A presidential candidacy on the line, a major speech about prejudicial reservations and voter trust tied to a religious history. Obviously not a full parallel to Barack Obama‘s make-or-break speech this morning about Reverend Wright and racial matters (a divisive radical priest and credibility issues were not part of the 1960 situation), but close enough to mention.

Variety‘s Joe Leydon gives an affectionate pass to 21 and he dumps on Stop-Loss? At least by diminishing expectations he made it seem all the better. Tonight’s DGA screening made it clear that the Stop-Loss ins far outweigh the outs. It has its own voice, but it reminded me — skittishly, fragmentarily — of Coming Home, The Best Years of Our Lives and especially I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang.

Stop-Loss star Ryan Phillipe following tonight’s DGA screening — Monday, 3.17, 10:25 pm.

Beans at Stop-Loss buffet table.

Mounted photo on DGA foyer lobby wall of Stop-Loss costar Abbie Cornish

Director-co-writer Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry) does not, by my sights, “chart a bumpy road trip through familiar territory [and] delivers a persuasive verisimilitude too often overshadowed by contrivance.” Not perfect but a very respectable, at times quite penetrating film, Stop-Loss also contains Ryan Phillipe‘s strongest and steadiest performance
It’s much stronger and more consistent, and certainly much better acted, than what Leydon says. I was aware of the moments when this film was slightly off its game (somewhat), but when I trusted it I trusted it 115%. I realize I may be in the minority, but I knew one thing for sure as it played last night in the DGA theatre: “This is a much better film than the one described by Joe Leydon. Honest as far as it went, rooted in real-life drama, well-crafted.” I might say more later today, depending on the usual determinations.

In a 3.17 USA Today/Gallup poll, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has 51% vs. Sen. John McCain‘s 46%, and Sen. Barack Obama nudges McCain 49% to 47%. That’s Hillary’s discredit-and-bomb-Dresden strategy, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and a nation of brilliant people. But how does this square with the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey putting Obama at 52% to Clinton’s 45% among nationwide Democrats? The usual mixed numbers, lack of trust in pollsters.
Not to mention the likelihood of Pennsyvania lunchbox Democrats favoring Clinton by a decent margin. All of which means…nothing. Except that Obama has to hit out of the park tomorrow, or else.

ESPN’s Bill Simon has written a pretty good lament about sports movies having shifted from “rewatchably good” to “predictably good.”

“Sports movies fill a void created by the real sports world. So many times we are disappointed by a game, a player, a team, a playoffs. But with rewatchably good sports movies, we’re always in control. Louden Swain is always going to pin Shute. The Good Nazi will always stand up after Pele nails that bicycle kick. Carl Spackler’s ‘Cinderella story’ will always be funny. Roy Hobbs‘ final homer will always shatter the lights. And Costner’s wimpy brother will always beat the Cannibal by one second as Costner cheers him on with a porn mustache.
“But the industry has dipped so far that I’ll let a movie slide if only a piece of it is worth watching. You need to pop two Dramamine to watch most of Any Given Sunday, but I’ll always stick it out long enough to see Steamin’ Willie Beamen and Pacino’s locker room speech. That’s how easy I am. You can reel me in with one quality character, a few football scenes and a single goose-bumps speech. Doesn’t take much. And say what you want about Sunday, but at least it takes chances.
“I blame Remember the Titans for this trend; after it earned a surprising $114 million, inspirational, semisappy, ‘based on a true story” copycats like Miracle, We Are Marshall, Pride, Coach Carter, Radio, Gridiron Gang, The Rookie and Invincible quickly followed. I enjoyed each of those flicks to varying degrees, but whenever they pop up on cable, I’ve already got the remote in hand.
“Same for slapstick farces (Dodgeball, The Benchwarmers, any Ferrell movie); inexplicable remakes like Bad News Bears, Rollerball and The Longest Yard; and any of the pseudo remakes — and that ‘based on true events’ thing doesn’t get them a pass in my book — in which a white cast is exchanged for a black cast (like in Glory Road and Hard Ball).”

Stu VanAirsdale‘s first big Defamer story is about three Newsday head-choppings, and all of them in the section devoted to projected entertainment. Movie editor Pat Wiedenkeller and veteran critics Jan Stuart and Gene Seymour are reportedly “accepting buyouts that would end their tenures at the Tribune-owned tabloid effective March 28,” per cost-cutting strategies mandated by Tribune Co. owner Sam Zell.

