Out of Focus

DEAR GRAY LADY: STICK WITH THE PUPPETS -- THEY OBVIOUSLY HAVE MORE SENSE THAN SOME OF YOUR WRITERS

Thank you NY Times for giving the brilliant Avenue Q its due with your story in Sunday's Arts & Leisure section. It was a good counterbalance to the useless A.O. Scott Cannes Film Festival wrap-up five pages later. Avenue Q is about to go down (in my book at least) as one of the best musicals to play Broadway and lose the Tony to a far inferior show. It will be even worse than Driving Miss Daisy beating ... well, every other movie nominated, and even more than a few not, in 1989. I haven't seen all the nominees, but I have seen the crowd-pleasing but relatively average Wicked (which will likely be the big winner next weekend) and it easily is more fun, interesting and creative than that dumbed-down crap-daptation of the novel by Gregory Maguire. (If you haven't seen Avenue Q, go. Now. No, no, don't wait. Go!)

But back to Scott's piece: it's no wonder the paper of record wanted to dump Elvis and bump Mr. Initials up to sole possessor of one of the most important positions in film criticism.

No ... wait ... I'm sorry. Scratch that. After reading his completely innocuous, ridiculous, trivial and flat-out boring piece, I seriously marvel at the fact that he has a job. I mean seriously ... what was that? What insight ... commonalities among films of dogs, food and sex. Wow. Maybe that's all he was able to create without use of his own personal laptop.

Actually, I did learn one important thing from Scott's article. It seems that he doesn't feel the need to actually sit and watch an entire film as long as he's able to "sample" it. In his opening graf, he writes about "... seeing 30 or 40 movies (or at least pieces of them) ...." Pieces? You're a critic, jackass. You don't see pieces. You're paid to actually sit through the entire movie. You're not allowed to walk-out if you don't like something. Personally, I won't walk out of anything. Yeah, maybe I'm a masochist that way. But I at least understand that even a movie with a terrible opening 15 minutes can get better, and vice-versa. And more importantly, any film (with the possible exception of those made by Michael Bay) has to be treated as a whole, whether one considers it high art or low "Hollywood." If Scott doesn't know that, he missed rule no. 1 of film criticism, at least in my book. But this shouldn't surprise me. It helps explain why his reviews often make no sense, genuinely lack any strong point-of-view, and usually serve as nothing more than a showcase for him to brag about how much he supposedly knows.

WILL THE WHOLE MOVIE SIMPLY BE HER TRYING TO OPEN THE CAR DOOR?

I'm pretty sure Uncle Grambo had this info at least a few days ago, but I can't check right now because he's so damn popular his site went over its bandwidth limit and is now down until June comes around. And I know it was on E! online after it was reported by Star magazine last week as well. Nonetheless, I was just browsing, and it seems that the story has now made AP. I guess the wire service wasn't comfortable running such major news without better sourcing, i.e., quotes from La Simpson herself. It just goes to prove that "journalists" such as Grambo, Jessica Blueprint and the web's most trusted news source, Gawker, have now surpassed the wires as the place to get the news of the day!

Jessica Simpson May Play Daisy Duke the headline reads. The story includes that such a role might be "consolation" for her ABC pilot being dropped. But the scary part to me is that JSimp is obviously getting a little big-headed, with full on diva-opinions and delusions of power.

I SUPPOSE THE OLSENS FINALLY WANTED TO CLAIM MORE INDIVIDUAL IDENTITIES

I'm sure this has been floating around forever, but it just landed in my mailbox today. It's kind of like the poor "Star Wars Kid" who's video floated around a while, but this actually made me laugh more. Obviously the result of a Photoshop user with too much time on his hands, I guess this is as good a reason as any to be careful when putting your picture on the WorldWideWebternet.

The resemblances to Michael Douglas, Kate Winslet and Shrek are particularly uncanny!

