I first saw Armageddon at an Academy screening in June of 1998. It gave me a headache because of the machine-gun-like cutting, which I was later told was a result of a deliberate Michael Bay strategy of cutting out as many frames as possible in each scene order to make the film play as fast, hard and compressed as possible. This information came from Armageddon screenwriter Jonathan Hensleigh, who claimed that the film was "frame-fucked" as a result.

In any event, when I saw Armageddon producer Jerry Bruckheimer...Read More

In Contention's Kris Tapley has been asked to both edit and write a new Oscar season bloggy-blog for Variety. This is the "fairly substantial announcement" he's been promising on his site for the last couple of weeks, the one that will "explain the slow-down of activity here and my absence from this year's Gurus line-up."

Yesterday I suggested that standard Gurus of Gold and the Envelope Oscar-season predictions "should be given minor attention until at least the passing of Thanksgiving," and that the prognosticators should "spend the next seven or eight weeks primarily championing the right movies and the right stuff, and not in some elitist, off-in-their-own-realm Village Voice sense of that term." In response, The Envelope's Tom O'Neil is half-seriously suggesting that "the Film Snob Moonies...Read More

The first of two New York Film Festival shorts by the great Jamie Stuart appeared today on the Filmmaker website. The short is very "Stuart" (cryptic, sardonic, superb editing), but I can't figure what's being "said." The basic suggestion seems to be that Darjeeling Limited director and co-writer Wes Anderson is some kind of visitor from from another planet. Stuart seems to convey this, at least, by showing us a close-up of Anderson's face (wearing a pleasant, unguarded expression) while we hear some kind of variant of 1950s electronic space music.

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Miss Moneypenny has died. Lois Maxwell, 80, who played M's secretary in fourteen James Bond films starting with Dr. No in '62, was 35 when she first played the role. Her last Moneypenny was in '85's A View to a Kill, when she was 58. She spent 23 years flirting and hinting with 007 to absolutely no avail. The Canadian-born actress died of cancer yesterday, 9.29, near Perth, Australia.

Jim Sheridan's remake of Susanne Bier's Brothers, a first-rate, Danish-language 2004 drama, will costar Tobey Maguire as the older, responsible, married brother who goes off to Iraq, Natalie Portman (he said) as Maguire's wife, and Jake Gyllenhaal as the younger fuck-up brother who begins to fill his brother's familial duties when Maguire disappears during a skirmish and is presumed dead.

(l. to r.) Jim Sheridan, Tobey Maguire, Natalie Portman, Jake Gyllenhaal

A 9.17 Variety story by Tatiana Siegel...Read More

If your idea of a really great film was Michael Bay's Transformers, don't even go to Tony Gilroy's Michael Clayton (Warner Bros., 10.5). It's just not your speed. And I'm not even referring to the fact that some theatres will be asking customers to flash college diplomas before selling them tickets next weekend, and that people with Masters Degrees will be given preferential seating. It's just not violent or mechanical enough, and there are no jokes about E-Bay and no Shia LeBouf- type guys running around acting lively and endearing.

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Fred Kaplan has written a moderately interesting N.Y. Times piece about Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, which has been re-cut and re-stored for the umpteenth time, and which will play in theatres prior to showing up on DVD on 12.18 as "The Final Cut." The payoff is the narrated slide show about the origins and influences of this 1982 classic -- worth clicking on.

"The clue to Deckard's true nature" -- the fact that he's a replicant -- "comes in a scene that was cut from the original release," writes...Read More

Letterman: "A hard-boiled egg and an orange? Gee, you can't go wrong there." Hilton: "Yeah, but [the jail experience] is over and I don't want to talk about it any more." Letterman: "Uh-huh...well, this, this is where you and I differ because this is all I want to talk about." You might think you're sick of this but watch this...happened last night. The way she turns on the sniffles when Letterman won't let up is exactly how this empty vessel got out of jail the first time...before they sent her back.

Two days ago director Wes Anderson told MTV.com's Josh Horowitz that work has begun on a bells-and-whistles Criterion DVD of the great Bottle Rocket. The only way to see this seminal '90s film now is on a bare-bones Sony Home Video DVD that' came out in December '98 -- no extras, voice-overs, deleted scenes, nothing.

"We've just begun work with the Criterion Collection [people] to do Bottle Rocket on a new DVD that's going to have all kinds of stuff," Anderson told Horowtiz. "There's a lot of Bottle Rocket...Read More

The whole idea of MCN's Gurus of Gold and The Envelope prognosticators (who will be assembled in good time) trying to predict which films and filmmakers will be honored by Academy nominations next January is a waste of breath, space and influence. Or at least, it is at this stage of the game.