And “it’s no golden handshake, either, ” writes Stu, “with one source telling Defamer the buyout deals topped out around 33 weeks salary, a fraction of remaining vacation days and less than a year of benefits.
“The departures of Stuart and Seymour, the latter a recent chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle, mark the third such high-profile exit at a New York tabloid in the last month, following Jack Mathews retirement from the Daily News. Look for Newsday music writer Rafer Guzman and reliable freelancers like John Anderson and company to pick up film assignments along the way.”
If he’s being this rough on the Newsday guys, you’d think that Zell would be applying more guillotine moves on an even-steven basis. As in the L.A. Times entertainment section…no?

With George Clooney‘s Leatherheads opening on April 4th, I’m feeling a bit of an atmosphere going on. It’s like you’re at a game and the coach from the opposing team has called ‘time out’ and the whole team is huddling by the sidelines and you’re wondering “what, did somebody forget to study the plays?” I’ve been at this racket for nearly 30 years, and I know what a vibe of slight trepidation feels like. It’s as distinct as the smell of mustard as you walk by one of those hot-dog wagons in Manhattan.

So I talked to a reputable guy who saw it last weekend at a junket screening, and his sum-up tag was “pretty bland.” Aww, come on!, I said. Don’t! Ease up! But the guy wouldn’t listen. “A few moments that make you smile, some that make you grimace,” he said. Jesus, man…stick it in and break it off.
“Most of the latter come courtesy of Renee Zellweger, miscast as the kind of Barbara Stanwyck dame that gives as good as she gets,” he said. “No Stanwyck she. Zellweger also isn’t aging particularly well, and I would imagine that this will be her swan song as a romantic lead.
“That said, director-star Clooney makes this cutesy, old-timey enterprise watchable,” he concluded. “But for a movie that is supposed to be about a bunch of eye-gouging, manly men, the last of a breed playing a game that’s about to leap into the big-time, Leatherheads is awfully polite. Too much so to work as anything but a niiiice valentine to a bygone era.”
When Universal decided early last October to bump Leatherheads out of its 12.7.07 slot and give it a 4.8.08 opening instead, I said to myself, “This might mean something.” But I didn’t want it to have problems because I’m as much of a Clooney kiss-ass as the next guy (i.e., like him, love his interview patter, admire his taste in movies as an actor-producer-director) and I wanted it to work so I put it out of my mind.
I could see from the trailer later on that Clooney was trying for some kind of 1930s semi-screwball vibe out of the Howard Hawks manual — Ball of Fire meets Knute Rockne, All-American, something like that.

Jack and Jill vs. The World is the worst movie title I’ve heard since the start of the 21st Century. It’s just awful — an AIM that goes right to the logic center of the brain and says, “Forget it.” This is no reflection of the film, of course, which Lantern Lane and Urbantone Media Group is opening on 4.11 (and screening for local press on 4.3). I’m not presuming anything but that title won’t step pecking me on the head like a crow. What could producer, director, co-writer and costar Vanessa Parise have been thinking?

Vanessa Parise

You could show this movie untitled to the three smartest marketing guys in the world and pay them to think up a title that would totally repel potential ticket buyers — a movie-title equivalent of Springtime for Hitler within the prism of The Producers — and I could imagine them coming up with titles that sound as bad as Jack and Jill vs. The World, but I can’t imagine them coming up with anything worse. It just says lame, contrived, forced, urban-eccentric, etc.
The film costars Freddie Prinze, Jr., Taryn Manning, Robert Forster, Vanessa Parise, Kelly Rowan and Peter Stebbings. It’s about a quirky-oddball romantic film about Jack, a youngish and “totally bored” Manhattan ad exec (Prinze) meeting and falling for Jill (Manning), a “fiery and adorable” type, etc. The plot has something to do with honesty and keeping secrets. It’s billed on the poster as “a love story for cynics.”
If it turns out that Jack and Jill vs. The World is sharp and amusing with a great ending…terrific. But if it turns out to be trouble of some kind (and I haven’t a thing to go on at this stage), no one will be able to say that they didn’t warn viewers in advance. You hear that title and you go “oh” and you just know.

