Whole ’05 Enchilada

Honestly? Right now? The ’05 films I’m seriously excited about number exactly 22. And that’s pushing it. Make it 17 picks and 5 toothpicks. And I didn’t just toss this list off out of boredom. I thought hard about my quirks and prejudices and sorted ’em all out.
There are at least five or six winners I’m overlooking or haven’t even heard of yet. That always happens. They’ll surface soon enough. In alphabetical order…

Steven Zallian’s All The King’s Men (Columbia, no release date but probably fall/holiday) Following in the trail of Robert Rossen’s 1949 original, based on Robert Penn Warren’s novel about a demagogue-ish Southern 1930s politician inspired by Huey Long. Being shot in and around New Orleans by writer-director Zallian (A Civil Action). Cast : Sean Penn as Broderick Crawford, plus Patricia Clarkson, James Gandolfini, Jude Law, Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Hopkins, Kate Winslet.
Terry Zwigoff’s Art School Confidential (UA, mid-fall) Probably destined to open at Toronto Film Festival, based on Dan Clowes’ satirical graphic novel of the same name. Yup, that old Ghost World chemistry again. Satirizing the cult of celebrity, the story follows an undercover cop who poses as an artist until he realizes that being a pretend felon or, better still, a supposed killer, will get him even more heft and attention. (I don’t get it either.) Cast: John Malkovich, Matt Keeslar, Anjelica Huston, Steve Buscemi.
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Robert Towne’s Ask the Dust (Paramount Classics, mid to late fall) A story of creative struggle and unlikely colliding love, set in 1930s L.A. but filmed in South Africa, where Towne’s artisans pretty much re-built Bunker Hill. Cast: Colin Farrell, Salma Hayek, Justin Kirk, Donald Sutherland.
Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man (Universal, 6.3.05) Semi-fabled story of Depression-era slugger and “folk hero” Jim Braddock, who defeated heavyweight champ Max Baer in a fifteen-round bout in 1935. Crowe’s weight seems down to where it was in the Romper Stomper days. Cast: Russell Crowe, Renee Zellwegger, Paul Giamatti, Paddy Considine.
Paul Haggis’s Crash (Lions Gate, 4.29) An L.A. freeway pile-up brings a group of strangers together. Showed at Toronto Film Festival ’04, allegedly strengthened by several top-tier performances. Cast: Matt Dillon, Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, Brendan Fraser, Ryan Phillipe, Thandie Newton, Jennifer Esposito, William Fichtner.

Edgar Ramirez, Mickey Rourke, Kera Knightley in Tony Scott’s Domino.

Tony Scott’s Domino (New Line, August), which only just wrapped a few weeks ago, having begun in October. The real-life story of Domino Harvey (daughter of actor Laurence Harvey, played by Keira Knightley), who blew off a Beverly Hills lifestyle and a career as a Ford model to become a bounty hunter. A non-vested guy wrote me later this afternoon claiming it’s “going to be an absolute masterpiece” and that the script by Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko) is “one of the best scripts to come out of Hollywood in years. It’s the best material Tony Scott has ever had, and I am an avid fan of Last Boy Scout and True Romance. It’s thoroughly crazy, unpredictable, funny, and clever. Just as out there and trippy as Donnie Darko, but a lot of shit blows up.” Costars Mickey Rourke, Edgar Ramirez, Delroy Lindo, Chris Walken, Jacqueline Bisset, Mena Suvari.
Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown (Paramount, 7.29) Failed suicidal shoe designer goes home to Kentucky to bury his just-deceased dad, falls in love with plucky airline stewardess, sorts out the kind of stuff that guys in their late 20s/early 30s need to sort out. A nicely rounded emotional piece that touches bottom at the right moments, in just the right way…but that’s standard stuff for writer-director Crowe. Cast : Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, Alec Baldwin, Bruce McGill, Susan Sarandon.
Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato’s Inside Deep Throat (Universal, 2.11) Smart nervy doc examines the legacy and cultural impact of the most profitable film in world history. Interview subjects: Erica Jong, Linda Lovelace, Norman Mailer, John Waters, Gore Vidal.
Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker’s Gunner Palace (Palm Pictures, 3.4) Purportedly first-rate doc about the experience of a group of U.S. soldiers’ from the 1st Armored Division in post-takeover Iraq, bunking for a year and half at Uday Hussein’s palace, renamed Gunner Palace. Said to be “a very emotional documentary that shows what these good men and women serving our country are truly like.”
Sydney Pollack’s The Interpreter (Universal, 4.22) A moody, politically sophisticated thriller set within the United Nations community, with a exotic-accented Nicole Kidman and a straight-ahead Sean Penn in the leads. Pollack at the helm means this one will be intelligently assembled and that the characters will have (I√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m assuming) unusual angles, if Pollack’s past work (like his last New York-based thriller, Three Days of the Condor) is any indication.

Sam Mendes’ Jarhead (DreamWorks, 11.11) William Broyles’ script is based on Anthony Swofford’s best-selling 2003 book about his pre-Desert Storm experiences in Saudi Arabia and about his experiences fighting in Kuwait. A Gulf War Platoon or…? Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Jamie Foxx, Peter Sarsgaard, Sam Rockwell, Lucas Black.
Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (20th Century Fox, 5.6) Aside from the distinction of being an expensive Scott film in the big-canvas Gladiator mode, this is an intelligent 12th Century armies-on-horseback movie about Eastern vs. Western forces. Or, as I said a couple of columns ago, “one of those Muslim vs. Christian, olive-skinned natives vs. white-guy invader type deals, taking place during the Crusades and set in war-torn Jerusalem.” Cast: Orlando Blooom, Eva Green, Jeremy Irons, Liam Neeson.
Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda (Fox Searchlight, 3.18) Acclaimed by Screen International as Woody√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s best in a long while. A discussion between playwrights about the nature of comedy and drama leads to the story of a woman named Melinda (Radha Mitchell), and a look at her life as a piece of tragedy and comedy. As a character in the movie puts it, a certain character is “despondent, desperate, suicidal…all the comic elements are in place.” Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Johnny Lee Miller, Josh Brolin, Will Ferrell, Wallace Shawn, Amanda Peet.
Jonathan Nossiter’s Mondovino (Thinkfilm, 3.23) A longish (135 minuntes), highly cultivated rant against globalism as manifested in the wine industry. Very smart, interesting…somewhat sprawling but in a good way. Wine culture has never been more fashionable and mainstream, and if you’re on the side of the small vinters and against the sippers of Robert Mondavi White Zinfandel and the flattening influence of the big combines, here’s a film to rally ’round.

Terrence Malick’s The New World (New Line, 11.9) Malick wrote this 17th Century drama based on the old Captain John Smith and Pocahontas legend, which focuses on the clash between Native Americans and British settlers. Emanuel Lubezki’s photography looks killer in the trailer. Cast: Colin Farell, Christian Bale, Christopher Plummer, Roger Rees, Q’Orianka Kilcher.
Mike Binder’s The Upside of Anger (New Line, 3.11) Described by a friend as Terms of Endearment with four daughters and without the cancer. Joan Allen’s feisty, middle-aged, less-than-totally-likable mom is the centerpiece. Rated R for language, sexual situations, brief comic violence, some drug use. Cast: Kevin Costner, Erika Christensen, Evan Rachel Wood, Keri Russell, Alicia Witt.
Gore Verbinski’s The Weather Man (Paramount, 4.1) At least partially, it would seem, about the slightly opulent toupee worn by star Nicolas Cage. Director Gore Verbinski√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s direction of The Ring has given him newfound respect, and word around the campfire is that this one√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s okay…maybe better than okay. Cage is a Chicago weatherman named Dave Spritz with an extremely chaotic personal life. The well-regarded screenplay is by Steve Conrad (Wrestling Ernest Hemingway). Cast: Michael Caine, Hope Davis.
And the five probable-hopefuls…
Based on the expectation alone of what I’m sensing will be a great Phillip Seymour Hoffman performance, I’m keen to see Bennett Miller’s Capote (United Artists, fall), a biopic about the once-great flamboyant writer who reportedly had a thing for Clutter murderer Perry Smith (allegedly expressed in his visits to death row), and whose suicide, in the view of Gore Vidal, was “a very wise career move.”

I don’t trust co-directors Robert Rodriguez or Frank Miller (the graphic artist) to dramatize a well-jiggered story, but the look of Sin City (Dimension, 4.1) is too cool to dismiss. Any genre movie shot in black-and-white gets my vote sight unseen, and I love the straight-from-a-comic-book visual style of this thing, and the Dick Tracy-like prosthetics worn by some of the actors (Mickey Rourke, Benicio del Toro). Based on three stories taken from Miller√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s graphic novels, the likely emphasis will be on “look” over story and character.
Because of the awesome job director John Stockwell did with Blue Crush, I’ve got my hopes up (somewhat) over his latest mer de bleu excursion, called Into the Blue (MGM, 7.15).
Ditto Doug Liman’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith (20th Century Fox, 6.10), the Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie thriller, because Liman kicked ass with The Bourne Identity and Go.
And despite the mixed word and horrific set stories, I’m still very interested in Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm (Miramax, 11.23). A Gilliam is a Gilliam.
I’m repeating myself, but I know there must be a whopper of an omission out there somewhere. Maybe a few of them.
I have next to no interest in seeing Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha (Columbia, possibly December) or James Ivory’s White Countess (Columbia, fall/holiday). Too genteel, too decorous, too Asian.
The openings of John Madden’s Proof and Lasse Hallstrom’s An Unfinished Life , both from Miramax, have been delayed over this and that concern, which I haven’t explored or even questioned. Tomorrow is another day.
I’m sure it’ll be well assembled and a class act, but I don’t expect Roman Polanski’s Oliver Twist (Columbia, 9.30) to be much more than marginally diverting. What can anyone get out of a Dickens film at this stage of our decline?

And like always, it’s hard to feel any excitement about the hot-ticket summer movies — Steven Spielberg’s The War of the Worlds (Paramount, 6.29), Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (20th Century Fox, 5.6), Bewitched (Columbia, 7.8), Batman Begins (Warner Bros., 6.17), Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Warner Bros. 7.15).
The broad comedies — The Wedding Crashers (New Line, 7.22), The Dukes of Hazzard (Warner Bros. 7.29)– aren’t doing much for me either. 96% or 97% of the time they aim straight for the ape cage. Why mince words?
I’m highly skeptical about Peter Jackson’s King Kong (Universal, 12.14), but that dead horse needs a breather.
And we can definitely, absolutely forget about Mike Newell’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Warner Bros., 11.28). Alfonso Cuaron’s, such as it was, was the high-water mark, and no one really wants to sit through another one. Not me anyway.
I’ve said all this because, fairly or unfairly…
Terry Zwigoff can do no wrong right now, especially with John Malkovich as a partner.
Roman Polanski did it with The Pianist and I wish it were otherwise, but the odds of his being pretty much tapped out at this stage are probably 70-30, his being 71 and all. But maybe not.
Paul Haggis, screenwriter of Million Dollar Baby is happening…the wind-of-the-moment is filling his sails.
Spielberg is over — too rich, too boomer-ed, nothing more to say or explore, going through the motions.
Mike Binder (now wrapping Man About Town with Ben Affleck) is starting to happen now….the grease is boiling in the pan.

Woody Allen has been on the ropes lately, but he could be on the brink of something profound, like what Bunuel was accomplishing when he passed 65. But he needs to hook up with a GenX writing partner to juice up the jokes.
Sam Mendes is either at the summit of his powers, or approaching it.
Peter Jackson’s Return of the King Oscars were not good for him, as they wildly applauded and will henceforth encourage his worst instincts as a director, which are to emphasize visual grandiosity above all other elements and emotionally underline scenes so as to drive people to drink.
Tim Burton may be in a great spiritual place, but to me he seems to be dithering, wandering, overpampered, lost. A remake of Willy Wonka ? Maybe, but I can’t even watch the Gene Wilder version.
George Lucas is a nice guy, a devoted dad and a genuine Darth Vader for our times.
No matter how good it looks, Chris Nolan is paychecking with Batman Begins. How the cool and the mighty have fallen.
Sydney Pollack has always been a solid craftsman, always “sweats” his movies. Even when they’re not so great (Random Hearts, Havana), they’re mildly satisfying.
Bailey and Barbato’s Tammy Faye doc was shrewd, sharp, satirical. How can they possibly miss with a serious-minded blowjob doc?
Robert Towne and Jon Fante have some kind of shared Los Angeles 1930s connection. In telling Fante’s story, Towne is drawing water from a deep dark well.
I don’t know about Zallian (A Civil Action wasn’t bad), but Sean Penn can’t miss as Willie Stark.
Everyone loves the idea of Terrence Malick continuing on his rebound, and at least there’s the painterly look of his films.

Ron Howard continues to deepen and improve, and the Cinderella trailer cooks.
Gore Verbinksi is gathering and climbing, and the word is good on The Weather Man .
I guess I can use some of this for the basis of an ’05 Oscar Balloon.
Again, please point out the films I’ve overlooked…as long as they’re not based on any Jane Austen novels or about closeted gay cowboys.

Baby Bashers

“Just to talk about pop art and boxing on a positive note, allow me to offer that Warren Zevon’s song `Boom Boom Mancini’ on Sentimental Hygiene says more about life, loss, boxing, death and choices in 3:17 than Haggis, Eastwood and company do in the two-plus dark, saxophone-heavy hours of Million Dollar Baby.
“Your 12/31 entry about my dislike of Million Dollar Baby reads, “I’m assuming, naturally, that he [Rocchi] almost called Million Dollar Baby the worst film of ’04 because it got to him on a very primal level. It’s a startling call….”
Well, Jeff, Million Dollar Baby did get to me on a primal level because it was bad in a very real, very conspicuous fashion. All I can do is call ’em like I see ’em, literally. The only thing startling to me about Million Dollar Baby is how many other critics are doing back-flips over it… but, all they can do is call ’em like they…you get the idea.

“And I’m hardly Kevin McCarthy yelling about the Body Snatchers on this one. David Edelstein, Charles Taylor and Armond White have all written great stuff about this bad movie.
“A few explanatory points about not liking Million Dollar Baby above and beyond my review at Netflix. [Editor: spoilers edited out]:
“Narration is almost always a sign that the director doesn’t trust the audience — or that he’s fallen in love with some other writer’s language and has gone blind. Leave aside how you have Freeman’s character narrating events he wasn’t there for. The problem is that the narration sounds like Narration — it’s got that dry, dead, book-on-tape feel to it. It’s not human language; it’s literary language, and (like in, say, White Oleander ) it sounds like blocks of text, not what people would say.
“Manipulation: When I go to the movies, I’m going to feel manipulated. It’s part of the experience. It’s a bargain we make with the filmmakers. The cost of it, for them, is that they have to earn it. I recall the fable-legend-history of how after THX-1138, George Lucas’s wife told him he needed to make a film people had an emotional reaction to, and he blew up. Anyone can elicit an emotional reaction from an audience, he said: All you have to do is show the audience a kitten and put a gun to its head.
“In Million Dollar Baby, Hilary Swank stars as The Kitten. And have it all happen in such a way so we can see what a great guy Clint’s lead character is.
“When Eastwood’s films work, it’s because they’re anti-clich√ɬ©: Unforgiven, Mystic River, Bird, The Gauntlet, High Plains Drifter. When they don’t work, it’s because they’re nothing but clich√ɬ©s: Blood Work, Absolute Power, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (not coincidentally, these are also all literary adaptations.)
“ Million Dollar Baby is nothing but clich√ɬ©, and it shows.