October and November should be set aside as ignore-the-Academy months. Or at least about downplaying...Read More

A producer with no connection to Enchanted, Kevin Lima's part-animated, part live-action fantasy drama that opens on 11.21, saw it last night at the Landmark and believes that Amy Adams, who plays a fairytale princess named Giselle who's thrust into the harsh present and needs to adjust her perspective as a result, will receive an Oscar nomination.

"The movie is a very well-conceived, well-made product straddling the po-mo Pixar style and the throwback Walt-era tropes," the producer says. "But Adams gives an incredibly complex, detailed performance...Read More

I thought with all the apparent lack of interest in Iraq/ Aghanistan/9.11-type movies that Against All Enemies, a film based on former terrorism czar Richard Clarke's novel about the failures of the Clinton and Bush administrations to stop the terrorist plotters who eventually brought about the 9.11 attacks, was dead. Indeed, Variety's Michael Fleming has reported that Columbia Pictures, "[which] had been developing the project, put it into turnaround last month."

But the guys who run Capitol Films...Read More

George Hickenlooper (r.) and Paul Thomas Anderson (l.) at the Alamo Draft House in Austin last Thursday night after that already-fabled screening of There Will Be Blood. Hickenlooper had just come from an adjacent-theater screening of Mayor of the Sunset Strip. Sissy Spacek joined them soon after and, says Hickenlooper, "kept telling me how it was one of the most extraordinary films she had ever seen...she seemed completely blown away by it." Spacek has been married to Blood's production designer Jack Fisk since 1974.

Universal gave The Kingdom a nationwide sneak a weekend or two ago and vigorously plugged it besides, and yet Dwayne Johnson's The Game Plan will ace it out this weekend. One estimate has the Sunday-night tallies for The Game Plan at $21,458,000 and $18,029,000 for The Kingdom.

More people simply liked the idea of a comedy over a Riyadh shoot-em-up, I guess, but it's also hard to dismiss the implications of yet another Middle-East drama underperforming. I thought The Kingdom...Read More

Leonardo DiCaprio as "Roger Ferris" and an obviously chunky Russell Crowe as "Ed Hoffman" during filming of Ridley Scott's Body of Lies (Warner Bros.), a Middle East drama that's been scripted by The Departed's William Monahan. It's about Ferris being after Suleiman, a Muslim terrorist behind a series of car bombings. The title refers to a complex scheme instigated by Ferris in which false information is fed to the bad guys via a dead body of a decoy agent.

...

Juan Antonio Bayona's The Orphanage (Picturehouse) "won't be released until the end of December, and there will be plenty of [similar-type] films before then -- including the very big budget I Am Legend," writes Newark Star-Ledger critic/columnist Stephen Whitty. "But I'm willing to already call this little Spanish film the best horror movie of the year.

The Orphanage director Juan Antonio Bayona following our chat in the Majestic Hotel lounge in Cannes -- Wednesday, 5.23.07, 12:25 pm

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On the same day that a certain film about three American brothers in India is getting half-trashed, a smaller, possibly less affected film about a single American guy visiting India under professionally strained circumstances -- John Jeffcoat's Outsourced -- has also opened in Manhattan, Austin, San Francisco and various northwestern cities.

It opens in L.A. (and other northern California towns) next week and, of course, no one has told me about any screenings. N.Y. Times critic Matt Zoller Seitz has called it "a wonderful surprise." I've decided to see it entirely because of this photo of Outsourced...

Hollywood Reporter guy John Defore was also at the Austin Draft House last night, and he's written that the fans of There Will be Blood director Paul Thomas Anderson "might not know what to do with this picture, which has none of the attention-grabbing flourishes of earlier films -- no hailstorms of frogs or deus ex machina pianos here.

"The closest it gets to self-conscious showiness is its closing scene, a confrontation as memorably strange as the fireworks-popping, 'Jessie's Girl"-belting drug deal in Boogie Nights. Its setting is as visually spare (a highlight of Read More

Ridley Scott's American Gangster (Universal, 11.2) is, of course, naturally... hello?...an absolute Best Picture contender because it's a straight, robust, high-velocity crime saga in the grand New York movie tradition of '70s and '80s Sidney Lumet. Which, in case you haven't been paying attention, is a very cool and vogue-ish thing to be churning out right now, and not for ephemeral reasons.

