The perception that Kerry won last week’s debate has wiped out President Bush’s lead in the race, according to the latest Newsweek poll. In the first national telephone survey following last Thursday’s debate, the newsweekly found that the race is now statistically tied among registered voters, with 47 per cent favoring Kerry vs. 45 per cent for Bush. All this means is that swing voters are total jellyfish. They all tumbled for Bush after the well-produced macho swagger of the Republican convention, giving him an 8 to 10-point lead, and then Kerry “wins” the debate and they all swing in the other direction because…is it okay to say this? Because swing voters are impressionable little weather vanes who want only to follow whoever’s got the heat.

29 year-old Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance as Howard Hughes in The Aviator (Warner Bros., 12.17) is “stunning,” producer Michael Mann has told Empire magazine. “Particularly in the second half, when he’s playing an older Hughes. He’s pheonomenal. It’s a really excellent piece of work.” A draft of John Logan’s script that I read in ’02 strongly suggests that the $100 million biopic won’t be about Hughes’ romantic dalliances with Kate Hepburn, Ava Garner and Jean Harlow as much as his passionate devotion to the task of making machines do things the world’s never seen before. Director Martin Scorsese may well deliver a beautifully made film with superb performances, but I wonder if audiences will warm to The Aviator, given Hughes’ basic weirdness….he was really an odd duck.

So Shark Tale did just shy of $50 million on its first weekend…big deal. A movie can be a box-office leviathan and people can still hate it. Everyone says it’s mainly about other movies, it’s got no heart, and the only good voice-actor performance is Martin Scorsese’s. Last May I attended a big DreamWorks presentation for Shark Tale at the Cannes Film Festival (footage, luncheon, and personal appearances by Will Smith, Jack Black and Angelina Jolie) As DreamWorks honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg introduced the footage he called it “a movie with heart.” Heart was precisely the missing component in the footage they showed, and I asked several journo pals if they had the same impression, and every last one of them shrugged and changed the subject and ate their food.

“The most powerful moments are so realistic that they’re almost excruciating. A good half dozen sequences are so intensely acted and so deeply involving that audiences will forget they’re watching a movie until the scene ends and exhaling can recommence. Yet [the director] knows how to increase the overall effect by interlacing quieter, more tender scenes as well.” I’m definitely intrigued by this excerpt from Peter Brunette’s review of Crash, the Paul Haggis-directed drama due from Lions Gate in early ’05. “One specific scene, involving [Thandie] Newton and [Matt] Dillon at the scene of an accident, is simply unforgettable,” Brunete continues. “Music also works some major magic here, with Mark Isham’s wonderfully eerie score often playing in disturbing counterpoint against what we’re seeing on the screen.”

I’m all over the place this morning (researching, ad concerns, re-designing) and running late with Wednesday’s (10.6) column. It probably won’t be up until 3 pm Pacific time. If only there two of me…or three of me, for that matter. One could sleep on the couch and the other on a cot in the dining room.

I’m tapping something out about Ray, which I saw last night. Nothing new here, but the rumble is not overblown: Jamie Foxx’s performance as Ray Charles totally kills, and is the exact sort of tour de force dazzler that always seems to appeal to Academy criteria. I almost said to myself last night, “This is it…he’s got the Best Actor Oscar.”

But then I held back when I thought of Paul Giamatti’s morose sad-sack performance in Sideways. The more I reflect on the particulars of his pissed-off junior high-school teacher struggling with a troubled novel, the more affecting it seems, especially given the quality of the film.

If you want to be provincial and small-minded about it, and I’m sorry to be passing these thoughts along, but the fact is that the other apparent contenders have this or that strike against them.

Javier Bardem is moving and dignified in The Sea Inside, but the film is a bit enamoured with the nothingness of death. Liam Neeson in Kinsey gives a beautifully measured performance, but a view that the real-life Kinsey was a creepy perv gained a certain legitimacy from a piece that ran in last Sunday’s New York Times. Kevin Bacon‘s acting in The Woodsman is top-drawer, but the sexual deviancy element is probably going to give some people pause.

I think these guys have all done superb work, but I know how Academy types tend to size things up and categorize, etc.

The fact is that Foxx’s performance, which carries sensitivity and grace but also impresses because it’s a superb impersonation piece, is the only one that conveys that positive uplift theme (a gifted man is beset and nearly undone by his demons, but eventually overcomes them) that always seems to strike a chord.

