Paramount Pictures publicists let me come to their screenings but they don't go out of their way to invite me either, so I haven't seen Sky Captain out of lethargy, but I doubt anyone needs my help in sussing this out. I'll go this weekend, I suppose.

Head in the Clouds (Sony Pictures Classics), a 1930s and '40s European wartime romance thing with Charlize Theron, Stuart Townsend and Penelope Cruz, is, in a certain sense, nicely written and directed (by John Duigan), but there's no tension in the story, and so the movie tends to more or less lie there.

And there didn't seem to be much reason to see Wimbledon, and I didn't give a damn about seeing Mr. 3000 either, so that just about covers it, I think.

Back to the "blues" feeling the blues...

I'm sure Moveon.org will disagree, but it's obvious what's happened over the last week or so. There's a strong likelihood that election is over and Dubya -- the worst President in the country's history...the dumbest, the cockiest, the most deeply indebted to the most venal and loathsome people in the country, plus the most arrogant and dangerous...it's very likely that Bush has it sewn up.

I can't believe I just wrote that. I'm very distraught about this. But look at this rundown -- http://www.electoral-vote.com -- and tell me I'm wrong.

As far as I'm concerned John Kerry is a bad guy for letting this happen. He's done a masterful job of out-Dukakis-sing Michael Dukakais with his idiotic inability not to see that the counsel of Bob Shrum, the Democratic candidate killer, was leading his crusade into quicksand, and this along with Kerry's regular-guy personality, his take-or-leave-it steadiness and his razor-sharp clarity on his Iraqi War policy beliefs...he just won the swing voters over.

To the Bushie side, I mean.

Even if he turns it all around and wins, he'll still be a jerk and a girly-man. I'm starting to think I might vote for Nader out of disgust, and I never thought I'd say that. All right, I'm still a Kerry supporter but what a muddle-headed wimp he turned out to be.

A Connecticut guy named Jim Hammell saw my WIRED posting on this catastrophe yesterday afternoon and wrote back the following:

"You're right on the money. Four months ago I was betting on a Kerry victory. Now I'm all but certain Bush is going to be re-elected.

"In my opinion, one of the big reasons for Kerry's downfall (besides his less-than-stellar personality) is negativity. For the past six months, the Democrats, Michael Moore, Al Franken, etc. have attacked Bush relentlessly. Yes, it's deserved. Yes, Bush has failed on virtually every level of being a President. Yes, he needs to go. But I got the message the first 10,000 times.

"From talking to swing voters (yes, there are a few in Connecticut) I've found that many are considering voting for Bush not because of his record, but out of spite. The constant attack by the Democrats, Hollywood, etc., have made them think of Bush as, believe it or not, an "underdog". A ridiculous concept...but that's the perception. They feel sorry for him. It's maddening.

"With two months until the election, I have enough reasons not to vote for Bush. Now I need reasons to vote for Kerry. I need a reason to get behind him. The Democrats have to go positive at this point...despite the fact that it's easier to go negative.

"Kerry has my vote regardless, but I really think we're looking at a blown opportunity."

Scale It Down

Roger Ebert has called Undertow (United Artists. 10.29) a masterpiece. Director David Gordon Green definitely has his brief together and he may very well one day turn out a truly grade-A film, but forget the "m" word as far as this Terrence Malick-y, southern-fried, kids-on-the-run movie is concerned.

Label this one an "s.i.," as in somewhat intriguing.

Green's thing so far (in George Washington and All the Real Girls ) has been to plumb the inner lives of rootless disenchanted kids in the South. This time he throws in action, violence, murder and a deranged low-rent villain, played by (was there a choice?) Josh Lucas. Green is obviously trying to go mainstream, and I like the gently spun character and atmosphere flavorings that he uses to make things cohere and feel real, but the story is a so-whatter.

You've got two brothers (Jamie Bell, Devon Allan) being raised by their hee-haw dad (Dermot Mulroney) father in a ramshackle, Tobacco Road-type spread. Then along comes Muloney's lower-end-of-the-gene-pool brother (Lucas), who's just gotten out of the slammer and wants to move in. He's trash, of course, and soon enough wants some gold coins left by his and Mulroney's father for himself.

Then a very bad thing happens, and then Bell and Allan are soon running away from Lucas and he's hot on their trail, and yaddah-yaddah.

And that's it. I'm not saying there aren't dabs of beauty in this film -- there are -- but it's more in the dialogue, acting and pictorial mood stuff. I'm saying Undertow is a little bit boring, but in a quality-type way.

Poor Josh

Part of my impatience with Undertow was because it put me through the umpteenth Josh Lucas performance as a fiendish psycho nutbag. He's definitely seems to be Hollywood's go-to guy for delivering reprehensible assholes, but aren't we all tiring of this?

Lucas played a relatively decent sort in A Beautiful Mind, a fairly likable dad in Jordan Roberts' Around the Bend (Warner Independent, 10.15), and a somewhat tolerable guy (a dead one, possibly) in Lasse Hallstrom's An Unfinished Life (Miramax, 12.24). And I really believed in his character's bottom-line decency in Around the Bend.

As Lucas is a pretty good actor, it seems a shame that he's gotten snared in baddie typecasting. I'm sure he's played other non-offensive types...only they're hard to remember. All I know is that he's played nutters so often that all he has to do is walk onscreen and audiences go, "Yo...bad guy!"

Lucas played Laura Linney's dickwad ex-husband in You Can Count on Me. He played a malevolent type in American Psycho. He was an icky predatory gay guy hitting on a teenage boy in The Deep End. He played Eric Bana's evil antagonist (a truly disgusting character) in The Hulk. His Wonderland character was so demonic you almost had to laugh.