This is not a first-rate cops-and-dealers drama by the director of Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator and Black Hawk Down as much as a wonderfully focused and flavorful time-machine ride back to the gritty-stinky ...Read More

This account of a snippy confrontation adjacent to the red-carpet for last night's premere of Ang Lee's Lust, Caution is the best piece of writing that The Reeler's Stu Van Airsdale has ever posted. Great stuff. More of this, please.

Tang Wei, Ang Lee at last night's Lust, Caution premiere

"No sooner had Lust, Caution...Read More

In this N.Y. Times video piece, Darjeeling Limited Wes Anderson discusses how he threw a scene together, partly, as it happened, in the dark.

I know things look bad for Wes right now. Critically Darjeeling seems to be faring roughly the same as The Life Aquatic, only the patience of the pulse-takers has worn thin. The film has a fairly crummy 50% rating from the Rotten Tomatoes cream-of-the-crop...Read More

Patton Oswalt is hereafter a God...the George S. Patton of George Lucas haters. This video riff is the single funniest vivisection of the Star Wars prequels ever performed, seen heard...the best. Oswalt starts off by saying that if he could time-travel himself back to 1993, he would...just click on it.

AICN's Drew McWeeny posted a report this morning about the Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull crew having "built a reproduction of the warehouse from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark somewhere in the town of Downey (a totally hellish suburb of L.A. principally known as the childhood home of Richard and Karen Carpenter) and that "they're staging a sequence there even as you read this."

McWeeny says he'd "love to see what this warehouse looks like, considering it's one of the most iconic locations...Read More

HE reader Mr. Gittes said it first a few minutes ago, and it's probably been said in a lot of other places this morning, but considering the reports from last night's Austin screening and just for the record (because we're all sensing that it's true, especially given the Citizen Kane echoes) ...There Will Be Oscars.

Cinematical's Scott Weinberg also saw There Will Be Blood last night, and is calling it "a stunning surprise" by way of a "departure" for director Paul Thomas Anderson -- a monumental display of evolution that'll wow the established fans and impress a helluva lot more new ones. This is a dark, compelling and effortlessly engrossing film, one bolstered by a lead performance that ranks among the very best of Daniel Day Lewis' impressive career."

Hold on...."effortlessly engrossing"? Oh, he means on the viewer's part...fine.

"The film will most often be compared to Orson Welles' ...Read More

The Envelope's Paul Sheehan has put up a big generous piece showcasing 36 or 37 potential Best Actor nominees, with a separate click-through page and a really nice photo showcasing each would-be nominee. The only weird part is that this isn't May or June or July -- it's late September and the field has been narrowed down to eight or nine guys, at most, and none of them are Anthony Hopkins in Slipstream! Please!

Due respect to the Envelope...Read More

N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott has taken a fountain pen and more or less stabbed Wes Anderson right through the heart in his Darjeeling Limited review.

He's calling the film "precious, unstintingly fussy, vain and self-regarding," and says that the "humanism" of Jean Renoir or Satyajit Ray "lies either beyond [Anderson's] grasp or outside the range of his interests.

"His stated debt to The River, Renoir's film about Indian village life, and his use of music from Ray's films represent both an earnest tribute to those filmmakers and an admission of his own limitations...Read More

HE reader Dan Brown saw Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood at Austin's Fantastic Fest last night, and his first reaction is that Daniel Day Lewis will indeed get an Best Actor Oscar nomination. "The film really belongs to Lewis," he says. "He commands every frame he's in and is a pleasure to watch. It's a great character and he really sinks his teeth into it."

Which is an apt phrase given that Anderson, who attended the screening and sat for a q & a session afterwards, said "he was thinking of Dracula...Read More

East Coast Journalist to HE: If Viggo Mortensen ain't a front-runner for Eastern Promises, I don't know who is." HE to East-Coast Journalist: He's not only not a front-runner -- he may not even be a contender.

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The top five Gurus of Gold Best Actress contenders are Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose), Julie Christie (Away From Her), Keira Knightley (Atonement), Ellen Page (Juno), and Cate Blanchett (Elizabeth: The Golden Age).

Julie Christie in Away From Her.

The second five (positions #6 through #10) are Angelina Jolie (A Mighty Heart), Laura Linney (The Savages), Halle Berry (Things We Lost in the Fire), Cate Blanchett again (in I'm Not There), Julia Roberts...Read More

The top five Gurus of Gold Best Actor contenders are Daniel Day Lewis (There Will Be Blood), Tommy Lee Jones (In The Valley of Elah), James McAvoy (Atonement), Johnny Depp (Sweeney Todd) and Emile Hirsch (Into the Wild).

Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood

The vulnerable wildebeests at this stage seem to be Depp and Hirsch -- the former because of growing presumptions that Sweeney Todd...Read More

What's so disturbing about Chris Matthews saying the following about Fred Thompson? "Can you smell the English Leather on this guy, the Aqua Velva, the sort of mature man's shaving cream, or whatever, you know, after he shaved? Do you smell that sort of -- a little bit of cigar smoke? You know, whatever."

I think it's hilarious -- it's like great dialogue from a smart movie. Not Paddy Chayefsky as much as...I can't think of which screenwriter's stuff sounds like this precisely, but I love it. Sounds like a real guy talking.

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Assisted by editor David Tedeschi (Shine a Light, No Direction Home), Martin Scorsese will assemble a doc about the life of the late George Harrison, the quietest, most solemn-minded Beatle who played a mean crying guitar. His playing on "So Sad," "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," etc. (Is that Harrison playing on Badfinger's "Day After Day," or someone who sounds like him?) He was also one of the most economical lead guitarists in rock music history. That mad jangly riff on "Hey, Bulldog" still has a great tumultuous quality.

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I was invited to last night's Entertainment Weekly soiree to honor and welcome L.A. bureau chief Sean Smith (formerly of Newsweek), even though Smith's been on the job for eight weeks. It was a truly elegant event -- relaxing, soothing lighting, fragrant evening air, no blaring music. The best party I've been to in months -- nicer than anything I attended during the Toronto Film Festival and that's saying something.

Entertainment Weekly managing editor Rick Tetzeli (l.) and recently installed L.A. bureau chief Sean Smith at last night's chit-chatter -- Wednesday, 9.26.07, 7:15 pm

Smith and EWRead More

A producer friend has chosen to disregard the things about Into The Wild that absolutely work -- the intimate communing with nature's grand cathedral, the serenely beautiful ending, Emile Hirsch's performance -- because of her feelings about the real Chris McCandless, and out of this believes that Sean Penn's film may be the weakest wildebeest among the herd of supposed Best Picture nominees (to go by yesterday's Gurus of Gold posting).

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For years I've clumsily mispronounced the name of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but yesterday's N.Y. Times Maureen Dowd column about Ahmadinejad's Manhattan visit has solved the problem for good. Katie Couric, she writes, "has dryly has told people that she remembers how to pronounce his name with the mnemonic 'I'm a dinner jacket.'"

Why didn't the guy who posted this YouTube version of Hotel Chevalier run the whole thing? The short is 13 minutes, and this is only 9 minutes and 35 seconds. It went up eight hours ago and hasn't been taken down...yet. But it should be. Because it arbitrarily edits.

Fox 411's Roger Friedman ran into original Sweeney Todd creator Stephen Sondheim at last night's Recording Academy's New York Chapter's Honors show, and asked if Sondheim has seen Tim Burton's movie version of the classic musical. Yes, Sondheim answered, and he likes it.

But "it's not the Broadway show," Sondheim cautioned. "It's only an hour and 45 minutes. A lot of the score has been cut. They've made it its own thing. You have to go in knowing that. But what they've done is great."

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New York/Vulture's Tim Murphy attended a soiree the night before last for song painter Joni Mitchell and her album Shine (her first since '98's Taming the Tiger) at Soho's Violet Ray Gallery. Easily the most soulful and influential female poet-composer-performer of the late 20th Century (as well as the most emotionally arresting, elegantly phrased, bravest and saddest), Mitchell spat out the blunt truth when Murphy asked why she'd recorded no new tunes since the days of the Monica Lewiinsky scandal.

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MTV's Larry Carroll reported this morning that Gregg Araki's Smiley Face, which got a rousing reception at Sundance last January, has gotten the shaft from its distributor, First Look. The comedy will open in one lousy theatre in Los Angeles later this year and then go straight to DVD in January. Carroll is calling Smiley Face "one of the funniest films we've seen in 2007...it deserves better." Tough break, tough town.

MCN's Gurus of Gold (Scott Bowles, Pete Hammond, Eugene Hernandez, Peter Howell, David Karger, Glenn Kenny, Jack Matthews, Mark Olsen, David Poland, Sasha Stone, Sean Smith, Anne Thompson, Susie Woz, Glenn Whipp) have put up their first Best Picture rankings, and the top five are Joe Wright's Atonement, Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country For Old Men, Mike Nichols' Charlie Wilson's War, Ridley Scott's American Gangster and Sean Penn's Into the Wild.