Alfie-ville

Jude Law’s acting in Alfie (Paramount, 10.22) is the big fulfillment move of his career thus far. It’s the kind of supple and immensely charming performance that presumptive, good-looking movie stars in their prime are supposed to deliver sooner or later. It’s the richest thing Law’s ever done. Between this, Closer and his hilarious work in I Heart Huckabees, he’s really riding high.

I usually hate emotional-bath movies aimed at women and couples, but I liked Alfie a lot, and for substantial reasons.

A story about a carefree womanizing louse and his eventual comeuppance, Alfie is a remake of the popular 1966 original, directed by Lewis Gilbert.

The present-day version, directed and co-written by Charles Shyer, isn’t a pretty good remake — it’s better. It retains the things that made the ’66 version grounded and touching, and at the same time is an appealing upgrade.

A 32 year-old Michael Caine made his first big score in playing the lead in the mid’60s version, just as the 31 year-old Law has done here. And he makes a more vivid impression than Caine did.

His Alfie is sexier and more seductive, and at the same time more befuddled and sad-pathetic. He’s a prick, but you can’t help feeling for him. He doesn’t have much of a clue at the finish, but at least is starting to recognize that he needs a bit more humanity.

Law could have gone hammy or too perverse or too cute…but he did it just right. It’s a performance that viewers everywhere are going to get and say, “Yup…really nailed it.”

Law has been Oscar-nominated twice so far — for Best Supporting Actor in The Talented Mr. Ripley and for Best Actor in Cold Mountain — and if it happens again for any one of his six performances this year, it’ll be for Alfie.
Then again the consensus may be that Alfie isn’t dark or heavy enough for Law to qualify. (It is for me, but you never know how these things will shake out.)

The only other possibility is his performance in Mike Nichols’ Closer (Columbia, 12.3), but that’s an ensemble piece — Law’s screen time is said to be roughly the same as costars Julia Roberts, Clive Owen and Nathalie Portman’s — and what he does may not register as a lead.

Plus he’s got seven or eight hard competitors — Javier Bardem in The Sea Inside ), Jamie Foxx in Ray, Don Cheadle in Hotel Rwanda, Jeff Bridges in The Door in the Floor, Kevin Bacon in The Woodsman , Paul Giamatti in Sideways, Liam Neeson in Kinsey and Tom Cruise in Collateral. Who knows?

Alfie is a mainstream confection of an unusally high order. It’s not a Jean Pierre Melville or a Robert Bresson film, obviously. It’s a well-funded glossy thing that’s meant to seduce, at least initially. But it doesn’t stay on that level. Inwardly it’s a movie about values, caring, human frailty. And getting to the heart of things. Smooth romantic films funded by big studios rarely have this kind of depth or flavoring.

I said the following in Wednesday’s WIRED item:
“Coming from the director of the schmaltzy Baby Boom, Father of the Bride and I Love Trouble, Alfie feels like some kind of life-change movie.
“The old Shyer movies (which he co-wrote with former wife Nancy) were massage-y and conventional in their audience pleasing ambitions. Alfie obviously intends to please also, but it does so in a much more measured and subtle fashion and without copping out with a feel-good ending (which Shyer was pressured to deliver by Paramount production executives).
“After the failure of Affair of the Necklace, Shyer knew it was do-or-die time…and he did.”

The only other Alfie reaction I’ve read so far is Drew McWeeny’s (a.k.a. “Moriarty”) in Ain’t It Cool News. He agrees with me, or vice versa.
“It would be hard to pinpoint exactly why Alfie feels so different from [Shyer’s] previous work, but there’s no denying that it does,” he wrote in a piece posted ten days ago. “There’s a pulse here, a new sense of vitality, and the result is a sleek, smart slice of adult entertainment that has some real soul amidst the slick.

“This isn’t a film about Alfie solving all of his problems, and it’s not a film about redeeming him and rounding off his rough edges. Instead, it’s just a journey towards some degree of self-recognition.

“When the big-studio romantic comedy is so often used to sell generic happily-ever-after horseshit to us, it feels brave to see someone make one as relentlessly realistic and even pessimistic as this [film]. Oddly, it’s this cad, this bastard, that may finally make Jude Law a full-fledged movie star here in the U.S. He manages to make you care about this guy even at his lowest moments, and there’s something genuinely affecting about watching him struggle for his soul.”

The smart move would be for Paramount to sneak Alfie a week before opening, or two weeks from today.

I realize it makes me sound slightly square to be enthusing about this thing, and that a more serious film aficionado would save his greater enthusiasms for the latest Bela Tarr movie instead, but I know good, shrewd filmmaking when I see it, and I know that Shyer has bumped his work up to a higher level.

