In “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas“, the late Hunter S. Thompson described the 1966 to ’67 era of cultural explosion-revolution as “the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle ’60s was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something, maybe not in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world.”

Malcolm McDowell in If…

You can feel a bit of this as you watch Lindsay Anderson‘s If…, which came out on a Criterion Collection DVD a couple of weeks ago. It’s a film that gets eighty or ninety things right (at least), and yet the finest of these is providing a distillation of mid ’60s rightness and holiness and inevitability. Precisely because it’s a metaphor piece and not a recreation of the times (i.e., it uses none of the music).
Except for the long hair and sideburns If… could be happening in the early ’50s or late ’70s or the ’80s, even. It’s about a repressive British school for boys, one that dispenses the old crisp disciplines and stiff-upper-lip values that fortified the British empire for two or three centuries, and about how a lot of this stuff just stopped flying in the early to mid ’60s. And how young people everywhere just knew this.
And yet a strange feeling hit me when I watched it a while back. The final scene depicts a gun battle between the old guard and the new, a small group of rebellious seniors firing machine guns from a rooftop while dozens below take cover and return fire. It’s what was happening back then, exactly like this, and yet it suddenly felt distant. It didn’t deliver the charge that I remembered from way back when.
I wasn’t exactly relating to the harumphy older guys being fired upon. I was still “with” Malcolm McDowell and the gang because I still believed they were coming from a very pure place, and I knew it had to happen. It always does. But I was also half-saying to myself, “Gee, guys shooting at each other…this is too bad. I’m sorry.”

I posted a somewhat negative review of Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix two days ago, but I took it down 45 minutes later after a Warner Bros. publicist reminded me that an embargo demand (printed on the invitation, she said) stated no reviews until opening day — Wednesday, 7.1. Now I don’t wanna pickle, but I was scratching my head and feeling a little confused as I did the obedient thing.

It had seemed to me that the Potter cat was out of the bag last Friday with reviews already posted from Variety‘s Todd McCarthy, the Hollywood Reporter‘s Kirk Honeycutt, Time‘s Richard Corliss, Rolling Stone‘s Peter Travers, New York‘s David Edelstein and Emmanuel Levy.
And I mean particularly on top of last Tuesday’s David Halbfinger piece in the N.Y. Times that talked about the increasing trend of major publications going earlier and earlier on reviews, in part because of a kind of domino effect created by this site and Movie City News and other online sites going early-ish on reviews of certain films.
Halbfinger began his piece, in fact, by saying that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix “does not open in theaters in the United States and Europe until July 11, but the reviews are already rolling in.” He also stated that “the odds that the New York Post and the N.Y. Daily News will hold their…reviews until the movie hits theaters are, roughly speaking, zero.”
Pheonix reviews aren’t a big deal. The big deal is whether or not J.K. Rowling will kill off Harry in the seventh and final novel, which comes out 7.21. Still, I’m wondering how to play this. I’m thinking if the N.Y. Post or the N.Y. Daily News run their reviews on Monday or Tuesday, then I’ll go that day also.

“Having confidently proclaimed that David Chase would learn the lesson of John Updike‘s Rabbit and not kill off Tony Soprano too early (Come on, folks, he’s dead, dead, dead), I’m loath to predict what July 21 — and the final Potter book — will bring. But the film of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is the best enticement imaginable. It rekindles the dread, the ache in your stomach that says, ‘He can’t die!’ — and at the same time, ‘How can he defeat everything racist, repressive, and murderously Fascistic in the world without making the ultimate sacrifice?'” — from a current review by New York magazine’s David Edelstein.

Brett Ratner spoke two or three days ago to TMZ about wanting to put Paris Hilton in his Hugh Hefner biopic. Ratner is no dummy, but he can’t seem to help himself. He seems to have a craving for scorn.

I’ve been dinged here and there for speaking highly of the early, funkier version of George Hickenlooper‘s Factory Girl, and for pushing Sienna Miller for Best Actress. So it’s satisfying to note that contrarian tough guy Charles Taylor has reiterated his support of this embattled film in a well-reported history in today’s N.Y. Times that covers the ride from inception to production to theatrical release.

George HIckelooper, Sienna Miler

“On July 17, thanks to DVD, the public will get to see the fuller version that Hickenlooper, Harvey Weinstein and producer Holly Wiersma were frantically working with last December,” he says. “It’s not the documentary-style cut that Hickenlooper, a documentarian himself whose credits include Hearts of Darkness and Mayor of the Sunset Strip planned when he originally laid out his vision of the film to Wiersma. But it does flesh out the somewhat truncated version that eventually made it into theaters.
“The new version confirms the mixture of empathy (for Sedgwick) and cold-eyed appraisal (of Warhol) evident in the theatrical version. And it confirms the extraordinary power of Miller’s fearless performance, as well as deepens the storytelling.”

The motive behind Steven Spielberg‘s co-financing and co-producing the forthcoming Broadway presentation of Aaron Sorkin‘s The Farnsworth Invention, about a boy genius named Philo T. Farnsworth who invented television in high school in 1927 only to be ripped off by RCA’s David Sarnoff over the patent, seems obvious. Spielberg is looking to produce and perhaps direct a film version. The golly-gee-gosh American-ness of that name — Philo T. Farnsworth sounds like the cousin of Clem Kadiddlehopper — and the theme of an innocent genius being hoodwinked by big-city tycoons is right up Spielberg’s alley. The question is how different will the movie be (if it gets made) from Francis Coppola‘s Tucker?

