Here’s a phone interview I did last week with No End in Sight director Charles Ferguson. You might want to read the various reviews on the NEIS site, and maybe my post about it earlier this month before listening.

No End in Sight director Charles Ferguson (l.), former Iraq Ambassador Barbara Bodine (middle) and U.S. Marine Seth Moulton (r.) at a press conference in Park City last January.

Believe it or not, 20th Century Fox suits have decided that a reaction story I ran yesterday — i.e., the one about Radar‘s Alan K. Raymond seemingly being wrong about a threatened Chicago Film Critics Association editorial boycott of Fox films (except for reviews) because I’d been told that the matter had been put to bed — crossed some kind of line, resulting in their telling me a couple of hours ago that they’re out of business with Hollywood Elsewhere.
I wasn’t even going to mention the CFCA situation until Raymond’s piece came along. I spoke to Fox publicity about this matter last week and exchanged a series of friendly, no-big-deal e-mails. There really wasn’t much of a story, but I felt I’d throw my two cents in when Raymond filed. My little piece was fair, honest, factual (as far as I knew) and reasoned. It was written calmly, which is more than you can say about Fox’s response to it. Emotions are clearly running high over there.
I simply sought to clarify and update an article that I understood to be at least somewhat inaccurate. To try and clear the air….you know? I even included a suggestion that Fox should “isolate those online journalists who have behaved fairly and honorably” should be given the courtesy of earlier screenings. Constructive, no? I then added a final truthful statement, which is that “my understanding is that this approach is being looked at with a degree of receptivity.”
Fox’s irate reaction apparently came from my including a belief (one backed up by a rudimentary understanding of how Fox marketing and publicity is structurally run) that Fox’s exec vp publicity Breena Camden had passed along and/or instituted Fox’s “tough” and restrictive screening policies regarding online reviewers and feature writers (i.e., the source of the CFCA’s frustration), and my calling these changes “very sweeping and bludgeon-y.”
By being “tough” about this issue, which is driven by concern about early reviews, “no one in upper management can say [Camden] is not taking strong action,” I wrote. Forgive me, but my understanding of corporate culture is that employees are occasionally obliged to demonstrate to those above them that they are doing their job in some sort of assertive, take-charge way (as opposed to being a jellyfish and just going with the corporate flow). Saying no or “wait until later” to certain online reviewers and feature writers — whether Camden decided this policy herself or passed along a high-up order — and restricting L.A. onliners and other media people to a night-before screening of The Simpsons Movie is clearly a demon- stration of willfulness.
I’ve pushed things in the past. I’ve been nervy and provocative and thown grenades. But yesterday’s piece was nothing. It was a waltz, a cup of tea…a 2.5 on a scale of 10 in terms of controversy. Sometimes it’s a good idea to take a couple of steps back and chill down, which is what I’m going to do. I’m not going to suggest this policy to others. They can make their own moves.

Everyone knows that Sideways screenwriters Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor worked on a rewrite of I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry before it was “Sandlerized.” Well, I finally got my hands on a copy of Payne and Taylor’s version — a 136-page revision [dated 8.24.05] of a script originally written by Barry Fanaro based on a treatment by Lew Gallo, and what I read wasn’t at all surprising. Theirs is a much better piece. [Warning: Chuck and Larry spoilers ahead.]

Jim Taylor, Alexander Payne

As anyone who’s seen Sideways and Election might expect, the Payne-Taylor is way more invested in realism — recognizable human behavior, logical bits and plot turns, real-seeming textures. It’s obviously a “comedy” but the tone is less slap- sticky, more naturalistic. Several scenes in the film are in the Payne-Taylor also, but there’s no question that I would have liked their version, had it been shot, a lot more.
For one thing it’s much less of a Sandler-esque ego trip (i.e., his Chuck character hasn’t nailed his girlfriend’s sister and he doesn’t enjoy group-sex with a private harem). The girlfriend who chews out Sandler’s Chuck in that early scene [see review below] is merely angry at his aloof and uninvolved manner — his lack of emotional sincerity. And Payne-and- Taylor’s Chuck doesn’t seduce a female hospital doctor but a sexy TV reporter who’s been covering one of the fires he’s helped put out. (Sandler obviously felt that making Chuck into a kind of flamboyant Brooklyn cocksman was funny, but in so doing he damaged the credibility…weird.)
A lot of the scenes that made it into the final film are leaner and tighter in the Payne-Taylor version. Where the Sandler-produced, Dennis Dugan-directed movie often feels goofy and fuck-all (like that idiotic scene when the middle-aged house- cleaning woman wakes up between Sandler and David James in their bed), the Payne-Taylor feels disciplined.
There are “refrains” (like Larry saying “going in alive” and Chuck adding “and coming out the same way”) that I don’t remember from the film. Okay, maybe they’re in there and I need to take more Gingko.
I know for sure that the Payne-Taylor is more particular in this and that quirky or interesting way. In the screen version there’s a scene in which Jesica Biel’s Alex invites Sandler/Chuck, whom she believes to be gay, to feel her breasts, and just before he does she says they’re 100% real. In the Payne-Taylor script she says to Chuck that they’re fake — saline-solution implants — and that they were given to her by a “jerk” plastic surgeon.

