My favorite memory of Paul Newman, whom I was lucky enough to interview several times, was at a premiere party at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel for “Nobody’s Fool” in 1994.  The film would win him his last Oscar nomination and remains an unqualified triumph.  But that night what got me was standing in the cocktail crowd and having Newman come up to his friends and saying, much like an excited kid, “They really seem to like it.”
The word on Newman was that he was, on set. coldly professional, an iceman.  My interpretation of that is when you’re one of the biggest sex icons of your generation, it must have been hard for film after film to keep people – actresses particularly — away.  I’d like to think he was as charming and engaging with his friends as he was with the press.
An actor who was saluted quite properly for his decades of charity work, Newman’s example was a model for subsequent stars on the proper use of celebrity.  He didn’t use his fame for more magazine covers, although he certainly had his share.  Newman showed that celebrity could be used not for image self-enhancement the way troubled or tarnished stars suddenly are seen doing charity work but as a means to leave the world a better place than when you started.  His “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” costar Elizabeth Taylor is in this respect a comrade in arms.
Newman’s film legacy is wildly uneven.  He made so many turkeys, movies that you can barely see once much less ever sit through again, that it will be interesting to see if future generations find various reasons in scholarly dissertations for his choices in this regard.  I’m thinking “Fat Man and Little Boy,” “The Hudsucker Proxy,” “Quintet” (big ouch), “Lady L,” “The MacKintosh Man.”
But when he was good, Paul Newman was so very good it still takes your breath away:  “Cat,” of course, when he and Taylor were the most beautiful animals on earth, “Nobody’s Fool,” “Hud,” “Cool Hand Luke,” “The Hustler,” “Sometimes a Great Notion,” “The Sting” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “The Verdict,” “Fort Apache: The Bronx,” “Harper,” “Exodus,” “The Prize,” “The Long Hot Summer,” “From the Terrace,” “Sweet Bird of Youth” and “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge.”
 

Photoshopping is common now but Hollywood’s movie posters have been routinely altering reality for, well, forever.  That’s why when I read a Toronto newspaper piece on Keira Knightley as a fashion icon and it mentioned how she had insisted that they let her be real on “The Duchess” poster and not insert a bosomy boost, I was pleased. 
No matter how much success she’s had, at 23 Knightley seemed to be keeping her head on her shoulders – and her perspective firmly rooted in reality.  So I asked her about it that afternoon:

QUESTION:  I UNDERSTAND THAT YOU INSISTED THEY NOT GIVE A BOOB JOB TO THE POSTER.  IS THAT TRUE?
KNIGHTLEY:  I don’t remember anybody asking me or telling me they wanted to give a boob job to the poster. 
QUESTION:  SO THAT’S NOT TRUE?
KNIGHTLEY:  No, I never said that, absolutely not.  I would love to say that I was really strident but I don’t remember it coming up. 

That prompted me to follow-up with a question about celebrity and how she felt about being written up and profiled and having so much of it be not quite factual:

QUESTION:  CELEBRITY, I THINK PAUL NEWMAN IN THE CURRENT VANITY FAIR — THERE IS A RETROSPECTIVE PIECE ON HIM — HE TALKS ABOUT CELEBRITY AS BEING LIKE A DEATH OF THE SOUL.  YOU ARE ONE OF THE FEW PEOPLE, SINCE YOU CAME OUT IN ‘BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM’ YOU HAVE BEEN A STAR.  I WONDER HOW YOU SEE YOUR CELEBRITY WITH YOUR LIFE?  AFTER SIX YEARS OF BEING THIS FAMOUS PERSON IS IT SOMETHING YOU WOULD LIKE TO SHED OR DISAPPEAR FROM OCCASIONALLY? 
KNIGHTLEY (with a mischievous smile):  I think Paul Newman’s description is quite accurate.  I would agree with him.  He’s been around a lot longer than I have, so yes.

