“I shared all your fears about Talladega Nights — not despite but because I’m a Southerner. I never, ever got NASCAR. And I dreaded, dreaded seeing the movie. Yes, it will get an audience automatically because of the combo of Ferrell and the whole insane NASCAR phenomenon, and don’t even get me started on the idea that watching guys drive fast around a paved oval is so much more important to a huge number of people than voting or following the news is to them. But I gotta tell you, I laughed out loud at this movie , and I almost never laugh out loud. There’s an inspired, almost surreal wit to it at times, and the cast is surprisingly strong. Take that for what it’s worth. It’s a great big goof of a film, but sometimes that laugh-out-loud response is all you want. I was surprised, that’s all. Even though I think NASCAR and all it represents is… well, never mind.” — Steve Murray, film critic, Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Nic Cage playing Liberace is a great, great idea. I’m there. Cage will get Liberace’s voice and posture and clothes just right. And he’s producing it also, so he’ll get to dictate stuff on all the levels. But there’s a problem –a big one — and it’s the fact that Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg, the gag-men who wrote large portions of the Scary Movie and Date Movie and Spy Hard screenplays, have written the Liberace thing.

Fake Cage-Liberace photo stolen from TMZ.com.

If I were Cage, I would boot these bozos off the project right now and find real screenwriters…seriously. TMZ’s Claude Brodesser has written that Seltzer and Friedberg’s “look at Liberace’s life is understood to be far more serious.” Hold it, Claude…movies are not serous or un-serious. They’re either good or un-good or cheesy or un-cheesy, and anyone who’s seen Date Movies and Spy Hard knows where these gusy are at. Spare us of the notion that Seltzer and Friedberg are suddenly going to channel Robert Bolt or Scott Frank or David Ayer or Cameron Crowe and become different writers.

Brian DePalma‘s The Black Dahlia debuting at the Venice Film Festival….great. I truly don’t believe anything good can come of this film except a spike in James Ellroy‘s book sales. The ’40s noir thing is over…done to death. DePalma — a truly exciting and out-there director from the late ’60s to early ’80s, and an occasionally successful commerical director from the mid ’80s to mid ’90s, has been over in the sense of failing to read or respond to the culture for years. I used to love the guy but then he made Femme Fatale and that was it. Two likely solves to the real Black Dahlia murder have been published — take your pick but they both sound pretty good to me. Alas, DePalma’s film, based on Ellroy’s “The Black Dahlia”, is fictional. DePalma’s chops are always first-rate — the guy has always been an audacious pro — so it might make for a good sit but I keep getting these vibrations and radio signals telling me it won’t be.

Guy Ritchie is a once-hot director (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) who baked his career and turned himself into an international joke when his remake of Wertmuller’s Swept Away tanked, in large part because he made it with Madonna, his wife. And then he made things worse with a film called Revolver which nobody liked when it showed at Sundance last January. Now he’s having another go, although he’s occupying a lower postiion on the totem pole.
According to the Guardian, Richie is the third helmer to try and get a crime flick rolling called Static. It’s about a wrongly-convicted mob guy being forced to testifying against some dirty cops. Ritchie will reportedly rewrite and direct the script, which was first written by New Zealand director Brad McGann five years ago.
The point is that back in the late ’90s Ritchie would have been the guy to make this film, but the Static producers came to him only after first trying to make it work with Stephen Kay and then music-video maestro Chris Robinson. Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw reportedly wrote earlier this year that “after Revolver, Swept Away now looks like Citizen Kane“.

The hottest picture on the tracking list right now is Will Ferrell‘s Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (Columbia, 8.4), which you and I know is going to be a dumb-ass redneck comedy pretending to be a satire of dumb-assed redneck car culture. We also know that fast-car movies are basically about old-boy nostalgia and the days when you could peel out and wail without worryin’ about nothin’, man. But times have changed, Jethro…sorry.

This is going to make me sound like a humorless liberal, but as funny as it may turn out to be (and I realize Ferrell and Adam McKay are going to mock red-staters and their values with this film) Talledega Nights will also be serving as a kind of yeehaw comfort-zone movie in spite of itself. A comfort zone for everyone who’s in denial about global warming and who refuses to see An Inconvenient Truth…a movie for all the ecological neanderthals to rally around and relax and rib each other about.
Friggin’ Ferrell, man…funny guy…vroom! vroom!…fill the friggin’ atmosphere with greenhouse gases….pass me another tasty groundup-pig-intestine hot dog…slurp down another frosty…yeahhhh!
Talledega has a 39 % definite interest and that’s from a phone survey of largely urban movieogers. I’m saying that the surveyors aren’t talking to people in the backwater shitkicker regions, which is where a lot of the business for this film is going to come from, so it’s going to be even bigger. I’ve been told (and I would naturally assume) that a lot of the Talledega ad money is being spent on this demo. As anyone would..c’mon. The ad people aren’t stupid.
Otherwise there’s a good amount of interest in World Trade Center (Paramount, 8.9) but there are stumbling blocks — Nic Cage isn’t a star, the 9/11 backdrop is a mixed bag with general audiences, and Oliver Stone doesn’t sell tickets like he used to between the late ’80s and the mid ’90s.
Miami Vice is going to do what it’s going to do, but I’m getting the idea that it’ll be a push to make $20 million this weekend. I hope I’m wrong, but the phrases I’m hearing are “soft landing” and “pissing upstream.”

