"Things have been so moribund for so long in the [James] Bond business that it was always going to take some major defibrillation to jerk it back to life," comments New Yorker critic Anthony Lane in the latest issue. "Die Another Day, the last film, was a gruelling nadir, although the producers would be right to point out that it earned $450 million dollars. This means that the sight of Pierce Brosnan driving an invisible car, though bound to dismay every Bond-revering adult, was catnip to the larger constituency of teenage boys, who were comfortable with a film that felt like a...Read More

Having spoken to a "rather large" percentage of 90-some Hollywood Foreign Press members, The Envelope's Tom O'Neil is reporting that at this somewhat early stage of the game that Golden Globe voters "are absolutely crazy about Babel, The Queen and The Departed.

"The other two slots for best drama picture will probably go to two of these three -- Flags of Our Fathers, Bobby or World Trade Center. They're not responding gushingly to The Pursuit of Happyness" -- I observed yesterday that Gabriele Muccino's film seems to be sliding-- "but they love Will Smith's performance and plan to nominate him.

The Smoking Gun has posted eight (8) MySpace shots of lardbucket Justin Seay, one of the fine young gentlemen trying to sue the Borat producers over claims he and his pals were coerced by the film's producers into signing a release while they were bombed. And as Defamer's Mark Lisanti has already observed, the shots are persuasive evidence that Seay's claim that he was pressured or led or goaded into a state of debilitating intoxication is bullshit.

John Travolta and Michael Madsen as the twin brothers of Vic and Vincent Vega descending upon Los Angeles to avenge the deaths of Vic (drilled by Tim Roth's Mr. Orange in Reservoir Dogs) and Vincent (grease-gunned by Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction) in a new Vega Brothers movie? That''s the dumbiest sequel set-up I've ever heard in my life. Tarantino must be losing his mind. Fuck what happened in Dogs and Fiction...really, to hell with story logic. Just bring the brothers back and put them into some heavy-shit situations and just do it. Did anybody give a damn when Travolta and Samuel...Read More

I've made no secret about being a fool for Taschen books, and damned if I haven't gotten into another one -- a making-of-Babel coffee-table book composed of 250 or more shots taken during the location shooting in Morocco, Mexico and Japan. Good viewing, good revisiting, good immersion. Better if you've seen the movie, but stirring either way.

Babel director Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu explains a gesture he wants from costar Cate Blanchett (l.) as Brad Pitt (playing her husband) listens

The 302-page book was edited by by Maria Eladia Hagerman, who's had the honor, intrigue and adventure...Read More

Mel Gibson's Apocalypto (Touchstone, 12.8) needs to make it with a much broader demographic than just Latinos and Native Americans to get any kind of decent traction, much less lift off the runway. A near-ecstatic thumbs-up comment from Edward James Olmos in a Robert Welkos L.A. Times article is insufficient persuasion. Olmos is responding to an ethnic heritage issue (Apocalypto is about ancient Mayans) as well as cinematic chops, and therefore can't be trusted.

Gibson, Icon chief Bruce Davey, Rogers & Cowan publicist Alan Neirob and Disney publicist Dennis Rice need to get WASP and Jewish...Read More

I first wrote about Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd (Universal, 12.22) last August, at which time a three-hour version had been research-screened and, I was told, deemed too long. That was three months ago, and now comes word that the Eric Roth-scripted CIA drama isn't going to screen for press or awards groups until 12.4. Nothing wrong with that -- there's a certain distinction in being the last major film to be shown.

But if you were running things and wanted to get the maximum bang out of a film like this, which obviously betokens quality-level viewing of one...Read More

This Sun story by Emily Smith says Borat star Sacha Baron Cohen was repeatedly slugged on the streets of Manhattan a week or so ago. It allegedly happened after he approached a guy and said, "I like your clothings. Are nice! Please may I buying? I want have sex with it." (That's a pretty exact quote -- was Smith tape-recording the encounter?) The story says the guy "took one look at Cohen and punched him in the face, " after which Cohen "yelled for help but was slugged again and again."

Hold up...he yelled for help like Jerry Lewis would have...Read More

First Ross Johnson's Deja Vu, blow-up-the ferry-so-it-looks-like-9/11 piece, and now a fawning, all-too-obliging Jerry Bruckheimer profile by N.Y. Times reporter Laura Holson.

The stink of smugness on the set of Top Car (i.e., Days of Thunder).

An honest look at Bruckheimer would acknowledge the obvious, which is that his action films of the mid to late '90s had a signature element -- super-sexy visuals, sharply-crafted scripts, macho wit, an underlying smarty-pants jocularity -- and today that element is gone. If and when some enterprising masochist writes a detailed, definitive Bruckheimer career analysis, the gutting...Read More

Dreamgirls may blow everyone away on Wednesday and sweep aside all the weak sister Best Picture competitors (two of which happen to be Flags of Our Fathers and World Trade Center... sorry but it's true) but this is a bottom-line fact: Pedro Almodovar's Volver and Florian Henckel- Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others are profoundly good films -- first-rate heart movies that portray how tough life can be in jarring, vibrant terms -- and they're connecting with people all over (I 've been hearing and feeling this). The foreign- tongue, foreign-produced thing will, I suppose, work against them but they definitely deserve full-on consideration...Read More

Reader Mike Sells claims to have seen Dreamgirls and says "it delivers on the level of razzle-dazzle movie-movie spectacle more than anything else this year, with lots of emotional peaks and valleys and a big tearjerking moment at the very end. The story is definitely less contained than the one in Chicago, but works very well on the level of an ensemble saga. Loved it overall." Chicago 's story was "contained" in what way? Because it was mainly about shallow greedy hustlers? Is that what he means?

The general reaction to Gabriele Muccino's The Pursuit of Happyness (Columbia, 12.15) -- the Will Smith-and-his-son- sleeping-in-bathrooms movie that's based on a real-life story -- has been politely positive all around, but gradually the politeness has given way to little candor farts here and there, and the upshot is that folks are finally saying it's not a Best Picture contender.

Don't get me wrong, it's said to be very nice and warm, but "Frank Capra-esque... emotionally affecting...tiny but timely...light...a reach." We know what that those words mean. An affecting heart movie, a likely audience hit, a Best Actor nomina- tion for Will...Read More

For the first ten days of the run of Dreamgirls (i.e., Friday, 12.15 to Sunday, 12.24), which is strictly a New York, L.A. and San Fran thing, interested parties will be charged $25 a ticket on a reserved-seat basis. The high-prestige movies used to open in New York and L.A. on a reserved-seat "roadshow" basis back in the late '50s and '60s. Still...$50 bucks for two people plus popcorn and whatnot?

