Forget Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, an unfocused, meandering and even dreary look at how a Portland skateboarding teenager (Gabe Nevins) doesn't deal with his complicity in an impulsive accidental homicide. It's another atmospheric immersion-into-an-exotic- youth-culture piece with a minimalist plot, but nowhere near as striking or stylistically distinguished as Van Sant's Elephant and Last Days. I'm calling it his first not-very-good film since Gerry. I'm sorry to say this given the respect I have for Gus, but you can't hit it out of the park every time.

Famed director Roman Polanski (Chinatown, The Pianist) caused a stir a day and a half or two days ago at the press conference for Chacun son Cinema, the anthology film comprised of 35 shorts by 35 distinguished directors.

The questions were on the banal side (which is not an altogether uncommon thing during this festival), and Polanski, irked by some especially lame inquiry, lost his temper and lashed out at either the questioner or, according to one version I heard, all the journalists in the room, calling them "losers" and whatnot. He then allegedly urged his fellow directors to leave the...Read More

Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which screened for press at the 8:30 this morning, is a passable attempt to render a beautiful, inwardly-directed portrait about what is truly essential and replenishing in life. But the film is neither of these things, and is nowhere close in terms of poetic resonance and emotional impact to Schnabel's Before Night Falls ('00). It's sensitively realized and skillfully made, but it's a movie about a state of nearly 100% confinement that itself too often feels confining.

Alfred Hitchcock attempted a similar-type experiment when he made Lifeboat, which takes place entirely aboard a lifeboat floating...Read More

The Death Proof press conference is going to happen at 12:30 pm -- 45 minutes from now -- and I'm thinking of blowing it off. What's Quentin Tarantino going to say? "Sorry, but self-referential masturbatory cinema is what I do, and who I am. Every guilty, lowdown cinema-watching impulse that you, the audience, harbor within yourselves, I epitomize and celebrate and in fact have made a wild, rollicking career out of.

The press guide listing for Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof press conference...

"My movies are about nothing from my own personal, deep-down self because I have no personal,...Read More

Another Michael Moore q & a, this one with Variety editor Peter Bart at the American Pavillion.

Peter Bart, Roger Durling prior to today's Michael Moore discussion (moderated by Bart) about Sicko -- Monday, 5.21.06, 2:25 pm

Here's a portion of today's A Mighty Heart press conference, which included producer Brad Pitt, director Michael Winterbottom, costars Angelina Jolie, Dan Futterman, Archie Panjabi and Irfan Khan (who's the standout supporting actor in this film).

A Mighty Heart star Angelina Jolie and costar Dan Futterman (i.e., Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Capote) at this afternoon's press conference -- Monday, 5.21.07, 1:05 pm

Brad Pitt

The agreeably shocking thing about Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart, which had its first-time-anywhere press screening this morning inside the Grand Palais, is that it's not a Michael Winterbottom film. Not, I mean to say, a film that has seemingly emerged from the palette and the sensibility of the director of The Road to Guantan- amo, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, 9 Songs, Code 46 and 24 Hour Party People...all but one of which I had problems with to varying degrees.

Instead, A Mighty Heart is a Michael Mann film -- a tight, absorbing,...Read More

HE to Ethan Coen (at today's press luncheon): "The only speed bump for mainstream audiences in No Country for Old Men, as you know, is your decision to not allow audiences to share in Josh Brolin's final fate, as it were."

Coen to HE: "And that's a perverse decision, isn't it?"

HE: "Well, that's one of the things that give the film artistic authority and distinction, and it either makes people respect it or..."

Cohen: "Or dislike it."

No Country for Old Men co-director and co-writer Ethan Coen at today's Miramax press luncehon --...

A fast follow-up on the Duelling Bielinski Brothers projects (i.e., Phillip Noyce's vs. Ed Zwick's). I've recevied the following statement from Noyce, to wit: "Historical facts should not be owned or bartered, but it would appear that the life rights of surviving family and Bielski brigade members that our lawyers have maintained for the past several years could mean the following:

"Any other film about the Bielski Brothers" -- Zwick's -- "might have to tell the story without retelling any of the incidents described in the personal statements of these real-life characters made exclusively to our research team or contained exclusively...Read More

It was hard to hear for all the restaurant clatter, but four No Country For Old Men guys -- director-writers Joel and Ethan Coen, and costars Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin -- sat down at a press luncheon early this afternoon at the Noga Beach eatery. The mp3s -- here's Bardem's and here's Brolin's -- are discernible if you wear earphones and/or turn the sound up.

No Country for Old Men costar Javier Bardem at this afternoon's Miramax press luncheon at the Noga Beach-- Sunday, 5.230.07, 2:20 pm

Variety's Sicko review, written by Alissa Simon. She's calling it "an entertaining and affecting dissection of the American health care industry that documents how it benefits the few at the expense of the many. Pic's tone alternates between comedy and outrage, as it compares the U.S system of care to other countries. Given Moore's celebrity and fan base, plus heightened awareness of pic resulting from the heated battle between left and right already ongoing in cyberspace, returns look to be extremely healthy."

Myself and maybe nine or ten other journalists were driven out to the Hotel du Cap at 11:45 this morning for some brief cabana sit-downs with Leonardo DiCaprio,the producer, co-writer and narrator of a down-to-it doc about global poisoning and not just global warming (which the film only focuses on for only 7 minutes) called 11th Hour (Warner Independent, October), as well as co-directors Nadia Conners and Leila Conners Petersen.

11th Hour producer-narrator Leonardo DiCaprio at the conclusion of today's Hotel du Cap round-table interview, which took place in an airy bungalow a stone's throw from the...

Here's a recording of the first half-hour of Michael Moore's Sicko press conference, with moderator Andre Behar asking the first question. It started just after 11 a.m. I had to bolt at 11:30 in order to get on a press shuttle for the Hotel du Cap and a sitdown with Leonardo DiCaprio and the 11th Hour principals. I still don't have my sound editing software up and running, so it's a little raggedy. Behar's introduction of Moore to the press throng comes about ten seconds in.

Sicko director Michael Moore (r.) and press conference moderator Henri Behar...

The big Cannes buzz right now is around the untitled (and apparently still uncompleted) Larry Charles/Bill Maher documentary about religion, which is being repped by CAA and IM Global. Charles himself attended a market screening yesterday to unveil footage, I'm told. I wasn't there but a trusted friend was, and he says that "what the buyers saw had everyone laughing hard" and that once out and about, the doc will definitely register as "controversial."

Mr. Friendly is predicting "a bidding war and an announcement within a couple of days."

Variety's Adam Dawtrey reported about the doc...Read More

Everyone has just come out of the 8:30 a.m. screening of Michael Moore's Sicko -- I'm typing this from the Salle du Presse where Moore will be answering questions ten minutes from now -- and I have to say that I went into it with limited expectations, but I came out teary-eyed. Surprisingly, I found this documentary about the evils and shortcomings of the U.S. health-care system just as moving as Fahrenheit 9/11 -- and I never would have predicted this.

Honestly...I found myself melting during the last 20 minutes or so, particularly during the scenes shot in Havana, Cuba, where Moore takes...Read More

Taken about 20 minutes before the start of yesterday's 7:15 pm screening of No Country for Old Men in front of the Salle Debussy.

Variety's Todd McCarthy wrote his rave review of No Country for Old Men last night, and here's how it leads off: "A scorching blast of tense genre filmmaking shot through with rich veins of melancholy, down-home philosophy and dark, dark humor, No Country for Old Men reps a superior match of source material and filmmaking talent. Cormac McCarthy's bracing and brilliant novel is gold for the Coen brothers, who have handled it respectfully but not slavishly, using its built-in cinematic values while cutting for brevity and infusing it with their own touch is one of the their very best films, a bloody...Read More

It's 9:55 pm and all of Cannes is doing the Friday night mess-around. I've been invited to a Soho House party at a medieval castle west of town on the coast called Chateau de la Napoule, but I can take it or leave it. That's because for the last half-hour I've been tripping on dozens of musings and fond recollections of Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men, all comprising a general awareness that this is a major, major film.

