If you need further proof that Hillary Clinton‘s campaign personality is vile and reprehensible, consider this charming observation she passed along last weekend about rumors that Barack Obama may be a Muslim: “No. No, there is nothing to base that on. As far as I know. On the basis of what he says.”

Susanne Bier‘s Things We Lost in the Fire — a film I went nuts over last October, largely but not entirely because of Benicio del Toro‘s landmark performance as a recovering heroin addict — will be out on DVD tomorrow from Paramount Home Video.

In honor of this, here’s (a) my original review, (b) a highly perceptive, beautifully written assessment of Del Toro’s performance by the Houston Chronicle‘s Josh Rosenblatt, and (c) my explanation about why Fire or Del Toro’s performance never got any awards-season traction.
“There can there can be no beating around the bush about Del Toro’s performance as Jerry the junkie, a once-successful lawyer who’s slid down into the pit,” I wrote. “Over the course of this two-hour film he climbs out of his drug hole, brightens up, chills out and settles in, relapses, almost dies, and then gradually climbs out of it again. I’m starting to see this actor as almost God-like. He’s holding bigger mountains in the palm of his hand, right now, than De Niro held in the ’70s and ’80s. He’s one of the top four or five superman actors we have out there. There isn’t a frame of his performance that doesn’t hit some kind of behavioral bulls-eye.
Del Toro has “managed to top even himself [in this film],” Rosenblatt wrote. “His Fire performance is right up there with the best screen turns, not just of his generation but of all time: Brando in On the Waterfront. Hopkins in Nixon. Washington in Training Day. Rarefied air. He imbues Jerry with such life, such ambiguity, such unsentimental complexity and depth that you can’t help but feel you’re watching the most intricately mapped depiction of addiction and strained humanity the film world has ever given us.”
The Stranger‘s Andrew Wright wrote that “you’re mainly going to be watching Del Toro, who somehow slinkys and random-tangents his way into a fully realized being who’s never more soulful than when he’s dealing with the monkey on his back. The film has yet to be made that fully does justice to Del Toro’s alien transmissions, but Bier comes awfully close.”

In ’85 and ’86 I worked for New Line Cinema as a freelance publicist on both coasts. A little Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, a little Critters, a little in-house p.r. writing. I worked out of my home in Los Angeles, and worked at New Line’s offices on Eighth Avenue for a period after that. In one sense it was a warm and familial place to be (my co-workers included a very young Mike DeLuca and producer Janet Grillo), and in another sense it had a dark neurotic vibe.

I grew up under the domain of an alcoholic dad, and can tell you that I felt the same disturbed, frazzled, self-loathing aura. But at the same time I was relieved that New Line wasn’t a chilly corporate place. Everybody felt, fed into or responded to the New Line vibe. Everyone worked hard, and no one was without their flawed, emotional, anxious and passionate moments. It was a very human place to be. I kind of loved it.

I worked hard and well for New Line, but they eventually canned me because they thought I was too full of my own juice and didn’t pay enough attention to proscribed boundaries. My biggest accomplishment was selling the idea of Freddy Krueger (as played by Robert Englund) becoming a kind of midnight-show cult figure among horror fans. (I’ll never forget marching up Fifth Avenue with Englund in Manhattan’s Halloween Night parade.)

The Nightmare om Elm Street films became a profitable franchise for New Line, and I was the first guy to sell the idea of Freddy’s cult coolness to pulse-takers like N.Y. Times feature writer Aljean Harmetz and Entertainment Tonight segement producer Pete Hammond.
I’m mentioning all this because the independent New Line is toast now, and because I was part of the team before it came big and flush and everyone cashed in/out and went swanky. Thank God in heaven I wasn’t there during the Lord of the Rings era.

In a 3.1. N.Y. Times obituary, critic A.O. Scott writes that “it’s not for me to argue the merits of the decision to snuff out New Line’s independence. The dissolution of one corporate entity by another is rarely an occasion for sentiment, except perhaps among stockholders. But New Line Cinema was a link between the smooth, conglomerated present and a gamier, more entrepreneurial past. Mr. Shaye may live like Hollywood royalty, but his roots are in New York retail and in the nervy, disreputable world of grindhouses and exploitation pictures.

