First Ross Johnson‘s Deja Vu, blow-up-the ferry-so-it-looks-like-9/11 piece, and now a fawning, all-too-obliging Jerry Bruckheimer profile by N.Y. Times reporter Laura Holson.

The stink of smugness on the set of Top Car (i.e., Days of Thunder).

An honest look at Bruckheimer would acknowledge the obvious, which is that his action films of the mid to late ’90s had a signature element — super-sexy visuals, sharply-crafted scripts, macho wit, an underlying smarty-pants jocularity — and today that element is gone. If and when some enterprising masochist writes a detailed, definitive Bruckheimer career analysis, the gutting of this mid-to-late Clinton-era Bruckheimer sensibility (which basically came from the residue of Don Simpson’s creative input, which lingered two, three, four years after his death) will definitely be noted. Holson doesn’t even nod in its direction.
The Pirates movies, of course, have been astoundingly successful , and they’ve probably enabled Bruckheimer to help pay for his Gulfstream jet and his Kentucky horse farm, but if they’re about nothing but the empty application of craft — they vacuum the soul and lay waste the spirit. The dollars they’ve earned aren’t clean, like tobacco or cocaine-industry profits; the hosannahs they’ve gotten from people who should know better (like a certain columnist who said they dispense “joy”) are reprehensible.
To what extent, one wonders, is the making of the Pirate trio connected to Bruckheimer’s admitted “fear of failure”? Director Tony Scott (Deja Vu) tells Holson that “Bruckheimer’s exacting standards” — i.e., standards in service of absolutely nothing but financial profit — “come from a deep-seated need to remain relevant. ‘There is a confidence that comes with age, but Jerry is still insecure, as I’m insecure,’ Scott says. ‘The insecurity comes from the fact you think you might lose it. Not the 10 houses or 4 Jaguars. It’s that your confidence might have gone.'”

Dreamgirls may blow everyone away on Wednesday and sweep aside all the weak sister Best Picture competitors (two of which happen to be Flags of Our Fathers and World Trade Center… sorry but it’s true) but this is a bottom-line fact: Pedro Almodovar‘s Volver and Florian Henckel- Donnersmarck‘s The Lives of Others are profoundly good films — first-rate heart movies that portray how tough life can be in jarring, vibrant terms — and they’re connecting with people all over (I ‘ve been hearing and feeling this). The foreign- tongue, foreign-produced thing will, I suppose, work against them but they definitely deserve full-on consideration for the Best Picture Oscar. The best of the year are The Departed, The Lives of Others, Babel, Volver, Little Miss Sunshine, Pan’s Labyrinth and United 93, in that order,

Reader Mike Sells claims to have seen Dreamgirls and says “it delivers on the level of razzle-dazzle movie-movie spectacle more than anything else this year, with lots of emotional peaks and valleys and a big tearjerking moment at the very end. The story is definitely less contained than the one in Chicago, but works very well on the level of an ensemble saga. Loved it overall.” Chicago ‘s story was “contained” in what way? Because it was mainly about shallow greedy hustlers? Is that what he means?

The general reaction to Gabriele Muccino‘s The Pursuit of Happyness (Columbia, 12.15) — the Will Smith-and-his-son- sleeping-in-bathrooms movie that’s based on a real-life story — has been politely positive all around, but gradually the politeness has given way to little candor farts here and there, and the upshot is that folks are finally saying it’s not a Best Picture contender.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s said to be very nice and warm, but “Frank Capra-esque… emotionally affecting…tiny but timely…light…a reach.” We know what that those words mean. An affecting heart movie, a likely audience hit, a Best Actor nomina- tion for Will Smith…fine, but no golden naked-man cigar for the film itself, and without Best Picture contender cred it’s always a little harder for a Best Actor contender to win through.
The contest is still between Smith vs. Peter O’Toole, I suppose, but the weak- ness-of-Happyness factor is something to mull over.

For the first ten days of the run of Dreamgirls (i.e., Friday, 12.15 to Sunday, 12.24), which is strictly a New York, L.A. and San Fran thing, interested parties will be charged $25 a ticket on a reserved-seat basis. The high-prestige movies used to open in New York and L.A. on a reserved-seat “roadshow” basis back in the late ’50s and ’60s. Still…$50 bucks for two people plus popcorn and whatnot?
DreamWorks is looking to create an aura of specialness with industry and media types by doing this, but cash-wise they’re basically looking to attract gays and the “bling” crowd. This is a bucks-up, all-black musical, after all, and they know that the blings like to flash the cash and parade around, and that most of them will probably leap at the chance to see Dreamgirls on this basis because of the ostentatious “statement” factor.
The blings have taken over the bar at the rear of the Beverly Wilshire. Weekends there are like New Year’s Eve in Dubai…gangstas and ho’s…guys with socks on their head or Iranians with shaved heads pulling up to the valet in $75,000 rich-ass- hole sports cars. The Beverly Wilshire used to have a touch of class…no longer.