Notice how the cheap metal pot sitting on my non-Martha Stewart stove in my kitchen is not perfectly round? How it’s all warped and oddly bent and has a darkly-stained bottom? That’s because every day I boil water for tea and then I go back to the computer to write something, and then I come out of my writing coma 15 or 20 minutes later and the water is all boiled out and the pot is just taking the heat.

So I pick it up with a pot holder and pour cold water on it and the kitchen fills with steam. I have done this, no exaggeration, about 40 or 50 times now, which is why this pot is totally baked and about to be tossed. I’ve already ruined two Bed, Bath and Beyond pouring pots this way…nice ones too. The kind that whistle when the water’s ready, I mean. And even when they were whistling I used to ignore them so I could finish the thing I was writing at the time. So it’s not cool and pretty stupid, really. And I’m just admitting this, M.Night Shyamalan-style.

So Crash producer Bob Yari isn’t paying out all the money he should be paying to the profit participants on Crash — director-cowriter Paul Haggis, screenwriter Bobby Moresco, Sandra Bullock, Matt Dillon, Don Cheadle and five other actors in the cast — and the meager money he’s parted with has been slow in arriving. This despite Crash having cost only $7.5 million to shoot and the total world income standing at $180 million so far. Why? Hollywood bookkeeping, people skimming, human nature.
A seasoned publicist who’s been at this racket since the ’60s once told me that people you work with will almost always fuck you financially one way or the other — by shortchanging you, by delaying payments, by disputing what you’re owed. Every damn time, he said. It’s probably built into our genes, he said.
Yari tells N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman that he’s “aware of the dissatisfaction, but that [he’s] completely up to date on payments. The profit participants “have been correctly paid,” he told her. “They will be paid more. This is the process. We’ve done everything aboveboard. If we wanted to not pay people and have them sue us, we wouldn’t pay them at all.”
I don’t know about that. I think that if Yari wanted to stiff the Crash participants without getting into a bunch of lawsuits he would (a) delay, and then (b) delay some more, and then (c) he’d finally send two or thee of them a modest check for $19,000, and then (d) he’d piss around some more, and (e) then say that Lion’s Gate and other people on hoarding profits, not him, and then (f) if a reporter called he’d get on the phone and say that everything is in perfect order.

“No other writer-producer-director makes males more excited at the prospect of a new film — especially a cop thriller — than Michael Mann. But it’s an anticipation that crosses gender and taste barriers, integrating art film buffs with the Friday night popcorn crowd. Fans look to this peerless creator of impeccably crafted films about existential male loners — films such as The Last of the Mohicans, Heat and The Insider — for a superior kind of big budget cinema, a hyperrealism that is simultaneously dumbfounding and realistic. He seems to be the sort of guy who can talk fast cars all day with the studio suits, as if he were a suit himself. Yet his artistry is a matter of absolute dedication, making him perhaps the most extreme cinema perfectionist since Stanley Kubrick.” — Nick James in last Sunday’s Guardian Observer.

According to L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein, what makes Michael Bamberger‘s “The Man Who Heard Voices” “especially damaging” is that Lady in the Water director-writer M. Night Shyamalan told Bamberger absolutely everything and let it all hang out. In so doing, says Goldstein, Night “violated Hollywood PR Law No. 1: Never let people see you as you really are. In an era when stars hide behind their handlers, who vet writers, limit their access and keep them miles away from any dirty laundry, Night let Bamberger see it all — straight, no chaser.”
This is an early July riff, I realize, and it’s time to move on, but Goldstein’s column just came out and I’m reacting
I said this before in my response to Janet Maslin‘s N.Y. Times review about Bamberger book, and here it is again. By giving Bamberger access to his insecure inner sanctum without restrictions, Shyamalan allowed for a portrait of “a vulnerable egoistic guy with problems — a guy with a deep belief in dreams and voices (as all creative types need to be) but with control-freak tendencies and a need for a certain kind of approval that requires being not just rich but fully understood by colleagues; a guy with demons and uncertainties like anyone else, but amplified by the power he’s accumulated as a big-time Hollywood director.”
What I find very revealing is that Maslin and Goldstein and a lot of others in the media are contemptuous of Night’s honesty. And they endorse and approve of people who carefully edit their public persona and spin everything up and down the flapgpole. They’re actually standing on the side of the 2006 Generic Deceivers. We all recognize that everyone has to play the game this way if they want to survive, but why am I one of the few people to at least show respect for Shyamalan’s willingness to let people see his trembling inner child? The guy may have problems, granted, but you can’t say he doesn’t have a kind of cast-iron courage.
And one other repeated point: take off the armor and we’re all scared and anxious and messed up in this or that way, including myself and Patrick Goldstein and Janet Maslin and Michael Mann. The difference is that Shyamalan has the courage to confess this and Bamberger has the focus and discipline to just lay it down as he heard and felt it, and all Maslin and Goldstein can write in response is tsk-tsk, “not very smart”, and a repeat of the John Lennon lyric, “Hey, you’ve got to hide your love away.” How very big of them.

