Scott Feinberg, auteur-administrator of andthewinneris. blog.com, had a recent chat with Little Miss Sunshine's Alan Arkin, whose grandpa with the heroin habit and the "fuckin' chicken" is an absolutely un-ignorable Best Supporting Actor contender. (And so is Steve Carell's performance. We should all support Carell. No matter how good he is in Evan Almighty he's going to get killed next year for just being in the damn thing so be nice to him now.) I tried talking to Arkin myself but it didn't work out. He was excellent in Keith Gordon's Mother Night.

It's very easy to snarl "no taste!", "oh, my God!" or "how could he do this!"...but showing a mock-profound lack of taste and sensitivity is where cutting-edge comedy is today. We all know this; we laugh at this. Comedians who don't play some variation of this game do so at their own peril. The truth? When I read about Bill Maher's Steve Irwin-stingray get-up I went right to Google and found it. I'm now leaving to check out the Halloween parade on Santa Monica Blvd. in hopes of finding another one. I'm sorry to offend.

This Paula Froelich or Bill Hoffman-authored item in the N.Y. Post's "Page Six" about George Hickenlooper's Factory Girl is warm urine in a bucket. First, it's not a "troubled biopic" -- it's an 8 on a scale of 10 (or was when I saw it) and is shooting extra scenes right now so it can elevate up to the level of a 9 or better -- big deal. Movies that don't quite nail it 100% during principal do this all the time; it doesn't mean squat.

I saw an early cut ...Read More

"As dull as Phil Angelides' campaign has been, I believe that he would better represent the interests of more Californians than Schwarzenegger could ever hope to," Alec Baldwin wrote on The Huffington Post two days ago. "Schwarzenegger is not a leader. Like Bush, he is a front man for a group of powerful interests and he is reading from a script."

And yet Baldwin has decided not to narrate a documentary by director-writer Dan Cox and co-writer Jerry Decker...Read More

Here for the record is a list of "The Friends of United 93" -- myself plus Toronto Star critic Peter Howell (who gave it 5 points on MCN's Gurus of Gold chart), Sasha Stone (7 points), Lou Lumenick (8 points), Anne Thompson (9 points) and Susan Wloszczyna (10 points). There are no friends of United 93 among Tom O'Neil's "Buzzmeter" forecasters at The Envelope. Joiners?

Cast of United 93 during filming in England

"Sure, a welder's unfortunate error is a completely plausible explanation for the conflagration, but we won't completely rule out the possibility that God Himself sparked the blaze, hoping that an unanticipated setback of this scale might help the producers of a movie inspired by one of His favorite Bible stories reach their goal of making The Most Expensive Comedy Story Ever Told." -- Defamer's Mark Lisanti on yesterday's fire at Universal Studios, possibly (no callbacks yet) on Stage 27 where the "ark" set for Evan Almighty has been constructed.

There's no such thing as entirely "normal" behavior these days. The world of 2006 is ten times loonier than, say the world of 1956. Egoistic oddballs, twitchy eccentrics, depressives, Courtney Love, people with hair-trigger tempers and substance-abuse problems. I can honestly claim to know at least two women who would stand a good chance of being rounded up and thrown into Bedlam if they were suddenly time-tripped back to Charles Dickens' London.

In such an environment, an escapee from a local mental hospital...Read More

Tom Cruise wasn't blown out of the Paramount water last summer by Viacom chief Sumner Redtone...well, he was, but the decision to evict apparently originated with kvetching from Sumner's wife, Paula. That's one of the semi-intriguing reveals in Bryan Burroughs' Redstone profile in the December issue of Vanity Fair:

"Paula, like women everywhere, had come to hate him,'' Redstone declares. "The truth of the matter is, I did listen to her, but I make business decisions myself.''

"And in terms of business, Redstone claims he felt Cruise was actually costing Paramount money...Read More

Focus Features asked for the usual exit-polling to be done regarding last weekend's opening of Phillip Noyce's Catch a Fire. Viewers exiting L.A.'s AMC Palisades Center and Pacific Sherman Oaks Galleria, Baltimore's Muvico Egyptian 24, Houston's AMC Studio 30, Seattle's AMC Pacific Place and Kansas City's AMC Studio 30 were polled and the usual ironies prevailed.

