The Envelope's Tom O'Neil wrote earlier today to ask for a quote about the Best Animated Feature race as it looks now. His piece just went up, but here's my summation in my own words: Ratatouille is the front-runner but the matter of Beowulf's classification is far more interesting.

I've seen most of the 3D Beowulf product reel that played at Comic-Con, and the digital work has convinced me that it's the most out-there and avant-garde-ish animated stuff I've seen in ages -- far more so than Richard Linklater's Waking Life or ...Read More

Sixteen minutes of Samuel L. Jackson talking about a few things --- his role as "Champ," a charismatic, grimy-ass derelict revealed to be a former champion boxer in Resurrecting The Champ and the real-life story behind it, the intriguing success of 1408 (in which he played a relatively small role), the respective failures of Black Snake Moan and Snakes on a Plane, and his refusal to name a favorite among the Presidential candidates because nobody's saying anything," or words to that effect. (Recorded at yesterday's Resurrecting the Champ junket at the Four Seasons hotel.)

Three factual statements: (a) Hilary Clinton has more black supporters than Barack Obama, (b) the archetypal Barack Obama voter "is a 28 year-old white woman with a Masters degree," as Tucker Carlson said on MSNBC a few minutes ago and (c) there's a certain portion of the electorate who will never vote for Obama because he's black. The last statement especially. We all know this deep down, and that the no-way-in-hell voters are not just old-school Jim Crow types with shotguns racks in their pickup trucks. But no one will ever address it, least of all the Obama campaign.

Ingmar Bergman "stopped making motion pictures in 1982, though he wrote and directed several small films for television," writes N.Y. Post columnist John Podorhetz. "And the truth is, he quit just in time. His day had passed. After decades of declaring modern life worthless and offering only suicide as a way out of the nightmarish tangle of human existence, Bergman had nothing more to say."

Podhoretz also says that "the critics who described Bergman as the greatest of film artists were people embarrassed by the movies...Read More

"Ingmar Bergman had an audience of one aside from himself. The one he always sang about was you. His was one symphony with slight variations -- from childhood to old age. (My favorite is obviously Wild Strawberries, aging, I hope with some slight honor). The two warriors have always been life and death, who had deep respect for one another. There is no death unless there is no throbbing life; otherwise you never die because you have never lived." -- Studs Terkel as quoted on Roger Ebert's tribute page to Bergman.

The closest contact I ever had with Ingmar Bergman, so to speak, was a night in 1981 or '82 when I talked for a long while with Harriet Andersson, who had a relationship with Bergman in the '50s and starred in various Bergman films of that general period (including Summer With Monika, Sawdust and Tinsel, Through a Glass Darkly) and later costarred in Fanny and Alexander.

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I've been told that a $70 million-plus haul for The Bourne Ultimatum this weekend is out of the question. I've been thinking that it might just happen because the word is out that it's the best action film in many a moon -- an instant genre classic -- and that it's not particularly sadistic or even brutal, and that these elements may result in heavier-than- normal patronage from teens, women and family auds. The counter-argument is that Casino Royale opened to $40.8 million and The Bourne Supremacy...Read More

Why were films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Porky's, American Pie and The Last American Virgin "both commercially and artistically successful? Because the creators drew from real-life experiences, and therefore made movies that reflected the genuine nostalgia they felt for those experiences.

"These films weren't made from an assembly line, where a group of old men sitting around a boardroom tried to come up with 'shockingly hilarious' bits to stitch into a sex comedy. These films -- well, except perhaps for Porky's -- had sincere characters and solid story construction...Read More

Which director working today is the ultimate anti-Antonioni? A filmmaker who not only expresses an overwhelming indifference to the "haunting nothingness" element woven into the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, but whose films seem to be strenuously arguing with this...Read More

When I wrote my Ingmar Bergman obit yesterday morning, I called him "one of the four or five greatest film directors of the 20th Century." And now Michelangelo Antonioni, the director of such drop-dead classics as L'Avventura, Blow-Up, L'Eclisse, La Notte and The Passenger who also belonged to this select quartet or quintet, is dead also. He and Bergman passed the same day -- yesterday -- according to most news services. An old man dying is never a tragedy, but two guys of this stature going within hours of each other...whoa.

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Agreed -- Josh Hartnett gives an exceptional, above-average performance in Resurrecting The Champ (Yari Film Group, 8.24). He plays an ambitious sports writer...I don't want to get into this just yet. (Tomorrow, the next day...it's a good film and all in good time.) What I asked Hartnett about instead was an earlier performance -- the best he's ever given, if you ask me -- in a movie that very few people saw called Mozart and the Whale.

