AND THE WINNER IS…

Although things have been quiet on the site over the past few days, I assure you they have not been off of it, and that your patience will pay dividends in the near future. Here’s some of what I have been/am working on:

• I’ve been doing extensive planning in advance of the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival, which I’ll be covering on the ground from September 4-10. I’ve already confirmed numerous exciting screenings, interviews, and parties, which I can’t wait to cover.
• I’ve also been invited to a number of early screenings of films that will be showing in Toronto, and I’ve gone whenever possible so that I can get an early read on them, and so that I don’t have to cram in more films than absolutely necessary while there—I’m already looking at 3, 4, or even 5 films daily for that week, which should be more than enough! Today, I’m heading into New York to see one of the most anticipated, but unfortunately cannot post anything about it for a little while longer.
• I’m prepping for this season’s second installment of our hallmark ATWI… Interview Series—following a great chat with Richard Jenkins of The Visitor (Overture)—which will take place over the weekend with Melissa Leo, who is a serious contender for a Best Actress nomination for her excellent performance in the critically-acclaimed Frozen River (Sony Pictures Classics).
• I’m reading Richard Yates‘ famed 1961 novel Revolutionary Road, which Kurt Vonnegut called “the Great Gatsby of my time… one of the best books by a member of my generation,” and which, of course, is the source material for the Leonardo DiCaprio-Kate Winslet film of the same title (Paramount Vantage) that is considered an early favorite for Best Picture and will hit theaters on December 26.
• I’m also very close to finishing posts on a number of varied subjects that I wanted to cover at length, including: the Olympics and the movies; the extraordinary first season of the television show Mad Men (AMC); a recent, unusual conversation with an old coot who used to roam the M-G-M lot as a carpenter in the mid-sixties; an examination of Apatovian humor; a dissenting opinion on Vicky Cristina Barcelona; and a rundown of the year’s best pre-Toronto films… hint: a Chaplinesque animated robot, of all things, leads the way.

I hope this gives you enough of a reason to stay tuned until the awards season officially kicks off in Toronto, at which point we’ll be back to our multiple-daily-posts format, offering our most extensive and exciting coverage yet. Until then, what Toronto film are you most excited about and why?

Today, I was pleasantly surprised to find not only a trailer of the upcoming awards contender Frost/Nixon (Universal, 12/5), but also a 9-minute reel of highlights from the actual paid interviews of Richard Nixon by British reporter David Frost that serve as the basis for the film.

Frost/Nixon doubters argue that any film which revolves around a series of sit-down verbal exchanges, which might work on the page or on the stage, will not on the screen, where it will be stuffy, claustrophobic, and tiresome. I’m more optimistic. As you can see for yourself below, each of these exchanges was like a high-stakes bout of intellectual cat-and-mouse, or chess, or, perhaps most aptly, boxing, for which both parties tirelessly prepared, stepped into the ring and fought hard, and then regrouped for the next round.

I think that the story’s colorful characters—Nixon, for one, was the most pervasive and endlessly fascinating American politican of the 20th century—and inherent structure should actually be conducive to a fine film, assuming that it is paced well and physically given some room to “breathe” in-between each round/interview. And, in my opinion, director Ron Howard is the perfect man for the job. Howard has, on past ambitious projects, demonstrated a mastery of pacing and overcome eerily similar challenges. Consider the following examples: Apollo 13 (1995), which he keeps interesting even though we all know the basic ending from the beginning; A Beautiful Mind (2001), in which he ingeniously takes us into the private thoughts of its central character; and Cinderella Man (2005) which is largely about and built around chronologically-separate rounds of—you said it—boxing.

In the hands of such an able director, not to mention a writer (Peter Morgan) and actors (Frank Langella and Michael Sheen) who know these characters inside-out (having lived with them for years on the stage), I believe the film is a gamble… but a good one. Check out this footage and then make your own call…

ADDENDUM 1: Anyone interested in either Nixon or the movies would enjoy reading Nixon at the Movies (University of Chicago Press, 2004), a marvelous book in which my friend/newly-minted Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Feeney of the Boston Globe uncovers and dissects Nixon’s obsession with movies during his years in the White House.

ADDENDUM 2: Turner Classic Movies has sent out a press release announcing that the network’s next “TCM Original Special” (following previous shows about Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg) will be called Ron Howard: 50 Years in Film. According to the release, the 90-minute special, which Time critic Richard Schickel will produce, “will trace the actor/director’s career from a first-person perspective. Howard will discuss each movie he has made, from 1977′s low-budget Grand Theft Auto to major blockbusters like Splash, Backdraft, Apollo 13, The Da Vinci Code, Parenthood, EdTV, and the film that earned him an Oscar, A Beautiful Mind. He will also talk about his latest film, the eagerly anticipated Frost/Nixon…” And when will the special debut, you ask? December, of course.

Who will join the Obamas on the stage at next week’s Democratic National Convention in Denver?

