The failure of Jarhead to stir any primal chords about anything …to make anyone feel anything about what happened 14 years ago in Kuwait, or sound any echoes about what’s going on in Iraq today…I think this absence of content is going to build respect for a film that dealt very precisely with young soldiers coping with an often boring war situation in a very real way. I’m speaking of Michael Tucker’s Gunner Palace, a credible contender for a Best Feature Documentary Oscar. It isn’t easy to go out and film an unpopular war, and the conflict in Iraq is something that’s happening right now…even though it’s a war that few people want to pay attention to. The funny thing about Jarhead is that it appears to wrap itself in “clever” postmodernism. Everybody is writing about the grunts watching the Vietnamese-village-attack scene in Apocalypse Now and the similarites to Full Metal Jacket. Like…surprise!…soldiers watch war movies, look at porn and masturbate. All of this stuff is part of Gunner Palace — Kubrick, Apocalypse and porn…but because Gunner Palace‘s soldiers are real, it’s being absorbed in a diffferent context.

Steven Spielberg is rushing to get Munich finished in due time …well, of course…yeah. John Williams is only just starting to get his musical score into shape, but pic will be done and screenable by early December. It has to be. Universal will be putting the Israeli Mossad eye-for-an-eye revenge drama in theatres on 12.23. Eric Bana, Daniel Craig and Geoffrey Rush costar.

I can feel and hear the Oscar air hissing out of the Jarhead balloon….sssssssssssssss. I’m not just talking about my own opinion of Sam Mendes’ Gulf War non-drama — it’s being written off across the board. It was noted last Friday (10.28) in a lead-in to a blog-riff by Steve Pond on the L.A. Times Oscar site “The Envelope”, that Jarhead may be the first Oscar casualty of the season. “Reviews are starting to come in and so far it’s not looking good,” wrote Pond. “While Jarhead was assumed to be a strong contender as well, initial reviews in both the Hollywood trade papers were lukewarm enough to cast serious doubts on the movie’s Oscar chances.” There are admirers, granted (Maxim‘s Pete Hammond and someone else…Joel Siegel?…are calling it the Cat’s Meow), but the tide is clearly running against Jarhead at this stage.

I ran my enthusiastic review of Woody Allen’s Match Point (DreamWorks, 12.25) from the Cannes Film Festival five and half months ago. I opined, in part, that it’s Allen’s “darkest and strongest film — certainly his most moralistically bitter and ironic — since 1989’s Crimes and Misdemeanors….somewhat stiff and artificial here and there, and at the same time scalpel-like in its social observations, this mixed-bag drama deals the same kind of cards and has its footing in more or less the same philosophical realm as Crimes and Misdemeanors, and it has a finale that absolutely kills.” It’s not opening until Christmas Day (seven weeks hence) but the appearance of Peter Biskind’s Allen profile in the current Vanity Fair (and a piece about Biskind’s article in the 10.31 USA Today) means it’s now in active psychological play with forward-thinking entertainment journos. The general impression, however, is that DreamWorks isn’t interested in screening it…yet. Maybe they don’t want too much buzz out there about Match Point being the latest Woody. The consensus among Hollywood marketers seems to be (judging by the trailers and one-sheets for Anything Else and Melinda and Melinda) that a key strategy in selling a Woody Allen film is to play down the fact that it’s a Woody Allen film.

Is this definite? Peter Jackson has told Empire magazine that King Kong’s snaggle tooth hasn’t been eliminated but reduced in size. (Recent reports/indications had suggested the dreaded s.t. had been eliminated altogether…not!) And that the basic look of Kong is that of a big grandpa ape with craggy features and silver hairs sprouting all over…the apparent equivalent of a 65 or 70 year-old. In other words, given Kong’s libidinal longings for Naomi Watts’ Ann Darrow, Jackson basically sees him as a dirty old ape. Other Empire divulgings: (a) As of last Thursday, Jackson was putting finishing touches on the editing, sound mix and music; (b) The three-hour length is due to an emphasis on “character, especially the relationship between Ann and Kong on the island” (80 extra minutes of character?); (c) Jackson has always regarded Kong as “a wild animal [and] not a friendly gorilla,” wanting to avoid any kind of cutesy-poo Mighty Joe Young-type moves that might soften or humanize the beast; (d) Jackson changed Kong after the teaser trailer came out, “making him older and craggier, reducing his snaggle tooth in size and making his face narrower”; (e) One of the most difficult scenes was the Kong vs. three T-Rex’s scene “which ended up about 300 shots long, or about nine minutes…it has taken us the entire duration of the project to do…the fight sequence ended up very elaborate, involving Kong and the dinosaurs swinging like a pendulum over the chasm, entangled in these vines, and Ann is also entangled and Kong is trying to protect her…it all ends up in a swamp”; (f)
the final Empire State Building sequence was also difficult “psy- chologically because it is such an iconic sequence”; (g) replacing Howard Shore was “a horrible thing” but the composter simply “didn’t click”; and (g) Jackson’s team “built a complete 1930s version of New York City, using aerial photos and archive material, in order to have as much freedom to move around as possible.”

