I don't know when Paramount intends to start showing David Fincher's Zodiac (1.17.07), especially given their apparent determination to not release it platform-style in late '06, but I've been told it'll be totally finished and screenable as of 11.10. The person who told me this expects Zodiac to begin showing the following week; let's see what develops.

All the purchase of ThinkFilm by Capitol Films means is that L.A. entrepreneurs David Bergstein and Ron Tudor have now expanded their way into the U.S. indie film distribution scene, having already established themselves in England by owning the U.K.-based Capitol Films. (Oddly, Capitol has Bordertown, that crackling Jennifer Lopez drama about the unsolved Juarez murders that no one will pick up, on its website -- kind of an industry advertisement that says "we pick up shit nobody else wants!") The upshot is that ThinkFilm (which will hang onto its name and retain all of its staffers) will now have more...Read More

I tried to think of something interesting to say about TomKat planning to finally get married in Italy on Saturday, 11.18, but all I could come up with was the idea of being inside their heads for five or six hours via one of those Being John Malkovich mud-tunnel transporting devices, or even being in both their heads simultaneously (weird thought), but it got too strange.

The intrigue is much higher regarding Cruise's interest in making an indie "political drama" called Lions for Lambs, which reportedly deals with a platoon of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, presumably post-9/11. The script is by...Read More

The more you hear about a film that presents a humanistic portrait of an afflicted people and their oppressors, and the more you hear about a director's humane, liberal views about the social particulars behind the film or that were used as a kind of socio-textural backdrop during its making, the more curious...okay, suspicious you are about how the movie plays by regular-guy, hang-the-politics standards.

Blood Diamond director Ed Zwick isn't exactly the Stanley Kramer of his time but he sounds like Kramer, a '50s and '60s Hollywood liberal who made socially- minded films with liberal...Read More

Go to the site for Paul Feig's Unaccompanied Minors (Warner Bros., 12.8) and right away you're thinking 180s, escape routes, avoidance patterns. The cast list tells me they've got Brett Kelly (Bad Santa) costarring as Beef Welllington, in the part of the morbidly obese kid, which every comedy seems to have these days. Morbidly obese people used to be oddities -- in today's culture young kids who are probably fated to die of a heart attack by the time they reach 50 are totally commonplace.

To me fatties have always been kind of chuckly, but there's something deeply unfunny about...Read More

I thought I had linked to Nathaniel R.'s comprehensive rundown of all the Best Foreign Language feature submissions on Film Experience. Well, I have now. '06 will be a bitch as far as playing favorites since the three top foreign-language contenders -- Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others (Sony Pictures Classic, 2.9.07), Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (Picturehouse, 12.29 -- submitted by Mexico, shot in Spain) and Pedro Almodovar's Volver (Sony Pictues Classics, 11.3) -- are equally major, exceptional, transporting. I worship each one and there's no choosing -- all three should take home the prize.

"The Daisy on Rodeo Dr., the MLK diner on Wilshire Blvd. where we all used to go at 2 in the morning, the Luau on the corner -- they're all gone. All the time I'm passing places that were part of my history here but they're not there now. I'm walking down the street and seeing things and people that only I can see. The town is full of ghosts for me. Frank Sinatra was a friend. Fred Astaire, Danny Kaye...they're no longer here." -- The Prestige costar Michael Caine speaking to the Toronto Star's John Hiscock, and posted three bloody...

The online re-design of the Hollywood Reporter, which went up three days ago, has resulted in something that doesn't have much of a pulse. It's hard to put your finger on it exactly, but somewhere on high the ghost of Billy Wilkerson is scrunching his face and going, "Whaaat?" A Hollywood trade paper needs to throw in some hot licks and boogie it up some -- it can't be too corporate-looking or it won't look like a Hollywood trade paper. Honestly, this new thing could be a website for some Midwest furniture manufacturer or ice-cream distributor. The recent Variety re-design was agreeable,...Read More

Writing in his New York magazine column (i.e., "Imperial City"), Kurt Andersen has explained and nailed what I've long hated about the L.A. Times (except for some of the Hollywood coverage): "L.A.'s liberalism remains far more circa-1975 paleo than New York City's, and the L.A. Times' journalism, which tends toward the dull and the earnest, reflects that. Racking up Pulitzer Prizes -- the paper's won fourteen in the last six years -- doesn't mean that a paper is exciting or essential to its readers, and can even be a contraindicator.

"The notion that tedious worthiness equals substance and importance and vice...Read More

Borat boys outside Mann's Chinese at last night's Borat premiere -- Monday, 10.23.06, 7:50 pm.

It was great to finally see Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (20th Century Fox, 11.3), even if it was on a very gracious, Russian-potato-line, second-class invitee basis.

Invited guests to last night's premiere were made to wait in a totally non-moving line on Hollywood Blvd. last night for a very long while, and while it was hardly painful or humiliating -- it was a nothing, a shrug-off -- this sort of thing never happens...Read More

Variety's Michael Fleming and Ian Mohr have run the third significant story about how Borat's tracking isn't all that terrific ("Kazakh Quandary"), following Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily 10.17 piece and my own 10.19 article on this topic. Oh, yeah...Poland ran something also.

"While Borat has benefited from a wave of crackling Internet buzz, strong reviews and knockout festival screenings, Borat hasn't registered as strongly in tracking reports," Fleming/Mohr have written. "So far, it has scored below rival fare, from Catch a Fire to Babel, in audience awareness. But Fox maintains standard tracking methodology doesn't apply. 'This is a new...Read More

"With a multitude of highbrow movies competing for the same adult audience" during the fall-holiday Oscar season, "film after film takes a nasty tumble," writes L.A. Times industry columnist Patrick Goldstein. His piece refers more to last year's wipeouts than this year's, understandably. It seems fairer to let the fate of pedigree movies like Stranger Than Fiction find realization by God's awful grace.

"Last year, for example, a host of movies tanked at the box office despite being touted -- either by the studios or some breathless Oscar prognosticator -- as having Academy Award potential. A partial sample includes Jarhead, Memoirs of...Read More

It's been on YouTube a little while, but here's the latest celebrity hipster put-on: Jack Black delivering an anti-piracy message disguised as a plug Tenacious D in 'The Pick of Destiny' (New Line, 11.17).

N.Y. Times staff writers David Halbfinger and Allison Hope Weiner -- sniffing around for a story after last week's news that attorney Bert Fields will skate in the Anthony Pellicano wiretapping prosecution -- have gone after Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers for not making more money last weekend.

Earning a meager $10.2 million on 1800 screens -- described as "a relatively tiny beachhead that did not match expectations or its mostly strong reviews" -- means casting a moderately negative light on the fact that Paramount is now going to have to spend a shitload on...Read More

Last Friday's Borat press conference included this exchange between producer-writer-star Sacha Baron Cohen (in full Borat character, of course...the guy never lets his real self, whomever and whatever that is, pop through) and L.A. Daily News critic Bob Strauss , who got a bit bored with the heavily-scripted nature of the press conference and went with a sudden urge to heckle Cohen and...you know, swat the tennis ball back and forth and see what might happen. Here's Strauss's recollection of how it went down, and here's a link to IGN's press conference video.

This Guardian piece by L.A. correspondent Dan Glaister says almost 900 African-American Marines took part in the battle of Iwo Jima -- mainly in a backup/ support mode but with some engaging in sporadic combat -- and yet there's not a single American-American face in Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers. A Warner Bros spokesperson tells Glaister that "the film is correct based on the book" -- i.e., James Bradley and Ron Powers' book of the same name. For what it's worth, I called and asked my dad -- a Marine lieutenant who fought all through the 35-day Iwo Jima battle --...Read More

I'm in full agreement with the second half of the second story in today's Fox 411 column, in which Roger Friedman rips The U.S. vs. John Lennon a new one.

Friedman begins with the obvious about David Leaf and John Scheinfeld's film, which is that it opened limited via Lionsgate on 9.29.06, earned about $551,821 (per the IMDB) and is now -- a bit more than three weeks later -- gone. Friedman attributes this relatively short theatrical life to Lennon's widow Yoko Ono, the film's executive producer, who "did here what she accomplished...Read More

In early '99, more than seven and a half years ago, everyone was talking about the studio version of Brian Helgeland's Payback -- a remake of John Boorman's Point Blank as well as a re-adaptation of Donald Westlake's "Parker" novel -- vs. the rumored Helgeland version that had been suppressed.

I distinctly remember asking then-Paramount publicist Jasmine Madatian at a Westwood screening about the "other" version of Payback at a screening and her telling me, "Jeffrey, what are you saying? There is no other version!"

Now comes a Harry Knowles review of an Austin...Read More

That scene in The Departed when Jack Nicholson's gang meets that gang of Asian thugs to sell those stolen missile-guiding microchips? Jack mentions the basic concept of payment for goods, and to underline the point in a crudely ethnic vein, he says, "No tickee, no laundry." Wrong. The perjorative Chinese immigrant expression is "no tickee, no washee ."

A nicely written, curiously selective Hollywood trend piece by Time's Rebecca Winters Keegan about the Splat Pack -- the latest, hottest crop of English-speaking horror filmmakers: Leigh Whannell (screenwriter of Saw I, II and III; actor in I and II), James Wan (director of Saw, Death Sentence), Rob Zombie (The Devil's Rejects, the new Halloween), Eli Roth (Hostel), Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes, the forthcoming Mirrors), Neil Marshall (The Descent, the forthcoming Doomsday) and Saw III director Darren Lynn Bousman. I didn't notice any mentions of Severance director Christopher Smith or Black Sheep helmer...Read More

Three or four months ago I was taken off the Movie City News columnist links -- demoted -- and grouped in with the very formidable Cindy Adams, Nikki Finke, Mark Ebner , Jeannette Walls and Rush & Molloy as a gossip. Two days ago I was restored to the colum- nist ranks, although I'm still lumped in with the gossips. Either it's a mistake and or I did something to warrant reconsideration. 10:50 pm update: Nope...a mistake! I'm just a gossip again.

Pete Hammond has listed several actors and actresses in his Hollywood Wiretap piece about how playing real-life figures seems to usher in Oscar contender talk. Typically comprehensive (Hammond knows his stuff) but a little too generous. Here's HE's tough-darts, hard-odds rundown:

the great Ben Sliney (seriously) as himself in United 93

First group: (a) Ben Affleck as Superman actor George Reeves in Hollywoodland / HE verdict: forget Venice; (b) Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin in Last King of Scotland / HE verdict : is all this Forrest-is-getting-weaker, peaked-too-soon talk being kicked around all over...Read More

Sen. Barack Obama acknowledged on "Meet the Press" this morning that he's considering a run for president in 2008, backing off previous statements that he would not do so. That's it...Hilary's over. She can run in the primaries and do whatever, but she was pretty much dismissed before as a candidate with any chance in hell of getting any kind of sizable support from the red-staters, and now she's really over. So in the general election it'll be Obama vs...?

Here's my third and final Flags/Emily thematic link item. No more, I promise, but anyone who saw Flags of Our Fathers this weekend definitely has to listen to this. If you want to be thorough about it, read item #1 and item #2 first.

Every damn line of movie dialogue in this Independent piece about (i.e., composed of excerpts from) Paul Welling's "Sex, Lines and Videotape: Famous Film Quotes" (which isn't even purchasable via Amazon.com) has been drilled into every movie lover's head like the the basic ABC's...over and over, year after year. We're living in a fascistic culture.

