“Barack Obama — delivered feet-first on Oprah’s couch and tickled on Meet the Press and then highly buffed by New Yorker editor David Remnick before the magazine editors of America — has enjoyed the best-orchestrated product reveal since the iPod,” begins a New York Observer piece by Choire Sicha and John Koblin.
“Now Mr. Obama is the only author with two books among the top 50 sellers on Amazon.com. Two weeks after the release of The Audacity of Hope, it is in its sixth printing, with 725,000 books in print. America can’t tell the difference between the book and the candidate. That may be because the book itself is the perfect campaign speech, and is one of the reasons why everyone keeps talking about Mr. Obama and ’08.
The phenomenon is deftly iportrayed in this here-comes-Obama piece, by the Toronto Star’s Tom Harper.
“Primaries are 13 1/2 and 14 months away, and there are full teams in New Hampshire and Iowa already,” says pollster John Zogby. “And Hillary, who is a household word, and Kerry and Edwards and Gore, who have run before — this is the time to get the word out, and this is the trial balloon.”
“The Obamamania trial balloon has gotten oohs and ahs from wonks and dreamers alike. But, with so many donors locked down by Hillary Clinton, and with a few hopelessly devoted to various non-celebrity candidates, is there affection — and wallet — enough for Mr. Obama to raise real money for a campaign? Why, yes! Yes, there is. Sort of.”

Those recently surfaced, possibly accurate details about Ryan Phillippe‘s bustup with Reese Witherspoon — alleged catting around with Abbie Cornish (his costar on Kimberly Peirce‘s Stop Loss), leaving e-mail evidence of same on his Black- berry — are being mentioned out of boredom, yes, but also to illustrate two behav- ioral truths: (1) people who get caught cheating are almost always subconsciously looking to get out of whatever committed relationship they’re in; and (2) married couples split up for two reasons and two reasons only — one or the other fucking around and money problems. All the other issues (including spousal abuse, alco- holism, gambling, etc.) are fixable. But not money — either you’re a winner and a conqueror or you’re not — and not dicking around, which most women will abso- lutely not forgive.

New York critic David Edelstein has parked his Lexus in the same Borat garage as New Yorker critic Anthony Lane. He’s confessed that he finally found Sacha Baron Cohen’s comedy “depressing,” and summoned impressions of “a bear-baiting or pigsticking.
“The comic imagination flowers on the dark-and-twisted end of the spectrum; in return for making you laugh, the artist has license to express rude truths in the rudest manner he or she can imagine. Most clowns have a wide streak of sadism, but it’s tempting to think of Cohen as a sadist with a wide streak of clownishness.” The comic servings in Borat, Edelstein feels, amount to “a cry of pain.
“The squirm-und-drang genre has its forebears, among them Albert Brooks, but I would guess that it has caught on now because it’s grounded in a documentary (or mockumentary) aesthetic. The Sultan of Squirm is surely Cohen, a sublime caricaturist whose hairbreadth timing can make you gasp [with his] righteously malicious agenda.
“To understand what Baron Cohen’s Borat is up to in part, it helps to consider the most notorious scenes in Claude Lanzmann‘s nine-and-a-half-hour Holocaust documentary, Shoah, in which the director trains his camera on Polish peasants who lived near the Nazis’ most lethal concentration camps while they were in full swing. Under Lanzmann’s probing, these old men and women — some of them residing on property seized from the Jews — murmur that yes, it was a terrible thing, the exterminations. Just terrible. But of course, the Jews did bring it on themselves, didn’t they?”
Exactly! This is precisely why I feel Borat is so brilliant, and in part why I didn’t laugh as much as others sitting next to me; I just sat there, open-mouthed. Cohen has taken the concept of the quiet ghastly realization in a documentary (like the one in Shoah) and flipped it over into reflective-absurdist comedy.

Scott Feinberg, auteur-administrator of andthewinneris. blog.com, had a recent chat with Little Miss Sunshine‘s Alan Arkin, whose grandpa with the heroin habit and the “fuckin’ chicken” is an absolutely un-ignorable Best Supporting Actor contender. (And so is Steve Carell‘s performance. We should all support Carell. No matter how good he is in Evan Almighty he’s going to get killed next year for just being in the damn thing so be nice to him now.) I tried talking to Arkin myself but it didn’t work out. He was excellent in Keith Gordon‘s Mother Night.

