Radar's Jeff Bercovici (i.e., "Fresh Intelligence") scans the "half-baked" Factory Girl Oscar-heat situation. My understanding is that the extra shooting was done in early to mid November, and that it's not that much of a problem to insert new scenes into an already- constructed feature. Still, Harvey Weinstein and director George Hickenlooper need to get cracking.

"With applause came a palpable exhalation of relief: This was not going to be another Rent or Phantom of the Opera train wreck. Dreamgirls, the movie, a quarter of a century in the making, the gay man's Lord of the Rings, just might...yes! ...live up to the hype." -- from Sara Vilkomerson's Dreamgirls story in the New York Observer.

I'm dying to say something about this, but the hour is not quite at hand. A savvy bearded Houston guy has a friend who's passed along a very excited impression of a soon-to-open film. Meanwhile, back in the jungle...

I've been putting this off for a while now, but the continued absence of presumed Best Actor contender Peter O'Toole is becoming more and more of a factor. By that I mean a kind of puzzlement. He almost didn't accept his honorary Oscar in '03 because he felt he was still very much in the game and wanted to win an acting Oscar for a particular performance instead. And now that his brilliant Venus performance as an aging but randy British actor has made this a real possibility, O'Toole is suddenly a non-campaigner and a no-show. Something isn't right.

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I don't want to sound crude or lowball, but how can one review the just-announced films for the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and not at least remark that one of them is a feature-length documentary named Zoo, about a Seattle man who died in the summer of '05 as a result of having anal sex with a horse? This is why the Islamic fundamentalists hate us so -- because there's no end to our interest in Godless perversity.

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Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke did some actual calling about the Pamela Anderson-Kid Rock-Borat argument at Universal honcho Ron Meyer's home that resulted in her filing divorce papers. Wondering why "those two losers were included among the 20 VIPs on what's supposed to be a triple-A screening list," Finke is reporting, the following:

"Anderson is a friend of a Meyer neighbor, who asked the studio mogul if Pam and Kid Rock could come over for the screening because new hubby hadn't seen new bride in Borat...Read More

In my 3.12.06 rave review of Sidney Lumet' s Find Me Guilty (Freestyle, 3.17), I wrote that the courtoom drama "is being sold the wrong way -- the one-sheet and the trailer are telling you it's a jaunty mob-guy comedy, a kind of farce, and the music toward the end of the film tries to convey this also, and this feels like a sell-out to the moron trade. Is everyone listening? The advertising is dishonest ."

And ineffective, I could have added two or three weeks later. The critically-hailed film only brought in less than $2 million worldwide.Read More

"He taught me so much, made me discover authors, painters -- a certain art of living, with elegance and discretion," the great Bertrand Tavernier has written about the late Phillipe Noiret. "He gave me a sense of actors and showed me that one could be exacting and passionate while remaining pleasant and gentle.

"He was a very generous actor who loved his co-stars -- Michael Galabru in The Judge and the Assassin, Isabelle Huppert and Eddy Mitchell in Coup de Torchon, François Perrot and Sabine Azema in Life and Nothing But......Read More

"The Reeler" editor Stu VanAirsdale on the latest death spasms (or certainly downshiftings) of Manhattan's elite downtown film culture establishment, as represented by the ending of annual Village Voice film critic's poll. (The bottom-line Voice management guys probably decided it was too expensive to maintain or too pie-in-the-sky, or both.) But on the heels of interim film editor Allison Benedikt having officially assumed the duties of the deposed Dennis Lim "comes word that Lim is working with indieWIRE to revive a comprehensive year-end survey."

The bottom line is that the prosecutors of "Hollywood's biggest scandal", as New Yorker writer Ken Auletta once described the Anthony Pellicano wiretapping case, can't nail anyone big so they're after small fry in hopes of shaking something loose. And so, as L.A. Indie's Ross Johnson reports, they're looking to nail a peripheral Anthony Pellicano wiretapping player named Joann Wiggin, who was acquitted on four of five perjury charges after a jury trial last September.

Coming Soon's Edward Douglas and Box Office Guru's Gitesh Pandya riffing in The Envelope about what kind of impact box-office performance may be having on certain Best Picture nominees. The biggest benefits have gone to Little Miss Sunshine and The Queen. The opposite appears to have affected Flags of Our Fathers and, to a lesser extent, Babel (although it's outrageous and stupid that the latter should be affected by "only' making the money so far that 21 Grams did...gimme a break).

"I caught Casino Royale on Sunday. Something kinda stirred in the back of my mind as I watched Daniel Craig do the moves, and about a half hour into it I realized what it was. Craig reminds me of Steve McQueen. In fact, he's channelling him.