This is is the very first time that a group has gotten together this year and said, "Okay...Read More

Here's a link for Wes Anderson's Hotel Chevalier -- Jason Schwartzman, a yellow and biege hotel room with a great view, Peter Sarstedt's "Where Do You Go To, My Lovely?", the naked Natalie Portman (with bruises) and a great pair of lines -- Portman saying "if we fuck, I'm going to feel like shit tomorrow" and Schwartzman saying "that's okay with me." The download is free. It's best to have iTunes open first. It lasts 13 minutes.

If a healthy, active 76 year-old public relations legend decides to change very little in her life, much less her work habits, by giving up a CEO title with the p.r. agency that she founded, how is this news? Especially if she plans to continue to come to work? Hollywood Reporter guy Borys Kit filed this story today about PMK/HBH honcho Pat Kingsley and...yeah, so?

What this probably means (and I'm just guessing) is that Kingsley is slowing down a bit and starting to downshift, which many older people tend to do (Sidney Lumet...Read More

I've made some mistakes in my life, but I sleep pretty well because I've also done a few things right. Like having watched only two episodes of the The Brady Bunch series in my entire life, and having deliberately avoided Betty Thomas's The Brady Bunch Movie when it came out in the mid '90s. Admittedly, I avoided out of ignorance, not knowing at the time that the backstage shenanigans among the Brady Bunch were like something out of a Radley Metzger flick from the '70s, or perhaps even one by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Brady Bunch

Some HE talk-backers have opined that ThinkFilm's Saul Bass-y poster for Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, which I posted yesterday, indicates satire or even comedy. This opinion strikes me as a little too conservative-minded, and perhaps a tad clueless. Irony posters are in short supply these days, and some people like 'em plainer, simpler...just the facts, ma'am. Nonetheless, here's a midnight variant with a different slogan -- "Loyalty. It's all relative." You'd have to be a total idiot to look at this and go, "Oh, a comedy!"

Saul Bass at midnight -- the "other" poster for

Here's a 9.24.07 Onion story with a headline that reads, "New Wes Anderson Film Features Deadpan Delivery, Meticulous Art Direction, Characters With Father Issues." A very rote piece for the Onion, but something about the phrasing of the headline made me laugh out loud. As I said yesterday I'm more of the LQTM type.

It's intriguing to pick apart a generic promotion- announcement article and the ultra-generic softball quote that is always supplied by someone about the appointee, and how this can sometimes convey what some may regard as the "wrong thing." I'm speaking of Tatiana Siegel's Variety piece announcing Amy Baer's appointment as president and CEO of CBS Films, and a quote by a former colleague, Columbia Pictures production prexy Matt Tolmach, that labels Baer as a "romantic comedy maven" with "uncanny commercial sensibilities."

Amy Baer

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In her Year of the Dragon review in '85, I distinctly remember Pauline Kael crediting Elvis Mitchell for the term "mood hair" --- a reference to Mickey Rourke's sometimes gray, sometimes gray and brown, sometimes grayish-white thatch in Michael Cimino's crime film. Kael set a good example by reminding that if you want to use some other critic's line or phrase in your own movie review it's good manners to credit them. I have an experience to relate along these lines that's hardly worth mentioning, but I'm going to mention it anyway.

In his 10.1.07 reviewRead More

A nicely written, Darjeeling-propelled profile of...well, I'm not sure. It seems to be mainly about Owen Wilson at first, but it's also called "The Wonder Boys" so obviouslyWes Anderson is meant to be equally favored. Writer John Seabrook has a smooth, fair-minded way of putting things. I prefer the title of the excerpt version running on MSNBC.com -- "The Story of O." (Which is solely about Wilson.) And why doesn't the Men's Vogue site provide heavy, quality-sized files of the Annie Leibowitz photos so they don't look all pixelly and degraded?

Peter Berg's The Kingdom "is basically (and disappointingly) a straight-up police procedural/action movie," says Newsweek's David Ansen, "in which a team of FBI agents, champing at the bit to apprehend the killers but hamstrung at every turn by local and international protocol, secretly fly [to Ryadh] from Washington in a race against the clock to stop terrorists" from doing their usual-usual. "As a genre movie, The Kingdom delivers atmosphere, heroic American derring-do and some decent thrills," but the way to best enjoy it is to "see it as a popcorn cross of The A Team...

Fox Home Entertainment's Steve Feldstein told N.Y. Post critic/blogger Lou Lumenick that "logistical issues" have forced the cancellation of next Monday's New York Film Festival showing of a restored version of John Ford's The Iron Horse (1924). Six days before the showing? The film was scheduled to play at the Venice Film Festival, and this did apparently happen. I called or left messages for FHE publicity, Fox restoration chief Schawn Belston, a Film Society of Lincoln Center publicity rep and two or three restoration specialists for a fuller explanation, and you know the rest.

