Barack Obama has finally thrown the Rev. Jeremiah Wright under the bus. A friend said Obama needs to throw Wright under the iron wheels of a subway train — which I think he’s now done. Less than an hour ago Obama said he was “angry,” “outraged,” “saddened” and “appalled” by “the spectacle that we saw yesterday,” describing at one point some remarks Wright said last weekend as “ridiculous.”

“At a certain point when a person contradicts what you believe fundamentally, and then he questions whether you believe it in front of the press corps…that’s enough. It’s a show of disrespect to me, and an insult to what we’ve been trying to do in this campaign.”
Obama said that Wright “obviously hasn’t shown much concern for me.” He said he had heard that Wright had given “a performance” and when he watched tapes, he realized that it more than just a case of the former pastor defending himself.
“What became clear to me was that he was presenting a world view that contradicts what I am and what I stand for,” Obama said. “What he said directly contradicts everything about my life. I am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened by the spectacle that we saw yesterday,” Obama told reporters at a North Carolina news conference.

The Cannes Film Festival has officially announced that Fernando Meirelles‘ Blindness (Miramax, 9.12) will open the festival on Wednesday, 5.15. Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover and Gael Garcia Bernal costar.

Gwynneth Paltow during shooting of Two Lovers

On top of which a third French film — Laurent Cantet‘s Entre Les Murs, with Francois Begaudeau — has been added to the Competition:
An American film has also been added to the Competition slate: James Gray‘s Two Lovers, a Brooklyn-set romantic drama about a guy (River Phoenix) torn between the good woman his parents wish he would marry and his beautiful but volatile new neighbor (Gwynneth Paltrow).
As tipped earlier by Variety, Steve McQueen‘s Hunger will open Un Certain Regard on Thursday, 5.15.
French actress Jeanne Balibar and the Iranian author-director Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis) have joined the jury, which will be led this year by Sean Penn.
And finally, it turns out that Barry Levinson‘s What Just Happened? — the Sundance bomb costarring Robert De Niro, Bruce Willis, Catherine Keener, Robin Wright Penn, John Turturro and Sean Penn — will close the festival after all. De Niro will present the Palm d’Or at the closing night ceremonies.

Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason is projecting Iron Man, which I saw earlier this evening, to earn $8 million Thursday night and $103 million over the weekend for an $111 million total. Made of Honor, the counter-programmed, female-angled wedding movie with Patrick Dempsey, is looking at a decent $15 to $18 million.

Paramount publicists made the media wait in line to get into Iron Man at the Arclight this evening. Not unheard of, certainly not an outrage…but it doesn’t happen very often.

An over-examined subject, agreed, but The Australian‘s Eddie Cockrell has nonetheless interviewed yours truly, USA Today and Talk Cinema’s Harlan Jacobson, and Hopscotch Films’ co-owner Troy Lum about the uniform snubbing in this country of all the Iraq War movies. And he’s done a good job of mapping it all out in very precise detail. The piece ran two days ago.
Explanation #1: “Iraq war movies have all been guilt-trippers about an ongoing conflict, whereas the Vietnam movies were all made after the last helicopter left the roof of the American embassy.” Explanation #2: “There have been no surreal, eye-popping, epic-scaled Iraq war movies along the lines of Apocalypse Now or anything that has attempted to sum up the tragedy of the war, except for one, In the Valley of Elah, which deserved a better reception.” Explanation #3: “Everyone is waiting for a facsimile of the last 40 per cent of Stanley Kubrick‘s Full Metal Jacket, which is arguably the best Vietnam War film.”

“Yet Segel’s flaccid member looks pathetic and laughable, especially because it’s attached to a body that is doughy and pallid. It can’t seriously be accused of being capable of anything, let alone of breaking a taboo. So obviously devoid of sexual intent, it symbolizes not so much his character’s abject emotional condition at his girlfriend’s rejection of him, but the sorry state of masculinity in American movies today.” — from still another galumph rant, this one by London Times‘ staffer Christopher Goodwin in yesterday’s issue. Straight out of the HE playbook. He gets it, all right.

My political-junkie hunger suddenly faded last week. The get-Obama ugliness being generated by the Clinton campaign, the Republican attack dogs, the Reagan Democrats and the media chattering class has begun to act on my soul like Zyklon B. I’m finding myself starting to just tune it all out. For the time being, at least. After following this damn race for God knows how many months I’m starting to feel physically sick at some of things being kicked around. MSNNC’s Chris Matthews began one of his shows last week by asking “is race a factor?” He actually said this in so many words.

