Baz Luhrman's Australia (20th Century Fox) will open down under on 11.13.08, and in this country on 11.26.08. No one I know has seen it yet, but two Australian cinemas are pre-selling tickets. One reports a duration of 170 minutes; the other reports 177 minutes. It hasn't been officially rated or timed so both could be incorrect, but someone clearly knows something.

A "Conversations With History" talk with Studs Terkel, the Chicago-based author, columnist historian, actor, and broadcaster who was born in 1912, died earlier today. He told it straight and blunt and with great flavor, had done and seen incredible things, and came to know everything and meet almost everyone. A great man, a great life. What it must have been to have been 18 years old at the start of the depression, and what a great book he wrote from it -- Hard Times, published in 1970.

The traffic around West Hollywood is murder due to Santa Monica Blvd. having been shut down for tonight's Halloween festivities. I was in car hell for over two hours because of this. I recognize that the West Hollywood Highway Patrolmen didn't stop traffic just to mess with me alone, but it was nonetheless awful. I guess I'll wander around tonight and take pictures.

West Hollywood resident Danny Lindsey in front of Holloway Cleaners on Santa Monica Blvd. -- Friday, 10.31.08, 2:25 pm

I love checking in on Vulture's "Oscar Futures" chart every Friday, despite always having disagreements with one or two calls. That Gran Torino trailer, for example, hasn't translated into a down-arrow cycle in my realm or that of anyone else I know. I disagree also with their Anne Hathaway judgment, although I chuckled at the sly way they try to stick it to her: "This category is getting pretty competitive," they write offhandedly. "Was [Hathaway] really as good as everybody thought two weeks ago?"

"Love has a nasty habit of disappearing overnight." -- Paul McCartney, "I'm Looking Through You," Rubber Soul.

Achtung -- Spoiler Warning!: New York critic David Edelstein today described the documentary Dear Zachary as "another dead-child saga, among the most enraging I've ever seen, and while it's fine and heartfelt and I commend it to those of you with strong constitutions, it is the film that has finally broken me. Folks, I can't take this anymore. I know children suffer and die in this cruel world; I know we can never be too vigilant on their behalf. But the number of movies [with this theme] is simply disproportionate.

"Come awards season, dead children seem to factor in every...Read More

I won't be saying anything about Doubt until the end of next week or thereabouts, but the big acting revelation for me and several others I spoke to at last night's AFI Fest screening is the supporting performance by Viola Davis, who plays the mother of one of the students in an urban Catholic school. She absolutely kills in one very intense scene with costar Meryl Streep, and I can't even find an online photo of her performing in this scene. Davis goes to the front of the line in the Oscar Balloon right now, dammit.

Fandango's Harry Medved has sent out a release about vigorous advance ticket sales for Twilight (Summit, 11.21). According to a "current Fandango survey of over 5000 moviegoers interested in buying Twilight tickets," (a) 95% of the respondents are female, and roughly 58% of these are under-25; (b) 92% of respondents say they'll see Twilight on opening weekend (duhhh), and (c) 85% say they plan to see the film more than once. Can you imagine sitting next to a group of under-25 women who've just seen Twilight in a bar after they've all had two glasses of wine? The giggling, the shrieking...good...

This 10.27 Celeb Bitch post -- four days ago! -- appears to confirm that Seth Rogen has indeed slimmed down big-time for filming on Stephen Chow's The Green Hornet, which Rogen and Evan Goldberg are co-writing. He'll revert back to his au natural form after shooting ends, of course. I knew guys who looked like Rogen when I was in my 20s, and now they look like sumo wrestlers with a drinking problem.

My latest theory is that movies that use numbers in their titles in a fun/escapist/frolicsome vein (like Ocean's 11, Three Men and a Baby, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers) tend to succeed in a marketing sense but those that adopt an emotionally sincere, verging-on-solemn approach (like Four Feathers, The Number 23, Seven Pounds) send out uh-oh signals that make people a little bit wary. There are exceptions, of course. Sergeants Three, a lighthearted Rat Pack remake of Gunga Din, isn't remembered fondly by anyone. And I'm not aware of Lina Wertmuller's Seven Beauties having suffered for its title.

...

The new Slumdog Millionaire trailer and Fox Searchlight site, up and out.

A slight tightening of the Presidential election numbers has kicked in due to the laziest, dumbest and most sheepish portion of the electorate going "hmm, gee, I don't know." Otherwise voters are dug in, polls are static (except for two -- Fox News and Mason-Dixon -- that fivethirtyeight's Nate Silver says are off on their own beam), the new N.Y. Times/CBS News poll says that 59 percent of voters believe that Sarah Palin is not prepared for the job (up nine percentage points since the beginning of October), and I'm still picking up worried/on edge/unsettled vibes from this and that...Read More

Originally posted on 9.7.08 during the Toronto Film Festival: As far as it goes, Kevin Smith's Zack and Miri Make A Porno is smooth and winning, largely due to Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks' engaging, alive-in-the-moment performances as longtime pals and roommates who discover, to their surprise, that they're in love with each other while making a low-grade, hand-to-mouth porn film.

Call this one definitely better (and certainly more smoothly shot and cut) than Clerks II, heads and shoulders above Jersey Girl, a bit funnier than Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, livelier and more entertaining...Read More

"The question now," as N.Y. Times media columnist David Carr wrote today, "is how many people will be left to cover it." Print people, he means. Yes, I too read this story online. I never read the print version of the Times, although, as I've said repeatedly over the last four or five years, I would be very saddened to live in a world in which you couldn't buy the print edition. As I do six or seven times a year when I'm in a sentimental, old-fashioned mood.

Clint Eastwood's Changeling, going wide this weekend, is running 74, 37 and 19 -- very heavily skewed towards older women, at least $20 million. The Haunting of Molly Hartley is at 43, 28 and 5. Rock n Rolla, going wide ,also has a 34, 22 and 1...nothing. Kevin Smith's Zack and Miri Make a Porno is running at 66, 33 and 13. Younger males, of course. Looking to be one of the better Weinstein Co. openings in a long while.

