"[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 is the system under which it was made, which is to say the political conditions. The movie is so Seinfeld-y that it's clear that the...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 about some crappy McJobs...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, one of the play's producers, is certain to either produce or direct it.

Directed...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's Oscar campaign, I'd be worried about those lack of hats. The word "but" is so often a decisive factor in life. I love my wife but oh, you...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.

Which is why films and filmmakers being promoted by...Read More

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.)

The bottom-line is that...Read More

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 with the Israeli academy, but denying...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 believes that the English dialogue in the film is around 23 to 25 minutes in an 85 minute film and isn't predominant in the film. The silence, expressions, and music are the predominant elements...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.

A drive that used to take 30 minutes...Read More

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.

Does that title scare anyone besides myself? Any title that ends with the words "of life" carries a potential for big trouble. Fountain of Life, Hot Dog of Life, Vacuum Cleaner of Life...they all stink. I'm...Read More

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...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.

In his Hollywood Reporter review, Kirk Honeycutt said that "unfortunately, bees just aren't that funny" and "they aren't intriguing cartoon creatures. Nor is the odd story Seinfeld and his collaborators dreamed up very inspired. The film labors too hard for its comic moments and never discovers a cartoon logic that will allow bees and humans to...Read More

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 that Langella is able to suggest exist within. At first Schiller is a guy whose purpose in...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], Annik, the real Annik, is very moved by the fact we're a couple. I think she likes the way that given a second...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 Jean Luc Godard's Breathless and Warner Home Video's...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's "dumbest guy...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

We're just...Read More

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 from the Weinstein Company. Both are about dead Iraq veterans." Correction: knuckle-draggers who haven't yet mastered the art of going online and reading about upcoming films might...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 (a good suggestion -- McDonald has a small role but she wrings exceptional feleing and...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...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. This persona has paid off for Shatner in numerous ways, but one of the offshoots of the nutter persona has been the surrendering of the...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: Having read this item earlier this afternoon, Lurie...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: "Frank had a nice package, no doubt. I had to get a pen and...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. I only started to see...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's films tend to do) can...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." -- from 10.28...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 sobbed to...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?

That's it -- I'm out the door. I don't support movies that depend upon exposition dialogue that's written as...Read More

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,...Read 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" from consideration for Best Foreign Language Film Oscar [as] There doesn't appear to be...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, which I saw at the Toronto...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 the DVD images have been "deliberately unsweetened and "very different" from the previous version because Malick "wanted it to look as natural as possible." Kline explained that Malick didn't want the film...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. And that was nearly fully covered by insurance. That's it. Nothing more....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 when you take a real look at it."

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 long...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's cross-out makes it clear, however, that others have been unsheathing their knives and...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 in...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) Michael Clayton, We Own the Night, Gone Baby Gone, Things We...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.'"

They taped it from different locations -- Wes in New York, Owen in Culver City...Read More

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 Post -- getting stories with...Read 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.

"There is a real discussion to be had about how independent-minded movies are being released, how screens are held and lost, and what the future for this kind of product really might be," Poland allows. "But hysteria over a few films that didn't catch in limited releases is short-sighted...Read More

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 Bob...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.

Instead, they put you through the lower-level tech support paces, checking this...Read More

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 (Dreamamount) apparently headed for $38 million to $44 million...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 Carter Burwell’s score.

"My grandfather, whose background...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

I had found...Read More

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.

I haven't timed...Read More

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 in the eyes of anyone...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.

Aft least it has a stab at...Read More

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...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.

And she doesn't venture within...Read More

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) couldn't get funded. I know...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.

I've flipped through about 20 or 25 pages, and it's basically Stefano's first-hand recollection of how Hitchcock came to hire him, how their conversations went as they got into the screenplay, how they came to know each other, etc. It's not exactly a "movie" -- it's very "industry" but it's mainly talk. And yet...Read More

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...Read 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.

"I [also]...Read More

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.

The script also weaves in -- a bit awkwardly, truth be told --...Read More

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.

So says one guy who attended last night's research screening of Burton's film on the Universal lot. During the focus-group discussion "there was some doubt...Read More

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 Los Angeles Film Critics...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: A serious actor doesn't get into scrapes over...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."

Goldstein's best point is that "if you're consistently keeping great films out of competition" -- which the Academy's foreign branch has done a lot --...Read More

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) are going to write about and promote the film among the faithful when it opens next January, and they'd be dumb not to do that. Mingiu's film is mainly a lament about a certain inhumanity that prevailed in Communist Romania in the 1980s, but viewers will find it impossible not to...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 and a strict law prohibiting abortion...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 The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,...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

But if you look closely you'll notice that Jolie is wearing some kind of yellow...Read More

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

We sat next to a...Read More

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.

The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw is absolutely correct in his interpretation of this Lion King clip. The lioness Nala "is settling back in a very languorous and inviting manner" as she looks up at Simba, "and then we cut to a close-up on Nala's face, and that...minxy facial expression of a Disney character who clearly and explicitly wants something that I can't remember a Disney character wanting before or since: vigorous and protracted penetrative sex." This is apparently the only animated sex scene in the 80-year history of Disney studios.

For the second time in two days, Hollywood Elsewhere is raising a glass and offering a hearty pat on the back to Ryan Gosling -- first for delivering a supple and layered-enough performance in Lars and the Real Girl to persuade Huffington Post guy Nick Antosca that Gosling's Lars may be a serial killer in sheep's clothing, and secondly for exiting the set of Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones one day before the start of principal photography over "creative differences."

Ryan Gosling; Peter Jackson

The story obviously won't be complete until somebody divulges...Read More

In the view of Huffington Post contributor Nick Antosca, Lars and the Real Girl is "the newest entry in a small subgenre of recent movies: the Endearing Potential Serial Killer Comedy.

"The only other entry in this subgenre is The 40 Year Old Virgin. I laughed about one and a half times when I watched [that film]... the jokes seemed lame and forced and the writing was amateurish, but the big problem was that Steve Carell's character just seemed so fucking creepy. That weird, strained stare...that rabbity way of speaking... those little dolls all over his...Read More

Speaking of '60s zeitgeist-reflecting movies, here's the single best moment in one of the most famous and justifiably admired of all the British- produced films of that decade.

Variety's Joe Leydon is calling Peter Hedges' Dan in Real Life, which had a nationwide sneak preview last night, "gracefully understated and thoroughly engaging...a pleasant surprise."

With Steve Carell and Juliette Binoche playing 40ish types who who fall inconveniently in love, pic "deftly interlaces heart and humor in a witty, warm and well-observed comedy about the unexpected and inconvenient blooming of romance at the weekend gathering of an extended family.

The film "more than fulfills the promise evidenced in Hedges' Pieces of April. From a B.O. perspective, his follow-up has the potential to delight...Read More

Last month British director Beeban Kidron (Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason) began shooting Hippie Hippie Shake, about the adventures of Richard Neville, the publisher/editor of a famed counter-culture magazine called Oz that caught the airy-fairy mood and merriment of late '60s London. (It actually published from '67 to '73.) Universal will probably open it sometime in the fall of '08.

Sienna Miller, Cillian Murphy among anti-war protestors in Beeban Kidron's Hippie Hippie Shake

Written by Lee Hall and William Nicholson and based on Neville's same-titled 1996 memoir, the film will focus on (a) the...Read More

"Most directors do not go on to make one of their best films after receiving their lifetime achievement Oscars," Dennis Lim's 10.21 N.Y. Times piece begins. "But then, most directors do not have the near-legendary stamina and efficiency of Sidney Lumet, who accepted his honorary Academy Award two years ago, turned 83 in June and now has made 44 features in 50 years. His latest, a bracingly bleak crime melodrama called Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (opening Friday in NY and LA), has been upstaging filmmakers less than half his age on the festival circuit this fall."

Time's Lev Grossman orchestrated and presumably edited a q & a discussion between Cormac McCarthy, author of the novel of No Country for Old Men, and director-writers Joel and Ethan Coen, who made the immaculate film version, but he wasn't allowed to participate verbally. Because McCarthy is extremely press shy, Grossman had to sit on the couch and just listen.

What resulted is an okay thing, but it might have been better with a pushy journalist asking intrusive questions from time to time. An extra pair of editor eyes would have helped as far...Read More

I respectfully disagree with Todd McCarthy's half-positive, half-dismissive Variety review of Ridley Scott's American Gangster, and his view in particular that "maximizing a gritty big-city story requires a credibility composed of thousands of small details, and this is one area where a citizen-of-the-world director like Scott can't excel."

(l. to r.) Russell Crowe, Ridley Scott, Denzel Washington during the making of American Gangster

The situation, he says, is "akin to asking [Sidney] Lumet or [Martin] Scorsese to make a definitive film about crime in '70s Newcastle -- they could do a respectable, even exciting job of...Read More

Jerry Seinfeld's Bee Movie opens a week from Friday (11.2) and nobody's seen or said a thing about it. Except for what was said and shown at the big Cannes Film Festival promotion five and a half months ago. The first screenings aren't happening until Tuesday, 10.30 and Wednesday, 10.31. The only thing to go on today is a softball Seinfeld profile by N.Y. Times guy David Itzkoff.

The best part of the piece explains how Seinfeld "can be affable with fans, but he doesn't hide a certain earned arrogance. When one stunned onlooker [at...Read More

I stood below the Sunset 5 marquee yesterday evening just before 9 pm, trying to talk myself into seeing Lars and the Real Girl. And once again, for the seventh or eighth time, I said "naaah, later." A movie journalist repeatedly missing showings of a respected, well-reviewed film like Lars is obviously derelict, but the truth is that I've been avoiding it because of my Ryan Gosling problem, which is hard to describe.

Paul Schneider, Emily Mortimer, Ryan Gosling in Lars and the Real Girl

I agree that he's one of our very best actors of...Read More

"In her acid flashback of a new book, 'For Love of Politics,' Sally Bedell Smith describes how First Lady Hillary routinely unmanned Bill and his aides, and engaged in sharp spurts of temper that sparked his temper.

"'Hillary's anger was bound up in the intricacies of her marital bargain, which engendered rivalry and resentment along with mutual dependence,' Ms. Smith writes. Political power was her reward for his marital infidelity.

"When Bill explains why Hillary should be president, his subtext is clear: We owe it to her for all she put up with from me." -- from today's (10.21) <strong>Maureen Dowd/N.Y....Read More

La Vie en Rose director-writer Olivier Dahan "wrote the script with me in mind. I never knew why, but then he told journalists, 'There was something about Marion's eyes.' He saw some tragedy in my eyes, something terribly sad that reminded him of [Edith] Piaf.

La Vie en Rose star Marion Cotillard

"And I have to say, I did feel close to her. As an actress, I could understand her behavior. That made me less afraid of playing an icon that so many people love.

"In the end, a role this huge is like the biggest...Read More

This 10.19 Hollywood Reporter story about the title of Woody Allen's next film is, I'm sure, a mistake. Allen would never call anything Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Even for a film that described as a "love letter to Barcelona," it's just too awful sounding. Scarlett Johansson, Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem costar.

Is Toronto Star critic Peter Howell really sure that Quentin Tarantino is actually going to make Inglorious Bastards, a Dirty Dozen-ish World War II flick with Tim Roth and Michael Madsen, much less deliver it sometime in '08? He's been talking about making this film for years and years.

What he seems to do, mainly, is talk about (a) what he's going to do, (b) what he's done, or (c) what other filmmakers have done. I realize that every three or four years he gets around to making a film, but I don't trust Tarantino to deliver a movie on any...Read More

Dreams never seem as profound the next morning as they do when they're running the show in your sleep, but I had a lulu of a dream last night that, if listened to and boldly acted upon, might lead to the resurrection of Wes Anderson's career with a single mad sweep of the brush and a sudden screech of tires.

DVD frame-capture from Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend

What Anderson needs to do more than anything else right now is to blow up "Andersonville," that specially styled, ultra-hermetic world that his films and characters reside in. Being Wes, he...Read More

Because of the failure last year of Terry Press's aggressive earlybird Dreamgirls push, "several studios are pulling back on the Oscar hype, according to Variety's Anne Thompson.

