Three or four months ago I was taken off the Movie City News columnist links — demoted — and grouped in with the very formidable Cindy Adams, Nikki Finke, Mark Ebner , Jeannette Walls and Rush & Molloy as a gossip. Two days ago I was restored to the colum- nist ranks, although I’m still lumped in with the gossips. Either it’s a mistake and or I did something to warrant reconsideration. 10:50 pm update: Nope…a mistake! I’m just a gossip again.

Pete Hammond has listed several actors and actresses in his Hollywood Wiretap piece about how playing real-life figures seems to usher in Oscar contender talk. Typically comprehensive (Hammond knows his stuff) but a little too generous. Here’s HE’s tough-darts, hard-odds rundown:

the great Ben Sliney (seriously) as himself in United 93

First group: (a) Ben Affleck as Superman actor George Reeves in Hollywoodland / HE verdict: forget Venice; (b) Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin in Last King of Scotland / HE verdict : is all this Forrest-is-getting-weaker, peaked-too-soon talk being kicked around all over or…?; (c) Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth and Michael Sheen as Tony Blair in The Queen / HE verdict : Mirren’s locked; Sheen’s looking pretty good for supporting; (d) Sienna Miller as Edie Sedgwick in Factory Girl / HE verdict: Miller’s terrif but the nommie thing’s on hold as no one except myself and F.X. Feeney have seen the film; (e) Renee Zellweger as Beatrix Potter in Miss Potter / HE verdict: has anyone seen this film, and if if she’s good isn’t the Zellwegger animus factor still pretty strong?
Second group: (f) Annette Bening as Deidre Burroughs in Running With Scissors / HE verdict: Bening’s a top-notch, very well-liked actress, but her performance has a certain root-canal quality; (g) Derek Luke as South African freedom fighter Patrick Chamusso in Catch A Fire / HE verdict: I bought and respcted his performance 100%, but is it Oscar-y enough?; (h) Adam Beach as Ira Hayes in Flags Of Our Fathers / HE verdict: chops aren’t there; (i) Nicolas Cage, Michael Pena, Maria Bello, Maggie Gyllenhaal as their real life 9/11 counterparts in World Trade Center / HE verdict: Bello or Gyllenhaal, maybe, but forget the guys; (j) Gretchen Mol‘s performance as a legendary ’50s pin-up model in The Notorious Bettie Page / HE verdict: won’t happen;
Third group: (k) Kirsten Dunst as Marie-Antoinette / HE verdict: c’mon…not a serious proposition; (l) Ed Harris as Ludwig van Beethoven in Copying Beethoven / HE verdict : has anyone seen this?; (m) Keisha Castle Hughes as Mary, mother of Jesus, in The Nativity Story / HE verdict : something tells me her being actually preggers at age 16 is going to work against her on some level; (n) Toby Jones and Sandra Bullock as Truman Capote and Harper Lee in Infamous / HE verdict : forget it; and…
Year’s Best Performance by a Non-Actor: (o) Ben Sliney as himself in United 93 — in all seriousness, a brilliant, fully believable, totally lived-in performance / HE verdict : Sliney’s the guy.

Sen. Barack Obama acknowledged on “Meet the Press” this morning that he’s considering a run for president in 2008, backing off previous statements that he would not do so. That’s it…Hilary’s over. She can run in the primaries and do whatever, but she was pretty much dismissed before as a candidate with any chance in hell of getting any kind of sizable support from the red-staters, and now she’s really over. So in the general election it’ll be Obama vs…?

Here’s my third and final Flags/Emily thematic link item. No more, I promise, but anyone who saw Flags of Our Fathers this weekend definitely has to listen to this. If you want to be thorough about it, read item #1 and item #2 first.

Every damn line of movie dialogue in this Independent piece about (i.e., composed of excerpts from) Paul Welling‘s “Sex, Lines and Videotape: Famous Film Quotes” (which isn’t even purchasable via Amazon.com) has been drilled into every movie lover’s head like the the basic ABC’s…over and over, year after year. We’re living in a fascistic culture.
What’s needed is a book of less-heralded movie dialogue that’s off the beaten path. Like Paddy Chayefsky ‘s “life is sensual, factual” speech spoken by James Garner in The Americanization of Emily…pretty good stuff, never quoted. Or this little Joe Pesci snippet from Raging Bull — whenever I think of this classic Martin Scorsese film I think of this line, I swear, and I laugh every time. Or this Pesci and DeNiro argument over supposed infidellity…great back and forth, and I’ll bet 90% of every pair of brothers or best friends have had a conversation like this at one time or another.

Friday, 10.20, 9:25 pm

James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo‘s …So Goes The Nation, which explains in the frankest terms imaginable how the John Kerry campaign blew it in every way imaginable with the middle American voting public during the ’04 election and how cagey and brilliant the Bushies were at almost every turn, opened last night at the Regency Showcase on La Brea just south of Melrose. The last time I saw this film was in Toronto with a full house — last night’s 7:30 pm show was, shall we say, a wee bit under-attended. It’s a riveting piece all the same, but the vibe isn’t the same with a near-empty house.

I’m repeating myself but the Best Actor race is going to come down to Will Smith‘s end-of-the-movie crying card and struggling-single-dad uplift card in The Pursuit of Happyness (the film being a true story about a guy who was homeless and on the streets with his son but who turned things around when he became a financial trader) vs. Peter O’Toole‘s career-capping performance in Venus fortified with a three-point pitch: (a) he’s never won an Oscar, (b) he wuz robbed 41 years ago when his Becket performance lost out to Rex Harrison‘s in My Fair Lady, and (c) it’s now or never. That’s the shorthand.

