Unlike The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil, who sharply criticized this 7.13 I’m Not There YouTube clip that he linked to earlier today, I don’t have a big problem with Cate Blanchett‘s inhabiting of a 1964-ish Bob Dylan. I find her voicings and mannerisms intriguing, curious…oddly cool.

I also love that it’s been shot in black-and-white, and that David Cross is such a convincing looking Allen Ginsberg.
I was told last May that the reason that Todd Haynes‘ long-awaited film wasn’t submitted to Cannes was that it was long (in the vicinity of three hours) and unwieldly with too many hard-to-place strands. I’m Not There will presumably ge given a berth at the Toronto Film Festival, with the Weinstein Co. apparently intending to open it on 11.21. (The IMDB says 9.21, but that can’t be right.) Many of the early fall prestige films are starting to be shown now, and I’m kind of wondering why I haven’t heard about any I’m Not There screenings.
The other five Dylans are being played by Christian Bale, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw.

There will be no hating on Adam Shankman‘s Hairspray (New Line, 7.20) by me. It’s a spunky early ’60s musical with “fun” performances (i.e., spirited by way of pronounced insincerity), dead-on retro clothes and hair styles, some well choreographed musical numbers and a few laughs here and there. The trick is to watch it without getting bored or suffering a major migraine. I was going through my usual movie-agony spasms (leaning forward, hands covering bottom half of face, quiet groaning, frowning) but I’m a sorehead who doesn’t get musicals, right?

John Travolta, Nikki Blonsky

Hairspray is wafer thin, full of shit, repetitive and broader than a barn door but it won’t give you cancer or indigestion or anything along those lines. Standards are always put aside when a robust musical comes along and says with a wink, “Do you get where we’re coming from? That we’re all about singing, dancing, winking and arched eyebrows within the prism of early ’60s nostalgia and culturally refer- enced air quotes? Of course you do! So relax and enjoy.”
The fact that Hairspray is a mildly amusing one-note crock isn’t bothering the critics so far. (It has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating as we speak.) They’re calling it entertaining goodtime fizz because (a) their taste buds are corroded or (b) they know the middle-class mall crowd loves easy-to-get retro jukebox pablum, and they don’t want to risk seeming elitist or clueless. Or both.
The original 1988 John Waters film of Hairspray (not a musical) was pat and shallow in a mocking-retro sort of way, and the Hairspray B’way musical was the same thing with big-heart songs and dance numbers. Now comes a big-screen musical version that follows the drill with a John Travolta fat-suit performance that’s moderately okay, a spunky lead-girl performance by Nikki Blonsky and a couple of good-sport turns by Michelle Pfeiffer and Christopher Walken so…what’s not to like? It’s fine.

Which it is. As long as you don’t mind totally pissing away the time it takes to watch it. As long as you can roll with the fizz and the bullshit and the gay Tin Pan Alley attitude. When it comes to musicals I’m more into Once or Hair or Cabaret or Carousel. Shows that came from something strong and real in the first place, and aren’t so much into going “wooooh!”
Hairspray is set in a 1962 Baltimore that existed in some ways (the hair styles, clothing, cars and sets are perfect) and never existed in others. Cute bubbly fat girls like Blonsky (the truth is that she’s dangerously obese) never, ever hooked up with slim good-looking guys back then. (It doesn’t happen today either.) People who knew good music were into Little Richard and Jackie Wilson, but interracial socializing was rare and interracial dating wasn’t noticable until the late ’60s. The movie has the surface details down, but too much of the inside stuff is fanciful tripe.
Blonsky plays Tracy Turnblad, a perky high-schooler who dreams about dancing and becoming famous on a local rock-music dance show called the Corny Collins Show. Her mom Edna (Travolta) is more obese as Tracy, and her good-natured dad (Walken) runs a quirky toy and curio store. Tracy has the hots for Link Larkin (Zac Efron) after laying eyes during an audition to replace a Corny Collins dancer. Her relationship with Larkin pisses off the frosty blonde Amber Von Tussle (Brittany Snow) and her frosty blonde mother Velma (Michelle Pfieffer) somewhat, but what really throws them off-balance is Tracy’s notion that the white-bread show should allow black kids to dance also.

