"[Simply] making people laugh is the lowest form of humor." -- the late humorist Michael O'Donoghue.

Longtime Time magazine reporter Jeffrey Ressner has joined the Washington, D.C.-based Politico as its Hollywood corespondent. Obviously the idea will be to report stuff that straddles the interests of the film industry and the governmental/political realm. The kind of thing you might run into on the Huffington Post, only....I was going to say "only different" but maybe it won't be. Hopefully Ressner won't file too many stories about gun lobbyists and the like.

I'm not saying this means anything as far as cineastes or animation aficionados are concerned, but a friend spoke to a Hollywood Foreign Press person about having seen Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf, and the HFPA guy expressed his feelings by putting his finger in his mouth. Is it fair to even repeat something like this? I don't want to acknowledge the opinion of an HFPA whore and pass it off as valid, but I heard this from a trusted source and I can't brush it off. The first Beowulf screenings are happening this weekend.

CHUD's Devin Faraci says he's seen "the" trailer for the monster movie coming from producer J.J. Abrams on 1.18.08. The trailer "lasts 2 minutes and 16 seconds, and will debut in front of Beowulf on 11.16," he says. Faraci also reports that "the version of the trailer I saw had the title attached at the end, so unless this title card was a temporary placeholder for the real title, this movie is called...wait for it...Cloverfield."

I have an explanation as to why Jerry Seinfeld's Bee Movie (Dreamamount, 11.2) isn't all that good or funny, and another about why it simply doesn't work. The answer to the second question is that deep down it's a movie about death waiting just around the corner, which is obviously a depressing thought for most of us. But that's a thematic issue that can wait.

The main problem with Bee Movie...Read More

Variety's Dave McNary wrote yesterday afternoon that the WGA "is probably going to push back its deadline [as] the emerging consensus is that WGA leaders won't start a strike until next week at the earliest -- even though the town's been fretting in recent days that scribes could walk out at 12:01 a.m. Thursday, when the current contract expires."

All right, that's it...no more WGA strike coverage until the strike actually happens, and even then I'm not sure anyone will care very much.

Meanwhile screenwriters Gregg Rossen and Brian Sawyer have thrown together a one-minute short...Read More

A friend is raving about a Broadway preview performance he just saw of Aaron Sorkin's The Farnsworth Invention, a play about how RCA's David Sarnoff (Hank Azaria) more or less ripped off the patent rights to an amazing new invention called "electronic television" from young inventor Philo T. Farnsworth (Jimmi Simpson).

Apart from calling the play brilliant and immensely satisfying with superb perform- ances (especially by Simpson), my friend is saying it will translate beautifully into a film, and that Steven Spielberg...Read More

American Gangster is looking at a huge opening weekend and is running 90% positive on Rotten Tomatoes and 79% positive on Metacritic. And yet many of the critics giving it a thumbs-up are saying "yes but..." Plus the rumble around town is that Academy members are feeling the same way. Support is positive but a bit soft. Enjoyment and admiration, but hats aren't being thown into the air.

If I were running Gangster...Read More

Tom Cruise plugged Lions for Lambs on Tonight Show with Jay Leno last night. NBC webmasters would like you to see the clip on the Tonight Show website, but the site is hopelessly constipated and stuck its own glue so the clip won't load.

For some of us, picking Oscar-race favorites at this stage is about choosing players and films that we truly feel were among the year's finest. (Like Zodiac, for instance -- unquestionably one of the year's five best entries.) But for others, 75% to 80% of their Oscar prognosticating is about bowing down in front of the throne of this or that big-league distributor. Strictly a show of obeisance before power...no different than the protocol observed among New Guinea headhunters in the presence of this or that tribal chieftain, especially when entering his hut.

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With the exception of Jerry Seinfeld's overly enthusiastic opening & closing remarks for NBC's "TV Juniors" show, this short about a Bee Movie writers conference (which was shown at the Cannes Film Festival promo event last May) is a lot funnier and cooler than anything in Bee Movie itself. Just sayin'...

Update: No one has yet seen Charlie Wilson's War, but the Gurus of Gold consensus so far is that Julia Roberts is a prime Best Supporting Actress contender. The Gurus are voting this way for the usual reasons -- i.e., to show obeisance before the power of Roberts' legend and the economic power of Universal Pictures. (Note: I erred earlier today in thinking that Variety's Anne Thompson had herself decided that Roberts in a likely contender in this category. She was in fact quoting from the Gurus of Gold list.)

