AND THE WINNER IS…

It’s very easy to feel cynical and hardened in this world in which we live, but after you learn about someone like Prof. Randy Pausch of Carnegie Mellon University you realize how silly and misguided it is to do so. Pausch, a 47-year-old computer scientist and one of the world’s leading experts in the field of virtual reality, was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer in August 2007, and a month later gave a “Last Lecture” that attracted an audience of 500 people… and subsequently 3.8 mllion more online after it was posted on YouTube! I wasn’t aware of the story until today, when CNN broadcast a profile of Pausch along with the sad news that he had lost his long battle and died. My interest was piqued, and this evening I decided to check out his 1 hour, 16 minute talk. The thing that struck me most about it is that most of what Pausch had to say has been said before and more eloquently… but rarely with as much passion, or conviction, or decency, which—I believe—is why so many people have responded to it so strongly. I defy anyone who watches it from the beginning to not cry like a baby when you see what Pausch does at the 1 hour, 10 minute mark and/or when he reveals his “head-fakes” near the very end. But why, you ask, does a story like that merit a post on a blog like this? Because I think it illustrates, as well as anything, the power of the Internet—this wonderful, crazy, democratic medium that we all share, in one capacity or another—to bring people together for the cause of good. See for yourself…

Heath Ledger gives a haunting performance in The Dark Knight (Warner Bros., 7/18)

I was initially one of the big doubters, but having now seen The Dark Knight (Warner Brothers, 7/18, trailer) along with millions of other Americans last weekend, I am mostly convinced: when the 2009 Academy Award nominees are announced early on the morning of January 22, 2009, the late Heath Ledger will be among them; further, if his competition is what I think it will be, then he will have an excellent chance of riding a wave of admiration and sentimentality to only the second posthumous win in Oscars history, following Peter Finch for Network (1976).

At the present moment, it’s hard to imagine that there will be five actors who will give better performances and will also have more compelling personal narratives (which often fuel awards campaigns) than Heath. With regard to the former consideration, Heath Ledger has given us an indelible screen villain: a colorful, three-dimensional character with ticks and tricks who steals every scene in which he appears and is so effective that audience members must be vigilant, lest they find themselves rooting for the always-charismatic Clown Prince of Crime over the often-bland Caped Crusader. As for the latter consideration, Hollywood has witnessed—and, in some cases, helped to cause—many premature deaths over the years, but few have befallen a talent as young, attractive, and promising as Heath, who in just a few short years shot to the heights of the profession, and whose final work may be his finest of all.

But, as uncouth and politically-incorrect as it may feel to do so at this time, we should consider the other side of the equation, as well—the reasons why things might not work out for Heath’s last shot at Oscar. Here are three questions that I think will come into play:

