Denzel Washington dropped by the Harvard University campus this evening following a screening of The Great Debaters. He did so at the invitation of Dr. S. Allen Counter, a Harvard neuroscience professor who enjoys considerable respect in both Cambridge and Stockholm circles. The event happened at the Carpenter Film Center, smack in the middle of the Harvard campus. Everyone was dressed in tuxedos and gowns except for Jett and myself. Here’s a portion of what Denzel said during the q & a, which lasted about 35 or 40 minutes.

Tuesday, 12.18, 9:35 pm

Another poll confirming very high negatives for Hillary Clinton with 42 % of third-party or independent voters and 17 % of Democrats saying they’ll vote against her no matter what. Younger male voters are “particularly cold,” the story says. “More than half of the adult men younger than 40 said they would use their vote to keep Mrs. Clinton from returning to the White House.” The candidate with the second-highest negatives is Rudy Giuliani.

“Very much in line with recognizable Oprah Winfrey mandates, The Great Debaters promotes literacy and articulateness, highlights the significant oral tradition in black storytelling, crams in as many factual details and statistics as time will allow, and depicts a society that, however impoverished and oppressed, valued knowledge and education,” writes Variety‘s Todd McCarthy in his 12.18 review.

“Above all, pic illustrates that the civil rights movement didn’t just spring out of nowhere in the 1960s, but was preceded by nearly a century’s worth of innumerable small, brave, mostly unknown steps.
“As agenda-driven and well-scrubbed as the film may be, that’s already a lot to pack into a straightforward narrative and doesn’t even include the story’s most unexpected sidelight — the implication that the revered English teacher and intellectually incisive debate coach, the real-life Melvin B. Tolson (played by director Denzel Washington), was a radical labor organizer and possible communist.
“The first notable element for contempo audiences is how well-dressed, polite and well-spoken everyone onscreen is; the era’s profound deprivations notwithstanding, the constant supply of freshly cleaned clothes is impressive. Even more striking is how the rural students — who, when they debate, wear tuxedos — toss off Latin phrases and quotations from James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence with the casual insouciance of Oxford lads. Who knew?”

The trailer for Fool’s Gold (Warner Bros., 2.8.08), which showed before last night’s Juno screening at the Leows/AMC plex near Harvard Square, promises a coarse, idiot-level romcom in the vein of Jewel of the Nile and Romancing the Stone.

You can tell right away from Hudson’s food-throwing-on-the-yacht bit that director Andy Tennant hasn’t lost his knack for over-emphasis. I can only presume that people like myself are going to hate most if not all of this. That seems to be the general idea, at least. Matthew McConaughey, the reigning king of the empties, costars with Kate Hudson, who has made nothing of any consequence since Almost Famous.

The Alliance of Women Journalists has come up with three lists and several awards covering the ’07 moviegoing year. Among their EDA (Excellent Dynamic Activism) Special Mention Award winners: Norbit (Hall of Shame award), Hilary Swank (Actress Most In Need Of A New Agent), Margot at the Wedding (Movie You Wanted To Love But Just Couldn’t), Viggo Mortensen‘s full frontal in Eastern Promises (Unforgettable Moment Award plus Best Depiction Of Nudity or Sexuality)…whatever.

The trailer for Drillbit Taylor (Paramount, 3.21), the Owen Wilson-playing-bodyguard-for-schoolkids comedy directed by Steven Brill, written by Kristofor Brown and Seth Rogen and produced by Judd Apatow.

This is one of those six-degrees-of-separation deals based upon on a complete aural misunderstanding, but I feel it needs to be discussed and cleared up in this heated political season. I first saw Warren Beatty, Robert Towne and Hal Ashby‘s Shampoo in ’74, before I was a journalist and had access to press kits and way, way before the arrival of the IMDB. So for many years I was under the impression that Beatty’s hairdresser character, whose name was actually George Roundy (a mixture of “randy” and “roundelay“), was called George Romney.

George Romney and 10 year-old son Mitt in 1957; Warren Beatty in Shampoo

I’ve seen the film six or seven times since, and although I’ve had some slight hearing problems lately his last name has always sounded an awful lot like “Romney” to me. Naturally, I always thought it was curious that Towne and Beatty would choose this name given the existence of the real-life George Romney, the Republican governor Michigan (from ’63 to ’69) who run for president in ’68, and whose son MItt Romney is currently running for the ’08 Republican presidential nomination. But I also thought it might be some kind of intended anti-Republican jab, given Shampoo‘s political tone.
Anyway, the Romney thing was pure disorientation on my end and utterly meaningless. But then I figured, wait…I’ll bet others have had this idea that Beatty’s Shampoo guy is called George Romney. Then I realized that mishearing it wasn’t my fault at all. It was the sound systems they had in theatres in the mid ’70s, which were terrible.

Please forgive me for not posting anything over the last hour. I ran down to Joe’s American Bar (Dartmouth and Newbury) to hoist a glass over the news that Peter Jackson and New Line have buried the hatchet and announced that J.R.R. Tolkien‘s The Hobbit is going to be made into two films. This will give me posting material for the next two or three years. I would have even more to work with (i.e., bounce off) if Steven Spielberg were involved as an exec producer. The only bummer, according to Variety‘s Michael Fleming, is that Sam Raimi may direct instead of Jackson.

Yesterday the WGA denied waivers that would allow the Golden Globes and Oscar awards show to use writers for jokes and patter. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was also told “no” on the use of clips from motion pictures and past Oscar shows — i.e., no clips of the performances and films being nominated. The mood of the producers, who had been in denial for weeks about this possibility, is starting to side-step into freak-out mode. But if they get creative the shows could actually be more fun.

Film Experience author Nathaniel R. has come up with five suggestions for award-show diversions that won’t require writing. My two favorites are (a) all Best Actor candidates thrown naked into a Russian bathhouse set to fend off real life assassins with their bare hands, and (2) Sweeney Todd star Johnny Depp shaves the heavily-bearded Phillip Seymour Hoffman…live!

I saw Juno for the second time last night at a Leows/AMC plex near Harvard Square. It played a tiny bit better than it did at the Toronto Film Festival, which was mostly thumbs-up to begin with. It’s a smart, ascerbic and kind-hearted film about…a bunch of things. Growing up, good parenting, working through stuff, finding true love? It grooves, it meanders, it has a heart…and I could tell that the people sitting near me in the small theatre were falling for it.

Ellen Page is still enjoyably spunky and feisty in the lead role but (here goes again) she still seems like too much of a scrawny elf to play a woman with child — it’s a little like watching Rick Moranis portray Primo Carnera. And that guitar duet Page performs at the end with Michael Cera is just…fine. Which is another word for nice. Which isn’t enough of a finale for a film that would be a Best Picture nominee.
But Jennifer Garner‘s performance as a clenched, hard-wired career woman who’s looking to adopt Juno’s baby went up a notch or two. I don’t know why exactly. She’s doesn’t have a big money scene or anything. She just inhabits very fully and believably — her character feels lived-in. Ands that final baby-holding moment works pretty well. All I know is that I sat up and took notice and went “hmmm.”
So I’m thinking of putting Garner third in my list of Best Supporting Actress nominees, right behind Cate Blanchett and AmyRyanAmyRyanAnyRyan.

Throwing a bag of Mexican takeout food at a cab is not what anyone would call a mature or attractive thing to do, but that’s what I did last night after a cab almost hit me as I was crossing Commonwealth Avenue. And I have to be honest and say it felt right for about three or four seconds. Then I felt like an idiot.

I turned to my left and saw a pair of killer headlights screeching towards me. Instead of leaping out of the way I went into a dead-freeze, deer-in-the-headlights mode. The cab stopped — no exaggeration — with less than six inches to spare.

Anyone who’s ever escaped getting hit like this knows that the usual reaction is rage. I think I said something really cool and clever like “what the f— are you doing, asshole?” Their cab driver screamed something back in the same vein. That tore it — he almost kills me and then he yells at me? That’s when I threw the Mexican takeout, which hit the passenger-door window.

The cabbie, offended by the assault, hit the brakes and jumped out, and I went into mock Sideways mode (Thomas Haden Church swinging the club on the golf course) and howled like an animal. The driver jumped back in and drove off. End of dignified altercation.

There’s nothing left to do now except sift through the last eleven and a half months for films to reconsider…maybe. The year is over, it’s settle-down time, screenings have stopped, and Christmas is only seven days away. So how about some lookin’ back, end-of-the-year love for the crazy-brave but titanically miscalculated Grindhouse, the three-hour exploitation double- feature flick that bombed so badly last April it just about sank the Weinstein Co.? It was a wank and a tank, but at least it was about an idea — a conceit — and it stuck to its guns.

Kurt Russell, Rose McGowan in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof

There should at least be a a little retro affection for Death Proof, the Quentin Tarantino segment that delivered some of the tastiest, self-amused dialogue of the year, as well as one of the all-time greatest car-chase sequences…no?
I sat through a good portion of Death Proof the other day. (Not the shorter theatrical version, which is probably gone forever, but the longer, lap-dance version that came out on DVD last September.) There’s an art to making an agreeable waste of time — a film that totally skims the surface and brings absolutely nothing to the table of any consequence, but at the same time one that people half-enjoy because it has some nice moves and (this is essential) is 100% committed to its sense of swagger and is head-over-heels in love with itself because of this.

I love, love, love the Suntman Mike dialogue in the barroom in the first half of this thing. Truly, there is something amazing brewing inside Kurt Russell as he peels off line after line in that slow-hand, seductive drawl of his. I said last April that Tarantino should have made a kind of Iceman Cometh out of this character and this setting — it could have been talk- talk-talk for two or even three hours and I, for one, would have eaten it all up. For the first time in his life Tarantino could have delved and dug in. He could have followed his feelings and beliefs and lamentations and just gone for broke. He could have riffed and probed and wondered about every last thing under the sun, and I would have relished it. (Probably.)

But Tarantino and his genre-wallowing partner Robert Rodriguez were committed to their memory-lane concept — making a pair of deliberately cheesey exploitation films that could have played in an urban grindhouse theatre in 1971– and so Death Proof had to leave that Austin bar and head for the hills of California (i.e., that rural winding-road area north of Solvang) and become a dopey but thrilling car-chase movie, which everyone admired for the 100% real, CG-free thrills.
My only beef with this abrupt changeover was that Tarantino totally abandoned his affection for Stuntman Mike by turning him into a raging psycho who moaned and wailed like a nine year-old when things went against him.

What is unquestionable is that by sticking to their Grindhouse concept Tarantino and Rodriguez outsmarted themselves and Harvey Weinstein and most of the ticket-buying Average Joes, who either didn’t get it or decided the idea was too much of a throwaway thing (especially with that three-hour length) and paid to see Disturbia instead.

I suppose I’m just raising a glass to Russell and Stuntman Mike and the movie that Death Proof could have been if Tarantino had had the character and the balls to think beyond doing ’70s genre revisitings and become a real writer and filmmaker, which I thought he might become in the early to mid ’90s before heaving a great sigh and finally realizing he’s too lazy and distracted by this and that to buckle down.

But in spurts and flashes the first half of Death Proof showed again that Tarantino still has the voice and the music. What a shame that he won’t (or can’t) focus and really get down.