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 in the lobby after the screening I did the usual chickenshit industry thing --...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 have kidnapped Jeffrey Wells over at Hollywood-Elsewhere.com and put a hex on him." Go figure. I was mainly saying that for the next eight weeks everyone should double-track --...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.

Then the piece goes...Read More

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 didn't mention Portman, but Sheridan himself...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.

For a while there I was...Read More

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,"...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.