Should have put this up earlier today. Speaks for itself. Newman the Great.

"This looks to be the Citizen Kane of Gen-X marital strife porn." -- HE reader James O. Incandenza wildly speculating about Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road.

Kim Voynar, late of Cinematical, has signed up with Movie City News as a writer-columnist-editor. Everything Voynar thinks, does, feels, believes in, dreams about, eats, breathes, longs for politically, wants to say and is looking to make happen is henceforth owned by MCN -- lock, stock and barrel.

"Loved you writing about Kristin Scott Thomas, I've Loved You So Long and her Best Actress shot," writes HE reader and Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling. "[But] how come there's no love for Elsa Zylberstein, a Best Supporting Actress nominee if I ever saw one? Zylberstein is quite a terrific foil to Thomas. It's through her eyes that we embrace Thomas' character and stick with her. If this soulful sibling is willing to shelter and care for her, so are we. All the doubts the audience has about Thomas, Elsa believably faces and deals with, and finally she takes us...Read More

I don't know who wrote this originally, but the spirit and the attitude are quite likable. And it makes sense to impose such terms in any Wall Street bailout deal. Thanks to HE reader Brendan for passing this along:

"Dear Wall Street,

"I'm speaking on behalf of a group called The Taxpayers of the United States. Now that we've rejected the first bailout plan, I'm sure that in the spirit of tough, free market capitalism and spirited negotiations, you'll consider our second offer. Here are some terms that we trust you'll find reasonable:

"(1) We are willing to loan you money at a...Read More

"I'm hearing schmaltzy," a guy told me this morning about Joe Wright's The Soloist. That's all you can share? I wrote back. How schmaltzy? Does it manifest right away, or does it...you know, hold off until Act Two or Three or what? I'm sensing a certain actorishness from Jamie Foxxin the trailer -- is that a problem? Don't tell me Robert Downey, Jr. isn't good in this because Downey is on a roll and can't fail.

Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married (Sony Classics, 10.3) "is endlessly sociable, with people crowding the camera as if in a documentary, yet sometimes you want that camera to draw back and watch them from a distance -- to see how they mill around in the frame rather than shifting the frame itself.

"The wedding party is the ultimate guide to Demme's benign vision: the groom is black, the bride is white, she and her bridesmaids are dressed in saris, nobody so much as mentions race, and the officiating priest is played by Demme's cousin, Father...Read More

The New Yorker's Ben Greenman has listed his five scariest movies of all time -- Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs, Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, Wes Craven's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Robert Wise's The Body Snatcher and David Lynch's Mulholland Drive.

These are all gripping portraits of inferno worlds, but big-time scary is always about triggering repressed fears with what you don't show -- with what you set loose in people's souls by implying the presence of demons.

There was a time when I thought that Wise's The Haunting ('63), which shows nothing, was perhaps the scariest...Read More

According to polling data on Yahoo Dashboard, Utah voters prefer John McCain to Barack Obama by 62.7 to 23.3. Red staters believe what they believe and their boots are dug in, but what's up with that lopsided margin? Utah's McCain support is much stronger than it is in states known for their adamant shitkicker sensibilities (Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky). Oklahoma is another fierce red state -- McCain over Obama, 61.3 to 29.3. What do these guys sprinkle on their eggs every morning?

NBC's Tom Brokaw is sounding more and more like a cautious milquetoast place-holder with an excessively deferential, go-along attitude. Good old avuncular, seen-it-all Tom, nostalgic sentimentalist and author of "The Greatest Generation." But where is the honor in lobbying to put a lid on two respected MSNBC colleagues (Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews) who have a passion for cutting through the bull, and in accomodating the disreputable liars and smoke-blowers in the McCain campaign?

Two days ago Brokaw (a) reportedly cited false disparaging poll data about Barack Obama, (b) recently conducted some shuttle diplomacy between NBC and the McCain campaign, seeking to...Read More

This high-def version of the new trailer for Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road (Paramount Vantage, 12.26) tells you pretty much what the film is without the particulars or the last two beats. Miserable, lost and sinking in surburbia. Richard Yates, John Cheever, John Updike, etc.

