AICN’s Dr. Hfuhruhurr, a card-carrying Reagan conservative, has posted a positive review of David Zucker‘s An American Carol, a reportedly broad anti-left satire about the transformation of a Michael Moore-like documentarian in the manner of Ebenezer Scrooge’s awakening in A Christmas Carol.
In the review Hfuhruhurr briefly calls yours truly a paragon of intolerance because I’ve posted some snarky but accurate items about the film and because I vented a brief flash of anger at Jon Voight when he wrote a stunningly ignorant anti-Obama editorial in the Washington Times a few weeks back.
Hfuhruhurr can bloviate all he wants (he’s a good snappy writer), but in this instance he sounds very much like a propagandist — a right-wing advocate who’s carrying water for a fired-up, hypocrisy-poisoned community that worships the Glenn Becks and Sarah Palins of the world — and somewhat less of a serious movie guy.
Today’s rabid righties are not guided by the principles of loyal opposition and all that — they’re hammerhead dogma-spewers of the lowest order. Contrarians, dogs, takedown artists. As Jon Stewart said (and I’m paraphrasing), “If Barack Obama was to discover the cure for cancer, they’d find a way to spin it negatively.” They’re not on the “wrong side” as much as the fact that they’re animals. Seriously. No offense.
I’ve been told by people I know and trust (to the extent that if Zucker’s film had anything going for it, they would acknowledge that rather than dismiss it on an ideological basis) that An American Carol is fall-on-the-floor, Burn Hollywood Burn bad..
Mark Olsen has written an L.A. Times piece listing the Best L.A. Films of the Last 25 Years. Fine, but you know what? The last 25 years (1983 to the present) have been cool, interesting, diverting, etc., but nowhere near as soul-stirring as the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s — the true glory days of L.A. cinema.
And so Olsen’s list leaves off Kiss Me Deadly, The Long Goodbye, Sunset Boulevard, In a Lonely Place, Point Blank, Bob, Carol, Ted and Alice, Play It As It Lays, Bloom in Love, No Down Payment, etc. What is the concept of “L.A. Film” without these? Olsen has done a good comprehensive job of summing up the ’80s, ’90s and 21st Century highlights — I’ll give him that.
“By creating the frame of the last 25 years, the idea was exactly to keep us from just rattling off Chinatown, Long Goodbye, etc.,” Olsen answers. “That list has been done. By sticking to the ‘modern classics’ or whatever you want to call them, we were trying to get at current representations of Los Angeles, what the town is now. The fact that, say, Fast Times or Blade Runner are forced off the list made us dig a little deeper and think a little harder. I, for one, think that’s a good thing.”
So much for my dream that Oliver Stone‘s W, Jim Sheridan‘s Brothers, Gerald McMorrow‘s Franklyn and Beeban Kidron‘s Hippie Hippie Shake might play the 2008 Toronto Film Festival.
George Clooney, Frances McDormand in Burn After Reading
None of ’em made this morning’s final list which means the first two weren’t submitted and that issues of one sort or another are afflicting the second two, since both are expected to open in England later this year. I don’t mind saying I’m damn disappointed.
Especially about the W no-show. The 10.17 opening, just over a month after the close of TIFF, would make the festival an ideal launch site by giving the film its first big blast of attention. But it only wrapped in July so this morning’s absence presumably means it’s not quite in “ship-ship-shape!,” as Tony Curtis‘s Jerry once said in Some Like It Hot.
The seven new world premiere galas include Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Burn After Reading (the script tells you it’s a can’t-miss comedy in a dry slapstick vein), Rod Lurie‘s Nothing But The Truth (which I reviewed last night); Gavin O’Connor‘s Pride and Glory, the top-tier crime drama with Ed Norton and Colin Farrell that WB honcho Alan Horn is reportedly willing to dump for the right price; and Neil Burger‘s The Lucky Ones, a stateside Iraq War vet drama costarring Rachel McAdams, Tim Robbins and Michael Pena that Lionsgate has delayed the release of over concerns about the failure of other Iraq War dramas.
Michael Pena, Rachel McAdams and Tuim Robbins in The Lucky Ones
Rear-guard galas will include Dean Spanley starring Peter O’Toole; Jodie Markell‘s The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, from a rediscovered Tennessee Williams screenplay (title sounds way too precious); Caroline Link’s A Year Ago in Winter, Jerry Zaks’ Who Do You Love with Alessandro Nivola; Anne Fontaine‘s La Fille de Monaco, Jean Francois Richet‘s Public Enemy No. 1 with Vincent Cassel as legendary gangster Jacques Mesrine, and Singh Is Kinng, a romantic comedy (forget it!) from director Anees Bazmee.