The costars are Marisa Tomei, Sienna Miller, Nia Long, Susan Sarandon (in the Shelley Winters role), Omar Epps. I wish I knew the name of a kindly white-haired actor whose character bonds with Alfie in two nicely-written scenes.

I was a little scared at first when a pink-tint Paramount logo appeared at the beginning and a echo-y fragment of Dionne Warwick’s singing of the “Alfie” tune (or what sounded like this) on the soundtrack. It felt too girly, but my concerns didn’t last long.
Alfie has one of the most emotionally agreeable end-credits sequences ever composed. (Not that this is necessarily a goal pursued by other filmmakers.) Black-and-white photos of significant behind-the-camera contributors are shown: Shyer, co-screenwriter-producer Elaine Pope, editor Padriac McKinley, production designer Sophie Becher, casting director Mindy Marin, executive producer Shawn Daniel, performer Mick Jagger, etc… and it feels really nice.

The final Alfie barometer, of course, will be whether Variety‘s Robert Koehler likes it or not.
Koehler’s general rep is that of a smart guy who never met an obscure foreign film he didn’t like, and who’d rather take cyanide than give a thumbs-up to a Charles Shyer film. I figure if he goes for it, the rest of the world will follow.

What Happened Was…

John Kerry won the debate last night because of what his body language said, and Bush lost for the same reason on his own end. Words can be rehearsed, edited, sold. But body language tells all, and everybody knows this.
A body-language expert named Sonya Hamlin said as much this morning on MSNBC, and as soon as she explained why, I knew she was right. I could be the biggest Bush guy in the western world….I could be Karl Rove or Matt Stone or Trey Parker, and her judgements would still be correct.
Kerry carried himself with dignity. He never looked irritated or defensive, as Bush did all through the debate whenever Kerry said something he disagreed with.

Unlike Bush, Kerry stood up tall and straight and didn’t slump over the lecturn. That little encouraging pat on the right arm that Kerry gave Bush as they shook hands at the very beginning, and the way Bush suddenly broke away before the handshake moment was concluded, was very telling.
Hamlin said that Bush was hurt by the simple fact that Kerry is taller. More of Kerry’s upper body was viewable behind the lecturn, and because of this seemed more stature-esque.
Bush’s petulant, pissed-off expressions obviously showed a lack of substance. I get that he’s a guy who wears his emotions on his sleeve, fine, but this also suggested he’s not accustomed to contrary opinions, and probably lives in a bubble in which he hears what he wants to hear from his advisors.
But I have to be honest: I really enjoyed Bush’s anger moments. His expressions were very, very funny. The second time I watched the debate I was laughing out loud.
Not because I was thinking, “Oh, great…this will help Kerry.” It’s because Bush is a very readable regular-guy type, like any good actor. His discomfort was almost endearing. He looked like some malcontent being scolded by a domineering authority figure. His face said, “Is he serious?…am I really listening to this?…c’mon!”
New York Times columnist Allessandra Stanley wrote that “the cameras demonstrated that Mr. Bush cannot hear criticism without frowning, blinking and squirming (he even sighed once).
“They showed that Mr. Kerry can control his anger and stay cool but that he cannot suppress his inner overeager A student, flashing a bleach-white smile and nodding hungrily at each question. ”
The latest results of a non-scientific MSNBC poll this morning said that 61% of viewer respondents felt Kerry had won, vs. 39% calling it for Bush.

Mein Fuhrer!

I’ve got the old Criterion special-edition laser disc of Dr. Strangelove, and a special-edition DVD from two or three years ago with all kinds of bells and whistles. Now Columbia Tristar Home Video is releasing a two-disc, 40th anniversary edition coming out in a few weeks (on November 2nd…election day!).
I’ll get into a fuller review down the road, but I should proclaim right now that the image is darker and murkier-looking than the previous CTHV Strangelove. And instead of using the proper alternating aspect ratios of 1.33 to 1 and 1.66 to 1 (the look used in the earlier CTHV DVD), the new DVD goes with a 1.85 to 1 crop, which pointlessly lops off visual information from the tops and bottoms of the frame.

There’s a fascinating snafu contained in a video interview with Robert S. MacNamara, Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson in the `60s and star of Errol Morris’ Oscar-winning The Fog of War.

The astonishing mistake is….the camera jiggles. McNamara is being asked about what it was like living under a nuclear Sword of Damocles ever day, and someone bumps into the camera tripod. Thump…jiggle…what happened? This kind of thing never makes the final cut of a taped interview. It was kept in because there wasn’t time to re-do anything because they were on a clock that McNamara had insisted upon.

