Shortcut to Happiness, the Alec Baldwin– directed film that was previously known as The Devil and Daniel Webster, is finally opening in U.S. theatres on 7.13 after a delay of approximately six years. I wrote about it last October, but Shortcut may have endured the longest post-production, delayed-release period in the history of motion picture distribution, which easily qualifies it as one of biggest train wrecks of all time.

New York or L.A. critics looking to see and review it for history’s sake are facing a problem though. A publicist working for the Yari Film Group, the film’s distributor, told me this morning that neither screenings nor theatrical bookings are scheduled for LA, NY or New Jersey. She said it will open on 7.13 in only six cities — Las Vegas, Rochester, Ft. Meyers, Columbus (Ohio), Alberquerque and Santa Fe. The publicist graciously offered to send me a DVD screener.
Baldwin directed, produced and costarred along with Anthony Hopkins and Jennifer Love Hewitt. The plot — an ambitious young Manhattan guy sells his soul to the devil in exchange for worldly success, and then hires an esteemed old-school lawyer to get him out of the contract — is a late ’90s rehash of Stephen Vincent Benet‘s story and Archibald Macleish‘s play.
Baldwin had his directing and producing credits taken off eons ago because his edit of the film (allegedly a dramatic ensemble piece with “dramedy” undertones) was taken away by the producers and recut into a comedy.
Yari Flm Group has decided against giving director credit to “Alan Smithee”, the fake industry pseudonymn that turns up on IMDB listings 28 times. Instead, the “directed by” credit has been given to the non-existent Harry Kirkpatrick, according to the YFG publicist.
Last October I called Shortcut to Happiness (then known as TDADW) is “a pre-9.11 nostalgia movie….look at the stills of Baldwin as he appeared while directing the film and compare them to how he looks today — he was a kid! Hopkins hadn’t made Hannibal, Red Dragon or The Human Stain when TDADW was shot, and Hewitt’s feature film career hadn’t yet gone into the crapper.”

This is just another inane side-trip riff, but I’m wondering if anyone has ever used air-freshener spray as a substitute for a deodorant if you’ve run out of the latter and nothing else is in the house. I’m a Febreze man myself, and as I was searching in vain this morning for my usual Right Guard gel it occured to me that applying one chemical to your person was the same as any other, so I went into the kitchen and reached for the Febreze and it didn’t feel that ridiculous. (Unlike the writing of this item.)

“I will confess that the only thing that kept me watching License to Wed until the end (apart from being paid to do so) was the faith, perhaps misplaced, that I will not see a worse movie this year.

John Krasinski, Robin Williams, Mandy Moore

“Come to think of it, the picture might be useful in certain circumstances, much in the way that Reverend Frank’s training program is supposed to be. If the beloved with whom you see License to Wed can’t stop talking about how great it was, you might want to cancel the nuptials. Or, if it’s too late for that, call a lawyer.” — from A.O. Scott‘s N.Y. Times 7.3.07 review.
License to Wed currently has an 8% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The only person to give it anything resembling a pass is Susan Granger.

No major distributor seems to release as many deadhead stinkers as Sony Pictures, but even they sometimes get it right. Within a 20-day period starting on 7.27, they’ve got two apparent groaners and one alleged goodie coming out.
First is a dubious-sounding thriller starring Lindsay Lohan called I Know Who Killed Me (7.27). Next is the return of the hapless Cuba Gooding to career-killing mode as the star of Daddy Day Care 2 (8.8), a comedy for the dolts who paid to see Are We Done Yet? And the capper is the said-to-be very funny Superbad (8.17), the Judd Apatow-produced comedy from director Greg Mottola (The Daytrippers).
The seemingly trashy-perverse quality of the Lohan thriller is unintentionally conveyed by the female narrator of this Sony product reel.

Every now and then the HE agenda allows for an off-topic footnote, and here’s a two-sided one about today’s (7.3.07) L.A. Daily News story about a months-long affair between L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Telemundo anchorperson and news reporter Mirthala Salinas.

(l.) Mirthala Salinas interviewing Antonio Villaigrossa in ’05; Salinas at party within the last year.

It would be truly refreshing if everyone would just shrug this story off (i.e., the way Europeans reportedly do when stories about their own politicians’ messy and/or eccentric personal lives gets out) and get back to work. Politicians are entitled to be people and should be left alone when their private stuff pokes through.
But as Robert De Niro‘s Neil Macauley character says in Heat, “There’s a flip side to that coin.” A story about an extramarital affair between two power-magnet types is always interesting, which in this case is a euphemism for pulse-quickening. Especially when the woman involved is a TV newscaster. Local TV news producers the world over always hire hotties in their late 20s and 30s to report news and handle anchor duties. They know there’s a certain transportation of erotic energy that comes across (and that this usually shows up in the ratings), so it’s always intriguing when a youngish woman whom hundreds of thousands of viewers feel they “know” in this sense is revealed to be a normal person with the usual drives and vulnerabilities.
Okay, “pokes through” was probably a Freudian pun. I knew a married guy in Westport, Connecticut, in the early ’80s who had a girlfriend on the side. He told me the day after one of his assignations that he’d told his wife he was going out to play “poker”, and how he felt on a certain verbal level that he was being honest. The guy had never grown emotionally past junior high school.

