And by the way, the Worlds marketing slogan is, “They’re Already Here.” As in hidden amongst us, preparing to strike, etc. Is anyone else hearing an echo? Just as the 1953 George Pal War of the Worlds was, in the vein of The Thing and other alien invasion movies of that period, a metaphor for a feared Communist takeover, the metaphor in Spielberg’s film is…well, think about it. But it’s not what you might think. If you read H.G. Wells’ novel, which was an allegory about the demise of the British empire, it can be deduced that the Spielberg film isn’t about fear of Osama bin Laden but our waging of the Iraqi War. Remember how the aliens die in the George Pal film, from breathing our air and not being able to cope with the infections? This comes straight from Wells, who was trying to show how British colonialists could invade less technologically-advanced cultures and completely dominate them, but would eventually, over time, be driven out by indigenous factors like disease (in the case of Africa) or local insurgencies (like in India), which are impossible to stop. No occupation ever succeeds because the occupier is too far from home, spread too thin, ideologically unsound, stuck far from their sources of support in a hostile land. Sound familiar? The metaphor obviously transposes pretty well to 2004. Just as Wells made the British the invaded rather than the invaders, so as not make his point too blaringly obvious, Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp have made the U.S. the invaded instead of the invaders.

I’ve just seen for the very first time, via the new Universal Home Video DVD, Howard Hughes’ Hells Angels (1930). Despite some creaky elements here and there, it really isn’t half bad. It has half-decent dialogue, characters you can grab hold of and relate to (or at least understand where they’re coming from), a pair of aerial action sequences that kick serious ass, and a tough-hearted finale. The realism in the third-act dogfight sequence is inescapably thrilling and is obviously well-shot and well-cut, deploying a swarm of World War I biplanes. Hughes, the director and producer, took three years and spent close to $4 million bucks to make this thing, and saw three stunt pilots get killed during the dogfight shooting. And honestly? I enjoyed it more than sitting through Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, a mostly laborious biopic about Hughes that Gold Derby.com’s Tom O’Neill is predicting will be showered with Oscar glory…right! If you plan on seeing The Aviator, make sure you catch the Hells Angels DVD also. You can sense more fully who Hughes really was from this 74 year-old film (especially his love of flying and his admiration of costar Jean Harlow’s sexual charms) than you can from Scorsese’s work, I swear. And you don’t have to think about piss in milk bottles.

The first impact grenade has gone off in the vicinity of Spanglish (Columbia, 12.17), and Tea Leoni’s chalk-on-a-blackboard performance has taken the heaviest hit. “It’s difficult to engage with a picture when a major character is so out of control emotionally as to require immediate institutionalization, even if no one in — or behind — the film seems to notice,” declares Variety critic Todd McCarthy. “So it is with Leoni’s Deborah Clasky, a Bel-Air matron whose complete self-absorption has obliterated any personality and interests she once might have had. A clenched fist of knotted nerves tightened by constant workouts, Deborah can’t relate to anyone on a human level, only in a manner she imagines is appropriate or prescribed.”

Empty Jape

Ocean’s Twelve (Warner Bros., playing everywhere) isn’t quite abominable. You could be a hard-ass and call it that, but then you wouldn’t be cool.
It’s expensive and smart-assed and scenic as hell, and not in the least bit stupid. It’s a very hip enterprise. There’s just nothing there. Some goofy guy humor but no major laughs, no thrilling set pieces, no especially tasty performances, no suspense…just a bunch of kool kats (George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, et. al.) having a lot of fun shooting in Europe and getting paid a shitload.

Take our money this weekend, Steven Soderbergh…please. We’re giving it to you and your Warner Bros. corporate pallies because the trailers are cool and we love paying $10 bucks a head to sit through smooth Americanized Euro-crap. That’s what this is, right?
I wish I could have been there for the filming. I love being in Rome, especially tearing around the streets at night on a fast scooter. Vincent Cassel’s big villa on the shore of Lake Como is a real honey. (The Locarno Film Festival, which I went to in August ’03, is right near there.) But frankly? The scenery seemed a bit more luscious in The Italian Job.
There’s one scene, however, that really works, and ironically it’s the one that some critics have been singling out for being too smug and self-referential.
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
Screen International‘s Mike Goodridge complained that “in the final heist sequence the film buckles under the weight of its own conceit by having Julia Roberts’ character Tess Ocean pretend to be…Julia Roberts. Even Bruce Willis pops up as himself and thinks Tess is Roberts. It’s a moment in which any pretense that the director and actors are trying to spin a compelling yarn is shattered.”
This shattering is precisely what I enjoyed about it. This is where Ocean’s Twelve completely drops its pants and says “all right, we really don’t care” and just tosses the whole Ceasar salad out the window and starts goofing off on a seriously fuck-all level.