“[Shaye] was the man who made the 1930s drug-scare propaganda movie Reefer Madness into a staple of the late-’60s campus counterculture. He picked up, on the cheap, North American rights to Bruce Lee movies, and he helped turn John Waters‘s Pink Flamingos into a cult classic. And let’s not forget Freddy Krueger of the Nightmare on Elm Street series, or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”

I tried reading David Halbfinger‘s 3.1 story in the N.Y. Times about the second-tier wtinesses scheduled to testify at Anthony Pellicano‘s racketeering/wiretap trial, which begins next week, and I couldn’t even scan it without getting bored. This story is so dead you could wrap fish in it.
As Halbfinger notes, “The investigation captured Hollywood’s imagination when Mr. Pellicano’s office was raided in 2002 and his dossier on industry heavyweights was seized. But the case has fallen well short of earlier expectations.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald is alleged to have written that “in the deepest and darkest regions of the soul it’s always three in the morning.” For 15 minutes I’ve been trying to find the exact source of this quote, and failing. If anyone knows for sure and can prove it with a link…

A “sweded” Once trailer from Ireland has been sent by Wesley Dolan. Glen Hansard, he writes, “has been hailed as a conquering hero since he returned home to Ireland [after the Oscars]. He’s in all the newspapers; he and Marketa Irglova were interviewed on Ireland’s leading chatshow. And ‘Falling Slowly’ is in heavy rotation on Irish radio stations. As Once flopped in its initial Irish release, it’s nice to see it finally having a moment in the sun.”

Today Variety‘s Dave McNary and Tatiana Siegel ran a story about the collapsing of New Line Cinema that said “the emerging consensus is that at least 75% of the slots will be axed in the coming months while a bare-bones staff stays on” and “that New Line will vacate its New York office and its West Hollywood HQ and move operations onto the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank.”
Last Thursday I ran a quote from a guy who knows the way of things about the likely fate of NL employees and their Robertson Blvd. headquarters. It said that Warner Bros. “is going to cut down on overhead as much as possible, which probably means eventually closing the 116 No. Robertson office and sending a pared-down New Line staff over to offices on the Warner Bros. lot.”

What ’08 films at this time next year will almost everyone be sick of talking and writing about due to their having recently won the top five Oscar awards? Right now eight are considered the most likely Oscar contenders, but what are the dark horses that no one’s spotting right now? There are always three or four sleepers that seem to suddenly arrive and catch on big-time.

Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman in Baz Luhrmann’s Australia.

The top eight, I suppose, are (1) Baz Luhrmann‘s Australia (20th Century Fox) with Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman; (2) Steven Soderbergh‘s The Argentine and (3) Guerilla (Focus Features) with Benicio del Toro; (4) Gus Van Sant‘s Milk (Focus Features) with Sean Penn; (5) Gabriele Muccino‘s Seven Pounds (Sony) with Will Smith; (6) David FIncher‘s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Paramount/Warner Bros.) with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett; (7) Joe Wright‘s The Soloist (DreamWorks) with Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr.; and (8) Ridley Scott‘s Body of Lies (Warner Bros.) with Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio.
My money’s on the Fincher, the two Soderberghs, the Wright and the Luhrmann.
Also in the mix: Sam Mendes‘ Revolutionary Road (Paramount Vantage/DreamWorks) with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet; Clint Eastwood‘s The Changeling (Universal) with Angelina Jolie; Ron Howard‘s Frost/Nixon (ditto); Joel & Ethan Coen‘s Burn After Reading with George Clooney and Tilda Swinton (almost certainly not an Oscar movie); John Patrick Shanley‘s Doubt (Miramax) with Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman; Fernando Meirelle‘s Blindness with Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo; Ed Zwick‘s Defiance (Paramount Vantage) with Daniel Craig; Saul Dibb‘s The Duchess (Par Vantage) with Keira Knightley; Bryan Singer‘s Valkyrie (MGM-UA) with Tom Cruise; and Stephen Daldry‘s The Reader (Weinstein Co.).

Leonardo DiCaprio in Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies.

A British Broadcasting Corp. documentary airing tomorrow will report that Mick Jagger escaped an assassination plot in late 1969 by the Hells Angels. The Rolling Stones singer “had vowed not to use Hells Angel members as bouncers following the death in December 1969 of an 18-year-old fan at a notorious free performance at Altamont Speedway in Northern California” so gang members decided to kill Jagger at his holiday home in Long Island, the BBC show reportedly claims.

So what happened? The Angels lost their will to kill? They couldn’t get past Jagger’s security people? Something tells me that your garden-variety Hells Angels psychopath of that era didn’t have the stealth or the smarts to pull off a celebrity hit like this.

Eons ago some friends of mine had to deal with a second-rate motorcyle-gang psychopath who went by the name of “Wild Bill.” It was 1:30 am in a small apartment that three of us were staying in next to a performance bar called Fat City in Wilmington, Vermont. And somehow Wild Bill muscled his way in and wouldn’t leave. (I was asleep in the bedroom.) He was fried and dangerous, they said. You could feel the boiling rage. He wore a chrome-plated Nazi helmet. My friends decided to humor him. It was that or maybe get knifed.

