2006 has been a significant just-say-no year as far as publicists screening (or not screening) movies for critics and journos. Earlier this year the trend of publicists deciding against holding press-screenings of mediocre movies seemed to accelerate. And now there's a new development affecting...well, just Hollywood Elsewhere right now, but maybe others as the trend spreads. I'm speaking of being barred from screenings of a couple of films because of too much meanness and negativity in my postings.

I've been told in no uncertain terms that I'm off the invite list to screenings of Running With Scissors...Read More

Here's an absolute Hollywood Reporter Key Art Award nominee for best movie poster -- Steven Soderbergh's The Good German (Warner Bros., 12.8). The Berlin-based, black-and-white noir is set in the late 1940s, and the poster seems to have been designed back then also. It's not a blindingly brilliant concept -- a fairly obvious one, in fact -- but something about it is unusually authentic-looking, like it was really and truly slapped together in 1948. George Clooney, Cate Blanchett and Tobey Maguire costar.

The Calgary Sun's Kevin Williamson spoke to yours truly a few days ago about the sudden trap-door trend of studio execs just saying 'no' to humungous big-star deals. "There is definitely a sea change [happening] in Hollywood," said Hollywood Reporter int'l general manager John Burman. "Not just in L.A., but in the world." And one my quotes was, "Is it definitely a bend in the river? Is it analogous to the 1989 [anti-socialist] revolution in Eastern Europe? I don't know, but I love that idea ."

One look at this shot from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Warner Bros., 7.13.07) and it's obvious that Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson have reached full biological maturity. They're contractually obliged, of course, to portray "Harry" and "Hermione" in the movie, but given the formulaic rigidity and corporate salivation behind this franchise, any and all implications of what being in your mid-teens inevitably involves will almost certainly be ignored/repressed. Which means that the fanciful archness of the franchise is about to intensify a bit more.

Radcliffe and Watson in

"'[My parents] didn't like the class system, and the royal family is the pinnacle of the class system. I was brought up very anti-monarchist. I was a bit cheeky, a little uppity [in my younger days] about why the queen won't smile. Does it hurt her to smile? Isn't that what she's there for?' " -- Helen Mirren talking about her much-admired performance in Stephen Frears' The Queen (Miramax, 9.30) with Newsweek's Barbara Kantrowitz.

"I've finally seen Tom Tykwer's Perfume in a plex in my home town of Augsburg, Germany , and I'm even more convinced that it will go the route of The Name of the Rose, which was a blockbuster in Europe ($120 million) while earning a miniscule $7 million in the U.S.," says a former exhibitor who runs a site about box-office in Germany and elsewhere.

"Just keep in mind that Perfume has so far grossed $31.8 million in five European markets in just 11 days.

...Read More

Warner Bros. is telling me they still haven't decided when to release Clint Eastwood's second Iwo Jima movie -- the Japanese language Letters from Iwo Jima. Despite what Variety editor Peter Bart wrote on 9.3.06 with Clint's apparent input (i.e., that Flags of Our Fathers "will open Oct. 20" [and then] Letters From Iwo Jima will open two months later"), I've been told that senior Warner Bros, distribution execs intend to open Letters sometime in January '07, or perhaps even later...but they aren't sure when.

...Read More

"The humiliating box office returns for All the King's Men may have trickled in over the weekend (a pathetic $3.8 million), but the death knell sounded almost a year ago and unintentionally came out of its producers' mouths. When Sony Pictures announced, just two months before the film's planned Christmastime release, that its opening would be pushed into the next year, the official reason was that more time was needed to complete the editing and score.

"But the unmistakable message sent to savvy audiences (that means everyone now) was: This movie is in trouble," begins a 9.26 ...Read More

When Columbia decided several weeks ago against putting Mike Binder's Reign O'er Me into the derby by opening it in early December, one of the factors, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, was that "Columbia had a heavy fall/Xmas slate (four films) and they didn't want to add another film to that list in the first place,"

Those films were All The King's Men, Running With Scissors, Stranger Than Fiction and The Pursuit of Happyness.