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa opens on 11.7, and is now at 90, 38 and 9. Over-25 women with kids. Pretty good business. Role...Read More

Apparently this is the final, decided-upon poster for Valkyrie (MGM/UA, 12.26) for the U.S. market. It's a fairly riveting image -- strong, exciting, tells you it's a solid thriller -- but let's be frank and acknowledge that one reason it's working is that it's pushing familiar buttons. My first thought was "kinda Reservoir Dogs-y." Then Ocean's 11 came to mind. Not that there's anything wrong or unwise about that. These are two very popular films.

As I understand it, David Fincher was asked by Empire to write down his favorite films of all time, and to do so without thinking about it too much -- just scribble 'em down! So as an exercise, I grabbed a notebook and did the same thing. I wish I'd been a little more foreign, a little more '90s indie, a little more '30s, '40s and '50s...but this is what happened. Live with it. I could have written down another 150 without blinking. Here are the two lists:

About a month ago Josiane Balasko's Cliente, about a 51 year-old businesswoman (Nathalie Baye) paying for the no-muss, no-fuss sexual services of a younger man, opened in France. This struck me right away as a good idea for an American remake. Especially with a classy, high-pedigree actress of a certain age -- Kristin Scott Thomas or Meryl Streep, let's say -- in the lead role.

Over and over I've walked the aisles of Gelson's and Ralph's in the evening and seen women in business suits pushing their carts, alone and guarded and yet, you can tell,...Read More

No, not Elvis as a semi-vampire, which seems (am I wrong?) to be the idea in Don Coscarelli's forthcoming Bubba Nosferatu.

I'm sorry but my Space Elvis idea (i.e., a script I wrote ages ago) is better: Elvis was kidnapped by aliens in August 1977 just before he died, and flown back to the aliens' home planet. He was restored, cleaned up, de-drugged, probed, kept in a large home (facsimile of Graceland) for 32 years, and then returned to earth in 2009 as the same 42 year-old he was before only much thinner and full of vim and vigor and...Read More

A day after speaking with Errol Morris about Standard Operating Procedure on or about 4.11.08, I wrote a piece titled "Morris Should Sell Obama." The idea was to re-boot Morris's brilliant spots for John Kerry in '04, which focused on "real people" (mostly Republicans) who'd voted for Bush in 2000, but were going for Kerry that year.

Read More

Three days ago a funny New Yorker piece by David Sedaris about undecided voters appeared. "For as long as I can remember, just as we move into the final weeks of the Presidential campaign the focus shifts to the undecided voters," it begins. "Who are they?" the news anchors ask. 'And how might they determine the outcome of this election?'

"Then you'll see this man or woman -- someone, I always think, who looks very happy to be on TV. 'Well, Charlie,' they say, 'I've gone back and forth on the issues and whatnot, but I...Read More

I'm attending the big Doubt screening at tonight's AFI Fest kickoff, but because it's being digitally projected I was asked -- told -- not to review it until I see it on a clean 35mm print in Manhattan sometime late next week. That's the aesthetic exactitude of the film's producer, Scott Rudin, talking.

In line with this, Variety's Anne Thompson has reported that Rudin "was so appalled at the way the digital projection looked on the curved giant Cinerama Dome screen that he made sure the film will show on three flat screens at...Read More

An "editor friend" recently sent Variety's Anne Thompson a note about from the first long-lead screening of Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road: "The word from me is wow!....very powerful," the guys starts off.

"[It's a] two-hander for Leo and Kate, all grown up now as a married couple, unhappy but still in love. They go at it fiercely and you can sense the real-life bond that lets them really go for it, all defenses down.

"It's powerful and also beautifully written and filmed. [American Beauty director] Sam Mendes doing suburban angst again, but this time in the 1950s. I daresay it...Read More

The Weekly World News is reporting that the Alien has switched his endorsement from Barack Obama to John McCain, which they call "a shocking reversal with major implications for the U.S. presidential election." Both political camps "are buzzing about the implications," the newspaper reports, "as the Alien has correctly predicted the winning president in every election for the past 28 years."

Federico Fellini's La Strada delivers one of the saddest and most fully satisfying endings in cinema history (providing you see the entire film before it), and surely one of the most penetrating moments ever from Anthony Quinn. He's hearing words as clearly as Charlton Heston did when he knelt before the burning bush in The Ten Commandments. Did Lars Von Trier "steal" from this in a sense when he decided on the heavenly bells visual at the end of Breaking The Waves?

Barack Obama's half-hour infomercial Wednesday night didn't teach us a lot we didn't already know, " Slate's Christopher Beam wrote tonight, "except that an Obama administration would likely feature immaculate stagecraft.

"The spot opened with a shot of -- I'm not making this up -- amber waves of grain. Obama reiterated his plan to cut taxes for families making less than $250,000 in a softly lit room in front of an oak desk. He explained his Social Security plan to moist-eyed retirees in what could have been...Read More

And finally, on a note of emotional maturity, identify the actor and the film. I'm sorry, but this line has never failed to make me chuckle or at least smile, and we're talking at least 15 or 20 viewings over many, many years.

In Benjamin Schwarz's Atlantic website review of David Thomson's Have You Seen...? (Knopf, 10.14), the book's basic prejudice is explained. That is, the single-page entries are Thomson's favorites. "But he also writes about many pictures he can't stand," says Schwarz, "including the 1959 Ben-Hur ("Has anyone made a voluntary decision to see [it] in recent years?"), Kramer vs. Kramer (a work of "inane studied gentility"), and Rain Man ("the smug movie of a culture charging down a dead-end street").

"All of these films won the Oscar for Best Picture, so the reader might assume that Thomson has gathered both movies...Read More

Politico's Jeffrey Ressner reported a little while ago that Joe the Plumber -- i.e., Samuel Wurzelbacher -- is "being pursued for a major record deal and could come out with a country album as early as Inauguration Day." Don't stop there! What about using Joe to play Mr. Clean in TV ads? (Seriously.) How about a reality show about Joe trying to make his way? Trying to pay back taxes, raise the dough to buy the business, etc.

Wurzelbacher has "just signed with a Nashville public relations and management firm to handle interview requests and media...Read More

The climax of the final interview between David Frost and Richard Nixon in 1977 came when Nixon said the following about his Watergate legacy: "I let down my friends, I let down the country, I let down our system of government and the dreams of all those young people that ought to get into government. I let the American people down. And I'll have to carry that burden the rest of my life."