There’s a new documentary called “No Fighting in the War Room or: Dr. Strangelove and the Nuclear Threat.” It includes talking-head interviews with McNamara, author Bob Woodward, Roger Ebert and Spike Lee, and is fairly interesting. It’s playing as I write this, but I can’t really watch it because the column needs to be up in an hour.

There’s also a doc called “Best Sellers: Peter Sellers Remembered.” I watched about five minutes’ worth and it seems reasonably smart and perceptive.

What I really want from a Dr. Strangelove DVD but will never get is (a) lost footage of the climactic pie-fight sequence in the War Room that was shot but never used by director Stanley Kubrick, and (b) 16mm color behind-the-scenes footage. That’s what I want. I know the pie-fight sequence didn’t work, etc., but I want to see it anyway.

One of the funniest moments in Dr. Strangelove is a slip-up. Go to the famous scene in which the wheelchair-bound Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers), a German scientist based on Dr. Werner von Braun, is fighting with his prosthetic arm, which has a sporadic tendency to give “seig heil!” salutes all on its own.

As Sellers tries to overcome the arm by beating on it, Peter Bull, the actor playing the Russian ambassador and who’s standing right behind Sellers, breaks character by smiling. He nearly starts laughing, but he checks himself. This is an absolute no-no, of course. However, Bull’s face was heavily shadowed and Kubrick probably figured all eyes would be on Sellers at that moment. But it’s a fairly glaring error, especially for a film made by a legendary control freak.

Break Your Heart

As long as we’re on a political jag, I’m recommending RFK , a two-hour documentary about the life and times of Robert F. Kennedy. It airs on PBS next Monday evening (10.4) at 8 pm.
Directed by David Grubin (who did LBJ, a superb four-hour documentary about the tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, for PBS’s “The American Experience” roughly fourteen years ago) and produced by Grubin and Sara Colt, RFK has the earmarks of a penetrating emotional experience. Translation: a good cry.

Check out the RFK website. It’s got a teaser, bios, a synopsis, a transcript…everything.

This new biography features interviews with historians, journalists and biographers, including Robert Dallek, Anthony Lewis, Jeff Shesol, and Ronald Steel, and the first-hand recollections of those who knew him well: Peter Edelman, Richard Goodwin, Nicholas Katzenbach, John Seigenthaler, Adam Walinsky, Jack Newfield, Roger Wilkins, and Harris Wofford.

I love this line about Kennedy, written by one of his biographers: “He was brave precisely because he was fearful and self-doubting.”

“RFK is a story about change and suffering,” Grubin writes on the site. “Robert Kennedy not only changed his mind about the great issues of his day — civil rights and the war in Vietnam — he changed himself. I wanted to explore his enormous capacity for growth and its relationship to the death of his brother, clearly the defining moment in his life.”

The titles of the hour-long sections are “The Garish Sun” and “The Awful Grace of God.”
The latter title is from a quote by Aeschylus: “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom by the awful grace of God.”

Right Thinkers

“If you’ve followed South Park without missing an episode, as I have, you would have noticed Republican talking points popping up several hundred times.

“Matt Stone and Trey Parker seem to have a problem with anyone who’s an environmentalist. They rag on global warming every now and then. SUV’s are good. Unregulated Corporations ditto. Dumping waste in Third World countries is great. So is cutting down rain forests and destroying sundry wildlife. But people from Mexico coming across the border are bad.
“And they have this weird Rob Reiner food-eating fetish which manifests itself on several occasions. As far as I can tell Reiner just a harmless ol’ guy who raises money for several worthwhile causes. But he’s a Democrat, so he needs to be skewered. Barbara Streisand isn’t a royalist plutocrat like Newt Gingrich, so she gets the short end of the schtick. The Baldwins get killed in the South Park movie, and on and on.
“It’s interesting that no one from the Hollywood Republican section ever lands on their shit list. No Arnold, no Bruce Willis, no Kevin Costner, no Shannen Doherty, no Chuck Norris, no Freddie Prinze Jr., no Jessica Simpson. Oh, they did do a really good hatchet job on Mel Gibson turning him into some sort of fanatical sado masochist wacko. Which in their minds probably balances out the rest of their right-wing gibberish.
“But Cartman’s a really funny fat boy. There’s also Jimmy, Butters, Mr. Mackey’s mmkay, Mr. Garrison and Mr. Hat and Mr. Slave, Officer Barbrady and Marlon Brando and his sidekick from The Island of Dr. Moreau. So you’ve gotta give them at least that.” — Vinod Narayanan
“As a longtime fan of South Park, I have to agree with you about their right-leaning ways. The celebrities they’ve attacked on the show have been people like Strisand, Rob Reiner, and Ben Affleck, all pretty famous liberals. My problem with their attacking both sides is they don’t have to choose sides. If you’re making fun of everything, you don’t have to take a stand on anything. — Alan Dingham.
“Parker and Stone are barely closeted righties–and more closeted by people’s perceptions (anti-censorship satirists must be lefties!) than any real hiding on their part.
“I believe they’ve identified themselves as Republicans in past interviews (more in passing, I think, as it was during the Clinton years). You can see some of that coming through on South Park –a funny show, but one I’ve sometimes had trouble stomaching because of those conservative undercurrents. Not because all satire needs to be from a liberal point of view for me to enjoy it, but because sometimes Parker and Stone can unbearably smug.
“I’ll certainly see Team America, but I’ve felt wariness for awhile now, based on what looks to be a torrent of /celebrities should just shut up!’ jokes. Which–as you seem to realize — are not inherently funny, and far from clever.” — Jesse Hassenger.

