A pretty good recap piece by the L.A. Times‘ John Horn about six never-say-die Oscar campaigns — Crash, The Pianist, Anna, Shakespeare in Love, A Beautiful Mind, Il Postino.

If there’s one thing the world really needs now, it’s a pumped-up Wachowski brothers feature based on a 1960s-era Japanese anime TV series. Is there a subtext to Speed Racer that I’m missing or overlooking? Someone besides producer Joel Silver is presumably into the idea of the Wachowski’s doing a family-friendly, PG-13 fast-car movie. To me, the nothingness of the concept is close to astounding. The boys will reportedly shoot next summer and release it in ’08.

Her performance is stunningly balls-out, but the chances of Annette Bening winning a Best Actress Oscar for her Running With Scissors performance are zilch…sorry. There’s such a thing as being too convincing as a wackjobber, and if the movie is tanking on top of that…forget it.
Of course, if you’re a Reuters writer trying to convey the same thing in a Bening interview piece, you have to go all namby-pamby and use the word “may”, in the same chickenshit way that the N.Y. Times relies on its stock phrase “remains to be seen.” Bening’s “losing record at the Oscars epitomizes an old saying — always the bridesmaid, never the bride,” the article begins, “and a big question this season is whether she may suffer the same fate again.”

The bottom-line on Brad Pitt‘s knickers allegedly being in a twist about his being on the new Vanity Fair cover without prior approval (per TMZ) is that the magazine was well within its rights. Reps for the Conde Nast publication have told TMZ that Pitt “posed for a Robert Wilson video portrait, and in the photo release (signed by Pitt), agreed to allow Wilson to use the portrait or any images from that sitting in connection with any publicity on Wilson’s video project.”

Vanity Fair thereafter “decided to do a story on Wilson’s video portraits and obtained rights to the entire collection of photographs from those sittings, which included Pitt’s.” Mag reps also state that “in a letter dated 10.5.06, and sent to Pitt care of Brillstein-Grey [Pitt’s managers], Wilson informed Pitt that a still image from his portrait was going to be featured in the December art issue of Vanity Fair.” A source told TMZ that Pitt “never saw the letter” — isn’t that in the same ballpark as “the dog ate my homework”?

“Barack Obama — delivered feet-first on Oprah’s couch and tickled on Meet the Press and then highly buffed by New Yorker editor David Remnick before the magazine editors of America — has enjoyed the best-orchestrated product reveal since the iPod,” begins a New York Observer piece by Choire Sicha and John Koblin.
“Now Mr. Obama is the only author with two books among the top 50 sellers on Amazon.com. Two weeks after the release of The Audacity of Hope, it is in its sixth printing, with 725,000 books in print. America can’t tell the difference between the book and the candidate. That may be because the book itself is the perfect campaign speech, and is one of the reasons why everyone keeps talking about Mr. Obama and ’08.
The phenomenon is deftly iportrayed in this here-comes-Obama piece, by the Toronto Star’s Tom Harper.
“Primaries are 13 1/2 and 14 months away, and there are full teams in New Hampshire and Iowa already,” says pollster John Zogby. “And Hillary, who is a household word, and Kerry and Edwards and Gore, who have run before — this is the time to get the word out, and this is the trial balloon.”
“The Obamamania trial balloon has gotten oohs and ahs from wonks and dreamers alike. But, with so many donors locked down by Hillary Clinton, and with a few hopelessly devoted to various non-celebrity candidates, is there affection — and wallet — enough for Mr. Obama to raise real money for a campaign? Why, yes! Yes, there is. Sort of.”

Those recently surfaced, possibly accurate details about Ryan Phillippe‘s bustup with Reese Witherspoon — alleged catting around with Abbie Cornish (his costar on Kimberly Peirce‘s Stop Loss), leaving e-mail evidence of same on his Black- berry — are being mentioned out of boredom, yes, but also to illustrate two behav- ioral truths: (1) people who get caught cheating are almost always subconsciously looking to get out of whatever committed relationship they’re in; and (2) married couples split up for two reasons and two reasons only — one or the other fucking around and money problems. All the other issues (including spousal abuse, alco- holism, gambling, etc.) are fixable. But not money — either you’re a winner and a conqueror or you’re not — and not dicking around, which most women will abso- lutely not forgive.