DreamWorks is looking to create an aura of specialness with industry and media types by doing this, but cash-wise they're basically looking to attract gays and the "bling" crowd. This is...Read More

The older Borat fans lined up yesterday in stronger than anticipated numbers, and so the projected weekend tally has been kicked up to $28,098,000 (according to one studio estimate), or a flat $29 million (according to Box Office Mojo) or $28.6 million (according to MCN's Len Klady). The cume is now $67.8 million or thereabouts. A guy told me yesterday he and a couple friends went to a 10 pm show last Wednesday somewhere near the Marina, and that it was damn near sold out. I'm guessing Borat will crest $100 million in about 10 days, give or take. Perhaps as soon...Read More

Asked by N.Y. Times editors to choose five comedies they'd want in their knapsack if they were stranded on a remote desert island (i.e., one with electricity, a 36" Sony flat screen, a table to put it on, a DVD player and an easy chair), none of these funny-ass professionals -- Will Ferrell, Judd Apatow, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, Catherine O'Hara, Bernie Mac, Chris Elliott, Christopher Guest, Fred Willard, David Cross, Ricky Gervais, Santiago Segura, Anna Faris plus four others who don't have very recognizable names -- chose Some Like It Hot, okay? Billy Wilder's greatest film ever! Recount!

In an otherwise well-reported, technically aware N.Y. Times piece about how director Steven Soderbergh made The Good German (Warner Bros., 12.15) the old-fashioned 1940s way with black and white photography, Michael Curtiz-era lenses, boom mikes and the like, Dave Kehr doesn't mention the most visually obvious period touch of all -- the fact that German has been matted on the sides to give it a 1.66 to 1 aspect ratio rather than today's standard Academy ratio of 1.85 to 1.

1.66 aspect ratio image, which is how The Good German more or less looks when projected...

In an 11.12.06 N.Y. Times story by Ross Johnson about Jerry Bruckheimer and Tony Scott's Deja Vu (Disney, 11.22), the details and background of an ultra-realistic explosion -- one that was surely inspired on some level by the 9.11.01 Armageddon -- are explained.

The World Trade Center explosions are specifically referenced in the following passage in Johnson's story when Bill Marsilli, one of the film's screenwriters, describes his reaction to the Deja Vu fireball: "I saw these incredible flames and I just burst into tears. My first thought was 'My God, what have I done?'"

It's not a rumor -- several of the performances in Karen Moncrief's The Dead Girl (First Look, 12.29) are knockout. And I'm not talking about efforts by guys. This is an honest, penetrating but extremely maudlin film about women suffering greatly -- the term "deeply depressing" doesn't begin to describe -- and yet it's a wow on a case-by-case, actress-by-actress basis.

Brittany Murphy's inhabiting of a damaged-goods, irrevocably doomed prostitute/ absentee mom is prickly, agitated and full-on. She's both pathetic and breathtak- ing. It's a cliche-ish thing to say that Murphy has expanded her range...Read More

The loyalty and respect factors among the media in the elite Clint Club run so deep that until very recently, no one had seriously considered actually looking the esteemed director of Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima in the eye and saying straight from the shoulder, "You've made an honorable film but it's not a homer or even a triple, so don't expect great waves of support from us when it comes to critic awards." None of the loyalists could ever bring themselves to actually say the words. But now that Flags is sinking fast with the public (it's losing...Read More

The Democratic surge last Tuesday -- "Voters were sick of phony swaggering, blustering and bellicosity, absent competency and accountability [and] were ready to trade in the deadbeat Daddy party for the sheltering Mommy party," in the view of N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd -- is further proof that the winds are favoring for a Barack Obama run at the presidency, and so there really isn't any need to try and corner the guy. It doesn't matter what he said or didn't say to George Clooney because there's almost no way he won't be going for it.

Borat's Sunday-night total will be just north of $25,000,000...maybe a bit higher when all is said and done. (It did $9,546,000 last night.) Flushed Away and The Santa Clause 3 will come in at #2 and #3 -- the former, off 15%, is projected to hit $15,918,000, and the latter, off 19%, will end up with close to $15,715,000.

The fourth-place Stranger Than Fiction will have an okay $14,576,000 by Sunday night with $6490 a print. (Nothing to frown about, but hold the champagne.) Saw III will be fifth with $6.046,000. Sixth-place Babel is doing fine in the blue cities but is...Read More

The Guardian's Joe Queenan is brutally writing off Scarlett Johansson...dissing, dismissing...tossing her onto the slag heap. "Somewhere along the line" -- right after Lost in Translation, he means -- "people who should have known better began to cast Johansson in roles for which she was not suited. And once the actress was asked to play anyone other than a 20-something Yank born and raised on the east coast in the waning years of the 20th century, it became apparent that she wasn't much of an actress.

"Listless and vacant in The Girl With The Pearl Earring, Johansson was hopelessly miscast as...Read More

The Envelope's Tom O'Neil is reporting that Miramax strategists yesterday decided to not submit Venus star Peter O'Toole in the Golden Globe competition for a Best Actor in a Comedy category, apparently out of concern that Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat performance might ace him out. So they've entered O'Toole into the Best Actor in a Drama category instead.

To which I can only wonder why Miramaxers thought O'Toole should have been in the Best Actor in a Comedy slot in the first place. Venus is amusing here and there -- arch, whimsical, spirited -- but there's no way anyone in...Read More

At the very end of Universal's The Good Shepherd trailer a subtitle appears: The Untold Story About the Birth of the CIA. Well, yeah...I guess. But Robert De Niro's spy drama is basically a psychological portrait of a generic workaholic, and the theme is about how an insatiable need for work, earnings, discipline and productivity has a way of eventually separating the workaholic from everything and everyone else. It's a portrait, in short, of tens of millions of people out there whose marriages are slowly dying on the vine, whose children are growing up alone, whose health is suffering because they eat...Read More

Former Los Angeles Times, Variety and Entertainment Weekly reporter Anita Busch -- whom accused wiretapper Anthony Pellicano tried to intimidate a few years ago with that dead fish "STOP!" message left on the windshield of her car -- has alleged in a civil lawsuit that former CAA honcho and talent manager Michael Ovitz "participated with indicted private investigator Anthony Pellicano and others to intimidate and threaten her."

Ovitz's attorney James Ellis told L.A. Times reporters Andrew Blankstein and Greg Krikorian that his"client "had nothing to do with this. It's unfortunate that Ms. Busch has chosen to involve him in this matter."

In Open City, Paisan, Europa, Stromboli and other films by legendary Italian neorealist Roberto Rossellini, the "reality principle is ephemeral and profound. He helped usher the world back into cinema by mixing authentic people and locations in with actors and studio sets. But neo-realist directors like Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica do not, to paraphrase the critic Andre Bazin, simply deck out a formal story with touches of reality, as if reality were bits of tinsel.

