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, he writes early on, "gives you the unique opportunity to see how two sets of filmmakers can take exactly the same story,...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:

(a) The doc does "persuasively chronicle an artist sticking to his guns through activism" as the U.S. government conspired to kick Lennon...Read More

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 into the derby and make it eligible for whatever possible critic awards and or Academy nominations that may result. This, obviously, would fortify the 1.19 general release to some...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. "That heads-down, persevering, keep-on-plugging-away mentality which is the spirit of...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, which I finally saw two or three nights ago and is better than I figured it would be, is going wide. And there's...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."

Tolkin...Read More

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.

I guess Childress' point is that some people whore out too much. They cross the line like Saddam Hussein crossed the line, and here's Childress dropping bombs and delivering shock-and-awe. I'm not saying everyone is a whore, but I think it was Bob Dylan who once wrote, "Show...Read More

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 Russell Crowe playing Ford's bad-guy role. These are fairly significant omissions,...

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".

Then his career eased down and stayed that way until the end 40 years later. He worked through...Read More

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 under control. A literally ripping good yarn is [ultimately] undercut by some lackluster performances and late-inning...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. Has anyone ever seen The Magic of Lassie (1978)...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 Others, said to be "a black...Read 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.

"It's knowing the genre, knowing how you want to approach that and how you want to surprise with...Read More

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.

Let's face it -- the two...Read More

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 Steve Roberts (most...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.

And it just throws you into a funk....Read More

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 The Wicker Man this coming Thuirsday night...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.

"Personally I think that horror comedy is veyr hard to do really well," says a buyer who saw it at Cannes last May, "but I think Smith really nails it. And it's...Read More

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"...hah!! (Which is the reason why Warner Bros. isn't bringing The Departed to Toronto...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 (Vers le...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 in perpetuity.)

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.

Six Flags? The Washington Redskins? Do they sound like rock 'n' roll Chateau Marmont-type names to anyone? A bunch of opportunistic guys can't just get together and fund a Hollywood company -- it can't really work unless they can hear the "music" in their own heads...unless they have the...Read More

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 who would choke on real color. There's something vaguely anesthetic and Orwellian about Paul Dergarabedian. I've seen saying this for five or six years now and nobody ever listens. Journalists writing Sunday box-office stories...Read More

Speaking of belligerent assholes and the avoidance of same, Illinois Senator Barack Obama won't run for President in '08...but he should. Everybody says it's too soon for the guy. But he's 44 years old and JFK ran when he was a year younger (having made his early plans for making a run on the U.S. Presidency when he wasn't quite 42) so what's the problem? Obama is thoughtful, reputable, charismatic, learned. And in possession of that inner connectedness that people seem to recognize and respond to. Everyone knew this right after he spoke at the Democratic Convention in the summer of '04....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 to look at the...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.

"After 42 years of pontificating at UCLA and years of trying to distill what I've learned down into one short book, I'm now facing the...Read More

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.)

Margo Martindale in Alexander Payne's "14th arronsidment"...

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 is "a painfully obvious (and failing) attempt by Crowe...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's "nobody knows anything." Pay for a big star or two and you'll get people to pay attention to your...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 today for any agency -- even one as powerful as CAA -- to boycott Paramount, which accounts for as much as 20% of the movie...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?

There's no denying that Mirren delivering two award-calibre perfs as a pair of English queens named Elizabeth in films presented the same year is a fairly striking coincidence. And I'm just...Read More

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 parts of America, an NC-17...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.

The...Read More

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- produced period political drama has been giving off sputtering noises since it was yanked almost...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.

Most producers and studio execs don't, of course. Most are afraid to...Read More

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 at the L.A. Film Festival. I always respected...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...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 Fonda? Bijou Phillijps? With every...Read 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 on Sunday night (8.27)? I've thought it over, and all I can figure is that it feels immensely cool to soak in the specialness of that early-to-mid '60s Dylan thing, which isn't "better" than the bolt around the current Dylan album or the late '90s incarnation or the one that happened in the mid '70s...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.

I'm going to try and score a DVD screener, as it'll...Read More

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.

The review, amended on Sunday, 8.20.06, says, "Thanks to DVD Talk reader Ryan, who...Read More

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. "It was probably within his power to do so...but how could he...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 is a smart, A-level...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, the way they bleachers felt, the size of the screen, whether it was sufficiently audible, what kind of people showed up, etc.?

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".

Some of the slogans were "SAMO as a neo art form," "SAMO as an end to to mindwash religion, nowhere politics...Read More

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. That's why I suspect that no matter how many good pictures get made at Paramount, as long as Redstone is around, studio...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 about Cruise's implosion that "if he's smart (and he is), he can damage control his way out of this, to some extent. Just...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 on Robertson Blvd. south...

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

Or so the indicators indicate. Crystal certainly seems to have had an indirect hand in limiting Kirby's acting opportunities...Read More

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 Antoine Roquemora and you found out your "street"...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 when the ship's captain announces that an engine part has cracked and the ship can't...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 book prophesized the Age of Celebrity Meltdowns) and he's certainly not as measured or cautious as Horn and Abramowitz, but I...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.

Before I get into Talent Guy's words, bear with...Read More

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...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 soon fell into the usual showbiz doublespeak when he said of Mr. Cruise, "As much as we like him personally, we thought it was wrong to renew his deal." He got that backward, at least from the moviegoers' perspective....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.

MCN's "The Reeler" has the complete official N.Y. Film Festival rundown: Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette (I'd like to hear some ripe New York boos this time instead of French ones), David Lynch's Inland Empire (adding the "The" is utterly ridiculous), Todd Field's Little Children, Johnnie To's Triad Election, Manoel de Oliveira's ,em>Belles Toujours , Warren Beatty's Reds, Alberto Lattuada's Mafioso, etc.

No film festivals, no Oscar lah-lah, probably no Film Comment tribute pieces to Martin Scorsese...just a complex hardball crime flick. Does this poster do the idea behind The Departed justice? What does it tell you? I'll tell you what it tells me: whatever this movie is, we're not saying. We've got Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon snarling and scowling and that's all we're saying. We know it's not enough, but it's all you're getting from Warner Bros. marketing. But watch the trailer, why doncha?

For those having trouble getting HE to come up on their screen, the reason is that I switched to a dedicated server this morning. This means you have to dump your cache and start anew. If your computer has any lingering cache impressions of the HE's numerically coded jibberish address (the URL is the same, of course -- it's the pain-in-the-ass coding that's different), you have to either clean out your cache or just refesh until it comes in.

Neil Burger's The Illusionist (Yari Film Group, 8.18) is said to be a pretty good, moderately okay duelling-magician movie set in turn-of- the-century Vienna. Or at least, that was the general rumble after it showed at '06 Sundance Film Festival. (I won't see it until this weekend.) It stars Edward Norton, Paul Giamatti and Rufus Sewell .

On the other side of the lake is Chris Nolan's The Prestige (Touchstone, 10.20), a duelling magician set in turn-of-the-century London that's said to be...well, much better . And they're opening within two months of each other.

The Touchstone/Nolan stars...Read More

Witness the British History Boys trailer and take note of a front- and-center hetereosexual coupling scene. (Which was in the play -- it just feels a bit more pronunced here.) And no intimations of ball-fondling, although there's a nicely rendered gay version of "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered." (Which is also in the play.) Loads of sunshine-lit photography. I for one am looking forward to not only hearing but digesting every line of dialogue, which you can never quite do from the 22nd row of the orchestra, even when you cup your ears.

When and if I'm ever hit with something that puts me in a hospital, I hope I can muster the stuffings to deal with it Roger Ebert-style. As in spunky, tenacious, moxie-man, life-affirming, etc.

This Haley Joel Osment DUI /pot-possession rap is so far below the Mel Gibson shockometer it's not funny. My first thought when I read it was, "Tough darts, kid...deal with it." My second thought was that this might be some kind of left-field karma payback for A.I. and especially that awful Pay It Forward. That sounds unfair and silly but I always partly blamed Osment for those films.

On top of this, who cares? Former child stars always get into trouble in their teens and 20s and beyond, right? Either they get what's happening at some point and they turn...Read More

Some "words to the wise" from director Francis Coppola (The End of Youth, Apocalypse Now), as taken from his on-camera opening commentary on the relatively new Patton DVD that came out in late May. (Coppola worked on the screenplay when he was 27 or so.) Every aspiring filmmaker and screenwriter reading this needs to take two minutes and listen.

And here's a Time magazine q & a with Coppola, which contains a variation on that thing he said a while back about still feeling sixteen and that a filmmaker need the bravery...Read More

Just before the chariot race sequence in William Wyler's Ben-Hur, Messala (Stephen Boyd) says to Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston), his childhood friend-turned-mortal enemy: "So, Judah...this is the day." And verily I say unto ye that today -- Thursday, 8.17 -- is the Day of Reckoning for Snakes on a Plane.

Snakes shows tonight around the country -- call it All-Snakes Day -- and tens of thousands of film fans will attend, of course, and I'm asking here and now for quickie reviews to be sent in quickly so I can get some kind of consensus up by late tonight.

I'm seeing...Read More

An English translation of Ken Watanabe's dialogue in that Flags of Our Fathers/Letters From Iwo Jima Japanese trailer that went up yesterday. It's obvious that Watanabe, playing a real-life general named Tadamichi Kuribayashi, is giving his troops some kind of threatening pep talk, but here's a Wells-edited version of what he's probably saying: "For the sake of our country, regardless if you're the last soldier, our mission is to kill the enemy on this island. Keep in mind you can never go back to the homeland." And then the titles supposedly read, "Never forget the heroes of Iwo Jima -- Japan...Read More

Inspired by Scott Weinberg's Cinematical piece about how he can't find any Snakes on a Train DVDs anywhere, I called Asylum Video, the L.A.-based producer of the Snakes on a Plane ripoff flick, and asked a distribution rep what's wrong. Nothing, she said -- it's available at all corporate Blockbuster outlets as well as all Hollywood Video and Movie Gallery stores, she said. It's the mom-and-pop stores and the online-ordering sites that aren't yet stocked. It turns out Asylum moved from an office on Sunset (at Windows of the World) to new offices on Sycamore a couple of months ago and the...Read More

A newly restored print of Warren Beatty's Reds ('81) is going to be screened at the N.Y. Film Festival in late September, presumably with Beatty dropping by for a post-screening q & a. And then Paramount Home Video is releasing this spruced-up version as a 25th Anniversary DVD on 10.3.

