“Gov. Sarah Palin, Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, McCain spokesperson Nancy Pfotenhauer and Rush Limbaugh have revealed that there is a measurable portion of this country that is not interested in that which the vast majority view as democracy or equality or opportunity. They want only control and they want the rest of us, symbolically, perhaps physically out.
“‘We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington D.C.,’ Gov. Palin told a fund-raiser in North Carolina last Thursday, to kick off this orgy of condescending elitism. ‘We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation.’
“Governor, your prejudice is overwhelming. It is not just ‘pockets’ of this country that are ‘pro-America’ Governor. America is ‘pro-America.’ And the ‘Real America’ of yours, Governor, is where people at your rallies shout threats of violence, against other Americans, and you say nothing about them or to them.”
“Between ‘Joe the Plumber’, ‘spread the wealth’ and ‘I’m not George Bush’, John McCain at least now seems to have a few somewhat more constructive talking points. So some of those crestfallen conservatives might have moved back into the likely voter universe. What I don’t know that McCain is doing, on the other hand, is actually persuading very many voters, and particularly not independents or registered Democrats.
“If that is the case, than McCain is likely to run into something of a wall very soon here, brought about [by] the Republicans’ substantial disadvantage in partisan identification.
“People sometimes misunderstand the nature of ‘momentum’ in presidential campaigns. If McCain was down 8 points yesterday and is down 6 points today, that does not mean that he is likely to be 4 points down tomorrow. On the contrary, polling in the general election seems essentially to be a random walk, with the minor stipulation that the polling has had some tendency to tighten slightly during the stretch run (as our model accounts for). That is, the polls are essentially as likely to move back toward Obama tomorrow as they are to continue to move toward McCain.
“McCain’s other problem is that the polls in battleground states have not really tightened at all. Obama gets good numbers today, for instance, in North Carolina, Wisconsin and Florida. Obama presently has something like a 3:1 advantage in advertising, and most of that advertising is concentrated in battleground states. As such, this may serve as a hedge against any improvements that McCain is able to make elsewhere in the country.” — Fivethirtyeight‘s Nate Silver, posted yesterday at 2:08 pm eastern.
Everyone regards MSNBC’s Chuck Todd as a brilliant political pulse-taker, but he and his First Read team are consistently the most cautious and conservative estimators around.
Today, three weeks from Election Day, Todd & Co. are only giving Obama a modest 101 electoral vote lead over McCain, 264-163, with 111 votes (Nevada, Colorado, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida) in the toss-up column. This at a time when almost everyone else regards Ohio, Colorado, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida as leaning-Obama states, at the very least. (Okay, one or two polls indicate Ohio is only slightly leaning to Obama.)
Fivethirtyeight has only Missouri and Indiana in the toss-up column, and is projecting Obama over McCain 351 to 187. The toss-ups at Pollster.com are Nevada (actually slightly leaning to Obama), Missouri, Indiana, West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina (again, slight Obama). They’re giving to Obama over McCain 320 to 158 with 60 electoral toss-up votes. And the Yahoo Dashboard is projecting Obama over McCain 344 to 167 with only one toss-up state — North Carolina.
So what’s up with Todd? What is he seeing that others are missing? Are the others all doing the wildly speculative spitball thing — slapdash, guesstimating — while only Todd is taking stock of the actual numerical realities? I don’t think so. I think there’s an element inside MSNBC that’s become cautious to a fault. I’ve pretty much come to think of Todd and his team as the “hold-back guys” — i.e., the last ones to admit that something’s happening here, Mr. Jones. It’s as if Tom Brokaw is tugging at their jacket sleeves and going, “Hold on, hold on…not so fast, don’t jump to conclusions.”
Arizona Daily Star critic Phil Villarreal reported this morning that An American Carol director David Zucker shot a cheapshot bit aimed at Sen. Ted Kennedy but apparently (and understandably) decided to cut it due to Kennedy’s recent struggles with brain cancer.
Zucker “had a Ted Kennedy look-alike offer a ride to someone at a convention,” Villareal reports. “When he opened the car door, water spilled out. It’s a reference to the 1969 incident in which Kennedy drove off a bridge with Mary Jo Kopechne as his passenger. Kennedy survived but Kopechne died.
Villareal says he “got this tidbit from former Tucsonan Jillian Murray, who has a role in the film. ‘It was a cool stunt,’ Murray told Villareal. ‘Fish were coming out.'”