"Instead, they offer fragments of reality that retain all of its mystery and ambiguity and whose meaning we piece together, much as the characters do. Others...Read More

Entertainment Weekly's Steve Daly has been shown Dreamgirls (DreamWorks, 12.15) and has seen "some arresting stuff," he proclaims. But he doesn't explain in great detail what stuff he's talking about. The piece is basically a blah-blah tap dance that delivers almost nothing. In terms of what we want to hear, I mean.

There are two minor chickenshit reveals. Daly writes that Beyonce Knowles is "resplendent in a disco-era silver-lame cape and long, corkscrew-curl wig." He also says costar Jennifer Hudson kicks splendid ass. Daly declares that "judging from an early look at Dreamgirls, director Bill...Read More

A fond farewell to Jack Palance, a great character actor whom, during his heyday in the '50s and '60s, exuded a sublime aura of sinister silkiness. Palance, a big guy with cheekbones you could shave roast beef with, died today at age 85 (or possibly 87) at his home in Montecito, near Santa Barbara.

Palance's first big career score was playing the hired gun "Jack Wilson" in George Stevens ' Shane, a guy so creepy and reptilian that a dog in the film would always get up and leave the room when he walked in. He...Read More

Catherine Hardwicke's The Nativity Story (New Line, 12.1) has screened this week and will junket this weekend, and I've been told "it's a very nicely made Christmas movie...it's one of those films that The Passion has begotten and is clearly aimed at the audience that loved that film. It definitely delivers a traditional spiritual capturing of Christmas, which is something Hollywood rarely does."

Alexander Siddig

He's saying, in other words, that it's sweeter (his first term was "more sugar coated') than, say, Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. "It's very well made but it's definitely...Read More

"The Apocalypto word has seeped out," writes Variety editor Peter Bart. "Small screenings of the still-uncompleted film are quietly taking place, [and] from Mel Gibson's dark, troubled mind has emerged yet another brilliant exercise in filmmaking, extremely violent, yet compelling. The inner demons that play havoc with his personal life continue to energize his creative vision.

"But how will his work be judged? The film is being released not just as Apocalypto, but as Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. Will the very community that understandably has been offended by Gibson's inebriated diatribes be willing to pass fair judgment...Read More

Those erudite and sophisticated young men who shared a scene in a trailer with Sacha Baron Cohen in the last third of Borat -- you know, the ones who somehow come off as drunken low-life cretins -- are suing everyone, says TMZ.com, because they claim they were told the film wouldn't be shown in the U.S. and they're embarassed. These guys are obviously animals (they make John Belushi's Bluto look like Averell Harriman) and yet they're claiming they've suffered "humiliation, mental anguish, and emotional and physical distress, loss of reputation, goodwill and standing in the community..." because the movie has been released...

Defamer's Mark Lisanti reported yesterday that Inland Empire director David Lynch is "RIGHT NOW sitting on the corner of Hollywood and La Brea with a cow on a leash and a picture of Laura Dern that says 'For Your Consideration.'" Lynch is obviously desperate, but his oddball streak is why most of us love the guy and a stunt like this is vintage.

Lynch "also has a sign that says 'without cows there would be no cheese in the Inland Empire.' This is one of those things that a person needs to see. I wish...Read More

"Black America should have been singing hosannas about the ascendancy of Condoleezza Rice" because "it is time to celebrate the New Black Americans -- those who have sealed the Deal, who aren't beholden to liberal indulgence any more than they are to the disdain of the hard Right," screenwriter John Ridley has written in the December Esquire. "It is time to praise blacks who are merely undeniable in their individuality and exemplary in their levels of achievement.

"But Condi was Republican. So never mind. Never mind she'd spent a lifetime facing down racism. Born in...Read More

As Paul Newman says to Robert Redford in The Sting, "Revenge is for suckers." Meaning that it doesn't really satisfy, not finally, and that to move on with your life you have to give up your hates and resentments because they'll only pull you down in the end. But how do put aside your rage when the people you're looking to settle a score with have not only murdered your mother (or so you've been led to thnik) but hundreds of thousands of innocent people?

We're talking about a young Rwandan guy named J.B. Rutagarama, the director...Read More

Peter Parker's dark side takes over and Luke becomes Darth...revenge...just to underline things, Spider-Man hangs the red-and-blue suit on a hook in the closet and puts on a dark grey one instead..."this guy killed my uncle, and he's still out there!!"...he means Thomas Haden Church's "Sandman"...a possible marriage to Kirsten Dunst's Mary Jane Watson is threatened by her shock and dismay at Peter Parker becoming an Angel of Vengeance ..."what's happened to you?"..could this be the end of Spider-Man?....a different kind of energy for Part 3, fine, but the same bullshit regardless...a far more interesting Tobey Maguire performance (how could it not...Read More

After trying for nearly a week to get hold of an mp3 file of Bobby Kennedy's "mindless menace of violence" speech that's heard during the final moments of Bobby -- it easily constitutes the most moving portion of Emilio Estevez's film-- I discovered today that it's the final track on the original motion picture soundtrack. Thanks to the Weinsten Co. publicist who sent it over today. It's hard to hear the words with the music mixed in, but give it a listen -- it really sinks in.

Once again, an upcoming longish movie with a moody, curiously textured canvas that's trying to deliver something other than the usual boilerplate ingredients (in this case something Malicky or Peckinpah-ish or Leone-like, or perhaps all three) is being punished for this commercial transgression while studio execs are stalling the release while they work on pressuring the filmmaker(s) to trim scenes and/or otherwise give it a significant re-think.

The offender (and I realize I'm already sounding redundant, given the two recent items posted over the last few days) is Andrew Dominik's The...Read More

Here's a site that lets you futz around with music and images from Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain...okay. Obviously a kind of promotional "Hail Mary" pass but fine. Clearly, curiously, not enough people are getting into this film. It has only a 50% positive Rotten Tomatoes rating. I told Aronofsky when I saw it late last summer than anyone who's taken LSD or mescaline should definitely be receptive to it. Not to be overly simplistic, but could some of the difficulty come down to the fact that not enough people out there are sufficiently "experienced"? (Well....I am.) Those on the fence may...Read More

Running a link to material as dusty and creaky as this is pretty close to unpardonable, but this YouTube video of Sacha Baron Cohen's visit to the Jon Stewart show is truly fascinating. Cohen's natural British accent is mesmerizing...in a very relaxed and affable way. He's witty as shit. On top of which (and for some reason I find this extra-surprising) his hair is thinning. For me, it revives the whole Borat thing because now there's an engaging real-life guy behind the mask. (The James Lipton story is hilarious, by the way.) Cohen needs to try a different Borat p.r. mode...Read More

The coming weekend looks like another Borat crowning, although I don't yet have an exact screen count tally. The other significant trackers are Casino Royale (85, 39. 10), Deja Vu (78, 31, 7), Stranger Than Fiction (68, 37. 7) and Bobby (60, 37, 3). For numerous reasons, the excellent Babel (52, 25, 5) is in the same awareness-and-definite interest ballpark as Ridley Scott's A Good Year (51,18, 4).