“A lot of people are calling it ‘magical realist.’ But if there’s magic in Million Dollar Baby, it’s dime-store stuff — hey, watch me pull a tragedy out of my hat! If there’s realism in Million Dollar Baby, I can’t see it.
“I also have to say one thing about a digression you make about one of my least favorite docs of the year and some of the TV I’ve done: ‘Let’s see…hated The Hunting of the President, supplied guest commentary on the conservative-leaning Scarborough Country. Wait a minute, let’s not jump to conclusions.’
“Jeff, for someone who doesn’t want to jump to conclusions, you’re making a bit of a leap. If I appeared on Sesame Street, would that make me a Muppet? The transcripts from my two appearances on Scarborough Country are on the web.” — James Rocchi, film critic, Netflix, Inc.
“After absorbing all the hype for Million Dollar Baby on your site, I made a great effort to see it while back on the east coast for the holidays, as my show at the Angelika in NYC was sold out.
“My verdict? Solid film, but hardly the year’s best.
“Some of the things that bothered me: Morgan Freeman playing his umpteenth saintly, omniscient narrator role. A very obvious reluctant hero first-act-structure that ended, surprise, with Clint taking on the young female fighter. Also, the femme fighter…could the girl have been more of a saint? Sexless, viceless…it’s easy to mourn the loss of a saint. But it cuts deeper when a good, but flawed character goes down. And for some people, the whole third act is not going to sit well no matter what.
“Those are my two-cent thoughts. I don’t expect this movie to blow up at all.” — Melvin Dummar, Winslow, Arizona.
Editor’s Note: Melvin Dummar is a nom de plume because the real guy didn’t sign his name, and I really haven’t the time or the energy to go back and search for it. I’m asking once again that all letter-writers please sign your name at the bottom of your e-mail. Thanks!

Why Wait?

“I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and I can’t go ten feet lately without a neighbor, acquaintance, or a random other person who knows I’m tangentially connected to the movie industry, etc., asking me about Million Dollar Baby and when they’ll get to see it.
“It’s absolutely bewildering the way Warners is handling it. I’m not sure this even counts as a ‘platform release’ unless we’re talking about some very, very long and shallow platforms. I think it’s finally opening here on Friday, which I assumed was the wide-release date — I can’t believe they’re going to be dribbling it out all the way through January.
“The other thing that sucks about the Million Dollar Baby situation
is that by now I’ve been hearing buzz for two months and I feel like I’m almost bound to be disappointed by the actual movie. It’s grueling to be both inundated with hype and in a second-tier market, where even the press screenings come late!” — Kristi Coulter, Director of Content, Movies All Media Guide.

Digital Sociopath

“I’ve been obsessed with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas since I got back from China. It’s violent, to be sure, but there is an extensive storyline about crooked cops and discovering who killed your character’s mom.
“There are also hundreds of challenges and games-within-the-game, to the point of overwhelming anyone who tries to wrap their head around it all. You can play arcade games and pool, bet on horse races, buy property, drive a cab, be a truck driver, paramedic, firefighter, or pimp, valet park cars, and eliminate crime as a vigilante. You can change clothes, eat at restaurants, date women, and work out. All this happens outside of the storyline.
“This is a complete world, where you can bathe yourself in fantasy for as long as you like. It’s like the Holodeck, or the Shore Leave planet from Star Trek; people can live out their fantasies with no repercussions. The game accommodates the violent and the mundane, the linear and the sporadic. Maybe it says something about character in how one chooses to play it, and the storyline is definitely skewed violent, but it can be whatever you want it to be.

“That said, whenever I drive and see a car on the road that I’ve seen in the game, I, for a split-second, imagine stealing it and speeding away. Space Invaders never had that effect. ” — Jon Rahoi, top Team Elsewhere dog, San Francisco, CA.
“Good take on Grand Theft Auto. I’ve been teaching young people for 33 years. They all are affected, whether subliminally or consciously, by games like this. The only thing good about it is that it is a ‘game.’ But to have kids with a game that kills people in this day and age is, I feel, very questionable, even with the best of parents.
“If kids hit each other over the head as they did when I was growing up as a result of watching Moe, Larry and Curly do it, kids are that much closer to acting out out the same thing with lethal weapons as a result of getting a feel for the activity in a video game . ” — T. H., Los Angeles.
“You wrote in last Friday’s column that `the ESRB `M’ rating for the previous Grand Theft Auto game, called Vice City, was described as having only “violence” (the `intense’ adjective wasn’t used) and didn’t mention `use of drugs.’ Obviously the creators, Rock Star Games, are upping the ante.’
“What you’re suggesting would seem obvious from the change in descriptions for these warnings, but what is funny is that Vice City actually contained more of a drug subplot than San Andreas does (up to this point in my play at least), and even the contrast in drugs featured is pretty drastic.

“Rockstar has said in the past that Grand Theft Auto 3 was modelled more after movies like Good Fellas, where a virtual unknown gets on the mafia inside by running errands and performing hits for key mafia moguls.
“Vice City was a change in theme creatively, and significantly structured after drug films, mainly Scarface in which a virtual unknown moves product and usurps a drug empire out from underneath key players.
“San Andreas is pretty much a send up of Boyz `n the Hood and Menace II Society, so the drugs of choice featured are both marijuana and crack cocaine. Ironically, the game takes a more negative look at drug use in reference to crack, as the gang bangers look at the drug as a disease and push to keep their fellow bangers off the rock, so to speak. Marijuana, however, is another story.
“So in essence, I find it interesting that the game that promotes a negative vibe towards crack, but yet gives the thumbs-up to marijuana gets a harsher description than its predecessor, which pretty much incorporated the use and distribution of narcotics as a major plot point to complete the game’s missions.” — Mario Anima.

This?

A week and a half since the big tsunami and this is the “money shot”…the best color snap of what it was like to actually be there as the wave was on its way in?

With all the tens of thousands of tourists in the impact areas, with their thousands upon thousands of digital cameras?
If we can get past the ninny-nannies who might be offended by my interest in locating a better photo, is there anyone out there who’s seen one somewhere? If so, please get in touch. Thanks.

“Fascinating, full-throttle DiCaprio performance, although he really isn’t right for the role…not really. Otherwise, it’s an OCD fest that drags in the middle, is way too long, feels curiously over-cut and over-accelerated in the beginning, and, some brilliant sequences aside (like the plane crash in Beverly Hills), is, for me, a major wipe-out. A good half of it is schizy wackjob OCD stuff…OCD, OCD, itching, twitching…twelve peas on the plate, bloodshot eyes, compulsive hand-washing, the horrors of dirt and lint, urine-filled milk bottles. Howard Hughes had to be a more intriguing guy than this. Cate Blanchett is a lot of fun as Kate Hepburn, but Gwen Stefani’s hard Italian features are totally wrong for a cameo walk-on as Jean Harlow, a milk-fed Missouri girl. I saw it with a middle-aged Academy crowd, and when it was over it was like walking out of a funeral home… nobody saying anything or making eye contact, shuffling off to the garage.”

A small matter, but here’s a sequential recap regarding the re-appearance of Thomas Jefferson’s “reign of witches” quote, which is being interpreted here and there as an allusion to Bush’s re-election: (1) Journalist Lewis Beale sent me the quote by e-mail on 11.3 or 11.4, and I ran it at the bottom of Hollywood Elsewhere on Friday, 11.5;(2) Barbra Streisand posted the Jefferson quote on her website three days later, on 11.8; and then (3) the New York Post’s Page Six ran a mention of Streisand’s posting on Wednesday (i.e., today), 11.10.

Posting Later Today…

Wednesday’s column will be up sometime around 3 or 4 pm this afternoon (okay, maybe not until 5 pm). I will overcome this late-posting problem somehow. I want to, I mean. I’m thinking of buying this high-energy powdered stuff called Superfood. A friend has told me about it. Has anyone tried it?

Knockout

Life is suddenly full of sparkle and possibility when a movie surprises and delights you. I live for moments when it all comes together in the dark and you’re suddenly part of an off-the-page experience, when the spark plugs are firing and everything has kicked in and it’s all a smooth groove.
You’re hearing and reading it everywhere and the buzz is not exaggerated. Brad Bird’s The Incredibles (Disney, playing everywhere) is a major wow and easily one of the coolest films of the year. It’s got the stuff and the attitude that super-hits are made of.

My willingness to invest in big-studio animated features over the years has been, shall we say, restrained. Their relentless brightness and bouncing imagery is, for me, headache food.
But every so often one comes along that’s especially rich and witty (i.e., 80% of the jokes geared to adults) and revved-up in a “familiar” but totally fresh way — The Little Mermaid, Toy Story, Alladin, Shrek. Or it’s an exception to the rule in some gentler, more soulful vein, like Iron Giant.
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The Incredibles is one of these and a lot more. Being my usual show-me self on top of feeling incredibly bummed by the election, I went to see this Pixar-produced film two nights ago with an attitude. I tried to feel bored or irritated by it, but it wouldn’t cooperate. It’s simply too well written, too sharp, too synched-up.
I never thought I’d feel this jazzed about a family movie. It’s not just an exceptionally good animated flick — it’s X-factor. It doesn’t just fill the screen; it seems to reinvent notions of what a family-type entertainment can be. If only they were all this hip and plugged in and given to flight. They’re not, of course, and that’s the reality that gives The Incredibles a truly exceptional profile.
The two things that keep paying off like a slot machine are Bird’s script — funny, fairly original, truthful, Simpsons-like — and Pixar’s absolutely dazzling and eye-popping digital animation, which has become an entire trip in itself.
I tried to speak to some tech guy at Pixar about the astonishing leaps their digital animation has made over the past few years, but the p.r. bureaucracy was overloaded with the film opening the next day, so take it from me on faith: the hard-drive imagery in The Incredibles is so vivid and startling that it looks almost psychedelic.

There hasn’t been an attempt in The Incredibles to simulate organic reality as a form of sensual me-too-ism. The idea, rather, seems to have been to digitally reconstitute everything in a way that seeks to constantly persuade the viewer that Pixar’s version is better. The textures of the spandex superhero suits, the strands of hair…the look of nature itself ….the flora and heaving seas….everything has been revised into a vast alter-reality that doesn’t pay tribute to as much as compete with the real thing.
I urge everyone who cares about absorbing these amazing images to the max to see The Incredibles in a theatre equipped with digital projection. The general color-pop, texture-throb elements are mind-blowing in this way. Digital delivers a certain hyper-sensuality that’s hard to describe, but once you’ve been there there’s no going back to the farm.
Bird’s script is basically about the rejuvenation of middle-age, which in itself doesn’t sound particularly kid-friendly. This is why I liked it, of course, but I can’t imagine any kid over the age of seven or eight who wouldn’t feel the same.
The happily-ever-after story is fantasy, of course, but rooted in what feels to me like hard middle-class experience. It’s not just a lot of bullshit ideas thrown in because they’re funny, like they’re making some Will Smith movie. The script has an undertow. The underlying message is that parenting doesn’t necessarily amount to a banishment of adventure and vitality, and that a family in a rut can rediscover and replenish itself.
Mr. Incredible (voiced by Craig T. Nelson) and Elastigirl (Holly Hunter) are onetime super-heroes sidelined by lawsuits (some of the people they’ve saved are resentful of their heroism and have turned to shyster lawyers to try and clean up) and middle-aged responsibilities. They’re just a couple of parents trying to cope and keep it together with three kids, bills and lethargy to cope with.
To escape the drudgery, Mr. Incredible and his former superhero pal Lucius (Samuel L. Jackson) — known in his heyday as Frozone, a spandex guy who can turn water into ice — listen to a police-band radio at night in order to find life-threatening situations they can jump into and be heroic in, just to feel the old juice.

The action kicks in when Bob is offered some freelance superhero work after getting fired from his dead-end insurance-company job. Elastigril gets the idea he may be cheating on her. It turns out his new employers are baddies with the usual sinister motives, which lead to Mr. Incredible being in jeopardy. This results in Elastigirl and their two teenage kids, Violet (Sarah Vowell) and Dash (Spencer Fox), donning the superhero attire and jetting off to the Jurassic Park-like island in the Pacific where Dad is being held.
Hence the third act with the family fighting a diseased wannabe-superhero creep (Jason Lee) and his giant spider-like killing machine, both on the island and then back in the big city, etc. A bit predictable…okay, more than a bit…but rousing and satisfying and funny all the way.
The Incredibles isn’t just a great animated feature in the mainstream vein. It’s a deeply satisfying movie-movie (and that term is used alot without much sincerity). I wouldn’t call it blazingly profound or super-original, but it passes along some fundamental truths about families and middle-age and the need for a sense of vitality in life, and that’s no small thing. And it ties the bundle together with wit, humor and splendorous style.

Fahrenheit Redux?

Like everyone else, I’ve been assuming over the last several weeks that if Bush won the election Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 would be dead as a Best Picture contender. If Bush had lost, nominating the Moore doc “would have been a way for Hollywood to celebrate itself and its influence,” a journalist friend recently said.
It may not have had much of a real chance regardless, despite its phenomenal financial success. Some have posed questions about Fahrenheit‘s thoroughness and veracity, and there’s the effect of all those right-wing Moore-slamming docs to consider. But ironically, it may be that Bush’s electoral triumph has actually improved its Oscar standing.

Here’s the scenario, as advanced by industry tipster Pete Hammond:
Academy voters, who are overwhelmingly liberal and, like most people I’ve spoken to around town over the last two days, probably deeply depressed over Bush’s triumph, may decide to nominate Moore’s film for Best Picture as a way of saying or doing something in response to the election, instead to wandering around and looking like they’ve been kicked in the stomach.
Nominating this anti-Bush doc, which the Cannes Jury was not alone is calling a first-rate piece of filmmaking, would be at least that….a retort, a nice tidy little f***-you to the Reds or, more to the point, the Karl Rovies. We will not lie down, acquiesce, go along. What this film says is valid and verified, and it links to core convictions that most of us share.
“My thinking a long time ago was that if Bush should win it would take all the heat out of Fahrenheit,” Hammond told me Thursday afternoon. “Then I changed my mind, and now I’ve really changed my mind. Now that there’s even a more intense feeling about Bush and everything this film was about, it may actually help the movie.”
Nominating Fahrenheit 9/11 would be “the most collective statement that the Hollywood community could make,” Hammond believes. “And remember they only really need a [marginal] number of votes to nominate it, and Academy members may look at this as not only a deserving film but a way to say something…I think it could be in a stronger position than if Bush hadn’t won.”

Former Universal Pictures honcho Tom Pollock, whom I briefly spoke to outside Hollywood’s Arclight theatre last evening, disagrees. “I happen to be one of those who supports a film for Best Picture based on its artistic merits, and not on any political baggage or import that goes with it,” he says. “And my interest, right now, is on other films.”
Marketing veteran Marvin Antonowsky, also an Academy member, doesn’t believe in the Hammond scenario either. “I don’t think it’s going to happen,” he said Friday morning.
I don’t know if it’ll come about either, but emotionally it would feel awfully damn good if it did. It would also be, in my humble view, an artistically justified thing. Just ask Quentin Tarantino or Tilda Swinton.
Fahrenheit 9/11 is an extremely persuasive piece of hard-core agitprop. It was the year’s second-biggest cultural lightning rod movie (after The Passion of the Christ). It made motion picture history by becoming the first documentary to pass the $100 million barrier. And it cut through the sludge and, in the view of many millions, said something right and valuable and brave.

Creasy’s Legacy

Paul Doro has sent in an interesting piece that analogizes voter attitudes with the import of two Denzel Washington films that opened earlier this year:
“It may surprise you, but two Denzel Washington characters hold the key to this year’s election, and particularly the whole red state/blue state issue,” Doro begins. “What happened can be summed up, or at least echoed on some level, by Tony Scott’s right-wing Man on Fire and Jonathan Demme’s liberal-minded The Manchurian Candidate.
“On one level or another, Bush vs. Kerry was like Scott vs. Demme. Or Creasy vs. Marco.
“Although it was a major summer thriller about a live-wire topic, Candidate managed a gross of only about $65 million, and thus was seen as a disappointment. Fire , released in April, managed to hit a slightly spunkier figure of $78 million. Neither was a monstrous hit or a huge disaster, but they paralleled the election, which also had a clear winner despite being a close contest.

