The movie, for me, was also about wondering if Spielberg will ever again use another dp besides Janusz Kaminski. His vaguely hazy-bleachy visual signature is feeling more and more like something to cope with than enjoy.

In any event nothing seems to be coming out of the faucet tonight except political stuff. Michael Moore and Bill Clinton stuff, I mean. ..

Burn This

An L.A. TIMES article up yesterday (i.e., Tuesday) said there are suddenly six or seven political documentaries either out now or soon to open, each one looking to tap into a gamey, word-of-mouth-spreading audience before heading off to video.

(My pet favorite, Robert Kane Pappas' ORWELL ROLLS IN HIS GRAVE, will open at New York's Angelica on July 23rd, in the Washington, D.C. area on the same date, and then at L.A.'s Fairfax in LA on July 30th. Check out buzzflash.com, an advocate website promoting it, or do a Poop Shoot search and check out my previous pieces. )

Obviously, of course, Michael Moore's FAHRENHEIT 9/11, which opens only nine days from today (i.e., Friday, 6.25), has a big advantage over the others. Everyone I spoke to in Paris who hadn't seen it was champing at the bit. I've also spoken to a fair number of non-pro types since I returned on Monday evening, and they all brought it up.

I paid particular attention when my next-door neighbor, a celeb-track jewelry designer named Christie Martin, told me it was high on her list. She doesn't lack sophistication (far from it), but she tends to like "entertaining" fare more than heavy-duty dramas like MONSTER, which she was mixed about. So if Christie is hot to see it, something extra is going on.

My sister from Connecticut, who doesn't see that many films, also brought it up on her own this morning, saying she "really [wants] to see it."

People like David Poland have been slamming it (is it reasonable to suppose there are various people out there "like" David Poland?), but otherwise the want-to-see has been building fairly steadily since Moore's film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes.

The current jab against Moore (and if you've been following the anti-Moore jihad-ists, you know they've been turning it on fairly strongly lately) is that he should have come forward sooner with the footage in FAHRENHEIT 9/11 showing U.S. soldiers treating Iraqi captors with cruelty and humiliation.

Moore admitted as much in an interview with the SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE last Friday. He said he had the footage "months" before the [Abu Ghraib prison torture] story broke, and that he "really struggled with what to do with it. I wanted to come out with it sooner, but I thought I'd be accused of just putting this out for publicity for my movie. That prevented me from making maybe the right decision.''

Film critic Joe Leydon shared an opinion with some of us on Monday that "I hate to say it, but I think Moore is right. If he had broken the news about prisoner abuse, he almost certainly would have been accused by right-wingers, Presidential apologists -- and, yes, probably a few entertainment columnists -- of exploiting a terrible situation (and maybe even exaggerating it).

More importantly, said Leydon, "the reaction he might have generated -- 'Oh, there's that commie-pinko Michael Moore, lying again!"-- might have persuaded other, more 'respectable' news outlets to sit on the story, or ignore it altogether. We'll never know for certain, [but] given the way the So-Called Liberal Media has been cowed into fearing an accusation of bias, who's to say [editors] might have shied away from following up on a story Michael Moore broke?'

I'm assuming there's some truth to the item that Poland put up on Movie City News yesterday, passed along by "Deep Distributor," about "at least two exhibitors in major cities in rural states" receiving "death threats about plans to show [Moore's film]." You know stuff like this is only going to make more people curious.

Could the rightie website Move America Forward have had something vaguely to do with this, if only in an inspirational sense? MCN added yesterday "there is word of other exhibitors getting similar calls" since the Bush-blowing website started urging loyalists to call exhibs and voice their displeasure with Moore's film playing in their home area.

Flaying Bill

You have to hand it to the rabid right -- when they decide to push a certain agenda or position or message, no matter how deranged or detestable, it gets pushed. They don't sit around contemplating the why's and wherefore's.

Or so I concluded after watching Harry Thomason and Nickolas Perry's THE HUNTING OF THE PRESIDENT, which opens in New York this Friday and will hit Washington D.C. on June 25, San Francisco on July 16, Los Angeles and Boston on July 23, and Chicago on August 13.

It's narrated by Morgan Freeman, and uses, to quote from the press kit, "interviews from both sides of the beltway." I wouldn't exactly say that. It's a fair-minded, thoroughly assembled thing, but most of the interview subjects are either Clinton pals or seemingly even-handed non-rightie types.