I'm speaking of an obviously brilliant action thriller that's been made with such exactitude and...Read More

L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein has seen James Gray's We Own The Night, which will debut in Cannes towards the end of next week, and he says that for Gray "it's a big breakthrough. It's a searing family drama as well as a cops-versus-criminals thriller with the same sticky web of loyalty and rivalry seen in Martin Scorsese's best work.

"Joaquin Phoenix is the family black sheep, running a mob-owned nightclub, while Mark Wahlberg has become a cop like their father, played by Robert Duvall. Although Gray still goes for quiet, underplayed emotion, he also...Read More

Risky Biz Blog's Stuart Kemp (apparently sharing duties with Gregg Kilday) is reporting that a gang of French thieves is working the Croisette, " turning over apartments and stealing whatever they can get their hands on. Every year as Cannes kicks off, there are always tales of thievery. It's a known fact that criminals steal in, take what they can from unsuspecting visitors, before melting away as the first weekend approaches. This year, a movie marketing team awoke one morning to find thieves had been in their room while they slept, spiriting away televisions, computers and cash."

"Pitch perfect and brilliantly acted, 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days is a stunning achievement, helmed with a purity and honesty that captures not just the illegal abortion story at its core but the constant, unremarked negotiations necessary for survival in the final days of the Soviet bloc.

"Showcasing all the elements of new Romanian cinema -- long takes, controlled camera and an astonishing ear for natural dialogue -- Cristian Mungiu's masterly film plays only one false note in an otherwise beautifully textured story. Further proof of Romania's new prominence in the film world, pic will attract discerning auds in Stateside...Read More

I'm just sitting here in the Orange Cafe, blowing off screening ops and trying to catch up (I didn't file enough stuff yesterday, due in part to the time-swallowing Jerry Seinfeld Bee Movie presentation followed by two late-in-the-day screenings and then a decision to just go for dinner and forget the damn column already) and waiting for Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men.

Tommy Lee Jones in No Country for Old Men

Only three hours and fifteen minutes remain until the the first Cannes screening, set to unspool at the Salle Debussy, begins...Read More

I'm confused about the name of the brand-new Three Amigos production company -- headed, of course, by Alfonso Cuaron, Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu -- that has just cut a deal with Focus Features, Universal's specialty division. Variety's story says the company is called Tres, but Indiewire's story says it's called cha cha cha. But right-click on the Indiewire portrait photo (which I stole for this story) you'll see the codeword "tresTRIO,jpg."

If any of the Three Amigos are reading this and would like a reaction, here's mine. Please, please don't call...Read More

There is suddenly hope for all anti-Ed Zwick partisans, especially those who are grimacing over Zwick's intention to make a movie out of "Defiance: The Bielski Partisans" by Nechama Tec, a true story of the Polish Bielski brothers who fought Nazi occupiers and wound up saving 1200 Jews from extermination.

A group of Polish anti-Nazi partisans, in the early 1940s, including I don't-know-how-many Bielski Brothers.

The hope factor has come in the form of a challenge from director Phillip Noyce -- a far more accomplished craftsman (Catch a Fire, Clear and Present Danger, Rabbit-Proof Fence)...Read More

The positive buzz (mostly from Cannes-covering British journalists) and yesterday's positive review from Variety's Russell Edwards aside, I've been told that Anton Corbijn's Control -- a black- and-white biopic of Joy Division's Ian Curtis, who hung himself at the peak of the band' s success -- is a fairly conventional work.

"It follows the usual form," a critic friend (and a once-devoted Joy Division fan) said this morning. "It tells Curtis's story going from one chapter after another....the old 'and then this happened, and then this happened' approach." He also said "it's too domestic,"...Read More

Good God, another hambone Ed Zwick movie. Defiance, a WWII-era drama, will star Daniel Craig in a "true story of four brothers in Nazi occupied Poland who flee to the Belarussian forest with a band of Jews and join forces with Russian Resistance fighters." Craig is flying high these days, but one day he'll regret this. Once an actor has been through the Zwick grinder, his aura is never quite the same -- the coolness factor always cools down. You can't tell me that Tom Cruise was tickled pink with how The Last Samura turned out; ditto Leonardo DiCaprio in Blood Diamond....Read More

I went to the 8:30 ayem press screening of Zodiac this morning just to see how it looked, and what I saw alarmed me. Despite director David Fincher having allegedly checked the print being shown, a slightly distorted version of Zodiac was shown. The Grand Palais projectionist was using a slightly wrong lens, the result being that the images in the film looked a bit more expanded horizontally than they should have.

Jake Gyllenhaal, those first murder victims at Lake Berryessa, Candy Clark, Robert Downey...they all had slightly wider heads that they should have. Every image was just a little bit fatter...Read More

There doesn't seem to be anything to write about Cannes-wise except for the jizzy peripheral stuff. That Bee thing this morning ate up three, three and a half hours when all was said and done, and before I knew it it was 2, 2:30 pm. I've been at the Orange Cafe for two hours now and barely keeping awake. If ever I needed a super-sized can of Red Bull, it's right now.

I'll be seeing two presumably major films in tandem less than 90 minutes from now. First, J.A. Bayona's The Orphanage, an "atmospheric thriller" about a kid with a vivid imagination....Read More

Dressed in a bee costume, Jerry Seinfeld took two wild rides off the roof of the Carlton Hotel late this morning to promote Bee Movie, the animated DreamWorks feature comedy that opens in November. Seinfeld was hooked up to a long-ass safety wire that stretched from the Carlton roof to the hotel pier some 200 yards away.

Bee Movie star and co-writer Jerry Seinfeld doing the paparazzi stroll on the Carlton pier a little after noon today -- Thursday, 5.17.07, 12:105 pm. (The wind and the light showed that Seinfeld has a bit of Rogaine issue...

I could sense trouble fairly early on in Wong Kar Wai's My Blueberry Nights, a horribly written, woefully banal self- discovery mood piece (the word "drama" really can't be applied) about a young girl (Nora Jones) who leaves her home town of Manhattan and starts job-hopping across the country -- waitress gigs in Memphis and I-couldn't-tell- what-town in Nevada, with an apparently uneventful stopover in Los Angeles -- in order to get over a bad case of breakup grief.

That early "uh-oh" comes when Jones, playing a lady named Elizabeth with a certain doleful sincerity, is...Read More

"Periodically -- about twice a year, by my calculation -- someone tries to breathe new life into the movie musical by putting together a lavish song-and-dance spectacle like the ones they used to make, full of big numbers and bigger emotions. (See, most recently, Dreamgirls and, before too long, Hairspray.) Against this trend, Once, a scrappy, heart-on-its-sleeve little movie directed by an Irishman named John Carney, makes a persuasive case that the real future of the genre may lie not in splashy grandeur but in modesty and understatement.

"Filmed with more efficiency than elegance on the streets of Dublin, Mr. Carney’s movie, a...Read More

L.A. Times Calendar editor Lennie LaGuire is cleaning out her desk, partly due to the cost-cutting syndrome at that besieged, downward- spiralling daily but also, according to an industry rumor passed along by Variety's Mark Graser, with an intention of accepting the top editing gig at the Hollywood Reporter, i.e., the one vacated by Cynthia Littleton earlier this year.