The late-in-the-game entries, of course, will include There Will Be Blood, Charlie Wilson's War, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street -- Tim Burton doesn't make Oscar faves -- and The Great Debaters. (There are rumors, Thompson reports, that Debaters will "barely finish" in time for viewing).

I didn't run this earlier, but despite that dug-in player insisting in a 10.8 posting that Wayne Kramer's Crossing Over might possibly be platform-released...Read More

Despite Writers Guild members having authorized a strike to begin as early as 11.1, N.Y. Times guy Michael Cieply is reporting that "bargainers for both sides this week felt their way toward something missing from their stalled talks: the kind of unofficial conversations that [have] led to deals in the past."

Times reporter Brooks Barnes, meanwhile, is re-stating the received wisdom that moviegoers "would not feel any immediate impact" from a strike "because studios work a year or more in advance and have been stockpiling scripts to shoot in case writers walk the picket line."

There's even an upside, Barnes...Read More

Francis Coppola's Youth Without Youth, the legendary director's first flick since The Rainmaker, showed before the public a few hours ago at the Rome Film Festival to "mixed reactions," according to an AP/ Herald Tribune story just posted.

Bruno Ganz, Tim Roth in Francis Coppola's Youth Without Youth

Variety's Jay Weissberg, having posted his review at 11:32 Pacific time, says "not just fans of Francis Ford Coppola will be disappointed by the mishmash plotting and stilted script of Youth Without Youth, the master’s first helming effort in 10 years.

"Overly talky tale spans...Read More

A 10.20 AP/Fox News story says Bill Maher helped security guys remove a shouter during last night's taping of Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, and that the incident went out live on the east coast and was repeated during the Pacific time zone feed. The tape obviously shows this, but also Maher shouting down two other hecklers. (All three were contending that the 9/11 WTC disaster was a controlled explosion.) Maher said that the experience made him, at that particular moment, want to vote for Rudy Giuliani.

Posted 14 months ago, this is one of the most emotionally satisfying payback scenes I've ever witnessed, and that includes the thousands of movies I've seen since I was three or four. I kept hoping this brave and valiant Bambi would try to finish the guy off by goring him in the neck with his antlers.

A younger married couple I know slightly used to drive a four-door sedan. Then she got pregnant, the baby came and before you knew it they were suddenly driving a big, black gas-guzzling SUV. They bought this fat humungous tank, of course, to fortify a sense of security for the baby's sake. But I'll bet anything it was the wife, the primary nest-tender and security freak in any relationship, who pushed for it.

Some guys will buy SUVs to compensate for having a small penis or to feel like an all-around tough guy, but sales are primarily driven, I believe, by "security...Read More

Last Thursday's tracking was correct in that 30 Days of Night, the Josh Hartnett vampire film, is the weekend's #1 film with a projected $15,580,000. (A slightly brawnier $18 to $20 million was expected by handicappers.) Tyler Perry's Why Did I get Married? dropped 44% for a second-place showing and an estimated $11,880,000. The Game Plan, a Middle American feel-good movie that refuses to go away, will earn $8,041,000 by Sunday night.

The fourth-place Michael Clayton (easily one of the best films now playing, along with Things We Lost in the Fire and Gone Baby Gone) will do about $7,419, 000 -- off...Read More

An 11.17 Hollywood Reporter piece by Gail Schiller went up yesterday about the blanket refusal of most American moviegoers to patronize any film vaguely related to 9/11 or the Middle East conflict. Even a first-rate whodunit procedural like In The Valley of Elah, highlighted by superb performances and set entirely in Tennessee and New Mexico....even that got the bum's rush.

Will audiences regard Grace is Gone (Weinstein Co., 12.5) as a sand movie in sheep's clothing?

The "leave us aloners" (no sand, no dark-eyed characters of any Middle Eastern heritage...we just want to be entertained) are,...Read More

Charlie Wilson's War blowback item #1: the more I look at this trailer, the more irksome those clips of Julia Roberts are starting to become. Trailers have the potential of souring viewers on the movies they're supposed to be selling because they always hammer home the most cloying selling points, but in every clip Roberts is either doing the sly sexy smile with the raised eyebrows or she's winking. Sorry, but I have a low tolerance for this stuff in movie trailers to begin with.

Plus her accent...Read More

Yesterday Benjamin Crossley-Marra announced on the Filmmaker website that a DVD of George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr's Hearts of Darkness, a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the tortured making of Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now, will finally be released on 11.20.

It bothers me that Crossley-Marra doesn't mention the disc's distributor in his story, and that I can't find any mention of the Hearts DVD on Amazon.com, and that I haven't heard about this directly from Hickenlooper. I'll feel a lot more trusting about this announcement when some of these details peek through, or when they don't.

I spoke last week to Barbet Schroeder, the esteemed director of Terror's Advocate, a doc that I wound up respecting more than liking. This led to conflicted feelings and a kind of blogger's block when it came to posting something about it last week, when the film had its debut.

Terrorist's Advocate is a portrait of Jacques Verges, a brilliant and vaguely charming French-Vietnamese attorney who's defended (or been in some kind of collusion with) almost every big-time terrorist, anti-colonialist, revolutionary cowboy and anti-imperialist operative of the last 50 years.

It's essentially a story...Read More

Things We Lost in the Fire has bombed out with slightly less than half the critics -- only 65% have thumbs-upped it on Rotten Tomatoes, 58% on Metacritic -- but nearly everyone (except for Stephen Holden and maybe one other) has gone into full cartwheel mode over Benicio del Toro's performance and, to any fair-minded reader or watcher of the film, made a Best Actor Oscar nom seem mandatory.

The Austin Chronicle's Josh Rosenblatt says it best: "If you're bored some Saturday night, try this game: Close your eyes, spin around three times, and...Read More

In this audio interview with The Envelope's Tom O'Neil, N.Y. Daily News film critic and amiable chatterbox Jack Matthews reiterates a basic perception about Best Picture Oscar contenders. Uhm...well, Jack doesn't really explain it as completely as he could so I'll re-phrase it.

The movies that tend to win (or come close to winning) always seem to do one of two things. They say something fundamentally true about life on this planet that most of us recognize (like American Beauty's theme that few of us take the time to appreciate life's small, quiet wonders). Or they make us choke up in...Read More

The notion of Naomi Watts playing the Tippi Hedren role in a Michael Bay-produced remake of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (which production sources prefer to call "a reimagining of Daphne du Maurier's short story"...bullshit) is at least a couple of years old. The basics were bandied about a year ago by myself, Hollywood Wiretap's Nancy Vialette and TMZ's Claude Brodesser-Akner.

(l. to r.) Martin Campbell, Michael Bay, bird victim, Naomi Watts

But Martin Campbell is now signed to direct and Watts is still the star, so Variety is...Read More

In The Sopranos: The Complete Book (in bookstores on 10.30), interviewer Brett Martin asks producer David Chase about that final cut-to-black scene in the diner and if there's a puzzle to be solved.

"There are no esoteric clues in there," Chase answers. "No Da Vinci Code. Everything that pertains to that episode was in that episode. And it was in the episode before that and the one before that and seasons before this one and so on.

The seed of the finale, says Chase, was "just that Tony and his family would...Read More

This one-sheet for Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker (due sometime in '08) feels to me like one of the greatest war-film posters I've ever seen. For the brutal squalor of it, the hellish atmosphere, and because of the guy on the ground looking back and to his left and straight at us.

He seems to be saying, "You just gonna sit there or what?" That expression -- the decision to make his face almost the entire point of the poster, the fact that he's got that thousand-yard stare -- is some kind of genius. Hats...Read More

Now that the biological host-vessel has expired, the spirit of Joey Bishop will attempt to enter (or perhaps already has entered) Jimmy Kimmel. Every culture and era needs a Joey Bishop type. Somebody smart, sardonic, flip, deadpan. This doesn't describe Kimmel to a T -- he's his own man, a guy who lives and dies by the wearing of elephant collars plus he smiles more than Bishop ever did -- but he's the closest thing we have today to a Bishopian figure.

New York magazine's Vulture column has a listing of the 10 Worst Movies Directed by Actors -- The Ten Worst Movies Directed by Actors. Mel Gibson's Braveheart, Eddie Murphy's Harlem Nights, Crispin Glover's What Is It?, William Shatner's Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Andy Garcia's The Lost City, Ben Stiller's The Cable Guy, Nicolas Cage's Sonny, John Turturro's Romance & Cigarettes, Kevin Spacey's Beyond the Sea and Danny De Vito's Duplex.

The Cable Guy doesn't belong on this list. The ending aside, it has its moments -- I particularly enjoyed Jim Carrey shoving that hot-air blower into Owen Wilson's mouth. In...Read More

David Poland's 20 Weeks to Oscar column says "anything can happen," meaning that it's a totally wide-open Best Picture race. I don't know anything either -- who does at this point? -- but c'mon....c'mon! It's not a salad toss. It's a definable universe and we all pretty much know what's going on so why pretend otherwise?

Barring a cataclysmic rupture in the scheme of things, it's going to be American Gangster (the spectacular '70s grit, the tangy, rock-hard performances, the huge grosses), Atonement (the obligatory square-stately romantic drama entry with Vanessa Redgrave's killer ending), Before The Devil Knows You're Dead (the...Read More

30 Days of Night, the Josh Hartnett vampire film, will, of course, be the #1 film this weekend with a 60 general, 36 definite and 13 first choice -- the trippiest, scariest entry in the pack, obviously destined to bring in the moronic (grunt-level, aesthetically challenged) majority. Fox Atomic's The Comebacks, another attraction that guys like me don't even want to know about, is at 48, 33 and 11.

Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone (Miramax) will probably be the strongest-performing of the weekend's three sober dramas with a 60, 35 and 10. Gavin Hood's Rendition (New Line) has a 56,...Read More

Turner Classic Movies and Robert Osborne aren't ones to let grass grow under their feet. News of the death of Deborah Kerr broke only about a couple of hours ago (Variety's AP obit was posted today at 10:33 am Pacific, even though Kerr passed away on Tuesday), and yet a press release announcing a special Deborah Kerr memorial double feature -- From Here to Eternity and Separate Tables -- showing on TCM this Sunday, 10.21 was received from TCM publicist Sarah Hamilton at 11:42 am.

You have to take your hat off. TCM must have...Read More

I meant to post the Stephen Colbert South Carolina primary decision-to-run thing earlier today, but the truth is that I've stopped grinning at the routine. The reason is that there's something tiring about somebody "doing a personality" over and over. I'm not saying Colbert has become a bit like Professor Irwin Corey was in the '60s and '70s, but now that I think of it, this might actually be the case. I just know I've been starting to go "yeah, hmmm" when I watch the show.

Slate's Kim Masters has asked around and come up with three theories about why Tony Gilroy and George Clooney's Michael Clayton underperformed last weekend. That's easy to answer, but let's first consider the content of the piece.

Theory #1: Clooney isn't a star, in part because he hasn't nurtured the fan base by making movie-star movies. Theory #2: A "former studio chairman" says Michael Clayton didn't have an idea to sell so nobody except people who like complex, sophisticated adult dramas (i.e., roughly 2% of the population) gave that much of a shit. "When you look at the marketing, you...Read More

As N.Y. Times media columnist David Carr observed on 10.10, movies about rock bands and troubled musicians are pouring out like mad these days. And now, according to Spinner magazine, there's a Blondie/ Deborah Harry biopic in the pipeline with Kristen Dunst as Harry and Michel Gondry directing.

Kirsten Dunst; Debbie Harry

And the story will be what exactly? Harry never ruined her career through drug addiction, never committed suicide, never went to jail, never stole someone's husband, etc. You can't just make a rock-band movie that says "this happened, and then this...Read More

The #1 rule of director-actress relationships is simple. If a film they make together fails at the box-office (or if one they'd like to make fails to get financed), the relationship will start to to disassemble sooner or later. It's like a couple giving birth to a child with a debilitating lifelong ailment.