If more of the film had been this willly-nilly and (seemingly) improvisational…if it had been more sincere about not being any kind of story-driven movie that adds up to anything of any consequence and just become the movie I sense Soderbergh always wanted it to be deep down, it could have been something else. Of course, the Warner Bros. chiefs would have vetoed any such notion, had Soderbergh had been nuts enough to suggest it.
I still say that the high-water mark for the frivolous jerkoff heist genre is Peter Yates’ The Hot Rock (’71). It was totally throwaway, but it was reasonably well-plotted in an absurdist way, and it had a clear-cut comedic tone.
I’m tired of saying this — we’re all tired of saying this — but Clooney really has to learn to be someone else besides that dry, flip, know-it-all guy. Really. David O. Russell tried to get Clooney to be stiller and less affected during the shooting of Three Kings (this story is in Sharon Waxman’s new book, Rebels on the Backlot), and he was absolutely on-target in trying to do that.

Thanks, Kevin

I went for the provocative headline rather than the fair-minded one. Kevin Spacey has not single-handedly boosted the Best Picture nomination odds for Ray.
But a serious argument can be made that his Bobby Darin biopic, Beyond the Sea, has made Taylor Hackford’s Ray Charles flick seem a bit more skillful and even artful than people were willing to give it credit for when it first opened.
You may have divined elsewhere that Ray is flatlining a bit. Not true. Or at least, not with the Academy voters, and Jamie Foxx’s Best Actor shot is as locked in as it ever was.

But the buzz around Ray does seem to be plateau-ing. We’re all mindful that Ray opened in late October and yaddah-yaddah, but to stay in the game and assure a Best Picture nomination (which is where the real box-office payoff comes from) it may — I say “may” — need some kind of second surge around the holidays, so the boys at Universal should probably get cracking, just to be safe.
Here’s where Spacey comes in with the fourth-quarter assist.
Ray has long been regarded as a good film, highly enjoyable but “not quite Ivy League,” as Richard Masur once said to Tom Cruise. But now that three other biopics have opened in its wake, among them a certain musical starring a singing guy in a bad toupee, you could say with some conviction that Ray‘s “invisible architecture” (a term borrowed from this guy I know) seems a bit more assured and crafty by comparison.
Ray tells a story that’s just as layered and particular as Beyond the Sea‘s, and it’s similar in some ways (gifted kid copes with medical handicap, works his way up the circuit, grapples with personal demons after he hits it big).
Ray may not be high falutin’ art, but it’s smooth and relatively efficient, and it doesn’t create any speed bumps for itself. Like, for instance, casting a too-old actor in the lead role, going with vaguely cornball Arthur Freed dance numbers, and starting out as a movie-within-a-movie and then dropping this device like a bad habit.

It’s not entirely that Beyond the Sea drops the ball and Ray doesn’t, it’s…well, maybe that’s it.
I happen to feel Kinsey is a better film than Ray and, frankly, more deserving of a Best Picture slot. But we’re in a political phase right now and the buzz levels for this Fox Searchlight pic feel even flatter than Ray‘s right now (am I wrong?), and there’s no arguing that Hackford’s film is more of a conventional Academy rouser than Bill Condon’s. Not to be a lowbrow, but there is a lot to be said for the raw rambunctious energy that Ray dispenses in short bursts.
That’s one of the problems I had with another postRay biopic — Finding Neverland. It’s a precise, quality-level thing, but it plays so delicately and with such ultra-sensitive regard for the feelings of Johnny Depp’s J.M. Barrie, Kate Winslet’s dying mom and all those adorable kids I wanted to smack it upside the head.
The things that make up a well-made biopic are not so easy to get hold of and assemble. The best biopics have always been about a lot more than “he had a rough childhood and then this happened and then his wife left him.” They have to have rhyme, reason and, in a manner of speaking, song.

Spellbinding

The overriding criteria for digital effects in a reality-based, non-fantasy movie is that they can’t look like digital effects. They have to blend right in and not seem too pixellated or hard-drivey. In a word, invisible.
I don’t know why visual effects supervisors working for big Hollywood films always seem to ignore this rule, and why European filmmakers are much more careful about it, but that’s how it seems to be. Last year I noticed a totally spotless CG shot in Goodbye Lenin (i.e., a statue of Nikolai Lenin being helicoptered across an afternoon sky), and now another great one has come along in Jean Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement (Warner Independent).