1. Heath’s performance is great, but is it really the stuff Oscars are made of? Heath plays a callous killer… with relatively short screen time… in an action-thriller… with a summer release date. Usually, any one of those facts eliminates a performance from contention—not substantive enough… not meaty enough… not serious enough… too early in the year to be remembered, respectively. I’m not here to argue whether or not this is fair or right, but only that it is the reality of what Academy members tend to embrace when they privately fill out their ballots. Sure, there have been exceptions—Anthony Hopkins won an Oscar for playing ruthless serial killer Hannibal Lecter for just sixteen minutes in the psychological thriller The Silence of the Lambs, which was released in February—but they have historically been few and far between. Heath backers can take some comfort in the fact that Academy members’ attitudes and values may be changing, based on their recent celebration of several bad guys: Denzel Washington in Training Day (2001), Forest Whitaker in The Last King of Scotland (2005), and Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Blood and Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men (both 2007). Aside from that, though, there remains still another major glass ceiling blocking Heath’s way: no actor or actress has ever won an Oscar for a performance in a comic book adaptation—not from any version of Superman, Spider-Man, or any of the others—regardless of whether they were the hero or the villain; in fact, as best I can tell, the only one to ever earn so much as a nomination was nine-year-old Jackie Cooper for Skippy (1931) more than 75 years ago. All of this begs the question: had Heath lived, would we even be having this conversation?
2. Heath’s acting won him respect, but did his personality win him affection? The last time Heath gave a great performance, as Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback Mountain (2005), his peers from SAG and the Academy rewarded him with nominations for Best Actor. In both instances, he lost to Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote (2005), but there can be no denying that he won the respect of his peers, both at the time and forever after. (If you need proof, just listen to the off-the-cuff tribute paid to him at this year’s SAG Awards by the most respected working actor, Day-Lewis.) What is up for debate, though, is the degree to which that respect (which can be fleeting and impersonal) was or was not coupled with affection (which is usually enduring and very personal). The potential “problem,” I gather, is that Heath didn’t really care what people thought about him. He was an intensely shy, private, and guarded person who hated and, therefore, shunned the Hollywood social scene whenever possible. He wasn’t from the L.A. area and had little interest in being there; he preferred Brooklyn and, subsequently, SoHo, presumably because they offer a simpler, more anonymous way of life. Can he be faulted for not playing the game? Of course not. But could he have been a bigger star, with better roles, and more fans, and more industry friends/supporters if he had? Of course. My point is that nearly half a year from now, when his peers are asked to decide whether or not to include him among their five nominees, the difference-maker will be not the number of people who think he deserves a nod, but rather the number of people who want one for him enough to vote for him themselves. Are there enough of them out there who do? I’m not certain one way or the other, but I do know that it’s not nearly a sure-thing. I got the news of Heath’s death from my father, an average follower of today’s movies, who heard the breaking news on the radio and texted me: “KEITH LEDGER DIED.” That pretty much sums it up… in his lifetime, Heath allowed himself to become “big” enough to matter, but not big enough to be nearly as widely known or cared about as he could have been. Since his death, of course, he has been a ubiquitous presence in the news, and consequently is now regarded by the public as a far bigger star than he ever allowed himself to be in his lifetime. All of this leaves me rather suspicious: has the apparent widespread societal mourning of and outpouring of affection for Heath been real, or is it merely the latest creation of a media desperate to fill a few more news cycles until the next big story (see Chandra Levy before 9/11, Anna Nicole Smith before the 2008 primaries, etc.)? It must be real, you might say, based on the massive box-office success of The Dark Knight, but I think you might be making a false association: (1) Batman Begins (2005), the first installment, also was a huge blockbuster without Heath, and so increased profits on the second were always expected, which is also why the budget for the second was $30 million more than the first; and (2) for every person who paid to see The Dark Knight because they were a fan of Heath’s during his life, there were almost certainly more who did so because he provoked their curiosity in death… the impulse is not unlike that which spurred people to make the National Enquirer issue featuring an unauthorized photo of Elvis Presley in his open casket that magazine’s all-time best-seller, and which every day spurs drivers on highways to slow down and hold up traffic for miles in order to try to rubberneck a peak at a car accident… we just can’t turn away… we take a look… and then we move on and forget.
3. The most sensitive—but inevitable—question of all: Heath’s death was tragic… but who/what caused it? According to the New York City Medical Examiner, Heath died of an accidental drug overdose or, more specifically, “acute intoxication by the combined effects of oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam, and doxylamine.” The ME indicated that Heath did have prescriptions for each of these drugs, but declined to specify the amounts of them found in his system. The fact that he ruled the death an accidental drug overdose rather than a suicide would seem to indicate that the meds simply did not mix well… but the fact that quantities and details have been hush-hushed has—along with Heath’s deeply troubling comments and behavior shortly before his death—left many with reason to believe that Heath’s death was actually brought about by his own reckless behavior (brought about by addiction?) and the failure of those around him to intervene (despite obvious warning signs). I understand that it’s easy to be a Monday-morning quarterback and that it’s largely unfair to point fingers, which is why I’m not trying to indict anyone… I’m just publicly airing sentiments that have been shared with me because I suspect they are not uncommon, especially among older and more conservative people, who still compose a large segment of the Academy’s voting block, and who are least inclined to be feel sympathetic about a young actor’s drug-related death.

Until we know what Heath’s competition is, nobody can really know what his awards prospects look like, and so it will be interesting to see if/what other supporting performances stand out over the coming months. In the meantime, those interested in learning more about Ledger and his Oscar prospects can find a number of supplemental reading materials below:

• Christian Bale, Ledger’s friend and co-star in I’m Not There (2007) and The Dark Knight, rejects the notion that the role of The Joker drove Heath to such a dark place that it drove him to drugs and to his death. (I hope and believe he’s correct, because any actor who could be so adversely impacted by a role shouldn’t be an actor.)
• Michael Caine, Heath’s Oscar-winning co-star in The Dark Knight and an Academy member himself, predicts that the late actor will receive a posthumous Oscar nomination.
  