I understand the whole flight-to-the-suburbs mentality of the '50s as well as the female nesting instinct, but why would Leonardo DiCaprio's Frank Wheeler, a guy who says he loves Paris because "the people are alive there...unlike here," want to buy a house in Cheever Land in the first place? Is...Read More

"A filthy-rich fantasy for these cash-strapped times, Beverly Hills Chihuahua features the voices of Drew Barrymore and much of the industry's top Latino talent in a live-action talking-dog lark that should please young pups. At the same time, it peddles tacky stereotypes in thick Hispanic accents, effectively ceding whatever dignity the breed regained since the 'Yo quiero Taco Bell' campaign went off the air. One thing's for sure: The Mouse House will realize a fine balance of trade on this one." -- from Peter DeBruge's 9.29 Variety review.

"The film...Read More

The map on the Yahoo Political Dashboard has the most accessible state-by-state poll numbers, and I'm pleased, naturally, with the electoral vote projections favoring Obama over McCain, 278 to 227. But I've come to expect greater comfort and assurance from the guys at fivethirtyeight.com. They have Ohio and Virginia as lean Obama states, and an electoral vote projection of 329 to 208. Why the discrepancy? Split the two and Obama is projected to win just over 300 to McCain's 217.

Another Jamie Stuart short about the New York Film Festival has been posted on the Filmmaker website. Per custom it hasn't much to do with the Lincoln Center happenings. It's another dry surreal thing. The term that comes to mind is "Bunuelian wackjob." It contains a clip of Che director Steven Soderbergh defining what a political film is, but is mostly about strange noirish dreams in Stuart's head. I watched it the first time with my amplified speaker system attached, and couldn't hear most of the dialogue because of a bass guitar going "thwong, thwong, thwong, thwong." And what does "this one's...Read More

"After I spent 2 1/2 hours laying on a stretcher, not being able to breathe, I thought to myself -- what a waste. I've got a ton of money in the bank, I've got this hotshot job at DreamWorks and it's all meaningless. I've just been living through my ego. From that minute, I promised myself that if I managed to survive, I'd live the life I wanted to live, not the way I thought other people wanted me to live.

"And however well I end up doing as a writer, whether I just eke out a living or win a bunch...Read More

What can you say about a tough-minded, hard-nosed political drama that tells the truth, doesn't mince words or pull punches, rekindles the viral excitement of a bygone era, offers several gripping performances and leaves you with a taste of ashes in your soul?

Moritz Bleibtreu, Johanna Wokalek

This is the reality of The Baader Meinhof Complex -- Uli Edel's 149-minute drama about the famed German radical leftist group. I caught it last Friday night at the Aero along with L.A. Times guy Mark Olsen, The Envelope's Pete Hammond and two or three publicist pals who may...Read More

In the remarkable, deeply penetrating I've Loved You So Long (Sony Classics, 10.24) , Kristin Scott Thomas gives an immensely sad but highly sensitive and attuned performance that you just know, minutes into it, will be with you the rest of your life. She draws you in like some sad-eyed lady of the lowlands, but she never sells anything. Start to finish, she dwells in this fascinating zen-grief space that just "is." She owns it...and from the moment the film begins, owns you.

Warning to first-time viewers: Watch this YouTube...Read More

I was just depositing some cash into a Washington Mutual account an hour ago, and the atmosphere was unmistakably edgy. A long line of people, anxious looks on some of the faces, a vaguely nervous undercurrent of one form or another. Washington Mutual went under a few days ago and was bought up by JP Morgan Chase on 9.26. There was a fat guy jabbering excitedly to a friend and making no attempt to hide his anger at bank employees behind the glass who were sitting at desks and not at teller windows. The vibe was on the sullen side. No jokes,...Read More

The Envelope's Buzzmeter software is currently being overhauled and redesigned, so in the meantime The Envelope's Tom O'Neil has tallied some 2008 Oscar predictions. Nobody agrees on anything...too early for that. The contributors are O'Neil, Anthony Breznican (USA Today), Edward Douglas (Comingsoon.net), Scott Feinberg (AndTheWinnerIs, The Feinberg Files at The Envelope), Pete Hammond (The Envelope), Dave Karger (Entertainment Weekly) and myself.