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The N.Y. Times has now jumped into the Band's Visit vs. Beaufort spat, with the Jerusalem-based Isabel Kershner reporting in a 10.30 story that "unnamed producers" of The Band's Visit have been quoted as "accusing the makers of Beaufort -- and director Joseph Cedar in particular -- of having drawn the academy's attention to the rule about the predominance of English, leading to the disqualification of The Band's Visit.

After this story appeared in an Israeli newspaper on 10.14, Cedar "was quoted...as acknowledging that his producers had raised the issue...Read More

It's very...I don't know, reassuring to see that Cate Blanchett's Dylan performance in Todd Haynes' I'm Not There is the far-ahead favorite among MCN's Gurus of Gold and the The Envelope's new Buzzmeter prognosticators.

Having read my clarification on Sunday, 10.28, about some of the maneuvers that may or may not have lead to the disqualification of The Band's Visit over language issue (i.e., over 50% of the films' dialogue being in English, according to the Academy's foreign film committee), the film's producer Ehud Bleiberg has written to explain his position on the qualification issues.

"One, the team of The Band's Visit...Read More

When this photo was taken in May 1972, Los Angeles was choking in smog (catalytic converters hadn't been installed) and the traffic situation was considered to be pretty bad, especially during rush hours. Today, 35 years hence, traffic in this town is beyond any reasonable concept of toleration. I remember reading a news story in the mid '90s that by 2010 the average driving speed in Los Angeles would be 11.2 miles an hour. That's only two years hence. The situation feels pretty close to that now.

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I'd love to know what the one-paragraph synopsis is for Terrence Malick's Tree of Life project, if anyone knows and wants to share. Getting a copy of the script would be even better. Heath Ledger and Sean Penn are said to be in talks to star and costar, respectively. River Road Entertainment's Bill Pohlad will produce with Sarah Green, who helped produce Malick's The New World.

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In a "Big Picture" column piece based upon Marc Norman's "What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting," a book that came out last week, L.A. TImes guy Patrick Goldstein says Norman "isn't especially optimistic" about relations between screenwriters and studio execs over the coming years, primarily because "the old studio patriarchs have been replaced by executives who think they're more in touch with the public taste than most writers.

As Norman puts it, "There's now a generation of executives who wonder why the writer couldn't be more like a court stenographer who can just put the ...Read More

Last Friday Variety's Todd McCarthy called Jerry Seinfeld's Bee Movie (Dreamamount, 11.2) "less than inspired... amiable but no more...short on surprise and originality...content with whimsical notions and mild jokes," etc. The all-media crowd is finally having a looksee this evening and tomorrow night, myself included.

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The best thing in Andrew Wagner's Starting Out in the Evening (Roadside, 11.23) is Frank Langella's performance as a sixtyish, once-great novelist named Leonard Schiller who's retreated into a congealed, emotionally blocked-off place as a defense from the narcotized reality that his writing career has all but shrivelled up and died.

Sixth-floor lobby of the Four Seasons on Friday, 10.19.07, at 11:05 am.

I can't say I "liked" the character but I was moved by the undercurrents...Read More

In an interview with Control star Sam Riley, L.A. Times/Envelope guy Mark Olsen says, "I hate to bring this up, but the fact that you and Alexandra Maria Lara, who plays Ian's mistress Annik Honore, are now a couple in real life, in a strange way, puts a positive, romantic ending on a story that doesn't have a lot of uplift."

To which Riley responds,. "From what I've heard from Anton [Corbijn]...Read More

The Criterion Collection's DVD of Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven, one of the most visually breathtaking and exquisitely transferred films of the 21st Century, was released seven days ago. But you'd never know this landmark DVD even exists to go by Dave Kehr's N.Y. Times DVD column, which ignored its release last week and again today.

In today's column Kehr writes about Anchor Bay's Mario Bava collection and Warner Home Video's Barbara Stanwyck Signature Collection; last week he wrote about a DVD of Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, a Criterion DVD of ...Read More

When I say I hate "dumb comedies," I'm referring to comedies that pander to the mentality (if that's not too sophisticated a word to use in this context) of simian-level moviegoers who love films like Balls of Fury. But if a comedy conveys the attitude and world-view of characters who are really and truly idiotic (and can't help it or don't care that they're so afflicted), then I collapse into helpless spasms. I love stupidity, but only the kind that's earnest and convincing.

Parts of Dumb and Dumber are hilarious to me. Ditto Bill Pullman...Read More

Memo from Universal marketing to American moviegoers: How would you like to see a sexy, sophisticated film about a smooth and tuxedoed Tom Hanks romancing the rich and super-fetching Julia Roberts over champagne and caviar while the man in the middle -- the cerebral, schlumpy, moustachioed Phillip Seymour Hoffman -- looks on apprehensively and wonders where the bathroom is so he can go take a leak while these two pitch woo as they conspire against the Soviet empire?