Everyone who saw it liked it quite a lot, but not enough people saw it overall. So who or what do we blame? The material, obviously -- nobody wanted to see an '80s apartheid movie...Read More

"Sacha Baron Cohen is one of the few British Jews to venture successfully into the comedy of shock," writes New Yorker critic Anthony Lane in one of the oddest Borat reviews I've read so far. "[The] defense of Borat as an unwitting scourge of the reactionary -- unearthing Midwestern beliefs no less parochial than those he left behind in Kazakhstan -- is sound as far as it goes. But the movie goes further. It is equipped, like an F-15 Eagle, to engage multiple targets at once."

And here's where the curious umbrage...Read More

Patrick Goldstein's "Big Picture" column is about the non- battle in today's media culture between the pornography of self-exposure vs. modesty and reticence, and how two of the fall's best films -- Flags of Our Fathers and The Queen -- "honor" the latter.

Really? I didn't get the idea that Queen director Stephen Frears was "honoring" Queen Elizabeth II at all. The film doesn't appprove or disapprove of her insulated cluelessness in the wake of the August 1997 death of Diana, Princess of Wales...Read More

The usual simplistic knee-jerk responses have flooded in since last night's summary and posting of a link to Michael Fleming 's piece about Steven Soderbergh's plan to shoot back-to-back Che Guevara films as of May '07. I ran a response in "comments" this morning, but just so everyone sees it...

I gave this a think-through last night and came to the rudimentrary conclusion that The Argentine and Guerilla combined are are going to resemble parts I and II of Lawrence of Arabia...Read More

Variety's Michael Fleming is reporting that Steven Soderbergh and Benicio del Toro are finally, finally about to begin shooting their long-delayed Che Guevara biopic, for Chrissake. Both of them. And both, for the most part, to be shot in Spanish...hooray for that! (For a while there I thought the linguistic tradition of Richard Fleischer, Jack Palance and Che would make a comeback.)

Soderbergh will shoot the two films -- The Argentine and Guerrilla -- in Mexico and various South American locations, including Bolivia. Del Toro will play Guevara; ...Read More

"Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once." -- Julius Caesar (Act II, Scene II, 32-37)

USA Today's Suzie Woz flew to Toronto to watch John Travolta in a drag fat-suit sing and prance around to "You Can't Stop The Beat", a musical number in Adam Shankman's Hairspray. "It's good," Travola told her. "The effect that I caused is fun and all, but it's a lot of work, man." The film costars Michelle Pfeiffer, Christopher Walken and Nikki Blonsky. The filmic re-do of the Broadway musical (based on the '88 John Waters film) will continue to shoot through early December, and is slated to open next July.

John Travolta

"I'm the guy who wrote you a few weeks ago after seeing Ed Zwick's Blood Diamond, and I wanted to add that I actually think the film has a good chance of being pretty successful," reader John Robie wrote earlier today. "Although I wasn't very high on it, it very well could get good word-of-mouth from people who will be persuaded into thinking it's an important film.

"Blood Diamond is in the realm of The Last Samurai...Read More

Letter to Clint

Some feel that journalists aren't supposed to make before-the-fact suggestions. They're supposed be good sheep and just eat the grass that's in front of them ....baahh! But I've got one anyway, and I think it sounds pretty neat. I mentioned it to a fairly big wheel at Paramount the other day and he thought it was pretty cool also, so please give it a think-through.

My dad, a Marine Lieutenant who fought all through the battle of Iwo Jima, saw Flags of Our Fathers...Read More

New tracking data arrrived this morning, and it contains good news for Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (Fox, 11.3). It's tracking better than those recent press stories have indicated, I mean -- 40 general awareness, 39 definite, 10 first choice. Room to grow but that's fairly decent for an 800-screen starter. Flushed Away is 59, 27 and 5....better. The Santa Clause is running 87, 33 and 9 -- still the strongest of the bunch.

Babel ...Read More

The ridiculously drawn-out Becket saga (thanks to those ass-dragging dilletantes at MPI Home Video) is at an end, thank fortune. Peter O'Toole's Oscar campaign team -- i.e., the Miramax publicists pushing his Best Actor candidacy for Venus -- will be comforted to know that this 1964 multi-Oscar nominated film, in which O'Toole arguably gave the finest performance of his career as King Henry II, will open at Manhattan's Film Forum on 1.26.07 and then L.A.'s Nuart on 2.9.07.

