On the occasion of its Venice Film Festival showing, Variety's David Rooney has gone thumbs-down on Douglas McGrath's Infamous, the other Truman Capote-writes-"In Cold Blood" movie from Warner Independent (opening 10.13). "There was an integrity and character- complexity to Bennett Miller 's Capote that's missing from this glossier biopic...none of it rings true...Infamous doesn't measure up to its predecessor and seems unlikely to echo the attention it received." But Hollywod Reporter critic Kirk Honeycutt thinks it's pretty damn good. Infamous...Read More

Boring Saint

Variety's Phil Gallo starts out telling it straight and true about David Leaf and John Scheinfeld's The U.S. vs. John Lennon (Lionsgate, 9.15) in his Venice Film Festival review, but then he begins to equivocate and cottonball. As does the film itself.

Here are my three main arguments with the documentary, which Lionsgate will release on 9.15 after showings at the Telluride and Toronto film festivals, along with Gallo's review:

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From: Jeffrey Wells, Hollywood Elsewhere. To: Dreamamount publicity/ marketing. Re: An open letter about the selling of David Fincher's Zodiac (currently set for release on 1.19.07).

Greetings and salutations, guys: I'm writing to ask what the upside is in not platform-releasing Zodiac at the end of December, which is what certain Dreamamount parties are apparently against at this stage. A late December release, obviously, will put Zodiac...Read More

Peter Jackson, the reigning enfant terrible and anti-Christ of overbaked, overcranked CG movies, is threatening to produce a remake of a well-regarded British World War II flick called The Dam Busters (1954). Jackson's King Kong animator Christian Rivers will direct...an animator! Obviously there's a determination to play heavily with the visual element, or Rivers wouldn't have the gig.

The original film told the true story of how Britain developed "bouncing bombs" that destroyed German dams during that conflict. "There's that wonderful mentality of the British during the war," Jackson told Screen Daily...Read More

Neil LaBute's The Wicker Man, which Warner Bros. won't show to the press, is apparently going to be the biggest peformer this weekend. 72% general awareness with a 34 definite interest and a first choice of 11. We're looking at a four-day weekend (Labor Day holiday is on Monday, 9.4) so figure somewhere between $15 and $20 million.

Crank will probablycome in second among the newbies -- 45 general awareness, 32 definite intrest, first choice 8.

The Illusionst...Read More

"The movies haven't been very good the last three or four years, they really haven't," author/screenwriter/director Michael Tolkin tells N.Y. Times profiler David Halbfinger. "Everybody knows that. At least that, maybe more. And what [movies] were will never return.

"I don't think America's had a good [big] movie made since Abu Ghraib," Tolkin continues. "I think [that Iraqi prison-torture scandal] showed that a generation that had been raised on those heroic movies was torturing. National myths die, I don't think they return. And our national myth is finished, except in a kind of belligerent way."

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Joseph Stefano, who wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and co-created the '60s sci-fi anthology series The Outer Limits, died on 8.25 at age 84. He was a very bright guy and fun to talk to. (I did a phoner with him six or seven years ago.) When you have a chance watch the 90-minute "Making of Psycho" doc on Universal Home Video's most recent Psycho DVD -- Stefano is interviewed extensively, and it's obvious from the get-go that he's a bright, affable, agreeable sort.

E-Film Critic's Erik Childress has another critic-bashing piece out, this one called "The Whores of Summer and the Embargoes They Break." It's hard to subscribe to strict black-and-white concepts of ethical shilly-shallying for film critics. Everyone has a remnant of dried jizz on his/her coatsleeve. Nobody is 100% pure. Not even "Rabbi Dave' Poland.

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As Lewis Beale pointed out this morning, the author of Glenn Ford's N.Y. Times obit, Richard Severo, failed to mention Ford's role in Fritz Lang's The Big Heat ('53) -- a significant listing on its own, but also a major career-accelerator for Ford. Severo and his editors also left out Delmer Daves ' 3:10 To Yuma ('57), an above-average Ford film that received some attention earlier this year after it was reported that Walk the Line director James Mangold was intending to remake it, first with Tom Cruise and then with ...