Resurrecting the Champ star Josh Hartnett in 12th floor suite in the Four Seasons hotel -- Monday, 7.30.07, 3:40 pm

Will Elizabeth Guider, a smart Variety veteran, being named editor of The Hollywood Reporter (effectively replacing the departed Cynthia Littleton) make any difference in the fortunes of the second trade? This sorta feels like a status-quo, within-the-perimeter move. Not bold or radical enough to keep Reporter revenues from...I was going to say "sliding even further in this, a declining marketplace for print." Put it this way: does anyone think the Guider hire is likely to improve matters? Not in the view of Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke, who filed this story late Monday morning.

To judge by his lean appearance, Robert De Niro was several years younger when he filmed this promo spot on behalf of the Tribeca Film Festival. It's for some kind of profile of the festival that was destined to appear "Tuesday on Fox," as De Niro says. The funny...no, hilarious part comes when the off-camera director asks him to sell it "with a little more energy" and De Niro goes, "I'm sorry but that was energetic....you don't know what you're talking about...sorry...I'm not selling cars, okay?" (Posted...

An excerpt from a Dick Cavett interview with Ingmar Bergman on a show that originally aired August 2, 1971. Key quote: "It is absolutely impossible for me to work with a producer who would try to tell me what to do. If he tries, I would ask him to go to hell." Here's a second excerpt with Persona costar Bibi Andersson taking part.

Judd Apatow and Greg Mottola's Superbad, easily the sharpest and funniest teen-sex comedy in ages, has an issue of concern. New tracking is in and it's not doing all that well -- 26, 25 and 1. For a film that's opening in two and a half weeks -- Friday, 8.17 -- that's not awful (things can change) but the marketers have to start scrambling. The film clearly sells itself, so Sony should sneak it this weekend. The trailer plays nicely, but it doesn't really convey how above-par exceptional this film is.

The Bourne Ultimatum...Read More

The rule-of-three once again applies: French actor Michel Serrault, best known for his role as Zaza in La Cage aux Folles, has died of cancer at age 79.

A South Park episode I happened to catch last night called "Make Love, Not Warcraft" was laugh-out-loud funny and flat-out brilliant. The site says it's been nominated for a primetime Emmy, which is no surprise. This is one of the most perceptive and subversive takes on the psychology and emotional babycake lives of hard-core gamers I've ever seen. I don't laugh out loud all that much, but I did last night.

This 1964 Bruce Lee interview (which I happened upon this morning on nerve.com) is worth watching for Lee's expression when he mentions that he majored in philosophy in college. He hesitates for a brief instant before admitting this, and his eyes flick to the side just after.

Tom Snyder cracks have been de rigeur since the '70s when Dan Aykroyd began spoofing him on SNL, but Snyder -- who died yesterday from lukemia at age 71 -- always had my absolute respect for a single interview he did with Sterling Hayden in, I think, 1977 or thereabouts.

That interview, which ought to be on You Tube or at least on DVD, felt to me like one of the greatest TV chats I'd ever seen because it was so nakedly confessional...Read More

That hooded, black-robed figure with the stern expression and almost Kabuki-white face paid a visit to Ingmar Bergman's home on the island of Faro last weekend (or certainly within the last few days). I like to think he would have been polite about it and knocked on the front door, but one way or the other he sat by the bed and took the one of the four or five greatest film directors of the 20th Century by the hand, and that was more or less that -- a final transition and fade to black.

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In this 9.29 L.A. Times essay, critic Kenneth Turan seems to be writing about Once from a slightly different angle -- i.e., how come it took so long for this exquisite little film to get picked up? -- than the one I went with yesterday, which was basically "how come more Average Joes haven't paid to see it?" But he gets around to saying the exact same thing at the conclusion.

"The Once experience worried me," Turan writes, "because it underlined how much the risk-averse studio mindset...Read More

"After watching Evan Almighty, I noticed that the exiting audience -- pale, wan and harrowed -- were collectively singing the post-movie equivalent of the lamentations of Jeremiah, emitting cries not unlike those of the sorely tested Job or the benighted citizens of plague-fatigued Egypt, and generally cursing His Holy Name with every obscenity in the biblical lexicon.

"All the Big Questions popped rapidly into my mind: 'Why does God inflict Bad Movies on Good People?' and more pertinently, 'How can we know for certain that God is good if he permitted this piece of dung to reach our screens?' Read More

Edward Norton participated in a Hulk dog-and-pony show in front of 6500 Comic-Conners yesterday along with costar Liv Tyler, Hulk director Louis Leterrier, and producers Avi Arad and Gale Anne Hurd. It had to have felt a little forced. Norton simply isn't part of the tribe -- doesn't talk geek, look geek....the genes and the attendant belief systems simply weren't passed along by his parents -- and no amount of good-sport promo whoring can change that fact. (Original reporting by MTV.com's Larry Carroll.)