Case in point: the relationship between slovenly downmarket B-movie director Robert Rodriguez and his actress-fiance Rose McGowan is probably in some kind of jeopardy because Universal has backed out of financing their costly Barbarella project because they don't believe McGowan has enough star...Read More

Sam Raimi has told MTV.com's Larry Carroll that Peter Jackson directing The Hobbit "makes the most sense," but if "he didn't want to direct and wants to produce it, I'd love to be considered for the project." In other words, New Line will be pissing on its own financial future if it doesn't make peace with Jackson, especially after Jackson's recent legal victory over New Line in his battle with the producer over alleged hidden revenues.

There are some things in life you need to accept as inevitable. All the same, the idea...Read More

From Maxim's exacting, occasionally contrarian but mostly big-hearted film critic Pete Hammond, Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs (which I saw yesterday but won't be reviewing until 11.1) has gotten its first glowing quote. He's calling it "an urgent, impassioned wake-up call for America, a hot-button politically incendiary work that is certain to become the most controversial and talked-about movie of 2007."

Hammond doesn't mean that friends and families from Vancouver to Key West are necessarily going to debate the merits over dinner starting early next month. He's saying that right-wing commentators are going to jump all...Read More

The Reeler's Stu Van Airsdale, on fire after his Chinese paparazzi run-in two or three weeks ago, bitch-slapped director Michael Haneke following a screening of his original 1997 version of Funny Games (which Maneke has remade in English for Warner Independent) at the kick-off of MoMA's Modern Mondays program.

"Haneke loves to think of himself as a master manipulator," Van Airsdale writes. "But adherence to convention is not the same thing as smugness, which is why Funny Games' climactic upshot -- wife Anna (Susanne Lothar) steals a gun and blows one of her assailants away, only to have...Read More

In a Youth Without Youth-promoting interview with GQ magazine, director Francis Coppola has trashed (in a non-vicious, somewhat distant, we-used-to-be-friends sort of way) Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson for not being hungry enough.

How does an artist stay hungry and keep the creative fires burning? Two years ago Coppola told GQ's Jeff Gordinier that "few filmmakers who become known for some great work do work later on in life that equals it. And why? Partly because everyone has a certain thing that they can do, and after they...Read More

Control's Sam Riley having won the Chicago Film Festival's Silver Hugo Best Actor award tells us three things. One, there are others besides myself who believe Riley's performance as Ian Curtis is not just phenomenal but award- worthy. Two, Chicago Film Festival voters are clearly too eccentric to influence industry thinking about '07's Best Actor finalists. And three, this "Chicago flake" factor will allow the Gurus of Gold and Envelope prognosticators to continue saying, "It's very nice that you admire Sam Riley's acting, Jeff, but c'mon, get real...we're talking likely winners here."

Control director Anton Corbijn, star...

"In another sign that kudos campaigns are getting innovative in a jam-packed season, 6,000 Oscar voters will receive a screener of DreamWorks-Paramount's Things We Lost in the Fire on Friday -- the same day the film opens in theaters," reports Variety's Pamela McLintock.

"Par will also send screeners of the director's cut of Zodiac, helmed by David Fincher, to the Producers Guild of America, the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild, instead of the official release version. Move reps the first time Par has sent out a director's cut.

"The day-and-date mailing of...Read More

This November cover of Radar doesn't strike me as all that outrageous. The suggested comfort or at least familiarity between Hillary and Rudy says something (I think) about under-the-skin allegiances, "all politics is local" or something along those lines. If Hilary looked this fetching in reality, the election picture (along with the easily manipulated allegiances of fellows like myself) would be, I suspect, reconfigured to some degree. "Who would Jesus vote for?" the small headline reads. I'll tell you who Jesus would vote for. Jesus would vote for Dennis Kucinich.

"Furthering the influence of the internet on filmmaking in the 21st century, Juno has hyper-thought cleverness and the distinct personality of voice that comes from the personal blogging set. It's the first LiveJournal or Blogger film.

"Under the razor-thin direction of Jason Reitman, Juno -- unlike Hot Rod or Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters -- is a pure movie. It dispenses any obtuseness and has the instincts of an audience-pleaser.

"Where an average movie about pregnancy turns its water-breaking scene into a dramatic, third-act starter (which even Knocked Up did), this film’s screenplay (scribed by hilarious blogger and memoirist...Read More

Hollywood producers this morning withdrew their inflammatory proposal to eliminate residuals, which was the biggest sticking point in the three-month-old, going-nowhere negotiations between the cruel, selfish suits and the riff-raffy Writers Guild. Now there's a decent chance of reaching some kind of accord before November 1st. AMPTP honcho J. Nicholas Counter III told the N.Y. Times' Michael Cieiply that "we now expect the W.G.A. leadership to get down to the business at hand and do what it takes to reach a new labor agreement.” So Terry George...thoughts?

Dylan Baker, 48, is one of our very best character actors. He's performed in 79 features, TV movies and series episodes over the last 20 years. I've greatly enjoyed his performances in The Road to Perdition, Thirteen Days and Happiness, but the best thing he's ever given the world has been "Owen," the tobacco-spittin' hayseed in Planes Trains and Automobiles, which was only his second acting job.

Can someone explain why the new double-disc DVD of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, which comes out on 10.23, runs 119 minutes while the old 2001 single- disc DVD runs 143 minutes? The film's IMDB page says the running time is 119 minutes" but also that the "normal USA version" runs 143 minutes. I'm confused. What's going on?

On top of which the 2001 DVD was presented in 1.33 to 1 (in line with Kubrick's vision, I love all that extra head space) and the new double-disc version is matted at 1.78 to 1.

The film's IMDB page also notes that...Read More

This, according to a Mammoth Advertising announcement, is the official one-sheet for Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Miramax, 11.30). You'll have to search long and hard to find a poster that misrepresents the content of a film more flagrantly. That said, I would probably try something like this if I were in charge of Miramax ads. They can't sell what the film actually is. Like Diving Bell's main character, they have no choice but to dream and fantasize.

Despite Schnabel's rich imagination and a masterful technique, despite Diving Bell's longings, passions and...Read More

This First Assembly of God sign was created by yours truly with an engine provided by Church Sign Generator. The problem is that the template photos aren't large or dense enough. Either the guys who threw this site together aren't hip enough to realize this defect, or they're cheapskates.

I have to see a film at 12 noon...back in the trough by 3 pm or so.

A journalist friend agrees that the Love in the Time of Cholera trailer "sucks, but hold your judgement. It's a decent shot at a difficult book, and two guys I know -- real men, I should add, not wussy types -- actually found the film quite moving. So maybe it will play to manly men, if their wives or girlfriends can convince them to see it." I repeat yesterday's question: if New Line marketers thought they could get regular guys to see this thing, why did they send out a trailer that almost begs them not to?

"Keeping your BlackBerry on isn't just acceptable, it's a life-affirming action," Nicole LaPorte declared in a 10.14 L.A. Times piece about industry cell-phone status, etiquette, penetration. "To turn off your BlackBerry is to be dead," she says. Which means, of course, that notions of biological, genetic or spiritual identity are passe. In short, "you are your phone."

If it's a bare-bones model with no e-mail capacities, you're an embarassment...a Luddite. If it's BlackBerry Curve, "you're someone who lives in the moment and 'gets' it, as opposed to those still stuck with the BlackBerry 8700," LaPorte...Read More

I'm still refining and cross-checking the numbers, but late last week American Gangster, which was three weeks away from its 11.2 release date, was tracking better than The Departed did two weeks from release. Thursday's numbers (i.e., two days from now) will probably show a bump, but the huge numbers aren't just from the male sector. Women, a bit surprisingly, are showing higher-than-normal awareness and interest levels. The definite interest is roughly 50% across the board, and in the vicinity of 60% for over-25 males.

Translated, this means the opening weekend should be in excess of $30 million. No scientific readings required...Read More

Who is the biggest piss-head critic around today? Somebody whose writing suggests that they scowl a good deal and are stingy with affection, who always seem to dissing this or that film for some arcane reason, whose views are so contrarian that you've almost come to hate him/her....and yet you read them anyway out of some perverse craving for adversarial drama?

N.Y. Press critic Armond White used to be the most flagrant in this regard, certainly the quirkiest and most strange, but I think the piss-head crown may have been snatched away by Slant's Ed Gonzalez. Are there others? Which critics seem...Read More

Listen for five or six seconds to the treacly, deeply patronizing narration in the trailer for Mike Newell's Love in the Time of Cholera (New Line, 11.16), and you know right off the top that Gabriel Garcia Marquez's respected romantic novel has been turned into something florid, unsubtle and aimed at women who didn't graduate from college.

Javier Bardem in Love in the Time of Cholera

I'd been told it doesn't quite work, but I still wanted to see it out of respect for Marquez's reputation and for the great Javier Bardem, who...Read More

Meryl Streep will be honored at the 35th annual Film Society of Lincoln Center Gala Tribute on 4.14.08, or roughly 30 years after she first punched through with a strong supporting performance in The Deer Hunter. Streep occasionally perform in a dreary film, but she's generally shown superb taste in picking films. Which is why I still find it mystifying that she's starred in a film version of Mamma Mia, the Broadway hit musical that has has been a huge favorite of rube tourists since opening in 1999, selling well over 30 million tickets. Laurence Olivier needed money when he agreed to...Read More

Director Susanne Bier, whose Things We Lost in the Fire opens this Friday, knows she's not average or aspiring. She's on it and she knows it. She didn't say anything when we spoke this morning that betrayed this feeling, but I knew it was there. All serious artists have a fairly high opinion of themselves, and of course it's the mediocre people who always say, "Who do they think they are? God?" The result is that when you talk to a serious artist, they're always fountains of modesty.

Talking to this side of...Read More

Jamie Stuart's third N.Y. Film Festival piece takes way too long to load...way. But once it's up and running you can feel a Terrence Malick/Thin Red Line/"never met a leaf I didn't like" influence.

The piece is mainly about leaves, water (dripping, ponds, gutter currents), ducks, construction scaffolding, the evident boredom on Tommy Lee Jones' face, the usual atmospheric space music, more construction sites, joiners, the evident boredom being felt by Jamie Stuart, bolts, wing nuts, plywood, shots of sky and clouds.

The best part is a one-on-one of Todd Haynes (director of I'm Not There) talking about capturing the...Read More

The official word from IMAX spokesperson Warren Betts: "There are no plans to release 2001: A Space Odyssey to IMAX." Roger Ebert said last week that a 2001/IMAX release is "almost inevitable." Warner Bros. to IMAX executives: "Forget it. We wouldn't make back the money we'd spend on properly transferring the 70mm interpositive to IMAX. The world has moved on. Under 30s don't know from Stanley Kubrick or monoliths or Johann Strauss. Releasing an IMAX version of the The Last Samurai, however, might work."

It's a good thing people like me weren't notified of the Laszlo Kovacs tribute seminar until today. (Ray Pride's item went up Friday but it only made MCN's front page a few hours ago.) If I'd known earlier others might have found out also and made plans to attend today's gathering at the Chaplin Theatre at Raleigh Studios, at 3:30 pm. God rest the soul of the man who shot Five Easy Pieces, Paper Moon and Shampoo.

The shared mirth aside, what's the most distinctive thing about this photo of Ethan Hawke, playwright Jonathan Marc Sherman and Josh Hamilton during a rehearsal for Sherman's Things We Want, which begins previews at Manhattan's Acorn Theatre on 10.22? For me, it's the unattractive footwear. Hawke's generic Foot Locker lace-ups with those lame white stripes on the side, Sherman's chunky-soled construction boots, and particularly those godawful sandals worn by Hamilton that show his grotesque white feet, most notably his splayed, bony toes.

The most pronounced difference between boomer and GenX guys is that most boomers...Read More

N.Y. Times columnist David Carr has delivered a frank, well-written examination of the facts driving the persistent rumors about the Weinstein brothers skating on thin financial ice.

