After ingratiating the Right with his last film “World Trade Center,” even going so far as hiring the Swift Boaters to promote it, Oliver Stone now has proposed a couple of new projects that look like he’s trying to fuck with them. Or maybe he’s stilll fucking with the left, who have already been feeling somewhat betrayed by his political inconsistency. Or just fucking with us all.

Certainly his proposed film “Pinkville,” his re-enactment of the My Lai masacre, isn’t going delight his former Republican benefactors, not after President Bush informed us that Vietnam IS like Iraq, and that’s a good thing  So a reminder of an atrocity in which 400 plus unarmed civilans including women and children were systematically executed by GIs isn’t going to help the cause. Not when two new films about Iraq suggest that when an immoral govern puts decent American soldiers into a brutal and confused war environment for repeated tours of duty with no goal and sight and tacit authority to use whatever means make sense at the time, stuff happens. After seeing Paul Haggis’s “In the Valley of Elah” yesterday, though, all I can say is the “Crash” master’s graceless manipulative hand remains the same and he should score political points with the already converted and earn Oscar nominations from the aesthetically clueless. Brian De Palma’s “Redacted,” on the other hand, which wowed them at the Venice Festival, is a different story. Based on a 2006  incident in which U.S. soldiers were accused of raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and then killing her and her family, it looks it might have some of the intensity of his Vietnam War-set “Casualties of War" (1989), one of his best and clearest-headed films.

Back to Stone, however, whose second project might prove even more irritating to some than the first. After his initial offer to make a documentary about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were rebuffed with him being denounced as part of the “great Satan” and Stone retorting “I wish the Iranian people well, and hope their experience with an inept, rigid ideologue president goes better than ours,” cooler heads apparently have prevailed and the movie buff Iranian spitfire has given the green light. All I can say is that they better get a move on if they want to start shooting before the bombing starts, or maybe that’s the kind of scenario Stone is hoping for.

All in all, though, I must admit I’ve been disillusioned with the effectiveness of movies making any difference in the overall scheme of things -- that is until I read this item in “Variety.” It seems that an Israeli website called “Ratuv” (Hebrew for “wet”) has won a lot of fans in Arab countries, some hostile to Israeli, with its politically savvy porn flicks featuring soldiers and Mossud agents engaged in non-violent undercover and undressed activity. This is clearly taking the slogan “Make love not war” at its word. Personally, I feel vindicated, since the last time I checked out the Internet Searches log for this site it consisted almost entirely of headings like  "sexiest scene," "blow-job non pornographic,"Tim Allen  nude," "tom hanks urinating scene," "blow jobs," and "sexiest sex scene."

8/31/2007 1:20:44 PM by Peter | Comments [0] |  

After feeble attempts at possible literary sources and pretentious stabs at auteuristic allusions go nowhere, things pick up when the subject turns to dead Polish directors, what it means when you’re tongue turns black, and Freedom Fries. Let’s listen in.

PK: Have you read “Swann in Love?” Because this seems to be a really intense portrait of someone who’s morbidly jealous.

JD: I’ve never read that. The Proust? No I’ve never read that. It sounds horrible for a French person but, like, I like a lot of French writers and Proust is the one I am…there’s a few writers like this who I read and it doesn’t really work for me. I mean maybe I need a more mature…

PK: And you’re reading it in  the original French, too, right?

JD: Yeah, I’m reading it in French, of course. Yeah. No it’s odd. I haven’t been able to read Proust. You know.

PK: You have a lot of allusions to other great movies.  You start with an allusion saying that yours is “Voyage to Italy” with a happy ending. Is that how you would describe the film still?

JD: What?

PK: “Voyage to Italy.”

JD: It’s one of my favorite films. I always love that film about a couple fighting and then they reunite in a religious, almost a miracle moment. I’ve always loved that film. My film couldn’t be more different. Obviously I’m not Rossellini. But I love that film and I wanted to make a reference to it for the very few people that will, you know, get it. At the end when they’re all walking in the crowd and separate and stuff I like it because the film changes tone a little bit and I needed that moment. I kind of always like when people are sad surrounded by happy people. Having fun everywhere and they’re miserable.

PK: You don’t seem to be a sad person yourself, though.