...Read More

Sharon Waxman's latest N.Y. Times piece (dated 9.25) is about Jim Carrey 's recent decision to leave UTA agent Nick Stevens and how the move "rumbled through Hollywood like a storm [and] signaled changing times for a tight network of stars who have dominated Hollywood comedies for several years -- Carrey, Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell, Jack Black, Vince Vaughn, Steve Carell and writer-directors Judd Apatow, Adam McKay -- and how the key to this web of interwoven talent has been Stevens and his deputies at the United Talent Agency, and the talent managers ...Read More

There are implications of laissez-faire rich-girl posturings in Sofia Coppola's decision to stroll around Paris with a New York Times photographer (who, I'm told, is a personal friend of Coppola's) and pose for shots here and there. Coppola is female and fairly young and a lover of the alluring eyefuls one normally finds in the shops and parks and museums of Paris, and that's fine...but the montage provides an echo, for me, of the rank emptiness (i.e., the constant regarding of 18th Century surfaces) in Coppola's Marie-Antoinette. The shots by the Times...Read More

I wasn't having all that terrific a time with the entirety of Todd Phillips' School for Scoundrels last night (I went to one of the commercial sneak showings), but I did enjoy the sour-shit attitude in some of Billy Bob Thornton's put-down lines. Particularly the retort to costar Jon Heder when he talks about a developing relationship with Jacinda Barrett (who doesn't do it for me, by the way...especially not after The Last Kiss) and Thornton goes, "Yeah...I'm sure you're days away from adopting a Chinese kid together...Read More

In an upcoming (10.2.06) Al Pacino interview on James Lipton's "Inside The Actor's Studio" series on Bravo, the 66 year-old actor tells a simulated rear-entry Oscar statuette story.

It happened right after he'd won his Best Actor Oscar for Scent of a Woman...Read More

"Murders have continued almost unabated [in his films], and at 66, Brian De Palma has been at it a long time, since the mid-'60s. While the other major directors of his generation -- Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola -- have ranged high and low, De Palma keeps hitting the same groove. Like Hitchcock, to whom he has often been compared, and not always favorably, his name represents a brand. [But] even in a film as roundly slammed and wildly unsatisfactory as The Black Dahlia, there are moments when De Palma's ecstatic love of filmmaking...Read More

"I found the whole time [in the writing of The Queen] that I had to dampen down the inflammatory nature of what I was being told," screenwriter Peter Morgan tells N.Y. Times profiler Sarah Lyall . "You have no idea how much hosing down and cooling of information we had to do. We were shedding and throwing out sensational information the whole time." A little too much!

In this well-researched, skillfully written New Yorker piece about the life and legacy of the life of Marie-Antoinette, Judith Thurman says the following about Sofia Coppola, director of the empty and for the most part despicable Marie-Antoinette (Columbia, 10.20):

She "is a fashion celebrity and muse who helps to publicize the work of designer friends by wearing it with the teasing glamour of a jaded virgin playing dress-up in her mother's clothes. She has always been drawn to beautiful, trapped girls...Read More

Queer Lady

Stephen Frears' The Queen (Miramax, 9.30) will open the New York Film Festival this Friday (9.29), but it's also been shown at the Venice Film Festival. It would have been okay to write about it after that festival debut, but I've been holding back. I've decided to let go today because a guy called me a candy-ass the other night for doing so.

I don't want to put The Queen down -- it's intelligent and restrained, and Helen Mirren...Read More

Four days ago TMZ's Claude Brodesser-Akner (where did the "Akner" come from?) wrote a short piece about the whacking of Bradford Simpson, the top guy at Leonardo DiCaprio's Appian Way. A big reason Leo fired the poor guy, Brodesser-Akner reports, is that "lots of interesting stuff was in development [at Appian Way], but little has come to fruition." Brodesser-Akner mentions Appian Way's interest in developing a film about LSD guru Timothy Leary , (with the idea of Leo eventually playing him), hiring playwright Craig Lucas (The Dying Gaul) and Leary archivist Michael Horowitz...Read More

"'What's human sacrifice if not sending guys off to Iraq for no reason?'" -- alleged Mel Gibson remark following last night's Apocalypto screening at Austin's Fantasticfest. The film, which Harry Knowles saw twice yesterday, is about big bad Mayans (aggressive, militaristic) conquering and mauling a smaller and simpler grass-hut society.