This according to Matt Drudge, who’s always first, and usually right…

UPDATE: The New York Times is saying Wednesday…

UPDATE: An intriguing Veep idea has been thrown into the mix by controversial filmmaker Michael Moore, of all people…

Interesting piece of swag in the mail today… courtesy of our friends at Focus Features, I am now the owner of a “Rock Me Sexy Jesus” bouncing action figure promoting their irreverent, eccentric upcoming release Hamlet 2 (8/27, trailer), for which Pam Brady and Andrew Fleming are going to get a push for a Best Original Screenplay nod.

It got me thinking: why not pose a little marketing challenge to our readers? If you can come up with the 5 best ideas for swag items that could realistically be used to promote some of this year’s contenders, then you will receive the gigantic TV Guide Film and Video Companion in the mail. (Winner to be determined by me next Monday.)

The “Comments” section is below… go crazy!

This is a piece about radio, not film, but work with me here: I just went on a late-night fast food run, tuned my radio to my favorite sports station (660AM, WFAN, “The Fan”), and was really saddened to learn that Mike Francessa and Chris “The Mad Dog” Russo, the hosts of the best sports-talk show in America, have abruptly broken up after 19 years together behind the mic. (Here is a New York Times piece about the situation.) These guys—frumpy Francessa and mousy Russo—were the oddest duo you could possibly imagine, but their banter for five-and-a-half hours daily never failed to be informative, amusing, and good company during a long drive home, and it made them local heroes in the tri-state area. The world today offers innumerable better reasons to be upset than the unfortunate break-up of a couple of guys who get paid to talk about sports… yet—call me shallow—this one, on this evening, somehow hit home harder than most of those ever do.

This morning, 91-year-old Oscar winner Ernest Borgnine (Marty)—a gruff but really good guy who I’ve chatted with on several occasions—appeared on Fox & Friends to hawk his new book Ernie: The Autobiography when co-host Steve Doucey asked him to reveal his “secret” for managing to look and act so young. Borgnine’s completely unexpected, jaw-dropping response may answer the half-century-old question about what Marty feels like doing tonight, and will certainly leave you laughing from here to eternity…

James Franco, who gives an hilarious performance in the new comedy Pineapple Express, will turn serious later this year when he plays Sean Penn‘s homosexual lover in the political bio-pic/likely awards contender Milk (Focus, 12/5). September’s GQ features Franco on the cover, along with an interview in which the magazine asked him, among other things, what it was like to kiss Penn in the film. Franco’s humorous answer:

“The first kiss of the movie was out on Haight Street with, like, 200 people watching, outside. I’m sure in the end it will be a really cool shot, but it starts close and then it takes maybe a minute. That’s a long time on film with everybody watching, and, like, a fake moustache getting in your mouth. It was long enough that you couldn’t help but think, ‘Oh, my God, I’m kissing Spicoli.’”

And the hits keep comin‘… what a year. The latest to go: Isaac Hayes, the singer-songwriter best known for one of the most recognizable movie theme in history (the “Theme from Shaft,” for which he received the 1971 Academy Award for Best Song, and which you can hear below) and for providing the voice of Chef on television’s South Park (clip also below) was found today by relatives beside his still-running treadmill, dead at the age of 65.

Update (8/10, 11:10pm): Shouldn’t MSNBC.com have chosen a different photo to accompany the death notice of someone who was found on the ground beside a treadmill? (I’m only half-serious.)

Several years ago, my friends Ana and Jon and I heard a ridiculously-funny name—it kills us, but we can’t remember what it was—and we have been trying to best it ever since. It occurred to me that the movies have offered us plenty of good options from which to choose, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally, and so I thought I’d challenge ATWI readers to compile some of the best in the “Comments” section at the bottom of this post. We’ll ship a DVD of the classic screwball comedy His Girl Friday (1940) to the person who comes up with the funniest! (No more than 5 per IP address; winner to be named no later than a week from today.)

I’ll get things started:

• Fielding Mellish (Woody Allen in Bananas, 1971)
• Lili Von Shtupp (Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles, 1974)
• Linus Larrabee (Humphrey Bogart in Sabrina, 1954)
• Egbert Sousé (W.C. Fields in The Bank Dick, 1940)
  
• Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, 1944)
  

“I’m not a star, and I don’t want to be a star. Stars fall.
I’m an ordinary guy with an extraordinary job.”
—Bernie Mac to Playboy, December 2004

Some pretty shocking and sad news: Bernie Mac, the late-blooming comedian and actor out of Chicago, has died of complications from pneumonia at the age of 50. Mac is best known for standup-comedy film The Original Kings of Comedy (2000) and television’s The Bernie Mac Show (2001-2006, Fox); he received two Emmy and two Golden Globe nominations for the latter. He also gave memorable performances in Friday (1995, opposite Chris Tucker), Get on the Bus (1996, under the direction of Spike Lee), Life (1999, opposite Eddie Murphy), as one of the eponymous heist participants in Ocean’s Eleven (2001) and Ocean’s Twelve (2002), and in a hilarious cameo in Bad Santa (2003, opposite John Ritter).