JD: Me sad? I’ve had my times when I was pretty depressed like everyone else. But I fight back. I’m the kind of person that…I don’t get depressed,I get angry.

PK: Are you angry about the fact that you started writing screenplays when you were seventeen and twenty years pass before you can get your first movie made because you were a woman?

JD: My anger is quickly transformed into creative energy. Instead of getting angry and bitter I kept writing more and more and more. Basically that’s my only way of dealing with things. And so instead of having anger that’s destructive it turns quickly into an energy thing. Obviously it’s been very difficult but it’s still going to be very difficult. It’s never going to be easy for me. I know that. And people will try and stop me for making my films and people will be offended by this film I guarantee you. It’s not a safe movie. Some people will be utterly offended by it. Don’t you think?

PK: Well, it’s very earthy. It could offend people on both sides of the political spectrum I could see that.

JD: Definitely. It’s not a safe movie. It’s not a cute movie. I’m actually surprised that the overall response is positive. Because I was thinking of being more attacked and the fact that I did the editing I was expecting a lot more attacks. I’m actually surprised. I’m actually happy to be surprised.

PK: You’ve had experience with some of the top directors of the past twenty years. Krzysztof Kieslowski, Leos Carax, Richard Linklater. Have you learned something from all of these directors?

JD: I’ve learned from all of them. Kieslowski was very supportive when I decided to go to film school in New York. I spent about a year meeting him quite regularly talking about writing screenplays and movie-making and all that and how to make your films your own and no one else’s. Which is funny because everyone’s comparing my film to Woody Allen’s. But I really didn’t mean to. I just am unfortunately neurotic and I think it transpires throughout the film and comes out that way. I love Woody Allen; it’s not a bad compliment, but I know it’s going to backlash on me eventually.

PK: Well, Kieslowski is the Woody Allen of Polish filmmakers.

JD: (laughs). Which is a very different sense of humor

PK: I thought that the “small world” that little philosophical tthat kept popping up was sort of similar to the world of Kieslowski movies.

JD: Yeah, about coincidences. Because Kieslowski is always full of coincidence. Obviously my film is so different but I can guarantee you he would like that film. I can guarantee you. I knew him so well I can guarantee you he would crack up because he had a really really funny sense of humor. And he was not a prude at all. I knew him so well and his sense of humor and he was a very funny man.

PK: Were you shocked when he died suddenly?

JD: I was horrified. Plus, how I found out about it was really awful. I was in Canada and this Italian journalist called me at six in the morning and I picked up the phone and he wanted some raw reaction. He was like “What do you think about Kieslowski’s death?”And I had just spoken to Kieslowski a few weeks before so it was horrible. It was very sad. I was really really sad that he died.

PK: It was a terrible loss for cinema.

JD: Yeah and plus it could have been have been avoided if he had gone to a good hospital.

PK: Do you think there was a little bit of a death wish involved there?

JD: There are two types of people with big egos and he had a big ego like a lot of creative people without being an egomaniac. He had a huge ego. And the problem is that there are two kinds. There is the kind who feels invincible and there’s the kind that feels that everyone is after them. He was the kind that thought he was invincible and could smoke five packs a day and have high blood pressure and put like crusts of salt on his meat you know what I mean and drink vodka almost every meal and I mean, five packs a day!

PK: So what’s the problem? You quit recently didn’t you?

JD: Yeah, yeah, I quit.

PK: You quit drinking too?

JD: Yeah I never touch a drop of alcohol. I realize it slows me down too much in the morning. I just can’t do that. It makes my body sick. My tongue turns black so I realize I might be slightly allergic to it.

PK: That’s a bad sign

JD: Yeah, usually when your tongue turns bluish black that’s a bad sign. (laughs)

PK: So you’ve got two movies coming out now. “The Countess” is one.

JD: “The Countess.” But also I wanted to say that Richard Linklater, not in the directing so much but the fact that he let me write so much of “Before Sunset” and a lot of “Before Sunrise” as well, made me realize that I could write because I had written before but always been rejected. The fact that my writing was validated in “Before Sunset” and stuff.