What's needed is a book of less-heralded movie dialogue that's off the beaten path. Like Paddy Chayefsky 's "life is sensual, factual" speech spoken by James Garner in The Americanization of Emily...pretty good stuff, never quoted. Or this little Joe Pesci snippet from...Read More

Friday, 10.20, 9:25 pm

James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo's ...So Goes The Nation, which explains in the frankest terms imaginable how the John Kerry campaign blew it in every way imaginable with the middle American voting public during the '04 election and how cagey and brilliant the Bushies were at almost every turn, opened last night at the Regency Showcase on La Brea just south of Melrose. The last time I saw this film was in Toronto with a full house -- last night's 7:30 pm show was, shall we say, a wee bit...Read More

I'm repeating myself but the Best Actor race is going to come down to Will Smith's end-of-the-movie crying card and struggling-single-dad uplift card in The Pursuit of Happyness (the film being a true story about a guy who was homeless and on the streets with his son but who turned things around when he became a financial trader) vs. Peter O'Toole's career-capping performance in Venus fortified with a three-point pitch: (a) he's never won an Oscar, (b) he wuz robbed 41 years ago when his Becket performance lost out to Rex Harrison's in My Fair Lady, and (c) it's now or never. That's...Read More

The previous Peter Howell/Flags of Our Fathers/Hannibal- at-the-gates piece will suffice if you want to post something about Clint Eastwood's film, but it would be really interesting to get as many reactions as possible about Flags. What people do and say this weekend in response to this film will, I think, largely decide if it becomes a Best Picture nominee.

Toronto Star critic Peter Howell went to a radio-promotion-with- a-smattering-of-critics screening of Flags of Our Fathers last Wednesday, and observed the following: "It was at the Paramount downtown, in a room with several hundred seats. I expected it to be a mob scene, as it often is at movie previews, but the theatre was practically empty when I arrived at 6:30 pm. When the movie started just after 7 p.m., the room looked only about half full. This for a movie that had been touted as a sure-fire Oscar nominee and likely winner.

"So what happened to the audience? The show had the...Read More

The Guardian's John Patterson is calling Ridley Scott's A Good Year (20th Century Fox, 11.10), which stars Russell Crowe as a London financial scalawag who inherits a broken-down French vineyard, "another sad case of a comedy being made by people with no sense of humor whatsoever."

Earth to Patterson: A Good Year isn't a comedy. Really, really. It's one of those tonic-for-the-soul movies. A mood piece about whimsy and effervescence and nurturing those things that need nurturing. It's light, yeah, and it has supporting "characters" and Crowe smiles and goofs around, but that doesn't mean...Read More

"Dr. Strangelove is not only a documentary, but an extremely innocent one given today's possibilities," Christiane Kubrick (i.e., Stan's widow) tells London Times writer James Christopher. "There are so many more things that can go wrong. Weapons are a hundredfold more dangerous. Giant mistakes are easier to make. We don't have the mental tools to make critical split-second decisions.

"I remember when Peter George's book 'Red Alert 'came out around the time of the Cuban missile crisis [in 1962]. Stanley said: `We're not anywhere near scared enough.' He thought we were being as blinkered...Read More

As a kind of followup to my Thursday item about City Beat critic Andy Klein pointing out the thematic parallels between Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers and Arthur Hiller's The Americanization of Emily, an HE reader named "nemo" has discovered another profound link between the two, which he pointed out yesterday afternoon:

(l. to r.) William Bradford Huie, Ira Hayes, Clint Eastwood

"Upon cross-referencing IMDB and Wikipedia, I discovered that The Americanization of Emily was based on a novel by William Bradford Huie who -- this is really...Read More

Alan Cerny wrote in response to my Running With Scissors review that he's heard the film "has a montage set to Al Stewart's 'Year Of The Cat' -- that alone is enough to make me run screaming." Hold on, soldier. First of all, director Ryan Murphy doesn't use the whole song but just the opening piano section. Which is the best part of the song. And listening to a this, trust me, is the most enjoyable portion of the film. I took the song and copied the piano intro a couple of times and edited out the singing --...Read More

Not realizing at the time that Flags of Our Fathers would be opening on only 1800 or so screens, I called it as the weekend's top film a couple of days ago. Nope. The Friday numbers are in and Flags wll finish in third place with an estimated $10,749,000. The weekend's #1 film will be The Prestige at $15,089,000 with The Departed at #2 with $13,733 and a total cume of $77,206,000. Open Season will be fourth with $8,572,000, Flicka fifth with $7,988,000, The Grudge 2 sixth with $7,910,000, Man of the Year seventh with $7,011,000 and I don't care about the...Read More

Hollywood Elsewhere is seeking an intern to work on all aspects of the site except the writing (unless you're a genius with a prose style very close to mine) in exchange for school credit. Work from your own place but it has to be someone enrolled in a Los Angeles (or L.A.-area) university. I don't know how it usually works when a journalism major interns with a publication but I'd prefer someone who will commit to a longer rather than a shorter term. Access/entry to press screenings, occasional press junkets, industry gatherings, etc. I've been hearing from friends over the past two years...Read More

"I came to London to study a three-year course, and about a year and a half into it, I was invited to do casting for Amores Perros. I got a phone call from Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, the director, and he asked me to read something, videotape myself and send it back to him. I had never done casting before in my life, so I did exactly what he told me to do. After that, I got a phone call back from him saying, 'Let's do it.'

"So he sends me the script, and I said yes. Well,...Read More

The worst trailer mash I've ever seen. Uncreative, clunky, witless, tasteless, stupid...really loathsome. Especially the very end of it. "Oh my gosh" is right.

"A favorite quote of the week came from a producer of a major awards contender : 'I guess since no one has seen it yet, Dreamgirls must be the front runner for Best Picture.'" -- from Pete Hammond's latest Hollywood Wiretap column.

Arizona Daily Star critic Phil Villarreal has made some early Oscar calls, and decided that the top five Best Picture candidates are Babel (of course), The Departed (definitely), Dreamgirls (almost certainly), Flags of Our Fathers (most likely) and United 93 (brilliant!).

I haven't even looked at this, but it's an apparently legit link to a Borat press conference that happened today in Santa Monica.

The Envelope "Buzzometer" is up and running...sort of. Only five or six of the ten contributors -- USA Today's Claudia Puig, Comingsoon.net's Edward Douglas, Newsday's Gene Seymour, myself, the Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips, Hollywood Wiretap's Pete Hammond (one of the slackers), Rolling Stone's Peter Travers, Ebert & Roeper's Richard Roeper, and The Envelope 's Steve Pond and Tom O'Neil -- are there, but I guess everyone will be along by the end of the month.

Two YouTube files containing refreshers on that original 20/20 Chris Gardner profile that led to the making of The Pursuit of Happyness -- part #1 and part #2.

With the exception of his performances in Enemy of the State and Ali, I've been fairly averse to Will Smith for years. He's a calculating performer who always leans on his shtick and charm. Too smooth, too ready with a line and a smile. Some critics feel Smith has to pay for past sins (The Wild Wild West and chomping on that cigar and saying "now that's what I call a close encounter!" in Independence Day ) and that he needs to just be still -- just settle into himself and stop looking for love.

So...Read More

If the general critical barometer means anything, Flags of Our Fathers -- despite the flaws, despite grousing from a few "name" critics, despite a director I know telling me that people who've seen it have been going "naah" -- is going to wind up as a Best Picture Oscar nominee. The Academy doesn't exactly look to film critics for guidance, but the Clint legend and Clint kowtowing are very powerful forces in this town, and critical huzzahs backing this up are always part of the dynamic.

The Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic averages for Flags...Read More

Hell House

Anyone who tells you Ryan Murphy's Running with Scissors is funny -- as in a film that makes you laugh, which is an activity regarded in most cultures as something positive and good for the soul -- has a very, very twisted idea of what "funny" is. On the other hand, certain aspects of blue-state culture are turning more and more perverse as things move along and -- who knows? -- maybe the people who will laugh at or with this film will outnumber people like myself.

But I respect Running With Scissors,...Read More

The Venus trailer...not sure when it went up and who cares in the great scheme, but I hadn't clicked on it before tonight.

The new Dreamgirls trailer is good stuff, but it doesn't deliver the same pizazz I've gotten out of those 20-minute reels shown at those special press presentations -- one several weeks ago at the Pacific Design Center, and an earlier one at the Cannes Film Festival last May. The unspoken fear is that the original Dreamgirls stage musical in the early '80s had a weak story (a friend who saw it way back when says this was the main complaint from the New York theatre critics), and that if Bill Condon's feature runs into any kind of flak, it'll be from this.

In honor of today's limited opening of Sofia Coppola's Marie- Antoinette, a link to my 5.24.06 Cannes Film Festival review.

City Beat's Andy Klein has suggested that Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers is "The Americanization of Emily without jokes." That sounds like a smart-ass thing to say but it's not. Okay, it is somewhat, but not really. I happen to love and respect the latter film, written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Arthur Hiller, and I feel the analogy is valid, although obviously only in the broad strokes.

Both films are essentially about the fraudulence that goes into selling war to the public, and how the lies and the bullshit...Read More

A London journalist friend tells me it was a bit of a touch-and-go thing about whether Oscar hopeful Peter O'Toole, 74, would attend tonight's London Film Festival "Mayor of London" gala screening of Roger Michell's Venus, but word came down late yesterday that he'd be dropping by after all, although probably not for long.

It's not touch and go, however, about whether O'Toole will attend the AFI Film Festival's special screening on 11.7 or the 11.10 Los Angeles Venus junket -- he's flat-out not coming. These two no-shows on top of O'Toole being too...Read More

Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers will be the #1 film this weekend -- 83 general, 43 definite interest, 14 first choice. Look for a decent opening ($20 million or so) but not a spectacular one. Chris Nolan's The Prestige, a turn-of-the-century duelling magician flick that doesn't quite work all the way around the track, will be #2 with about $15 million, give or take. (Nolan-heads will be out in force, but regular-guy reactions will probably result in a sharp dropoff next weekend.)

20th Century Fox's Flicka -- 53, 23, 7 -- is looking like it'll do fair business with families. The...Read More

Director Bill Condon locked the final edit of Dreamgirls last week and is now working on the sound mixing. The final critic-ready print won't be ready until 11.10 at the earliest, so there won't be any earlybird screenings before then. The first showing will probably happen on or about 11.14 or 11.15...just a guess. The Dreamamount release opens in N.Y. and L.A. on 12.15, and goes wide on 12.25.

MSNBC's Dave White begins his monstrous-movie-moms piece, naturally, with Annette Bening's diseased hell-hag in Running With Scissors (Columbia, 10.20). Based, naturally, on someone real and still living -- book author Augusten Burroughs' mom -- Deirdre Burroughs' neuroses are so extreme and curdled she seems to be suffering from a kind of leprosy of the soul. She's too much by my standards, but excessiveness, clearly, seems to be the point. Gay guys will probably wet themselves over Bening's performance the way they went ga-ga over Faye Dunaway's in Mommie Dearest . They're both gargoyles for the ages.

(l....

And the Becket DVD delays continue, courtesy of MPI Home Video. The Illinois-based company had rights issues with the family of playwright Jean Anouilh to deal with, but these have been settled. Despite the current interest in Peter O'Toole, who nearly won a Best Actor Oscar for his performance in this 1964 film, and his Oscar-calibre performance in Roger Michell's Venus, MPI still has no plans to release the Becket DVD. A great film, remastered and ready to go, is being kept in the cupboard by a third-rate outfit; it seems like a kind of hostage situation. The MPI Home Video website...Read More

The Envelope's Tom O'Neil has this notion -- along with some reporting to back it up -- that Diana Ross could wind up dissing Dreamgirls, a show she allegedly "hates", which could result in adverse vibes of some kind.

"If Dreamgirls is truly the best-picture frontrunner, as many pundits claim, this year's biggest awards cliffhanger may be the answer to this question: Will Diana Ross, the original Dreamgirl, finally embrace the fictionalized story of her career 25 years after it debuted on Broadway or, now that it's immortalized on film, publicly disapprove and turn on...Read More

Ich bin ein frommer Bewunderer dieses neuen Anhangers fur Steven Soderbergh's den guten Deutschen (Warner Bros. 12.8). Eine vierziger Jahre Atmosphare, hartgekochtes noir, direkter Ton, schone Schwarzweiss-Fotographie. Reizvoller George, reizvolles Cate, creepy Tobey Maguire...ja!