• The usually sedate Associated Press seems to enthusiastically agree, and solicits quotes from Heath’s The Dark Knight co-stars Christian Bale and Gary Oldman to support the theory.
• Industry observers Leonard Maltin and Tom O’Neil attempt to pour cold water on the idea, which Maltin calls “a wish-fulfillment rumor.”
• Critic Lou Lumenick calls Heath’s performance “astonishing and memorable,” but says his “gut feeling” is that it “isn’t going to pay off with a nomination in the end.”
• John Foote thinks Hath was great but doesn’t expect him to be nominated, and is pleased that he’s at least getting some well-earned attention.
  
• Terry Gilliam, who directed Heath’s one yet-to-be-released film, finds it necessary to ridicule the whole idea of a nomination, which he dismisses as a “publicity stunt.”
• Eric Kohn says voters should only nominate or award Heath if they feel his performance merits it, not because of any concerted effort to do unto him what was done unto James Dean, with whom he has often been compared.
  
• Ty Burr calls the box-office phenomenon a “cultural mass wake,” and doubts the movie or Heath would be celebrated nearly as much had Heath not died.
  
• Adam West, who starred in the 1960s TV series Batman as the eponymous character (but is best-known these days as the inspiration for and voice of Mayor Adam West on Family Guy), feels the whole franchise is getting too damn loud!
• And, finally, a May 2001 New Yorker article touches upon Columbia’s early efforts to turn Heath into a star with A Knight’s Tale (2001), only to see Miramax and Paramount reap the benefits on his next film, The Four Feathers (2002).

KA-POW!: Christian Bale, best known for playing Batman, apparently had a very dark night.

You really can’t make this stuff up: Christian Bale (The Dark Knight), the star of the Batman franchise that’s latest installment became the biggest box-office winner in history this past weekend, has been arrested in London after his 61-year-old mother and 40-year-old sister contacted authorities to report that he had assaulted them. Details are still emerging.

Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman at home in Australia (Fox, 11/14)

A Minneapolis-based film buff who accepted a free pass to an unidentified movie at the Mall of Americas ended up among a lucky few who got to see the first rough cut of the much-anticipated likely awards contender Australia (Fox, 11/14, trailer). He subsequently said to hell with the “6 paragraph legal bullshit” that he signed promising not to discuss what he saw and sent a full review to Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News, who has posted it on his site. Despite describing himself as someone who had hoped the blind screening would be Hancock, and thereby revealing himself to be exact opposite of Australia‘s target demographic, the snitch nevertheless writes that the film “was actually really cool… really special,” and goes on to offer a review so fawning and rich with detail that one might think it actually came not from a screening attendee but from a studio plant—except I know for a fact that virtually nobody at Fox and/or who will work on its awards campaign will see the film until next week.

Anyway, the highlights of what this guy has to say (with a few spelling corrections) follow:

• “For sure, the first words that will come out about this film are ‘old school’ or ‘they don’t make ‘em like this anymore’”
• “Cinematography is really amazing and every scene of the film looks like a painting. It’s truly beautiful to look at.”
  
• The score has not yet been laid over the film—in the interim, Max Steiner’s sweeping music from the similarly epic Gone with the Wind is being used.
• [Nicole] “Kidman is perfect for this part and she’s really great in it. It’s very easy to buy her as stuck-up and snooty at the start, but she does open up to us and makes you care about her and her struggle.” [SF: it's possible that I'll care about her struggle in the movie, but it's not possible for me to  feel sorry for her when she describes her Vogue photoshoot to promote the film as "the roughest thing I ever had to go through"]
  
• “As for Hugh Jackman, I only know him from being Wolverine but he has a real Clark Gable/Clint Eastwood vibe going on. He obviously has the physicality and physique to pull off this rugged Marlboro Man character, but it turns out it’s his emotion and charm that really get you. He feels like a real movie star-movie star in it.”
• “But the little kid playing the Aborigine boy is the one who steals the movie and actually gives a great performance, which is rare for a kid actor.”
• [A major plot development occurs and] “you think this is the happy ending of the movie (and after 2 hours it sure felt like the end), but you’d be wrong. Just as they are on the brink of living happily ever, [something happens that I will not spoil]… weird transition. I won’t give away the real ending but let’s just say it’s not something you’re necessarily prepared for. It’s incredilby emotional and everyone around me was crying.”