"Thanks to the collapsing dollar, mandatory first-class travel to the Cannes Film Festival for both movie stars and their countless handlers and friends, the price tag for a Cannes unveiling can be staggering, often four times (or more) the tab for an equally lavish Hollywood premiere," reports the L.A. Times' John Horn. "A suite at the popular Majestic Hotel costs about $2,500 a night, while a big room at the swank Carlton can run up to $3,000. The tiniest room at the ultra-luxurious Hotel du Cap is more than $1,000 a night, with suites logarithmically higher.

"Mark Wahlberg, the costar of this...Read More

Looking east from the American Pavillion beach about three hours ago. I'll most likely work up some ambition later today or tomorrow and tape something of interest. Hey, maybe even an interview. But no jiggly hand-held stuff.

One of the reasons it took so long to get rolling today in Cannes (apart from being occupied this morning with seeing Wong Kar Wai's My Blueberry Nights, a mystifying shortfall for a respected, world-class director and a full-on mediocrity that comes close to being a rank embarassment) is the absurd wi-fi situation at the American Pavillion and, for what I've been told, inside the Grand Palais press room also.

Everyone with a badge has been given a five-digit user ID and a three-digit password, and none of them work. But the AMPAV tech-head volunteers have...Read More

Before before she flew to Cannes on Sunday, Variety's Anne Thompson got Michael Moore on the phone to talk about the early-bird attacks on Sicko, his health-care doc that will screen in Cannes within a few days, and particularly Moore having taken ailing workers from Ground Zero in Manhattan to Cuba for free medical treatments. Here's Fred Thompson's National Review attack piece. Here's Moore's official responses so far, and a bunch of links besides.

Paulie Walnuts' adoptive mom died on The Sopranos the night before last, and what else? A.J. got into some pronounced gangster action and "Christophuh" upped the ante on his end, but storm clouds aren't assembling overhead and nothing is really happening in any kind of knockout-punch way, and it's looking more and more like the Big Finale won't actually materialize.

L.A. Times writer Mary McNamara has written that "the entire [final] season has seemed pure prologue, spotlighting one force, then another, which may or may not be the agent of Tony's doom," and also that "the rumor is that there will...Read More

Something sudden and surprising did happen. My Lufthansa flight from JFK -- due to leave the ground last night at 8 pm, but delayed an hour -- arrived a little late in Munich, and I missed my connecting flight to Nice, which I had only a half-hour to get to. I was one of the first passengers off the plane and I ran through the airport like Peyton Manning, but the passport line and the re-scanning security process slowed things down considerably.

The only decent option is to take a short flight to Basel, Switzerland, and...Read More

A 12 year-old girl and her conservative grandparent custodians have filed a redstate-bluenose lawsuit over a substitute teacher showing Brokeback Mountain to a class of eighth-graders. My God...exposing 12 and 13 year-olds to a discreet dramatization of a tragic gay relationship? Not to mention saturating their heads with the perverse notion that life is short and we should all go for the gusto and the passion while we can? I'm thoroughly disgusted.

Edward Klein, an Oregon reader who sent me the link, says that "if true, the teacher was way out of line to show this film to this class,...Read More

"Tarantino before its time...long, florid dialogue punctuated by grotesque violence followed by more long, florid dialogue and then more grotesque violence." -- Telluride Film Festival honcho Tom Luddy describing Norman Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance ('86). The quote is from a Mark Singer New Yorker piece about a Tough Guys Don't Dance reunion that happened last year. (I was the in-house Cannon publicity press-kit writer at the time, and I got to interview Mailer at some length while working on the notes for the film. I was always pleased that fate allowed this to happen.)

"It is the first time in eight years that I haven't got an acting job which I am immediately going in to," Orlando Bloom tells The Scotsman's Garth Pearce. "I celebrated my 30th birthday in January and it feels different. It is less urgent. It is now time for reflection and to ask myself: 'How much living do you want to do?' As much as working has been my life, there is now a shift in my priorities."

In other words, Bloom is in a career lull. Things haven't been happening for the guy since the...

I've taken video-editing tutorials from four different people (one in L.A., three in NYC), and at least some of it is seeping in. I've been a little hesitant about posting video, but I think the key to getting past that is just admitting that some of the early MPEG4 files are going to be borderline inane. No, wrong description...how about underwhelmingly austere? I took this today not with the video camera that I'll be using in Cannes but with the Canon A540, my no-big-deal digital photo camera that has a video option.

If you liked Hearts of Darkness, Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper's renowned 1991 documentary about the arduous making of Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now, you may also have a place in your head for Coda: Thirty Years Later, an informal sequel to Hearts of Darkness that is "partially" about Coppola filming Youth Without Youth in Romania two years ago.

Peter Nellhaus's Green Cine Daily report on the doc, which Nellhaus saw Sunday night at Miami's Colony theatre, has a lot of good reporting, including a remark that "much of the footage shown from Youth Without Youth is bathed in golden browns" and...Read More

It's a tough job lining up discussion panels at the American Pavillion during the Cannes Film Festival, since talent usually only flies into Cannes for brief 24-hour periods (the barrage of invasive paparazzi attention is soul-deflating) and their publicists are always first and foremost hooking them up with major media outlets, with AmPav panels often regarded as a low priority. Roger Durling, director of the Santa Barbara Film Festival, has nontheless rounded up My Blueberry Nights director Wong Kar Wai, Sicko director Michael Moore, Mister Lonely director Harmony Korine and New Line honchos Robert Shaye and Michael Lynne to talk about New...Read More

Pete Hammond doesn't think that recent announcement about Francis Coppola's Youth Without Youth having its world premiere at the RomaCinemaFest in late October necessarily means that it won't show up at Telluride Film Festival a month and a half earlier. "Telluride doesn't advertise its films in advance and gets movies all the time before their official 'world premieres' at Toronto or other places because of that reason," he reminded me yesterday. "To call something a 'world premiere' means nothing to Telluride, which just wants to show good movies. Brokeback Mountain premiered at both Venice and Telluride at the exact same hour a...Read More

There's an interesting idea for a series of N.Y. Times articles suggested by Michael Wilson's 5.13.07 piece about a New York cop in his 60s watching Jules Dassin's The Naked City for the first time. Sit down and watch a classic film with an average, not-terribly-sophisticated person and report his/her reactions. I sincerely love this idea, which would basically deliver downmarket versions of those articles from three or four years ago in which big-name directors watched their favorite films (i.e., Woody Allen getting all sentimental over Shane). Think of it -- Shawna Castro of Livingston responds to F.W. Murnau's Sunrise, Fred Collard...Read More

"The average American woman, according to articles I've read, weighs 25 percent more than the models who are showing the clothes they are being sold," Leonard Nimoy has told N.Y. Times writer Abby Ellin for a profile of him and his photographs of obese women. "So, most women will not be able to look like those models. But they're being presented with clothes, cosmetics, surgery, diet pills, diet programs, therapy, with the idea that they can aspire to look like those people.

"It's a big, big industry," Nimoy goes on. "Billions of dollars. And the cruelest...Read More

The Cannes trip (JFK to Munich, Munich to Nice) begins at 8 pm eastern this evening. It will conclude around 12:15 pm Tuesday in Nice, which is 6:15 ayem in Manhattan and 3:15 ayem (close to the hour of the wolf, when the demons and the nightmares come out) in Los Angeles. I probably won't post anything until three or four hours after that.

It's ironic and almost sad to think of all those thousands of insomniac Los Angelenos tossing and turning at that hour, thinking about how scary and theatening everything is and listening to that...Read More

Over a third of '07 (19 weeks out of 52 weeks) is behind us, and with the summer season just launching and Cannes due to start in three days, here's the HE rundown for 2007 superlatives so far. 12 first- raters (including 4 festival flicks yet to be released), 19 above-average or not-half-badders, 24 that were either barely tolerable or outright awful, and 6 unseen. A total of 55 films that made some kind of strong impression. Feel free to add, subtract, debate, etc.