Brittany Snow, Michelle Pfeiffer

Blonsky is very good and talented and likable, but she looks like a smiling little beach ball in a cartoon. I realize I’ve got a rep of being Jabbaphobic, but I really and truly don’t have a problem with largeness as a rule. Plump is cool and fat happens, but extreme obesity is an affliction. Am I lying? To me a seriously obese person is like a drunk staggering around with a bottle of Jack Daniels.
Travolta has been telling interviewers that he tried to play Edna as a real woman and not as a guy giving a drag performance. That’s true as far as it goes but it’s mostly smoke because Travolta isn’t the maestro here — Shankman is — and the scheme of the movie blocks any interest in real-people behavior. Edna emotes within the broad-ass emotional framework of a stage musical, but there’s a ceiling with this kind of thing.
The bottom line is that you have to understand, agree with and follow certain rules of engagement in order to enjoy Hairspray. Maybe the reason I couldn’t have fun is that I understand the rules all too well.

“The people trusted me with an important position. I didn’t live up to expectations. If only I had kept my promise to go after the thugs who attacked us on 9/11, because now I’ve made Osama and Al Qaeda stronger. I know my false claim about Al Qaeda’s ties with Iraq led to Iraq’s being tied down by Al Qaeda. I see now that my bungled war on terror has created more terror, empowered Iran and made America less secure. Oh, yeah, and I’m sorry I broke the military.” — an imagined letter of apology from George W. Bush, inspired by a confession written by Beijing’s former FDA-type regulator Zheng Xiaoyu before his execution last Tuesday, and written by N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

“If there’s a specter that’s haunting Indiewood and Hollywood alike, it’s the shambling figure of [a] semi-shaved, post-collegiate 22-year-old watching movies on his cellphone,” Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir wrote a couple of days ago.

Why do people keep bringing this up as the next big shift in viewing habits? Cell-phone moving images are strictly about fast and short and move on to the next distraction. If I’m stuck or locked down somewhere I might be persuaded to watch a news show on a iPhone for 20 or 30 minutes, but sustained viewing of anything on a screen that size makes your eyeballs throb. Seriously — does anyone know any 12 or 14 year-olds who prefer iPhone-sized screens to watch movies on? (As opposed to music videos, YouTube clips, amateur porn, movie trailers, etc.)

There’s a certain coolness that comes with watching movies on iPhones if you’re in the mood to do that, but step back and consider the obvious — the size of an iPhone screen makes watching whole movies on them time and again (week in and week out, a regular viewing habit) fairly ridiculous.

“Now, I don’t know anybody who has actually watched a feature film on a telephone,” O’Hehir goes on, “and I’m not even sure it’s feasible. But three different people in the film industry have mentioned the idea to me within the last week, and the question of its present-tense plausibility is clearly not relevant.

“What people are really saying is that a big, weird change is coming. They don’t quite understand it and they can’t do anything to stop it, but they’re worried that the whole business of selling $10 tickets to go sit in a dark room with some strangers and a movie projector is suddenly going to seem like Thomas Edison‘s windup gramophone and its wax cylinders.”

Obviously the theatrical experience doesn’t rule like it used to. It’s still a preferred option, but “option” is the governing term. Movie-watching can happen anywhere these days, in any kind of environment that allows for semi-darkness or at least shade. I just can’t imagine anyone actually preferring to watch full-length movies on screens that are less than 15″ inches wide. I don’t even like that very much. I’m okay with watching a film every so often on my 17″ Gateway, but not as any kind of habit. I’m not even particularly comfortable with 27″ flat screens. I mean, they’re tolerable but in no way preferred.