New Universal one-sheet for Charlie Wilson's War, which is being previewed exclusively by Coming Soon.net

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Leaving aside OTX's suggestion that Hollywood distributors need to cough up for a more specific and intensive marketing survey system, there's a bothersome sentence in Michael Cieply's 10.28 N.Y. Times piece about Hollywood's flooded market for serious prestige dramas.

Cieply writes that "you can't blame a potential customer who can't see the difference between In the Valley of Elah from Warner Independent Pictures and Grace Is Gone...Read More

The Film Experience/Naked Gold Man blogger Nathan R. says there's an apparent shortage of potential Best Supporting Actress candidates. I don't see what he's talking about -- there are at least seven strong candidates right now.

Nathan is figuring Amy Ryan in Gone Baby Gone (likely), Jennifer Jason Leigh in Margot at the Wedding (doubtful), Jennifer Connelly in Reservation Road (forget it), Leslie Mann in Knocked Up (a reach), Marisa Tomei in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (definitely) Kelly Macdonald in No Country For Old Men...Read More

Having seen about a half hour's worth of New Line's The Golden Compass, Fox 411's Roger Friedman said today "it will be the big holiday smash hit for which Hollywood is so desperate, without a doubt. It's full of fantastic animals, all busy shape-shifting, talking and clawing their way to the front of the screen. From what I've seen, not only kids but adults too will want to go back and see The Golden Compass a second time for the menagerie alone."

Is Friedman saying that even special-effects-hating, CG-animal-despising movie columnists who felt tortured by the ...Read More

The most likely reason that J.J. Abrams doesn't want William Shatner in the new Star Trek movie (despite having hired Leonard Nimoy to make an appearance as Spock) isn't hard to figure. Ever since playing an amusingly wackjob version of himself in Robert Burnett's Free Enterprise nine years ago, Shatner has basically been a self-satirizing comic figure -- the older eccentric actor who doesn't realize (and wouldn't care if he did realize) that he's completely insane...Read More

After quoting ex-CIA Valerie Plame's thoughts about who might portray her in a film based on her book "Fair Game" (i.e., "I just hope it's someone with intelligence and good skills...that's a lot to ask in Hollywood"), New York's "Vulture" column quips that Plame apparently "hasn't yet heard that Kate Beckinsale will play her in a movie."

They're referring to Rod Lurie's currently-lensing Nothing But The Truth, except Beckinsdale plays a Judith Miller-type character -- a younger Miller who's marred with kids. The Plame character is played by Vera Farmiga.

Update...Read More

New York magazine's Mark Jacobson referees a fascinating phone conversation between former Harlem heroin dealer Frank Lucas and Lucas's onetime rival Nicky Barnes. Denzel Washington plays Lucas as a flamboyant but tightly disciplined businessman in American Gangster, and Cuba Gooding plays Barnes as a full-of-himself superfly.

Jacobson: "Which one of you guys had the best dope?" Lucas: "Mark, here you go! Stirring shit up. Man, I had the best dope in the world. I had 98 to 100 percent pure." Barnes...Read More

I was talking with a friend yesterday about scenes in movies that aren't intended to be funny, but which some of us laugh at anyway. Because we have a perverse sense of humor, if not an out-and-out cruel one at times. I've repeated this observation often since I began writing this column in October '98, but the cruelest jokes are always the funniest. (Mort Sahl said it.) In any event, two of my personal faves came to mind yesterday.

One, the crow attack upon the school children in Hitchcock's The Birds...Read More

Will the retooled, slightly shorter version of Richard Kelly's Southland Tales, which is opening on 11.14 via Samuel Goldwyn, pass muster as a satisfying surreal experience? Will it at least end up as a favorite in the cult movie section at Blockbuster?

The reason I tend to mistrust and sometimes avoid trippy, off-the-planet movies is that it's a very tall order to create an alternate universe that hangs together on its own terms.

Movies with a deconstructionist attitude that invest in oddball imaginings for their own sake (as Terry Gilliam...Read More

"[Last] Friday it became clear to us that management's plan is to stall the talks until the final hours and divide us with a low-ball eleventh hour offer. This sort of brinkmanship will likely be met by fear, confusion, and even acrimony. All that is natural and expected. Therefore, we must be strong and steadfast in our convictions so that we convey the proper message to our employers, to our allies in the entertainment community, to the industry at large, and to each other: That, as much as we don't want a strike, we want a bad contract even less...Read More

Writing about the Wes-and-Owen chat video that went up on Friday night, ABC News columnist Sheila Marikar is calling it a regrettable new form of celebrity spin. Regrettable, in part, because celebrity-controlled internet chats have the potential to diminish the drawing power of the big networks and news stations.