O'Toole's Venus...Read More

L.A. Times columnist Claudia Eller has written a fairly glowing, nicely observed profile of Paramount Vantage chief John Lesher, who's used his talent relationships (i.e., nurtured during his many years as a hot-shot Endeavor agent) to build the former Paramount Classics into a formidable producer and distributor that's easily on the level of Fox Searchlight and Focus Features. Here's hoping that Paramount Vantage's Babel, which goes wide on 11.10 into 1200 theatres, does as well en masse as it did last weekend.

New Line Cinema appears to have pulled back fairly radically on its Little Children bookings. The Oregonian's Shawn Levy is reporting that Todd Field's Cheever-esque drama is "getting a very scattershot release from its distributor and, frankly, may be in trouble. It was meant to open in Portland on 11.3, but that date has been pulled and no new date has yet been announced."

We all know Children hasn't done much business, or been given much of a chance to, I should say. Since opening on 10.6.06 it's only been booked into 32 theatres...Read More

A Mystic River-ish childhood anecdote from Little Children director-writer Todd Field, passed along to Oregonian critic Shawn Levy and posted on his "Mad About Movies" blog:

"I remember coming home one day on my bicycle along this gravel path, and this Ford Falcon pulled up, this white Ford Falcon with two guys in it, and they said 'Come 'ere kid, come 'ere.' And you know when you're near trouble...Read More

For the two-month shoot of Borat (20th Century Fox, 11.3), Sacha Baron Cohen "was in character from early in the morning until night," reports Time's Joel Stein. "The crew shot so much footage that director Larry Charles is trying to sell the unused parts to HBO as a series. Even when the cops came, Baron Cohen never dropped character. It's an impressive, perhaps insane, performance: Johnny Knoxville with a sense of humor, Andy Kaufman with a desire to please, Peter Sellers set loose on the public instead of David Niven. "It's like ...Read More

Newsweek's Devin Gordon does his part to help devalue originality while bumming out readers in the bargain by saluting...well, not quite...acknowledging with muted respect the increasing popularity of prequels, a slightly re-energized indication of Hollywood's boundless tediousness. The latest include, in no particular order: Casino Royale, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, Halloween (young Michael Myers), Friday the 13th (young Jason Voorhees) and Hannibal Rising (young Hannibal Lecter). I need to find a hole to get sick in.

On Saturday morning Breadly Moore wrote in and said he'd seen Saw III on Friday and that he was "stunned to find it booed at the very end by the full house." (Not scattered boos, in other words.) He said it "made [him] happy" to hear this since he figured the type of people that enjoy these films would swallow any tripe the producers decide to shovel down their throats." I was stunned by this news myself. Has anyone heard of audiences booing or sneering Saw III...Read More

Richard Donner showed up at ComicCon last summer to talk about the forthcoming " Superman II -- The Richard Donner Cut" DVD (Warner Home Video, 11.28), and now that it's only a month away from delivery I'm wondering if there's much interest out there among the HE smarty-pants regulars, or if the dismay some felt about Bryan Singer's Superman Returns (which I still think is a solid film in a spiritual sense, even if I came to the conclusion it was a bit too long after seeing it a second time) has diminished interest or what.

...Read More

During our Friday lunch Michael Sheen, who's played British Prime Minister Tony Blair not only in The Queen but also in an '03 British TV movie called The Deal, said that a "plan" is afoot between himself, Queen director Stephen Frears and screenwriter Peter Morgan to make a third Blair film.

This will be about Blair's downfall due to his alliance with President Bush, his pitching the weapons-of- mass-destruction b.s. to the British people, and sending British troops to fight in the invasion of Iraq. It will begin with President Clinton...Read More

Nikki Finke has reported that among the 11.10 openers, Marc Forster's Stranger Than Fiction is tracking much better than Ridley Scott's A Good Year. Ironic given the unmistakable fact that Year is a somewhat better film -- not a great one, but certainly better written, better assembled, and more in touch with itself and how to best say what it's saying.