Photo originally posted by mtv.com

"And heah, out of the oven...the chicken and the peahs....very nice...sort of a French thing....a little pepper on the top....400 degrees...one hour....these peahs are very nice, very tasty...they've gotten kinda candied ...pehrfect with the chicken...they go very well togetheah." -- Christopher Walken cooking what looks like a delicious upright chicken along with six or eight sweetened pears. Walken's a serious foodie, but it's hard to watch this video without wondering when the punchline's coming, even though you realize there probably won't be one. And you'd be right.

We've all chewed on the notion of Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and maybe Neal Moritz co-writing a Green Hornet movie in which Rogen will play the title role as well as his alter ego, the "debonair newspaper publisher" Britt Reid. But what can be made of this report from Coming Soon's Edward Douglas about a Comic-Con Superbad q & a in which Rogen "stated very clearly that the movie is 'not a comedy, it's an action movie.'"

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I watched the Bee Movie footage at the Cannes Film Festival, I listened to Jerry Seinfeld do a funny riff about it, and it all seemed fine. I said on the day of the Cannes thing that "I'm half into it...I like 'silly' if the movie really goes for it whole-hog." But this one-sheet is just...what is it? It's dull and smug like cereal-box art. It seems afraid to say or do anything that might define the movie in some specific attitudinal way, and thereby persuade some of us to actually sit up and take notice.

A hundred years hence, film historians will look back at the epic-quest CG fantasy fanboy-adventure genre (Arthurian comic-book fables, other-worldly milieus, mind-blowing visuals, Joseph Campbell-esque heroes in their 20s, constant insinuations and threats from all-powerful reptilian villians, relentless physical combat or sword-fight scenes, gah-gah finales) and be absolutely agog that tens of millions went to these films over and over again for decades (geek culture has sprayed shorts over these films since Star Wars opened 30 years ago) without making a peep about how oppressively similar they were from year to year, decade to decade.

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There's a funny caption that needs to go with this photo, which accompanies Michael Cieply's readable but slightly ho-hum Comic-Con story in the 7.27 N.Y. Times. Who would've thought when Jabba the Hut first appeared in Return of the Jedi 24 years ago that he would gradually become an icon of...naahh, not today.

The high-def trailer for Susanne Bier's Things We Lost in the Fire (Dreamamount, 10.26). It's a working-through-tragedy story about the best friend of a dead guy -- a dad who had a wife and two or three kids -- slowly edging into intimacy of one form or another (perhaps not sexual) with his widow. One viewing and you can tell that Benicio del Toro (i.e., the best friend) is giving one of his most appealing performances -- his most accessible since Traffic. Halle Berry is the widow; David Duchovny is the deceased ex.

Come 12.18 you'll have the option of paying between $55 and $70 dollars for the Blade Runner Five-Disc Ultimate Collectors' Edition DVD set from Warner Home Video, and you'll get no less than five versions of Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi noir. There's something insane about a package like this. You don't have to be a Blade Runner obsessive living in your parents' basement to want to own one, but it would help.

The thing for us level-headed types to do, of course, is buy or rent a stand-alone of Scott's all-new, restored and remastered "final cut"...Read More

Bidisha, a British author and art critic, is claiming in a Guardian piece that it's the gossip publications and not the whacked-out celebs who are the true orchestrators of pain and meltdown and ruination. And not so much the publications as the women who work for them.

"The media that deal in pop freakouts don't report these stories so much as create them," she says. "If Britney Spears...Read More

I'm slow from time to time, but I hadn't seen the headless Statue of Liberty art for J.J. Abrams' monster film (i.e., the one that absolutely cannot be called Monstrous) until last night. Was it revealed at some earlier point?

Wait...Todd Haynes' I'm Not There, the long-awaited Bob Dylan mystique movie with six actors inhabiting Dylan at different life-stages and incarnations, is going to open on two screens at Manhattan's Film Forum on 11.21? That's what The Reeler's Stu Van Airsdale is saying. Doesn't this news constitute a kind of advance review?

The Simpsons Movie made $28,689,000 last night and is looking at a projected $72,102,000 for the weekend. The tracking projected only $30 to $40 million, but this often happens with kid movies. I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry will come in second with $19,291,000....off 44%. Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix will earn $16,151,00 by Sunday night -- off 60%, at $240 million now, probably won't reach $300 million. Hairspray, off 44% from last weekend's opener, will make $15,402,000.

Transformers -- $10,965,000, now at $284 millon, will crest $300 million. Read More

I was talking to a nice-enough twentysomething guy from Thousand Oaks before last Monday night's Bourne Ultimatum screening. He doesn't work in the business and it was clear soon enough he wasn't a film buff, but he seemed an intelligent, well-groomed adult. So I asked him at one point, "Have you seen Once? One of the best films of the summer, the best date movie in years?" Not only had the guy not seen it -- he hadn't heard of it.