HE reader Richard Huffman wonders if N.Y. Post reporters Kati Cornell and Samuel Goldsmith were “played” in the reporting of a 3.15 story about Ashley Alexandra Dupre, given an end-of-the-story quote attributed to defense attorney named Steve Zissou, the character played by Bill Murray in The Life Aquatic.
“What’s the likelihood that someone has that name outside of that Wes Anderson flick?,” Huffman wrote. The answer is that there are men and women with movie-character names all over this country. They’re ubiquitous. And they’ll probably have to deal with bad jokes about this the rest of their lives.
Switchboard has three Steve Zissous in New York alone, and one living at 1 Irving Place in Manhattan. There are two New York State guys called Frank Galvin, i.e., Paul Newman‘s drunken attorney character in The Verdict. There are four guys named Roger Thornhill, Cary Grant‘s adman in North by Northwest, in New York State also. The state is home to no less than seven fellows named Max Fischer, the name of Jason Schwartzman‘s character in Rushmore. There’s even a guy named Hans (not Han) Solo with a business address at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
And this is just from a casual scan of one state. There are probably scores of U.S. citizens going by every major character name in movie history except for eccentric Stars Wars names Boba Fett, Jar-Jar Binks and Lando Kalrissian. I wonder how many guys are named Charles Foster Kane? Or John Book, i.e., Harrison Ford‘s cop character in Witness?
Now that I think of it, I can definitely imagine Star Wars freaks (just starting their adult lives in ’77, now pushing or slightly over 50 with grown kids) with kids named Lando or Han or Obi-Wan. Lando Rodriguez. Obi-Wan Schwartzman.
Wait — there’s a guy named Frank Bullitt, Steve McQueen‘s detective in Bullitt, living on Rochester Street in West Los Angeles right now. Same two l’s and two t’s. What if it turns out he’s driving a dark green late ’60s Mustang fastback?

“Therein, the patient must minister to himself.”

Another story about the challenge that Paramount is facing in the selling of Stop-Loss, this version from the Hollywood Reporter‘s Steven Zeitchik.

Ever since last summer’s tanking of summer of A Mighty Heart and In The Valley Of Elah, the mantra is that American guys and gals don’t want to know from movies about the Iraq War and its combatants, and yet Kimberly Peirce‘s drama, opening 3.28, is “the first movie told entirely from [Iraq veterans’] point of view…a movie emblematic of how soldiers really feel,” she says.
And so the Stop-Loss trailers and ads are basically saying , “What, me Iraq?”
The story, directed and written by Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry), is about a soldier (Ryan Phillipe ) who finishes his tour in Iraq and returns home to Texas, only to be ordered right back to Baghdad under the Army’s stop-loss provision. Except he’d rather not. Should he say or should he go? Abbie Cornish costars.

I’m been led to believe, beyond the implication in this “Page Six” item, that Ben Quick, Billy The Kid, Brick Pollitt, Anthony Judson Lawrence, Harry Bannerman, David Alfred Eaton, Ari Ben Canaan, Eddie Felson, Ram Bowen, Chance Wayne, Hud Bannon, Lew Harper, Professor Michael Armstrong, Butch Cassidy, Rheinhardt, Hank Stamper, Joseph Rearden, Henry Gondorff, Doug Roberts, William F. ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody, Reggie Dunlop, Murphy, Frank Galvin, Harry Keach, Gen, Leslie Groves, Sidney J. Mussburger, Sully Sulllivan, Harry Ross, Dodge Blake and John Rooney may be facing a hard situation. But it’s almost as hard to think of any 83 year-old guy working out in an oncologist’s waiting room and “doing squat thrusts” as being anywhere close to on the ropes.
On one hand, I’m told, he was taken from his home in Westport, Ct. to Norwalk Hospital last week in an ambulance. But he also drove Barbara Walters around the track at Lime Rock (also in Connecticut) 10 days ago for a program she was shooting on the topic of longevity. A tough old bird and best wishes to a good fellow.

John Adams, the seven-part miniseries, has been airing for two hours now on HBO East, and the rave reviews, I now realize, were totally on the money. It’s awfully damn good — superbly acted, atmospherically correct, absorbing at every turn, great visual compositions, “important,” delicious.

It’s the kind of thing that feature films have obviously given up on. Unless, you know, Roland Emmerich is the director and every now and then a guy’s head gets blown off by a cannonball or a church full of American Christians is burned to the ground by British troops and we can hear the screaming and the agony.
A leader in the war for independence, principally in his role as diplomat and negotiator par excellence, Adams as the second president of the United States (1797-1801). He also served as America’s first Vice President (1789-1797). He was defeated for re-election by Thomas Jefferson.
I love that line in Jill Lepore‘s New Yorker piece about Paul Giamatti, who plays Adams, “scowling beneath fifty-seven different wigs.” And her observation, which is accurate, that the film, based on David McCullough‘s biography, “is animated as much by Adams’s many private resentments as by the birth of the United States. It is history, with a grudge.”

For me, it’s 18th Century history starring (I’m sorry) Miles from Sideways, but in a much more fierce and passionate guise. When Giamatti gets indignant, there’s that petty sound he makes with his voice, and I’m sorry but it’s all Miles. I just see him losing it at that winery and picking up that clay pot and sloshing down the “pours.” And I wish the producers had decided to give Giamatti a prosthetic nose like the one belonging to Real McCoy. John Adams (pictured above) looked English, and Giamatti simply doesn’t. And they could’ve fixed or modified this.
If you’re in the Pacific time zone, there’s plenty of time to catch this thing. It starts at 8 pm and last three hours. The subsequent episodes will be one hour each.