The previous Peter Howell/Flags of Our Fathers/Hannibal- at-the-gates piece will suffice if you want to post something about Clint Eastwood‘s film, but it would be really interesting to get as many reactions as possible about Flags. What people do and say this weekend in response to this film will, I think, largely decide if it becomes a Best Picture nominee.

Toronto Star critic Peter Howell went to a radio-promotion-with- a-smattering-of-critics screening of Flags of Our Fathers last Wednesday, and observed the following: “It was at the Paramount downtown, in a room with several hundred seats. I expected it to be a mob scene, as it often is at movie previews, but the theatre was practically empty when I arrived at 6:30 pm. When the movie started just after 7 p.m., the room looked only about half full. This for a movie that had been touted as a sure-fire Oscar nominee and likely winner.
“So what happened to the audience? The show had the usual radio-station push and free tickets. The only thing missing was the T-shirt giveaway, which would have been tacky for a film like this. I noticed a preponderance of people over age 40, including several elderly gents a few rows ahead of me who were quite likely WW II vets. The likely answer: Flags just isn’t grabbing young people.

“One other interesting thing about that screening. A good many people stayed in their seats to watch the credits right to the end, including those older gents. They were obviously moved by what they’d seen and wanted more time to take it in.”
At the same time Howell’s letter came in, an e-mail from a younger guy named Peter Rogers declares that Flags “did so-so business this weekend for the same reason Hollywoodland and The Black Dahlia bombed, and why The Good German, The Good Shepherd and Catch a Fire will fall. The paradigm has shifted and no one under 30 wants to see bygone-era movies anymore on the big screen.
“Moviegoing these days is all about events and genre films (Departed, Saw 3, Spiderman, etc.). TV and cable are the primary outlet for adult dramas. The sooner you accept this, the sooner you will write about stuff people actually care about.”
Wells to Rogers: I’m not saying you’re wrong about the under-30s, but I’d rather take cyanide than live in the movie world you’re describing. No offense, gentle sir, but you’re avatar-ing the philosophy of the unwashed digital masses and forecast- ing the death of culture and cultivation, and I don’t mean the culture that worships Upstairs/Downstairs.
“I love good slovenly downmarket entertainment as much as you do; it just has to be good. An example of this is The Departed, obviously, but I also love Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s Julius Ceasar (due 11.7 on Warner Home Video), so no offense and due respect but you have spittle on your chin and pieces of fast-food chicken on your jacket. You’re one of Hannibal’s soldiers beating drums and throwing rocks outside the gates of Rome.

The Guardian‘s John Patterson is calling Ridley Scott‘s A Good Year (20th Century Fox, 11.10), which stars Russell Crowe as a London financial scalawag who inherits a broken-down French vineyard, “another sad case of a comedy being made by people with no sense of humor whatsoever.”

Earth to Patterson: A Good Year isn’t a comedy. Really, really. It’s one of those tonic-for-the-soul movies. A mood piece about whimsy and effervescence and nurturing those things that need nurturing. It’s light, yeah, and it has supporting “characters” and Crowe smiles and goofs around, but that doesn’t mean it’s trying to be Bringing Up Baby. It’s about slipping out the back door and being a little bit happy at times, and it left me in a pleasant, sitting-outdoors-as-the-summer-sun- sets, good-glass-of-wine frame of mind.

“Dr. Strangelove is not only a documentary, but an extremely innocent one given today’s possibilities,” Christiane Kubrick (i.e., Stan’s widow) tells London Times writer James Christopher. “There are so many more things that can go wrong. Weapons are a hundredfold more dangerous. Giant mistakes are easier to make. We don’t have the mental tools to make critical split-second decisions.

“I remember when Peter George‘s book ‘Red Alert ‘came out around the time of the Cuban missile crisis [in 1962]. Stanley said: `We’re not anywhere near scared enough.’ He thought we were being as blinkered as the Germans under Hitler. He even bought tickets to Australia .”
Christopher spoke to Mrs. Kubrick on the occasion of a forthcoming (10.29) screening of the classic 1964 film at the BFI London Film Festival. It looks pretty damn good on the DVD that I own (i..e, the slightly older one with the far-preferable 1.33 to 1 aspect ratio), but the corresponding BFI web page says that Sony’s restoration expert Grover Crisp will be on hand at the showing to “describe the high-resolution techniques used to produce this dazzling new print.”

As a kind of followup to my Thursday item about City Beat critic Andy Klein pointing out the thematic parallels between Clint Eastwood‘s Flags of Our Fathers and Arthur Hiller‘s The Americanization of Emily, an HE reader named “nemo” has discovered another profound link between the two, which he pointed out yesterday afternoon:

(l. to r.) William Bradford Huie, Ira Hayes, Clint Eastwood

“Upon cross-referencing IMDB and Wikipedia, I discovered that The Americanization of Emily was based on a novel by William Bradford Huie who — this is really quite interesting — wrote the screenplay for Delbert Mann‘s 1961 movie The Outsider, starring Tony Curtis as Ira Hayes. Yes, the same real-life Hayes played by Adam Beach in Flags of Our Fathers . The Outsider also focuses on the propagandistic exploitation of Hayes after Iwo Jima.
“Obviously Huie had a strong persistent interest back in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s in taking a harsh, unromanticized look at the conduct of the American military leadership during WW II. (Huie also wrote the non-fiction book The Execution of Private Slovik, later made into a 1974 TV movie starring Martin Sheen).
“Huie was born, grew up, was educated, lived, worked, and died in Alabama. He served as a Naval officer in World War II. His journalism on racism in the South (“The Klansman” and “Three Lives for Mississippi”, about the Goodman-Chaney-Scwherner murders) earned him death threats and a cross burning on his front lawn.”