HE is now aware of two excellent films about the '04 Presidential election in Ohio -- a feature documentary I've already written about and a short documentary I just saw today. And boy, do they wise you up and make it clear what an incomplete, fuzzy-minded job regular TV news reporters did in covering what was really going down.

No Umbrella director Laura Paglin at 2006 Sundance Film Festival

The feature is James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo's ...So Goes The Nation, which I've called "the smartest, the most perceptive and the most...Read More

Bert Fields was obviously entwined with accused wiretapper Anthony Pellicano over several years, but not in any indictable way. The feds couldn't build a solid case against him in the Pellicano wiretapping casestick and now, according to Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke, Fields is " virtually free and clear of almost every aspect of [prosecution], including the wiretapping and conspiracy accusations which prosecutors have been pursuing against Pellicano.

"This is done and over," sources told Finke earlier today. She adds that the news "comes despite prosecutors calling at least 10 members of [Fileds']...Read More

Another story confirming that Vaughniston is still happening ...bummer. On the other hand I rented The Breakup last night and discovered to my surprise that it plays just as spritzy the second time (since seeing it last May), and maybe even better than that.

In my initial review I said "there are no laughs after the first third of The Break-up, and there's no bouncy comic energy or pacing in any of it...but it's not intended to deliver this stuff. It's a decently made, reasonably mature, well-acted relation- ship drama with humorous punctuation...Read More

The general awareness and definite interest levels about the hottest, funniest, most out-there comedy of the year -- that would be Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (20th Century Fox, 11.3) -- are kind of "meh" so far. With Average Joes, I mean. The people who only focus on movies coming out this weekend (as opposed to two or three weekends from now), the ones who went to see Texas Chainsaw Massacare: The Beginning instead of The Departed two weekends ago...that crowd.

The current EW cover: an obvious boost

It...Read More

I meant to say this last week, but Martin Scorsese wanting to work in a lower-budget realm is good news because it means more freeedom and creativity and no more Aviators. But his wanting to direct a small-scale adaptation of the Shusaku Endo novel "Silence", about two 17th century Portugese missionaries, sounds like it may result in a somewhat lethargic viewing experience. Movies about missionaries are generally unwelcome, and the spiritual connotations of that title are very unsettling. Just when I thought the Marty problem was solved by his having rediscovered and accepted his knack with urban crime stories in The...Read More

I meant to run all the Bend Film Festival winners last Sunday but somehow it slipped my attention -- here's a festival page with the complete dope. And here's a sum-up piece from dvdtalk's Geoffrey Kleinman.

Brad Pitt gives his best performance ever in Babel, but it's nothing close to a lead -- Babel is an ensemble piece -- and so talk of a Best Actor nomination, no offense, is without foundation. (Tom O'Neil is saying Pitt has "declared himself in the supporting race" -- has he said this in so many words?) It's a Best Supporting Actor situation or nothing. The crying-on-the-phone- with-his-son sells the performance, but the one that seeps in even more is the peeing scene with Cate Blanchett, who plays Pitt's wife.

The Hollywood Reporter ran Nicole Sperling's nicely sculpted profile of Columbia TriStar marketing group president Valerie Van Galder yesterday...fine. I've always respected Van Galder's aesthetic sense. I really admired that flower-pot concept in the Adaptation one-sheet that she worked on. I remember wanting to do an article on the various Adaptation poster concepts that she'd considered -- she loved the film and was very enthused about getting the art just right -- but the piece gradually died for some reason. Half me, half her.

I also remember Van Galder wearing one of...Read More

In Marie-Antoinette, Sofia Coppola "sabotages her vision outright, resulting in the most conventional kind of boring period trash" -- "The Reeler's Stu Van Airsdale....pile on!

I was looking at this boring IMDB poll of popular '70s movies (you'll never guess which film came out on top), and out of my temporary non-interest in the same old pantheon of classic '70s films I was suddenly thinking again of John Flynn's The Outfit (1973), and wondering why it hasn't been issued on DVD.

The Outfit isn't one of those AFI best-of-the'70s movies by any means, but except for a flabby ending it's a crackling little genre film that's done almost perfectly. It stars Robert Duvall as an ex-con named...Read More

I was searching for an item about The Outfit that I wrote in September of '04, and I came upon my original Sideways review. And reading the following graph almost choked me up because of how infrequently this kind of specialness seems to manifest: "The worst thing a film can do (apart from being awful or boring you to tears) is to deliver this or that cheap high when you're watching it but then fall apart on the way home. Sideways does the precise opposite. It's okay at first, and then better, and then deeper and then really funny, and finally very...Read More

Poor Edward Bass, the Bobby producer who's sounds to me like he's just another obstinate and egoistic self-promoter and con artist, which puts him in the same general polluted tank that a lot of other producers in this town are swimming in. L.A. Times writer Robert Welkos has run a profile piece with a headline that describes Bass as an "ex-con," which he is...but if you read the article a second time, he only sounds moderately flawed. Not that much worse, I'm saying, than a lot of other smiling flim-flammers I've run into over the years.

I'm not saying...Read More

Tom Laughlin and Dolores Taylor's website contains a pitch for Billy Jack's Moral Revolution, a "new 2007 film" that's not a movie but a plan. The pitch is breathlessly over-written -- a super-loaded political-cultural mouthful about a film that would trigger an earthquake of change -- a political, sexual, spiritual and psychological revolution that includes ejecting the Bushies and turning away from the Bush Doctrine and managing an end to the Iraq War.

Tom Laughlin, Barack Obama, Clint Eastwood

The idea of Billy Jack's Moral Revolution doesn't seem...Read More

Screengrab's Bilge Ebiri has linked to a five-minute YouTube clip of a seemingly hand-animated, presumably Vatican-funded piece called John Paul II, Friend of Humanity. It's a little bit odd -- sweetly deranged, as religious propaganda tends to be -- but not enough to be bizarre-funny. It begins with the Pope's death on April 2, 2005, as noted by four close friends -- John Paul II's talking diary and talking ink pen (who both have sad emotive eyes) as well as Piccolo and Fiona, the Pope's "bosom pigeons." Then there's a Clutch Cargo-like image of John Paul II waving to his followers...Read More

I'm just an impartial observer here -- of course I'm not -- but New Yorker critic Anthony Lane sure knows how to kick the pretense out of Sofia Coppola. His Marie-Antoinette review is glorious. I haven't felt such an intravenous surging of pure pleasure in weeks...no, months.

"Is this film to be believed?," Lane asks at the one-third mark. "Coppola films Versailles with a flat acceptance, quickening at times into eager montage, and declares, in her notes on the film, that she sought to capture her heroine's 'inner experience.' Her what? This is like a manicurist claiming to capture the inner...Read More

I'm slow on the pickup again, but 36 hours ago the L.A. Times ran two Borat stories, and portions of each are worth quoting because they lay bare what Borat's star-cowriter-producer Sacha Baron Cohen is essentially up to, which is a cunning mockery of America's rural cluelessness.

The piece by Mark Olsen and John Horn quotes Talladega Nights director Adam McKay as follows: "I don't want to speak for my movies; you could say my movies are just completely silly and dumb, but in the case of Idiocracy and Borat, without a doubt there is a really subversive and sophisticated assault on...Read More

I never think about Vaugniston except when I'm at the check-out counter at Pavillions, but I'm wondering if anyone else is feeling vaguely let down to read that apparently they haven't broken up after all. I don't give a shit but I thought it was over. I think it would be fairly cool, frankly, if every celebrity couple except Brangelina were to all break up at the same time. (I have a soft spot for Pitt and Jolie; it has something to do with that tabloid story about Jolie making sounds "like an animal being killed" when she was apparently getting down with...Read More

Six days ago -- October 10 -- I didn't post anything about the Movies.com 1st Annual Readers Poll Awards, partly because the results seemed so obvious and insipid and indicative of a lazy, low-rent reader mentality. 30,000 fans participated in the poll, and...and...and I can't write about this. I just can't. The site itself is lively, punchy, well-designed. Let's just leave it that.

I ran across a sloppily-written item that briefly piqued my interest because it ties into Emilio Estevez's Bobby (Weinstein Co., 11.17). L.A.-based culture journalist Dianne Bates Kenney (of Bates Rates News) tells about having met a commercial photographer named Eric Saarinen several years ago and hearing a fascinating story about footage he captured of the shooting of Robert F. Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel on June 4,1968. At first the story gets you, then it drives you mad because of the details she ignores.

According to Saarinen, Kenney writes, he "and a friend were filming Kennedy and followed him after he...Read More

A Judd Apatow fanboy who was profoundly impressed by The 40 year-Old Virgin and actually believes this film plays on the same level as classic Woody Allen pics -- in short, a not-very-worldly GenX monkey who probably has a beefy physique and wears cutoffs and cross-trainer shoes with no socks and plays video games with his 33 year-old buddies -- is gushing about Apatow's new comedy, Knocked Up (Universal, 8.17).

Virgin convinced me that one cannot say "beware of Judd Apatow!" often enough. I listened to him earlier this year at a Santa Barbara Film Festival panel and I think I...Read More

The Dallas movie, praise the wisdom of the gods, is quite obviously cursed. The planned November shoot, which followed a previous start date, has been postponed and all the actors except John Travolta have been let go to save money. (Travolta, who is so not Chili-in-Get Shorty these days since he gained the weight back and started wearing that tennis-ball haircut, will play J.R. Ewing if and when this thing ever makes it to the screen.) The budget contraction happened because somebody at New Regency got worried about the commercial potential of an adaptation of an musty '80s TV series, although you'd...Read More

Two observations about Oliver Stone's Jawbreaker, his Paramount project about this country's response to the 9/11 attacks with the invasion of Afghanistan and hunt for 9/11 maestro Osama Bin Laden. One, the source material and choice of screenwriter indicates the film will be more critical of the Clinton team's anti-terrorist efforts than that of the post-9/11 Bushies, which is surprising given Stone's lefty leanings. And two, Jawbreaker sounds a lot like the "fascinating procedural" about a hunt for terrorists that Stone spoke of five years ago during a public discussion at Alice Tully Hall .

As Variety's Michael...Read More

"Warner Bros. had their chance the first time around, and they blew it. It's a factory job, that's what it is, and I know the way it's done. I've had too many friends work on those movies. I know the way it works, and that's not the way I work. Alfonso Cuaron's [The Prisoner of Azkaban] is really good, but the first two I thought were just shite. They missed the whole point of it; they missed the magic of it. Alfonso did something much closer to what I would've done." -- Tideland director Terry Gilliam, a guy everyone loves for what he...Read More

Jamie Stuart's fifth and final New York Film Festival video report delivers a slight diss to Pan's Labyrinth director-writer Guillermo del Toro by implying he's long-winded (and thus boring, which Guillermo never is), and gives a pass to Sofia Coppola and Marie-Antoinette by saying that the Austrian queen's idle distractions in Versailles serve as a metaphor for the human condition in general and denial in particular. Stuart is a talented filmmaker, but to end his NYFF with a Coppola-Kirsten Dunst bendover...shattering. Unless he meant it as a put-on.

Annette Bening, thrice nominated for acting Oscars, is "almost certain to get another shot at the gold for her performance as a narcissistic, mentally ill mother in Running with Scissors (Columbia, 10.27), according to Newsweek's Sean Smith. "Her character, Deirdre, gives up teenage Augusten (Joseph Cross) for adoption to her quack psychiatrist (Brian Cox), while she dreams of becoming the next Anne Sexton. At turns hilarious, vicious, gorgeous, hideous, imperious and pathetic -- often in a single scene -- Deirdre is the kind of flashy role that allows an actress to chew serious scenery, but Bening doesn't do it for a second."...

