This London Times Online piece about the most audacious and penetrating envelope-pushers in terms of sex, drugs violence and religion is old and crumpled and covered in dust — it was published last Saturday, 8.19 — but it’s a pretty good rundown.

It doesn’t mention what a ground-breaker Mike Nichols‘ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff was in 1966 for its first-time-ever use of terms like “screw you” and “up yours”. It sounds comically lame in today’s context but no studio- funded film had used coarse street dialogue before.
Sam Peckinpah‘s Straw Dogs (’71) is mentioned for the Susan George rape scene, which for years has made compassionate and senstive people feel guilty when they watch it because it delivers a kind of dark twisted turn-on. (Yes, yes…Peckinpah was a sexist dog but the arousal factor is still there.)
And I’ve never even heard of No Orchids for Miss Blandish (’48), a crime drama about a relationship between a gangster and an unsullied woman in her 30s. The film isn’t on DVD or even VHS, but the Times piece says that one British critic called it “the most sickening exhibition of brutality, perversion, sex and sadism ever to be shown on a cinema screen.”

I’ve seen the initial one-sheet poster for Werner Herzog‘s Rescue Dawn, which will screen at the Toronto Film Festival, and it’s close to awful. It’s not Herzog’s doing but the film’s producers, Gibraltar Films (or perhaps its distributor, Conquistador Worldwide Media), and it’s utter mediocrity. The decision to allow the poster be dominated by Christian Bale‘s fleshy, overfed, clean-shaven face sends exactly the wrong message.

Bale’s puss is overbearing and the concept has no soul, no texture, no implication of poetry — nothing that suggests that the movie being sold is a Werner Herzog creation, which is as close of a guarantee of something layered and profound as you can find anywhere.
In fact, the poster says nothing except for the fact that Bale (represented with a photo that has nothing to do with how he looks in the film) is the star. It looks precisely like the kind of Cannes market screening poster/trade ad that a low-life distributor looking to cash in on Bale’s Batman popularity would throw together in a state of huckster desperation. There’s a coarse mentality at work here — you can smell it 100 yards off.
Rescue Dawn is an “action drama” (i.e., the producers wish it would simply be that) costarring Bale and Steve Zahn. Based on Herzog’s 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, it’s about German-born Dieter Dengler, a German-born U.S. military pilot who was shot down over Vietnam/Laos in ’65 and captured and then escaped from a jungle prison camp and eventually made it back to safety.
Here, apparently, is a black-and-white shot of Herzog speaking with Marlton — the hulking sumo wrestler-type gentleman with the black toupee/wig in the black sunglasses standing to the right. It’s a photo taken from the Gibraltar Films website.

In this brief excerpt from a forthcoming Mean magazine interview with director Chris Nolan, Better than Fudge columnist Josh Horowitz gets Nolan to say two clear-cut things about his second Batman flick, to wit:

The green-haired, jut-jawed Joker, as he appears in the pages of “The Killing Joke”.

(a) “The title of the film” — The Dark Knight — “has been chosen very specifically… it’s quite important to the film”, and that (b) Heath Ledger‘s Joker will be less Cesar Romero and Jack Nicholson than the Joker portrayed in a comic like “The Killing Joke.” Or, as Nolan puts it, “I would certainly point to ‘The Killing Joke’ but I also would point very much to the first two appearances of the Joker in the comic. If you look at where the Joker comes from there’s a very clear direction that fits what we’re doing very well.”

Roger Friedman‘s analysis of the Cruise-vs.-Paramount fallout covers a lot of ground, but a lot of it sounds like follow-the-bouncing-ball speculation.
Did Paramount allegedly being in some kind of temporary cash-poor position have anything to do with Sumner Redstone’s announcement that the studio wasn’t renewing its deal with Cruise/Wagner Prods.? (This sound especially questionable.)
Doesn’t Redstone’s stated reason for Paramount severing ties with Cruise — “unacceptable” off-screen behavior — smack of hypcocrisy considering the various bad behaviors (including studio chief Brad Grey‘s past dealings with Anthony Pellicano) that have been tolerated at Paramount? (Deadline Hollywood‘s Nikki Finke raised this point also in her column about the mess.)
What impact, if any, did the alleged rift between Cruise and Paramount/ DreamWorks honcho Steven Spielberg (which stems from Spielberg’s alleged concern that Cruise’s summer of ’05 Scientology antics hurt the War of the Worlds box-office) have on Paramount’s attitude about maintaining its ties with C/W Prods.?
Is Warner Bros. the studio most likely to extend a new housekeeping deal to Cruise/Wagner?

