Is it real? Wax? Silicone? Shiloh?

The TomKat baby has yet to be unswaddled, but there’s plenty of baby Shiloh to go around. And there’ll be more of her if the temperatures stay as high as they are. Tomorrow (Wednesday), the Madame Tussauds waxeteria in Times Square will feature its first celebrity baby, pouting waxenly in her bassinet alongside the doting faux figures of her parents, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.

The Brangelina duo is made of wax, while Shiloh is pure silicone — perhaps in homage to the nip ‘n’ tuck Hollywood scene in which she’ll one day come of age.
The museum will donate $1 to charity for every photo taken. They should also donate $1 to Shiloh’s future analysis bills for when she grows up to find that every tourist in America has an intimate-looking picture taken with her while she appeared to be sleeping. Where were her parents when all these strangers used her as a photo prop?
Waxing philanthropic.

What's the fuss? Mel already said those things in TPOTC

I interviewed Mel Gibson many years ago in London on a morning when he was clearly hung over. After arriving an hour late, looking like Christ dragged to the cross of media interrogation, he nursed cappucino after cappucino, a black cloud hanging over him through the whole dispiriting session. I can’t blame stars for hating interviews, but since it’s usually part of their contracts to help promote their movies, or at least it fosters good will with their studio employers, and since their profession makes them perfect for at least acting like they’re actors who enjoy talking about their work, I have no sympathy.

This particular interview was for Bird on a Wire, and whether it was bird or dog or turkey, you didn’t see Goldie Hawn showing up late and scowling. Known for her professionalism, Hawn was perky, engaged, and wearing a Lycra top that flirted with areola territory. At least she was making the effort.
The film community has long known of several biblical commandments Gibson was prone to breaking. Now that he’s confessed his alcoholism — the lesser of two evils on display during his recent arrest for drunk driving — it’s almost a relief to be able to state the obvious: that the vehemence of The Passion of the Christ has always been as much about the strident zeal of the newly reformed addict as about Gibson’s guarded anti-Semitism.
Think of ex-smokers who won’t tolerate others lighting up, not even outdoors, or those nouveau vegetarians who examine the meals of complete strangers with disgust. At some point, Gibson gave up (or tried to give up) his hard-partying ways, and the result is the kind of intolerance people often exhibit when they struggle to keep themselves in check. I haven’t followed closely the timeline of Gibson’s turnaround — his embracing of religion as part of his atonement for years of bad behavior — but TPOTC was clearly part of his own, personal detox program. Once you’re on the wagon, you can’t proclaim it loudly enough, and TPOTC was not just a movie about Jesus, it was an attempt to rewrite history according to the narrow view of one particular religious sect, one that is as rigid in its views (toward Jews, for example) as reformed alcoholics are rigid on the topic of booze.
But ex-drunks fall off the wagon. Why? Because they’re human, not divine. All the addiction literature makes note of it. As Gibson observed in his statement, it’s a good thing he was arrested before he hurt someone.
The anti-semitism he betrayed from the bottom of the bottle is something else. Alcohol is a chemically proven disinhibitor, and Gibson apparently spun himself like a top as he spewed his bile at the arresting officers, demanding to know if they were Jews, blaming the Jews for all the wars in history. (Hmm, where do the Crusades fit into that theory?) His published “apology” mentioned alcoholism but not the anti-semitic remarks, or at least not specifically. Just as he’s never distanced himself from his father’s crazy, Holocaust-denying rants, Gibson still refuses to pin down just what it is about the statement “Jews are to blame for everything” he doesn’t believe.
But I’m surprised anyone’s surprised. TPOTC is an anti-semitic screed. I’m not saying that in an accusing way, simply as a matter of fact, like saying The Awful Truth is a screwball comedy or Oliver Stone’s movies are blunt. I received thousands of e-mails after my initial review of TPOTC, the majority from those who believed that a movie can’t be “anti-semitic” if it’s “true.”
Where to begin to refute such a Moebius strip of incomprehension and illogic?
For the most part, I’m guessing the problem is that people don’t know how to “read” a movie. They can’t see how Gibson, as writer, producer, and director, created his own “truth” through the magic of movie composition, editing, casting, lighting, and words. What went into TPOTC, what didn’t, the litany of choices he made, the calculated variables of the moviemaking process itself, all this contributed to saying on film what Gibson said to the arresting officer the other day.
What part of “Jews are the devil” does Gibson not believe? He’s sorry he fell off the wagon, embarrassed himself and his family, broke the law and endangered others. He wasn’t sorry for the hole in his heart.
And why should he be? After all, he’s said it all before, on film, and he must have known what he was doing, because it went down millions of gullets as smoothly as a nice cold beer.