The older Borat fans lined up yesterday in stronger than anticipated numbers, and so the projected weekend tally has been kicked up to $28,098,000 (according to one studio estimate), or a flat $29 million (according to Box Office Mojo) or $28.6 million (according to MCN’s Len Klady). The cume is now $67.8 million or thereabouts. A guy told me yesterday he and a couple friends went to a 10 pm show last Wednesday somewhere near the Marina, and that it was damn near sold out. I’m guessing Borat will crest $100 million in about 10 days, give or take. Perhaps as soon as next Sunday.

Asked by N.Y. Times editors to choose five comedies they’d want in their knapsack if they were stranded on a remote desert island (i.e., one with electricity, a 36″ Sony flat screen, a table to put it on, a DVD player and an easy chair), none of these funny-ass professionals — Will Ferrell, Judd Apatow, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, Catherine O’Hara, Bernie Mac, Chris Elliott, Christopher Guest, Fred Willard, David Cross, Ricky Gervais, Santiago Segura, Anna Faris plus four others who don’t have very recognizable names — chose Some Like It Hot, okay? Billy Wilder‘s greatest film ever! Recount!

My personal five: Some Like It Hot, The Big Lebowski, Sullivan’s Travels, Dr. Strangelove, Sideways, Flirting With Disaster, Groundhog Day, Prizzi’s Honor, Election, Intolerable Cruelty, Hold That Ghost, Young Frankenstein, Bringing Up Baby, Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life and Planes, Trains and Automobiles . Okay, that’s fifteen…whatever. How about some lists from the readership?

In an otherwise well-reported, technically aware N.Y. Times piece about how director Steven Soderbergh made The Good German (Warner Bros., 12.15) the old-fashioned 1940s way with black and white photography, Michael Curtiz-era lenses, boom mikes and the like, Dave Kehr doesn’t mention the most visually obvious period touch of all — the fact that German has been matted on the sides to give it a 1.66 to 1 aspect ratio rather than today’s standard Academy ratio of 1.85 to 1.

1.66 aspect ratio image, which is how The Good German more or less looks when projected…

I asked Soderbergh at Thursday night’s semi-elite media screening why he hadn’t side-cropped his film to render a boxier 1.33 to 1 image, which was the Academy standard in 1946, when The Good German takes place. “I did,” he answered, “but it seemed a little too much so we [compromised and] went with 1.66.”

1.85 aspect ratio, which is how it would look if Soderbergh hadn’t been so exacting about visual period detail.

There’s a been a conspiracy among film preservationist types to deny that 1.66 to 1 ever existed — they all say that aperture plates used in projectors of the ’50s were set at 1.85 — even if it’s obvious that standard Academy aspect ratio films of the mid to late ’50s and into the mid ’60s were intended to shown at 1.66. Every now and then you meet a smart guy like Soderbergh who says, “Yeah, of course …1.66 to 1 aperture plates were the going thing in the ’50s” but they’re few and far between. DVD companies have commonly masked films of this era with a 1.66 aspect ratio, but the preservationists continue to pooh-pooh it, like it’s a fantasy concept or something.

In an 11.12.06 N.Y. Times story by Ross Johnson about Jerry Bruckheimer and Tony Scott‘s Deja Vu (Disney, 11.22), the details and background of an ultra-realistic explosion — one that was surely inspired on some level by the 9.11.01 Armageddon — are explained.

The World Trade Center explosions are specifically referenced in the following passage in Johnson’s story when Bill Marsilli, one of the film’s screenwriters, describes his reaction to the Deja Vu fireball: “I saw these incredible flames and I just burst into tears. My first thought was ‘My God, what have I done?'”
“As an aspiring screenwriter in September 2001, Marsilii stood on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fourth Street, near his Greenwich Village apartment, and watched in horror as the World Trade Center towers fell. Having struggled to conceptualize Deja Vu since 1997, he stopped writing for a year after the 2001 terrorist attacks, he said. Eventually he returned to the story with another writer, Terry Rossio.”
Later in the story Johnson mentions the fertilzer and fuel-oil explosive used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and compares it to the relatively benign explosives that were used in the film.
On 9.12.01, I wrote the following for a story filed from the Toronto Film Festival: “Those hundreds (more likely thousands) of bodies lying under the rubble in New York and Washington, D.C., have pulverized everyone’s consciousness. Reality has taken over completely. Reality is all. What happened yesterday was beyond horrific, beyond sadistic, beyond the most spectacular Jerry Bruckheimer CGI fireball.
“Those camcorder shots of the buildings crashing down were terrible but awesome. I watched them over and over yesterday and into the night. We all did, I’m sure. It sounds insensitive to even think this, but one result of that footage is that special- effects companies are going to have to get a lot better very quickly. That’s because any huge, computer-created explosion in any new movie is suddenly going to look a lot faker. Reality has raised the bar.”