"It used to be that controversy-saddled celebrities sidled up to big-name reporters when they were ready to tell their tales, revamp their public image and revive their careers," she writes. "Gary Condit came clean to Connie Chung, Monica Lewinsky cried to Barbara Walters, Britney Spears...Read More

Right off the top, within the first ten seconds of the trailer for Awake (Weinstein Co., 11.30), Terrence Howard (a doctor) is standing next to Hayden Christensen (a rich guy) and saying to him as they look out at New York harbor, "You're saving jobs, you're creating companies ...you own half of this city." Anakin Skywalker ("I need haahlllp!") owns half of Manhattan? At age 26?

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Awards Daily has taken note of trade ads pushing Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf (Paramount, 11.16) for Best Picture as a safety measure should the Academy decide to rule that Beowulf doesn't qualify for the Best Animated Feature Oscar. I won't see the completed film until Friday, but I've seen a reel and as far as I'm concerned Beowulf not only qualifies as an animated film, but it deserves an industry-wide salute for expanding the definition of "animated" in a truly brilliant and innovative fashion.

The short list of eligible animated films will be announced on Monday, 11.5Read More

Angered by the Academy's disqualification of The Band's Visit, a much-praised Israeli film, because it had, in their judgment, over 50% English and less than 50% Hebrew or Egyptian in the dialogue, and having heard from Band's Visit's producer Ehud Bleiberg that allies of Beaufort, another Israeli-produced contender, had lobbied against The Band's Visit on this issue, I wrote a paragraph the other day that voiced my feelings but which also contained a small but crucial error.

I wrote that "if I were king I would scratch Israel's Beaufort...Read More

This Telegraph profile of Lions for Lambs costar Andrew Garfield is about as clueless as it gets. Writer Isabel Albiston presumes that Garfield acting in a film directed by Robert Redford will act as a launching pad for his career, when the backstage rumble says otherwise. Supporting actors never get the blame when a film bombs with the critics and/or the pubic, but they never benefit from this. Lambs certainly won't catapult Garfield to stardom.

Odds are he'll get a much bigger bump d'estime out of John Crowley's Boy A...Read More

Another article about the public's unwillingness to see Iraq War movies....it won't stop. The only reason I'm linking to A.O. Scott's N.Y. Times piece is to suggest that Brian Stauffer's art -- a U.S. solder-in-Iraq action figure with a celluloid magazine feeding out from his rifle -- works better with the solder lying on his side.

Having now seen the wonderfully vivid and deeply affecting Criterion Collection DVD of Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven, it needs to be said that Criterion producer Lee Kline misrepesented the truth of what this DVD contains in a ridiculously over-amped piece that he posted on the Criterion website on 8.16.

With Malick himself presiding over the final tuning, Kline said...Read More

The best quote in L.A. Times reporter Robert Welkos' 10.26 piece about red-band trailers comes from Chicago-based marketing blogger Chris Thilk. Each red-band trailer, Thilk has written, becomes the "equivalent of sneaking a Playboy into junior high homeroom." And the opposite effect kicks in when you try to shoehorn the essential appeal of an R-rated film into a "green" PG-13 trailer. "If you've got an R-rated movie and you're creating a PG-rated trailer," he tells Welkos, "I'm not going to say you're misrepresenting the film, but you're certainly watering it down."

Referring to that 12:18 pm item about the New York "Vulture" guys having removed Charlie Wilson's War from the Best Picture hot-to-trot list due to rumors about extra shooting, a Universal publicity guy got in touch and set things straight.

"I wish you'd check in before perpetuating rumors. This isn't studio spin: there were no recent or costly reshoots on Charlie Wilson's War. Just didn't happen. There were a couple of days reshot many weeks ago because of a weather impact in Morocco...Read More

It's now incumbent upon David Poland to scold and swat down Variety's Pamela McLintock for writing an assessment article about the tanking or underperforming of all those serious early fall dramas that's more or less coming from the same place as that Rachel Abramowitz L.A. Times piece from two days ago.

Time, in other words, to explain once again that it's all "a bunch of hysteria over a few films that didn't catch in limited releases" and that "there's no real story here" and "it's business as usual...

I've saved copies of newspapers reporting historic events for years, and I'm therefore accustomed to the tattered and sepia-toned effect that kicks in after a couple of decades. I was nonetheless a bit surprised this morning when I came upon this copy of the 8.22.91 issue of the New York Times -- the failure of the old-guard communist coup, the triumph of Boris Yeltsin -- and saw that it looks fairly yellowed and decrepit.