So there's the critique of the U.S. and the Bushies -- an idea to hold onto -- but the thing that seemed to have really impressed everyone last night are the B-movie action-driven aspects.

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Mel Gibson, wearing a mask and a wig so he wouldn't be noticed, visited two Oklahoma towns on Thursday and Friday to attend test screenings of Apocalypto, which Disney will release on 12.8. The Friday screening played before "a mostly American-Indian audience" -- the film is about an ancient Mayan culture -- at the Riverwind Casino in Goldsby, Oklahoma. The Thursday screening happened at Cameron University in Lawton. If anyone who saw Apocalypto at either screening wants to share, please get in touch. It's strange that Gibson would wear a "mask", no?

Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers (Dreamamount, 10.20) has been seen on the Left Coast, and it's "damn good," according to a certain eyeballer. The word is that some kind of limited peek will be given to a select group within a few days. That doesn't mean anyone's necessarily going to write anything about it straight away. Let's see how it plays out.

There's a certain John Fordian echo in Flags of Our Fathers...Read More

There was a Big Unaddressed Element in Michael Fleming's 9.21 Variety story about Crash director Paul Haggis suddenly abandoning Against All Enemies, a feature adaptation of Richard Clarke's best-seller about the roots of 9/11, and his jumping into "talks" to direct Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron in The Garden of Elah .

The BUE is why did Against All Enemies, a Sony project with Sean Penn...Read More

"But for the most profoundly cinematic/ thematic take on our shared global dilemma, nothing compares to Babel (Paramount Vantage, 10.27.06). It's the apotheosis of the multi-story, meta-tragic approach Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga have been perfecting with Amores Perros and 21 Grams. Here the scope is wider, the craftsmanship gives Martin Scorsese a run for his money, and the emotional, political and philosophical implications are devastating yet, in their simple, honest way, reassuringly humanistic as well." -- L.A. Daily News critic Bob Strauss on the recently-launched "Reel Deal"...

Postscript to yesterday's riff about Pete Hammond's what-about-Zodiac? piece: a certain know-it-all is saying there's no way Paramount is going to platform-release David Fincher's drama in late December in New York and Los Angeles because they don't want anything else in the soup that might dilute their efforts, even a little bit, to get World Trade Center a Best Picture nomination.

The likelihood of this happening is just about zilch -- ask anyone, it's not in the cards -- but WTC is the only pure-Paramount, pure-Brad Grey, pure-Gail Berman...Read More

Hold up on those wildcat Friday numbers from back east and consider this studio projection: (1) Jackass: Number Two will end up #1 with roughly $27,317,000 for the weekend; (2) Jet Li's Fearless will end up with $9,716,000; (3) The Gridiron Gang will end up a hair below that with $9,617,000; (3) Flyboys will come in with $5,042,000; (4) Everyone's Hero, $4,823,000, (5) The Black Dahlia, $4,358,000; and All The King's Men will finish with $3,709,000...dead.

While speaking to Factory Girl star Sienna Miller, Daily Mail columnist Baz Bamigboye makes mention of the fact that "those who have seen early rough-cut versions" -- partly a reference to yours truly -- "tell me the performances of Sienna and leading man Guy Pearce, as Warhol, are brilliant. So much so that studio chief Harvey Weinstein plans a year-end Oscar campaign for them."

I never said anything rock-solid about Harvey planning to release Factory Girl, so presumably Baz has done some digging of his own. That or Sienna said so.