My own viewing tastes and preferences from (b) on down probably synch up with those of any movie-lover with a semblance of taste (and I’m including 12 year-olds in this equation): (a) Private screening rooms in Los Angeles or New York or any big-league city, (b) Recently constructed ace-level theatres (Arclight, Landmark, Bridge, Egyptian, Aero, etc.) with stadium seating and all the other high-standard trimmings, (c) high-def 16 x 9 flat panel viewing off Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, (d) my own Sony 36″ flat screen, and (e) my 17″ Gateway laptop.

Cell phone viewings aren’t taken seriously in this corner. They’re not even in the “hey, maybe” category. And forget small-screen TVs. I’ll consider the notion of seeing a film in some schlubby run-of-the-mill theatre like the New Beverly or the Regency Fairfax or the Monica plex on 2nd Street, but only if backed into a corner. On the other hand, the Vista in Silver Lake is pretty cool.

“We’re all on the web, weighing various kinds of data we get — eBay listings, blog posts, Craigslist solicitations — and trying to read between some pixels, and connect others,” writes N.Y. Times reporter Virginia Heffernan. Her topic is a strange mass compulsion to indulge in dispassionate visual dissection of celebrities, which even sophisticated journalists are prey to. Not something akin to fan behavior, but obsession with a white lab coat — a kind of coldly analytical scientific curiosity.

“I don’t expect we’ll break any big news reading PerezHilton.com,” she explains. “But maybe we’re not entirely wasting our time; we’re practicing interpreting images from the new close-range, high-def magazines and websites.
“In any case the danse macabre that stars now do with the paparazzi, who appear to lurk everywhere, must be logistically maddening and emotionally draining. Every trip to the grocery store is a performance piece; every day at the beach is a soft-porn movie.
What’s more the consumers of the resulting plays, movies, video projects and photographs — that’s us — are not primarily looking to be entertained or transported. We’re just looking for data, more and more data, the more raw the better.
“Someday we may need nothing but zeros and ones to give our prognostications. And then we really won’t need the star herself. But for now a young star is in a strange place. To become a specimen, a lab slide, a piece of data: surely this is not what people dream of when they quit high school, take singing lessons and move to Hollywood.”
Of all the sites she mentions, I like idontlikeyouinthatway the best. All the celeb gossip-and-photo sites are cruel and catty, but this one’s a little more so. The way it dismisses Cameron Diaz is beyond savage; it’s kind of sociopathic.

Liam Neeson recently spoke to London Times profiler Tom Charity, and there’s not a single…wait, there is a glancing mention of what may be Neeson’s finest unplayed role, which would be Abraham Lincoln during his White House years. But it’s not enough to suit me. Neeson is obviously the right height (6’4″), the right age (55) and the right everything else (acting chops, an aura of solemn rectitude, wiry frame, similar bone structure) in order to fill Lincoln’s shoes and reanimate him every which way.

Abraham Lincoln; how Neeson might look in the role

A year and a half ago Neeson told me about forthcoming plans for Steven Spielberg to direct an adaptation of Doris Kearns Goodwin‘s “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” which at the time was being adapted into screenplay form by Paul Webb.
This movie really, really has to be made. If Spielberg can’t or won’t do it (i.e., if it scares him), he should have the good grace to step away and let somebody else carry the ball.

Gawker posted this 1981 magazine ad (“…around the time that asbestos manufacturers were starting to take serious heat for their cancer-causing product”) four or five days ago; I didn’t happen upon it until earlier today.

“After 16 years on the national stage, Hillary Clinton is still a bafflement — a formidable building that appears, no matter how many times you circle it, to have no door” — from Jennifer Senior‘s 7.15 N.Y. Times review of two new Hilary books — Carl Bernstein‘s Woman in Charge and Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr.’s Her Way.

“This impenetrability doubtless accounts for the wide range of feelings she generates (absent knowing what’s inside, voters can ascribe motivations both good and evil). And it’s this impenetrability that doubtless explains why so many journalists can’t stop writing about her, even though she’s a biographical subject who appears, at both first and 50th blush, to offer few rewards.”