A little later in the film there’s a Chuck and Alex foot-massaging scene, but for some reason Sander and Dugan didn’t use a fascinating bit in which Alex asks Chuck why he’s a fireman, and how this affects the way he behaves and sees things. Chuck goes into a riff about how he always notices fire-safety violations and susceptibilities in restaurants and other commercial establishments, and then he ticks off seven danger signals that he’s noticed in Alex’s apartment. It convinces you that Chuck is a very alert, very serious fireman. (I called a Universal publicist to make sure my memory wasn’t remiss, and she agreed that this dialogue isn’t in the film.)
There’s a scene in which Larry’ seven-year-old daughter asks Sandler, who’s been put on a different shift than her dad, if she can sleep with him in Chuck and Larry’s conjugal bed. He hesitates and says okay. The little girl says she loves him, and he says “me too.” Is this scene in the movie? I don’t think so. Not in the bed, at least.
In the movie there’s a big courtroom finale in which Steve Buscemi‘s character dares Chuck and Larry to kiss in order to prove they have a passionate relation- ship. They don’t. But in the Payne-Taylor script, they do. Unconvincingly. The fact that they don’t have a passionate sexual relationship has been made obvious. But the next morning, when Larry admits they’re not gay, Payne-Taylor has him give a short speech that I don’t remember from the film. Roughly, perhaps, but not word-for-word.
“We’re not gay,” he begins. “But that doesn’t mean we’re not married. We have friendship and loyalty and genuine affection. Hell, we even love each other. The only thing we don’t have is sex. Well, if you want to invalidate every sexless marriage in this state, I hate to tell you but you ain’t gonna have very many married people left.”
The sum-up slam-dunk speech given by the fire-station chef (played by Dan Aykroyd in the film) is tougher and more eloquent in the Payne-Taylor. And a Mayor character (the script is set in Philadelphia) gets involved with settling the insurance-benefits situation, partly out of fear of political blowback.
And in the Payne-Taylor, Larry’s 11 year-old son Eric, whom the film tells us is almost certainly gay because he’s always singing and tap-dancing to Broadway show tunes, is revealed to be happily straight with a new girlfriend called Toni.
It’s not just me. I’ve thought and thought about this, and I know a Payne-Taylor version would have gone over better than the one opening on Friday. I know it. Certainly with the critics and the genuinely serious comedy fans (i.e., the ones who own DVDs of Some Like It Hot and Tootsie and Flirting With Disaster) and high-thread-counters everywhere.

I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (Universal, 7.20) is the ultimate yaw-haw straight guy comedy about gays. That’s a way of saying it’s a chowderhead thing (i.e., made for chunky guys who slurp down pitchers of beer at sports bars and wear low-thread-count T-shirts) that’s not very hip. That’ll be no problem at all for 85% or 90% of the viewing public, but what will take it down with the somewhat more thoughtful 10% or 15% is that it’s a creative house divided.

Adam Sandler, Kevin James

The Chuck and Larry dialogue says all the right humanistic things — i.e., that everyone but especially red-blooded heteros need to show respect and support for gays — but a good percentage of the jokes are of the rib-poking “eewwww!” variety about what gay guys say and how they behave and decorate their homes, and what they do with each other in private. Jokes, in short, that say gays are different and prissy and into icky sexual practices facilitated by substances in tubes.
This is a flagrantly hetero film. The women characters are almost all hot-to-trot sex bunnies who are totally devoted to servicing Adam Sandler’s “Chuck,” a Brooklyn fireman-slash-sexual conquistador. Let’s get one thing straight — fireman got laid like rock stars in the weeks following the 9.11 tragedy, but otherwise the unattached ones live hit-and-miss sex lives like anyone else. Sandler’s Chuck isn’t just an exception — he’s Warren Beatty‘s Shampoo character without the guilt, and then taken to almost Daffy Duck-level extremes.
The first time we meet Chuck he’s coping with a hot-and-saucy girlfriend who’s enraged because he’s schtupped her sister behind her back. Chuck claims he couldn’t tell the difference in the dark. Then the sisters devolve into a rivalry about which one is hotter, i.e., more pissed at each other than they are at him. I was like…what?
Ten or twelve minutes later Chuck is recuperating in a hospital room from a fire-fighting accident, and talking to an attractive doctor like she’s a pole dancer….c’mere baby, sit on my lap, etc. She’s enraged at his crude disrespect and walks out the door. Five minutes later she’s not only schtupping Chuck in his Brooklyn apartment, but taking part in a group scene with three or four other girls. Again…what? How is depicting Sandler’s sexual prowess in absurdly overwrought terms “funny”?