You’re Fired, Tom!

Paramount Pictures has shown Tom Cruise the door, and it’s top executive has explained why in a blunt and unflattering way. “Lo, how the mighty have fallen” is one way of reacting to this, but the real question is why has Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone spoken so curtly and dismissively of a once all-powerful superstar?

The Wall Street Journal has a story up about Paramount severing ties with Cruise/Wagner Prods., and it’s a whopper. The money quote is Redstone explanation for why Paramount is ending its 14-year relationship with Cruise’s film production company, to wit: because the actor’s “offscreen behavior” which “was unacceptable to the company.”
It’s astonishing that Redstone would say this because it wasn’t really necessary to spell things out. The usual Hollywood routine in explaining a parting of the ways (creative or otherwise) is to use polite respectful terms, which Redstone obviously decided against. He’s clearly disdainful of Cruise’s eccentric Scientology-driven antics and has made a very public show of flipping him the bird.
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Why didn’t Redstone just say “we wish Cruise and Paula Wagner well” and let it go at that?” What could have brought this on? “It seems as if Redstone is acting on a belief that Cruise has become box-office poison, or is starting to become that,” an insider with ties to Paramount said this afternoon.
Cruise’s partner Paula Wagner told Variety earlier today that Redstone’s comments about Cruise were “outrageous and disrespectful.” Wagner also asserted that CAA, which reps Cruise, terminated discussions with Paramount earlier in the week. The studio had had been offering a sharply reduced annual funding commitment for C/W Prods., down from $10 million to something like 20% of that, according to an earlier report.
It was also annouced that Cruise and Wagner have raised $100 million from two hedge funds and are striking out as indies while looking for a housekeeping deal at another studio. “‘This is a dream of Tom and mine,’ Wagner told the Wall Street Journal.
Still, could anyone have imagined even two or three years ago that Cruise would be in effect be pushed off the Paramount lot? It’s one thing for Paramount to cut C/W’s annual deal down from $10 million to $2 million, but for its chairman to effectively say “you’re fired’ is a mind-blower.
Between Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic wipeout of a few weeks ago and Cruise being booted off a big-studio lot due to “unacceptable behavior”, we’re once again reminded that studio chiefs are being less and less accomodating to big-star salaries.
And also that big-star meltdowns are becoming more and more common these days. The difference this time is that a major corporate figure has given this bizarre syndrome as a reason for ending a deal. This is significant. And it seems fair to re-acknowledge that Andrew Breitbart and Mark Ebner‘s “Hollywood Interrupted” called this syndrome a long ways back.
Free Katie. Free Suri.

The increasingly bizarre saga of John Mark Karr is going to be at least a low-budget movie one day. It’s a movie if he ‘s lying about having murdered Jon Benet Ramsey, and it’s a movie if he’s not lying. Especially given his alleged interest in having taken steps in Thailand to have a sex-change operation.

Producers of dark crime dramas are always attracted to real-life creepy killers, and while nobody knows anything it does seem as if Karr fits the general profile. He’s building up a resume that may lead to his becoming the next superstar monster. If his guilt is proven he’ll have joined the pantheon of famous fiend-murderers like Ted Bundy, Ed Gein, Richard Speck, etc. If he turns out to be delusional he’s still a world-class creep wo’s been after little girls for a long time. A loathsome creature, yes, but also the kind of diseased boogeyman that Hollywood wants.
If producers don’t make a movie of Karr’s exact history they’ll almost certainly make one that’s been inspired or suggested by his history. You know it, I know it. Karr’s saga, depending on how it plays, could be the basis of the next The Silence of the Lambs. Or maybe a kind of twisted-perverted Girls Don’t Cry with an unsympathetic lead character instead of a sympathetic one.
I realize that Hilary Swank, say, would never consider playing a guy again, much less Karr, but the way to cast Karr, I’m certain, would be to get a woman to portray him. That would make the movie even freakier. Look at his photo…it’s obvious. Question is (and I realize how creepy this sounds), what actress could they get to play him? What actresses are the right age, which ones are good or brave enough?
Oh, my God — T.H. Ung has just suggested Naomi Watts and she’s right. Watts would be dead perfect. (Somebody needs to take her face and photoshop Karr’s hairline and prison uniform on…anyone?)