Year...Read More

This has been kicking around for some time, but just for the HE record and in case somebody hasn't read this on Defamer or elsewhere, there are indicators that strongly suggest Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat character is based on a real-life Turkish guy named Mahir Cagri, whose doofus-level web page attracted internet notoriety six or seven years ago.

Make your own assessment, but Cagri's Wikipedia page says that "chief similarities between Mahir and Borat include facial hair and taste in formal wear. Borat also shouted out Mahir's catchphrase 'I like sex...Read More

Warner Bros. has decided to open Ed Zwick's Blood Diamond a week earlier -- 12.8 instead of 12.15. Fine, whatever, no biggie. WB domestic distribution chief Dan Fellman apparently told somebody that the film has been generating good buzz and the studio wants to give Academy and guild members more time to see it before the Oscar game heats up too much. Except the good buzz thing is a fantasy -- the buzz is good about Leonardo DiCaprio...Read More

Check out Denzel Washington's 'fro in Ridley Scott's American Gangster. The photo is illustrating John Leland's N.Y. Times piece about the filming of Scott's period ('70s to '90s) crime pic, which costars Russell Crowe. Universal will open the film in November 2007.

Snap Judgment

Just as Burt Lancaster's Ernst Janning character finally spills his true thoughts at the end of Judgment at Nuremberg, it is time after days of sober reflection to speak of the Borat playdate scale-back that was confirmed by 20th Century Fox last Wednesday. Instead of opening Sacha Baron Cohen's rollicking comedy on the previously decided-upon 2000 screens on 11.3, Fox will now start with an 800-screen debut and then bump the run up to 2,200 screens the following weekend (i.e., 11.10).

My basic feeling is that ...Read More

Despite recent vigorous efforts by Paramount and Universal to promote World Trade Center and United 93, respectively, as Best Picture contenders, "an Oscar consultant not connected to either film" said to Hollywood Wiretap's Pete Hammond a few days ago that "this expensive grab for renewed attention by both films will result in a wash...Read More

Michael Sheen, Montana & 14th in Santa Monica -- Friday, 10.27.06, 2:35 pm

I sat down with Michael Sheen, a.k.a. Prime Minster Tony Blair in The Queen, for a quick lunch on Friday afternoon. I'll be writing something about it tomorrow or Monday, as the recording of our chat was mostly ruined by clattering dishes and the loud, insistent voices of three or four women sitting two tables away. I don't know if they were drinking wine or not, but they sounded like they were. At least they didn't shriek with laughter. Not too much, I mean.

...Read More

"The TV networks don't want you to see ads for the Dixie Chicks documentary Shut Up and Sing. The movie theater chains don't want you to see the fictionalized polemic Death of a President. The president of Kazakhstan doesn't want you to see Borat. Just ask the people promoting the movies. Hollywood appears to have hit upon a fail-safe strategy for getting attention for just about any kind of film: get someone, anyone, to try to suppress it, and then rush to the news media with breathless warnings about the First Amendment coming under attack." -- from Read More

"In a film with a wealth of strong actors -- including Jack Nicholson as the crime boss and Matt Damon as a policeman in his pocket -- there is scarcely a weak link (well, a couple of over-the-top Nicholson moments). But no one is better in The Departed than Leonardo DiCaprio," writes N.Y. Times columnist Caryn James in Sunday's edition. "His role is central, and the film would collapse without him.

"His character, Billy Costigan, is a smart guy who has to infiltrate a crime ring and act a little less smart in his undercover guiseRead More

Billy Corben's Cocaine Cowboys (Magnolia) is fast and whiplashy -- a 118-minute roller-coaster ride through the world of big-time Miami cocaine dealing 20, 25, 30 years ago...whew! I liked it start to finish and so did a lot of others (it's running 82% on Rotten Tomatoes), but no review I've read so far has mentioned two very obvious points, so allow me.

(l. to r.) Jorge "Rivi" Ayala, Mickey Munday, former cocaine dealer Jon Roberts

(1) If you're any kind of fan of Brian De Palma's Scarface ('83), an operatic chronicle of the rise and fall of Read More

I received Warner Home Video's five-disc Marlon Brando Collection yesterday (it'll be in stores on 11.7), and spent most of last night watching Mutiny on the Bounty, Julius Caesar, Reflections in a Golden Eye, Teahouse of the August Moon and The Formula. The first three, actually; I can't stand the latter two (can anyone?), especially Teahouse.