"Not that he absolutely looks like the guy (although he does, somewhat) but something in the Craig equation -- the steely understated machismo that McQueen had back in the mid to late '60s, and shot into a James Bond vessel -- is why the movie works. Maybe. Just a thought." --- Jeff Burton...Read More

Budd Schulberg and Spike Lee have been "piecing together" a script about heavyweight champ Joe Louis (and his bout and later friendship with Max Schmelling ) for about five years, according to this 11.24 AP story by Ryan Pearson. I'm sorry but that's too long. Movies that are truly meant to happen don't get pieced together over a period equal to one third the lifespan of the average cat. They spew out over a period of days, weeks...months at the most. Okay, a year but no longer.

And the IFP Best Feature award nominees are (a) American Gun (what?), (b) The Dead Girl (congrats to First Look), (c) Half Nelson (drugs in a school toilet stall), Little Miss Sunshine (my personal fave), and Pan's Labyrinth (the best work ever by the great Guillermo del Toro ). These and other nominees were just posted a few minutes ago. Sunshine and Nelson landed five nominations each.

You might have expected that streaming video of this morning's announcing of the nominees wouldhave been up on ifc.com by now...Read More

I've been there with Ellen Burstyn in a lot of films, but my all-time favorite moment was the way she said to Bruce Dern's relentlessly boastful and mouthy character in The King of Marvin Gardens, "You're full of shit!" The frazzled, end-of-the-road, Uzi-spray impatience in her voice, I mean. It tells you she's said this to Dern so many times she can barely stand to hear it again, but she has to. Because he won't quit, because he can't, because he's gone over the falls and so has she.

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Tony Scott's lame ideas for reconstructing Walter Hill's The Warriors is another case of a hip Hollywood guy (and his chortling corporate backers) showing obesiance before the power of street machismo, or the wild west factor in urban culture. Establishing a bond with all this links to a general connection with urban audiences and presumed loyalty down the road. In short, a good business move.

You homies are the shit and the style...predatory turf monsters with fierce expressions and shaved heads and big developed biceps, and you know how fast and cool I can be. (Check out Domino...Read More

Catherine Hardwicke's The Nativity Story (New Line, 12.1) "lacks controversy," said New Line COO Rolf Mittweg to the N.Y. Times Rome correspondent Peter Kiefer, following a Sunday screening at the Vatican. "I think with The Passion, people wanted to see how bloody and gory this movie was. They wanted to see how far one would go to depict that story. This movie isn't political and doesn't make a statement in that regard." Hah! Mittweg seems to almost be saying, "Our film isn't very edgy. In fact, it's kinda tame."

Anyone in a marriage or a romantic relationship knows you don't air your messy feelings in public, much less at in front of rich industry peers. Keep it at home or in the car. But Kid Rock (i.e., Bob Richie ) doesn't get this, or didn't, in any event, at a party he and wife Pamela Anderson attended at the home of Universal honcho Ron Meyer a couple weeks ago, at which time his "male insecurity and major anger issues" erupted over Pamela's bit on Borat.

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Unlike the Academy, the Hollywood Foreign Press likes to keep things simple. If a movie is spoken in a foreign language and is also, you know, set somewhere off these shores, it's a contender for a Best Foreign Language Golden Globe award....even if a L.A.-based distributor funded it. The result, says Hollywood Reporter guy Gregg Kilday, is that Mel Gibson's Apocalypto and Clint Eastwood 's Letters From Iwo Jima "could" be in the running against Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others, Pedro Almodovar's Volver and Guillermo del Toro's ...Read More

Some faces are so authoritatively creepy they do more than stay in your memory; they seep into your psyche, your bones ...little pan flashes of something long buried. This guy -- I won't insult his iconic status by identifying him or mentioning the film he starred in -- got so far under my emotional skin when I was a kid that he'll probably stay with me into my next life.

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Sheigh Crabtree strikes again -- the second Riskybiz post in a 24-hour period. This one says (most) everyone at a recent Manhattan screening of Dreamgirls was delighted and applauding. She adds, however, that costar Jennifer Hudson didn't quite get a 100% approval rating. (One guy was saying Jennifer Holiday was better in the early '80s B'way show...read the item.) Speaking as a mixed-bag responder who knows other mixed baggers, I can say that if there's any one unanimous feeling about Dreamgirls...

After he suffered a bout of insomnia last Saturdaywhile staying at London's Ritz Hotel, Al Pacino reportedly "came down to the lobby at 2 am and instead of doing a jennifer Lopez or whatever and complaining and making all kinds of demands about having his room changed, he said he wanted to get to know the people who worked at such a great place" -- or so it says in this Mirror story. Pacino, I've been told, is in London working on a Looking for Richard-like documentary called Salomaybe, about Oscar Wilde...Read More

"Given all the publicity surrounding Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen may now be too well known, some say, to fool enough people into taking Bruno -- his forthcoming Universal project, which he'll star in and write and probably produce -- as seriously as is required to make the film work," according to a piece by L.A. Times writer Lorenza Munoz about Universal execs possibly feeling "buyer's remorse" about agreeing to fund and distribute Cohen's next comedy, about a gay guy named Bruno.