Harvey and Bob Weinstein

"The Weinstein Company is still looking to acquire or produce something for small money and have it blow up huge," he notes. "And for years, Harvey Weinstein was the first and last stop for indie hopefuls hoping to make it big. Now, there are a dozen or more companies, many staffed by people who broke in with the Weinstein-era Miramax, that are looking for...Read More

I had a few problems with the first half of Gone Baby Gone when I first saw it three or four weeks ago. On top of which I was so whipped I had trouble keeping my eyes open. On top of which I had to be somewhere so I bailed at the one-hour mark, intending to catch it again in a more rested state. I saw it again last week and this time wide awake and right to the end, and it was a whole different deal.

Ben Affleck

I still have beefs, but the ending...Read More

Everyone enjoyed Manohla Dargis's Elizabeth: The Golden Age review than ran two days ago, but a big-city critic had this comment: "Do you think a male critic could have gotten away with that many references to female legs crossed, bosoms heaving and bodies quaking? What might the female equivalent of 'smoldering slab of man meat' be, and could you publish it in the New York Times? A male scribe would have been called a perv and worse, methinks. The double standard lives!"

Nikki Finke's latest Jeff Robinov bashing states that the Warner Bros. production president will receive a promotion in early '08 that will "finally end his nightmare of running in place behind Warner Bros Entertainment Inc President and COO Alan Horn, " largely because, as one source confides, Robinov is a slavish corporate toady "in complete submission to quarterly reports and bottom line [thinking]." Shocker!

The thing that made my eyes pop is Finke's astonishing claim that Horn "frequently says The Last Samurai [is] one of his favorite movies of all time." That explains a lot,...Read More

This is lame, cheesy, sophmoric. I admit that. But being in a pre-Halloween mood (or something), I clicked on this real ghost video (from www.szworld.net) this morning, and suddenly I wasn't bored or suffering from the Sunday blahs. Sometimes a low-rent quickie video delivers a certain thing that's beyond the grasp of narrative.

An IFC News video clip of John Landis during his recent N.Y. Film Festival press conference for Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project, which several L.A. journos would love to see sometime soon. "Not a comedian but a performance artist....and the judge laughed." The public NYFF screening is (or was) today.

Does anyone find the MPAA's decision to give Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf (Paramount, 11.16) a PG-13 rating a little puzzling, or at the very least inconsistent? Lots of intense (one could say orgiastic) violence and a haunting use of frontal female nudity (a digitally reconstituted Angelina Jolie) would normally result in an R.

As reader David Adams wrote this morning, "Judging from the red-band trailer they either sliced it up to get the rating (only to return the footage for the 'Special Edition Director's Cut DVD') or...

A San Francisco guy named Bob Bowman recently wrote the following to Roger Ebert: "Wouldn't it be great if someone were to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey next year by striking new prints and showing the movie on IMAX screens across the country? What a fantastic experience that would be!" Ebert said that the idea "seems almost inevitable. And remember that the film was shot in 70mm, so it would look even better."

I would do backflips over this. And Ebert is right -- the process by which 35...Read More

The first Academy screenings for Charlie Wilson's War (Universal, 12.25) have been scheduled for Monday, 12.3 -- one in New York, one in Los Angeles. This plus director Mike Nichols' tendency to finesse his films until the very last minute (like a lot of directors) plus his statement at last night's American Cinematheque tribute to Julia Roberts that he's still tooling around with it indicates no media screenings until after Thanksgiving.

Aaron Sorkin's War script loses its energy a little bit in the final third. It's best in the first and second acts. The ending is okay -- thoughtful, echo-y, a "hmmm"...Read More

The numbers guys are saying the new Sleuth is already dead (it opened in 9 theatres this weekend and will only average about $4000 a print). Question is, does having seen the '72 original -- directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier starring -- improve or diminish the current version (Kenneth Branagh directing a Harold Pinter adaptation)? Worth a looksee. Joe Leydon is alerting the world to an airing of the oldie tomorrow night.

It hit me last weekend (along with several thousand others) that the failure of The Heartbreak Kid could mean that the Farrelly brothers are finished. It seems as if they are right now -- yes, I'll admit that, the curtain has come down. But they can get it right back if they make that Three Stooges movie they've been talking about for three or four years now, and I mean with Russell Crowe as Moe. I don't care if he's told them "no" a hundred times. He's the only guy for that part. No one else.

The killing of Howard Dean's Presidential primary campaign was a deliberate media hit job. News producers played that "yeeahhhhh!" video clip (pulled from Dean's speech to followers after his third-place showing in the 2004 Iowa caucus) hundreds and hundreds of times over the next two or three days until Dean had been turned into a complete clown, a punchline, a living Wilhelm scream.

And now Leonardo DiCaprio wants to portray Dean in a film version of a play called Farragut North, written by former Dean staffer...Read More

Yesterday Variety's Ben Fritz and Dave McNary reported that Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Michael Clayton, Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married? and We Own the Night "are expected to gross in the low- to mid-teens" in a kind of even-steven fashion, and I said I'd been told that Why Did I Get Married? would do "$20 million-plus, and that the others will come in at $10 to $12 million lowball, and $12 to $14 million at best." That's more or less what's happened. My estimate, I mean, and not Variety's.

There's too much product out there and product kills product, but...Read More

"A strike looms, the war seems unrelenting and the country is fragmented politically," notes Variety's Peter Bart. "So here's Hollywood's response: a new genre called the feel-bad movie."

Grace Is Gone -- a sad movie that makes you feel pretty good because it mostly feels right and true and uncluttered.

Bart is talking about movies about "revenge-seeking crime victims" (The Brave One), "terrorist assaults" (The Kingdom), "disappearing Iraq vets" (In The Valley of Elah) and "lovers who've learned to hate each other" (clueless). I wasn't the least bit depressed by these three myself. You want depressing?...Read More

Sometimes your opinion is in line with almost everyone else's, and sometimes you're on an island with maybe four or five others keeping you company. You have to chill down and get philosophical 'bout dat island, dawg. If you're not in with a fairly small minority at least once or twice each year, you're probably doing something wrong.

Cases in point: Elizabeth: The Golden Age and Things We Lost in the Fire.

My reaction to Elizabeth during the Toronto Film Festival ("Is it me or the movie, or should I just take the elevator up to the roof and jump off?")...Read More

Variety's Ben Fritz and Dave McNary have reported that weekend's four big openers -- Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Michael Clayton, Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married? and We Own the Night -- "will all be released or expanded at 2,000-plus theaters and are expected to gross in the low- to mid-teens.

"Studio sources uniformly agreed that the weekend looks like a toss-up, with any of the four debuts having the potential to break out. The four bows are aiming at somewhat different auds, leading studios to hope they can co-exist peacefully."

I'm not hearing that. One guy, anyway, is telling...Read More

It's a law of nature that even the best-liked producers with the finest taste buds have to make an occasional stinker. Nobody bats .1000. The law of nature, averages, expediency...one of those. And so Working Title co-chiefs Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner have produced Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Love Actually, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Smokin' Aces, Chicago Joe and the Showgirl and two or three other clunkers.

Tim Bevan (l.), Eric Fellner (r.)

But for a couple of guys who've been been a hot team for 22 or 23 years and have made...Read More

"It seems a safe bet that Cate Blanchett will be in the race for Elizabeth: The Golden Age," Hollywood Reporter columnist Martin Grove has written. "Blanchett won a best supporting actress Oscar in 2005 for The Aviator, [and] her already acclaimed second performance as the 16th Century English Queen could bring her a second Oscar, but this time for best actress."

Not happening. No way. The Cate performance of note is her Blonde on Blonde Dylan in I'm Not There.

In his review of Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Maxim critic Pete Hammond says "[it] will most likely be admired by...Read More

Yesterday Premiere critic-columnist Glenn Kenny disputed Nikki Finke's recent claim, as stated in an Elle magazine interview, that she her campaign against torture porn was somewhat successful in shutting the sub-genre down.

In response to which Finke posted a response this morning to Kenny, to wit: "Didn't your dumb-ass movie magazine go out of business in the U.S. because (a) it sucked, and (b) it sucked up to Hollywood so pathetically that even the movie biz lost respect for it?" In response to which Kenny replied, "Hey, great to hear from you, Nikki. Say, are you ready to...Read More

Academy spokesperson Teni Melidonian, who works for Leslie Unger, confirmed this morning that the Academy has in fact ruled against Eran Kolirin's The Band's Visit from competing for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar because the Academy's foreign branch has determined that more " a majority" of the dialogue is in English. Melidonian also said that no appeal will be considered. On top of which three Israeli news sources -- Haaretz, the Jerusalem Post and Israeli blogger Yair Raveh -- reported yesterday that this decision had been reached.

And yet Indiewire's Brian Brooks wrote this morning that that reports...Read More

The Catholic League's Bill Donohue occasionally rips into this or that Hollywood movie for delivering his idea of an un-Christian or anti-Catholic message (ask Kevin Smith), and his latest salvo is against director-writer Chris Weitz and New Line Cinema's The Golden Compass (New Line 12.7), an adaptation of Philip Pullman's fantasy novel that is one of a trilogy called "His Dark Materials."

Catholic League spokesperson Bill Donohue

Dakota Blue Richards, Daniel Craig in The Golden Compass

Donohue is not actually not ripping into the film as much as trying to...Read More

A tough-minded exhibition guy from another continent says that "'awesome' is the only word I can think of to describe Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood," which he saw yesterday.

"As someone who fell giddily for Boogie Nights only to be frustrated by the excesses of Magnolia and disappointed in many of the indulgences of Punch Drunk Love, this new film does more than restore PTA's stature as one of the most exciting American filmmakers -- it puts him in the leagues of the masters.

"Blood is two hours and 45 minutes of cinematic heroin. It's a frightening, overwhelming, punch-to-the-gut...Read More

A friend who saw Lions for Lambs says it runs 88 minutes, and is calling it "a Godard movie" in the most intriguing sense of that term. It's almost all talk and that's fine, he says, because it really rips into the Bushies and their mishandling of the Middle Eastern terrorist threat. The hottest promotional angle for the film is that it will likely piss off Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and all the other staunch neocon militarists to no end, and good for that because it'll be a lot of fun to see them fuming with necks and faces turning beet red.

Three "reveals" came out of today's screening and press conference for Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (Sony, 12.21), which happened from 12:30 to 2 pm on the Sony lot and was hosted by producer Judd Apatow, director Jake Kasdan (who appears to be roughly the same size as The Orphanage director Juan Antonio Bayona and Jason Schwartzman...good company!) and star John C. Reilly.

One is that the movie isn't a genre spoof (as David Carr's N.Y. Times piece suggested a day or two ago) as much as a flat-out Walk the Line satire. The...Read More

I was speaking to Judd Apatow an hour ago with four or five other web guys after the Walk Hard presentation at Sony, and one of them told Apatow he'd seen Pineapple Express (Sony, 8.8.08) , the David Gordon Green-directed comedy about a stoner (Seth Rogen) and his dealer (James Franco) forced to go on the run from the police after they see a cop shoot a guy for the wrong reasons. And the big revelation, he said, is Franco's hilarious performance.

Playing a character named "Saul" who, Apatow said, is somewhat like Brad Pitt's "Floyd"...Read More

This shot of Benicio in the bush was taken during the filming of Guerilla, the second of two Steven Soderbergh films about the definitive up and down chapters in the life of Che Guevara, near the Spanish town of San Pablo de Buceite, which was chosen to sub for Bolivia. The first film, The Argentine (which I feel is the better of the two, by which I mean the more rousing and engaging), is now lensing in Puerto Rico.

Benicio del Toro as Ernest "Che" Guevara during relatively recent scene filmed for Guerilla.

The trailer for Charlie Wilson's War (Universal, 12.25) tells you right away it's going to be at least fairly good. It also persuaded me that Phillip Seymour Hoffman has a Best Supporting Actor nomination in the bag. (I've read the script and know he has a real part and not just a few clever lines.) Which means he'll be fighting himself with ThinkFilm pushing him for Best Actor in Before The Devil Knows You're Dead. As Charlie Partanna would say, "Which one of these?"

