10 or 12 seconds of music, all strings, two notes, no melody. I’m figuring people know the movie it’s from anyway. It’s got a very strong vibe. Obviously not a comedy.

For the sake of its own dignity, the Cannes Film Festival should impose limits upon itself in terms of providing a forum for questionable, possibly tacky films to make a pre-release splash. I know very little about the upcoming Sex and the City movie, but my first reaction to reading Elizabeth Snead‘s 3.14 Envelope story that the 5.30 New Line release might make its worldwide debut in Cannes was “oh, no…bad idea.”

Snead quoted Sarah Jessica Parker ( a.k.a., Carrie Bradshaw) as saying “we are all still figuring out what we want in terms of the movie…whether it’s at Cannes two weeks before it opens domestically…it will all shake down in the next week or so.”
Speaking at Showest, Parker told Snead that “a handful of people have seen it and have been very surprised by the seriousness [of the film]…there’s something that happens in this movie and it’s really about realizing your own complicity and disappointment…you know the necessity of friends, but at a certain point, as a grown-up person, you have to take care of yourself. There’s still plenty of ripe old salty dirty stuff. But I think it’s a really smart story and I think Michael Patrick wrote a beautiful screenplay. I feel like he wrote the role of a lifetime for me and it was just such an amazing experience.”
It won’t be a “tragedy” if Sex and the City goes to Cannes. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is being shown there, after all. The festival screened Ocean’s 13 last year, and Brett Ratner‘s X-Men 3: The Last Stand and The DaVinci Code the year before. Still, Sex in the City at Cannes would drop the prestige levels by a notch or two. C’mon…you know it would. Nothing dramatic or devastating, but it would be seen as sliding a little bit closer to the swamp.

Congrats to The Reeler’s Stu VanAirsdale for landing a full-time gig with Defamer. It will begin on March 17. I’m predicting that within six months VanAirsdale will have to go to the dentist for cosmetic dentures due to having ground at least a centimeter off his smile teeth. I flirted with some kind of limited Defamer contributor status in late January (I liked the idea of growing HE’s audience), but a little voice kept telling me, “Do this and you’ll die.”

If you’re on the ropes with a life-threatening illness and it doesn’t look good, what difference does it make if you have a cigarette? It’s a tough situation, but if I was Patrick Swayze‘s best friend and he pulled out a smoke and lit up, I’d shake my head but my main attitude would be, “Whatever, man.”

My father’s doing better than Swayze but he’s not in the best of shape either. Bed-ridden, gaunt, stuck in a hospital room. The kids and I paid him a visit last December. He asked to bum a cigarette at one point. I thought about it for two or three seconds and figured where’s the harm at this stage of the game? I told him I don’t smoke but that his grandson Dylan does and that I’d ask. Dylan, 18, visited him a few minutes later and slipped him a butt and a match.
Of course, the only way to sneak a cigarette in a hospital ward is to go outside so the nurses won’t smell it. Except my dad can’t move without someone pushing him in a wheelchair so I knew there’d be trouble. Sure enough, he lit up and a nurse came in almost immediately and gave him hell. My father, a real stand-up guy, said, “It wasn’t my fault entirely…my grandson gave me the cigarette!” The angry nurse found Dylan playing pool in a nearby rec room and grilled him about this. Dylan stood his ground and said he didn’t know what she was on about.
The time not to smoke is when you’re healthy and want to stay that way. But if your goose is more or less cooked, pick your poison and be at peace.

After wandering barefoot in the woods for over a year, Deborah Kampmeier‘s Hounddog, which everyone (and I mean everyone) dissed at Sundance ’07, has finally been acquired for theatrical distribution. The sucker, according to N.Y. Post critic/blogger Lou Lumenick, is Empire Pictures, which plans to open the southern gothic drama in “more than 500” theaters on 7.18.

Robin Wright Penn, Dakota Fanning

If any movie ever had the words “straight to DVD” tattooed on its forehead, it’s this one. Why could Empire be thinking? Is this a tax writedown?
I wrote the following about Hounddog roughly 14 months ago: “I agree with everyone else that it’s nothing. Nothing to see, nothing to release, nothing to rent, nothing to get shocked or stirred about…just another neo-Faulknerian Southern gothic wallow with a tasteful, non-inflammatory Dakota Fanning rape scene.” Robin Wright Penn (has she dropped the last name?) costars as Fanning’s mom.
I added, however, that Fanning “is a very skilled, super-readable scene inhabitor. That may have been obvious to others previously, but this is the first film she’s had to carry as the star.”
Here‘s what Variety‘s Todd McCarthy had to say

Responding to the Weinstein Co.’s decision to open Vicky Cristina Barcelona on 8.29.08 instead of December, N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick wrote a day or two ago that he’d “be tempted to say the Woody Allen movie is being dumped if I hadn’t gotten a lecture last year from Harvey Weinstein himself on how the second half of August is no longer a wasteland.”