The Masters program will show Paul Schrader‘s Adam Resurrected, about a charismatic patient in a mental institution for Holocaust survivors with Jeff Goldblum and Willem Dafoe. (Does anyone expect Schrader to even hit a strong double these days? I wish it weren’t true, but with each succeeding effort the Schrader balloon seems to leak more and more air.) The festival will also preem Werner Schroeter‘s Nuit de chien.
What fresh insights, I’m asking myself, can possibly come from Adria Petty‘s Paris, Not France, an “examination of the Paris Hilton phenomenon” that’s “modeled after 1960s pic Darling“? Does the latter statement mean it was shot in black and white? Or that it reveals the presence in Hilton’s life of an older British lover who resembles Dirk Bogarde?
Bulked-up Vincent Cassel in Jean Francois Richet’s Public Enemy No. 1
Special Presentations includes the work-in-progress omnibus New York, I Love You, composed of 12 shorts directed by Brett Ratner, Allen Hughes, Shekhar Kapur, Joshua Marston, Mira Nair, Fatih Akin, Scarlett Johansson, Ivan Attal, Natalie Portman, Shunji Iawi, Jiang Wen and Andrei Zvyagintsev.
25 titles were added to the Contemporary World cinema lineup, including Nigel Cole‘s$5 a Day with Christopher Walken, John Stockwell‘s Middle of Nowhere with Susan Sarandon and Anton Yelchin; Ole Christian Madsen‘s Flame & Citron (a sort-of Dogma movie, apparently) and Olivier Assayas‘ L’Heure d’ete.
Be an American Caroler — sign up, take the pledge, support your country.
Jerry and David Zucker have a rep for borrowing material from old films to make new ones. So it should come as no surprise that David’s forthcoming An American Carol, the conservative fantasia opening on 10.3, is, according to a certain guy in the loop, based on a 69 year-old Porky Pig cartoon called Old Glory.
Carol uses the same basic idea as Old Glory — i.e., a character deemed insufficiently patriotic changes his tune after being “turned” by some ghosts from American history. In Zucker’s film it’s an unpatriotic documentarian based on Michael Moore who needs to be aroused; in the 1939 cartoon it’s a chubby pink (pinko?) pig who can’t be bothered to memorize the pledge of allegiance.
As summarized more than once on this site, An American Carol is about a fatty named Michael Malone (Kevin Farley) undergoing a political change-of-heart after being visited by patriotic ghosts in the form of George S. Patton (Kelsey Grammer), George Washington (Jon Voight) and John F. Kennedy (Chriss Anglin), and coming to see the correctness of right-wing thinking.
In Old Glory, Porky Pig is visited in his sleep by Uncle Sam, who explains why the tiny little animal should respect the U.S. enough to learn the pledge. Sam provides a quick inspirational run-through of U.S. history (Nathan Hale, the Declaration of Independence, pioneers on the trail, Abraham Lincoln), which, sure enough, wakes Porky up in more ways than one.
David Zucker has previously helped create two projects that cribbed from older films so ripping off Old Glory (along with Charles Dickens‘ A Christmas Carol) wouldn’t be out of character. Airplane! (’80), which the Zuckers co-directed and co-wrote with Jim Abrahams, used the plot of Zero Hour (1957). And Brain Donors! (’92), which Jerry and David exec-produced, was “suggested” by the George S. Kaufman-Maury Riskind screenplay for A Night at the Opera.
Reason.com‘s David Weigel saw a trailer for and some clips from David Zucker‘s An American Carol, a right-wing satirical fantasy in which a Michael Moore-like documentarian, called Michael Malone (Kevin Farley), undergoes a catharsis not unlike Ebenezer Scrooge’s in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, except Malone comes to see the light of reactionary conservatism.
In one of the clips, Weigel writes, “George Washington (Jon VoIght) takes Malone to St. Paul’s Cathedral to lecture him on freedom of religion and ‘freedom of speech, which you abuse.’ Malone is grossed out by dust in the priest’s box, so the doors open onto the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center. ‘This is the dust of 3000 innocent human beings!’ bellows Washington. Malone whimpers that he’s just making movies. Washington won’t have it. ‘Is that what you plan to say on Judgment Day?'”
Last week I decided against linking to Jeffrey Ressner‘s 7.23 Politico story about David Zucker‘s An American Carol because the basic plot — a documentarian named Michael Malone [read: Moore] finally sees the conservative light in the way Ebenezer Scrooge got beyond being a selfish miser — sounded sickening to me. Three or four graphs into Ressner’s story and I was muttering, “I don’t know want to know about this…I’ve read enough.”
Jon Voight as George Washington and Kelsey Grammer as Gen. George S. Patton in An American Carol
But people here and there started writing about Zucker’s film anyway, the latest being CHUD’s Devin Faraci. He was so struck by one of Ressner’s graphs that he ran it twice. “In a climactic scene, Malone finds political clarity at the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center,” it reads, “while the admonishing ghost of George Washington (played by Jon Voight) hovers nearby.”