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Talk to any impassioned, ahead-of-the-curve film snob about classic westerns, and he/she will probably tell you that Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo (1959) is a much better, more substantial film than Fred Zinneman's High Noon (1952). More deeply felt, they'll say. Better shoot-em-up swagger, tastier performances, more likable, more old-west iconic. Many people I know feel this way. And now here's director Peter Bogdanovich saying it again in a New York Observer piece -- Rio Bravo is even better than you thought, High Noon doesn't hold up as well, etc.

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Here are two trailers for Joe Wright's Atonement (Focus Features, 12.7), an adaptation of an Ian McEwan period drama which will play at both the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals in early September. The film doesn't appear to be monumental art, but it's almost shocking how differently these two trailers sell the film.
This cooler trailer makes it appear serious, adult, thoughtful, grounded; the other trailer makes it seem tawdry, vaguely cheap and almost soap opera-like. The differences are really amazing -- the cooler version is posted above but watch the other one and compare.

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This video footage from the fatal crash this afternoon of those two Pheonix news helicopters is, of course, ghastly -- there's a crash sound and then the picture goes out. (Four guys died -- two pilots, two news phtographers.) But what was that Stepford Wife blonde anchor thinking as she totally ignored the visual and aural implications of what had seemingly just been broadcast?

Obviously something of a sudden, possibly catastrophic nature...Read More

Here's a fairly engrossing teaser for Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight (Warner Bros., 7.18.08) -- medium and high. It's mainly about darkness and voices and laser light piercing same, and a simulation of what might happen to a Batman logo if it were to enter the earth's atmosphere and start to flake apart like a faulty heat shield. Plus a relatively recent still of Heath Ledger as "the Joker" -- the crude stitchwork applied to a sliced-open mouth makes for a Leatherface effect. This shot has already turned up on AICN and other sites:

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What do Michael Clayton, Dolores Claibourne, Jerry Maguire, Audrey Rose, Susan Slade, Mildred Pierce and King Kong have in common? They're all titles of movies that are named after their main characters because...well, hard to say. Nothing poetic or allusive in them. Were they so named because a first and last name sounds straight and unpretentious? You tell me.

(l. to r.) George Clooney in Michael Clayton, Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce, Kathy Bates in Dolores Claibourne, King Kong

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Yesterday's (7.26) L.A. Times CFCA correction read as follows: [Both] the headline ('Online Critics Expand Boycott Against Fox') and deck ('Supporters Nationwide Join Chicago Group in Protesting Its Limited Access to Screenings') on a July 20 article in the Calendar section inaccurately suggested that the Chicago Film Critics Assn.'s online critics alone were protesting 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight Films' alleged practice of limiting access to screenings and that supporters nationwide had joined Chicago's protest.

"Film critics in other cities voiced support for the Chicago group but did not formally join it...Read More

Opening weekend reviews don't matter at all with most under 30s, and they probably don't matter that much with the slightly or somewhat older female crowd that Warner Bros. is hoping will take a chance on Scott Hicks' No Reservations this weekend. Many of them will, probably, although it would be better for WB if they don't consult the pic's Rotten Tomatoes score.

No Reservations has so far amassed a failing grade of 43%. Anything under 70% or 75% means trouble. Slip under 50% or 60& and you're really in Shit City.

My favorite pan...Read More

Per tradition, each and every film playing at the 64th Venice Film Festival (8. 28 to 9.8) will most likely play at Toronto, and many of these at Telluride just before. Except (possibly, know nothing, just guessing) for Woody Allen's Cassandra's Dream, which will show out of competition at Venice, and which has unveiled itself skittishly (i.e., at that hidden-away Aviles Flm Festival in Spain) beforehand. And Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited, of course, which can't play Toronto because it's the opening-night New York Film Festival attraction.

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Danny Boyle's "change of tack" at the end of Sunshine (Fox Searchlight, 7.20) "feels jagged with impatience and panic," writes New Yorker critic Anthony Lane in one of the best-written critiques of this interesting but enormously infuriating sci-fier that I've read anywhere. (It's suddenly hit me that I haven't posted a word myself -- sometimes I just turn away and say nothing when a film seems as shockingly miscalculated as this one.)

"Villainy descends upon the spaceship, but so pressing is the question of why and how it got there, and ...Read More

That 7.26 ABC News story by Russell Goldman stating that Steven Spielberg "may quit his post as artistic adviser to the 2008 Beijing Olympics unless China takes a harder line against Sudan" has so far been disputed twice -- in a piece yesterday by Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke, and in a portion of an audio interview I posted earlier this week with The Devil Came on Horseback spokesperson/figurehead Brian Steidle.