The Amazon page doesn't say if Beatty recorded a narration track or participated in a retrospective documentary, which would be par for the course for a DVD of this sort. (The Paramount Home Video folks didn't know about this, Beatty biographer Peter Biskind didn't...Read More

"We did the best film we could, and it's just snakes on a plane. It's not 'Snakes on Brokeback Mountain.'" -- the compulsively honest Samuel L Jackson speaking to The Independent's Leslie O'Toole.

"Riddle me this," David Poland wrote this morning. "Is a 20 minute clip, some free hors d'oeuvres, a handshake and a smile from a singing diva, and a Japanese trailer really enough to lock up the Oscar season for people now?" The implication seems to be that it's too early to make a call about Flags of Our Fathers and Dreamgirls looking like the hottest Best Picture choices. That or he thinks I'm full of gas for joining Tom O'Neill in saying so. Or something like that. I'm not quite sure.

Let's just repeat the Flags basics without comment: (a)...Read More

L.A. Times writer Deborah Netburn has asked editors of some of the top geek sites if Snakes on a Plane (New Line, 8.18) is coming out past its hip prime. I thought this was a settled issue. Of course it's coming out too late as far as the hip online community is concerned. Thing is, the 100% support of this crowd isn't enough to make Snakes a serious hit.

To broaden general interest levels New Line Cinema began in June tand July to reach out to the less-hip, the squares, the newspaper readers, the slow-on-the-pickups -- in effect dumbing down the...Read More

The Envelope's Tom O'Neill got Dreamgirls costar Jennifer Hudson to tell him about the filming of the scene in which she sings "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" -- the classic tune that Jennifer Holliday sang in the original B'way stage version that ran in the early '80s, and which won more or less won her a Best Actress Tony Award.

For Hudson's performing of "the most anticipated scene in one of the most eagerly awaited movies of the year, director Bill Condon fretted so much over shooting it that he saved it up for last and shut...Read More

Walter Becker and Donald Fagen (a.k.a. "Mr. Steely Dan") have struck again, this time writing to sometime Owen Wilson colleague Wes Anderson. The idea is to get Wes to convince Fox Searchlight to fork over $400 grand for the rights to two songs Becker and Fagin have composed for Wes's forthcoming The Darjeeling Limited, which was offically announced yesterday in Variety. Here's the lyrics to the chrous from the first song: "Darjeeling Limited / That's the train I wanna get kissed on / Darjeeling Limited / But I'll be lucky if I don’t get pissed on."

Hollywood Interrupted is reporting that Bruno Kirby has died from "recently diagnosed leukemia." Kirby is best known for having played "young Clemenza" in The Godfather, Part II, for doing a good job with a fairly sizable role in City Slickersand for having played Albert Brooks' co-editor in Modern Romance who says to Brooks at one point, "The 'ludes kicked in, right?" Kirby was only 57. A sad thing...sorry.

The Thursday night 10 pm showing of Snakes on a Plane is going to be one of the coolest events in the ticket-buying L.A. moviegoer realm in a long while. Every critic in town, I imagine, will be at one of the theatres where it's playing, and will thereafter run straight home (or back to the office) to write the review at 12:30 am. I'm assuming that the Arclight will be Ground Zero that night. I want to be among a crowd of loud talk-backers, booers, cheerers, Samuel L. Jackson fans and hipper-than-thou's who were into Snakes in March-April but have since...Read More

Anne Thompson agrees with L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein that print critics should also write blogs to keep their connectivity levels up and running with cyber film fans. "Major news outlets should give their critics blogs and encourage them to weigh in before the official studio review dates," she writes. "I love this idea! And it will probably drive the studios nuts."

Sad news about that Nick Papac, a 25 year-old propmaster, getting killed in that crash with an SUV carrying director Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights) during shooting of The Kingdom, starring Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Garner. One thing these stories never to seem to reveal is what really happened (or what appears to have happened). The details always seem to emerge weeks or months later.

Jennifer Aniston's publicist Stephen Huvane vs. Us magazine's Janice Min and and the Today show...old news (over 24 hours! forget it!) but hilarious. Who's the more-full-of-shit offender in this thing?

N.Y. Times DVD columnist Dave Kehr, whose dismissive snortings have prompted an occasional retort from this corner, has gotten it wrong again. In his current column he refers to Billy Wilder 's The Spirit of St. Louis, a not-half-bad 1957 James Stewart flick about Charles Lindbergh's 1927 solo flight from New York to Paris, as "stunningly impersonal."

In terms of auteurist brushstrokes, he means. And Kehr is right -- the film has none of the wit or subversion in Wilder's best films, and it does seem as if Wilder made it because he...Read More

A frank, astute, well-written piece by L.A. Times industry columnist Patrick Goldstein about why film critics seem to more and more irrelevant (or at least being seen as such), and what moves could be made to plug them into the cyber world -- i.e., basically bring the learned brahmin types into more of a democratic give-and-take dialogue with the rude and unwashed masses.

Oscar Mashing at Paramount

Here it is not even Labor Day, and it's looking more and more likely that the two strongest Best Picture contenders are going to be Flags of Our Fathers and Dreamgirls, which in itself is going to make this a phenomenal Oscar campaign year for Paramount /DreamWorks (a.k.a. "Dreamamount"), which is distributing both.

Shot during the filming of Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers (DreamWorks/Paramount, 10.20)

Japan Gets Clint Better Than We Do

This Japanese trailer -- short and hard but quite intriguing, especially in its use of desaturated, close-to-monochome color -- is very clearly promoting Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima (i.e., formerly known as Red Sun, Black Sand) as war films joined at the hip -- as an epic-scaled, double-dip, you-can't-see-just-one experience.

The emphasis in the Japanese trailer, naturally, is on star Ken Watanabe -- he has the longest dialogue clip -- and other Japanese actors who will (apparently) appear only in Letters. (The Flags of Our...Read More

The story about Dan Futterman playing Daniel Pearl for Michael Winterbottom during a hip-pocket location shoot in Pakistan, passed along by Reliable Source columnists Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts two damn days ago.

The Old Toronto Sidestep

I didn't realize this until a few hours ago, but Ryan Murphy's Running with Scissors (Columbia, 10.11 limited, 10.27 wide) will be joining Nicholas Hytner's The History Boys in not visiting the Toronto, Telluride, Venice or New York film festivals. And given what it seems to be, it seems fair to wonder why.

A darkly comedic dysfunctional-family flick that's been seen and liked by exactly one guy I happen to know, Scissors looks like a natural to play at one of the elite festivals for the simple reason that it sounds very much like a...Read More

Honestly, truly -- if you were Alan Horn and Jeff Robinov at Warner Bros., would you greenlight a second Superman film? Would you want Bryan Singer to "go all Wrath of Khan-y" on it or would you hire someone else of his general calbire?

If it was my call I'd say yes to Singer but under the following conditions:

(1) He has to bring in a two-hour film -- no ifs, ands or buts;

(b) Kate Bosworth is dimissed as Lois Lane and Rachel McAdams replaces her in a no-big-deal way, like it was when Val Kilmer was...Read More

Being a big fan of Ira Levin's "The Boys From Brazil", which works extremely well on the page, I was more than a little disappointed with Franklin Schaffner's film version, which (I don't believe this) opened 28 years ago. And now New Line is financing a remake of the Shaffner film to be directed, God help us all, by Brett Ratner, who just keeps digging himself in deeper and deeper with each new film. Has Ratner nudged aside McG, Michael Bay, Roger Kumble and Stephen Sommers for the title of the most despised commercial director on the planet? I don't know....Read More

Reader Neil Harvey passed along a story that hard-core Chicago actor Gary Sinise is reportedly going to Iraq to perform for the soldiers with his band, the Lt. Dan Band. "I think it's a good thing that he's taking time to do something for the troops," Harvey writes, "but given that in Forrest Gump, Lt. Dan was a fictional soldier who followed a family tradition of being cannon fodder in wars and lost his legs in Vietnam, then returned home to alcoholism and horrible living conditions, it just seems...well, It feels kind of like having the deck band from Titanic perform...Read More

The thrust of this N.Y. Times David Halbfinger story about World Trade Center 's first few days of commercial release is...uhm...that it's doing well for a 9/11 film? I guess. It's done much better so far than United 93 did, primarily because word has circulated that it's a warmer, more conservative-minded, hooray-for-the-regular-guys film. And that it did better in the New York area that in Los Angeles. And that Snakes on a Plane (opening this Friday) poses no challenge. And the word-of-mouth is primed to take flight.

"Everything that we hoped about the movie has started to happen," Paramount marketing chief...Read More

How strange....how very strange. The reputation of Andrea Staka's Fraulein, winner of the Locarno Film Festival's Golden Leopard award, has been tainted somewhat by an admission by festival juror Barbara Albert that she co-wrote the film with Staka. How could the festival have allowed even the appearance of a possible conflict-of-interest go unchallenged?

When the news broke last Wednesday, Albert said she would recuse herself from jury discussions relating to the film. And then three days later -- Saturday, 8.12 -- she resigned from the jury entirely in opes of wanting to avoid the appearance of bias. Obviously, to avoid any trouble...Read More

Variety's Adam Dawtrey on Curb Your Enthusiasm helmer Robert Weide planning to direct a Vanity Fair version of Devil Wears Prada. The feature, Weide's first, will be based on Toby Young's "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People", about his none-too-politically-successful stab at working for VF as a contributing editor in Manhattan several years ago. Shaun of the Dead's Simon Pegg will play Young; the part of VF editor Graydon Carter -- the character will be called Clayton Harding, an editor of a fictional monthly called Sharps who will presumably share certain Type A characteristics with Meryl Streep's fashion magazine editor...Read More

Another piece about the storm weathered by Daniel Craig after being hired to play 007, nicely written by Esquire's Daniel Katz.