Richard M. Nixon; George W. Bush

It hit me as I was watching the Nixonified Frank Langella say these words in Frost/Nixon...Read More

George Hickenloooper (Factory Girl) and R.J. Cutler (The War Room) have put together an upcoming documentary series about Denver mayor John Hickenlooper (George's cousin) called Hick Town. Below is a 156-second teaser that includes a private moment between Mayor Hickenlooper, Senator Barack Obama and co-director George. Get out the vote, watch the show, cheer on the mild-mannered mayor, etc.

Hickenlooper-the-director describes Hick Town as "a high-end reality series about a big city Mayor keeping his office and town together. Think a real life version of Spin City or The Office. The...Read More

"I've had just about enough of the patronizing bullshit of Kris Tapley," writes And The Winner columnist Scott Feinberg. The fight began with Feinberg's responding to my quickie Milk reaction post last night, which led to Tapley bitch-slapping Feinberg over something he wrote and then it was off the races. I'm just passing this along, okay? I'm not in this.

"Incidentally, who the hell is [Tapley]?," writes Feinberg. "We're about the same age, we both started covering the Oscars in the same place, we've been doing this for roughly the same length of time, and -- acknowledging something that he...Read More

I've been otherwise engaged (which is sometimes a euphemism for "lazy") but let's get down to this, link-wise: (a) Stephen Zeitchik's 10.28 Hollywood Reporter piece about the alleged "Milk marketing conundrum" (which broke late yesterday evening as I was on my way out of the Milk screening and on my way to the Frost/Nixon one); (b) the angry response from Focus Features honcho James Schamus; and (c) a comment from Nathan Lee that echoes back into what Devin Faraci has raised today.

One of the things that's striking a lot of people about Milk is how regrettably timely it is right now, with Proposition 8 (i.e., eliminating gay marriage) on the ballot in California. Which makes you wonder if the movie should have been released before Election Day as a way to organize people to vote this measure down. In the view of CHUD's Devin Faraci, in the 30 years since Harvey Milk died we really haven't come very far in terms of gay rights.

In the 11.10 issue of People, Oliver Jones asks I've Loved You So Long star and likely Oscar nominee Kristin Scott Thomas about her favorite review so far. "Someone compared my performance to Steve McQueen," she answers. "That's the ultimate compliment to me -- to be compared to a man!"

That "someone" would be me. The McQueen comparison is on the mp3 in this KST interview piece ("Doesn't Miss a Trick") that I ran on 10.14. What I actually said is that her ILYSL acting reminds me of McQueen's in The Sand Pebbles -- masterfully low-key, and his best...Read More

The cutting, the humor, the personalities, the conversations, the Harrison Ford turnaround -- this really works and builds and more than sustains itself, and for a nearly five-minute running time. Which is no small thing. Either Steven Spielberg directed or is "playing" the director. If it's the former, did he supervise the cutting also? If so, my hat is off.

Famed NASCAR driver and racing-team owner Robert Glen Johnson, a.k.a. "Junior Johnson" -- the guy Tom Wolfe wrote about in his famous 1965 article "The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!" and which led to Lamont Johnson's The Last American Hero ('73) with Jeff Bridges in the title role -- has come out for Barack Obama.

Robert Glen Johnson; jacket art for Last American Hero DVD.

"Our country is in a rough spot, and we're going to need some serious change. There's only one candidate ready to deliver it...Read More

A friend who had heard and passed along some less-than-ecstatic reactions to Milk a while back wrote me last night to ask what I really meant when I wrote that "those who've been spreading the iffy stuff are, I have to conclude, by and large mean-spirited and overly demanding."

What I was trying to convey, I answered, is that anyone who would come out of this film and call it hagiography and a bronzed martyr construction and declare that there's no lump-in-the-throat at the end wouldn't necessarily be "wrong" but they would fit my definition...Read More

"For the first time in my memory, we have a major Oscar movie that actually is a gay-agenda movie," MCN's David Poland briefly wrote last night. "But on the making, it is so much more. It is a brilliant, powerfully humane piece of work that reaches well beyond the issue of gay rights or any idea that this is a gay-only film.

"Sean Penn gives an Oscar lock performance of power and subtlety that ranks with the best of his career. Great work by James Franco and Emile Hirsch. Josh Brolin may not have enough screen time or empathy for awards, but...Read More

I don't feel like writing anything now, but I'm now officially thumbs-up on Milk and Frost/Nixon. On a 1 to 10 scale, I'm giving them both an 8.5 -- and that ain't hay. Others are going to bestow 9 or 9.5 ratings, and that's fine also.

Daylight tells you this was taken prior to this evening's Milk premiere at the Castro. Photo by Randy Matthews.

I've been hearing iffy things about Milk for the last week or so, but I have to conclude that those who've been spreading the iffy stuff are by and large mean-spirited...Read More

"It's really important to tell people to go out and see W. so they can talk about it and have an opinion about it and this freedom of speech, of course, that allows us to go and talk about a film about a current sitting president." -- Ben Lyons speaking on Sneak Previews, according to Erik Childress's efilmcritc.com. The quote results in Childress calling Lyons "the Sarah Palin of film criticism."

A Daily Beast article by Paul Alexander claims that while Barack Obama is sending out signals that things are going well and that success looms, the behind the scenes mentality is fraught with concern about voter suppression as well as the Bradley Effect.

"The Obama leadership believes there is a systematic campaign," a source tells Alexander, "by the White House and the Justice Department to suppress voter turnout across the country." Hence, Obama-Biden campaign chiefs are "amassing lawyers and gearing up to counter dirty tactics on election day.

Team Obama has "one of the largest legal teams ever assembled by a presidential...Read More

Richard Dreyfuss told the ladies on The View that he played Dick Cheney in W. for "money." Well, partly. The four things actors kick around before doing a film are (a) how many of the scenes are mainly about my character?, (b) how many lines and possible close-ups do I have?, (c) how much will I get paid? and (d) how good is the overall script and/or the director?

The question...Read More

If I had a Blu-ray player and a 50" LCD or plasma flat-screen, I would be very, very cranked about the 1.27.09 Blu-ray release of the 162-minute director's cut of David Fincher's Zodiac. I've never been so floored as I was by seeing a tip-top digital projection of this film at the big Paramount theatre on the lot. It's basically a 1970s Gordon Willis film made for 21st Century gear-heads.