Engagement is set in France during World War I and just after. Every frame is composed like a restored Rembrandt painting, but there’s an exceptional “wow” to be had from a five- or six-second shot of the massive plaza area in front of the Place de l’Opera and the nearby Cafe de la Paix in Paris, as it looked in 1920 or thereabouts.
The alchemist is Alain Carsoux, a longtime Jeunet colleague who did the effects on Amelie and The City of Lost Children, among others. He served as visual effects supervisor for the film. His professional base is Duboi, a state-of-the-art special effects company that he’s been with for roughly sixteen years.
We spoke briefly yesterday on the phone. His English was a bit rough and my French is embarassing, so we only spoke for ten minutes.
“Jean Pierre always wants integrity in the texture of the movie, and he never wants to show the digital fake of the shot,” he told me. “So when we work for him, we always push for the integration of the digital into the reality element, as it is captured by film.”

They started by shooting a nearly vacant Place de l’Opera very early on a Sunday morning. Then they found a massive parking lot in the suburbs and created their own Place de l’Opera with old cars and buses and actors dressed in period, with certain aspects (like the Cafe de la Paix) temporarily dressed in digital blue.
Then, obviously, they married the two shots, but Carsoux and Jeunet were careful not to make the finished panorama look too new or pretty. They made the color muted and a little yellowy, as if the scene had actually been shot in 1920 (if there had been widescreen color film back then) and then digitally restored. As Coursoux says, “We let it look old.”
Before composing the final version of the shot, Carsoux and Jeunet assembled the final married image in 3-D for a reason I couldn’t discern. Caroux explained it as best he could but I didn’t get the gist.
Carsoux says that 70 people worked on A Very Long Engagement at Duboi’s headquarters in Bologne. (I think that’s what he said. It sounded like Bologne.) They employ 20 people full-time. Their website is www.duboi.com.

Les Journos

The end-of-the-year forecasts will be acquiring a firmer configuration over the next five days with the Los Angeles and New York film critics groups rendering final judgements. It’s widely presumed that Academy members don’t give a toss what the critics think, but if the critics’ choices are uniform or at least emphatic, they can be guilt-tripped to some degree.
The Los Angeles Film Critics Association will be announcing its ’04 awards tomorrow (Saturday, 12.11). Two days later come the tallies from the New York Film Critics Circle, followed by the slightly more populist, meat-and-potatoes calls from Broadcast Film Critics Association — the highly-aggressive L.A.-based group looking to de-throne the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Golden Globe awards as the leading indicator of Academy sentiments — on Wednesday.
And oh yeah…the Golden Globe nominations are being announced Monday morning.

I know what’s going to happen in New York and L.A….I think. Baby showers, mostly. I really can’t imagine the bountifulness of Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor’s Sideways script being overlooked, but I suppose it’s possible. Aviator helmer Marty Scorsese definitely has his LAFCA homies, and the group likes to split things up so maybe he’ll be graced with what will be interpreted as a LAFCA Life Achievement Award.
In L.A., Sideways‘ Virginia Madsen is seen as a near-lock for a Best Supporting Actress honor. And it would be right and just if her costar, Paul Giamatti, wins a Best Actor trophy on at least one coast.
My New York journo pals aren’t sharing any tea-leaf readings about Monday’s NYFCC voting. I guess they want to preserve the element of surprise. But here are a couple of astute-sounding forecasts about tomorrow’s balloting.
“It seems that the strongest right now with LAFCA are Million Dollar Baby (one of my top picks) and Sideways (not),” says one critic. “Although I wonder if the group will give Payne yet another nod after winning for About Schmidt two years ago.

“The concern with M$B had been if enough critics had actually seen it, but Warners has just now sent out DVD screeners (arriving at doors as we speak) and they’ve got a Grove screening tonight [i.e., last night]. This last-minute exposure could give M$B a boost — seeing it fresh just before voting tends to help critics who tend to be playing a lot of catch-up, and who just don’t know what’s out there worth seeing.
“I greatly fear a Best Foreign Film surge for House of Flying Daggers, which would be a hugely disappointing pick in my view, given the wonderful spread of choices this year — always a much stronger list of films than the domestic group.”
The other guy says, “I know of several who are diehard Million Dollar Baby supporters, including Henry Sheehan, the president of the group. I would figure the film will come away with a least a couple of major awards — Best Picture or Best Director, though probably not both (the group tends to spread the wealth, which I think is a good thing).
“There will also be some support for Eastwood in the lead actor category, though given the number of contenders, it’s hard to make a strong prediction here. I would even make a case for Eastwood’s score in the film, although I know Team America has some strong backers (myself included).

“I know Eternal Sunshine‘s Kate Winslett has some support in the lead actress category. Almodovar has many fans, though people seem a little more divided on Bad Education than on his past couple of films.
“Virginia Madsen would seem a Best Supporting Actress slam-dunk for Sideways , if only because every heterosexual male in the group would like to…well… give her an award.
“And I know so many people who loved Payne’s movie. In fact, it’s such a critical favorite, I’m wondering if there’s almost some kind of attitude against voting for it … too obvious a choice? That seems fucked, I know. And I fully expect it to come away with a couple of decent awards. Best Picture or Best Director…but who knows?”
The noteworthy “tell” in this assessment is the critic’s enthusiasm for Eastwood’s score. (He’s right about how good it is.) When support for a film reaches down to tributes for the musical accompaniment, you know passions are running high.