We’ll see soon enough how much of this hype is legit. Personally, I’m very optimistic: the film’s trailer is fantastic… the macro war story that serves as the backdrop for the micro love story is little known, but true and fascinating… the role of the female lead seems custom-made for Kidman, since both the actress and, apparently, the character initially come across as rather cold, but grow on you once you recognize that it’s just the product of her insecurities, a realization which, oddly enough, actually increases her appeal—this applies to almost all of her better roles, like those in To Die For (1995) and Dogville (2003)… and, if the role of the male lead is made of the stuff I think it is, then this may finally be the moment for which I have long been waiting: when serious-Hollywood (in other words, not just X-Men fans) realize what Broadway already has: that Hugh Jackman has the looks and talent to be the biggest star in the world.

Orson Welles as Harry Lime in the most famous shot of The Third Man (1949)

Last week, I invited my buddy Tony, a fellow fan of older movies, to come over and check out my newly-acquired Criterion Collection 2-Disc edition of The Third Man (1949), a marvelous classic produced by Alexander Korda and David O. Selznick, adapted from a Graham Greene story by Greene himself, directed by Carol Reed, and starring Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Trevor Howard, and Orson Welles (in the greatest cameo appearance of all-time), all at or very near the top of their games. The film has been claimed by both America (in 1998, the AFI named it the 57th greatest American movie of all-time) and England (in 1999, the BFI named it the #1 British movie of all-time), and in my humble opinion is right up at the top of the film noir genre alongside The Maltese Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), Laura (1944) and Sunset Blvd. (1950). Like my friend, I had seen the film twice before, but relished every moment of this third viewing because it allowed me to pay less attention to following the storyline and more attention to identifying the other things that make it so special…

First, though, for those not familiar with the general storyline: The film is set in post-World War II, rubble-strewn Vienna. Pulp novelist Holly Martins (Cotten) arrives in town greatly excited to visit his best friend, fellow American Harry Lime (Welles), who he has not seen since before the war. Lime’s neighbor informs Martins, to his shock and dismay, that Lime was crossing the street and struck by an automobile earlier in the day and that three men had carried him off the street before he succumbed to his injuries. Martins somberly attends his friend’s burial and plans to head home, but when other witnesses to Lime’s death offer conflicting reports of his last moments and deny the presence of a third man, Martins senses something is awry and extends his visit, questioning others who knew Lime—including his lover, Anna (Valli)—in an attempt to get to the truth of the matter. Interestingly, the plot construct is not dissimilar from that of the more famous Welles-Cotten collaboration, Citizen Kane (1941), only in that film the questions that follow a man’s death lead only to more questions, whereas in this film the questions lead to some very surprising answers.

What struck me most upon this viewing was the daring of Robert Krasker‘s cinematography, for which the film received its one and only Academy Award. Krasker worked on many other marvelous films over his illustrious career, including Brief Encounter (1945) and El Cid (1961), but never was he better than on this film, for which he created a visual embodiment of the story’s conflicts that has been matched by few others—perhaps only The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). There is hardly a moment in the film that doesn’t feature something visually interesting and important, from the canted frames that evoke Martins’ growing sense of confusion and doubt to the lighting of the sewer system that turned its greatest impediments (darkness, smoke, and shadows) into its greatest, most haunting assets. In someone else’s hands, Vienna’s cobblestone roads, drab government buildings, and bombed out neighborhoods might have appeared as boring as they sound, but Krasker’s camera makes the city exciting, exotic, dangerous, and above all authentic in a way that brings to mind the very best examples of foreign intrigue films, Algiers (1938) and Casablanca (1942)—granted, the worlds of those two films really were manufactured, as they were shot on their studios’ back lots and not on location, as was the case for the vast majority of The Third Man.

Beautiful visuals can only take a film so far, though, as anyone who has ever seen Heaven’s Gate (1980), the film in which Cotten made his final big screen appearance, can tell you. Words and music seem to have a more profound impact on most moviegoers, and The Third Man offers some of the best of both.

