Spike Lee‘s untitled World War II drama, based on James McBride‘s “Miracle at St. Anna“, is apparently going to play like an American riff on Rachid Bouchareb‘s Days of Glory (i.e., Indigenes), the 2006 war film about French-speaking North Africans fighting for the French during World War II and dealing with prejudice in the ranks.

This is definitely the kind of topography you want to shoot a World War II film upon (i.e., taken by myself in an area south of Volterra in 2003)

Lee said during a recent Rome press conference to announce his film that “if you look at the history of Hollywood, the black soldiers who fought World War II are totally invisible,” adding that the film would be about the “paradox” of “black people who were fighting for democracy but at the same time were second class citizens at home.”
Lee will begin shooting the film early next year at Rome’s Cinecitta Studios, in Italy’s Tuscany region — nice! — and in New York City.
An Amazon synopsis for McBride’s book suggests it’s also going to be a bit like Sydney Pollack‘s Castle Keep: “Miracle at St. Anna vividly follows four of the U.S. Army’s 92nd Division of all-black buffalo soldiers as they become trapped between forces beyond their control and between worlds. Three of the soldiers have bolted behind enemy lines to rescue their comrade, the colossal, but simple Private Sam Train.” (Who could Lee have in mind for this role, I wonder?)
“They find themselves stranded between worlds in a remote central Italian village, with the German Army hidden on one side and their racist and largely mismanaged American commanding officers on the other. The strange world of the village floats between myth and reality, where belief in magic coexists with the most horrific acts of war. In the melee that opens the book, Train suddenly comes to believe he can turn invisible, the local miser believes he is cursed with a wealth of rabbits, and each of the other soldiers also exists in a mythical world of his own. But they are all about to be shattered by the Miracle.”
“Magical”, “myth and reality”, a psychologically confused soldier who thinks he’s “invisible”, a miracle”? If Lee’s movie turns out to be half as fantasy-driven and airy-fairy as this synopsis suggests, it’s going to suck eggs. Mix in the fanciful stuff with Lee making a point about the military treating the Buffalo Soldiers like shit…forget it. Too much in the pot.

Instead of speak to Sicko director Michael Moore (who’s been quoted everywhere lately), L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein has spoken to directors Paul Greengrass (United 93, The Bourne Supremacy) and Brett Morgen (Chicago 10) for a 7.3.07 piece about Moore’s style and tactics.
Moore’s work, says Greengrass, is “‘highly interventionist‘ in the sense that he’s willing to use the power of film, be it clever cutting or funny archival footage or cheap melodrama, to carry the day. ‘His work is often intensely tabloid, but I remember from my days as an on-camera interviewer that the question that makes you sweat by the very idea of asking it is the one you should always ask. And Moore’s brilliance is that he always asks that question, over and over.”
I felt guilt pangs the instant I read that passage about “the question that makes you sweat is the one you should ask.” I’ve wimped out on that score more times than I’d care to remember. Too often when I have a tough question in my head I go into my chickenshit tap dance — equivocation, verbal padding, side-stepping — before saying it.

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.