Chuck and Larry is about a scam in which Chuck and Kevin James’ “Larry”, old pals who work as firefighters out of the same station, pretend to be gay so James, a widower with kids, can receive insured benefits. Sandler and James have to lie and lie and lie all through it, but they finally come clean at the end. In this sense the film adheres to a classic formula know as the Three D’s — desire, deception, discovery. Some like It Hot used this exact same formula, but my God, what a difference in the execution!
The basic problem is that there’s no interest on Dugan or Sandler’s part in a story that even occasionally passes muster as something that could conceivably happen, or in characters you can half-accept as occupying the actual world outside. The action and dialogue are all about dumb schtick. Sander and Dugan are saying to the audience, “You don’t believe this stuff and neither do we….obviously. But you know what? You don’t give a shit because we’re being funny, right? That’s all that really matters.”
As it turned out, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry didn’t make me laugh once…not once. (To be fair, others in the Mann Chinese 6 audience were lapping it up. Even Jett was laughing.) It’s going to make decent money this weekend, somewhere in the mid 20s.
What I was looking for, I guess, was something that was really and truly outrageous, something that would make you go “oh my God, I can’t believe I just laughed at that.” Then it hit me — the film has to take its closeted attitudes (gay guys are cool but also a little bit ewww!) and turn them around.

There’s no question that the film’s strongest single impression (for straight guys, at least) is when Chuck takes a long look at Jessica Biel‘s near-naked ass. (Director Dennis Dugan milks the moment with two extended close-ups.) It suddenly hit me that this magnificent object d’art could have been deployed to a truly subversive and stand-out bit along the lines of that scene in Brokeback Mountain when Heath Ledger flips over Michelle Williams in their marital bed, etc. I trust I don’t have to explain myself any further, but think about this — the ewww! factor would suddenly be addressed in a different light, and an especially different light if Biel’s character turned out to be…well, if not “receptive” then at least open to the action.
The always-likable Sandler is appealing enough but James is the better performer — steadier, more planted, less smirky. The film also makes it clear that Biel doesn’t have much acting ability. She’s been told to exude a cheerful, go-along attitude with everything that Sander, James and the plot throw at her, but there’s nothing extra going on.
I knew I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry would be a problem early on when James and Sandler and their buddies get on their firetruck and arrive at a burning building, and the flames coming out of the windows look exactly like the flames on the Universal Theme Park “Backdraft” attraction. This is a typical Dugan move — he doesn’t care if hundreds of thousands of people have seen those boring, gas-generated fires, or made jokes about them after seeing them in Ron Howard‘s Backdraft. Ten year-old kids in Kabul know real infernos don’t look like this, and Dugan waves it off. This is the blade of grass that tells you what kind of film Chuck and Larry is.

Sicko director Michael Moore, who will again appear on Wolf Blitzer‘s “Situation Room” later today, is pointing out that CNN has admitted that “they did indeed fudge at least two of the facts in their coverage of my film and apologized for [this].
And yet “no apology seems to be coming for the rest of their errors,” Moore adds. These days, to get the mainstream media to admit they were wrong is rare; to get them to admit it twice, as they have with Sicko, I guess should be considered a whopping victory. Will they eventually apologize for the rest, or for their reporting on the war? Will the Cubs win the World Series this year?”

For whatever reason, the Hollywood Reporter‘s Borys Kit decided not to mention in a 7.17 story that Mark Boal, the screenwriter of a semi- fictional Iraq War drama called The Hurt Locker, is the writer of the 2004 Playboy magazine article that Paul Haggis ‘s In The Valley of Elah (Warner Independent) is based upon.

They’re both Iraq movies (Elah less so in terms of in-country footage), but Boal has obviously begun to carve himself a rep as Hollywood’s go-to guy for moralistic Iraq material.
Kathryn Bigelow will begin directing Locker next week in Jordan and Kuwait, presumably for a price. Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty are starring. Ralph Fiennes and Guy Pearce have cameo-sized roles. The story’s about “an elite Army Explosive Ordinance Disposal team in present-day Baghdad that fights an onslaught of bombs and snipers.”

Washington Blade editor Kevin Naff explaining his call for a gay boycott of Adam Shankman‘s Hairspray to Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly a while back. The beef is about star John Travolta‘s affiliation with Scientology, which Naff feels has been injurious and insulting to gay interests by offering gay-to- straight therapy sessions.