I could do a mass e-mailing of the New York film publicist community, but I might as well use this space to announce that Hollywood Elsewhere will be trolling the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn starting this Friday and throughout the rest of the month. Looking very much forward to (i.e., close to panting for) that very specific New York action and energy, along with the blessed wearing of scarves and overcoats.

I've agreed to a 12.1 review embargo on The Good German (Warner Bros., 12.15) but this Riskybiz item submitted by the Hollywood Reporter's Sheigh Crabtree about director Steven Soderbergh getting a "Bronx cheer" following a DGA New York screening two nights ago (i.e., Saturday) leaves an impression that this 1940s-era black-and-white drama is some kind of marginal embarassment and/or unintended hoot. (Crabtree reports that one guy in the audience went "puhleeze" and that a geezer asked Soderbergh during the q & a if he'd intended "to do a spoof or a parody of The Third ManRead More

Producer Saul Zaentz has been quoted by a German fantasy-film website called Ebenwald that Peter Jackson will direct The Hobbit for the Saul Zaentz Company. (I tried finding a mention of Saul Zaentz on the Ebenwald site, but nothing turned up.) Zaentz appparently acquired the rights to one or more works by Rings writer J.R.R. Tolkien in the mid '70s. The Hobbit "will definitely be shot by Peter Jackson," Zaentz has apparently said. "Next year The Hobbit rights will fall back to my company. I suppose that Peter will wait because he knows that ...Read More

A couple of months ago I mentioned the snob syndrome among the elite big-city film writers. I said "there's something vaguely arid and ingrown about this culture...a certain tendency to sidestep films with what an elitist would describe as plebian emotionalism." And now here's Time's Richard Corliss elaborating on this aversion as a prelude to a thumbs-up review of Darren Aronfosky's The Fountain.

"Movies critics can't agree on much, but there's one assumption most of them hold deeply without ever discussing it. It's that ...Read More

"Animation came in for a number of reasons. There were certain moments that weren't on film, especially the trial. We needed a way to show what was happening in the courtroom. We could have done it in renactments, or though talking heads, or we could have had courtroom drawings panned and scanned.

"But I thought animation would have served as commentary on the trial; Jerry Rubin called it a `cartoon show,' and when I read that quote, the bells went off." -- Director Brett Morgen talking to John Anderson in the N.Y. Times...Read More

Kevin Smith vs. Orlando Sentinel film critic Roger Moore -- good rantin', good readin'.

A well-reported piece by the San Francisco Chronicle's Ruthe Stein about odd bookings of specialty films. Basically about the "impact of a 7.8 earthquake" caused by the recent opening of the Century Centre plex, the overpowering of the indie-oriented Landmark chain, various trickle-down effects, etc.

"Devoted Bay Area moviegoers may feel like Alice Through the Looking Glass when they scan theater listings to locate the latest must-see specialty film [since] nothing seems to be playing where logic would dictate it should anymore," Stein writes.

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No one seems willing to spit out the truth about Superman II -- the Richard Donner Cut (Warner Home Video, 11.28), which is that it's a so-so, patience- straining thing to sit through...at best.

The '81 theatrical version was shaped by the fact that Donner, who had directed the original Superman and a good portion of part II, was fired by producer Ilya Salkind and replaced by Richard Lester...Read More

Revised 5-day holiday estimates based on Saturday numbers: Happy Feet will end up with $52,167,000, second-place Casino Royale with with $44,099,000 and Deja Vu (not doing quite as poorly as estimated a couple of days ago) with $29 million .

"He's a murderer and an artist, he's like a child and also like an old man, and he's like an animal, but there's something ethereal about him," says Ben Whishaw in describing Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the character he portrays in Tom Tykwer's Perfume (Paramount, 12.27), in a chat with N.Y. Times writer Coelli Carr. "Because he hardly ever says anything, you start to read his behavior and look at those tiny things -- posture, gait or the expression in the eyes -- that are usually secondary to words."

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Anne Thompson has linked to it, and Joe Leydon has linked to Anne Thompson linking to it. Here's the thing itself: a blunt, perceptive and (if you ask me) very courageous Michael Moore piece called "Cut and Run -- the Only Brave Thing to Do."

Today -- Sunday, 11.26.06 -- "marks the day that we will have been in Iraq longer than we were in all of World War II," he begins. "That's right. We were able to defeat all of Nazi Germany, Mussolini, and the entire Japanese empire in less...Read More

"Pour some extra vinegar on that popcorn -- the Borat effect has begun," observes the Toronto Star's Peter Howell. His basic thesis is that all comedic phenomenons and iconoclasts create spawns, and that Borat's success is unleashing a wave of imitators,wannabes and samplers. Hence the Michael Richards onstage "nigger" outburst at L.A.'s Laugh Factory. (Which led to Richards' explanation the other night on "Late Night with David Letterman.")

