“Some critics have called Stanley Kramer‘s films out of touch, but a look now at many of them proves they were anything but,” writes Envelope columnist Pete Hammond in a just-published piece. This is “perhaps a reason why the Academy nominated six of them for the Best Picture Oscar, including Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, which featured Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn and Sidney Poitier in a movie about the consequences of a racially-mixed romance.

“It won Oscars for Hepburn and original screenplay, and in light of the current Barack Obama frenzy, the movie could not be more relevant, as evidenced by the audience reaction when Poitier, as a magna cum laude too-good-to-be-true doctor, pours cold water on the far-off fantasy of whether a black person could ever become secretary of state or even president.
“Obama himself is the product of just the kind of inter-racial marriage this movie portrays, and it’s not hard to imagine him now in a slightly altered version of the Poitier role, an almost perfect and brilliant Harvard-educated African American coming to dinner at the White House.
“Oh, and did we mention the name of the woman who runs Hepburn’s art gallery and strongly questions Poitier’s suitability for her daughter? Hillary.”
HE comment: I didn’t think that the beef against Stanley Kramer’s films was that they were “out of touch.” The beef was that they were too stiff and earnest in their socially liberal frame-ology, that they were so pointedly topical and issue-driven that they didn’t really breathe as drama. I nonetheless have always enjoyed and respected Kramer’s best social-issue films, which numbered four and were directed in tandem over a four-year period — The Defiant Ones, On The Beach, Inherit the Wind and Judgment at Nuremberg.
I never felt very enthused about the films he made after Nuremberg, including Ship of Fools. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner felt suffocating and sound-stagey. The Secret of Santa Vittoria, R.P.M., Bless the Beasts & Children and Oklahoma Crude were all problematic or worse.
A new DVD of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner hit the shelves yesterday.

The Page‘s Mark Halperin has apologized for passing along an alleged comment by John Edwards (a.k.a. that “gutless dithering douchebag pussy“) that Barack Obama is “kind of a pussy” and how Edwards has “real questions about Obama’s toughness, his readiness for the office.”
Public talk is often more distinguished but sometimes less truthful; private talk is always about the lowdown.
An older friend told me yesterday he wonders the same thing. He believes that Michelle Obama wears the pants in their family, that Barack is “pussy-whipped,” and that he may therefore lack the cojones to be a strong president. I don’t see it that way at all. I think most guys have two faces — the steady brave one they wear in front of their friends and enemies and business colleagues, and the one they wear when they’re taking out the garbage at home with the wife laying down the law. I don’t know that one necessarily feeds (or feeds off) the other.

Same line, same idea, different contexts. The meaning depends upon who’s saying it and how it’s pitched. Example #1 is from a very well-known 1962 film. The line implies a kind of enigmatic intrigue. Example #2 is from a very well known 1976 film. This time the implication is that the speaker is sick, deranged.

The embedded code for the 2.13 MSNBC “Morning Joe” segment I tried to post is clearly different than last night’s (“An Embarassment of Niches”) but it doesn’t post. Instead you see last night’s segment all over again. The MSNBC techies need to get their act together. Irritating. Drop it.

“I’ve recently watched two largely dismissed large-format Hollywood films in exemplary HD transfers– The Big Country and the 1966 Lawrence of Arabia wannabe Khartoum. In both cases certain dramatic deficiencies of the films that would have been apparent [as] talking-heads dramas on your 21″ Sylvania in the 60s or 70s, receded in importance when the films again benefited from having their sheer size and detail restored.
“Seeming subtleties of presentation make a big difference. A film that is captivating in a sparkling clear print can be a chore in an only slightly muddier one. A film that seems trite on TV can delight on a big screen when its visuals dominate its words.
“We know all this, but as we were reminded this week, the chances to see such movies on the big screen are fewer and fewer and, of course, for many films they have never existed again since their initial release. HDTV is not the same as having everything in 35mm or 70mm on a big screen, but at the same time, it is very different from the standard-def TV experience we’ve known for 50 years.”
— from an excellent piece by Nitrateville‘s Mke Gebert about re-discovering the pleasures of big-format films via big-screen high-def.