I dropped by the American Cinematheque last night for the kickoff of Martin Lewis‘s “Mods and Rockers” festival, which runs between now and August 1st. The outdoor courtyard (where I took some snaps) was a lively scene, and the auditorium was packed. I saw some friendly familiar faces milling around — Sidney Kimmel exec Bingham Ray, director Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential, In Her Shoes) and Bourne Ultimatum director Paul Greengrass.

“Mods and Rockers” festival director Martin Lewis in the Egyptian-styled courtyard of the American Cinematheque — Friday, 7.13.07, 7:15 pm; Sunset Blvd. adjacent to Cinerama Dome — Friday, 7.13.07, 9:25 pm.

The festival opener was Alfred and David Maysles‘ What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A., an underwhelming 81-minute assemblage that follows the British group during their first tour in February 1964. A version of the doc has been issued on DVD in an Apple-produced compilation called “The Beatles First U.S. Visit”; there’s another DVD that intercuts portions of the doc with clips from the group’s three Ed Sullivan Show appearances.
The Maysles doc minus the Sullivan material (i.e., the version shown last night) is too often flat, muddy-looking and borderline boring. The shooting and editing choices were putting me to sleep. Why didn’ t the Maysles shoot the famous first press conference at JFK? Did they run out of film? The doc has some interesting material — fooling around on a southward-bound train, dancing in a Manhattan club — but I wanted to leave after a half hour or so.
Lewis is writing daily blog entries about the festival on The Huffington Post. Other guests and friends are filing also.
Jett and I will attend tonight’s 6 pm showing of Rob Scheinfeld‘s sad-sack Harry Nilsson doc — a great portrait of a gifted and brilliant singer-songwriter who couldn’t contain an asshole-ian self-destructive streak. There’s a “Mods and Rockers” drinking room in the rear of the Pig ‘n’ Whistle that’s right next to the theatre; carefully selected ’60s and ’70s music will be playing before and after shows.

Michael Moore‘s Sicko is looking at a push to $20 million by the end of its run. Okay, it may crest $20 million but not by much. Agreed — health care isn’t as dynamic a subject as the Iraq War or American’s firearm fetish, but it’s a much closer-to-home subject that everyone can relate to on some level.
And yet millions of potential moviegoers haven’t gotten past the impression I had before seeing the film in Cannes, which is that health care isn’t very sexy and do I really care? I felt very differently after seeing it — Sicko is funny (well, somewhat), moving, arousing, touching. And it’s been on the news and debated over and over in recent weeks (that Moore vs. Wolf Blitzer tempest was a blast). No matter — there’s obviously a big chunk of vegged-out moviegoers (the under 25s, I suspect) who are determined to ignore it no matter what.

Peter Jackson has produced an eight-minute video celebrating the marriage of Harry Knowles and Patricia Jones? I’m chummy with various directors, producers and screenwriters and I enjoy the access this gives me, but boundaries need to be observed and this obviously crosses it. Well…doesn’t it?
Best wishes to the couple (the nuptials are apparently happening in Austin this weekend), but does the Jackson element cement impressions of AICN being grossly cozy with this and that heavyweight filmmaker or what? Is it fair to call Jackson an oozy glad-hander looking to keep his toast buttered? You tell me. These guys need to jump into a hot tub together during the post-wedding reception and massage each other’s neck muscles.
Here’s an excessively naive and mean-spirited video sature piece that was created last March. All marriages are based upon perceptions of opportunistic mutual benefit and financial upgrading, and impassioned fat guys are entitled to as much happiness as anyone else (if they can get it).

The element that makes this iPhone smoothie-blender clip so hilarious is that guttural groaning sound that someone overdubbed. I don’t often laugh out loud at stuff. I’m more of a heh-heh type, and sometimes I just smile and don’t laugh at all (which is what I was doing all though I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.) But I laughed at this longer and louder and from a deeper place in the diaphragm than anything in Superbad, and that’s the funniest film I’ve seen in years. (Thanks to Anne Thompson for the link.)