Glenn Ford died today at age 90, and I'm sorry. A good life he had. But let's be honest and admit the basic facts. Ford broke through with Gilda (1946), but his face and manner seemed a bit too young and smooth back then -- he lacked character. He had taken some on by the time he starred in Fritz Lang 's The Big Heat (1953), and from then until the mid '60s he was "Glenn Ford".

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This is several days late (a bit dusty even), but a colleague heard someone say last night that the happiest person about the Tom-Cruise- leaving-Paramount mucky-muck has to be Mel Gibson...back under the radar!

Roger Friedman reported earlier today that that two guys funding Tom Cruise's producton company, Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder and Virginia home builder Dwight W. Schar, are Republicans supporters who give money to Bush-Cheney. Which underlines the obvious reading of this situation, which is that Cruise has gone outside the liberal Hollywood fold to fund C/W Prods. Snyder looks like a rightie with his fleshy overfed face and that white-shirt-and-red-tie combo, which no self-respecting Hollywood creative collaborator would be caught dead in.

"Chinatown it ain't, not in any department," says Variety critic Todd McCarthy about Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia, which had its big world premiere several hours ago at the Venice Film Festival.

"Based on James Ellroy's estimable fictional account of what was, for 47 years, Los Angeles' most notorious unsolved murder, this lushly rendered noir finds De Palma in fine visual fettle as he pulls off at least three characteristically eye-popping set pieces while trying, with mixed success, to keep some pretty cockeyed plotlines...Read More

All right, hold up on those no-one-cares- about-Lassie sentiments. It's running a 92% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a critic I respect told me a couple of hours ago that he "bawled like a baby" when he saw it a few days ago.

Could this G-rated British programmer be made of the actual right stuff? You can't blame me for presuming that this modest little film, opening 9.1 via the Samuel Goldywn Co., was just a run-of-the-mill family flick featuring auto-pilot paycheck performances by costars Peter O'Toole and Samantha Morton...Read More

In an article running today, L.A. Times guy John Horn has listed four likely Telluride Film Festival selections that I haven't yet posted, to wit:

(a) Adrienne Shelly's Waitress , with Kerri Russell as a pregnant, unhappily married waitress in the deep south who falls into an affair with a visitor as an attempt to get out of her situation and redefine her life; (b) Susanne Bier's After the Wedding (sure to be strong and absorbing in the vein of Bier's Brothers and Open Hearts); (c) Florian Henckel-Donnersmarck's The Life of OthersRead More

"All of [the] power is lying in the last third of the movie, and you're slowly ratcheting up the tension along the way," Wicker Man director-writer Neil LaBute has told Coming Soon's Edward Douglas. "You have to be very patient and say that I'm making a movie that people can watch and enjoy, but it's not something that's going to keep rattling the cage every few minutes. It's just something that's constantly twisting, twisting itself so that you're very caught up in it.

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The more Martin Scorsese's stock as a great American auteur has plummeted, the more he's focused his energies on celebrating cinema culture by doing interviews and providing commentaries for DVDs. I realize, of course, that Marty is one of this country's most devoted, impassioned and knowledgable cineastes, and that he's probably done more than any other working director to preserve and restore great films and hail to that...seriously.

But deep down I think he's investing in his cinematic-historian thing as compensation for the lack of genuine electric current in his strivings as a narrative filmmaker.

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I sifted through my DVD screeners last night trying to find my copy of Al Franken: And God Spoke (Balcony, 9.13), the Chris Hegedus-Nick Doob doc about Franken's political adventures over the last two or three years . The doc became a bit of a hot news item yesterday thanks to the censorious instincts of right-wing harridan Ann Coulter, as this Anthony Kaufman/Indiewire item explains.

My intent was to find that debate scene between Franken and Coulter taped at Hartford's Connecticut Forum on 5.14.04. It's being cut from the final release print because Coulter and/or moderator Read More

We all run into films every so often that seem exceptional in a deep-down way. And not just in a particular-personal vein but smacking of some kind of profound life-lesson and/or greatness of theme that seems to reach out and strike a universal chord. Or they deliver an emotional connection that seems to reflect our commonality in some rich and resonant fashion. And yet -- here's the rub and the shock -- much or most of the world doesn't agree. Almost everyone you know and nearly every other critic seems bored, unmoved, mocking, snide.