"The biggest robbery in the history of this country is taking place as you read this," Michael Moore wrote today. "Though no guns are being used, 300 million hostages are being taken. Make no mistake about it: After stealing a half trillion dollars to line the pockets of their war-profiteering backers for the past five years, after lining the pockets of their fellow oilmen to the tune of over a hundred billion dollars in just the last two years, Bush and his cronies -- who must soon vacate the White House -- are looting the U.S. Treasury of every dollar they can...Read More

"To a certain extent, I think John gets hurt by this," said CNN contributor Ed Rollins about the failure of the bailout bill to pass the House earlier today. "He obviously, at the end of the day, said he was for it. But more important than that, he said he was the one who would bring them to the table and to a certain extent he will be viewed now as not being able to do that.

"McCain is our nominee and [congressional Republicans] will do everything they can to help him, but they are not going to go over the...Read More

One frequent reason why high-quality films are chosen as Best Picture finalists is because of the resonance and universality of their themes. And the themes that always seem to register more than others are contained in personal journey movies about growth, redemption and transformation. They say something with a measure of eloquence that people recognize as fundamentally true based on their own life experience, and if they don't jerk the audience around with too much shallow diversion or emotional manipulation, they tend to shine through -- even if they end sadly or tragically.

You will see change/grow/transform...Read More

N.Y. Times reporter Michael Cieply has an Oscar season piece out this morning. It mainly focuses on Paramount's intention to push The Curious Case of Benjamin Button big-time. The most interesting line comes from marketing chief Megan Colligan, who says the not quite finished slogan for the film is something along the lines of "you must live your life forward, but it can only be understood backward."

A portion of the Cieply piece raised an eyebrow. "Some publicists who specialize in Oscar campaigns," he wrote, "are privately predicting a year-end shootout between Button and Frost/Nixon, a planned December release from Universal Pictures, directed...Read More

This David Byrne/"Once in a Lifetime"-themed trailer for Oliver Stone's W. is, make no mistake, brilliant -- an award-level advertisement if I ever saw one. Is this a Tim Palin original or did an outside agency throw it together? TV junket press saw W. last weekend. Print/online showings will almost certainly be this week.

Here's last summer's trailer for Baz Luhrman's Australia (20th Century Fox, 11.26), and a newer, just-released version.

Luhrman is a fever-pitch, headstrong, first-rate director -- one of the dependable visionaries in this business. The finely crafted script tells a rousing, big-canvas, primary-colors story that's set in the World War II era. And the movie is clearly looking to deliver an eye-filling, epic-sized experience with a mostly realistic (i.e., not too much CG) brush.

The only uncertainty is whether or not the Nicole Kidman marquee factor, which hasn't been working in recent years and has...Read More

I hate it when trailers tell you everything about a movie except the final beat, so you'd think I'd be receptive to the plot vagueness in this recently posted trailer for Seven Pounds, the Will Smith movie coming out on 12.19. But it bothered me. "What's going on here?" I was saying to myself. I got the part about Smith being shattered by something he did and wanting to help others in a kind of Pay It Forward vein, but what's the shot?

You have to search around on the Seven...Read More

Production designer Ken Adam talking to the Telegraph's Horatia Harrod about the war room set he designed for Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove some 45 years ago.

Edited by the 23/6 guys, and not a bad job of it.