In that Tuesday, 2.24 interview I asked Steidle about the Spielberg/Beijing Games/Darfur situation...Read More

Warner Home Video will release a nine-disc "Director Series: Stanley Kubrick Collection" on 10.23.07. New two-disc special editions of 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Eyes Wide Shut and The Shining as well as a "deluxe edition" of Full Metal Jacket (which would be...?). Also included: the doc called Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures. The whole kit 'n' kaboodle with set you back $79.92, but titles will also be sold individually for $26.99 a throw.

Ruthless, ogre-ish, heavily-armed invaders descend from the sky, take over the reins of government, and before you know it rebel groups are forming into grass-roots militias, fighting back like proud guerillas and asserting their nativist rights -- this is our country! Death to the invaders! Death before submission! Does this like, uhm.. remind anyone of anything?

This double-disc DVD of John Milius' Red Dawn...Read More

An MTV.com observer at today's Paramount panel at Comic-Con reports that Karen Allen appeared on a video feed earlier this afternoon to confirm that she'll have some kind of supporting or cameo role in Indiana Jones IV.

Spielberg and Allen on Indy IV set in Hawaii.

Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, Shia LaBeouf and Ray Winstone "were all appearing via satellite when Spielberg left the scene for a moment to [grab] another director's chair. He came back with a chair with Marion Ravenwood written on it, and of course the crowd went bananas" -- bananas...Read More

A brilliantly edited spoof trailer for I Know Who Killed My Career, the Lindsay Lohan film that ought to be opening this weekend, by an outfit called the Mashturbators (who don't have their own website). Should have had this up earlier. Sitting on Iklipz.com.

Mia Farrow has told Slate's Kim Masters why she submitted that blistering public letter last March to Steven Spielberg (via a Wall Street Journal article) about how China's bankrolling of the Darfur genocide might mean that his serving as artistic director for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games would paint him with a Leni Reifenstahl brush.

Mia Farrow, Steven Spielberg

The short answer is that Farrow sent Spielberg two urgently-worded letters that were either (1) blocked by obsequious staffers or (b) were seen by Speilberg and duly ignored until Farrow submitted that now famous WSJ...Read More

"If failure, as the saying goes, is an orphan, then Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight can be thought of as a brief in a paternity suit, offering an emphatic, well-supported answer to a question that has already begun to be mooted on television talk shows and in journals of opinion: Who lost Iraq? On Mr. Ferguson’s short list are Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and L. Paul Bremer III. None of them agreed to be interviewed for the film. Perhaps they will watch it." -- from A.O. Scott's 7.27 review in the N.Y. Times.

"You've mentioned that your father served in WW II (Iwo Jima ,wasn't it?). I wasn't close to my father, but he served also. I may not have known him well, but he didn't consider himself a hero, as I suspect your father didn't. We may not always agree, but that's the meaning I took upon reading your parenthetic on 'Iraq war hero.' I don't think Audie Murphy considered himself a hero either." -- HE reader Chuck Wagner.

"Never forget, never forgive"? A slouching Johnny Depp in striped pants and a shock of white hair with a big straight razor? Tim Burton doing his usual indulgent production-design wallow with cooler-than-cool photography? Is this anyone's idea of a likable slogan and an enticing "key" image for a big-studio, gotta-see-it, end-of-the-year musical?

I've seen Sweeney Todd twice on stage and enjoyed it greatly both times -- it's a brilliant work -- but there's something about the energy and attitude that this DreamWorks-funded film (opening 12.21.07...Read More

"We both were looking to do something different. We both were single at the time, and we would compare these stories [about our personal lives]. We wanted to do a frank, romantic comedy about sex and relationships. Aaron Abrams is fond of saying romantic comedies usually end with a kiss. But for us, the really interesting stuff happens after the kiss." -- Vancouver-based director Martin Gero speaking about Young People Fucking, his $1.5 million feature that ThinkFilm has picked up, and which will launch Canada First! program at September's Toronto Film Festival.

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Paul Haggis's In The Valley of Elah (Warner Independent, 9.14) turns on an act of savage murder by a group of soldiers recently returned from the Iraq War, and the efforts of the father of a victim of this act (Tommy Lee Jones) to find out what the hell happened. In the view of N.Y. Times reporter Michael Cieply, Elah will be asking moviegoers "to decide if the killing is emblematic of a war gone bad."

Tommy Lee Jones, Susan Sarandon in Paul Haggis's In The Valley of Elah

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In yesterday's item about Kimberly Pierce's Stop-Loss (Paramount, 3.8.07), I quoted a plot synopsis that used the term "Iraqi war hero" and thereafter wrote in parentheses, "What would that be exactly?" Those five words brought down a torrent of hate. I won't dignify what was said by quoting the bashers (read 'em if you want), but I tapped out a response this morning.