Iron Man gripe #1 from New Yorker critic David Denby: “Without a continuous infusion of visual poetry, digital spectacle quickly burns through one’s sense of awe.” Gripe #2: “There’s a slightly depressed, going-through-the-motions feel to the entire show.” Gripe #3: “Apart from Downey’s private sense of amusement, the kidding lacks conviction.”

Illustration by John Ritter

The only tactical advantage to seeing Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in Cannes on 5.18 is that critics there will have a jump on those seeing it stateside by perhaps as little as seven or eight hours.

The Cannes press screening will happen at 8:30 am with reviews going up an hour or so after it ends at 10:35 am — make that 11:30 am to 12 noon, Cote d’Azur time. That’s 6:30 am to 7 am New York time, and 3:30 am to 4 am L.A. time. If U.S. domestic screenings happen in the evening, the word from Cannes will be exclusive for two-thirds of a day, give or take. Obviously less so if they happen in the afternoon. I’m hearing that U.S. screenings may begin around noon or 1 pm in the east.

One of the best critics in the business, Matt Zoller Seitz, who’s recently been doing freelance reviews for the N.Y. Times, has decided to bail on the profession in order to be a filmmaker. His comments about this decision suggest he also wants to absorb life in less neurotic, more open-pored terms. You know…a little of that Frank Capra-esque, final-ten-minutes-of-It’s a Wonderful Life quality from time to time.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Seitz seems to think that a film critic’s life doesn’t provide enough in the way of cleansing “happiness moments,” like what some people get from walking in the woods or watching basketball or going bowling or murdering a deer in the forest with a high-powered rifle.
Well, it’s not supposed to do that…hello? If you’ve been lucky enough to be called to the profession of film criticism (or any profession that most people are unable to do for lack of talent or persistence or both), then you do that thing until you die at your desk — simple. And no moaning.
“There’s more to life than movies,” Seitz tells colleague Keith Uhlich, “and I don’t think that, ten years ago, I don’t think I would have said that. But I’m saying it now: there is more to life than movies.
“And I remember a conversation with Sean Burns — I think it might have been in the comments section of the blog — he casually mentioned that Gene Siskel, God rest his soul, was… there was somebody who looked down on Siskel for saying that he skipped some film festival to go to a basketball game. And Burns was completely approving of [Siskel], and I am too. I am too: Go to the goddamn basketball game!

“And when I look back on those hundreds and hundreds of hours that I spent watching movies — many of which were not that memorable, and many of which did not tell a whole lot that I didn’t know — when I realized that they were hours that are gone now and I’m not getting them back…it makes me mad. It makes me mad, honestly, that I’m not gonna get those hours back. You know those are hours I could have been spending with my family. With my loved ones.”
Family? Loved ones? Movies were invented, in part, so you can occasionally escape from these good people. Those near and dear are fine in their time slots (weeknight dinners, Sunday morning, Thanksgiving, the occasional outing or vacation) but “family and loved ones” are certainly not my source of peace or serenity on a day-to-day basis. If you want to be hard-but-honest about it, you could refer to “family” and “loved ones” as your jailers. If you want to go there, I mean. You certainly don’t have to, of course.

I was confused by two Amazon.com statistics regarding Fox Home Video’s 5.13 DVD release of Raoul Walsh‘s The Big Trail (1930). This staid, somewhat cornball John Wayne wagon-train western is immensely watchable due to its being the first Hollywood film to be shot and released in a 70mm widescreen format (which was called “Fox Grandeur”). The problem is that Amazon says the aspect ration is 1.85 when the true aspect ratio is 2.1 to 1. And the running time is given as 212 minutes despite the actual length (according to packaging) being 122 minutes.

Take no notice of the IMDB listing stating that the film’s varying running times are 125 min (35 mm version) and 158 min (70 mm version). Mordaunt Hall‘s N.Y. Times review (which ran on 10.25.30) mentions a Fox Movietone Newsreel as well as an “atmospheric prelude” to the feature. There’s your additional 26 minutes.

Eliott Gould‘s allusion to Alan Arkin‘s Little Murders in that Gothamist interview led me to this YouTube clip of Donald Sutherland‘s famous wedding-scene soliloquy.