Joe Groans

“I am not sanguine about The Aviator, either. Video game verisimilitude?Gwen Stefani is a video game. And while Leonardo DiCaprio is a talent, he is
not the guy to portray someone who collected his urine, and had Mormon flunkies
hand him the telephone wrapped in Kleenex.
“The life of Howard Hughes was a rich banquet and recondite fare. But Scorsese has turned Hughes into palatable kink for the masses, the same people who prefer Jimmy Buffett to Keith Richards.
“As far as Soderbergh and his Oceans canon, George Clooney is a lot of things but he is not Frank Sinatra, much less Dean Martin. So what’s the point? Is it just arrivisite stars of our generation pandering to a philistine audience?
“Wes Anderson has a fecund mind, and The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life
Aquatic are amusing. But I think we need something both more relevant and more
ironically escapist during a misguided war, a plummeting U.S. dollar, and a President supported by a confederacy of dunces.
“We live in a stagnant, jejune society. Where are our new Beatles? I don’t see them in the film industry.” — Arizona Joe
Wells to Joe: Clint Eastwood is kind of like the Beatles. I’m serious. Were Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin undeniably cool in the original Ocean’s 11? Look at that movie again. All they do is hang around, and Sinatra is always wearing those orange sweaters.
Just after disc jockey Murray the K died in…what was it, the mid ’80s?…a joke went around that referred to the fact that Murray billed himself as “The Fifth Beatle” in the mid ’60s, trading on his much-ballyhooed friendship with the band. The joke went, “What do they call Murray the K in heaven?” The answer was, “The second Beatle.”

This hasn’t gotten around all that much, but a well-placed source confides there was very little love earlier this year between Clint Eastwood and certain Warner Bros. production execs who had voiced almost no enthusiasm about making Million Dollar Baby, on top of having pulled roughly the same crap when he tried to get them to support the making of Mystic River two years ago. In both cases the WB production execs — relative whippersnappers who don’t get Eastwood because he’s not much of a youth-market magnet — “begrudgingly” okayed both films. The source says Eastwood “was so stung by the lack of faith evidenced by the suits, and felt so pissed that he went ahead and shot Million Dollar Baby without a unit publicist — which is why we never read any on-set location pieces — and vowed he would do only minimal publicity to promote the flick.” Of course, this posture makes little sense now in view of the acclaim Baby is receiving, and Clint may well be shfting gears as the Oscar nominations approach. The source contends, however, that “before anyone at the studio had a chance to see Baby, WB reportedly sold off all foreign rights for under $20 million. This decision may come back to haunt certain people.” Like all stories told late in the night over a campfire, this one probably has holes in it. But it comes from a person who ought to know, and is obviously worth looking into.

Nothing substantive can be gathered from a skillfully-cut teaser assembled from what will obviously be a sumptuous visual experience, but go to the site for Terrence Malick’s The New World (New Line, late ’05) and tell me it doesn√ɬ≠t get your blood going. The dp is Emmanuel Lubezki (Y Tu Mama Tambien, Sleepy Hollow) and man oh man…awesome. Malick√ɬ≠s historical drama is another go at the age-old saga of Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) and Pocahantas (Q’orianka Kilcher), set in olde Virginia. I√ɬ≠ll bet Farrell is comforted that the teaser has arrived right on the heels of the Alexander shutdown. There√ɬ≠s also his performance in Robert Towne√ɬ≠s drama Ask the Dust, about L.A. novelist John Fante, to look forward to.

Speaking of Alexander, Oliver Stone will be talking this evening (Thursday, 11.9) with writer-director Rod Lurie on the stage of the Leo S. Bing theatre at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art at 7:30 pm.

Best prediction line so far about Saturday’s L.A. Film Critics voting (which I’ll be re-running in tomorrow’s story about same): “Virginia Madsen would seem a Best Supporting Actress slam-dunk for Sideways, if only because every heterosexual male in the group would like to…well…give her an award.”

I’ve been meaning to tap out something based on my recent Beverly Hills sit-down with Fahrenheit 9/11 director Michael Moore, but I’ll say this for now: In his meetings with local journos over the past couple of weeks, Moore has been making a compelling argument. Fahrenheit is alive and well in the Best Picture competish despite John Kerry’s loss because “it’s the emotion, stupid.” Moore didn’t use these words (he’s graciously soft-peddled and aw-shucksy in private conversation), but he’s right — his film made people a lot of people tear up (it got to me this way when I saw it at Cannes), and this is the key barometer by which most of the Academy members decide on their Best Picture finalists. There’s the other small matter about F9/11 being a stellar piece of agitprop with one of the most masterfully edited and narrated finales of any film this year…but that’s me talking.