(l. to. r.) Michael Richards; still of Richards' Laugh Factory appearance; Sacha Baron Cohen

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Whatever the interest may be in the recently released DVD of Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar (1953), here's one of the more stirring moments -- Marlon Brando's "cry havoc" speech.

One of the best-written appreciations of Robert Altman's California Split I've read anywhere. The author is Tom Block; the site is called The High Hat.

'You know, we don't do things like you do in Hollywood, bling bling. Here, it's bling pow.'" -- pissed-off South African guy with a gun talking tough to Leonardo DiCaprio while conveying a reported threat to Djimon Honsou during filming of Blood Diamond, according to a story told by Honsou at a recent press conference and written up by L.A. Daily News critic and "Reel Deal" blogger Bob Strauss.

In an 11.23 L.A. Times piece about Robert Altman, Prairie Home Companion creator Garrison Keillor says when they first met he "tried to interest him in making a movie about a man coming back to Minnesota to bury his father, a winter movie. 'There haven't been many movies made in winter,' I said. And Altman replied, "You would quickly find out why.' He declined. 'In the end,' he said, 'the death of an old man is not a tragedy.'" (Joe Leydon sent me the call-out.)

Watched the trailer again for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Warner Bros., 7.13), and you're left with one main impression, which is that it's a hormonal coming-out party. Daniel Radcliffe has developed a weight-lifter's bull neck and has basically turned into Sammy Stud (the Katie Leung kissing scene, his plans to do Equus ...Read More

Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain "is visually intoxicating -- the images have a luminous psychedelic beauty -- and the film's themes emerge elegantly out of the story's intricately-looped tri-level structure. It's a new kind of science-fiction movie, and, unusually for that boys' club genre, probably a great date movie too. Mainly, though, as they used to say back in the Roger Corman days, it's a trip." -- MTV.com's Kurt Loder refraining the stoner mantra.

In her 11.25 piece called "No One To Lose To," N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd quotes former Times reporter Neil Sheehan, author of "A Bright Shining Lie," to wit:

"In Vietnam, there were just two sides to the civil war. You had a government in Hanoi with a structure of command and an army and a guerrilla movement that would obey what they were told to do. So you had law and order in Saigon immediately after the war ended. In Iraq, there's no one like that for us to lose to...Read More

Happy Feet bounced back yesterday from a very temporary Thanksgiving Day (i.e., Thursday) defeat at the hands of Daniel Craig's 007. The Birds tallied $15,692,015 on Friday compared to Casino Royale's $12,928,000...families out in force. Deck the Halls did $4,952,000, Borat $4,351,000, Santa Clause 3 $4,230,000, Stranger Than Fiction $2,461,000, Flushed Away $2,293,000 and Bobby $1750. In limited N.Y. and L.A. runs, The History Boys did about $36,000 in 7 theatres or $5140 a print -- okay but not much. (Figure a projected $132,000 for 5 days.) Fiction...Read More

One of my all-time favorite improvs in a Robert Altman film -- fast, loose, totally spur-of-the-moment -- is one spoken by Elliot Gould in The Long Goodbye.

Phillip Marlowe (Gould) is speaking to a couple of local officials in a small Mexican town about the death of old friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton ), whom Marlowe has always known deep down to be a frosty taker-user- manipulator. Speaking in typical heavily-accented, south-of-the-border English, one of the officials says, "You were acquainted with the deceased?" And Marlowe/Gould says, "The diseased...

Nine reasons why Robert Altman mattered, as assembled by Toronto Star critic Geoff Pevere: he was brilliant at ensemble pieces, he was phenomenally "in the zone" from '70 to '75, his pioneering use of multi-track, overlapping sound, he always packed lots of visual information into scenes and was sometimes into long takes (like that famous opening shot in The Player), he was a superb genre-deconstuctor...Read More

On 10.20, Hollywood Wiretap columnist Pete Hammond ran a piece about how playing real-life figures seems to usher in Oscar contender talk. Three or four days ago a very similar AP story by an anonymous writer was posted on MSNBC -- the exact same idea with a few more quotes.

Think of the presumed essence of Joe Queenan -- that very funny (often hilarious), always irreverent, smart-assed film/ culture writer -- and then imagine some middle-aged cultural regressive...some staunchly rural, long-of-tooth, Kentucky Fried Chicken-subsisting, V.F.W.- supporting yeehaw who watches Fox News. Once you've done that, and once you've hankie-dabbed the tears streaming down your cheeks following your latest re-reading of Tom Brokaw's "The Greatest Generation", tell me who wrote the following:

"When Borat was first released, blue-state sophisticates in New York and Los Angeles were delirious, overjoyed that Sacha Baron Cohen...Read More

Nothing going on and a draggy news day, so I recorded four mp3 dialogue clips: (a) echo-y, too bassy with hard-to-hear consonants and it works so much better if you can watch the actor's eyes; (2) same thing here, especially considering the unusual jump-cutting in this scene; (c) Cockney cursing; and (d) "you fuck up, you know what".