A Summer It Was

August is toast in two and a half weeks so I guess it's time for a summer '06 wrapup piece. I don't feel like doing a typical why-they-failed-or-succeeded analysis, so I'm just going to run a listing of the stories that felt like standouts in terms of my weekly Elsewhere agonistes. There were 25 punchers in 14 weeks.

I will, however, reiterate what I felt was the most welcome and most dramatic story of the season: the out-of-the-blue "just say no" decisions of some big-studio chiefs about some hugely expensive big-star vehicles & fee deals (Used Guys, Ripley's...Read More

On the occasion of Madonna's having announced that she's given up acting, let me say once more that she was pretty close to impressive in Alan Parker's Evita ('96).

I respect that film enormously -- it's my favorite Parker flick after Mississippi Burning and The Commitments -- and I think it works in part because of Madonna's singing, which is fairly soulful and stirring. (Perhaps not up to Patti Lupone's level but she holds her own). She was as good in Evita as her talent allowed her to be. All she had to do was punch out the tunes and weep...Read More

Variety's Gabriel Snyder reports that three super tentpolers will be released within a four-week span next May -- Sony's Spider-Man 3(5.4.07) , Dreamamount's Shrek the Third (5.18.07) and Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World's End (5.25).

Obviously, if any of these films are going to take a hit (i.e., be hurt) it'll be Shrek the Third, but then it's a family film and isn' really going mano e mano against the other two. Somewhat but not really.

After this comes a ten-week stretch in which a big-studio tentpole will launch every weekend from June to August:...Read More

Hey, whatever happened to a U.S. release of OSS 117: Nest of Spies? The French-made period espionage spoof, directed by Michel Hazanavicius, was a big hit in France after opening there in mid April. It then won the "Golden Needle" audience award for Best Film at the 32nd annual Seattle Film Festival awards in mid June. If there's a U.S. distributor or plans for any U.S. release, I can't find it.

We all need to bow our heads and observe a moment of silence for the dear & departed title of Clint Eastwood's second Iwo Jima movie, which up until recently was called Red Sun, Black Sand. It now has a much blander title -- Letters from Iwo Jima.

The title change is revealed on page 64 of this week's Entertainment Weekly (a "Fall Movie Preview" issue with Daniel Craig on the cover), and was confirmed this morning by a Paramount staff publicist.

The original title had a poetic tint with allusions to the...Read More

Let the word go forth from this time and place to friend and foe alike, but particularly to Hollywood Elsewhere loyalists, that starting today & forever after everyone is going to have to register in order to post comments to articles. I've done it and it's a relatively quick and simple process. HE's webmaster Jon Rahoi tells me it's safe and anonymous -- you won't even have to leave your e-mail address. I had to do this because some moronic spammer posted 52,000 comments yesterday and shut down the reader-response capability for two or three hours.

Step Up (Disney), Friday's #1 film, dropped 20% on Saturday so Talladega Nights (Columbia) rushed in like a fool and took the #1 slot with $22,404,000. That's a 52% drop from last weekend due to high-octane word-of-mouth.

Step Up could've been the champ but its teenage-girl supporters got most of their rocks off Friday when it made $8,499,000. The take dropped on Saturday to $6,834,000 and so the film will wind up with something close to $20,007,000 as of Sunday evening.

World Trade Center was being projected yesterday to end up with about $25,700,000 for its first five days (it opened on...Read More

I wrote a couple of days ago that I'm nursing doubts about Emilio Estevez's Bobby (Weinstein Co., 11.17), but in fairness I should acknowledge that a bigwig from the electronic side of entertainment journalism has flipped over it, or at least is telling people that. This person is also saying that the two standouts are Sharon Stone and -- hold onto your hats -- Lindsay Lohan. The Weinsteiners are showing it to a select few before the big Bobby unveilings at the Venice and Toronto film festivals as a "work in progress" (i.e., a euphemism for "Harvey doesn't think it's quite...

In the third graph of this profile of Rufus Sewell by N.Y. Times writer Sarah Lyall, the 38 year-old actor is described by Neil Burger, the director-writer of The Illusionist, as "more of a leading man" than a character actor who could villains or oddballs. Only in softball profiles like this do you find such delusion. Sewell isn't a leading man type in the slightest. He never has been. He's vaguely villainous, obsessive, creepy, churned-up- inside, glaring. There's a reason -- hello? -- he's played almost nothing but villains these last few years. Sewell is an intense and accomplished...Read More

If you haven't read my early-bird piece about Mike Binder's Reign O'er Me, please do so now. It'll prepare you more fully for the disappointing but not altogether surprising news that Reign won't be opening on 12.1 after all. Columbia is going for a March or April '07 opening, and here's why:

(1) Columbia has a heavy fall/Xmas slate anyway (four films) and they didn't want to add another film to that list in the first place, although jazzed reactions to early screenings of Reign told them they have something that works in a big...Read More

Box Office Mojo is reporting that Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men has been pushed back to 12.25.06 from the previous 9.29 date. It'll still show at the Venice Film festival, though, and will be released internationally in the fall, starting with the U.K. on 9.22.

The delay is about "giving things more time to accumulate and gather momentum [in the States]," a Universal rep says. "Critical and popular acclaim, word-of-mouth, understanding, exposure, etc. Alfonso has rendered this film with real virtuosity and passion, and we just [decided to wait] to give it some more time for a meaningful campaign."

This 8.11 posting from Britain's Film Ick says Terry Gilliam told a London crowd last Thursday night that a deal for him to direct Paul Giamatti in The Owl in Daylight, an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's final unfinished work, is "going ahead." (My mind is melting & the plaster walls are cracking -- I know I wrote a four or five-graph story about the Giamatti-Dick project three or four days ago, and now I can't find it on the site.) If Gilliam directs Owl it will definitely have a mood and a sense of visual drive and togetherness, but it's...Read More

Another noteworthy Film Ick/Terry Gilliam item: Tideland, the Gilliam film that people were calling "unwatchable" at last year's Toronto Film Festival & which inspired seven or eight critics to walk out of during a screening I happened to attend, "is now playing with a filmed introduction in which Gilliam helps the audience get into 'the right mindset'. Gently amusing though possibly rather redundant, the film is a single shot of Gilliam addressing the camera, and offers nothing as elaborate, funny or pointed as 'The Dress Pattern' -- Gilliam's introduction to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which you can see on the...

When all is said and done Talladega Nights (Columbia) is expected to be the #1 film on Sunday night with $22,871,000. It was down 52% from last weekend(indicated by that B CinemaScore), but the cume will be roughly at $90,800,000so it's going good . Step Up was #1 Friday but will come in second with $21,241,000, or so the experts are saying. World Trade Center will end up with about $25,700,000. Barnyard will be #4 with $9,509,000, Pulse (#5) with $8,818,000...nobody cares about the lesser numbers. Miami Vice, whipped, will come in ninth with $4,427,000...a real shame. Little Miss Sunshine added 90...Read More

The surprise-heat movie of the weekend is Disney's Step Up, a teen dance-romancer that got a failing grade on Metacritic (50%) and a much worse number on Rotten Tomatoes (19%). But it was the #1 movie yesterday, doing $8,499,000 and beating out the #2 Talladega Nights and #3 World Trade Center . The final weekend tally for Will Ferrell's NASCAR flick is expected to nudge it into first place, although Step Up is expected to finish with a higher-than-projected $21,240,000.

Step Up's Channing Tatum

The Step Up surprise was mainly about ace-in-the-hole Channing Tatum, the 26...Read More

"My girlfriend went crazy during this movie and was actually the one who wanted me to send in a review because she wants everybody to see it. I would rate this 10 out of 10 and is probably the best movie I've seen in a couple of years. We couldn't believe how much we got into this movie and the music. Everybody was tapping their feet and laughing and cheering.

"At the end of the movie the whole crowd was applauding for a long time and they had this part when the credits were on where...Read More

Disney's Touchstone division will definitely distribute Mel Gibson's Apocalypto on 12.8, according to Disney spokesperson Heidi Trotta. Her statement came in response to Roger Freidman's Fox 411 report that Disney was trying to shop it around because of concerns that the controversy over Gibson's anti-Semitic remarks would diminish the box-office. I don't believe Disney didn't at least explore the possibility of dumping it, or delaying the release date. Any responsible company would have.

So it was Frank Whaley's paramedic character in World Trade Center -- a real-life guy named Chuck Sereika -- who was the first to crawl "into a burning black hole in the unstable pile of debris that was once the World Trade Center, and was the first man to reach trapped Port Authority officer Will Jimeno" -- the guy played by Michael Pena. But in Oliver Stone's film, the guy who goes in first is NYPD officer Scott Strauss (played by Stephen Dorff).

Frank Whaley as Chuck Sereika, the real rescue guy in Oliver Stone's World Trade Center...

Hey, how come Toronto Star critic Peter Howell didn't include The History Boys among his top 12 fall films? Does he know something? Or has Fox Searchlight's low-profile campaign been too successful?

Art of the Dodge

What's up with Fox Searchlight's cards-to-the-chest History Boys campaign?

London publicists are preparing for a 10.13 opening, and so Nicholas Hytner's film is starting to screen for the press next week. With the pic opening stateside on 11.24, nothing's doing here now. And yet -- this is the unusual part -- there are no plans to show the film version of Alan Bennett's Tony Award-winning play at the Telluride, Toronto, or Venice Film Festivals.

Portion of invitation to next week's London screenings of The History Boys (Fox Searchlight, 11.24)

One interpretation is...Read More

This well-cut trailer for Douglas McGrath's Infamous (Warner Independent, 10.13) is fascinating and strange. An undeniable "here we go again" feeling -- Truman Capote, Perry Smith, "Nell" Harper Lee, etc. -- with a somewhat brighter, less austere tone than Bennett Miller's Capote.