IN GERMAN, THE NAME WOULD BE "APFEL"

Today's Variety (sub rq'd) reports that Gwyneth Paltrow has decided to only play iconic historical real-life women from now on (thanks Reuters). Following her take on Sylvia Plath (I must confess I have not seen Sylvia; I have heard she was good and the movie was not), Paltrow apparently plans to follow her maternity leave by portraying silver screen star Marlene Dietrich.

As usual, not only has the Cinetrix beat me on reporting this news, but she also perfectly expressed what was apparently our shared initial reaction: AAAAIIIIIIEEEEEEEE!!!!

Variety's story reminds us that this is the second attempt at a Dietrich biopic, a film that should most definitely be made, but with better casting. The first go 'round, Louis Malle was planning to direct from a script by John Guare. Uma Thurman was to play the title role, but than Malle passed away.

Uma would have been a more interesting choice if only because of the resemblance between the two actresses. In fact, if you can access the Variety story online or see the cover of today's issue and see the picture they use of Dietrich, it is not so difficult to picture Uma made up to look just that way. But does she have the chops to pull-off the performance of such a strong, complex and influential screen icon? Probably not.

This role definitely needs someone of the Cate Blanchett (good one, Cynthia)/Tilda Swinton variety. A younger Meryl Streep. A less crazy (and younger) Judy Davis. I know I'll be called crazy for this, and she's probably too short, but it could be a (finally) starmaking role for Helena Bonham-Carter. Oooh, what about Julianne Moore -- or she's too fair-skinned, and also probably too old. And why can't I think of any actual appropriate German actresses?

Start the suggestions ... maybe we can start a petition or something.

ON SECOND THOUGHT, MAYBE NICKY'S EX ISN"T SO BAD

I admit it. Even after ranting about The WB's Superstar USA last week, I have to cop to the fact that when this level of train-wreck television shows up on the schedule, I'm eerily drawn to it like the mosquito to the zapper. I still say the show is terribly produced -- they continue to do too much recap and preview and not enough of the show itself. Go further with the profiles; let the contestants "sing" for more than 30 seconds; and don't cut the judges short.

But after last night's first "finalist" and elimination episode, if you're into just flat out evil TV -- far more evil than The Joe Schmo Show could ever have been -- then Superstar USA may just be it. These people are so delusional, one can't help but sit there open-mouthed in some combination of shock, terror and amusement. The three judges have the deadpan complements boiled down to a science, but they are still so laudatory that it seems almost incredible that none of the contestants have caught on even a little bit.

Personally, I was disappointed at some of the cuts. If they're really looking for the worst singers/performers, how could they cut Frank? (I can't post a specific link to Frank, but if you go here you'll see him and can get a video clip. And that's a tame one.) Regardless, there are some real "winners" left, and if you thought (as I had) that you saw this before when American Idol held their little William Hung-influenced special, think again. Those people, on some level, had to know they were being made fun of when they were asked to sing in that special; these people are being told their "superstars"!

Still, the thing that finally turned me was the host with the least -- Brian McFayden himself -- actually signing off with a bigtime dig at Ryan Seacrest. At some point near the beginning of this season of Idol, Seacrest decided he needed a little catch-phrase, and after two years on the show and more in radio, he came up with the ever-so-clever, "Seacrest Out." I think he's decided he's going to make simply dropping words cool. (Ryan, you've failed.) I'm pretty sure last night during his intro I heard him say, "Seacrest ... Idol ... Here we go," or something equally annoying.

Well, if I give Superstar USA credit for anything, it's McFayden's sign-off. It was just a little throw-in at the end of the show. In fact, I almost missed it since I was fast-forwarding so as to not watch yet another preview of their final reveal of the hoax. But just as they're about to throw to tape and spend several minutes previewing the final two or three episodes of the series, McFayden turns to the camera, and although he didn't smirk and wink, he might as well have, because the words came pouring out: "McFayden ... gone!"

I can't do it justice in print, but to me, it was a wonderful moment in modern crappy-pop-culture-TV. Good on you Brian -- as far as I'm concerned, you're just as cheesy as Seacrest ever was, and maybe even slightly more clever.