It’s very easy to snarl “no taste!”, “oh, my God!” or “how could he do this!”…but showing a mock-profound lack of taste and sensitivity is where cutting-edge comedy is today. We all know this; we laugh at this. Comedians who don’t play some variation of this game do so at their own peril. The truth? When I read about Bill Maher‘s Steve Irwin-stingray get-up I went right to Google and found it. I’m now leaving to check out the Halloween parade on Santa Monica Blvd. in hopes of finding another one. I’m sorry to offend.

This Paula Froelich or Bill Hoffman-authored item in the N.Y. Post‘s “Page Six” about George Hickenlooper‘s Factory Girl is warm urine in a bucket. First, it’s not a “troubled biopic” — it’s an 8 on a scale of 10 (or was when I saw it) and is shooting extra scenes right now so it can elevate up to the level of a 9 or better — big deal. Movies that don’t quite nail it 100% during principal do this all the time; it doesn’t mean squat.

I saw an early cut several weeks ago (have Froelich or Hoffman had the pleasure?) and can say with more than a little authority that Factory Girl has a deliberately imposed downtown-raggedy feeling that a person not hip to the mid ’60s Andy Warhol-early ’70s Paul Morrissey aesthetic might mistake for sloppiness.
Factory Girl “has a grungy Manhattan, Collective-for-Living-Cinema, 16mm street quality,” I wrote, “like it was shot two or three years before Flesh and Lonesome Cowboys and maybe a year or two after Empire State and Blow Job. Hickenlooper gives it discipline and tension, working from a tight script by Captain Mauzner but styling in the realm of the Warhol-Morrissey aesthetic, which could be summed up as ‘don’t recreate anything, just behave and let it happen.'”
I’ve been told that the finished Factory Girl will definitely start to be screened in very early December, and maybe a bit sooner. (You have to get it seen that early so the critics groups can weigh in.) The Weinstein Co. should have just made sure that Factory Girl was on its website instead of someone allowing it to slip off (or not be there at all) due to an “oversight”, which was what got “Page Six” all hot and bothered in the first place.

“As dull as Phil Angelides‘ campaign has been, I believe that he would better represent the interests of more Californians than Schwarzenegger could ever hope to,” Alec Baldwin wrote on The Huffington Post two days ago. “Schwarzenegger is not a leader. Like Bush, he is a front man for a group of powerful interests and he is reading from a script.”
And yet Baldwin has decided not to narrate a documentary by director-writer Dan Cox and co-writer Jerry Decker because he feels it pushes certain back issues — Arnold’s father’s Nazi associations, for one — too forcefully. “The makers of Running With Arnold hammer Schwarzenegger over his private behavior and his record as governor,” Baldwin declares. “But Schwarzenegger deserves to be treated fairly and the film’s images of Nazi rallies were over the line.”
I asked Cox about seeing this film a while, and then again a couple of days ago. He said copies will be going out to the press fairly soon. I’ll reserve comment until I see it, but journalists have been doing stories about Arnold’s dad’s Nazi affiliations back in Austria for a long time, and it seems fair to get into this — although there’s something about the stink of Naziism that always seem to warp or overbake an inquiry when it’s mentioned. I don’t know what the “private behavior” stuff is about, but I can guess — and if I were doing an Arnold doc I would definitely leave that shit out.

Here for the record is a list of “The Friends of United 93” — myself plus Toronto Star critic Peter Howell (who gave it 5 points on MCN’s Gurus of Gold chart), Sasha Stone (7 points), Lou Lumenick (8 points), Anne Thompson (9 points) and Susan Wloszczyna (10 points). There are no friends of United 93 among Tom O’Neil‘s “Buzzmeter” forecasters at The Envelope. Joiners?