A bland recap by L.A. Times writer Michael Koehn about how Iris Yamashita landed the job of writing the screenplay for Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima (Warner Bros., 2.9) and how she researched it, refined it and whatnot. It reads like a thorough job of reporting, but the piece doesn't even acknowledge that Yamashita's script was originally called Red Sun, Black Sand.

"Sometimes [directors] don't change with the times,. They don't reach out to material that they can change or grow with. I think if I had come back from Italy in the '60s and [only] knocked off a few westerns, I would have been out of business long ago. I think pushing the envelope, constantly changing, constantly searching for new material and new things to overcome, both as an actor and as a director -- that's the secret. Not being limited. And so you could say, a man shouldn't know his limitations." -- Clint Eastwood talking to N.Y. Daily News profiler John Clark.

Whoops....Chris Nolan's The Prestige (Touchstone, 10.20) is a "smarter", more ambitiously constructed turn-of-the-century magician movie than Neil Burger's The Illusionist...but it's so complex and so into cinematic sleight-of-hand with too-obscure hints that it's something of a struggle to make heads or tails out of what you've just seen when it's all over. And that ain't good.

Groups of journos were standing around after the all-media screening at the Westwood Avco last Wednesday night trying to sort out what they understood vs. what they didn't get at all. When moderately with-it types are admitting confusion to each other...Read More

An okay-whatever N.Y. Times piece by Ginia Bellafante on Douglas McGrath's Infamous, which opened and closed this weekend. Warner Independent sealed the fate of Infamous last year when it made the decision not to open it last fall against Bennett Miller's Capote, which would have been a kind-of event -- no one would have been able to see just one. That would have been the only chance it had.

As it happened, people had no interest in seeing a second Truman Capote-writes-In Cold Blood film a year later, especially when the word began to get around...Read More

Holy shit, Variety's website has been re-designed. Airier, more white space, more widescreen-friendly...vaguely similar to the N.Y. Times redesign of a few months ago.

Sometime in '92, I wrote a piece for Empire magazine called "Reanimator," about how emerging digital technologies will one day be able to bring back actors from the grave and put them in new movies in a highly believable fashion. One computer graphics guy I spoke to for the piece said this could be a reality within 15 or 20 years. And I remember how Army Archerd wrote something in his Variety column not long after that seemed to comment on the piece, and how he faintly pooh-poohed the possibilities.

Well, here we are 14...Read More

"I've never set out to diminish the seriousness of what Roman Polanski did, but it comes down to crime and punishment. How much do you have to pay for the crime? What I've always set out to prove is, despite what Polanski did, which was awful, he was treated unfairly by the judge. That's the bottom line." -- Filmmaker Marina Zenovich to Charles Lyons in today's N.Y. Times about Polanski's unlawful-sex-with-a-minor case, which she's been making a documentary about for eons.

Polanski and attorneys leaving Santa Monica courthouse in '77

Zenovich's film, "untitled and unfinished"...Read More

The sum effect of coverage of Marie-Antoinette in Vanity Fair, Vogue and the New Yorker along with the Kitson Boutique window treatments, wild posting and pink Converse sneakers "is penetrating the culture," Columbia marketing president Valerie Van Galder has told Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson.

"In just the way that Sofia didn't treat [the story of Marie Antoinette] as a straight biopic, we're taking a unique approach," Van Galder explains. "We're having fun with the marketing. The movie has captured people's imagination."

Surely Van Galder doesn't mean the movie itself -- which I've...Read More

All Squonked Out

Life is hard all over, day after day, but every time I visit a film festival I'm reminded how especially hard it seems for documentary filmmakers. How so many of them go into deep debt to get their films made, and how most find that it takes three or four or five years to finish. And if they don't manage to win awards at film festivals it's that much harder to land a DVD distribution deal because awards are regarded as selling points.

Filmmaker and script supervisor Peggy Sutton

There's the personal...Read More

Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif costarring again, for the third time! For eight or nine seconds I was entertaining the idea of actually paying to see One Night with the King, the Christian conservative right-wing Biblical costume movie, until....

"At the very beginning, Peter O'Toole shows up for a day's work as the prophet Samuel, looking as if he wandered in from the set of Troy; later, his old friend from Lawrence of Arabia, Omar Sharif, ambles on as well as Memucan, whispering sage advice to the king. Unfortunately they're separated by five centuries, and never share a scene....Read More

Philip Noyce's Catch a Fire (Focus Features, 10.27) is a smart, urgent political drama about how an uneducated average-Joe black guy, Patrick Chamusso (Derek Luke), was goaded -- brutalized -- into becoming an anti-apartheid terrorist in the early '80s. But the idea the film came from a white guy, albeit an atypical one -- Joe Slovo , the white chief of staff of the African National Congress’s military wing and later Nelson Mandela's housing minister.

It all started when Slovo, according to this 10.15 New York Times story by Kristin Hohenadel, told his daughter Shawn Slovo, a screenwriter,...Read More

Bad news, encouraging news: Doug McGrath's Infamous (Warner Independent), the second Truman Capote-writes-In Cold Blood movie, opened weakly yesterday in a limited 179-theatre break. $120,000 cume and $600 per print average yesterday -- an expected $411,000 and a $2295 per-screen average by Sunday night. These numbers may not sound tragic, but in industry eyes this means it pretty much opened and closed. Stephen Frears' The Queen (Miramax), on the other hand, expanded from 11 to 46 screens and will have about $937,000 by Sunday night, not counting last week's take. It's doing very well, and will probably continue to do so for a...Read More

Takashi Shimizu's The Grudge 2 (Columbia), showing in 3211 situations, will end up in first place Sunday night with roughly $27,261,000. But the big story is Martin Scorsese's The Departed (Warner Bros.), which will come in second roughly $19,369,000, dropping only 26%. That's a very strong hold from last weekend, especially considering that last Sunday's business was stronger than usual due to the Columbus Day holiday that came the next day (i.e., Monday, 10.9).

Man of the Year will be third with an expected Sunday-night cume of $12,399,000, Open Season will end up with $11,105 (decent hold). Texas Chainsaw Masscare: The...Read More

"It may be tempting to greet Marie Antoinette with a Jacobin snarl or a self- righteous sneer, since it is after all the story of the silly teenager who embodied a corrupt, absolutist state in its terminal decadence," A.O. Scott wrote yesterday. on the occasion of Sofia Coppola's film being shown at the N.Y. Film Festival. "But where's the fun in such indignation? And, more seriously, where is the justice? To say that this movie is historically irresponsible or politically suspect is both to state the obvious and to miss the point."

But it's not that Coppola's...Read More

Had I not been all Bend-ed and distracted yesterday, I would have posted a sampling of reviews of Nicolas Hytner's The History Boys (Fox Searchlight,11.21) which opened yesterday in England. The consensus is not one of immense enthusiasm for the film, but derby-wise Richard Griffiths' performance as a rotund, intellectually spirited grammar school prof named Hector may -- favoring winds allowing -- have a shot at a Best Actor nomination.

The Envelope's Tom O'Neil yesterday reported that Fox Searchlight, encouraged by the rave reviews Griffiths has gotten from London film critics, has decided to push him in the Best Actor category...Read More

It's been a strong year for British films and British performers. The proof, says Daily Mail columnist Baz Bamigboye, is that the 2007 BAFTA Awards, set for Sunday, 2.11, will have a larger-than-usual amount of actual competing Brits. To make his point he starts by safely predicting "the Battle of the Dames" -- Notes on a Scandal's Judi Dench vs. The Queen's Helen Mirren going head-to-head for the best actress crown. (Baz has seen Notes and says Dench "nails it.") Dench's costars in this film, Cate Blanchett and Bill Nighy (as Blanchett's husband) will also be up for best supporting BAFTAs, he...Read More

The column wasn't very active today either, largely because the Bend Film Festival jury -- myself and five other guys -- sat down and mulled over which films will win the cash (including a $10,000 Best of Show" award) and non-cash prizes for a little more than four hours. We started around 11:15 this morning and finished at 3:20 pm. There were some differences of opinion but very little debating; everyone was more or less on the same page. The winners will be announced on Saturday night.

Bend Film Festival jurors during deliberative recess -- (l. to...

Three strongly worded reactions -- an ecstatic rave, a thumbs-up and a pan -- to David Fincher's Zodiac (Paramount, 1.17) went up on AICN today following Thursday night's screening of a nearly-finished cut at Hollywood's Arclight.

San Francisco's Transamerica tower was built between '69 and '72; the Zodiac action mainly happens between '69 and '71.

You can discount the wows or choose to regard them as plants, but it sounds at the very least like an impressively detailed and workmanlike policier coming from an early '70s Pakula-type place. Given the building consensus that...Read More

The shadows are getting longer and I have to make the rounds around Bend (at festival headquarters and at various opening night soirees), so I guess this is one of those days in which five items will have to do. Unless I get industrious later this evening.

Rapidly speaking: (a) Dreamgirls won't be seen in its entirety until later this month, but it's feeling more and more like a locomotive; (b) The Departed is Marty's Rousing Return and a bit of a torch-bearer for the tradition of The French Connection; (c) Based on almost nothing (or virtually nothing), The Good German feels a bit pallid; (d) Little Children is all about Kate Winslet right now...if that; (e) Little Miss Sunshine is on the move again...yes!; (f) We all know about Helen Mirren's inevitability, but now The Queen, which seemed good but overly tidy at first, is starting to...Read More

I'm just adding my voice to those who've already cheered Roger Ebert's re-appearance from his sick bed yesterday. "I won't be back to full production until sometime early next year," he said. "The good news is that my rehabilitation is a profound education in the realities of the daily lives we lead, and my mind is still capable of being delighted by cinematic greatness."

The recovering critic assures us he "will eventually walk, talk, taste, eat, drink and live, more or less, normally. But it will be a struggle, involving another surgery to complete what began in June.

My favorite passage:...Read More

I landed in dry and sunny Bend, Oregon, a couple of hours ago -- blue skies, clean air, juniper trees. About an hour later I checked into the Marriott Fairfield -- bland, sterile, colorless, corporate...and located right next to a freeway. I'm a juror at the Bend Film Festival, which kicks off at 5:30 pm today and winds up on Saturday night. All the corporate brand stores are here in force, naturally. Remember when rural smallish towns had their own particularity, a hamlet-y feeling... far from the madding crowd?

Suddenly there's a consensus that year-end contenders are weak, weak, weak all over. It does kinda seem that way. I'm not just saying that because the more I hear about the supposed heavyweights coming out in December, the less current they seem to have. Warner Bros. managed to keep people from seeing The Departed so there was no advance word, but when a film is really exceptional and a couple of months away the word will usually seep out. A hint or two, minor leakage...something.

I realize studio p.r. people don't want anyone saying anything about their Decem- ber films -- too...Read More

Who and what the hell is Ezekiel 22, and why are the principals of this Atlanta-based company allegedly paying $3.8 million for rights in all media to the story of three not-terribly-brilliant Mexican guys who drifted 5,000 miles across the Pacific, from San Blas to the Marshall Islands, and had to resort to "occasionally" drinking their own urine to stay alive?

Is this some kind of put-on? Has Yahoo Entertainment News been taken over by a team of Onion-styled satirists?

Late this afternoon a story was posted on Yahoo Entertainment News with a headline that read "Movie to make millionaires...Read More

A byline-free Yahoo Movies article about likely Oscar nomines was posted late this afternoon, and the basic claims are that Helen Mirren may win the Best Actress Oscar for The Queen (duhhh), and Peter O'Toole may finally win for Venus (things have been strangely silent from the O'Toole corner since he bailed on Toronto Film Festival due to ill health).