Eddie and the Thugs

“I second the motion for a The Friends of Eddie Coyle DVD. I finally managed to tape a censored version of the movie on AMC a couple of months back and quickly became obsessed with it. I ended up watching it it three or four times to catch all of the nuances, and then read George Higgins’ classic novel.

“This is the most realistic look at low-level criminals ever made, and maybe the purest example of how different the studios were in the ’70s. Is there even one remotely attractive or heroic character in that film? Everybody, from the cops to the criminals, is run-down, depressed or a mercenary desperate just to grapple to the next low rung in the ladder.

“And I love how the film just ends, with no catharsis or hope, just the implied question (as written in the book): `Is there any end to this shit?’
“Eddie Coyle is the rarest kind of film that makes absolutely no contrived concessions to entertain the audience, yet there’s some intangible quality to it that makes the movie lodge into your memory.
“A lot of that probably has to do with atmosphere. I worked in the South Shore of Massachusetts (the movie’s milieu) one winter and Victor Kemper’s cinematography really captures the bleak, lonely ambience of the cold months there. Let’s hope the eventual DVD producers don’t skimp on the transfer.
“And for perhaps the only time in movie history, the Boston accents in the film aren’t the kind to make New England viewers wince.
“I initially started thinking that a re-make is in order (I’m sure Tarantino would really sink his hooks into the story’s low-life characters), but screw it — the original is damn-near perfect. ” — Chris Pizzello

The “impartiality” being shown by news channel spinsters in assessing what happened during last night’s Presidential debate is slightly odious. Ask anyone on the street and they’ll tell you Kerry did much better than Bush. He had it together and attacked with dignity, precision and a crisp delivery style. Bush didn’t blow himself up, but (a) he seemed frustrated (i.e., irked by Kerry’s criticisms, at times comically), and (b) he seemed slow, primitive of thought and fumbling at times. I don’t know if this impression is going to turn things around for Kerry, but he was the clear victor. For some reason (any goofy theories?), this impression is being slightly mucky-mucked and loop-dee-looped in the post-debate coverage on CNN or MSNBC.

I was in a hair styling salon yesterday (9.29) and, for the first time in a fairly long while, actually sat in a chair and read recent issues of People, Us, the Star and In Touch cover-to-cover. We all know they’re essentially the same rag aimed at a not-terribly-bright female readership. (I worked as an in-house freelancer for People from ’96 to ’98, when it occupied a slightly higher editorial station than it does today, so I have a certain insight.) And we all know they’re essentially glamour porn. What’s changed is that they’ve gone from being hard R to XXX, and it’s nauseating. It makes you want to wash your hands. These rags distort, degrade and generally vulgarize the lives of celebrities (not to mention the human condition) as surely as gynecological X-rated films pass along some extremely rancid imressions about what goes down between men and women they get close and naked together.

I take back my theory about Team America: World Police creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker possibly being closet righties — they’re a couple of proclaimed Republicans and KY Jelly Bush bitches. In 2.3.01 news story written by E Online’s Emily Farache about their then-controversial Comedy Central series That’s My Bush, it was said to be “ironic that [Parker and Stone] are getting so much flak, because they’re both Republicans and — believe it or not — they don’t plan on ridiculing Bush. ‘What we’re trying to do is way more subversive,’ Parker said. ‘We’re going to make you love this guy.'” They also copped to their Republican loyalties in a Fox News story that ran in late ’01.