It sure is heartening news that Eileen Newman has been named as the new exec director of the National Board of Review, following reports by Fox 411’s Roger Friedman of internal dissent and discord. Is this supposed to signify that the NBR’s annual awards (which are always the first out of the gate) might one day be considered as something more than a mild news snort, an anecdotal diversion…a joke?

For no reason other than a strong belief that all remnants of Danny Kaye should stay buried six feet under, last summer’s news about Owen Wilson planning to star in a new version of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty seemed like a dreadful prospect. Which is why yesterday’s Reuters report that the Mitty project has gone into turnaround feels like a very good thing. Mark Waters (Just Like Heaven, Mean Girls) was to have directed; the screenwriter is/was Richard LaGravanese (The Horse Whisperer). The inability to find an actress to fill the Virginia Mayo role “seems to have been the main reason for the project’s collapse,” said one report…although Scarlett Johansson had been mentioned as a lead contender, blah, blah. Doesn’t matter — dead is (hopefully…please!) dead.

The latest Lewbowski Fest happened in NYC about ten days ago, on 10.20 and 10.21, and it just hit me: why was there no documentary about this home-grown phenomenon on the just-out The Big Lebowski Universal Home Video DVD (released 10.18)? They issued two different special editions (a regular-regular and an “achiever’s” edition, which cost $34 and change) and obviously spent a good amount of coin promoting them, but they couldn’t cut together a short piece about the Lebowski fans? Will Russell and Scott Shuffitt have been putting on Lebowskifests since ’02, and they’re obviously genuine and repeating. Fox Home Video’s Rocky Horror Picture Show special edition DVD (released in 2000) included a special feature about the fans showing up at midnight screenings, etc. When I ran my Lebowski Fest piece last March I reported there were three hand-made docs being assembled. One by a couple named Robin and Rose Roman. Another by a guy named John Nee, who has an outfit called Idiot Works and who also works for Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison production company. And a third Lebowski Fest doc called “Over the Line,” which was said by its maker, Eddie Chung, to be in post-production at the time. Universal Home Video couldn’t get in touch with these people and use their footage to throw together a little short? As Walter would say, “Kinda derelict, dude.”

I do believe in ghosts….I do believe in ghosts…I do, I do, I do, I do…I do believe in ghosts and always have, I swear. And be sure to click on the spooky audio slide show that accompanies this very ghostly story…sitting right there on the left margin.

Bob Berney’s Picturehouse Films has shelled out $3.75 million to be the distributor of Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion, a feature based on Garrison Keillor’s radio show. Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Lindsay Lohan, Tommy Lee Jones, Virginia Madsen, Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly costar. Berney caught the film at a distributor screening in Manhattan last Thursday. (Another screening happened Friday in L.A.) Variety‘s Ian Mohr reports there was a bidding war, hence the nearly four million dollar fee. An impression was passed along by a couple of set-visit articles that Paul Thomas Anderson informally co-directed Prairie Home Companion, as a favor to Altman having to do with insurance issues. Berney told Mohr that the almost-certainly- folksy film would come out between April and June, and that he would sell it in part to “people who don’t go to every movie but will come out if they find something — the underserved older audience.”

Here’s that snarky 50 Cent toon off Zipperfish…finally found the link. Very funny stuff. I’ll leave it to 50 Cent fans to determine how accurate and/or well researched.

Wow, did you read that undeniably dispiriting excerpt from Maureen Dowd’s forthcoming book in Sunday’s New York Times (“What’s a Modern Girl To Do?”). The book is called “Are Men Necessary?: When Sexes Collide” (G.P. Putnam’s Sons), and the subject is how today’s younger women have totally shunned feminism and have reverted back to a 1950s sensibility — catching a man, being demure, letting him pay and going shopping, etc. The subtext, of course, is basically Dowd’s coming to terms with the probable fact that she’s too intimidating to attract a suitably high-powered guy and keep him (i.e., persuade him to propose getting married), and that being a strong, whip-smart professional of a certain age, she’s more or less doomed to live a single life and that’s that. And that feminism has led her to this place and she’s not especially happy about this, and may in fact be livid. I love this photo of Dowd, taken recently at Manhattan’s Bar Centrale, that illustrates the piece on the main page. Here’s a montage assembled from photos I took of Dowd plugging her Bush-bashing book at L.A.’s Skirball Center in September 2004. She’s a very sexy and vivacious woman, but she’s not what you’d call a confessional type and she’s extremely mindful of power dynamics and political equilibriums. (Naturally, being who she is and who she writes for.) Notice that discerning, cold-blooded look she has in the lower-left photo of the montage? Imagine getting that look in her bedroom at four in the morning.