Toby Jones, Hope Davis in Douglas McGrath's Infamous

A friend says it's quite good -- I won't see it for another two weeks or so. Toby Jones is obviously much more of a close physical emodiment of Capote than Phillip Seymour Hoffman was. The costars are Sandra Bullock, Daniel Craig, Peter Bogdanovich, Jeff...Read More

In Friday's Entertainment Weekly, Danel Craig -- the new Casino Royale 007 guy with the blond hair and the boxer's face -- has been quoted as saying that "if I went onto the internet and started looking at what some people were saying about me -- which, sadly, I have done -- it would drive me insane."

This is a very queer sentence -- a suppositional "if" that turns into a blunt admission that leads back to a conditional "would".

Craig then says that the old-school, pot-bellied, going-online-in-their- parent's-basement 007 fans "hate me....they don't think I'm right for the role....Read More

When a big-name client star (like, say, Mel Gibson) screws up big-time, a smart publicist should (a) urge him to "go fast, go humble" in terms of admitting guilt and showing remorse, (b) suggest a one-on-one mea culpa interview with a single reporter (i.e., Larry "cottonball" King) who will allow the client to make as good a case as possible" and "then go radio silent and not keep flogging that wild beast ", (c) urge him to say he'll "never do it again, but [he] also has to say it to himself and mean it", or (d) all of the above.

This...Read More

It does seem earlyish for Dawn Hudson's Film Independent (formerly known as IFP West) to be announcing a final submission date of 10.6.06 for fimls to be considered for the 2007 Independent Spirit Awards. That's more than three weeks before Halloween...whoa. It's also eight days earlier than last year's 10.14.05 deadline, but then the '07 Spirits are happening earlier also. I'm sure thought was given to this. If you've got an indie-type feature coming out in mid-November or early December, you'll probably have some kind of watchable rough cut on a DVD by early October...no? It doesn't feel as if the '06 Spirits...Read More

It's fair to say that Emilio Estevez's directing abilities were amply exhibited in Rated X ('00), which I felt was pretty awful after seeing it at Sundance six and half years ago. This is one reason I'm not all that enthused about seeing Bobby (Weinstein Co., 11.17) at the Toronto Film Festival. Estevez's film (he directed and co-wrote) is about how Robert Kennedy's shooting on 6.4.68 affected various people (i.e., not just campaign workers) who were inside L.A.'s Amassador Hotel when it happened.

Sharon Stone in Emilio Estevez's Bobby

Between the Estevez directing resume (which also includes...Read More

Todd Field's Little Children (New Line, 10.6), a suburban marital-relations drama with Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson and Jennifer Connelly, will have its debut at the Telluride Film Festival.

Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson in Todd Field's Little Children

I presume it'll also play at the Toronto Film Festival (why wouldn't it?) but just for safety and assurance it would be good to catch it here before Toronto begins, as Telluride is never an option because of the oppressive cost. Fields (In The Bedroom) directed and wrote the screenplay, which is based on the novel of the same name...Read More

A guy I know has been told by a guy who's part of the N.Y. Film Festival crew that Stephen Frears' The Queen (Miramax, 9.30 in NYC --10.6 limited) is "the best Frears film since Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and that Helen Mirren is definitely a Best Actress contender" for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth. The film has been given an opening-night (9.29) berth with the N.Y. Film Fest, which means it won't be at Telluride, Venice or Toronto. Journos who won't be attending the Manhattan festival are naturally appealing to Miramax staffers to arrange for screenings sometime this month so...Read More

Eight "special presentations" -- seven world preems and a North American debut -- have been slotted for the 31st Toronto Film Festival. The films are Tony Goldwyn's The Last Kiss (a remake of Gabrielle Muccino's 2001 Italian-language original) with Zach Braff; Marc Forster 's Stranger Than Fiction with Will Ferrell; Leon Ichaso's El Cantante with Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony (yipes!); Mark Palansky's Penelope with Christina Ricci and The Last King of Scotland's James McAvoy (a modern-day fairy tale produced by Reese Witherspoon...proceed with caution); David Von Ancken's Seraphim Falls, a Civil War-era drama with Pierce Brosnan and Liam "whatever happened...Read More

The honorable Roger Michell will not direct the next Daniel Craig 007 film (a.k.a. "Bond 22") for caretaker producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli due to "creative differences." This could mean anything, but Michell told a London reporter he wanted Craig's Bond to have "an element of cruelty" and there's speculation that Wilson-Broccoli -- who time and again have blocked fresh ideas and innovations from filmmakers regarding the 007 character, and are regarded industry-wide as total stooges and creative "stoppers" -- were against this. This Dark Horizons story blends the original Nicole LaPorte/Michael Fleming Variety story with a Michell quote...Read More

World Trade Center didn't exactly rock the U.S. yesterday with $4,499,000 haul in some 2803 theatres, or about $1605 per print. (A friend went to a 5 pm showing in a big L.A. plex yesterday in a 400-seat theatre, and there were only about 25 people there.) And I can't imagine that today's liquid-bomb news from London is going to help. WTC will do less today -- figure $3.6 or $3.7 million, maybe a bit more -- and the prognosis is that it's looking like a push to bring in $20 million over the coming three-day weekend.

The five-day tally may be...Read More

Let's presume that by the time everyone travels to the Toronto Film Festival a little less than four weeks from now, the airlines won't be prohibiting carry-on luggage out of London or anywhere else. Today's news from London about a coordinated plot to blow up airliners traveling between Britain and the United States (the 21 British Muslim suspects intended to build bombs in mid-flight with liquid explosives and detonators) means that normal air-travel misery levels have worsened dramatically. If there's a carry-on luggage ban when it's time to fly to Toronto, that's it -- no computers means no Toronto and no...Read More

Roddy McDowell's "Antony lives no more!" speech from Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Cleopatra ('63) -- one of the few really good moments from an otherwise tiresome and pretty much discredited film.

The drop-dead perfect final lines from Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (45), a remastered version of which Universal Home Video is releasing on 8.22. It looks improved -- richer, crisper tones and fewer speckles than on the old cruddy version that Uni issued in '98 -- but so many scenes are shot in shadowy darkness it can't possibly gleam like shiny silver. Great audio commentaries and retrospective doc, though.

Fred MacMurray, Edward G. Robinson in Double Indemnity

The news was unofficial 9 or 10 days ago about Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn playing at the Toronto Film Festival -- now it's official. Earlier today a big-time distributor told me he's seen it and "between this and Grizzly Man, Herzog is enjoying a real rennaissance these days. It's Herzog going back upriver and into the jungle...it's really good. Perhaps not the most brazenly commercial film but what do you expect from Herzog? Christian Bale really goes for it, really out on a limb...and Steve Zahn is also good because he's fairly restrained."

Indiewire says the 50th London Film Festival (which runs in late October) will open with Kevin Macdonald 's The Last King of Scotland ...big deal. It'll also show at the Telluride Film Festival in early September, and then at the Toronto Film Festival a week or so later. Scotland is that Idi Amin movie with Forrest Whitaker and James McAvoy.

Okay, hold up there on that Disney-dumping- Apocalypto thing. At least until you consider the view of another connected distribution guy who called back this afternoon and said he hasn't heard anything about Mel Gibson's film being quietly offered to other distributors, and "you'd think I'd be hearing something." But then you never know with Disney, he added, because "they're so crazy." He emphasized, in any case, that it would be awfully expensive for Disney if they tried to get rid of Apocalypto because Icon, Gibson's production company, is "very tough" and would insist upon Disney paying very heavy financial penalities...Read More

Hollywood Wiretap had the link first, but columnist Jim Hill (of Jim Hill Media) is reporting that "studio insiders who have actually worked on the Pirates sequels are saying that -- thanks to all of the elaborate FX sequences in Dead Man's Chest and At World's End -- the combined production costs of these two films is now well north of $600 million.

"And let's keep in mind that we're just talking about production costs [and] not the additional $100 million that a studio typically has to spend in order to properly launch a summer blockbuster. That $600...Read More

Okay, it's true -- Robin Williams has gone into rehab. Anyone who faces up to a problem and tries to do something about it deserves respect and support. Presumably he'll be out and jazzed when he starts doing publicity for Man of the Year (Universal, 10.15), which is said to be his best film is a while. Barry Levinson's too.

Sussing Shepherd

Take this with a grain, but early murmurings about Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd (Universal, 12.22) indicate it's less of a story of how a real-life CIA counter-espionage ace (Matt Damon) gradually succumbs to obsessiveness and paranoia, and more of a...well, the readings are a bit vague. Positive but varying -- how's that?

Damon plays Edward Wilson, a character modelled on legendary super-spook James Jesus Angleton. And Shepherd, a verite spy thriller, is more or less his story. It's said to be dense and labrynthian and exacting -- all positive things -- and also that it's a wee bit...Read More

"Watching World Trade Center, I thought of several prominent critics who argued that United 93 was little more than a conventional Hollywood heroism saga in verite-documentary clothing. It's true the filmmakers didn't frame 9/11 in the context of a larger geopolitical struggle. But United 93 did lay out, in haunting detail and with stunning immediacy, the lack of military preparedness, the garbled lines of government communication, and the absence, for all practical purposes, of a commander in chief. If it was indeed a saga of heroism, its heroes weren't conventionally introduced, and all, unconventionally, perished [and was therefore] a fitting monument to people...Read More

I don't mean to be a killjoy but those Metacritic review samples for Oliver Stone's World Trade Center (opening today) average out to a 68% positive. Any grade below 70 is a flunk unless the teacher likes you and cuts you a break, and there are some stiff rebukes out there, particularly from L.A. Times critic Kenny Turan, New York critic David Edelstein, and Toronto Globe & Mail critic Rick Groen.

Not that moviegoers give a damn what these guys think, but still...