All I was trying to do was get to Josh Horowitz's story about Judd Apatow declaring that Borat should be an Oscar Best Picture contender, but the MTV.com's site is way too layered and complicated and show-offy. Way too much stuff that needs to load before getting to the story. Wells to MTV.com webmaster(s) -- please let guys like me access Horowitz's material without trying to saturate my head with all of your empty-ass, sub-literate "whoa, dude" audio-visual bullshit .

The best Borat news of the week -- banned in Russia. "The film contains material that some viewers may consider offensive to certain nationalities and religions," Federal Agency for Culture and Cinematography minister Yury Vasyuchkov has explained to local press.

Variety's Moscow correspondent Tom Birchenough has reported that the ban "is likely the first time that a non-pornographic movie has been banned [in Russia]...plenty of hard-core porn movies succeed in being licensed by the agency."

Local distributor Gemini had intended to give Borat "a medium-range release" starting on 11.30. Gemini spokesperson Alexander Kovalenko told Birchenough he was still considering...Read More

Condolences to the friends and family of Ed Bradley, the legendary, steady-eyed 60 Minutes correspondent who died, according to Variety, sometime earlier today at age 65. He was felled by lukemia, which he'd been reportedly coping with for some time. The Variety obit says Bradley won 19 Emmys during his career at CBS, which began in 1971 when he joined as a stringer in the Paris bureau...[he] was transferred to Saigon the year after and was wounded covering the war in Cambodia." It also says that "after the semi-retirement of Mike Wallace in 2005, Bradley became the longest-serving full-time 60 Minutes correspondent...Read More

I wasn't invited to Wednesday night's Westwood screening of Casino Royale (a kind of punishment, I presume, for having dissed Sony's magnetic fall trio -- Marie Antoinette, Stranger Than Fiction, Running With Scissors -- with too much vigor) but Variety's Todd McCarthy attended, and he obviously sped home and speed-wrote his rave review and had it posted hours later.

And he's made two encouraging proclamations -- Daniel Craig is the studliest, most Ian Fleming-esque Bond since Sean Connery, and that the film's low-tech, somewhat underproduced quality is very agreeable thing. For 007 purists, at least.

Reconsidering Lives

I spoke early Wednesday evening with Florian Henckel- Donnersmarck, the 33 year-old director of the gripping, pulverizing German-language thriller The Lives of Others (Sony Pictures Classics), which is all but a dead lock for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination.

Florian Henckel-Donnersmarck at the Beverly Wilshire hotel -- Wednesday, 11.8.06, 6:05 pm.

A huge favorite at the Telluride Film festival and the biggest hit of the Toronto Film festival after Borat, The Lives of Others won't open in a conventional commercial sense until 2.9.07. L.A. audiences will get an early peek...Read More

Agents are beefing to L.A. Times reporter John Horn about not being allowed to vote in the Oscar competition. Agents are not all Ari Gold types. They do a lot of creative facilitating, of course, and that's definitely an important part of the process. But there's been continued stiff resistance to allowing them access to the ballot box. Right now the academy's position is that "membership is extended to people who make the art," says an Academy spokesperson, "[but] not people who provide services, however valuable, to the people who make the art."

Revised due to reader input: The only somewhat younger, new-to-the-game persons in Mark Olsen's L.A. Times/The Envelope piece who have any hope of generating any kind of Oscar heat is Dreamgirls supporting actress hopeful Jennifer Hudson and The Queen's Michael Sheen, a best supporting actor contender. That's it...the list goes no further.

N.Y. Times guy David Carr (a.k.a. "the Bagger") listens to director-screenwriter Billy Ray (Shattered Glass) expound during an American Film Market panel. in Santa Monica. "It's difficult out there, but it always has been," Ray comments. "If your goal is to write or direct for a living and make a contribution to the culture, you are choosing something tough. If I could be happy doing something else, I would."

I presume Ray isn't delighted with the status of 102 Minutes, a script adaptation of Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn's 9/11 book that Ray wrote for Mike DeLuca 's Sony-based...Read More

Say what you will about Emilio Estevez's Bobby (Weinstein Co., 11.17), but it seems to have tapped into something fairly strong with the over-50 set. Or it did last night, anyway, when it screened at Pete Hammond's KCET class out at the TV Academy in North Hollywood. It was election night, of course, and perhaps people were reflecting back on those old Bobby Kennedy highs. Or maybe the movie just got to them. The crowd, in any event, really responded when the lights came up and Hammond introduced Estevez.

"It was the longest and strongest applause...Read More

Something head-scratchy this way comes: (a) earlier today Movie City News put up a link to the Golden Trailer Awards (which MCN has listed on its own page under the title "Notepad: What's Happening now"), and linked to a trailer for Patrick Reade Johnson's 5-25-77, a black-hole movie (shot eons ago but still no distributor) about a geeky Illinois teenager (based on Johnson himself) whose life is changed by the influence of mid '70s Steven Spielberg movies and particularly by the debut of Star Wars in May of '77 (hence the title); (b) I went to the Read More

Digital remixes of old hits are generally irksome -- they tend to make original cuts sounds cheap in a clubber/house-music sort of way -- and I hate the idea of any musical show that launched in Las Vegas of all places -- still the #1 Middle American mecca for plastic, get-drunk-and- jump-off-the-roof-of-the-casino Sodom & Gomorrah wallowings -- but I'm feeling a little differently about some of these Beatles tracks.

This Strawberry Fields one in particular. (Here's a Real Audio link.) Everybody read last June about original Beatles producer George Martin and son Giles remixing...Read More

In the wake of the Democratics winning a solid majority in the House and (too soon to tell but odds are favoring) a bare majority in the Senate, Donald Rumsfeld has just announced he's stepping down as Secretary of Defense. Feels like a one-two punch to me...clearly a sign of cracks in the resolve of the Iraq War-supporting Bush cabal. This has to be the best pop-the-champagne day for Bush-loathing lefties in a long while. Where are the glasses?

Nine and a half weeks remain before the polls will close on Academy nominations -- the drop-dead hour being 5 pm on Saturday, 1.13.07. In other words, three or four weeks from now (figuratively speaking) and the whole nommie-nommie Phase 1 thing will be over and done with.