And also that Jack Nicholson's mobster performance in The Departed could result in his tying Katharine Hepburn for a record fourth Oscar (no way...too many people are saying his Costello character is way too over-the...Read More

Just goes to show that whatever the rumble on Running with Scissors, it sure as shit hasn't stopped director-writer Ryan Murphy from landing all kinds of movie and TV directing gigs. He's going to adapt and direct a Julia Roberts feature based on Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love," but before that he'll direct another Paramounter called Dirty Tricks, a drama about Martha Mitchell, the loud-mouth Southern-belle wife of Nixon's Attorney General John Mitchell, with Meryl Streep attached to star. And there's still that 4 Oz. series for FX, about a guy who has a sex-change operation. The Roberts vehicle and the guy-getting-his-dick-cut-off...Read More

New York Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle was apparently either the pilot or a passenger on that small plane that crashed into a Upper East Side high-rise in Manhattan this morning, which had to take some doing. Does it strike anyone else as as curious that another Bronx bomber -- Thurman Munson -- killed himself after screwing up behind the controls of a twin engine Cessna Citation jet at Akron-Canton airport on 8.2.79? Munson was practicing takeoffs and landings, and I remember reports saying there was no question his crash was due to poor handling and ignoring the basics. But at...Read More

The Hollywood Reporter has another publisher -- the third in a year's time. The new guy is Billboard publisher John Kilcullen (Scottish or Irish?), taking the place of Tony Uphoff, who said he'd rather take an Irvine-based job as president of CMP Technology, which he called "a significantly larger opportunity." That means Uphoff didn't work out on some level. Nobody vacates a top-of-the mountain position like THR publisher after less than a year on the job without something askew somewhere. Billboard and the Reporter are sister publications under the Dutch media conglomerate VNU.

Without running a photo or naming the guy in this space, it's just amazing -- staggering -- how unstoppable self-destructive urges seem to be in some people, despite the certainty of exposure and brutal consequences.

A Book of Mann

Just a couple of guys sitting in a restaurant, talking it out. It's not just the acting in this scene (and the fact that the actors are so legendary-iconic), but the writing. The dialogue is straight, clean...entirely about fundamentals.

It wasn't quite the same during a sit-down with the creator of this scene, Michael Mann, a couple of weeks ago at his office in West Los Angeles. The idea was to talk about the new Taschen book about Mann and his career -- a luscious visual smorgasbord (the photos are...Read More

"Like any good celebrity today, Diana perfected the illusion of accessibility, exuding the common touch although she was anything but. The tension between her new, and Queen Elizabeth II's old, brand of royal image-making is at the heart of Stephen Frears' The Queen, as the out-of-touch queen (Helen Mirren) grapples with the public and media clamor for some hint of feeling from the palace in response to the princess's death.

"Afterward, Elizabeth bitterly realizes: 'I've never been hated like that before. Nowadays people want glamour and tears, the grand performance.'

"What Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) tries to persuade her to embrace,...Read More

"I've always been interested in films that address the contemporary situation. Historical films interest me more as history than art. I have, perhaps, 10 years of films left in me, and I'm perfectly content to ride the broken-down horse called movies into the cinematic sunset. But if I were starting out (at the beginning of my narrative, so to speak), I doubt I'd turn to films as defined by the 20th century for personal expression."

So says Paul Schrader, in a preface to a very long article now available in the September-October issue of Film Comment. It's called "Canon Fodder", with...Read More

The obviously cool thing about this trailer for Grind House (Weinstein Co./Dimension, 4.6.07) is that it's been processed to look like a banged-up American International trailer left over from 1973. As I wrote on 10.2, the pic is composed of two high-style wank-off movies in one -- Robert Rodriguez's Planet Proof and Quentin Tarantino's Death Terror. That's a reference to my getting the titles wrong before, of course. They're actually called Planet Terror and Death Proof.

Still from Grindhouse trailer; Rose McGowan

The other thing that pops through is how pistol-hot Rose McGowan...Read More

"Rarely do words as stark as 'heroism' get parsed in filmmaking, but that's just what Clint Eastwood's World War II feature Flags Of Our Fathers does. A diffuse and demanding picture that, as with most Eastwood films, takes a while to find its stride, it should nevertheless see good upscale market business, as well as make a deep critical footprint that will ensure awards consideration." -- from Brent Simon's review in the 10.11 Screen Daily.

The latest Jamie Stuart New York Film Festival video is mainly about hair -- i.e., Stuart's sparse Soderberghian thatch vs. the angular, abundant topside forest that has always been a component with David Lynch, director of the NYFF-screened Inland Empire . Stuart doesn't get into how the the film plays, what others seemed to think of it, or the whys and wherefores of Lynch's decision to self-distribute it.

Another would-be Oscar contender has been dinged just as it rushes out of the starting gate. Nicholas Hytner's film version of Alan Bennett 's Tony-award-winning play The History Boys has finally been reviewed out of London (two days before its commercial opening over there), and if the word of Variety's Leslie Felperin is to be given any weight, there appears to be trouble in River City.

"The History Boys may please fans of the original legit production and the stragglers who didn't catch it in Gotham or London's West End," Helperin begins....Read More

Hollywood Bytes columnist Elizabeth Snead dropped by last night's Flags of Our Fathers premiere after-party, which I would have liked to attend. And not just for the free food, which was probably of a higher quality than the offerings at Oki-Dog.

This is hilarious -- Terry Gilliam on the streets plugging the Manhattan opening of Tideland (IFC, 10.13) and looking for loose change in the bargain. I've seen most of Tideland (I walked out after an hour) and this clip is fifteen times more entertaining. Gilliam's spirit is infectious.

But why has David Lynch arranged to self-distribute Inland Empire, his 172 minute, digitally-shot "fever dream" flick, before the end of the year? What were Lynch's concrete options before he decided to go this way? Manohla Dargis wrote some respectful things about Empire, but what are the buyers really saying about it behind closed doors? Was nobody was making a serious offer? Gregg Goldstein's Hollywood Reporter story is vague about this stuff.

Diane Sawyer: "How much did you read of people who came out and said, Do not work with him again? What do you feel about them?"

Mel Gibson: "I feel sad because they've obviously been hurt and frightened and offended enough to feel that they have to do that. Um, and it's their choice. There's nothing I can do about that."

-- excerpted from two-part interview Sawyer has taped with Gibson, set to air on Thursday and Friday morning on "Good Morning, America"

Columnist Ray Richmond has mentioned a half-assed site called Celebrity Ranker that claims to calculate how popular and sexy someone with a lot of internet exposure may be. It ranks people by sifting through Google and tabulating the pages focusing on this or that celebrity, which Ranker says number 23,706. (That's appalling in itself -- 23,706 celebrities pressuring maitre d's to seat them in restaurants before others.)

But the rankings sound like total bullshit. As Richmond points out, George Clooney is only the 3,486th most popular celeb and the 4,618th sexiest. Really? I put in the names of the three Departed...Read More

"Life's hard...but it's a lot harder when you're stupid." -- a line presumably written by novelist George V. Higgins, but definitely spoken by a young illegal-sun salesman (Steven Keats) in The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

"Given the times we live in, Sofia Coppola's Marie-Antoinette (Columbia, 10.20) could well become a box-office hit," wrote Sean O'Hagan in last Sunday's Guardian. "While not quite as shallow as Liberation critic Agnes Poirier paints it ('history is merely decor and Versailles a boutique hotel for the jet set, past and present') nor as visionary as Lady Antonia Fraser insists, it is an oddly empty film.

"Having moved away from the cool contemporaneity of her previous mood piece, the lauded Lost in Translation , Coppola seems adrift in the ancien regime. The result is a historical drama for the Wallpaper generation,...Read More

I have a military underwear problem with Flags of Our Fathers (Dreamamount, 10.20). Nobody will see what I'm talking about for another ten days and it may seem like a chickenshit thing to bring up, but the final scene of Clint Eastwood's Iwo Jima film shows the small group of Marines who raised the U.S. flag atop Mt. Surabachi taking a swim in the Pacific Ocean, and they're all wearing white underwear.

The problem is this: no G.I.'s wore white underwear during World War II -- they were all issued olive drab briefs for camouflage purposes....Read More

IndieWIRE's Anthony Kaufman is spotlighting the big contenders in the Best Foreign Language Oscar category: Pedro Almodovar's Volver (from Spain), Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (Mexico), Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others (Germany), Deepa Mehta's Water (Canada) and Daniele Thompson's Avenue Montaigne (France).

HE can't decide which of the three biggies -- Volver, Pan's Labyrinth, The LIves of Others -- to stand up for. I love all three equally, but in different ways. The Pedro is one of the finest films ever made about what it takes to keep a family together...a film...Read More

The Queen costar Michael Sheen arrived in Los Angeles a couple of days ago, and one of the first things he attended to after touching down at LAX was join Pete Hammond and Helen Mirren in last night's discussion about the Stephen Frears- directed drama following a Variety screening at the Cinerama Dome. I've seen The Queen three times now, and Sheen's performance seems to become richer and more spot-on with each viewing.

(l.) Michael Sheen as David Frost in Nixon/Frost; (r.) Frank Langella, Sheen

Sheen is on hiatus from his on-stage...Read More

I was in some kind of diminished state when I first read this 10.1 piece on the best Boston movies by Newsweek's bureau chief Mark Starr. Inspired by the Boston-y locales, accents and Irish machismo in Martin Scorsese's The Departed, Starr tapped out a laundry list of films shot in Boston, some of which (Between The Lines, The Boston Strangler, The Verdict) exude some of the cultural atmosphere of that town, and some of which (the Steve McQueen-Faye Dunaway Thomas Crown Affair) are mere Hollywood visitations.

Of course, there is only one real Boston...Read More

Former HE columnist and hot-shot Brazilian critic Pablo Villaca is asking if I think there's "any chance the next Academy Awards could honor Michael J. Fox's fight for stem-cell research and a cure for Parkinson's? The guy clearly deserves it, despite the recent Bush veto that put a crimp on research funding. I was deeply touched by watching Fox in this YouTube video. The poor guy is in an obviously advanced stage of Parkinson's, and he's talking about the subject so passionately. It seems clear that the attention the Oscars could give to his cause would be extremely important."

Following the Ebert & Roeper and MCN early breaks, Variety 's Todd McCarthy and Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt have posted thumbs-up reviews of Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers. McCarthy calls it sad, ambitious, powerful and exemplary in its physical aspects, and Honeycutt writes that the film "does a most difficult and brave thing and does it brilliantly...it is a movie about a concept...not just any concept but the shop-worn and often wrong-headed idea of 'heroism.'"

"Tackling his biggest canvas to date with a pointed exploration of heroism -- in its actual and in its trumped-up, officially useful forms --...Read More

Lloyd Grove's "Lowdown" column has has left the room. Grove told N.Y. Times media columnist David Carr that his next gig will be I will be "something that is multimedia, with components of internet and television and print media." I called him just now to ask when that might happen, but apparently he's already packed and out of the building.

Which reminds me: is Carr coming back to the Oscar beat as "the Bagger" again? If so, he should get back into it no later than November 1st.

"At the Los Angeles premiere of director Stephen Frears' The Queen Tuesday night, partygoers anointed Helen Mirren as the inevitable best actress Oscar winner for her bravura turn as the dowdily out-of-touch Queen Elizabeth II, but several Miramax Films marketing staffers were looking like deer frozen in headlights. That's because the last thing anyone wants to have happen this early in the developing awards season is to be named the Oscar frontrunner." -- from Anne Thompson's latest Hollywood Reporter/Risky Business column.

Bring On Letters!

A couple of hours after Clint Eastwood's press conference last Saturday, I wrote that his latest film, Flags of Our Fathers (Dreamamount, 10.20), is a mature and very soulful meditation piece with its head and heart in the right humanistic place. It definitely is that...but I'm afraid this isn't enough.

It's not what it's saying but how it says it that creates the problem for Flags of Our Fathers. It's a fairly decent film and not a tank, but it's not that satisfying because of a lack of strong story and strong...Read More

Daily Show host Jon Stewart yesterday told his would-be political base -- i..e, the people wearing "Stewart/Colbert '08" T-shirts -- to forget about himself and Colbert Report host Stephen Colbert making a run for the White House, a la Robin Williams in Barry Levinson's Man of the Year (Universal, 10.13).