The question facing WTC is whether paying audiences will be sufficiently enamored with the film's...Read More

Whenever Apocalypto gets released, it may not be Disney/Touchstone booking the theatres. Fox 411's Roger Friedman is quoting "sources" in his 12.9 story that says that Disney/ Touchstone is "shopping" Mel Gibson's movie Apocalypto -- i.e., looking to dump it because it was a tough sell in the first place, and now it's even tougher and they don't want the headache. And I'm hearing also that the film is in play. An L.A. marketing source tells me "no one" except Disney wanted Apocalpto when it was first offered so the enthusiasm levels of a new distributor would be open to question.

I...Read More

Esquire's Chuck Klosterman totally gets the Snakes on a Plane sham of a mockery of a mockery of a sham.

The ironical appreciation of Snakes "is based on the premise that the bad movie aspired to be good," he says. "If a film never takes itself seriously and originates as satire, everything is different; its badness means something else entirely." Right.

"SOAP doesn't fit into either category: It doesn't take itself seriously, but it's not a satire. It will probably be unentertaining in a completely conventional way. Which, apparently, is what people want." Apparently.

"They want to see Snakes on a...Read More

I remember having a quick chat with IFC Films topper Jonathan Sehring and IFC marketing exec Ryan Werner near the end of last year's Toronto Film Festival, and being asked what I liked that hadn't been picked up. I said I was pretty taken with Abel Ferrara's Mary, which I'd seen a night or two earlier. Obviously a marginal type deal, I added, but it felt to me like Ferrara's best since Bad Lieutenant. The costars are Matthew Modine, Forest Whitaker and Juliette Binoche.

Here it is almost a year later and after...Read More

Talladega Nights got a B from CinemaScore. If a movie's getting a solild positive response it gets an A or an A-minus. Anything below a B-plus means the word isn't sensational. Perhaps this explains that 12% Friday-to-Saturday drop last weekend. I would figure on Talladega business being down 45% to 50% this weekend, or a gross in the low 20s.

John Horn is reporting that an L.A. Times/Bloomberg poll about movie-viewing habits says youths "are willing to watch brand-new movies at home rather than in theaters, are starting to use their [computers] as their entertainment gateway and are slowly turning to their iPods and cellphones for video programming." Fine, but some of the wording in this story feels vague.

47% of 12 to 17 year-olds contacted by Times/Bloomberg pollsters say they "would" watch a movie on a computer, which is higher than the percentage of those amenable to watching films on their cell phones (11%) or video iPods (18%). What does...Read More

Congrats to Ronan Graffiti's Steven Santos and Marcus Levy for throwing together this trailer for Signs of Anti-Semitism, a forthcoming Mel Gibson thriller. It starts out perfectly, peters out a bit, then rebounds with a Woody Allen clip at the end. If they'd only made the font for the words "of Anti Semitism" exactly the same as that for "Signs". It's still pretty good though.

I guess we're never going to see any stills of Ben Affleck in that those old, clunky-looking TV series Superman suits he wears in Allen Coulter's Hollywoodland (Focus Features, 9.8). He wears them in two or three scenes -- the brown-and-gray tunic (worn when the show was shot in black and white) once, and once or twice in the brilliant red and blue outfit. There must be a prohibition in effect. I don't know why this is interesting, but here's an exclusive shot of the two suits from IGN's "Stax" Flixburg.

When I was at San Diego Comic-Con two or three weeks ago I flipped through a copy of Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon's "The 9/11 Report", a 144-page graphic-novel version of that 2004 document. There's something weird about looking at comic-book images of that day and reading approximation terms like "WHOOOM!" to describe the sound of United #175 slamming into the south tower. But if you're going to illustrate something like this I guess there's no avoiding generic moves. Jacobson and Colon are old pros, both in their 70s.

You'd think there'd be a prominent...Read More

Women are often disrobed and filmed in a stylish, lip-smacking way in Brian DePalma's films, and the trailer for The Black Dahlia (Universal, 9.15) seems to indicate he's maintaining his signature. Nothing wrong with this -- just predictable. The forthcoming booking at the Edinburgh Film Festival (8.14 to 8.27) is fine, but my reservations still hold.

"I've traveled the world and seen it everywhere -- we lost the trust of the world," World Trade Center Oliver Stone has told L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein. "So now we have more death from terror, not less. We haven't fought smartly. We've fought stupidly. We've overreached."

The footage of the guy sitting shotgun inside Pamela Anderson's black SUV, quivering and bent over like a traumatized child, is like something out of a Dogma film from the late '90s. He and Anderson are the leads in a Los Angeles tragedy by Lars von Trier.

"It's a horror film based on an insane asylum that's been converted into a college, and these kids that end up going to this college all have dark secrets in their past. [The college is] haunted by this doctor who used to perform lobotomies on kids, thinking he was doing a good thing for them by erasing their nightmares, but he was actually really sadistic. So it's twisted and gory and psychological." -- Snakes on a Plane director David Ellis talking about Asylum, his next contribution to the rigor and glory of cinema. It begins shooting on 9.18 in South Carolina for...Read More

Writers --- serious writers of books and plays as opposed to, say, journalists -- are not very interesting people to make films about. They're almost as bad as painters. Morose, self-destructive depressives...terrific. Unless the film follows the writer on an intense real-life adventure of some kind, as Fred Zinneman's Julia did with an episode in the life of the young Lillian Hellman. Or better yet, if the movie somehow injects its writer character into a surreal realm of his/her own devising, like Joel and Ethan Coen did with John Turturro's gloom-head screenwriter in Barton Fink, or like David Cronenberg did with a William...Read More

The history of movies about writers is mostly colored in varying shades of tedium.

My nomination for the worst movie ever made about a playwright is Arthur Hiller's Author! Author! ('82).

Christine Jeffs' Slyvia, with Gwynneth Paltrow as suicidal author Sylvia Plath, turned out far better than Larry Peerce's The Bell Jar ('79), but that didn't make it pulse-quickening in and of itself.

Ernest Hemingway's times in Italy during World War I resulted decades later in one of the worst wartime romance movies ever made, Richard Attenborough's In Love and War ('96) as well as the middling Rock Hudson-Jennifer Jones...Read More

Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland's Quinceanera (Sony Pictures Classics) is a nice little cultural mixer (gays and Hispanics in L.A.'s Echo Lake district) and an above-average indie drama. The story moves along, nothing feels arch or forced, and all but one of the characters are likable. The one who isn't -- the problem -- is Emily Rios, who plays the central character of Magdelena, whose pregnancy gets her kicked out of her home and leads to her staying with an 80-something uncle (Chalo Gonzalez) along her gay cousin Carlos (Jesse Garcia), etc. The glitch is that Rios plays her character like a sourpuss...Read More

11 years ago, to mark the 100th anniversary of cinema, the Vatican (expressing its wisdom through a site maintained by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) made known its choice of 45 all-time great films. You'd think they could have at least gone for 50 or 60 films. You'd think they'd also would have updated the list last year to honor the 110th anniversary. That aside, the Vatiican made some decent calls back in the Clinton era; plus their critic knew how to write and sounded moderately sophisticated. The films are blocked into three categories: religion, values and art.

This photo of the late Jayne Mansfield, taken from a dance-hall sequence in Raoul Walsh 's Sheriff of Fractured Jaw ('58), is taken from Dave Kehr's DVD column on the N.Y. Times site. Some Times guy working for the tech squad has obviously squeezed it horizontally, and the effect is more than weird. It's almost spooky.

Mansfield's face somehow reminds me of Don Keefer's on that Twilight Zone episode called "It's a Good Life" -- the way Keefer looked after being turned into a plastic jack-in-the-box head, I mean. A mere photo hasn't creeped...Read More

This has been an incredibly soft day. In terms of stuff to get into, I mean. I feel numb, drifting. Like I'm in a rowboat without oars. It's so draggy I'm reduced to tapping out items like the one you're reading right now. It's so slow I'm linking to a Bill Maher/Mel Gibson piece that was Huffington Post-ed five days ago. Pathetic. This is a good excerpt, though: "Mel, let me remind you: The Jews have not started all the wars in the world. But they have greenlit all the movies."

Horror and Kevin Smith? Doesn't sound right. The words "profoundly awful idea" may even apply. I've previously suggested his writing suggested a GenX Who's Afraid of Viriginia Woolf, which I know he has in him. And here's a new pitch: a 150-minute My Dinner with Andre with Jason Mewes and I-don't-know-who-else. Maybe Kevin, maybe somebody else playing Mewes' old friend, maybe an actress playing a hot date, maybe Nick Nolte playing his dad. Shot in a restaurant like Andre, with nothing but closeups and two-shots and just dialogue, dialogue, dialogue.

Something needs to be explained about the new Fox Home Video Star Wars double-disc DVD (out 9.12), which will include both the original 1977 version plus the digitally reworked, extra-scenes version that Lucas created in the '90s. Even though the DVD jacket displays a big golden "IV" in the background plus that rejiggered '90s title -- "Stars Wars: A New Hope -- that Lucas created back in the Clinton years, the opening yellow credit crawl seen at the beginning of the brand-new, spiffed-up '77 version will simply say "STAR WARS" and then go into the storybook crawl. The words "A NEW HOPE" will...Read More

This 8.6.06 Australian Herald Sun piece doesn't put much on the table, but it's reporting that 19 years ago Mel Gibson expressed some form of roundabout verbal support for the Australian League of Rights. The group is described by reporter Lincoln Wright as "a far-right group notorious for its anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial." (Gibson reportedly campaigned for "a friend" [named] Rob Taylor, who is described as having "stood unsuccessfully for the northern Victorian federal seat of Indi," although Taylor's ties to the Australian League of Rights group, if any, aren't remotely explained.) The story strikes me as a bit thin,...Read More

I always miss good movies at Sundance, every time, and one I missed last January is an intimate relationship drama called Off the Black. Directed and written by James Ponsoldt, the film has no website (a mistake) but ThinkFilm is releasing it on 12.1.06. I can't seem to find a nice, tight little one-line description but it has something do with a high-school umpire (played by Nick Nolte) and a screwed-up kid (Trevor Morgan) and the kid's not-very-nurturing father (Tim Hutton ).