L.A. Times reporter Steven Braun reported yesterday that "soon after Sarah Palin was elected mayor of the foothill town of Wasilla, Alaska" -- in 1997 -- "she startled a local music teacher by insisting in casual conversation that men and dinosaurs coexisted on an Earth created 6,000 years ago."

Last night MTV.com guy Josh Horowitz reported that if and when Nottingham ever gets made, director Ridley Scott intends to have Russell Crowe play both the Sheirff of Nottingham and Robin Hood. Scott revealed that Crowe will be "playing both!" to MTV News during a Body of Lies junket interview over the weekend. Scott explained that Crowe's dual roles would be "a good old clever adjustment of characters. One becomes the other. It changes." This isn't just a terrible idea -- it's an embarassing one. Unless Scott was having Horowitz off.

"It's just the ultimate hustle. It's just selling an invisible product, and so if I can be Toto in The Wizard of Oz pulling back the curtain, which is how I see religion, great, that's fine, I'll do that and get off the stage. I'm not looking to be the anti-messiah." -- Religulous producer-star Bill Maher speaking to N.Y. Times writer John Leland.

Religulous producer-star Bill Maher, director Larry Charles

15 months ago Michael Cera, the 19 year-old costar of the just-opened Superbad, was suddenly the Guy of the Moment -- a cool new GenY talent who embodied a very dry, droll and witty comic mentality, which was also evident in Clark and Michael, his co-created web series. And yet today -- don't laugh -- I'm getting a feeling that Cera may be two or three steps from being over.

I'm not saying this is in the cards, and I'm not saying I don't enjoy Cera's comic sensibility -- I do. But if he is...Read More

This two-day old CNN clip has gotten around, but it has something new I missed on Friday. Jack Cafferty's rant about Sarah Palin is angry but unexceptional -- he's expressing a fairly common reaction to Palin's performance during her recent Katie Couric interview. What stands out is Cafferty's rebuke of CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer when the latter tries to explain away Palin's shoddy performance due to having had to cram in a lot of information in a short time frame.

Thanks to Jack Morrissey for passing this along. Originally posted on 6.17.08 by a young student from southeastern Kentucky, just back from football practice. The woman is his neighbor, according to the YouTube description.

Producer Scott Rudin and Weinstein Co. honcho Harvey Weinstein today issued a statement that they're "in complete agreement" about releasing The Reader, the Stephen Daldry war-crimes drama, about on December 12, a decision facilitated by "a plan to extend the post-production schedule in order to give Daldry the additional time he needs to successfully complete [it]."

Kate Winslet, Stephen Daldry during filming of The Reader

The statement was prompted by a 9.23 Hollywood Reporter story by Stephen Zeitchik claiming that "a heated disagreement" between Weinstein and Rudin about distribution plans" for The Reader was underway.

The people who made Eagle Eye the weekend's #1 film with a $29.2 million haul are obviously easy lays. The ads and reviews made it crystal clear this was/is a brainless, pumped-up slapdash thriller, and they went anyway.

The $13 million-plus that Nights at Rodanthe earned for the #2 position came from the wallets of women with low (certainly flexible) standards who don't want to know from reviews and just wanted to hang with Richard Gere and Diane Lane...end of diagnosis.

The $6.5 million earned by Fireproof in 839 locations, or $7,764 per theatre, makes for a nice...Read More

"I guess it comes down to the fact that I take the escapism that movies provide very seriously, and that TV 'entertainment news' shows don't. I'm not alone on this. There are millions of us who don't necessarily think of movies as mere diversion. They can be opportunities for communion or transportation -- a profound high.

"When a special movie comes along, a theatre can feel like a church. Maybe most people see movies in less reverent terms; maybe the true believers are a minority. But if the lore of movies was just about glamour, fun...Read More

"What we learned last week is that the man who always puts his 'country first' will take the country down with him if that's what it takes to get to the White House," says N.Y. Times columnist Frank Rich in today's edition.

"For all the focus on Friday night's deadlocked debate, it still can't obscure what preceded it: When John McCain gratuitously parachuted into Washington on Thursday, he didn't care if his grandstanding might precipitate an even deeper economic collapse. All he cared about was whether he might save his campaign. George Bush put more deliberation...Read More

It wouldn't have worked with undecided voters, but frustrated Barack Obama supporters like myself would have felt immensely satisfied if he'd shown a little steel last night and told John McCain to wipe that smirk off his face because... you know, there was nothing the least bit funny or amusing about what they were discussing.

I'm thinking, of course, of that delicious moment in Michael Mann's The Insider when Bruce McGill tells Wings Hauser to do just that in that Mississippi courtroom.

The best thing about Last Chance Harvey (Overture, 12.26), a mature romantic drama with Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson, is the title, which seems to say it all in three words. But read the synopsis on this Movie Jungle page and tell me what it tells you. I think it sounds a little forced, a little twee. Like someone's trying to sell something.

Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson in Last Chance Harvey

In any case, The Envelope's Pete Hammond reported last night that it's coming out on 12.26 rather than 1.23 because Hoffman "is said...Read More

There isn't a lot of Paul Newman in these clips from George Roy Hill's Slap Shot -- just two locker-room pep talks -- but he and the Hanson brothers (i.e., the Carlson brothers) were beautiful in this thing. In the second clip, the riled-up referee's reaction during the playing of the national anthem is perfect -- two turn-arounds and a confrontation. "I'm listening' to the fuckin' song!" That settles it -- I'm buying the DVD later today.

I'm too lazy to have bought or rented the BBC series Life on Mars, about a present-tense cop finding himself time-transported back to 1973. But it has a relatively good rep. Which is why an American version of this series will debut on ABC on 10.9 with Jason O'Mara as the time-traveller and Harvey Keitel as his older, grizzled partner.

If you research it, indications pile up that the ABC version may turn out to be on the trite or mediocre side.

One, jokes about the...Read More

Seriously -- this guy is Ironman. And a perfect Herzog hero. First-rate Jetman footage of his flights (a high-quality mini-digital camera strapped to his helmet) would be awesome. All right, the German newscaster is what made me think of Herzog initially, but this is an idea that gets better and better the more you think about it. A great doc waiting to happen.

Update: All right, all right, maybe John McCain said "coursh" (as if "of course") rather than "horseshit." But that's only because I've been told over and over that he said "coursh" -- it's the power of suggestion. Even if I still believe in my heart that he said "horseshit."

Earlier today: Thanks to HE reader George Prager for spotting the portion of last night's debate in which McCain said "horseshit" twice. I've listened to this MSNBC clip over ten times now and there doesn't seem to be any question about it. The first "horseshit" happens at...Read More

College Humor's Palin-Disney trailer, inspired by Matt Damon, is a good moderate chuckle and way above average for this sort of effort.

Awards Daily's Sasha Stone was the first to post a report of Paul Newman's death last night, but the source seemed a wee bit dicey and I decided to wait until this morning. But just to run it down I called Newman's biographer-in-progress Shawn Levy -- he was uncertain also. And very sleepy. (And so was I.)

Now the news is confirmed. Frank Galvin, Hud Bannon, Henry Gondorff, Cool Hand Luke, Rocky Graziano, Butch Cassidy, Reggie Dunlop, Lew Harper and Eddie Felson have left the room for good. We've...Read More

I'm looking to launch HE's own Oscar handicapper feature this year. I'm thinking of calling it the HE Badass Brigade. Maybe the HE Oscar Badasses would be better. Starting on 10.15 and moving forward from then on. I'm looking to get as many filmmakers to participate as I can. Ones who don't have a dog in the hunt, I mean. Plus screenwriters, studio guys, agents...along with the usual journo-critics.

Obama came off better than McCain tonight -- he's clearly brainier and more exacting and got in some very good points and zing lines, and he sure as hell didn't let McCain get away with any of his blah-blah routine -- but he wouldn't do the street-fight thing. He wouldn't punch or kick or do the slap-down. McCain was the snarly one. The grouch, the jabber, the bulldog prick who wouldn't stop smirking and making faces and going "heh, heh, heh."

Obama reportedly did better with independent voters, but I...Read More

Wait...I've seen this supposedly newish trailer for David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Paramount, 12.25). It looks better in high-def, of course. Glorious, in fact. The exquisite visual quality tells you it's a first-rate dreamscape experience. Eric Roth's screenplay is, take it from me, delicate, eloquent and quite moving. The question, of course, is will it all coagulate?

It's been one of those distracted days. Only six stories today...shameful. I have to get over to a restaurant/bar in Santa Monica called R + D Kitchen on Montana to see the debate at 6 pm, and then walk across the street to the Aero theatre for a 7:30 screening of The Baader Meinhof Complex, which got panned today by Variety.

It's no secret that the plot by German military officers to assassinate Adolf Hitler in the waning days of World War II failed, and that the conspirators -- including Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, the character portrayed by Tom Cruise in Valkyrie -- were shot. So it's no spoiler to say that I want to see Cruise eat lead at the end of Bryan Singer's long-awaited historical thriller.

I want to see him grimace, convulse and fall to the ground. No cutaways, no panning up to gray skies over Berlin...Read More

"Does Diane Keaton owe some loan sharks a considerable amount of cash?," asks critic Brian Orndorf in his review of Smother (opening 9.26). "Are there incriminating photos of her that she's trying to keep out of circulation? I'm having trouble understanding why Keaton would, over the course of a single year, take part in both Mama's Boy and now Smother.

"Perhaps she was poisoned by merciless Asian gangsters with strict instructions to make two career-denting comedies that methodically peel away her integrity before she was allowed the sweet kiss of a life-saving antidote. Heavens,...Read More

"The presence of Kristin Scott Thomas in Philippe Claudel's I've Loved You So Long is so powerfully distinctive," the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw notes, "that it's as if Claudel has not merely written the lead role for her, but extrapolated his film's entire narrative structure from Scott Thomas's personality.

Elsa Zylberstein, Kristin Scott-Thomas in I've Loved You So Long

"Her formidable bilingual presence, her beauty -- elegant and drawn in early middle age -- her air of hypersensitive awareness of all the tiny absurdities and indignities with which she is surrounded, coupled with a drolly lenient reticence: it...Read More

I've decided to double-post the Oscar Balloon -- it's on the main page (ten items down from the top) as well as on its own page. Somehow it got un-designed as a result of the server switchover so it has no tint or flair or anything -- it looks awful right now. (But it'll be fixed this weekend. I hope.)

I've tried to prune out the stragglers and the good-but-not-good-enoughers. Josh Brolin's lead performance in W. is the the latest surge in the Best Actor category. Unless reports come in to the contrary, experience has taught me that anything to...Read More

L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas has posted a frank, perceptive, and typically well written profile of Mickey Rourke, star of Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler (Fox Searchlight, 12.19), an almost-certain Best Actor nominee and by general consensus the Comeback Kid of 2008.

The timing of Foundas's article is a little unusual -- a few weeks after The Wrestler was hailed at the Toronto and Venice film festivals, and nearly three months before it'll open commercially. Obviously Foundas is foresaking the usual considerations to say to the industry, the press...Read More

Thanks to Politico's Jeffrey Ressner for passing this along...

"David Letterman is no Walter Cronkite. He's not even Ed Sullivan. But he is the face that millions of Americans see before turning in for the night. For years, John McCain has appeared on his show, even announcing his intention to run for president on the program. And to have the affable Letterman visibly boil and go on the offensive showed that, perhaps, McCain, whose campaign has stumbled since the beginning of this economic crisis, is in bigger trouble than one would think.

"Perhaps McCain won't say, 'If I've lost Letterman, I've lost middle America.' Does Letterman even say his audience is...Read More

I work pretty hard all day, extreme concentration and tension and furrowed brow, and all these guys do is sleep and do this all day.

Untitled from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo.

"If Barack Obama doesn't become the next President of the United States, I'm going to blame the Jews. I am. And I know you're saying, like, oh my god Sarah, I can't believe you're saying this! Jews are the most liberal, scrappy, Civil Rightsy people there are. Right, that's true...but you're forgetting a large group of Jews who are not that way. And they go by several aliases."

The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo

Variety's Anne Thompson, one of those who declared last May that Steven Soderbergh's Che was a problem movie because it lacked story tension and movie moments, has written about how the forthcoming New York Film Festival showings may "provide a fresh opportunity for an iconic Argentine revolutionary to find new life on American shores." The two-part epic, which I saw and loved for the second time in Toronto, is now twelve minutes shorter than the version that played in Cannes.

I love hearing the dirt or reading about it in the checkout line, but I've always thought it slimey and wrong to dredge up the private lives of political candidates. The press corps was right not to pester JFK for his randiness. Jimmy Carter shouldn't have taken heat for admitting to "lust in his heart." Beating up on Bill Clinton for Monica Lewinsky was absurd -- his absolute refusal to talk plainly or honestly to Ken Starr's inquisitors was one of the moral high points of his administration.

Granted, John Edwards was an absolute fool and a scumbag to have run...Read More

In a laundry-list story about upcoming Disney projects, Variety's Marc Graser has reported that Johnny Depp has agreed to reprise his role as Captain Jack Sparrow in a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean pic and also play Tonto in a bigscreen adaptation of The Lone Ranger, both of which will be produced by Jerry Bruckheimer.

Johnny Depp; Jay Silverheels as Tonto in the '50s TV series The Lone Ranger

Whoa, whoa. I think we need to repeat this. Johnny Depp is going to play Tonto in a big-budget Lone Ranger movie. Meaning that...Read More

The day before yesterday L.A. Times guy Josh Friedman reported that Fireproof, a Christian drama with Kirk Cameron as a firefighter struggling to save his marriage, "has been No. 1 in advance sales on movie ticketing site Fandango.com with 31% of this week's business, albeit in a slow marketplace -- even outpacing sales for the big-budget popcorn thriller Eagle Eye, starring heartthrob Shia LaBeouf."

The Fandango numbers, he reported, are due to "grass-roots support and bulk purchases from churchgoers.

"Nobody expects Fireproof, which Samuel Goldwyn Films will open Friday...Read More

The opening four and a half minutes of Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light, which I didn't see in Cannes or Toronto because I've learned to say "later" with this guy. I seem to lack the depth and the patience to get through a Reygadas film without leaning forward in my seat and covering my face with my fingers. But watch this clip and tell me it's not beautiful, primal and faintly haunting. In the vein of the opening moments of Mike Nichols' Catch 22, only much slower.

HE reader Christian Hamaker...Read More

Patience is a virtue, of course, but it rarely comes into play when an old dog is learning a new trick. Courtesy of the 23/6 guys, who posted this yesterday.

HE reader Salvador Perez wrote this morning to complain about a nearly three-week-old remark in my Toronto Film Festival review of Kevin Smith's Zack and Miri Make a Porno. I felt it was a mistake for Elizabeth Banks to be apparently wearing jeans (or a jean skirt) right after having on-camera sex with Seth Rogen. Who wears anything while shooting a sex scene in a low-rent amateur porn film, which is what the shot is? Perez said what I saw "wasn't a mistake [because] Miri was wearing a denim miniskirt that was hiked up during sex."

"Yeah, Kevin Smith pointed that...Read More

Cheers and salutations to Matthew Belinkie, who posted this video on overthinkingit.com earlier today. One shot doesn't work but otherwise it's nearly perfect. And the speed in which it was composed! Bush only spoke last night.