Brett Ratner‘s intention to direct a biopic of Hugh Hefner will fail for one very simple reason. Ratner, one of Hollywood’s more ardent hounds, is too invested in bacchanalian appetites and indulgences to look at Hefner’s life (and the cosmic meaning of same) with any kind of divested perspective.

Brett Ratner, Hugh Hefner (sometimes in the late ’50s), Brian Grazer

Fortified by producer Brian Grazer, a guy also known for randy recreation, Ratner will feel a natural pressure from within his own soul to not only adorn Hefner with flattery and hero worship, portraying the Playboy founder as a super-cool, pipe- smoking revolutionary who relaxed and liberalized 1950s American attitudes about sex, but to cut him a break every which way.
Unless Ratner submits to a personality transplant, his nature will most likely rob the Hefner flick of judgment, tension and angularity. Roman Polanski (who has a small role in Ratner’s Rush Hour 3) was obviously a hound in his day, but he could have brought serious moral focus and irony to the Hefner saga. Anyone in town would have been a better choice than Ratner to direct this thing. The best thing would have been to hire a total non-hound, or at least a guy (or a girl) known for taste and restraint, or even dweebiness. (Todd Solondz?) If Karel Reisz of the ’70s or ’80s had been around…
If physical similarity is the criteria, there’s a fairly obvious choice for the best actor to play Hefner. Does everyone know who I mean?

Iran president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has shown that if you push paranoia and bullheadness far enough, you can transform these qualities into rank stupidity. Turning down Oliver Stone‘s request to make a documentary about him, Ahmadinejad explained that “while it is true that Stone is considered to be among the opposition in the US, the opposition is still part of the Great Satan…we believe that the American cinema system is devoid of all culture and art and is only used as a device.” Idiot — the iconoclastic Stone would have portrayed Ahmadinejad in a fairer light than he would have gotten from almost any other U.S. filmmaker.

Hollywood Wiretap‘s Nancy Vialatte wrote today that “after a series of back-and-forth reports over the past week, it’s finally official: Bryan Singer‘s Valkyrie” — the Tom Cruise World War II flick about the German military plot to kill Adolf Hitler — “will not be allowed to use the Bendlerblock historical site for filming.” Big effin’ deal — it just means Singer will have to find a building somewhere in Europe that looks sufficiently similar to the building-with-a-courtyard pictured below. How hard could that be?

As this Wikipedia page explains, the Bendlerblock is a building in Berlin in which the military resistance to Hitler’s regime was launched. Infantry General Friedrich Olbricht “developed the Valkyrie operation plan into a plan for a coup d’etat against Hitler. In October 1943 Colonel Stauffenberg” — Cruise’s character — “was transferred to the General Army Office as Chief of Staff. His position gave him direct access to situation briefings in Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair headquarters.
“On July 20, 1944 he set the fuse of a bomb there and returned to Berlin, [but] Hitler survived the blast and the conspirators all died for their failure. Following the arrest of the conspirators in the Bendlerblock, General Olbricht, Stauffenberg, Werner von Haeften and Albrecht Ritter Mertz von Quirnheim, all members of the uprising, were executed that same night in the courtyard of the building, by firing squad. A fifth plotter, General Ludwig Beck, chose to shoot himself.”

The ending of Rescue Dawn “is triumphant, with [Christian Bale‘s] Dengler surrounded and cheered by his comrades,” writes New Yorker critic Anthony Lane. “This is accurate enough — the man himself confirmed it in the documentary — and yet nobody watching the freeze-frame of Bale’s grin, and hearing the thudding surge of the musical score, would guess for a second that this is a Werner Herzog film.

“I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a Michael Bay moment, but in its mood — the solid pomp of emotional relief — it slides into the groove of Uncommon Valor, Behind Enemy Lines and other mainstream parables of men lost and found. Most of Herzog’s previous films were made by his own production company; this one was made partly by Top Gun Productions. What is going on?”
My sentiments exactly as I was walking out of a Rescue Dawn screening at the Toronto Film Festival 10 and 1/2 months ago.

