I was searching for an item about The Outfit that I wrote in September of ’04, and I came upon my original Sideways review. And reading the following graph almost choked me up because of how infrequently this kind of specialness seems to manifest: “The worst thing a film can do (apart from being awful or boring you to tears) is to deliver this or that cheap high when you’re watching it but then fall apart on the way home. Sideways does the precise opposite. It’s okay at first, and then better, and then deeper and then really funny, and finally very touching. Then it seems to get even better the next morning, and better still a couple of days later.”

Poor Edward Bass, the Bobby producer who’s sounds to me like he’s just another obstinate and egoistic self-promoter and con artist, which puts him in the same general polluted tank that a lot of other producers in this town are swimming in. L.A. Times writer Robert Welkos has run a profile piece with a headline that describes Bass as an “ex-con,” which he is…but if you read the article a second time, he only sounds moderately flawed. Not that much worse, I’m saying, than a lot of other smiling flim-flammers I’ve run into over the years.
I’m not saying Bass is the most respected or creative-minded producer to have worked on a mainstream film in this town. Is he a dick? Bobby director-writer Emilio Estevez has evidently been of that opinion. He warred tooth-and-nail with Bass over the shape of the script, and as John Ridley‘s seminal Esquire piece recounts, it was Bass whom Esetevez was addressing when he uttered the immortal line, “Checkmate, asshole!”
Bass did time in the early ’80s for mail fraud and that’s no joke, but if you look closely at the particulars — he and another guy were charged with falsifying information to obtain a higher credit rating that allowed their company to purchase equipment at cheaper prices — Bass was involved in the same realm of financial fakery that Jack Lemmon‘s Harry Stoner character was guilty of in John Avild- sen‘s Save The Tiger (’73), and he was presented as a flawed but sympathetic man. A lot of people cut corners and put on false fronts. I’m not saying it’s okay, but Hollywood has never been a sanctuary of ethical behavior.
Bass changed his first name from Michael to Edward so people wouldn’t associate him with his younger jailbird incarnation and so he could start anew, in a sense. Is there anyone who hasn’t wanted to keep certain aspects of their past hidden? It’s not exactly touching when Bass says to Welkos, “Why can’t we just let Michael Bass die and let Edward Bass live? He’s my evil twin“…but you can half-feel for the guy.

Tom Laughlin and Dolores Taylor‘s website contains a pitch for Billy Jack’s Moral Revolution, a “new 2007 film” that’s not a movie but a plan. The pitch is breathlessly over-written — a super-loaded political-cultural mouthful about a film that would trigger an earthquake of change — a political, sexual, spiritual and psychological revolution that includes ejecting the Bushies and turning away from the Bush Doctrine and managing an end to the Iraq War.

Tom Laughlin, Barack Obama, Clint Eastwood

The idea of Billy Jack’s Moral Revolution doesn’t seem to have been received with sufficient enthusiasm by Laughlin’s network of would-be, small-time financiers. The same ideas and goals were expressed by Laughlin in 6.20.05 article by N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman, and it makes you wonder if he’ll be proposing the same package — he’s trying to raise $12 million — 18 or 36 or 72 months hence.
Laughlin is the original tough-minded independent, but he sounds like a street- corner nutter when he writes that his film will contain “four exciting, highly-charged love stories, with a unique focus on the difference between sex and eros and violence in human relationships — especially among teenagers, including the problem of abortion. Like the original Billy Jack, it will be an uplifting, ten-handkerchief tearjerker.”
But as undisciplined and wiggy as some of Laughlin’s agenda seems to be, a lot of what he says about why this country is deeply loathed and the effects of the Bush Doctrine makes basic sense. I completely agree with Laughlin 100% that the three greatest evils afflicting this country right now are (a) corporate oligarchs, (b) totalitarian neo-con agendas and (c) false evangelicals .
Laughlin is a a devout believer in the fundamental tenets of freedom and individual rights that this country was…I’m not going to say it was entirely founded upon these beliefs (I’m too much of a James Ellroy fan to swallow that one whole), but Laughlin truly believes in the myth of the once-good-and-noble-U.S.A., and there’s something touching in that.