“Life’s hard…but it’s a lot harder if you’re stupid.” — spoken by Steven Keats’ “Jackie Brown” character in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (’73), reading from Paul Monash’s script which was based on the novel by George V. Higgins.

“There’s a revolution going on,” the legendary cinematographer Christopher Doyle (Hero, The Quiet American) tells the Guardian‘s Zoe Cox, “and the world’s changed. Kids these days have so much visual experience they don’t think in literary or narrative terms. They’re constantly online or playing computer games or fiddling with their phones. These things may not be sophisticated, but they are realigning the parameters of visual experience. It’s almost like the death of the talkies.”

I’m somewhat surprised to say that Charles Shyer’s Alfie (Paramount, 10.22), a remake of the 1966 Michael Caine original, is a sure hit, a likely Oscar contender and (did I forget to say this?) a very fine film — touching, truthful, emotionally supple. The Oscar part of the equation certainly includes a Best Actor nomination for Jude Law. His performance as a smoothly charming womanizer (a limousine driver in present-day Manhattan) is more shaded and varied than Caine’s, and gets deeper and more affecting as it moves along. Alfie has loads of big-studio gloss and panache, but it pays off inwardly with obvious skill and finesse. Coming from the director of the schmaltzy Baby Boom, Father of the Bride and I Love Trouble, Alfie feels like some kind of life-change movie. The old Shyer movies (which he co-wrote with former wife Nancy) were massage-y and conventional in their audience-pleasing ambitions. Alfie obviously intends to please also, but it does so in a much more measured and subtle fashion and without copping out with a feel-good ending (which Shyer was pressured to deliver by Paramount production executives). It’s one of the best confections of its kind I’ve ever seen. After the failure of Affair of the Necklace, Shyer knew it was do-or-die time…and he did. Hail to the script (by Shyer and Elaine Pope), photography (Ashley Rowe), editing (Padraic McKinley), production design (Sophie Becher) and original music (Mick Jagger, John Powell and David A. Stewart).

The column is supposed to be completed and up on Wednesdays and Friday mornings, and today (10.1) it’s not. Again. My work load has tripled since Hollywood Elsewhere launched in August, and I haven’t figured how to work faster or better. I’ve been trying to wash and dry some clothes this week, and it’s taken me three or four days so far — they’re still down in the laundry room. The column will be up around noon.

Right On

The satirical audacity of Matt Stone and Trey Parker, man…wow. Love their humor, irreverence, anti-Hollywood sentiments and general smart-assed coolness, etc. And I love those strings.
Those fishing-line marionette wires, I mean, in their new film Team America: World Police. Holding up the cast and doing the heavy emoting all through it, and nobody (least of all cinematographer Bill Pope) making the slightest effort to obscure the basic mechanics.
With any imaginable dreamscape fully creatable and ripe for CG-manifestation these days, there’s something at least moderately cool about a movie starring actor dolls held up by invisible hovering humans. It’s such a Being John Malkovich thing, and with such authority.

Last Monday afternoon (9.27) I saw a 20-minute reel from Team America: World Police (Paramount, 10.15)…the same thing that journos were shown during the Toronto Film Festival.
It looks…well, pretty good. Pope (Spider-Man 2, all three Matrix movies) has given this political-satirical puppet show a handsome, carefully rendered lighting scheme and shot it in widescreen (2.35 to 1).
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Of course, Matt-and-Trey movies are essentially internal affairs. They’re selling wit, attitude and politically incorrect goadings. The feature version of Team America, which I presume will start to be screened within a week or so, seems to have this in spades…although some of the more outrageous bits (as I’ve heard them described, at least) weren’t on the tape.
The plot involves a low-grade Jerry Bruckheimer-by-way-of-Barbara Broccoli team of square-jawed jerkwads called Team America trying to stop North Korean leader Kim Jong Il from selling weapons of mass destruction to Muslim fundamentalist terrorists.
There’s an affair of some intensity happening between a blonde commando-intelligence female and a dopily earnest action hero named Gary, a stage actor who’s brought into the team so he can infiltrate an Islamic terrorist cell so…you know, I don’t think anybody wants to read about a parody plot.

