Ich bin ein frommer Bewunderer dieses neuen Anhangers fur Steven Soderbergh‘s den guten Deutschen (Warner Bros. 12.8). Eine vierziger Jahre Atmosphare, hartgekochtes noir, direkter Ton, schone Schwarzweiss-Fotographie. Reizvoller George, reizvolles Cate, creepy Tobey Maguire…ja!

HE is now aware of two excellent films about the ’04 Presidential election in Ohio — a feature documentary I’ve already written about and a short documentary I just saw today. And boy, do they wise you up and make it clear what an incomplete, fuzzy-minded job regular TV news reporters did in covering what was really going down.

No Umbrella director Laura Paglin at 2006 Sundance Film Festival

The feature is James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo‘s …So Goes The Nation, which I’ve called “the smartest, the most perceptive and the most fair-minded reading of the election I’ve ever seen or considered.”
The short is Laura Paglin‘s No Umbrella: Election Day in the City, a documentary short (20-something minutes) that shows how a polling place in a black neighborhood in Cleveland was under-served and under-maintained — thus forcing would-be voters who couldn’t afford to wait two or three hours to vote to do just that — by an unresponsive bureacracy.
We all know what really happened, of course. Ohio’s Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell happened. A postscript at the end of Paglin’s film says that “a Congressional report found ‘massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies through the state of Ohio’ caused by ‘intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio. One result was “a wide discrepancy between the availability of voting machines in more minority and Democratic and urban areas as compared to more Republican, suburban and exurban areas.”
Nation has an embrassment of brilliant talking heads al through it — Republican National Committee chairman Edward Gillespie, his Democratic counterpart Terry McAuliffe, Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman, Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill, senior Democratic adviser Paul Begala, local Democratic strategist Evan Hutchison, et. al.
Umbrella delivers several memorable personalities also, but the unquestionable star is Fannie Lewis, a plucky, spirited councilwoman from Cleveland’s 7th Ward who tries to deal with shortages of polling booths, voting machine inserts that take forever to arrive, anger among voters waiting in line and whatnot. She’s a real trip.

Los Angeles residents will have a chance to see both films in fairly quick succession if they care to: …So Goes The Nation will open on Friday, 10.20 at the Regent Showcase on La Brea just south of Melrose, and No Umbrella will show at the Pacific Palisades theatre on Sunday, 10.29 at 8:15 pm, as part of the Pacific Palisades Film Festival.
I spoke to Stern and Del Deo earlier this afternoon. I didn’t realize until today that their film’s website uses that very same HE quote I mentioned earlier in the piece. I told them I had decided sometime during the early part of the Kerry campaign that Bob Shrum and Tad Devine were definitely two of the bad guys who mis-advised Kerry on just about every key issue. One said, “I don’t know if Shrum was literally the bad guy” but neither argued with the basic thesis.
We talked about the inevitability of Barack Obama and why, in my view, Hilary Clinton, if she gets the presidential nomination, will lose big-time. This will happen because the working-class bubbas hate her guts, and if you don’t get the bubbas on your side you’re dead. Stern reminded me that “political landscapes change rather suddenly at times,” and told me that after the ’04 election a major news organization took a post-Presidental election poll in Ohio and that Kerry beat Bush 57 to 43.
They said they didn’t know when …So Goes The Nation will be out on DVD, but said their film has been qualified to compete for a potential Best Feature Documentary Oscar nomination.

Bert Fields was obviously entwined with accused wiretapper Anthony Pellicano over several years, but not in any indictable way. The feds couldn’t build a solid case against him in the Pellicano wiretapping casestick and now, according to Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke, Fields is “ virtually free and clear of almost every aspect of [prosecution], including the wiretapping and conspiracy accusations which prosecutors have been pursuing against Pellicano.

“This is done and over,” sources told Finke earlier today. She adds that the news “comes despite prosecutors calling at least 10 members of [Fileds’] Century City law firm Greenberg Glusker before a federal grand jury in recent weeks, as reported yesterday by The New York Times‘ Pellicano-probing duo of David Halbfinger and Alison Hope Weiner.”

Another story confirming that Vaughniston is still happening …bummer. On the other hand I rented The Breakup last night and discovered to my surprise that it plays just as spritzy the second time (since seeing it last May), and maybe even better than that.

In my initial review I said “there are no laughs after the first third of The Break-up, and there’s no bouncy comic energy or pacing in any of it…but it’s not intended to deliver this stuff. It’s a decently made, reasonably mature, well-acted relation- ship drama with humorous punctuation from time to time (i.e., mostly in the early portions).”
I still didn’t “laugh” when I saw the DVD last night, but it was consistently amusing (again), well acted and never dull. Here’s a less funny recording of the first big argu- ment scene, and here’s the first post-breakup argument, which is actually funny here and there.

The general awareness and definite interest levels about the hottest, funniest, most out-there comedy of the year — that would be Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (20th Century Fox, 11.3) — are kind of “meh” so far. With Average Joes, I mean. The people who only focus on movies coming out this weekend (as opposed to two or three weekends from now), the ones who went to see Texas Chainsaw Massacare: The Beginning instead of The Departed two weekends ago…that crowd.