Wells to All Vigilant Defenders of U.S. Military Guys in Iraq: Sorry, but as soon as I read the term "Iraqi war hero" in that synopsis of Stop-Loss...Read More

Good heavens, another movie -- Grace is Gone, a Sundance '07 entry that echoes Iraq anguish but doesn't quite deal with it in a specifically confrontational sense -- wasn't previously put on the Hollywood- Iraq-Afghanistan list. So make it eleven films now -- six Iraqs (In The Valley of Elah, Redacted, Stop Loss, The Hurt Locker, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Grace is Gone), four Afghanis (The Kite Runner, Lions for Lambs, Charlie Wilson's War, Jawbreaker) and the Riyahd shoot-em-up thriller that is Peter Berg's The Kingdom.

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Okay, I missed another Iraq film -- director Kimberley Pierce and producer Scott Rudin's Stop Loss (Paramount, 3.08). About an "Iraqi war hero" (what would that be exactly?) who freaks when his enlistment is extended and he's ordered to return to Iraq. Channing Tatum, Ryan Phillipe, Mamie Gummer, Timothy Olyphant, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jay Hernandez and Abbie Cornish costar.

So that makes ten upcoming Hollywood movies either set in or dealing in some way with Iraq and Afghanistan -- five Iraqs, four Afghanistans, and a thriller set in Riyahd, Saudi Arabia film (i.e., The Kingdom...Read More

A professional guy who knows the dog track has seen Tony Gilroy's Michael Clayton (Warner Bros., 10.3), and he's calling it "a superior, impeccably crafted piece of big-studio entertainment.

"Aside from being a terrific legal drama, it's especially noteworthy for the astonishingly assured direction by Gilroy. The pared down, rat-tat-tat efficiency he brought to the Bourne scripts is very much in evidence here. Pic otherwise reeks of the serious-cool craftmanship of other Soderbergh/ Section Eight productions like Out of Sight, Traffic and Syriana. What a debut!

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John Stockwell, whose career took an exploitation turn after the success of crazybeautiful and Blue Crush, has finally broken out of the youth-in-peril genre that he's been shackled with over the last three years (Into The Blue, Turistas). He's about to direct Middle of Nowhere, a decently written relationship drama with Susan Sarandon as a flaky, irresponsible mom who squanders her eldest daughter's college fund ($30 grand) on her youngest daughter's beauty pageant campaign. I had a chance to flip through Michele Morgan...Read More

It turns out that Film Jerk's announcement about Brian De Palma's Redacted now being a December 14th release came from a bum source. (FJ's Edward Havens simply ran with what he was given; bogus information was put out.) A Magnolia Pictures source has just told me that this lower-budgeted Iraq War feature will in fact hit theatres sometime in November, and that a booking at September's Toronto Film Festival wouldn't be totally out of the realm.

The fact that Redacted, which has been described on the IMDB...Read More

That pounding fuzz-bass rock track on that Blackberry Curve ad that's been playing over and over and over again on MSNBC is called "Jique", by a New York group called the Brazilian Girls. The embedded code has been withdrawn by request, but here's the YouTube video of the group performing the song. Everyone's heard it. A sassy-voiced lady singing, "You know I really, really like you...he said I really, really like you," etc. The Blackberry people are obviously going for 30-and-under single women.

Brazilian Girls, a quartet, has no Brazilians and just one girl -- vocalist ...Read More

The Guardian's Geoffrey McNab has written about the the radical youthifying of Beowulf costar Ray Winstone by director Robert Zemeckis and the sophisticated CG monkeys hired to facilitate. Interesting, but I'll take bets with anyone that the final visuals won't be convincing. I just don't think we're "there" yet. Ian McKellen's digital facelift in Brett Ratner's X-Men: The Last Stand didn't get it.

Ray Winstone in Sexy Beast ('01); in Robert Zemeckis' upcoming Beowulf

I first met Winstone in '79 at a Manhattan party for Scum...Read More

Windy City film critic Erik Childress has announced that the Chicago Film Critics Association and 20th Century Fox have resolved their screening and embargo issues. Of course, I posted an e-mail heralding this agreement last Friday (7.20) and was asked by two or three CFCA members to please take it down because Fox flacks were angry about some parliamentary detail. (Trust me, it takes very little to raise the hackles of certain Fox publicists.) And it only took another three business days for Fox and CFCA to iron things out.

"I think we need a trial, in this country, where Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush would be brought up on charges for causing the deaths of so many people." -- Michael Moore on Chris Matthews' Hardball, 7.23.07, on MSNBC. A portion of a PBS documentary called "The Dark Side" that supports this view. Rep. Dennis Kucinich explaining three months ago (to CNN's Wolf Blitzer) his reasons for wanting Cheney impeached.

