The TMZ guys spoke with Bryan Singer, Kate Bosworth and Brandon Routh on the promo circuit in Europe., and in this clip all three are asked about Pirate 2‘s monster opening weekend. Poor Bryan…tough place to be, but he’s facing it with class. (If you don’t have the Mozilla ActiveX plugin, forget it…the clip won’t play.)

A fairly clever aping of the Drudge Report in order to promote Lionsgate’s The U.S. vs, John Lennon (which will hit theatres a couple of months from now, give or take).

Way of the Ass

[Spoiler Note: If you consider a single specific description of a gross-out moment in a Kevin Smith film to be an earth-shaking spoiler, read no further.]
I can roll with bestiality as an occasional online diversion. Every five or six months, I mean. I’m not a subscriber to any of the farm-love sites, but an actor once sent me a video file…you don’t want to know. But I’ve never seen a donkey show in Tijuana, and I’m proud that the notion of attending one has never crossed my mind.

KRosario Dawon and Brian O’Halloran in Kevin Smith’s Clerks 2

How did I get started on this subject ? Oh, yeah….Kevin Smith’s Clerks 2 (Wein- stein Co., 7.21), which does the gay-donkey thing inside a New Jersey fast-food joint called Mooby’s in the third act with the whole crew (Brian O’Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Smith, Jayson Mewes, Rosario Dawson, Trevor Fuhrman) alternately fascinated and horrified, etc.
I come from a decent middle-class New Jersey family, and I’ve read read hundreds of good books. I have two children, I can sing on-key and play drums, I know how to write, I’ve been to Paris and Prague and Rome, I know some of the best people on the planet, I used to be heavily into the Bhagavad-Gita, and here I am riffing on a scene in a film in which a bald leather-clad gay guy blows a donkey and then lubes the poor animal and anally goes to town
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I was fine with Clerks 2. Okay…define “fine.” I think it means feeling okay, smiling, laughing now and then…having an alpha time of it.
I’m a fool for Jayson Mewes (whom I once called “the Marlon Brando of stoner comedies”) and also Ms. Dawson, whose passion and vivaciousness upgrades this film all to hell. (As Smith put it yesterday during a round-table session at the Clerks junket, Dawson’s top-grade acting is verified by the fact that “she makes you believe that she would fuck Brian O’Halloran.”) And it has a Jackson Five musical dance sequence that rocks out pretty well.

Jayson Mewes, Kevin Smith

I presume I don’t have to go into the basic drill about O’Halloran and Anderson playing older, slightly chunkier versons of the Dante and Randal characters they portrayed in Smith’s original Clerks…you know this. The guys getting older and still treading water in a retail service job (serving fast food instead of selling smokes), and wondering what the hell’s next.
But the energy and the humor is up and down, in and out…and I just wanted more. I was hoping for Clerks 2 to be faster and darker. That’s just me. It hangs in there true and steady, but it doesn’t build all that much as it moves along. It keeps to a certain deliberate pace and I guess I’m more comfortable with more wildness. I wanted more boyfriends and girlfriends arguing and challenging each other, more pushing the limits of propriety, more confrontations with customers, more shoving ….something looser and ruder.
I can honestly say that until last week I’d never heard, much less used, the term “porch monkey”, but Clerks 2 has rectified the first half of that situation. (If you want an idea of how racist-ugly Americans can be, check out this Wikipedia page on ethnic slur terms.) And I agreed with Randal when he asks in the film, ‘Why is ‘porch monkey’ necessarily a racial slur? It refers to a lazy guy doing nothing but hanging out on his porch. And monkey isn’t racial thing — it just implies “devolved.”
Little Miss Sunshine does something pretty amazing. It sometimes drops down into some pretty dark places, but then two minutes later it bounces right back and does something pretty damn funny, or at least amusing, and sometimes touching. With the memory of that film in my head, I was kind of hoping for some meaner, grislier, heart-of-New-Jersey darkness stuff in Clerks 2.