9.25 UpdateRead More

Having read this morning's riff about my difficulty with the idea of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull beng based "on some creative-bedrock level" upon a ride at Tokyo's DisneySea theme park, the pic's screenwriter David Koepp wrote a little while ago to emphasize that Indy 4 "is not based on a theme park ride. Never heard of the ride, never went on the ride, nobody ever talked about the ride.

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If Keifer Sutherland winds up doing time for his second DUI conviction (the first was in '04), then c'est la vie. He could do as much as 60 days, according to a DUI lawyer quoted by People's Ken Lee. Jail time is good for the soul. I did two days in L.A. County for unpaid traffic tickets when I was in my 20s, and I came out a better man. (I think.) I at least came out with a newfound affection for the simple joys of being free.

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The Reeler's Stu Van Airsdale asks N.Y. Film Festival director Richard Pena to respond to the A.O. Scott rap that the festival "isn't programmed as much as it is curated," which, Van Airsdale says, "implies a more abstract, individual mission than institutional mandate."

Pena replies as follows: "I think of 'curated' more in the sense that it gives people the sense of having been carefully selected...Read More

I laughed at Tilda Swinton's line, given to New York's Bennett Marcus at last night's Michael Clayton premiere at the Zeigfeld, that costar George Clooney's "very existence is an entire joke on humanity." Then four or five seconds later I said to myself, "Wait... what?" Forget it. Jokes die when you break them down and send them to study groups.

Those devil horns and that crooked arrow strongly suggest that the ghost of legendary art director Saul Bass created the new one-sheet of ThinkFilm's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. The arrow appears to have been borrowed verbatim from the bent-forearm concept in Bass's poster for Otto Preminger's The Man With The Golden Arm, and what a splendid idea it was.

You need to click on the larger version of ThinkFilm's poster to read the slogan: "No one was supposed to get hurt."

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In a just-up posting on the Filmmaker site, Nick Dawson speaks to Andrew Dominik, director of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which Dominik describes as " a big beast of a film." He epxlains that "there's all kinds of westerns. Revisionist westerns, acid westerns, Nicholas Ray-type neurotic westerns, John Ford westerns, and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. We thought of it more like that kind of a movie, like Pat Garrett. [It's a] western as a Greek curse."

Barry Lyndon...Read More

For fifteen years and counting, the spiritual dead weight around the neck of the Indiana Jones franchise has been producer George Lucas. The lameness of Lucas's creative vision was made abundantly clear by the Stars Wars prequels -- no argument, a settled issue. It's also commonly known that Lucas was the principal naysayer in turning down idea after idea and script after script for the fourth Indy film -- a process that tore through the entire eight years of the Bill Clinton administration and two-thirds of the reign of George W. Bush.

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The best line I heard all day was from comedian Demetri Martin, who was being interviewed early this evening on NPR: "I never write LOL in e-mails. I write LQTM -- laughing quietly to myself. It's more honest." I would say my own personal LQTM to LOL ratio, over the span of my entire life, has been about 10,000 to 1.

"Generally the things that people are ashamed of make the best stories." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Another industrious Finke link: Hostel director Eli Roth ripped into Entertainment Weekly critic Lisa Schwartzbaum last Thursday (9.20) for views posted two months earlier (7.19) saying that she hates torture-porn and that she refuses to see films of this type. Roth replied that Schwartzbaum's "smug, holier-than-thou attitude" makes him sick because "there's no such thing as 'torture porn'" and that "it's time for her to hang up her critic's pen."

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Holy moley -- Nikki Finke is reporting that action director John McTiernan (The Hunt for Red October, Die Hard, Last Action Hero, The Thomas Crown Affair) is going to the slammer for four months for lying to a federal agent over an aspect of the Anthony Pellicano wiretapping prosecution. The fib was that "he had no knowledge of alleged wiretapping" involving Pellicano, Finke reports. The rap carried a maximum penalty of five years.

Israeli film columnist Yair Raveh usually writes me directly about stuff, but this time he spoke to Nikki Finke about the Best Foreign Language Fiilm Oscar qualification issue that may be affecting Eran Kolirin's The Band's Visit. But I did some calling around and found out a couple of things.