It's hard not to sympathize with the Walt Disney Co.'s decision to become the first major Hollywood studio to ban depictions of smoking [by] "saying there would be no smoking in its family-oriented, Disney-branded films and it would 'discourage' it in films distributed by its Touchstone and Miramax labels," according to a 7.25 Reuters report. They'd be wrong to push this too far with Touchstone and Miramax films, however. Life is life and some people still smoke for this or that reason, and any film that artificially suppresses that reality will devalue itself.

Last May ...Read More

Last October 15th a Charles Lyons piece appeared in the N.Y. Times about Marina Zenovich's documentary about the great Roman Polanski. I ran a shout-out and followup that same day. The Lyons article described Zenovich's film as "untitled and unfinished," but the timing of it, as I noted, indicated "a possible debut at [the 2007] Sundance Film Festival and some kind of commercial exposure in '07."

Sundance never happened, and a commercial opening is now an '08 prospect, at best. But it's been nine months since the Lyons' piece so something...Read More

I don't know if this Lindsay Lohan figure was actually snapped at Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum or not, but if it was, the staff is to be commended for some very fast work.

Clean My Ride is a pro-ethanol, anti-big oil website pushing fuel efficiency and ethanol use as a means to reduce global warming. The webmaster is a guy named Phin -- a spirited, 32 year-old, Michael Moore-sized activist from Springfield, Vermont. No last name, man beard, and chummy with GenX celebs like Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner and Sarah Silverman. These four have appeared in four Phin videos. Excellent message, meh quality. The best moment is in #4 when Damon slugs Phin.

Brutal, urgent, devastating -- the documentary The Devil Came on Horseback demands to be seen as soon as possible and by as many viewers as possible," N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis has written. "An up-close, acutely painful call to action, the movie pivots on a young American, a former Marine captain named Brian Steidle, who for six months beginning in the fall of 2004 worked for the African Union as an unarmed monitor in Darfur.

"What he saw in Darfur was unspeakable...Read More

Shattering news -- Ulrich Muhe, 54, who delivered one of the most touching and devastating performances of '06 as the Stasi agent in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others, has died of stomach cancer. I'm told he had an operation immediately after the Oscar ceremony five months ago, but he lost the fight last Sunday.

The Lives of Others Ulrich Muhe at Toronto's Sutton Place hotel -- Saturday, 9.9.06, 4:55 pm

I fell deeply in love with Muhe's Lives of Others...Read More

James Bond is "an imperialist and he's a misogynist," Bourne Ultimatum star Matt Damon has told an unnamed AP writer. (Let me guess....Dave Germain?) "He kills people and laughs and sips martinis and wisecracks about it." Jason Bourne, on the other hand, "is this paranoid guy. He's on the run. He's not the government -- the government is after him. He's a serial monogamist who's in love with his dead girlfriend and can't stop thinking about her. He's the opposite of James Bond."

"I hope they put her in jail for as long as they can. Maybe she'll realize how serious it is. I believe she's uninsurable. And when you're uninsurable in this town, you're done." -- manager-producer Bernie Brillstein, whose company once represented John Belushi and Chris Farley, referring to Lindsay Lohan in a 7.25 piece by N.Y. Times reporter David Halbfinger.

"I hate these movies. I won't see these movies. Never saw Saw or its sequels, never will. I'm not impressed with the 'quality' of the gore or the 'wit' of the filmmaking. I'm not enjoyably scared; I'm horrified, and not in the way horror fans get off, groaning and screaming with pack-mentality excitement. Instead, my horror is one of disturbance and anger: Who makes this vile crap?" -- Entertainment Weekly critic Lisa Schwarzbuam in a column not yet on the magazine's website, but quoted by Moving Picture Blog's Joe Leydon.

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Israeli journalist Yair Raveh of www.cinemascope.co.il reports that Israeli marketers for The Simpsons Movie "recently sent out Simpsons treats to newsrooms and writers, but the content was less than appetizing. Journos brave enough to put the red blob in their mouths said it tasted horribly. The general hope is that the movie will be better.' Donuts, it should be added, are not easily found in Israel but it's still unclear how they managed to mess this up so badly."

Israeli Simpsons donut [photo credit: Ehud Kenan of http://flickr.com/photos/ehud]

J.J. Abrams wants to call his monster-on-the- loose-in-Manhattan movie (i.e., the one he's producing but not directing) Monstrous? Absolutely doesn't make it. Back to drawing board. Terrible title. End of meeting.