Most of you have probably clicked on this by now, but Milk and Cookies has a silent clip of that deleted sex scene from Matt and Trey’s Team America: World Police. You know, the one the MPAA ratings board kept sending back for more cuts. Whatever…

Game Over

The ’04 Oscar Best Picture race is all over but the shouting and the ad buys. Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby (Warner Bros., 12.15) is it, and that’s that.
I’m saying this with a twinge of regret since it affects the chances of my personal Best Picture favorite, Alexander Payne’s Sideways. I wish it were otherwise.

The only thing that can stop Million Dollar Baby at this stage is some kind of backlash about the elements that don’t quite work — the retarded kid in the gym, the roteness of Hilary Swank’s first-round knockouts, etc. But I don’t think these things are stoppers.
Emanuel Levy can beat the Aviator drum for Martin Scorsese’s work on The Aviator until he’s blue in the face (“Will Scorsese win the Oscar at his fifth nomination? And how high will The Aviator fly with the Academy voters?”) and it won’t matter. I’ve worshipped Scorsese for decades, and I’m sorry to slap down the hoo-hah, but a reality check is required at this stage.
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
The Aviator (Miramax, 12.17 limited) will grab six or seven Oscar noms but mostly, I’m guessing, for below-the-line tech stuff.
But maybe not. Scorsese could luck out with a Best Director nomination, but this will be mainly seen as a tribute to his rep. Leonardo DiCaprio might also snag a Best Actor nomination for his Howard Hughes performance because he’s one of the fiercest, go-for-broke actors of our times, and thereby manages to overcome a gut feeling I couldn’t ignore in the opening reels that he’s just not the right guy physically.
And it’s possible that the film might land a Best Picture nomination, but as God is my witness The Aviator isn’t close to being satisfying or elevating enough, and all this Oscar talk is just wishful thinking.

From where I sit today Million Dollar Baby is probably going to take the bulk of the Best Picture honors…from most of the critics’ groups (an L.A. critic tells me he’s “getting the vibe that Million Dollar Baby may be becoming a strong consensus pick, passing aside The Aviator , which perhaps can’t gather a consensus”), probably from the Hollywood Foreign Press (i.e., the givers of the Golden Globes), and almost certainly from the Academy.
I’ll be a confirmed Sideways man to the bitter end, but Payne’s wonderfully finessed film just doesn’t have the heat that Baby does right now. His work is a tiny bit better than Eastwood’s, I feel. It has a livelier assortment of moods and shadings, and is more emotionally supple, agile and surprising — but it doesn’t have Baby‘s arthouse austerity, and it’s not as strong emotionally.
Just to round things out and maintain a sense of artificial suspense (in the same way that Chris Matthews and the MSNBC news team kept saying “maybe” about Kerry’s election-night chances long after it was clear he was finished), you’ll be hearing about Ray, Finding Neverland, Kinsey, Maria Full of Grace, The Incredibles and so on, but it’s pretty much over and settled.

Aviator Slaps

I didn’t believe for a split second that I was getting a look at anything close to the actual life and times of Howard Hughes when I saw The Aviator. Most of it felt like play-acting, dysfunctional weirdness, time-travel disorientation and phony-baloney CGI.
DiCaprio looks like a 17 year-old kid doing his best at pretending, but once you get past this he’s great. (Does that make sense?) Otherwise, The Aviator is an OCD freak show that drags in the middle, feels somewhat overlong and at the same time strangely choppy and over-accelerated in the beginning, and, some brilliant sequences aside (like the plane crash in Beverly Hills), is a very bumpy ride.
You sit there and you just don’t give a damn about Howard Hughes, and all through it you’re saying, please God…please make this movie about something besides not enough green peas on a plate, urine-filled milk bottles and lint on the lapels.
I’m referring (again) to the relentless attention paid by Scorsese to Hughes’ obsessive compulsive disorder mishegoss. Portions exploring this aspect of his psychology seem to take up nearly half the running time.