There are brilliant verbal contributions not only from Greene:

HARRY LIME (on Ferris Wheel looking down at people on Midway): “Victims? Don’t be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax—the only way you can save money nowaways.”

but also from Welles. He showed up to the set in Vienna two weeks late, refused to shoot scenes in the sewers (doubles were used, and the hands that come up through the sewer near the end belongnot to Welles but to director Reed, of all people), and was generally uncooperative, but nevertheless did suggest the film’s most famous soliloquy:

HARRY LIME: “In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democraccy and peace, and waht did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Also, of course, there is the haunting melody of Anton Karas‘ zither, which is played throughout the film and is as closely associated with it as any musical instrument is to any production. Karas was an Austrian musician who played at one of the film’s production parties, impressed Reed, and ultimately was brought to London to provide music for the entire film. It made him a world-famous celebrity (his nickname was “Mr. Cinderella”), but also terribly unhappy (“It is because of that film that I was pushed from one place to the other… my only desire was to be back home again”).

But, let’s face it, beautiful cinematography, brilliant dialogue, and well-chosen music do not alone make a beloved and enduring classic; for that to happen, movie stars are usually needed, and The Third Man offers us three, in particular—Cotten, Welles, and Valli—each made of very different stocks:

By the time Cotten was asked to play Holly Martins in 1949, he had already perfected the characterization of the cheerful but impotent and naive best friend/husband/brother in films like Citizen Kane (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Gaslight (1944), and Duel in the Sun (1946). Sure, he broke out of the mold once, playing a serial killer in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), but that was the exception, not the rule. Cotten was basically a decent-looking (not beautiful), amiable (not charming) guy who was never going to set a room abuzz, but knew how to act, and thus could be counted on to bring to life the visiting American who finds himself out of his element in deeper trouble than he realized. Some categorize The Third Man as film noir, but it is not a true noir because the central protagonist, Cotten’s Martins, is not himself sacrificed by the film’s end. This is because he is more of a surrogate for the audience—the majority of whom are quite bland themselves—observing carnage rather than facilitating it in any way, and experiencing dismay and sadness as he discovers the truth he hoped not to find. In that way, he is more like Spencer Tracy in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), a witness, than like, say, Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past (1947), a noir hero-victim.

Despite the order of the billing of credits or amount of screen time, the film’s true star is not the good guy, Cotten, but the bad guy, Welles. Ironically,Cary Grant was initially considered for the part of Harry —based on his personality and his earlier work in Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941), we know he was suave enough to remain likable to audiences even while playing a cad, but it was not to be. (Funnily enough, though, when production on The Third Man returned from Vienna to London, Grant was in town filming I Was a Male War Bride (1949) and regularly stopped by the set for lunch.) Reed was dead-set on Welles, an idea that Selznick vehemently opposed (possibly because of the potential oil-and-water effect of asking a director to follow directions) but ultimately proved brilliant, in part because many in the industry and public already associated the “boy wonder” with Lime’s most obvious attributes, greatintelligence and great arrogance. Many of the same such people, who with a nudge from William Randolph Hearst had helped to make Citizen Kane a box-office and awards season failure just a few years earlier, now experienced sadistic glee at watching him being chased through the sewers and cornered like a lowly rat in the film’s famous sequence (which, incidentally, inspired a similar scene decades later in The Fugitive).

Lastly, we come to Valli, for whom Selznick clearly had great expectations: in The Third Man, her screen credit, beside “JOSEPH COTTEN,” “TREVOR HOWARD,” and “ORSON WELLES,” is simply “VALLI.” Not long before, he had signed her to a personal contract—I suspect because she bore a resemblance to Ingrid Bergman, whom he had also discovered and groomed into a star during his own hey-day in films like Intermezzo (1939) and Spellbound (1945)—and made her the star of The Paradine Case (1947), his acrimonious final collaboration with Hitchcock. Valli’s face was actually less delicate and more hardened than Bergman’s, but it was perfect for The Third Man, in which she was asked to play a grieving lover in a war-ravaged country now being run like a police state by a bunch of foreigners (and for Welles, who once described her as “the sexiest thing you ever did see in your life”). She may have been Italian and not Austrian like her character in the film, but her legitimate European accent and sensibility provided it with invaluable authenticity; her exotic beautiful looks but prudish attitude with simmering sex appeal; and her fine performance with several unforgettable moments, most notably the ending. Greene wanted to write a happy ending, but Selznick pushed for the one used in the film, and Reed agreed (spoiler alert): Holly had met Anna at Harry’s first funeral, subsequently courted her to no avail since she was still in love with Harry, discovered that Harry was still alive, and then set in motion the events that led to Harry’s second funeral. As he is driven away from that occasion, his car passes Anna on the road, and though he is in a rush to catch an airplane back to America he orders his driver to let him out so that he can tell her goodbye. The camera remains static for a minute-and-a-half as Anna slowly nears him, passes him without so much as a glance, and then leaves the frame and his life forever.

