict, is dug in deep with the lobbyists, same old lower taxes for fat cats, etc. The levels of ignorance in this country gush like foothill rapids fed by melted mountain snow. Just when you think there might be a serious turn in the road, Ma and Pa Kettle think again and decide it might be better after all to stick with another saber rattler. People sense a certain maverick integrity in McCain, the “Honest John” straight-shooter thing, but my God…the lack of examination! It’s going to be a very rough and infuriating campaign.

Prom Night, opening today in roughly 2700 theatres, is tracking at 70, 31 and 17 — obviously the film to beat this weekend. What kind of coarse jungle genes do you need in your system to be looking forward to this thing? Don’t the under-25s realize that buying a ticket to it is tantamount to stenciling the words “shameless moviegoing cretin” on their foreheads?

As critic Brian Orndorf has observed, “Stop me if you’ve read these ingredients before: a PG-13 horror picture, a remake of an 80s cult classic, directed by nondescript filmmaker, pathetically kept from critics to avoid unpleasant opening-day reviews, and starring a roster of insipid young actors? Surely this means only the finest quality Hollywood has to offer!”
David Ayer‘s Street Kings (Fox Searchlight) is running just behind at 50, 38 and 15. Opening in roughly 2500 theatres, it’ll be nipping at Prom Night‘s heels all weekend. They’ll both do moderately well. The final tallies will be what they will be. What do you really care…am I right? What does the modest box-office fate of Street Kings have to do with anything, much less the price of rice? What does it mean at the end of the day?
Smart People, the relationship movie starring Dennis Quaid (sporting a beard and a pot belly) and Sarah Jessica Parker, will be bringing up the rear. It’s tracking at 48, 26 and 6.
I should have posted this yesterday, but the action on left-click button on my primary computer has been getting worse and worse so I finally took it into the shop yesterday morning, and in so doing left the latest tracking data on the C drive without a copy.

According to this 4.10 Yahoo article by Jeanna Bryner, the Judd Apatow fantasy of schlubby galumphs hooking up with hot mommas isn’t that much of a fantasy.
“Women seeking a lifelong mate might do well to choose the guy a notch below them in the looks category,” she writes. “New research reveals couples in which the wife is better looking than her husband are more positive and supportive than other match-ups. The reason, researchers suspect, is that men place great value on beauty, whereas women are more interested in having a supportive husband.”
I still think this is horseshit. Birds of a feather tend to flock together. Nine tend to hook up with nines, eights hook up with eights, sevens with sevens, etc. And smart guys never, ever marry women who are nines or tens because they’re more trouble than they’re worth.

I spoke this morning with Tom McCarthy, director-writer of The Visitor (Overture, 4.11 limited). He was calling from a train from Boston to New York. The reception cut out at one point, but is otherwise audible. The chat runs about 25 minutes.

Tom McCarthy‘s The Visitor (Overture, 4.11 limited) is easily among the best films of the year so far — right up there with The Bank Job, Young @Heart, Shine a Light, In Bruges, Taxi to the Dark Side and 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days. If I’d been more on my game I would have seen it at last January’s Sundance Film Festival, but something obstructed. (I’m telling myself it was the 72-hour flu that got me the night before Heath Ledger was found dead.)

Richard Jenkins, Hiam Abbass

Set mostly in Manhattan, The Visitor is about a dull middle-aged academic (Richard Jenkins) discovering a pair of illegal immigrants (Haaz Sleiman, Danai Gurira) living in his barely-visited New York City apartment (due to a subletting by a con artist), and how he gradually comes to care for them and help out when Sleiman’s character, a Syrian, gets into trouble with the INS.
It’s also about the dull bird, who is called Walter Vale, gradually falling for Sleiman’s beautiful dark-haired mom (Hiam Abbass) when she visits New York to try and help with her son’s situation. The last third of the story is about coping with the threat of a deportation while love gently blooms — a mixture of Kafka and alpha.
Shot on a shoestring, The Visitor is a modest but fully realized middle-aged love story that’s about a lot more than just a man and a woman finding each other. It’s about heart and music and beating a native drum. It’s also about post-9/11 bureaucratic paranoia, and about the shedding of crusty skin. It’s exceptional in the way that it unfolds with elegance and simplicity from start to finish. It touches precisely because it doesn’t seem to try all that hard. McCarthy just ladles it out, pouring by pouring.