Zucker’s scumbag sense of humor aside, the fish-coming-out-of-a-car is a bit from Paul Brickman‘s Risky Business. Remember? It was followed by the Porsche car-dealer guy coming up to Tom Cruise and his friends and asking, “Who’s the U-boat commander?”
In some of his films director Jonathan Demme has revealed a profound affection for Caribbean culture and music, and occasionally for African-American characters and subject matter. Examples include his two Haiti docs — 1988’s Haiti: Dreams of Democracy and ’03’s The Agronomist. His 1998 adaptation of Toni Morrison‘s Beloved. That Hannibal Lecter-in-the-Bahamas scene at the end of The Silence of the Lambs. The end-credit singing of “Wild Thing” at the close of Demme’s Something Wild by Jamaican singer “Sister” Carol East.
Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt
So it feels very Demme-ish that the union that’s endlessly celebrated in Rachel Getting Married, his latest feature, is between a very alabaster lassie (Rosemarie DeWitt, playing Rachel) and a handsome Afrique-ebony guy (musician Tunde Adebimpe, playing Sidney the groom). It’s also a very Demme thing that nobody so much as mentions this.
You can say “well, why would anyone mention it?” and I’d take your point, of course. We all like to see ourselves as color-blind. My point is that in real life someone in the wedding party would at one point or another throw some kind of slider ball — something anecdotal, flip, netural, whatever– into the proceedings. In the same way someone would say “oh, it’s raining” if a cloudburst were to happen. My other point is that such a remark (which wouldn’t necessarily be coarse or gauche ) is verboten in a Demme film because it doesn’t reflect his values or sensibilities.
You may have noticed that movie critics haven’t come within 20 feet of mentioning this in their reviews. That’s because it’s not cool, dude. If you do you open yourself up to being called a subliminal racist of some kind. Just wait — someone is going to say this about me in the comments.
But if the blunt-spoken alcoholic played by Howard Duff in Robert Altman‘s A Wedding (1978) had been invited to Rachel and Sidney’s wedding, he would have said something or other, trust me. Because he was the kind of wealthy middle- aged guy who didn’t give a shit because he was always half in the bag.
Tunde Adebimpe, DeWitt
I was hoping that Demme had decided to include one character like this in Rachel Getting Married. Someone who wouldn’t necessarily say the wrong thing, but who might say the right thing in a slightly wrong way. Someone who doesn’t quite fit the sensitive mold. Demme doesn’t, of course. It’s not in him.
Rachel Getting Married, written by Jenny Lumet, is mainly about how Rachel’s older sister Kym (Anne Hathaway), a longtime alcholic and drug-user now living in a rehab facility, screws things up by being her natural attention-grabbing self, scheming to make most of the conversations about her, only sometimes letting the happy couple have the spotlight. Me, me, me, me. me.
It’s wonderfully shot in a darting, hand-held, Dogma-like way, making everything feel very loose and random and catch-as-catch-can. It’s also magnificently acted by Hathaway and De Witt.
But a friend has observed that the way Demme portrays the African-American and Jamaican characters — Sidney, his Army-serving younger brother, his parents and the various musicians and guests who float in and out — is a form of benevolent reverse racism. He does this, my friend argued, by making certain that only the white characters — Rachel and Kym and their parents, played by Debra Winger and Bill Irwin — are the screwed-up ones. Antsy, haunted, angry, nervous, gloomy. But the darker-skinned characters are all cool, kindly, radiant, gentle, serene.
Jonathan Demme
I was a little surprised when I first heard this view, but I’m starting to think she may have a point. It does seem a little phony. I would have invested myself a little bit more in Rachel Getting Married if, say, Sidney has been a wee bit obnoxious or an obsessive-compulsive or a relentless pot smoker — anything but the dull block of wood that Demme, Lumet and Adebimpe have created. Everyone everywhere has conflicts, problems, insecurities, regrets. Except in films like this one.
All to say that I never really believed Rachel Getting Married. I enjoyed the craft and random energy of it, but I never believed that I watching real-life people. Every step of the way I felt Exiled in Demmeville.
I’m wondering what the tolerance levels are for that cell-phone-dropped-in-the-gross-toilet scene in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. I realize this may be a cultural failing on my part, but I have a real problem with body-waste humor — in movies, in real life, anywhere. Did I just write that? The grossification of movie comedy continues on a downswirl. It used to be that seltzer bottles and custard cream pies were laugh props; today, the brown torpedo.