I'll bet Lucas has played more bad guys in the seven or eight other films he's made; I just haven't seen all of them.

I thought when he romantically hooked up with Salma Hayek earlier this year that he might get some leverage out of this alliance and possibly shake things loose for himself. Maybe that process has been underway for some time.

Finger Lickin'

Sally Potter's Yes, which showed at the Toronto Film Festival a few nights ago (but hasn't yet landed a distributor), is a kind of lust story.

Set mostly in London, it's about an affair between a married Irish-American scientist (Joan Allen) and a Lebanese doctor (Simon Akbarian) working as a chef in a London restaurant. Sam Neill plays Allen's husband. Shirley Henderson has a curious little part as the couple's maid who has a perceptive take on their personal undercurrents.

The finest things in Yes are Alexei Rodionov's cinematography and Daniel Goddard's editing. You could watch it without sound and still enjoy it, but if you did that you'd miss the iambic pentameter dialogue, and that's supposed to be important, I think.

In any event, Allen and Abkarian's fuckathon eventually runs into difficulty when he becomes angry about having been treated like (or, more to the point, having begun to feel like) her Lebanese boy-toy. The whole post-9/11, looking-at-Middle-Eastern- guys-askance attitude among Anglos comes under harsh review.

Yes is not your usual, run-of-the-mill, middle-aged-white-woman-falls-for- somewhat-younger-Arab-guy movie. I especially liked the scene when Abkarian fingers Allen in a restaurant with people and waiters nearby, and then he licks them. Good material, this.

But I must say something: Abkarian doesn't have the dignity, discipline and inner thoughtfulness of Chiwetel Ejiofor, the man of color who played the London immigrant and African doctor in Stephen Frear's Dirty Pretty Things, had. Ejiofor had class; Abkarian has a lot less. He's less considered, less measured in his thinking. I didn't much like him because of this.

And his nose is too big. I kept staring at it. Cyrano! Durante! I'm sorry but he seemed common to me, like some chuckling proprietor of a rug shop you might meet in downtown Lebanon.

And I hated a scene in which Abkarian dances for Allen on a table top. And I had even less respect for him when he gets into an argument with a couple of guys in the kitchen he works in, and he's stupid enough to hold a knife as a defensive weapon, knowing that he's more likely to be found at fault if the authorities come, which of course they do.

Can I say this? I'm going to say it anyway. Abkarian isn't good enough to fuck Joan Allen, and she lowers herself considerably in our eyes by spreading her legs for him. He's just not my kind of Arab. (Did you ever hear the line that Woody Allen once said about Harvey Weinstein? "He's not my kind of Jew," he said. I got this straight from a guy who worked for Allen a few years ago.)

I've read over Sally Potter's very informative press notes about the film, and in some ways they frankly told me more about the film than the film itself did. That should tell you something right there.

Uncle Charley

Again, a movie I included in my Most Wanted DVD column of two or three weeks ago is now scheduled to be released on DVD. Don Siegel's Charley Varrick (1973) is due from Universal Home Video on 12.28.04.

Here's the link: http://homevideo.universalstudios.com/title.php?titleId=317

Here's what I wrote about this 1973 semi-classic last month:

Don Siegel's Charley Varrick, with Walter Matthau, Joe Don Baker, John Vernon, Andrew Robinson, Sheree North, Woodrow Parfrey and Norman Fell, is one of the best second-tier, no-big-deal crime flicks ever made.

Admired for its low-key tone and character-driven action, for the crackling tension from Siegel's shooting and cutting of the opening bank-robbery sequence, and for Matthau's easy-going turn as a wise, cagey, seen-it-all indie felon. But it's Baker and Vernon who give the tastiest performances -- the former as a suave, southern-fried, pipe-smoking assassin in a cowboy hat and cream-colored suit, and the latter as a Reno exec fronting for organized crime.

The dialogue in Vernon's heart-to-heart scene with Parfrey, playing a wimpy Las Cruces bank manager to perfection, is so good that Quentin Tarantino ripped it off. "You know what kind of men they are," Vernon informs Parfrey, whom he suspects may have colluded with guys who made off with $300,000 in mob loot. "They'll strip you, tie you down and go to work on you with a blowtorch and a pair of pliers."

It's also worth noting that Universal Home Video has finally gotten around to putting out Costa-Gavras' excellent 1982 film Missing, set for 11.23.

Participles

Pitttsburgh-based reader George Bolanis has written the following:

"Let's look at the mini-trend of participle-based movie titles. (Of which the latest lifeless, imagination-less example I have seen in this group is Being Julia.)

"I will start with the contention that Being John Malkovich kickstarted the trend as everyone who passed on that project salivated with envy and pounded their head with regret. From there, well, people just saw a title-packaging strategy.

"I've tried to remember as many titles as I could recall along these lines. I decided to plot the titles on a bell curve showing the Originators (known in marketing parlance as early adopters) on the left against the Bandwagon-Jumping Laggards on the right. (See attached.)

"Should a producer-distributor even bother trying to buck a popular trend that might contribute to a more substantive fare falling flat because its title falls within an overused device even if it suits the art in the long run? Are a few bad apples ruining it for everyone else?

"I myself tend to get sick of any product (movie, snack food, whatever) that might even seem to be jumping on the bandwagon." --

READER ALERT: Hollywood Elsewhere is also readable at the home site URL, which is www.hollywood-elsewhere.com. Go there sometime soon and bookmark it, because as of October 1, 2004, Hollywood Elsewhere will be forever gone from Movie Poop Shoot.