In her 11.25 piece called “No One To Lose To,” N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd quotes former Times reporter Neil Sheehan, author of “A Bright Shining Lie,” to wit:
“In Vietnam, there were just two sides to the civil war. You had a government in Hanoi with a structure of command and an army and a guerrilla movement that would obey what they were told to do. So you had law and order in Saigon immediately after the war ended. In Iraq, there’s no one like that for us to lose to and then do business with.”
In response to which Dowd writes, “The questions are no longer whether there’s a civil war [in Iraq] or whether we can achieve a military victory. The only question is, who can we turn the country over to? At the moment, that would be no one.”

Happy Feet bounced back yesterday from a very temporary Thanksgiving Day (i.e., Thursday) defeat at the hands of Daniel Craig‘s 007. The Birds tallied $15,692,015 on Friday compared to Casino Royale‘s $12,928,000…families out in force. Deck the Halls did $4,952,000, Borat $4,351,000, Santa Clause 3 $4,230,000, Stranger Than Fiction $2,461,000, Flushed Away $2,293,000 and Bobby $1750. In limited N.Y. and L.A. runs, The History Boys did about $36,000 in 7 theatres or $5140 a print — okay but not much. (Figure a projected $132,000 for 5 days.) Fiction‘s cume is about $32,008,000 after three weeks. It will do about $8 million for the 5-day Thanksgiving weekend, and next weekend it’ll be down to $3 million — it’ll be a push to $40 million altogether. Not bad for a film that doesn’t work, but in relation to cost (and Will Ferrell‘s fee) it’s probably a short-faller.

One of my all-time favorite improvs in a Robert Altman film — fast, loose, totally spur-of-the-moment — is one spoken by Elliot Gould in The Long Goodbye.

Phillip Marlowe (Gould) is speaking to a couple of local officials in a small Mexican town about the death of old friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton ), whom Marlowe has always known deep down to be a frosty taker-user- manipulator. Speaking in typical heavily-accented, south-of-the-border English, one of the officials says, “You were acquainted with the deceased?” And Marlowe/Gould says, “The diseased?…yeah, right.” Deft stuff like this never turned up in any other director’s films.

Nine reasons why Robert Altman mattered, as assembled by Toronto Star critic Geoff Pevere: he was brilliant at ensemble pieces, he was phenomenally “in the zone” from ’70 to ’75, his pioneering use of multi-track, overlapping sound, he always packed lots of visual information into scenes and was sometimes into long takes (like that famous opening shot in The Player), he was a superb genre-deconstuctor, he was great at inspiring and capturing improvisation, he had a running stock company of actors who turned up time and again, he was always pissed off about something and put these beefs into his films, and he never stopped working.

On 10.20, Hollywood Wiretap columnist Pete Hammond ran a piece about how playing real-life figures seems to usher in Oscar contender talk. Three or four days ago a very similar AP story by an anonymous writer was posted on MSNBC — the exact same idea with a few more quotes.

Think of the presumed essence of Joe Queenan — that very funny (often hilarious), always irreverent, smart-assed film/ culture writer — and then imagine some middle-aged cultural regressive…some staunchly rural, long-of-tooth, Kentucky Fried Chicken-subsisting, V.F.W.- supporting yeehaw who watches Fox News. Once you’ve done that, and once you’ve hankie-dabbed the tears streaming down your cheeks following your latest re-reading of Tom Brokaw’s “The Greatest Generation”, tell me who wrote the following:
“When Borat was first released, blue-state sophisticates in New York and Los Angeles were delirious, overjoyed that Sacha Baron Cohen was savaging evangelicals and cowboys and hicks, as if this were either daring or original. Their rationale was that Cohen was merely playing with our heads, forcing us to reassess our convictions. No, he isn’t. Baron Cohen is just another English public school boy who hates Americans.
“It is fine to hate Americans; it is one of Europe’s oldest traditions. But the men who flew the bombing raids over Berlin and the men who died at Omaha Beach and the women who built the Flying Fortresses and Sherman tanks that helped defeat Hitler are the very same people that Baron Cohen pisses all over in Borat. A lot of folks named Cohen would not even be here making anti-American movies if it were not for the hayseeds he despises.
“Personally speaking, it does not bother me that Baron Cohen hates Americans; some of my best friends hate Americans. But it bothers me that my fellow Americans are making yet another odious twit from Cambridge rich. Happily, as Baron Cohen is discovering, if you are going to spit on Americans, you had better be careful which Americans you spit on. As the saying goes in the Bronx: if you mess with us, we’re going to mess with you.”

Nothing going on and a draggy news day, so I recorded four mp3 dialogue clips: (a) echo-y, too bassy with hard-to-hear consonants and it works so much better if you can watch the actor’s eyes; (2) same thing here, especially considering the unusual jump-cutting in this scene; (c) Cockney cursing; and (d) “you fuck up, you know what”.

In a USA Today “Magic 8 Ball” piece, Scott Bowles is asked if this year will once again see a Clint vs. Marty showdown for Best Picture and director, and he answers that “all signs point to yes. While Clint Eastwood‘s Flags of Our Fathers hasn’t been burning up the box office — $32.9 million since its release Oct. 20 — it continues to play well at academy screenings.”
HE respectfully disputes this — my understanding is that Flags has been playing to respectful but sluggish responses all along — although there’s no doubt, as Bowles says, that Scorsese “seems a shoo-in for a Best Director nomination with The Departed, his return to the crime genre.”
And then EW‘s Dave Karger comes along and blows everyone’s mind by saying we should all watch out for Dreamgirls director Bill Condon, whom he calls a “dark horse” contender. He also says that Dreamgirls “could be a spoiler.” A spoiler? A lot of handicappers have been calling it the Big Kahuna for a while now.