The slender 2008 Oscar potential for actors is beginning to pick up steam.  It wasn’t so much Toronto’s film fest that did it as the trailers on view in theaters as studios eagerly begin to announce their candidates.
Already the Best Actor/Actress race has fielded two solid if virtually unknown to the public at large candidates:  Melissa Leo for “Frozen River” and Richard Jenkins in “The Visitors.”
Now Mickey Rourke, fresh from starring in the Venice film festival’s Gold Lion-winning Best Picture “The Wrestler,” is a shoo-in with the kind of comeback story every showbiz addict loves.  “Wrestler” triumphed in Toronto and has the prestigious closing-night slot at the New York Film Festival.
Trailers in theaters and online for Meryl Streep in “Doubt,” Frank Langella as the disgraced President in “Frost/Nixon” and Sean Penn as Harvey Milk in “Milk” give heft to the notion that these three will be almost certain nominees. 
Certainly Streep, coming off two $100 million-plus hits with “The Devil Wears Prada” and “Mamma Mia!” has become the kind of movie star no one ever expected her to be: A box-office draw.  Whether “Doubt,” a sensational theatrical experience via “Moonstruck” Oscar winner John Patrick Shanley, transfers to the screen with the same impact or becomes another “Proof” is the big question.
Langella was touted as Best Actor for his sublime work last year in “Starting Out in the Evening” – definitely check it out on DVD – and didn’t place.  This time he has Ron Howard behind the scenes.  Even if you think Howard’s best work was years ago, he’s a major Hollywood player with tremendous clout and influence.  “Frost/Nixon” could go the distance.
Then there is Sean Penn as gay martyr Harvey Milk directed by the out and proud Gus Van Sant (“Good Will Hunting”).  If there’s ever a role that nearly screams “Nominate me” it’s of a saintly, humorous, generous man cut down by a bigot (the uber attractive Josh Brolin who plays both sides of the law with his George W. Bush for Oliver Stone first) – who then gets off when his trial comes.  Injustice will be posthumous but golden.
Potential Oscar candidates take note:  Tilda Swinton, who won Best Supporting Actress last year as George Clooney’s neurotic nemesis in “Michael Clayton,” still hasn’t gotten over the misery of it all.  I asked her  and the Coen brothers (who won Best Picture and Best Director) in Toronto ten days ago if the Oscar win had changed anything.
Swinton sounded a uniquely honest note:  “I must confess I’m sorry, but it doesn’t seem to have changed anything for me.  Occasionally people remind me that was a peculiar night that happened.  It was sort of a nasty dream.”
Why?!
“I’m not so keen on standing up in front of three billion people.  It’s traumatic,” she confessed, adding, “It would be all right if they sent it to you in the post.” 

I’m still not sure what Jada Pinkett Smith meant when I asked her this week as she was doing press for “The Women” about her Scientology school.  Pinkett Smith, who I have always found to be charmingly direct and no nonsense, has opened a school in L.A.along with her husband Will Smith.  I know that when I went to grade school where they had Catechism class, it was called a Catholic school and was ineligible for public funding because it taught religion.  But Pinkett Smith doesn’t see it quite that way:

QUESTION: WHAT ABOUT THIS SCIENTOLOGY SCHOOL THAT I READ YOU AND WILL STARTED?
SMITH: Well, come on, it’s not a Scientology school. You should know better than that. It’s a secular school but we do use the [SCIENTOLOGY] study tech.  But it’s not Scientology.

I still say, “Huh?”  As for her film, in this remake of the 1939 “The Women” Pinkett Smith is an out lesbian with a runway fashion model girlfriend.  Every star it seems gets talked about and the rumors and questions about the Smiths’ sexuality have been around for a while.  Could her lesbian portrait be some kind of inside joke?  We didn’t go there.  But the character’s out lesbianism prompted this Q&A:

QUESTION: IN THE 1939 ORIGINAL YOUR CHARACTER WRITES BOOKS, WEARS GLASSES, DOESN’T GET INTO HIGH FASHION AND IT WAS ONLY SUGGESTED THAT SHE MIGHT BE A LESBIAN. HERE IT’S FULL OUT. CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THAT TRANSITION?
SMITH: Well, I think that today people are really a lot more – I don’t know what you’d call it – open. Let’s put it that way. I found it really liberating that Diane [English, the writer-director] kind of just put it on the table with a particular character and then brought me in as the black woman. As we know there were no black actresses in the original one. So I decided that I would just fly with it.
QUESTION: DID YOU BASE YOUR CHARACTER ON ANYONE YOU KNOW IN PARTICULAR?
SMITH: As far as writers or lesbians? I know a lot of lesbians. A lot of them! I got a ton of lesbians that are friends of mine. You know what?  I think there’s a lesbian inside of me somewhere that I just pulled out [Laughs]. I just said, ‘Honey, let that lesbian shine on through!’ So that’s what I did.
QUESTION: ANY PLANS TO EXPAND THE FAMILY?
SMITH: I think I’m going to have ten more.
QUESTION: WHAT WAS YOUR FAVORITE THING TO DO IN THIS MOVIE?
SMITH: Well, they took my favorite scene out. I thought I was going to get the opportunity to kiss Eva Mendes, but that didn’t happen.
QUESTION: HOW FAMILIAR WITH THE ORIGINAL FILM WERE YOU BEFORE GETTING INVOLVED WITH IT?
SMITH: My mother and my aunt loved it. My mother, when she found out that I was going to participate in this film, I mean she and my aunt were through the roof. She’s like, ‘You have to do it! You have to do it!’ I was getting a phone call everyday. I was like, ‘Alright, ma. Dang.’ But I met with Diane and I read the script and I just loved it. I thought, ‘This is a must. I have to participate.’
QUESTION: DID YOU GET A CHANCE TO SEE THE ORIGINAL?
SMITH: I’ve seen pieces of it, yeah, and my mother, she makes me watch the classics.

Once again I have survived the onslaught known as Hollywood Comes to Toronto for their film festival.  I once again stupidly did not get a festival pass, which gets you into all the industry and press screenings and without which you might as well be, well, you have as much chance getting in to any of these screenings as Tom Cruise does trying to get an audience to take you seriously as a one-eyed noble Nazi. 
Because Toronto opens with a Canadian film, opening night was a dud without anyone who mattered on the red carpet or the lackluster premiere, Paul Gross’ “Passchendaele.”

Things quickly got up to speed with Guy Ritchie’s “RocknRolla” a first-rate return to form for the much-maligned filmmaker.  No, Madonna didn’t show – as she did in London for the ensemble gangster film’s world premiere – but Thandie Newton, Jeremy Piven, Chris Ludacris Bridges, Gerard Butler, Idris Alba and newcomer, soon to be well-known Toby Kebbell.  Ritchie, who’s been suggestively labeled a homophobe in the not-so-scandalous book by Madonna’s brother, seems mighty comfortable with the gay stuff here, putting Butler into a situation that will qualify as a dream fantasy for his many gay fans.  When asked about, Butler blushed.

There is much to be said for the power of a beautiful woman to reduce us ordinary blokes to Jell-O.  I’m thinking not only about Newton, so slender and delicately sweet, but Alicia Keys, in a red Gaultier belted dress that suggested she’s a natural heir for Lena Horne, and Keira Knightley, the only major actress I saw who wore pants – not the skinny tight kind but softly billowing ones.

THE DUCHESS

Knightley “The Duchess” is one of those tour de forces destined to prompt Oscar and Golden Globe buzz.  As a biopic, “Duchess” was fine as it detailed a miserable marriage in billionaire heaven.  Ralph Fiennes’ Duke of Devonshire, the fifth richest and most powerful man in England in the 1780s, has been compared to our own Prince Charles and Knightley’s Lady Georgiana Spencer, a great-great-great aunt of Princess Diana, is being touted as an example of how history is destined to repeat itself. I never thought of Diana or Charles as I watched Fiennes delicately walk the line between an offensively cruel husband who rapes his wife between bouts with his in-house mistress (granted, it’s a very big house but still) and someone puzzled by the violent reactions he prompts.
Mostly though in “The Duchess I kept watching Keira and felt as if I was seeing the most exotic bird, a kind of peacock who lived in these exalted plains and ruled the roost but was, quite rightly, very unhappy.  Knightley seems strangely unknowable and always fascinating, onscreen and in person.  Could she be the new Garbo? 