Here's how I ...Read More

This Dutch trailer for Paul Verhoeven's Black Book (Sony Classics) is interesting for the extreme widescreen framing. It looks like a 3 to 1 aspect ratio...odd. The film is supposed to be Verhoeven's return to his Dutch roots, but it looks like it was shot with the same technical slickness that he applied to The Hollow Man. I have to give David Poland credit for making me laugh by calling it Showgirl's List...Read More

What you have to do is watch this Good Shepherd trailer and then read my mid-August HE piece called "Sussing Shepherd" and then let it all sink in, and then you need to stir it around until it becomes a kind of oatmeal mush.

There's some kind of defensive gatekeeper vibe coloring the advance-screening policy on behalf of Running With Scissors (Columbia, 10.20). The first hint came in mid-August when it was made clear that Scissors wouldn't be going to the Toronto Film Festival ("The Old Toronto Sidestep"). Then a mild-mannered journalist told me the other day that publicists working the Scissors...Read More

Last year Brokeback Mountain became a kind of milestone for gay subject matter in mainstream films, in part by lending an aura of class because of all the critical praise and Oscar nominations. This year we have three gayish films of an allegedly strong distinction -- for lack of a better term I'm calling them the Gay Trilogy -- opening during award- contender season, plus a couple of second-tier so-sos.

None are on Brokeback's level -- not even close -- but they all have same-sex encounters woven into their fabric, and I'm wondering how much of this is a Read More

The MCN link says "The NY Film Critics Circle Sets Its Award Dates for January"...bullshit. They'll vote on Monday, 12.11 and of course, the winners will be announced right away. The awards ceremony will take place on Sunday, 1.7.07, at the Supper Club, "a new venue for the organization this year."

89% of the Rotten Tomatoes critics have spat upon All The King's Men, and in such an atmosphere three or four people have remarked with surprise at Kenneth Turan's rave in the L.A. Times. I shouldn't say anything because I slept through about 30% to 35% of Men when I caught it in Toronto, but a sign of a formidable critic is one who says what he/she likes despite the herd mentality, so Turan's okay in my book. And he isn't completely alone. A quick scan of the Metacritic survey tells you tthat Time's ...Read More

Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson has penned a column about Zach Helm's fabled Stranger Than Fiction script, which "five studios, 37 directors and scores of movie stars threw themselves at." I knew all about that excitement when it was happening. Everyone was creaming over that script except I couldn't get past page 20 when I tried to read it (twice), and then I saw the finished film in Toronto and I went, "What the fuck was that about?"

Ostensibly, Fiction is about a problem afflicting IRS agent Harold Crick (Will Ferrell...Read More

Said this before, saying it again: despite Clint Eastwood having told Variety editor Peter Bart earlier this month that Letters From Iwo Jima, his Japanese-soldier-POV Iwo Jima movie, will be released "two months" after Flags of Our Fathers, or sometime in mid to late December, and despite Pete Hammond considering a scenario that Letters will indeed be competing 'against' Paramount and Dreamworks' Flags and Warner Bros. "sources" yelling him "they are only seeing the film for the first time this week...Read More

Pete Hammond jumps into the will- Paramount-give- Zodiac-a-platform-opening-in-late-December story in his latest Hollywood Wiretap column, which is basically about how end-of-the-year crowding has left the studios with an embarassment of riches. But before exploring the Zodiac particulars, I have a suggestion.

Robert Downey

Paramount is apparently still on the fence (i.e., reluctant but unwilling to give this reluctance a full voice) about opening David Fincher...Read More

"If I see one more bus ad for one more fucking animated movie with fucking animals in it, I'm going to start screaming" -- an actual comment from a director to his manager-producer, apparently in response to seeing an Open Season poster.

Caught up as I was in my 9.19 Jim Carrey indifference ("Does anyone really give that much of a hoot if he continues to be a big star or not?"), I went all "meh" on Nikki Finke's latest L.A. Weekly column, which details the blow-by-blow of how UTA's Nick Stevens lost Carrey as a client (largely due to the finaglings & ministations of Carrey's manager Jimmy Miller). I should've paid faster attention. It's a well reported, extremely tasty story.