Two live diamondback rattlesnakes were set loose inside the AMC Desert Ridge theatre in a northern area of Pheonix, Arizona, during a recent showing of Snakes on a Plane, according to a Local 6 News video report. (Click here.) Apparently a couple fo young guys (teens, I’m guessing) snuck the rattlers into the theatre in their backpacks and let them slither out onto the floor while the New Line thriller was playing.
The Local 6 report says the two snakes “caused a panic in the dark theater.” Well, naturally, but for that to happen someone had to get up and yell “live snakes in the theatre!” If the theatre was even half-filled the panic would have been terrible. I wonder how crazy it was in there. If I were in the theatre I would have stepped from one row of seats to the next — my feet would have never touched the floor.
Somebody should do some shoe-leather reporting. This Local 6 report has no details, no emotion — a poor job. Who discovered the snakes and how? Was it an usher or a moviegoer? Who sounded the warning?
There’s a herpetological association rep named Tom Whiting who’s quoted as saying that the idea of live snakes in the theatre “is very scary…I would hate to be watching a movie about snakes and have a rattlesnake bite me.” My God…did this man take sound-bite lessons from Exhibitor Relations spokesperson Paul Dergarabedian? That quote captures the Dergarabedian style to a T. Could it be that the Dergarabedian method — keep your quotes plain and obvious and a little simple — be influencing others?
Wranglers were called in to collect the snakes, the report says. No one was bitten and the culprits haven’t been caught.

Toronto Finals

The final tally of Toronto Film Festival titles has been released, and along with that comes HE’s initial checklist (must-sees, should-sees). This usually includes about 50 or 55 films, which always has to be whittled down to a more realistic 25 or 30.
My first run-through has resulted in 49 titles, give or take. I’m posting this list in hopes of hearing from the usual know-it-alls in hopes of pruning it down or getting wise to films that aren’t on my list but should be.

Abbie Cornish, Heath Ledger in Neil Armfield’s’s Candy (ThinkFilm, 11.17.)

The only high profile head-turner in this morning’s official list is the inclusion of Ridley Scott‘s A Good Year (20th Century Fox, 11.10). For whatever reason I hadn’t heard this was definitely going there.
Here are most of the categories reprinted with HE’s priority titles in boldface (and the ones I’m already seen in bold italic). If anyone knows anything good, hard and solid about any films I haven’t boldfaced — positive or negative — please advise and I’ll work them into the schedule. Obviously I don’t need to see the italicized bold titles again and there are all kinds of additions to come, and I can keep updating and modifying as I go along:
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The only high profile head-turner in this morning’s official list is the inclusion of Ridley Scott‘s A Good Year (20th Century Fox, 11.10). For whatever reason I hadn’t heard this was definitely going to be up there.
Here are most of the categories reprinted with my priority titles in boldface (and the ones I’m already seen in bold italic). If anyone knows anything good, hard and solid about any films I haven’t boldfaced — positive or negative — please advise and I’ll work them into the schedule. Obviously I don’t need to see the italicized bold titles again and there are all kinds of additions to come, and I can keep updating and modifying as I go along:

Russell Crowe in Ridley Scott’s A Good Year (20th Century Fox, 11.10)