“Creasy, Denzel’s Man on Fire character, went on a brazen mission of cold, calculated revenge in the film’s third act. He killed (i.e., slaughtered) without remorse in order to accomplish what he felt was absolutely necessary or at least deserved, which was delivering justice to the kidnappers of a little girl he’d come to love.
“Creasy’s attitude was clear: collateral damage be damned. If you got in his way, tough shit. He was righting a wrong. Completely a black-and-white issue. Old school and Old Testament. An eye for an eye. When someone strikes at those close to you, you strike back. That is easily understood and digested. You appeal to people’s base emotions and make it difficult for them to see it any other way. Good must prevail over evil and order must be restored.
“Just like the United States did in Iraq, Creasy essentially did it all solo. He didn’t care what anyone else thought about what he was doing. He wasn’t going to listen to what anyone else had to say. He received a little help here and there, but it was ultimately his mission. He didn’t require allies or approval.
“And audiences that showed up, ate it up. They took comfort in seeing Denzel seek vengeance (and is it any coincidence that his character quotes the Bible?). They loved watching him mercilessly torture and kill in order to rescue the little girl.
“It was pure and it was simple. Everyone cheers for a righteous man who has a troubled past (remind anyone of anyone?) but is trying to do right. No one stopped to question the moral issues. Complexity is not in the building. He did what had to be done. For Red State voters, what’s not to love?
“On the other hand, the vastly superior The Manchurian Candidate (in my opinoon, of course) didn’t exactly set the summer box office ablaze. Maybe that was because last summer was busier and more competitive than usual, but you can’t say that it didn’t disappoint at least a little.
“Denzel’s Cpt. Marco falls into the gray area. He’s a much more complex man than Creasy . And despite being a military man (Kerry), he has a tough time winning people over. Maybe he just lacks charisma. Or he seems a little distant. Maybe he’s too smart for his own good and comes off as an elitist. Whatever it is, people don’t immediately warm up to him. They are skeptical and take convincing.

“Intelligent and thoughtful, Marco’s methods are quite different from Creasy’s (as is their respective situation). He gathers evidence and seeks facts. He asks questions first and pulls the trigger later. Maybe he never gets around to pulling the trigger. Maybe he finds other ways to accomplish his goals. Maybe he can find allies and work with them to achieve things. Better to make friends than enemies.
“There is evil in the world, Marco believes, but it isn’t obvious. It doesn’t always announce itself. You have to look for it and calmly, carefully attempt to stop it. There are lives at stake. You don’t want to cause any unnecessary harm. Quite the opposite. Better to be certain about what you’re doing. Better to know exactly who your friends and enemies are.
“Ask people why they voted for Bush, especially moderate, non-religious freaks. Stoppping gay marriages might have been a hot-button factor, but their vote really boiled down to terrorism. Not wanting to change presidents while we’re at war. Not really believing that Kerry could protect us. Believing that Bush could do a better job of keeping us safe, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
“In short, people wanted the man who shoots first and asks questions later. The man who is simple and sees things in black and white. The man who will do whatever it takes to find the bad people and destroy them, consequences be damned. They made their decision at the box office, and at the polls.”

Prick Up Your Ears

Michael Bergeron of Houston, Texas, was the first to correctly identify all three of Wednesday’s sound clips.
Clip #1 is Burt Lancaster’s J.J. Hunsecker speaking about Tony Curtis’s Sidney Falco in Alexander McKendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success (1957). Clip #2 is Cary Grant and Ingrid Mergman in a third-act scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946). And Clip #3 is Kirk Douglas and George Macready in a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory.
Here are today’s dialogue clips. Clip #1 is from Walter Hill’s Streets of Fire….kidding! It’s actually the easiest of the three, and features a certain debonair actor who committed suicide over, if memory serves, a profound case of boredom. Clip #2 ought to speak for itself, and Clip #3 is a tiny bit harder than the other two, but not by much.
Harder and harder clips will follow in the weeks to come. Send in your answers quickly and include a JPEG photo, and I’ll post the winner in the column in next Wednesday’s column.

Linney

“I love Laura Linney as much as you do, and maybe even more, but surely the
unmitigated commercial failure of Newmarket’s P.S. sends her chances of a Best Actress nomination completely down the gurgler? And is it certain that Searchlight won’t push for her in the leading category for Kinsey?” — Australian Exhibitor Guy
Wells to Australian Exhibitor Guy: The movie died, eh? Toast? Off to video? I guess Laura Linney’s great performance doesn’t deserve a Best Actress nomination then. Really too bad. I wish P.S. had been more successful because if it had been, Linney’s performance would be a contender.

Lefties

“In Wednesday’s column you said your spirits needed a lift. I’ve been trying to find some small consolation in the fact that we’ll probably never have to see or hear George W. Bush again.
“Now that he’s a lame duck, we won’t have to watch him campaign again. Now that he’s no longer accountable to voters, he’ll refuse to give press conferences. And now that he has an even larger Republican majority in the Senate and House, there will be nobody to hold him accountable with public hearings for the inevitable scandals that usually bog down second terms.
“I expect the laziest president in history will spend much of the next four years on vacation at his ranch (out of sight, out of mind) while the world goes to hell.” — Mike Scholtz, Duluth, Minnesota.

“I’m a little surprised at the election as I figured Kerry would win by a narrow margin. Bush is riding on the coattails of the evangelical crowd, since I guess any Christian who at least thinks about going to church has a moral inclination toward Bush since he considers Christ his main man.
“In any case, nothing can be done. It’s over and nothing really ever changes anyway. Life just goes on. Try to stay out of trouble, I guess. I know the Kerry win meant a lot to you. I guess this also means Fahrenheit 9/11 is not going to be nominated?” — Kathyrn Garcha.

Youth

“The Youth Vote is the Fool’s Gold of Elections. The Democrats know they don’t vote. The Republicans know they don’t vote. This hasn’t changed. And it likely never will change. So why did Kerry try so hard to get the youth vote? And just months after that strategy clearly failed Howard Dean.
“Sure, they’ll vote for ya… on msnbc.com, yahoo.com, or cnn.com. But will they show up at the polls? Well they haven’t done it yet, and there is no reason to believe that they will anytime soon.
“I imagine that standing in a two-hour line at the polls is similar to standing in a two hour long line at the DMV, but without the obvious benefit of walking out with a drivers license. The `I voted’ sticker is cute, but just isn’t enough to entice the young voters who are now, more than ever, expecting things to be quick and easy… two things that voting is not.
“And I say this as a voter that fits into the coveted 18-29 age group… as someone who woke up at 5:00 AM on Tuesday to get to the polls by the time they opened… as someone who voted for the president of the United States for the third time… and as someone who voted for Bush.
“As for your extreme fear of the way that the country is choosing it’s leaders, rest assured that while some dumb people voted for Bush for the wrong reasons, some dumb people voted for Kerry for the wrong reasons too (like the mythical draft). Generally it evens out. Libertarians (who make more sense to me than the Republicans or the Democrats) tend to vote Republican because we don’t have a viable alternative. The lesser of two evils, in our view.

“If you wanna blame something original, blame the same-sex marriage initiatives that were on the ballot in 11 states. Evangelical Christians weren’t voting for Bush based on his DUI in 2000. Well this year in swing states such as Michigan and Ohio same-sex marriage initiatives were on the ballot. That initiative may have gotten them to the polls and while they were there they probably voted for Bush.” — Derrick Diemont , Yorktown, VA.
“Why did the Blues lose? Maybe if people who happen to disagree with them politically weren’t automatically labeled as fascists or Bubbas or gun-toting, three-tooth rednecks who hate all them queers. Maybe if people like Nick Kristof and Lewis Beale would stop complaining about Red Staters ‘voting against their own interests.’
“And perhaps, just perhaps, people who vote Republican know what their own interests are better than Nick Kristof. and they think it’s the height of arrogance for him to tell them what they should think is important. Maybe if people who support the President weren’t diagnosed as psychotic.
“Gee, I can’t imagine anyone getting all that thrown at them and not wondering if the accusers have just a hint of elitism. If you stopped spending all your time disparaging such a large percentange of the voters, they might swing your way every once in a while. Just a thought.” — Bryan Farris, Baton Rouge, LA.
Wells to Farris: You’re right, Bryan. It’s mean and dismissive of Blues to suggest that Reds don’t respect the rights of gay people. Reds have long been known for their respect for gay rights, and it was lax of me to ignore this.

Righties

“How sad you are! To me, you’re just another wacko liberal living among other wacko liberals who really believe that people living in La La Land know what’s best for the country. You people live in a bubble, feeding off each other’s discontent. It must really hurt you folks to have to come to the realization that your opinions carry zero weight in America.” — Louis L. Orlando.
“Stick to movies. Your politic rants are for the birds.” — Bicycle Bob
“Maybe its time for you to admit liberalism is dying a slow and tortured death in this country. It’ll hang around in [the] big cities and Massuchucetts but it’s dead everywhere else. And why? Because it is out of touch with modern America.” — Mindy Cohn
“Did you pack your bags for Canada yet? You and Alec Baldwin can catch the flight together.” — Mark Zeigler.

From a Friend

“A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles.
“It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt.
“But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are the stake. Better luck, therefore, to us all; and health, happiness, and friendly salutations to yourself.” — Thomas Jefferson , 1798.

Maybe Baby

Take this with a very small grain, but remarks from a couple of actresses have upped my interest in Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby (Warner Bros., 12.15).
Paul Haggis’s script is a surrogate father-surrogate daughter relationship piece. It’s about an aged ex-prize fighter (Eastwood) who decides to train a young woman (Hilary Swank) who’s determined to box. Morgan Freeman plays Eastwood’s longtime pal and confidante…the character with the pithy sayings and sage ringside commentary.
Haggis’s script is said to be based upon two short stories from the novel “Rope Burns,” by F.X. Toole. The plot has always sounded to me like a riff on Karyn Kusama’s Girlfight, with maybe a tad less emphasis on the girl boxer and a bit more on her trainer.
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Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby

Laura Linney, whom I interviewed last Monday regarding her just-opened film P.S. (Newmarket, 10.15) and who played a blue-collar Lady Macbeth in Eastwood’s Mystic River, has told me Million Dollar Baby is “really good.”
Linney said this with a certain conviction. Not in some deadly earnest, you-must-believe-me way, but in a tone of voice that said, “Well, yeah…of course…what else would you expect?”
An agent friend who sat down with Hilary Swank the other day says Swank is starting to think Eastwood might snag a Best Actor nomination for his portrayal of the haggard ex-boxer. Her remark wasn’t intended for journalistic absorption, so maybe she meant it.
This is all just talk, of course, but hearing these comments in the same week made me go, “Hmmm…maybe.”
You know going in that an Eastwood film will have a planted focused quality… that down-to-it, no-funny-stuff sensibility he brings to all his films. Maybe this will have a bit more.
The 12.15 Million Dollar Baby opening will be platformed — New York, L.A., Chicago, Toronto. It’ll break wide in January `05.

Ethnic Impurities

Easily, without question, Maria Full of Grace (Fine Line) is one of the best films released this year, one of the finest foreign-language movies I’ve ever seen, and a great woman’s film bar none.
Maria is one of those deserving indie flicks — quiet, character-driven, no stars, Spanish-speaking — that needs all the help it can get. A few Oscar noms in January would help.
The story’s about a poor, independent-minded 17-year-old girl from rural Colombia (Catalina Sandino Moreno) who accepts a gig as a drug mule in order to escape a dead-end life. Being a mule involves swallowing 60 or so sealed pellets of cocaine just before flying off to an American city (New York City, in this instance), and then crapping them out when she arrives. For this she gets $5000, minus expenses.
The film shifts into second gear when Maria embarks on her maiden voyage. On the same trip is Lucy (Giulied Lopez), an experienced mule whom Maria has befriended. Things get tense and then tenser, then somebody dies and tough calls have to be made.

(l. to r.) Maria costars Guilied Lopez, Catalina Sandino Moreno, director Joshua Marston, costar Yenny Paola Vega at Sundance Film Festival Fine Line party, January ’04

Joshua Marston, the film’s director-writer, wrote a totally solid script, and got superb performances out of each and every player, Moreno in particular. It seems especially remarkable that the U.S.-based Marston made Maria feel like an organic, hand-made Colombian right down to the bone.
His story is about Colombian characters, and wholly believable ones at that. 99% of it was acted in Spanish by a mostly Colombian cast, with slightly more than half of it filmed in Bogota, Colombia, and in Amaguacha, Ecuador. (A bit less than half was shot in Queens, New York, in the Colombian section of town, and on a set simulating a Manhattan-bound jet.) It’s a movie that looks brown, talks brown, thinks brown.
But it’s ineligible for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar because the money and the behind-the-camera talent was too white.
This was essentially conveyed yesterday when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released their list of submitted foreign-language-feature entries.
Marston is a California Anglo (he went to the same high school as Angelina Jolie, Nic Cage, Lenny Kravitz, et.al.), a lot of the crew members were American, and four out of five companies that put up production cash were U.S.-based.
The Academy’s rejection of Maria Full of Grace as a Colombian film is “just technical,” says Fine Line marketing vp Marian Koltai-Levine. “It’s truly a technicality.”
The country of Colombia “supported it” and “wanted to submit it,” she adds.
Fine Line is unbowed, says Koltai-Levine. “We’re still running Academy campaigns on Catalina as Best Actress and Josh as Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay…we’re going for it.”

Foreigners

Which of the 49 films submitted for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar have the most heat? I asked around yesterday, picked up some hints.
The two films most likely to be nominated are Alejandro Amenabar’s The Sea Inside (Fine Line), a Spanish-produced right-to-die drama with an Oscar-calibre lead performance by Javier Bardem, and Yimou Zhang’s House of Flying Daggers (Sony Pictures Classics), a visually operatic actioner from the Chinese director of Hero.
After these two it gets dicey.
Jan Hrebejk’s Up and Down, submitted by the Czech Republic, is said to be “a humanist cycle-of life” movie that “may play a bit too familiar…it’s good but has been done and seen before.”
Jorgen Leth and Lars von Trier’s The Five Obstructions, a Danish entry and a critical favorite at film festivals over the past year or so, is being dissed as too much of an elitist, smarty-pants exercise to draw any kind of groundswell support.

Bernd Eichinger’s Downfall, a German feature about the last days of Hitler (played by Bruno Ganz) in the Berlin bunker, is said to depict the Nazi leader in a way that may seem overly sympathetic (i.e., too vulnerably human) to industry mainstreamers, which, if true, means it’s toast.
The general Hollywood Jewish community rule is that Hitler can be portrayed only as a warhead of pure evil, straight from the molten caverns of hell. Downfall is based on the documentary Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary, based solely on the recollections of Traudl Junge, a Hitler assistant who was with him right to the end.
Nimrob Antal’s Kontroll, a Thinkfilm release from Hungary, ought to be one of the five. It’s a strong, stylistically nervy thing with a richly developed theme…except that Academy handicappers think it’s too strong and nervy, and they apparently feel the murky underground-subway milieu is a bit much. Go figure.
Brazil’s Olga, a true-life tale with a Holocaust undercurrent, is said to be shamelessly cornball, so it may have a chance. (HE’s Pablo Villaca wrote about this in his “Burden of Dreams” column two or three weeks ago — he said it was embarassing that the Brazilians bigwigs had submitted it.)
Timur Bekmambetov’sNight Watch, a big-budget submission from Russia, is kind of a Hollywood-style special effects fantasy thriller. A publicist tells me it’s set in present-day Moscow and is about “aliens who come down.” The IMDB says it’s about “forces that control daytime and nighttime doing battle.”
Night Watch has been a big hit in Russia, but will the Academy’s foreign branch want to salute a non-nativist Russian film trying to ape Big Hollywood? Fox Searchlight is releasing it sometime in ’05 — they couldn’t say when.

Blue Dog

I was finishing up the column this morning (10.22) and having a perfectly miserable time FTP-ing the photos when a Fed Ex guy came by with a package from Universal — a VHS of the new Meet the Fockers trailer. So I stopped working and popped it in.
Uh-huh, uhm-hmm, funny, funny, uh-huh…yeah, yeah, okay…whoa, FUNNY! A mix of toilet water and pet cruelty, and I was laughing for 15 or 20 seconds after the spot ended. I ran the tape three more times just to replay this one bit.
Except now it’s out there (I guess the trailer will be online before too long) and everyone will know about it going in, and so the movie won’t be quite as funny now.

That’s the trailer business for you — give away the money material in hopes that the audience will pay to see the film in order to get more. One hopes.
The invisible subtitle of this film is “Meet the Jews, Accept Them Into Your Family, and Sacrifice the Purity of Your Wonderbread Bloodline.”
The premise has been drilled into everyone’s head, but maybe someone’s been napping.
Having given their blessing to their daughter Pam’s (Teri Polo) wedding to neurotic male nurse Greg Focker (Ben Stiller), ex-CIA wacko Jack Byrnes (Robert De Niro) and wife Dina (Blythe Danner) travel to Detroit to meet the Greg’s touchy-feely liberal wacko parents, Bernie and Roz Focker (Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand).
Meet the Fockers (Universal) opens on 12.22.