Very little about The Aviator seems to be tethered to anything except the front-and-center obviousness of it. The fact that it’s a big pricey period thing shot by Marty Scorsese never leaves your head. I don’t know if it’s the lighting or the cinematography or what, but visually it feels phony and swaggered-up and pushed too hard. (Unlike, for instance, the evocative historical aroma one gets from Jean Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement.)
In all sorts of little needling ways, The Aviator never stops offending. Some of the CG-amped flying sequences, for me, are only a step or two away from video-game verisimilitude. I hated that Scorsese picked Gwen Stefani to inhabit Jean Harlow, and I hated those inane lines she says into the mike during the Hell’s Angels premiere scene. (She sounds like some checkout girl at Target.) And I despised Rufus Wainwright’s preening theatrical gestures as he sang on the bandstand in that early party scene at the Coconut Grove. I started to turn off to the film right there and then. I’m just being honest.
New York Press critic Matt Zoller Seitz summed up a perception problem — an unwillingess to roll with Scorsese’s big-canvas, post-Goodfellas phase — with an e-mailed comment on Tuesday, ironically prior to seeing The Aviator that evening.
He said he was “looking forward to it but also dreading it, to be honest. I love Scorsese and think he has gotten a bit of a bum rap in certain quarters recently, because he has evolved from a micro filmmaker specializing in subjective, emotional stories to a macro filmmaker who is concerned with the mechanics of particular societies, and critics have been somewhat unwilling to adapt to this evolution.”
Some took exception yesterday to my anti-Aviator comments in the WIRED column a couple of days ago and sent me some toughly worded e-mails. A couple of them sounded like Peter Jackson fans from last year, saying “you think you know everything but you don’t, asshole!” and so on.
So I asked some journos to see if they’ve gotten the same noise. I told them I was getting a street-thug attitude from Aviator admirers. I said it felt like I’m a struggling tavern owner in 1931 and Jimmy Cagney is striding into my place, grabbing me by the collar and slapping me silly and threatening worse if I don’t buy his brand of bootleg beer.

A trade-paper critic said I had brought the Cagney aggression upon myself “because your comments on the film have been — now let’s be honest — particularly hostile. Perhaps the hostility engendered a hostile response. I do particularly enjoy films that divide the room, though I’m not sure if the division is equal here. It seems that the Aviator supporters outnumber its detractors.”
No argument there. The Rotten Tomatoes rundown shows that reviews are running about 90% positive.
The rest of the comments ignored my Cagney riff and just dealt with the film.
L.A. Daily News critic Glenn Whipp said he had “had no idea The Aviator had ardent supporters, [as] everyone I know is mixed about the thing. The Hells Angels stuff is fine, damn entertaining even, but finding the drama in [Hughes] being afraid to touch a doorknob seems elusive.
“Gangs of New York was much more entertaining,” he continued. “And there’s no performance here on the level of Daniel Day Lewis going apeshit in Gangs….unless you count Cate Blanchett’s butchering of [Katharine] Hepburn’s accent.
“Tell those hard-asses to stuff a bar of hypoallergenic soap where the sun don’t shine,” Whipp concluded, “and catch Million Dollar Baby. That will put The Aviator‘s ‘greatness’ into proper context.”
Along with his post-Goodfellas directions, said Seitz, Scorsese “has run into the realities of Hollywood filmmaking — i.e., he’s somehow able to get the massive funding required for peculiar big projects like Bringing Out the Dead, Gangs of New York and The Aviator , but to get that funding, he has to accept severe studio interference, unwelcome notes and marketing input, and the presence of problematic stars like Nicolas Cage, Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz, whose names guarantee studio support but who frankly aren’t always strong enough to pull off the very specific emotional effects his recent movies require.”

Oregonian critic Shawn Levy said, “Not to come off sounding like a thumb-breaker or anything, but I thought The Aviator was a really wonderful picture, easily Scorsese’s best since Goodfellas and lots of fun all the way through. Couldn’t believe it was 160 minutes when it was over. I’m virtually certain that it’s gonna win major gold in February. We can still be chums, of course. I just won’t let you hold the remote when we’re channel-surfing.”
Christopher Kelly of the Fort Worth-Star Telegram recently wrote a piece on how Sideways‘s Oscar chances are, in his view, looking much better since he saw The Aviator. He called himself “an Aviator shrugger, not a basher.”
Philip Wuntch of the Dallas Morning News said, “Sorry, Jeffrey, but I really liked The Aviator.”
New York-based journalist Lewis Beale said he hasn’t spoken to enough people about this, but confides he sat next to a big-name critic at the screening he attended, and “this guy said afterwards in an e-mail exchange that (a) the flying effects didn’t work [and] just called attention to themselves, (b) Leo is okay but this critic always relates to him as a little kid playing dress-up, (c) the OCD stuff was way over the top, (d) the film rates 2 and 1/2 stars, and (e) Cate Blanchett’s Kate Hepburn is the best thing in the film.”
But the critic “also felt the pressure was on to give Marty his Oscar for this one. Which, needless to say, he does not agree with.”
One final Seitz thought, rendered post-screening: “In marked contrast to other big Scorsese productions like Goodfellas, Casino and The Age of Innocence, The Aviator is not about a crafty player or alienated pariah pretending to be an insider. It’s about an outsider who truly, deeply, sincerely wants to be an insider. It’s about a visionary who wishes to belong to a club that would not have someone like him as a member. Which I suppose makes it a Groucho Marx joke stretched out to three hours.”