PK: Well it got an Oscar nomination

JD: Yeah. Yeah it kind of made me realize the possibilities. Even though my writing in this one is very different and very harsh and all that. I so didn’t want to do the same film. I didn’t think that would be very smart. I didn’t make a romantic film this time you know. I took the other side of me. “The Countess” is a film I wrote and I’m going to be directing and starring in.

PK: I heard you’ll be bathing in blood.

JD: I’ll be bathing in blood. The film is about vanity and cruelty. Then there is “World Wars and Other Fun Stuff to Watch on the Evening News,” which will not please politically some people also. If I get to make it, because I doubt I will ever get the money for that film. Well, no, actually that’s not true. I have two companies interested already.

PK: It’s a satire, right?

JD: It’s a satire. But it’s really kind of goofy so I can’t imagine anyone being offended by it. I mean anyone in their right mind apart from the people that still call French fries Freedom Fries will get offended by it but I don’t  know who are those people still calling french friends Freedom Fries

PK: Did you ever call them Freedom Fries?

JD: I still call them Freedom Fries, actually.

8/24/2007 6:31:42 PM by Peter | Comments [1] |  

 

She’s been writing film scripts for 20 years, and I’m sure every one of them is better that that for “The Invasion” or  “The Nanny Diaries”  or 90% of the other movies made these days. She’s made films with some of the world’s best directors -- Jean-Luc Godard, Leos Carax, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Richard Linklater. She’s got a degree from NYU’s film school and has a dirty mind. So it’s hard to believe that in order to make her first feature “2 Days in Paris”  Julie Delpy had to write, direct, edit, compose a soundtrack, tape cables, reduce her co-producer to penury and  and put her ex-boyfriend, her parents and her cat in the cast. Is it because she’s French? Because she’s a woman? Here’s her side of the story, the first part of the transcript of the interview you can also find in “Backtalk” in the next issue of the Phoenix.

 

PK: So how’s it going with the film? I’ve been looking at the reviews. They all seem pretty positive.

JD: Yeah yeah overall very positive. So I’m happy. Some people think you know… I’m just laughing at some reviews that say “Why did she do everything?” I almost want to send them little emails and say “Hey, if I didn’t do the editing there would be no movie” because we had zero money to have an editor on the film. Basically it was either the editing bay or the editor

PK: Did you do costumes too? Because I know you like to design clothes.

JD: No I didn’t do costumes. But I had to do a lot of the post production alone because there was no money to finish the film. So I had to edit, put the editing bay in my house and do it like that. I had no choice.

PK: That’s quite an accomplishment.

JD: Oh thank you.

PK: So what do you say to people like Anthony Lane who say it’s not a vanity project; it’s an insanity project. I’m not even sure what that means.

JD: No but you know what?  I read the article. It’s positive! On Rotten Tomatoes they put it as rotten but it’s actually- I take it as a compliment. It’s almost like they just read the first paragraph. I take it as a positive review that it’s insane. I mean obviously the film’s insane. It’s supposed to be.

PK: Are you insane?

JD: I’m far from that. I can tell you that because to produce and finish a film you have to be pretty together. But actually they say in the article that it’s the opposite that my mind is less insane than anything else. I wanted the film to be this wild very free movie in the limitation of the budget I had.

PK: What was the budget?

JD: Truly in cash altogether we spent—I say five hundred but it was probably more like four hundred

PK: Five hundred dollars? I could afford that

JD: (laughs) No four hundred thousand. That’s not very much

PK: Yeah that’s very cheap. That’s like the cost of a commercial for any other movie coming out this summer.

JD: Yeah it was a very small budget which means that we had no budget for a lot of things in post-production. Like editing, like we had no budget for music of course. For example like I had to sing on the ending song because it was a deal I made with the music company that if I sang on the ending song they would pay for the songs in the film.

PK: Do you have any product placement in the film?

JD: Well we had to yeah. We have one because the other ones wouldn’t give us money. Now they want the product placement but we took them all out because when we were editing the film it didn’t seem like it was going to be released anywhere because we were so broke. It was all those things that we had filmed and edited into the film like [inaudible] and all that shit. Like water, drink companies, mustard, this and that. And then they say we’re not interested. So it was kind of a pleasure removing all those shots.

