During last weekend’s junket for The Spiderwick Chronicles, executive producer Kathleen Kennedy said that there will be no press junket for Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Director Steven Spielberg won’t be doing “much” press, she added, because the shooting of his Trial of the Chicago Seven movie will be underway at the time. Okay, but how is that shoot going to keep Harrison Ford, Shia LeBouf and Cate Blanchett from doing junket interviews? Obviously the two are unrelated. The bottom line is that the more blockbuster-inevitable a movie seems to be, the less partial publicists are to a conventional junket hoe-down.

For the last few weeks the conventional wisdom has been that the top two contenders for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar are probably Charles Ferguson‘s brilliantly analytical No End in Sight and Sean Fine and Andrea Nix‘s feel-good War/Dance. Last night, however, a friend told me about a fairly stupid-sounding statement from a person who belongs to the Academy’s documentary branch. Or a statement, at least, that indicates a fairly unthoughtful Iraq War subject-matter bias.

This Academy person believes, I was told, that the three Iraq War-themed docs that are nominated — No End in Sight, Richard Robbins‘ Operation Homecoming and Alex Gibney‘s Taxi to the Dark Side — “basically cancel each other out.”
The guy seems to be saying that they’re all part of the same bowl of soup not just in terms of subject matter, but in terms of tone and viewpoint. He seems to be implying that all three are belly-aching about what a disaster the war has been and still is, and it’s all the same blah-dee-blah and who needs it?
This attitude was recently echoed by Sundance programmer John Cooper in a 1.16 AFP story when he said that “cinema audiences are fatigued by the conflict…filmmakers haven’t said all there is to say about the war in Iraq, but I think audiences are saturated.”
Michael Tucker, co-director of Bullet-Proof Salesman, a doc about an Iraq War profiteer that will show at next month’s South by Southwest, is understandably dismayed by such talk. “Alex Gibney’s film is completely different from Charles Ferguson’s movie, and yet to hear it from the Academy crowd it all comes down to subject,” he says. “It’s no secret that a lot of Iraq War films have sold very few tickets. Grace is Gone made 35 thousand dollars so the word has spread that Iraq movies are commercially unfashionable. But how can a war be out of fashion?”

It was announced during Sundance that Pride and Glory, the Ed Norton-Colin Farrell cop drama that’s been more or less done since last November, had been bumped by New Line into ’09.

Colin Farrell, Ed Norton in Gavin O’Connor’s Pride and Glory.

You can tell from the trailer that Pride and Glory is a little boiler-platey, perhaps a little too emphatic and histrionic. My general motto is that any New Line film that costars Noah Emmerich (brother of production chief Tobey Emmerich) is a potential problem. But there doesn’t seem to be anything to fear from director Gavin O’Connor, who did a first-rate job with ’04’s Miracle.
How bad does a film have to be to bump it all the way into ’09? The postponement feels extreme and bizarre. Yesterday Farrell cleared up the mystery with journalists at an In Bruges junket. The problem with Pride and Glory isn’t Pride and Glory, he said, as much as Nicole Kidman and The Golden Compass.
“There’s this rumor going around that [Pride and Glory has been bumped] because it’s a mess or it’s a really bad film,” he began. “I feel the need to kind of speak up, not from my own end but genuinely for Gavin O’Connor because he wrote and directed it. It’s just a really really strong piece, but I think New Line lost the bollocks on The Golden Compass…and they literally don’t have enough money to market things.
“Pride is a tricky one to market anyways. It’s pretty dark…I’ve seen it. Gavin did a great job and you know, Jon Voight is brilliant in it, and Ed [Norton] is great in it and a really strong cast of supporting characters…it’s a really strong piece.”
The main thing is that it’s got Farrell playing another downward-spiral character beset by demons. In my book Farrell is an actor reborn, having found his kwan over the last ear or so by getting under the skin of a pair of anxious, emotionally disshevelled losers in Cassandra’s Dream and In Bruges.

Yesterday Movieweb.com posted this Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull close-up shot. If it’s genuine, it seems to confirm the presence of aliens in the third act. The talk was first generated by the Indy 4 one-sheet revealed in early December with the tiny alien face between the eyes of the skull.

For those who missed this when it first went up last week. Yes, you shouldn’t have.

During a discussion last night on Keith Olbermann‘s MSNBC show, an outspoken female commentator (30s, longish dark hair, didn’t write her name down) invoked the legendary words of Tom Hanks‘ Jimmy Dugan character in a discussion of Hillary Clinton‘s repeat performance at Yale University of the old “misting up the day before a big primary” routine that worked so well for her in New Hampshire.