This evening a reliable source passed along this verbatim quote from a friend who’s seen An American Carol: “This thing goes beyond heavy handed. It reminds one of the sensation of watching Burn, Holllywood Burn. It tries to be outrageous but just comes off as a paean from a Republican who wants to continue getting tax breaks. I rank it right out there with Skidoo and Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness as far as the WTF nature of it all. The laugh quotient is right up there with The Love Guru and confirms that David Zucker was always the Fredo of the ZAZ comedy mafia.”
Vivendi Entertainment will release An American Carol on 10.3. Keep in mind that the major distributors all saw it and passed, even the Weinsteins.
David Zucker
After months of shadowing, it would appear that those tenacious big-game hunters from Lantana, Florida, finally cornered their prized North Carolinian leopard in the Beverly Hills hotel this morning and threw a net over him. Or so it would seem. This is the scenario that some (like Slate‘s Mickey Kaus, having heard the stories) predicted would happen sooner or later. The running-up-and-down-the-stairs and into-the-cellar part sounds so humiliating. We live in a diseased and predatory culture.
It was reported earlier today that Bill Clinton has told confidantes that in order to get his full support in the presidential campaign Barack Obama will have to apologize, beg and grovel like nobody’s business. Clinton was quoted as saying, in fact, that Obama will have to “kiss my ass” in order to make things right.
Bill Clinton, George McGovern
Clinton apparently resents having been tarnished by the Obama campaign for having played the race card, which of course Clinton absolutely did when he compared Obama’s win in the South Carolina primary to Jesse Jackson’s two previous wins there in the ’80s. Coupled with Hillary’s statement that Obama is not a Muslim “as far as I know” and her “psst…Obama is black!” implications in speeches to and comments about “white” Appalachian-belt voters, it’s almost surreal that her husband is angry about all this, but the truly arrogant have never recognized boundaries.
The last time “kiss my ass” was attributed to an ex- or would-be White House resident in a presidential campaign was, according to this Time report and this Wikipedia page, on the final day of the 1972 campaign when Democratic candidate George McGovern euphemistically told a pro-Nixon heckler in Battle Creek, Michigan, to plant his puckered lips on McGovern’s rump. The astonished heckler, a chubby kid with glasses, reportedly told a reporter that McGovern had “said a profanity!”
Time columnist Joe Klein has told the Telegraph that he’s been told the ex-president is “very, very bitter” about the campaign. “It’s time for him to get over it or go off and do his charitable work,” Klein is quoted as saying. “[Clinton] knows the rules of the road. What’s going on now is kind of strange. I think his behavior is really, really shocking.”
David O. Russell‘s Nailed, which has had its filming schedule halted at least twice due to money problems on the part of its financier, “will resume filming Wednesday thanks to a late-breaking financing deal” between the notoriously shaky Capitol Films and Comerica Bank,” according to Hollywood Reporter guys Gregg Goldstein and Leslie Simmons.
“Key cast members, including Jake Gyllenhaal, Jessica Biel and Catherine Keener, were en route to the South Carolina set Tuesday to begin shooting the next day. But the ultimate future of the film from the economically troubled Capitol remains uncertain.
“Sources say the Comerica financing, secured Monday, will help the film meet its projected $25 million budget and additional costs from a week of missed shooting days and union penalties. But some of the filmmakers aren’t sure if the funds will last through postproduction.”
North Carolina-based film archivist and HE loyalist Joe Corey tells me that he’s confirmed the validity of an e-mail, posted today by Home Theatre Forum subscriber Stephen Bowie, that “was apparently sent out in an e-mail to theaters with upcoming Universal repertory bookings, and appears to contradict what Uni [has been] telling the press,” to wit:
“It is with great sadness that I must inform you that yesterday’s [Universal Studios] fire destroyed nearly 100% of the archive prints kept here on the lot.
“Due to this we will be unable to honor any film bookings of prints that were set to ship from here. Over the next few weeks and months we will be able to try and piece together what material we do have and if any prints exist elsewhere. For the time being please check your rental confirmations and look under shipping instructions. If the print was set to ship from the studio then you date is now canceled. If the shipping instructions say ‘ship from Deluxe’ then those dates are still good.”
I haven’t heard anything definitive, but apparently this is a burned-print situation — not negatives. The archival material was at Deluxe. What was destroyed, apparently, were prints that were skedded to sent to repertory showings.
“If things continue to go as well for Barack Obama this week as they have so far this month, with a romp in North Carolina, a strong showing in Indiana and daily growth in his support among party superdelegates, he could actually end up with enough pledged delegates to proclaim, without fear of contradiction, that he is now the Democratic nominee for president.” — from Larry Rohter‘s 5.18 N.Y. Times story.
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