My latest tally of Hollywood-funded Iraq-Afghanistan movies -- narratives, not docs -- comes to eight. Well, nine if you count Peter Berg's The Kingdom, which is set in Riyahd. (There may be others I'm missing.) All but one look like chocolate sundaes to me -- dramas about things harsh and seething and generating impact waves as we speak.

allegedly from Brian De Palma's Redacted (Magnolia/HD Net, early '08)

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"If they could bottle what gives The Bourne Ultimatum its rush, it would probably be illegal," writes Variety reviewer Todd McCarthy. "The third and purportedly final installment in the mountingly exciting series is a pounding, pulsating thriller that provides an almost constant adrenaline surge for nearly two hours.

"In setting Jason Bourne on the home stretch of his search to discover who and what made him the killing machine he is, director Paul Greengrass has outdone himself...Read More

Earlier this afternoon I interviewed former Marine Cpt. Brian Steidle, author of "The Devil Came on Horseback: Bearing Witness to the Genocide in Darfur" (Public Affairs) and the "star", so to speak, of the just-emerging doc of the same name, which I wrote about yesterday.

The Devil Came on Horseback has been well directed by Annie Sundberg and Rikki Stern...Read More

For the sin of thinking like a free-associating innovator rather than a limits-observing company guy, Patrick Goldstein's latest "Big Picture" column -- the one that should have been published today -- was killed, allegedly by associate editor John Montorio. As L.A. Observed Kevin Roderick reports, "Goldstein's offense was to propose that the Times follow the lead of the U.K.'s Mail on Sunday (which distributed 2.9 million free Prince CDs) and partner with older artists to give away music in the paper.

Goldstein's column has been reprinted in full by Roderick.

Goldstein "argued...Read More

I think it's fantastic that Michael Apted's Stardust (1974), one of the best movies about the exterior and interior life of a rock musician ever made, is being re-released on August 10th. Okay, kidding. The Stardust that is being released on 8.10 is another matter -- an adaptation of Neil Gaiman's fantasy novel, with the direction by the undeniably talented Matthew Vaughan (Layer Cake).

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Although there wasn't much in the way of hardball debating and there were no breakthrough moments, the YouTube format -- sometimes eccentric Average Joes asking questions instead of the usual jaded media types -- used in last night's Democratic contender debate was revolutionary. It definitely added a newly alive aura -- a sense of engagement with the pace of information and the back-and-forth of current online conversation. There were at least a couple of "whoa, that was different" moments. It should become a permanent fixture.

The conventional view is that Lindsay Lohan's latest DUI bust in Santa Monica at 1:35 this morning, or roughly nine hours ago (TMZ reported the arrest at 8:45 ayem), means that she's really finished this time -- finito, toast, done. Not because she can't dry out and come back a la Robert Downey -- she could obviously do that -- but because she's become such a pathetic metaphor for our own much-feared inability to defeat our private demons.

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Inspired by those perfectly dry Geico caveman commercials, ABC is definitely going with a Geico caveman series this fall. This despite a rumble in early May that the pilot was allegedly awful. It'll all come down to the writing, of course. The calibre of the writers and, of course, the acting. ABC could screw it up. I haven't heard any backstage rumble, but they could elbow aside the guys who did the ads and blow off the dry sardonic tone and try to make the cavemen softer, goofier and more red-state. You know...dumb it all down.

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The trailer for Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited (Fox Searchlight, 9.29) is up and rolling. Trailers speak with forked tongues -- you can no more trust a movie trailer than a 17 year-old high school girl can trust the base intentions of a cute guy in a tuxedo taking her to the junior prom -- but it's immediately likable, and I can smell that old intimate- chemistry-between-brothers Wessy thing that I remember from the '90s. I said to myself, "Please, please...make this Sons of Bottle Rocket and not The Life Aquatic Goes to India."

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James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma (Lionsgate, 9.7) is said to be a rough, rugged tale of the Old West -- no CG, nothing slick, back to the cowpoke basics. Which is why this poster surprised me. It makes it look like a Bob Fosse western. The guy holding the two handguns has his head down like he's waiting for a musical cue before going into a hot and slinky dance number. In fact, he could be Catherine Zeta Jones with her hair up.

The Coming Soon guys had this poster first...okay?

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In last Sunday's Entourage (episode #48 -- "The Weho Ho"), Kevin Connolly's Eric -- the manager of Adrien Grenier's Vincent -- decided to bail out as producer of Vincent's next film because he can't stand the abrasive personality of the film's director, Billy Walsh (Rhys Coiro), despite his considerable talent. (According to Vincent and at least one other character.)

In so doing, Eric not only acted like a picky-prissy -- he also ignored one of the most essential laws of survival and success in this town, which is that ...Read More

Speaking of Hairspray star Nikki Blonsky, National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance spokesperson Peggy Howell has