A group of New York press saw Milk last night," a guy I know writes. "You could hear people tearing up in the end so I suppose Oscar season has officially begun. [It has] some great Gus Van Sant creative camerawork from the pre-Good Will Hunting days. An excellent cast. Josh Brolin and James Franco are quite good, the latter especially since he doesn't have a lot to say or do but leaves his mark regardless. And yet no one really outshines Sean Penn's performance as Harvey Milk."

Film Journal editor Kevin Lally has posted a report about last night's appearance by Liv Ullmann at Manhattan's Paley Center for Media. The legendary Norweigan actress, now 69, was there to bring attention to a rare screening of Richard Kaplan's 1977 documentary A Look at Liv. The doc (which I've never seen) includes "highlights from her career, interviews with Ullmann's longtime director, friend and ally Ingmar Bergman and cinematographer Sven Nykvist, scenes of Ullman at premieres, book signings and relaxing with her young daughter, and candid conversations," Lally describes.

"Kaplan,...Read More

I love snow scenes, as a general rule. Anything showing snow-covered grounds, snow storms, blizzards, gently falling snow...any variation as long as it doesn't involve howling winds. Especially period snow, like Coppola uses in The Godfather, Part II. Pine trees covered with the stuff. Galoshes, show shovels, chains on tires, ear muffs, scarves, knitted snow hats with little white reindeers. Eisenhower-era Fords, Studebakers, Chevys, Cadillacs, Edsels and Ramblers parked on the roads and just blanketed with it.

The Envelope's Tom O'Neil also reported this morning that Doubt costars Meryl Streep and Phillip Seymour Hoffman won't be attending the film's first public showing at the AFI Fest's opener on Thursday night here in L.A. Director-writer John Patrick Shanley and costar Amy Adams will, however.

Today will end early due to the first media-elite screening of Gus Van Sant's Milk (concurrent with tonight's benefit premiere in San Francisco at the Castro) at 3:30 this afternoon in Beverly Hills, followed by a 7 pm showing of Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon in West L.A. It's cool to write about the latter but the Focus guys aren't looking for Milk reactions just yet. There's plenty of time.

The basic idea behind the well-attended, star-studded Hollywood Film Festival Awards, which have been an annual event now for 12 years and which took place last night at the Beverly Hilton, is to put names out there -- i.e., to get people thinking about this or that contender as a major contender or even a possible front-runner when the real awards action starts happening later this year -- the critics, Golden Globes, Academy noms, etc.

Angelina Jolie, Clint Eastwood at last night's 12th Annual Hollywood Film Festival Awards ceremony at the Beverly Hilton -- Monday, 10.27.08, 9:10...

The news seeped through yesterday that L.A. Times Envelope editor and reporter Sheigh Crabtree has taken a buyout deal and is off to other pastures. A friend told me last night she hasn't been around that much over the past couple of weeks. If you're reading this, Sheigh, I'm sorry for the trauma and hope you land something else soon. But what is there? What in the way of nourishment or mild comfort can be had these days for a first-rate pro with a print history? Damn little, it would seem. But let's think positively.

...

I'm sorry to read about L.A. Times film critic Carina Chocano getting the hook over at the L.A. Times. Tough deal, but it's going this way for so many good critics, reporters and editors these days. I'm not sorry for my good fortune in owning a respected site that can only grow and strengthen, putting me for once on the right side of the equation with a truly secure foothold, but I've been through layoff traumas and know what it feels like. My heart goes out to all print people suffering through the Big Implosion.

When...Read More

"I thank God for Judd Apatow," Zack and Miri director Kevin Smith has told N.Y. Times reporter David Itzkoff, "because he shattered what I assumed was a $30 million ceiling." The story is basically about how the Apatow imprint is all over under-30 humor these days, and how the Apatow brand "has reinvigorated Hollywood's appetite for R-rated humor," and how Smith may not be getting full credit for working in this vein before Apatow started mining it. Caution: Itzkoff's story is dated 10.24. Three days ago!

The sudden departure of DreamWorks partner (or former DreamWorks partner) David Geffen has been written about by N.Y. Times reporter Michael Cieply. Which again raises the question, who cares about this stuff except industry reporters and their editors? My energy levels plummet each and every time I read about this or that corporate hotshot making a move. I'm not saying these guys aren't newsworthy. I'm saying that the reading about big dicks buying and selling Monopoly hotels offers, for me, zilch in the way of intrigue. Because it's the same story every time.

Note that Ed Meza's 10.27 Variety story about the big 70mm retrospective that'll be shown at next year's Berlin Int'l Film Festival doesn't actually say that each and every film will be shown in 70mm -- it says only that the program will show films that were shot in 70mm. I'm not assuming David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia won't be shown in 70mm (as 70mm prints of that 1962 classic do exist), but will William Wyler's Ben-Hur and Joseph L. Mankiewicz 's Cleopatra be shown in this format?

I'm not aware that 70mm prints of...Read More

A just-posted CNN.com story by Abbie Boudreau and Scott Bronstein reports that "more than 50,000 registered Georgia voters who have been 'flagged' because of a computer mismatch in their personal identification information. At least 4,500 of those people are having their citizenship questioned and the burden is on them to prove eligibility to vote.

"Experts say lists of people with mismatches are often systematically cut, or 'purged,' from voter rolls. It's a scenario that's being repeated all across the country, raising fears of potential vote suppression in crucial swing states.

"'What most people don't know is...Read More

AICN has exclusively posted the trailer for Susan Montford's While She Was Out (12.12), an effective, pared-down thriller about Kim Basinger vs. a crew of low-rent, white-trash predators led by Lukas Haas. (Yes, the cute little Amish kid with the big black hat in Witness has grown into a grungy guy with the demeanor of a sociopath animal.) Is Montford the new Kathryn Bigelow?

Here's a riff on the film by AICN's Moriarty, and a take by Latino Review's George "El Guapo" Roush

"And finally, Barack Obama has to give comedians something to work with. Seriously, here's a guy who's not fat, not cheating on his wife, not stupid, not angry and not a phony. Who needs an asshole like that around for the next four years?" -- from Bill Maher's latest "New Rules," aired last Friday night.