I don’t like quoting from WENN, but Hairspray director Adam Shankman is quoted by the British news org as being “astonished” that Naff “has made the dumbest claims on the entire planet. Everybody involved in Hairspray — all the creators are gay. So John has no problem with people being gay — me, the writers, composer, John Waters…all gay. John’s personal beliefs never walked onto my set. I never heard the word Scientology.”

It’s looking more likely that the one-page Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows summary and final-chapter spoiler site that I linked to but didn’t discuss yesterday is legit, except (I won’t mention any particulars) for statements about a certain character biting the dust.

Some other guy (or maybe it’s the same dude from yesterday) has posted almost the entire book online. The links went dead about an hour ago — the Potter lawyers are clearly hard at work. Someone also posted an assortment of big-plot-turn links — this one is still active. The only chapter missing in today’s posting is the epilogue, which seemed to be revealed in yesterday’s posting.
In a N.Y. Times story by Mokoto Rich about the online spolings (i.e., titled “New Potter Book May Have Made Its Way to Web” and posted at 2:38 pm this afternoon), it says that “Kyle Good, a spokeswoman for Scholastic, the book’s United States publisher, said that she was aware of at least three different versions of the file ‘that look very convincing’ with what she described as ‘conflicting content.'”
As HE reader James Hammell summarizes, “This is either a fantastic disinform- ation campaign from the publisher, an excellent and unprecedented hoax, or totally legit.” Not that photographing and posting pages from a not-yet-released book is “legit” — he means a genuine theft from the true-blue Hallows.

The Toronto Film Festival will, of course, be showing the latest from Canadian filmmakers, but my keenest anticipations are for David Cronenberg Eastern Promises, Denys Arcand‘s Days of Darkness (which I missed at Cannes), Francois Girard‘s Silk, Roger Spottiswoode‘s Shake Hands with the Devil and Daniel Lanois‘ Here Is What Is.

Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts in David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises

Missing in Michael Fleming‘s Variety story about Town House, a film that Once director John Carney will begin shooting in January for Fox 2000, is that it’s fundamentally about a character grappling with agorahobia, i.e., a fear of open spaces.

Doug Wright‘s script is an adaptation of Tish Coen‘s recently released book. Coehn’s story unfolds in Boston; Fleming reported that the film “will shoot on the East Coast.” Does that mean New London? Asbury Park? Does Carney have a problem with Beantown, or was Fleming just writing the story under a hard deadline?
Here’s an Amazon/Booklist summary: “The son of a legendary rock musician, Jack Madigan (an Irishman!) has been living off his father’s royalties for years, but things are looking dire as the money runs out. His wife has already left, unable to deal with Jack’s refusal to confront his agoraphobia; his teenage son, who avidly embraces 1970s clothing because ‘uncool is the new cool,” may relocate to California with his mom..
“But Jack’s once magnificent Boston townhouse, now crumbling around him, is being repossessed by the bank. Even his work as a color consultant — he has been tinkering for years with a formula for the perfect white–is failing to provide the funds he so desperately needs. His only hope is the charming but hopelessly inept realtor assigned to sell the house. With the help of the little girl next door, whose dream is to become an Olympic skater, Jack suddenly finds himself motivated to face his greatest fear — stepping outside of his house.
“Rising above its obvious, overly tidy plotting, this highly readable first novel offers plenty of sardonic humor and a cast of endearing eccentrics.”

Rotten Tomatoes has compiled a Midyear Report with an ’07 Best Reviewed Movies list, and the top ten are Ratatouille, Away From Her, Once, Knocked Up, Hot Fuzz, Sicko, The Host, Zodiac, Waitress (Waitress?) and The Lookout (really?).
The top ’07 releases in Metacritic’s list of All-Time Best Reviewed Films is also Ratatouille, but the second best-reviewed is Charles Burnett‘s Killer of Sheep, and the fifth best reviewed is Jafar Panahi‘s Offside, “a smart comedy illustrating the fight for women’s rights in Iran” which Sony Classics opened in March.
The second, third and fourth best-reviewed ’07 Metacritic films are Once, Away From Her and Knocked Up.

L.A. Times reporter Robert Welkos has written that Brad Bird‘s Ratatouille “probably won’t be in the running” for a Best Picture Oscar as opposed to one for Best Animated Feature, which it has a good shot at. What am I missing here? What critical criteria would have to be surpassed for an animated feature to leapfrog out of its own category and into the running for a regular Best Picture Oscar? Implicit in Welkos’ piece is a notion that a Best Animated Feature Oscar is a second-tier honor. Media by Numbers analyst Paul Dergarabedian supports this by saying “there’s an innate bias against animated films [by Oscar voters]…they are perceived as being for kids.” What kind of beer are these guys drinking? The last time an animated feature was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar was when Beauty and the Beast managed it in 1991 — 16 years ago. It’s not happening again. Forget it.