PK: That can be on the DVD right?

JD: Yeah. It’s quite hilarious, actually.

PK: The Product Placement Cut

JD: Yeah they were cut because they wouldn’t give us money. And then they were so mad when they found out finally when the film came out in France and was doing really well that we had cut them out. I was, like, yeah, but product placement, you need to give us money. If you had given us money we could have hired an editor and a composer.

PK: Who was it that coughed up the money?

JD: I think we lost all our product placement money actually. We never got it because they thought it was not going to go anywhere. So we lost everything. There’s still one left in the film but they didn’t give us money but we couldn’t cut it out. But it’s okay because you don’t even notice it that much.

PK: Are you tired of being compared to Woody Allen?

JD: You know it’s not a bad comparison but I have to say I know it’s going to backlash on me. Because I know a lot of people are fans of Woody Allen and me first and I feel it’s not fair. And plus they compare it to “Annie Hall.” You know I saw “Annie Hall” like ten years ago. When they mention Jack Roberts or whatever it is…Jake Roberts or something which I guess is the brother of Annie Hall in the film--

PK: Tony Roberts?

JD: I don’t even know the name. It’s crazy because I don’t even know who it is. Now I know because people have explained it to me. I haven’t seen the film in ten years. I don’t even remember a voice-over in the film so it should tell you how little I tried to imitate Woody Allen or even thought of Woody Allen. The Woody Allen films I watch regularly are like “Bananas” and “Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex” and “Love And Death.”

PK: The funny Woody Allen.

JD: Yeah the crazy kind of goofy ones.

PK: Did you meet him? You were both in the cast of [Godard’s] “King Lear.” Is that correct?

JD: Yeah we never met. Godard was shooting in New York with him and we were shooting in Switzerland so we never actually met.

PK: Is your cat named Jean Luc because he bears a resemblance to the director?

JD:  No but I always thought it was funny and I could imagine she would call her cat Jean Luc because she likes Godard films. That’s like very intellectual (laughs), but in a funny way.

PK: The cat is terrific. I haven’t seen anybody else comment on the cat really. He doesn’t have a lot to work with, though.

JD: He’s terrific.

PK: You still have the cat. Max, right?

JD: Yeah. He’s on the bed right now.

PK: He looks like my cat actually. A tuxedo cat

JD: Yeah a tuxedo cat. I love those cats. They’re so cute

PK: In working with an ex boyfriend… that seems to be a bit of a tense situation.

JD: Tense. No no it’s a little funny at times like the male side of the actor can come up and be like “Hey you’re telling me to do this and that?”. Adam in a way just showed up twelve hours before we started shooting and in a way it might have been a blessing because he was so exhausted he just did what I said. The only danger that could be is that when you’ve been with someone they start to act like an ex-boyfriend. We didn’t really have time for that stuff. We were shooting so fast that we didn’t have time to do that stuff. I mean, he’s Adam. I knew what to expect when he showed up in Paris. I knew there are certain things to handle which the French crew couldn’t believe. Like I could put up with that shit. But for me it’s like a certain kind of behavior you know of, like certain actors in Hollywood and stuff that are used to being extremely pampered and suddenly they come to a French set and it’s not at all the same. But it wasn’t more than I expected. Just the regular stuff.

PK: So, he’s a little spoiled you’re saying?

JD: No, just the usual pampered thing. Which is no more…He wanted a personal assistant so we got him one. It’s funny because Ethan [Hawke] on “Before Sunset” didn’t get one you know and he was there for as long and didn’t know Paris more than Adam. But you know that’s the way he is. I knew he was going to be like that but what I cared about was his performance and that’s all I care about in the end. The producer had to deal with his other issues.

PK: So you’re not the producer that deals with the other issues?

JD: No. I told the producer I was like “You deal with that stuff”. He wasn’t so bad. Like for example we had one trailer for everybody and we had no choice. We had no money. The trailer, basically the producer had to pay for it with his own pocket. And like his children don’t have clothes for school this year.

PK: That’s terrible

JD:His wife was crying every day. It was really hard. I sold everything I owned apart from my house because if I sold my house I’d kill myself. It was like to finish the film I had to do everything you know. I don’t have much money. I’ve been working on two films in the last four years and I’ve made 60 thousand dollars.