Wild Bill got his switchblade knife out soon enough, and my two friends and he began to throw it at the kitchen door. Except Bill began to get more and more angry that his knife-throws weren’t sticking. (My friend was better at this than Bill was, but he felt he had to deliberately miss so as not to enrage Bill all the more.) Then a new game started with Bill putting a wad of cocaine into a rolled-up dollar bills and then blowing it into a recipient’s nostrils, like a dart gun. Each friend took a nose blast or two.

It went on and on like this until at least 4 am. I missed the whole thing, thank God. I wouldn’t have been very good at the humoring part.

I can’t put my finger on it, but I’m getting this vague sense of slight Barack Obama slippage. Something along the lines of what happened in New Hampshire. Women rallying ’round, yahoos buying into the red-phone bullshit, the hate, the beginnings of the ’08 swift-boating. I’m not saying Hillary Clinton will take Texas (Obama will almost certainly finish with more Texas delegates, no matter how the vote tips) but Hillary’s possible winning margin in Ohio — 5% or 6%? — is starting to scare me. And if she stays in and it goes to Pennsylvana the old James Carville definition of that state — “Philadelphia in the east, Pittsburgh in the west and Alabama in between” — is also unnverving.

I can’t offer a link, but somebody (Joe Leydon?) recently quoted Pauline Kael as having said that she could tell if a movie blew by watching the first ten minutes. I’ve always been able to tell in less than five. Like with people, there are dozens of ways that movies give the game away early. In House of Games Joe Mantegna called them “tells.”

Owen Wilson in Drillbit Taylor

Sometimes I can smell trouble from an opening-credit sequence. Any comedy or relationship movie from a big studio that opens with a helicopter shot of a major city (you know the kind of shot I mean…swooping in over the bay, moving under a bridge) is almost certainly going to cause pain.
I’ve actually moved beyond credit sequences. When it comes to films I haven’t read the scripts of or heard stuff about, I can all tell a lot by just skimming an Entertainment Weekly preview blurb. I read it, other stuff kicks in, I get a fix. Here’s a rundown on the whole spring season, based partly on the EW article in last week’s issue (#980), partly on screenings, partly on film-festival buzz, partly aroma, partly knowing the directors, partly talk, partly insect antennae.
Out of 33 films, 12 are either known or suspected of being very good, good or decent second-raters.
High Calibre, Certainly Worth Seeing: Roger Donaldson‘s The Bank Job (3.7); Kimberley Peirce‘s Stop Loss (3.28); Martin Scorsese‘s Shine a Light (4.4). (3)
Promising but No Promises: Ira Sachs‘ Married Life (3.7 — good festival buzz); George Clooney‘s Leatherheads (4.4); David Mamet‘s Redbelt (4.25); Noam Murro‘s Smart People (4.11); David Ayer‘s Street Kings (4.11); Marcel Langenegger‘s The Tourist (4.25); Helen Hunt‘s Then She Found Me (4.25); Bill Maher‘s Sleepwalking (3.14); Thomas McCarthy‘s The Visitor (4.18). (9)

Richard Jenkins (l.) in The Visitor

Possibly Tolerable: Steven Brill‘s Drillbit Taylor (3.21 — mild slapstick, Owen Wilson featherings); Roland Emmerich‘s 10,000 B.C. (cheap sabre-tooth thrills); Michael Haneke‘s Funny Games (sadistic perversity); Robert Luketic‘s 21 (3.28); Carter Smith‘The Ruins (4.4); Michael McCullers‘ Baby Mama (4.25). (6)
Caveat Emptor: Bharat Nalluri‘s Miss Pettigew Lives for a Day (3.7); Zak Penn‘s The Grand (3.21 — best-in-show poker movie…meh); Wong Kar Wai‘s My Blueberry Nights (saw it in Cannes, big disappointment); Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin‘s Nim’s Island; Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg‘s Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (4.25); Jon Avnet‘s 8 Minutes (4.18); ; Nicholas Stoller‘s Forgetting Sarah Marshall (not with that title); Gus Van Sant‘s Paranoid Park (3.7); David Gordon Green‘s Snow Angels (3.7); Masayuki Ochiai‘s Shutter. (10)
No Way in Hell: Tyler Perry’s Meet The Browns (3.21 — obvious reasons); J.P. Schaefer‘s Chapter 27 (3.28 — Mark Chapman stalks John Lennon, delayed forever, said to be rough going, fat Jared Leto + Lindsay Lohan); Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino‘s Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who (3.14); Nelson McCormick‘s Prom Night (4.11); Craig Mazin‘s Superhero Movie (3.28). (5)