Nomination ballots are being mailed out 12.26.06. The locked-down nominations will be announced on Tuesday, 1.23 -- ten and a half weeks hence. And then Phase 2 kicks in for a mere four weeks (literally) with the final polls closing at 5 pm on Tuesday, 2.20.07 . The Oscar telecast -- i.e., the vaguely...Read More

The only interesting part of this Rebecca Winters Keegan Time story about the Britney Spears-Kevin Federline divorce is the final-graph observation that Spears has now joined "a growing group of powerful celebrity women who have recently split from their less successful husbands, including Reese Witherspoon (from Ryan Phillippe) and Hilary Swank (from Chad Lowe)."

That's the principal thing of it -- the emotional-psychological inability of most wannabe alpha males to play second violin in a marriage, not to mention the corresponding discomfort often felt by their stronger, richer, better connected (and in many cases, more mature) wives. Marriages between alpha-female...Read More

"You cannot make a daring, unusual, completely risky film about amazing, outrageous subject matter, and not expect people to be polarized. When I made Secretary, there were people who thought it was a dirty movie. And there were people who were very moved by it. Those are the only kinds of films I'm going to make anyway. I know the game I'm in, [and] I'm not capable of -- nor am I interested in -- making a film that is attempting to appeal to everyone. That would be ridiculous.

"I mean [that] I'm interested in making...Read More

The Bagger blog -- Oscar season riffs from N.Y. Times pulse-taker David Carr -- is up and running. Here's the first video piece, which is mostly about recaps, the usual aroma-funk of Times Square, and a little red carpet that Carr rolls up and carries around.

We all know that Ridley Scott's A Good Year (20th Century Fox, 11.10) is facing an uphill situation. I don't know what's wrong but something's not taking. The tracking says so, and I can feel it when I talk to people about it. I think this is mostly about vague perception and skewed expectations, and almost nothing to do with what the film actually is.

Is it the Russell Crowe factor? I wouldn't like to think so. He slips into an appealing groove as a London-based master-of the-universe who learns to lighten up after he inherits the deed to a French vineyard,...Read More

"I've seen Casino Royale, and I don't want to get into the trip of breaking the embargo to slap down another critic, but let me say this: that French guy is completely wrong about the movie. See it for yourself and tell me I'm wrong." -- Big-gun critic based in a very cool northern city.

And the Jesse James plot thickens: yesterday I linked to a Kevin Williamson interview in the Calgary Sun with Tony Scott, who's the executive producer of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Scott said to Williamson that the film, directed by Andrew Dominik with Brad Pitt playing the famed Missouri outlaw, would be out in February '07.

Now I'm hearing forget February. In fact, forget any specific date. Limbo!

Before posting I called a Warner Bros. p.r. rep yesterday for a precise date -- she didn't get back until this afternoon, and she...Read More

There are very few adults in the big bad business world who don't swear by the Don Corleone maxim, "Keep your friends close but your enemies closer." Whatever your game is or what side of the fence you're on, dealing with people who understand how things really work is usually a very smooth experience. Unfortunately, there are those who don't get Don Corleone and instead are into a kind of iron-cannon, thick-walled, defend-the-English-castle mentality. They basically strategize the way Frank Thring's King Aella did in Richard Fleischer's The Vikings, and they regard well-meaning interpreters of the Hollywood film business the way that...Read More

The Hollywood Reporter has published a Hollywood Hot-Shots of Tomorrow list. Get in with the "tomorrow guys" or you'll start to experience shaky relationship footing in five years, and five years later you'll be dead. Congrats to Paramount's Pam Abdy, New Line's Cale Boyter, Silver Pictures' Susan Downey, Pheonix Pictures Brad Fischer, DreamWorks' John Fox, Universal's Kristin Lowe, Fox Searchlight's Zola Mashariki , Columbia's Adam Milano, Lionsgate's John Sacchi, Warner Premiere's Geoff Shaevitz and IFC Films' Ryan Werner.

Paramount Pictures' chairman Brad Grey has persuaded Martin Scorsese to sign a four-year, first-look deal with the studio, under which the Departed director (the most likely winner of the Best Director Oscar next February, as things currently stand) "will direct and produce entertainment across all platforms including feature films, made-for-DVD, digital content and television for Paramount Pictures and Paramount Vantage," according to the release.

Martin Scorsese (l.); Brad Grey (r.)

Is this the beginning of something new and dynamic for Marty? Or is this a gold-watch honorarium being given to an older guy who's probably never...Read More

I've twice read Patrick Goldstein's 11.6 column about Jason Apuzzo and Govindini Murty, those Bush-shilling film lovers who run the Liberty Film Festival (Friday to Sunday at the Pacific Design Center), and I'm wondering yet again where all the good fascist entertainments are hiding these days?

Tony Scott's Man on Fire was the last Hollywood-produced, high-quality, conservative-minded, get-those-godless-third-world-scumbags movie, and that was a couple of years ago. I'm saying there's room in my liberal head for good right-wing films if they're well-made enough. (What a thing to say on Election Day!). Problem is,...Read More

Another George Lucas-is-a-bit-of-a-dead- head-and-a-creative-ass-dragger story, this one from screenwriter Frank Darabont.

"I worked for over a year on [the Indiana Jones 4 movie]," Darabont has told CHUD's Devin Faraci. "I worked very closely with Steven Spielberg. He was ecstatic with the result and was ready to shoot it two years ago. He was very, very happy with the script and said it was the best draft of anything since Raiders of the Lost Ark. That's really high praise and gave me a real sense of accomplishment, especially when you love the material you're working on as...Read More

I was intending to vote first thing this morning. All right, no later than 1 pm. Some of the people I know are saying, "Hmmm... I'm actually going to vote for a Republican today." (Schwarznegger, they mean.) I know one thing for sure -- Jerry Brown for Attorney General! If you're a Californian and want to vote the lock-step liberal line...naah, you can figure it out yourself. People say they're liberal or conservative or libertarian, but they mainly belong to the Green Party. As in the color of currency.

"Some close to Sacha Baron Cohen point to Borat's amazing $31,607 per-playdate average as a sign the film had enough appeal for a wider release. But some distrib execs point to the still-low awareness -- in the latest tracking, which reflects polling from over the weekend, just 57% of people were aware of the film, while 90% had heard of Santa Clause 3 -- and argue that Borat will benefit by waiting a week for word of mouth to build before going out wider." -- from Gabriel Snyder and Ian Mohr's 11.6. Variety story. How is it possible that 43% of the...Read More

Snarly Softie

I've tried and it's impossible -- there's no feeling just one way about John Ford. His movies have been wowing and infuriating me all my life, and after seeing Peter Bogdanovich's Directed by John Ford -- an expanded, unexpectedly touching documentary about the legendary helmer that will show twice on Turner Classic Movies Tuesday evening (and also at a special AFI Film Festival screening at the Linwood Dunn) -- the muddle is still there.