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With Roger Michell's Venus (Miramax., 12.15) now slated to play Telluride this weekend as well as Toronto, and all the talk about Peter O'Toole giving one of his career-best performances, you'd think the film would have its own website by now. But there's nothing. Miramax needs to get the lead out. (And apologies for the fatigue that resulted in Harvey Weinstein being ID'd last night as the Venus distributor.)

Peter O'Toole, Jodie Whittaker in Roger Michell's Venus (Miramax, 12.15)

Ross Johnson's nicely written, shrewdly-observed piece about the indefatigable Robert Evans, appearing in Wednesday's N.Y. Times. Evans thrives, persists...will persevere until the end! And beyond that even! Evans!

This coming Friday is something like a Labor Day clearance sale with The Wicker Man, Crank, and Idiocracy -- all opening on 9.1 -- not screening for the press, and in the case of Lassie, barely screening for the press. (Nobody cares one way or the other.) Crossover , the basketball movie from Screen Gems, is screening this week. And of course, Kirby Dick's This Film Has Not Yet Been Rated has been screened a lot since debuting at Sundance last January. I called around today and tried to at least arrange to see ...Read More

Christopher Smith's Severance (Magnolia, 3.07) , a reputedly witty horror-thriller, shot to the top of my Toronto must-see list earlier today when I found out it's being screened at this weekend's Telluride Film Festival. I don't know when a horror film of any kind last played Tellruride, but obviously it wouldn't have been accepted if it hadn't been two or three cuts above the norm.

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Kazu Workman of Crescenta, California, has passed along a review of the Ridley/Russell 's A Good Year, posted by Kellvin Chavez from Latino Review, And okay, all right...A Good Year may not be Oscar-caliber but at least there's a notion afloat that it gives fans of quality acting and gorgeous cinematography something to look forward to.

A persuasive argument piece by MSNBC's Sarah Bunting that Steve Carell deserves a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his work in Little Miss Sunshine...hail to that. (He and Alan Arkin have been topping the list of Best Supporting Actor possibles in the Oscar Balloon since last spring.)

But the thing you really want to look at on the same page is that MSNBC slide show of Oscar bait movies ...hah! The banner copy says that "Martin Scorsese's The Departed will take on Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers...Read More

"I'm very confused personally," actress Karen Young, 47, says to the San Francisco Chronicle's Ron Dicker. "I feel like I was in this generation of women who were supposed to take care of ourselves, supposed to be totally self-sufficient and even support a husband. There was a lot of talk about being that way, and I don't think it actually transpired. We kept our names, but that was about it." -- from Dicker's 8.27 profile of Young.

I met Young at last year's Toronto Film Festival when her latest film, Laurent Cantet's Heading South...Read More

For some reason I never watched "How Scarface Got His Groove Back", this trailer mash-up from editor Steve Kenny, when it surfaced last June. It's not bad except for Brendan Raher's narration. He sounds too much like the guy who lives across the hall who just broke up with his girlfriend -- trailer narrators always sound a little bit like slick Martians. (Editor's Note: I came upon this Trailer Mash site -- all trailer mashes, all the time -- becuase David Poland linked to it this morning. That means Poland owns all links to this site...

I know there are dozens of folks out there with Photoshop skills who can throw together a decent likeness of what Heath Ledger will look like as The Joker in Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight. A guy sent me a version today that didn't quite make it, but it put the hook in. I know this is doable & not difficult. I'll post the best one and provide all links, etc.

Holy moley...there goes that idea of a John Mark Karr thriller with Naomi Watts playing Karr, which I mentioned last Tuesday. The D.A.'s office in Boulder, Colorado, announced its decision earlier today not to file criminal charges against Karr in the death of JonBenet Ramsey because his DNA doesn't match the evidence found at the scene of her death 10 years ago. Amazing. The guy's a pathetic charlatan. Kick him out of jail, put him on a bus. No TV-movie deals, no rights to his story...over.

Tom Cruise has put together a deal with a group that includes Daniel Snyder, the owner of the Washington Redskins and a chairman of Six Flags, Inc., to finance the overhead costs of Cruise/ Wagner Prods., according to this L.A. Times story by Claire Hoffman.

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In a dull piece about the culture of box-office reporting and editorializing, Slate's Bryan Curtis is calling Exhibitor Relations spokesperson Paul Dergarabedian one of the industry's "color men... whose job it is to peer at the data and extract larger truths."