We’ve all digested the proposition that team America isn’t a leftie satire but some kind of neutral equal-opportunity offender. It nonetheless seems to have a penchant for leftie-celebrity bashing. It rags on Michael Moore, Sean Penn, Alec Baldwin, Sean Penn, etc., and alludes to their character by making them members of FAG — i.e., the Film Actors Guild.
“We diss on people like actors, who get on a soapbox and say, ‘Let me tell you how it works in Iraq,’ cause they don’t know fucking shit,” Stone told the New York Post‘s Megan Lehmann.
Of course they don’t. Sean Penn went to Iraq and he doesn’t know a thing. The lefties who’ve spoken out against the war are complete ignoramuses. Any liberal-leaning actor who reads up on current affairs and tries to make a political speech should be pulled off the podium and slapped around. They’re all a bunch of elitist, out-of-touch, Mercedes-driving weenies.
But then Matt and Trey are proclaimed Republicans, so what do you expect?
Here’s Parker with another observation from the Dennis Miller handbook: Team America “is about the main characters going through a journey of what it’s like to be an American, to be the only country that has to deal with stuff, but then gets bitched at for dealing with it.”

Yeah…guldurn it! Standing up like men and dealing with the threat of domestic terrorism by invading Iraq, the absolute mother of all terrorist-embracing Islamic ….well, not really.
“The whole idea of positioning our movie as this important cultural event that people are going to be mad about is just a joke — it’s a puppet movie,” Stone told Lehmann.
“Before there even was any political environment, we wanted to make a big Bruckheimer action movie with puppets,” Parker added. “The original idea was to make a big disaster film like Armageddon with puppets. Super funny, right?”

Missing Friends

Oh, how I long for The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Oh, how I long for that long-gone, far-away realm in which bleak noir-type movies with fall-winter color schemes and hard-boiled criminal characters played by name actors used to turn up every so often.
Maybe I can help a little bit. It seems like every time I bitch about this or that great `70s movie not being on DVD, somebody at some DVD distribution company pulls the trigger two or three weeks later. So let’s see…

We all know the basics — directed by Peter Yates, based on the George V. Higgins novel, and starring Robert Mitchum, Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Steven Keats, James Tolkan, et. al.
Eddie Coyle is one of the great all-time Boston movies. Every actor in this thing reeks of blue-collar or criminal-class attitude, and they all have that pale doughy-faced Irishman look that comes from too much cold weather and cruddy food and too many boilermakers. The bleak downbeat mood of this film combines with the grayish colors and general down-at-the-heels atmosphere to produce a kind of gloomy beauty that stays with you.
Mitchum’s performance as Coyle, an aging small-time criminal looking for a scheme to trade his way out of a long prison term, is one of his best ever. It’s part of the pantheon along with Out of the Past, Macao, The Locket and Night of the Hunter.

Texas Pride

There are elements of light and darkness in Friday Night Lights (Universal, 10.8), the new football movie from director Peter Berg. But it’s the light that stays with you. The light of desire, glory and struggle combined with a plain but stirring look at the residents of an ordinary Texas middle-class town.
It’s got more of a moody, funky quality than the last great football movie, Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday, and it’s got a muddier look (grainy and worn and a bit brownish), but, like Stone’s film, this is a movie with a rock-solid value system that you can’t help but agree with and admire.
The theme of Any Given Sunday, as summed up a climactic locker-room speech by coach Tony D’Amato(Al Pacino), is “life is inches.” Every inch of yardage has to be fought for with your life, and it all adds up. It’s not easy, it can be a real bitch…but that’s what it takes to win.

The theme of Friday Night Lights, as summed up by coach Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton) on the night of the Big Final Game, is “be perfect.” Football isn’t about the score board, but about being able to look in the mirror and into the faces of your friends and loved ones and say, “I gave everything I had…I held back nothing.”
This is a beautiful life philosophy, but tell that to the woman who was walking in front of me as everyone was leaving a screening at the Mann Chinese a week or two ago.
The ending of Fright Night Lights is in keeping with Billy Bob’s philosophy, but it doesn’t exactly conclude in a typical blaze-of-glory explosion. I guess the woman in front of me wanted that good old “we’re number one!” feeling at the finish, because she said very loudly to her date, “It sucks!”
Well, she sucks. She wanted what she wanted, but she didn’t get what the movie had to say….or refused to let it in. I hate people like this. “We have to win all the time….winners!…gold medal! …king of the hill!” Obnoxious creeps.
Be concentrated and resourceful and push yourself as hard as you can, and if you win the prize, great….but if you don’t, don’t quit, keep coming and have a cup of green tea every so often.