But Bogdanovich's film gives you a feeling -- one that seems clear and genuine -- that you've gotten to know...Read More

Paramount's done it to Zodiac again!! David Fincher's hunting-the-zodiac-killer melodrama was going to open on 1.17.07 -- now the national release date has been bumped to 3.2.07, according to Box-Office Mojo. And this for a movie that will absolutely be finished and ready to screen by 11.10 or 11.15, according to a well-placed source.

I'm sure we'll be hearing a nicely measured, sensible-sounding explanation within the next day or two. Example: "March is a better release date than mid-January and we want this film to be as big a hit as possible ." I know they aren't burying it --...Read More

In her N.Y. Times piece about the origins of The Nativity Story (New Line, 12.1), Sharon Waxman says it came about because three of the principals -- director Catherine Hardwicke, producers Marty Bowen and Wyck Godfrey -- wanted to make a film of lasting value that would reconnect them on some level with their rural/family roots. I'm not doubting their sincerity -- who doesn't want to make a film that means something and sticks to the ribs? -- but I smell hucksters in sheep's clothing.

Amazing...startling: New York City cops have arrested a blue-collar guy who's allegedly confessed to killing actress Adrienne Shelly in a furious rage. The 40 year-old actress was found hanging from a shower rod in a West Village apartment last Wednesday. A New York Post story that ran on Friday said that "law-enforcement sources said they are inclined to believe Shelly's death...was a suicide, noting there was no sign of struggle or forced entry in the fourth-floor apartment." But a CBS News report says that a 19 year-old constructon worker named Diego Pillco has told cops that he "punched" Shelly "after she complained...Read More

"I had lived my life believing two things -- that pain should not be sought, but, by the same token, it should never be avoided, because there is a lesson in facing adversity. Having gone through that experience, I can attest, in a non-masochistic way, that pain is a great teacher. I don't relish it, but I learn from it. I always say, even as an ex-Catholic, that God sends the letter, but not the dictionary. You need to forge your own dictionary." -- Pan's Labyrinth director-writer Guillermo del Toro, speaking to The Guardian's Mark Kermode.

The highlights of Russell Crowe's "60 Minutes' interview with Steve Kroft are all here. Fascinating stuff -- you can't just watch one clip. I liked Crowe's statement that in Australia, the phone-throwing thing would have been resolved "with an apology and a handshake." You know...the way John Wayne would've handled the after-effects of a fist fight in a John Ford film.

But in the world we're contendng with over here (and this is HE speaking, not Crowe)...a world filled with manly hotel employees who say "whatever" when a customer has a problem and then run to...Read More

On or about 6.1.06, when I was posting my daily material from a wi-fi cafe in Montmartre, I reported that Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford -- i.e., Brad Pitt's other '06 movie besides Babel -- would not be released by Warner Bros. on the then-posted date 9.15.056, but rather some time in early 2007. This meant that some reconfiguring was going on and Team Jesse needed time to fix certain problems, etc.

Now comes a Kevin Williamson piece in the Calgary Sun reporting that the fillm's...Read More

"Hollywood is in the midst of a strategic shift," N.Y. Times reporter Laura Holson writes for the Monday, 11.6 issue. "The average cost to make and market a movie has skyrocketed -- to $96.2 million last year, from $54.1 million in 1995 -- while lucrative DVD sales have flattened. Major film studios are fending off illegal piracy, which industry executives say accounted for $1.3 billion in lost revenue in the United States last year.

"The growth of new media threatens to undermine traditional businesses, while studios are flummoxed about how to take advantage of the new opportunities they represent. And movies and...Read More

Empire is reporting that Spike Lee is in negotiations to direct a sequel to Inside Man -- excellent news. Lee is said to be "already working with the original screenwriter Russell Gurwitz." Insufficient details! This is truly a nothing item. It's getting late, all right.

More reactions to Daniel Craig's James Bond, of a generally more positive nature than views spouted by "Manhattan Movie Guy" and assembled by the BBC. The London Times has said that Craig "is up there with the best -- he combines Sean Connery's athleticism and cocksure swagger with Timothy Dalton's thrilling undercurrent of stone-cold cruelty."

"Don't quote me but Casino Royale is James Bland. And very long. Lots of cool little moments don't deliver what America will want. And Daniel Craig isn't Bond. He's Jason Bourne in five years." -- Hotshot Manhattan movie guy who gets around and sees everything.

The N.Y. Times' David Carr -- a.k.a. "the Bagger" -- is back in action and making the claim that Oscar heat is somehow hotter in Manhattan than Los Angeles, and that Gotham Oscar campaign publicists cater more egregiously to movie journalists than L.A. flacks, some of whom say "no" or "later" or "let me get into it" or take an awful long time to return calls.

Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder, who stepped in and made Tom Cruise look alive and well by offering an overhead and development cost deal just a few days after Cruise was booted off the Paramount lot by Sumner Redstone, looks like he may be interested in funding movies for the new United Artists stakeholder," blah, blah.

Casino Royale (Columbia, 11.17) screened in London last night (Saturday, 11.4) and the Telegraph has run some reactions. "It's terrific," said one critic. "This is going to be the prequel to all other Bonds. There are a lot of fans who prefer either Moore or Connery but Daniel Craig could be better. This is the story of how Bond got started, before he became 007. Craig is such a good actor...he plays Bond as strong but emotionally vulnerable. For the first time you see his sensitive side."

"The flm begins in black-and-white, but then goes to color. There is no sexual innuendo in...Read More

Eat Me

Yesterday I lucked into a screening of Jonathan Hensleigh's Welcome to the Jungle, a hand-held, Blair Witch-y, spookily atmospheric horror film about four kids looking for the remains of Michael Rockefeller in New Guinea (which they hope will lead to paydirt) and running into cannibals.

And I don't mean nameless actors who've been wardrobe-fitted with animal-bone necklaces and loincloths and had the right kind of movie-set makeup applied so they'll "look" like cannibals. I mean genuinely spooky feral types with muddy-milky skin and carrying hand-made weapons. We never see them all that clearly,...Read More

As noted earlier, friends who've seen The Pursuit of Happyness (Columbia, 12.15) have told me that Will Smith's performance as Chris Gardner, a onetime homeless guy who worked hard and became a successful businessman, is seriously touching and Oscar-worthy, and that the Best Actor race will most likely come down to Smith vs. Peter O'Toole in Venus. They're probably right.

But I can't help but feel a certain amusement over David Poland and N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman having seen Gabriele Muccino's The Pursuit of Happyness (Columbia, 12.15), and gone right back to their...Read More

A studio estimate regarding Borat's phenomenal weekend tally has gone up. Yesterday morning the projection was for $22,486,000 by Sunday night -- a mere 837 theatres, 26,000 per print. That figure was based on an expected slight dip in Saturday's business, but instead the numbers -- it took in about $10,002,000 yesterday -- went up. The expected final weekend figure is now $25,516,000.