BEST SO FAR (9): A tie between Zodiac and The Lives of...Read More

Only a few days before its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, and therefore time to consider the trailer for Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart (Paramount Vantage, 6.22).

I'm intrigued by Angelina Jolie's skin pigmentation and black tendril-like curls, and I presume she gives a decent performance as the widowed Mariane Pearl, but right away you can tell that Dan Futterman (i.e., the '90s indie actor whose Capote screenplay was nominated for a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar last year) gives the more interesting performance as the kidnapped-and-murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein rounded up a few 13 and 14-year-olds and showed them some summer trailers. Here's what they had to say about the totally bash-worthy Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (Disney, 5.25):

Kid #1 (i.e., Ryan) said, "I know I'm going to have to see it, but I don't think I'm going to like it. It really looks repetitive. But I guess I have to go." Kid #2 (i.e., Adam) said, "It just looks horrible, so over the top, with one fight scene after another. I give it one point, mostly because Chow Yun-Fat is in...Read More

Triangle, a Chinese crime pic co-directed by Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam and Johnnie To, has been added to the Cannes Film Festival's out-of-competition slate. This is somewhat exciting as far as the idea of three directors directing a film with a single narrative line is concerned. But if they want Hong Kong action aficianados like me to see it, they're going to have to show it sometime in the daylight or early evening hours. The only screening is set for Friday morning at 12:20 ayem, which of course means it'll actually start around 12:35 or or 12:40 (late-hour screenings never, ever...Read More

Varietyr's Nick Vivarellis reported Thursday that Francis Coppola's Youth Without Youth, a World War II-era saga about an old professor (Tim Roth) imbued with a kind of immortality, will have its world premiere at the RomaCinemaFest, which runs Oct. 18th through 27th. Wait...no Venice or Toronto or Telluride film festival unveilings in September? I guess that's what "world premiere" at an October film festival would mean, right? Obviously somebody doesn't want the Toronto or Venice or Telluride-attending journos to have the first looksee. Now, let's see...what does that suggest?

"Lee Marvin moved across the screen like a shark coming in for the kill," Manohla Dargis has written in a 5.11 N.Y. Times appreciation for this late, great actor whose films are being honored with a retrospective series at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade theatre.

"Long and lean, with shoulders that looked as wide as his hips and hair as silver as a bullet, he seemed built for speed. He roamed across genres, excelling at gangsters and cowboys. Romance was not his thing. He could make you laugh, at times uneasily, but it's his bad men that...Read More

The 2007 Seattle Film Festival, which I plan to visit for three and a half days, will run from Thursday, May 24th to Sunday, June 17th -- a full 25 days, which is a good 15 days longer than most big-time film festivals. You can bet that the volunteers are whipped when it's over. I won't be seeing the opening-nighter, Garth Jenning's Son of Rambo (which was acquired at last January's Sundance Film Festival by Paramount Vantage) but...well, something will happen.

Some have asked me to recount the car-tossing incident mentioned in Ella Taylor's profile of David Poland in the current L.A. Weekly. It wasn't that big a deal except for what it said about Poland's character. Taylor writes that "on Poland's direction," I was "ordered out of a carful of Poland's colleagues on the way to Sundance." And it wasn't much more than that.

It happened in January '02 (or was it '01?) I had flown in on Southwest with critic Andy Klein, who was writing at the time for Poland's amply-funded Hot Button site. I asked when we arrived in...Read More

Green Cine Daily's D.K. Holm has written about the conflicting opinions that have greeted Paramount Home Video's just-released, two-disc To Catch a Thief special edition DVD. Two reviewers -- DVD Authority's Matt Brighton and Slant's Fernando F. Croce -- have declared that the new transfer (which is based upon the original VistaVision elements) is identical to or at least not noticably improved compared to PHV's passable-but-unexceptional 2002 version.

screen capture from PHV's 2002 version

Spider-Man 3 is being projected to earn $60,379,000 this weekend -- a 60% drop. If people really liked it, it would be doing better than this. (The CinemaScore rating was only a B.) It's now at $242 million cume, and will end up with a bit more than $300 million domestic. But it cost over $300 million to make and the marketing costs were over $100 million, and nobody but nobody who saw it did cartwheels in the lobby. A cruddy script written by three screenwriters (Raimi, Raimi's brother and Alvin Sargent, producer Laura Ziskin's husband>) and populated with too many villains (i.e.,...Read More

MTV News' movie blog posted an exclusive yesterday about the biologically- inappropriate Nicolas Cage being cast to play 1920s Chicago crimelord Al Capone in Brian DePalma's The Untouchables: Capone Rising, which will begin shooting next October and come out sometime in late '08. It'll be a kind of prequel to DePalma's The Untouchables ('87), which was about Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) and Jimmy Malone (Sean Connery) trying to bust Capone (Robert De Niro) and his henchman.

(l. to r.) Nicolas Cage, Al Capone, DeNiro-as-Capone

The really age-inappropriate aspect is that...Read More

Georgia Rule "swerves and spins, taking its predictable plot in some surprising directions," says N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott. " Working against its maudlin impulses with lively humor, and at the same time undercutting its laughs with some hard, ugly themes, this movie is neither a standard weepie nor a comforting dramedy. It's an interesting, maddening mess -- not a terrible movie, and by no means a dull one."

The "incoherence" of it, Scott adds, is in fact "a sign of life, evidence of an emotional energy percolating beneath the glib 'very special episode” surface. The source of that vitality...Read More

David Poland is "a lot more thin-skinned than Sammy Glick," the L.A. Weekly's Ella Taylor observes in a just-up profile. "Like many people who make their living on the attack, he's better at dishing it out than he is at taking it. Having regularly dumped all over L.A. Times Hollywood columnist Patrick Goldstein, he went public on the site with his distress when Goldstein hit back.

"Still, for all the bile of his well-known war with rival Hollywood blogger Jeffrey Wells -- who, on Poland’s direction, was ordered out of a carful of Poland’s colleagues...Read More

I sat down with 28 Weeks Later director Jean Carlos Fresnadillo last Monday afternoon -- i.e., the day that my hard drive froze up and died. Fresnadillo is a quiet, meditative guy with a nicely measured European attitude and what felt to me like a very contained and settled ego. The interview is okay, nothing spectacular; the film is much better.

I would have posted the Fresnadillo thing yesterday afternoon but -- no complaining, just fact -- I was stopped again when the brand-new hard drive, installed only hours earlier, froze on me. Apparently the...Read More

There's a bottom-line rationale regarding Robert Rodrguez being "in talks" to direct a Warner Bros. live-action feature version of The Jetsons for Warner Bros. Pictures. And it can be summed up in eight words: "Danger! Danger! Retreat to the family safety zone!"

With the Grindhouse financial debacle coloring Rodriguez's industry aura (on top of the fact that most viewers outside serious gore geeks thought that Rodriguez's Terror Planet was way, way inferior to Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof) and his biggest financial successes having come from directing the three Spy Kids flicks (which came out in '01, '02 and '03), a...Read More

Aida Turturro (i.e., "Janice" on The Sopranos) briefly mentioned the possibility of a Sopranos feature on Jimmy Kimmel last night with a certain hyper-bunny tone of hope and/or expectation. But whatever chances there may be of Turturro or James Gandolfini or any of the present-day cast members being in a feature version was recently thrown into question by Sopranos producer-writer David Chase.