"In addition to being one of the most beautiful movies ever made about rock 'n' roll," Anton Corbijn's Control "also works, quite simply, as a story about a gifted and deeply troubled young guy who just couldn't hold it together. Sometimes the stories you think you've heard a million times before are merely universal.

"This is, by far, the most rapturously beautiful-looking picture I've seen all year. The images have an almost satiny texture. Corbijn's shots are always meticulously composed, as you'd expect from a filmmaker with a background as a portrait photographer, but even though...Read More

This is the coldest (or pretending-to-be-coldest), flat-out funniest reply to a female golddigger I've ever heard or read in my life. In. My. Life. It's completely logical (in a Wall Street sense of the term), completely heartless and utterly brilliant. My first big laugh of the day. The guy who wrote this should identify himself and take a bow...seriously. He's a bit of a creep, but what he's written has struck a nerve. He should go on Letterman.

An Israeli correspondent has forwarded a 10.11.07 Hebrew- language news story from Haaretz, the Israeli news agency, that Eran Kolirin's The Band's Visit has been disqualified from competing for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. The Academy's foreign branch has determined that more than 50% of the dialogue is English and therefore, according to the rules, not eligible.

Israeli film blogger Yair Raveh is reporting the same situation also. (Ditto the Jerusalem Post.) Raveh says the Israeli Academy is planning to appeal to reverse the decision, but if the Academy won't budge Israel...Read More

In David Carr's 10.11 N.Y. Times piece about today's absurdly overcrowded movie marketplace, Sony Classics co-president Tom Bernard speculates on the motives of new-to-the-business investors. "Hey, if you've made all of your money in corn futures and manage a hedge fund, why not gamble a bit in the movie business?" he says.

"I'd say that there is real money to be made by being the guy that collects and holds all of this money, the theater owner," Bernard adds, "but I don't see a bunch of Wall Street money heading into that. Nobody wants to...Read More

Nikki Finke's explanation of how the whole "working with women" hoo-hah went down with Warner Bros. production president Jeff Robinov from last Friday until yesterday adds layers and intrigues, although I can feel the helium leaking out of this thing.

James Franco delivered a landmark performance as James Dean in a Mark Rydell-directed TV movie six years ago, and without dismissing his subsequent work in any way (I'm a fan of his performance in '03's City by the Sea and his small but solid performance in In The Valley of Elah, which should have been larger) this is what I mainly think of when I see or run into Franco.

A performance he gave six years ago...right. Like those Woody Allen fans who say to him in Stardust Memories, "We love your movies, especially the earlier,...Read More

"I waged a campaign this year against horribly violent horror movies and especially torture porn," Nikki Finke has told an Elle magazine interviewer in a piece called "The Good, The Bad and the Ugly." And this campaign, she believes, was influential to some degree.

"I really shamed the Hollywood execs making money on these movies. I do believe that no Hollywood player should earn a dime from a film he's ashamed to show in his own home. Then other journalists started doing the story. I'm not saying I'm solely responsible, but it's been gratifying to see...Read More

I have this rough theory that leading men who've established themselves as appealing good guys and/or made it as movie stars shouldn't play villains until they're at least 45 or 50 (a la Jack Nicholson in The Shining and Batman, Harrison Ford in What Lies Beneath and Willem Dafoe in Speed 2: Cruise Control), and that an even better time to get into bad-guy roles is when your career is on the way down, or at least when it's starting to lose altitude.

Eric Bana in Hulk

There are exceptions to every hard and fast rule, of...Read More

Charlize Theron's "sexiest woman of the year" designation by Esquire was spoiled by yours truly on 9.2 (and with great delight since I despise the long tease that leads up to the final reveal), and has now been announced in a press release and tapped out for the 10.11 issue of the Hollywood Reporter.

"Cue the wah-wah pedal and widen those lapels," writes Washington Post columnist Ann Hornaday, because "the '70s are back, at least at the movies." She mainly talks about Tony Gilroy's Michael Clayton, which has a kind '70s Gordon Willis-y vibe, and also lists The Brave One (Jodie Foster channeling Charles Bronson), In The Valley of Elah (with its echoes of Coming Home and The Deer Hunter), and director James Gray including a French Connection-like car chase in We Own the Night. But she omits the biggest and best '70s movie of the season -- Ridley Scott's American Gangster.

In the 1950s, Michelangelo Antonioni began to make features in the '50s "that considered film's capacity for visualizing interior states of mind," writes L.A. Weekly contributor Robert Koehler about Il grido, which screens tonight and tomorrow at L.A.'s New Beverly cinema.

"As a tale of factory worker Aldo (American actor Steve Cochran), who has a breakup with his longtime lover Irma (Alida Valli) and leaves home with his young daughter to get a new grasp on life, the film cunningly borrows many neorealist tropes and then rattles them until they splinter.

"Viewers may...Read More

"You don't have to know anything about Joy Division to grasp the mysterious sorrow at the heart" of Anton Corbijn's Control, writes N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott. "No doubt aware of what this movie will mean to devotees of post-punk melancholy, [Corbijn] sticks to the human dimensions of the narrative rather than turning out yet another show business fable. Where it might have been literal-minded and sentimental, Control is instead enigmatic and moving, much in the manner of Joy Division's best songs."

Scott declares that Sam Riley, the "hollow-eyed and gentle-looking" portrayer of the late Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, "is crucial...Read More

I've been sent two more reports of Jesse James dissing by Warner Bros. distribution execs -- one from Las Vegas Review Journal critic Carol Cling, another from Salt Lake Tribune critic Sean Means.

Cling says she received an e-mail from Phoenix-based Allied Advertising (which handles screenings etc. for the Las Vegas market) two days ago, saying he/she had just heard that The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford "will be opening this Friday! If possible, I would like to set a press screening, but I think it may be too late...let me know if there's still time."

In a piece that reviews all the recent pop-music docs, dramas and biopics, N.Y. Times columnist David Carr mentions Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (Sony, 12.21), the mock biopic in which John C. Reilly plays a Johnny Cash-like musician.

Carr says that "one of the surest signs that a trend is under way is that it has become worthy of parody," and this Judd Apatow-produced, Jake Kasdan-directed satire "riffs through many of the genre's tendencies."

The article makes it clear that Carr has been shown a Walk Hard clip and heard a...Read More

The reactions to yesterday's report from Pheonix writer/critic Henry Cabot Beck that Pheonix critics are being denied a chance to see The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford indicate that local Warner Bros. distributors are giving Andrew Dominik's film the bum's rush in fairly uniform fashion around the country. As Arizona Daily Star critic Phil Villarreal remarks, "It's the Assassination of Jesse James by the Cowards at Warner Bros."

The Oregonian's Shawn Levy has written about not getting a chance to review it in time. Villarreal and Houston-based critic-blogger Joe Leydon have...Read More

Having no doubt heard from numerous irate female producers and representatives of various big-name actresses over Nikki Finke's 10.5 report that Warner Bros. is "no longer doing movies with women in the lead," production president Jeff Robinov has told Variety's Anne Thompson that he's not only "moving forward with several movies with women in the lead," but is also "offended by rumors of his cinematic misogyny."

Warner Bros. honcho Alan Horn, producer Joel Silver, production prexy Jeff Robinov

Thompson's story, which went up last night at 7:30 pm, didn't mention Finke or her column, alluding...Read More

Yesterday Brian DePalma and Magnolia's Eammon Bowles debated the issue of certain grisly photographs of Iraq casualties having been removed from the end of DePalma's Redacted due to concerns about legal vulnerability. The discussion happened at a N.Y. Film Festival press conference held yesterday afternoon. Movie City Indie's Ray Pride has posted good information about this, including a statement from Bowles.

This old JFK anecdote about bad advice he got for years from Sen. George Smathers reminds me that in politics as well as Oscar forecasting, there are some predictions you automatically disregard.

Three serious adult dramas are opening against each other wide on 10.19 -- Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone, Gavin Hood's Rendition, and Susanne Bier's Things We Lost in the Fire. And a fourth -- Terry George's Reservation Road -- is opening limited the same day also.

Four films fighting over the same over-25 audience is a form of public suicide. Bier's film is easily the best of the bunch, but even with this advantage you have to figure at least two or three of these films will take a hit.

And I mean especially with the strong likelihood that...Read More

A well-employed screenwriter wrote earlier today to point out an angle in the stories about the likely WGA strike that no one's mentioned. "I've been making most of my living over the last few years as a script doctor / punch-up person," he wrote, "and many of the movies now hurriedly wrapping or being rushed into production will not be able to handle the usual studio-mandated reshoots that inevitably occur after test screenings if a strike is on." The punch-up guys will have their hands tied, and producers will be caught between a rock and a hard place.

Partly as a result of a certain online journalist making a call last week to Paramount Studios which led to the "sting" arrest of Roderick Davis, the 37 year-old Cerritos resident who tried to peddle hundreds of stolen photos from the shoot of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull for $2000 bucks, director Steven Spielberg hosted a small "thank you" lunch and set visit today for a small group of fanboy web journalists at Universal studios.

Universal Studios lot (foreground)

The group included CHUD's Devin Faraci, "Quint" from Ain't It Cool and, I've been...Read More

It doesn't feel right somehow when guys like Benicio del Toro go on Oprah and do the old turn-on-your-love-light routine. He did it for Susanne Bier's Things We Lost in the Fire, which Paramount is opening on 10.19, but the guy in this photo and the guy he plays in the film are so different it's weird. His real-life personality is another planet also. I've never seen Benicio smile like that ever.

Pheonix-based entertainment journalist Henry Cabot Beck wrote earlier today to report that "here in Arizona it was announced yesterday that despite The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford opening this Friday in Phoenix, it's been decided at the last minute not to screen it for critics.

"It was touch-and-go yesterday for about an hour with the talk being that they might screen it tonight (Tuesday) with a one-day notice," he adds. "Depending on how this shakes out, this could mean that Jesse James has become the most lauded, worst-treated movie of the year.

"Everybody's split on the...Read More

I've been trying to avoid dealing with Fred Claus (Warner Bros., 11.9), an obviously broad and garishly commercial family comedy starring Vince Vaughan, Paul Giamatti and Rachel Weisz, but it's been made, it opens a month from now, and we may as well stand up like adults and face it. Every November somebody releases a right-down-the- middle family holiday film, and this seems to be a semi-misanthropic 2007 version. An upbeat Bad Santa without the booze and set in a Polar Express-ian Santa's village?

I was with the trailer until those ninja elves turned up....Read More

Two random thoughts about Rob Reiner's somewhat messy but passionate online ad for Hillary Clinton, which was sent around today.

One, Reiner has cast himself in the spot, and seems very much of an amusingly hyper, judgmental live-wire type. (More so than he's ever seemed to me during junket round tables.) So much so that you can't help but wonder, "How could such a hyper, judgmental live-wire type make such cautious, edgeless movies like Rumor Has it, The Story of Us, Alex & Emma , North and Ghosts fo Mississippi for the last ten to...Read More

Last Thursday's Washington Post poll convinced a lot of people that Hilary Clinton is probably going to win against Rudy Giuliani. The Post's hypothetical matchup between Clinton and Giuliani showed Hilary leading Rudy 51 percent to 43 percent. A legislator was recently quoted by Peggy Noonan as saying that "it's all over but the voting."

The problem for me (for many lefties) is that Hilary Clinton will almost certainly polarize more ferociously and draw more hate (and God knows what else) than Barack Obama would. Hilary might win, but Obama would be a better candidate,...Read More

Conscientious reviewers who plan on reviewing The Bucket List should probably try to hunt down a VHS tape of a British-produced 1988 film called Hawks. It's about two terminally ill patients (Anthony Edwards, Timothy Dalton) in a grim English hospital yearn who plot an escape for one last wild time, and who hook up with two English women (Janet McTeer, Camille Coduri) on their way to the brothels of Amsterdam . At least for curiosity or perspective's sake.