MICHAEL MOORE IS THE KING OF THE WORLD! (OR IS IT QUENTIN TARANTINO)

Michael Moore's "controversial" film Fahrenheit 9/11 was awarded the top prize -- the Palme d'Or -- at the Cannes Film Festival earlier today. I haven't seen any of the films in competition at Cannes, so I'm not saying it wasn't worthy. And Moore looked genuinely shocked, even though he says he flew back to Cannes just yesterday evening after being notified that there was a good chance his film had won ... something.

It should be fascinating to see the fallout of this prize. Obviously, this gives Fahrenheit 9/11 even a higher profile than it already had in recent weeks, what with Disney deciding it wouldn't allow Miramax to distribute the film. It should also hasten another distributor picking-up the picture, even though the Palme d'Or is by no means a guarantee of box-office success. But most interestingly, I'm sure on some level, there will be no less than a few conservative commentators out there who decide that this is just another example of the French bashing America.

VINCENT GALLO FILLS ME WITH ENOUGH BILE TO CHOKE CHLOE SEVIGNY

As has been reported in several places today (but I'll give credit to IndieWire), Vincent Gallo's roundly trounced The Brown Bunny has been picked-up for distribution in NY and LA by Wellspring Media. The movie caused a war of words (to put it politely) between critic Roger Ebert and Gallo, and it basically has a built in audience of curiosity-seekers who simply won't believe that Chloe Sevigny actually gave a blow-job to Gallo onscreen until they see it for themselves in the film. (At least, that's the excuse I'm going with.)

The only reason I bring this up is because I was devastated today to learn that another blogger whose opinion I respect greatly, and will readily say is much more of a Filmbrain than I, especially in the realm of foreign cinema, is a fan of Gallo's last directing effort, Buffalo '66.

Sorry Filmbrain. I'm calling you out. What you describe as a "breath of fresh air" was a stale pile of shit. There was nothing fresh about B66 other than it being different for difference sake, and that does not a good movie make, although many people who like anything non-Hollywood seem to think so. The only element of the movie that interested me at all was the finale in the bar, one of the first times I had seen the 306-degree-freeze technique. OK, that was slightly cool, but I was so dead inside from how annoying the rest of the movie was, I couldn't even appreciate that. Near-death boredom and overly self-indulgent filmmaking (and I know you have a problem with Tarantino; Tarantino can't hold a candle to Gallo in doing things that may make no sense but he deems them important ... simply because he says) is never the same fresh air. There's no compromise on this subject with me, I'm sorry to say. I give you points for making a very valiant attempt at stating specific elements of the film you liked, but to me, they still added up to a whole bunch of blech. I expect nothing better from The Brown Bunny. Oh, I'll still go see the damn thing and probably cry for years after about those two hours of my 30s ripped out of me, but I have this opinion problem, you see ... I must have one, otherwise I go nuts. So I'll go. Maybe we should go together and then we can rumble on Houston in front of the Landmark.

I won't touch Henry Fool, a far superior movie in every way. If I was Hal Hartley, I'd want to hunt you down for even putting my film in the same sentence, equating the quality of the two as in any way similar. Making B66 even worse is that I too love Christina Ricci, but I walked out of the screening at New Directors/New Films however many years ago wanting to bash my head into the column that I wish had obstructed my view of the screen even more.

You want to see a breath of fresh hair, find a way to see the Tribeca Film Festival award winner The Green Hat, which unfortunately I believe you missed. Now that's a new and invigorating film that the indie crowd should love and will hopefully get distribution and noticed.

HOSTED BY SEACREST-LITE, WHO ALSO WANTS TO BE A SUPERSTAR

The best part about The WB's Superstar U.S.A. is that it gives the home viewing audience another chance to be annoyed by former Carson Daly and current Ryan Seacrest wannabe (and even more infamously, former Nicky Hilton paramour) Brian McFayden. McFayden has had a phenomenal career-curve, starting as the not-quite-the-next-Daly MTV-VJ, and then popping-up on the ridiculous ABC reality show Cupid where a bunch of men competed for the hand of a beautiful woman, protected by her bitchy best friends, with boring commentary by Simon Cowell.