North, Part 2

Here I am finally writing about the entirely agreeable, smoothly run Mill Valley Film Festival, which I visited last weekend. It began on 10.7 and wrapped on 10.17…the usual ten days of screenings, q & a’s, parties, etc.
Mark Fishkin, the festival’s founder and executive director, picked up the phone last Sunday morning to suss things out a bit. The main subject was how Fishkin and his team managed to keep the festival going despite the collapse of the roof of one of the theatres inside the festival’s prime venue, Mill Valley’s Sequoia Theatre, in mid August.
The Sequoia’s owner, Century Cinemas, “was extremely optimistic that they could have it repaired before the festival began,” says Fishkin, “and the optimism was so great that there was no hint that it might not happen in time. As it was, we were told this about two hours before the press conference began.”
Century partly made up for this by providing two screens at the Century Northgate in northern San Rafael.

The rest of the festival schedule played at the first-rate San Rafael Film Center, which is owned and operated by the Film Institute of Northern California (also the parent org of the annual MVFF). The theatre is located on 4th Street in downtown San Rafael, and is know for its top-notch projection and sound quality. (I can attest to these personally.)
Switching everything around at the last-minute cost the festival an extra $20,000, says Fishkin.
I Heart Huckabees director David O. Russell showed up on opening night. Mike Leigh and likely Best Actress Oscar nominee Imelda Staunton dropped by to talk about Vera Drake. Alfred Maysles visited and gave a “master class” on documentary filmmaking. Laura Linney flew in for a day to talk about P.S.. Gena Rowlands stopped by, and so did Kinsey director Bill Condon.
Fishkin founded the MVFF in 1977. The festival has twelve regular staffers based in Mill Valley. The work force goes up to 27 or so in June, and then up to 100 during the festival run, along with the efforts of some 300 volunteers.

“It’s like making a movie every year, but you don’t end up with a negative,” Fishkin says.
Tom Luddy’s semi-secluded, non-competitive Telluride Film Festival was Fishkin’s inspiration when he started the MVFF in ’77. “Our atmosphere is still like that of a destination festival, but the numbers are more like an urban festival,” he says. The attendance this year was 40,000. The highest ever tally was 43,000.
Fishkin acknowledges the obvious fact that film festivals have exploded across the American landscape over the last decade. “First everyone wanted to write the Great American Novel, and then direct their own Hollywood movie,” he says. “Now everyone wants to manage their own film festival.”

Hell You Say

I nominate Tom Cruise to play the part of Lars Von Trier’s spiritually anguished American biologist in Antikrist,, which the provocative Danish helmer plans to shoot after finishing Manderlay, the second part of his Amerika trilogy.
In fact, I insist on this happening…even if Cruise can’t fit it into his schedule.
Peter Aalbek Jensen, von Trier’s producer, said earlier this week (I popped this into the WIRED column on Thursday morning) than the plan is to finish Antikrist in time to show it at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival.
This means Cruise probably can’t do it, since he’ll be making Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds and then Mission Impossible 3 through most of ’05. Because he’ll need to do something solemn and arty after these two, and a good von Trier would be just what the doctor ordered.

The Cruise idea is just a floater from Sweden, but von Trier is looking for a major American actor for the lead, and he went with Nicole Kidman for Dogville, so why wouldn’t he try for Cruise?
Jensen called Antikrist a “horror film.” Knowing von Trier, I’m guessing the horror will be more of a philosophical than a hair-raising thing.
Jensen told a Swedish reporter that Antikrist will “put an end to the big lie that God created the world,” and explore the more compelling view is that “it was Satan who created the human race and the world.”
There’s no script yet apparently, but according to a story in the Danish daily Berlingske Tidende , the plot will be about an American biologist who develops a fear of nature, finding it to be a place of evil, and starts seeking therapeutic help.
As Antikrist develops, von Trier’s theory of Satan being the true father and creator will be explored.
There’s a more detailed piece about this in the Swedish newspaper daily Dagens Nyheter .

Aristotle and Alexander

“Your question about whether Oliver Stone’s Alexander might capture “the bedrock faiths and realities of the time and culture in which he lived is a good one. But is Aristotle a significant player in the film? He should be. The `father of rational thinking’ certainly had a hand in creating the world conqueror, as he was Alexander’s personal tutor during his early teen years.
Aristotle believed in the City State idea, and this thinking was diametrically opposed to the philosophy Alexander later adopted. Aristotle believed that the Greek citizen was superior to others, and he held a condescending attitude towards other cultures, particularly Persians. Alexander came to embrace other cultures, albeit through conquest.
“When Alexander, in the name of cultural harmony, ordered several thousand of his Greek soldiers to take Persian wives, and to consummate their marriages by fornicating on the side of a hill, Aristotle must have come unglued. (I’ll bet that scene isn’t in the film).” — Ron Cossey, Studio City.

Distant Drum

“I’m not surprised that Charles Taylor hated Sideways I went to college with the guy (Connecticut College, class of ’83) and in those days he pretty much despised all contemporary filmmakers except Brian De Palma. (He put Dressed to Kill and blow out in the same category as The Godfather and Nashville.)
“I like Charlie and I think he’s a good writer, but calling Alexander Payne `a pretentious wiseass’ is like calling David O. Russell `formulaic.’ It makes him look stupid.” — C. Hashagen
Wells to Hashagen: DePalma acolytes are a weird bunch. They’re like born-again Christians. They’ve seen the light and you haven’t.

The arrival of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers on a Criterion DVD last Tuesday is one of the most fascinating historical echo events in a long time.
A nearly 40 year-old account of guerilla warfare waged by the Algerian Liberation Front against French colonialists on native soil in the late 1950s, Pontecorvo’s astonishing film is a primer on what U.S. forces are grappling with now in Iraq.
If the movie itself doesn’t make this clear, there’s a 25 minute featurette on the DVD’s third disc that spells it out further. Former anti-terrorism official Richard Clarke, the tough-minded guy who accused the Bushies of bungling the war on terror in his book “Against All Enemies,” discusses the echoes with former State Department expert on counter-terrorism Michael Sheehan and ABC News investigator Christopher Isham.
The parallels aren’t just close, they’re spooky.

Political currents are everywhere this weekend. The election is less than three weeks off, the last Presidential debate happened two nights ago, the bullshit levels are peaking and the bombings in Iraq are happening non-stop. And now there are two big political movies awaiting your attention — Pontecorvo’s and Team America: World Police, an undeniably hilarious comedy that’s essentially a conservative message piece disguised as a satire of Jerry Bruckheimer-type action films.
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The Battle of Algiers would obviously be the cooler thing to watch (it’s totally cooks as a melodramatic thriller), but this is Amurrica, dude…
Shot in 1965 and released two years later, The Battle of Algiers is a fairly even-handed, ultra-realistic account of what was happening in 1957 Algeria. It initially focuses on the recruiting of a young street criminal named Ali La Pointe (Brahim Haggiag) by the F.L.N. But as the canvas becomes broader and more painted with observation, the revolution itself becomes the story.
Algiers was scripted and staged with a story, characters, fake explosions and all the rest. But it feels as authentic as the funkiest down-and-dirty documentary ever made…seemingly loose and random, like something caught on the fly.
And it’s not a one-sided account. Pontecorvo is obviously partial to the rebels, but he doesn’t overly romanticize them and he also shows respect for their French opponent- oppressors. The film ends with the rebels suffering a defeat and losing tactical ground, although the French gave up and let Algeria have its independence in 1962.

Algiers basically shows the hellish extremes that dedicated men in such a conflict will resort to when push comes to shove. Bombings, torture, assassinations….nothing is too malicious if the plan is to weaken your opponent’s spirit by any means necessary. Human life is a commodity to be erased at will. And woe to the combatants and their sense of 24/7 hell.
“Five people were killed today when two separate explosions were set off inside the heavily-controlled Green Zone in central Baghdad,” the New York Times reported yesterday (10.14).
“Three Americans were among the dead,” the story went on. “The first blast was set off by a suicide bomber near a cafe. The second occurred in or near a bazaar, or market area, a spokesman for the First Cavalry Division, Maj. Philip J. Smith, said by telephone from Baghdad. It was unclear whether that blast also involved a suicide bomber.”
“The Green Zone is home to the the United States military, the interim Iraqi government and a number of embassies. But it is also home to `thousands of Iraqis,’ Major Smith said.”
U.S. forces in Iraq may not see themselves as the bad guys, and the Iraqi snipers picking off soldiers and blowing up civilians aren’t the good guys…but the whole situation is starting to feel like a lose-lose. We started out as the good guys, but now we’re the black hats — the cultural oppressors who don’t belong, who will leave sooner or later (but probably not for years)…the inspiration for a whole new generation of terrorists.
Admit it — deep down we all know or strongly suspect that the seeds for the next 9.11 are being sewn right now in Iraq.

Criterion’s Battle of Algiers DVD is on the pricey side, but it’s a three-disc set with seven documentaries, so it’s not like they’re ripping you off.
The film itself, shot in black and white, isn’t supposed to look dynamic and sparkling — that’s not the idea — but it looks better than the last time I saw Algiers at the Bleecker Street Cinema 20-odd years ago.
There’s an excellent, too-short testimonial doc on disc two called “Five Directors.” It’s basically Oliver Stone, Steven Soderbergh, Mira Nair, Spike Lee and Julian Schnabel talking about their respect for Pontecorvo’s film, how innovative it was for its time, how relatively recent films (like Soderbergh’s Traffic) have followed its example, and so on. I just wish it could have gone on for an hour or so.

Near-Death Trip

Has a movie or more precisely a DVD ever gotten into your dreams and resuscitated an old nightmare?
This happened to me last weekend after watching James Marsh’s Wisconsin Death Trip, which came out on DVD last Feburary. It’s an adaptation of Michael Lesy’s cult book about an ugly-vibe plague that descended upon the Wisconsin town on Black River Falls in the 1890s. Economic depression and a diphtheria epidemic brought about all kinds of horrors — murders, insanity, infant deaths, etc.
Marsh does a decent job of bringing the book to life (so to speak), although I didn’t like the re-enacted footage as much as the old photographs.

A day or so after watching it, I had a nightmare about something that happened to me in Wisconsin when I was just out of high school. It’s funny how memories from long ago suddenly return and tap you on the shoulder and say, “Hey.”
The scariest thing about this nightmare wasn’t the fact that myself and two friends came close to dying in a car crash that almost happened…but didn’t. The fact that this happened isn’t so bad. I can live with that.
The freaky part was re-living that godawful horrifying feeling as I waited for the car we were in — a 1958 Chevrolet Impala convertible — to either flip over or slam into a tree or hit another car like a torpedo, since we were sliding sideways down the road at 70 or 80 mph.
It happened just outside Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. A classmate named Bill Butler was driving, another named Mike Dwyer was riding shotgun, and I was in the back seat. It was 1 am or so, and we were coming from a beer joint called the Brat Hut. We’d all had several pitchers of beer and were fairly stinko.
We were five or six miles out of town and heading south towards Markesan, where we had jobs (plus room and board) at the Del Monte Bean and Pea plant. To either side of us were flat, wide-open fields and country darkness.
Butler, a bit of an asshole back then, was going faster and faster. I looked at the speedometer and saw he was doing 90, 95, 100. I was about to say something when the road started to curve to the right, and then a lot more. Butler was driving way too fast to handle it and I was sure we were fucked, especially with nobody wearing seat belts and the top down and all.

But thanks to those magnificent Chevrolet engineers, Butler’s Impala didn’t roll over two or three times or slam into a tree or whatever. It just spun out from the rear and slid sideways about 200 feet or so. Sideways! I remember hitting the back seat in panic and looking up at the stars and hearing the sound of screeching tires and saying to myself, “You’re dead.”
The three of us just sat there after the car came to a halt. There was a huge cloud of burnt-rubber smoke hanging above and behind us. I remember somebody finally saying “wow.” (Dwyer, I think.) My heart began beating again after a few seconds.
I don’t remember saying much to Butler or Dwyer after the near-accident that night, but I sure feel like saying something now.
I realize I’m a little late getting in touch with my emotions, but if Butler is reading this (he’s alive and well and living somewhere near Redding, Connecticut), I want him to know I’m really furious about this. Butler almost took away my becoming a journalist and loving my kids and going to Europe and everything else, and all because he had some idiotic anger issues and tended to dare-devil it after the ninth or tenth beer.
I don’t know why this is hitting me now, but it is. And it’s not just because I watched Wisconsin Death Trip. That was just the doorway.
Maybe some 17 year-old kid with issues similar to Butler’s will read this and think twice the next time he’s out with friends and starting to tromp on the gas.

Errol Again

MoveOn.org is pushing those great Errol Morris spots with Republican and independent voters venting their Bush frustrations. I ran this a few weeks ago, but here’s the link again: www.moveonpac.org/donate/switchad_winners.html.
Please pass this email on to any swing voters you happen to know. They’re really great spots — brilliant, really. MoveOn.org is trying to raise money to get them on television over the next couple of weeks, and you know the rest.

Sex, Death and House Flies

I wrote the following article in ’97 for the L.A. Times Syndciate, and for some reason I have a special affection for it. And since I have to drive up to San Francisco this afternoon (Thursday, 10.14….trying to leave around 2:30 or 3 pm), I’d thought I’d post it just for fun:
Say what you will about Bliss, Lance Young’s film about love and sexuality — that housefly-on-the-fan shot is awesome.
Young marrieds Craig Sheffer and Sheryl Lee are lying in bed and mulling over their troubled sex life. Lee’s psychological history is at the nub. One of her problems is a bug phobia — she’s always scrubbing under the sink and hunting around for creepy-crawlies.
Anyway, the camera rises up from their bed, climbing higher and higher until it comes to an overhead propeller fan. And we suddenly notice a fly sitting on one of the blades.

How did Young get that little bugger to just sit there, waiting for his big moment?
Answer: he was too cold to move because his legs and wings had been numbed because he’d been put into a freezer for five minutes just before Young yelled “action!” Even if he’d been able to fly away he would’ve failed, due to a thread of tungsten wire — thinner than a human hair — tied to his midsection and holding him down.
The one who arranged all this was “fly wrangler” Anne Gordon, whose company, Annie’s Animal Actors, was hired by the Bliss shoot in Vancouver.
The Bliss fly is actually a flesh fly — the kind that feeds on meat, and is about two or three times larger than your average house fly. Gordon bought 100 to the set on shooting day but only used “about a dozen” to get the shot.
A different chilled fly was used per take, she says, because it would be cruel — not to mention impractical–for the same fly to be sent back to the freezer after each shot. The optimum time to shoot a chilled fly is four minutes after the ice chest, she says. They’re usually warmed up and able to fly around after seven minutes.
Another way to get a fly to sit still is to “cover him with a special mixture of milk and honey,” says Mark Dumas of the Vancouver-based Creative Animal Talent. “That way it’ll stay there a while and groom itself.”

The overhead ceiling fan shot was “tough,” says Gordon, and not just because of the fly-preparation issues. She says she felt a bit awkward looking down at a couple doing a love scene all day. “They’re down in the bed doing their thing and I’m up on the ladder,” she says. “They hardly had anything on.”
Of course, the main issue when it comes to bug actors isn’t sex but death — i.e., not getting killed during takes.
The fact that flies are small and pesky and murdered by the tens of thousands each day by humans the world over cuts no ice on movie sets. SPCA rules require that any visible insect used in any shot be treated with the same care afforded to any large animal.
Dorothy Sabey, a Vancouver-based humane officer for the SPCA who watches out for animal safety during shoots, understands the hard realities of insect life. She just wants them suspended during filming. No bugs have ever been harmed on her watch.
“I just have to make sure they can fly away,” she says. Or scamper away. Sabey recalls working on a TV movie that had a scene in which a shoe is seen stepping on a cockroach. Death was averted, she says, by hollowing out the shoe sole “so the cockroach was quite safe.”
It goes without saying that no Bliss flies were sprayed, swatted or flattened during production.
Their safety was matter of particular pride for Gordon. “We cannot kill a fly for any purpose if it’s being used in a shot,” she says. “This rule includes mosquitoes and maggots, even. I know maggots are really awful looking, but then again they’re baby flies.”
As Dorothy Sabey explains, “If any life form is in front of a camera, it’s an actor…and we don’t kill actors, do we?”