You know who’s also into the idea of restoring the spiritual American dream? Clint Eastwood.
In his Time magazine interview with Richard Schickel, Eastwood sounds standardly cynical when he says that “everyone is looking for who’s the hero that is going to get us out of what we’re in now. I heard somebody on the radio the other day — one of these talk shows — saying, ‘Oh, where’s the new General Patton? Where’s the guy who says, ‘I don’t give a shit what the politicians want — this is what we should do.’ Well, that era’s gone.”
But later in the piece he’s asked by Schickel if “there’s any conceivable possibility in the modern world for the assertion of conventional heroism,” and Eastwood’s reply shows he very much wants to somehow see things made right.
“I certainly don’t see any politician that’s a hero in any party anywhere,” he begins. “I think John McCain did something that I don’t know if I could do and I don’t think many men can look in the mirror and say they’d do: give up a chance to get out of prison because his dad was an admiral and the Vietnamese were going to let him go. Pat Tillman, giving up his NFL career to fight — and die — for his country is like that for me too.

“But all that said, is there a hunger among Americans for heroic behavior? I think there is a hunger. I think that most people would love to see a heroic figure step forward. I can almost sound like one of those Christian-right guys: Where is the Messiah?”
I’m not saying that 75 year-old Tom Laughlin — part visionary, part wack-doodle, part eminently sensible American who’s not stupid and who genuinely cares — is any kind of marketable Messiah, but there’s a common chord in what he and Eastwood are saying — a common lament and a hope-against-hope that I’ll bet hundreds of thousands of Americans are feeling as well.
Barack Obama is no messiah and no saint and he’s not as tough as he could be on issues like health care, but he’s The Guy right now. He’s got that Bobby Kennedy-in-’68, special-aura thing. People of different political tribes, persuasions and affiliations seem to be hugely taken with the guy. And I just think he really has to go for it in ’08 and not four years later. People know he’s Presidential timber and that it’s all but inevitable he’ll run.
If Obama declares, I have a feeling that Laughlin and Eastwood and many, many people in between will vote for him.

Screengrab’s Bilge Ebiri has linked to a Pope’s death on April 2, 2005, as noted by four close friends — John Paul II’s talking diary and talking ink pen (who both have sad emotive eyes) as well as Piccolo and Fiona, the Pope’s “bosom pigeons.” Then there’s a Clutch Cargo-like image of John Paul II waving to his followers as he ascends into the night skies above Rome. If only the Pope had bade a final verbal Clutch Cargo farewell with that weirdly organic wet-mouth and “live” lip-and-tongue effect.

I’m just an impartial observer here — of course I’m not — but New Yorker critic Anthony Lane sure knows how to kick the pretense out of Sofia Coppola. His Marie-Antoinette review is glorious. I haven’t felt such an intravenous surging of pure pleasure in weeks…no, months.

“Is this film to be believed?,” Lane asks at the one-third mark. “Coppola films Versailles with a flat acceptance, quickening at times into eager montage, and declares, in her notes on the film, that she sought to capture her heroine’s ‘inner experience.’ Her what? This is like a manicurist claiming to capture the inner experience of your pinkie.

“The one, transfixing virtue of Marie Antoinette is its unembarrassed devotion to the superficial. There is no morality at play here, no agony other than boredom, and, until the last half hour, not a shred of political sense. The fun dies out of the film — in fact, the film itself expires — when Coppola suddenly starts dragging in discussions of the American Revolution and, at the close, a baying crowd with a hatred of chandeliers.

“I can see what the director was after here: the kind of irruptive shock that cuts short the jamboree in ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost.’ But horrified realism is not her style, and her lunges at historical gravity seem insulting and uncourageous; she should have kept her nerve and stuck to the fripperies — to the noisy, brightly decorated void in which her characters spin.

“The question has to be: what does Coppola know? Was Lost in Translation really, as it first appeared, a wistful commentary on the plight of Americans abroad, who shut themselves in their hotel rooms and fell lightly in love because it was sweeter, and less scary, than venturing outside? Or was it, as a later viewing suggested, in hock to that same trepidation, creating an insular chic out of xenophobia?

“A similar uncertainty pervades Marie Antoinette, borne along on a wave of anachronistic rock. Is the movie somehow contending that the Queen was, with her gang of cronies and her witless overspends, the Paris Hilton of the late eighteenth century? If so, then the catcallers of Cannes were even more misguided than they knew, since any decent French Marxist would be happy to deconstruct the film as a trashing of the idle rich.