Whoa there, sunshine. Dergarabedian does not extract larger truths from box-office data. He extracts larger homilies and bromides. He's an extremely dull, water- soluble stats man...Read More

Speaking of belligerent assholes and the avoidance of same, Illinois Senator Barack Obama...Read More

Sherrybaby star Maggie Gyllenhaal, interviewed by New York's Emma Rosenblum, addresses that dumb-ass pickle she got into last year by saying the United States was "responsible in some way" for 9/11. "It was just terribly misunderstood," she explains. "I never said anything like, 'We deserved this.' Nothing like that.

"Instead of apologizing, I wrote a little clarification of what I meant. I said that as important as it is to continue to honor all the people who were hurt and killed on 9/11, which was catastrophic, it's also equally important to be brave and patriotic enough...Read More

Jack Nicholson's fiendish Irish gangster in Martin Scorsese's The Departed "is so evil that he wears a Yankees hat on the streets of Boston. 'First of all, they wanted me to wear a Red Sox hat,' Nicholson grumbles, 'but I said, all things being equal, I don't want to." -- from Logan Hill's chat with Nicholson in the current New York magazine.

I've been susceptible to the film-watching perceptions of UCLA prof Howard Suber since the mid '90s, which is when I first listened to his incisive commentary on the Criterion Collection laser discs of The Graduate, High Noon and Some Like It Hot. Judging solely by how good these audio tracks were, I'm moderately revved about getting a copy of Suber's "The Power of Film" by mail in a day or two.

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Paris, Je t'aime, which screened in Cannes three months ago and will show again at the Toronto Film Festival, is a lot more than interesting. It's an anthology film with serious rhyme, reason, poetry and nocturnal fairy dust. It drags only once or twice, and is otherwise a cut or two above anything I've ever seen in this vein. It moves right along and is well-sprung and yet, surprisingly, it found no distributor out of Cannes. (John Sloss's Cinetic Media was handling sales before and will do so again in Toronto.)

A newly expanded site for Martin Scorsese's The Departed (Warner Bros., 10.6) launched last week , and here it is. I still don't understand this film not showing at Toronto, even if it's more or less a straight genre crime flick. How can it not be at least some kind of medium- grade festival-level thing with the once-masterful Scorsese at the helm? There's absolutely nothing disreputable about a good genre film if it's good.

Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding! The judgments of two seasoned pros are producing another Toronto Film Festival trouble alarm, this one concerning Ridley Scott's A Good Year. It's been described all along as a Ridley Lite flick about a London financial shark (Russell Crowe) growing a soul and falling in love as a result of owning, visiting and working on a vineyard in the south of France.

Lightly spirited and whimsical doesn't seem to be Crowe's forte, agreed, but one plugged-in journo says the problem is with the film itself. Another disagrees, saying that A Good Year...Read More

And there are also expressions of concern being voiced over the Toronto Film Festival's opening night film, the Journals of Knud Rasmussen. Based, as you might presume, on the journals of 1920s Danish ethnographer Knud Rasmussen and directed by Norman Cohn and Zacharias Kunuk , it's been described as a portrayal an Innuit shaman and his daughter and about the ravages of change. A Canadian know-it-all is calling it "possibly the most incomprehensible show opener in the history of TIFF...the hix in the stix are gonna hate it."

Eduardo Porter and Geraldine Fabrikant have written a N.Y. Times piece titled called "A Big Star May Not a Profitable Movie Make." And we all know that to be true, but what is the ultimate bottom-line rule of thumb that any producer needs to accept when he/she pays big bucks for a star to play the lead role in a film?

Here's what you get, and I swear to Krishna this is as much of a basic and fundamental rule as William Goldman...Read More

"The mudslinging between Sumner Redstone and CAA [over last week's Tom Cruise dismissal from the Paramount lot] may be largely a show for each side's power base. Their interdependence is underscored by the dozen movie projects involving CAA clients pending at Paramount. The studio can ill afford to be feuding with CAA when it is only now getting back on track after a year of management turmoil and box-office disappointments. And it would be next to impossible...Read More

Now that the great Helen Mirren has won a Best Actress (in a Miniseries or Movie) Emmy for her performance as the Queen Elizabeth of yore in HBO's Elizabeth I, does this affect in any way her chances of being considered as a Best Actress contender for her performance as the current Queen Elizabeth in Stephen Frears' The Queen (Miramax, 10.6)? Or does it matter not at all?

