I can relate to Annie Proulx‘s sour grapes (“Blood on the Red Carpet“), although if I were her I probably wouldn’t have confessed to them. In a fair and aesthetically just world Brokeback Mountain, the film based on Proulx’s short story of the same name, wouldn’t have lost the Best Picture Oscar to Crash…and she knows it as well as anyone, and she’s furiously pissed about it. Truly first-rate writers don’t tippy-toe around their feelings, no matter how raw and unattractive they might seem to guys like David Poland, who thought at first that Proulx’s piece might have been taken from The Onion, and then called it “the ugliest Oscar speech ever.”

I have to shut down for two or three hours, but I’m looking for thoughts and/or arguments about Failure to Launch star Matthew McConaughey. I’m cooking up a piece about the poor guy called “Dead Man Walking.” It’s my belief that McConaughey is a somewhat historic figure in that he’s one of the very few actors who’ve made it as a pseudo-movie star and yet, contrary to what you might think is a necessary attribute, exude absolutely nothing from within. No river, no spirit…McConaughey is the most empty-souled movie actor I can remember since Don Johnson. But he presents an interesting proposition, which is that sometimes, apparently, you don’t need to have anything going on inside to be moderately popular and sell a reasonable amount of tickets and be a semi-credible marquee attraction. Some movigoers, in other words, enjoy and/or identify with shallowness. Obviously some women and some gay guys must like the guy, right? But are there historical precedents besides Johnson? If Montomery Clift is an icon for the kind of movie star who was once very pretty but also had tremendous amounts of inner activity going on, who were the empty-cupboard stars of the ’40s, 50s and ’60s who were like McConaughey…if any? (I just thought of a few — Guy Madison, Tab Hunter, Troy Donahue.) He’s the easygoing, nothing-to-say, nothing-on-his- mind, party-guy movie star of the red-state DisneyWorld TGIF set…right? Or am I missing something?

“Sunday’s selection of Crash over Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture was the first time in memory that fear seemed to be the guiding impulse for awarding Oscar’s top prize,” says Toronto Star critic/columnist Peter Howell. “Faced with the choice between a feel-good movie about the evils of racism and a troublesome film that challenged prejudices about homosexual love, Academy voters grabbed their security blankets and starting sucking on their thumbs. They figured they were being progressive, but in fact they shunned anything that smacked of subversion. In an era of cowboy conservatives they wanted real Marlboro men, not sensitive males who collected dirty shirts as love mementoes.”

“I could not promise that we would not come back and do a [Sopranos] movie,” series creator David Chase has told N.Y. Times writer Bill Carter (which I can’t link to because the article is on Times Select). “It may be that in two or three or four years I could be sitting around and get an idea for a really great Sopranos movie. I don’t think that will happen. But if one morning somebody woke up and said this would make a really good, concise, contained Sopranos story, I wouldn’t rule that out.”

Another example of a Sopranos spoiler, this from N.Y. Times critic Allesandra Stanley: “Sadly, this episode marks the beginning of the end. The good news is that it begins with a badda bang.” And by the way, why do reviewers keep saying this is the final season? It’s fucking not that, okay? As N.Y. Times guy Bill Carter recalls in a Times Select article that I can’t link to, to wit: “After several years of speculation, [series creator David] Chase and the executives of HBO came to an agreement that the latest season of 12 episodes, which starts up on March 12, would be the show’s last — and then they renegotiated again and added a mini-season of eight more episodes that will be shot in the coming months and played starting [in January ’07].”

Woody Allen‘s Paris-based film, which lenses there this summer with Wild Bunch footing the bills, was described in Variety‘s 3.7 story as “an American movie set in Paris” rather than one with largely French characters, or not in the vein of Match Point and Scoop, which were London-based flicks mostly about English natives. It would be nice if Allen’s Paris locations turn out to be less generically touristy than the London ones he chose for Match Point, but you know Woody…his pics always use “glamorous” locations enjoyed by mildly hip, not-terribly- adventurous people with money. (So forget Oberkampf.) Woody’s next will shoot in ’07 in Barcelona. (Calling Whit Stillman for advice and assistance! I just saw Barcelona for the first time about six months ago, by the way, and I think it’s far and away Stillman’s best). You can’t say Woody getting out of Manhattan has been the best thing for his career and his creativity in a long time because we only have Match Point so far as evidence, but something tells me it might turn out to be this…maybe. Hey, any chance of Scoop turning up in Cannes two months from now?

A sympathetic portrait of Oscar-winning Crash producer Cathy Schulman by Risky Business columnist Anne Thompson. Stand-out graph: “In the film community, while many respect Schulman’s taste and acumen as a producer, some question her business judgment when it comes to the men with whom she works. ‘Cathy’s emotionality makes her a good producer on-set,’ says one producer, ‘but gets her into trouble in business.'”