Julian King, the missing 7 year-old in the Jennifer Hudson family murder case, has been found dead inside an SUV parked on a street. It's an ongoing tragedy that won't stop hammering this poor Chicago-based family. Devastating.

I posted my first story/item about Barack Obama during the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, or roughly 21 months ago. Today, in any event, marks the beginning of the final week of '08 Presidential campaign. Eight and a half days from now, all present-tense anxieties will be stilled and we'll all start to feel a huge depressing shift in the current.

It's probably unrealistic to hope for 60 Democratic U.S. Senators once the dust has settled, but it'll be beautiful if it happens. An FDR-like New Deal overhaul of priorities would be possible. The next step would be to go out and...Read More

I sat down early Sunday evening inside a spacious, softly lit Culver City cafe and spoke with Frozen River star Melissa Leo. She's blonde-ish these days (part of a look she's using for the currently filming Welcome to the Rileys, in which she plays the estranged wife of James Gandolfini) and very thin and...well, looking good, which is to say sexier, healthier-seeming and more spiritually centered than the frazzled trailer-dweller she plays in that three-month-old Sony Classics release.

Melissa Leo outside of Akasha in Culver City -- Sunday, 10.26.08, 6:35 pm

After...Read More

Update: It's 1:32 pm, and I've changed my mind about yanking Josh Brolin. I was weak. Brolin is back in. Original 1:21 pm post: Earlier this week I withdrew Josh Brolin's W. performance from the Oscar Balloon, and I feel badly about it. Every press person I've spoken to thinks his performance is spot-on and emotionally genuine -- they all get the sadness and the lost feeling at the end. But nobody would stand with me and call it Oscar worthy. Nobody did any cartwheels in the lobby about it, as I did.

Probably, I guess, because the film was not a...Read More

High School Musical 3, which I wouldn't see with a snub-nosed .38 jammed into my ribs, turned out to be a Friday-night sensation (it reportedly dropped 10% on Saturday) which means it will only have $42 million as of Sunday evening instead of Steve Mason's projected $55 million.

Mason initially predicted a weekend gross between $35 and $38 million on 10.22, and then reported a projected 3-day haul in the region of $55 million.

"For all its sophistication, Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche is oddly fond of poop jokes and, indeed, of poop shots. Is there really no better way to dramatize the frail health of your character" -- Phillip Seymour Hoffman's Caden Cotard -- "than by showing the discolored stream of his urine? The problem is not one of bad taste, to which the director is welcome, but the obviousness -- dare I say, the dullness -- with which he nags away at the sight of debilitation, in body and spirit alike.

Illustrationm by Robert Risko

"There has long been a strain of...Read More

Warner Home Video's double-disc release of a remastered Quo Vadis has two selling points, which are (a) Peter Ustinov's portrayal of Nero and (b) Miklos Rosza's score. Otherwise it feels like a wash. I've never had the slightest interest in seeing it. Partly because I've never read a truly rousing review, and partly due to Robert Taylor, an actor I've never liked and have always tried to avoid, being the lead.

Is there any big-time star of the old studio system of the '30s, '40s and '50s who matters less to anything or anyone right now...Read More

Somewhere within Prague's Stare Mesto, taken last week and sent along by Jett, who just returned to London after a visit to the Czech Republic capital as well as Budapest (seven hours from Prague by bus).

Five or six days ago in Prague

"There are racists in western Pennsylvania, as there are in most pockets of our country," N.Y. Times columnist Frank Rich writes in today's edition. "But despite the months-long drumbeat of punditry to the contrary, there are not and have never been enough racists in 2008 to flip this election. In the latest New York Times/CBS News and Pew national polls, Obama is now pulling even with McCain among white men, a feat accomplished by no Democratic presidential candidate in three decades, Bill Clinton included.

"Nor is America's remaining racism all that it once was, or that the McCain camp has been...Read More

A 70mm presentation of West Side Story played last night at Santa Monica's Aero. It's a stodgy, dated, mediocre film in so many ways. But the Leonard Bernstein score (and the Stephen Sondheim lyrics) will always be beautiful, so I delayed a dinner date so I could drive over and buy a ticket in order to watch the first 20 or so minutes, which is the only part I can stand.

The rest of it is mixed to painful. The fresh red paint on the tenement walls is ludicrous. The...Read More

I've barely seen any Blu-rays of classic black-and-white films, but enough to know that the format is heaven for anyone with a serious monochrome jones. So my interest in the forthcoming Scott Derrickson-Keanu Reeves remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still (20th Century Fox, 12.12) is, I have to admit, at the very least matched by interest in the remastered Blu-ray of the1951 black-and-white original with Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Billy Gray, Sam Jaffe and Hugh Marlowe, which is out on 12.2.

An MSNBC reporter in Scranton said this morning he'd recently spoken to a middle-aged woman who's still undecided about Obama-McCain, still wants to know more, etc. Meaning, of course, that she's (a) profoundly uncurious or otherwise lazy, (b) intellectually challenged, or (c) would rather not say what she's actually thinking to a TV reporter. (Or a combination of all three.) Most voters of her ilk are probably going to break for McCain, which might mean a final national lead for Obama in the range of six or seven points rather than nine or ten when all is said and done.

Then the reporter...Read More

"Of the three Blu-ray Connery Bond's that I've covered to date, Dr. No (10.21) looks the best yet -- which may sound surprising as it is the oldest film. Colors are vibrant and detail shows a good deal of gratifying sharpness. Black levels are pitch. The image overall is quite beautiful -- far in advance of anything put to SD-DVD. It resides on a dual-layered Blu-ray and the feature takes up 28.5 gigs. It felt like I was watching this initial Bond entry for the very first time -- what an addictive image!

Sean Connery...

Last night the Orlando Sentinel's Hal Boedeker reported that the Obama campaign has called WFTV news anchor Barbara West's 10.23 interview with Sen. Joe Biden "unprofessional and combative." Look at West's conservative blonde coif, her surgically sculpted, sanded-down features and particularly her cold timberwolf eyes as she asks her pathetic Steve Schmidt-playbook questions.

In a chat last night with Boedker, West said "I have a great deal of respect for [Biden]. I have a great deal of respect for Sen. Obama. We are given four minutes of...Read More

"There is one thing I can do as well as ever -- I can write," Roger Ebert said yesterday. "When I am writing my problems become invisible and I am the same person I always was. All is well. I am as I should be.