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The MPAA's rating system "is a racket, a way of saving face and assuaging public morality while making as much money as possible by showing sex and violence to cinema audiences," writes David Thomson in the 8.27 Independent. It's a piece worth reading because Thomson sums it all up very neatly.

"In practice, the MPPA has viewing panels that see a film, make their suggestion and then 'negotiate' with the filmmakers over what can and cannot be included. To this extent, the system is rigged. An NC-17 rating is still a killer because in the sedated and religious...Read More

Here's a taste of Stephen Frears' The Queen (Miramax, 10.6), which will open the New York Film Festival in late September. The big selling point is Helen Mirren's performance as Queen Elizabeth, which will probably put her into the Best Actress derby. She's sublime in the role. Mirren is obviously inhabiting Queen Elizabeth in ways that feel true and well-observed. Her performance is necessarily dry, restrained and reserved, as befits the subject, but she acquaints us with a woman who feels a lot more human than anything I've ever detected from the real McCoy.

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I leave for the Toronto Film Festival in five days (I like getting there early), and I've just done a re-scan and there are at least five high-profile festival selections that are putting out mild distress signals. No torpedo holes, no manning the lifeboats, but expressions of concern on the captain's face. It means dredging up old material and I hate that, but I can at least re-review the situation with three of them:

(a) Steven Zallian's All The King's Men (Columbia, 9.22) -- This Mike Medavoy...Read More

Every so often but especially at the close of summer, a Variety reporter or two will write a story about how the formulas or genres that seemed to be working a year or two ago don't seem to be working any more. Trying to calibrate the willingness of ticket-buyers to line up for this or that kind of film based on apparent trends or sociological currents is horseshit, of course. Movie-making is about inspiration, talent and gambling, and either you get that and run with it or you don't.

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Here's a good Ben-Hur joke that I never heard until today. The oar slaves on the warship that Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) has been condemned to serve on (the one commanded by Quintus Arrius, the senior Roman officer played by Jack Hawkins) are told to listen up by a galley commander. "I have good news and bad news," he announces. "The good news is that we won't be going into battle today against the Macedonians." And the oar slaves all whoop and cheer. "The bad news is that Arrius wants to go water-skiing."

C.C. Goldwater has her day in the N.Y. Times sun, talking about her grandfather, Barry Goldwater, and more particularly the doc she produced, Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater, which will debut on HBO starting 9.18. Directed by Julie Anderson and co-produced by Tani Cohen, it reconfigures the image of the late Arizona Senator and 1964 Republican President candidate as a kind of liberal-styled libertarian...a fair-minded, independent-minded guy in the vein of, say, John McCain or maybe even a bit to the left of that.

I saw Mr. Conservative in late June...Read More

Another 3-Disc Apocalypse Now DVD Story: "That Circuit City third-disc Complete Dossier deal was advertised here in a flyer that appeared in the Philadelphia area, which is why I went to Circuit City to get it, not to mention the fact that their $12.99 price beat out Best Buy's $14.99," writes Feeling Lucky in Philadelpha.

"So I showed up early and scanned the displayed copies. None of them had any identifying markers on them, so I assumed they all came with the extra disc. But while I was doing this, I noticed a Circuit City employee ...Read More

I'm thinking of a Career Chiller Top Ten -- a rundown of the best actors and actresses of the last 15 or 20 years whose careers suddenly stalled for no apparent reason. Their talent didn't evaporate, they didn't get fat, they didn't get pinched for child molesting...but the wheels just stopped turning. This happened to poor Ned Beatty for a while over, I was told, an inside-the-industry sensitivity issue. John Travolta went cold for a while, of course, but that was mostly over lousy choices and the curse of Jonathan Krane . Whatever happened to Shelley Long? Bridget FondaRead More

I've seen Martin Scorsese's No Direction Home: Bob Dylan three times now -- once at the '05 Toronto Film Festival, twice on DVD. Why is it, then, that I'm seriously contemplating going to see it again as the final showing in the Aero's "Mods & Rockers" series...Read More

I've heard a couple of good things about ABC's five-hour TV movie The Path to 9/11, which will air over two nights -- Sunday, September 10 (8: to 11:00 pm, PT/ET) and Monday, September 11 (8 to 10 p.m., PT/ET). It's about the lead-up to the 9/11 tragedy starting with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The director is David L. Cunningham, the writer is Cyrus Nowrasteh, and the principal star is Harvey Keitel playing John O'Neill, the onetime FBI agent and WTC security consultant who was killed on 9/11.