The following sentence can be found in a 7.1.07 Benjamin Anastas N.Y. Times piece about various authors, radio talk-show hosts and Biblical nutjobs who believe that it’s all coming to an end in 2012: “Polls indicate that up to 50% of Americans believe that the Book of Revelation is a true, prophetic document, meaning they fully expect the predictions of ‘Rapture,’ ‘Tribulation’ and ‘Armageddon’ to be fulfilled.”
I re-read that sentence two or three times before it really sank in. Let’s bend over backwards and allow for the possibility that 50% may be a little high. Maybe only 40% to 45% believe that the Rapture is really coming. Maybe only one in three Americans believe in this…who knows for certain? But think of how thoroughly divorced you have to be from reason and rationality to seriously buy into the notion that “God” has orchestrated a Big Moral Finale to the whole of human existence because of high levels of evil and collective moral failings.
But the real “tell” in this statistic is an explanation of why a significant portion of American righties are still saying that the science isn’t in yet on global warming, that Al Gore is mostly a fantasist, and even if global warming is real it’s man’s right to plunder and destroy the planet if he’s so inclined. No guilt trips, no cutbacks, no re-thinks…we’re keeping our SUVs, McMansions, dune buggies, 24-hour air condi- tioning and power boats because we work hard for our lifestyles.
We all know there some ardent Christians who are liberal, centrist or non-political, but the general acknowledgment is that most Christians are allied with right-wing Republicans. We also know from polls that a large percentage of righties don’t believe global warming is real — I read a poll a few months ago that said as much as 40% think that global-warning data is bogus.
The “polls” referred to by Benjamin Anastas provide a theoretical explanation for this. 40% to 50% of Americans don’t believe we’ll be here all that long, so why worry about the devastation that global warning will bring to the planet 50 or 100 years hence? “God” will probably be ending things sooner than that, so kick back and gas up the tank.

At the ’06 Santa Barbara Film festival — sixteen and a half months ago — I ran my first piece about John Scheinfeld‘s Who is Harry Nilsson (and Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?). I started out both liking it enormously and disliking it — I couldn’t get past the depressing aspects of a story about another ’60s-era rock musician self-destructing, but I was deeply moved by the music and the obvious love and care that Scheinfeld put into his film.

For whatever reason a distribution deal never happened. A logical suspect, Sony Pictures Classics, never bit despite Sony BMG owning the Nilsson catalogue, which would allow for an obvious cross-promotion potential.
And now with Scheinfeld’s doc about to have another screening at yet another film festival — a July 14th showing at Martin Lewis‘s Mods and Rockers festival at the American Cinematheque — its rep has become that of a proverbial wanderer, doomed to roam the seven seas without a port to call home.
I don’t know what the problematic particulars may be, but a film as good as this one deserves to be seen. It’s a profound insult to Nilsson, his legacy and his thousands of fans that the best this doc can hope for is some cruddy straight- to-video deal. The man was one of the greatest songwriter-singers of the ’60s and early ’70s — what’s the problem?
Obviously Nilsson never attained Beatles-level fame, and obviously Scheinfeld’s doc has a limited commercial potential. But for the film to fail to get any kind of deal whatsoever is absurd. Sounds like somebody’s being obstinate or unrealistic or both, and that other parties are asleep at the wheel.
Lewis suggested last week that one problem is the title. He thinks the doc should be called Everybody’s Talkin’. As soon as he said this I knew he was right. Are you listening, John?

Neil Jordan‘s The Brave One (Warner Bros., 9.14), otherwise known as Jodie Foster-does-Death-Wish-slash-Ms. 45, is starting to be shown to select long-lead press with the idea of interviewing Foster before she leaves the U.S. later this month to start shooting her next film, Nim’s Island (20th Century Fox), in Queensland, Australia

A WB publicist told me this morning that The Brave One will play at the Toronto Film Festival a few days before it opens. An L.A. critic friend who’s seen it had some positive things to say about it last weekend, calling it very compelling, interesting, thumbs-uppy, etc.
The generic online synopsis: “New York radio host Erica Bain (Foster) has a life that she loves and a fiance she adores.” What…a guy? “All of it is taken from her when a brutal attack leaves Erica badly wounded and her fiance dead. Unable to move past the tragedy, Erica begins prowling the city streets at night to track down the men she holds responsible.”
Obviously the basic set-up is close to the one used in the cheesy but historic 1973 Michael Winner/Charles Bronson classic. Abel Ferrara‘s Ms. 45 (1981) is more of a feminist-rage, kill-all-male-predators movie, but the story kicks off because of a brutal assault upon a young girl.
“[Bain]’s dark pursuit of justice catches the public’s attention,” the synopsis continues, “and the city is riveted by her anonymous exploits.” Again — exactly like Death Wish. “But with the NYPD desperate to find the culprit and a dogged police detective (Terrence Howard) hot on her trail, she must decide whether her quest for revenge is truly the right path, or if she is becoming the very thing she is trying to stop.”
The most satisfying solution would be for Howard and his cop colleagues to huddle with Foster after she’s been wounded in a shootout and explain that they know she’s the renegade shooter, and that the best solution would be for her to move to another city. She does that, and it’s deftly implied in the final shot that she’ll soon be back in action.