The Band's Visit

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Going by data compiled by market research group E-Poll on the country's leading pundits, Forbes staffer Tom Van Riper has listed the top dogs -- Roger Ebert, Bill Maher, Bill O'Reilly, Al Franken, etc. Leonard Maltin was ranked seventh. This is obviously based on visibility through television. Has anyone ever done a pundit/columnist popularity poll restricted to movie opinion? When I think of my favorite opinion-givers it's not how important they are or how much they've influenced my thinking (whatever that means), but how much I enjoy reading or hearing them.

The lamenting in Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men -- those perfect, world-weary ruminations spoken by Tommy Lee Jones' lawman character about dissipation and ghosts and the fate that you can't see coming, much less stop -- are what the film (slavishly faithful to Cormac McCarthy's novel) is all about. It's the damn raison d'etre. Take it or leave it but the tune is the tune.

Joel and Ethan Coen

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In the third graph of a 9.19 Newsweek story by Karen Springen about Mary Todd Lincoln, it is offhandedly stated that Sally Field will play the emotionally troubled wife of Liam Neeson's Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg's forthcoming Lincoln biopic. This is a done deal, or is this being floated to see what the reaction might be? I'm asking in part because the IMDB is reporting that Marcia Gay Harden has the role, and because she'd nail Mrs. Lincoln cold.

Sally Field, Mary Todd Lincoln, Marcia Gay Harden

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Curiously, almost bizarrely, Darjeeling Limited director Wes Anderson has given his critics all the ammo they need and then some by freely discussing his whimsical, mercurial, Wes-world lifestyle (thus spurring thoughts about how this may have affected the style and content of his films) in a New York interview by David Amsden called "The Life Obsessive."

Anderson, says Amsden, is "someone who has constructed a life almost preposterously conducive to the pursuit of fantastical whims. [And yet] one gets the impression that even Anderson, these days, can find living in Wes's world a bit Read More

Wes Anderson's Hotel Chevalier, that 13-minute short currently being shown prior to The Darjeeling Limited at film festival and critics' screenings, will have its world public premiere next Tuesday (10.2.07) at Apple stores in L.A., New York, Chicago and San Francisco. It will also be a free download on iTunes the following day (Wednesday, 10.3). It will also, as previously announced, be included on the Darjeeling DVD.

It's basically a piece about Jason Schartzman's Darjeeling...Read More

I love the brassy-gutsy David Shire music that accompanies the opening credits of The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974) -- here's the clip. And now Entertainment Weekly says there's a Tony Scott remake coming with Denzel Washington as Walter Matthau..."gesundheit." Do you think Scott will use that bit with the Japanese businessmen being given a tour of New York's MTA central control and have Denzel, presuming (as Matthau presumed) they don't speak English, refer to them as "monkeys"?

As I wrote yesterday, the two best tunes in Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited (Fox Searchlight, 9.29) and arguably the most flat-out enjoyable aspects of the film itself are Peter Sarstedt's "Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)" and Joe Dassin's "Les Champs-Elysees." The Dassin song is a sentimental French cornball thing, but the Darjeeling usage has made it cool. Here's the least offensive YouTube video I could find.

Asked if he would defend Adolf Hitler in a theoretical court of law, Jacques Verges -- the French ally and defender of numerous leftie extremists and terrorists over the last four decades -- says, "I would even defend Bush. As long as he pleads guilty." A trailer for Barbet Schroeder's Terror's Advocate (Magnolia, 10.12) is up exclusively on Coming Soon. The doc is a primer on the history of world terrorism from the '60s until today, as told through the experience of Verges.

A reiteration for ESPN fans: To be a hard-core sports buff you need to be inherently conservative on some deep-down level. By this I mean naturally deferential to "order." Sport happens in a definable, quantifiable world of rules and referees and umpires and end zones and teams guided by coaches and managers. But there's an unruly world of lonely individualism out there (and "in" there), and it's a lot wilder and weirder and scarier than anything encountered on a soccer, football or baseball field. Just ask Albert Einstein.

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It's been nearly three months since I saw Peter Berg's The Kingdom (Universal, 9.28), and some of the details have faded. But I remember the fundamentals. It's basically C.S.I Riyadh with a slowish first two acts and then a wowser third-act shootout -- a team of FBI guys and a few Saudi cops blowing away several terrorists (a couple of dozen, at least) who were behind the bombing of an American compound and the deaths of several Americans early on. Crazy-ass towelheads...get 'em!

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In explaining his $70 million lawsuit against CBS, Dan Rather recently claimed on Larry King Live that news reporting is being routinely diluted, brainwashed and diminished by corporations and big government "Somebody, sometime has got to take a stand and say democracy cannot survive, much less thrive with the level of big corporate and big government interference and intimidation in news," he told King last Thursday.