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CNN will run a replay of its coverage of the 9/11attacks as it actually happened in real time on 9.11.06 on CNN Pipeline, starting at 8:30 ayem and ending at midnight. That means not on CNN's cable station but online...kapeesh? The 9/11 viewing will be available for free that day -- viewers normally pay $2.95 monthly or $24.95 per year. Iinteresting. (I almost wrote kewl.) But why not also make the full-day coverage available via a DVD box set of some kind?

I've heard from several people that there's been some kind of unadvertised deal between Paramount Home Video and Circuit City to provide an Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier DVD package that contains 3 DVDs if -- and only if -- you buy it at Circuit City. And here's a review on DVD Talk that mentions this Circuit City-only "third disc" version. And yet these versions were apparently recalled a few days ago and can no longer be found at Circuit City stores.

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Snakes on a Plane, the hottest internet sensation of the year that opened last weekend, will rank in eighth place as of Sunday evening with earnings of $5,812,000 -- a drop of 62%. And Little Miss Sunshine, which expanded to 1450 theatres this weekend, will come in third with $6,928,000. The #1 film, as expected, is Invincible with a projected $16,198,000.

POV Online's Mark Evanier is arguing that the Bruno Kirby- Billy Crystal piece by Nicholas Stix that I linked to yesterday (i.e., the one that suggested that Crystal might have been a "career-killing ogre" as far as Kirby was concerned). I don't know anything about this, but Evanier makes some good arguments. I 'm disputing one of them, though, and I want to point out something he didn't mention:

"Perhaps Crystal blocked Kirby from being cast in City Slickers II and subsequent Billy Crystal movies," he writes...Read More

Year's Best Trailer

Stop what you're doing and click on this trailer for Todd Field's Little Children (New Line, 10.6). It's probably the best trailer for a dramatic film I've seen this year, no shit. It really grabs you, and it's almost all about the sound. No music, almost no talk, no story. All you hear is a wonderfully haunting, far-off train horn in the distance. And the whole piece just seeps right into your soul the second you start watching it.

The trailer tells you right off that Little Children...Read More

This is the strangest piece about The Searchers that I've ever read. Written by Alex Cox, it's supposed to be about his watching John Ford's 1956 classic western in Utah's Monument Valley, where it was shot. Cox describes the drive (a little bit) and then sidewinds into a perceptive but relatively generic appreciation of the movie, blah, blah, the duality of John Wayne's Ethan character, blah, blah. What happened to the outdoor movie-watching experience? The desert dust inside the boots...

Cartoonist-satirist Mike Russell did a sitdown last month in Oregon with Beerfest boys Eric Stolhanske and Steve Lemme (two from the Broken Lizards comedy troupe who costarred in Super Troopers), and here's how it went down.

When I was living in my cockroach-infested, struggling-young- journalist Soho pad in the late '70s, there were all those Jean Michel Basquiat SAMO graffiti pieces painted all over Soho and the Bowery.

SAMO was Basquiat's graffiti alter-ego -- it basically meant "same old shit' -- and I remember being hugely disappointed when I met Basquiat himself on a street corner and he told me in passing it was pronounced "same-oh". I had always preferred "sam-oh".