What a gutless dithering douchebag pussy John Edwards has turned out to be, sitting on the sidelines, thinking things over, unable to pull the trigger for days on end. My respect for the man has gone out the window.
It’s not that he’s reportedly thinking about endorsing Hillary Clinton, which would be fine. (She’s all but finished anyway and the Edwards voters have already re-aligned so what does it matter?) It’s the fact that he’s been acting like the softer, squishier, less decisive brother of Gregory Peck‘s character in The Big Country. By the standards of that 1958 William Wyler film, a part of me wants to see the kind of decisiveness exemplified by Burl Ives or Charles Bickford‘s characters in my Presidential candidates.

Chicago investors are reportedly looking to build McMansions on just-acquired land right next to the Hollywood sign. Opportunity knocks! The city of Los Angeles needs to make a definitive statement to itself and the world that there is no such thing as hallowed ground in this town when it comes to potential real-estate booty. No major U.S. city has shown less regard for its past (even when it came to preserving ’50s kitsch establishments like Tiny Naylors back in the ’80s). Build the homes, get your ugly on, and hire some crack riflemen to go out and kill those coyotes

A discussion is warranted about Pete Hammond‘s belief/theory (which is shared by yours truly) that given the strong support/affection for Michael Clayton, particularly among the over-60 crowd, the odds favor at least one Clayton nominee — Tilda Swinton — getting rewarded with an Oscar.
The thinking is that Academy voters, wanting to give Tony Gilroy‘s film something but knowing that a Best Picture or Best Director or Best Original Screenplay or Best Supporting Actor win won’t happen (because No Country, the Coen brothers, Diablo Cody and Javier Bardem have these prizes all but sewn up), will throw all their Clayton love to Swinton.
Swinton has the added plus factor of having gained a bit of weight for her role as a never-jangled corporate flunky and thereby made herself look less than fully attractive (flab being a symptom among Type-A professionals of bad food, late-night drinking, stress and anxiety). Academy members have always seemed to admire any performance that physically alters or deglamorizes. I know, I know….the height of shallow thinking. But why was there laughter when Denzel Washington said “by a nose” before he announced that the Best Actress Oscar was going to Nicole Kidman for her performance in The Hours?
http://goldderby.latimes.com/awards_goldderby/2008/02/tilda-swinton-w.html

In a Berlin Film Festival review of Filth and Wisdom, the first feature directed by Madonna, Times Online critic James Christopher has waxed mixed-positive. Wait…is that an accurate way to characterize? It’s almost a pan but with a Valentine flourish. Like Christopher was staggered by the fact that it was a lot better than expected, which led to his writing from a generous (i.e., relieved) state of mind.
“Despite its many shortcomings and an ending so mushy and neat it would embarrass Richard Curtis, Madonna has done herself proud. Her film has an artistic ambition that has simply bypassed her husband, the film director Guy Ritchie. She captures that wonderfully accidental nature of luck when people√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s lives intersect for a whole swathe of unlikely but cherishable reasons. ‘Altmanesque’ would be stretching the compliment too far, but Filth and Wisdom shows Madonna has real potential as a film director.”

It was already pretty “official” by most standards, but Hollywood’s writers made it even more so last night when they voted to end the WGA strike by a 92.5% majority. That means, apparently, that 7.5% of the 3,775 members (roughly 345 writers) said no, not good enough, back to the barricades.

As a way of challenging HE talk-backers who screamed in defiance in response to my two There Will Be Blood/”I drink your milkshake” postings last Friday (enough! it’s jumped the shark! we can’t stand it any more!), here’s a column posted today (2.12) by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson on the same topic. And they admit that they only began to get wind of the milkshake thing a week ago! So give us a break! For Mr. and Mrs. America, this milkshake branding is a relatively new thing. There’s no room for snide elitist judgments on this site. (Kidding!)