Perfect

I really need to pay tribute to the brilliant new Aviator one-sheet that popped through a week or two ago. It captures the Hughes essence in a stunningly attractive way that the film never manages. It portrays him as a kind of fearless alien, not quite of this world and with powers beyond the norm, and at the same time blinkered and keeping the world from penetrating his inner sanctum.

I guess I’ll find out later today who the artist was, whether he/she is with an outside agency or working for Miramax’s in-house marketing department. If the film had delivered more of what this poster conveys and less of what I’ve been ranting about today, it might have amounted to a different equation. Not a portrait of a nutbag Hughes, but a man whose inner turbine was so relentless and who was possessed of such unique vision and fierce reach that he was not quite of this earth.

Court

Today’s column was 95% finished as of late Tuesday evening, and I’ve got a fantastic excuse for not getting it up until Wednesday afternoon. I sat in courtroom #602 at Beverly Hills Superior Court all this morning waiting for a small-claims issue to be resolved, and it was all for naught because I didn’t have that pink form that proves the defendant (I’m the plaintiff) had been served.

Defending Soderbergh

“I’d hate to read what you’d be writing about Soderbergh if he was actually making bad movies. As it is, at least from my perspective, he seems to be making films that are either safe and entertaining, or risky and flawed.
“Oceans 11 was mild but fun enough. Given the huge cast and complicated story it could’ve been a smug fiasco but it was entertaining and, despite its strangely off-key trailers, I’m expecting the same from Ocean’s 12. Would you call Eastwood a Warner Bros. go-along boy? He alternates serious fare with popcorn flicks for them, too.
“Solaris wasn’t effective but it stuck with me and, for a film I’d rate at about a 5 or 6 out of 10, it’s still something I find myself turning over in my head from time to time. Full Frontal was a wank — Schizopolis Lite — but I’d rather see something that took a chance and failed than played it safe.

“And you didn’t mention the aborted HBO series K Street, which was another one of those A-for-effort endeavors. It didn’t quite work but if it had found a stronger groove, it would’ve been great. Even at its worst it still felt like an R-rated TV show directed by an at-his-prime Alan Pakula. Soderbergh tried to base a series on the big political events of the week, using real political figures, real events, D.C. locations; he shot-edited-directed the whole thing himself on a week-to-week basis. Sounds like more work than is healthy. I was almost relieved for him when the series upchucked its own intestines.
“Anyway, my point is he’s out there trying and for the past four years, he’s unfortunately been getting his ass kicked. Given his level of self-deprecation and candor in interviews (see any post Underneath remarks or post Oscar remarks for that matter) I’m sure he’ll admit at some point if your reading on him was accurate or not.
“I personally have more ire for directors who don’t seem to be doing anything at all. Where’s Paul Thomas Anderson? I love him but it’s been two years since Punch Drunk Love and we’ve yet to even hear an announcement about an upcoming project. Can I borrow his clout if he’s not going to use it? What’s taking John Cameron Mitchell so long to follow up Hedwig? Yeah, he’s doing the sex flick but where’s it at? David O. Russell hit a cult homer with Huckabees, but it came five years after Three Kings.
“Understand, I mention these guys because I love and respect the hell out of them but I’d hate to see anybody I like fall prey to the Tarantino syndrome. Therein lies stagnation, I think, and a failure of nerve and instinct. ” — Neil Harvey

“What’s with your bizarre psychoanalysis of directors lately? Okay, Wes Anderson and Steven Soderbergh aren’t making films that precisely match your sensibilities anymore but that doesn’t mean they’ve gone crazy and sold out. As far as I can tell, The Life Aquatic looks very much like something the Anderson we all know and love would make. If it’s too weird for popular tastes, good for him. I’d be happy if he made something with an even more unusual rhythm than his other films. Nobody bashes Kubrick for his cold, precise attention to detail. Why bash Anderson? Is it because he doesn’t return your calls anymore? I thought you were above that kind of thing.
“As for Soderbergh, he definitely hasn’t been asleep for four years. As anyone who’s seen the complete K Street will tell you, it’s one hell of a five-hour movie. Also, you’re in a minority when it comes to Solaris. Yes, it was rejected by the mainstream, 1+1 = 2 film industry crowd but most serious students of film that I know felt this was one of Soderbergh’s best films to date.
“Full Frontal was a flawed but worthwhile experiment and definitely not the work of a sell-out. And don’t forget the countless interesting films that Soderbergh has supported as a producer over the last four years (Insomnia, Far From Heaven, Naqoyqatsi, A Scanner Darkly).
“The one area where I turn against Soderbergh is in the Oceans department but…wait a second, didn’t you write a favorable review of Ocean’s 11 in 2001? I remember being excited to see it, based on your review, then being terribly disappointed with the actual film. Now, in order to justify your out-there Soderbergh thesis, you’re pretending you hated it all along. Also to Soderbergh’s credit, don’t forget that several risky projects were green-lit as a result of his involvement in Ocean’s 12. (Soderbergh’s Insider-like whistle-blower project, The Informant, is one.)
“I don’t know why you expect these filmmakers to keep repeating themselves. You can go back and watch The Limey or Rushmore any time. Even if they’re not going in the direction you want them to go, give them some credit. They’re intelligent, film-loving auteurs who put a lot of care into their work and you can’t say that about very many filmmakers these days. ” — Jonathan Doyle, Montreal, Quebec.
Wells to Doyle: Here’s a portion of what I wrote in my early December ’01 piece about Ocean’s 11:

“A little less than two years ago, I reviewed an early draft of Ted Griffin’s script of Ocean’s 11. I said it plays ‘a lot like The Sting‘ but that it ‘lacks the wit and character that made that 1973 film so richly entertaining. The Sting devoted its first 20 to 25 minutes to setting up the job (i.e., providing motivation, ability), and the rest of its running time to playing it out, with no consequences at the finale other than success. That’s pretty much what Ocean’s 11 does.’
“I was wrong. Ocean’s 11 doesn’t do what The Sting does. It doesn’t do what The Hot Rock — another minor but hugely enjoyable early ’70s heist film — does either. And it’s not Rififi or Topkapi or the original Ocean’s 11. It’s not anything, really. It’s a shell of a heist film covered in a yellowish haze. (You’ll know what I mean after seeing it.) One slick move after another, adding up to nothing and leaving you with less than you came in with. That’s Vegas for you.”
Does this excerpt strike you as a rave?
“Good lord! I’m hoping that your Soderbergh rant (and, come to think of it, your son’s QT-inspired pass on tipping) was nothing more than an attempt to prod readers.
“Sure, I’d like another Limey or Out of Sight or sex, lies & videotape. Shit, I’d make do with Kafka. But why all the hostility towards Ocean’s 11 and Ocean’s 12? The former was fun and clever. Not nearly as fun or clever as Out of Sight, but not worthy of that kind of bile. Have you watched it since? I was very surprised to find that I enjoyed it more the second time around. I liked the smug little asides between the actors. They were having a good time, and, against all my instincts, I felt like I was in on the joke with them. The movie is ridiculous, but it’s not stupid.
“When he was super-hot, I considered Soderbergh to be the only American filmmaker who mattered. Maybe he’s not working at that level right now, but give him a break. Say what you will about Full Frontal and Solaris, but they felt like home to me. They reminded me of my favorite `70s films — they had a presence. You could wrap them around you like a blanket. They have a voice that I enjoy hearing.

“Soderbergh was going at a breakneck pace from `98 on — 7 films in 5 years. Who came close to that output with half the results?
“I refuse to begrudge Soderbergh for making a big Hollywood movie. Because even if it is a big Hollywood entertainment, it’s not Coppola making The Cotton Club or Dracula or Jack. O12 is a silly thing made with some friends. No more complicated or important than that. And I feel like SS knows that. Make it good, don’t insult anyone, no huge effects, just a nice little caper built on snarky dialogue and silly situations. I’ll take that over Beyond the Sunset any day.” — Sean Cameron
“There aren’t many directors who haven’t hit this kind of snag. Remember that the same man who directed The Maltese Falcon, The African Queen and The Asphalt Jungle also directed Annie, Reflections in a Golden Eye and Victory. And yet he came back from the ashes periodically to bestow upon us The Man Who Would Be King, Fat City and Prizzi’s Honor. Roman Polanski drudged through Pirates, Frantic and The Ninth Gate before he knocked everybody off their asses with The Pianist.” — Christopher Hyatt.

Another words-in-passing quote, this one from Meet the Fockers costar Dustin Hoffman in the current issue of Time: “Meet the Parents was a really good comedy,” he begins. “It had layers, and it hit some interesting notes. But with this thing, I don’t ever recall being in a movie that seemed to get this kind of steam going before it opened. I mean, it’s just a nice movie. Why do people seem so interested?” Choke, cough, uhhh….excuse me, but did Hoffman just call Meet the Fockers a “thing”? Upon hearing this, Hoffman’s costar Robert de Niro gives off, according to Time, a “low primal grumble.” Then costar Ben Stiller says, “Well, Bob just gave his opinion. How would you write that out?” And then Hoffman goes, “What do you think, Bob? Arrwarrrgh!”