An MTV.com report quoted Chase as saying that an idea for a Godfather, Part II-like feature -- "a story about the Sopranos’ grandparents first coming to this country" -- is "interesting to me." Naaah, forget it. The idea is way...Read More

It's not smoking in movies per se that's so bad, but actors who use constant smoking as a behavioral crutch. Smoking can look marginally cool depending on how skilled or preternaturally cool the actor is, but it becomes extremely tedious and off-putting when done to excess. Now the Motion Picture Association of America is stepping in for somewhat different reasons and declaring that smoking will now affect movie ratings....maybe. A few too many self-conscious lungfuls and a film may end up with...what? An R rather than a PG-13? A PG-13 rather than a PG? Something along those lines.

...

The last two and half days were so awful, and then this framed photo arrived via Fed Ex this afternoon. Talk about a radical mood swing and the kindness of strangers. An HE fan whom I don't know saw that post three or four weeks ago about that damaged print of Jack Nicholson and got inspired and threw this together with a glass cover and a classy wood frame and everything. It's now hanging on the den wall.

Thanks so much to everyone else who sent along cleaned-up JPEGs of the Jack shot, by the...Read More

I always thought of Las Vegas is a cool place to visit for about 24 hours, after which it starts to get old fast. But then along came the uptown, reconfigured, Trevor Groth-approved Cinevegas Film Festival and I started to amend that view. Seeing choice movies (some fresh out of the gate) and attending parties with fairly hot women every night makes it all go down easier.

There's still something over-electrified and soul-frying about that town, and the only thing I used to really love about the casinos -- the loud metallic clatter of silver dollars falling into the tray of the...Read More

Doing time for 45 days is going to be the best thing that ever happened to Paris Hilton. I did a little time in L.A. County in the late '70s for some unpaid parking tickets, and it sure as hell clears the clutter out of your head and leaves you with something that feels a lot like focus and fortitude. And if there's anyone on the face of the planet who could use some of this more than Paris Hilton, I'd like to know who that is.

Jail is awful but if you can grim up and face it down, you come...Read More

And so begins the rejuvenated, out-of-the-woods, post-hard drive crash, five-pounds-lighter-due-to-stress phase of Hollywood Elsewhere, with only five days to spare before the flight to Cannes. The new hard drive is installed, all the programs are re-installed and running, and pretty much everything is back to normal.

Before anything else I need to give a shout-out to Angelo Moratta, the guy who got me out of this mess more than anyone else. Angelo runs a shop about 50 miles north of Manhattan called Mindtrain Computer Services, and if you're ever in any kind of serious dutch with your computer...Read More

The Los Angeles Film Festival (6.21 through 7.1) will kick off with Kasi Lemmons' Talk to Me (Focus Features), the real-life story of Ralph Waldo "Petey" Greene (Don Cheadle), an ex-con who became a talk-radio personality in the 1960s in Washington, D.C., and close with Danny Boyle's Sunshine (Fox Searchlight), the mostly well-reviewed space-mission sci-fi adventure that's already opened in Europe. I asked for a screening opportunity in L.A. since I'll be able to catch it France or Italy at a commercial cinema later this month, but the Fox Searclighters didn't want to show favoritism (or something along those lines). So...Read More

Yesterday's news: Michael Moore's Sicko, the long-awaited health-care doc due to premiere in Cannes, will be released domestically on June 29th by Lionsgate. The Weinstein Company will handle marketing and publicity and cover all the p & a costs whiel Lionsgate, which handled the release of Farenheit 9/11, will book theatres and handle physical distribution. TWC will also handle international sales. How interested will European auds, who enjoy pretty good government-supported health care benefits, will be in an exploration of how ridiculously costly health care is over here? Your guess.

Ben Kingsley, Tea Leoni and Luke Wilson in the trailer for John Dahl's You Kill Me, which is automatically afforded exceptional interest due to the Dahl-Kingsley configuation.

Jon Favreau's Iron Man, set for release by Paramount in May 2008, is an adaptation of Stan Lee's Marvel comic about "troubled" billionaire Tony Stark (Robert Downey) who's forced to wear a "life-support suit" after a life-threatening accident, and thereafter turns this hindrance into a crime-fighting alter ego routine. (Sounds more or less like the same old Bruce Wayne shit, no?)

As some of you know, IESB posted video footage last Thursday of a guy (Downey?) in an Iron Man suit between takes in Long Beach. Yesterday Paramount attorney's pressured IESB's server to shut the shite down due ot perceived...Read More

A special edition DVD of Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief came out today -- special because it was mastered, for the first time, from the original VistaVision elements, which means more visual detail and fullness of color. I've been waiting for this for a long time. Paramount Home Video put out an okay-looking Thief DVD about six or seven years that provided the matted 1.85 to 1 aspect ratio of VistaVision, but without the visual splendor. Thief cinematographer Robert Burks won an Oscar for his efforts. Some of the film -- okay, a fair amount of it -- is engrossing...Read More

20 minutes to go until the cyber cafe closes. Why can't they stay open until midnight? 19 minutes now. It's an Australian place -- it's called Tuck Shop -- and it doesn't feel spirtually or geographically in character for a down-under establishment to close early. I've never known an Australian guy to not stay at a party until the wee hours or not close a bar down. I've just wasted another five minutes -- 14 minutes to go.

When I get my computer back tomorrow and everything's technologically jake (I hope, I pray), I'll bang out some kind of longer tribute piece about 28 Weeks Later (Fox Atomic, 5.11), which I saw this evening. (I'd write it now but the cyber cafe I'm sitting in on West 49th Street closes at 11 pm, and they're charging $11 bucks an hour. Hey, why not $15?)

28 Weeks Later is a "wow" second-act piece -- more of a continuation of 28 Days Later than a sequel. It doesn't thematically build upon or add intriguing new layers to Danny Boyle's original raging-zombies...Read More

Computer trauma update: It's 3:35 pm on a beautiful blue-sky day, and after almost 24 hours of high anxiety I'm almost out of the woods. I came to my senses last night and realized that buying a brand new computer simply because the hard drive had crapped out was ridiculous. (Thanks to those who stated this in the reader replies.) I obviously wasn't thinking clearly yesterday. All I was saying to everyone was, "I have to fix this problem fast."

I found a Brooklyn-based computer repair guy named Marcel (his company is called Big Island Interactive) on Craig's List around 8...Read More

Today was a moderately good day until the hard drive on my relatively new Gateway laptop (a nice 17-incher with a 160 gig hard drive) hiccuped and froze up and was suddenly functional no more. "A bad hard drive," the Geek Squad guy at B'way near Houston said about 90 minutes after I first realized I had a problem. No repairs, over and done with, tough luck.

I didn't purchase unit-replacement insurance when I bought the Gateway for the second time last December (the first unit stopped putting out sound and had to be replaced), so I had to fork over big-time...Read More

Thanks to Houston's Michael Bergeron for passing along this shot of a pair of Hondo 3-D viewing glasses left over from the original 1953 release of this John Wayne film. ("Ain't that a Shane?") It was announced last week that the 3D version of Hondo will be screened at the Cannes Film Festival.

These 3D specs appear to be in awfully good shape considering they're 54 years old and made of featherweight cardboard

"I look at the people I meet. No one's dying to have a lot of responsibility in their lives. Very few people are looking at life and thinking, 'Gee, I wish there was another thing to occupy my time and energy.' Our characters are definitely trying to avoid that type of thing." -- Knocked Up star Seth Rogen analyzing schlub culture in Sharon Waxman's N.Y. Times piece about Judd Apatow's focus on (and identification with) nerdy/schlub types in his films.