I was lectured on this very same point in 1993 by a Columbia Pictures publicist when I was researching an article about Mike Myers‘ So I Married An Axe Murderer. I had mentioned in conversation that August, during which the studio was thinking about releasing the film, was seen as a “dumping ground,” and boy, did they jump all over me! [SIMAAM was finally released on 7.30.93.]
In any case, Lumenick might want to also consider an opinion of VCB that I heard a couple of days ago from an actor-director friend, to wit: “Not great but very good…funny and sweet and sad and way, way better then his last few movies, including Match Point…Penelope Cruz walks away with it. And the sex scene [lesbo action between Scarlett Johansson and Rebeca Hall or Cruz or whomever] is really, really sexy. It’s so weird that Woody Allen did it.”

I watched a DVD of Michael Haneke‘s original 1997 Funny Games last night. Some of it, I mean. Haneke’s English-language version (which opens tomorrow) is such an exact remake — shot for shot, line for line — that I couldn’t stay with it. It’s simply too ugly to absorb twice. I’ll never see the new version or the old version ever again. And yet the game Haneke is playing is undeniably about something that matters. If you can take it, you should see it.
“Can a movie be gripping and repellent at the same time?,” asks Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman. “In Funny Games, a mockingly sadistic and terrifying watch the middle class writhe like stuck pigs thriller, the director Michael Haneke puts his characters in a vise, and the audience too. I wouldn’t recommend Funny Games to a lot of people, yet I won’t dismiss it either. It’s been made with brutal fascination and skill, and a kind of sick-puppy suspense.”

From a visual standpoint, the Wachowski brothers’ Speed Racer (Warner Bros. 5.9) looks like interesting comic-book candy. Here’s the high-def trailer, and the Quicktime version. I can’t say I’ve seen a feature film with this precise visual scheme (live actors-meet-cartoon reality) ever before. It’s like Sin City in color, minus the noir attitude. The more it went on, the more I was willing to overlook the McDonalds’ logo on Emile Hirsch‘s helmet.

I got into a fierce argument with an attorney friend yesterday about Obama vs. Clinton. He voted for Obama in the California primary, argues his case with friends and may donate to his campaign, he says. But he doesn’t agree with my feelings about the malignant tone and spirit of the Clinton campaign. He doesn’t exactly believe that Obama and Clinton are tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee, but he feels they’re more or less cut from the same cloth. So I wrote him a letter this morning to apologize and explain where I’m coming from.

Several HE readers have claimed I’ve never precisely said why I’m an Obama guy, so I figured I’d post this e-mail and shut them up forever.

“I’m sorry for being excitable and losing my temper and shutting down,” I began. “I should treat you with more respect and affection. It’s just that whatever Obama’s faults may be (not aggressive enough, not macho enough), to me he’s a guy with a special light around him. Whatever else he may actually be or will show himself to be down the road, he is, I believe, smart, temperate and innately wise about human nature, political gamesmanship and managerial matters. Most importantly I believe him to be an immensely important bringer of symbolic change.

“Obama is not just another guy hustling his way into power who isn’t that different from Hillary Clinton, blah, blah. It truly repulses me to hear you say that. That is the lawyer in you, and I really hate that kind of talk.

“Obama is the guy, I believe, because history is not just telling us this — it is grabbing us by the lapels and shouting in our faces, ‘Will you crawl out of your pathetic little foxholes and listen, please?’ Obama is a tough Chicago politician with some over-zealous people on his team, probably, but clearly (to me anyway) his own man. My intuition (which I trust greatly), my sense of things, my psychological perceptions tell me he’s the closest thing to ‘the guy we’ve been waiting for’ in decades, in part because he says things like ‘we are the people we’ve been waiting for.’

“My understanding of history says that major choices and bends in the road appear very rarely. Only a fool would say that this way is the absolute pure-beautiful-right way to go and the other way is the way of agony, falling dead frogs and rancid toilet water, but Obama, I believe, represents a primal generational gearshift — a bringer of significant change in how we think, see ourselves and deal with our own problems and those of other nations. He represents, at the very least, a generational passing of the torch. And let’s face it — a guy with his middle and last name alone in the White House would do more to humanize and rejuvenate our profile with Europe, the Middle East and Asia than anything Clinton or McCain could do, policy or legislation-wise.

“Bush-Clinton-Bush is over…it has to be.

“God knows that Hillary Clinton has shown herself to be a detestable party member by suggesting to Democratic voters that if she doesn’t win the nomination, they might want to think about voting for the only other candidate with a lifetime of experience — John McCain. She has shown an apparent willingness to bomb Dresden, burn the house down and poison the pond before the battle with McCain even starts. She has shown herself to be sociopathic in he apparent belief that her winning the nomination is all. There seems to be no little voice inside her that says ‘you’re taking this too far….this isn’t just about you.’ Her kitchen-sink campaign has been avaricious, two-faced and despicable. She’s played to fear and lied and misstated and failed to stand up for even her own personal dignity.

