Watched the trailer again for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Warner Bros., 7.13), and you’re left with one main impression, which is that it’s a hormonal coming-out party. Daniel Radcliffe has developed a weight-lifter’s bull neck and has basically turned into Sammy Stud (the Katie Leung kissing scene, his plans to do Equus in the spring) along with a fiercer, angrier look in his face when asked to register deep emotion. Boys of 11 and 12 are into imaginary realms and barely notice the scent of girls — not so when they reach 16 and 17, and no amount of formulaic CG diversion can hide this simple fact.

Darren Aronofsky‘s The Fountain “is visually intoxicating — the images have a luminous psychedelic beauty — and the film’s themes emerge elegantly out of the story’s intricately-looped tri-level structure. It’s a new kind of science-fiction movie, and, unusually for that boys’ club genre, probably a great date movie too. Mainly, though, as they used to say back in the Roger Corman days, it’s a trip.” — MTV.com’s Kurt Loder refraining the stoner mantra.

In her 11.25 piece called “No One To Lose To,” N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd quotes former Times reporter Neil Sheehan, author of “A Bright Shining Lie,” to wit:
“In Vietnam, there were just two sides to the civil war. You had a government in Hanoi with a structure of command and an army and a guerrilla movement that would obey what they were told to do. So you had law and order in Saigon immediately after the war ended. In Iraq, there’s no one like that for us to lose to and then do business with.”
In response to which Dowd writes, “The questions are no longer whether there’s a civil war [in Iraq] or whether we can achieve a military victory. The only question is, who can we turn the country over to? At the moment, that would be no one.”

Happy Feet bounced back yesterday from a very temporary Thanksgiving Day (i.e., Thursday) defeat at the hands of Daniel Craig‘s 007. The Birds tallied $15,692,015 on Friday compared to Casino Royale‘s $12,928,000…families out in force. Deck the Halls did $4,952,000, Borat $4,351,000, Santa Clause 3 $4,230,000, Stranger Than Fiction $2,461,000, Flushed Away $2,293,000 and Bobby $1750. In limited N.Y. and L.A. runs, The History Boys did about $36,000 in 7 theatres or $5140 a print — okay but not much. (Figure a projected $132,000 for 5 days.) Fiction‘s cume is about $32,008,000 after three weeks. It will do about $8 million for the 5-day Thanksgiving weekend, and next weekend it’ll be down to $3 million — it’ll be a push to $40 million altogether. Not bad for a film that doesn’t work, but in relation to cost (and Will Ferrell‘s fee) it’s probably a short-faller.

One of my all-time favorite improvs in a Robert Altman film — fast, loose, totally spur-of-the-moment — is one spoken by Elliot Gould in The Long Goodbye.

Phillip Marlowe (Gould) is speaking to a couple of local officials in a small Mexican town about the death of old friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton ), whom Marlowe has always known deep down to be a frosty taker-user- manipulator. Speaking in typical heavily-accented, south-of-the-border English, one of the officials says, “You were acquainted with the deceased?” And Marlowe/Gould says, “The diseased?…yeah, right.” Deft stuff like this never turned up in any other director’s films.

Nine reasons why Robert Altman mattered, as assembled by Toronto Star critic Geoff Pevere: he was brilliant at ensemble pieces, he was phenomenally “in the zone” from ’70 to ’75, his pioneering use of multi-track, overlapping sound, he always packed lots of visual information into scenes and was sometimes into long takes (like that famous opening shot in The Player), he was a superb genre-deconstuctor, he was great at inspiring and capturing improvisation, he had a running stock company of actors who turned up time and again, he was always pissed off about something and put these beefs into his films, and he never stopped working.

On 10.20, Hollywood Wiretap columnist Pete Hammond ran a piece about how playing real-life figures seems to usher in Oscar contender talk. Three or four days ago a very similar AP story by an anonymous writer was posted on MSNBC — the exact same idea with a few more quotes.