Here's a sample graph: "A furious Stevens confronted Miller and [Carrey's other manager-at-the-time, Eric Gold...Read More

I didn't hear anything all that good about Michael Ian Black's The Pleasure of Your Company during the Toronto Film Festival. Maybe I wasn't talking to the right people. Whatever the rumble, MGM has acquired the North American rights to this GreenStreet Films and Fugitive Films co-production....go figure.

"I mean, I get depressed like everybody. I have angst. I have anxiety. I worry about the world. Nobody was expecting the kind of fearful times that we live in. It's really out of the blue. It's like, 'My God, what the hell is happening?'" -- Jack Nicholson (plugging The Departed is his usual roundabout way) to Erik Hedegaard in a relatively fresh-off-the-vine issue of Rolling Stone.

It would be nice if Toronto Film Festival slackers like myself had a shot at seeing films they wanted to catch in Toronto but didn't. Like Paul Verhoeven's Black Book, which Sony Classics has acquired for distribution in North America and other territories. I didn't prioritize it in Toronto, frankly, because of mixed word of mouth...but then Variety's Robert Koehler convinced me it was worth seeing. Now comes an announcement that the Netherlands has submitted Black Book, a sexually- pronounced World War II drama, as its official foreign language entry for the Oscars.

A trailer for Zack Snyder's 300 used to be on this AICN page, but it appears to have been taken down. (I don't know what happened.) I know the film is based on the Frank Miller graphic novel of the same name -- kind of a Sin City take on the Battle of Thermopylae...Read More

The only 9.22 opener that looks like anything commercially is Jackass Number Two (Paramount) with, according to a tracking survey, an 81% general awareness, 40% definite interest and 13% first choice. (It also has a 25% definitely not interested, but that's just the older audience harumphing.) The two liveliest 9.29 openers, to go by the numbers, are The Guardian -- 62, 36, 8 -- and the animated Open Season -- 47, 32, 3. (32% definite interest among adults is a very strong number for a kids film.) And The Departed...

Suber Lesson #5: "There are three things that a memorable popular film is never about -- (1) unrequited love, (2) impotence, and (3) despair. In real life, people experience unrequited love, impotence and despair all the time. But the gospel of popular entertainment is based on individualism" -- the belief that you can become anything and anyone if your determination and inner resources are up to the task -- "and anything that suggests otherwise is forbidden."

Not literally forbidden, Suber is saying, but pretty much isolated, marginalized... barred from the realm of mass-acceptance...Read More

"...then I realized, Gawd laeft this playce a lawwng time ago"...that's Leonardo DiCaprio 's final line in the trailer for Ed Zwick's Blood Diamond (Warner Bros., 12.15). This is being positioned by Warner Bros. as an Oscar-worthy movie, but The Last Samurai taught everyone that you have to be careful with Zwick. He can be tasteful and restrained at times, but also ham-fisted -- for my money his emotional points have too often been underlined with a black felt-tip marker.

But the trailer tells me that DiCaprio -- one of the three leads in Diamond, along with ...Read More

Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers (Dreamamount, 10.20), the WWII epic about Iwo Jima and the p.r. effort to celebrate the men who raised the flag atop Mt. Surabachi, began screening for selected journalists this week in New York, according to a 9.21 N.Y. Times piece by David Halbfinger.

He calls it "a big, booming spectacle that sprawls across oceans and generations," with "much of [it] following the flag raisers as they crisscross the country in the spring and summer of 1945 pitching war bonds for a government in desperate financial straits. It is ...Read More

Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette is a well made, relentlessly shallow film about an 18th Century Paris Hilton (Kirsten Dunst) living inside a whimsical fantasy membrane in and around the grounds of the Palace of Versailles in the years leading up to the French revolution. Camille Paglia is a brilliant writer, a social seer and a fearless pretense-puncturer, and she's written a piece about...well, not Coppola's film but how Marie-Antoinette is back in vogue. I was hoping she'd seen the film and might have hated it....pity. It is not enough to merely hate Marie-Antoinette...Read More

ESPN's "Page 2" writer Sam Alipour follows Rescue Dawn producer and Clippers All-Star hotshot Elton Brand around Toronto as he went to the premiere and the after-party and whatnot. If there's a serious money quote in this piece, I haven't found it yet. Maybe I need to read it again .