Opening night gala: The Journals of Knud Rasmussen. Closing night gala: Amazing Grace.
Gala Presentations (10): After the Wedding, All The King’s Men, Away From Her, Babel, Banquet, Black Book, Bobby, Bonneville, Breaking and Entering, Dixie Chicks — Shut Up and Sing, For Your Consideration, A Good Year, Infamous, Mon Meilleur Ami, Never Say Goodbye, Penelope, Volver.
Special Presentations (13): 10 Items or Less, A Chairy Tale, Alatriste, Begone Dull Care, Blinkity Blank, Brand upon the Brain!, Bubble, Cantante, Catch a Fire, Congorama, Crime, Dog Problem, Exiled, Fall, Fay Grim, The Fountain, Golden Door, HANA, Hen Hop, Homme de sa Vie, Horizontal Lines, Jindabyne, Kabul Express, Last King of Scotland, The Last Kiss, Little Children, Lives of Others, Love and Other Disasters, The Magic Flute (ought to see it, don’t want to).
Plus: Manufactured Landscapes, Merle, Mon Colonel, Namesake, Neighbours, Nue Propriete, Opening Speech, Pan’s Labyrinth, Paris, Je T’aime, Pas de Deux, Pleasure of Your Company, Post-Modern Life of My Aunt, Quelques Jours en Septembre, Seraphim Falls, Snow Cake, Stars and Stripes, Stranger than Fiction, Synchromy, This Is England, Venus, Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights, Woman on the Beach.

Jude Law, Juliette Binoche in Anthony Minghella’s Breaking and Entering (Weinstein Co., December…maybe)

Contemporary World Cinema (6): 12:08 East of Bucharest, Abeni, Antonia, Beauty in Trouble, Bella, Bet Collector, Born and Bred, Bothersome Man, Candy, Chronicle of an Escaped Citizen Duane, Confetti, Copying Beethoven, Diggers, Dimanche √É∆í√Ǭ† Kigali, Dog Pound, Falling, A Few Days Later…, Fiction, Four Minutes, Grbavica, Hula Girls, Indigenes, Italian, Last Winter, Mainline, Monkey Warfare, Nouvelle Chance, Offside, Outsourced, Palimpsest, Prague, Rain Dogs, Red Road, Requiem, Retrieval, Silence, Sleeping Dogs, Slumming, Starter For Ten, Suely in the Sky, Summer ’04, Summer Palace, Sweet MudTimes and Winds, To Get to Heaven First You Have to Die, Tourneuse de Pages, Twilight Dancers, Unnatural and Accidental, Violin, Waiter, Wake, The Way I Spent the End of the World, White Palms, Winter Journey.
Discovery (0): 7 ans, Art of Crying, As the Shadow, Bliss, Cashback, DarkBlueAlmostBlack, Falkenberg Farewell, Family Ties, Glue, Grave-Keeper’s Tale, Griffin & Phoenix, King and the Clown, Out of the Blue, Reprise, Silly Age, Thicker than Water, True North, Vanaja.

Dustin Hoffman, Will Ferrell in Marc Forster’s Stranger Than Fiction (Columbia, 11.10)

Masters (3): Caiman, Coeurs, EMPz 4 Life, I Am the Other Woman, Untouchable, Lights in the Dusk, Missing Star, Optimists, Rescue Dawn, STRIKE, Voyage en Armenie, When The Levees Broke: A Requiem In Four Acts (seeing this on HBO), The Wind that Shakes the Barley.
Mavericks (2): “An Evening with Michael Moore“, “Making of a Bollywood Blockbuster: Karan Johar, Shah Rukh Khan, Rani Mukherji”, “Vanguard Cinema: John Waters in conversation with John Cameron Mitchell“.
Midnight Madness (3): Abandoned, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, Black Sheep, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, Host, Princess, Severance, Sheitan, Trapped Ashes.
Real to Reel (8): …So Goes the Nation, American Hardcore, Blindsight, Cry in the Dark, Deliver Us From Evil, Dong, Esprit des lieux, Ghosts of Cite Soleil, Iran: Une Revolution Cinematographique, Killer Within, Kurt Cobain About A Son, Lake of Fire, Made in Jamaica, My Life as a Terrorist: The Story of Hans-Joachim Klein, Office Tigers, Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Primo Levi’s Journey, Prisoner or How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair, Radiant City, Remembering Arthur, Sari’s Mother, Session Is Open, Shame, Sharkwater, Shot in the Dark, Sugar Curtain, Summercamp!, Tales of the Rat Fink, Tanju Miah, These Girls, This Filthy World, Toi, Waguih, U.S. vs. John Lennon, Very Nice, Very Nice, Yokohama Mary.