Stewart told New Yorker editor David Remnick on Sunday (10.8) that the T-shirts "are a real sign of how sad people are" with the Bush administration and the general drift of things. "Nothing says 'I am ashamed of...my government' more than 'Stewart/Colbert '08.'"

Just for...Read More

Impact grenade, hot shrapnel, exploding black sand: MCN's David Poland has just posted not one but two pans of Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers and it's fairly rough stuff. Not a disappointing film but a bad one, he says.

I was told after seeing Flags of Our Fathers last week that reviews most likely wouldn't be "hitting the street" so to speak until next Monday, 10.16, so this took me aback. But the TV review that ran yesterday on Ebert and Roeper (Roeper gave it a thumbs-up, guest critic Zorianna Kitt was more mezzo-mezzo-neghead) blew that apart and suddenly the...Read More

Man, is there a here-we-go-again feeling conveyed by Lorenza Munoz's prosecutorial L.A. Times article about monster cost overruns on Universal's Evan Almighty or what?

This Steve Carell-Morgan Freeman mega-laugher about "a Noah-like congressman commanded by God to hoard hundreds of animals into an ark the size of a cruise ship", Munoz says, will "probably become the most expensive comedy ever" because of a total tab (including marketing) of $250 million . The title of the article sounds rote: "Budget Overruns of Biblical Proportions." If you ask me, the title in people's minds reading this...Read More

My Sunday morning estimate was $25.8 million, but WB is saying Martin Scorsese's The Departed, showing on 3017 screens, finally ended up with just over $27 million...whatever. The reallly encouraging news is WB distrib chief Dan Fellman's claim that while Departed tracking had indicated its popularity would mainly be among older males, "we hit almost 25% in every quadrant." My eyebrows went up slightly when I read that but fine, terrific...bodes well for the next three or four weekends.

16 year-old Keisha Castle-Hughes' announcement that she's pregnant by her 19 year-old boyfriend and intends to give birth next year sounds vaguely creepy, yes. I don't want to speculate how this may affect the reception to New Line's The Nativity Story (opening 12.1), or if anyone will give a shit one way or the other.

But when you think about it and get beyond the young-girl-having-sex-in-her- early-teens angle, which is common behavior the world over, it's not that strange.

Most younger people put off coming to grips with the heavy stuff until they're...Read More

Some of the items on Pug Bus are mildly funny. As good as some of the stuff of The Onion, only punchier. This Tom Cruise one isn't bad; neither is this one on Courtney Love.

According to Variety reviewer John Anderson, "Robin Williams is not particularly funny" in Barry Levinson's Man of the Year (Universal, 10.13). "And, as if to compensate, Levinson and editors Steven Weisberg and Blair Daily cut to reaction shots each time [his character]cracks a joke.

"Williams comes off too stiff for a performer who has achieved such widespread popularity. His lines aren't particularly fresh or crisply delivered, and his manner is, well, mannered. Although much is made of his bachelorhood during the early campaign part of the pic so that one assumes he must be...Read More

"When the romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally was released in July 1989, it made just $1.1 million during its opening weekend," writes N.Y. Times staffer Laura Holson. "But Alan F. Horn, whose film company produced the movie, was confident that, given time, it could be a hit. He was right. The movie earned $93 million at the domestic box office that summer. 'If it was today, the headline in Variety would have been When Harry Met Disaster,' Mr. Horn said in an interview. 'They would have killed us after that first weekend and I don’t think we would have had a...Read More

Neil Armfield's Candy (ThinkFilm, 11.27), which I saw last month in Toronto, is an Australian-made drama about a young couple (Heath Ledger, Abbie Cornish) hooked on heroin and, to a lesser extent, each other. The fact that it's mostly plays like a cautionary tale about drug addiction begs a question. Has there ever been a movie about drug users enjoying satisfaction and serenity?

In the best-respected movies about drugs and druggies (Last Days, Requiem for a Dream, Panic in Needle Park, Drugstore Cowboy, Last Train to Brooklyn, The Basketball Diaries), controlled substances always enslave. They...Read More

Oregonian critic Shawn Levy delivers on that stand-alone piece about the Bend Film Festival, which kicks off four days from now. As a juror I've watched about 20 features and docs plus eight or nine shorts on DVD so far, and I'm still not entirely done. The experience has only reenforced my belief that 90% of everything is crap. Which isn't "my "belief at all -- it's a famous quote from science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon. Okay, let's re-phrase for sensitivity's sake: 90% of everything isn't quite good enough.

That "Sexist Woman Alive" tease over the last five issues of Esquire, consisting of staffer A.J. Jacobs interviewing "an enigmatic trailer-park temptress" who turned out to be Scarlett Johansson, was one of the boring and infuriating wank-offs in monthly magazine history. I got more and more angry with each new installment, and now that it's over I feel like throwing the latest issue across the room.

Esquire spread, page 136

Esquire did the same thing last year with Jessica Biel, fine. Jacobs gives credit to Johansson for coming up with the idea of her portraying a...Read More

"I'm not saying John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus is up there with Citizen Kane or Drunken Master II," says Richard Corliss in a Time essay called "Meet the F--kers." "It's mostly clever, sometimes meandering. And I have to say I didn't get all that jazzed by the many gay exertions (or the straight ones)."

Really? I thought the sequence with Paul Dawson leaning upside down against a wall and blowing himself was right up there with the Odessa Steps sequence in Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin.

"But I was, critically speaking, excited to see the coherent integration...Read More

"I saw The Departed last night," an industry friend wrote this morning. "I recognize the awesomeness of the filmmaking, of course. But I agree with you that it really is about nothing at all. It's a film without a soul. And the praise it's gotten makes me wonder how much the aura of a director influences critics. Sometimes it helps and sometimes it hurts.

"Allegiance factors are a big factor with Clint Eastwood these days also. Million Dollar Baby was a lazily directed film. It was all in the screenplay. Casino was not well reviewed, but had it been directed by...Read More

Next Thursday and Friday morning (10.12 and 10.13) Mel Gibson will grovel before Diane Sawyer on ABC's Good Morning, America about his anti-Semitic blurtings when he was arrested for that DUI last summer. The idea, of course, is to pave the way for Apocalypto (Touchstone, 12.8) by at least starting to try and mitigate some of the disdain that the Hollywood community feels for him.

"In Running With Scissors, which is based on Augusten Burroughs's best-selling memoir about his crazy, destructive upbringing, Annette Bening portrays Burroughs's mother, a would-be poet who is addicted to pills that have been prescribed by her psychiatrist. Under the sway of narcotics and convinced that her greatness will be realized only if she is on her own, Deirdre allows the psychiatrist to legally adopt her only child, young Augusten.

Annette Bening

"Despite the extreme loopiness of this woman, Bening manages to make her understandable and sympathetic -- she is a fascinating mess, a strangely driven...Read More

It's nearly time to start getting into Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers, but before it all starts here's a musical hint about a thematic predecessor. No need to make a big deal out of it. Just something to consider and maybe chew on.

Farrah Fawcett's been dealt some bad cards. I'd say something comforting, but that's not the spirit. Grim up, fight it out, kick it down.

My theory-of-the-moment is that a good portion of the Departed dissers who've written in over the last 28 hours or so are basically responding to all the praise from professional critics. They're posting, in other words, out of a longing to slap down the know-it-alls and set them straight. I believe that the actual hoi polloi verdict -- i.e., one more fully reflective of how most ticket buyers are responding -- is more enthused than what's been coming in so far. Or am I...you know, wrong again?

Ridley Scott has told Comingsoon's Edward Douglas that his next project will be a Middle Eastern drama based on a forthcoming book (due in March '07) by journalist David Ignatius called "Penetration", and that the script will be written by Departed scribe William Monahan. "It's really about what's happening now in the Middle East, our complete misunderstanding of what's going on and how we're not dealing with it," Scott tells Douglas. "Inevitably, [it gets] into the heat in terms of a man who is actually a par journalist that gets sucked into working on a peripheral level in a special department where...Read More

"I want to be respectful," Ellen DeGeneres recent told N.Y. Times writer Jacques Steinberg about her upcoming Oscar Awards hosting gig. "I know what the job is. It's to honor movies and to honor people who worked hard. Those people take it seriously. I'm there to make them feel good and take their minds off it a little bit and make it a fun night." I honestly don't think anyone needs respectful or disrespectful -- everyone just wants the Oscar show host to be really sharp and funny, like Billy Crystal was during his mid to late '90s hosting heyday.

I forgot to post the latest Jamie Stuart NY Film Festival video thing a couple of days ago. Pedro Almodovar, Penelope Cruz, Warren Beatty, Michael Apted, et. al. Does Suart wear those sneakers and that knit beanie everywhere he goes? Is that like a signature thing, the way Stanley Kubrick of the '60s and '70s would always wear a dark suit and a white shirt?

The legendary Clint Eastwood answered questions this morning about Flags of Our Fathers (Dreamamount, 10.20). Tall and trim, a model of silver-fox urbanity, he strode in and sat at a table in front of 60 or 70 seated entertainment journalists inside a small "ballroom" inside the Four Seasons hotel, and talked straight and plain about his World War II drama for just over 47 minutes.

Saturday, 10.7.07, 11:05 am

The guy looked only slightly (or do I mean vaguely?) bowed by his 76 years. Tanned face, tight features, perfectly cut grayish-white hair, and wearing a...Read More

I have to get myself down to a Flags of Our Fathers press conference. I'm told that the coordinated review date will be on Monday, October 16th. More later today...probably.

I''ve heard it before, of course, but I was moved again this morning after listening to this brief but very eloquent Robert F. Kennedy speech in which he announced the death of Martin Luther King, invoked the words of Aeschylus, and reminded his listeners how we all need to seek wisdom and restraint. Just as I was moved during the final minutes of Emilio Estevez's Bobby when Kennedy's speech about the lamentable violent traditions of this country is heard on the soundtrack.

I feel more or less the same things that Estevez has expressed in recent interviews about RFK, about what a...Read More

With about $8,400,000 earned yesterday (3017 theatres, $2785 per print), it's been estimated that The Departed will have about $25,207,000 by Sunday night. The demographic is primarily older males. It's not performing all that well with teenaged boys (yet) and is undoubtedly doing poorly with women of all ages, and is almost certainly playing stronger in urban blue state areas than in middle-red America.

Miramax has its first real hit with The Queen. Playing in only 11 situations, it did almost 10,000 a print for a total of about $105,000. I was at the Arclight last night (i.e., my second look at Flags...Read More

"The Departed is Scorsese doing Tarantino doing Scorcese, right down to the Asian remake influence." -- reader/artist Jerry Lee Kirk, a.k.a. "jackkerouac".

Okay, we finally have a roster of serious Departed dissers -- the Toronto Globe & Mail's Rick Groen and the Charlotte Observer's Laurence Toppman. Because of these two trashings plus a Jim Hoberman half-pan, the Metacritic rating for Martin Scorsese's crime film has dropped to 88%. Rotten Tomatoes is still above 90 -- 92%, to be exact,

Hollywood Wiretap's Nancy Vialatte has a story up about Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes signing with Rogue, the Focus equivalent of Dimension, to provide relatively inexpensive horror flicks (under $25 million) on a three-year, first-look basis. Her piece isn't exactly a grabber, but it reminded me that Platinum is also at work on a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds for Universal.

I gather that Bay (still at work on Transformers) won't be directing The Birds, but he should. Because if he does it right -- and I believe Bay has it in him...Read More

Okay, now it's official: Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima will open on February 9, 2007 in limited release.

Factory Girl star Sienna Miller has had to backpedal after calling the city of Pittsburgh "shitsburg" after her comment appeared in a just-published interview in Rolling Stone...but we know how this went down. She said what she really meant to Rolling Stone interviewer Jenny Eliscu, and then she was pressured to apologize by her manager or her agent (or both) so she did.

