Filed under: Celebrities and Controversy, Trailers and Clips

People often complain about celebrities and "Hollywood elites" who talk politics from their soapboxes, but maybe they won't rag on this amusing conservation PSA from Harrison Ford -- after all, he makes a considerable personal sacrifice to get his message across. Or at least it looks like he does. I've never seen the unpleasantness of chest-waxing used as a metaphor for the damage caused by rainforest destruction, and I'm not sure it makes very much sense (is that the Earth wincing in pain?), but it's certainly clever. And Ford, sporting a stylin' stud earring, is in full-on Indiana Jones exasperation mode -- no one can do macho annoyance quite like he does. It's not quite 40-Year Old Virgin-level agony, but it must have taken some convincing.

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Filed under: Celebrities and Controversy, Politics

These stories just keep getting better. On the heels of Israeli municipalities apparently banning the display of the word "sex" on Sex and the City billboards (a claim that's been disputed) and Russian communists calling for a boycott of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull because the Soviet Union did not, in fact, seek to use alien technology to practice mind control on US citizens during the Cold War, comes the news that Sharon Stone has annoyed the owner of the leading Chinese cinema chain to the point where he's pledged not to show her films.

What did she say? She said that the recent earthquake in China may have been "karma" -- cosmic justice for the way China has treated the Tibetans. That's stupid, but the theater owner -- Ng See-Yuen -- wasn't angry at the manifest silliness of Stone's statement so much as the fact that she's politicized a devastating natural disaster. Which is kind of a good point too -- at least, she's politicized it in a way that's really weird. And it's important to note that, at least on its face, this doesn't seem to be a case of the Chinese government censoring Stone's films, but rather an exhibitor making a choice not to show them. Of course, with the way the Chinese government operates, who really knows.

Sharon Stone seems to have no "big" films in the pipeline, so it's not clear what effect, if any, the boycott will have on revenues.

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By the end of his long, successful career, Sydney Pollack was just slightly more reliable as an actor than as a director. As Dustin Hoffman's agent in "Tootsie" (that's him on the left above) he represented outraged common sense and the shrug that has seen everything. When he popped up as the gruff, soullessly capable name partner in last year's "Michael Clayton," you breathed a sigh of relief for the New York-school movie professionalism he exuded.

Pollack's final movie appearance before his death Sunday of cancer at 73 was in the recent "Made of Honor," as Patrick Dempsey's much-married father -- the only piece of grit in that empty romantic comedy's faux Manhattan playground. In a way, Pollack the actor was the visual correlative of the Sidney Lumet worldview: tough, East Coast-direct, politically progressive, trusting the individual far more than the group.

Those qualities are present in the movies he directed, too, although camouflaged behind a smoothly faceless style. Pollack would be the first to admit he wasn't an auteur -- he served his actors and the story, not any sense of artistic self. Yet because he was a smart filmmaker and a friend to the reigning powers of his day, it's movies like "Tootsie," "The Way We Were," "Out of Africa," and "Three Days of the Condor" that you think of when you think of the good movies of the 70s and 80s.

Not necessarily the great movies, but the good ones: intelligent, committed, well-acted films with a sweep that flattered both their subjects and their audiences. "Three Days" is possibly the best of the conspiracy thrillers that studded the 1970s, the one most rooted in a realistic sense of one individual (Robert Redford as a low-level CIA librarian, standing in for you and me) peering over the abyss into the evil deeds our government can do.

"Out of Africa" -- Pollack's best director Oscar-winner -- and "The Way We Were" shared big historical canvases and female characters who broke the mold, played by actresses (Meryl Streep and Barbra Streisand respectively) who did the same. That could also be said for "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?," Pollack's 1969 critical breakthrough about a grueling 1930s dance marathon that served as a metaphor for the death of the American dream. Jane Fonda's performance in that film has a ferocity that takes no prisoners and that makes the men in the film look slightly stupid. Pollack liked ballsy women, and, yes, that includes Dustin Hoffman in "Tootsie," learning what it is to be a man by dressing as a woman.

By contrast, the men in his movies are usually daunted by events, and it says something that this Jewish director kept coming back to the WASPy Redford as his hero, a reluctantly active figure thrown by those fierce women even as he's desired by them.

The one Pollack movie that sidesteps the algorithm is 1972's "Jeremiah Johnson," in which the director and his star say the hell with women and disappear into the American west to grow a beard. The movie's a fascinating halfway point between Jedidiah Smith and Hollywood hippie daydream, and a crucial document, in its way, of the changes the American movie industry went through as the anarchic 60s gave way to the corporate 80s.

Which is to say that Sydney Pollack wasn't a raging bull or an easy rider like Scorsese, Friedkin, Coppola, Spielberg and the other New Hollywood cowboys. He was from the half-generation earlier that studied acting in New York under Sanford Meisner and learned how to make movies by shooting black-and-white TV shows like "The Defenders" and "Alfred Hitchcock Presents". Pollack's first movie as director was 1965's "The Slender Thread," an eminently responsible social-problem movie about a suicide hotline staffer (Sidney Poitier) trying to talk a desperate woman (Anne Bancroft, gloriously unsubtle as always) out of killing herself.