It’s not a rumor — several of the performances in Karen Moncrief‘s The Dead Girl (First Look, 12.29) are knockout. And I’m not talking about efforts by guys. This is an honest, penetrating but extremely maudlin film about women suffering greatly — the term “deeply depressing” doesn’t begin to describe — and yet it’s a wow on a case-by-case, actress-by-actress basis.

Brittany Murphy‘s inhabiting of a damaged-goods, irrevocably doomed prostitute/ absentee mom is prickly, agitated and full-on. She’s both pathetic and breathtak- ing. It’s a cliche-ish thing to say that Murphy has expanded her range and career prospects in one fell swoop, but that’s pretty much fact. She’s only on-screen for 20 minutes or so, and there isn’t time for her character to express more than two or three shades of desperation. She’s playing a woman with so many problems that the only question is when, not if, a random collision with this or that predator will take her down for good, but Murphy’s blending of feisty combativeness and sadness feels volcanically alive.
Marcia Gay Harden, who plays Murphy’s mom, has proved again how precise and soulful a performer she can be. Mary Beth Hurt is mesmerizing in a weird, over-the-hill way as a lonely and unbalanced partner of a fiendishly secretive middle-aged man. (It’s obviously sexist of me to report that the twitchy neurotic fox from Interiors and The World According to Garp has been eradicated by age, but it’s a fact nonetheless.) Also top drawer are Toni Collette, Piper Laurie, Rose Byrne and Kerry Washington.
But the color palette in The Dead Girl is pale and splotchy, and the mood of it is down, down…all the way down. Moncrief, who wrote and directed, has invested herself and her cast in an orgy of dingy, hopeless, lower-depths misery. Her female characters (the guys are mostly creeps or louts) are either sad or trauma- tized or badly bruised, or a combination thereof. There’s no question that Moncrief regards them with the utmost compassion and respect, but she’s mainly interested in how it feels to be in their cages — caught, desperate, unable to escape.
There’s a saturation point with films like this, a point at which you mutter to your- self “enough already” as you realize (or re-realize, having been here before) that for some filmmakers being immersed in grief and despair and down-headedness deli- vers a kind of perverse emotional high. Yeah, I know…strange.

Rose Byrne

It needn’t be this way. Rodrigo Garcia‘s Nine Lives — another film with superb female performances — was a more balanced and compassionate piece; you could feel Garcia’s generosity of feeling, as you can with Pedro Almodovar‘s Volver. These men care for their characters; they want them to some how pull through — and I don’t get this feeling from Moncrief at all. It’s not the hurting-women thing that’s hard to roll with — it’s the aroma of futility and put-upon female victimization that Moncrief is obviously queer for.
Moncrief’s Blue Car, which I saw at Sundance ’02, convinced me she was a comer. Now I’m starting to wonder. Why would a director-writer want to go so far down into a well that there’s no sunlight or air?
But once again, hats off to Murphy, Harden, Hurt, Collette, et. al. Murphy is good enough to be considered for a supporting actress honor, but The Dead Girl is going to die so quickly — it’s going to make about $950 dollars, if that — that her only chance is for thousands of screeners to be sent to press and Academy members (like the Lionsgate team did last year for Crash), and I doubt if First Look has the resources to do this, so the odds aren’t favoring.

The loyalty and respect factors among the media in the elite Clint Club run so deep that until very recently, no one had seriously considered actually looking the esteemed director of Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima in the eye and saying straight from the shoulder, “You’ve made an honorable film but it’s not a homer or even a triple, so don’t expect great waves of support from us when it comes to critic awards.” None of the loyalists could ever bring themselves to actually say the words. But now that Flags is sinking fast with the public (it’s losing theatres and will only earn about $2,717,000 for the weekend), no one has to do anything. To paraphrase a Paddy Chayefsky line in The Hospital, Clint’s Iwo Jima film is on the verge of being “simply forgotten to death.” Who could have foreseen such a situation two months ago? How swiftly the tide recedes.