A story in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette got some payback by referring to Miller as a "semi-famous actress" in a headline.

"Can you believe this is my life?" Miller said to Eliscu. "Will you pity...Read More

YouTube is very cool, but is it worth $1.6 billion? To Google it is, apparently. The N.Y. Times is reporting that the Google guys are in "serious talks" to acquire YouTube, which "is not yet profitable [although] it has exploded into a cultural phenomenon less than a year after its debut, broadcasting more than 100 million video clips a day."

Variety's John Hopewell and Emilio Mayorga persuaded Sitges Film Festival co-director Angel Sala to offer an explanation why StudioCanal has decided not to show David Lynch's Inland Empire there as part of a proposed Blue Velvet 20th anniversary tribute.

StudioCanal was concerned, Sala said, that "the three-hour cut of Empire, which unspooled to so-so reactions in Venice, would play so well among Lynch die-hards at Sitges that the helmer would never be persuaded to slim it down for commercial release."

Inland Empire runs three friggin' hours? How come Manohla Dargis didn't mention this in her NYFF review? That's a very...

Okay, all right...I was low on my Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning prediction. It's looking like it'll earn closer to the high teens this weekend than "between $10 and $12 million." Fine. Hooray for R. Lee Ermey and all the sophisticated simians who plan on seeing this instead of The Departed.

Helen Mirren's performance as Queen Elizabeth II "has turned The Queen into something you never imagined it could be: a crackling dramatic story that's intelligent, thoughtful and moving." -- from Kenneth Turan's review in the L.A. Times. Stephen Frears' just-opened film is intelligent, thoughtful and...well, somewhat moving. But "crackling" it absolutely is not. We all know what crackling is -- something like fire, a plot with close-to-breathtaking dips and turns, next door to crackerjack. Due respect to Turan --he's a gifted and careful writer -- but he should have chosen more carefully.

David Lynch's Inland Empire, which has been shown at the New York Film Festival, is the filmmaker's "most experimental feature since Eraserhead, according to N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis. The story spins a familiar Lynchian fairy tale: a blond actress (Laura Dern, in a career-defining performance) lands a coveted film role and spirals down into a hallucination in which dreams become nightmares. There are whores, of course, with laughing and lurid mouths, and shadowy corridors that, in suggestively female anatomical fashion, lead to dark rooms. Mostly, though, there is Mr. Lynch, whose shards of dream logic sometimes achieve the convulsive beauty...Read More

"This is either great acting, or atrocious scene-chewing. Maybe it's both. But it's sure entertaining to watch." - - CNN's Tom Charity in his review of The Departed, and particularly of Jack Nicholson 's peformance.

The two biggest exhibition chains who are saying they won't play Gabriel Range's controversial Death of a President -- Phillip Anschutz's Regal Entertainment Group and the Texas-based Cinemark USA -- are run by people who've expressed support for Republican causes and/or the Bush administration. For whatever reason, Nicole Sperling and Anne Thompson's story about Newmarket's difficulties in booking the film fails to mention this.

Death of a President; Regal Entertainment chief Phillip Anschutz

Death of a President, which I saw in Toronto, begins with an imagined, recreated asassination of President Bush in...Read More

On page 244 of the latest issue of Vanity Fair, Marie Antoinette director Sofia Coppola is quoted by Lady Antonia Fraser, author of Marie-Antoinette: The Journey, as having asked early on, "So would it matter if I leave out the politics?" And Fraser, whose biography Coppola based her film upon, replies, "Marie Antoinette would have adored that." Exactly. Precisely.

As most everyone knows, Jackie Earl Haley -- a balding, pale-skinned, rodent-like actor of some 45 years -- has suddenly popped through in supporting roles in a pair of high-profile films -- as Sean Penn's all-but-silent driver in All the King's Men, and as Ronnie, a prison parolee who's been in jail for exposing himself to minors, in Todd Field's very well-crafted Little Children, which opens limited today.

And USA Today's "Suzie Woz" (a.k.a., Susan Wloszczyna), in a profile of Haley, says that "Oscar handicappers" -- a reference to pally David Poland, for the most part, and perhaps also herself --...Read More

The thinking is that Tom Tykwer's Perfume (Paramount, 12.27) isn't going to do as well in the U.S. as it has so far in Europe. But it could turn into a goofy-kicky theatrical event if ..if...the Paramount distribution people were crazy enough (and trust me, they're not) to invest in a special revival of an upgraded Smellovision system to accompany the showing of Tykwer's film in select big-city theatres.

From a newspaper ad for Michael Todd's Scent of Mystery, directed by Jack Cardiff.

Perfume is a movie about the loveliness of scent -- specifically...Read More

The reason Fox will be pushing Devil Wears Prada star Meryl Streep in the Best Actress category, I suspect, is that they don't want her up against likely Best Supporting Actress contender Jennifer Hudson in Dreamgirls (Paramount/DreamWorks, 12.15). Because she would stand a pretty good chance of losing if they did. I don't know anything but I sense awesomeness from Hudson's performance, based on what little I've seen.

Streep will probably lose in the Best Actress race anyway...no offense. She's up against The Queen's Helen Mirren, who has a much richer part than Streep's Miranda Priestley (another sort of aloof queen)...Read More

Unofficial but you can take it to the bank: Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima, the Japanese soldier, Japanese-language battle- of-Iwo-Jima film, will open in early February. This is the decision from Warner Bros., which is handling the film's U.S. distribution, and its partner DreamWorks. It's being regarded very much as an "art film" by the powers-that-be, and may even turn up at the '07 Sundance Film Festival. Or so I've been told. Oh, and Clint isn't quite finished editing it yet, even though Warner Bros. marketing staffers saw a print a couple of weeks ago.

"Indiana Jones 4 is still in development," George Lucas has told Variety reporter David S. Cohen. He explained that "Steve (Spielberg) and I are still working away, trying to come up with something we're happy with. Hopefully, in a short time, we will come to an agreement . Or something."

Indy IV -- the anti-matter black-hole movie that refuses to die, that can never be satisfactorily written, that will never be made.

Lucas made this comment earlier this week following groundbreaking ceremonies for the renamed School of Cinematic Arts at USC.

He also said that -- pop open the champagne! --...Read More

New York Observer reporter Sara Vilkomerson reports that "more than a few guests dismissed Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette" at last week's opening-night party for the N.Y. Film Festival. "It's like sticking your hand in a giant meringue. Mark my words, no one will see it but gays and girls."

Nicholas Hytner's film version of Alan Bennett's The History Boys (Fox Searchlight, 11.21) had its U.K. premiere three nights ago -- Monday, 10.2 -- before a black-tie audience and a couple of Royals (Prince Charles, the Duchess of Cornwall). And it opens in England a week from tomorrow (i.e., Friday, 10.13).

So where are the trade reviews? Any reviews?

And why is the British website calling it "a comedy by Alan Bennett"? Nobody I know who saw The History Boys on Broadway called it that, and I don't recall any reviewers using the "c" word either. It's obviously funny in...Read More

It was reported yesterday that Harrison Ford was mistaken by Disney security guards as some kind of homeless geezer when he fell asleep in Calista Flockhart's car near the set of Brothers And Sisters, a family drama series she's been shooting for Touchstone Television. (I couldn't find out where it was shooting, but the show has a production office on the Disney lot.) The story reads that guards sent word to Flockhart (i.e., Ford's girlfriend) that "some old guy had crawled into her car to go to sleep and that they'd called the cops to have him removed." Who falls asleep...Read More

The Departed is going to be the #1 film this weekend -- easily over $20 million, and maybe into the mid 20s -- but the general opinion is that the bulk of the under-25 audience is going to to patronize Employee of the Month and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning instead. They're under the impression that The Departed is too complex, too adult, too dark-heavy, and they'd rather just have fun. Is this is a generation that truly gets what's happening and is plugged into the current vitality or what?

It looks as if The Departed -- which had a 73% general...Read More

"Apocalypto is amazing," writes Massawyrm in another AICN posting. "Even in its unfinished form it is easily one of the best films of the year, if not the very best. Once again Mel Gibson sets out to put you in another place and time, one which at first seems totally alien – only to brilliantly and quickly endear you to the people you’re following. Within the first 20 minutes of the film you absolutely identify with the tribesman and find quite a bit in common with them. And just as you are completely comfortable and at home with them, bad shit happens....Read More

On the heels of Tuesday's news about Village Voice film critic Michael Atkinson being whacked, now we're hearing that New Times management has also put a cap into Voice critic/editor Dennis Lim. And senior critic Jim Hoberman is the Last Man Standing...by a thread. And as Anthony Kaufman has written,"It's come time to realize that for those who want a truly alternative newsweekly, throw in the towel, accept the end -- the Voice is dead."

Everything cultural runs it course, and then is no more. The Village Voice has become more and more...Read More

"The new Stephen Frears film, The Queen, is about a clash of wills between Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and the Right Honourable Tony Blair, M.P., Prime Minister in Her Majesty's Government. Or, if you prefer, Alien vs. Predator." -- from Anthony Lane's review in last week's The New Yorker.

And this from "Styles & Scenes" columnist Elizabeth Snead: Queen star Helen Mirren "really does look -- and dress -- just like Queen Elizabeth in the film. Although, in some scenes she also bore a unsettling resemblance to President George Washington."

Richard Roeper is the latest addition to the Gold Derby Oscar panel, and aside from his expected Best Picture favorite being Flags of Our Fathers (which he may or may not have seen when he submitted his list), he's got The Departed in his #2 slot -- which is somewhat significant, I feel. On one level I feel like an idiot cheerleader yelling "Go, Departed!" but I'm sensing a real surge on behalf of this Martin Scorsese film.

A fellow journalist said, "Forget it...that 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating will drop after Wednesday night's all-media in Manhattan." Well, it's down to 95% now,...Read More

A well-connected journalist at last night's premiere party for The Queen told me she has a bit of a problem with a certain film coming out later in the month. She called it "the worst piece of shit" she's seen in a long while. That sounds mean, doesn't it? But that's how people talk at parties after a glass of wine. Taken aback but ever the optimist, I said, "Not even [well-liked actress] for Best Actress?" Nope, she replied. I ran this past a guy who's seen it also and he said, "Well, it's a pretty crowded field for best actress contenders so...Read More

There's a new coffee-table book called Edie: Factory Girl (VH1 Books) . It's mainly filled with -- surprise! -- photos of Edie Sedgwick as well as some relatively recent ones of Sienna Miller portraying Sedgwick during filming of George Hickenlooper's Factory Girl (Weinstein Co., 12.29).

The photos were all taken by Nat Finkelstein, a notorious Warhol photographer -- a character -- who knew Edie better than fairly well; the text is by David Dalton, who began working as an assistant to Andy Warhol, Sedgwick's media promoter and benefactor until he cast her aside, when he was...Read More

"Helen doesn't say, `Please love me. Look, I'll smile nicely, and you'll love me," Stephen Frears tells John Lahr for a cannily written profile of Queen star Helen Mirren in last week's issue of The New Yorker. "She's not inviting you in the way other actresses often are. She just says, `This is what it's like,' and that's what you love about her. She confronts something, and she doesn't sentimentalize it." Elizabeth I costar Jeremy Irons adds, "She goes for life...that's why she's alluring to men. She is the complete antithesis of the vapid."

How can Chris Nolan's The Prestige (Touchstone, 10.20) be "falling off of the list" of MCN's Gurus of Gold if it hasn't been seen all that much? A friend saw it yesterday for what he believed was the first time (or one of the first times), and feels it's one of the more satisfying commercial rides he's taken in a long while because Nolan is such an expert filmmaker, etc. There may be another screening this week, a Variety series screening and an all-media screening next week.