Kevin Smith is too nice and mild-mannered, I guess, to go in that direction. I know him pretty well and it’s really not a rumor — he’s one of the gentlest and giving-est guys working in this town. (What do you want me to do, lie about this?)
Thing is, Clerks 2 is about something very real and not altogether pretty — what happens when under-the-radar guys get into their 30s and they’re still doing nothing with their lives? What’s it like to deal with this? What options are possible? Are people doomed by this age, or do they still have a shot?
The despair levels that I’ve seen among the unambitious knockaround types I know from Fairfield County are not pretty. Rage sometimes erupts out of nowhere and then it’s “whoa….look out.” These guys are not living lives of any fullness or self-satisfaction. And there’s no one like Smith to point a finger at something psychological or sociological and say, “Forget what you’ve read or heard — this is what’s really happening.”
I think if Smith wanted to get down and make a funny movie that also takes a probing look at a sad situation that may be happening with — who knows? — tens of thousands of GenX slacker types, he could do it with one hand tied behind his back. But he hasn’t chosen to, and he’s cool with that. He’s just not a fire-in-the-belly John Osborne or Chuck Palahniuk.

A perfectly focused glass of water (center) and a less-focused Jason Mewes at Tuesday’s Clerks 2 junket at Four Seasons Hotel — 7.11, 2:20 pm.

Nothing against Anderson and O’Halloran, but I would have preferred seeing another Jay and Silent Bob film, or even one that’s mostly about Jay. Call it a weakness, but I think Mewes is a truly gifted madman. I peed in my pants at the Silence of the Lambs stuff he does in Clerks 2, and I just think he’s a star, and that he’s got more X-factor magnetism than Anderson or Halloran have any day of the week.
I loved the Battle of the Trilogies debate scene (Rings vs. Star Wars). I was okay with the donkey-blowing, and cool with the urine ice being put into the glass of coke. I laughed at the porch monkey thing despite the negatives. The energy from Rosario Dawson is glorious when you consider the contrast. The vocal energy and the feeling in her eyes…Smith was either lucky or inspired or both when he decided to try and bring her into this.
I like O’Halloran’s sad, soulful eyes and his voice — he can do romantic lines pretty well — but I wasn’t quite comfortable with his puffy Irish kisser. With two women liking him enough to chow down on him, the guy should have dropped some pounds before shooting began. And what’s with the hair? I sat next to him during the junket yesterday and it’s kind of sandy brown, but his hair is dyed a kind of inky dark brown in the film and doesnt look right — like he did it himself at home.
Why was I cool with Clerks 2 but hated You, Me and Dupree? Because at least Clerks 2 has some genuinely funny stuff that kicks in from time to time, and because Mewes is funnier than Owen Wilson, and because Rosario Dawson kicks Kate Hudson’s ass.

The reader comment thing is up and rolling again. There was an awful technical hassle all day with the software having been disabled by the Soviet bureaucrats at Lunar Pages, on top of other issues and things to come. But the problem has now been rectified and everything’s jake…for now.

Down on Dupree

Reviews of You, Me and Dupree (Universal, 7.14) are starting to show up so here goes my own. As an exercise in eccentricity I thought I’d run my thoughts raw, as I first expressed them in an e-mail a few days ago.
But first the basics: Carl Peterson (Matt Dillon) is an affable guy with a new wife, Molly (Kate Hudson), and a new job working for her tyrannical egotistical land- developer dad (Michael Douglas…obvious echoes of De Niro’s psycho-pop in Meet the Parents). Enter Carl’s best friend Randy Dupree (Wilson), an amiable slacker who can’t hold a job and has lost his apartment, so Carl takes pity and invites him to stay in his and Molly’s home…for a short while.

Kate Hudson, Owen Wilson and Matt Dillon in Joe and Anthony Russo’s You, Me and Dupree

“Oh my God…oh my God,” my letter began.
“You must know that You, Me and Dupree is easily one of the worst films of the year. Slapdash, undisciplined, uninispired and sans compass or clues. It’s Boudou Saved From Drowning and The Man Who Came to Dinner subjected to devolution, the TV backgrounds of co-directors Joe and Anthony Russo, and the enthralling comic vision of producers Scott Stuber and Mary Parent.
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“I don’t want to sound harsh or intemperate, but if I was running Universal I wouldn’t hire the Russo brothers to be gate guards.
“There is one scene that works, in which Owen gives a rousing speech about different lifestyles and modes of growth to a classroom of eight year olds. It’s been dubbed ‘the Mothership’ scene on this Yahoo page.

“I’ll always love Owen Wilson and Dillon is actually pretty good, and Michael Douglas has obviously had some great work done and has dieted a lot of pounds off and has a great wardrobe guy to boot.
“Hudson is okay but she’s not exactly a comedian — she’s more of an aura lady — but over the last six years she’s hasn’t landed anything nearly as good as the role she played in Almost Famous, and she’s gotten weaker and less connected as the years have rolled by.
“Thank God for Owen. He plays the same spirited spiritual-flotation-device spacehead in every film he’s in, and he’s always great at it, and that’s what makes him a bona fide star. Even though he doesn’t really ‘open’ anything.
“But woebetide this movie. I leaned over and said to [name of a guy] sitting next to me about 35 minutes into it, ‘This isn’t very funny.’ And then it got worse and worse.

