Missed this two-day-old Variety story about John Landis directing a movie about EC Comics Mad magazine publisher William Gaines called Ghoulishly Yours. Mad was great in the ’50s and early ’60s but you can’t go home again. No one will care outside of the boomers and baby- busters who read the legendary rag when they were young. Sorry, but a bad idea for a theatrical feature. An HBO film at best.

With the Vanity Fair and Elton John Oscar after-parties cancelled (along with the late-night Oscar party hosted by Rick Yorn, Brent Bolthouse, Patrick Whitesell and Mike De Luca), the Governors Ball has become “the undisputed, hot-ticket, must-go-to after-party,” says Variety‘s Bill Higgins.
Also eighty-sixed are Ed Limato‘s annual Friday before the awards party, Dani Janssen‘s Academy Awards party for the over-70 crowd, the Barry Diller and Diane Von Furstenberg Oscar-eve luncheon for Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter.
All that leaves, according to Higgins, is the annual Night Before party on Saturday, 2.22, the Night Before the Night Before on Friday, and Saturday’s Film Independent Spirit Awards on the beach (which always includes the hugely crowded Shutters party that follows). There’s another thing that Higgins doesn’t mention — an Oscar-nominee party being thrown by Miramax, happening in a cool, high-up place.

This 2.16 N.Y. Times story by Don Van Natta Jr. and Jo Becker goes into pretzel-like contortions in order to not say what’s really going on, but it comes into focus if you settle into the quotes and the careful parsings and hints and whatnot. Bottom line: unless she pulls off a total nuclear blowout in Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania, Clinton is toast.
Van Natta and Becker’s report about a decision by Al Gore and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others to “remain neutral for now in the presidential race in part to keep open the option to broker a peaceful resolution to what they fear could be a bitterly divided convention” is, don’t kid yourself, a slapdown to the Clinton team’s proclaimed intention to purse a backroom winning strategy via superdelegates.
It is particularly a rebuke to that statement by Clinton’s communications director Howard Wolfson that the Clinton campaign will “not concede the race to Barack Obama if he wins a greater number of pledged delegates by the end of the primary season, and if necessary [to rely] on the 796 elected officials and party bigwigs to put her over the top,” as reported two days ago.
This story doesn’t read like much at first, but read it over a second time and let it settle in. Trust me, it’s the next thing to a death-gong.
Hillary could blow Barack out of the water in Texas, Ohio and Pennsvlvania. She could but she almost certainly won’t. Barack will probably match her in Texas delegates, and he could even get more votes. The notion of the space aliens in Ohio and Pennsylvania voting in a radically different way than the way the voters in Virginia and Maryland have just doesn’t figure. It would be just too weird.
And by the way, John Edwards is still acting like a squishy, calculating old-school candy-ass. The man is pathetic.

Agreed — this Verizon FiOS commercial is the cleverest, most likable piece of filmmaking from the hand of Michal Bay since The Rock. Because it has a theme. Because it’s half-sell and half-personal confession. By embracing his rep as the shallowest big-name director around, Bay has almost transcended it. He’ll make his first truly rich and mature (and possibly even moving) film ten years from now. Maybe sooner.

Let’s just take a moment to acknowledge the strange success of The Bucket List. Four out of five of the top critics hated it, and the damn thing keeps selling tickets. It will make $5,191,000 this weekend for a cume of $82 million. Other than the old saw about average audiences having no taste, a view supported by decades of abundant evidence…why? They like the CG travel footage? There’s one good bit in the entire film, which is when Jack Nicholson says that “I believe more people die of visitors than diseases.”

Features of Hasbro’s Cloverfield monster: (a) 70 points of articulation and incredible life-like detail; (B) Authentic sound; (c) 14 inches tall; (d) 10 parasites; (e) Two interchangeable heads; (f) Statue of Liberty head accessory. The Cloverfield monster is available exclusively through HasbroToyShop.com. Limited quantities are available. Includes 3 AAA batteries. Price: $99.99.

What finally happened with Cloverfield? It was at $71,915,658 domestic as of 2.3 and has sold well overseas, but why did the U.S. box-office plummet so radically after the first weekend? Was it the crazy-cam photography, which reportedly made some people sick? Or was is the nonsensical-inexplicable monster to some extent? Flesh-colored, huge ears, 20 stories tall, long spindly arms…pretty damn absurd.
In a cool way, I mean. I genuinely enjoyed the absurdist approach because it made the monster more of an emotional/psychological construct than a pseudo-literal one that might have barely passed muster by movie-logic standards (i.e., the ones that have explained all past movie monsters). But maybe people might have gotten into it a bit more if the monster had been a old-fashioned Godzilla-like super-reptile with flippers and claws and the ability to breathe fire.
Don’t even start with the spoiler whinings. I don’t want to hear even one peep. The movie was seen by millions and now the Hasbro people are marketing the image online. Just shut up. You know who you are.

The unrated extended (i.e., 18 minutes longer) version is out Tuesday, two- and three-disc packages and on worthless HD-DVD. The 176-minute version will screen at the Westside Pavillion on Tuesday night, followed by a Ridley Scott q & a.

A freshly conceived London presentation of my all-time favorite Stephen Sondheim musical has been in previews since last January, opening later this month. Directed by Sam Buntrock, said by a friend who caught it last week to be brilliant and dazzling. Playing at least until May 18th. Any first-hand reports?

To me, the most interesting thing about Caryn James‘ 2.15 N.Y. Times article about how the Oscar nominees for Best Feature Documentary are “where the action is” — politically charged, focused on conflict, urgent messages — is the flames-of-hell photo from Charles Ferguson‘s No End in Sight.

The richest quote comes at the end when James asks Ferguson if the nomination [is] having any effect on his film. He says he has no evidence of this but adds: “If the film wins, there will be one effect. I will have about 60 seconds to say something about Iraq to 200 million people, and I will.”

The HD-DVD death-gong was heard ’round the world a month ago with that hilarious Hitler video, but this 2.15 CNN Money report about Wal-Mart giving the hard-luck Toshiba machines the heave-ho is worth noting as a kind of magic-marker underline.

All well and good that Paramount Vantage is apparently intending to distribute Philip Noyce‘s Mary, Queen of Scots, which will begin filming this spring, but…naaah, forget it. Each movie is its own novel, journey, river, song, etc. And plenty of time will have elapsed between this late ’09 release and The Other Boleyn Girl, which is out on 2.29.