"Super Ex" a power drain

Uma Thurman gamely sends up her tough-girl, kick-ass, Kill Bill persona in My Super Ex-Girlfriend, but the nearly clever idea that powers the screenplay sputters into brownout mode early on, developing rolling blackouts and cutting off vital blood supply to brain cells.
As the brown-bewigged Jenny, Thurman adopts a mousy librarian demeanor (even though Jenny, inexplicably, works at a high-end art gallery). As Jenny’s blonde alter-ego, the Fantastic-Fourish superhero “G-Girl,” the character is tricked out like Superman with laser vision and the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound (and an allergy to extraterrestrial rocks).
But Jenny reveals her bipolar secret early on to new boyfriend Matt Saunders (Luke Wilson), thus sidelining the movie’s one running joke — the powerful woman who is secretly insecure, a jealous bunny-boiler in the making. As Glenn Close would say in Fatal Attraction, which this movie vaguely references, she WON’T be IGNORED.
With the full subtext now on display, like underwear worn over street clothes, the story has nowhere to go, no ideas to push, no opportunity for playing peekaboo with G-Girl’s embarrassing, relationship-killing secret: She can save Metropolis from ruin but she’s jealous and possessive.
What to do? Some filler with sidekick characters, and a few Jokes that repeat like the reprise of title songs in a musical — here’s a scene of sex so super the bed moves, and here’s a scene of buddies discussing sex so super the bed moves, and here’s, yes, more bed-moving. At least Brigadoon only showed up once every hundred years.
Luke Wilson’s reaction shots are fun, but you can’t hang a movie on them. (If it were Owen Wilson, maybe.)
Thurman is clearly more comfortable with comedy than any other acting style, and she’s good at it. Her Quentin Tarantino roles have all been essentially comedic. Super Ex-Girlfriend, though more obviously billed as a comedy, is a bad one, a lazy and half-baked one, and it’s a step down for her. She’s not even the lead — Wilson’s reaction shots play the lead. G-Girl’s super powers are indicated by cheesy special effects, the kind that would be impressive on small-screen Smallville; she she goes into action, there’s a watery ripple effect as if G-Girl is disturbing the cosmos just a little. Her powers seem to reside in placing a watermark on the screen; could G-Girl be the first heroine for the paper-supplies industry?
Screenwriter Don Payne (who is writing next year’s Fantastic Four and the Silver Surfer) is clearly more interested in the superficial aspects of the high-concept, comics-based joke than in mining the rich, deep vein of Jenny/G-Girl’s personality conundrum. Comics are not superficial, though. The best of them explore the painfully human — how to fit in when you’re different, how to turn your back on those you love to protect them from retribution by your enemies — and movie comedy should demand no less. We should laugh at but also feel for the plight of poor Jenny — so competent. So helpless.
That’s not to say there are no good scenes, like one in which Jenny and Matt have dinner out with Matt’s work colleague Hannah (Anna Faris). A missile is headed for midtown, and the other diners are glued to the TV, but jealous Jenny doesn’t want to leave Matt alone with an attractive woman. “Shouldn’t SOMEONE do something?” Matt hisses to Jenny. “Maybe SOMEONE needs just ONE NIGHT OFF!” she hisses back, like any couple bickering over who did what in the relationship.
I wouldn’t go on at length about a movie like this except that the missed opportunity is profound. Fatal Attraction is in desperate need of a feminist makeover, but I’d rather see a serious one than a comic send-up (it is its own send-up, really). And superhero comics are all about the strain of keeping subtext in place, the exhaustion of keeping the secret life and the public life in balance. The chief mistake of Super Ex-Girlfriend is that Jenny/G-Girl should be the protagonist, not the less-interesting Matt, whose goal is to get a hot chick who won’t turn out to be high-maintenance. That’s too common a movie topic, and it’s been addressed countless times.
No, what this needed to be was a hip, breezy summer spin on The Upside of Anger, that movie in which Kevin Costner is strangely attracted to Joan Allen even though she’s a raving bitch. As a woman, I want to see such a movie in all its variations. And I want to see Uma Thurman (or any actress!) play a smart, strong, funny woman, not the male-fantasy version of it.

Oh, so Kevin Dillon WAS the problem …

The biggest unintentional guffaw of Poseidon, Wolfgang Petersen’s remake of the 1972 disaster flick, came when the captain announced that it was neither bird, nor plane, nor iceberg, but a “rogue wave” that was to be the harbinger of death, destruction, and Act II.
Rogue wave, my ass. At least try to make the movie’s galvanizing event sound plausible.