What would the ghosts of Irving Thalberg, Preston Sturges, Ernst Lubitsch or Billy Wilder say about the ongoing fecal-matter syndrome in contempo films about twentysomething characters? Which began with those two scenes in Danny Boyle‘s Trainspotting…right?
To quote from Pete Hammond‘s Backstage review: “Norah’s friend Caroline, played to the hilt with grating drunken abandon by Ari Graynor, gets separated from the pack and winds up passed out in a public bathroom, where she later tries to retrieve her cell phone and chewing gum, which have fallen into a toilet that looks like it has never been flushed. This attempt at gross-out comedy is where I checked out.”
In a laundry-list story about upcoming Disney projects, Variety‘s Marc Graser has reported that Johnny Depp has agreed to reprise his role as Captain Jack Sparrow in a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean pic and also play Tonto in a bigscreen adaptation of The Lone Ranger, both of which will be produced by Jerry Bruckheimer.
Johnny Depp; Jay Silverheels as Tonto in the ’50s TV series The Lone Ranger
Whoa, whoa. I think we need to repeat this. Johnny Depp is going to play Tonto in a big-budget Lone Ranger movie. Meaning that it’s going to be a jape? How could Depp’s Tonto be performed with any sincerity? How can it not be satiric-ironic-moronic?
Depp will also star as the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton‘s Alice in Wonderland pic.
Disney distrib chief Dick Cook has called the upcoming pics for the rest of this year and 2009 “the most creative slate of films in Disney history,” Graser reports. These films will include High School Musical 3: Senior Year, Bedtime Stories, Race to Witch Mountain, Hannah Montana: The Movie, Old Dogs, The Princess and the Frog, Robert Zemeckis’ A Christmas Carol and Pixar’s Up.
The most creative slate of films in Disney history? Not in the view of Ain’t It Cool‘s Mr. Beaks.
Kimosabe means “trusty scout” or “trusty friend.”
The deranged smear jobs that have characterized the McCain campaign’s anti-Obama ads — misleading or shamelessly false, aimed at the dopes — bear the stamp of Steve Schmidt, a protege of former George Bush operative Karl Rove. And Rove was a protege of the late and infamous Lee Atwater, the godfather of the right-wing culture-war smear and arguably one of the most demonic mentalities to exert a profound influence upon the American political process.
And yet Stefan Forbes‘ Boogie Man, a portrait of Atwater’s life and career which I saw last summer at the L.A. Film Festival, is, believe it or not, not a smear job. It doesn’t sidestep the facts and doesn’t blink at the hard stuff, but it’s relatively fair-minded. Call me left-biased, but it seems to bend over backwards to give Atwater a fair shake. Really.
InterPositive Media will be releasing Boogie Man this Friday (9.26) in New York and Washington, D.C. and in L.A. on Friday, 10.3, at the Sunset 5. The idea is to open in about 20 additional markets “immediately thereafter,” says a release.
Consider this 9.19.08 N.Y. Times piece by Eleanor Randolph called “The Political Legacy of Baaad Boy Atwater”:
“For all the nastiness of this year’s presidential campaign, the downward spiral into ever-meaner electioneering really started about 20 years ago,” she begins. “The political Magus who ushered in our new muddier era was Lee Atwater, best known for engineering George H.W. Bush‘s win in 1988. Mr. Atwater became such a mythic figure in American politics that he was praised at his funeral in 1991 for being Machiavellian ‘in the very best sense of the word.’
“As many Democratic victims could attest, Mr. Atwater was Machiavellian in the actual sense of the word. Boogie Man, a new film by Stefan Forbes, details Mr. Atwater’s impish, strangely seductive charm, his mean boogie guitar and mostly his political chicanery. A lot of the latter sounds very familiar to anyone following the 2008 campaign.
“For starters, Mr. Atwater knew how to seduce the news media. He could wink and laugh and drop a fake story on the best of them. Lee Bandy, a respected political journalist for The State newspaper in South Carolina, recalled the time that he accidentally helped one of Mr. Atwater’s candidates, former Gov. Ronald Reagan of California. Later, Mr. Bandy recalled that ‘Lee laughed and said, ‘Bandy, you got used.’
“Using the news media apparently was not the hard part for Mr. Atwater. The real trick was finding the way to get inside peoples’ heads.
“One of the cruelest examples of this maneuver involved former State Senator Tom Turnipseed, a South Carolina Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1980. As a youth, Mr. Turnipseed had shock therapy for depression, which he talked about on occasion.
