Okay, okay…no more mentions of Uncle Festus. The first-anywhere teaser for Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Crystal Skull is a kind of comic-flamboyant Festus refutation. Too old and tired to play Indy again? Too much of a graybeard Hillary Clinton supporter to direct an Indy film as well as they were directed 21 to 27 years ago? Eat our dust, Festus naysayers!

After the reviewing-the-last-three-Indy films intro (which consists of 40% of the teaser’s length) and an homage to the iconic Indy fedora, it starts off with a clip of a cockney-accented Ray Winstone saying, “This ain’t gonna be easy” and Harrison Ford, standing next to him, saying, “Not as easy as it used to be.”
Then comes the heavy artillery: a series of Harold Lloyd-like CG action sequences that show the past-retirement-age Ford doing stunts that are much wilder and more acrobatic than anything he’s ever done before in these films. Got it.
Then comes the “sell” footage that assures that Crystal Skull is just as much of a popcorn wow as the others. There’s a glimpse of a scene in a warehouse with thousands of wooden crates (the same one in which the Ark of the Covenant was stored at the end of Raiders?), six or seven clips of the South American action scenes with sexy Russian baddie Cate Blanchett barking orders, spear-carrying natives in loincloths, four ancient stone pillars coming together to form a single column….lots and lots of CG that looks like CG. This in itself clearly sets this latest Indy against all the others, which used visual effects, of course, but none this lavish or show-offy.
No aliens, of course. Depicted, I mean. The closest it gets is a very brief clip of a box with the words “Roswell, New Mexico, 1947.”
It looks great, lots of fun and thrills, a barrel of monkeys, I’m there, etc.
He protected the power of the divine. He saved the cradle of civilization. He triumphed over the armies of evil. He smoked a lot of pot and fell asleep in the back of a car once next to a soundstage, but he ate healthily and watched his weight and worked out like a demon before shooting started.

Reminder: The heavily-hyped debut trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will play tomorrow morning — Thursday, 2.14 — at 6:00 am on http://movies.yahoo.com/. Wait…Eastern or Pacific?

How the Hillary forces failed, how the numbers don’t add up for her even if she wins Texas/Ohio/Pennsylvania; how she’s in denial, how the haters and the patriarchals are massing against her, how she’s slipping with whites and women. I could read this stuff all day.

Joshua Green‘s “Inside the Clinton Shake-Up,” a well-reported account of how Hillary Clinton‘s campaign (and the departed Patti Solis Doyle in particular) mis-managed its money, went up two or three days ago on Atlantic.com. It gives you an idea what kind of ship Hillary’s been running, and explains her cherishing loyalty over everything else (including managerial efficiency).

The last two minutes of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Lifeboat are about a young German sailor, his ship torpedoed and sunk, pulling a gun on the boat’s inhabitants (Tallulah Bankhead, John Hodiak, Henry Hull, Hume Cronyn, etc.), and then, having been disarmed, asking “aren’t you going to kill me?” I’ve always loved the final line, spoken by Bankhead.

The current Vanity Fair reconstruction

Paramount is bumping JJ Abrams‘ Star Trek from 12.25.08 to 5.8.09. DreamWorks has shifted its Ben Stiller comedy Tropic Thunder from 7.11.08 to 8.15.08. (There are dozens of proven exceptions to the legend of August being a dumper month, but it persists all the same.) And Paramount has announced that Martin Scorsese‘s Shutter Island will open on 10.2.08.

How the Hillary forces failed, how the numbers don’t add up for her, how she’s in denial, how the haters and the patriarchals are massing against her, how she’s slipping with whites and women. I could read this stuff all day.

“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.