Can there be any doubt that it was American schlubs who contributed a significant portion of last weekend's huge Spider-Man 3...Read More

"And The Winner Is" columnist and Oscar-race analyst Scott Feinberg had a look last month of a rough-cut of S.O.P.: Standard Operating Procedure, the Abu Ghraib/Iraqi War documentary from Oscar-winner Errol Morris (The Fog of War, The Thin Blue Line) that Sony Pictures Classics may not release until "sometime next year," he says. Here's Feinberg's report:

"Morris says he has a longstanding fascination with 'iconic images,' including the photo of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima that inspired Clint Eastwood's two latest films (Flags of Our Fathers, Letters From Iwo Jima), and most recently...Read More

"There are three things that Democratic political candidates tend to do when talking with constituents: they display an impressive grasp of the minutiae of their constituents' problems, particularly money problems; they rouse indignation by explaining how those problems are caused by powerful groups getting rich on the backs of ordinary people; and they present well-worked-out policy proposals that, if passed, would solve the problems and put the powerful groups in their place.

"Barack Obama seldom does any of these things. He tends to underplay his knowledge, acting less informed than he is. He rarely accuses, preferring to talk about problems in...Read More

Bruce Willis attempted to spin the recent anti-Live Free or Die Hard buzz (i.e, that it's been marginally deballed in order to earn a PG-13 rating and therefore may not be a genuine kick-ass Die Hard flick) by calling Harry Knowles at home a day or so ago.

Since the PG-13 brouhaha arose out of a Peter Biskind interview with Willis in the new Vanity Fair, Willis told Knowles that "his comments had been taken out of place and that Biskind focused on [the rating issue] more than he felt was justified, especially since at the point in which...Read More

Fay Grim and Broken Engish star Parker Posey "refuses to play a role in the hoary media ritual," observes N.Y. Times writer David Carr. "Most actors manage to bring every conversation gracefully and stealthily back to their brilliant, courageous career choices. Posey, 38, is precisely the opposite, [and] discursive in the extreme."

Exactly -- that's what I found so engaging about her. Not once did she try to steer our chat over to the merits of Fay Grim. And yet with Carr...

"Wasn't Apocalypto amazing?” she says. “Did you love it? I have it on DVD. I've watched it like, oh, my...Read More

"'What are they doing?' a 5-year-old boy asked his parents when an explicit sexual scene showed up on his TV screen [a few days ago].

"The boy's father, Paul Dunleavy, was appalled.

"'It was two people doing their thing, it was full-on and it was disgusting,' said Dunleavy, who asked that his son not be named. 'It wasn't something you'd expect to see on Cinemax, never mind Disney.'" -- from a 5.2.07 N.Y. Daily News story by Adam Nichols called "Cable Porn Gaffe: The Full Mickey!"

"The movie industry has been in the business of big -- big stars, big stories, big productions, big screens and big returns -- about as long as it's been a business," writes N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis in her Sunday piece called "Defending Goliath: Hollywood and the Art of the Blockbuster." And, she adds, "as long as the movies have told stories, they have used spectacle to sell those stories."

Dargis's point is that there's not a whole lot of difference between emotionally primitive '50s style spectacles like The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur and the current assortment as represented by...Read More

In reporting that John Malkovich is "in talks" to costar in Joel and Ethan Coen's Burn Ater Reading, a half-serious, half-doofusy dark comedy set to begin shooting in August with Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Frances McDormand playing major roles, the Hollywood Reporter wrote that the Coens' screenplay "is being kept under wraps" and that "it is unclear what Pitt's character will be."

Brad Pitt, Ethan and Joel Coen, John Malkovich

I can clear that mystery up since I finished the script this morning. Pitt is playing a dumb health freak and...Read More

Variety is reporting what I posted yesterday morning -- a first-weekend tally of $148 million for Spider-Man 3. That's the biggest domestic opening weekend ever. The comic-book extravaganza from the hand of director, co-writer and Republican supporter Sam Raimi also took in $375 million worldwide, which is the biggest across-the-globe tally in human history.

Congratulations, lemmings! By supporting a mediocre film to this degree you have guaranteed that more big-scale CG mediocrities (i.e., dumbed-down behemoths that don't logically add up or contain anything in the way of cleverness or skillful character construction, etc.) will be cranked out in the years and...Read More

Spider-Man 3 did $57,274,000 last night, including about $10 million from Thursday's midnight show. Others are claiming it did $59 million even. One studio is projecting a total weekend tally of $148,929,000. Even if the disappointing word-of-mouth brings it down some it'll still do over $140 million. Sam Raimi's movie is eating up 80% to 85% of the weekend's business.

Disturbia is #2 with $5,700,000 and Fracture is #3 with $3,666,000...off 46%. The Invisible is fourth with $3,542,000, followed by Next at $2,966,000. Poor, kicked-around Lucky You will end up with about $2,626,000 -- the per-screen estimate is about $1940. Blades of...Read More

When I first heard a few weeks ago about screenwriter Stephen Schiff writing a Wall Street 2 movie, I wrote him with some questions. I said there's a competitive element afoot with Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio cooking up a rise-and-fall-of-a-Wall Street-hustler story -- an adaptation of Jordan Belfort's upcoming tell-all autobiography "The Wolf of Wall Street." And I was wondering if Schiff's piece was going to be something different or familiar.

The familiar would be another tale about a twentysomething money-hungry guy (a) gaining entry to the world of high finance, (b) learning the ropes, making...Read More

Oliver Stone's anti-Iraq War video spot, sponsored by the MoveOn.org political action group and VoteVets.org, is straightforward but underwhelming. When I first heard Stone would be doing this I was kind of expecting...I don't know, some kind of pulverizing visual statement that would scream "wake up and listen!" Something that would say "the guy who made Platoon made this." Maybe some kind of Battle of Algiers-type deal.

Instead, Stone shows us two talking-head closeups of two vets -- John Bruhns, a former infantry sergeant who fought in Iraq "starting from day one" in '03 and realized early on that the presence of...Read More

L.A. Times reporters Claudia Eller and Lorenza Munoz reported today that Steven Spielberg has won a bidding war for the right to finance Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones, a movie based upon Alice Sebold's 2004 book about the aftermath of the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl who narrates her tale from heaven. DreamWorks SKG will reportedly be paying Jackson "just under $70 million" to make the film, including his producing and directing fees.

The Spider-Man 3 "attack dogs are out in force," laments Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers in a more-or-less positive review. He says that the haters "see the film's budget (a reported $250 million) and the huge box-office take of the first two installments ($1.6 billion) as evidence that the filmmakers are in it for the money. Now there's a shock." That wasn't the point, Travers, and besides your figures are wrong. The "reported" budget (per Kim Masters' recent Radar story) is actually $350 million with Sony admitting to $270 million.

Travers also takes note of "internet wags" pointing out that...Read More

Several days ago -- six, to be exact -- MSNBC's Brian Alexander posted a piece on older hotties, or MILFs or GILFs. Ellen Barkin, Lena Olin, Helen Mirren, et. But he never mentioned Anna Magnani, a major MILF in her time. Striking but never exactly "pretty, dark bags under her eyes, looking like an underpaid Roman cleaning woman...but one look and you knew she'd be breathtaking in the sack. I could tell that when I was ten.

I realize, of course, that jails are necessary. Society needs to be protected from bad people. But I've never liked the idea or the metaphor of jail...who does? Whenever I hear about a prison break there's a part of me that wants the escapee to elude the fuzz and the hounds and never be heard from again. All that changed tonight. For the first time in my life, I'm not only glad that a certain person is going to jail -- I'm happy, reassured, comforted.