The bottom line is that I'm not quite ready for 1991 to be regarded as a long time ago

Gee...was 1991 that...Read More

Yesterday New York's "Vulture" column did an odd thing with its Best Picture predictions list: it put a cross-out line through Charlie Wilson's War because of the reports/rumors about extra shooting. A publicist friend told me last Wednesday that these supposed extra scenes (reports of which have been denied by Universal publicists) have cost many millions besides.

Last week I expressed a concern about the trailer making War seem a little too jaunty and glib -- I've read the script and know that it plays differently. New York...Read More

I tried to time the new Zodiac Directors' Cut screener that I was sent a couple of days ago, and I failed. What happens is that you get so caught up in watching it that you forget about the damn running time. An extra five or six or seven minutes...what does it matter? I know that the extras don't seem to stand out in a "whoa!...look at this!" sort of way. They just seem to belong, like they should have been there from the start.

That said, I have two favorites: (a) a new scene...Read More

Yesterday's projection had Saw IV topping $20 million. Scratch that -- it brought in around $14.7 million yesterday and will definitely crest $30 million by Sunday night.

HE theory to explain the resurgence of torture porn: Besieged by too many serious dramas, the 18 to 35-year-old gorillas were laying in wait for a cheap, fiendish low-rent wallow as well as a pre-marketed "old friend." In other words, Saw IV did as well as it did in part because audiences been worked over by the "challenging" (as far as knuckle-draggers are concerned) ...Read More

The deal between Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson before taping this thing seems to have been "let's skirt and skate and basically chill." It's okay -- Owen is dry and circumspect, Wes is relaxed -- but they should have somehow dealt with the elephant in the room, if only to say to each other, "Is there an elephant in the room? What elephant? Okay, there may have been an elephant, but now it's so, like, 'not right now.'"

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The issue has already been discussed in this space but just for thoroughness's sake I should have linked earlier to Spencer Morgan's 10.23 New York Observer piece about George Hickenlooper being pissed about not being invited to record a voice-over commentary for the upcoming DVD Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (Paramount Home Video, 11.20), the legendary doc about the making of Apocalypse Now that he and Fax Bahr co-directed.

Hickenlooper tells Morgan that Francis Coppola, the doc's rights-owner who apparently was invited to record a voice-over commentary, is the principal Read More

A journalist colleague says I'm "being a bit unfair" to Washington Times reporter Christian Toto in complaining that his 10.25 story about all the Iraq movies dying with the public is late to the party, old news, slow on the pickup.

"I have written a story for [a newspaper] on the same subject. It won't run until a week from Sunday, but I pitched it at least a month ago. The problem is, the world of so-called entertainment 'journalism' has changed so drastically that except for a handful of papers -- N.Y. Times, L.A. Times, Washington PostRead More

David Poland has written that Rachel Abramowitz's L.A. Times piece about a series of adult dramas tanking or underperforming with the public (a story that HE readers had a field day with yesterday) is "a mixed bag of truths, falsehoods, spin, and reaction to one piece of mean-spirited, self-serving gossip mongering.

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There's a loose-talk piece on Digital Spy saying that James McAvoy has been "tipped" to play Kurt Cobain in a movie version of Charles Cross's "Heavier Than Heaven", a 2001 Cobain biography that Courtney Love (Cobain's widow) and Howard Weitzman are looking to produce with Kite Runner screenwriter David Benioff allegedly adapting into screenplay form.

Kurt Cobain, James McAvoy

I flinched immediately upon reading this. Shouldn't an actor at least vaguely resemble the actor he's being "tipped" to portray? If you were producing this thing would you hire an actor who resembles ...Read More

Red Carpet District columnist Kris Tapley has written that four journos saw Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will be Blood last night on the Paramount lot. I may as well admit that I was one of them. But there will be no Blood talk from this columnist until after the San Francisco screening on Monday, November 5th, at the Castro. No vague hints, no between-the-lines innuendo...nothing.

I need to take a moment and thank the folks at Time Warner for interrupting the column for two and a half hours this morning. It may still be out, for all I know -- I finally gave up and drove to the nearest Starbucks. It's not that wireless service goes down occasionally, but that the unfailingly polite technicians who answer when you call never just say "sorry, the service is out in your area." Which would be fine. We all accept that machines don't work perfectly 100% of the time.

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Steve Carell's Dan in Real Life, a surprisingly passable adult family comedy (although not quite on the level of '80s and '90s James L. Brooks), is expected to earn between $10 and $12 this weekend. The big winner, however, will be Saw 4 with over $20 million. If this isn't cause for rejoicing in the streets (the resurgence of torture porn!), I don't know what would be.