PK: Well isn’t this one going to make a little bit of money for you? It already has done well in France.

JD: Yeah I hope so. You never know. Everyone takes his share. So far I haven’t seen a dime.

PK: That’s terrible.

JD: No no it’s okay. I will eventually see something. I think so. Eventually with the DVD sale that should come eventually

PK: I think Adam Goldberg should be happy because he gets some of the best lines in the movie. Was any of that improvised?

JD: There are a few of the lines that are improvised yeah. But are they the best ones? I don’t know. Like which one do you really like?

PK: There are a lot of them under his breath. Like when he’s talking about the tourists waiting at the taxi. Like in the beginning he sort of like takes over with these asides and these  sotto voce kind of comments.

JD: For example that scene is entirely written. I mean there’s a bunch of things that seem very improvised. But Adam is a very good actor. He can take a line and make it its own which is pretty amazing. That’s what you dream for in an actor.

NEXT: Why Delpy doesn’t read Proust, how she found out Kieslowski was dead, and bathing in blood.

 

8/21/2007 2:37:03 PM by Peter | Comments [0] |  

Two films being released in the next two weeks deal with terrorist -- some really alien -- germ warfare attacks resulting in apocalyptic pandemics. What can it mean? Maybe it’s time to break out the duct tape.

One of those films, “Right at Your Door,” opens August 24 and I’ll have a review of that film in that issue. The other, “The Invasion,” opens this Friday, but did not screen in time for our deadline. What can that mean? I think you know, but just in case you don’t, here’s a transcription of the review I wrote for broadcast on WFNX.

[
THE INVASION [one and a half stars]

Like the alien pods at the heart of the story, adaptations of Jack Finney’s 1955 horror classic “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers” take on the form of the paranoias and indulgences of the age. For Don Siegel’s 1956 version, it was the Red Scare. For Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake, it was the bland New Age hedonism and conformity. Abel Ferrara’s 1993 “Body Snatchers” drew on militarism and domestic violence. This latest incarnation also has a lot of anxiety to work with. It opens with an exploding space shuttle (is that actual footage of the Columbia disaster?) that spreads an alien virus from DC to Dallas. The government sets up an inoculation program, but are they curing or causing the disease? People are turning into robotic, Mitt Romney lookalikes, including psychiatrist Dr. Carol Bennell’s (Nicole Kidman) ex, who not only heads the agency compelling people to get shots but  also wants to grab their kid. So, let’s see, there’s fear of terrorism, of government oppression, of alien conspiracies, of menacing, estranged husbands, of scientologists. In fact, though, the main trend “Invasion”  taps into is ersatz blockbuster movie making. Originally directed by German filmmaker Hirschbiegel, taken over by the Wachowski Brothers when studio honchos found the result too arty, it’s riddled with blatant plot cues and gaping narrative holes, absurd jump cuts and gratuitous, unintentionally hilarious action sequences. “The Invasion” may look like a movie, but it’s just another soulless copy.

8/16/2007 5:52:19 PM by Peter | Comments [0] |  

Perhaps in tribute to the late Michaelangelo Antoinioni and the immortal Purple Paper Scene in “Blow-Up,” IFC has recently released a list of the 50 sexiest scenes in cinema. Oddly, the Purple Paper Scene is not among them. Maybe they felt it was such an obvious choice it didn’t need to be mentioned. On the other hand, the list also omits other films that I feel deserve consideration. So at the risk of further exposing my own personal crotchets of taste and inclination, here’s a quick supplement of five more of film’s sexiest scenes.

1. Ingrid Bergman as Sister Mary Benedict in the sporting goods store in “The Bells of Saint Mary’s” (1945)

It doesn’t take a Freud to figure out what’s going in this scene as Bergman’s saucy nun wraps her black-silk gloved hands around the white ash shaft of a Louisville Slugger, her wimpled angelic beauty intent on her swing, as she teaches her pre-pubescent charge how to knock it out of the park

2. The Rubber Stamp Scene in Closely Watched Trains (1967)

Not to take the fetishism too far, but Jiri Menzel really summarized the connection between bureaucratic repression and kinky sex in this scene in which the foxy train dispatcher chases a nubile secretary around the office, gently coaxes her to lie on a desk, removes her bloomers and, with exquisite care, repeatedly authorizes her bottom with the station’s official rubber stamp.