Think of the presumed essence of Joe Queenan — that very funny (often hilarious), always irreverent, smart-assed film/ culture writer — and then imagine some middle-aged cultural regressive…some staunchly rural, long-of-tooth, Kentucky Fried Chicken-subsisting, V.F.W.- supporting yeehaw who watches Fox News. Once you’ve done that, and once you’ve hankie-dabbed the tears streaming down your cheeks following your latest re-reading of Tom Brokaw’s “The Greatest Generation”, tell me who wrote the following:
“When Borat was first released, blue-state sophisticates in New York and Los Angeles were delirious, overjoyed that Sacha Baron Cohen was savaging evangelicals and cowboys and hicks, as if this were either daring or original. Their rationale was that Cohen was merely playing with our heads, forcing us to reassess our convictions. No, he isn’t. Baron Cohen is just another English public school boy who hates Americans.
“It is fine to hate Americans; it is one of Europe’s oldest traditions. But the men who flew the bombing raids over Berlin and the men who died at Omaha Beach and the women who built the Flying Fortresses and Sherman tanks that helped defeat Hitler are the very same people that Baron Cohen pisses all over in Borat. A lot of folks named Cohen would not even be here making anti-American movies if it were not for the hayseeds he despises.
“Personally speaking, it does not bother me that Baron Cohen hates Americans; some of my best friends hate Americans. But it bothers me that my fellow Americans are making yet another odious twit from Cambridge rich. Happily, as Baron Cohen is discovering, if you are going to spit on Americans, you had better be careful which Americans you spit on. As the saying goes in the Bronx: if you mess with us, we’re going to mess with you.”

Nothing going on and a draggy news day, so I recorded four mp3 dialogue clips: (a) echo-y, too bassy with hard-to-hear consonants and it works so much better if you can watch the actor’s eyes; (2) same thing here, especially considering the unusual jump-cutting in this scene; (c) Cockney cursing; and (d) “you fuck up, you know what”.

In a USA Today “Magic 8 Ball” piece, Scott Bowles is asked if this year will once again see a Clint vs. Marty showdown for Best Picture and director, and he answers that “all signs point to yes. While Clint Eastwood‘s Flags of Our Fathers hasn’t been burning up the box office — $32.9 million since its release Oct. 20 — it continues to play well at academy screenings.”
HE respectfully disputes this — my understanding is that Flags has been playing to respectful but sluggish responses all along — although there’s no doubt, as Bowles says, that Scorsese “seems a shoo-in for a Best Director nomination with The Departed, his return to the crime genre.”
And then EW‘s Dave Karger comes along and blows everyone’s mind by saying we should all watch out for Dreamgirls director Bill Condon, whom he calls a “dark horse” contender. He also says that Dreamgirls “could be a spoiler.” A spoiler? A lot of handicappers have been calling it the Big Kahuna for a while now.

“When I grew up, everything was propaganda. We all thought that the Japanese tortured and killed people,” Clint Eastwood recently said within earshot of L.A. Times writer Bruce Wallace during the Tokyo Film Festival . “But it’s tough to swallow that everybody was that way. After all, some of the Japanese have a decent soul.”

“Some”? Eastwood is a humanist and a gentleman, but the obvious implication is that other Japanese soldiers didn’t have a soul because of their barbaric behavior on the battlefields of World War II, or whatever. I say there can be no separating or categorizing — either we’re all God’s children with souls or none of us are.
I’ve been waiting for screening invitations to see Letters From Iwo Jima since the recent confirmation that Eastwood’s second Iwo Jima film will be opening on 12.20 instead of early February. But nothing so far.

“There’s something cool about being around the vitality of youth. People who haven’t sold out yet, who still have that gleam in their eye that hasn’t been snuffed out by the studios.” — Kevin Smith talking to L.A. Times writer Dawn C. Chmielewski about a weekly mtvU show, “Sucks Less, With Kevin Smith.”

The basic idea is Smith teaching a UCLA School of Theatre, Film and Television class that produces mtvU. The TV channel is aimed at college students and serves some 750 schools. It mainly features short-form video by college students as well as music videos by up-and-coming artists.
There’s no “i” between the “h” and the “m” in Chmielewski’s Polish-sounding name. She should hook up and compare notes with USA Today‘s Susan Wloszczyna, who still takes the prize for having the least pronouncable, most unspellable name in the ranks of entertainment journalists. Chmielewski runs a close second, though. I’m sitting here trying to pronounce it right now.