An Amazon enthusiast has called it "a rare gem that balances humor and pathos...Read More

This high-def trailer for Robert Reiner's The Bucket List (Warner Bros., 12.25) is one of those trailers that appears to tell you every major plot beat in the film, start to finish. It even appears to divulge which character dies early and which one survives so he can hug his estranged granddaughter. It seems so on-the nose, so Reinerish...I don't know.

I haven't read Justin Zackham's script (has anyone?), but I'm seeing this invisible subtitle that says, "Okay, here's the whole movie including the ending. Now, would would you like to see the feature-length version?

A WGA member had this to say this morning about the looming WGA strike situation: "This whole thing started with the producers sitting around...I'm sure this actually happened...none of them respecting the writers, thinking little of them and saying 'we have to change this residual formula thing. We're just handing them all this money, and they don't deserve it.' They know a strike could happen, obviously, but also that eventually people just get worn down, the rank-and-file start losing their incomes and need to get back to work.

"Those residual checks are so welcome...getting those checks in the mail is so great....Read More

There are 39 paragraphs in Dave McNary and Josef Adalian's well-reported, well-composed Variety story that went up yesterday about the increasingly likelihood of a WGA strike happening on 11.1 (or perhaps in January) rather than next June, but you can boil it all down to four:

Graph #1: "Many believe a November walkout could be particularly crippling since it could affect both the current TV season and the next one. By Nov. 1, the nets will have enough episodes of current shows in the can to get them through mid-January. But the February sweeps would be decimated, and new shows would halt...Read More

The full slate for L.A.'s AFI Fest (Thursday, 11.1. to Sunday, 11.11) was announced today, and as usual the films with genuine intrigue are few and far between. Two of the three big galas -- Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs and Mike Newell's Love in the Time of Cholera -- are thought to be half-and-halfers, leaving Jason Reitman's Juno as the only solid. The biggest eyecatcher is Gregg Araki's Smiley Face, enjoying another festival viewing on its way to the home video bin (which some feel is an unjust fate, especially those who saw at Sundance '07).

The World Cinema section...Read More

After the dust finally settles on last week's Indiana Jones photo-theft caper, it'll be fascinating to read a detailed account about the web journalist who made the call to Paramount Studios that led to the "sting" arrest of Roderick Davis, the 37 year-old Cerritos resident who tried to sell hundreds of stolen photos from the shoot of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull for $2000 bucks. I don't know when the details will finally surface, but it'll make a fascinating story.

Shia Lebouf, Harrison Ford in an action still from Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones...

I did a phone interview last week with Control director Anton Corbijn. I'm not going to describe our chat except to call it easy from start to finish. Nothing remarkable in that, but pleasant all the same.

Control star Sam Riley, director Anton Corbijn at the film's very first press conference in Cannes last May

I didn't mention a nagging thought to Corbijn, which is that a film as fine and top-notch as Control -- the toast of '07 Cannes Film Festival, one of the finest rock-music dramas ever made, easily one of the...Read More

This "Fifty Best Breasts in Film History" piece (dated 10.9, which is tomorrow) on the Film Threat site is a bore and a time-waster. The YouTube clips stink, for one thing. It's the kind of online wank that makes you hate yourself for dancing through it even for four or five minutes.

"I'm trying to satisfy your need to probe into my private life and thoughts, but uh....I'm not going to give you any revelations. Just not going to happen." You should to try and guess who said this to a would-be interviewer inside a trailer parked in a Toronto suburb in 1986. If it takes you more than five or ten seconds to identify the person, then you probably need to see a certain film by Todd Haynes, and I don't mean Velvet Goldmine.

I've twice read Alissa Simon's Variety review of Marc Forster's The Kite Runner (posted last Thursday after a Chicago Film Festival screening), and it feels so dry and dispassionate that a computer program could have written it. Trade reviews are supposed to assess the merits and demerits of a film (including how commercial it may turn out to be), but you can feel the presence of perspective, personality and even emotion in the Variety reviews by Todd McCarthy, Robert Koehler and Derek Elley. Simon seems to be saying that it's a modest achievement, but offers no real hints about how she really...Read More

Jamie Stuart's 2nd New York Film Festival short is a lot trippier and more engaging than the first, which I posted on 10.2.07.

He's still using that Forbidden Planet music on the soundtrack to suggest a feeling of being disengaged as this or that filmmaker answers a question, but the overall cutting is sublime and the first 40%, in which images and dialogue from various post-screening press conferences are digitally projected upon (and made to fit within) various Manhattan ad spaces, is flat-out brilliant.

The first portion of this section shows Stuart emerging...Read More

Yesterday Wilson Morales of blackfilm.com posted a chat with WGA negotiator Terry George (culled from an interview George gave to promote his latest directing effort, Reservation Road) about the state of discussions between producers and the Writers Guild regarding a possible strike. DGA and SAG have related issues, says George, but right now the suits and the writers are miles apart.

Terry George

The studios, George said, are saying "this an antiquated system [we're living under] and we want to revisit the residual situation. The residual is what most actors and writers live off. It's...Read More

According to a story posted two days ago, three different producers have told Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke that Warner Bros president prexy Jeff Robinov has declared that "we are no longer doing movies with women in the lead."

Finke concludes that Robinov's "Neanderthal thinking" is a kneejerk reaction to the tanking of two WB female actioners -- The Brave One, a Jodie Foster urban revenger, and the Nicole Kidman pod-people thriller The Invasion.

She fails to mention that still another Warner Bros. femme-topped thriller -- Hilary Swank's The Reaping -- tanked last April, and that four years...Read More

Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese humanitarian and politician who's been held under house arrest by military thugs since winning 82% of the Parliamentary seats in her country 17 years ago -- that's not funny. But Moving Picture Blog's Joe Leydon has noticed something overly sincere about Jim Carrey's delivery of his video message about her situation, so he runs a post that snickers at Carrey's maudlin emoting. ("But seriously folks!") Doesn't the reality of the Burma thing balance out the Carrey factor?

A few days ago N.Y. Times DVD columnist Dave Kehr suckered me into buying the just-released DVD of Stanley Donen's Funny Face. I hate glossy-synthetic '50s musicals -- I've known that for years-- and yet I allowed the smooth-talking, snake-oil-selling Kehr to lead me down the garden path.

This is the second time I've bought a disc based on a Kehr recommendation that I suspected deep down I wouldn't like (the first being the Criterion Collection DVD of John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln), and which I traded in later on. Kehr is a...Read More

The IF THERE WAS A GOD... box has been moved to the middle of the column, so as not to challenge the Oscar Balloon's bottom-of-the-column position. The "pure" Best Picture contenders are only different from the regular Balloon-ers for the inclusion of Once and Zodiac, which absolutely deserve the toast. Nothing to say (for now) about three I haven't seen -- Charlie Wilson's War, Sweeney Todd and There Will Be Blood.

The Best Director contenders follow, but the acting nominees aren't very different at all except for Zodiac's Robert Downey, Jr. and Before The Devil Knows You're Dead's Ethan Hawke in the Best...Read More

"You were right and I was wrong." Beat, beat...a full five-second pause. "About the horses. The Lipizzaners. They are from Spain, not Portgual." Spoken by Gene Hackman at the tail end of Crimson Tide, and one of the best closing lines of the last 20 years. (As long as you've heard the set-up, that is, which happens about 15 minutes earlier.) Apparent closure to a story of intense conflict by suggesting a capitulation, and then pulling back. With a laugh. Perfect.

Not a huge surprise, but Sydney Pollack, Steven Soderbergh and Anthony Minghella were three good Godfathers on Michael Clayton, according to director-writer Tony Gilroy. "The advice all the way through the preproduction process is all ambassadorial and diplomatic: 'Can you call this person for me?' and 'Have you ever worked with this costume designer before?' and 'I didn't rehearse the film..is that a good idea?' It's all that kind of process stuff. To all of their credit, they gave to me what they would all want [as directors]. They gave me absolute autonomy. They gave me final cut. They protected me. They...Read More

I've been hanging onto the idea of Barack Obama reviving his candidacy by beating Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucus. Now comes a Des Moines Register poll showing Clinton at 29%, John Edwards at 23% and Obama at 22%. The Iowa caucus isn't until mid-January -- three and a half months hence -- and things could change, of course, but this is awful news.

Those Heartbreak Kid numbers have gotten slightly worse. The Farrelly Brothers/Ben Stiller film did about $4,585,000 Friday and was projected yesterday to end up Sunday night with $14,434,000, which was less than the $15 to $16 million that was projected midday Friday and over $5 million less than the $20 million that handicappers were expecting a day or two earlier. This morning's weekend projection, based on yesterday's ticket sales, is a limp $13,756,000.

Jonah Weiner's 9.27 Slate piece about what he believes to be unconscious racism on Wes Anderson's part ("Unbearable Whiteness") is interesting reading, but what I liked the most was reading a line from Bottle Rocket -- spoken by Luke Wilson's Anthony -- that I'd forgotten.

"Anthony's last girlfriend sent him into a psychological tailspin, we learn, when she made a bourgeois proposal," Weiner explains. "Over at Elizabeth's beach house," Anthony says, "she asked me if I'd rather go water-skiing or lay out. And I realized that not only did I not want to answer that question but I never wanted to answer...Read More

This is one of the meanest, most heartless pieces of analytical celebrity journalism I've ever read. I've never written anything this insensitive or pointless. You don't pack it in if things aren't working out. Maybe if you're struggling or uncertain but not after you've already made it. What you do in a jam is redefine, rethink, reinvent. Quitting is completely out of the question. Anyone who suggests this is some kind of fiend.

The most important thing in Dennis Lim's 10.7 N.Y. Times article about two Joy Division movies that the Weinstein Co. is distributing -- Anton Corbijn's Control, a feature film, and Grant Gee's Joy Division, a documentary -- is a line that sums up Corbijn's film very neatly. It says that Control "largely resists the temptation to assign blame or explanations."

To me, that's the all of it. In a very stark and disciplined way, Control is a "this happens, and then this happens" telling of a true-life story that does more than just relate events....Read More

"Todd Haynes's Dylan film isn't about Dylan. That's what's going to be so difficult for people to understand. That's what's going to make I'm Not There so trying for the really diehard Dylanists. That's what might upset the non-Dylanists, who may find it hard to figure out why he bothered to make it at all. And that's why it took Haynes so long to get it made.

"Haynes was trying to make a Dylan film that is, instead, what Dylan is all about, as he sees it, which is changing, transforming, killing off one Dylan...Read More

There's a good Chris Jones story about Benicio del Toro in the current Esquire that explains the genesis of a certain white T-shirt that the 40 year-old actor wears in Things We Lost in the Fire -- a T-shirt with the words SAME SAME printed on the chest. Not just in a jogging scene (when you can read it plain as day) but in other scenes also -- covertly, under shirts, jackets and overcoats, unseen but "there."

"It became very important to him that Jerry" -- Del Toro's junkie character -- "wear the T-shirt in Things...Read More

There's some doubt in the air about whether the Weinstein Co. is going to give Wayne Kramer's Crossing Over, a Traffic-like drama about the immigration situation between Mexico and the U.S., a modest platform-type release in December. One of the reasons for uncertainty is that the Weinstein Co. recently mailed a list of '07 films to Academy members, and Crossing Over wasn't on it.

Kramer (The Cooler, Running Scared) directed and wrote with Harrison Ford, Cliff Curtis, Ashley Judd, Sean Penn, Ray Liotta, Alicia Braga, Alice Eve and Jim Sturgess topping the cast. My personal suspicion is...Read More

So there's a mild story-telling phenomenon afoot these days: movies about two strong assertive alpha males who never meet during the course of the film until the very end, which a friend feels amounts to a kind of cheat. I think parallel-fate stories are interesting as hell, but I know what thsi guy means. You see two tough male leads on the poster and you figure, okay, these guys are going to mix it up on some level. And then they don't.

