I guess the California polling places are finally geared up now. (A lot of them reportedly weren’t this morning.) I’m heading off to the West Knoll apartments (just north of Melrose) to do my duty. If anyone reading this hasn’t yet voted…hubba-hubba.
With everyone believing that the WGA strike will probably be settled by sometime next week, Vanity Fair has announced that they’re cancelling their annual Oscar Party “in support of the writers and everyone else affected by this strike.” Does anyone buy this? They’re nervous about shrinking revenues and just tightening their belt….right?
“Douglas Sirk‘s 1959 Imitation of Life is among the most closely analyzed films in the Hollywood canon, a Lana Turner soap opera turned into an exercise in metaphysical formalism by Sirk’s finely textured and densely layered images.” — from Dave Kehr‘s review of John Stahl‘s Imitation of Life (1934) in his N.Y. Times DVD column, published today.
Gee, I never knew that. I know that if someone had come up to me on the street yesterday, stuck their finger in my face and ordered me to name “the most closely analyzed films in the Hollywood canon,” I almost certainly wouldn’t have said “Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life.” But I will henceforth!
I realize that the Sirkians are a very passionate group and that SIrk was a fine composer of a very particular type of dramatic “music” (as well as a super-exacting craftsman), but I’ve never felt especially excited about his ’50s films. They deserve respect, but deep down I’ve always regarded them, despite their emotional intensity and immaculate compositions, as middle-aged chick flicks.
No way would Imitation of Life be among my top 100 DVDs-in-a-trunk if I was stuck on a South Seas desert island with a battery-powered DVD player and an endless supply of batteries. I would rather watch 100 Three Stooges shorts than a single Douglas Sirk melodrama. Lana Turner was great when she young and hot in the late ’30s and ;’40s, but for my money she was stifling when she got older. She always looked like she had an upset stomach.
Today’s Reuters/CSPAN/Zogby poll reported a 13% Obama lead over Clinton in California. It’s too much of a leap to take seriously, but it’s in keeping with the general surge. The concern is that the absentee voter tally, which will amount to a fairly significant percentage of the overall, will reflect the sentiments of two or three weeks ago when Clinton was up by 20% or more. A friend says this may not be a problem for Obama because most absentee voters are from the ranks of the educated-business traveler class, which are not Hillary’s constituency.
There was a party at the Chateau Marmont last night on behalf of La Vie en Rose star Marion Cotillard, who’s generally considered to be in a neck-and-neck race for the Best Actress Oscar against Away From Her‘s Julie Christie. Held in the two-storied Bungalow #1 and agreeably un-crowded, it was a kind of mixed-bag affair — some press, some publicists, some talent (Star Trek costar Clifton Collins, director Larry Kasdan), producer Mark Johnson, former Paramount Classics chief Ruth Vitale, etc.
Atonement screenwriter Christopher Hampton — Monday, 2.4.08, 8:40 pm
I had a chance to speak briefly with Christopher Hampton, the legendary London-based writer whose Atonement script has been nominated for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar. I mentioned my admiration for the final scene in which Vanessa Redgrave, playing the final, septugenarian, cancer-ridden incarnation of Briony Tallis, confesses her feelings of life-long guilt for having fatally screwed up the lives of her big sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) and her sister’s boyfriend Robbie Turner (James McAvoy) to a TV interviewer.
Hampton said that he based this scene largely upon screenwriter and playwright Dennis Potter‘s final interview, taped in 1994, in which he spoke about his oncoming death from cancer and his struggle to finish his work. His interviewer was Melvyn Bragg. The chat was released on VHS in April 2002.
During last weekend’s junket for The Spiderwick Chronicles, executive producer Kathleen Kennedy said that there will be no press junket for Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Director Steven Spielberg won’t be doing “much” press, she added, because the shooting of his Trial of the Chicago Seven movie will be underway at the time. Okay, but how is that shoot going to keep Harrison Ford, Shia LeBouf and Cate Blanchett from doing junket interviews? Obviously the two are unrelated. The bottom line is that the more blockbuster-inevitable a movie seems to be, the less partial publicists are to a conventional junket hoe-down.
For the last few weeks the conventional wisdom has been that the top two contenders for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar are probably Charles Ferguson‘s brilliantly analytical No End in Sight and Sean Fine and Andrea Nix‘s feel-good War/Dance. Last night, however, a friend told me about a fairly stupid-sounding statement from a person who belongs to the Academy’s documentary branch. Or a statement, at least, that indicates a fairly unthoughtful Iraq War subject-matter bias.
This Academy person believes, I was told, that the three Iraq War-themed docs that are nominated — No End in Sight, Richard Robbins‘ Operation Homecoming and Alex Gibney‘s Taxi to the Dark Side — “basically cancel each other out.”
The guy seems to be saying that they’re all part of the same bowl of soup not just in terms of subject matter, but in terms of tone and viewpoint. He seems to be implying that all three are belly-aching about what a disaster the war has been and still is, and it’s all the same blah-dee-blah and who needs it?
This attitude was recently echoed by Sundance programmer John Cooper in a 1.16 AFP story when he said that “cinema audiences are fatigued by the conflict…filmmakers haven’t said all there is to say about the war in Iraq, but I think audiences are saturated.”
Michael Tucker, co-director of Bullet-Proof Salesman, a doc about an Iraq War profiteer that will show at next month’s South by Southwest, is understandably dismayed by such talk. “Alex Gibney’s film is completely different from Charles Ferguson’s movie, and yet to hear it from the Academy crowd it all comes down to subject,” he says. “It’s no secret that a lot of Iraq War films have sold very few tickets. Grace is Gone made 35 thousand dollars so the word has spread that Iraq movies are commercially unfashionable. But how can a war be out of fashion?”