“If the Russos were geniuses, they might have transformed this thing into some- thing resembling Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild. You know it, right? Some say it’s Demme’s best film ever.
“The Russos could have run with the ball and made it lame-funny at first, but gradually darker and meaner and nastier. They could have had Dillon get into a car accident and maybe kill a pedestrian and wind up in jail and turning into a thief. Hudson and Wilson could have had an affair, and Douglas could have hired Owen and fired Dillon, and then Douglas could have seen his business fall apart for some reason. And Owen could have become a gleeful villain with a serious psycho streak.
“It could have been amazing — a movie that starts out as an exercise in “comic” tedium and morphs into a kind of melodrama-horror film. Startling, breathtaking… the audience wouldn’t know what to think or feel, but they’d definitely be talking it up.
“But not with the Russos as they really (apparently) are. Not with Stuber and Parent involved. Not with Universal’s committee process in place.

“I really think the people who helped make this thing need to leave town and go to an ashram somewhere deep in the Mexican mountains and ask themselves, ‘What am I doing with my life? What have I become? How do I live with myself after this?’
“As soon as it ended last night, the theatre emptied out like that. People sticking around for the closing credits is always a good sign that a film has affected viewers on some level. But people couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
“Every which way this movie is a tank, an embarassment…a fountain of eternal shame and remorse.”

As a way of honoring the great Barnard Hughes, who died today in Manhattan at age 90, please listen to this sound file of a confession he delivers in Arthur Hiller and Paddy Chayefsky’s The Hospital (1971)…a confession about having killed three staffers in a New York hospital, but not by his own hand…not precisely…he merely arranged for the three to need urgent medical attention, and then put them under the care of the hospital’s general staff, thus ensuring their deaths.

HE readers may have noticed over the past several hours that the software allowing comments to be posted at the tail end of each item or article has been disabled. This is the intended deliberate doing of Lunar Pages, HE’s web server out of La Habra, California. Of course, they didn’t think to notify me of the problem (whatever it is) by e-mail as it happened. Naturally I’ve written them about this problem and marked it “triple urgent”, but they sometimes take 24 to 48 hours to respond to e-mails. And of course, they don’t have anyone answering phones at their office after 5 pm Pacific. I don’t have a dedicated line with Lunar Pages, which is the biggest and most secure server they offer, but I pay a somewhat sizable fee for the largest shared server plan you can get from them. All I can tell you is, they’re not reliable and when things go wrong they are always slow as molasses to respond.

Columbia Pictures hasn’t yet put an offer on the table for Vince Vaughn to play heroic FBI guy John O’Neill in Paul Haggis ‘s film version of Against All Enemies, but Vaughn has been reportedly been talking to Haggis about doing it. And a story about this not yet solidified situation was fed to the Hollywood Reporter for what purpose, and with what motive? Vaughn’s O’Neill is a likable supporting character — a good hombre who gets the terrorism picture as clearly as the hero, Richard Clarke (who will apparently beplayed by Sean Penn) does. I’ve read a draft of the script as it existed before Haggis began his “supervisory” rewrite with original screenwriter James Vanderbilt, and I ran a review of it on 3.20, and I can tell you that O’Neill turns up on page 67 and exits on page 123. Tatiana Siegel‘s THR piece says no offer has been made to Vaughn because Columbia Pictures is “fine-tuning the film’s budget.” What is that, a euphemism for “hemming and hawing”, as in “this project scares us…we’re not sure what we should do…if it fails it’ll reflect badly on us…should we wait and see what World Trade Center makes the first weekend before we greenlight it?”

Fox 411’s Roger Friedman has seen Oliver Stone‘s World Trade Center (Paramout, 8.9) and is calling it “an elegant, powerful, moving and genuinely personal document about the horrors that happened inside and outside of the World Trade Center.” He also says that “because of its scope, [it’s] grander than United 93 and perhaps has some loftier cinematic aspirations. And as much as it’s all about the real men and women whose acts of courage nearly got them killed that day, World Trade Center is nonetheless an Oliver Stone film through and through.”