It's not exactly a great film, but you can see Pollack the future director in every sensible frame: the woman with frighteningly "big" emotions (a figure to be both pitied and worshipped), the wary man trying to save her from herself, the middlebrow balancing act of Kennedy-era racial and gender politics, a gift for unfussy storytelling as filtered, primarily, through performance.

A Pollack movie, in fact, lives through its central performance, which is almost always about a character kicking at the walls of society: Streep in "Out of Africa," Fonda in "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?," Hoffman in "Tootsie," Redford in "Jeremiah Johnson," Streisand in "The Way We Were." On top of that performance the director explored certain themes, but always within the context of creating a compelling narrative entertainment.

"Here?s what I always try to do, and again it?s something I get my wrists slapped for all the time," Pollack told Jump Cut magazine in 1976. "I want to work within genres -- a western, romance, melodrama or spy film. And then, within that form, which I try to remain as faithful to as I can, I love to fool around with serious ideas. The westerns that I've made have not been straight westerns, by any manner. 'Jeremiah Johnson' was, for me, a very serious film. It was a western, but it was still a serious film and it entertains very serious ideas about copping out, dropping out, how far can you go? Do you have to make it work within the system or do you try to make it work elsewhere? To me, those are serious ideas, but still it?s a movie, basically an entertainment."

It's a measure of Pollack's power within the industry -- and how much he was well and truly liked by everyone -- that even as he lost his stride as a director, he remained in demand as a producer and an actor. His "Out of Africa" follow-up was 1990's "Havana," a foolhardy attempt to bring the romanticism of "Casablanca" into the modern age (Redford may be many things, but he certainly isn't Bogart). The films that followed -- "The Firm," "Sabrina," "Random Hearts," "The Interpreter" -- are polished and unnecessary, lacking the urgency that animated Pollack's earlier work. The one keeper is small and personal: a documentary about the director's good friend, architect Frank Gehry.

In front of the cameras, though, he seemed to recover something of himself (Pollack had originally studied to be an actor but decided he didn't have the looks for it). He popped up in "The Sopranos" and "Entourage," sunk his teeth into a juicy Woody Allen role in "Husbands and Wives," served as Tom Cruise's sex-club tour guide in Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut." His metier was fallen Manhattan men, alternately bitter and tickled by the things they'd seen.

As a producer, Pollack more than kept his hand in. Here are some of the movies on which he's credited as either producer or exective producer: "The Fabulous Baker Boys," "Presumed Innocent," "Searching for Bobby Fischer," "Sense and Sensibility," "The Talented Mr. Ripley," "Iris," "The Quiet American," "40 Shades of Blue," "Michael Clayton." Again, not necessarily the greatest movies of their day but ambitious and persuasive and intelligent, which makes them vastly superior to 90 percent of the movies around them.

Pollack had been part of a number of production partnerships over the years -- he joked that one of them, MJ Inc., stood for "Melancholy Jew" -- but in 1985 he launched Mirage Enterprises and in 2000 invited writer-director Anthony Minghella in as full partner. Minghella died unexpectedly earlier this year at 54, and now Pollack is gone. There are remaining Mirage films in the pipeline: "Recount," which just played HBO, Stephen Daldry's "The Reader" with Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes, a remake of "The Lives of Others" still in development. After that, the slate is empty and a particular (and for Hollywood, rare) movie sensibility ceases.

That said, I think I'll miss Pollack the actor most: The hard-nosed, kind-hearted quintessential New Yorker (quintessentially from someplace else -- Lafayette, Indiana, in his case) bringing the hero down a peg just because he's been around the block so many times.

Sydney Pollack, that highly instinctive director of movie stars, died yesterday. His death signals the end of a bridge between two Hollywood eras. Or, at the very least, he was a holdout that movies could be -- should be -- now as they once were: serious, glamorous, feeling, intelligent, and, above all, respectful of their audiences. Pollack never made the best films -- although "Tootsie," from 1982, is still the best Hollywood has done with the romantic comedy since the genre's golden age started to tarnish in the 1950s, and "Out of Africa," from 1985, won him best picture and directing Oscars. At his strongest and most skillful, Pollack crafted overwhelming films that sent you home satisfied that you got more than you paid for, even when the star is killed at the end, the way Jane Fonda was in "They Shoot Horses, Don't They," from 1968, or when you felt like you might die from, say, the CinemaScope emotionalism in "The Way We Were," from 1973.

In 1963, Pollack arrived in Hollywood to be a dialect coach for John Frankenheimer, and his great skill as a director was giving us stars as we wanted to see them and hear them. His movies felt hyper-classical in that sense: the material was characterized not by a script or flashy direction but by the men and women in front of the camera. I wouldn't call Pollack a transparent director, but he was trained as an actor and came of age as a moviemaker working in television in the 1960s. The style he acquired was never particularly cinematic. It wasn't even always exciting, regardless of how good the movies looked. But his style seemed to be in the service of the actors, a trait that seemed true even in a movie as politically problematic as "The Interpreter," from 2005, in which Pollack coaxed an intriguingly complex performance (and accent) from Nicole Kidman. (In his documentary "Sketches of Frank Gehry," he treated the architect like a movie star, too.)