TV screen capture from the rounding-Cape-Horn sequence.

While Mutiny doesn't play quite as rousingly as I remembered -- I'd forgotten how foppy and buffoonish Brando's Fletcher Christian character is, and how frequently his contentious relationship with Trevor HowardRead More

This isn't news to readers of IMDB postings, but one of the all-time saddest orphans of Movies-in-Limbo Land -- The Devil and Daniel Webster, which Alec Baldwin directed and costarred Anthony Hopkins, himself and Jennifer Love Hewitt -- will be released in '07 by The Yari Group, or roughly six years after this modern-day (hah!) rehash of Stephen Vincent Benet's story and Archibald Macleish's play finished lensing.

Look at the stills of Baldwin as he appeared while directing the film and compare them to how he looks today -- he was a kid! Hopkins hadn't made ...Read More

The weekend projections are in and aside from Saw 3 being the #1 dog-of-all-dogs (a projected $32,984,000 by Sunday night, which indicates a heavy Friday-to-Saturday falloff given the opening-day tally of $14 million- something), the omens are bad for Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers and Phillip Noyce's Catch a Fire, and very good for Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu's Babel .

Despite Flags having added 300 screens this weekend for a total of about 2100, it's expected to take in only about $6,023,000, which is a drop of just over 40%...Read More

"Before I read any more reviews and start questioning my judgment, I'm going to predict that Babel will be nominated for best picture this year. What's more, I think it just might win," says Newsweek's Sean Smith in a 10.27 posting. "Why? Because the Oscar is almost always awarded from the heart rather than from the head...Read More

Tribute and Testament

The late Richard Sylbert, one of the most gifted production designers in Hollywood history and a guy I was proud and very delighted to know, wrote a 200-page chronicle about part of his career before passing away in March 2002. Five or six years ago journalist Sylvia Townsend offered to edit what Sylbert had written. That never happened, but a year after he died his widow, Sharmagne Leland-St. John-Sylbert, cut a deal with Townsend to finish what Sylbert had begun and also fill in the missing pieces -- i.e., to create a combination biography- autobiography.

...Read More

Time and again Hollywood types -- directors, producers, studios -- get into business with oily foreign guys (European or Israeli) who tend to live high and swagger around and smoke cigars. The Hollywooders are always interested because there are always fresh oilies looking to buy their way into the business, and they'll hook up with almost anyone with a connected rep in order to do so. Elie Samaha, Giancarlo Peretti, Jean-Marie Messier, Bob Yari, Menahem Golan, Yoram Globus, Avi Lerner, etc.

Yari has been doing pretty well for himself lately (The Illusionist...Read More

Persistence of Sunshine

The last few months have cast Little Miss Sunshine in its proper light. When it opened last July following an ecstatic debut at the Sundance Film Festival six months earlier, nearly everyone called it one of the most original and emotionally grounded family comedies seen in a long while. Quirky and perky, sometimes despairing in tone but intimate and knowing -- a movie with smarts and verve and finesse.

Sunshine...Read More

To me, the end-of-the-year Oscar beat mosh-pit action is tough and bruising but bracing and a lot of...well, fun. In a perverse sort of way. But to David Poland, it's becoming more and more of a wallow -- craven, degrading, downmarket and heavily caked with brown glop. His latest rant, which I love, sounds like a ringside boxing reporter complaining about the hitting. It's really good...Read More

At Wednesday's Tom Freston roast in Manhattan, Paramount Pictures honcho Brad Grey was quoted by Variety's Jill Goldsmith and Scott Kirsner about his studio's shucking-of-Tom-Cruise move that happened two months ago.

Paramount "had considered two options when Cruise's producing pact came up for renewal," the story reads...Read More

To get up to speed for her piece about formidable Best Actor contender Leonardo DiCaprio, Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson persuaded Warner Bros. to let her see Blood Diamond, the hard-hitting Ed Zwick drama set in South Africa that costars DiCaprio, Djimon Honsou and Jennifer Connelly. Thompson treads gingerly in describing the film, but the piece nonetheless contains three "tells."