Cast of United 93 during filming in England

“Sure, a welder’s unfortunate error is a completely plausible explanation for the conflagration, but we won’t completely rule out the possibility that God Himself sparked the blaze, hoping that an unanticipated setback of this scale might help the producers of a movie inspired by one of His favorite Bible stories reach their goal of making The Most Expensive Comedy Story Ever Told.” — Defamer‘s Mark Lisanti on yesterday’s fire at Universal Studios, possibly (no callbacks yet) on Stage 27 where the “ark” set for Evan Almighty has been constructed.

There’s no such thing as entirely “normal” behavior these days. The world of 2006 is ten times loonier than, say the world of 1956. Egoistic oddballs, twitchy eccentrics, depressives, Courtney Love, people with hair-trigger tempers and substance-abuse problems. I can honestly claim to know at least two women who would stand a good chance of being rounded up and thrown into Bedlam if they were suddenly time-tripped back to Charles Dickens‘ London.
In such an environment, an escapee from a local mental hospital wouldn’t seem all that curious, much less threatening. Unless he was homidical and foaming at the mouth, he’d be seen as just one more nutter with ongoing issues. And so the idea of making a movie about a couple of characters trying to identify which person “among several plausible candidates” is the true escapee from a nearby mental hospital doesn’t exactly light the room on fire. Not by today’s standards. Even if you do the movie in “period.”

Tom Cruise wasn’t blown out of the Paramount water last summer by Viacom chief Sumner Redtone…well, he was, but the decision to evict apparently originated with kvetching from Sumner’s wife, Paula. That’s one of the semi-intriguing reveals in Bryan Burroughs‘ Redstone profile in the December issue of Vanity Fair:

“Paula, like women everywhere, had come to hate him,” Redstone declares. “The truth of the matter is, I did listen to her, but I make business decisions myself.”
“And in terms of business, Redstone claims he felt Cruise was actually costing Paramount money. Cruise’s production company, which the actor operates along with producing partner Paula Wagner, was paid $10 million a year to create movies for Paramount, and until this year had a sterling track record, led by the first two Mission: Impossible movies, which grossed around $500 million each worldwide. (Overall, Cruise’s films with Paramount have grossed $3 billion worldwide at the box office.)
“It’s the performance of Mission: Impossible III, however, that Redstone seized upon as he and his wife soured on Cruise’s public utterances. The movie did excellent business, earning just under $400 million worldwide, but Redstone felt the actor’s extracurricular behavior prevented it from making more. A Cruise spokesperson declined all comment.
“When did I decide [to fire him]?” Redstone asks. “I don’t know. When he was on the Today show? When he was jumping on a couch at Oprah? He changed his handler, you know, to his sister — not a good idea. His behavior was entirely unacceptable to [my wife,] Paula, and to the rest of the world. He didn’t just turn one [woman] off. He turned off all women, and a lot of men… He was embarrassing the studio. And he was costing us a lot of money. We felt he cost us $100, $150 million on Mission: Impossible III. It was the best picture of the three, and it did the worst.”
“The deal with Cruise/Wagner Productions was scheduled to lapse at the end of August. Redstone indicates he decided to cut ties to the company sometime last spring, waiting until the July time frame to notify Tom Freston and Paramount’s C.E.O., Brad Grey. ‘I made my decision without their support; I didn’t tell anyone for months,’ Redstone says. ‘But [eventually] I made my position clear to Tom and Brad, that he should be off the lot. They had some concerns.’
“In fact, Freston and Grey realized that ‘firing’ an actor with Cruise’s visibility and track record, a highly unusual if not unprecedented move, would trigger a severe backlash in Hollywood’s creative community. Still, it was Redstone’s company, and they were his employees.
“‘This wasn’t just Sumner — he had a right to feel the way he did,’ says a person involved in Paramount’s deliberations. ‘I mean, women didn’t go see the movie, because of Tom Cruise’s behavior. It showed up in the research.’ Freston and Grey, this person says, had put a lowball bid on the table to renew the contract — $2.5 million, by all accounts — and everyone involved realized that both sides would probably allow the deal to quietly lapse.
“‘The negotiations had started when Sumner weighed in,’ this person says. ‘Brad had to get rid of the offer, which is a hard thing to do. They were working toward that. They understood where Sumner was coming from. They really did. They were trying to pull [the offer] back, and when they were trying to do that, Sumner went public. That’s when everything hit the fan.'”