“On the other hand, I spent long periods of Marie Antoinette under the growing illusion that it was actually made by Paris Hilton. There are hilarious attempts at landscape, but the fountains and parterres of Versailles are grabbed by the camera and pasted into the action, as if the whole thing were being shot on a cell phone and sent to friends.

“The young Queen builds a faux-pastoral paradise in the grounds, where she and her little daughter sport like shepherdesses, but, rather than raise an eyebrow at this make-believe, the director treats it as just another white-linen moment, like an outtake from The Virgin Suicides, and, for good measure, tosses in a few shots of nodding flowers and ickle bouncy lambs. That is so Coppola.

“It is hard to hate the film, whose silly fizz makes it simpler and less creepy than her earlier projects. If it does drop larger hints, they have less to do with the vanished culture of Versailles than with the fretful stasis of our own. The movie’s approach to the world beyond, to everything that one doesn’t know or wouldn’t care to buy, is like the look on Kirsten Dunst‘s face: a beautiful blankness, forever on the brink of drifting, with a smile, into sleep.”

I’m slow on the pickup again, but 36 hours ago the L.A. Times ran two Borat stories, and portions of each are worth quoting because they lay bare what Borat‘s star-cowriter-producer Sacha Baron Cohen is essentially up to, which is a cunning mockery of America’s rural cluelessness.
The piece by Mark Olsen and John Horn quotes Talladega Nights director Adam McKay as follows: “I don’t want to speak for my movies; you could say my movies are just completely silly and dumb, but in the case of Idiocracy and Borat, without a doubt there is a really subversive and sophisticated assault on American culture.
“It’s one thing to mess stuff up and break stuff, but [Borat] is really pointing out the ideology of America. It’s one thing to break stuff and damage people’s possessions, but when you start aiming at the ideology of America, that’s dangerous comedy.”
The article/rant piece by Carina Chocano points out that Borat — i.e., Cohen playing a Kazakhstan culture reporter — hangs out with “normal people” — i.e., non-actors who aren’t in on the joke — and gets them to happily reveal their prejudices.
“Shopping for a house, in one TV episode, Borat asks a real estate agent about a windowless room with a metal door for his mentally disabled brother, whether he may bury his wife in the yard if she dies, and whether black people will move into the neighborhood. At the wine tasting, he asks if the black waiter is a slave, to which the ‘commander’ of the Knights of the Vine society in Jackson, Miss., replies that there was ‘a law that was passed that they could no longer be used as slaves — which is a good thing for them.’ (‘Oh, good for him, not so good for you!’ Borat yelps, picking up an undercurrent that may not have even been evident to them.)
“And he does all of it with a wide-eyed, kiss-you-on-the-cheek, ‘America is No. 1’ insouciance that lowers everybody’s guard — which must be it, because, otherwise, what’s going on? Why is it that Borat can boast to a recruiter at a financial services company that he can ‘hold down a large woman for three hours’ or patiently explain to a career counselor how his last job consisted of masturbating camels, and both men will nod patiently, never so much as cracking a smile or doing a double take, unflappably respectful of their ‘cultural differences’ until the end.
“Are they media-coached to the point of catatonia? So secure in their cultural superiority and so clueless about the world around them that they actually believe that this nice, besuited television reporter from Central Asia has never seen a toilet before? Are they dead?
“This, I think, is where the genius and horror of Borat’s explorations really lie: The joke is not on the U.S. or Kazakhstan or even the fake Kazakhstan of Cohen’s imagination. The joke is on petrified, inward-looking nationalism of all stripes. What’s funny is a jingoism so blinkered it can’t see the joke in a fake Kazakh singing the fake Kazakh national anthem to the tune of the American one. (Or the irony, for that matter, in the malaprop: ‘I support your war of terror!’)”

I never think about Vaugniston except when I’m at the check-out counter at Pavillions, but I’m wondering if anyone else is feeling vaguely let down to read that apparently they haven’t broken up after all. I don’t give a shit but I thought it was over. I think it would be fairly cool, frankly, if every celebrity couple except Brangelina were to all break up at the same time. (I have a soft spot for Pitt and Jolie; it has something to do with that tabloid story about Jolie making sounds “like an animal being killed” when she was apparently getting down with Pitt in that African hotel bungalow.)
But now here’s this BBC News story sayings they’re still happening — the exact phrase is “the couple [is saying] they remain together” — and that Vaughn is suing a couple of London tabs plus the New York Post for running a story that he kissed some hottie, blah, blah. I’m just saying I didn’t realize how sick I was of Vaughniston until they came back.