McFayden is the right guy to host the WB's latest reality crapfest, though. He's just bad enough to go along with how horribly this show is produced. It's not even that Superstar is a bad idea for a program, at least not if you're in for the practical-joke-that-makes-its-participants-look-like-assholes genre of television. Hey, I'm all for it. When you boil it down, that's why we watch reality shows anyway. They all allow the audience to say to their collective television screens, "I'm so much smarter than that moron. If I were starving on a desert island, I would never do what he just did." Reality TV enhances all our superiority complexes, so what better way than to make fun of a bunch of people who have no idea they're the butt of the joke.

American Idol this season scored a recording contract for one of their worst ever singers -- William Hung -- and they aired a whole special where they brought back the "favorites" of the bad from the auditions. The people who couldn't sing at all. And these people, knowing they were the joke, came back to sing, to extend their 90 seconds of fame into closer to 15 minutes. So really, there's nothing wrong with Superstar right?

There wouldn't be if the WB didn't give us yet another show in the mode of Popstars and The Surreal Life. I'm a big fan of the WB: Gilmore Girls, Everwood, Smallville (which, by the way, had a pretty kick-ass season finale!) are all usually good shows, and the Frog was the network that gave birth to what I consider one of, if not the, consistently best show of the '90s, Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. But there's something about the way the WB produces its shows that turns good, or at least fun, television into boring and tedious. The most annoying thing about Superstars so far is how little of the show we've actually seen over the course of two episodes. They spent a full six minutes of episode 2 recapping the 48 minutes of show from episode one. Then they spent at least five minutes at the end of the episode previewing the rest of the season, which, mind you, they had already done in shorter snippets at least two other times in that episodes and four or five times in the episode from the night before. And along with that, they showed the same people on both nights! All of this with McFayden doing his stupid narration and trying to buddy-buddy the contestants after their auditions in the exact same way as the original kiss-ass, Seacrest. (Who shockingly really believes he's created a catch-with "Seacrest out!" but I digress.)

I really want to watch this show, but I don't think I can take it. It's too boring in the way it's edited together. The judges are Tone Loc, Vitamin C and some guy named Briggs (who seems to claim to be a television producer, but then again, who doesn't?), and I give them credit for doing the straight-faced praising of some terrible performers perfectly. Briggs is the obvious attempt at creating a more misogynistic Simon Cowell; he goes as far as telling more than one female contestant (who can in fact sing) that she doesn't have the voice they want but since she's "smokin' hot," he'd love to take her to dinner. (Thankfully, he's repeatedly denied.) The horrible people who the rave over buy it so completely that any home viewer has to sit there mouth-agape saying, "How do they not know? How delusional can someone be?"

Nevertheless, it's dull, and the show needs something more than just previews of the final reveal (sorry, but adding echo to McFayden's already grating voice isn't that "something") to make me keep watching, no matter how much I really, really want to.

MIAMI RED, NY BLUE

I had myself a little C.S.I. franchise night, sort of by default because there was nothing else on. I like the original show, but I don't watch it that much because I've got too much other crap on my plate. I never watch the Miami spin-off because I can't really take all that much of David Caruso's patented acting technique: head-tilt, barely audible growl, making every line read sound like he's giving you the hidden location of the lost Ark of the Covenant. I used to like the guy. Now he's a parody of himself.

In case you haven't been paying attention, there's a third sibling coming to this franchise next fall, C.S.I.: NY, and it's basically a spin-off of C.S.I.: Miami. On the plus side, this new series has a phenomenal cast led by the sell-out brilliant actor Gary Sinese and joined by Melina Kanakaredes and Hill Harper. The defacto pilot aired last Monday as an episode of the Miami show, and after watching tonight's interesting but anti-climactic season finale of the original show, I decided to subject myself to the hour of Caruso I DiVo'd on Monday.