In a USA Today "Magic 8 Ball" piece, Scott Bowles is asked if this year will once again see a Clint vs. Marty showdown for Best Picture and director, and he answers that "all signs point to yes. While Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers hasn't been burning up the box office -- $32.9 million since its release Oct. 20 -- it continues to play well at academy screenings."

HE respectfully disputes this -- my understanding is that Flags...Read More

"When I grew up, everything was propaganda. We all thought that the Japanese tortured and killed people," Clint Eastwood recently said within earshot of L.A. Times writer Bruce Wallace during the Tokyo Film Festival . "But it's tough to swallow that everybody was that way. After all, some of the Japanese have a decent soul."

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"There's something cool about being around the vitality of youth. People who haven't sold out yet, who still have that gleam in their eye that hasn't been snuffed out by the studios." -- Kevin Smith talking to L.A. Times writer Dawn C. Chmielewski about a weekly mtvU show, "Sucks Less, With Kevin Smith."

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Somehow I never quite understood that Baz Luhrman's trouble-plagued, endlessly-prepping Australia, which will finally roll film in March with Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman in the leads, will basically be a down-under Red River. In telling his story of a risky Australian cattle drive occuring in mid to late 1941, Luhrman is looking at a very difficult and strenuous shooting schedule, partly because he intends to shoot au natural, or at least without the obvious augmentation of computer graphics.

Luhrman said several months ago that he intends to shoot Australia in the manner of ...Read More

Nancy Meyers, the director-writer of The Holiday (Columbia, 12.8), has been totally busted for putting in that Cary Grant-came-from-Surrey line in her film, which I briefly questioned in an item a couple of days ago. I'd always read that Grant was born and raised in Bristol, England, and that he never once lived in Surrey. Since Meyers and a Columbia publicity rep both declined to return calls about this matter on Wednesday, I openly asked if anyone could provide clues to the Grant-Surrey conundrum. This morning a Cary Grant historian named Nancy Nelson, author of "...Read More

"I'm feeling like a very large turd on a very thin stick. I'm holed up in bed and taking everything from sled-dog urine to powdered East Indian vulva -- maybe won't work tomorrow if I feel the same. I really feel bad for not showing up at your birthday bash but I really feel shitty and best stay in bed. I don't have much of a selection. I'm sure it will be a kick in the ass and I hate to miss it -- Happiest of birthdays to you, Charlie." -- text of a handwritten letter written by Marlon BrandoRead More

The big Thanksgiving Day box-office news...well, not exactly "big news" but it's certainly unwelcome as far as the Weinstein Co. is concerned. Emilio Estevez's Bobby took in a mere $1,104,000 yesterday in 1667 situations, which translates into rough $662 per screen. Too bad, but the film sadly followed the fate of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel on 6.4.88 -- initial cheers and hoopla at Toronto and the AFI Film Festivals and friendly encounters with friendly press, and then it left the podium and made its way through a mixed crowd of average Joes...blam...

The great Phillipe Noiret, the portly, droopy- faced French character actor whose three greatest performances were in Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso and Bertrand Tavernier's Coup de Tourchon and Life and Nothing But, died a day or two ago. A sad thing to report, but we're all getting there sooner or later -- no exceptions. Weep not for Phillipe, who lived a very full and succulent life.

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AICN's Drew McWeeny drove out to Universal a few days ago to see the not-yet-released DVD of Michael Mann's slightly longer "director's cut" of Miami Vice, and while satisfied -- pleased -- he wasn't exactly blown away. "I'm glad Universal is putting both the theatrical cut and the unrated alternate cut on disc, because I think they're both worthwhile. I really liked the film when I saw it, and I think this new cut has some interesting alternative choices, but it doesn't really change my feelings one way or another. All Mann has done is ...Read More

"Memories of dreary Sunday school classes come flooding back courtesy of The Nativity Story," Variety's Todd McCarthy wrote a couple of days ago. "Earnestly Hallmark-worthy to a fault, this stodgy addition to the cinematic religious-revival gravy train offers only a bit of Year One location realism to distinguish it from films of its kind made in the '50s and early '60s, though at least then it might have had the advantage of a score by the likes of Miklos Rozsa, Franz Waxman or Alfred Newman. Admirers of [director] Catherine Hardwicke...Read More

By saying yesterday that I hate eating big plates of food because of the way it makes me feel, I didn't mean to sound unthankful for a lot of things. I'd like to express thanks to the various forces -- parental guidance, genetics, fate -- for things having worked out for Hollywood Elsewhere as well as they have over the last couple of years. Those of us who are healthy and not too fat or (God forbid) affllicted with terrible diseases can be thankful for these things also. I'm very thankful for all the gifted people in this town...Read More

Yesterday The Envelope columnist Patrick Goldstein wrote a toast about four Oscar bloggers -- myself, Anne Thompson (Risky Biz blog), David Poland (The Hot Blog) and Tom O'Neil (Gold Derby). I'm thankful for the attention -- thanks, Patrick -- and especially for the following portion:

"Right now the writers who matter are the Oscar bloggers...Read More

The harder, blunter version of Brian Helgeland's almost eight-year-old Payback is coming out on Paramount Home Video in March '07, and it'll also show at the Santa Barbara Film Festival in late January. A good guy gave me a VHS of it a few days ago; I watched some of it this morning. It's smart and amusing in spurts, and I guess it's an improvement of sorts...but its not much of one. I found it a little too dour. That's one way of saying I still prefer John Boorman's Point Blank, the 1967 noir classic.