But hold on…Mr. Manhattan (i.e., a guy I know and trust) has also seen World Trade Center and he’s not doing cartwheels like Friedman is.
“It’s easily the most traditionally-shot film Stone has made in some time…no insane jump-cut editing, no bleached film stock,” he begins. “But it’s dull. The basic problem is that the two protagonists — Port Authority policemen trapped in the rubble of the fallen towers — are immobile for most of the film, which isn’t exactly cinematic.
“Stone manages to give a fair sense of their terror and claustrophia, but he’s also decided to make the middle of the film very schematic, cutting back and forth between the buried cops talking to each other, and then to their desperate families trying to get news of their whereabouts. It’s not that intrinsically interesting, and borders on outright soap at times.
“The film only really picks up in the last third, with the rescue efforts, which are pretty detailed and excruciating. There’s also an interesting subplot about an office worker in Connecticut, a former Marine, who puts on his military duds, bluffs his way onto Ground Zero, and is instrumental in rescuing the cops.
“But there are also some unintentional howlers. A short sequence in which one of the parched officers hallucinates Jesus offering him a bottle of water will definitely elicit embarrassed laughter from any audience.
“And a very minor subplot about some Wisconsin firefighters who volunteer their services has you wondering: why these guys? Hundreds of rescue workers came from all over the country. Why pick these guys if they didn’t do anything special? (The only thing they’re shown doing is handing out bratwurst to the rescue workers.)
“The film is sincerely made, well acted, and there’s definitely some emotional catharsis at the end, but Greengrass’ United 93 is far, far better, for, I think, two reasons: the semi-doc style makes it very immediate; and most of United 93 is about how a variety of people and agencies reacted to the day’s events. This macro view seems to checkmate World Trade Center‘s micro viewpoint at every turn.

There’s qualifying, there’s hedging and then there’s cotton-balling, and it seems like Variety‘s Nicole LaPorte and Chris Gardner went for option #3 when they used the word “may” in their story about Paramount deciding whether or not to renew its deal with Cruise-Wagner Prods. If Par re-ups with C/W, they said, the deal “may not come with the same points as it did before.” Everyone knows C/W is a devalued entity due to the antics of Nutter Tom, despite his highly respected and shrewd partner Paula Wagner. Nothing personal — it’s the money. For a guy whose aura is in the process of imploding , which resulte in M:I:3 only making $132,556,364 million domestic, and for a company that produced the unsuccessful Elizabethtown and Ask the Dust (both of which should have worked — I read both scripts a couple of years ago and was convinced both were at least semi-golden), C/W Prods. simply costs too much. So from the perspective of Paramount honcho Brad Grey, the negotiating slogan is probably something alone the lines of “take a markdown or find another home, guys.”

Michael Mann‘s movies are so good and so Rolls Royce that when a new one comes up 8, it’s an easy 9.5 or 10 by everyone else’s standards. If you know his stuff, you know what I’m saying is true. I’m not using the Rolls Royce analogy casually. The elation I felt yesterday from Miami Vice (Universal, 7.28) wasn’t just about tromp-down speed or engineering or a perfectly-tuned engine — that’s standard content in any Mann film. And it wasn’t quite about the sadness and the soul, which is in this film but not in the abundant qualities found in Heat and Collateral and The Insider.

I’m talking about the fumes. The fumes of Miami Vice — the aroma, the grit, the atmospheric stuff, the digital flavor of Dion Beebe’s here-and-there photography — are superb (and sometimes in a realm so special I can’t quite describe it), and this alone makes it the supreme commercial “ride” movie of the summer.

By this I mean my kind of two-hour popcorn movie…an exquisitely configured, not-too-taxing thing for people who are smarter, hipper and more seasoned than the mainstream squealies who went nuts for Pirates 2. It sounds elitist to say this, but…

I’m talking about a crime movie that just roars in and does the job, but lingers on with so many different little moods and tones and accents and side-excursions that, like all first-rate films, it’s clearly up to a lot more than just “story” (and the more I write about movies the less I know what that term really means).

I was never that much into Mann’s Miami Vice back in the mid ’80s, so I wasn’t sitting there yesterday afternoon going “this is new” or “that’s cooler”. Forget Don Johnson and the other guy whose name I’ve never been able to remember, and who I’d rather not look up on the IMDB because that will somehow kill the mood.