My bad. According to a splashy piece in The New York Times science section yesterday (“Huge, Freakish, but Real, Waves Draw New Study”), rogue waves exist indeed and are suspected of causing many a flip twixt the ship and the slip — even those watercraft that don’t have Kevin Dillon aboard, playing as clueless a character as a screenwriter can dream up on his sofa. (“I’m just lucky,” says Lucky Larry, or final words to that effect, before doing a Tarzan from an electrical vine over a cavernous inferno.)

Barnard Hughes comes through

Actor Barnard Hughes is dead at 90. I’d like to tell my Barnard Hughes story now; it’s a small story, but it reminds me of why I always thought he’d live to a ripe old age.

Many years ago, Elle Magazine asked me to write a piece on New Year’s Resolutions of the stars. They wanted 50 “fabulous” celebrities. No problem, I said.
It was a problem, of course. Rule No. 1 for freelancers: Never agree to do a “roundup” story involving celebrity quotes unless you personally have the home phone numbers of said celebrities in your PalmPilot (or, back then, in your handwritten scrawl on a piece of paper). Even when you have their home numbers – I dialed Susan Sarandon while she was in her kitchen making dinner and she chewed me out in a most Oscar-worthy way – these need to be home numbers of celebs who will take your call.
Getting a celeb on the phone is hard. Getting a “fabulous” celeb is harder. Getting 50 of them on deadline? Impossible. I tried night and day, hounding publicists, calling in chips. I didn’t have any chips, but I called them in anyway.
Then I widened the net. I couldn’t get Mick Jagger, but I got Judge Reinhold, briefly buzz-worthy for Ruthless People. Brooke Adams, already fading from sight after Days of Heaven, would only cooperate if I also used a quote from her (less fabulous) sister; I agreed.
Then there was Barnard Hughes. Not only was his home number listed, but he answered his phone, seemed honored that I had thought to include him, was delighted to help. His movie credits included Midnight Cowboy, Hamlet, and Tron. He was an Emmy winner for Lou Grant. Really, he was more of a theater actor, starting out at New York’s Shakespeare Fellowship Repertory and developing into a Broadway and Off-Broadway institution. He worked steadily, reliably, never making it to People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive status, but never lacking for work or respect either. And still answering his own phone. I don’t remember what his New Year’s resolution for 1987 was, but I like to think it was that he’d continue to be at one with himself.
I’m not saying actors should get off their high horses and take my phone calls. Far from it. I think actors and “stars” and “celebrities” should strictly enforce boundaries to afford themselves a private life, since the media and public certainly won’t do it for them. But I can barely recall today the other names on my list of 50 — only Hughes, who was gracious, charming, generous, and seemed so at home in the world that he’d likely live to 90.
Which he did.
Elle Magazine killed the piece. “Not fabulous enough,” was their assessment of my 50 celebs.
Barnard Hughes, dead at 90. Not fabulous enough for Elle Magazine, but fabulous enough for me.

Bootleg Sandler

Will I respect myself in the morning?
Unclear. But I felt sleazy as hell as I purposely made eye contact with the stooped Chinese woman who was selling bootleg DVDs at a pizza place in Queens. This on the heels of a spectacular FBI roundup of 13 bootleggers, the punchline to a long-gestating sweep through New York.
Those 13 may be behind bars, but there’s still inventory floating around out there. The Chinese pizza connection was a veritable one-woman Blockbuster, carrying all the latest summer titles — X-Men, Da Vinci Code. Also like the folks at Blockbuster, she didn’t seem to have any personal interest in or knowledge of the movies she sold. I noticed her because her body language was that falsely ingratiating kind found in pleading-eyed scavengers who try to sell single-stem roses to diners before a restaurant kicks them out. But the table of teenagers near me squealed with glee when the woman splayed her plastic-wrapped wares like slabs of an oversized Tarot deck; I was curious.
Years ago, the MPAA took me along on a stakeout of a Bronx video store that was serving as a front for bootleggers. So now, I briefly thought of calling my old contact (who, notwithstanding, had long since left the MPAA) and alerting him to the skulduggery of this old woman — although she was “old” only in the sense that actresses over 40 were once considered fodder for granny roles. She was possibly in her 50s, but she shuffled as if she were in her dotage, perhaps because life had beaten her down. Or perhaps she’d lost the will to live after seeing Click, the moronic, depressing new Adam Sandler movie that I bought from her for five bucks, rationalizing to myself that it was in the service of “research” for this blog.