“On top of which I cannot stand the idea of having to listen to that braying voice and look at those awful bags under her eyes for the next four to eight years. I weep at that prospect. I deflate. But she could be the most physically and vocally appealing politician in history and she’d still be repulsive.

“The race cards have been played repeatedly, and if you haven’t kept up with this, I am not going to educate you. She’s not playing Strom Thurmond race cards — she’s dishing her own race cards out in her own way, and in so doing is appealing to the lowest and least educated and the most fearful people out there. She is divisive, creepy, overly scripted and throughly hated by Bubba males. Obama is the one with Republicans and independents ready to vote for him, not she.

“Obama, yes, will fuck up, and fail to do things the right way, in some people’s opinion. His supporters will get him in trouble sooner or later and he will have to correct his course, and maybe fire some people. He will piss people off for this, that or whatever. But the record shows that Obama has run the wiser and smarter campaign. He is cool, measured, programmatic, decisive. (I didn’t agree with his firing of Samantha Power — she only said what millions believe — but at least he did it quickly.) He’s the new guy with the new attitude, and it is time to go with that, cross our fingers and hope for the best.

“It is certainly time to take the reins away from the selfish boomers who have screwed things up beyond belief. We’ve been left with an economy in a total shambles (we’re about to suffer a recession, we owe the souls of our children and our grandchildren to the Chinese, the dollar is at 1.55 against the Euro, gas was at $1.40 a gallon when Bush came in and now it’s now a bit more than $4 dollars a gallon), we’re choking ourself to death with greenhouse gases, there’s no money for the social welfare of my sons’ generation….the greedy boomers have polluted and/or taken it all. It’s really time for the boomer greedheads to go away, and a GenX guy (Obama was born in ’62, which actually makes him a cusp guy) to come in and maybe do some good while fucking things up according to his own flaws and inclinations.

“In this context I believe that Bush-Clinton-Cheney-McCain represents, in a manner of speaking and perception, one thing (with Hillary representing more hate and divisiveness and right-wing animus and dysfunctional-obsessive tendencies, despite her liberal-progressive inclinations), and Obama represents another. It will be a kind of death of the soul to cast our lot once again with Bush-Clinton ….truly a death of the soul, a swallowing of the ‘nothing changes and we’re all screwed so kick back and have a drink’ pill, a death of belief in possibility and constructive tomorrows and turnabouts, a renewal of the old battles and bullshit.

“The election is not a snore, and you are betraying a very rancid attitude by saying this. We are facing a major split in the road, and what happens next November couldn’t be more important. Obama is a turner of the page, an emblem of our better and fairer selves. There seems to be something fundamentally temperate and wise about the guy. He seems more down with the here-and-now than Hillary or McCain. He will really get rolling with arresting global warming, restoring the economy, getting us out of Iraq. I applaud his statements that he’s not reluctant to negotiate with the bad guys.

“Do I worry that he’s not macho enough? Frankly, yes…but no one’s perfect. He’ll obviously need to improve on that score. But I believe in his capacity for growth.”

Alejandro Amenabar, director of The Sea Inside (winner for the ’05 Best Foreign-Language Oscar) and The Others, is about to begin filming Agora, an historical epic starring Rachel Weisz. They’re kidding, right? A title that means absolutely nothing to anyone except ancient-history scholars? Did I not just quote Jack Lechner‘s observation that one should never choose a title that’s “incomprehensible until you see the movie, but not intriguing enough to make you want to see it”?

An 1885 painting of Hypatia by Charles William Mitchell.

Weisz will play Hypatia of Alexandria, a mathematician, astronomer and philosopher of ancient Egypt. The story will be about the religious revolts of Roman-ruled Alexandria, where Hypatia battles to save the wisdom of the ancient world contained in the city’s famous library. Agora will also star Max Minghella, Rupert Evans and Michael Lonsdale.
If anyone’s interested and not concerned with spoilers, consult the Wikipedia page about Hypatia and scroll down to the portion that describes her death. Echoes of Braveheart; not for the squeamish.

Hormonally-driven, sensation-seeker, risk-enjoyer — three characteristics of the type of guy (like former New York governor Eliot Spitzer) who tends to cheat, according to this 3.12 Newsweek article by Mary Carmichael. Cheating on a partner you’re commited to and care for is obviously hurtful and destructive and deserving of condemnation. But I have to admit that the person being described here is me. I’m easily bored, and I find myself saying more and more often, “Is that all there is?” The things that did it for me ten years or ten months ago don’t seem to satisfy as much today. I need more. I’m not proud of this. I wish it were otherwise.