In other words, the de-corporatized and disenfranchised Rather repeated almost precisely what was said four years ago in Robert Kane Pappas' Orwell Rolls In His Grave.

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In today's N.Y. Times, Terrence Rafferty reminds that Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows (a new print of which will show at N.Y.'s Film Forum on Wednesday) is "a lyrical and surprisingly tough-minded little picture about a 12-year-old troublemaker named Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leaud), as seen by a sympathetic and slightly more seasoned troublemaker named Francois Truffaut.

Snapped four years ago in the Cimetiere de Montmartre

The originality of this 1959 film "lies in its willingness to trot along to the quotidian rhythms of a boy's life...Read More

A deluge of photos appeared two or three days ago of Sarah Jessica Parker and Chris Noth shooting scenes in Manhattan for New Line's Sex and the City movie, but I found this one (taken by Anna Zozulinky and supplied by Israeli columnist/ blogger Yair Raveh) especially intriguing because it shows you all the heavy-duty location-shoot regalia -- trucks, canvas coverings, metal lighting stands, light reflectors and filters and whatnot.

Sarah Jessica Parker, Chris Noth (i.e., "Mr. Big"), shooting three days ago on upper Fifth Avenue -- Thursday, 9.20.07

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The people giving Into the Wild those terrific per-screen averages in four theatres (which looked like $50,000 per situation yesterday, and now looks more like $52,000 and change) are, of course, the big-city fans of Jon Krakauer's book who've been reading the rave opening-day reviews of this Sean Penn-directed film and champing at the bit. In other words, it's been patronized right out of the gate by a bright, thoughtful, literate crowd. It's a foregone conclusion that the Good Luck, Chuck crowd won't be as ardent, but the big test is whether or not Into The WildRead More

That Engish-language version of a French-subtitled trailer for Sidney Lumet's Before The Devil Knows You're Dead on Awards Daily is fine as far as it goes, but the cutting on this UGC trailer, posted on Brightcove last July, is more engrossing. (Thanks to cjKennedy for providing the link.)

Online columnists "don't own their blogs," Variety's Peter Bart wrote two days ago, "their blogs own them." Right away I laughed because it's half true. More than half!

"In fact, their blogs have changed their lives," he goes on. "Forget the morning coffee. Now the first thing they do upon waking is to nervously check the blogosphere to see if someone has beaten them to a story. Then the panic really starts: What can they concoct that someone out there might pay attention to? Why was yesterday's traffic disappointing? Surely there should have been more hits.

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Sneaking back east as we speak, and showing itself to Pacific-area audiences in two or three hours. Terrific! Something to go to besides those heavy-duty dramas like In The Valley of Elah and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. For people who just want to kick back and be entertained...right?

I just noticed this several-days-old sentence from Time's Richard Corliss in a 9.16 Toronto Film Festival piece on Julie Taymor's Across The Universe: "I forget who said this -- a movie producer, I think, appearing on a making-of promo video -- but he characterized the quality of his film as 'somewhere between Sergeant Pepper the album and Sergeant Pepper the movie.'"

I don't think this is a fair analogy -- Across the Universe is more reminiscent of Milos Forman's Hair...Read More

For all the HE talk-backers who slammed me for writing that Darjeeling Limited director Wes Anderson "will wade into ground-level sensibilities" when he makes a personal appearance at an upcoming Santa Monica screening of the film, I rest my case.

Why is the N.Y. Times Sunday magazine running a pages-long John Wray piece on Michael Haneke's Funny Games with the distributor, Warner Independent, not opening it until next February? I can imagine what might have happened but....

Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern has finally joined HE in dissing those idiots employed by various bars, hotels and electronic stores who show images that are obviously intended to be seen on conventional 4 x 3 TV screens in a horizontally expanded format on their 16 x 9 flatscreens. This looks absurd to anyone with a sense of visual and biological proportion, and yet the people who understand that it's infuriating to watch incorrectly widened images seem to be very much in the minority.

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I saw Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited (Fox Searchlight, 9.29) the other night. I'm going to wait until it opens the N.Y. Film Festival before riffing on it, but I have to at least mention two stand-out music tracks -- Peter Sarstedt's "Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)" and Joe Dassin's "Les Champs-Elysees."

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Novelist Nick Antosca ("Fires") has penned "a breathless, extemporaneous appreciation" of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford on the Huffington Post and called it "a majestic accomplishment....a film had me so deeply in its reality" that he's found it hard to remember when it last happened.

"I experienced Assassination in my skin and my blood and my bones. It's such a powerful piece of art... spooky, absolutely beautiful, and so richly put together.

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