Whoever filmed Click off a movie screen with a camcorder was sitting to the left of the theater, coughed like a banshee, hit the mute button twice by mistake, and squeaked his chair with alacrity throughout the movie. As for those pesky end credits, he didn’t bother filming them. They’re not part of the movie, are they?
If you care about film, you don’t want to see one off a bootleg copy. But then, if you care about film, you don’t want to see Click.
No one has accused Sandler of having range. His claim to fame is still his man-boy singing of silly songs in a silly voice. As most sentient beings will agree, a little Sandler goes a long way. But that doesn’t stop him in Click — SPOILER ALERT!!!! — from performing an excruciatingly sorry-ass death scene in which he flails about, gasping, in a hospital gown and a puddle of water. His character, who has fast-forwarded through his life to avoid the hassle of experiencing any of it, suddenly sees the error of his ways and tries, with his dying breath, to gain absolution from the family he betrayed.
Hamlet he ain’t.
But the week wasn’t a total loss. Here’s the view from my neighbor Nick’s terrace:

Fitness and Costco, together again

I’ve decided to train for a half-marathon. Yesterday I put in 3 hours at the gym — yeah, it’s great to be unemployed! — and today I set out for a 45-minute training run. But you need a goal when you run, and my goal was Costco.
.
Fitness doesn’t mean you can’t multitask. I jogged in leisurely fashion to Costco, where what I really wanted was Post-it flags. They make my heart sing. This Costco didn’t have Post-it flags, but they did have other extremely necessary items, like 10 pounds of herring. And everything there is sold in Family Pack size, which is so handy when you’re jogging without a backpack or anything suitable in which to carry home a party tray of international cheeses.

I put my Costco card, key, and money in a plastic zip-lock baggie — snack size — which makes a good impression on everyone behind you on line when you drag it out from your sweat-drenched running shorts pocket. But I forgot my debit card — Costco doesn’t take Visa — and I didn’t have enough cash on me for anything so fabulous as herring.
There’s nothing like being unemployed, fishing dollar bills out of a Baggie, and having to put back one item at a time: A tub of hummos with pine nuts. An already defrosting bag of frozen berries for smoothies. Whole-wheat pita pockets for, like, 100. I ended up with the cheese party pack and a bathmat tucked under one arm as I jogged home.
They say fitness is good for self-esteem, but I’ll bet when they say that they’re not taking into account the bathmat.

What do Superman Returns & The Da Vinci Code have in common?

BIG-TIME spoiler alert ahead … not that you wouldn’t guess it within the first reel.
Both Superman Returns and The Da Vinci Code play off the notion that Christ is mortal — or mortal enough to spawn heirs.
There’s been no outcry, no protests, no picketing over Superman Returns (unless you count complaints that Kate Bosworth is no Margot Kidder and Brandon Routh is no Christopher Reeve). And certainly there’s no good reason to protest the movie on religious grounds, but then, why protest Da Vinci Code either? What they have in common is the subtext of divinity versus humanity. Where they differ is in the seriousness with which they appear to raise the issue — although I would argue that Da Vinci Code is no more serious, in its genre way (and certainly no more high-minded or realistic) than Superman Returns.
In the case of SR, perhaps the kind of people who protest this sort of thing are mollified that Superman is just a comic character, not a JC stand-in — despite the fusillade of JC references that are hurled onto the screen like meteors aimed at Metropolis. Jor-El (the holographic Marlon Brando, referenced in a pane of Fortress of Solitude flat-screen-TV ice) gave his “only son” that humankind could learn to be just a little bit nobler. Director Bryan Singer’s Superman hovers, Christ-like, in space, where he spends his nights filtering out the babble of the world’s prayers like a messianic antenna. He decides which prayer to answer, and in what order. The central dilemma of Superman, and of Superman Returns, is how to prioritize.
And yet, Superman Returns is about social ineptitude. Superman returns from a five-year walkabout in space, and Lois is so furious at his lack of social grace — he never said goodbye — that she’s channeled her rage into a good-riddance essay that has won her a Pulitzer. The essay probably doesn’t mention what she hasn’t really discussed with her new boyfriend, either — that she spent a night with the Man of Steel. She slept with her source!
Full disclosure: I’ve written a Lois Lane comic, (a 5-page story within Superman: Secret Files & Origins) and did a rewrite on a Superman script. Should that make me more inclined to like or dislike Superman Returns? Dunno. I doubt the success of the movie will influence sales of my little comic one way or the other.

But if I were a religious protester, one inclined not to see the forest for the trees, I’d protest this movie’s depiction of Clark Kent, not of the savior Superman who answers the most desperate prayers. The human in him knocks up a girl, leaves without saying goodbye, and doesn’t pay child support. What would Jesus do?