3. The four way Sex Machine in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Sauve qui peut (la vie)” (1980) 

Though it embodies in one brilliant sequence everything that’s gone wrong with sex, power and money over the past two thousand years, it’s impossible not to laugh hysterically and maybe even get turned on as hardboiled prostitute Isabelle Huppert and a rookie whore she’s  breaking in visit a client, a respectable businessman named M. Person. Much like a movie director, he assigns the two prostitutes, his assistant and himself various positions, sex acts and vocalizations (“Hey!” “Ho!” “Ha!”) in a rumba line of depravity.

4. Bloody Bonet in “Angel Heart” (1987)

A sexiest scene should have an edge of transgression, and this tryst in Alan Parker’s unnerving  thriller has more than its share. Cosby kid Lisa Bonet scandalized her TV dad by taking on a rain of blood, Mickey Rourke and a rooster in one of the most morbidly erotic love scenes in cinema. And it’s all just setting up an outrageous, perverse and satisfying twist ending.

5. Take tea and see in “Zoolander” (2001)

As orgies go, only the magic tea sequence in Ben Stiller’s underrated and indefatigueable comedy come close to that in Godard’s  “Sauve qui peut (la vie).”  The screen wobbles in “Performance”-like psychedelic jump cuts, and if the ululating of Hansel’s Sherpa guide doesn’t crack you up, then the Maori spirit guide or the Finnish dwarf will. I wish I could have seen it before it was edited for a PG-13 rating.

8/15/2007 7:10:45 PM by Peter | Comments [0] |  

Some accuse me of reading too much politics into popular movies. I plead guilty, but I’m not alone. Take conservative critic John Podheretz’s recent appreciation of the life and career of Ingmar Bergman in the July 31 “New York Post.”

“Bergman used motion pictures to explore grand and grandiloquent themes - the fear of death, the horrors of old age, the mysteries of womanhood, the disasters of marriage, the trauma of living without God.”

Holy shit, that almost sounds like real life. If we start making movies about that, the next thing you know it might start popping up on the news and in White House Press Conferences.

 “Happiness, contentment, even momentary good feeling are all but absent from a Bergman movie, which is a portrait of a traumatized species.”

Yeah, that “Magic Flute” is a real bummer. Mozart, lighten up! Actually, isn’t all of classical music a drag, too? And Shakespeare, Greek tragedy. Art, when you come down to it, is like one long whine.

What we want is entertainment, and the lower the common denominator the better. Anyone looking for anything else is a masochist. Some, like the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, in fact, are so masochistic that they don’t like Bergman because he’s TOO entertaining. But that’s another issue.

“They didn't admire the medium,” continues Podheretz’s description of the movie-haters.  “They were offended by its unseriousness, by its capacity to entertain without offering anything elevating at the same time.” It comes as no surprise that the writer’s favorite movies are “Cinderella Man,” “Road House” and “Phantom Menace.” And as for those who admire such freakish anomalies as “Vertigo” (“silly”), “The Searchers” (“turgid, wooden, boring, weird”) or “2001” (“a crashing bore”) as well as the works of the late Swedish pretender: thy are "embarrassed by the movies.”

How so 1960s! Don’t they know that the delusion that movies can be BOTH entertaining and intelligent died out at least 25 years ago?

“[Bergman]  stopped making motion pictures in 1982, though he wrote and directed several small films for television. And the truth is, he quit just in time. His day had passed.”

Yes, his day had passed. It was morning in America. Reagan was in the White House. Greed was good. Americans had become willingly blind to whatever might disturb their materialism, entitlement, hedonism and false piety. And movies had gotten over their airs of artiness and recognized their role as providing mindless stimulation to the bored, empty and stunted. They became at last what they always were, a billion dollar industry grinding out tawdry fantasies acting out the basest desires and anxieties of the hordes that went to see them.