Whenever I hear the haunting sound of zither, whenever a light turns on and illuminates something I didn’t previously know was there, and whenever I walk down a street or sidewalk lined with trees on both sides, my first thought is The Third Man.

I drove up to Boston Wednesday afternoon for a 24-hour or so rush through three screenings and three meetings. Things got off to a terrific start when—silly me—I assumed there was only one Jordan’s Furniture IMAX theater within a half-hour radius of Boston. This turned out not to be the case, and as a result I missed my last chance to see The Dark Knight (Warner Brothers, 7/18, trailer) before its opening weekend (which is apparently tracking to be a record-shatterer). C’est la vie. Anyway, tomorrow morning, I am going to stop by and observe a very successful summer camp for young actors from the Boston area that is being run by a friend of mine, and then head downtown for press screenings of Oscar-possibility Vicky Cristina Barcelona (The Weinstein Company, 8/15, trailer)—my second attempt—and Oscar-impossibility Step Brothers (Columbia, 7/25, trailer). I should have more on those for you tomorrow night.

UPDATE (7/17, 10:04pm): Today, I got my theaters straightened out, but not my expectations. I’m going to withhold comment on Vicky Cristina Barcelona for a little while, as there is still about a month to go before it hits theaters; I will, however, share some general reactions to Step Brothers, since that opens nationwide a week from tomorrow, and since I was so pleasantly surprised by it: aside from the other Judd Apatow production, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, it’s easily the funniest movie of the year so far, offering more laugh-out-loud moments than any other in which Will Ferrell has starred. He and co-star John C. Reilly were sporadically funny in their one previous collaboration, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby—which, like this film, was directed by Adam McKay—but, to me at least, it didn’t quite click; this time, it does. Sure, it’s infantile, crude, vulgar, and everything else that the usual haters of Ferrell/Sandler/Vaughn/Wilson/Carrey/Black/Rogen/et. al. despise… but it’s also wildly amusing escapism that only a complete stiff would not chuckle at. (It’s also important to remember that silly big movies like Step Brothers pay the bills for great character actors like Richard Jenkins, allowing them to make serious little movies like The Visitor, which is reason enough to tolerate them!)

I’m heading into New York tomorrow morning to attend a screening of the Woody Allen-written/directed contender Vicky Cristina Barcelona (The Weinstein Company, 8/15); to have lunch with a friend; and then to attend the Major League Baseball Home Run Derby with my dad—it’s one of the last major events at Yankee Stadium, the home of our beloved New York Yankees and site of so many great games to which he has taken me, so I thought I’d surprise him with tickets. (I initally hoped to get us into the All-Star Game on Tuesday, but it turns out you can’t one ticket for under $400. All the All-Stars attend the Home Run Derby, though, and our left-field bleacher seats offer a great view of the action and a decent chance of catching a ball, so it seemed like a good alternative.)

UPDATE (7/15, 12:57a): Here’s irony for you: the Vicky Cristina Barcelona screening, which was held at the Dolby 88 Screening Room in Manhattan, came to an abrupt end about one-third of the way into the film… due to sound problems! A bit disappointing, but I’ll see it soon enough. As for the evening? Three words: Josh. Hamilton. Woah.