Dugan, of course, was the snarly, tobacco-chewing manager of a female baseball team in A League of Their Own who said, “There’s no crying in baseball!” And this was echoed by the commentator’s words: “There’s no crying in politics! I was with her the first time but not again. You can cry to get out of paying a traffic ticket when a cop pulls you over, but not the day before Super Tuesday.”

Here’s a short political manifesto written by a Brookline-residing mom, titled “Why Caroline Kennedy and I are for Obama” and sent to me a few minutes ago: Her thinking is summed up in four words: “It’s about our kids.” It’s the most moving and concisely stated vote-for-Obama plea I’ve read since the primary season began.
“Remember when we were young idealists, 18 years old, voting for the first time? Who was your first? The first candidate I voted for was Jimmy Carter. I felt empowered, like my vote mattered, like together, we could change the course of history.
“That’s the last time I voted for the winning candidate. In the Reagan years I became increasingly disillusioned and felt completely out of touch with the rest of the country. I never liked Bill Clinton, although I liked his policies. He seemed sleazy to me, and has since revealed his base tendencies. But all that is beside the point.
“Our kids, Caroline and mine, are now of voting age and this will be their first presidential election.
“We brought these kids into a world where global warming, off-shoring, the shrinking of the American dream, housing priced out of their reach and failure of the safety net of Social Security and Medicare will be their reality.
“It’s our duty now to listen to them. This is their future and Obama is their candidate.
“He has shown that he can enlist the young en masse.
“In Caroline Kennedy’s words: ‘Senator Obama is inspiring my children, my parents’ grandchildren, with that sense of possibility.”
“We’ve left a mess for our kids: they’ll never be able to own a home, they’ll never have job security and they’ll never be able to retire. Give your kids the President they want.”

Of all the actors Vanity Fair could have picked to stand in for Cary Grant in a restaging of the classic crop-duster scene in Alfred Hitchcock‘s North by Northwest, they chose (who else?) Seth Rogen. They even had the original makers of the sleek gray suit that Grant wears in the 1959 film, Norton & Sons of London’s Savile Row, to weave a near-duplicate for the somewhat out-of-shape star of Knocked Up and The Pineapple Express. This and other Hitchcock recreations are part of a special article in the Hollywood issue.

An excellent pro-Obama argument by author Michael Chabon (Gentlemen of the Road, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh), based on the idea of saying “no” to fear or what he calls “the phobocracy.”

The easygoing, conservative-minded, regular-guy attitudes exuded by Jay Leno (and his conservative, regular-guy sense of humor) have always been more popular than the satiric-minded, vaguely jaded, oddball urban attitudes exuded by the effete smarty-pants David Letterman. So it goes among regular tube-watchers out there, who probably have more in common with Giants or Boston Red Sox fans than they do with theatregoers, book-readers or opera lovers.

N.Y. Times reporter Bill Carter has written that “after returning to regular shows on Jan. 2nd, Leno averaged about 5.2 million viewers on NBC while Letterman on CBS has averaged 4.1 million. Last week Leno pulling in 5 million viewers compared to 3.6 million for Letterman. It will always be this way. Johnny Carson was always vastly more popular than Dick Cavett, etc. This is Amurrica. Pass the mashed potatoes.

Solid, straight words about that Heath Ledger drug video from Village Voice columnist Michael Musto: “So a bunch of celebs came to dead Heath Ledger’s rescue at the behest of a publicist and partly as a result of the pressure, Entertainment Tonight dropped the video they had bought of the actor at an ’06 drug party. And once again, the PR industry succeeds in keeping the truth from the public.

“Flacks were suddenly outraged over the ‘bad taste’ involved in running such a video, but THEY’RE the class acts who accept large sums of money to obscure celebrity realities on a daily basis. Talk about bad taste!
“I’m not saying this was going to be a Pulitzer winning tape or even provide any concrete answers about Heath’s sad demise, but it certainly promised to be newsworthy and less coy than the OFFICIAL reactions anyone’s gotten about what happened. Let’s not forget the maid who spoke to an Olsen twin way before calling 911 or the various people stepping forward to downplay any potential self destruction involved, as if a 28-year-old could have suddenly dropped from natural causes. Strangely, they’re the same people lionizing Heath for having hated any form of b.s.! This tape couldn’t have truly hurt anyone. The truth — even in sensationalized form — can only heal.”

With Fox honcho Peter Chernin reportedly telling pals that the WGA strike is “over,” it feels good — secure, comforting, bucks-up — knowing that the splashy, tedious, quality-ignoring Oscar show will almost certainly happen on 2.24. And it feels good to contemplate once again the Vanity Fair Hollywood issue group-shot cover, as we all do every time this year.

Vanity Fair Hollywood issue cover, on sale February 12th.