It was announced during Sundance that Pride and Glory, the Ed Norton-Colin Farrell cop drama that’s been more or less done since last November, had been bumped by New Line into ’09.
Colin Farrell, Ed Norton in Gavin O’Connor’s Pride and Glory.
You can tell from the trailer that Pride and Glory is a little boiler-platey, perhaps a little too emphatic and histrionic. My general motto is that any New Line film that costars Noah Emmerich (brother of production chief Tobey Emmerich) is a potential problem. But there doesn’t seem to be anything to fear from director Gavin O’Connor, who did a first-rate job with ’04’s Miracle.
How bad does a film have to be to bump it all the way into ’09? The postponement feels extreme and bizarre. Yesterday Farrell cleared up the mystery with journalists at an In Bruges junket. The problem with Pride and Glory isn’t Pride and Glory, he said, as much as Nicole Kidman and The Golden Compass.
“There’s this rumor going around that [Pride and Glory has been bumped] because it’s a mess or it’s a really bad film,” he began. “I feel the need to kind of speak up, not from my own end but genuinely for Gavin O’Connor because he wrote and directed it. It’s just a really really strong piece, but I think New Line lost the bollocks on The Golden Compass…and they literally don’t have enough money to market things.
“Pride is a tricky one to market anyways. It’s pretty dark…I’ve seen it. Gavin did a great job and you know, Jon Voight is brilliant in it, and Ed [Norton] is great in it and a really strong cast of supporting characters…it’s a really strong piece.”
The main thing is that it’s got Farrell playing another downward-spiral character beset by demons. In my book Farrell is an actor reborn, having found his kwan over the last ear or so by getting under the skin of a pair of anxious, emotionally disshevelled losers in Cassandra’s Dream and In Bruges.
Yesterday Movieweb.com posted this Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull close-up shot. If it’s genuine, it seems to confirm the presence of aliens in the third act. The talk was first generated by the Indy 4 one-sheet revealed in early December with the tiny alien face between the eyes of the skull.
For those who missed this when it first went up last week. Yes, you shouldn’t have.
During a discussion last night on Keith Olbermann‘s MSNBC show, an outspoken female commentator (30s, longish dark hair, didn’t write her name down) invoked the legendary words of Tom Hanks‘ Jimmy Dugan character in a discussion of Hillary Clinton‘s repeat performance at Yale University of the old “misting up the day before a big primary” routine that worked so well for her in New Hampshire.
Dugan, of course, was the snarly, tobacco-chewing manager of a female baseball team in A League of Their Own who said, “There’s no crying in baseball!” And this was echoed by the commentator’s words: “There’s no crying in politics! I was with her the first time but not again. You can cry to get out of paying a traffic ticket when a cop pulls you over, but not the day before Super Tuesday.”
Here’s a short political manifesto written by a Brookline-residing mom, titled “Why Caroline Kennedy and I are for Obama” and sent to me a few minutes ago: Her thinking is summed up in four words: “It’s about our kids.” It’s the most moving and concisely stated vote-for-Obama plea I’ve read since the primary season began.
“Remember when we were young idealists, 18 years old, voting for the first time? Who was your first? The first candidate I voted for was Jimmy Carter. I felt empowered, like my vote mattered, like together, we could change the course of history.
“That’s the last time I voted for the winning candidate. In the Reagan years I became increasingly disillusioned and felt completely out of touch with the rest of the country. I never liked Bill Clinton, although I liked his policies. He seemed sleazy to me, and has since revealed his base tendencies. But all that is beside the point.
“Our kids, Caroline and mine, are now of voting age and this will be their first presidential election.
“We brought these kids into a world where global warming, off-shoring, the shrinking of the American dream, housing priced out of their reach and failure of the safety net of Social Security and Medicare will be their reality.
“It’s our duty now to listen to them. This is their future and Obama is their candidate.
“He has shown that he can enlist the young en masse.
“In Caroline Kennedy’s words: ‘Senator Obama is inspiring my children, my parents’ grandchildren, with that sense of possibility.”
“We’ve left a mess for our kids: they’ll never be able to own a home, they’ll never have job security and they’ll never be able to retire. Give your kids the President they want.”
<div style="background:#fff;padding:7px;"><a href="https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/category/reviews/"><img src=
"https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/reviews.jpg"></a></div>
- Really Nice Ride
To my great surprise and delight, Christy Hall‘s Daddio, which I was remiss in not seeing during last year’s Telluride...
More » - Live-Blogging “Bad Boys: Ride or Die”
7:45 pm: Okay, the initial light-hearted section (repartee, wedding, hospital, afterlife Joey Pants, healthy diet) was enjoyable, but Jesus, when...
More » - One of the Better Apes Franchise Flicks
It took me a full month to see Wes Ball and Josh Friedman‘s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes...
More »
<div style="background:#fff;padding:7px;"><a href="https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/category/classic/"><img src="https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/heclassic-1-e1492633312403.jpg"></div>
- The Pull of Exceptional History
The Kamala surge is, I believe, mainly about two things — (a) people feeling lit up or joyful about being...
More » - If I Was Costner, I’d Probably Throw In The Towel
Unless Part Two of Kevin Costner‘s Horizon (Warner Bros., 8.16) somehow improves upon the sluggish initial installment and delivers something...
More » - Delicious, Demonic Otto Gross
For me, A Dangerous Method (2011) is David Cronenberg‘s tastiest and wickedest film — intense, sexually upfront and occasionally arousing...
More »