The Sunday 11.5 issue of the L.A. Times Calendar section is mainly about "Dream Women", and the photo editors have managed to illustrate two articles just a little bit incorrectly. In Irene Lacher's Cate Blanchett profile (link to come), there are three photos -- a sexy portrait shot of Blanchett and two smaller stills showing her in scenes from Babel and Notes on a Scandal, and yet they don't run a shot of Blanchett in Steven Soderbergh's The Good German, in which she gives her fullest and most commanding performance of the year...odd. And in Carina Chocano's piece about Read More

The inability of guys in their 30s to grow up and live adult lives is far and away the most persistent GenX theme in movies today. David Munro's Full Grown Men, which played Friday night and Saturday afternoon at the AFI Film Festival, is another in this vein. A guy named Alby (Matt McGrath ) decides he can't hack being a husband and a father and decides to hook up with his his best friend from childhood and a few others in the same boat, etc.

Sarah Rafferty, Francesca Faridany, Matt McGrath at the Full Grown Men after-party...

Adrienne Shelly's widow Andy Ostroy has told ABC's Eyewitness News that "my wife...did not kill herself." He said that "so much remains a mystery, like the money missing from her wallet and the uniden- tified shoe print in the bathtub." He says these are highly suspicious circumstances and worth looking into before his wife's death is ruled a suicide. On late Wednesday afternoon Ostroy "found his wife of five years face up on the bathroom floor of the apartment. Investigators say she had a bed sheet tied around her neck, the sheet was hanging from a shower rod."

Talk about some critics not getting it, about how some barely see a performance when it's exploding right in front of them. I just this morning read Brooks Atkinson's complete N.Y. Times review of A Streetcar Named Desire (dated 12.4.48) -- a play that gave viewers the first full-on encounter with a style of acting from a particular 24 year-old actor that would change the landscape forever. Talk about historic, and yet Atkinson only briefly mentions the actor in question, and only in the second-to-last paragraph. Amazing.

Clearly a small but persistent percentage of the film critic elite are gunning for Babel. This Mark Caro piece from his Chicago Tribune/Pop Machine blog (which has been nicely re-designed, by the way) is an example.

Caro thinks Babel is Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu's (and Guillermo Arriaga's) least impressive film, and yet I've spoken to many bright and perceptive viewers (including Pan's Labyrinth director-writer Guillermo del Toro) who think it's truly their best. I feel this way myself because it's the most poem-like. Who's right? Obviously no one, but I know this: Caro & Co. are being overly harsh on a film...Read More

As indicated by the sudden rise in tracking over the last 10 days and by what my Morgan Stanley friend wrote yesterday, Borat's opening day was an explosion, and generally speaking the weekend's #1 film is a monster. It's expected to do $22,486,000 by Sunday night -- a mere 837 theatres, 26,000 per print.

Fox had cut back on theatres a couple of weeks ago because of weak tracking and exhibitor concern about same, but then the numbers started to shooot up more and more starting about a week and a half ago. Obviously Fox...Read More

Adrienne Shelly's Waitress, a comedy-drama about a pregnant, unhappily married waitress (Keri Russell) falling love with an intriguing stranger, was very nearly invited to show at last September's Telluride Film Festival, according to what festival honcho Tom Luddy told me this morning. Given Luddy's liking (or at least respect) for Waitress, the odds seem to indicate that it might be accepted by the '07 Sundance Film Festival, to which it's been submitted.

This, obviously is the kind of reception that indie-level director-writers dream of. Obviously something to not only live for but feel pretty good about. On...Read More

In his just-released Volver (Sony Classics), director-writer Pedro Almodovar "acknowledges misfortune -- and takes it seriously -- from a perspective that is essentially comic," says N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott. "Very few filmmakers have managed to smile so convincingly in the face of misery and fatality: Jean Renoir and Billy Wilder come immediately to mind, and Mr. Almodovar, if he is not yet their equal, surely belongs in their company.

"Volver is often dazzling in its artifice -- Jose Luis Alcaine's ripe cinematography, Alberto Iglesias's suave, heart-tugging score -- but it is never false. It draws you in, invites you to...Read More

A reader who works out of a Morgan Stanley office in Westchester County wrote the following this morning: "I'm no expert but I think 20th Century Fox made a big, big mistake in not giving Borat a wide release this weekend." [Editor's note: Fox had it scheduled to go out semi-wide but then got the heebie-jeebies and cut the exposure by 800 screens.] "I work in an open office and everyone is aware of it to the point that people may be skipping out to check an early show if they can find one.

"It looks to me like a blockbuster, in...Read More

Two or three hours this morning talking to people about poor Adrienne Shelly, and then four and a half hours trying to re-launch my SAM broadcaster software to it funnels into my server so I can get into the occasional podcast thing again. Exasperating! But at least it's done and the ordeal's ever.

Does the box-office popularity of a film have much to do with its chance of being nominated for a Best Picture Oscar? Obviously yeah...it does. A movie that has shown itself to be a modest little-engine-that-could success can be nominated, and obviously being a huge success doesn't hurt a bit, but a film that stiffs on opening weekend is pretty much dead in the water. Hollywood Wiretap's Pete Hammond looks at the winners and losers so far, according to this equation:

"The Departed's box-office cume "is near $100 million, and now the story goes if it gets to $150 million it could...Read More

Reactions to and explanations why Nicole Kidman has blown off promotional appearances on behalf of Fur (Picturehouse, 11.10), which, let's face it, is probably dead anyway no matter what anybody says or does.

The most moving thing in Bobby is a recording of Robert Kennedy speaking about the pernicious effect of violence in our culture. It's heard at the very end of the film. He gave this short speech on April 5, 1968 -- one day after he delivered his famous impromptu remarks to a crowd shortly after the death of Martin Luther King was reported, and 29 days before he met his own end from an assassin's bullet at the Ambassador Hotel.

"It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity, my only...Read More

A friend was standing near Bobby costar Lindsay Lohan after she'd finished doing her on-camera interviews with E.T.'s Jan Craft and the other Stepford Showbiz News ladies outside the Mann Chinese. What my friend overheard was somewhere between mildly amusing and "telling" -- a mini-Eugene O'Neill drama played out in the space of two lines of dialogue and one bit of physical business.

Lindsay Lohan talking to E.T.'s Jan Craft -- Wednesday, 11.1.06, 7:26 pm

Several fans were yelling "Lindsay! Lindsay!" Lohan was aroused and moved to respond. "Oh, I have to go over and talk...Read More

I saw a slightly shorter version of Bobby (Weinstein Co., 11.17) at the AFI Film Festival premiere last night. Shorter by maybe ten minutes, but it hasn't made that much difference. This is a fairly square, somewhat old-fashioned film trying to do the right, heartfelt, semi-poignant thing with the legend of Bobby Kennedy , and either you can roll with this sort of thing or you can't. I talked to a lot of people at the after-party who felt favorably disposed, so don't take my view as the final word.