Six days ago — October 10 — I didn’t post anything about the Movies.com 1st Annual Readers Poll Awards, partly because the results seemed so obvious and insipid and indicative of a lazy, low-rent reader mentality. 30,000 fans participated in the poll, and…and…and I can’t write about this. I just can’t. The site itself is lively, punchy, well-designed. Let’s just leave it that.

I ran across a sloppily-written item that briefly piqued my interest because it ties into Emilio Estevez’s Bobby (Weinstein Co., 11.17). L.A.-based culture journalist Dianne Bates Kenney (of Bates Rates News) tells about having met a commercial photographer named Eric Saarinen several years ago and hearing a fascinating story about footage he captured of the shooting of Robert F. Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel on June 4,1968. At first the story gets you, then it drives you mad because of the details she ignores.
According to Saarinen, Kenney writes, he “and a friend were filming Kennedy and followed him after he exited the [Ambassador ballroom] podium. They captured Kennedy as he fell after being shot as well as the scramble of the people around him. They went back to the campus, made a copy of the film and locked the original in one of their lockers.
“Then, Saarinen said, both students, overwhelmed by what they had witnessed, ‘sat on the street corner and proceeded to get very drunk.’ They were approached by a strange man and while under the influence, told him what they had just seen and filmed. They assured him that the original film was safely locked in a locker. The next day, when they went to the locker, the film was gone.”
Okay…so what happened to the copy Saarinen said they made? The original, the story suggests, was stolen by the “strange man” (strange in what way? was he oddly dressed?) who somehow knew which locker the original film was stored in. Did Saarinen and his friend tell this total stranger how to find it? They must have been awfully damn stupid on top of being dead drunk. In any case, the story clearly states that a copy was made, so where is it? And has this story ever been passed along to anyone before, and was the whereabouts of the copy ever investigated?

A Judd Apatow fanboy who was profoundly impressed by The 40 year-Old Virgin and actually believes this film plays on the same level as classic Woody Allen pics — in short, a not-very-worldly GenX monkey who probably has a beefy physique and wears cutoffs and cross-trainer shoes with no socks and plays video games with his 33 year-old buddies — is gushing about Apatow’s new comedy, Knocked Up (Universal, 8.17).
Virgin convinced me that one cannot say “beware of Judd Apatow!” often enough. I listened to him earlier this year at a Santa Barbara Film Festival panel and I think I know what his game is. Apatow was a very hip comedy writer in the ’90s. Now he’s a 40ish maintainer with expenses to cover.
There’s only one graph in this review that’s half-intriguing: “If you’re looking for a movie with wall-to-wall tear-faced laughter, you can’t do any better than Borat and Idiocracy this year. But Knocked Up is the better film.” He’s saying it has more emotional depth than the other two, and maybe even a trace of a soul. But keep in mind the apparent cultural vistas of the guy writing this.
The author adds that “its the sort of film that comes along and makes you realize that the Oscars is such a broken system, because they would never pull a stick out of their ass to nominate a movie like Knocked Up, a movie that has a two-minute conversation about Julianne Moore’s pubic hair no sooner than the opening credits finish up.” In other words, the conversationalists are talking about Moore’s exposed bush in that marital argument scene with Matthew Modine from Robert Altman‘s Short Cuts. Okay….and the ahead-of-the-curve factor in this scene is what exactly?

The Dallas movie, praise the wisdom of the gods, is quite obviously cursed. The planned November shoot, which followed a previous start date, has been postponed and all the actors except John Travolta have been let go to save money. (Travolta, who is so not Chili-in-Get Shorty these days since he gained the weight back and started wearing that tennis-ball haircut, will play J.R. Ewing if and when this thing ever makes it to the screen.) The budget contraction happened because somebody at New Regency got worried about the commercial potential of an adaptation of an musty ’80s TV series, although you’d think the Devil Wears Prada audience would show up if it were half-decent. But it can’t be because the gods are foursquare against it. The obviously humane thing would be to jettison the fetus before it develops any further, but some people are tenacious no matter what.