Pollack was also adept at synthesizing a film's different technical properties into an often seamless whole, so pictures like "Three Days of the Condor," from 1975, or, to a lesser extent, "Absence of Malice," from 1982, "Havana," from 1990, and "The Firm," from 1993, all displayed clean, clear craftsmanship at the center of which were, respectively, Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway; Paul Newman and Sally Field; Redford and Lena Olin; and Tom Cruise. You remember who was in a Sydney Pollack movie more than what it was necessarily about. Amazingly, a stream of politics ran through most of his films, but it never got in the way of the stars. Whenever I catch "The Way We Were" on television, the tone of the fights always surprises me. Redford and Streisand argue about communists and the blacklist the way lovers argue about their love. But the ideological issues between them are real.

At the risk of seeming terribly nostalgic -- is terribly wistful OK? -- this sort of human premium is currently missing from a lot of Hollywood movies, from the "Speed Racers" and "Star Wars" regurgitations of the world, where the actors are treated like pixels and candy and furniture. Pollack's movies were scarcely realistic (they had too much radiance), but the glow in both his romantic films and nightmare-thrillers usually came from the casting. Was Jessica Lange ever starrier than she was in "Tootsie"? Was Teri Garr ever Teri Garr-ier? And the bantering Dustin Hoffman does with the cast is different for every single actor: The performance was too busy, complicated, and inspired to resort to shtick . He and Pollack disagreed over the tone the movie was supposed to take. The actor thought it should be light. The director disagreed. The final movie wondrously split the difference (in Hoffman's favor).

"Tootsie" gets better every single time it turns up on cable. Just last month, I was in a video store that happened to be playing it and damn if I didn't stand there completely hooked as if I'd never seen it before. It doesn't even matter that Dave Grusin's score still makes you feel like you're stuck in a mall elevator. The movie itself would have worked just as well in 1942 as it did in 1982. In 2022, it'll still feel as vibrant. "Tootsie" continues to work as a kind of feminist critique. Watch it with a certain indefatigable presidential candidate in mind. Your brain will explode.

As the movie business changed -- around the time of "The Firm" the paradigm was shifting away from pure star vehicles; movies were turning more global -- Pollack started to retreat into old-fashioned material. His remake of Billy Wilder's "Sabrina" two years later was miserable purely because it was so dutifully nostalgic. It was the work of a student trying to pass to himself off as a fan. Julia Ormond was in the Audrey Hepburn part, Greg Kinnear in the William Holden role, and starchy Harrison Ford in the Humphrey Bogart role. The original wasn't perfect; but empty of cynicism and full of the oily 1990s capitalist spirit, the remake was hard to justify. (This is Pollack talking to Charlie Rose about the film in 1995.)

His "Sabrina" was the anti-"Tootsie": The stars never aligned. But you knew where Pollack was coming from. He was deeply entrenched in the history of the business that made him want to make movies in the first place. He wasn't going to retreat from the belief that the studios were capable of better and the audiences should expect more from them. You almost hunger for a trashy, wrongheaded movie like "The Interpreter," since there was a real film there to wrestle with. Pollack wanted his genre movies to make us think, even if you didn't happen to agree with their politics. His seriousness about the state of moviemaking extended to the seriousness of moviegoing. That was him in an ad admonishing you for using your cellphone during a screening.

Actually, most of his own memorable performances -- from Dustin Hoffman's agent in "Tootsie" and Tom Cruise's skeezy friend and patient in "Eyes Wide Shut" to George Clooney's sinister boss in "Michael Clayton -- blended the tutorial and the scolding. (He was usually some younger star's mentor; his last role was as Patrick Dempsey's dad in "Made of Honor.") It's a scandal, frankly, that more was never made of Pollack's performance as a midlife crisis-sufferer opposite Judy Davis in Woody Allen's very good "Husband and Wives." Everyone rightly went on about Mount Saint Judy, but he brought a lot of ache and vulnerability to the part. Liam Neeson was the sexiest thing in the movie, but Pollack ran a surprisingly not-so-distant second. Plus, he rocked a tracksuit like nobody's business.

Getting back to Pollack's classical Hollywood sensibility: It's not for nothing that he eventually teamed up to produce movies with the younger Englishman Anthony Minghella who was very much his kindred spirit -- a director eager to bridge the widening gulf between art and commerce. Like Pollack at his best, Minghella worked as though there were no continental drift at the the movies -- he excelled at big, serious adult films lit up by major stars. Minghella died in March; and with these two gone, there's every reason to lament that a certain kind of moviemaking has gone with them. The aesthetes and snobs will say good riddance to their tony, middlebrow entertainments. But without the great human care they brought to directing and producing, the middle in Hollywood gets bleaker and thinner every year.