Paris Hilton's attorney Howard Weitzman said that her sentence was "uncalled for, inappropriate and bordered on...Read More

New York's "News Reel" column has taken a look at the script for The Lovely Bones, am 112-page adaptation of Alice Sebold's novel by Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, and declared that it "looks to be not nearly as good as Heavenly Creatures." I too have a copy of The Lovely Bones (sent to me a few days ago). It's difficult for me to invest any enthusiasm in a project that the dreaded Jackson has an interest in, but I'll try to read it and write an assessment within the next few days.

The Hollywood Reporter isn't what it used to be, but there's still plenty of interest in the trade paper's top editorial job," says a 5.4 Radar item by Jeff Bercovici. "A number of Los Angeles Times staffers are said to have thrown their hats into the ring, perhaps worried about what might become of the Times now that it (and parent Tribune Co.) have been taken over by Sam Zell. (One, staff writer Claudia Eller, says she was contacted by a search firm, not the other way around.) New York Times scribe Sharon Waxman's name has also come up.

"Asked whether...Read More

Last night Anne Thompson posted a new "Thompson on Hollywood" column that assesses the Hollywood blogosphere, and how bloggers (a term that I will never be fully comfortable with) are re-shaping film coverage. It's a smart, comprehensive and fair-minded look at things, but I might as well take this opportunity to respond to (i.e., clarify) some of the things she's said about myself and Hollywood Elsewhere.

"Such kudos bloggers as Oscarwatch.com's Sasha Stone have become factors in the Oscar race, because they are read by younger Academy members as well as the media," Thompson says in paragraph #27. And right after...Read More

I meant to link to this Tom Tapp/Hollywood Wiretap story yesterday about Premiere subscribers being angry because Jann Wenner has bought their addresses and subscription deals and will be sending them Us magazine instead. I didn't get to it because I was packing and running around, but also because anyone who pays money to receive mailed copies of paper publications is living in the past anyway so what do I care? On top of which it's not that startling to hear that a corporation is trying to invade and re-arrange the reading materials of old-school magazine subscribers.

A very big hint about my current whereabouts is in the size and radiant color of the leaves on this tree. Okay, a tree growing in Brooklyn. There goes the guesswork.

Meditative moment this morning on the way back from El Brilliante, the Montrose Ave. breakfast joint, and my last decent L.A. shot -- taken Thursday, 5.3.07, 5:20 pm

One of the things I truly love about being back east is the way everything starts popping through in late April-early May. Not to dismiss those blue-violet Jaracanda blossoms that explode sometime around May or June in...Read More

Last week L.A. Times columnist Deborah Netburn asked the usual web suspects -- David Poland, myself, Garth Franklin, myself, Leonard Klady, etc. -- for opinions about the likely big winners, losers and surprises of the coming summer season. The piece went up today. Here's the opening page, and here's the page with my blah-blah.

Netburn quoted me quite liberally (thanks!) but here's a portion that got cut: "The question shouldn't be about how many hundreds of millions the obvious biggies -- Spider-Man 3, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Transformers, etc. -- are going to make. The question should be...Read More

Toronto Star critic Peter Howell is lamenting the current dominance of one- or two-word bullet movie titles like Next, Vacancy, Fracture, Disturbia, The Invisible and The Condemned. "Whatever happened to movies with evocative titles like The Trouble With Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much or Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?," he's asking.

Howell asked me for a quote about this and posted a portion of what I sent him, but here's the whole schpiel:

"Hollywood has always kept titles down to two or three words. Occasionally a four-worder like The Guns of Navarone slipped...Read More

"Scrap the Black Vines of Doom and Spider-Man 3 becomes a fable about how success makes monsters of us all (a story that Sam Raimi, helming one of the top-grossing franchises in movie history, no doubt knows something about.)" -- from Dana Stevens' Slate review. Sounds like she may have been alluding to bitter Danny Elfman comment about Raimi having become a changed man between the making of the original Spider-Man and the sequel.

I saw about 25 minutes worth of Jonathan King's Black Sheep at the Toronto Film Festival last September (I was killing time, waiting to see something else), but what I saw and heard wasn't bad. I laughed; I rolled with the gore. It didn't seem quite as nimble-witted and character- driven and quick with the quip as Tremors, my all-time favorite mock-horror monster-predator film, but it's close, or at least in the same ballpark.

IFC First Take is opening Black Sheep in the U.S. on 6.22.07, and yet the only official website I could find...Read More

Oscarwatch.com's Sasha Stone doesn't appear to consider me a friend or a supporter any longer because she didn't send me those May 1st AMPAS lawsuit papers from Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges, LLP. Probably because of that pissy business from two or three days ago. But I am her supporter and ally as far as her problem with the Academy is concerned.

They're bullies, these guys....throwing lawyers and lawsuits at a single mom who intelligently promotes the Oscar hoo-hah like a clean machine and who makes the Academy membership and their emotional-whimsical preferences seem much more important than they actually...Read More

I've just returned from a 20-minute junket quickie with Parker Posey. The general plan was to talk about Fay Grim (Magnolia, 5.18), her new Hal Hartley movie, but we kind of veered from topic to topic. Here's the mp3 of our...I was going to say "discussion." Call it a chat or a ping-pong match with nobody trying to win.

Parker Posey in a sixth-floor bedroom at the Parker Meridien hotel., West Hollywood -- Thursday, 5.307, 2:455 pm

I don't mean to ignore Fay Grim, which is dry and quirky-funny and not at all half bad. It's...

I had a nice chat yesterday with Mimi Freedman, the writer- producer of Brando, the two-part Turner Classic Movies doc that ran last Monday and Tuesday nights. (You can't tell from TCM's website if any other showings are slated.) Warner Home Video will release a Brando DVD "sometime in the fall," I've been told. Freedman told me that Martin Scorsese once tried to get hold of any discarded footage (or reels) of One-Eyed Jacks, Brando's only effort as a director, but that he was unsuccessful.

Hey, there's going to be a Cannes Film Festival showiing of the original 3-D version of Hondo, the 1953 John Wayne western that John Farrow (i.e., father of Mia) directed, with Geraldine Page, Lee Ackers and Ward Bond costarring. I've never seen it, much less in the original 3-D process. All I know is that it's (a) well photographed and (b) not considered to be on the same level as Red River, The Searchers, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon or Rio Bravo. Has anyone seen it and is there any kind of consensus?

An actual 3-D image from...

And Curtis Hanson's Lucky You, an unquestionably half-decent poker movie, has, so far, a 20% Rotten Tomatoes rating with guys like the Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt calling it "dull, dull, dull." Wrong, wrong, wrong -- it's simply one of those films that chooses to stay with character and the reality of the setting and the story. I didn't slump, nod off or shift in my seat once....it's fine. The only two guys who seem to get this so far are the Arizona Star's Phil Vallarreal and Kevin Laforest of the Montreal Film Journal.

The Spider-Man 3 Rotten Tomatoes situation as of Thursday morning at 9:45 a.m.: a 68% positive by the rank and filers, and a 53% positive from the cream-of-the-croppers. Homie #1: "Yo, dawg...we really sure about this, man? 53% rating cream of the crop...sounds dicey. Hell, it sounds bad," Homie #2: "Yeah...a little scary, man...I know. Shoot, hang it...let's see Lucky You instead." Homie #1: "Down wit dat."

Anthony Lane's New Yorker pan is glorious fun; it makes you feel as if you've almost seen it:

"In an early scene, a meteorite crashes to Earth, and from it crawls what seems...Read More

"I'm glad you liked Lucky You," the Las Vegas Review Journal's Carol Cling wrote earlier today. "As I did. It's one of the few Las Vegas movies to accurately capture the feel of living here -- especially the contrast between glitzy vs. gritty, older neighborhoods vs. shiny new suburbs.