Haaz Sleiman (top), Jenkins.

And it has two award-quality performances from Jenkins and Abbass that will almost certainly be remembered at year’s end. Jenkins’ name may not ring a bell, but you definitely know his bald head, lean face and sadly creased eyes. He plays it way down at first — curt, glum , inexpressive — but gradually the pores open. His emotionally muffled college professor experiences one of those spiritual growth spurts that small movies specialize in — ones that enploy just the right amounts of skill and suppressed feeling. Jenkins has achieved the same kind of thing that Peter Reigert managed in Local Hero; ditto Marianne Sagebrecht in Baghdad Cafe.
The Israeli-born Abbass is almost as much of a revelation. She radiates warmth, hurt, sadness, maturity, sensuality.
Almost every critic has fallen for The Visitor, which, of course, means nothing in terms of your average moviegoer wanting to see it or not. The situation is further complicated by the fact that McCarthy’s decision to give the lead role to Jenkins, a character actor whose best role before this was the gay FBI agent in Flirting with Disaster, is both an inspiration and a problem.
You know that the Average Joe is going to go “Richard who?” Jenkins has achieved a career triumph here, but Jack Nicholson in Terms of Endearment he’s not. The Visitor isn’t that kind of movie, and Walter Vale isn’t that kind of role. How interested are you in seeing a love story starring the balding clerk from your local DMV or the manager of the supermarket just down the street? When it comes to stories about older folks scratching that itch, moviegoers tend to respond more easily to middle-aged actors with rascally vigor and charm. And yet what happens in The Visitor really and truly kicks in. You’ve got to see it to believe it.

Overture is facing an uphill marketing struggle, but The Visitor has the kind of heart and craft that mature moviegoers are always looking for. Here’s hoping that the ding-dongs who refuse to read reviews or consider the recommendations of online columnists like myself will at least listen to their friends who will hopefully see The Visitor and tell them to get off their backsides and go. Unless, of course, their friends are just as determined to avoid reading about movies as they are.
This is McCarthy’s sophomore effort following ’03’s The Station Agent, which he also wrote as well as directed. He’s a fine actor also. He played the journalist Scott Templeton in The Wire and the dutiful Bradley son in Flags of Our Fathers. Besides his promotional chores on The Visitor, he’s currently filming Tony Gilroy‘s Duplicity.

Near the end of Errol Morris‘s Standard Operating Procedure (Sony Classics, 4.25 NYC, 5.2 LA), which examines the whys and the particulars of the Abu Ghraib prisoner-torture scandal, a middle-aged, non-military investigator who looked into the matter while stationed in Iraq (and apparently remained there for a prolonged period), offers a conclusion about the overall Iraq War effort that is blunt, bitter and shorn of any semblance of spin. It last 43 seconds.

Listen to it right here. He mentions the Abu Ghraib scandal first, but he quickly shifts into an appraisal of the U.S. military mission in Iraq. I’ve never heard a veteran of that inferno sum things up quite so succinctly: “There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell you can fix any of that,” he says. “If we leave, they’re killing each other and they’re not killing us. If we stay, they’re killing each other and they’re killing us. That’s the end result of this whole fuckin’ debacle.”
I’d like to see this guy talk to John McCain and listen to McCain tell him, “No, the surge is working…this is the central essential conflict of our times….we have to stay and see this through,” etc. I’d like to hear what this guy says back to McCain. I’d like to see the expression on his face as he does this.

“Bad buzz. Creative infighting. Superhero gridlock at the multiplex. For Marvel Studios, handling gamma rays is starting to look like a cakewalk compared to turning The Incredible Hulk (Universal, 6.13) into a movie franchise.” — the lead graph from Brooks Barnes‘ 4.10 N.Y. Times piece, which mainly focuses on negative fan reaction to the trailer and creative differences between star-screenwriter Ed Norton and Marvel Studios chairman David Maisel.

What’s the point of running a tribute to the original 1965 George Lois Esquire cover with Virna Lisi? It meant something in the mid ’60s, sort of — obviously a faint provocation or taunt aimed at forward-thinking women — but what does it mean for Jessica Simpson to repeat it for the May issue? Nothing. The Esquire website, which is always behind the curve, doesn’t even mention it.