New York critic David Edelstein has parked his Lexus in the same Borat garage as New Yorker critic Anthony Lane. He’s confessed that he finally found Sacha Baron Cohen’s comedy “depressing,” and summoned impressions of “a bear-baiting or pigsticking.
“The comic imagination flowers on the dark-and-twisted end of the spectrum; in return for making you laugh, the artist has license to express rude truths in the rudest manner he or she can imagine. Most clowns have a wide streak of sadism, but it’s tempting to think of Cohen as a sadist with a wide streak of clownishness.” The comic servings in Borat, Edelstein feels, amount to “a cry of pain.
“The squirm-und-drang genre has its forebears, among them Albert Brooks, but I would guess that it has caught on now because it’s grounded in a documentary (or mockumentary) aesthetic. The Sultan of Squirm is surely Cohen, a sublime caricaturist whose hairbreadth timing can make you gasp [with his] righteously malicious agenda.
“To understand what Baron Cohen’s Borat is up to in part, it helps to consider the most notorious scenes in Claude Lanzmann‘s nine-and-a-half-hour Holocaust documentary, Shoah, in which the director trains his camera on Polish peasants who lived near the Nazis’ most lethal concentration camps while they were in full swing. Under Lanzmann’s probing, these old men and women — some of them residing on property seized from the Jews — murmur that yes, it was a terrible thing, the exterminations. Just terrible. But of course, the Jews did bring it on themselves, didn’t they?”
Exactly! This is precisely why I feel Borat is so brilliant, and in part why I didn’t laugh as much as others sitting next to me; I just sat there, open-mouthed. Cohen has taken the concept of the quiet ghastly realization in a documentary (like the one in Shoah) and flipped it over into reflective-absurdist comedy.

Scott Feinberg, auteur-administrator of andthewinneris. blog.com, had a recent chat with Little Miss Sunshine‘s Alan Arkin, whose grandpa with the heroin habit and the “fuckin’ chicken” is an absolutely un-ignorable Best Supporting Actor contender. (And so is Steve Carell‘s performance. We should all support Carell. No matter how good he is in Evan Almighty he’s going to get killed next year for just being in the damn thing so be nice to him now.) I tried talking to Arkin myself but it didn’t work out. He was excellent in Keith Gordon‘s Mother Night.

It’s very easy to snarl “no taste!”, “oh, my God!” or “how could he do this!”…but showing a mock-profound lack of taste and sensitivity is where cutting-edge comedy is today. We all know this; we laugh at this. Comedians who don’t play some variation of this game do so at their own peril. The truth? When I read about Bill Maher‘s Steve Irwin-stingray get-up I went right to Google and found it. I’m now leaving to check out the Halloween parade on Santa Monica Blvd. in hopes of finding another one. I’m sorry to offend.

This Paula Froelich or Bill Hoffman-authored item in the N.Y. Post‘s “Page Six” about George Hickenlooper‘s Factory Girl is warm urine in a bucket. First, it’s not a “troubled biopic” — it’s an 8 on a scale of 10 (or was when I saw it) and is shooting extra scenes right now so it can elevate up to the level of a 9 or better — big deal. Movies that don’t quite nail it 100% during principal do this all the time; it doesn’t mean squat.

I saw an early cut several weeks ago (have Froelich or Hoffman had the pleasure?) and can say with more than a little authority that Factory Girl has a deliberately imposed downtown-raggedy feeling that a person not hip to the mid ’60s Andy Warhol-early ’70s Paul Morrissey aesthetic might mistake for sloppiness.
Factory Girl “has a grungy Manhattan, Collective-for-Living-Cinema, 16mm street quality,” I wrote, “like it was shot two or three years before Flesh and Lonesome Cowboys and maybe a year or two after Empire State and Blow Job. Hickenlooper gives it discipline and tension, working from a tight script by Captain Mauzner but styling in the realm of the Warhol-Morrissey aesthetic, which could be summed up as ‘don’t recreate anything, just behave and let it happen.'”
I’ve been told that the finished Factory Girl will definitely start to be screened in very early December, and maybe a bit sooner. (You have to get it seen that early so the critics groups can weigh in.) The Weinstein Co. should have just made sure that Factory Girl was on its website instead of someone allowing it to slip off (or not be there at all) due to an “oversight”, which was what got “Page Six” all hot and bothered in the first place.

“As dull as Phil Angelides‘ campaign has been, I believe that he would better represent the interests of more Californians than Schwarzenegger could ever hope to,” Alec Baldwin wrote on The Huffington Post two days ago. “Schwarzenegger is not a leader. Like Bush, he is a front man for a group of powerful interests and he is reading from a script.”
And yet Baldwin has decided not to narrate a documentary by director-writer Dan Cox and co-writer Jerry Decker because he feels it pushes certain back issues — Arnold’s father’s Nazi associations, for one — too forcefully. “The makers of Running With Arnold hammer Schwarzenegger over his private behavior and his record as governor,” Baldwin declares. “But Schwarzenegger deserves to be treated fairly and the film’s images of Nazi rallies were over the line.”
I asked Cox about seeing this film a while, and then again a couple of days ago. He said copies will be going out to the press fairly soon. I’ll reserve comment until I see it, but journalists have been doing stories about Arnold’s dad’s Nazi affiliations back in Austria for a long time, and it seems fair to get into this — although there’s something about the stink of Naziism that always seem to warp or overbake an inquiry when it’s mentioned. I don’t know what the “private behavior” stuff is about, but I can guess — and if I were doing an Arnold doc I would definitely leave that shit out.