The worst case, he feels, was War, the Jason Statham/Jet Li flick "that marketed itself...Read More

The Heartbreak Kid was never tracking through the roof, but "it looked like $20 million" or something close to that. Nikki Finke reported late yesterday afternoon that this projection had been scaled back to $15 to $16 million, and now even that figure hasn't been met. The Farrelly Brothers/Ben Stiller film did about $4,585,000 yesterday and is projected to earn $14,434,000.

That's a bit of a stunner. Obviously people detected something in the ads and trailers that turned them off to some degree, but what? Marital discord, betrayal, embarassment, humiliation....something. I suspected that the film's...Read More

It's good to have Pete Hammond's Oscar- handicap column back in play, although it's running on the Envelope this year instead of Hollywood Wiretap. His opening shot is that "a little game is being played" in order to keep the profiles of likely Oscar contenders low, or at least low-ish. As in Presidential politics, nobody wants to be seen as the front-runner too early.

"Smart Academy consultants -- battered by this year-round internet and mainstream media interest in the hunt for awards -- are starting to act like CIA operatives, doing everything they...Read More

Susanne Bier's Things We Lost in the Fire (Dreamamount, 10.19) is like a thousand emotional wind-chimes made into a quiet symphony. It's my idea of a flat-out masterpiece, certainly within the realm of the family-tragedy drama. Bier knows exactly how to make every moment feel true and on-target, and Benicio del Toro's lead performance as a heroin addict struggling to recover and stay that way is the best I've seen this year from anyone of either gender, country or classification. Yeah, that's what I said.

Benicio del Toro in Things We Lost in the Fire

I ran down to the Four Seasons this morning for a breakfast chat with Michael Clayton director-writer Tony Gilroy, and right away it was relaxation time. I asked him two or three toughies, but we talked about everything and could have gone on and on. It felt so easy and unforced that I figured I'd run 95% of the recording, or about 45 minutes worth. It involves the ordering of food and personal stuff here and there, and the sound skips once or twice.

Michael Clayton director-writer Tony Gilroy in the Four Seasons dining room --...

Anne Thompson's 10.4 Variety column about the pitfalls and benefits of long running times observes that "every film has its own shape and focus, to be sure, but figuring out a movie's ideal scale requires a delicate balance of art, commerce and talent relations.

"Cut a would-be epic too slim," she writes, "and you wind up with truncated frustrations like Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America or Oliver Stone's Alexander, three forced edits that later blossomed in longer form on DVD. [But] let a film run too long and you limit its audience appeal....Read More

From Lou Lumenick's N.Y. Post movie blog, posted this morning: "One of the biggest compliments I can pay a movie is that I wish it were longer. Such is the case with Ridley Scott's masterful American Gangster. At 158 minutes, it left me wanting more -- only the second film this year (after Zodiac) that I can say this about. Like David Fincher's film, it's an exquisitely detailed period piece set in the early 1970s that warrants a full three-hour running time."

From my own Gangster review of a week or two ago: "I...Read More

I was speaking a little while ago to Michael Clayton director Tony Gilroy, and we got into the subject of actors speaking English with foreign accents in movies set in foreign-speaking countries. We agreed on two things: (1) It's entirely the right thing for Benicio del Toro and his costars tp speak Spanish in the two Che Guevara films (The Argentine and Guerilla) for director Steven Soderbergh but (2) Tom Cruise and his mostly British costars speaking with a German accents in Bryan Singer's Valkyrie might be a problem.

Maximilian Schell in Judgment at Nuremberg

"In Hollywood, there's redemption, and then there's redemption," writes Business Week's Ron Grover. "For most folks who make or star in films, redemption is having a hit after a real stinker -- when, say, Jim Carrey actually makes another movie that someone other than his immediate family wants to see. The other type of redemption is the kind that superstar Tom Cruise and his longtime producing partner Paula Wagner hope to enjoy soon."

Fair enough -- Cruise and Wagner have bounced back. But then Grover goes into a little tap-dance. This is a piece about redemption,...Read More

The Heartbreak Kid has obviously touched a nerve among critics. They aren't just panning it (it has a 34% positive from Rotten Tomatoes) -- many of them are vomiting on the sidewalk. A random sampling: (a) "An ugly, hateful and deeply unfunny bit of hackwork that not only stinks on its own but also tarnishes the reputation of a genuinely funny and inspired comedy." -- Peter Sobczynski, efilmcritic.com; (b) "A grim, shrill, deluded and incredibly depressing movie...bewilderingly mean-spirited." -- Carina Chocano, L.A. Times; (c) "Based on the 1972 movie... much in the same way that a breakfast of Pop...Read More

N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott says he's "not dogmatically opposed to remakes, and I've admired much of the Farrelly brothers' earlier work. At their best -- in Shallow Hal or Kingpin, say -- they show a rare ability to mix the nasty and the nice, to combine humor based in the grossness of the body and its functions with a sweet, humanistic spirit.

"But that generosity seems to have abandoned them here," Scott observes. "Their squeamish, childish fascination with bodily ickiness, when crossed with the iffy sexual politics of the original, yields a comic vision remarkable for its hysterical misogyny."

Precisely,...Read More

Caught up in the usual, I should've run this clip yesterday of Hardball's Chris Matthews suffering a "book interview from hell" on the Jon Stewart Show Tuesday night (10.2).

Matthews' book is called "Life is a Campaign." Review the Amazon page before watching the clip -- everyone the world over has had this argument with themselves.

Owen Wilson showed up tonight -- his first public appearance in several weeks -- at the Darjeeling Limited premiere at the Academy. Snapped from the ninth or tenth row after the 7:35 pm screening of Hotel Chevalier (and just prior to the Darjeeling screening) -- (l. to r.) Adrien Brody, Wilson, Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman, Natalie Portman. Darjeeling director-co-writer Wes Anderson was standing to the right.

"It's forever being drummed into us that movies are a visual medium," writes New Yorker critic David Denby. "Screenwriters are chastised with this half-truth all the time; they may be told to keep dialogue terse or suggestive or to drop lines altogether. After the movie is shot, directors may cut good as well as bad dialogue."

But in Michael Clayton, director-writer Tony Gilroy "pitches us into a high-pressure world of law-firm shenanigans and corruption with irresistible relish, and the talk is copious, detailed, and both smart-assed and soulful.

"It takes a while to figure out...Read More

The trailer for Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Dreamamount, 12.21) is up on Yahoo movies. A friend "knows some post people working on Sweeney and they're all saying it's Depp's best performance ever."

"In The Darjeeling Limited, director Wes Anderson "toys with those who believe all fiction is autobiographical: Jason Schwartzman's Jack, a writer, is frequently protesting that his stories -- which the audience knows to be taken directly from his life -- are pure fiction.

"I don't think I'd want to write about three brothers if it weren't for the fact that I have two brothers and there were three of us growing up and that comes from my own experience," Anderson tells Globe and Mail writer Simon Houpt.

"So does Anderson understand why he keeps gnawing at the theme of fractured families?

"He...Read More

I'm going to try and get the "pure" Oscar Balloon box (i.e., IF THERE WAS A GOD...) up by 5 or 6 pm. I have to go to a 1 pm screening of Things We Lost in the Fire, but if anyone wants to follow Ian Sinclair's example rom yesterday and list a bunch of deserving Oscar nominees that don't necessarily correlate with what the Gurus of Gold and Gurus 2.0 are predicting will be Academy favorites (although it's perfectly allowable to include a likely Academy pick), post 'em here and I'll give them a full think-through.

I take back my concern, based on an early trailer and general word-of-mouth, that the Farrelly Brothers' The Heartbreak Kid might be "a much coarser and more slapsticky thing than" Elaine May's 1972 original film of the same title, as I said in a short piece that went up on 8.13.

Ben Stiller, Malin Akerman

I feared that it might have "fewer mixed-bag subtleties in terms of the characters" and might be...well, sort of crude and apeshit and anything-for-a-laugh commercial, in part because I've long felt attached to the Jewish-ness of the...Read More

Fearing possible reprisals that may be visited upon three young stars of Marc Forster's The Kite Runner by politically thuggish elements in Afghanistan, where the film is set, Paramount Vantage is delaying the film's release from 11.2 to 12.14, at which point the boys will be out of school and free to leave Afghanistan for a presumably safe harbor.

A 10.4.07 N.Y. Times story by David Halbfinger says that Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada, Zekiria Ebrahimi and Ali Danish Bakhty Ari and their families are looking to get the hell out of Dodge -- Kabul -- "over fears...Read More

George Clooney's Leatherheads, a romantic comedy set in the world of 1920s football, had been set to open on 12.7, but Universal is pushing it back to the spring. April, actually. The Universal guy who told me about this says that extra shooting is currently being planned. He's also been told "there'll be new actors hired as well." Remember, now -- it's not real unless you read it in Variety! No word on why it's been bumped, but with "new actors" being hired it 's not hard to put two and two together.

John Krasinski, George Clooney in...

I could run a list of ten things I like or at least admire about The Darjeeling Limited (which I may do tomorrow -- could a slightly positive backlash be manifesting?), but there's nothing but good vibrations on the soundtrack, and I almost never mention CDs in this column in any context. (Unless it's a new Springsteen album.)

The Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Actress prediction calls of the Gurus 2.0 are, for the most part, just as timid and safe and soft-bellied as the choices made the first-string Gurus. Okay, so In The Valley of Elah ranks a little higher and Zodiac got three Best Picture votes instead of one...big deal.

I know -- it's unfair to refer to Gurus 2.0 as second-stringers when what they are, basically, are "the other guys." Is there another way to put it, something less dismissive? Thirteen smart critics and bloggers who've been labelled...Read More

Every once in a blue moon, David Poland gets it right about an end-of-the-year awards contender. American Gangster (which I went for big-time a week ot so ago) is one of those rare lucky recipients. Not quite "the undeniable classic [he] felt throughout was trying to emerge," Poland says, and yet "a classic tale of the American dream on drugs...one of the very best gangster epics of all time...the work of a truly skilled filmmaker, some excellent actors, a great story, and a '70s spirit of filmmaking that is a pleasure to see on the big screen in 2007."

With Halloween starting to approach, a reader asked an hour ago about my running a list of favorite horror films. Instant stopper. The term "horror film" has, of course, become a euphemism for slash-chop-gore, and most people need to be in a state of acute hormonal tumescence to be a fan of this. My idea of a cool high-end-end horror film is Juan Antonio Bayona's The Orphanage -- a movie that mainlines fear into your spinal cord. (Especially that hide-and-advance scene when the kids make their appearance.)

Pumpkin display at the West Hollywood Pavillions on Santa Monica...

I spilled the beans about Kris Tapley's Oscar-season Variety blog last Sunday, but Variety editors needed two days of contract-affirming, conference-calling and lotus-position meditation before officially confirming it last night. The blog will be called Red Carpet District. The story says Tapley will continue to tap out In Contention stuff also....really? With a lot less fervor and regularity, I would think.

Click on this Dylan online promo (i.e., intended to persuade you to buy the Dylan Collector's Edition CD that came out yesterday) -- it lets you type your own thoughts onto the flash cards. I just did it myself -- the Hollywood Elsewhere philosophy of hourly composition and soul-baring.

Russell Crowe has written a letter to Moving Picture Blog's Joe Leydon correcting a passage in his Cowboys and Indians profile of the actor that referred to "the 100-acre spread [Crowe] maintains five hours from Sydney, along the coastal flats of New South Wales, where he raises Brangus cattle."

Not quite, Leydon is embarrassed to admit. "My property," Crowe wrote, "is now 1360 acres in the main block -- with 180 acres of grain land down the river one way and 360 acres of finishing land down the valley the other way.

"[And]...Read More

Rich 60-ish men huffing and puffing about power and territoriality is boring, but Paramount has given the DreamWorks trio an olive branch -- a DreamWorks-Paramount label called DW/Par, which doesn't sound as good as Dreamamount -- in order to keep Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg from abandoning their Paramount deal over resentment that they haven't been given sufficient credit for generating a string of B.O. successes this year, blah, blah. The new label is is a symbol of Paramount's resolve to correct that oversight.