"But it's an indication of how fast things move in this town that many of the things that are in the movie have changed. Including the Aladdin, which became Planet Hollywood Resort a week or so ago, and Binion's Horseshoe, which is no longer the Horseshoe -- just Binion's -- and...Read More

Pirates of the Caribbean costar Keira Knightley has told the BBC that being accused of being anorexic has forced her to reconsider her acting career. "I think I just have to move away or give it up altogether," she said. "I couldn't have kids in the situation I'm in now. But I could just do something else. That's probably what's going to happen. I'm just not so hungry any more. I made a decision very recently that I wanted a life instead." If Knightley were to quit the business, I think I could live with that. As I more or less...Read More

When I think of the great Lee Marvin, who's being tributed with a Lincoln Center film series this month, I think only of Point Blank. That 1967 John Boorman film is the ultimate Marvin mood trip. His character's perfect name (Walker), the spareness of the dialogue ("Ninety-three") but more particularly the silences get better each time I see it. And the quintessential Point Blank scene is the clop-clop scene in LAX. Marvin striding hard down the endless hallway with the linoleum floor, his eyes glaring, his white-hair forelock flopping slightly in the breeze of indoor velocity.

The coldest, most lacerating and most misanthropic epilogue ever presented to mainstream audiences in the history of motion pictures. Was there a better one in this regard? Tell me what it was.

270 minutes of drop-dead beautiful photography and impeccable CG, basically amounting to a lot of preening eye candy...can't wait.

"An analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign finance, found that Democrats took in more than $4 from donors in the movie, music or TV business for each dollar contributed to GOP candidates," AP writer Michael Blood has reported. No surprise there, not in this town.

Mindy Stearns, the only reported McCain supporter among actors; McCain

"Hilary Clinton led the list with $837,000, followed by Barack Obama with $687,000, John Edwards with $322,000; John McCain with $244,000, Rudolph Giuliani with $108,000 and Mitt Romney with $73,000.

Giuliani has collected checks from...Read More

If I'd been quicker on the draw (which I never seem to be when preparing for a trip), I would have posted Mike White's N.Y. Times guest editorial about screen violence, called "Making a Killing":

"Most of us who chose careers in this field were seduced by cinema’s spell at an early age. We know better than anyone the power films have to capture our imaginations, shape our thinking and inform our choices, for better and for worse. At the risk of being labeled a scold -- the ultimate in uncool -- I have to ask: before cashing those big checks,...Read More

Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford finally has a release date -- 9.21.07 -- and L.A. Times guy John Horn is reporting that there's been a big backstage struggle about the film's "tone and length -- at one point its running time was more than three hours -- according to several people close to the production."

Remember that Kevin Williamson/Calgary Sun interview with executive producer Tony Scott I linked to several moths ago? Scott said that "we have to be careful how we market [Jesse James] because it's like...Read More

I'm being told that $120 million is a conservative figure regarding Spider-Man 3's projected weekend earnings. I'm now hearing $125 to $130 million. I tried buying an IMAX ticket at Leow's Lincoln Plaza this weekend...forget it, every seat sold. It's already rockin' the sock in Europe and Asia, as this Nikki Finke column reports.

Excuse me for not popping open the bubbly and doing cartwheels on Melrose. This is going to sound like Charlton Heston lecturing the sinful Hebrews in The Ten Commandments, but the more money Spider-Man 3 makes this weekend, the darker the implications for the human condition and the...Read More

I've been kept out of Spider-Man 3 press screenings (I plan on catching it commercially on Saturday in Manhattan), but last night I finally saw Lucky You, the Eric Bana-Drew Barrymore-Robert Duvall poker movie that's being thrown up against the Sam Rami behemoth as a kind of sacrificial lamb. Warner Bros. is calling it counter-programming, but they're basically dumping it. But I can say without question that it's a pretty good film, and by no stretch is it any kind of burn.

If I'd seen Spider-Man 3 by now I could write that Lucky You...Read More

That black-and-white short from TCM's Brando doc -- the one showing Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and Kevin McCarthy goofing around sometime in the mid '40s -- is here. Silly in an exaggerated, overly "gay" Charlie's Aunt vein and kind of awful in the way that all over-acting is excrutiating to watch...but interesting nonetheless.

Warner Independent Pictures will put Leonardo DiCaprio's The 11th Hour into theatres in October, or a little more than five months from now. The global warming doc, described in some quarters as "Son of Inconvenient Truth," will have its debut in Cannes two or three weeks from now. The title refers to "the last moment when change is possible," with the film "exploring how humanity has arrived at this moment -- how we live, how we impact the earth's ecosystems -- and what we can do to change our course."

11th Hour talking heads will...Read More

The feeling seems to be that torture porn has peaked and is on the wane. Has it? Is it? Or are we looking at a healthy (i.e., spiritually rancid but financially formidable) genre that nowhere to go but up?

Is there any straight guy out there who's sincerely into Auschwitz chic? Does anyone want a girl just like a girl who looks like she might die from malnutrition?

DreamWorks Animation chief Jeffrey Katzenberg has said that "everyone" will see the Spider-Man, Shrek and Pirates three-quels, "but the key will be which one gets the most multiple viewings," writes Slate's Kim Masters. "His argument, not surprisingly, is that Shrek will prevail because it's only 81 minutes long. The math, at least, is on his side: Pirates is a butt-numbing 170 minutes [and] Spider-Man is 140 minutes.

"A distribution executive at a studio that has nothing to do with any of the films just mentioned predicts that Spider-Man 3 will open huge, at about $120 million,"...Read More

David Poland (or someone with a herky-jerky, raggedy-ass camera sense) videotaped Roger Ebert's appearance last week at the Overlooked Film Festival, and you have to love the guy -- Ebert, I mean -- for his buoyant and unstoppable spirit

Sam Raimi has told Fox 411's Roger Friedman that there will be a Spider-Man 4. As Ned Beatty's character says in the second act in Deliverance, "My God...there's no end to it." Raimi told Friedman that "it's all about getting a script." Beware of any franchise in which a supporting player confides to a columnist at a premiere party, "It turns out I may not be completely dead." Ugh!

Mel Gibson has gotten too old (51) and too weathered-looking to play a sexy smoothie in a Maverick sequel, as he's indicated he'd like to do. He's gotten chunky-framed and his hair has been thinning like crazy. Plus he's regarded as too much of a nutter to play light and frothy -- he can't go home again after the drunken Malibu rant. Gibson was always great at playing eccentric nutjobs along the lines of Martin Riggs in Lethal Weapon -- that was always his home turf because he's always been in touch with that side of himself, and he probably has no...Read More

I've been thinking so much about the musical nature of John Carney's Once (Fox Searchlight, 5.18) since seeing it at the Sundance Film Festival last January that it didn't hit me until this morning that it's a 21st Century Brief Encounter. No exaggeration or reaching -- it really is that at its emotional core.

Hansard, Irglova in Once (l.); Johnson, Howard in Brief Encounter (r.)

The essence of David Lean's 1946 classic is the notion of love found and love lost -- a love between two people (Trevor Howard, Celia Johnson) that's clearly...Read More

An electrifying, must-watch trailer for Asgar Leth's Ghosts of Cite Soleil (ThinkFilm, 6.27). Superb in all respects -- ThinkFilm should adopt this as the U.S. trailer. Here's my original review that ran in March '06.

After that first screening, I wrote that "I now see Haiti as less of a Ground Zero for abstract political terror and more of a place where people on the bottom rung are trying to live and breathe and create their own kind of life-force energy as a way of waving away the constant hoverings of doom....Read More

For what this may or may not be worth, video of red-carpet interviews with Spider-Man 3 director Sam Raimi and costar Topher Grace from last night's premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival.