Cause for guarded optimism or more poll smoke? Sen. Barack Obama has apparently (a) nudged into a slight lead over Sen. Hillary Clinton in California in a Zogby-C-SPAN/ Reuters poll out today, and (b) is holding a one-point edge over Clinton in California in a 2.3 Rasmussen poll.
On top of which (c) the same Reuters poll is reporting a nationwide dead heat between the two Democratic candidates; (d) Gallup is saying the same thing; (e) ditto a CBS/N.Y. Times poll; (f) a Pew Research Center survey conducted from 1.30 to 2.2 states that 41% of registered voters have said they dislike the idea of Bill Clinton being back at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, if and when Sen. Hillary Clinton is elected president (with 34 percent of voters having affirmed the same view last October); and (g) Maria Shriver, the wife of California’s Republican governor, announced for Obama earlier today.
As I did on 1.27, L.A. Times contributor (and Christian Science Monitor critic) Peter Rainer saw Sylvester Stallone‘s Rambo with a mostly male paying audience, and detected an unusual current in the raucous whoops and yaw-haws that greeted every over-the-top killing.
“Could Rambo be the Tony Bennett of the new movie generation?,” Rainer asks. “His retro-ness has become his pedigree. Of course, in both his Rocky and Rambo incarnations, Stallone has always been blatantly retro. The Rocky movies draw heavily on Depression-era tropes; the Rambo narratives are positively primeval. (With his no-tech skills and half-Indian blood, Rambo is as elemental as Tarzan, if not as talkative.)
“Unlike other aging stars (such as Bruce Willis) attempting to revive their action franchises, Stallone, in Rambo, doesn’t try to tamp down the toll of the years. (He didn’t in Rocky Balboa either, which accounted for its sweetness and may have been the key to its commercial success.) Stallone is a bit like the latter-day John Wayne, who also put his gruff weariness on display.
“But Wayne, in films such as Rooster Cogburn, consciously cartoonized his own image, while Stallone in his Rambo mode is still playing it straight. And this squareness may be one reason why his audience still finds him authentic — a classic.”
Santa Barbara hills, looking northeast from muddy lot next to Super-Rica — Sunday, 2.3.08, 11:58 am
Opening Friday in 1977 theatres, the lightweight rom-com Over My Dead Body has made only $4,600,000 — not much to crow about. Obviously the concept, the marketing and the appeal of the two leads, Eva Longoria and Paul Rudd, didn’t cut it with Joe Average. The fact that it managed only a 13% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes (and an even worse 8% among top critics) undboutedly had something to do with the D.O.A. reception. Jeff Lowell’s film appears to be the worst of the year so far. Disputes?
Yesterday morning’s $22.9 million projection for Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour was too conversative. Disney’s 3-D special-event film will take in $29 million as of late tonight, from just 683 theaters. Variety‘s Pamela McClintock is calling this the biggest haul of any film playing over Super Bowl weekend, including Titanic.
The Envelope’s Tom O’Neil has run a list of classic films that weren’t honored with a Best Picture nomination. Point made, but the odd thing (for me, anyway) is that O’Neil didn’t include Zodiac and yet he did include A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. If I was the Absolute Mussolini Dictator of Hollywood, I wouldn’t nominate that Steven Spielberg film for Best Picture with a gun at my back.
O’Neil’s shaft list includes Adam’s Rib, Aliens, Arthur (exception!), Being John Malkovich, Being There, The Big Slee, The Birds, Blade Runner, Blood Simple, Blue Velvet, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (exception!), Brief Encounter, Carrie (exception!), Casino, Central Station, The China Syndrome, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Cool Hand Luke, Days of Heaven, Days of Wine and Roses, Do the Right Thing, Dreamgirls (exception!), Duck Soup, East of Eden, Election, A Fish Called Wanda, Gilda, Harold and Maude, Hud, In Cold Blood, Leaving Las Vegas, The Lion King, A Little Princess (exception!), The Manchurian Candidate, Manhattan, The Matrix, Mean Streets, Meet Me in St. Louis,, Melvin and Howard, Memento, The Misfits, Modern Times, Murder on the Orient Express, North by Northwest, Notorious, The Opposite of Sex, Out of Sight, Paper Moon, Peggy Sue Got Married, The People vs. Larry Flynt,, Philadelphia, The Player, Pleasantville, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Ran, Rear Window, Rebel Without a Cause, Rosemary’s Baby, Saturday Night Fever, The Searchers, The Seventh Seal,, Singin’ in the Rain, Spartacus, Strangers on a Train, The Stunt Man, Suddenly, Last Summer (exception!), Sullivan’s Travels, Sweeney Todd, Thelma and Louise, The Third Man, To Have and Have No (exception!), A Touch of Evil, Toy Story, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The Truman Show (exception…hated it!), The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Victor/Victoria (exception!), Viva Zapata, The Way We Were, When Harry Met Sally, The Wild Bunch, Wild Strawberries, A Woman Under the Influence, The World According to Garp (exception!) and You Can Count on Me.
Democrats cheering the possibility of an Obama-Clinton (or Clinton-Obama) dream ticket during last Thursday’s Kodak debate “didn’t seem to know that in Hollywood, couples who have chemistry on screen often don’t like each other off screen, and ones who are involved off screen often don’t have any chemistry on screen,” N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote today. “And so it is with Barack and Hillary. Thursday night was not the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Just a beautiful, dare we say, fairy tale.”
The last seven graphs, an account of a testy face-off Obama and Clinton had on 12.13.07, otherwise known as “the tarmac moment,” make for informative reading, and are not in the least bit flattering to Clinton, a one-eyed jack if there ever was one when it comes to televised debates. Just read it.
During yesterday’s Santa Barbara Film Festival director’s panel, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly helmer Julian Schnabel was asked about the Sean Young heckling incident. I’m told he said he was basically delighted by the whole stink because it raised his film’s profile like almost nothing else and created a solid positive-sympathetic vibe on the film’s behalf. A very cool, adult, grown-up attitude….cheers.
No Country for Old Men took the Darryl F. Zanuck trophy for best film at last night’s Producers Guild fo America awards, held at the Beverly Hilton. Congrats again to Scott Rudin, Joel and Ethan Coen, Roger Deakins, Javier-Josh-and-Tommy Lee, etc.
Last night’s Angelina Jolie tribute at the Santa Barbara Film Festival was arranged when it seemed seemed like a reasonable or even bordering-on-likely prospect that she would wind up with a Best Actress nomination for her Mighty Heart emoting. The fact that it didn’t finally happen (Jolie was probably elbowed out by The Savages‘ Laura Linney) doesn’t change my opinion that her performance as Marianne Pearl in Michael Winterbottom‘s film was the best of her career.
Snapped near the beginning of last night’s Angelina Jolie tribute at the Santa Barbara Film Festival — 2.2.08, 8:50 pm.
Jolie was affable, cheerful, relaxed on-stage. Pete Hammond handled the questions with his usual ease and aplomb. Clint Eastwood, director of The Changeling, in which Jolie costars, presented her with the fest’s Performance of the Year award.
Before the 8 pm event finally began at 8:35 pm, Jolie and Brad Pitt spent most of their time mingling with screaming (it’s slightly more correct to say “squealing”) fans, taking their time posing for photos and signing autographs and generally paying respects . I was calling it a “Day of the Locust-sized mob” as I stood and marvelled outside Santa Barbara’s Arlington Theatre. The red-carpet paparazzi got to snap photos as Jolie and Pitt strolled inside, but no interviews. (Or none that I noticed.)
The outdoor after-party, held near the Bacara Resort in Goleta, was mostly a bust due to inclement weather and not enough shelter. Heavy sprinkling (i.e., not quite a full-on rainshower but dense enough to turn your hair into a wet floor mop and make your clothes damper and damper, depending on how oblivious you wanted to pretend to be) sent guests huddling under food tents. Local weather has favored the SBFF for many years, but this year precipitation and cool (sometimes outright cold) temperatures invaded.
Soggy revelers at the after-party.
It looks like the full-bells-and-whistles Oscar telecast will happen after all on 2.24, considering the reports that broke around noon today that “major roadblocks” (presumably concerning new media) have been sorted out in WGA-AMPTP strike negotiations, and that some sort of agreement in principle will be resulting fairly soon.
United Hollywood stated today in a 1:23 pm post that “off-the-record sources” had confirmed “that progress is indeed being made in the informal talks, and that creative solutions to the biggest differences between the AMPTP and the WGA have gotten the tentative and cautious approval of both sides.
“This does not mean there is a deal in principle yet. It means we may, finally, be very close to one — as close as days away. And while we’re cautiously optimistic about what we’re hearing, it comes with a real caveat.
“Just as happened with the DGA deal, points that are agreed to in informal negotiation can be thought of as points on a deal memo — but it’s the drafting language that comes from hammering out those points that makes them legally binding. And our sources say that draft language doesn’t yet exist. That’s a big part of what will be happening in the next few days, as negotiations continue.
“Until the WGA and the companies have enshrined the deal points — whatever they are — into real draft language, those deal points can’t be thought of as final.”
In the realm of romantic comedies, “predictability in itself is not a bug but a feature of the genre,” writes N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott. But oh, how the gene pool has been compromised. Can we use plain language here? The appropriate term is “mongrelized.”
“The marriage plot, after all, is one of the oldest in literature, flourishing in Roman comedy, in the plays of Shakespeare and Moliere and in the novels of Jane Austen. More to the point, the obstacle-strewn road to discovered or recovered bliss was heavily traveled in the old studio days, from the screwball comedies of the 1930s and ’40s to their loopy Technicolor descendants of the late ’50s and early ’60s.
“Our parents and grandparents had Rock Hudson and Doris Day — such delicious subtext! such amazing office furniture! — or Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Or Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Or Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. Or even, in That Touch of Mink, Cary Grant and Doris Day.
“But you get the point. [Today] we have Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey.
“Who are perfectly charming. Don’t get me wrong. You remember them in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, don’t you? Neither do I, even if a search of this newspaper’s archives indicates that I saw it. I believe Mr. McConaughey wore a striped shirt and played a guy from Staten Island. He is mostly shirtless in Fool’s Gold, which reunites him with Ms. Hudson as a bickering, still-in-love couple whose divorce is disrupted by a search for undersea treasure.”
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