“Page Six” is claiming that George Clooney was the bad guy smoothie in Teri Hatcher‘s life a couple of months ago. A non-attributed source has fingered Clooney as a guy described as “a world-class Don Juan” and a “Mystery Man” in Leslie Bennett‘s just-out Vanity Fair interview piece with Hatcher. This guy, Bennett says, seduced and abandoned Hatcher last January, and made her feel so badly she got in touch with feelings about her uncle having abused her as a young woman, etc. I just bought the issue today, and Bennetts reports that the seducing and abandoning of Hatcher by “Mystery Man” left her so torn up that she could no longer keep from talking about her evil uncle. Clooney’s rep Stan Rosenfield told “Page Six” that “I doubt very seriously that your source is credible…I doubt Teri Hatcher is your source, and unless she is, you’re full of shit.”
Bennetts writes in the piece, “After an elaborate courtship, Hatcher opened her heart to a handsome guy who convinced her that she was entering a magical new relationship, only to have him disappear as soon as she’d let down her guard. He charmed, he conquered, he said, ‘I’ll call you,’ and — poof — he was gone.” I guess I’m mentioning this because of Jon Stewart‘s joke last Sunday that “good night, and good luck” was Clooney’s real-life closing line to women he goes out with. It was funny then, but now…? On the other hand, reader Stacey Singfleton has asked three questions: “One, does George Clooney really have to ‘seduce’ anybody? Two, who in the free world doesn’t know that Clooney has stated repeatedly for the past ten years (without any obvious hostility or rancor, mind you) that he has no intention of getting married or having kids? And three, if you’re a single mother looking for a relationship, as opposed to nice dinners and booty calls (not that there’s anything wrong with those), would you date George Clooney?”

This site says that pirated DVDs of Brokeback Mountain are floating around Turkey, and evidently the title “they’ve” gone with in Turkish — Ibne Kovboylar, or something close to that — translates into English as Faggot Cowboys. An Istanbul site called Radikal has written about this crude title and quotes a reader saying that “this hopeless and disgusting name shows my culture’s primal face…it’s really bad.” I went to three Turkish- English translation sites and tried translating Ibne Kovboylar into English, and three times I got “nothing found.” Then I tried translating “faggot cowboy” into Turkish and it didn’t work again. If “they” means Turkish bootleggers, doesn this mean that the legal distributor of the DVD will call it Ibne Kovboylar also?

Turkish DVD cover

Bilge Ebiri, a Turkish reader, says “‘ibne’ does mean ‘faggot’ in Turkish, but there’s no way the legit film release of BBM will be called that. There are pretty strict rules against curse words in advertising and movie titles in Turkey, and I think this is just a case of some bootlegger thinking he was funny and getting crude. In news coverage the film has been referred to either as Brokeback Mountain or Brokeback Dagi (i.e., ‘mountain’ in Turkish). I’m happy to bet a thousand bucks that the movie will never be legitimately released in Turkey under the title Ibne Kovboylar.”

This is nine days old and counting, but also a fascinating peek into Ann Coulter’s head when it comes to discussing Hollywood films and industry attitudes. And here’s Coulter’s 3.8 response to the show and who won, etc.

The V for Vendetta London premiere took place last night (Wednesday, 3.8) at the UCI Empire Cinema in Leicester Square, and here’s a link to some video coverage.

If you live in L.A. and have masochist-adventurist leanings, get over to the American Cinematheque Aero Theatre on Saturday, April 1st, for a 7:30 pm screening of a restored and uncut print of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, which clocks in at faucet-dripping 219 minutes. This version has been on DVD for a long while, but this is one of those appalling creations you have to experience in a theatre on the big screen to fully appreciate. I was there, you see….at the evening press screening of this bloated, turgid western at Manhattan’s Cinema 1 theatre nearly 25 years and eight months ago. And I remmember very clearly how it played with the crowd I saw it with, and no amount of F.X. Feeney reimaginings are going to change that. Seeing Heaven’s Gate that night was like death from asphyxiation…it was oxygen being sucked out of the room….like being buried alive in the lower chamber of an Egyptian pyramid. And yet…and yet…it had something. A display of monumental indulgence that I’d never felt before that fateful night, and haven’t since. “When it was released, many critics reacted to the hoopla and negative hype, instead of the actual content of the film,” the program notes say…which, trust me, is revisionist horseshit. The notes are partly accurate, however, in saying that Heaven’s Gate “has undergone significant re-appraisal and its considerable virtues are now widely recognized,” except for the word “widely.” People have bought into the Feeney view of this film, although I can’t remember which contrarian film critics have signed aboard. The restored print will be introduced at the Aero screening by Sony film preservationist John Kirk and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, and I am strangely attracted to the idea of coming and watching it again. What does that mean?