"After my first stretch in the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, I began to write again, a little. After my second, I returned to a nearly normal schedule. This spring during my third rehab, I was able to log onto a wi-fi network and begin writing much more. This year, which has included two major surgeries, I have...Read More

After predicting a weekend gross between $35 and $38 million on 10.22, Fantasy Moguls' Steve Mason is now reporting a projected 3-day haul in the region of $55 million for High School Musical 3. Saw V is looking at $29 million, give or take. Gavin O'Connor's Pride and Glory is looking at $6 million.

In a surprisingly scathing pan of Clint Eastwood's Changeling, New Republic senior editor Christopher Orr has called it "not merely a contender for the worst film of the year, but a contender for the worst domestic tragedy, the worst conspiracy thriller, the worst serial killer flick, and the worst courtroom drama. It is that rare movie which, long after you think it's exhausted the possibilities, keeps discovering new ways to fail."

Except it's very well handled, all of a piece, believably "period," an "Eastwood film," a nicely grounded cruise-a-long. You can feel the hand of a guy who knows how to...Read More

There's some kind of injection software that allows the creator (or the sender) to pop anyone's name into this video. Re-name and send to friends. Thanks to HE reader "Pete" for pushing it my way.

Frontunners is a smart, engaging, tightly cut doc about four Stuyvesant High School candidates running for the ceremonial title of president and vice-president of the Student Union in this elite Manhattan school, in 2006. I liked it for the same reasons everyone else is standing by it. Because it's brisk, well-shaped, thoughtful, catchy and echo-y in a sense that the campaign issues and tactics are somewhat similar to some of the ones that are now playing out on the national stage.

Here's the trailer.

I did an 18-minute phoner yesterday with Frontrunners...Read More

In her recently televised interview with NBC's Brian Williams, Sarah Palin pronounced the embattled country where over 4,000 American troops have died as "Eye-rack." It's Ehrahq, you moron. And if you want to ape the way the locals say it, it's Uhrahq. (Or at least, that's what an Italian director told me a couple of years ago.) I have no tolerance for people who say Eyetalian either. Saying eye-anything is like having a tattoo across your forehead that says "yokel."

For what it's worth, this columnist feels very badly for the traumatic loss suffered by poor Jennifer Hudson. A hug, a pat on the back, I'm sorry, life can be brutal and savage, hang in there.

Here, also, is a three-day-old Las Vegas Sun high-def video of enraged McCain supporters (older, grayer, thicker, Supercut hair) shouting down Obama supporters. Except it takes way too long to load. The situation indicated by the just-out Newsweek poll -- 53 Obama to 40 McCain among registered, 53 percent to 41 among likely voters -- is surely goading the angry McCainers.

...from a former McCain operative (posted on Politico) that I didn't get around to posting two days ago (i.e., Thursday): "The cake is baked. We're entering the finger-pointing and positioning-for-history part of the campaign. It's every man for himself now."

The jacket art for the Criterion Collection's new Missing DVD (out 10.21) is classy, nicely done. The helicopter shot, of course, is from a scene when Thomas Horman (John Shea) steps outside his hotel room in Vina del Mar and sees what he sees, which tells him (and us) that a military coup against Chile's Salvador Allende government has begun. If I'd designed the cover I would have used the shot of the white horse being chased by soldiers in a jeep down a deserted Santiago street.

Two days ago the Times Online Paris correspondent Charles Remner reported that Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona has led the French box-office tallies for the past two weeks. The film hasn't done badly in the U.S. since opening limited in mid-August (it ranks as 81st among all '08 attractions) but neither has it been burning up domestic records.

The reason for the French success is that Allen is "adored in France," Bremner writes. "Annie Hall, Manhattan and the other masterpieces of his oeuvre were a cult in the 1970s but his name is barely known to...Read More

"The water cooler has frozen over. Twittering on the interweb has dimmed to faint chirps. A scan of the horizon reveals no bat signal on any building. I'm referring, of course, to the debate over whether The Dark Knight will beat Titanic's $601 million (U.S.) record take at the North American box office.

"TDK is just past $527 million, still in release and still in the Top 20 for current pictures. It has just $75 million to go to sink the ship, which should just be chump change for Hollywood. Yet I spy no cheerleaders garbed...Read More

To go by Henry Blodgett's analysis on Silicon Valley Insider, the N.Y. Times is in serious financial trouble. We've all been reading about the dropping ad revenues, newsroom layoffs and whatnot, but this looks bad. "How The N.Y. Times Can Save Itself?" Yeesh. I am, needless to say, very emotionally invested in this newspaper. It's been with me all my life.

HE's Austin-based columnist Moises Chiullan on Synecdoche, New York.

In a discussion of the Best Actor race in his latest Envelope column, Pete Hammond reports about an "honest-to-God truth, swear on a stack of bibles" response from an insider who saw a rough cut of Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino earlier this week. The tipster said that "the old guy could actually win it all for this one. He's that good in this." The insider adds that "the role gives Clint great emotional range," Hammond says.

"With a smart True Grit style campaign that takes note of the fact Eastwood has actually never won an...Read More

In a review posted 45 minutes ago, Variety's Derek Elley has given a stiff slap-down to Quantum of Solace, the soon-to-open James Bond flick directed by Marc Forster (Monster's Ball, Stay), who made his bones as a touchy-feely type. "The shortest and certainly the most action-dense Bond ever, Quantum of Solace plays like an extended footnote to Casino Royale rather than a fully realized stand-alone movie," he says.

"Producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, possibly knowing they couldn't immediately top the previous pic's sheer stylishness, have radically reshuffled the series' traditional elements, but also allowed...Read More

Imagine doing dozens of interviews with a cross-section of 25 year-old guys across the country, guys from middle to lower-middle-class backgrounds who haven't benefitted from high-end university educations, and saying to them, "If you had to choose between (a) a modest, unexceptional, not-very-exciting life involving hard work, an annual two-week vacation and maybe a little quiet desperation in between, or (b) the life of Raffaelo Follieri, the 30 year-old Italian con man who was recently given 4 and 1/2 years for cheating investors out of millions but who ran with a very high-end crowd and got to enjoy the allegiance and creature...Read More

A 10.24 Daily Mail article has posted two negligible photos of Heath Ledger in Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. Ten months have passed since Ledger worked on the film (in December '07) and this is the best that anyone can come up with?

In Contention's Kris Tapley has laid out a logical-sounding scenario by which Clint Eastwood could nab a Best Actor Oscar nomination and perhaps even the award itself for his swan-song performance in Gran Torino. Here it is along with my comments:

"Of the contenders most anticipate to be in play, only Sean Penn's portrayal of Harvey Milk has the on-paper swagger, while Leonardo DiCaprio (despite generating considerable heat -- I've heard one person say "it's one of the best performances I've ever seen") could spoil the party if he can push past the pretty-boy image that fellow hopeful Brad Pitt will face."...Read More

The trailer for Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino (Warner Bros., 12.17) is up and running, and it feels delicious. Make that scrumptious. It shows the basics, who the characters are, the tone of it, the tough-old-bird-against-the-gang-bangers scheme. And it conveys something really special, or does by my sights.

Remember that initial rumor that Gran Torino might be some kind of Dirty Harry movie (which of course was soon after debunked)? Well, take a look at this thing -- it is a kind of Dirty Harry movie, at least in terms of the pugnacious, suffer-no-fools, take-no-guff...Read More

Here's an excerpt from Andrew OHehir's q & a with Synecdoche, New York director-writer Charlie Kaufman, up today on Salon:

O'Hehir: Charlie, I guess we have to talk about the title a little bit. You may be sick of doing that. I was at the press conference in Cannes where somebody accused you of committing commercial suicide with that title.

Kaufman: I remember talking about that. Why would they care? It wasn't the distributor, since I didn't have one yet. Who said that? Do you know who that was?

O'Hehir: Yeah, it was Jeff...Read More

Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York opens limited today. But before getting into my own complex, semi-enthused, slightly tortured feelings about this undeniably interesting, densely layered film, let me quote one of the greatest opening paragraphs of a N.Y. Times film review that I've ever read, written by Manohla Dargis and concerning, naturally, the matter at hand:

"To say that Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York is one of the best films of the year or even one closest to my heart is such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well pack...Read More

Here's the initial Synecdoche, New York review I posted on the morning of 5.26.08 (which read as 5.25.08 by the Los Angeles clock):

There's no way around saying that Charlie Kaufman, the director-writer of Synecdoche, New York, is a gloom-head. A brilliant and, in his past screenplays, hilarious one (by the standards of dryly perverse humor), but a gloom-head all the same. Who, for now, has put aside his sense of humor. The problem with his film, which I loved in portions, understood the point of and was intrigued and somewhat amused by in the early rounds,...Read More

Variety's Michael Fleming and Elsa Keslassy are reporting with apparent seriousness that Steven Soderbergh intends to direct a $30 million 3-D rock musical about Cleopatra with Catherine Zeta-Jones in the title role and Hugh Jackman as Marc Antony.

Financing and distribution deals are being shopped "over the next two weeks" by producers Greg Jacobs and Casey Silver. (Some kind of drop-dead, do-or-die window of opportunity?) The music has been written by the defunct indie rock band Guided by Voices (formed in '83, disbanded in '04), and the script is by James Greer, a former bass player for the band and...Read More

As expected and as suggested here earlier today, John Patrick Shanley's Doubt (Miramax, 12,12) been chosen as the new opening-night flm for AFI Fest 2008, and thereby replacing the The Soloist, which Paramount withdrew after eighty-sixing its November 2008 release and bumping it into March '09.

The official Fox Searchlight Slumdog Millionaire one-sheet, as posted a few minutes ago by Variety's Anne Thompson. Reactions? Danny Boyle's film opens limited on 11.12.

I've always loved the political term "dead cat bounce" -- i.e., a poll bounce that happens once, slightly, and then goes nowhere. It's one of the minor regret issues of my life that I've never had a chance to use it in a sentence in this column or in anything else I've written. Not in a way that felt right. You can't just plop a term into a sentence. It has to happen of its own volition.

NPR commentator and screenwriter John Ridley has reviewed the old bromide that Hollywood movies tend to perform okay during bad economic times. Not that bad economic weather is "good" for the industry, but it doesn't seem to hurt either. On top of which hard dark times tend to produce better films. As F.X. Feeney explained to A.O. Scott four years ago.

Patrick Goldstein posted a belief/suspicion two days ago that "the days of Focus Features are numbered." For what it's worth, I've been told by a reliable fellow that this simply isn't true. Now and for the foreseeable future, he meant.

Goldstein suspects that "Universal will probably say, for now, that it's committed to Focus' survival. That's because the company is about to launch Milk, its big end-of-the-year Oscar movie, whose campaign would be undermined if Focus looked like a lame duck. Expect Universal to wait until next spring, after Oscar season is over, before quietly announcing layoffs, signaling that Focus,...Read More

Happened across this Onion-produced video on Anne Thompson's column. Dry, funny, well-done.

I've come to the bitter conclusion that I'm better off with fake plants than live ones. Because I can't seem to bring myself to care for the live ones in the right way. Too much water, not enough water or watered too infrequently, not enough light, too much light. I've lost count of the number of plants that have died slow terrible deaths in my home. The word has gone out among all the plants in all the plant shops in Los Angeles. If that Wells guy buys you and takes you home, it's like going to the gas chamber.

In Janet Maslin's 10.22 N.Y. Times review of Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies (Harmony, 10.28), she paraphrases author Donald Spoto's view that "no understanding of the director's career can be complete without the dark side, and that great art need not correspond with saintly behavior.

"And [Spoto] suggests that this book be read as 'a cautionary tale of what can go wrong in any life.' After all, 'it is the story of a man so unhappy, so full of self-loathing, so lonely and friendless, that his satisfactions came as much from...Read More

"I can't take much more of this," Larry David wrote yesterday on the HuffPost. "Two weeks to go, and I'm at the end of my rope. I can't work. I can eat, but mostly standing up. I'm anxious all the time and taking it out on my ex-wife, which, ironically, I'm finding enjoyable. This is like waiting for the results of a biopsy. Actually, it's worse. Biopsies only take a few days, maybe a week at the most, and if the biopsy comes back positive, there's still a potential cure. With this, there's no cure. The result is final. Like death.