Yeah, but we do freeze them. As long as we’re going to get all extra-sensitive and p.c. about it, doesn’t this constitute some kind of cruelty? Would any filmmaker or animal wrangler ever consider putting a dog or a cat into a freezer to keep them still in front of a camera?
“It’s a gray area,” Sabey admits.
Even grayer is the SAPCA rule that after shooting the flies used by the wrangler have to be returned to the storage laboratory from which they’ve been brought.
Given the average fly’s lifespan of about 30 days, the decent thing would be to set them free after putting in a hard day on a soundstage. Instead it’s back to the lab and a convict-like confinement, killing time and just waiting for the end.
Sabey says she’s willing to forgive if a bug is accidentally killed. “If it happens anyway then it really is an `oops’ because everybody tries hard,” she says.
“Of course if somebody kills a fly around the block, that’s different.”

Matt and Trey vs. Liberals

“I don’t think that the celebrity big-mouths know how much political damage do when they publicly criticize the president. I am an average middle-age American who is very likely to vote for John Kerry. I have never before voted for a Republican presidential candidate.
“Are lefty celebrities so egotistical that they think they are actually going to convert Bush supporters to Kerry supporters? They are more likely to do the opposite. I don’t know if you realize this, because you may be so deeply entrenched in the Hollywood scene, but most people are turned off by this sort of celebrity rhetoric. I know I am. They almost make me want to vote for Bush.
“I am not saying that they are or are not well informed. What I am saying is I don’t like to hear what their opinion is regarding political issues. Entertain me. That’s what I want and is the reason I spend my money to see their movies, etc. So please, wake up. Get your head out of the, uhm…sand. Why don’t you write and tell them to just shut up and do their jobs? The people mentioned in your recent column about the new puppet movie are just a bunch of pompous liberal blowhards who need to keep their opinions to their selves. Or I might just change my mind and vote for…” — Thomas Cochrane .
Wells to Cochrane: Yeegods….don’t do it! I hear you, I hear you.

“You’re right on Team America. Some very funny stuff ridiculing the genre, but politically Parker and Stone have their heads up their asses. Their attacks on Hollywood liberals come from the same place as their apparently serious suggestion that `ignorant’ people should stay away from the polls.
“On one hand they attack actors for being ignorant, and on the other for `reading things in the newspaper and presenting them as our own opinions’ (or words to that effect).
“Tim Robbins especially can be awfully insufferable, but compared to an overtly
mendacious Presidental administration, a few mouthy, semi-informed celebs hardly seems like a problem worthy of frontal assault, especially in a movie that seems to find the Team Americans’ bellicosity (i.e. blowing up the EiffelTower and the Louvre to get to a few Arab terrorists) more endearing than upsetting.
“Stone and Parker have always styled themselves as equal-opportunity offenders, but there’s a nastiness to their attacks on famous left-wingers thatv is unrivaled by anything on the other side of the ledger. Michael Moore as a hot dog-waving suicide bomber? Unfair and, more importantly, unfunny. Maybe it’s ridiculous for people to take Sean Penn’s word on what’s happening in Baghdad, but it’s not Sean Penn’s fault that people report what he has to say.
“In a perfect world, Seymour Hersh would be a regular guest on Leno, but that’s not
American culture as we know it. Maybe Parker and Stone should take their own advice and keep mum on things they know nothing about.” — Sam Adams, Movies Editor, Philadelphia City Paper.
“Thank you so much for finally making it perfectly clear: Hollywood types who spout liberal dogma are enlightened icons who should be relied upon for all of our political knowledge. However, Hollywood types who seem to spout conservative views are idiots who are wrong and should be chastised! Why didn’t I see it!?
“Don’t you see that what you are saying in your column is exactly the type of pomposity that Parker and Stone are attacking in their movie? The problem with Hollywood liberals is that they think because they are famous we should care what they think, even worse, that their opinion is the ONLY viable one. That is why regular people, for the most part, wish Sean Penn and company would just shut the fuck up.
“It really frightens me that someone might ir vote for Kerry because Spicolli said them he da man.” — Chris
Wells to Chris: I didn’t say Hollywood liberals are the end-all and be-all. I essentially said the stated reason for Stone and Parker’s trashing them in Team America (i.e., because “they don’t know shit,” as one of them told the New York Post‘s Megan Lehmann) struck me as brusque and short-sighted and slanted.
How does a person acquire enough knowledge about the Bushies and the running of the Iraqi War these days to speak out about same, according to Stone and Parker? Penn went to Iraq before the war and looked around on his own, but they still think he’s an asshole. Moore, Robbins, Garafalo and the others have presumably read up on these topics from books, newspapers, academic authorities, etc. But they can’t speak out about these things because they’re ignorant and/or annoying, according to Parker and Stone.
Given these criteria, you’d think Matt and Trey would also trash 9/11 Republican Ron Silver, since he’s just another actor who probably gets his information from more or less the same sources that the liberal wankers rely on. But somehow I don’t think this will happen. Do you?

“I’ve heard Team America described as an equal-opportunity offender (I haven’t yet seen it), but is it really? I guess a case could be made that Parker-Stone are slamming Bush’s war-waging, but that seems kind of tenuous at best, and, from all I’ve read, the only real-life targets lampooned by Stone and Parker are the U.N. and liberal actors who speak out against the war. The latter seems particularly absurd, as these actors are artists just like Stone and Parker, and who’s to say that only certain artists should express their opinions?
“Artists have a long history of commenting on current events — take Picasso’s Guernica, for example. And it’s doubly ironic that Republicans criticize outspoken entertainers so much (‘no one cares what you have to say!’), but the party has elected far more entertainers into office than have Democrats — Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sonny Bono, Clint Eastwood, Ronald Reagan. I guess actors are only out-of-line when they’re Democrats, huh?” — Kyle Buchanan
“Do a search for ‘South Park Republicans’ and although you’ll find a lot of right-wingers overselling how close South Park is to their thinking, you’ll get a sense of the libertarian place that Parker and Stone are coming from.
“One of the things about youth is that it likes to rebel against whatever it perceives as the prevailing, and often suffocating, culture. In 1968 that meant the Establishment and Suburbia. But for at least a notable minority on college campuses today, the establishment, the prevailing culture is the leftist orthodoxy. It’s
middle-aged professors who hate America and capitalism but have never had a job that wasn’t with the state.
“It’s the victim culture that creates rules for sex which presume male guilt, and speech codes that allow leftists to suppress rightwing views on campus. And it’s the Democratic party rolling over for the RIAA and Jack Valenti (to get to
the issue that really matters– reproductive freedom for my iPod, man!)
“Maybe a lot of that’s exaggerated or simple-minded, but I’ll bet not everything the Yippies said about LBJ would stand up in a court of law either. The point is, if you believe that Saddam rather than Bush comes closest to being another Hitler, and that free-market capitalism and personal responsibility are better systems to live under than hypersensitive, politically correct nanny-statism, South Park has been your show and your way to laugh back at your profs and your extremely serious Chomsky-spouting dorm-mates for a long time.
“The only thing new about Team America is the puppets.” — Mike Gebert

Idea

“Love the new site and your ambition. Hope you’re getting some sleep.
“The letter from Kenya made me think that you should have a column alternating with Visitors. Call it Visitations or some such. Have your international readers describe their home towns and the Hollywood and local films that have been shot there.
Heck, get Nebraskans who want to comment on Alexander Payne’s movies–just no one from NY, LA, Toronto or Vancouver. If you archived them by continent, country and city, it would be a fun place to look up before taking a trip abroad.” — Jack Cheng, Boston, MA.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone are clever filmmakers and inspired comedians, but I can’t help despising where they’re coming from politically in Team America: World Police (Paramount, 10.15), their R-rated puppet flick.
I’d love to fall in line with my journo friends and call them the cat’s meow in all respects, but man, I can’t. Matt and Trey are in league with the bad guys, or at the very least doing what they can to undermine the legitimate and (hello…?) insightful convictions of the anti-Bush lefties everywhere, so no offense but leaving aside the fact that they’re a couple of extremely funny dudes, they can both cram it sideways.
Let’s get the compliments out of the way first….

Matt and Trey really know how to sell a joke or a bit, and are clearly operating ahead of the curve. I was laughing pretty hard here and there when I saw Team America last weekend. It’s an appallingly funny film at times. It’s going to be a fairly big hit.
I never thought I’d find myself saying that a scene showing a drunken puppet repeatedly vomiting on a New York City sidewalk is a comic jewel, but Team America has such a scene and it’s a bona fide classic — right up there with the most celebrated comic bits of Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers and Martin and Lewis.
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In fact, it’s the best funny-vomiting scene to happen in American cinema over the last 40 years. The last truly remarkable scene in this vein was included in Arthur Hiller’s The Americanization of Emily in 1964. (There’s not much to it — just a bit with a young sailor on a ship heading for Omaha Beach on D-Day throwing up into a steel-pot helmet. The sound he makes while doing this is amazing.)
But I’m also ticked off, dammit, about what roughly half of the political jokes in Team America are saying deep down.
And what is that? Basically that showbiz liberals are pompous jerks with broom handles up their ass. It also implies righties aren’t quite as bad because the film doesn’t criticize them, so maybe it’s okay to vote for Bush.
I should acknowledge that none of the journalists and critics I’ve spoken to are taking the political content of this film even half-seriously. “I don’t agree with you…they’re just funny guys,” a journalist friend told me last Sunday. So maybe I should back off, lighten up, grow a sense of humor?

Parker and Stone have been telling journos all along that Team America is a goof on Jerry Bruckheimer-type action movies. “People are saying that [the film is] about politics,” Stone told Washington Post columnist Anne Thompson. “It’s a satire of movies.”
That’s partly true, but it’s also a smokescreen thing to say. Never trust the artist — trust the tale.
Some of Team America‘s political humor is about how American military forces have acted like high-tech brutes in their fight against the terrorist baddies on foreign soil, and how their single-minded desire to be the world’s #1 tough hombre has pissed off millions in Europe and the Middle East.
There’s also a funny song about how Pearl Harbor sucks, but it came out four years ago. Why not trash Hudson Hawk and Last Action Hero while they’re at it?
The biggest percentage of the gags are about how all the big leftie Hollywood types — Tim Robbins, Janeane Garafalo, Sean Penn, Alec Baldwin, Susan Sarandon, Michael Moore, Matt Damon — are ignorant blowhards who give aid and comfort to America’s enemies.
The anti-American, fellow-traveller metaphor is conveyed in Team America when these leftie dickwads join forces with the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. Stone and Parker respond by making sure the dirty lefties get blown up, shot or incinerated to death, decapitated or thrown off tall balconies.

In a movie like Team America, there’s no such thing as just plain hah-hah funny. It’s all about the sub-currents, and the message here is that these liberal snobs aren’t worth listening to, and therefore everything they’ve said about Bush being wrong and arrogant on Iraq is probably suspect. You can throw ’em all out with the trash, the film says. Moore is a lunatic, Baldwin is deranged, Robbins’ complaints about Clear Channel are deluded, Garafalo’s rants on Air America radio are hot air, etc.
Stone told the New York Post‘s Megan Lehmann, “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.”
In other words, you can’t have a halfway legitimate opinion about Iraq if you’re a leftie actor, because all you really know is what you’ve read in newspapers, magazines, books and the internet…which isn’t good enough. You have to work for the government or a think tank, or better yet you need to go over to the Middle East and absorb what’s going on first-hand.
But not like what Sean Penn did when he went to Iraq because he’s one of those leftie wack-jobs. To really know what you’re talking about you have to join the military or be a U.S. Senator or work for the CIA or Halliburton.
Maybe Matt and Trey know something we don’t. Maybe Tim, Sean, Michael, Janeane, Alec and the rest of them really are clueless assholes. They probably know them a lot better than I do, so maybe I should shut up.
But I’ll bet Stone and Parker will never accuse actor Ron Silver, a “9/11 Republican” who’s been praising Bush’s record on the news channels, of not knowing what he’s talking about. And he’s just another SAG member getting his information from the same sources.
Could any of this have something to do with E Online‘s Emily Farache, who interviewed Stone and Parker in early ’01 over their Comedy Central series That’s My Bush!, and reported that “they’re both Republicans” and that they “don’t plan on ridiculing Bush” in their then-upcoming series?

“What we’re trying to do is way more subversive,” Parker told Farache. “We’re going to make you love this guy.”
Or a story by Brit Hume on the Fox News site that ran in December ’01, in which it was reported that Stone and Parker had announced at a People for the American Way fundraiser “that they were Republicans. `It’s true,’ said Parker, who was wearing a stars and stripes outfit.”
Some people have written in and said I’m taking their comments too literally, and that they might have been putting everyone on when they said they’re Republicans. As if.
In a just-posted interview with the Guardian‘s Heather Havrilesky, Parker summed up the film’s political philosophy. To understand his meaning, understand that “dicks” means law-enforcers or international cops (i.e., U.S. forces in Iraq) and “pussies” means Hollywood liberals. Here it is:
“Dicks are bad, and it sucks to be a dick, but it’s way worse to be an asshole, and because there are assholes, we need dicks. So shut the fuck up, all you pussies!”

Guarded Guy

I think all of us felt pretty sad about Chris Reeve’s death. Especially given his image as a kind of never-say-die spiritual hero.
There’s no question in my mind that his life as an impassioned quadraplegic and stem-cell-research advocate made a much greater impression than his performances ever did. I enjoyed his acting from time to time, but I was in awe of who he became after that tragic horse-jumping accident paralyzed him in ’95.
Reeve had a ten-year run (’78 to ’88) as a marquee name. Superman got him off the ground; Switching Channels finished him off. His best film performances were in Jeannot Szwarc’s Somewhere in Time (’80), Sidney Lumet’s Deathtrap (’82) and James Ivory’s The Bostonians.

His best performance ever was in the Broadway stage production of Lanford Wilson’s The Fifth of July, in which he played a gay paraplegic Vietnam veteran. It ran in the late summer or fall of 1980. Jeff Daniels and Susie Kurtz co-starred.
I had an experience with Reeve in 1980, when I was a pup journalist living in New York. It began with an interview piece I wrote about him for a New Jersey weekly called The Aquarian, the main subject being Somewhere in Time.
Reeve and I met for the interview at a restaurant on upper Columbus Avenue. I had done my homework and prepared a lot of deep-focus questions, and I think he enjoyed our talk. Sonia Moskowitz, a gifted photographer whom I was seeing at the time, sat in for the interview and then took some photos of Reeve (plus one of him and me) outside the restaurant. Then we went back inside to sort out the bill.
I was a bit green back then, but I’d done a few celebrity interviews and knew that the basic rule was that the studio always picked up the tab. I assumed this would be the case but there was no Universal publicist at the restaurant to cover the check, and I didn’t know what to do because my Aquarian editor had never talked to me about expenses, and I didn’t have the cash to cover it on my own.
I thought Reeve (wealthy actor, right?) might step up to the plate and get his money back from Universal. It was that or somebody would have to leave a personal check or wash dishes. Talk about embarrassing. When I told Reeve I was a bit light I could see he was irritated. We kind of hemmed and hawed about it on the sidewalk, I offered everything I had (about $15 bucks), and he finally dug out his wallet and said, “Well, all right” and paid the balance.
When I wrote my piece I threw in a couple of graphs at the end about this bill-paying snafu. I thought it was both amusing and humanizing on some level that a successful big-name actor who’d played Superman was capable of getting flustered about paying a check, just like anyone else.

A week or two later, just as the Aquarian piece came out, I went with a couple of friends to see Reeve in The Fifth of July. We visited his dressing room to say hello after the show, and as an ice-breaker I asked if he’d seen the article. Bad question. Reeve hadn’t liked my closer and said so. He was scowling at me. I felt like I was suddenly in the Twilight Zone. I thought I’d written about the restaurant-tab thing with humor and affection. I’d figured this plus the fact that the overall piece was highly flattering would have charmed him.
To soothe things over I wrote him a note the next day saying I was sorry he had that reaction, that I really thought the humor I got out of our check-paying episode made it a warmer, fuller piece, and that I hoped he wouldn’t hold a grudge.
A few weeks later I ran into Reeve at an invitational party at a Studio 54-like roller skating joint in Chelsea. As soon as he spotted me he came right over, smiling, and said, “Hey, Jeff. Got your note…everything’s cool…don’t worry about it.” We shook hands, he smiled again and said “peace,” and that was that.
What this told me about Reeve is that he was gracious, obviously, and able to handle embarassments and whatnot. It also told me that deep down he was into dignity and protocol and doing things a certain way. I think that attitude bled into his acting on a certain level, and that’s why he wasn’t quite Marlon Brando.