I'm particularly interested because I'm a big Nolte fan (I thought he should have...Read More

I filed "Apocalypto Later " about 15 hours ago, and I've since read all the responses and elicited some new thoughts and the consensus, boiled down, seems to be this: Americans are not the media, and are fairly racist deep-down and don't really care that much about Mel's anti-Semitic rant so don't worry about any negative reactions to the film, especially with some people apparently being more inclined to see Apocaylpto because of this episode.

The other factor is that unless Gibson himself asks for a release-date delay, Touchstone, the film's distributor, is pretty much...Read More

Apocalypto Later

The Mel Gibson mess seems to be getting heavier all around, like fog. People will eventually get sick of it, but they'll never forget about it. I've gotten used to the idea of news stories flaring brightly for a week or two and then going away, but there's something deeper and skunkier about this one. Fame lasts 15 minutes; memories of racial hatred tend to linger a bit longer.

And that probably means that Gibson's Apocalypto (Disney, 12.8) may have to push back its release date. April '07, I'm thinking. Maybe. I don't know. I'd like to hear opinions. But...Read More

Jon Finch speaking the "cure her of that...sweet oblivious antidote" speech from Roman Polanski's Macbeth (1971), and also the "tomorrow and tomorrow" speech. For the nurturing.

I guess Warner Bros. really doesn't want any advance word on The Wicker Man (9.1). Critic Steve Murray of the Atlanta Constitution says "they're not screening it for critics. At least in Atlanta. Got the word here Friday from the local publicist that the screening will be 10 p.m. on Thursday, 8.31 -- the night before it opens."

I can't believe this is a quality issue, not with director-writer Neil LaBute at the helm. He's a shrewd writer, a pro-level director and no schlockhound. It must be about WB not wanting any kind of hint...

The last time I checked New Line Cinema was planning on doing the same thing with Snakes on a Plane -- no screenings until 10 pm on Thursday, 8.17, the night before it opens. I'm guessing New Line publicity is going to arrange gratis passes for critics. It should be a rockin' experience, especially getting home at midnight and having to write the review so it's up the next morning.

This story by London Times correspondent John Harlow says that executors of Brando's estate "including [Pheonix Pictures honcho] Mike Medavoy...are raising money by licensing Brando products including...a semi-fictional documentary called Citizen Brando." The semi-doc, formerly called Brando and Brando, is about a Tunisian "boy" who traveled to the U.S. to meet Brando. Directed by Ridha Behi, it is said to be a partly fictionalized doc about Behi's friendship with Brando.

Hold on....what about that series of acting-class videos called Lying for a Living, which Brando and director Tony Kaye partnered on roughly four years ago? It's basically...Read More

N.Y. Times Ed Leibowitz asks if it's "better to mimic or transcend" famous figures you're playing in a movie? Uhmm...the best way is try and do both, no? All I know is, any piece using a photo of Kirsten Dunst as Marie-Antoinette (as she appears in Sofia Coppola's film) is an automatic turn-off. It doesn't open until 10.20, but Marie-Antoinette is already fixed in people's heads as this year's Memoirs of a Geisha...if that. It may do some business with young women who aren't that deep, and it'll probably pick up some tech nomninations (costumes, production, design, makeup).

I didn't mention the sad 63% drop suffered by Miami Vice this weekend, but obviously not enough people agreed with critics that the dense aroma of that film -- the visual "fumes," as I put it two or three weeks ago -- more than made up for a not-that-great story and an emotional current that could have been stronger. It'll be a push for Vice to reach $60 million domestic, which won't cover prints and marketing. The Vice shortfall may not prove as much of a bath for Universal as Poseidon was for Warner Bros., but it's in that vicinity. I don't...Read More

Three days before World Trade Center opens and here's L.A. Daily News critic Glenn Whipp raising the United 93 Oscar flag. Go, Glenn! Oliver Stone's film is a thoroughly decent 7.8 on the HE scale, but Paul Greengrass's film is far superior and deserves all the salute pieces it can get.

The only thing "off" is that Whipp quotes David Poland as saying that United 93 "was not a powerful emotional experience for most people, and, as the academy goes, emotion leads intellect every time." Of course, United 93 was nothing but emotional. The very idea of seeing it, in...Read More

This Peter Howell piece about inside jokes is pretty good, but just because I blanked on "Hey 19" -- I don't know the titles of any Steely Dan songs -- doesn't mean I missed it. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen may have written that letter-to-Owen with a jocular tone, but You, Me and Dupree did rip their song off, and they were definitely half-pissed. A person talking in a flip or cavalier way about something doesn't mean they're 100% joking.

What's "inside" anyway? One of my first big-star interviews was with Jack Nicholson back in '82, and during our...Read More

Even though Sony is apparently projecting a $47 millon weekend tally for Talladega Nights, a rival studio is projecting $49,002,000. The Will Ferrell-Adam McKay comedy dropped 12% from Friday to Saturday. My guess it that it's probably a bellwether of some kind.

Freshly Perverse

In anticipation of Neil LaBute's The Wicker Man (Warner Bros., 9.1), yesterday I rented a DVD of Robin Hardy's '73 classic of the same name. (The extended version, of course.) Sharply written by playwright Anthony Shaffer (Sleuth), it has a reputation of being an exceptionally creepy piece. Which it is, although it contains only one big jaw-dropper at the finale. Which there's no forgetting. And yet it's far from a horror film.

Boiled down, Shaffer and Hardy's Wicker Man is a correctly mannered, somewhat dry parlor drama with an undercurrent of female eroticism and faint malice. It's pretty much all...Read More

Someone wrote this afternoon that "if someone tells you Talladega Nights is hateful, look at the hatred of the source" and that "only an arrogant jackass would suggest that large groups are too stupid to know they are being made fun of."

Just for fun, let's assume this guy was referring to my Talladega review. What I wrote (and what's being indicated this weekend at the box-office) is simply that the people that Talladega "shits on the heaviest" -- Southerners, NASCAR fans -- "are going to be its biggest fans." Where I come from that's called irony. I didn't say...Read More

After seeing Patrick Stettner's The Night Listener at a Sundance screening last January I wrote that "watching it felt like being in a kind of prison...a windowless isolation cell in Iraq during the Hussein regime. It's a movie for dead people -- the whole thing feels entombed. Almost every shot is enveloped in shadows and blackness, and your kindly torturer is a bearded and withered-looking Robin Williams . "

Well, I saw it again last week and Stettner's film has been slightly trimmed and tightened since Sundance. I got through it with less grimacing. But...Read More

Hollywood Elsewhere's self-sponsored follow-up to the Netflix Rolling Roadshow -- a non-approved, unofficial fall sequel to the current tour -- has just added (1) Elia Kazan's Viva Zapata! ('52) , to be screened at an open-air faciity near Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles (Friday, 10.7), (2) Peter Yates ' The Friends of Eddie Coyle ('73) at an outdoor theatre adjacent to Boston's Government Center (Friday, 10.14), and (3) Anthony Mann's El Cid ('61) at an undetermined location on 10.21. Admission is free. Bring your own food, drink and blankets. There's just one problem...

An argument against "in vino, veritas" has been written by security consultant Gavin de Becker in an open letter to Endeavor agent-partner Ari Emanuel, who suggested earlier this week that people in the industry should blacklist Mel Gibson over his anti-Semitic remarks. The letter appeared in Friday's Hollywood Reporter, but it's not linkable so here it is on Defamer. And here's the Defamer intro .

Standard studio-produced sell-job video for World Trade Center, and yet it has a straight, comprehensive and emotionally honest tone. It's viewable on I-Film. The idea behind this movie is catching on. I can feel this happening. But I still say Paramount should have snuck in this weekend.

Here's a N.Y. Times piece that's a portrait of GenX males getting older and not getting married -- marriage levels are down all over -- and just shuffling along and scratching their heads. Written by Eduardo Porter and Michelle O'Donnell, the article is called "Facing Middle Age with No Degree, and No Wife." It basically says that women with jobs and maturity and a firmer sense of responsibility don't see that much upside in getting married to some 37 year-old dude who's trying but not pulling down much of a salary. And so the guys whose careers aren't going great...Read More

Take a moment and think about Arthur Lee, who died Thursday from lukemia at age 61. And if you don't have a CD of Forever Changes in your collection then I guess that's your choice. You can always do something about this later on.

Recapping for precision's sake: The three Darjeeling Limited brothers are going to be Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman and Owen Wilson. In Movieland, as we all know, brothers rarely look like each other and there's almost never any resemblance -- none -- between parents and their kids. But The Darjeeling Limited is a Wes Anderson pic, and Andersonville is a much more particular and exacting place, and the usual bullshit doesn't apply.

(l. to r.) Jason Schwartzman, Adrien Brody, Owen Wilson

So with this in mind, I have to say I'm having...Read More

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby is doing much better than those projected figures in the low to high 30s that showed up on Thursday and Friday. It did $18,254,000 last night (i.e, Friday) and one estimate is projecting $49,287,000 by Sunday night. The reason is that's doing extremely well in the red-state boonies. If this pattern holds you can bet Columbia will claim a first-weekend figure of just over $50 million. Sunday is always weaker for a redneck white-bread comedy like this, which -- face it -- won't be attracting much support from African American filmgoers. Movies that play stronger on...Read More

Steve Oedekerk's Barnyard, a Nickelodeon/ Paramount animated film that I didn't care about seeing, did a decent $5,463,000 -- a little over $1600 a print. -- yesterday, and is projected to bring in $16,936,000 by Sunday night. The weekend projection for Pirates 2 is $10,875,000, off 47%. The expected weekend tally for Miami Vice...hold on to your hats...is $9,577,000, which is a drop of 63% from last weekend. It's over -- it'll be a push to reach $60 million. Lionsgate's The Descent will do about $9,438,000, which means they'll probably report over $10 million. John Tucker Must Die will wind up with $6,697,000....Read More

Christian Bale is locked down to play the Van Heflin role in James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma. That's the less charismatic role, as if you had to be told. Russell Crowe has the cool-bad-guy Glenn Ford role, or the one that Tom Cruise was going to play before he bailed over...I don't why he bailed. (Does anyone?) Columbia Pictures bailed on this oater a while back, but now Relativity Media is going to cover production costs.