“Mr. Atwater, who was working for the Republican, was not sympathetic. He went around the state telling people that the Democratic candidate had once ‘been hooked up to jumper cables.’ No matter how much Mr. Turnipseed talked about education or crime or dirty tricks after that, voters only saw the jumper cables.
“For the 1988 campaign to elect then-Vice President Bush, the indelible image that helped defeat Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts was a black man named Willie Horton. Willie Horton committed rape while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison under a program that was actually started by another governor, a Republican.
“Despite his public denials that he had anything to do with an anti-Dukakis commercial featuring Mr. Horton, this film has Mr. Atwater encouraging an outside group to spread the word. The tactic worked. Mr. Atwater and friends managed to turn Willie Horton’s face into the only thing some voters could remember about the Democratic nominee.
“Struck with brain cancer in 1990, Mr. Atwater began to repent. He apologized to Mr. Dukakis and Mr. Turnipseed, among others. He tried to get his former acolytes, like Karl Rove, to back off. But, by then, it was too late.
“Many of today’s third-party ads like the Swift Boat attacks that helped defeat Senator John Kerry in 2004 are linear descendants of the Willie Horton campaign. A supposed slip of the tongue that in fact gets some truly nasty tidbit on the record — that tactic is straight from the Atwater manual. As are nasty blog items, quickly denied by candidates who know full well that their supporters are behind them.
“These tricks contribute to voter apathy. They destroy good people. They make it harder for candidates and their families to brave the campaign trail. But too many of today’s political strategists forget Mr. Atwater’s final appeal. They are out there looking for something else — more jumper cables.”
Update: An apparent policy not to screen Ed Harris‘s Appaloosa (New Line/WB, 10.3) for critics in local markets is being corrected. I reported this morning that screenings hadn’t been scheduled in Portland and Arizona, but I’ve since been told by the Arizona Daily Star‘s Phil Villarreal that a press screening was suddenly set up today, after my earlier story ran.
Viggo Mortensen, Ed Harris in Appaloosa
Las Vegas Review Journal critic Carol Cling also told me that it’s being press-screened for her territory; same message from Dan Lybarger in the Kansas City area. So either things weren’t as bad as suspected or local WB reps are now getting things in gear.
Villareal and the Oregonian’s Shawn Levy told me this morning that Appaloosa is not being screened for them. I asked Appaloosa’s exec producer Michael London what the story was, and he didn’t get back.
The early reports seemed to argue with an upbeat 9.19 Conde Nast Portfolio column by Fred Schruers, called “New Life for a New Line Movie,” that says Warner Bros. seems to be getting squarely behind the film.
Schruers first explains how there was initial trepidation on the part of Harris and London that Warner Bros. might not fully support Appaloosa, a New Line production that became part of the WB release calendar when New Line company was folded into WB behemoth.
Schruers writes that “in his first meeting with the Warner Bros. marketing executives after the merger, Harris recalled that the outlook for his sober Western was decidedly downbeat. ‘I was getting the feeling they were going to throw it the dogs, or straight to DVD,’ Harris said.”
“We naturally had a lot of trepidation” after Warner Bros. absorbed New Line, London is quoted as saying. “But once the studio began really working on the movie, they started getting excited about their marketing materials. They got a great trailer out there.
Jeremy Irons, Viggo Mortensen
“Now, after the Toronto [Film Festival showings], Warners seems genuinely invested in the movie succeeding,” London states.
No screenings in Portland or Tuscon doesn’t sound like genuine investment to me. I can understand crappy programmers not being screened, but Appaloosa is a better-than-passable tweener. I wasn’t over the moon about it, but it’s certainly not a burn. It grabbed me for the most part, and at no point did it irritate or piss me off — a significant thing from my perspective. It’s not half bad. Engrossing, interesting, handsomely shot, character-driven.
“It’s a tiny bit better than James Mangold‘s 3:10 to Yuma,” I wrote in Toronto. “It’s got a nice modest feel to it. And it’s nicely shot, very well acted (particularly by Harris, Viggo Mortensen and bad-guy Jeremy Irons) and ‘engaging’ as far as it goes.”
And a fair number of journos who saw it in Toronto posted admiring reviews. N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick called it “the best Western since Open Range [that] shows there’s still life in this most unfashionable of genres.” Time‘s Richard Corliss wrote that “in its fidelity to western verities, Appaloosa may seem radical to today’s viewers. At a time when images in all visual media bombard the brain, the western — the one original American film form — moves at the pensive pace of a European art film.”