Let There Be Sound

My writing skills are more precise than my verbal skills, to judge by this sound file. But I decided to just throw this in as a way of explaining what I’d like to do henceforth, which is turn Hollywood Elsewhere, or a portion of it rather, into an occasional sound-clip thing.
I’ve always wanted to do radio, I’m fairly loquacious, I have a decent-sounding voice and I like trying new stuff. So let’s see what happens. It makes sense to do this. Everyone’s computer has sound these days — we’re not living in 1998 or ’99 — and it’s easy to record a digital segment and throw it in to the column as a link.
I’ll probably start doing this next week. My speaking style will sharpen up after a while and I’ll get rolling with the whole thing and the segments will eventually be interesting.

Sideways Guys

I’ve seen Sideways three and a half times, and it’s gotten better with every viewing. It’s my favorite movie of the year now, enjoying a slight edge over Collateral, Touching the Void and The Motorcycle Diaries.
The halfer happened Monday night at a screening for the Broadcast Film Critics Association that was sponsored by Movie City News. I knew I’d be seeing it again at the Sideways premiere on Tuesday evening (10.12), and I mainly wanted to listen to the q & a screening between Sideways director-co-writer Alexander Payne and his writing partner Jim Taylor.
Movie City News editor David Poland handled the interviewing and question-fielding with his usual aplomb. I’ve since read that the session went on for just over an hour; it felt like half that.

I raised my hand and passed along a comment from an agent friend of mine. She said she didn’t believe that Virginia Madsen would hook up with a guy like Paul Giamatti, which is what happens in the film. Her point was that Madsen is too brainy, busty, beautiful and rich of spirit to pay any mind to a glum and pudgy neurotic.
I told Payne that I think her view is short-sighted, but I wanted to pass along his own response, and here it is: “I think your friend is kind of shallow. I mean, she sounds so L.A.”
I spoke to Payne last night at the after-screening reception. He said he’s working with Taylor on something new, but plans on taking some time off after he finishes promotional duties for the film.
Payne said he’s particularly looking forward to visiting Greece in a few weeks time and attending the 45th International Thessaloniki Festival, which runs from 11.19 through 11.28. (Payne is of Greek ancestry — the IMDB says his birth name was Alexander Papadopoulos.)
The official website says the Thessaloniki festival “assumed its present dynamic internatrional character in 1992, under the direction of Michel Demopoulos.” The site features a quote from Bernardo Bertolucci that says Demopoulos has brought in “a new vitality, opening [the festival] up to a young audience.”
Major filmmaker attenders have included Istvan Szabo, Ivan Passer, Goran Paskalijevic, David Thewlis, Dean Tavoularis, Bernardo Bertolucci and Jerzy Skolimowski. Hey, Demopoulos….do you ever fly in columnists?

Nairobi, Part 2

“It was a nice surprise to see my e-mail posted on the site last week, with a great picture of Nairobi no less.
“Though you might be tempted to think that those giraffes were doctored into the photo of the Nairobi skyline, it is actually possible to see such a view without the aid of PhotoShop.
“The picture must have been taken at Nairobi National Park, which is on the outskirts of town and boasts plenty of giraffes, zebra, gazelles, ostrich and a few rhinos and lions within view of downtown Nairobi’s skyscrapers. Since we get resident rates on park admission ($5 versus the $15 to $30 the tourists pay to get in), my wife and I sometimes bring a picnic blanket and a bottle of wine (South African, of course) to NNP and watch the sun go down as giraffes amble by. A real hardship post, Kenya.

“Kenya’s natural beauty, mix of cultures and ample wildlife have made it a prime location for Hollywood movies about Africa. Ralph Fiennes and Fernando Meirelles were in town a few months ago filming John Le Carre’s The Constant Gardener. Some people I know saw Fiennes in the bar of the Serena Hotel, and a friend-of-a-friend white Kenyan journalist reportedly had dinner with him.
“I’m waiting patiently for the arrival of Nicole Kidman, who is supposed to be starring in Tony Scott’s adaptation of Emma’s War, a non-fiction book about a British aid worker who married a Sudanese warlord. I heard somewhere that the filming of this movie (much of which takes place in Nairobi) has been delayed by the crisis in Darfur. Scott is apparently determined to film in the Sudan.
“Incidentally, Kidman’s character, Emma McCune, was killed in a collision with a matatu (minibus taxi) about a block from where I live. Oops…spoiler.
“The most famous movie filmed in Kenya is, of course, Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa, based on the life of Karen Blixen, the Danish baroness who “hahd a faaaahm in Aaahfrica.” In her honor, the southeast side of Nairobi, where white farmers and corrupt government officials still own huge pieces of land, is still called Karen. You can tour her former house there. At first glance it looks exquisitely preserved from the colonial days, until you learn that Karen took almost everything she owned back to Denmark with her and that much of the furniture and decorations now filling the house were made for the movie.
“You can also take a hike in the nearby Ngong Hills and linger at Denys Finch-Hatton’s grave, and also contemplate why Robert Redford didn’t at least attempt a British accent.
“An hour outside of Nairobi you can visit Lake Naivasha, another prime filming location. The arabesque Djinn Palace, site of several gauzy debauchery scenes in White Mischief, is still there. You can see it from a boat on the lake when you take a hippo tour, though the mansion now belongs to a Dutch flower magnate and is not open to the public.
“My favorite place to stay at Naivasha is Elsamere, the former lakeside home of George and Joy Adamson, who were the subjects of the old Disney flick Born Free. (the management keeps a scratchy VHS copy at the ready for anyone who wants a screening). Joy, a painter and nurturer of orphaned lions and leopards, was not the prim, bland British babe of the movie but a feisty and abrasive Austrian whose third husband was George, a game warden in Kenya.
“Both Joy and George were murdered — George by Somali poachers and Joy by a
disgruntled servant. The movie, which was a huge hit in its time (just try to get that song out of your head), now looks pretty dated and the production values are pretty embarrassing even by 1960s standards. (Pauline Kael body-slams the movie in her book “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”).
“One of the funniest things is that whenever the Adamson’s go on safari, none of the animals are just standing there peacefully grazing. Every shot is a wild stampede of elephants, gazelles, zebras, etc., as if a production assistant had fired an assault rifle in the air just before the cameras started rolling.

“Up in the Kikuyu highlands near Mount Kenya, you can see where the recent Oscar- winner Nowhere in Africa was filmed. You can also have a drink in the severed-head festooned bar of the Mount Kenya Safari Club, which was founded by William Holden and some of his Hollywood pals so they would have a place to shoot the shit after bagging big game. At least one of the old Tarzan movies was filmed nearby.
“It has recently become vogue for Hollywood producers to throw a few Maasai warriors from Kenya into action flicks to signify `darkest Africa,’ to the extent that one East African journalist recently referred to the Maasai as `the Red Indians of today’s Hollywood adventure movies.’ The most recent example is Tomb Raider 2, partially filmed in Kenya and featuring Djimon Hounsou as an unusually buff Maasai.
“Why are most movies set in Africa pretty bad? Probably because the Africans never get to tell their own stories. I’m hard-pressed to think of more than a couple of Western-produced movies set in Africa (Lumumba, Sarafina, The Gods Must Be Crazy) where the African experience is not filtered through the persective of the Sensitive White Actor to whom the Africans are little more than tragic victims or trusty servants — in other words, reflections of the white man’s own nobility.
“Maybe someday Africans will have a global film industry of their own and more realistic African characters will appear on screen. Nigeria (or Nollywood, to Africans) cranks out nearly as many films in a year as Hong Kong or India, but they are universally crap. And yet that country did produce Chiwetel Ejiofor, so maybe there’s hope.” — Peter Mackenzie, Nairobi, Kenya.

I admired and enjoyed Bill Condon’s Kinsey (Fox Searchlight, 11.12) upon seeing it Monday night. It’s a smart, probing, movingly performed portrait of what it was like to live in sexually suppressed times, and how a startling work of research by an gangly odd-duck scientist named Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neeson) began to lift the cloak of sexual puritanism.
I’ve just made it sound like one of those plodding, dutiful, good-for-you biopics. It’s not. It’s alert and focused and keeps you thinking and re-thinking.

Neeson hasn’t been this concentrated and affecting since Schindler’s List (and this time without any “forgive me!” breakdown scenes). Costar Laura Linney, as Kinsey’s plucky wife Clara, delivers yet another perfectly-tuned performance. And John Lithgow’s acting as Kinsey’s constipated pathetic prick of a father sneaks up and touches you in a third-act scene — you go from hating the bastard to feeling compassion in one surprisingly swift stroke.
Kinsey is even a howl at times, and I’m surprised that the Toronto Film Festival reviews I read didn’t mention this more. It’s not a comedy, but when the laughs come they’re uproarious.
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I’ve been asking myself whether this curious but undeniably intriguing story about what Kinsey went through in the 1940s and early `50s in delivering two culturally convulsive best-sellers about human sexual behavior (“Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” and “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female”) is going to touch people where they live, or at least make them care about Neeson’s heroic character.
As Caleb Crain’s Times article observed last weekend, “Not everyone applauds [Kinsey’s] accomplishment,” adding that there are those who “revile him as a fraud whose `junk science’ legitimized degeneracy.” There may be some people in the more conservative quarters of this country who will recoil slightly from the film, being of the belief that Kinsey helped bring about far-too-liberal attitudes about sexual matters in general, thus hastening the grim slide into the swamp.

But aren’t most of these people living in underground bunkers and old-age homes? Is there anyone with any advanced education or moderate sophistication who still feels queasy about sexual candor?
We live in an era, after all, in which a previous U.S. President found comic infamy a few years back as the recipient of an Oval Office blowjob. In which Kitty Kelley has reported that Dubya may have had extra-marital episodes. In which Vice President Cheney’s daughter is an uncloseted lesbian.
The U.S. is still a somewhat prudish nation in some respects, certainly compared to European folk, but isn’t every libidinal stirring known to man pretty much out on the media table these days? When a Kansas conservative like Bob Dole jokingly refers to being a Viagra man, you know sexual constipation levels aren’t what they used to be.

Feeling It

I caught Taylor Hackford’s Ray (Universal, 10.29) on Tuesday night, and the talk is not overblown: Jamie Foxx’s performance as the legendary Ray Charles totally, righteously kills. This is the exact sort of tour de force thing that always seems to hit a bulls-eye with the Academy. I almost said to myself, “This is it…he’s got the Best Actor Oscar.”
Then I reconsidered. This race isn’t over. Not with Paul Giamatti’s doleful sad-sack performance in Sideways kicking ass. The more I think about the moody dance that his lonely, pissed-off junior high-school teacher goes through, looking for love and struggling with a troubled novel, the more affecting it seems, especially given the quality of Alexander Payne’s film.

If you want to be provincial and small-minded about it, and I’m sorry to be passing these thoughts along, but 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 too 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 bit of a 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 (think I) know how Academy types tend to size things up.
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.
I’ll get into the film itself down the road, but it’s clearly a foot-tapping, highly charged thing and pretty much impossible to resist. Hackford has assembled a right-down-the-middle biopic in most respects. It isn’t a Martin Scorsese or a Paul Thomas Anderson film. It more or less just tells a life story, albeit with rhythm and feeling.

Sometimes a ball thrown straight across the plate is okay. Not every pitch has to be a curve or a slider or a knuckleball.
I also agree on some level with David Poland’s view that Ray runs a bit too long. To be fair, I’ve spoken to others about this and I seem to be in the minority. The odd thing is that I’ve thought it over a few times since last night and I can’t really figure what should have been cut. Maybe it needed a thousand tiny cuts. All I know is, I was feeling one of those Harry Cohn ass-twitchings during the last 20 to 30 minutes.
A friend of the film, responding to this concern, wrote the following on Wednesday morning: “I’d encourage you to see it again, despite of (or maybe because of?) its length. I have found that on my second and third viewings, my appreciation for how delicately Hackford feathers the drama and the music really grew. Now that you know the beats and the arc, you can really sit back and enjoy some of the finer filmmaking points.”

Recruiting

I’ve made this point before, but in trying like hell to fill Hollywood Elsewhere with all kinds of new columns and sidebars and whatnot, I’ve overlooked a logistical fact or two.
One, I can’t do everything, even at the pace I’ve been keeping (work days starting at 7 am and lasting until midnight or so, with time-outs for screenings). I can handle two weekly columns, the WIRED items, arranging for weekly DISPATCHES pieces from filmmakers, and editing and composing the regular contributor columns.
And two, I need more skilled contributors living on trust funds to pitch in and fill things out. The longer I do this, the more I realize that the appeal of Hollywood Elsewhere isn’t just about me and my big mouth, but a whole community of spirited film lovers — people who know how to write and need to be heard and ought to be heard.
I need some more people to send in VISITORS articles, interview transcripts that can go into VERBATIM, and writers who want to bang out DVD reviews for DISCLAND. Plus I need someone willing to do some grunt layout work with articles from time to time.

Squared Away

The Castle Keep DVD brouhaha is officially over, soothed and rectified.
Earlier this week I received a handsome widescreen version of Sydney Pollack’s 1969 anti-war film, and I have no complaints. Everyone can now dismiss from memory the pan-and-scan version released in August by Columbia TriStar Home Video. Unless, of course, CTHV president Ben Feingold approves the issuing of more pan-and-scan versions of widescreen films.

The hurried release of the widescreen version, due on 11.2, happened in response to an angry letter written sometime in mid-August by Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Martin Scorcese to Sony vice-chairman Jeff Blake. The letter “raised hell” about the Castle Keep pan-and-scan transferring, according to an insider who read it. Blake passed the letter along to Sony honcho Michael Lynton, who in turn conveyed his concerns about negative p.r. to Feingold.
The Spielberg-Lucas-Scorsese letter also complained about a pair of Three Stooges DVDs released last August that offered colorized versions of four Stooges shorts, along with black-and-white versions. No word on what response, if any, CTHV had on the Stooges.

Rahoi’s Rant

Hollywood Elsewhere art director Jon Rahoi sent me the following last weekend about his experience with Ladder 49, the Disney-produced firefighter movie with John Travolta and Joaquin Pheonix:
“I usually give movies the benefit of the doubt,” he began. “I almost always leave the theater saying something nice or focusing on what I liked. It helps to be picky about what you see, but even so during the show I’m a forgiving viewer. It’s not until much later that any criticism works its way out.
“So imagine my surprise when, during the middle of Ladder 49, I actually thought about walking out. The last time this happened, Alec Baldwin was bombing Japan with Ben Affleck. You know how fun it is to be at a party where everyone else is drunk except you? Others in the theatre were laughing, sighing, and letting go with a sniffle or two. And there I was, the designated driver.

“My Cheese Detector beeped in the first few minutes, but it wasn’t off the charts. There were cardboard characters, jovial male-bonding scenes set to music, the “tell my wife I love her” scene, past footage of a beloved character freezing into a black-and-white photo scene, and even the obligatory get-hold-of-yourselves-after-a-devastating-tragedy scene.
“I know some firefighters, and most of them talk about how little they work. They talk about the pay, the benefits and the pension. That’s why most of them get into it in the first place. These are guys who were middle-of-the-roaders in school. Maybe they were athletes, maybe they got into it when that Business Admin degree was looking like less of a sure thing. They’re not haunted, and they’re not idealistic heroes living to help all. I respect them, but certainly don’t see them as heroic. It’s a job. They’re working just hard enough to avoid the axe, like every other schmuck in the western world.
“Every man in this crap movie is a hero. None of them do anything remotely human, except for the token aging asshole character cheating on his wife, the token father figure sharing how he chose his job over his wife, and the token black guy saying he didn’t want his kids to see him burned because “this is something kids don’t forget.” Who are these guys? If you want realistic firefighters, watch Rescue Me on F/X.
“Joaquin Phoenix lives with another hero-movie staple, the wet-blanket woman. Whether it’s Adrian in the Rocky movies, Aretha Franklin in The Blues Brothers, Diane Keaton in Godfather II or Gretchen Mol in Rounders, the wet-blanket woman is there to throw salt in the hero’s game, upping the personal stakes on his quest for glory.