Burt Lancaster (right) plots an escape with his prison cell mates in Brute Force (1947)

Things may be slow on the Oscar front at this time of year, but that does not mean that I stop watching movies. I attend press or theatrical screenings of highly buzzed about new releases (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Sex and the City, Iron Man, WALL-E, etc.); I check out soon-to-be-released DVDs (including 21 just last week); and, most enjoyably, I catch up on my classics, some of which I have seen years before and others of which I have been hoping to see for just as long. Over the past two months or so, I’ve checked off a number of these, and so I thought I’d recap some of them:

• Advise and Consent (1962), one of the great (but dated) political procedurals, adapted from Allen Drury‘s soap-operatic novel about the behind-the-scenes workings of the American government by the great director Otto Preminger and featuring outstanding performances by Franchot Tone as the dying President, Lew Ayres as his reluctant successor, and Walter Pidgeon, Don Murray, and especially Charles Laughton as United States Senators; frequent invocations of the film during the presidential primary season by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews spurred me to finally check it out.
• Bright Victory (1951) comes from director Mark Robson, who is probably best known for helming the dark melodramas Champion (1949) and Peyton Place (1957). In-between those two films, he made two other films that are much lesser known but probably of greater significance: Home of the Brave (1949) and Bright Victory, both studies of race that were way ahead of their time. In this film, Arthur Kennedy stars as an all-American G.I. blinded by a sniper’s bullet while fighting in North Africa during World War II. While recuperating at an Army medical facility, he befriends another soldier facing the same predicament, played by James Edwards. The two get along winningly until—in a scene that still packs a wallop—Kennedy makes a bigoted statement that leads him to learn that Edwards is, in fact, black. The metaphors are obvious and yet perfect: when you can’t see, you can no longer judge a man based on the way he looks, and then you realize we are all the same. The film can get slightly preachy, at times, and the romantic subplot with beautiful Peggy Dow (Harvey) seems somewhat unnecessary, but the film overall is an important one. And, incidentally, Edwards is owed some of the credit for breaking down film’s racial barriers that is usually afforded exclusively to Sidney Poitier; Edwards was playing leading roles year’s before Poitier broke through in Blackboard Jungle (1955).
• The Parallax View (1974) is the archetypal 1970s political-thriller, but is really about obsession, a theme that producer-director Alan J. Pakula explored previously in Klute (1971) and subsequently in All the President’s Men (1976). The film, which was clearly inspired by the JFK assassination and its subsequent investigations, centers around a shameless reporter (Warren Beatty, preening at the height of his sex appeal) as he pursues the facts behind a political assassination that he believes are being covered up. (The extended brainwashing sequence took guts!) More than anything else, what sets apart post-JFK films about obsession from those that came before them is the utter exasperation that colors their endings—the truth is rarely exposed and the little guy rarely emerges mentally and/or physically intact, having been crushed by the very people he previously thought were on his side. This post-JFK rule seems to apply not only to political films—Seven Days in May (1964), Dr. Strangelove (1964), Three Days of the Condor (1975)—but to all films about obsession, including most notably Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) and The Conversation (1974).
  
• David Copperfield (1935), the David O. Selznick prestige-project in which Charles Dickens‘ title character is played by young Freddie Bartholomew in his first featured role (he’s a little too green and grating), surrounded by an all-star team including Lionel Barrymore, Elsa Lanchester, Jessie Ralph, Edna Mae Oliver, and standouts Basil Rathbone (effectively detestable as David’s step-father) and W.C. Fields (effectively, and surprisingly, charming—opposite a child, no less!—as the infinitely-quotable man David wishes were his step-father, possessing an oddly American accent in the film); something, however, is missing from the film, and it is far from “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Greatest Motion Picture,” as advertised.
  
• my new Criterion Collection special edition of The Third Man (1949), which merits—and will receive—its own post shortly
  
• The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), a Cecil B. DeMille chronicle of a Barnum-like circus that is as far from meriting that title as possible thanks to a bloated runtime of 152 minutes, stiff performances (most of all by Charlton Heston, least of all by Betty Hutton), and no real point… the fact that it won Best Picture over High Noon (1952) and The Quiet Man (1952) is one of the greatest injustices of Oscar history.
• In Cold Blood (1967), the powerful big-screen adaptation of Truman Capote‘s groundbreaking non-fiction novel, in which a remorseful murderer is ironically portrayed by future unremorseful murderer Robert Blake in an equally good performance; the film’s violence and language hammered some of the final nails in the coffin of movie censors
  
• Dressed to Kill (1980), an early example of director Brian Da Palma‘s obsession with flesh and blood (venereal horror), featuring a Psycho-like disposal of the female lead (Angie Dickinson, in a good performance) and resolution (with Michael Caine as you’ve never seen him before).
  