The story -- how and why platoons of right-wing attack dogs, from low-level, undeniably sleazy Arkansas operatives like Larry Case and Larry Nichols to ogre-ish establishment thugs like former special prosecutor Kenneth Starr and billionaire Richard Mellon-Scaife, went after President Bill Clinton for ten years, determined to take him down or at least wound him severely, one way or another -- is familiar stuff, of course.

Based on a respected best-seller of the same name by Gene Lyons and Joe Conason, HUNTING is a tight, pared-down, and, in my judgement, bullshit-free recounting of the back story behind the big Clinton scandals of the '90s (Whitewater, Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky).

What a foul and loathsome waste of time all this stuff amounted to. Year after year after year of it, and over what? No hard evidence of financial improprieties, and a sexual lie or two. Big deal.

Shame on the media (and TV news editors, especially) for going along with the anti-Clintonites they way they did. Europeans are still laughing about it and shaking their heads at their yokel-ish, hyena-like behavior. It was a gross and obsessive thing to live through, and the country clearly suffered.

I presume everyone reading this was up to speed on all this sludge as it was dredged up. Even my teenaged kids remember something about those days.

You could call HUNTING a preaching-to-the-leftie-choir thing, especially in the style of the cutting, which uses melodramatic black-and-white B-movie footage to underline its points and suggest nefarious character traits of this and that Clinton hater.

But it also has author and NEW YORKER staff writer Jeffrey Toobin, damn it, offering some very measured, perceptive and persuasive talking-head commentary. And that ain't hay. If you've read any of Toobin's NEW YORKER stories or his Clinton book, "A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President," you know what I'm saying.

I've said to friends that if Clinton were a tougher, more honest person, he would have told Starr and all the rest to shove it on a point of honor -- I absolutely refuse to be questioned about sexual matters, period -- rather than pass along lies, half-lies and equivocations, which I nonetheless feel he had a more or less honorable right to do, given the circumstances.

The doc talks to nearly everyone who was in a position to know anything during the period, although, as acknowledged, relatively few big-time righties. The "heads" include Sidney Blumenthal, Paul Begala, Jerry Falwell, Jim and Susan McDougal, Jonathan Alter, and James Carville, along with a sizable Arkansas contingent. The doc may be, in this or that person's opinion, "Clinton-friendly," but it seems a lot cleaner and more revealing than most of the news coverage generated as the scandals unfolded, which was notoriously and unambiguously not friendly to poor Bill.

"Poor" implies Clinton was mainly a victim. He was and he wasn't, obviously. His playing around was clearly self-destructive, especially given the bent of his political enemies and the social mores during his term, although Clinton's shenanigans were modest compared to JFK's in the early '60s.

The most anyone says about Clinton's appalling lack of judgement (not to mention his relentless cooperation with his enemies by giving them the sticks to beat him up with, year after year), is when James Carville says, "We've all done stupid things, but none of us have been faced with people spending years and millions of dollars trying to uncover the specifics"....or words to that effect.

Watching it, for me, brought back memories of Mike Nichols' PRIMARY COLORS, which I happened to turn on two or three months ago and found to my surprise that it had improved since I first saw it. It seemed sadder, wiser, funnier...more rooted.

Clinton attended a premiere showing of the film a night or two ago at NYU's Skirball Center, by the way.

It was also attended by one-time Whitewater defendant Susan McDougal, who, a press release stated, hadn't spoken with Clinton in roughly 15 years. I had a sense that the doc wasn't being 100% candid about Ms. McDougal's evasions and transgressions, but I also came away from it with new respect for her willingness to do time rather than cooperate with than sonuvabitch Starr.

Diesel's Arc

I realize the conventional wisdom is that THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK did okay last weekend, but its star, Vin Diesel, is obviously no longer the guy he seemed to be a couple of years ago.

It's striking how quickly superstar pizazz burns out these days. Fame cycles aren't even cycles any more.... they're spasms. Audiences still get married to certain actors and stay with them for years, but more often they're having brief affairs and one-nighters. There are attractions and flirtations out there, but very little love.

Diesel was the cool new action-movie hero for the under-35s two summers ago when the drums were beating for Rob Cohen's XXX. You couldn't get away from it. Now I can't even find a pulse on it. It's gone...where?

For what it's worth my 16 year-old son says he and his friends don't care about Diesel or RIDDICK at all. Okay, so it's not exactly scientific but when Jett and his friends tell me someone is over, they're over....for the time being, at least.