You should thank me. I don't know, maybe the "NY" show will get a lot better; these spin-off episodes always kind of suck, and this one was no exception. But just in case you were wondering how NY would differ from Miami, and in case you have long been confused about how Miami differed from the original set in Las Vegas ... rest your little heads (stop it! you know what I mean), I have all the answers.

It seems that in New York, everything is very blue. Also, their crime lab, very white, bright and hi-tech with everyone wearing lab coats. Additionally, New York CSI have to deal with a lot more media -- reporters hounding them outside every crime scene. But mostly, it's just very blue. Everything has a blue tint. Except, strangely enough, Mr. Caruso, who in this episode is given the ability to appear and disappear almost out of thin air. When Caruso first sneaks up on Sinese examining a murder scene in a dingy (because is there any other kind?) apartment in downtown Manhattan, the apartment is devoid of all color, except for that strange, cool, blue tint that seems to permeate everything in New York. Everything in New York except Caruso, who being from Miami is still very colorful and red.

Because if you've ever watched C.S.I.: Miami, I'm sure you've noticed that Miami is very red. Red and orange actually. That's because it's hot. It's mostly daylight, and it's hot and red and orange, which probably explains hiring Caruso in the first place, his being a redhead and all. See how it all comes together. There's also a lot of water around Miami. Sure, Manhattan is an island, but there aren't the beaches, just the bridges, and there are plenty of stock footage shots of bridges and tall buildings. But South Florida has water and beaches and the Everglades and ... did I mention hot red and orange? Ahh good.

Now I'm sure you can see how this all differs from the original C.S.I. set in Las Vegas. Obviously, in the city that never sleeps (wait, isn't that NY?), most things happen at night, so it's often dark. Except in Vegas, with all the bright lights, is it ever really night? No clocks allowed and all, you know. It is colorful, though. Saturated with color. But no dominant color, unlike the saturated Miami red and orange sun, which is completely different from the cool and sterile unsaturated NY dinginess. Oh yeah, and Vegas? No water ... other than the artificial pool and casino kind. And the C.S.I. lab in Vegas, very dark. Certainly nowhere near as white and scientifically lablike as in NY.

So see, it's really all about color, and light and dark, but not in any actual interesting way. There once was a time when the TV networks would try to copy successful shows and fail miserably because everyone knew that these series were copies and not as good or original. (Remember all the Friends wannabes in the years after that show started?) But I guess some time ago, Dick Wolf and NBC discovered that you didn't really need to go to so much trouble. Just take basically the same show, change the theme music slightly, give it a very small shift in focus and let it share the moniker of its superior original, and year's later you can have four Law & Order series (another is also due this fall).

CBS is just following suit, being only slightly lazier by shifting not much more than locale and color scheme. But hey, when you can fool all the people all of the time and end up with that many hits, why take a risk with anything else.

HAS ANYONE SEEN ELVIS MITCHELL SKULKING AROUND CANNES?

Today's Page Six details the thievery occurring at Cannes, and strangely enough, it has nothing to do with Tarantino stealing the presidency of the jury. Rather, it seems that someone snuck into A.O. Scott's room -- while he was there and asleep -- and stole his wallet and laptop. The poor guy has been relegated to filing his stories to the NY Times from the press office.

I'll admit it now: I've made no secret of my hatred for A.O. Scott as a critic. I find him stuffy and a show-off who thinks he knows all while lacking any ability at actually stating an opinion, whether I personally consider it valid or not. I know there are a number of you out there who disagree with me and think Scott is great. I'm hear to tell you that you're wrong. And shockingly, I've discovered that it really is that simple. Who knew? So anyway, yes ... I thought if someone stole his laptop, maybe he wouldn't be able to submit anything, or he'd have to do it over the phone. Filing over the phone is a pain in the ass, as I know having had to do so once, from the Oscars many, many (uhm, about 12) years ago. So I dispatched Elvis to burgle, and he apparently did a good job. But drat you A.O., you and your stupid initials.