In other words, Berg and his co-screenwriter, David Aaron Cohen, aren’t peddling the same-old same-old. And yet they explore the eternal fundamentals that the playing of good football always tends to teach.
Based on H.G. Bissinger’s 1990 best-seller, Lights tells the true story of a triumphant 1988 season played by the Odessa Permian Panthers, a high-school team based in (you’ve already heard this, right?) Odessa, Texas.
The slightly grungy digital widescreen photography is by Tobias Schliessler. The oerfect-or-close-to-it editing is by David Rosenbloom and Colby Parker Jr.
Thornton is first-rate (when is ever not?), but he looks a bit fuller of body and face than usual, and I’m wondering if he went on a cheeseburger and fries diet so as to look more rural or something.
The football player performances — Lucas Black (the kid in Sling Blade), Derek Luke, Jay Hernandez, Garret Hedlund have the leads — feel non-actor-ish, which is one of the highest compliments there is, in my book.

Set of Steak Knives

“I need you to clear something up for me (and a lot of others out there I’m guessing.) How is the new Mike Nichols film Closer pronounced? Is it ‘closer’ as in getting more intimate or is it ‘clozer’ in the Glengarry Glen Ross that-guy-is-a-closer kind of way? I always assumed it was the intimate way but then I saw Natalie Portman on The Daily Show and she said it the second way.
“You’re the man with titles, and I’ve learned this the hard way (I lost a DVD to you over the whole I Heart Huckabees thing. Help us all out so we don’t sound stupid.” — Matthew Morettini

Wells to Morrettini: Nathalie Portman wasn’t supposed to let the cat out of the bag this early, but the real plot of Closer — it’s set in the take-no-prisoners world of London real estate, and was once referred to in Screen International as “son of Glengarry” — should tell you how to pronounce it. “Always be closing,” as the saying goes. No, seriously… it’s the emotional pronounciation. You probably mis-heard Portman.

Creepy?

“I saw Kevin Spacey’s Bobby Darin biopic Beyond the Sea the other night. It wasn’t a final cut — it was shown at one of those test screenings — but looks pretty much done and it was…ecch.
“It didn’t know what it wanted to be — edgy biopic, sitcom, drama, musical…? Spacey tried to make it play avant-garde, but it covered the same old territory of other entertainer biopics, including a mundane sequence where the hippie-ish Bobby Darin goes to find himself, blah blah.
“It took some risks, but Spacey’s just too old to play Darin. I think Darin was 37 when he died and Spacey is… what, 45 or so? It was a little creepy when Spacey went in to kiss Kate Bosworth, who’s barely drinking age. I liked the musical numbers, but that’s my inner gay guy talking and he’s rather biased.” — Dezhda Mountz

Sideways and Youth

I think Laurence Price’s claim that no under-25s are going to enjoy Alexander Payne’s Sideways is a rash generalization, but I also acknowledge the truth of it.
“I’m 23, and when I rattle off names like Paul Giamatti or Thomas Haden Church to my friends they respond with blank stares. I may not have seen everything these actors have been in, but I know some of their films, and these lead to more blank looks. (Well, maybe for the exception of the god-awful Planet of the Apes remake with Giamatti or George of the Jungle with Church.)
“You can blame MTV for the trend if you want, but I would point to a more insidious influence over what my generation was raised to like: our parents. Thankfully mine raised me on To Kill a Mockingbird, Ben-Hur and the like. Sure there were some duds that I saw as a kid that I liked then but can’t stomach now, but overall I was blessed to learn what good cinema was, even if I didn’t fully appreciate it.
“And yet some of my friends can’t watch dramas without falling asleep and have only patience for Ben Stiller for the zillionth time in a year. (I like a few of his movies, but I wish he’d go away now). Their parents let the TV stay on throughout the day, never questioning if this practice was a good one (or did they and not admit it?).
“Also I blame the lack of book-reading among my peers. They were not encouraged to do so when they were younger, and few do with any regularity. I read more books than I watched TV as a kid. I’ll make damned sure my kids are raised the same way too.
“When I took a girl on a first date to Election back when I was 17, it was just a suggestion based on buzz I’d read on Ain’t It Cool, but I was thoroughly entertained. (Although my date wasn’t especially enthused.) I watched About Schmidt and enjoyed it, and I’m pretty sure I’m the only one in my age group that I know that would admit that.
“I was interested in Sideways from the time I heard Alexander Payne was involved, so put me down as one under-25 who will see it. Plus I’ll be dragging at least one other under-25 to it with me. And I’m betting I at least will enjoy it based on the talent. What more can I say?” — Daniel Revill

George W. Bush image composed of head shots of most of the U.S. soldiers and civilians who’ve died thus far in the Iraqi War