“Pheonix’s wife (Jacinda Barrett) fights his longing to be a hero and urges him to take a safer job. I’m a father and a husband, and there’s no way I could fight off constant `you’re putting yourself in unnecessary danger’ scorn for ten years. And why would I want to? First of all, it’s not fair to the spouse — marriage is a partnership, not a sidebar to a career. It’s not like Baltimore needs him and only him.
“The wet-blanket woman character is based on a mistaken assumption, which is that a hero needs to listen only to his internal compass, and that his closest friends and family couldn’t possibly have anything important or informed to say about his situation. Because a man has to go his own way.
“What does it say about us that we cheer this attitude? We will our heroes into acting irrationally for the same reasons Earl gave Tiger a putter at 3 years, and why Jon Benet Ramsey wore makeup — we feel like failures. So instead of being happy with life, we force others to succeed for us.
“This movie could not have been made before 9/11. It’s a FDNY suckfest — they’re not fooling anyone by setting it in Baltimore. And just as movies in the late ’70s and ’80s paid hamhanded tribute to the fallen in Vietnam, it looks like we’re in for a rough few years of movies about the war on terror.
“Maybe some people will say I’m unpatriotic or an unfeeling ass. But how heroic is it to take stupid risks to the eternal chafe of your soulmate, and to eventually leave your wife and two kids to fend for themselves?
“‘Yes, Daddy’s a hero. Now look really sad when you hold up the cardboard sign.'”

Alleged Commie

“My wife and I both felt the same way you seem to regarding Janet Leigh’s performance in The Manchurian Candidate until we happened to read an article airing the theory Leigh’s Eugenie Rose is a Communist agent assigned to keep watch over Frank Sinatra’s character.

“That odd conversation she has with him on the train is used as an example of her taking control over him by her use of words (just as a card and words are used to control Laurence Harvey). This explains why he goes immediately to her apartment, as well as some of the reaction shots of Leigh’s face when Sinatra is telling her what is going on. Her expression is particularly chilling during their last encounter near the end of the film.
“Anyway, I cannot say if this idea is right or wrong, but when we watched the film recently with this thought in mind, Leigh’s character worked much better for us.” — Wade Warshal.
Wells to Warshal: Yeah, I’ve heard that one. It doesn’t hold water or add up in the slightest in terms of what John Frankenheimer directed or George Axelrod wrote, but if the boat floats for you, fine.

I forgot a likely development when I made some forecasts about ’04 Best Picture Oscar nominations a couple of days ago. I guess I didn’t want to consider it.
Almost every year there has to be one semi-awful, vaguely embarrassing Best Picture nominee. You know…a flick that people like me tend to despise or worse but the Academy tends to (a) emotionally support despite overwhelming taste considerations to the contrary and (b) is more than willing to risk tarnishing the Academy’s reputation in history books by actually giving it the Best Picture Oscar.
I’m talking about nominees like Chicago, Ghost, Babe, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Chocolat, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Mission or The Color Purple.
(Let’s acknowledge upfront that my including Return of the King on this list will provoke a torrent of letters calling me a rash and injudicious Peter Jackson hater. Okay? Now you don’t have to write them.)

If there’s a contender of this sort this year, it’ll most likely be Joel Schumacher’s The Phantom of the Opera.
It may turn out to be wonderful, devastating, heart-palpitating, etc. But with Schumacher at the helm the odds favor the likelihood of something overwrought and oppressive.
I know it’s imprudent to stick my neck out like this, but I feel I’ve come to know Joel, and I’m convinced that his directorial hand is generally something to be wary of.
I became a surprised Joel fan after Falling Down and The Client , but then he did A Time to Kill (an all-time Otto Preminger film from hell) and his two nipple ring-and-codpiece Batman movies (both awful) and I was off the boat.
Okay, Tigerland was a decent bounce-back effort and Phone Booth was a solid urban thriller with a good Colin Farrell performance, but Flawless was a wash and Veronica Guerin missed it big-time.
Phantom‘s chances may be upped by acting and tech credit noms. I was told last night that Emmy Rossum, who plays the lead Phantom role of Christine, will emerge with an enhanced rep…assuming she scores. She was last in Dan Ireland and Jim Jermanok’s Passionada, which I’d now like to finally sit down and watch just to see how she is.

Once Again

So figure the five finalists will probably be selected from the following nine movies:
(1) Sideways, (2) The Aviator (although I’m starting to feel a little bit twitchy about this one), (3) possibly Alexander, (4) quite possibly Spanglish, (5) The Motorcycle Diaries (an increasingly big maybe, like I said two days ago), (6) probably Hotel Rwanda as a liberal guilt-trip nominee, (7) probably Closer if the alleged “plays a little cold” factor doesn’t overwhelm the content, (8) The Phantom of the Opera, and (9) if Bush loses (and we all know the odds at this stage), Fahrenheit 9/11.

I think it’ll be criminal if Sideways and The Motorcycle Diaries are left out, but that’s me.
If it was me alone choosing from the films released so far I’d make it these two plus Collateral and Touching the Void.
And oh, yeah…I haven’t even considered John Madden’s Proof (Miramax, 12.25), but the Broadway play was awfully good and playwright David Aubrey wrote the screenplay, so who knows?
There’s a concern in that Proof has the slight Gwynneth Paltrow curse factor to contend with. (Everything she’s done since The Talented Mr. Ripley five years ago has been mediocre, with the significant exception of The Royal Tenenbaums). On the other hand, one should never dismiss an end-of-the-year film starring the great Anthony Hopkins.

Blanket

I Heart Huckabees (Fox Searchlight, 10.1) shot right through my skull on Wednesday night and came out like some cosmic effusion and just sort of hung there above my head like a low-altitude cloud, sprinkling gentle misty rain.
No, that sounds too tranquil. A movie this funny and frantic and this totally off-the-planet (and yet strangely inside the whole universal anxiety syndrome that we all live with day to day) can’t be that cosmically soothing. That’s not the idea.
But it is soothing… that’s the weird thing. Huckabees makes you laugh fairly uproariously, but it leaves you in a spiritual place that feels settled and well-nourished. Variety‘s David Rooney said it was “largely an intellectual pleasure with a hollow core.” Rooney has probably never been wronger in his life. Not because he isn’t smart or perceptive, but because he failed to do a very important thing.
He didn’t see Huckabees twice.

This is one of those rare movies in which you have to double-dip it. You obviously don’t have to take my advice. Go ahead and just see it once and then say to yourself, “Well, that happened!” Just understand that Huckabees is, I feel, too dense and arch with too much going on to fully get it in one sitting.
On one level it’s a kind of psychobabble satire; on another it’s the most profoundly spiritual Hollywood film since Groundhog Day. And the amazing-ness of it may not come together in your head…if at all.
That’s how the first viewing happened with me, at least. I was initially into it on a “whoa…what was that?” level and for the antsy, pedal-to-the-metal pacing …but it goes beyond that. The first time is the eye-opener, the water-in-the-face, the violent lapel-grabbing; the second time is da bomb.
There’s something else that Rooney probably couldn’t help when he wrote his review. I’m guessing he’s not really a “blanket” kind of guy. Blanket acceptance is what this film is about (and is what passing through the doors of illumination usually entails…you can’t reason your way into a Godhead realization).
Huckabees is about the blanket, and you either get this and it makes you laugh and turns you on at the same time…or it doesn’t and you don’t.

Imagine sitting in a theatre and laughing in a half-chuckling, half-hysterical way. And mulling over some basic tenets of eastern mysticism at the same time. And also feeling amazed and throttled by the most relentlessly verbal machine-gun Hollywood comedy since His Girl Friday. And also doing that outboard-motor thing against your lower lip with your right index and middle fingers and going, “Bee, bee, bee, bee, bee…”
(Recognize that graph? I just plagiarized my own WIRED item.)
Huckabees is about movie stars and laughs and hyper-energy, but boiled down to basics it’s essentially about a philosophical feud between two schools of thought — one that says life is perfect, harmonious and essentially divine, and one that says that life is merely a series of random and disconnected occurrences that are more often than not painful, and sometimes much worse.
The more positive alpha view is articulated and passed along by an existential detective agency run by Bernard and Vivian Jaffe (Dustin Hoffma, Lily Tomlin). The darker, more nihilist approach is espoused by Isabelle Huppert’s Caterine Vauban, a former colleague of the Jaffes who’s crossed over to the dark side like Annakin Skywalker.
The guy in the middle of these two factions is an environmental activist named Albert Markovski (Jason Schwartzman). First he goes to the Jaffe’s for help in sorting out his life, then he takes up with Huppert (an alliance that carries a side benefit of great mud sex), and then….I’m not spilling the ending.

The Jaffes quickly discover that Albert’s troubles are mainly stemming from a rivalry with a shithead executive named Brad Stand (Jude Law) who works for a retail chain store called Huckabees. Albert is pissed at Brad for challenging his authority as the head of an envuronmental actiivst outfit called the Open Spaces Coalition group. Albert is fervently anti-development when it concerns marshlands and whatnot while dickhead Brad is pro-development and pro-greed.
Then, weirdly, Brad hires the Jaffes to look into his own life. This in turn leads to his girlfriend Dawn (Naomi Watts), Huckabees’ sexy spokesperson/model, to hire the Jaffes to look into her life, which leads to her refusing to play the sexpot and to exploring her inner infinite self, an exercise that involves shunning makeup and wearing an Amish bonnet.
Albert eventually becomes disillusioned with the Jaffes and hooks up with a philosophically-driven firefighter named Tommy (Mark Wahlberg), another client of the Jaffes who’s drifted over to Vauban’s way of thinking. For a while they’re a kind of threesome, but then Tommy gets cut out of the equation. He rebounds when he couples with Dawn during a rescue mission at her home. For him (and unlike Law), her bonnet is totally cool.
Does I heart Huckabees get you emotionally? No…and yet, the more you let it in and the longer you think about it, yeah.
Wahlberg gives my favorite Huckabees performance (he’s really good as conveying that frenzied-spiritual-seeker quality), but the entire cast is fairly killer. They all do amazing stuff, and there are all kinds of fine actors (the great Richard Jenkins, for one) giving great supporting perfs.
Schwartzman has finally tied into a role as good as “Max” in Rushmore, and hail to that. Jason’s a very spirited and likable fellow. I’ve been running into him at parties and restaurants and whatnot going back to the Rushmore days.

Law is seven or eight times more intriguing here than he was in Cold Mountain . I love his unsuppressable vomiting in the Huckabees boardroom scene. There’s another bit in which he sticks his tongue out while looking in a bathroom mirror that’s oddly classic. I’m predicting right now it’ll be used for a Jude Law tribute reel when he’s in his late 60s or early 70s and being honored by the AFI or the American Cinematheque.
Tomlin’s performance is the best she’s given in years on-screen. Hoffman is mostly hilarious. Watts is tonally on-target in every scene she’s in. Huckabees allows everyone to stretch and wig out in such unusual ways it’s almost like a theatre high. It’s an unleash-your-inner-nutbag thing for everyone involved.
I might as well borrow from another WIRED graph for a wind-up…
Russell told the New York Times that I Heart Huckabees is “all an existential meditation.” You will go into this movie as one person, and come out a little less regimented, a little more free. In the final analysis any film that makes you want to find spiritual clarity or satori is, I think, a good thing. Or don’t you agree?

Buzzing

I went to the I Heart Huckabees premiere and after-party at the Grove the night before last (9.22). It happened inside a two-story retail space normally inhabited at the Grove by…I forget.
Like all parties, it got better the more everyone had to drink. There weren’t too many people, which was nice. All kinds of great food was served, most of it prepared in thematic harmony with the film.
I worked my way past the goons in the roped-off area and had friendly chats with David O. Russell, Lily Tomlin, Isabelle Huppert and Naomi Watts.

(l. to r.) Huckabees theme song composer Jon Brion, writer-director David O. Russell, unidentified brunette posing for photographers at end of Wednesday night’s Huckabees shindig

I especially enjoyed meeting songwriter-singer Jon Brion, who performed the Huckabees theme song “Knock Yourself Out” in front of the crowd before the screening began. I love this song. Hearing it made me want to badger the Searchlight publicists for a free Huckabees soundtrack. I’ve been told I should buy Brion’s CD “Meaningless.” If you’re in L.A. he performs at Largo on Friday nights.

Aspect Ratios

I asked two or three publicists at a recent press junket whether the film being promoted had been shot in Scope or widescreen (2.35 to 1) or standard Academy ratio (1.85 to 1), and nobody could answer. Two of them said words to the effect of “I’m not up on the technical side of things.” The aspect ratio of a film is pretty basic stuff. Why did I need to ask? Good question. I guess the movie was so absorbing for its inward elements that I simply didn’t notice.

Two New Columns

There’s a new front-page column starting today called “What Lies Beneath,” written by Dezhda Mountz. The focus is more or less the social-political issues that are highlighted by this or that film. It’s located just below the VERBATIM column on the lower right. Dezhda’s a good spirited writer, so please give her a read. There’s no e-mail link for her presently, but I guess we’ll fix that soon enough.

There’s also a new Hollywood Elsewhere DVD column debuting on the front page, on the left just under the navigation bar. It’s called DISCLAND: DVDs Are Crack. It’ll be up and running no later than Friday, October 1.
DISCLAND will be co-authored by myself and Hollywood Elsewhere columnist Kim Morgan on a weekly…I was going to say a weekly basis but we’ll probably bang it out as often as the passion strikes.
The deadlines and writing load will probably get overwhelming from time to time, so if anyone wants to submit a review of any upcoming or just-out disc, or if they have a think piece or investigative inquiry of any kind, send it on.

Dowd

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd during a discussion of her book, Bushworld, at L.A.’s Skirball Center on Thursday, 9.23. I arrived late and there were no seats, so I sat on the floor right in front of the stage. Dowd’s book is a brilliant Dubya dissection and well worth reading, and she’s a fascinating off-the-cuff speaker. However, she was a bit on the guarded, circumspect side when it came to probing questions from the audience. Dowd was interviewed for roughly 100 minutes by fellow Times columnist Alessandra Stanley

Sideways and Under 25s

“I have to disagree that adolescents will line up with anticipation for Sideways even if the buzz is outstanding. There is no chance teenagers and young adults will be able to relate to a wine tasting journey taken by two middle-aged men who are are coping with personal issues, etc.
“It doesn’t matter how much of a genius Paul Giamatti is — they still will not be persuaded. The majority of adolescents are not looking for a sophisticated, thoughtful, critically acclaimed film. They’re into cheap, easy-to-swallow crap.
“Hopefully the movie will be lucky and make as much as About Schmidt at the box office but that will only happen if Sideways gets substantial Oscar heat and word-of -mouth. Sideways should not rely or count on loyalty or support from the majority of the under 25 crowd.
“Since Payne’s Election was set in a high school and had teenage characters (okay, 25 year-olds pretending to be that age) in lead and supporting roles, and was conspicuously produced by MTV Films, it should have almost been a decentp-sized success at the box office. The movie regretfully turned out to be a flop. I went to see it in an almost completely empty theater on opening weekend.
“The sad reality is that if adolescents want to witness `guy rage’ on screen they’re going to go and seek out the latest Adam Sandler movie.
“For the record I can’t wait to see Sideways since I trust Alexander Payne to be immensely talented and skilled at his craft. I regard him as a truly exceptional director who consistently produces quality. From what I have read about Sideways I am sure it will be an incredible and [thing] and well worth waiting for. I’ve never been let down by Payne and I hope he this will continue.” — Laurence Price , Toronto, Canada.

