“As I watched Transformers yesterday at the new Cine Capri in Tempe, Arizona, I was noticing, as you said, that the non-CG visuals lacked polish. Then about 2/3 of the way through, a question came to mind. Did Michael Bay intentionally use a lower-quality film stock in shooting this thing?
“The robots seemed to be a genuine part of the picture and background, better than I would have expected, even with ILM and Digital Domain doing the work. So I thought perhaps the grainy clammy texture in the medium and closeup shots of human actors was intentional, a way for Bay and co. to sell the absurdity of giant robots destroying cities and Army bases. Or perhaps I’m just seeing things.” — a letter from HE reader Marc Mason.

“When Mort Sahl first swooped, in the ’50s, there was a much more homogenized, middlebrow media landscape — fewer than a handful of television networks, no internet, no satellite radio, no iPods,” James Wolcott observes in a profile of the legendary comedian in the just-delivered August issue of Vanity Fair.

“Except for cable-news junkies, keeping up on current events is practically an aristocratic pursuit these days. And cultural allusions? Forget it. You can’t assume the audience knows anything beyond the latest thong-snappings in the supermarket tabloids. Fewer and fewer ticket buyers may go to Lindsay Lohan‘s movies, but everyone knows who she is.
Conversely, “when Sahl mentions Estes Kefauver in a Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross on NPR, he’s drawing a name from an abandoned well. Even I, a phony student of history, have to rub a couple of sticks together in my head before the name Estes Kefauver computes.”
This prompted a question: which former household names from yesteryear’s Hollywood realm — major stars, big box-office, former cultural icons — have so dropped off the planet that you average 28 year-old movie buff has not only not heard of them, but wouldn’t want to know who they were with a knife at his/her back? Who, in other words, tops the list of the filmdom’s most historically dead, forgotten and irrelevant?
If you ask me, there’s no one who more forgotten than Bing Crosby. Nothing he did in movies plays appealingly in today’s terms. He comes off as smug and bland and about a half-inch deep. Loretta Young and Glenn Ford are right behind Crosby. The list could go on and on, but contributors have to confine themselves to people who were serious megastars in their time.

More investigations about how to pronounce Shia Labeouf. Shia, which you’re supposed to pronounce with an “eye” sound (as in shyster), delivers the exact same sound as “Chaya” as in Chaya Brasserie, an L.A./San Francisco restaurant, and that gave me pause. I’ve been hearing his last name pronounced by college-educated adults as Leboaf (loaf of bread) and Leboof, but it’s a French name, of course, and “oeuf” (French for egg) is pronounced “uff” so I’m figuring the correct way to say it is Shya Labuff. This answers-for-kids page agrees.

I overlooked this two-day-old graph in a story by L.A. Times staffer Steve Lopez about L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa‘s admitting to a no-big-deal affair with Telemundo anchorperson Mirthala Salinas: “We need to know if the former Tony Villar, who blended his last name with that of wife Corina Raigosa, will now be Mayor Antonio Villarsalinas.” Cheap and cruel, yes, but “the cruelest jokes are often the funniest,” as Mort Sahl (subject of a great James Wolcott profile in the new Vanity Fair) once said.

Shia Leboeuf is smart and talented, all right, but he’s a little too exotic to be the next Tom Hanks, despite notions to the contrary on the latest Vanity Fair cover. Unless Leboeuf gets really lucky with a perfect role in the right film (and I’m not predicting this won’t happen), five years from now he’ll be the new Bill Pullman.

The 21 year-old actor is mainly getting the Big Attention because he’s Harrison Ford‘s son in the fourth Indy film, but three weeks after this film opens next year people will be saying “that’s it?” and asking what’s next. At the very least I think it’s fair to ask for a small punishment to be meted out to Leboeuf for playing the pseudo lead role in Transformers. I honestly believe that right now his stock is a tad lower than it was in the wake of Disturbia‘s surprise success earlier this year.
And to this very minute I’m still undecided about how to pronounce his name. I think the “i” in Shia is pronounced like “eye”, and the last name is Leboaf as in “loaf of bread.” Quick — bring up a blank e-mail screen and try to spell the last name. Oh-ee-you, oh-ee-you, oh-ee-you.

ERS News is reporting sans permalink that TV reporter-anchor Mirthala Salinas may get the heave-ho from Telemundo management, partly because she reportedly didn’t level with them previously about her involvement with L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and because reports of a previous power-fucker alliance (reportedly with California Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez from ’03 to early ’04) compromises her credibility as a supposedly impartial news reporter.
“High-level officials of NBC’s Telemundo are having meetings this 4th of July (not a barbecue) to consider what to do about Mirthala Salinas,” the story reads. “General manager Manuel Abud and News Director Al Corral are meeting with their legal department and other station officials. They believe there is now a serious question of journalistic integrity and credibility.”

Gone in Sixty Seconds director Dominic Sena is unjustly dissed in this Amazon.com listing of the 12 Worst Movie Directors Today. Apart from loving Gone in Sixty Seconds as a personal guilty pleasure, it obviously has its shit wrapped tight. It’s a cleanly and confidently directed utility film with a smirky, cool-cat attitude, photographed with first-rate composition and lighting and cut like a champ. I could watch this film once a year for the rest of my life without pain or regret.

And not including Sweetest Thing director Roger Kumble on the top-ten list is just derelict. I’m not even sure it’s fair to include Joel Schumacher with films like D.C. Cab, Falling Down, The Client and Tigerland on his resume. I completely agree with Barry Sonnenfeld and George Lucas topping the list. (Thanks to Anne Thompson for alerting me to this.)