This is a good thing, unless the fantasy starts to tresspass on someone’s ideological, or “faith-based” interpretation of the real world. Hence Bill O’Reilly’s recent umbrage at the commercial and — most suspiciously! — critical success of “The Bourne Ultimatum:”

“I knew this movie was trouble when I read the reviews,” he writes in his column “The Bourne Boffoonery.”  “Almost all the critics liked it. The only way American movie critics would like a violent car chase film like this was if it bashed the USA, which, of course, it does.”

My first response to this: Bill O’Reilly reads reviews? Maybe my profession isn’t as moribund as I thought, movie haters and American haters though we are. And since only Stephen Hunter didn’t like the film, O'Reilly's conspiracy theory is probably onto something.

And what do you know, it turns out that Bill’s suspicions prove correct (as usual!). And why does the movie bash the USA? Because the actors and filmmakers are “far left.” Like that Commie Matt Damon:

“ The actor also told the Idaho Statesman that the CIA's use of waterboarding is an erosion of our American values. Guess what? There's a waterboarding scene in the flick. What a coincidence!”

Waterboarding an erosion of values? The next thing you know he’ll be saying there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And its “coincidental” inclusion in the movie -- doesn’t that prove that liberals' claims that US interrogators use torture are as farfetched as a Hollywood fantasy?

And did I tell you that the director is not just an American hater, he’s not even an American? And get a load of this:

“The director of the movie, Paul Greengrass, told the Times of London that he purposely tapped into the mistrust the world has of the USA. In my opinion, Mr. Greengrass has used his skills as a filmmaker to create a slick propaganda package that will make him millions of dollars. And standing between Mr. Greengrass and real life terrorists who would slit his throat are, of course, real life American intelligence people.”

Sounds like Greengrass could use a little dose of waterboarding himself.

Sad to say, though, lots of Americans seem duped by this diabolical “movie” passing for entertainment. $70 million worth last weekend alone. These losers fall into two basic groups:

 “America-haters will love The Bourne Ultimatum and apolitical others may enjoy the action and carnage. The movie is a perfect storm of misguided ideology, silly plotting, and absurd conclusions. In other words, it's a blockbuster.”

  Don’t tell me it’s just a movie. It almost makes you nostalgic for the films of Ingmar Bergman

8/10/2007 7:08:31 PM by Peter | Comments [0] |  

What about ducks? Rats, walruses, pigs, dogs, killer whales, mice, bugs -- they all have their movies. Why not ducks? They’re cute, goofy, have nice beaks and webbed feet. They quack and walk funny. Why no movie?

What about Donald and Daffy? Mere sidekicks, and annoying to boot. “Duck Tales” in 1999? Scrooge McDuck is about as lovable and popular as John McCain. “Lord Love a Duck?” “Duck Soup?” “Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx?” The ducks are only in the titles, I’m afraid. And, of course, there is  “Howard the Duck,” the film that probably ruined it for all ducks to come.

Until now. As I noted in a posting last fall, certain TV commercials and the characters that appear in them exceed in inventiveness and entertainment value about 90 % of the stuff appearing on ther big screen. Among those I mentioned was the Aflac duck. I don’t want any credit for discovering a new star, but it seems I wasn’t the only one who noticed.

Nic Bettauer, whose previous credit is the black comedy “Zack and Reba,” was planning to adapt her novella, aptly named “Duck,”   in which “A man and a duck search for the means to live, and some meaning in life, in Los Angeles 2009.” In other words, a futuristic “Harry and Tonto” with President Jeb Bush and feathers. She cast Philip Baker Hall, renowned veteran character actor, as the man, Arthur. What fowl could hold the screen with Hall as Joe, the duck? None other than the heartwarming waddler who matches sputtering non-sequiturs with Yogi Berra in our favorite employment insurance commercial. Known to his friends in real life as Duck #30.

“Duck” is scheduled to open at the Embassy Cinema in Waltham on August 24.

 

8/3/2007 1:43:14 PM by Peter | Comments [1] |  

 

Congratulations to the Red Sox for obtaining Cy Young Award-winning ace reliever Eric Gagne. But are they sure it isn’t really  the riising goof-ball star, Seth Rogen? Either way, Sox fans hope their new acquisition doesn’t get knocked up.

8/1/2007 11:00:11 AM by Peter | Comments [0] |