Howling Man

“I have a friend who is a struggling film maker who certainly agrees with you that George Lucas is the devil incarnate, but I have a tough time agreeing with that. He’s just doing what he wants to do. I’m not saying that his recent stuff has been good, but its his dollar so he can make whatever he wants.
“The real blame has to fall on the viewing public. They’re the ones who pony up the cash to watch mind-numbing garbage like Van Helsing or The Day After Tomorrow. The fact that both Aliens vs. Predator and Resident Evil 2 opened up at number one says all that needs to be said.
“One other big point on George Lucas, I absolutely love both Empire and Raiders, and the fact that he produced those two films atones for all the other junk that he’s kicked out.
“By the way I was pretty impressed by your political analysis last week. You made me realize that Republicans and Democrats can agree on one thing — our candidates both suck! It also showed me how desperately we need a true third party in our election system.” — Jeff Horst

“Don’t think the irony of the Star Wars plot is lost on George Lucas either. He conveys this in a documentary called “Empire of Dreams” that’s included in the Star Wars Trilogy DVD set. (A one-hour version of the doc was aired on A&E before the DVDs came out, which has a two-hour cut). It has footage of Lucas ruminating on becoming the corporate empire he was trying to destroy, and a lot more.
“I guess you had to get a new George Lucas rant in on the new site (nice job, btw), but just let go of your hate. Or when Episode III: Revenge of the Sith comes out in May ’05, just run the same stuff you have up to now with a disclaimer at the top that this is a reprinting. It will save a lot of time for everyone. ” — Dave Murdock
“There is a tendency to look upon great artists the same way one looks upon one’s parents, which is that they have to be perfect. Any slight shortcoming is magnified as a horrendous flaw, and any mistep in motivation seems utterly evil.
“You can’t call George Lucas evil, though. He hasn’t done that kind of bad thing.
“Lucas’ only real mistake of late is to not bring in outside screenwriters to subdue the flaws in his more recent screenplays, thus disappointing millions of fans who expect to relive that moment of spellbinding trasfixtion with which the greeted the first Star Wars movie with every new one. But that’s not evil.
“Microsoft is evil. Their monopoly is so pervasive that word processing programs are no longer being improved through competition.
“Lucas, however, is working to expand the technology of filmmaking and share that expansion with his fellow artists. He has never tried to suppress a technological innovation, or prevented its development. You could make a case that by initiating Pixar he is responsible for the eventual death of traditional animation, at least on a feature scale, but that would be stretching things given the progress of technology outside of his control.
“It was the development of television, not Lucas, that brought forth the death of gradual roll-outs. While it took Hollywood a little bit to pick up on the trick, it has long been a staple of entertainment flim-flam that you try to fool as great a potential audience as possible before word gets out, and with network commercial buys and saturation bookings, any decent movie that receives that kind of treatment is going to get the blame for the turkeys that follow.

“‘Idiotic high concept movie formulas’ have been around since the 1910s. Any time there is a hit film, greedy movie companies try to get out their cookie cutters and profit from the scraps. They have also been dumbing movies down for just as long.
“How has Lucas possibly `maligned the idea that the making of quality movies had value in the Hollywood marketplace’? Not counting Howard the Duck and Radioland Murders, even his failures have been quality productions, and he has lent his support and reputation to numerous artists from Akira Kurosawa to B.W.L. Norton. He’s led the development of improved quality in sound systems and mixes in motion picture theaters and in home theaters, and he has hastened the development of the integration of animation and live action, opening a vast array of subject material to be tackled by the motion picture industry that has been beyond their grasp in the past, such as the outstanding Lord of the Rings trilogy.
“Nope, George Lucas’ supremely evil act was to make Star Wars in the first place, because it is such a good, wholesome, exhilirating and satisfying film that it made almost all other movies, including many of his own, seem inadequate; just as the supremely evil act parents make is to conceive the individual who then blames them for the disappointements brought on by life.” — Doug Pratt, editor, DVD Newsletter.
Wells to Pratt: “Outstanding” Lord of the Rings trilogy? You don’t have to say this stuff any more, Doug. Jackson has his Oscars and all you Rings lovers can come clean now and admit to the world what agony these films have always been to sit through. C’mon, man…you’ll feel better. Spill it.

Digital Choo-Choo

I’m kind of an undistilled-reality type guy, visually speaking, so don’t expect me to cream over the latest animation technique.
I can take or leave Japanese anime (and Japanese anime snobs tick me off). I was never a fool for Disney-style paint-cell animation. I’ve always liked but never quite loved those bursting colors and needle-sharp detail in those PDI/Pixar-generated features (you know …Shrek, Shark Tale, etc.) And while I admired those CG compositions in Final Fantasy, they never made me want to jump up and down.
But I sat up, took notice and felt I’d seen something really different and noteworthy after watching a few demo clips yesterday from the forthcoming Tom Hanks/Robert Zemeckis film The Polar Express (Warner Bros., 11.10).

Hanks, the film’s star-producer, and Zemeckis, the director, walked on stage at the swanky Steve Ross theatre on the Warner Bros. lot around 12:15 pm. They took turns introducing the clips and then took everyone through a tutorial about how The Polar Express found its unique visual signature. Then they answered questions for 30 minutes or so. The presentation took about 65 minutes.
The big visual technology used to compose this super-expensive family flick (Variety says it cost $165 million) is a device called “performance capture,” which is similar to “motion capture” technology except for its focus on facial expressions.
Hanks does a Peter Sellers in The Polar Express — he performs five separate roles, including the lead part of an eight year-old boy. No, he’s not doing another Big. He portrayed the kid during filming in every actorly way imaginable, but then it was all digitally transferred into this computerized digi-kid character.
The story is basically about the kid being woken up the night before Christmas by the Polar Express (a big 1940s-era train) pulling up in front of his house. He gets on and it takes him and a bunch of other kids to the North Pole and Santa’s headquarters.
I don’t know how the rest of it plays, but it’s based on a popular 18-page book by Chris Van Allsburg that came out in ’85.

Anyway, Hanks gets to play the five characters (including his own dad and a moustache- wearing Polar Express train conductor) and act his way through each performance with total particularity through “performance capture” technology.
It’s not animation (or at least, not precisely) and it’s not live action. It’s somewhere right in the middle, with a lot more in the way of convincing above-the-neck emotionality than any digitally composed anything I’ve yet seen.
As I understand it, motion capture (which is what Peter Jackson and Andy Serkis used to create Smeagol-Gollum in the Rings movies, coupled with a technique called “video roto” to create those painfully over-emphasized Smeagol-Gollumn expressions) basically uses digital motion sensors attached to actors wearing blue-screen body suits.
And as I also understand it, performance capture delivers convincing facial expressions (along with the regular body stuff, of course) by pasting 152 digital sensors to an actor’s face and then reading each and every muscular shift and twitch, and then converting these into digital data, blah, blah.
We were shown a rehearsal video of Hanks dressed in one of those blue-screen suits and with those 152 sensors pasted to his face. He looked like he was suffering from a strange form of chicken pox or early-stage leprosy.

What I saw on the screen during the showings of finished clips looked painterly, kind of, but at the same time actuely “real.” It looked better — more complex in the renderings, more interesting to simply look at — than anything in Final Fantasy or the Rings films or any other CG animated thing you could mention.
I’m not saying I’m necessarily going to go hog-wild for The Polar Express when it comes out. Well, maybe I will. Hanks said it wasn’t made to appeal just to kids, that it’s aimed at kids of all ages, and so on. At least I know the visuals will kick ass.
Hanks said the four main kid roles are played by himself, Eddie Deezen (remember him? “Mr. Potatohead” from War Games? The bespectacled dweeby Beatles fan in I Want to Hold Your Hand?) , Nona Gaye and Peter Scolari.
The 80 or so invited journalists were ushered out of the theatre after the presentation ended and then treated to a superb lunch in the lobby and an adjoining outdoor patio. I tried to show restraint but I ate everything, including two servings of salmon.

Career Extensions

Robert Zemeckis offered a startling, almost mind-bending prediction during yesterday’s Polar Express press conference.
He was responding to my question about a graph in a new Peter Biskind article about an aspect of motion capture technology. The piece can be found on page 220 of the current issue of Vanity Fair.
It asks a question of its own. What if you could use advanced digital technology to make actors in their 60s or 70s or older look like they did in their youthful prime? Not through digital foolery, since the older, real-life actors would be properly hired and perform the role. But when the movie is finally done, they would be tweaked in a totally convincing way to look 30 or 40 years younger.

What if you could, in a sense, cast the young and hunky Robert Redford — the guy who starred in The Way We Were or Three Days of the Condor, say — in a brand-new film? What if Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli could hire Sean Connery as he looked in 1962’s Dr. No to star in their next Bond film? Wouldn’t that be a cooler way to go than hiring, say, Eric Bana? (Nobody did 007 better than young Connery — everyone knows this.)
Such a thing is only about two years away, said Zemeckis. His more-or-less exact quote was, “We’re only about two years away from being able to make possible, for example, Redford or Connery or someone [like then] play younger versions of themselves.”
Zemeckis said at one point the realistic detail achieved in the digital compositions in The Polar Express was so exacting and precise that digital artists had to “take it down” and make it all look more painterly and animated.

Zemeckis knows whereof he speaks, and much more about what’s possible with digital trickery than I could hope to know… but I still didn’t believe him about the two years. Technology never develops quite as quickly as we’d prefer, although it gets there. I’d guess three or four years, or maybe five or six, before this Doran Gray effect would be technologically refined enough to use in a feature film.
It’s a diseased idea, of course. A journalist friend said after the press conference, “I don’t want to see a young Robert Redford star in a movie!” But he agreed later that casting a 32 year-old Connery (with hair) in a new 007 film would be nifty.
As freaky, anti-life, non-organic and fundamentally twisted as it sounds, a Dorian Gray casting with a major star would be — admit it — fascinating.
What did everyone and his brother say when Redford starred in Sydney Pollack’s 1990 film Havana? That he looked so worn and weathered-down… right?
The Dorian Gray effect could, at the very least, extend the careers of actresses, almost all of whom start to lose work once they hit their mid 30s

Dish Served Cold

If I had gone to the Toronto Film Festival, I would most likely be running a review today about the opening-night film, which is Istvan Szabo’s Being Julia. I saw it in Los Angeles on Wednesday night, so here we go anyway.
It’s an off-kilter comedy about London theatre folk, set in 1938. I’m sorry but it’s an okay distraction at best. At worst, it’ struck me as a petty, ungracious, small-minded thing.
The screenplay, based on the novel “Theater” by W. Somerset Maugham. is by Ronald Harwood, who won an Oscar for the script of The Pianist. It doesn’t add up that such talented men could have written the basis for such an unsatisfying film.
Julia Lambert (Annette Bening) is a legendary theatre star of 45 years, a kind of Margo Channing of the West End. She’s introduced as starring in her latest hit play, married on non-sexual terms to former actor Michael Goselyn (Jeremy Irons), loved or at least admired by friends and fans, and deeply depressed. She’s on the verge of a breakdown.

Hungry for something fresh and new in her life, Julia starts an affair with a cute young American named Tom Fennel (Shaun Evans). But Tom turns out to be a callow little shit, and things eventually turn sour when Julia realizes that Tom, behind her back, is schtupping another actress, Avice Crighton (Lucy Punch).
Avice, we learn, hopes to use the connection with Tom (who’s a connection to Julia) to get an audition in a new play that Julia plans to star in. The film’s last third is basically about Julia arranging an elaborate scheme to turn the tables on Tom and Avice.
A colleague wrote a day or two ago that Being Julia has no point. I disagree. There’s a narration line from A Clockwork Orange when Alex (Malcolm McDowell) comments about a group of old homeless men who are savagely beating him up: “It was old age having a go at youth.”
This is what Being Julia is pretty much about. Wise and witty middle-agers — people who have a cultivated appreciation of the finer things in life — sticking it to a pair of opportunistic youths who haven’t the talent or sensitivity to deserve being treated with respect, and thus getting what they deserve.
The result, oddly, is that you almost wind up feeling sorry for Tom and Avice. Almost.
Being Julia, then, is a kind of revenge film. In its not-quite-British, partly-Hungarian, partly-Canadian way, it’s a cousin of Michael Winner’s Death Wish. If repertory cinema still existed, you could one day show Being Julia and Death Wish on a double-bill, and people would get it, believe me.
The distributors are Sony Pictures Classics in the U.S. and ThinkFilm in Canada, and here’s to better days.

A Satire Forgotten?

One of the best American social satires ever made is newly released on DVD and sitting in video stores right now, and nobody gives a shit. Or so it seems. Michael Ritchie’s Smile, a sophisticated, slightly loony-tunes screwball comedy that every critic admired when it opened in ’75, couldn’t have a much lower profile. I couldn’t even find a copy in my visits earlier this week to Tower Video and West L.A.’s Laser Blazer.
It’s not exactly a wondrous, incandescent, life-changing film, but it’s got a worked-out tone and attitude. Ritchie and screenwriter Jerry Belson knew exactly what they were saying about the middle Americans being lampooned, and yet they managed to show affection for them while goofing on their foibles.

Belson’s script, set in Santa Rosa, California, and nominally about a Young American Miss Pageant, is a city-slicker satire about the self-imposed confinements and general ennui of conservative, Rotary Club, small-town schmuck culture of the mid ’70s. The beauty contest inspires all kinds of anxiety and desperation on the part vof the principal characters, and each is quite funny in their own half-sad way.
Like Big Bob Freelander (Bruce Dern), a “donkey” (Pauline Kael’s term in her first-rate New Yorker review) who sells motor homes and does what he can to promote the yearly pageant, which of course involves promoting himself. The beauty pageant is managed by a deeply neurotic ex-pageant queen (Barbara Feldon) who eventually manages to drive her alcoholic husband Andy (Nicholas Pryor) to the brink of suicide.
And yet no one acts in a deliberately cruel or hurtful manner. Smile is a fairly scathing comedy, and yet the actors, male and female, never seem to broadly play it for laughs, and Ritchie’s affection for these poor clods always seems to come through.
The other cast members include choreographer Michael Kidd (playing a choreographer- for-hire with a wonderfully cynical attitude and deadpan speaking style), Geoffrey Lewis, and, as pageant contestants, Joan Prather, Annette O’Toole, Melanie Griffith, Maria O’Brien and Colleen Camp.
A woman named Beth Whiting of Glendale, Arizona wrote this about Smile in a posting on Amazon. com: “I found a crusty old copy at a video store and decided to take a chance, expecting at best a mediocre comedy. But I was surprised. This movie is really good, one of the best comedies of the 70’s. How it ever faded away into oblivion is a good question. It’s not dated at all. Unlike most old comedies, I found myself laughing throughout this whole movie. The humor is still fresh and revelant.”
The Smile DVD, which I eventually found a copy of after trying a couple of more stores, is okay looking. The late Conrad Hall’s cinematography looks a little softer and bleachier than I remember this film to be, but perhaps my memory’s gone soft. You can never expect too much from the people at MGM/UA Home Video, whose big home-video initiative has been the $15 no-frills cheapie.

Night of Nights

Universal had a small press contingent over to the lot on Thursday night for a screening of Peter Berg’s Friday Night Lights (opening 10.8), a true-life football movie set in Odessa, Texas.
Based on a book by H.G. Bissinger, it’s about the efforts of a tight-ass coach named Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton) to whip the town’s high school into shape, which led to their winning a Texas State Championship in 1988.
Two friends went to the screening (which was preceded by a small dinner that was attended by Nights‘ executive producer Brian Grazer ), and had some morning-after impressions to share:

Mostly shot in a documentary-type style,” Nights delivers “a lot of good football action,” said one. “Thornton is good as the coach, ditto Derek Luke and particularly Lucas Black as two of the players. The film seems like an ambitious attempt to shine a light on a very particular world, which revolves around small-town devotion to high school football.”
“It’s a different take on the high-school football movie,” said the other. “It goes for a documentary feel with a hand-held camera thing. And there’s a lot to like in the story and performances. Billy Bob is very understated and good.
“In some cases, there seems to be a little ambivalence about trying to resolve the stories of the individual kids, which gives it an unfinished or not-quite-satisfying feeling but the movie has some nuance and is about something(s).
“It has some very exciting football sequences but since it’s not the standard feel-good movie, it’ll require some special handling and may not have broad commercial appeal.”

Berg, also at the dinner, said it took 11 years in development (and several attempts by other filmmakers, including Alan Pakula) to get Bissinger’s 1988 book to the screen. Berg said he’s been faithful to the book which was somewhat controversial dealing with racism and other issues when it came out. And yet it’s a little less intense, he said.
Nights is “a definite step up for Berg whose last film for Universal was The Rundown,” one observer said. “It should get decent reviews when it’s finished. Reaction seemed good as far as I could tell. Universal is hopeful for this but want to just put the film out there and see what kind of critical and/or awards attention there may be for this. They aren’t ‘pushing’ it yet beyond its initial release.”