First Einstein's brain, now this …

The android head of Philip K. Dick went missing recently after its creator, roboticist David Hanson, mistakenly left it behind while changing planes. These things happen.
The lifelike Dick head, which was able via computer chip to conduct semi-coherent conversations in the voice of the late, great author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which morphed into the movie Blade Runner, was being used to help promo the new Richard Linklater film, A Scanner Darkly, opening July 7. The android’s body was found, but the head has gone to a place even America West cannot fathom.

Warner Independent’s Laura Kim told the New York Times that it was a shame to lose the talking head, since she’d been thinking of sending it out on junkets or pitching it to Letterman. Even Philip K. Dick’s headless body would be an improvement on the usual brainless zombies you find on the interview circuit; I doubt, somehow, that it would spout such wisdom as “I was attracted to this project because of the script” and “Film is a collaborative effort.”

Bruce Springsteen loves America

Tonight’s Springsteen concert at Madison Square Garden was a radical political protest accomplished through the agency of America’s musical heritage. And while Springsteen was using his ferocious interest in musicology to entertain, educate, and raise up the crowd, it occurred to me: Bruce Springsteen loves America.
OK, he didn’t do his E Street Band stuff, and I can’t say I wasn’t hoping for I Came for You. (Like that would happen.) But he repurposed the folk songs of Pete Seeger and resurrected the musical glory of New Orleans with a backup band so potent you could smell the beer on Bourbon Street. He panned for the gold of America’s frontier days, retrieving haunting, fervent nuggets of social protest.
Springsteen expresses his patriotism through musicology. And if that sounds fusty, there was nothing fusty about the roaring crowd that ate up Seeger’s Bring ‘Em Home, written in 1965 during the Vietnam War, and just as chillingly apt today.
And it didn’t hurt that I had a skybox ticket courtesy of Seth Rosenthal, a senior account executive at the New York Post.

Critic sans portfolio

Welcome to my blog, hosted most graciously by David Poland and Movie City News. I’ve named it after my forthcoming book, The Incredible Shrinking Critic … 75 Pounds and Counting: My Excellent Adventure in Weight Loss. A blog on weight loss and movies? Worse things have happened.
After 13 years as a film critic with the New York Daily News, we’ve parted ways. As Dianne Wiest would advise in Bullets Over Broadway, I’ll say no more.
Except that you can watch my little movie, Behold the Future of Film Criticism, for a quick look at what movie critics do when they’re sans portfolio.
The first movie I saw as a civilian is The Break-Up, as depressing a movie-going experience as I’ve had. The half-hour of ads and trailers that preceded it, the poor sound quality and projection, Jennifer Aniston’s uncomfortably real misery (the Brangelina thing, you know), distasteful characters, too much Vince Vaughn … I’m not necessarily blaming the filmmakers for the searing stomach pain I experienced during the second act, since the pre-movie pita joint mght have been a contributing factor. But still. In the days of screwball comedy — the comedies of remarriage, as they say — watching a bickering couple wear down their own defenses against true love was as comforting as being rocked in a warm bath. Here, the Aniston-Vaughn union is too toxic even for extreme couples counseling (although the opening-credit photo montage of the progression of the budding relationship is quite well done, the most genuine part of the movie). Tell me, what kind of romantic comedy has you rooting for the protagonists to see other people and move on with their lives?
But really, there’s hope in the world as long as there’s a Brangelina baby, or something like her, being birthed in Namibia every so often. This just in from Britney Spears:

I’m freaking out, y’all, about this Namibia thing! When the press said I was going to Africa to have Kev’s spawn, I was, like, whoa!

Fortunately, the Associated Press corrected their initial report that Spears was going the Jolie route. Namibia’s deputy environment and tourism minister, Leon Jooste, regretted leaking the news based only on an anonymous phone tip. What’s interesting here is not just the tantalizing thought that celebrities are having their babies in places where they can better control the auctioning of the rights to the baby photos. It’s also the matter of this tidbit about Brangelina, from the ABC News website:

The Namibian government shielded the Hollywood couple from the paparazzi, insisting that visiting journalists obtain permission in writing to cover them.

Let me see if I understand. Security is so tight in Namibia, suspicions so high, you have to perform the 12 labors of Hercules if you want to interview the country’s honored guests. But anyone can just pick up the phone and tell Leon Jooste that the Martians have landed, and he calls a press conference.
Click here to send me an e-mail, and click on Buzz, below, to see that little movie about unemployed film critics again.