I haven't spoken to anyone at 20th Century Fox, but a guy who knows everyone and everything is saying the plan is for Meryl Streep's The Devil Wears Prada peformance to be put up for Best Actress. And in the words and cadence of David Mamet, I say no, no, a-thousand- times-no to that. Meryl isn't the main character in Prada -- Anne Hathaway is -- and she won't have a snowball's chance in hell if she goes for Best Actress. And forget about her spirited performance in A Prairie Home Companion. That's strictly backup, strictly "oh, yeah, she was good in that...

Magnolia Films chief Eammon Bowles called earlier today to explain his position about not wanting Michael Moore to show Jesus Camp, a doc about evangelicals, at the Traverse Film Festival . The film, directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, is a balanced look at evangelicals, he says, and he doesn't want Average Joes in middle America getting the idea that it's a lefty, anti-Christian thing because they would almost certainly interpret Moore's support of the film as evidence that it is, most likely, a lefty, anti-Christian thing.

Eammon has a good practical point, but even if Jesus Camp is as...Read More

"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." -- Napoleon Bonaparte. In other words, better to have ridden high and drunk the electric brew, however briefly, than to have never ridden at all.

This 8.4 Associated Press article is the first significant "soft" piece about Mel Gibson. It has quotes from some Giibson friends, some of them Jewish, giving him a pass. Okay, fine. But a guy I know who worked with Gibson over a decade ago, and he's has written and told me he "believe[s] all this shit." He calls Gibson a "bigoted man, now and forever" and "a bigoted son of a bitch." But life is fluid and moving and people grow. Look at how Bobby Kennedy evolved from '62 to '67. And the impulse to stand by a guy you like...Read More

Brando Bounty

It took them several years, but Warner Home Video is finally about to release a big swanky DVD of the 1962 Marlon Brando version of Mutiny on the Bounty. The film has been re-mastered from the original 65mm elements and will be presented in the original 2.76 to 1 Ultra-Panavision aspect ratio. This version hasn't been seen by anyone since Bounty's big-city, reserved-seat showings some 44 years ago.

It'll be part of a spiffy new Marlon Brando Collection box set hitting stores on 11.7.06. The set will also include a purist remastering of John Huston's Reflections in a Golden...Read More

I've seen a million trailers like this one for Joe Carnahan's Smokin' Aces (Universal, 2.16.07). Why, then, does it seem way hipper than the others? Maybe I'm easily impressed, but it does seem funny. Jeremy Piven (Entourage 's "Ari Gold") is a Vegas stand-up comic who's decided to rat out some organized crime figures, which of course results in a couple of assassins (Ben Affleck, Alicia Keys) being sent to silence him. And of course there's an FBI agent (Ryan Reynolds) looking to keep Piven alive. "Forget Hollywoodland -- this is the movie that will bring acceptance back to Affleck,"...Read More

Word around the campfire is that Nicole Kidman's performance as celebrated art-gallery photographer Diane Arbus is the best thing about Fur. As for the film itself, some are using the A word, as in "arty." Or as in, "It turned out a little artier than what some in the loop were expecting."

In some circles "arty" means index-finger-up-the-butt precious, but shouldn't an Arbus biopic, of all biopics, have a kind of art-gallery feeling? An aura of artified apartness? If I'd directed this puppy I would have shot it in 35mm black-and-white.

The director is...Read More

I don't mean to go anal, but there's this nagging issue with the blue contact lenses that Maria Bello wears for her part as John McLoughlin's wife Donna in World Trade Center (Paramount, 8.9). Reader Rich Frank observed yesterday that her eyes "are a weird, translucent blue and the pupils never seem to change size. Every time they went for a close-up I couldn't help but stare at her eyes. Sure enough, in the photos on her IMDB page her peepers are deep brown."

Maria Bello in World Trade Center) (l.) and A History...

Oliver Stone's World Trade Center is being celebrated by the patriot crowd, conservatives and right-leaning pundits as the best hooray-for-the-USA film in a long time. And they're correct -- it does work on this level, although not in any kind of divisive, anti-liberal way. Like I wrote earlier, I'm fine with it. It didn't offend my political sensibilities, I mean. I can't imagine it offending anyone's.

This is why it's starting to seem likely it'll be one of the five Best Picture nominees. Because mainstream American moviegoers are always saying Hollywood movies always are a little...Read More

If I could clap my hands three times and rid the world of the Mozilla ActiveX plugin, I would clap my hands three times. You need to load the damn thing to watch trailers on the AOL Moviefone site but which it won't load. The latest trailer I can't watch because of this problem is one for Barry Levinson's Man of the Year (Universal, 10.13.06), an allegedly shrewd and restrained political comedy with Robin Williams, Laura Linney and Christopher Walken.

A friend who saw Man of the Year at a small screening a few months ago swore up and down...Read More

I just thought I'd put up this Descent one-sheet and ask for interpretations. It's obviously meant to look like a kind of Rorschach ink blot by way of Heironymus Bosch. It seems just as obvious to me that the artist who created this poster had his/her head in Vulvaland. It looks like some kind of mad Dali-esque scene from a Ken Russell movie. The message is either "beware those who would enter this chamber" or that some kind of satori consciousness awaits.

As I Lay Dying

Usually if I go to a comedy and don't laugh, I'll wind up writing it's no good or that I hate it, or both. Well, a different thing happened with Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (Columbia, 8.4). I didn't laugh much at all -- two or three titters, a couple of chuckles -- but it's not a bad film. I respected it. It's quite smart, very hip and a piece of searing social criticism.

I just didn't laugh. Well, barely. A critic sitting next next to me was shrieking -- you should have heard the sounds...Read More

Roger Michell's Venus (Miramax, 12.15), which has that allegedly delicious Peter O'Toole lead performance, is going to play at the Toronto Film Festival. And Alfonso Cuaron 's Children of Men (Universal, 9.29), which everyone wet their pants over at Comic-Con and which Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu says has the visual chops of a Stanley Kubrick film, is not going to Toronto.

If I come back as a dog, I'd wouldn't want to live in Asia because there'd be a fair chance I'd be killed and chopped up and grilled and served as somebody's meal. I'd want to be a rich American dog living in Beverly Hills. Point of fact, I'd like to live with Candice Bergen and have the kind of life that this basset hound is living. Except I'd want be be a golden retriever. Seriously, read this story and who's got it better -- this dog or your average citizen in southern Lebanon?

I have this idea that Oliver Stone, Nic Cage and Michael Pena will be a good group on The Charlie Rose Show this evening. I'm seeing World Trade Center a second time for good measure this evening.

Waaay down at the bottom of his Film Convictions page, with a Permalink anchor, is a "Hangman" review written about two months ago of Steve Zallian's All The King's Men. Take it with a grain, but at least there are hints and indications. About what may be up with it, I mean. As explored here, here and here.

I was going to report that Jennifer Lopez's Bordertown, a drama about several unsolved murders of poor women in the El Paso-Juarez areas, would finally see the light of a projector lamp on 10.20.06. Except it's not happening, and nobody you call seems to have a clue when it might be seen.

10.20 is when the IMDB says MGM will be releasing the Gregory Nava-directed drama about a reporter (Lopez) looking into the murders. Not true, according to MGM publicist Jeff Pryor. And pay no mind to the fact that there's an MGM-related Bordertown website either. MGM had negotiations about...Read More

There was an either-or work situation that Owen Wilson was looking at not long ago -- a high-paying role in Steven Brill's Drillbit Taylor, some kind of simple-ass Paramount comedy, or a role in Wes Anderson's not-as-well-paying "India movie", the title of which has now been revealed by Production Weekly as The Darjeeling Limited. But something worked out or Owen just chose the right thing, but he's now doing the India flick. It begins shooting in December. Cowritten by Anderson, Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman, it's about three brothers travelling through India. And the brothers will be played by Owen, Jason...Read More

This Devin Faraci CHUD interview with Brett Ratner is four days old (by internet standards that's almost like saying it's a parchment scroll found in an underground tomb) but it's a worthwhile education about where Ratner is at these days and how he sees himself. He acknowledges that "people have always hated me" and mentions that Paul Thomas Anderson threatened to put a bullet in Ratner's head if he carried through on his plan to remake John Cassavettes' Killing of a Chinese Bookie ,and talks about Roman Polanski's willingness to play a small part in Rush Hour 3 which Ratner will start...Read More

Talladega Nights (Columbia) is going to grab about $35 million this weekend...maybe more. One tracking report says general awareness is 89, definite interest is 47 (that's big) and first choice among all pictures in release is 24 -- one person out of four. And this is from an urban sample. It goes without saying it's gonna kill 'em in the boonies -- a movie like this is red meat for the red states.

Meaning it's going to more than double the Miami Vice tally, which will probably come in around $13 or $14 million.

World Trade Center Paramount, 8.9) looks like...Read More

Studio executives who've said nothing about Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic remarks "are clearly not the bravest people in the world," producer Howard Rosenman has told L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein. "They don't want to alienate Mel or [Gibson agent] Ed Limato, one of the most powerful agents in town. They're all thinking, what happens if he comes out of this and I've said something? He won't work with me when I need him."

The formal DUI charges filed today (8.2.06) against "Mel C. Gibson (01.03.56)" by the People of the State of California.

It's intriguing about Hugh Jackman and Fox 2000 planning to make another film version of Rodgers & Hammerstein's Carousel, with Jackman producing (with partner John Palermo) as well as playing the lead, Billy Bigelow. The original 1956 film version, directed by Henry King and starring Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones, is kind of cornball but it has some great songs and a devastating final 20 minutes. Every time I watch it, I melt.