A $30 million Ben-Hur mini-series has been launched by Alchemy TV, producer David Wyler (son of Willam Wyler, the director of the 1959 Oscar-winning classic) and director Christian Duguay. Fine…except for two problems.

Problem #1 is that the present-tense Wyler told Variety‘s Ali Jaafar and John Hopewell that “in my mind” the miniseries “is dedicated to my dad and [Charlton Heston]…we think it’s a great way to keep his memory alive.” Never, ever make a movie as a tribute to anyone or anything. Make it only for reasons that are tied to the present and future tense. Make it for your own reasons, because you have a vision or at least a concept that you’re burning to put onto a big screen.
Problem #2 — and certainly a major challenge — will be the chariot race sequence. The only way the miniseries version will stand up to the ’59 version will be if they shoot it entirely “live” and CG-free. And what are the odds of that happening, given the realities of present-day production?
I love that Wyler and Duguay intend to “downplay the religious aspects of the source material.” Well, naturally. The original Lew Wallace novel was subtitlled “A Tale of the Christ” but that kind of thing would only play in the Christian marketplace today. Besides, Ben-Hur always and always will be a story about revenge. What kind of dramatic satisfaction would the ’59 or ’26 versions have delivered if the evil Messala hadn’t been beaten and died from injuries in the chariot race?

“There is a strangely static and claustrophobic quality to the fiercely loyal cult Hillary Clinton has gathered around her since her first lady years,” writes Salon‘s Camille Paglia in a deliciously phrased diss piece [dated 4.9.08].

Camille Paglia; Hillary Clinton

“Postmortem analysts of this presidential campaign will have a field day ferreting out all the cringe-making blunders made by her clique of tired, aging courtiers who couldn’t adjust to changing political realities. Hillary’s forces have acted like the heavy, pompous galleons of the imperial Spanish Armada, outmaneuvered by the quick, bold, entrepreneurial ships of the English fleet.
“The male staff who Hillary attracts are slick, geeky weasels or rancid, asexual cream puffs. (One of the latter, the insufferable Mark Penn, just got the heave-ho after he played Hillary for a patsy with the Colombian government.) If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say Hillary is reconstituting the toxic hierarchy of her childhood household, with her on top instead of her drill-sergeant father. All those seething beta males are versions of her sad-sack brothers, who got the short end of the Rodham DNA stick.
“The compulsive war-room mentality of both Clintons is neurosis writ large. The White House should not be a banging, rocking washer perpetually stuck on spin cycle. Many Democrats, including myself, have come to doubt whether Hillary has any core values or even a stable sense of identity. With her outlandish fibbing and naive self-puffery, her erratic day-to-day changes of tone and message, her glassy, fixed smiles, and her leaden and embarrassingly unpresidential jokes about pop culture, she has started to seem like one of those manic, seductively vampiric patients in trashy old Hollywood hospital flicks like The Snake Pit. How anyone could confuse Hillary’s sourly cynical, male-bashing megalomania with authentic feminism is beyond me.
“Obama’s Rezko embroglio is certainly troublesome. But the splotches on Obama’s record are few and relatively minor compared to the staggeringly copious chronicle of Clinton scandals, a mud mountain that the media have shown amazingly little interest in exploring during this campaign cycle. For all their grousing about media bias, the Clintons have gotten off scot-free over the past year from any kind of serious, systematic examination of their sleaze-a-thon history from Little Rock to Foggy Bottom.
“Obama has actually served longer in public office than Hillary has. It’s very true that he lacks executive experience, but so does she. Her bungling of healthcare reform, along with her inability to control the financial expenditures and internal wrangling of her campaign, does not bode well for a prospective chief executive.
“Beyond that, I’m not sure that your analogy to professionals like doctors, accountants and teachers entirely applies to presidents. There is no fixed system of credentialing for our highest office. On the contrary, the Founders envisioned the president as a person of unpretentious common sense and good character. Hillary may spout a populist line, but with her arrogant sense of dynastic entitlement, she’s a royalist who, like Napoleon, wants to crown herself.
“I too wish that Obama had more practical experience in government. But Washington is at a stalemate and needs fresh eyes and a new start. Furthermore, at this point in American history, with an ill-conceived, wasteful war dragging on in Iraq and with the nation’s world reputation in tatters, I believe that, because of his international heritage and upbringing, Obama is the right person at the right time. We need a thoughtful leader who can combine realism with conciliation in domestic as well as foreign affairs.”