Both are based on Read More

It's hard to put my finger on a simple, pared-down "why", but this Ben Ratliff piece is one of the best-written impressions of the ongoing Pet Sounds tour -- Brian Wilson and his crew stopped at NYC's Beacon Theatre two nights ago -- I've ever read, and I've read dozens over the past few years.

I'm fairly loaded, I have lots of stuff in my house, I'm not all that sociable, and I miss my kids so I buy more stuff to make up the difference. So says Rick Moranis in this odd jotting in yesterday's N.Y. Times.

Tony Scott's Deja Vu is a box-office fizzle in relation to cost. Thanksgiving weekend projections put the 3-day earnings at $19,209,000 and the 5-day tally at $27,690,000. It cost a tidy amount (director Tony Scott and producer Jerry Bruckheimer don't shoot cheap, and Denzel Washington always gets his big fat fee, and they shot on location in post-Katrina New Orleans) and the weekend totals indicate that final domestic theatrical earnings won't exceed $60 or $70 million. Unless it does really big overseas, it's basically a bomb .

The other 3-day and 5-day Thanksgiving projections: #1 isRead More

Alfonso Curaron's Children of Men is "another sort of fairytale altogether, one cloaked in the mystique of dystopia. It's a film as unflinching in its bleakness as it is penetrating in its deep-seeded sentimentality. And in manifesting one of the most horrific visions of the future [that have been] yet committed to film, Cuaron has given us his masterpiece, the crowning achievement of 2006." -- Kris Tapley, In Contention.

Sometimes recordings don't work out, like this one of a chat I had last Monday with Flags of Our Fathers Adam Beach at the Four Seasons hotel. Four loud guys in business suits sat down two tables away and started telling each other jokes, and I knew if we didn't move right then and there the digital recording would be ruined. I should have suggested this to Beach, but I didn't. I told myself those four loud guys weren't so loud. Listen if you want, but it's a little bit faint and echo-y at times.

Adam Beach

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association is right, of course -- Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon's performances in The Departed are leads and not supporting. And yet Warner Bros. marketers have tried to separate Leo's undercover-cop performance in the Martin Scorsese drama with a proposed Best Supporting Actor nomination so it won't compete with his South African diamond-smuggler performance in Blood Diamond, which WB has put up for Best Actor.

The Envelope's Tom O'Neil reported the HFPA divergence fomr the Warner Bros. line earlier today.

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Fantasy -- the kind geared to the women who read Cosmopolitan -- is a very fundamental aesthetic in any Nancy Meyers film. Not just girly-girl fantasy, but historical fantasy as well. Case in point: a line in Meyers' new film The Holiday (Columbia, 12.8) declares that Cary Grant came from or had roots in the London suburb of Surrey. The problem is that it ain't so. I could be half-wrong and Grant may have lived in Surrey at one point, but I doubt it...and if I'm right, why would Meyers fabricate something about a famous actor's life? Read More

It's strange, but there's a bizarre scene in Nancy Meyers' The Holiday when Cameron Diaz punches her soon-to-be ex-boyfriend (played by Ed Burns) that almost works, and the same bit is shown in the Holiday trailer and it doesn't work at all. The reason is that the sound of the punch is different in the feature (i.e., fake but not blatantly so) than in the trailer.

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For months I've been feeling that former FAA bigwig Ben Sliney, who plays himself in Paul Greengrass's United 93, should be regarded as a Best Supporting Actor contender. It's a minority opinion, okay, but New York Post critic Lou Lumenick is an ally. And there's a lot more merit to this suggestion than you might think at first.

Ben Sliney at Hollywood's Renaissance Hotel -- 11.22.06, 10:35 am

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There is no peace to be had from Thanksgiving, ever...unless your idea of peace is having a bloated stomach and a feeling of being drugged and woozy and needing desperately to take a long walk. The only sense of thankfulness I presently have is due to Oscar season ad revenues. As for stuffing myself...forget it. I spoke Monday with Flags of Our Fathers costar Adam Beach (awfully nice guy) and he was in the fourth day of a ten-day fast. Meeting Beach and being told this was a message from the Health God...Read More

What a revoltin' development! Nikki Finke is reporting that Sony is paying $4 million to Akiva Goldsman to write what will technically be a sequel to The Da Vinci Code, the strangely popular adaptation on Dan Brown's best-seller that I saw once -- once -- at the Cannes Film Festival and will never, ever see again. Goldsman will be adapting Angels & Demons, which is actually a Da Vinci Code prequel. ("Robert Langdon's first adventure!") Brown, meanwhile, is now in the midst of writing an actual Da Vinci Code...Read More

I tried to find my California Split and The Long Goodbye DVDs earlier today...loaned out! But here's a pretty good McCabe and Mrs. Miller scene between Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, with Christie doing most of the talking.