“When I grew up, everything was propaganda. We all thought that the Japanese tortured and killed people,” Clint Eastwood recently said within earshot of L.A. Times writer Bruce Wallace during the Tokyo Film Festival . “But it’s tough to swallow that everybody was that way. After all, some of the Japanese have a decent soul.”

“Some”? Eastwood is a humanist and a gentleman, but the obvious implication is that other Japanese soldiers didn’t have a soul because of their barbaric behavior on the battlefields of World War II, or whatever. I say there can be no separating or categorizing — either we’re all God’s children with souls or none of us are.
I’ve been waiting for screening invitations to see Letters From Iwo Jima since the recent confirmation that Eastwood’s second Iwo Jima film will be opening on 12.20 instead of early February. But nothing so far.

“There’s something cool about being around the vitality of youth. People who haven’t sold out yet, who still have that gleam in their eye that hasn’t been snuffed out by the studios.” — Kevin Smith talking to L.A. Times writer Dawn C. Chmielewski about a weekly mtvU show, “Sucks Less, With Kevin Smith.”

The basic idea is Smith teaching a UCLA School of Theatre, Film and Television class that produces mtvU. The TV channel is aimed at college students and serves some 750 schools. It mainly features short-form video by college students as well as music videos by up-and-coming artists.
There’s no “i” between the “h” and the “m” in Chmielewski’s Polish-sounding name. She should hook up and compare notes with USA Today‘s Susan Wloszczyna, who still takes the prize for having the least pronouncable, most unspellable name in the ranks of entertainment journalists. Chmielewski runs a close second, though. I’m sitting here trying to pronounce it right now.

Somehow I never quite understood that Baz Luhrman‘s trouble-plagued, endlessly-prepping Australia, which will finally roll film in March with Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman in the leads, will basically be a down-under Red River. In telling his story of a risky Australian cattle drive occuring in mid to late 1941, Luhrman is looking at a very difficult and strenuous shooting schedule, partly because he intends to shoot au natural, or at least without the obvious augmentation of computer graphics.

Luhrman said several months ago that he intends to shoot Australia in the manner of Lawrence of Arabia, without any blatant CG crap. Quality-level filmmmakers are saying this all over — CG that looks like CG is horseshit. It’s funny, but reading a description of Luhrman’s project reminded me of Roadshow, a Martin Ritt project about a contemporary cattle drive that would have starred Jack Nicholson and Tim Hutton. (It fell apart in pre-pre-production about 25 years ago.)
Australia will be Luhrman’s “first time back in the director’s chair since 2001’s Moulin Rouge,” says an Empire report, “and willl focus on an English aristocratic land-owner (Kidman) who, in an attempt to avoid money-grabbing cattle barons, embarks on a harzardous cross-country trip with a rough and ready cattle driver (Jackman). The pair then encounter the Japanese bombing of Darwin, which occured a few days after the attack on Pearl Harbor.”

Nancy Meyers, the director-writer of The Holiday (Columbia, 12.8), has been totally busted for putting in that Cary Grant-came-from-Surrey line in her film, which I briefly questioned in an item a couple of days ago. I’d always read that Grant was born and raised in Bristol, England, and that he never once lived in Surrey. Since Meyers and a Columbia publicity rep both declined to return calls about this matter on Wednesday, I openly asked if anyone could provide clues to the Grant-Surrey conundrum. This morning a Cary Grant historian named Nancy Nelson, author of “Evenings with Cary Grant,” wrote in with the following:

“You are absolutely right about Cary Grant and Bristol,” Nancy began. “I haven’t seen The Holiday, but from what you say, it’s a silly mistake. Grant’s origins are fairly well known. My book, ‘Evenings with Cary Grant‘, describes in detail his origins, including the interior of the house in which he lived. Starting at age 14, he traveled with a vaudeville outfit (The Pender Troupe) throughout the English provinces. I suppose it’s possible that they stayed in a house in Surrey, but I’m afraid there is absolutely no documentation. (I was the first writer to go through his private papers. I did not miss a thing, believe me.) Even so, a tour stop in Surrey does not warrant ‘Cary Grant came from Surrey.’
“Young Archie Leach traveled with the Pender Troupe to New York at the age of 16. When the Troupe returned to England, he stayed in the United States and made his own way. While he made many subsequent trips to England, he did not take up residence there.
“Responding to one of your emailers: Yes, Cary Grant’s accent is Bristol, cockney from the provinces, and what he called ‘American English,’ which he said he picked up at New York’s Polo grounds. (He was a lifelong baseball fan.) If you put it all together, that’s how you get the Cary Grant accent. Nobody sounds like him.
“Addressing the comment of one of your other responders, I’d like to say that when I give my talks about Cary Grant (‘The Cary Grant Few People Knew’), my SRO audiences are mixed, men and women. And the women represent three generations. Young women today know Cary Grant’s work and have seen his films, and they all want to know how they can meet a man just like him! Which reminds me of the Wall Street Journal reporter who once interviewed Cary when we were in San Francisco (I represented him for his one-man show ‘A Conversation with Cary Grant’), and this young reporter later wrote that Grant was the only male who could inspire lust in every red-blooded American girl …and her mother…and her grandmother.” And she did not say this about him when he was in the prime of his career. He was 80 and she was 24.
“Cary Grant died in Davenport, Iowa, just 20 years ago. November 29 (i.e., next Wednesday) is the anniversary of his death. His presence will always be with us through his films. My book is completely in his words and those of his friends and colleagues. Without conjecture or speculation and with full attribution, it is the most accurate book about him. It is often used as a reference.
“P. S. I will be speaking about Cary Grant at the National Arts Club in New York City on Tuesday, 12.19.06, and at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City on Friday, 6.15.07.”