And Fantasy Moguls' Steve Mason is reporting that next week (11.2 to 11.4) is shaping up to be a record-breaker with Jerry Seinfeld's Bee Movie...Read More

"As pessimistic as it is -- you have to squint hard to find the barest flicker of redemption in its denouement -- Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is also curiously exhilarating," declares N.Y. Times critic A.O Scott. "Some of this comes from the simple thrill of witnessing something, or rather everything, done well. Even the overwrought performances -- Albert Finney's growls, Ethan Hawke's twitches -- have integrity and conviction. This is a melodrama, after all, and its lifeblood is in the manic acting, just as surely as it is in the plaintive horns of ...Read More

I sat down late this morning with the extremely bright and gracious Khalid Abdalla, 27, who plays the tortured lead character in Marc Forster's The Kite Runner (Paramount Vantage 12.14). He delivers a first-rate performance as a San Francisco-residing, Afghanistan-born writer who goes back to his country to try and rectify a terrible error -- a betrayal of a friend -- he made as a child. Not incidentally, he's also an immensely nice and likable guy.

The Kite Runner star Khalid Abdalla at the Four Season restaurant -- Thursday, 10.25.07, 11:40 am

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David Fincher's Zodiac is, was and always will be one of the finest movies released in '07. This fact was reiterated when I watched the 164 or 165-minute directors' cut version that arrived yesterday. The '70s period thriller would be a likely Best Picture candidate if (a) God existed and (b) took any kind of active interest in the awards game, instead of being a mere concept by which we measure our pain.

A Zodiac "Director's Cut" screener, some 7 minutes longer than the theatrical version that opened between just under eight months ago.

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Pete Hammond's latest Envelope column is one of his horse-race commentaries -- what's starting to take shape, what cards the players are holding, etc. The photo of Cate Blanchett (sitting to the right of the article) raises a question, though -- one that's bothering me more and more every week that it's sidestepped or ignored.

When are handicappers going to stand up and declare Blanchett's (or her handers') attempt to land a Best Actress nomination for Elizabeth: The Golden Age a lost cause because the movie is an absolute joke...Read More

"It doesn't matter how many Oscar winners are in front of or behind the camera -- audiences are proving to be conscientious objectors when it comes to this fall's surge of antiwar and anti-Bush films." Good God, another article saying the same thing? Fines should be levied upon journalists and editors who run trend stories two or three weeks after everyone else has gone, "Okay, I've had enough, what else can you show me?"

The offender in this instance is Washington Times reporter Christian Toto, whose article about this topic went up today.

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Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days has to be the front-runner for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. No other contender is generating this much buzz or has won Cannes' Palme d'Or prize or is blowing people away quite as much. But I guess I should wait until it screens for the Academy's foreign branch on Friday, November 2nd. You never know with the Academy fuddy-duds.

Screenings have begun already of the 63 entries and continue through 1.12.08. I don't know anything about the hot titles except that (a) Mungiu's film is the stuff of ...Read More

Too many indie dramas are flooding the well. Cultured moviegoer consciousness is being diluted and depleted by too many choices. Nothing's happening, nobody's catching any waves and "we're all suffering," says Focus Features chief James Schamus to L.A. Times reporter Rachel Abramowitz. "At least someone should be succeeding. It's as bad a fall [season] as I've ever seen."

I agree -- there's just too much out there, and that winds up hurting the whole field. But Abramowitz skirts the issue of quality and/or attractiveness in discussing the higher-profile underperformers.

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Last week I heard that Michael Mann was pretty well focused on directing Robert De Niro in Frankie Machine, a script by David Levien and Brian Koppelman that's based on Don Winslow's "The Winter of Frankie Machine," about an aging hit man who's hounded out of retirement as the target of a hit himself.

Mann has had a hard time getting his projects set up since the financial failure of Miami Vice -- two films that would have starred Leonardo Di Caprio (including an adaptation of For Whom The Bell Tolls...Read More

Brian DePalma's Redacted won't have its limited opening until 11.16, and yet it's been playing twice daily -- at 1:05 and 3 pm, no evening screenings -- at the Silver Cinema in Norwalk, Connecticut, for the last few days. Obviously for a reason. Thanks to HE reader Mark Rochefort for providing the tip.

Now I'm told there's a third Alfred Hitchcock project called Psycho/Analysis, based on a script by Psycho screenwriter Joseph Stefano. Like the Ryan Murphy/Anthony Hopkins Hitchcock project I mentioned this morning, it's about the making of Psycho -- but only as far as the screenplay was concerned.