Reader John Coogan has passed along this Google Video file containing Werner Herzog's TV documentary Wings of Hope (2000), which is about Juliane Koepcke, a German woman who was the only survivor of a plane crash that occured in the Pervian jungle in 1972. She and Herzog are shown revisiting the site of the accident as she tells how she managed to survive. The doc is freshly topical due to last weekend's mid-air collision above Brazil which resulted in the deaths of 155 people aboard a commercial jetliner.

In a conversation with Radar Online's Jebediah Reed, the legendary R. Lee Ermey -- star of Texas Chainsaw Massscare: The Begining -- says something surprising about Stanley Kubrick and Eyes Wide Shut. "Stanley called me up all the time," he says. "He'd call at three o'clock in the morning and say, "Oh, it's 10 o'clock over here." [Laughs] "Yeah, well, it's three o-fucking-clock in the morning here, Stanley. Oh well.

"He called me about two weeks before he died, as a matter of fact. We had a long conversation about Eyes Wide Shut. He told me it was a piece of...Read More

If N.Y. Post writer Reed Tucker quotes Departed star Leonardo DiCaprio yelling, in a manner of speaking, "Table on fire!", does that mean there was one, particularly if a quote in a Time magazine transcript disputes this?

One one hand we have a bull session between Time's Josh Tyrangien and the Departed guys -- Martin Scorsese, DiCaprio, Matt Damon and Jack Nicholson. But it contains a slight problem for Tucker, who included an apparent wrongo in an interview piece with Nicholson that ran on 10.1.

Tucker writes that "before one scene in which...Read More

The Reeler's Stu VanAirsdale on Warren Beatty's NY Film Festival press conference following Tuesday's press screening of Reds. And N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott speaks to Beatty about the film and its legend in a 10.4 piece.

"I braced myself as Emilio Estevez's Bobby began," writes Fox 411 columnist Roger Friedman. "First of all, it's filled with well-known faces like Demi Moore, Sharon Stone and Lindsay Lohan -- actors who are often more frequently in supermarket tabloids than good movies.

"After these three, plus William H. Macy, Anthony Hopkins, Harry Belafonte, Helen Hunt, Martin Sheen, Christian Slater and Estevez himself all make the scene, Laurence Fishburne's entrance is nearly comical. You hear yourself saying, 'Anyone else back there?'

"But I have to tell you, I loved Bobby. Once the shock of all these people settles in -- quickly,...Read More

Scriptland columnist Jay Fernandez has picked up on the rumble that was going around last May (in Cannes, for the most part) about Babel director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and screenwriter Guillermo Ariagga being at odds. The L.A. Times reporter has written that people in their respective cirlcles "are privately aghast that Inarritu, apparently miffed that Arriaga claimed much of the credit for the critical success of 21 Grams, banned the writer from attending Cannes, where Babel had its world premiere. Inarritu, in full auteur glory, went on to claim the best director prize. Multiple calls to Arriaga's UTA agent went...Read More

Mainstream reporters whose stories are printed in newspapers which are then hand-delivered to newsstands and newspaper vending machines by guys in trucks...these reporters and their editors really love pointing out that Steve Zallian's All The King's Men was a huge debacle. The difference this time is that L.A. Times writer Scott Martelle got to talk to Zallian, the poor guy, and take his photo even. Look at the expression he's wearing. It's glum but in a kind of enigmatic, late-afternoon, verging-on-Mona Lisa way.

And what's with this morning's posting of this Time "blog" piece by Washington Times reporter and Brainwash editor Eric Pfeiffer about the selling of Oliver Stone's World Trade Center to conservatives? Why now, I mean, two months after the movie came out? Because Stone has been promoting it in Europe?

The Queen star Helen Mirren, who's looks at this stage like an even more likely shoo-in for Best Actress than Prada's Meryl Streep and Volver's Penelope Cruz, sat for a round-table chat this morning at the Four Seasons hotel; so did the film's director Stephen Frears and screenwriter Peter Morgan. Frears and Morgan deliver a somewhat livelier session (Frears' voice is the sharper and deeper of the two), but Mirren ran a close second.

Queen star Helen Mirren, not as she appeared during roundtable interviews this morning (9.3) at the Four Seasons but at a Miramax-funded...

La Opinion's Josep Parera called me a few days for a piece about the Oscar season, and what's cool about this isn't what I said (the usual praisings of Innaritu and Almodovar) as much as the mildly exotic thrill of being quoted in Spanish:

"Para el periodista Jeffrey Wells, responsable de la pagina en la red hollywood-elsewhere.com, y uno de los expertos en analizar la carrera de los Oscar, 'Babel es la obra cumbre de Inarritu. El es el director mas brillante de la actualidad. Esta al mismo nivel que cineastas como Fellini y Antonioni. No es solo un director,...Read More

Happiness and lethargy are merely flip sides of the same coin. People who go "whoopee" when things are going well and "woe is me" when things are going badly are slaves in a jungle of illusion. There is only the cosmic hum and continuity of it all.

That is why people who spray champagne on their friends and scream "we're number one!" when their football or soccer or baseball or basketball teams wins are cosmic midgets. And why this front-page story that appeared in the Times this afternoon will only excite or encourage children.

It reads, "After days of flirting...Read More

"I will tell you right now -- Cate Blanchett will win the Oscar," Good German star George Clooney has told the Associated Press about his costar. "She's the best actor working today. Not actress -- she's an actor. Intimidating, in a way, to work with an actor that good."

"Martin Scorsese's The Departed clocks in at two and a half hours, yet it's two and a half hours of jabber and jolt, and [with] enough color for ten crime pictures. It works smashingly. There's no mercy -- not even for the audience. William Monahan's dialogue is Mamet-speak played at Alvin and the Chipmunks speed with a broad Boston accent.

"While characters spit yahmuthahfuckedme expletives into one another's faces (along with peculiar citations of Shakespeare, Freud, and James Joyce), Scorsese and his fab house editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, drive the action brusquely. They can hardly sit still in the present; they leap around...Read More

As every knows, Grindhouse (Weinstein Co., 4.07) will be two high-style wank-off movies in one -- Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror and Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof. Two guys who are capable of much, much more slumming by making a couple of B movies in quotes. Point is, this thing became more interesting since the stories started getting around last summer about Rodriguez disassembling and losing his focus during the shooting of Death Planet because he was so emotionally shattered over getting divorced from his wife and producer, Elizabeth Avellan.

This freakout -- a couple of guys I've spoken to have used the antiquated...Read More

I did some reporting in '99 about other Neos who might have starred in The Matrix (Leonardo DiCaprio, Will Smith), and I never heard squat about Kevin Costner being offered the part so take this Guardian story (or this aspect of it) with a grain. Richard Burton would have been sublime as Brutus in Joseph L. Manckiewicz's 1953 production of Julius Caesar (which is out on DVD on 11.7) Julia Roberts blew it big-time by turning down Gwynneth Paltrow's role in Shakespeare in Love. Warren Beatty would have been perfect as Hubbell Gardiner (the role that Robert Redford finally took)...Read More

The Oregonian's film critic Shawn Levy has written a piece about how October is a great old time for film festivals in his neck of the woods. He chooses to mention three -- the Portland Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (Oct. 6-15), the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival (Oct. 6-8) and the Local Sightings Film Festival (Oct. 6-11) -- but he can't afford any space for the poor little Bend Film Festival (Oct. 12-16) -- an indie-attitude shebang happening in Bend, Oregon, a nice little town a bit south of Redmond.

Late Monday afternoon/Yom Kippur...Read More

William J. Mann, the respected author of "Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn" (Holt & Co.), describes Katharine Hepburn's "lifelong affection for women," as Janet Maslin puts it in her N.Y. Times book review, as "the elephant in the room."

I for one could never really imagine Hepburn making love with a man...not Spencer Tracy, not Charlie Allnut, not Rossano Brazzi. Whatever and whomever she let into her life and heart, hetero mambo never seemed part of the deep-down picture. And you can always sense these things, to some extent. Not everyone was readable, but many were. You could always...Read More

I'm well aware that providing a link to this shot of an Italian magazine cover is in bad taste, but I'd never happened across this photo before last weekend. It's from a link sitting on the Diana Princess of Wales Wikipedia page, and with The Queen having just opened in New York and opening this weekend in Los Angeles, I'm guessing others might want to have a quick peek.

I was going to write "separated at birth" or some other smart crack, but it really boils down to a certain ad agency affinity for ominous pre-thunderstorm clouds as portents of heavy-osity -- a minor zeitgeist current that briefly affected a couple of graphic designers a few months ago.

Tom Tykwer's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Dreamamount, 12.27), which isn't expected to blow anyone's socks off on these shores, has now brought in $47.3 million in Europe, with $28.4 million in Germany alone. It opens Wednesday in France. Here's a U.K. teaser-trailer and the German teaser/final trailer.

On The Huffington Post, Liberal democratic activist and blogger Bob Geiger wrote yesterday that "while some would say we need additional evidence that the Iraq war is prosecuted by a bunch of Republican liars as much as we need more proof that disgraced GOP Congressman Mark Foley is a pervert, it's still important that everyone catch [last night's] 60 Minutes to see "State of Denial" author Bob Woodward [explain] in agonizing detail how George W. Bush and the Republican party have lied to the American people on the level of violence in Iraq and, in particular, the intensity of attacks...Read More

"U.K. directors have such great faces. All those fags and Guinesses." -- Jamie Stuart commenting on the walrus-bulldog features of The Queen director Stephen Frears in his latest video mini-doc from the 44th New York Film Festival. (Some, I'm presuming, have never seen a British kitchen-sink movie or been to England, and therefore don't know that "fags" is a slang term for cigarettes.)

"Film is like a dinosaur in a tar pit. People might be sick to hear that because they love film, just like they loved magnetic tape. And I love film. I love it! It's so beautiful! But I would die if I had to work like [I have with film] again. The sky's the limit with digital." -- Inland Empire director David Lynch to N.Y. Times witer Dennis Lim.

I'm getting a little tired of these kiss-ass articles that journalists always write when Jack Nicholson has a film about to come out. They all say the same damn thing, which is that Jack is an exceptionallly talented wild man and a kind of Hollywood force-of-nature. Not to say Nicholson isn't one of the very greatest -- his imitation-of-a-rat bit in The Departed automatically ranks alongside his hold-the-chicken-salad- between-your-knees diner scene in Five Easy Pieces -- but I've had it with these suck-up pieces. I've been reading them for 25 years.

Austrian Airlines, procedural skittishness and hamsters on a plane. A single hamster, actually. The key graph: "Austrian Airlines said the jet would remain grounded until the hamster was found 'because it can't take off that way for safety reasons.'"

I wangled a last-minute entry into a big hoo-hah for Warren Beatty's Reds ('81) at the Directors Guild of America theatre last night. It was a four-part affair -- a buffet reception at 6 pm, screening at 7 pm, coffee, fruit and brownies in the lobby during intermission, and then a q & a with Beatty and interviewer Bennett Miller (the esteemed Capote director) sometime around 10:40 pm.

Capote director Bennett Miller and Reds director-producer-star Warren Beatty during Saturday night's q & a following a screening of Reds at the DGA on Saturday, 9.30.06.

"The fate of most movies is decided by the first day of principal photography. Pirates of the Caribbeanwas destined to be a blockbuster irrespective of its sloppy storytelling. All the Kings Men from day one was the wrong idea with the wrong cast." -- Peter Bart in his 10.1.06 Variety column. What other preordained success and failures are waiting in the wings? I could run my lists, of course, but how about some reader calls?

John Clark has written a piece in the N.Y. Times about aging independent filmmakers who made their bones in the late '80s and early '90s who are now grappling with tough financial times in the hardball, corporate-driven moviemaking world of 2006. In some cases only eeking out a living, scraping by, etc.

"The indie business was full of mom-and-pop operations with nickel-and-dime aspirations, [but] now the corner stores have been edged out by studio specialty divisions with far larger appetites and needs. Geoffrey Gilmore, the director of the Sundance Film Festival, says that in the early 90's an independent film...Read More