I don't have any kind of case against Diesel. I've always liked the guy. He's got a kind of macho authority thing going -- a deep gravelly voice and an unforced, take-it-or-leave-it way of speaking. If it were up to me he would be the new Lee Marvin...although I don't think he's got half of Marvin's raw pizazz.

Diesel's upswing last four years. It started with his stand-out supporting performance in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN in '98. It picked up steam with another choice supporting part in BOILER ROOM ('00), and kicked up to the next level with his performance as Riddick in PITCH BLACK ('00), his first solo starring role.

The surprise success of '01's THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS, in which Diesel played a charismatic car thief named Dominic, put him on the Cool List.

Then mediocrity set in -- KNOCKAROUND GUYS, the underwhelming XXX (over-hyped given what it really was), and the third-tier revenge film A MAN APART.

The only thing that can save Diesel from turning into Jean Claude van Damme or, worse, Chuck Norris is hooking up with a serious A-level director and having this guy bond with him and support him, so to speak....like James Cameron did for Arnold Schwarzenegger during the '80s and '90s.

Would Schwarzenegger be California's governor today if Cameron hadn't directed him in THE TERMINATOR, T2; JUDGEMENT DAY and TRUE LIES? You tell me.

Stepford Wrongos

I saw a bit of THE STEPFORD WIVES last night, and I can tell it's definitely funny and hip during the first hour or so, and it definitely cops out and tries to nice itself up at the finish.

They wouldn't show me THE STEPFORD WIVES in Paris, but even from my Boulevard Arago vantage point I came up with a boo-boo. It involves a "spoiler," if you want to call it that, but my philosophy says you can't spoil a movie that spoils itself.

You can't replace real women with robot facisimiles and turn real women into obedient little sex bunnies by implanting micro chips in their heads. Well, you can if you want to, obviously, but you can't employ both techniques in the same damn film, which is apparently the case here.

In the original Ira Levin book and in the 1975 STEPFORD WIVES film, the wives were killed and replaced with replicants. This always seemed too vicious to accommodate the sexist metaphor. Chauvinist males don't want to murder their wives -- they just want them to stop mouthing off and giving them shit. Levin should have just gone with an implant plot....much tidier and easier to swallow. (After all, it worked for William Cameron Menzies in INVADERS FROM MARS.)

But the Frank Oz version can't quite decide if the women are robots or not. Somewhere along the way there's an explanation that the women's perky behavior is due to implants. Fine ...but there other scenes showing that the women are indeed cyborgs (hand-held remotes control their behavior, sparks come out of a malfunctioning model, and another is used as a cash-dispensing ATM).

I could easily think up a reason to explain to the audience why there are replicants and remote-controlled puppets among the female Stepford populace...I mean, if anyone on the production team cared about the plot making sense.

It's been speculated that the microchip-implant explanation was one of the re-shot add-ons, but why the producers would go to such lengths to demonstrate their equivocating nature is beyond me.

I love Zertinet Movies' Steven Snyder's review, which says in part, ""What a gutless and apologetic film this is...Hollywood has never met a good idea that it couldn't eviscerate. "

But hold on....

The other thing I'm getting is that there are some who think THE STEPFORD WIVES is "a good, smart gay man's comedy," as one colleague put it to me last week, and not (or at least not quite) the disaster that entertainment reporters have been running with.

And yet Paramount publicity's reaction was totally defensive all the way. They did everything but take out trade ads proclaiming, "We can't deny it -- the press reports have been fairly accurate."

Bunny

When you think of all the hoopla generated by Vincent Gallo's THE BROWN BUNNY at last year's Cannes festival and then the revisionist, it's-actually-not bad responses at last September's Toronto Film Festival, it doesn't seem appropriate that it all seemed to boil down last week to a minor booking at a little Parisian Left Bank multiplex called Studio Galande.

I was walking down the street and spotted the poster and the show times, and I felt let down. It's hard to explain why I was having trouble equating this modest booking with the hype and ultimate value of Gallo's film (which I think is actually pretty good....even the blow-job scene makes sense when you think about the reality of what's actually happened and what Gallo's character is going through), but I was.

THE BROWN BUNNY opened in France on April 7th, actually, so maybe the mood was a bit more enthusiastic back then. It'll open in this country on August 27th. You have to figure it'll do really well on DVD. The intimacy of the subject (and, of course, the blow- job scene itself) might work better on a small screen...hard to say. But if you're looking to catch something agreeably nervy and curious, you could do a lot worse.