Werner Herzog, Steve Zahn, Christian Bale during filming of Rescue Dawn (Weinstein Co.)

Vanguard (5): 2:37, Bunny Chow, Chacun sa nuit, Drama/Mex, Election, Election 2, Hottest State, Jade Warrior, Macbeth, Renaissance, Shortbus, Sleeping Dogs Lie, Suburban Mayhem.
Visions (1): August Days, Bamako, Belle toujours, Big Bang Love, Juvenile A, Blessed are the Dreams of Men, Book of Revelation, Bugmaster, Building a Broken Mousetrap, Cages, Climates, Colossal Youth, D.O.A.P., Dans les villes, Day Night Day Night, Day on Fire, Fantasma, Flandres, Gathering the Scattered Cousins, In Between Days, Invisible Waves, Island, Khadak, Kinshasa Palace, No Place Like Home, NYC Weights and Measures, Sistagod, Takva – A Man’s Fear of God, Taxidermia, Ten Canoes, Time, Zidane: Un Portait du XXIeme Si√É∆í√Ǭ®cle.

Summer Palace

Barbara Kopple and Cecilia (daughter of Gregory) Peck‘s Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing, a doc about the political storm ignited by singer Natalie Maines’ statement against George Bush at a 2003 London concert, has been picked up for worldwide distribution by the Weinstein Co. The film, scheduled to screen at the Toronto Film Festival, is apparently set for a mid-fall release.
I love this Gregg Goldstein-authored paragraph in his Hollywood Reporter story: “Asked why [Kopple and Peck] chose to go with the Weinstein Co., Peck said, “They made a great offer,” though no figures were disclosed. Such companies as Focus Features and Picturehouse expressed interest in the docu a few months ago.” Translation: why would these two women want to get in bed with Harvey Scissorhands when they could cut a deal with Bob Berney or James Schamus?

Three weeks and two days ago Endeavor partner Ari Emanuel wrote on the Huffington Post that Mel Gibson should be shunned for his anti-Semitic statements uttered a couple of days previously. And two days ago — Sunday, 8.20 — an L.A. Times editorial said pretty much the same thing. “Shun Mel Gibson,” it was titled, the subhead asserting that “obscurity, not public service announcements, should be the consequence for Gibson’s transgressions.”
The question is not about the rightness or wrongness of calling for a shunning — the question is what the hell took the Times so long to grow a pair and speak their mind? My first thought after reading this was what timid chickenshits these people are. They can’t summon the cojones or discipline to call for Gibson’s shunning on 7.30 — that would have required thinking and acting quickly. They couldn’t run their editorial on Monday, 7.31 or Tuesday, 8.1, when the Gibson story was running hot and heavy all over. No — they waited three weeks, long after the story cooled down.
This is one of the saddest and wimpiest things the L.A. Times has ever done. Can anyone imagine the N.Y. Times or the Washington Post dithering and delaying on writing an editorial about some issue that reflected and affected the culture right in their own backyard? I can’t. The L.A. Times would have been better off running no editorial at all. Either stand up and speak your mind when an issue is aflame, or forever hold your peace.

Thanks to everyone who wrote yesterday with get-well-soon messages. And thanks also to David Poland for saying this in person, although his posted get-well-soon is flecked with urine. It’s a character-revealing note, this. Not in my darkest delusional imaginings would I suggest or wish for Poland’s exit from entertainment journalism. It seems tantamount to life itself — the thing that keeps him breathing. It’s how I feel about what I do. But for as long as I’ve known him Rabbi Dave has always spoken from time to time of the desirability of this or that journalist going away…banished, shunned, fired…forcibly expelled into the desert with a measure of bread and water (like Yul Brynner ‘s Ramses did to Charlton Heston ‘s Moses). He’s kind an absolutist in an ancient Middle Eastern sense. A greater part of him wants the sinful to die or have their hands cut off rather than repent or be saved. Such thoughts have never once fluttered into my head. Like any writer worth a damn I speak with passion and even anger at times, but I do nobody harm, I say none harm, I think none harm.