"The New Line / Peter Jackson contretemps is just posturing on both sides of an ongoing negotation. There's too much money to be made by settling their differences, so settle they will -- after issuing a few inflammatory press releases first." -- a guy who seems to know everyone and is quite familiar with New Line corporate pyschology.

The forthcoming Xmas season is looking weak, weak....exhibitors are crying. Prior-to-Thanksgiving holiday-tracking is always one indicator, and the only title with any kind of potential heat (i.e., build factor) is Will Smith's The Pursuit of Happyness (Columbia, -- 12.20) -- 69, 35, 3. Otherwise nothing is over 6 or a 7 in the first choice category. Night at the Museum and Dreamgirls may ignite a month from now, but right now early tracking isn't pointing to anything really big -- nothing Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter level. It's almost all low-flamey.

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I've just heard about the death of the irreplacable, eternally influential Robert Altman. There are hundreds of things I could riff on, but death's honesty always seems to be a little too blunt -- too sudden -- when it comes to really special guys like Altman. I guess the Academy got around to giving him his gold-watch award last year none too soon. His health was getting shakier and shakier over the last three or four years.

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Isn't this the same funny trailer for Night at the Museum (20th Century Fox, 12.20) that's been kicking around since Labor Day, if not before? That Robin Williams/Teddy Roosevelt bit is hilarious. (Meaning it'll be tired when we finally see the film.) Thing is, it says "January 2007...Read More

"While many critics were impressed by Children of Men's virtuosity and bravado," writes Hollywood Reporter/Risky Biz blogger columnist Anne Thompson, "the industry types were seeing a downer film that's going to lose money. The movie is a brilliant exercise in style, but it's another grim dystopian look at our future -- like Blade Runner or Fahrenheit 451 -- that simply cost too much money."

Wells to thoughtful industry types: (a) Yeah, it's "grim" but, as you well know, only in a general milieu-ish way -- it's mostly an action-driven chase movie...Read More

Before reading this item, please click on this mp3 file -- it'll set the proper mood. Done? Here we go: We all know what the words "directed by Nancy Meyers" mean -- glossy, carefully lighted comedies about smart-but- quirky career women who (a) usually have shiny copper pots hanging in their kitchens and (b) have been hurt in past relationships but are looking to make a new unlikely relationship work, even if they start out hating the guy.

If you look at the trailer for The Holiday...Read More

According to a letter from Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh posted late last night on theonering.net, New Line Cinema has parted ways with Jackson/Walsh over a lawsuit that they had brought aainst the distributor tied to Fellowship of the Ring revenues (i.e., product licensing, "differences of opinion", etc.).

The positive-minded Jackson/Walsh had been expecting settlement on the lawsuit, which would then be followed by a deal to start work on The Hobbit plus a Lord of the Rings prequel. However, according to the letter, "last week [New Line bigwig] Mark Ordesky called Ken Kamins...Read More

As the Bagger points out, the somewhat unwitting and definitely appalled Borat costar Cindy Streit is more than a killjoy. She's also not very hip. And she may not be all that smart. Of all the angry reactions from Borat participants who didn't get what was really happening when the cameras rolled, this may be the funniest.

46 years ago, or roughly 35 years before Harvey Weinstein began rewriting the Oscar campaign book, Burt Lancaster voiced some angry allegations to the Saturday Evening Post about certain unsavory practices involving Oscar award balloting and politicking. (Thanks to Michael Bergeron for sending this along.)

Three months after winning the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Elmer Gantry (i.e., when it was safe to do so), Burt Lancaster let loose.

A trailer for Evan Almighty (Universal, 6.22.07), the most grossly expensive CGI comedy of all time with the least funny, most tiresome premise in the world. The mere threat of this film seems to have undone all the good vibes that Little Miss Sunshine extended to poor Steve Carell, who's clearly playing to the cheap seats in this apparent Tom Shadyac monstrosity. God's (i.e., Morgan Freeman...

Pat Broeske has written a N.Y. Times piece about a couple of planned duelling biopics about the legendary jazz trumpeter Miles Davis... fascinating. The movie world certainly needs another biopic (or two) about a troubled genius musician who had drug problems and wasn't the most likable or admirable guy in the world. I mean, that's a story that absolutely needs to be told.

The Davis film most likely to get shot is called Miles and Me (shitty title!); the other one is being assembled by the Davis estate and may star Don Cheadle.