Miami Vice is right table-slam now…a combination of big expense (Universal is copping to $135 million), sweat-zone cool and wow photography, all focused on a kind of saxophone-solo story about a couple of Miami detectives looking to burn some very serious drug dealers by way of an undercover operation — a piece of elaborate theatre in which the cops pretend to be bad guys.

The way it’s been shot and cut is mainly about set-up for the first half (or do I mean two-thirds?)…mutterings, maybes, sex, whispers, half-understood’s and the radiant Gong Li, who is back at the top of the list of all-time hotties with this film — and then Big Payoffs happen during the last 30% or 35%.

Colin Farrell’s blonde hair in this film is much better — greasier, more lived in, more in synch with his age and his Irish-ness — than it was in Oliver Stone’s Alexander . Sounds like a mundane nonsequitur, but sometimes the authority of movies can be measured by such things.

Drink a strong cappucino and be well rested before you see this thing — you’ll need to pay close attention. All good movies are calibrated to stay a wee bit in front of what you think you know is going on — if this isn’t done boredom sets in. But my feeling during the first half (and I’m describing this with respect) was along the lines of “whoa, wait a minute…what’d he say? Is this Haiti or…? Rewind those last two lines…oh, I get it…well, most of it.”

Beebe’s photography (like Collateral, most of Vice was shot with a Thomson Viper) is, as you may expect, nervy as shit — at times conventionally appealing, at times “pushed” and flecked with grain, but always sensual and photochemically “real” in a way that never stops being exciting or enticing in some “off” way.

Who, exactly, are Farrell’s Sonny Crockett and Jamie Foxx’s Ricardo Tubbs? Foxx/Tubbs seems like a relatively at-ease guy in love with his lady (Naomie Harris) but Farrell/Crockett is the kind of guy who doesn’t know what kind of guy he is outside of the rush of the job.

That’s what makes his falling in love with Gong Li’s Isabella, the girlfriend of big-time drug lord named Arcangel de Jesus Montoya (played by Luis Tosar, a balding, bearded guy with the most piercing eyes I’ve seen anywhere in a long time), so I-don’t-know-what…odd, surprising, curious, unexpected. A man in the grip of something that won’t let go and is about a lot more than tumescence.

There’s a big heartbreak factor that comes out of the Farrell-Gong relationship at the finale, but let’s be honest and admit it’s not as emotionally touching as Tom Cruise‘s Vincent asking Jamie Foxx if anyone will notice his body sitting on an L.A. Blue Line train in Collateral, and it’s not as touching as Al Pacino holding the dying Robert De Niro’s hand at the end of Heat. That’s one reason why this movie is an 8 on the Mann scale.

The sex scenes (Farrell/Gong’s in particular) have deep-down currents of feeling and longing that other directors wish for before they’re about to shoot their own. Dear God, let me find something between my actors that will make the audience forget the carnality, or at least put it into some kind of spiritual perspective.

All Mann movies are beautifully acted, and each and every supporting Vice actor, no surprise, is a stand-out. The big bad guys (Tosar, John Ortiz) are fearsome. Ciarin Hinds is playing a dullard but it’s good to experience him nonetheless. Barry Shabaka Henley, the jazz-club owner who got shot in the forehead twice by Cruise in Collateral, is good as an upper-level Miami cop. John Hawkes, an anemic-look- ing actor with a scuzzy goatee and an aura of insufficiency, portrays a low-level criminal during the opening few minutes. Domenick Lombardozzi (Find Me Gulity, Entourage) is very fine as another cop.

But please, please see this film for Gong Li, if for no other reason than it will help you forget how poorly she was used as the wicked bitch in Memoirs of a Geisha. This is one of the sexiest and most soulful performances by an actress in any medium in a very long time. I couldn’t quite understand everything she said, to be perfectly honest (her accent is a problem), but ooh, mama, the stuff she exudes during her scenes with Farrell.

I don’t want to get into the story any more than I have. It’s a film about lying — selling them, discovering them and the heavy cost and the smell of them.

I’m going to let this go and see Vice again on Thursday and get into it a bit more on Friday, but no one can watch this film and feel burned. The people who’ve been whispering about this film not being the thing that it could have been haven’t seen it, not really. They haven’t let it in. Or they’re just being hard-assed.

Like I said, the highlight of the set-up, exposition, planning, and planting-the-seeds portion, which is something like 65% to 70%, is the romantic white-water ride taken by Farrell and Gong. I imagine there may be some who will feel a bit lost or uncertain in terms of what’s actually going down at this or that point. I did at times, but there’s something to be said every so often for the feeling of “not knowing.”