Bigelow is a Maine carnival barker and an ignorant thug who's managed to charm and marry a local girl named Julie. Too proud...Read More

O'Toole Scores Again?

As everyone presumably knows, Miramax has swapped the release dates of Stephen Frears' The Queen, a drama about Queen Elizabeth (Helen Mirren) grappling with the death of Lady Diana, and Roger Michell's Venus, based on a script by Hanif Kureishi about septugenarian sex, romance and parenting. Queen was advanced up to 10.6, and Venus was pushed back to 12.15. The motive was to put Venus into a better position for an Oscar campaign, but not necessarily for the film itself.

The main beneficiary of the Venus campaign is going to be Peter O'Toole, who reportedly plays the lead...Read More

Mel Gibson "has been a very bad goy,'' author and New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier has told N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd. "It is really rich to behold Gibson asking Jews to behave like Christians. Has he forgotten how bellicose and wrathful and unforgiving we are? Why would a people who start all the wars make a peace? I have always wondered why people who believe that we control the world do not have more respect for us. Take that cop who arrested Gibson. Do you think it was a coincidence that he was a Jew? We have been following...Read More

Oliver Stone is throwing together a third, extra-lengthy DVD of Alexander -- 225 minutes, give or take -- and Warner Home Video will put it out whenever....later this year, early '07. Rope Of Silicon's Laremy Legel posted this story about it 11 days ago, but I wasn't paying attention. ""I'm doing a third version [of Alexander on DVD, not theatrical], Stone told Legel during a World Trade Center interview. "I'm going to do a Cecil B. DeMille/Oliver Stone three hour, forty-five minute thing. I'm going to go all out [and] put everything I like in the movie. He was a complicated man,...Read More

So what's being "conveyed" here with this new Flags of our Fathers one-sheet? Class, of course -- Clint Eastwood's film (Dreamamount, 10.20) is going to reek of the stuff. And a tone of gloom, as signified by the raising of the flag atop Mt. Surabachi, which originally took place at midday, at either at dawn or sunset, or maybe just before a thunderstorm. Handsomer and cooler-looking this way....more of a mythical quality. Other thoughts?

One of the issues with All The King's Men (Columbia, 9.22), I'm being told, is "length." Director Steven Zallian "can't really part with any bit of it."

For those who don't feel like reading to the end of the "Balloon Dismissals" piece I just put up, my revised Best Picture of 2006 list in order of probable (i.e., perceived) Oscar strength is as follows: (1) Flags of Our Fathers (DreamWorks); (2) Babel (Paramount Vantage); (3) Dreamgirls (DreamWorks/Paramount); (4) The Pursuit of Happyness (Columbia Pictures); (5) World Trade Center (Paramount); (6) Stranger Than Fiction (Columbia); (7) The Good Shepherd (Universal Pictures) and (8) Blood Diamond (Warner Bros.).

Plus (9) The Fountain (Warner Bros.); (10) Little Miss Sunshine (Fox Searchlight); (11) United 93 (Universal); (12) Infamous (Warner Independent); (13) Reign O'er...Read More

Balloon Dismissals

Four weeks from the Toronto Film Festival and the start of early Oscar season, and it's becoming clear that certain films I put into the presumptive Oscar Balloon way back when have to be eliminated. I'm sorry but life is necessarily Darwinian at times, and handicappers like myself are merely agents of that process.

On top of which David Poland began running his Gurus of Gold chart today, and this goaded me into action. Poland is saying he didn't invite me to participate this year because I resigned from last year's Guru gang at the end of the Oscar road,...Read More

Isn't it about time to start showing Steve Zallian's All The King's Men (Columbia. 9.22) to the press? It was presumed to be some kind of Oscar hopeful last fall before it was pulled, it was subsequently re-edited and refined (or so I was told), it's been done for while now, it'll be showing at the Toronto Film Festival before you know it, and playing in theatres in about seven weeks. I made three calls about this yesterday and today...zip. But I heard too many interesting things about this film last year. Has to be something estimable. Give it up, guys.

The Departed trailer minus the dreaded Mozilla X Plug-in factor, in Quicktime and Windows Media Player.

Mission: Impossible: III "is likely to gross close to $400 million worldwide at the box office and is projected to earn an additional $200 million in DVD revenue...[and yet] Paramount expects only to break even after star-producer Tom Cruise gets his share of the profit, which two informed sources estimate could be as high as $80 million." This according to Claudia Eller's 7.31 L.A.Times piece about the diminishing interest that Paramount has in cutting any more fat deals with Cruise and his ilk. Paramount recently offered Cruise/Wagner Prods. an annual $2 million budget, Eller reported, instead of the annual $10 million C/W...Read More

In his revivings of the Rambo and Rocky franchises, Sylvester Stallone is taking a last desperate leap at marginal fame, semi-relevance and a revenue surge. It's a tough place to be in but we all have to keep knocking. I wish Stallone had kept trying to play Copland-type character roles, but I guess he wasn't offered much in this vein after Copland came out, probably because people felt he wasn't that terrific in it.

I got to know Stallone slightly as a result of working for a couple of publicists (Bobby Zarem, Dick Delson) who represented him during the big-dick Rambo...Read More

"In the New Hollywood, the power has shifted from production to marketing. And why not? When your aim is to make a franchise picture aimed at the whole family, the person you want at the helm is a brand-management expert, not a filmmaker-friendly production chief. Next summer is already jammed with another slew of sequels, including new installments in the Harry Potter, Spider-Man, Pirates of the Caribbean, Shrek, Fantastic Four, Rush Hour, Bourne and Ocean's Eleven series. These are consumer products, not cinema." -- from Patrick Goldstein's 8.1 "Big Picture" column.

"It's folly for studios to say we're only going to make a movie we know how to market," says World Trade Center producer Michael Shamberg. "The problem with marketing is that it's based on what's worked in the past. But audiences want freshness and new ideas, which is all about the future. If a studio is unwilling to be a home for fresh ideas or daring films, they're ultimately not going to be competitive, because the top talent is going to go somewhere else." -- also in Patrick Goldstein's 8.1 "Big Picture" column. To which I would add, audiences don't seem to...Read More

Suddenly my old Fairfield County stomping grounds (Wilton and Norwalk) are part of the Hollywood-now cycle. The Dave Karnes character in World Trade Center (Paramount, 8.9) is shown watching the 9/11 tragedy on a TV set along with two or three coworkers at his job in Wilton, and now House of Sand and Fog director Vadim Perlman is in a legal skirmish over something that happened in a South Norwalk restaurant-bar. It sounds lame to bring this up, but if you lived in this neck of the woods and someone mentioned this to you at a party at someone's home on Cheesespring...Read More

I've seen thousands of films with rote, static, or unimaginative camera work, particularly those made between the nascent sound era of the early 30s up until the beginnings of the influence of Italian neorealism in the early '50s and the hand-held, free-form era of the French nouvelle vague in the early '60s. Laurence Olivier was, I suppose, not an especially exciting or inspired director, but his three best-known Shakespeare films -- Henry V, Hamlet and Richard III -- never struck me as being particularly labored or tedious or difficult to sit through.

These three...Read More

And while speaking of Shakespeare on film, what's with Warner Home Video's continuing delay in releasing a remastered DVD of Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar ('53)? By my standards this superbly acted, exquisitely mounted black-and-white version is one of the best Shakespeare rides around, Hollywood-produced or otherwise. (Dave Kehr might piss on it and wish for more of a Plan 9 From Outer Space approach, but that's his right as a critic.)

Marlon Brando's performance as Marc Antony may not exemplify the grunty, earthy Marlon of legend, but it's one of his most striking performances. No...Read More

Another trailer mashup, this time selling the idea of a warm and uplifting Taxi Driver. Very well edited by Steven Santos...but I think we all got the idea with that Shining trailer that went around a couple of years ago.

The L.A. Times' Deborah Netburn with a recent sum-up of Gibson blogger riffs.

This Gibson-meltdown story from the Toronto Star's Peter Howell reads like something that should have run Monday instead of today....sorry, but news cycles are running almost hourly these days. That said, there's a decent pull-quote from yours truly: "As Woody Allen might put it, Mel is toast with those of the Hebrew persuasion." But maybe there's a chance with Mel having asked to meet and sit down with Jewish leaders, etc. Doubtful but maybe.

There's a kind of nascent rumble on Talledega Nights (Columbia, 8.4), which has its all-media showing in Westwood this evening: Will Ferrell's dumb race-car driver schtick is whatever it is (funny, very funny, amusing, vaguely exasperating), but the supporting stand-out seems to be Sascha Baron Cohen, whose comedic Borat (subtitled "Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan") played in Cannes last May and is opening on 11.3 via 20th Century Fox.

"On many levels, Talladega Nights is reminiscent of Anchorman," says Screen Daily's Tim Grierson. "Both films were directed by...Read More

Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson and RiskyBiz blogger once again runs a Mel Gibson statement ahead of everyone else. Gibson has stopped shot of agreeing to be lashed by rabbis in penance for his anti-Semitic remarks last weekend, as I half-seriously suggested he do yesterday, but he is saying, humbly, that he wants to sit down with Jewish community leaders and get his head straight.

"I'm not just asking for forgiveness," his new statement reads. "I would like to take it one step further, and meet with leaders in the Jewish community, with whom I can have a one-on-one...Read More

"World Trade Center yields lovely and touching moments but proves a slow-going, arduous movie experience, if more uplifting than Universal's earlier test of that historic day's box office potential, United 93 ," says Variety's Brian Lowryin his 7.31 review .

"Stone's film bears some thematic resemblance to Alive , Frank Marshall's 1993 chronicle of a plane crash in the Andes. Both offer a tribute to human endurance under unimaginable conditions, but watching young guys huddle together trying not to freeze to death or two cops pinned under tons of debris isn't exactly a cinematic thrill ride. Long stretches are shot...Read More