Transformers did $25,971,000 yesterday, which was a 14% increase from Friday (an boost of $3.2 million). The weekend cume is now projected to be $68,227,000, and the six-day cume will be around $153,130,000.

Allan Bacchus of Daily Film Dose is attempting to recreate a new AFI Top 100 American films list, but one based upon the fanboys/cinephile/blogger point of view. He’s using the same guidelines and procedure as the AFI (enabling a ‘shadow’ list to be created) and is inviting HE readers to participate. A ballot can be be downloaded from the blog posting. He’s looking for 1500 voters, which is what the AFI had. It would be good if a significant percentage of the 1500 voters (presuming he accumulates that many) could be drawn from rank-and-file online journo-bloggers.

A YouTube clip that lampoons celebrity couple reality shows was sent to me this morning. The kicker is that “Michael Bay” is introduced and, according to the sender, the guy who portrays him does so to a tee. I’m sitting in a low wifi cafe in Los Alamos, California (north of Santa Barbara about 25 miles), and loading a video file will take eons. But if anyone who knows Bay has a reaction…

HE reader Nate West took exception yesterday to my description of Charlie Wilson’s War — the reading of Aaron Sorkin‘s script, I meant — as “a feel-good ride.” He said that a line I used about the admirable actions of the three main characters (played by Tom Hanks, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Julia Roberts) having consequences that reverberate throughout the world today is an oblique reference to a certain catastrophic 21st Century event.
“The real story of Charlie Wilson’s War isn’t about victory,” he concluded. “It’s about blowback. Perhaps those seeking a feel-good ride aren’t interested in such ironies.”
My answer was yes, it’s mostly a feel-good ride…until the last 19 or 20 pages. Yes, it’s about blowback, as in “no good deed goes unpunished.” Which, of course, is the most common definition of irony in the book.
Truth be told, I’m not quite sure how I feel about the ending. It’s striking and of course it delivers a turn in the road — call it an end-of-the-third-act thud — and it’s obviously truthful. It’s just that I don’t know what the movie is saying about the journey of our three characters except the obvious, which is that they performed craftily and wonderfully until the whole thing turned around or metastasized several years later at which point they were left with very mixed and confused feelings. Which will be true for the audience also, I suspect.
But it’s a hell of a good ride (and wonderfully written in that smart, sassy, Sorkin-esque way) for the first 136 pages. And that ain’t hay.

I took another stab last night at reading Aaron Sorkin‘s script of Charlie Wilson’s War, and now, on page 32, I’m finally feeling the heat of it. (I don’t know why I couldn’t get into it before.) I’m particularly revved about what Philip Seymour Hoffman will do with the part of Gust Avrakotos, a Middle Eastern intelligence operator. The script is a pleasure to read, but Hoffman’s part is delicious. It’s like ice cream.

Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts in Charlie Wilson’s War

Charlie Wilson’s War is the true story of how a play-it-as-it-lays, cruise-along Texas Congressman (Tom Hanks), Hoffman’s CIA agent and a rich Houston socialite named Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts) joined forces to lead “the largest and most successful covert operation in history,” according to one synopsis.
The efforts of these three, it says, “contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, with consequences that reverberate throughout the world today.”
I finally saw Charlie Ferguson‘s No End In Sight last night, a brilliant but devastating doc about the Bush administration’s disgusting mismanagement of the situation in Iraq following the March 2003 invasion. The pain and rage we’ve caused over there is incalculable. I came out of this film seething with anger at the Bushies. It made me want to see them strung up. And now along comes this big-studio upper about Americans — three likable renegades — doing the right thing and making it up as they go along and changing history.
Charlie Wilson’s War is based on truth, but it reads like a feel-good ’80s nostalgia ride for people who want to remember a time when Americans were effective in that area and even liked, as opposed to how things are today in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The MIke Nichols film is about Charlie, Gust and Joanne travelling the world (Joanne not as much — Roberts’ role is smaller than Hoffman’s and much smaler than Hanks’) and forming unlikely alliances among Pakistanis, Israelis, Egyptians, arms dealers and lawmakers. “Their success was remarkable,” it says here. “Funding for covert operations against the Soviets went from $5 million to $1 billion annually. The Red Army retreated out of Afghanistan.
“When asked how a group of peasants was able to deliver such a decisive blow to the army of a superpower, Pakistani President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq responded simply, ‘Charlie did it.'”

The first out-of-town, pre-Broadway run for the stage musical version of Mel Brooks‘ Young Frankenstein begins at Seattle’s Paramount theatre on Saturday, 8.4, and closes Saturday, 9.1. The tickets are steep ($175 for orchestra/mezzanine) but they’ll be nowhere near as outrageous as the prices New Yorkers will pay when it starts previews at the Hilton Theatre on 42nd Street on 10.11. (The official opening is on 11.8.) I’m told that premium seats will go for $450 on weekend nights and $375 on weekday nights. I could not in all good conscience part with that much money to see a Mel Brooks musical. I’m happy just watching the DVD of the 1974 film.