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Those American Gangster pirating stories (in New York's "Vulture" column and on Digg) are true. I've just visited the biggest pirate site and there it is, waiting to be downloaded. The "Vulture" item said the quality sucks -- good. I hope they arrest the guy whose screener was used for the master. I don't know how many illegal Sicko downloads happened last summer or how much it hurt the box-office (or if it had any serious impact at all), but I wonder how many Gangster steals will happen starting today.

Despite the de riguer practice of releasing unrated versions of films on DVD, six years ago Warner Home Video decided to release only the digitally covered-up version of Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (i.e., the one with the hooded CG figures standing in front of sex acts in the orgy scene) because, it was said, they wanted to respect Kubrick's vision. In fact, Kubrick's original vision didn't include the cover-ups (which were inserted after his death in early '99), so the WHV people who said this were totally full of it.

In any event, the just-released Eyes Wide ShutRead More

"A nation is in peril. Bitterly divided at home, it vacillates between two warring dynasties. Threatened by dark forces abroad, it worries that a decisive moment is coming when one great empire will rise and another will fall. And a female leader is struggling to maintain her femininity while proving she can rule as well as any man.

"Watching Elizabeth: The Golden Age, I couldn't help thinking of Hillary Clinton, quite possibly the next president of the United States, a woman who often seems to live behind her own plate of glass.

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Between the two Duelling Hitchcock films, HE's money is on the Ryan Murphy/Anthony Hopkins version rather than Number 13, the comedy-thriller about young Alfred (Dan Fogler) finding his style as a British-based filmmaker in the 1920s. I've read an early draft of the Murphy-Hopkins script, written by John J. McLaughlin and largely about the making of Psycho.

16-month old draft of John McLaughlin's ""Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho," which Ryan Murphy will direct with Anthony Hopkins as Hitchcock.

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There was a research screening last night of Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd (Dreamamount, 12.21), and it played, for most viewers, as a very satisfying musical horror film. Not a gothic London period tragedy but a classic horror flick in the vein of Phantom of the Opera, says one observer. Oh, and it occasionally morphs into an out-and-out blood bath.

Tim Burton (l.) directs Johnny Depp (r.) during shooting of Sweeney Todd.

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Footage of Joy Division's Ian Curtis intercut with Control's Sam Riley -- posted four months ago, very nicely assembled. Thanks to HE reader Frank Booth for the heads-up.

Three Oscar-predicting lulus have turned up in BBC entertainment reporter Neil Smith's 10.24 article: (1) "Having won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar last year for Syriana, George Clooney could also be up for that prize for playing a conflicted lawyer in Michael Clayton"; (2) "Robert Redford's political thriller could figure among the Best Picture candidates" (3) "Hairspray could easily land [acting] considerations for Michelle Pfeiffer, Christopher Walken."

Dan in Real Life star Juliette Binoche on the cover of the latest French Playboy. The magazine has recently undergone staff augmentations ("many big guys have joined the crew," a reader confides, "big guys with the ability to attract big stars to pose for Playboy"). I could talk about Binoche having been born in March 1964, etc., but...how would a Playboy editor put it? That parted-mouth expression is all.

Jamie Stuart's latest video piece isn't a "piece." It's just a straight conversation with the great Sidney Lumet -- 18 minutes long and very beautifully monochrome. A lot of tech talk, Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, digital vs. analog, Dog Day Afternoon, etc.

A New York-area critic feels that IFC Releasing is missing out on "at least a shot" at 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days winning a Best Foreign Film trophy from the New York Film Critics Circle in December. Only films with an '07 theatrical release in NYC (or the NYC area) are eligible for NYFCC consideration, but it's expensive as hell to open a little foreign movie in Manhattan in December. (IFC intends to open it nationwide in mid January after the Oscar nominations are out.)

The Romanian entry has a chance to win, however, with the ...Read More

A good clip from 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days that doesn't give away too much, unlike 95% of all trailers (including the French-language one for Cristian Mungiu's film).

So Ryan Gosling didn't argue with Peter Jackson over some aspect of The Lovely Bones, "Page Six" is reporting, and he didn't walk off the set. (Momentary deflation.) Jackson apparently canned him.

"Peter couldn't stand Ryan," a source has told a reporter. The word earlier this week was that Gosling had walked over some creative issue, but the "Page Six" source says it was because Gosling "was so demanding...[he] cut his own hair and was fighting with wardrobe [so] Peter booted him two days before filming started."