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Much admired screenwriter Eric Roth is making the rounds to raise awareness about his work on Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd (Universal, 12.22), which, as he promised in a phone chat a few days ago, has a lot more in the way of adult texture than most of the films out now. Here's a N.Y. Times interview piece by Kris Tapley, out today.

Here's a 39-minute portion of yesterday's conversation with Children of Men director-cowriter Alfonso Cuaron. A lot of it won't add up for those who haven't seen the film, but Cuaron's obvious intelligence and his very precise choice of words deliver a kind of contact high if you listen for a few minutes. That and his laughter, which has a wonderful eruption and spontaneity.

Cuaron really knows his stuff, and he obviously respects to the nth degree and swears by the great Emmanuel "Chivo" Lubezki...Read More

"It's kiddie season at the movies, and children are everywhere you look: brandishing machine guns in Blood Diamond, fighting for their lives in the desert in Babel, suffering from mortal wounds in Pan's Labyrinth, being blown to bits in Deja Vu, sleeping in public toilets in The Pursuit of Happyness and getting massacred in The Nativity Story," John Horn and Chris Lee's 11.19 L.A. Times piece begins.

"Hollywood historically has steered away from depicting children in peril, typically limiting any life-or-death struggles to cartoonishly violent genre films such as The Shining, Aliens...Read More

There's no question that Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (Picturehouse, 12.29) is his best work to date -- a finely woven, emotionally haunting fairy tale of the first order. It's one of del Toro's semi-realistic films in the tradtion of Chronos and The Devil's Backbone, but a very dark one also. I meant to write a longish piece after seeing it in Cannes last May but I didn't. Now I'm figuring the right time will be a week or two before it opens in late December.

The reason why I delayed on writing a Pan's...Read More

TomKat's wedding -- a gala affair that happened yesterday inside Odescalchi Castle in Bracciano, Italy -- reportedly cost a whopping $2.5 million. It seems a wee bit harsh for a N.Y. Post story to report that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes "pledged to live a wacky life of Scientology"..but the fact is that the ceremony was carried out by a Scientology minister, and that the secretive David Miscavige, the top dog in the Scientology church heirarchy, was Cruise's best man. I love this shot of early evening fireworks in the wake of a huge afternoon rainstorm....nice.

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The gap closed yesterday between Casino Royale and Happy Feet. The two are going to end up so neck-and-neck this evening -- one studio's estimate has Bond finishing the weekend with $41,122,000 and the Birds grabbing $41,254,000 -- that their respective distributors, Sony/Columbia and Warner Bros., will probably be inflating the figures so as to position their film as the winner.

Right now, the Birds appear to be ahead of the Bond by $132,000...a nose-hair...but let's see if the Bond spinners try to b.s. their way into a victory of some kind...Read More

A heartbreaking N.Y. Times story by Alex Mindlin about the closing of Movie Palace, a locally-owned Upper West Side Manhattan video store (105th and Broadway) that's been run in a very neighborhood-friendly way by the same impassioned semi-ecentric, Gary Dennis, since 1984. The building has been sold and the new money-grubbing owner, a guy named Ralph Braha, more than doubled Dennis' rent. And we all know the name of that tune.

"Like the movie theaters that preceded them, video stores are fast becoming relics...Read More

Genius Brand

"Best Picture of the Year" means different things to different folks. For some (most, I suspect) it means being the most fundamentally "entertaining" -- the one that will most likely reach the largest middlebrow audience. (Which is why a lot of people are suddenly behind Dreamgirls.) For others, it's the film that's the most soul-soothing or life-capturing (Volver, Babel, Little Miss Sunshine, The Lives of Others ). Or that seems the most complete and fully realized according to its own particular rules (The Departed, The Queen, Pan's Labyrinth, United 93).

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The Birds are beating Bond, by not by much. Happy Feet is expected to end up with about $42,595,000 (3804 theatres, $11,199 a print). Martin Campbell's Casino Royale will be close behind with a projected tally of $40,470,000 (3434 theatres, $11795 a print) -- the Daniel Craig experiment has succeeded and they're out of the woods.

The third-place Borat will be off about 47% with an expected Sunday-night tally of $15,052,000. Santa Clause 2 will be off 48%. As expected, Stranger Than Fiction...Read More

"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." -- quote attributed to Jesus Christ in the Gospel of Thomas, and used in the opening credits of Amy Berg's Deliver Us From Evil (Lionsgate).

To salute the limited opening of Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation (Fox Searchlight), here's my original riff from the Cannes Film Festival. (Six months ago...jeez, time flies.) I know I was one of the first journos to use the description "Traffic with meat." That's still the best three-word description I can think of.

I used to live on a second floor of a home in the Hollywood hills, on Franklin Avenue, and my landlord, believe it or not, was Mitch Mitchell, the frizzy-haired, British-born drummer for the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain has put me into a Hendrix receptivity realm for the last couple of days, and one res