First Showing.net's Alex Billington posted a first-anywhere trailer for Steve McQueen's Hunger (IFC, sometime in '09) earlier today. You can tell in an instant that McQueen is a first-rate visual composer. The art of Hunger is not open to question. What is open to question (to nausea-prone middle-class guys like myself who have problems with the idea of being stuck in small prison cells with fecal matter smeared on the walls) is whether or not you want to sit and meditate and tough it out with some IRA guys in a British-run prison for the better part of two hours. Otherwise Hunger...Read More

I know this is about as lowbrow as it gets and I'm sorry for that, but this is mildly funny, largely due to the Borat-styled voicing.

I read with interest Tom O'Neil's salute to Bill Condon and Laurence Mark, the new Oscar show producers whom I know personally and like enormously. Excellent fellows, touch of class, taste buds, cool tuxedos, etc.

Do I agree with O'Neil's suggestion that Will Smith would be a great choice to host the Oscars? Uhhm...sorry but no. No offense, but to me Smith is Mr. Easy, Mr. Bucks-Up Hah-Hah. He doesn't exude anything except exuberance, perfect teeth and postivism. He lacks discrimination and is accomodating to a fault -- he'll throw his head back and laugh at anything, radiate positive energy about...Read More

"Let me take you back to 1997, and a conversation I had with Paul Schrader, author of Taxi Driver, director of Mishima and American Gigolo. He told me that after Pulp Fiction, we were leaving an existential age and entering an age of irony.

"'The existential dilemma,' he said, 'is 'should I live?' And the ironic answer is 'does it matter?' Everything in the ironic world has quotation marks around it. You don't actually kill somebody; you 'kill' them. It doesn't really matter if you put the baby in front of the runaway car because it's only a 'baby' and it's only a...Read More

An offical announcement came down late today that Cloverfield helmer Matt Reeves will re-write and direct the American adaptation of Let the Right One In, the Swedish-made tweener vampire film that I wrote about earlier today. The producers are Overture Films and the London-based Hammer Films.

The deranged smear jobs that have characterized the McCain campaign's anti-Obama ads -- misleading or shamelessly false, aimed at the dopes -- bear the stamp of Steve Schmidt, a protege of former George Bush operative Karl Rove. And Rove was a protege of the late and infamous Lee Atwater, the godfather of the right-wing culture-war smear and arguably one of the most demonic mentalities to exert a profound influence upon the American political process.

And yet Stefan Forbes' Boogie Man, a portrait of Atwater's life and career which I saw last summer at the...Read More

Ever since catching glimpses of Ken Loach's Poor Cow in flashback sequences in Steven Soderbergh's The Limey, which came out nine years ago, I've been hoping to see this 1968 Loach film on DVD in this country. But it never happened. There's a new British DVD coming out next month, which of course can be ordered on Amazon UK and seen on any all-region player. But why not an NTSC version? Or a TCM airing? I've never seen it.

John McCain has reportedly made the decision not to attend Friday night's presidential debate in Oxford, Mississippi unless a Congressional Wall Street bailout deal has been reached by sometime earlier in the day. What a transparent sidestepping fool. What a phoney-baloney drama queen.

McCain has been dropping in the polls and knows he'll be at a rhetorical disadvantage with Obama so he's playing the role of the dedicated, pure-of-heart public servant in order to give himself a temporary out. Plus he wants to postpone the debate until Thursday, 10.2, which would of course bump the Biden-Palin debate. More prep time for Sarah!

I spoke this morning to dp Gordon Willis, a.k.a. the legendary "Prince of Darkness" whose films include the Godfather trio, Alan Pakula's All The President's Men and The Parallax View and Woody Allen's Manhattan, Annie Hall and Interiors. We spoke for 20 or 25 minutes, but I could have easily kept this master of light and shadows occupied for three or four hours.

The phoner happened in part because of my somewhat surprised, very positive response to the restored Coppola/Harris Godfather DVD. Even on a crummy DVD, which delivers about 15% of the visual data...Read More