“Hollywood is not Republican country,” Ben Stein has told Politico‘s Jeffrey Ressner in a column about John McCain‘s fundraising efforts there. “There are some of us here, but not enough to make a difference. I don’t think Hollywood will be counted on to make a great deal of support for Senator McCain.”
Ressner reports that McCain’s contributors include producer Jerry Bruckheimer, Paramount Pictures chief Brad Grey, MGM chief Harry Sloan, Time Warner chairman Richard Parsons, Saturday Night Live creator-producer Lorne Michaels, General Electric chairman Jeffrey Immelt, former MGM owner Kirk Kerkorian, as well as Stein, Rip Torn and Dick Van Patten. (Immelt and Grey also donated to Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, Ressner adds.)
Rip Torn?

There’s an indie puzzlement called Bunraku now shooting in Bucharest, Romania. Josh Hartnett, Demi Moore, Ron Perlman and Woody Harrelson are costarring under director-writer Guy Moshe. Here’s the link to an IMDB plot synopsis. Romanian friend Laura Gutanu sent me this 5.19 story about the film that appeared in Ciao!, a Romanian publication. Odd that a straight news org chose this photo.

Five long years after the publication of Alanna Nash‘s “The Colonel: The Extraordinary Story of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley,” producers David Permut and David Binder have acquired the screen rights. But given the tragic slant of the story, it sounds HBO-ish to me.

The film will inevitably register as a downer of some kind, as any kind of honest translation of the book will basically be the story of a greedy Svengali‘s brilliant promotion of Presley (from the mid to late ’50s), followed by the slow ruination of his musical reputation and career (from the early ’60s onward) by cutting Presley off from the world (i.e., no European concert tours), turning him into a joke by putting him in those godawful ’60s movies, looking the other way at Presley’s drug dependency and basically grabbing all he could until Presley turned things around somewhat with that 1968 TV concert comeback show.
It’ll be, in short, a tragedy about how Parker went for the short-end money and all but killed the King’s career, but also about how Presley was a none-too-bright soft touch who let himself get pushed around by Parker, lacking the character to say “you’re fired” and not getting himself back into a semi-serious rock groove until it was almost too late.
Permut and Binder’s film will be called The Colonel. The role has Randy Quaid‘s name written all over it. Parker was in his mid ’40s when Elvis’s career began to take off; Quaid is in his late ’50s. Who else would be right or it? Somebody big and fat with a natural oozing-sleazeball quality.

Quentin Tarantino has told Canal TV that he’s “just finished” the first draft of Inglorious Bastards, and “if all goes well” it’ll show at next year’s Cannes Film Festival? If you buy that, you don’t know Quentin.

I was looking around for the big Sydney Pollack-Judy Davis-Liam Neeson blowout scene from Husbands and Wives, but couldn’t find it. If anyone has a link…

Brian Lowry‘s 5.27 Variety piece about old franchises refusing to die (Indy, Rocky, Rambo, John McLane) says that in “this latest flurry of comebacks, all these heroes can still party (and punch) like it’s 1989.”
But he’s doing a disservice, I feel, to Sylvester Stallone‘s recent Rambo flick since it’s the only aging action-hero franchise to deliver a truly fresh charge. The genius of this sleazy Southeast Asian actioner was to reinvent and reinvigorate an old formula by submitting to a kind of deranged self-parody. The key is that it was so unabashedly nutso — to me it was only a couple of steps removed from being an outright comedy — that it didn’t feel like a here-we-go-againer.
“It’s so relentlessly blunt, so absurdly violent in a ’70s exploitation vein, so visceral and depraved and elbow-deep in jungle blood & guts that I loved it,” I wrote on 1.27.08. “Rambo ‘works’ in its own deranged way. It’s like an ultra-violent half-time show at the Super Bowl. It’s shit, of course, but it’s fast, fun and agreeably grotesque.”
As Stallone said to a Scottish radio interviewer earlier this year, “What do you mean one of the most violent movies of all time? It is the most violent movie of all time!”

“We need your help to make a critical decision — our next official campaign t-shirt,” reads a 5.27 e-mail from Chelsea Clinton. “We recently launched a contest to design a campaign t-shirt, and I couldn’t believe the incredible response. We got thousands of great entries. They were creative, inspirational, funny, and beautiful. It was amazing to see the devotion to my mom’s campaign come through in each t-shirt.

“It wasn’t easy to narrow it down, but we’ve chosen five we think are particularly great, and now we need your help in making our final decision. Please vote for your favorite design — the winning shirt will go on sale in our online campaign store. Please click here to see the finalists and vote for your favorite.
“Thanks again for everything you’re doing to help my mom!”

In Contention‘s Kris Tapley, currently in London and working in some capacity for the Times Online, has assembled some of the better Sydney Pollack tribute pieces that came out within the last 24 hours.

The best overall belongs to Time‘s Richard Schickel. The bluntest and least gentle is from the Guardian‘s David Thomson. (All the delicate souls who went into cardiac arrest over my comments about the passing of Bob Clark should definitely read this.) Bloomberg News‘ Peter Rainer delivers a straight and wise assessment. Some Came Running‘s Glenn Kenny delivers an intriguing thought or two.

Jett hadn’t seen Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, so we caught it yesterday at the UGC Les Halles. (19 euros for two, or roughly $28 US.) It sank in estimation on my end. I was half-okay, half-unsatisfied with it after the 5.18 Cannes screening. Yesterday’s second viewing convinced me that it’s just too silly and George Lucas-y. Anyone who had a fairly good time after seeing it last week or weekend….don’t go a second time! No film infected with the Lucas-collaboration virus ages like fine wine. Precisely the opposite, in fact.