One, she calls it "a big expensive drama with a heartfelt political message, just the kind of movie that needs the extra boost of an Oscar campaign...Read More

All that Jack Nicholson-for-Best-Actor-in- The-Departed jazz? Forget it. Warner Bros., I'm hearing, is off the boat on that one. Delicious as he is, Jack is all flavor and feisty backup in that film, which I've felt from the beginning. Oscar prognosticators, take note.

The trailer for Richard Eyre's Notes on a Scandal (Fox Searchlight, 12.25) is very nicely done, but my goodness...it's one of those trailers that gives away 90% of the movie. I feel I've really and truly seen it now, on top of being instructed how obviously top-tier the performances from Cate Blanchett, Judi Dench and Bill Nighy are going to be. Now, it seems, the only thing to do is sit down and see the feature-length version. I didn't realize how Fatal Attraction...Read More

Now I really want to watch the Dixie Chicks' Shut Up & Sing documentary, which the Weinstein Co. is opening in New York and L.A. tomorrow and nationwide on 11.10, now that the the cowardly NBC and CW networks are refusing to air ads for the film, apparently because they're afraid of whatever political blowback may result from vengeful apparatchiks in the Bush adminstration.

Harvey Weinstein, co-owner of the Weinstein Co., is fuming about this turndown and complaining big-time to Matt Drudge, who apparently broke the ad-turndown story this evening. "It's a ...Read More

According to Advertising Age reporter T.L. Stanley, a research report titled "Hollywood Online: Ad Innovators Play Spending Catch-Up" is saying that "studios have made a misstep by not increasing their online spending sooner in order to reach the coveted young consumer who spends significant amounts of time on the web."

...Read More

A nicely put David Poland/MCN copy link -- "a Bosley Crowther moment?" -- went up a while ago regarding this John Patterson Guardian piece about Martin Scorsese and The Departed . Patterson trashes the film and harumphs that "after an enormously fulfilling relationship of nearly 30 years, it may be all over for me and Scorsese [since] I cannot decently call The Departed 'a return to form', which seems to be the prevailing opinion." It's perfectly fine to roll with your own opinion in whatever direction, but that's what Crowther was doing when he (a) praisedRead More

This is the end of an entire Sunset Strip mecca experience, a place that always felt like the epicenter of of L.A.'s music industry...until things changed.

...Read More

"Narrative has been a big poison of cinema. The narrative is not a good thing just to be attached to. It doesn't free us to explore more images, metaphors, poetry. When you're dealing with different subject matters that you want to address, it's better to expand the possibilities. I have been fascinated always that the character is defined not only because of what he does but [how] the others around him affect him. We are defined by the others. In Latin American literature this kind of structure is a natural way to tell a story...Read More

There will always be outfits offering formulas and stratagems that will cut down on the risk factors in movie-making. A New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell is focusing on a a new permutation of this -- a British- based company called Epagogix. If every producer and creative executive in this town were to embrace Epagogix, the effects upon the withered soul of Hollywood would be nothing short of demonic. And yet, to be perfectly honest, if I were running a studio I would probably take a look at it.

The principals are Dick Copaken, Nick Meaney and Read More

A couple of good hombres hook up, throw ideas around, it feels mostly right and things jell really nicely and three excellent films result. Then the usual headstrong egoistic stuff happens (harmony between willful types never, ever lasts) and things devolve and the guys eventually say to each other, "This isn't working like it used to...time to move on" and they both do this and whatever happens on their separate journeys, happens. What...a... shocker!

"The title may throw some moviegoers, but it's really quite profound. According to Webster's, Babel is a confusion of voices or sounds. There are many different languages spoken here, lots of translation needed from one character to another. What unites them is a unifying voice, however. One which speaks universal truths in understanding the harsh realism of humanity." -- senior Variety editor Stuart Levine, writing on msnbc.com.

I was looking at an autobiographical piece I wrote when I was ten or eleven, and apart from the appalling prose style it struck me how clear and legible my handwriting was. My handwriting is pathetic these days. That's what being on a keyboard all this time will do. I presume this is the case all around.

...Read More

"You learn very early, or you learn never, if you're an actor. You sit in front of that mirror at the Theatre Royal, Bristol, in 1958 and learn that that is the meat. You can't be self-conscious about [your face]. If you are, you're dead.