The current EW cover: an obvious boost

It goes without saying that awareness and interest levels are through the roof with media, industry, ubers and early-adopter types — Borat has been heavily buzzed and written about since breaking out at the Toronto Film Festival — but otherwise it’s looking like it may be a little too hip for the room,”the room” being pretty much everyone else.
Maybe Sacha Baron Cohen‘s goofy-dry put-on humor only travels with a certain clientele. Maybe people are starting to hear that Borat is basically about Cohen’s Kazakhstan culture reporter goofing on Middle Americans and maybe that’s not going down so well with some. Or maybe they just haven’t tuned in yet.
I’m not saying Borat is cruising for a buising. I’m saying as of right now that a not-big-enough group is saying, “Oh, yeah, I know that film….looks good!…I’ll be in line!” It’s not doing terribly and awareness and interest levels will certainly climb between now and 11.3, but right now it’s not doing all that great. And it opens only two weeks from this Friday. And it’s rated R.
The good news is that Borat‘s only 11.3 competitors are two family-trade films — Disney’s Santa Claus 3: The Escape Clause (almost guaranteed to be the #1 film that weekend) and DreamWorks’ Flushed Away. Pedro Almodovar’s Volver, one of the year’s great films, is only opening in New York and L.A.
The fact that Borat is unusual means “it’s not falling into any kind of model,” a senior Fox publicist told me earlier today. “Among the intelligentsia, media, industry…everybody’s buzzing about it. And in terms of word-of-mouth screenings, [the numbers] have grown and grown, and they’re continuing to grow. Lately we’ve had turnaways at screenings. Thing is, this is about all real people” — Borat interviewing regular folks who aren’t in on the joke — ” but it’s not a documentary.”
And so some people aren’t sure what it is (yet) and are going “hmmmm.” But that can change. The usual TV ads, trailers in theatres, more magazine and web articles, more word-of-mouth screenings, etc.
Nikki Finke ran a piece about the Borat deal a little earlier than me, but I didn’t catch it until after I wrote my own so there you are.

I meant to say this last week, but Martin Scorsese wanting to work in a lower-budget realm is good news because it means more freeedom and creativity and no more Aviators. But his wanting to direct a small-scale adaptation of the Shusaku Endo novel “Silence“, about two 17th century Portugese missionaries, sounds like it may result in a somewhat lethargic viewing experience. Movies about missionaries are generally unwelcome, and the spiritual connotations of that title are very unsettling. Just when I thought the Marty problem was solved by his having rediscovered and accepted his knack with urban crime stories in The Departed, he’s seemingly about to wade into something vaguely Kundun-ish — an east-west spiritual culture-clash thing with shades of The Mission, Hawaii and The Last Samurai. Yipes!

I meant to run all the Bend Film Festival winners last Sunday but somehow it slipped my attention — here’s a festival page with the complete dope. And here’s a sum-up piece from dvdtalk’s Geoffrey Kleinman.

Brad Pitt gives his best performance ever in Babel, but it’s nothing close to a lead — Babel is an ensemble piece — and so talk of a Best Actor nomination, no offense, is without foundation. (Tom O’Neil is saying Pitt has “declared himself in the supporting race” — has he said this in so many words?) It’s a Best Supporting Actor situation or nothing. The crying-on-the-phone- with-his-son sells the performance, but the one that seeps in even more is the peeing scene with Cate Blanchett, who plays Pitt’s wife.

The Hollywood Reporter ran Nicole Sperling‘s nicely sculpted profile of Columbia TriStar marketing group president Valerie Van Galder yesterday…fine. I’ve always respected Van Galder’s aesthetic sense. I really admired that flower-pot concept in the Adaptation one-sheet that she worked on. I remember wanting to do an article on the various Adaptation poster concepts that she’d considered — she loved the film and was very enthused about getting the art just right — but the piece gradually died for some reason. Half me, half her.

I also remember Van Galder wearing one of those cat-in-the-hat hats in front of Park City’s Egyptian theatre in ’96 as I waited to scrounge a ticket for a public showing of Looking for Richard. Van Galder was a Fox Searchlight publicist and, let’s be honest, not exactly a friend. It was my choice to wait and hope — Valerie made no promises — but I stood in increasingly frigid cold for 45 minutes only to be told no-dice. It was nothing in the grand scheme and I naturally moved on, but on some residual level whenever I think of the talented and much-admired Val I think of the total absence of sensation in my toes that night, and the way snow was coming down so heavy and pretty, and how big Sundance kahuna Robert Redford and director-star Al Pacino drove up and jumped out of an SUV about ten minutes after the show was supposed to begin.

In Marie-Antoinette, Sofia Coppola “sabotages her vision outright, resulting in the most conventional kind of boring period trash” — “The Reeler’s Stu Van Airsdale….pile on!

I was looking at this boring IMDB poll of popular ’70s movies (you’ll never guess which film came out on top), and out of my temporary non-interest in the same old pantheon of classic ’70s films I was suddenly thinking again of John Flynn‘s The Outfit (1973), and wondering why it hasn’t been issued on DVD.

The Outfit isn’t one of those AFI best-of-the’70s movies by any means, but except for a flabby ending it’s a crackling little genre film that’s done almost perfectly. It stars Robert Duvall as an ex-con named Macklin out for revenge against some cold-blooded mob types. Karen Black, Joe Don Baker, Robert Ryan, Richard Jaeckel, Joanna Cassidy and Sheree North costar. Call it a lean, hardboiled, low-key crime drama in the same realm as Charley Varrick. Not as sombre or big-city noirish as The Friends of Eddie Coyle, but a very fine and flavorful film of its type.
The Outfit is based on Richard Stark‘s (i.e., Donald Westlake‘s) 1963 book of the same name, which was apparently part of his “Parker” series. (“Parker”, I gather, is more or less the same guy as “Walker” in the Stark book that became John Boorman‘s Point Blank.)
I mentioned The Outfit as a DVD candidate a little over two years ago…flatline. It’s only viewable on VHS, and has apparently been screened from time to time on Turner Classic Movies. It was originally an MGM release; Warner Home Video now has the rights. WHV honcho Ned Price seems to be napping on this one. Here’s hoping he wakes up and approves a DVD that will include a retrospective docu- mentary and audio commentaries from at least some of the creative principals. Before they’re all dead.