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.

Is Steven Soderbergh‘s Che “an unreleasable dud in its current form? Or is it ‘virile, muscular filmmaking,’ as Peter Bradshaw wrote in The Guardian?

“Guess what: It’s both. Based on trade journal reports and on-screen evidence, Soderbergh’s massive undertaking wasn’t really ready for Cannes. The director barely made the deadline, and you can tell. The result is a shaggy beast — maddening, incomplete, the work of a historical ironist who has no taste or interest in conventional biography.
“Another American competitor, director Clint Eastwood‘s Changeling, is severe ’20s-style pulp [that’s] guided by a fearsomely committed performance by Angelina Jolie. But Che is the more interesting work. It is defiantly non-dramatic as well as a commercial impossibility. And it√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s the most vital work Soderbergh has done in years.” — from a 5.23 Michael Phillips Chicago Tribune piece.

A Fandango survey of 2800 Sex and the City ticket-buyers reports that (a) 94% are women, (b) 67% plan to see it with a group of women; (c) 16% of the female respondents said they are going with a single woman friend; and (d) 6 % said they were going with a man. (I feel sorry for those guys.) It’s expected to do slightly better on its first weekend than The Devil Wears Prada, which did $27.5 million in its opening frame and took in $124.7 by the end of the domestic run. Sex is expected to earn more than $30 million by Sunday night, and possibly exceed $35 million.
I’ll be seeing it for the first time at a noon show in Paris tomorrow, and will file sometime tomorrow afternoon.
No screening invites since the good people at Warner Bros., who apparently ran screenings for this New Line/HBO co-production, have kept me on their don’t-invite-him for several months because, as I explained a while back, I had the temerity to write this ten-month-old piece about an abrasive ad/trailer for No Reservations. Former WB marketing chief Dawn Taubin (a.k.a., “the village idiot”) apparently became offended. The ban officially kicked in three months later (it takes Warner Bros. distribution execs a long while to get around to making decisions), and that was that.
I wouldn’t mind as Warner Bros., like other studios, is basically out of the game of making movies for hip or even halfway-hip adults. It has CG’ed and downmarketed itself into the cultural pig trough. Hey, Jeff Robinov, I have an idea — how about about making Grand Theft Auto 4: The Movie? You could make some money with that and honor the Warner Bros. legacy (which is being honored by You Must Remember This, a Richard Schickel documentary about the good old tyrannical Jack L. Warner days) at the same time.
The ’08 exceptions to not being in the WB groove will be missing out on press screenings of (a) The Dark Knight and (b) Clint Eastwood‘s Gran Torino. And I regret, of course, that the WB advertising that I used to get during Oscar season is now history.

Fox News’ Liz Trotta making her initial Sunday gaffe about certain parties wanting to “knock off Osama…er, Obama…well, both, if they could.” And yesterday’s apology. For those who, like me, have been off in a realm of their own.
How do you say something like this — how does a savvy adult of either gender think something that flippantly toys with the idea of a presidential candidate’s death? — and then dismiss it as merely an aspect of a “very colorful campaign”?

It’s not that this red-band trailer for M. Night Shyamalan‘s The Happening (20th Century Fox, 6.13) has footage that’s especially jolting. But it feels more engrossing (being eerier, grabbier, more fluidly cut) than the teasers and trailers have come before. Here are the Windows, Quicktime and Real Player versions.