"The rest is self-consciousness and nightmare. I've watched actors I know -- who are not really actors, but they get away with it in the movies -- and they spend their life not being able to bear their profile, poor sods. It's the vain who get fucked up. I've never thought about it." -- Venus star Read More

There's some significance, I think, in Nicholas Hytner 's The History Boys getting only four nominations for the British Independent Film Awards noms. Stephen Frears' The Queen took seven, Kevin Macdonald's The Last King of Scotland and Shane Meadows' This Is England got six each, and Andrea Arnold's Red Road and Roger Michell's Venus got five each. Katja Hoffman's Variety announcement story didn't mention if Boys star Richard Griffiths landed an acting nomination. The BIFAs will happen 11.29 at the West London's Hammersmith Palais.

I've always been of the opinion that Yeshua of Nazareth was, of course, an Anglo-Saxoner who more or less resembled Jeffrey Hunter in King of Kings. A nice-looking guy with faintly wavy, medium-brown, nearly shoulder-length hair with blondish highlights, almost always dressed in a white robe with Biblical briefs underneath, his eyes a penetrating bright blue and his toenails always pedicured. I realize what this sounds like, but the idea of an African-American Yeshua with black kinky hair has always sounded like a stretch.

"Babel is a masterpiece....a brilliant, profound and devastating film that explores the dangers and consequences of what can happen when words fail, communication ceases and all you've got left are feelings," says New York Observer critic Rex Reed, whom I respect for having laid his always-passionate, sometimes fierce opinions on the line for the last 40-something years.

"One tragic incident may have shock waves around the world, but in Babel...Read More

I decided last week that no matter how celebrated or shot at Leonardo DiCaprio's Blood Diamond performance turns out to be, he's still a dead-serious, kick-the-door-down Best Actor contender for his work in The Departed...no question. His undercover state cop is so fierce and frazzled and emotionally strung out that it just clobbers any resistance you might have to the notion of an award-worthy performance coming out of a straight-ahead crime film.

Forget whatever depth or resonance his character appears to have upon the pages of William Monahan ...Read More

I had a moment's hesitation this morning in trying to remember that smart Noah Baumbach film that the likable Jessie Eisenberg costarred in. The whale, the shark, the squid, the porpoise, the flounder. It's not Mozart and the Whale, I told myself -- that's the Josh Hartnett/Radha Mitchell movie about lovers with Asperger's Syndrome. It's The Shark and...it wouldn't come but I knew it was about two aquatic life forms, and one of them was definitely a whale.

It came to me 10 or 12 seconds later, but in the meantime I was reminded that ...Read More

Clearly, poor Michael J. Fox appears heavily afflicted by the ravages of Parkinson's disease in this political ad that has recently gotten a lot of press. Rush Limbaugh's saying that Fox, whose body jerks back and forth as he speaks, "either didn't take his medication or was acting," was asinine (although he later apologized for accusing Fox of overdoing it).

About two weeks ago I ran a Fox item and a link to a YouTube video of Fox talking, and it's also quite obvious what Parkinson's is doing to him but he's ...Read More

There's this dark comedy called Spring Break in Bosnia now being filmed in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and it's about an actual attempt once made by journalists to find and capture real-life Serbian war criminal and former head of state Radovan Karadzic. In the script he gets nabbed, but in real life he's still free. And Senad Pecanin, the editor of a weekly Muslim-read magazine called Dani, is telling New York Times reporter Nicholas Wood that "it's kind of farcical to have this when Karadzic is still at large. For me it's a Hollywood invasion of tragic reality."Read More

The following excerpt from Larry Grobel's "Al Pacino: Conversations with Lawrence Grobel" (Simon Spotlight Entertain- ment, $25.00) endeared me to the actor known as Al Pacino almost as much as his better performances: "His three-room apartment" -- which Pacino was living in around 1979 -- "consisted of a small kitchen with worn appliances, a bedroom dominated by an unmade bed, a bathroom with the toilet constantly running, and a living room that was furnished like a set for a way-off-Broad- way production about some down-and-out city dweller. I knew poor people who lived in more luxury than that."

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...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...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 philosophies, in this ...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.

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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...

"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 ...

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...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 ...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...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 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...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...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...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...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 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 ...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 befo