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Paramount Pictures "remains firmly in the grasp of a man so out of touch with the modern world that when citing the support he'd had for his remarks, Sumner Redstone told reporters he'd had a congratulatory call from Vanity Fair celebrity chronicler Dominick Dunne, who told him he behaved like Samuel Goldwyn. Being compared to Goldwyn has a nice ring to it, but the truth is that Redstone really has far more in common with N.Y. Yankees owner George Steinbrenner...Read More

A recap & post-mortem on the Redstone-Cruise- Wagner-Grey kerfuffle from Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson. Here's one thing we definitely agree upon, which is that turmoil and transition can sometimes provide a creative blessing in disguise. Thompson writes that not having a Paramount berth is just such a situation for Cruise: "Freeing himself from a studio like Paramount could be the best thing to happen to him." And I said last May in my "Upside of Taps" piece...Read More

I've never run a fluffball item of this magnitude on Hollywood Elsewhere before, but you know me...anything to push along the Little Miss Sunshine bandwagon. If you have any "mad money" to spare and you're on Robertson Blvd., Kitson is the place to drop into. Except I don't have any mad money because advertising revenues suck in the summer months, so that lets me out and then some. Nonethless, Kitson has a big Sunshine display in the window....cool. I love those family-size buckets of Dinah's Fried Chicken.

Kitson window display

This article by New York journalist Nicholas Stix (posted on Tuesday and updated today) could have been called "When Billy Shafted Bruno." It's not mentioned in the lead graph or the second or third graph, but the heart of the story provides indications and quotes supporting a thesis that Billy Crystal "made" the career of the late Bruno Kirby, who died last week, and then he un-made him.

Billy Crystal, Bruno Kirby

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Three fascinating Dreamgirls interviews in tandem with costars Beyonce Knowles, Jennifer Hudson and Anika Non-i Rose, written by ,em>USA Today's Suzie Woz (a.k.a., Susan Wloszczyna). Except uhm....well, I lied about the "fascinating." This may have something to do with the fact that Dreamgirls won't be screened for another couple of months, probably. And I don't see why Wloszczyna, whose last name is unspellable, doesn't just change her handle to Suzie Woz full-time. This is America -- land of hamburgers and simplicity and Ford Fairlanes. Answer this honestly: if you were the Pulp Fiction character named Read More

Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett will be in Toronto to flog the TIFF showings of Alejando Gonzalez Innaritu's Babel (Paramount Vantage, 10.27), as will Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott for the screenings of A Good Year (20th Century Fox, 11.10). And a publicist friend called today about setting up an interview with a client.

But nothing can be scheduled, of course, because the Toronto Film Festival hasn't made the schedules of press and public screenings available.

Remember that exchange from Beat the Devil...Read More

I was into this for a few seconds based on the headline and the illustration, but the poor spelling and grammar queered it.

It's my humble opinion that L.A. Times reporters John Horn and Rachel Abramowitz have written more enthralling analysis pieces that this one, a sum-up about the increasingly strained relations between studios, producers and eccentric talent like Tom Cruise, Lindsay Lohan and M. Night Shyamalan, blah, blah. This mp3 of Mark Ebner's mouthing off about Cruise's situation on a Calgary radio station on Wednesday, 8.23, is a livelier absorption. Ebner naturally embraces the Sumner-was-right scenario (Ebner and Andrew Breitbart's Hollywood Interrupted...Read More

Hatfields vs. McCoys

I spoke last night with someone we'll call Talent Guy, who just got back to town from a vacation and who spent most of yesterday soaking up the whole brouhaha about the way Viacom chief Sumner Redstone cut Paramount's ties with Tom Cruise. And he had some pretty bold things to say.

I'm not saying his thoughts are the sum total of mystical godly wisdom out there, but I know his views reflect what a lot of big-time talent types are saying amongst themselves.

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There's apparently been some feelings of hesitancy among Lucasfilm staffers about the transfers of the original versions of the Star Wars flicks on those upcoming DVDs (due 9.12). This message recently went out from Fox Home Video: "Due to an internal decision from the [George] Lucas camp, we unfortunately will not be distributing any screeners for these three releases."

Did they do some kind of half-assed job (I've been reading all along that the DVDs would just be taken from the masters of the old Star Wars laser discs) that needed some last-minute tweaks or something? I mean, ...Read More

"These days [Tom Cruise] is like a charlatan who can't manage to dupe anybody. He seems desperate to maintain his stature as one of the world's biggest movie stars, even as he morphs into something no movie star can afford to be: a guy you wouldn't want to know," writes N.Y. Times columnist Caryn James in today's edition. "[Viacom chief Sumner] Redstone...Read More

Stirring praise for Factotum star Matt Dillon from critic Anthony Lane: "The beautiful joke of Factotum" -- Bent Hamer's adaptation of Charles Bukowski's novel -- "is that Dillon is nobility itself.