• Charly (1968), in which Cliff Robertson gives a career-defining, Oscar-winning performance as the eponymous mentally retarded character who cannot even outsmart a mouse (wonderful Algernon) until a medical procedure abruptly makes him even smarter than his devoted teacher, played by a somewhat stiff Claire Bloom, if only for a time—a clear inspiration for the similarly powerful Awakenings (1990).
  
• American History X (1998), featuring a haunting but great performance by Edward Norton as a neo-Nazi skinhead that earned him a Best Actor nomination (and, as an aside, a surprisingly touching supporting turn by Beverly D’Angelo… yes, the same Beverly D’Angelo who was married to Chevy Chase’s Clark W. Griswold in all the National Lampoon’s Vacation movies and Al Pacino is real-life).
• Brute Force (1947), the Jules Dassin-directed film noir in which Hume Cronyn, as a sadistic prison guard, almost—almost—steals the show from Burt Lancaster, as a prisoner with brains, a heart, and the gentlest eyes in the world.
• Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), a dark-comedy that is often ranked among the best British films of all-time, in which Dennis Price stars as a conniving social climber and Alec Guinness portrays eight of his different victims (long before Peter Sellers, Mike Myers, or Eddie Murphy did the same).

On the docket for the coming days:

• The Gunfighter (1950), a western that stars Gregory Peck, of all people; earned a rare Best Picture nomination for a film of that genre; and paved the way for other adult westerns like High Noon (1952).
• Refusenik (2008), an acclaimed documentary that chronicles the thirty-year international movement to free Jews in the Soviet Union and features interviews with key players like Natan Sharansky.
• Air Force (1943), released during the heart of World War II, follows the crew of an Air Force bomber as it is dispatched to the Philippines in the wake of Pearl Harbor; the focus on the interpersonal relations of the men on board (including John Garfield, Arthur Kennedy, and Gig Young) comes to illustrate the group-mentality that won the War, and also illustrates director Howard Hawks career-long obsessisions with aviation and professionals performing their duties.

Feel free to share your thoughts on any of these films in the “Comments” section below.

Seven cast and crew members working on Oliver Stone‘s George W. Bush bio-pic W., including Josh Brolin (who is portraying the second Pres. Bush) and Jeffrey Wright (who is portraying Gen. Colin Powell), were arrested just after 2am on Saturday morning following a bar fight in Shrevport, Louisiana. Details are still emerging, but the metaphors/symbolism, on so many levels, cannot be missed: chaos among the Bush Administration; Bush and Powell at odds again; and, most interesting of all, apparently yet another experience—alcohol abuse (see here and here)—that overlaps the lives of Brolin and Bush. (If you missed it, Nat Rogers at The Film Experience site has compiled a tongue-in-cheek but nevertheless chilling list of others.) One can only wonder what will happen next… Brolin choking on a pretzel? Bush shooting a dog?

UPDATE (7/14, 12:42a): The latest version of the story, via Hollywood-Elsewhere, is much less dramatic… apparently, after being asked several times to leave the bar at closing time, the guys were uncooperative, so the police were called in, and Brolin and Wright were charged with interfering with police (a misdemeanor). The only remaining juicy element of this story is that Wright—who always struck me as a rather sedate kind of guy—apparently resisted arrest, and was therefore maced and stun-gunned.

Evelyn Keyes, a lovely actress who broke into movies in 1938 and then struck it big by winning the role of Scarlett O’Hara’s younger sister Suellen in Gone with the Wind (1939), has died of uterine cancer at the age of 91. Keyes also appeared in The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Best Picture winner Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), and was married to and divorced from the great directors Charles Vidor and John Huston, as well as the band leader Artie Shaw. With her passing, there are now only seven surviving members of the cast of Gone with the Wind, one of the most important films ever made: Olivia de Havilland (Melanie Hamilton), Alicia Rhett (India Wilkes), Fred Crane (Stuart Tarleton), Mary Anderson (Maybelle Merriwether), Cammie King (Bonnie Blue Butler), and my friends Mickey Kuhn (Beau Wilkes) and Ann Rutherford (Carreen O’Hara).