Men Apart

We all know the five-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is happening soon, and that Hollywood has gotten into this already with Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (which I still feel is the best theatre-released film of the year so far), and that Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center is about to pop on August 9th, and that the TV networks are planning on airing some 9/11 stuff in September.
And I can understand people saying, “Look, leave me out of this…we all went through it and it was awful but I’ve moved on…enough.”

Don Cheadle, Adam Sandler in Mike Binder’s Reign O’er Me

But what if there was a 9/11 movie that was only nominally about 9/11? A movie about dealing with 9/11 grief by not dealing with it, by keeping it in a box? Which, let’s face it, is where an awful lot of people are still at these days. (Like the ones who refused to see United 93 last spring, for instance) And which opens a door in a broader sense to a whole way of living, or not living as it were.
This is what Mike Binder’s Reign O’er Me, which I saw a couple of weeks ago, is more or less about. Set in Manhattan, it’s about a dentist and a widower in his 30s named Charlie (Adam Sandler) who lives in a state of total shutdown that requires never feeling grief over his dead wife and daughters — killed on 9/11 because they were on one of the jets that slammed into the towers. Because the hard drive has been erased and he’s living somewhere else.
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The story’s about how Charlie slips into a renewed friendship with a dental-school pal named Allan (Don Cheadle), a well-to-do husband and father who relates to Sandler because he’s also living in a place of crust and solitude, and how this friendship brings some comfort to both. And then, very gradually, a bit more.
I’m bringing this up because I know Reign O’er Me is honest and real and excep- tional. And because I’m hearing that Sony Pictures execs are also high on it and have tested it with Average Joes and gotten some great test scores, and are thinking about opening it on December 1st and going for what they can get.

I’m also talking about Reign because I feel it touches the communal 9/11 current in a sadder and more intimate way than World Trade Center…no offense to Oliver or Michael Shamberg or Stacey Sher or Paramount, because they’ve made a good film also. But Reign has a metaphor that spreads out and sinks in. Which is that everybody (or almost everybody) buries the stuff that hurts.
I’m also mentioning Reign O’er Me because Sandler is damned convincing as Charlie, and despite his having never gone into serious acting territory, his work is good enough here to warrant entry into the year-end derby. I’m serious.
Sandler has never tried to do much more than his patented Sandler shtick (Punch Drunk Love and maybe The Wedding Singer excepted). But his Reign performance is a trip off the reservation. And it all crescendos in a breakdown scene at the end of Act Two that nails it and makes the performance whole. Say what you will about Click and Little Nicky, but Sandler’s Charlie is going to earn serious respect.
I’m also talking about Reign O’er Me because it’s Binder’s best film ever — it’s at least two or three notches better than The Upside of Anger, which I thought was a solid 8.5 with a couple of nicely full-bodied performances by Joan Allen and Kevin Costner.
And because Cheadle is superb in the film also — I found him much more affecting in this than in Hotel Rwanda. And because the rest of the cast — Jada Pinkett Smith, Saffron Burrows, Liv Tyler, Robert Klein, Melinda Dillon, John de Lancie, Donald Sutherland, and Binder himself — give rooted, lived-in performances all down the line.

Jada Pinkett Smith, Don Cheadle

And because Russ T. Aslobrook’s widescreen photography, which was captured with a digital Genesis camera, is quite beautiful at times, the footage of nighttime Manhattan in particular.
And because the whole thing just works in a layer-by-layer way. Because it has a certain decency and quiet focus…a not-slow, not-hurried, building-into-something- true quality. And because it’s finally as much about Cheadle’s character and his marital issues as it is about Sandler’s emotional novacaine.
There are plans afoot to try to get it shown at certain festivals and hire the right publicity firm, etc. The usual moves for any quality-level drama with a December release date. Reign O’er Me (which is incorrectly called Empty City on the IMDB) may or may not get awards traction…who knows? Resistance among the Sandler haters may be so stiff that they won’t consider him for Best Actor…but I would be astounded if he doesn’t pick up support among the handicappers.
That’s about it. I just wanted to put this out there and let everyone know that some- thing pretty damn good has joined the fray…nothing more.

If anyone knows anyone who managed to digitally capture that Kim Cattrall Nissan ad that ran on New Zealand TV before it was banned for being too sexually out-there….the one in which she moaned suggestively while driving over a hump in the road (the ad reportedly shows a yellow road sign with that very word printed in black letters), and then, while talking to a Nissan salesman, says, “Why didn’t you tell me it was so big? I just wasn’t prepared for it! The all-new Nissan Tiida makes you feel really, really, really good inside. Absolutely fabulous! I mean the great body and the way you moved it.” Send it along and I’ll run the link or load it onto my server…whatever.

DVD Beaver is one of the greatest DVD sites anywhere. I love the screen-capture comparisons. Check out their comparison piece on new two-disc “Collector’s Edition” of Billy Wilder‘s Some Like It Hot.