Jim Sheridan told me that Natalie Portman is playing the wife in Brothers, his remake of Susanne Bier's Danish-language '04 film, when I ran into him last Saturday at a CVS pharmacy in West Hollywood, and I ran the news the following day (Sun.). But it became a repeatable, quotable story only when Variety's Tatiana Siegel posts her story about same at 8 pm last night. Uh-huh.

Update: A hard drive with over 2,000 images from still photographer David James' work from the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was recently stolen and offered for sale to news outlets, but IESB's Robert Sanchez reported last night that "the alleged thief was apprehended [yesterday afternoon] at the Standard -- the still-happening Sunset Strip hotel that caters to an under-40 clientele -- around 4:00pm PST.

"The thief was apprehended by LAPD and the FBI with the help of a member of the online press that had been offered the stolen property. An undercover sting operation was set...Read More

Sometimes you can just smell the readiness in a critic or a columnist to take a film down. They can't do this, of course, unless the film "cooperates" -- i.e., is at least a little bit bad -- but you can always sense an itchy trigger finger. Good critics and columnists always try to be receptive to whatever moves and grooves a movie has to offer, but you can always tell when they've strapped on their belts and are twirling their pistols and waiting, just waiting. Ask any publicist.

A professional always keeps 'em holstered unless there's...Read More

The Envelope's Paul Sheehan has posted a rundown of 20 potential Best Actress contenders. Again, this is an article that should have run last summer. His inclusions are generous...too generous. The field is not that wide at this stage.

"I know you don't delve into music too much, but if you're at all interested, you should check out the Bruce Springsteen album that comes out today, Magic. It relates a little bit to what you've been talking about regarding the Iraq-oriented films. He has made an album that at first obliquely and, at the very end, overtly gets into the tragedy of the war and the deception behind it (which even the title alludes to).

"And he's done it in the form of his first record with the E Street Band that sounds like...Read More

Ju-osh wrote yesterday about how he and his girlfriend "watched Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain the other night, and we both liked it a lot. But we agreed that the 'optimal' (for lack of a better word) time to see this film would be in the days/weeks following the death of a loved one. In that fragile, often illogical, emotional state, the Rorschach-ish imagery and dialogue would mean that much more, and possibly do quite a bit to help provide some glimmer of hope to the bereaved.

"What I was hoping was, would you consider asking your readers...Read More

A reporter from Investors Business Daily who's been assigned to write a profile piece on Sydney Poitier asked this morning for a quote. I thought about it for five seconds and tapped this out: "Starting in the mid to late '60s with the advent of political militancy among African Americans, Sidney Poitier began to be dissed in certain circles as a kind of house nigger. His offense was having handsomely profited from playing black guys that white audiences were comfortable with at the time, guys who were handsome, dignified and totally unthreatening.

"But look at those performances today -- the ones...Read More

"I know you have issues with Christianity," a reader wrote this morning, "but given your admiration for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, I thought you might be interested in this appraisal by Catholic critic (and screenwriting-workshop coach) Barbara Nicolosi, who greatly admires it."

Roman citizens enjoying the show in Cecil B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross

I don't have issues with Christianity. I have issues with right-wing Christians, particularly the kind focused on in Tony Kaye's abortion documentary Lake of Fire. The Romans may not have thrown Christians...Read More

Visual economy in a film is always a great thing, but it can be dazzling when used to portray a character's state of mind and explain why he's about to embark on a certain course of action. There's a moment near the beginning of Louis Malle's Damage, a masterful drama about an obsessive, self-destructive affair between a British politician (Jeremy Irons) and his son's fiance (Juliette Binoche), that's a good example of this.

Irons walks into his tres elegant, two-story home in Hampstead Heath at the end of the day and tells his wife (Miranda Richardson) about a meeting with the Prime...Read More

"I met this guy named Ding-Dong. He told me the whole earth is goin' up in flame. Flames will come out of here and there and they'll just rise up. The mountains are gonna go up in big flames, the water's gonna rise in flames. There's gonna be creatures runnin' every which way, some of them burnt, half of their wings burnin'. People are gonna be screamin' and hollerin' for help.

"See, the people that have been good, they're gonna go to heaven and escape all that fire. But if you've been bad, God don't even hear you. He don't even hear...Read More

Ben Affleck's thing with Jennifer Lopez "was probably bad for my career," he admits in a Details interview meant to promote Gone Baby Gone (Miramax, 10.19), a Boston-based thriller cum procedural that Affleck has directed.

"What happens is this sort of bleeds over from the tabloids across your movie work. You go to a movie, you only go once. But the tabloids and internet are everywhere. You can really subsume the public image of somebody. I ended up in an unfortunate-crosshair position where I was in a relationship and (the media) mostly lied and inflated a bunch of salacious stuff...Read More

I paid money to see Robert Benton's Feast of Love last night. It's a completely decent second-tier relationship drama. That doesn't mean "second-rate" -- it's just not refined enough to be called top of the line. A little too schematic, not enough of an underflow. Maybe it is second rate, but I half-liked it. I was half into it and sometimes fully engrossed, and also a bit bored from time to time, but it didn't hurt altogether.

I respected Gregg Kinnear's willingness to go into vulnerable places, and the growing intimation that you get from Allison...Read More

Here's a well-phrased appreciation from N.Y. Times DVD columnist Dave Kehr of Paramount Home Video's 50th anniversary DVD of Stanley Donen's Funny Face ('57). I'm not sure I would have watched this without Kehr's recommendation, but now...maybe. "In a version that returns to the original VistaVision negative for an uncommonly crisp and vibrant transfer," he writes, "Funny Face is a movie that bridges two generations -- that of the traditional, studio-bound musical and that of the new, on-location epic."

Wasn't On The Town ('49) was the first on-location musical? Shot mostly on sound...Read More

"I actually think that it's easier for people who know less about Dylan to go with it, if they're up for something different. Clearly, that's the first thing. Whether you know Dylan or not, you have to surrender to the movie to have a good time at all and get anything out of it. If you have a lot of Dylanisms in your head, it's kind of distracting, because you're sitting there with a whole second movie going on. You're annotating it as you go.

"[But] it's kind of nice to sit back and let it take you. I think people get...Read More

Another industry-watcher -- Wall Street Journal contributor Anthony Kaufman -- is reporting that the Iraq-Afghanistan movies are either dying (In The Valley of Elah) or underperforming (The Kingdom). If I had the power, I would make every person who voted to continue the Iraq War by voting for Bush's reelection in '04 watch every last Iraq War movie there is. I would have them gently brought into theatres and strapped down like Alex in A Clockwork Orange with their eyes kept open with those clamp devices and shown every last one.

Okay, I might let...Read More

Eight or nine months ago Michael Sheen told me that a third chapter in the Tony Blair saga -- a film about Blair's relationships with Bill Cinton and George Bush, and particularly about Blair's misguided alliance with Bush over the mounting of the Iraq War -- would one day be written by Peter Morgan (who wrote the first two chapters, The Deal and The Queen), and then be directed by Stephen Frears and star himself as Blair.

Morgan sounded somewhere between iffy and disinterested about it when I asked about the project at last October's Queen press junket, but he sounded slightly...Read More

This "what do you stand for?" Google/You Tube promotion for Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs (MGM, 11.9), which offers a $25,000 cash prize for the best short political video piece submitted, might raise awareness and get the word going. Maybe. What would really help, I suspect, would be for MGM to release stills that show costars Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise doing something besides sitting in that damn Washington, D.C., office with Cruise instructing/lecturing Streep about the hard choices facing America in the fight against terrorism.

For weeks and weeks I've been looking...Read More

Steve Guttenberg is alive and well and 49 and doing (I presume) pretty well, but the fact that he's cut a deal with Thomas Dunne Books to write a memoir about his early years in Hollywood (the late '70s to mid '80s) indicates he's either got time on his hands or is looking to jump-start things.

It's generally agreed that Guttenberg's peak artistic period was between Barry Levinson's Diner ('82) and Curtis Hanson's The Bedroom Window ('87). His last bona fide hit was Three Men and a Little Lady ('90). I used to hate him before Diner. I remember being...Read More

Ad art for Scott Coffey's Ellie Parker ('05) and Michael Haneke's Funny Games (due in February '08).

No biggie, but interesting that the Warner Independent ad art guys chose the same Naomi Watts eye to be running the tears and mascara.

A 9.30 report by Elle's Tracey Lomrantz that Robert Rodriguez will be directing real-life squeeze and Planet Terror star Rose McGowan in a remake of Barbarella is at least...what, four months old? But it reminds us that Rodriguez is an old hand at dressing his leading ladies in skimpy outfits and turning them into objects of lascivious attention (as he did with Salma Hayek in Desperado and From Dusk to Dawn). And it seems to once again confirm R.R.'s absolute opposition to making a film of any attempted soul or substance or delicacy for the rest of his life. He's a thick-fingered...

For years the once-great Carroll Ballard (The Black Stallion, Duma, Never Cry Wolf) has been tagged as the go-to guy when you're making a spiritual-poetic animal movie, so it was no surprise when he was hired to direct Hachiko: A Dog's Story, a feature that will star and be produced by Richard Gere. Also produced by Vicki Shigekuni Wong, it's based on a true-life Japanese legend about of a college professor's bond with the abandoned dog he takes into his home.

The problem is that Ballard wound up butting heads with Gere and, according to a trusted source,...Read More

I can't remember the last time I saw a fiery volcano explode in a film, but we know we won't be seeing one from Roman Polanski any time soon with the plug recently pulled on his Pompeii movie. But look at this -- a real-life volcano blowing fire and fury just hours ago about 130 kilometers off the coast of Yemen. I can only hope for a YouTube video down the road. It looks like the fire-breathing monster effect in the trailer for J.J. Abrams' Cloverfield.

A better-than-ILM display of fire, lava and massive ash clouds...

Every time I read a story about certain political forces wanting smoking in Hollywood movies to be restricted or stopped, which is the topic of this Michael Cieply story in the 9.30 N.Y. Times, I have the same reaction. Europeans, people under heavy stress, 20-something clubgoers and low-rent rubes often smoke cigarettes, and as offensive as this habit can seem to ex-smokers like myself it's absurd to say that filmmakers shouldn't show people sucking smoke into their lungs when it's appropriate for the story or theme they're trying to convey.

And yet it wouldn't be bad to see less movie-smoking as...Read More

I was reading Jennifer Pearson's Tomkat cover story ("Tom and Katie's Big Blow-up!") in the latest Star in the checkout line at Gelson's last night, and was startled to read that Valkyrie, Bryan Singer and Tom Cruise's still-shooting WWII thriller, is now being called Rubicon. That's dead wrong, I found out. I just want to clarify that in case anyone else reads this Star story over the next three or four days and goes "whoa" when they read this.

I called Pearson and her Florida-based editor, Larry Brown, to see what the source was, but Brown dummied up and Pearson said the...Read More

As this trailer proves, the voice that Daniel Day Lewis uses in There Will Be Blood (Paramount Vantage, 12.26) doesn't resemble his Gangs of New York/ "Bill the Butcher" voice in the least. Anyone who says this has no ear. It's actually a blend of two voices -- the late John Huston's and ThinkFilm honcho Mark Urman's. Huston + Urman + a little raspiness + a measured, conniving quality.

This out-of-synch Bill Maher riff about Hilary vs. Rudy on Larry King Live was taped six weeks ago, but the situation hasn't changed. Knowing deep down that Maher is almost certainly right is enough to give anyone indigestion. Obama vs. Thompson would have been an interesting race, but Hilary vs. Rudy is going to be the smelliest campaign in human history. I can't believe it's come down to this. It's so dispiriting...God.

A portion of the only first-rate scene in an otherwise dated and often irritating film, especially due to some horribly banal dialogue and some truly atrocious acting by some child actors.