The religulous movie film => up

Male order: Josh Brolin (above) in W. and Daniel Craig in Quantum of
Solace are this season’s leading men.

Lee’s Miracle at St. Annatackles the efforts of our so-called
Buffalo Soldiers in Tuscany. I’m pumped for anything Spike Lee
has his name on, particularly after his outstanding 2006 one-two
punch of Inside Man and When the Levees Broke. But I also think old
Eastwood was onto something when he replied, “A guy like that
should shut his face.”

The kids told me to make sure to mention High School Musical 3: Senior
Year. I have no idea what this is, except I vaguely remember seeing
pictures of one of these starlets in her underwear on the Internet,
followed by a lot of Disney-scripted apologies. In an age when most
second sequels go direct to DVD, I guess there’s something to
be said for a series that inverts the paradigm. But whatever the
case, I’m 33 fucking years old, I smoke too much and usually
smell like booze. If I even tried to attend a screening of this thing
I’d probably end up on some sort of government watch list.

More interesting is the fall movie most likely to get at least one of
its participants assassinated. Larry Charles’ Religulous teams
the brilliant comedy guru and director of Borat with the insightful
but often too-smarmy raconteur Bill Maher for a guided tour through
the hypocrisies and absurdities of faith with a capital-F in our
troubled modern age. Anyone who’s watched more than a few
minutes of Maher’s indispensible HBO talk show knows exactly
where all this is going to end up.

But the question mark here is whether Charles might be able to
suppress his star’s more unseemly tendencies toward sanctimony
and get a productive discussion going. It doesn’t look good. My
esteemed PW colleague Matt Prigge caught an early peek and is
decidedly not a fan, and he’s one of the most godless heathens I
know.

Since we can’t get enough of the culture war, those rascally
righties strike back with David Zucker’s An American Carol, a
Fox News-friendly retelling of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol,
starring Kevin P. Farley (Chris’ little bro) as Michael Malone,
a slovenly, morbidly obese, America-hating documentary
filmmaker—hmm, I wonder who he’s supposed to
be?—visited by the ghosts of George Washington, George S.
Patton and JFK, who have presumably been enlisted to teach important
moral lessons about supply-side economics and government-sanctioned
torture. Bill O’Reilly plays himself because who else could?
(Larry Linville died in 2000.)

This independently financed production has become something of a cause
celebre for victimized Hollywood conservatives, so supporting roles
are filled by luminaries like Kelsey Grammer, Jon Voight and Dennis
Hopper. The film’s trailer plays as desperate and unfunny as
any non-ideological Grammer vehicle, but expect the “liberal
media” to bear the blame for this impending box office
disaster.

If Michael Malone isn’t cutting it for you and you want the real
deal, Michael Moore also has a flick this fall, except you
won’t find it in theaters. His Slacker Uprisingwill be made
available for free on the Internet, with the filmmaker magnanimously
declaring, “This is being done entirely as a gift to my
fans.” What he’s not telling you is that the film, a
chronicle of Moore’s 2004 college campus tour, was up until
recently called Captain Mike Across America and failed to land a
distributor after being critically pasted at last year’s Toronto
Film Festival.

In one of the kinder reviews, Variety’s Joe Leydon claimed
“this repetitious and self-indulgent hodgepodge comes across as
a nostalgia-drenched vanity project, with far too much footage of
various celebs at assorted gatherings intro-ing Moore as the greatest
thing since sliced bread.” That dang liberal media strikes
again.

Of course, the biggest dog in this hunt is Oliver Stone’s W.,
shot on the fly with one of those preposterously brief production
schedules that brings back fond memories of Stone’s early-1990s
heyday, when a steady diet of righteous indignation and (rumored,
ahem) suspicious substances sent the fiendish rebel knocking out
another broadly unsubtle, epic-length, formally dazzling provocation
roughly every nine months or so.

The early, freakishly convincing footage of star Josh Brolin wreaking
havoc upon the English language is already enough to stoke hopes for
this chronicle of “a life misunderestimated,” and we
still haven’t caught more than stray glimpses of Richard
Dreyfuss’ Darth Cheney, Scott Glenn’s Donald Rumsfeld or
Toby Jones’ Turd Blossom. In the Greatest Casting Ever
Department, former Daily Show correspondent Rob Corddry plays former
White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer.

And while we’re talking about insane schedules, the breathlessly
anticipated (at least by me) new James Bond flick benefitted most
from that aforementioned Harry Potter move, so the perplexingly titled
Quantum of Solace now has the luxury of a full eight weeks to complete
postproduction tasks that take some filmmakers (like Martin Scorsese,
for instance) more than a year. Good thing director Marc Forster,
known for agonizingly literal-minded, Oscar-grubbing dreck like
Monster’s Ball and Finding Neverlandwill never be confused with
Scorsese.

But the Bond Factory has become such a well-oiled machine over the
past 40 years it’s hard to imagine Forster mucking things up
too much, particularly with Bourne-movie stunt god Dan Bradley now
directing the action sequences, which will presumably comprise at
least half the picture. The presence of art-house icon and winner of
the Roman Polanski-lookalike contest Mathieu Amalric as the villain
augers well, but mainly I’m just looking forward to seeing more
of Daniel Craig’s ruthless, stonecold rottweiler-in-a-tuxedo
routine.

If you want to stir up da yoof, you can’t serve up some mom’n’pop
friendly pottage of family entertainment.9/26 – in extremis

A late season slugger, a smart young writer, an Entourage favorite, a
veteran interviewer and a perfectly executed magazine cover.9/25
– top 5 of the moment

“The case was politically motivated, because Milton Street has what’s
been referred to as a radical, or big, mouth.”9/24 – random act

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Tags: absurdities, bill maher, borat, brilliant comedy, buffalo soldiers, culture war, daniel craig, josh brolin, leading men, prigge, question mark, religulous, sanctimony, scripted, senior year, sequels, solace, spike lee, starlets, when the levees