Sharon Stone at last night's Bobby premiere --...

Does raunchy, power-chord rock music kick and wail no matter how old the performers, the audience and the guy shooting the concert documentary are? Screw the calendar -- rock is a state of mind. But there's something creepy about grey-haired, turkey-necked, pot-bellied rock musicians getting down on-stage with a sea of AARP fans stompin' and hootin' and whatnot. There's something just "not right" about this.

Part of the solution (and I know this sounds shallow) lies in dieting, daily workouts, hair dyes and face-lifts. You've got to try and look the part of a rocker or a rock- music fan, and by...Read More

Loathing of corporate-formulaic animated talking-animal movies is building, building...a very healthy development. It basically means that even compassionate people of moderate dispositions have a breaking point and that those who maneuver and profit within the quiet corridors of power need to listen up. I cite two examples as proof:

(a) On 9.19, I printed the exasperated comment of a hard-working director (initially conveyed to his manager-producer), to wit: "If I see one more bus ad for one more fucking animated movie with fucking animals in it, I'm going to start screaming."

(b) Now it's...Read More

"Studio management by creative talent" was the idea when Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith formed the old United Artists on 2.5.19, and now the same deal is in effect with today's announcement that Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner are taking over UA and running the creative-greenlight side of the business "subject to certain parameters," with the partnership and support of MGM chariman and CEO Harry E. Sloan.

Tom Cruise, Paula Wagner; MGM CEO Harry E. Sloan

Crazy Tom, Crazy Harry and Paula Wagner! This is definitely a Cruise + Wagner...Read More

Sony Pictures Classics' Michael Barker and Tom Bernard are so taken with a recently viewed final cut of Curse of the Golden Flower (opening 12.22) that they've decided to launch Oscar campaigns for the two principal talents -- star Gong Li for Best Actress, and helmer Zhang Yimou for Best Director.

Flower reunites these legends of modern Chinese cinema for the first time since the mid '90s following their collaboration on films such as Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern, To Live and Shanghai Triad (all but one made during their passionate and very public...Read More

Nikke Finke paints the South African diamond industry with an appropriately dark brush in her latest L.A. Weekly column, called "Throwing Precious Stones":

"All along, the real question behind the scenes of Blood Diamond -- an action-adventure pic set against the backdrop of civil war and chaos in the diamond-mining center of 1990s Sierra Leone, starring Leo DiCaprio, Jennifer Connelly and Djimon Hounsou, directed by Ed Zwick and produced by Paula Weinstein -- is not whether it will be an Oscar contender (probably) or a critics' favorite (possibly). It's just how much mud the World Diamond Council and its flacks and flunkies...Read More

As Wired's Steve Silberman begins in a Darren Aronofsky profile, "Perhaps the most surprising thing about The Fountain (Warner Bros., 11.22) is that the director was able to finish it at all." Due in no small part, as he gradually explains, to the abrupt withdrawl of Brad Pitt from the Hugh Jackman role in a much more costly and elaborate version of The Fountain than the one coming out three weeks from now.

Aronofsky, Pitt

And yet the scaled-down, present-tense version has a kind of purity, a spirit...a feeling that transcends scale, stars, special...Read More

"The consensus in the community is that what [Viacom chief Sumner Redstone] did to Tom Cruise, and to [Tom] Freston, was outrageous...you know, just to prove he's still alive.'' -- Legendary agent Sue Mengers speaking to Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke.

A pretty good recap piece by the L.A. Times' John Horn about six never-say-die Oscar campaigns -- Crash, The Pianist, Anna, Shakespeare in Love, A Beautiful Mind, Il Postino.

If there's one thing the world really needs now, it's a pumped-up Wachowski brothers feature based on a 1960s-era Japanese anime TV series. Is there a subtext to Speed Racer that I'm missing or overlooking? Someone besides producer Joel Silver is presumably into the idea of the Wachowski's doing a family-friendly, PG-13 fast-car movie. To me, the nothingness of the concept is close to astounding. The boys will reportedly shoot next summer and release it in '08.

Her performance is stunningly balls-out, but the chances of Annette Bening winning a Best Actress Oscar for her Running With Scissors performance are zilch...sorry. There's such a thing as being too convincing as a wackjobber, and if the movie is tanking on top of that...forget it.

Of course, if you're a Reuters writer trying to convey the same thing in a Bening interview piece, you have to go all namby-pamby and use the word "may", in the same chickenshit way that the N.Y. Times relies on its stock phrase "remains to be seen." Bening's "losing record at the Oscars epitomizes an old...Read More

The bottom-line on Brad Pitt's knickers allegedly being in a twist about his being on the new Vanity Fair cover without prior approval (per TMZ) is that the magazine was well within its rights. Reps for the Conde Nast publication have told TMZ that Pitt "posed for a Robert Wilson video portrait, and in the photo release (signed by Pitt), agreed to allow Wilson to use the portrait or any images from that sitting in connection with any publicity on Wilson's video project."

Vanity Fair thereafter "decided to do a story on Wilson's video portraits...Read More

"Barack Obama -- delivered feet-first on Oprah's couch and tickled on Meet the Press and then highly buffed by New Yorker editor David Remnick before the magazine editors of America -- has enjoyed the best-orchestrated product reveal since the iPod," begins a New York Observer piece by Choire Sicha and John Koblin.

"Now Mr. Obama is the only author with two books among the top 50 sellers on Amazon.com. Two weeks after the release of The Audacity of Hope, it is in its sixth printing, with 725,000 books in print. America can't tell the difference between the book and the candidate....Read More

Those recently surfaced, possibly accurate details about Ryan Phillippe's bustup with Reese Witherspoon -- alleged catting around with Abbie Cornish (his costar on Kimberly Peirce's Stop Loss), leaving e-mail evidence of same on his Black- berry -- are being mentioned out of boredom, yes, but also to illustrate two behav- ioral truths: (1) people who get caught cheating are almost always subconsciously looking to get out of whatever committed relationship they're in; and (2) married couples split up for two reasons and two reasons only -- one or the other fucking around and money problems. All the other issues (including...Read More

New York critic David Edelstein has parked his Lexus in the same Borat garage as New Yorker critic Anthony Lane. He's confessed that he finally found Sacha Baron Cohen's comedy "depressing," and summoned impressions of "a bear-baiting or pigsticking.

"The comic imagination flowers on the dark-and-twisted end of the spectrum; in return for making you laugh, the artist has license to express rude truths in the rudest manner he or she can imagine. Most clowns have a wide streak of sadism, but it's tempting to think of Cohen as a sadist with a wide streak of clownishness." The comic servings in...Read More