Potpourri

On Hollywood, the NY Times, and Grass

We're halfway through 2000, with the good studio films presumably still waiting for the fall and winter Oscar season. The best of Hollywood through June? It's probably High Fidelity, knowingly written and skillfully played, though, with its phony upbeat conclusion at the rock club, hardly a masterpiece.

And Wonder Boys? Too many smart film critics persuaded themselves that the Michael Douglas starrer was something special. Audiences sensibly stayed away from this enervated, self-conscious, academic-set comedy of manners; but Paramount Pictures was so smitten with the reviews that it's announced plans to reissue Wonder Boys in late fall, in time for Academy Award consideration.

Yawn! You want a robust campus comedy? It's Francine Prose's page-turner recent novel, Blue Angel (Harper Collins), in which her shlemazel professor obsesses that he's following the path to oblivion of Emil Jannings's sad clown teacher, who destroys himself tripping after Marlene Dietrich in the 1930 German movie of the same name. Still, our guy can't resist making a pass at a female student whose writing turns him on. Mistake! Even as he goes down, a hapless victim to the plague of political correctness, he's so much gutsier than Douglas saying a Boy Scout "No" to nubile Katie Holmes in Wonder Boys.

---

Mitchell Robbins, the Newton-based realtor-turned-film-magnate behind Squeeze, The Darien Gap, and Next Stop Wonderland, has been incredibly discreet selecting a follow-up project. At last, Robbins Entertainment has green-lighted Austin Chick's XX/XY, the story of three friends -- two fellows and a party girl -- at a New York college in the 1980s. Here's the press-release explanation: "They begin a dangerous three-way relationship, which spirals out of control, leading to dire consequences that haunt them ten years later." Among the nice-people Boston-area talents involved: co-producer Susan Welsh, a VP at Robbins Entertainment, and Bill Anderson, everyone's favorite local editor.

---

I carped last fall about the New York Times' unnecessarily offbeat choices to replace the retired Janet Maslin: A.O. Scott, a book editor at Newsday, and Elvis Mitchell, a Fort Worth-based journalist. I lobbied for Dave Kehr, able veteran of the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News. Months have passed, and I'm still eager to see Kehr reviewing, but I've also become a convert to Scott and Mitchell.

The Times seems to be hoping that long-time highbrow readers will be appeased by Scott's intellectual command, his virtuoso vocabulary, and his pedantic approach while the bright younger set are attracted to Mitchell's lively prose and enthusiastic devotion to popular culture. In general, Scott reviews the "important" movies, Mitchell the "fun" ones. They're both damned good on their beats. Scott has a bullshit detector for manipulative pictures; he's hard on Miramax product and a total nay-sayer about Erin Brockovich. Unlike the easily placated Maslin, he criticizes more movies than he approves, as he should. Mitchell writes superbly about music films and about iconic films like Shaft.

And where does that leave Dave Kehr? Last winter, if you turned enough arts pages on a busy Friday, you'd finally come to a Kehr review. That is, until Variety editor Peter Bart's incendiary column insisting that Kehr was being used because the Times had no confidence in their two hirees. Bart's charges were probably unfounded -- Times editors are said to be pleased with Scott and Mitchell -- but to my knowledge there hasn't been a Kehr critique since.

---

Will Rogers never met a person he didn't like. Sometimes weeks go by when it seems there's not a movie the review-friendly Boston Globe doesn't like. It would take a spotlight team to confirm that film companies pack the Globe with lucrative ads because of the boosterish write-ups, but a go-easy movie section certainly doesn't hurt. The Hollywood Reporter says the 1999 movie-ad revenue for the Globe was $10.6 million.

---

How does a critic feel when he's party to an adverse critique? None too good if we judge by my reaction after taking a hit in my own Phoenix on the subject of Ron Mann's Grass, the documentary history of marijuana legislation that played for a week at the Brattle last month. As a credited Editorial Adviser who consulted in the editing room on shaping the material and formulating the voiceover, I naturally cried "foul" at Scott Kathan's contention that "Grass is so overtly pro-pot that it ends up being . . . narrow-minded . . . " Whoa! "It's not pro-pot at all," I talked back to the review. "Grass is for decriminalization of marijuana, something else entirely." And when Kathan opined that "its arguments carry as much moral and philosophical weight as a good Cheech & Chong movie," I retorted, "Do you have any idea how long and hard Mann toiled on this film? Four years!" Then I sank really low, remembering a certain local daily's positive -- what else? -- review. "The Globe got it right," I actually heard myself saying. Hypocrite!

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com

---

The Film Culture archive

---