Black Film.com's Wilson Morales has transcribed what reads like a portion of last weekend's Departed press conference. Matt Damon, Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, producer Graham King, Vera Farmiga and screenwriter William Monahan sat and suffered through a series of brain-novacaine press-junket questions.

A publicist I spoke to during a lunch earlier this afternoon told me that 80% of the "people" (journalists, I presume) she's spoken to about Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu's Babel have been iffy about it -- too long, too much like the previous Innaritu films, etc. But there's no basis for anyone to "meh" this film, I argued. It's too well crafted, too full of feeling and echoes about parenting and children. Later I talked with an industry guy who's spoken at length with Samuel L. Jackson, who saw Babel...Read More

FILMdetail's Ambrose Herron on yet another anti-blogger screed written by a print journalist (the Guardian's Rachel Cooke). Cooke's piece was posted roughly three weeks ago (9.3) -- why does it take people like Herron and Anne Thompson so long to respond to these things? Why am I posting this item myself? I don't really give a shit about any of this. That's not true -- I do give a shit about some of it.

Suber Lesson #4: "In many of the most memorable stories, th central character is torn between desire and duty, between what the self seeks and society demands. The inner voice whispers, 'I want...' but the outer voice responds, with an echo-chamber resonance, 'You must...' The duty of the hero is not merely to stand up; he must stand for something. It's not something he desires; it's something he's got to do."

For some reason I've never forgotten this line from a David Mamet ...Read More

Sven Nykvist, the cinematographer who shot Ingmar Bergman's best films with some of the most exquisite black-and-white compositions in film history, has died. I admired his color photography on Woody Allen's Another Woman and especially Crimes and Misdemeanors, but deep down he will always be the silver-monochrome painter who shot Bergman's The Virgin Spring, The Silence, Persona, Winter Light and Through a Glass Darkly. I met him on the set of King of the Gypsies...Read More

Scorsese Wired

At long last and after weeks of conflicting buzz-hype, Warner Bros. finally had a screening last night of Martin Scorsese's The Departed (10.6), and what great Scorsese stuff it has. And what a relief! The fabled director of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and Goodfellas is back on the contempo urban turf where he once belonged. Here, at long last, is a return to an old-school, brass-knuckles crime flick with piss and vinegar and style to burn. It may not be profound or symphonic, but it's cause for real cheering.

...Read More

Germany has chosen Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others as its offical entry for the 2007 Best Foreign Film Oscar...what a shocker. The 1980s-era drama won seven Lola awards (i.e., the German Oscars), it was the toast of Telluride and Toronto and it's looking to everyone like a very strong contender. What was Germany going to do? Was there a choice?

Suber Lesson #3: "Like religion, people to go movies not to see the world as it really is , but to see a world that compensates for the one they know."

A film will almost certainly be made out of "Hannibal Rising" (Delacourte Press), Thomas Harris's new Hannibal Lecter book that's due on 12.5, but Anthony Hopkins can forget it. It's strictly a young Hannibal thing that covers ages 6 through 20. Meaning two or three actors, right?

"Close readers of Mr. Harris’s previous novels, which also include 'The Silence of the Lambs' and 'Red Dragon,' may recall that Dr. Lecter saw his entire family killed during World War II in Eastern Europe," Motoko Rich recalls in this New York Times ...Read More

A study conducted by MarketCast on behalf of Google has concluded that "89% of moviegoers initially hear about a film from traditional sources including TV, in-theater trailers or word of mouth, while only 8% do so online. However, once people find out about a film, 49% typically do additional research before deciding to see a film; for them, the internet is the most popular tool. Of those researchers, 70% use the internet to discover more about the film. That's about one-third of overall moviegoers