Intuitive, source-free HE interpretation...Read More

Congratulations to L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein for bitch-slapping the Academy's Foreign Film Committee for talking only about "the rules, the rules" instead of the reality of modern communication today, and particularly for having disqualified The Band's Visit, the much-admired Israeli film, because more than 50% of its dialogue is in English.

Academy rules state that for films to qualify for a Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar, the dialogue must be "predominantly in a non-English language."

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I just wrote in my review of 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days that Cristian Mungiu's film, whatever he may have intended, is "the most persuasive anti-abortion argument in any form I've ever heard, seen or read."

Naturally, alert Right-to-Lifers (like deaconforlife's Peter J. Smith and John Jalsevac...Read More

I finally caught up with Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days last Friday, and when it was over I was stunned. Half-staggering in a slightly amazed daze. The heavy praise that came out the Cannes Film Festival (where I was clumsy enough to miss it) led to expectations of something solid, commendable and probably disturbing. But I didn't expect to see a masterpiece, which is what this "Romanian abortion film" certainly is.

Anamaria Marinca

Set in 1987, when Romania was a Communist state under Nicolae Ceausescu...Read More

Variety's Archie Thomas didn't list all of the ten British Independent Film Award nominations tallied yesterday by Anton Corbijn's Control, noting only that Sam Riley placed in Best Actor and Most Promising Newcomer categories.

Rebeca Davies' Telegraph story elaborated a bit more: Best Film and Best Director for Anton Corbijn (presumably a cinematography nom was included as well) with Samantha Morton and Toby Kebbell handed Supporting Actress/Actor noms. A British film industry circle jerk or a nudge for nod-out types on this side of the pond? A bit of both, presumably.

I'm a declared Jamie Stuart fan but anything with cockroaches, even big orange ones with N.Y. Film Festival celebrity faces, makes me go "eeww." Don't wanna know from bugs.

"Long movies have always been with us," observes Wall Street Journal film critic Joe Morgenstern. "Some have been follies (Heaven's Gate -- 219 minutes) while others have been glories (Abel Gance's silent classic Napoleon -- 330 minutes). Indeed, I was a staunch -- some might say dogged -- supporter of Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, which runs 188 minutes, though I admired just as intensely his Punch-Drunk Love, which clocked in at 95 minutes.

"And earlier this month I came down firmly -- some might say heedlessly -- on the side of ...Read More

Sex usually sells, particularly when you're looking to attract geek fanboys. And it's especially alluring when you're talking about a bare-breasted Angelina Jolie slinking around with nothing to keep her warm except a long serpent's tail, which is what her "Grendel's mother" character does in the red-band trailer for Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf (Paramount, 11.16). And so there are bus-stop ads currently emphasizing this.

Bus stop ad at Santa Monica Blvd. near Fairfax Ave. -- snapped Monday, 10.22.07, 10:05 pm

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So it's finally been decided that paying audiences will henceforth be shown Wes Anderson's Hotel Chevalier short prior to his Darjeeling Limited feature, as it always should have been. Due respect, but I've no clear idea what Fox Searchlight marketing chief Nancy Utley means when she says "we thought it would be too challenging to moviegoers to be exposed to the short in theaters right at the beginning of the run...we wanted to make sure The Darjeeling Limited got established first as a movie."

Variety's Derek Elley is no fan of Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs, which he saw at the London Film Festival. Calling it "talky, back-bendingly liberal but also deeply patriotic," he says it "plays like all the serious footnotes scripter du jour Matthew Michael Carnahan left out of The Kingdom. Redford's first helming chore in seven years, and his most directly political pic yet, amounts to a giant cry of 'Americans, get engaged!' wrapped in a star-heavy discourse that uses a lot of words to say nothing new."

I drove to Santa Monica around noon today for a half-hour interview (a relative luxury these days) with Control star Sam Riley, who happens to be a very gifted and shrewd actor. His undeniably penetrating performance as Joy Division singer- songwriter Ian Curtis, who hanged himself in 1980 at age 23, has made him a bona fide Best Actor candidate whether certain handicappers want to acknowledge this or not.

Control star Sam Riley inside One Pico, the awkwardly named Shutters restaurant -- Monday, 10.22.07, 12:45 pm; another shot

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It's eight months old, yes -- probably old news to most of the HE wiseacres -- and I remember seeing something like this a while ago...but not this precise one.

Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will be Blood (Paramount Vantage, 12.26) will begin a series of journo and industry screenings in mid November, but for those who can't wait (i.e., persons like myself) it's getting a special sneak preview at San Francisco's Castro on Monday, November 5th. Thanks to HE reader Randy Matthews for sending all the info.

Castro theatre marquee, snapped yesterday by Randy Matthews.