Fairly or unfairly, it’s my expectation that sitting through Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Warner Bros., 7.11) will be less than fully transporting. (I got off the train after Alfonso Cuaron‘s Prisoner of Azkaban segment back in ’04.)
Given this prejudice, I’d rather see it at next Monday’s IMAX screening on the assumption that the general hugeness and clarity of this process will probably make Pheonix feel more involving on some level. There’s just one problem: Warner Bros. publicists are insisting that journos won’t be allowed to see it in IMAX unless they’ve first seen Phoenix in regular 35mm.
If Nehemiah Persoff‘s gangster character in Some Like It Hot could be inserted into this situation, he would bend over, adjust his hearing aid and then say to the WB staffers, “You mean I have to see this movie….twice?”

There’s a passage in the Hollywood screenwriting rulebook that says if a major star is required to die in a film (i.e., obviously an unusual thing in itself), the death should not be vividly or bluntly depicted — no knife in the chest, no bullet holes, no spurting blood, and especially no showing the star wincing or looking fearful.
To do otherwise, the rulebook says, would be disrespectful of the star — it would make him seem mortal and vulnerable and rob him of his aura. Stars can’t be killed like grubby extras — they have to surrender their ghost in some noble majesterial way. One way to convey this is to have the camera look away or pan up to the sky at the instant of departure. (Granted — Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio‘s deaths in The Departed are blunt and graphic, but theyr’e also quick — and Damon gets to go “okay” before getting plugged by Mark Wahlberg.)
Spoiler ahead for all the ostriches out there who don’t want to know what happened to the military guys (and others) who plotted to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944:
I’m mentioning this because I’ve just read a January 2007 draft of Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander‘s Valkyrie, the Tom Cruise-Brian Singer movie about the German anti-Hitler plotters, and on page 114 — the final page and final scene of the film — it follows the rulebook exactly.
Cruise plays a senior plotter, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, and just as his moment of truth comes he “shouts defiantly” Stauffenberg’s final words — “Long live sacred Germany!” (“Es lebe unser heiliges Deutschland!”) — and the camera CRANES UP and away as the music swells, looking at to the overcast darkness of the night sky.”
Singer can of course shoot this scene any way he chooses, but before the big day comes he should rent The Counterfeit Traitor and watch the scene in which Lili Palmer is machine-gunned to death by German soldiers in a prison courtyard. Or he could look at video footage of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena after they were shot in the same way, in 1989. What he’ll see isn’t pretty but it’s real-er than hell.
As Singer well knows, today’s aesthetic demands that the old rules have to give way to raw visual truth as it comes to us on TV and computer screens 24 hours a day. McQuarrie and Alexander may not understand that the old romantic crap doesn’t fly any more, but Singer ought to.

Movie theatre attendance “is running behind last summer’s and has even fallen below that of summer 2005, a year of box-office duds that had some analysts predicting audiences were abandoning movie houses in favor of home theaters and other entertainment options,” the AP’s David Germain reported in a 7.3 piece.
“With studios offering a stronger late-season lineup than normal this year, attendance likely will pick up and lift Hollywood to a respectable summer. Still, early forecasts that Hollywood would have its first $4 billion summer now look like wishful thinking.”
The reason seems obvious to me. Attendance is down because none of the big May-June-July blockbusters — Sony’s Spider-Man 3, DreamWorks Animation’s Shrek the Third, Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Uni’s Evan Almighty and Dreamamount’s Transformers — have really connected. They’ve all stunk of corporate-think and therefore haven’t really turned audiences on. (There’s a difference between rote and genuine enthusiasm.) The only groundswell word-of-mouthers have been Knocked Up and Once and…what else?

The Lives of Others director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck has written a piece in yesterday’s edition of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung saying it’s a good thing for Germany that Tom Cruise is playing would-be Hitler assassin Col. Claus von Stauffenberg in Bryan Singer‘s Valkyrie.
Donnersmarck’s article obviously implies that German authorities who’ve refused to give permits to Singer’s movie to shoot at a legendary building in Berlin should re-think their position.
Cruise, wrote Donnersmarck, is “the most successful of all the [Hollywood] superstars, [and] his superstar light will illuminate this rare shining moment in the darkest chapter of our history. In doing so, he will do more to improve Germany’s international image than 10 soccer World Cups could.”

I’ve been waiting for the right thought or angle with which to jump into the Scooter Libby thing. A pretty good one hit me yesterday — i.e., that Bush’s commutation of Libby’s prison sentence provides a perfect third-act climax to Warner Bros.’s Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson project, which Akiva Goldsman and Jerry and Janet Zucker are producing — but then Sasha Stone beat me to it. (I haven’t found any links, however, to support her notion that Sydney Pollack is involved.)

Joseph Wilson, Valerie Plame

In any event, here’s another one: Jez and John Butterworth, the guys writing the Plame-Wilson screenplay, need to finish their work quickly so the movie can shoot as soon as possible. The increasing velocity and high-volume turnover rate means that the voltage on this story will be dropping off sooner rather than later. The producers are dreaming if think they can take their time with this thing. If it’s not out by, say, the end of ’08, forget it.
Plame was outed by Robert Novak as a CIA agent in July 2003 — how many years does Hollywood need to throw a film together on an evolving news-topic movie? The Watergate break-in happened in June 1972, and Robert Redford got All The President’s Men onto screens by the summer of ’76 — four years from start to finish. If the Plame-Wilson movie hits screens by late ’08, it will have taken five and a half years after the inciting incident. Somebody or something is dragging ass.
Oh, and I still say Tom Hanks as Wilson and Robin Wright Penn as Plame.