BURN AFTER READING

“Burn After Reading,” the brothers Coen’s follow-up to their Oscar-lauded “No Country for Old Men,” will be mostly savaged and derided by the critics I suppose.  I found it great sick fun.  Sure, “Burn” brightly flames without ever adding up to much but in spite of the awful bloodletting it seemed very breezy and sort of a charmer.  The first-rate cast is led – and the picture’s stolen by — Brad Pitt who seems to have taken a happy pill and bounces his way through the strange events that unfold like an idiot on a pogo stick.  George Clooney and Tilda Swinton are blissfully perfect as a mismatched couple; neither has the slightest clue about who the other really is.  Frances McDormand gives such a compelling performance as the stupidest woman in Washington, D.C., that she’s actually vile.  Richard Jenkins and David Rasche are fine but J.K. Simmons, a usually benign presence as Kyra Sedgwick’s boss on “The Closer,” is hilarious as the CIA chief who wants everything, just everything including any stray bodies, pushed under someone else’s carpet.

THE BROTHERS BLOOM

“The Brothers Bloom,” a con man comedy from “Brick” helmer Rian Johnson that stars Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo as brothers and Rachel Weisz as their rich mark, left me mystified.  I couldn’t figure out what it was supposed to be and why anyone in their right mind would like it — but there were many who said how much they liked it.  It’s been postponed to ‘09 except for LA and NY runs. 

THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES

“The Secret Life of Bees” is a bit drawn out but so sweetly affecting and sensationally acted.  And designed.  And shot.  Set in 1964 America in the South, adapted from Sue Monk Kidd’s bestseller, “Bees” stars Dakota Fanning as 14-yearold Lily Owens who is on the run from abusive dad (an extraordinarily subtle turn from Paul Bettany) with her black companion Rosaleen (wonderful work by Jennifer Hudson).  The end up in a small South Carolina town where a bee shop and home is presided over by August Boatwright (Queen Latifah) and her sisters June (Alicia Keys who replaced Jada Pinkett Smith when she opted to go direct her first movie) and May (Sophie Okenodo who deserves serious Oscar attention here).  There were sobs at the end and for the gala, a well-deserved standing ovation.  

NICK AND NORAH’S INFINITE PLAYLIST

“Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” is charming even if it doesn’t quite add up to much.  Maybe it’s because Michael Cera’s been here before as the sweet, sensitive teen.  Or maybe it’s because Kat Dennings seems so much wiser and mature — she’s an 8 to his 14.  “Playlist” boasts a real feel for New York at night as it strolls through the club scene – great score here – as our two opposites bounce and bicker until the final pucker.  There’s a gay chorus of Cera’s rock band mates who blessedly aren’t mocked for being gay but never seem as amorous as everyone else here.  Ari Gaynor as Norah’s best pal is truly adorable as the drunken party girl who is so sweet and who just loves her gum.

MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA & APPALOOSA

“Miracle at St. Anna” and “Appaloosa” have to be rank among my favorite films of the year.  What Spike Lee has managed is so personal and yet so epic in his tale of an Italian village in 1944who must fight the fleeing Nazis, the bitter Fascists within and sill protect the black Buffalo soldiers who have come for shelter.  Lee’s to be commended for telling the previously unsung exploits of the Buffalo soldiers.  Would it take a miracle for “St. Anna” to get Lee a Best Director Oscar nomination?  He deserves it.
Ed Harris’ old-fashioned yet very contemporary Western “Appaloosa” starts with a bang and sets the stage for what looks initially like a classic battle between evil (Jeremy Irons’ rapacious rancher) and good (the hard-working, scared townspeople led by Timothy Spall).  Summoned with money and a contract that allows them to set the law are Harris and Viggo Mortensen, gunmen for hire who are lethal yet operate by what might be called the John Ford-John Wayne Code of the West, which means they are men of an honor that often goes unspoken but must be followed even unto death.
Into this somewhat predictable set-up arrives Renee Zellweger’s Allison, an obviously respectable woman of very little means who quickly seduces Harris.  What follows is always surprising, often fun and just as often dangerously violent.  It’s a treasure.