Here’s Levy’s account: “Before Toronto, the local rep” — the Seattle-based Terry Hines & Associates — “contacted us wanting to know if we’re interested in speaking to Ed Harris about Appaloosa. We said sure, show us the movie, and they said okay, we’ll set something up. The deadline came and went. Then the picture got onto the release schedule, and the other day — this is a movie that’s coming right up, opening on 10.3 — and they said, ‘Oh, it’s not being screened in Portland.'”
Villarreal said the local WB/New Line rep has told him “nothing [is] planned right now” as far as showing Appaloosa to Arizona critics.
“Almost every week something is not being screened for the press up here,” says Levy. “Or they show it at the very last minute. You can’t see it, you can’t see it, you can’t see it…oh, you can!
“30 to 40 films per year don’t get screened in Portland,” Levy says. “I would say three to four each month. That’s thirty or forty per year — 10% of their annual product — that they don’t want to show people. And Appaloosa has about a 58 rating on Metacritic….it’s not shit.”
Here’s another, somewhat unsual take, conveyed in a couple of excerpts from A.O. Scott‘s review in the N.Y. Times: “It’s not a great western, and, as I’ve suggested, it doesn’t really try to be. This one shows a square jaw and a steely gaze, but also a smile and a wink. There is no shortage of killing — it’s a large part of how Virgil Cole, Mr. Harris’s character, makes his living — but Appaloosa works best as a cunning, understated sex comedy.”
Amazon is accepting advance orders for the DVD of David Zucker‘s An American Carol (Vivendi, 10.3), which will hit the shelves on January 6, 2009. 83 minutes long, by the way, and presented in a Scope aspect ratio of 2.35 to 1.
AICN’s Dr. Hfuhruhurr, a card-carrying Reagan conservative, has posted a positive review of David Zucker‘s An American Carol, a reportedly broad anti-left satire about the transformation of a Michael Moore-like documentarian in the manner of Ebenezer Scrooge’s awakening in A Christmas Carol.
In the review Hfuhruhurr briefly calls yours truly a paragon of intolerance because I’ve posted some snarky but accurate items about the film and because I vented a brief flash of anger at Jon Voight when he wrote a stunningly ignorant anti-Obama editorial in the Washington Times a few weeks back.
Hfuhruhurr can bloviate all he wants (he’s a good snappy writer), but in this instance he sounds very much like a propagandist — a right-wing advocate who’s carrying water for a fired-up, hypocrisy-poisoned community that worships the Glenn Becks and Sarah Palins of the world — and somewhat less of a serious movie guy.
Today’s rabid righties are not guided by the principles of loyal opposition and all that — they’re hammerhead dogma-spewers of the lowest order. Contrarians, dogs, takedown artists. As Jon Stewart said (and I’m paraphrasing), “If Barack Obama was to discover the cure for cancer, they’d find a way to spin it negatively.” They’re not on the “wrong side” as much as the fact that they’re animals. Seriously. No offense.
I’ve been told by people I know and trust (to the extent that if Zucker’s film had anything going for it, they would acknowledge that rather than dismiss it on an ideological basis) that An American Carol is fall-on-the-floor, Burn Hollywood Burn bad..
Mark Olsen has written an L.A. Times piece listing the Best L.A. Films of the Last 25 Years. Fine, but you know what? The last 25 years (1983 to the present) have been cool, interesting, diverting, etc., but nowhere near as soul-stirring as the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s — the true glory days of L.A. cinema.
And so Olsen’s list leaves off Kiss Me Deadly, The Long Goodbye, Sunset Boulevard, In a Lonely Place, Point Blank, Bob, Carol, Ted and Alice, Play It As It Lays, Bloom in Love, No Down Payment, etc. What is the concept of “L.A. Film” without these? Olsen has done a good comprehensive job of summing up the ’80s, ’90s and 21st Century highlights — I’ll give him that.
“By creating the frame of the last 25 years, the idea was exactly to keep us from just rattling off Chinatown, Long Goodbye, etc.,” Olsen answers. “That list has been done. By sticking to the ‘modern classics’ or whatever you want to call them, we were trying to get at current representations of Los Angeles, what the town is now. The fact that, say, Fast Times or Blade Runner are forced off the list made us dig a little deeper and think a little harder. I, for one, think that’s a good thing.”
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