"Five...Read More

Fresh interviews with Synecdoche director-writer Charlie Kaufman and Changeling director Clint Eastwood are up today on NPR's Fresh Air.

An inspired Barack Obama endorsement piece by the stars of The Andy Grifith Show and Happy Days -- Ron Howard, Andy Griffith and Henry Winkler. A brilliant piece, whoever dreamt it up and directed. (Original link on Funny or Die.)

Note: I haven't used the word "Opie" to refer to Howard in many, many years, and I won't henceforth ever again, but I figured it was okay in this context.

Variety's Anne Thompson is the latest convert to the view that I've Loved You So Long's Kristin Scott Thomas is not only a shoo-in for a Best Actress nomination but "leads the field." But I have a slight disagreement or two with her assessments so let's review.

Reason #1, she says, is that Thomas "wears no makeup, looks awful and moves from shut-down depression to life." I don't think KST looks awful at all in this film. She's just not wearing makeup and therefore looks her age, and so what? The bottom line is that she's an extremely beautiful woman, and no...Read More

A courtesy screening of John Patrick Shanley's Doubt is happening this evening for the original B'way cast (including the legendary Cherry Jones, who played Meryl Streep's role on stage). Not many columnist-critic types are attending. The Envelope's Tom O'Neil, EW's Dave Karger, Mark Harris, some ghostwriter for Liz Smith.

So what major Oscar-worthy feature will be chosen to open the AFI Film Fest on 10.30, now that The Soloist has been withdrawn from that slot? An announcement will be forthcoming later this afternoon, I'm hearing. If I were running the AFI show, I would get either Doubt or Nothing But The Truth. Or I'd shift the already-scheduled The Wrestler or Slumdog Millionaire into the opening-night position.

The Soloist was yanked due to stars Robert Downey, Jr. and Jamie Foxx not being interested in doing the red carpet due to the general atmosphere of humiliation and embarassment stemming from Paramount's decision to...Read More

What does this seemingly legit Gran Torino one-sheet tell you? Here's what it tells me: (a) Forget "sensitive" -- this is a brass-tacks movie about one snarly old mofo; (b) The old Dirty Harry spirit and physicality is alive and well (that's an enviably flat stomach for a 78 year-old!); (c) We'll get into the racial-bigotry-and-animosity stuff in late November or early December -- all we want to do now is send out those good old Clint vibes. Gran Torino now has a firm release date of 12.17.08. [Sorry for previous 11.17 typo.]

Gregg Goldstein posted a Hollywood Reporter story late last night about "several of the Weinstein Co.'s top founding film executives departing the company with no imminent replacements for their positions." You could say that the facts speak for themselves and that's fine, but the story as written seems to skirt the basics. Why can't Goldstein just say that the Weinstein Co. is apparently scaling back while trying to negotiate a difficult stretch of road? Which would be a polite way of putting it.

"The story is ludicrous. You can imagine where it goes from here." What respected cult movie is this dialogue from? And who said it?

"Unlike Clint Eastwood's Changeling, there is no melodrama in I've Loved You So Long, only real, quiet, strong acting," says Daily Beast columnist Tom Tapp. Kristin Scott Thomas' Juliette does not rant at society's injustices. Hers is a reactive performance. She watches the family. She watches her employers. She watches her sister. And somehow, our attention is held the entire time -- I was completely captivated observing her, observing the world.

"Thomas's is the kind of performance that critics always say deserves an Oscar, but rarely wins: an interior role...Read More

I've seen Terrence Malick's The New World three times -- the 150-minute version that screened for the press in late '05 (just once), and the shorter 135-minute version that opened in early '06 (twice). But I've never seen the 172-minute extended cut that came out on DVD on 10.14. I've simply been too lazy to pick it up. I have the reviews, of course, but can anyone pass along some non-pro thoughts?

Ron Silver's decision to become a 9/11 Republican a few years ago is what it is. But the poor guy's appearance on Larry King Live a day or two ago was alarming. He looks gaunt, drained and sounded weak. I don't know what the backstory is but I hope he's doing well, and if he isn't that he gets better. The Ron Silver I know and love is a bearded New Yorky-type guy with longish, swept-back hair, wearing an expensive suit and sporting a swaggery attitude.

It's long been understood that Al-Qeada (also spelled "Al-Qaida") wants John McCain elected so they'll have a more full-on, never-say-die war effort to deal with in Iraq, which will advance their cause by inspiring more young and disaffected Middle Eastern men to join up and give their lives. So it's not that big a deal for an Al-Qeada backed website called al-Hesbah to have posted a message along these lines.

The message reported late last night said that in order "to exhaust the United States militarily and economically," Al-Qeada believes that the "impetuous Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain...Read More

I don't know how many others have placed Nanette Burstein's American Teen on their short list of Best Feature Doc Oscar contenders. I did for a while because I mostly liked this Paramount Vantage-released doc. I called it a "full meal movie" that "takes us on a rewind tour of our own high-school experiences," and that it cuts through cliches by "immersing us in the essentials.." And yet I've taken it off my short list for two reasons.

One, I just can't shake the suspicion that the doc was "vaguely rigged" on some level,...Read More

This happened earlier today during a campaign stop in Goffstown, New Hampshire. At least once before John McCain blurted out a (Freudian slip?) "c" word. I'm reading today's episode as another indication of stress and fatigue. He's in a tough place now, has to be feeling it.

Gonzalo Arijon's Stranded, which knocked me down at last January's Sundance Film Festival, is finally opening today. It deserves full consideration as an Oscar contender for Best Feature Documentary (unless it's ineligible). I'm sorry but it's much more spiritual and primal than Trouble The Water (the King Kong of amateur-video jiggle docs) or Alex Gibney's Gonzo. In my head it's second only to James Marsh's Man on Wire.

This deeply moving doc about the Uruguyan plane-crash survivors who were forced to resort to cannibalism after landing in the...Read More

If it's a Kate Hudson movie, there's a good chance it's going to be shallow, retard-formulaic and repulsively chick-flicky. (As I explained in a 9.22 piece called "Lady Has No Taste.") Make that an excellent chance. I'm sorry but that's the bed she's made. So the uh-oh vibe that emanates from the trailer for Bride Wars (Fox 2000, 1.9.09), her latest, is no surprise.

This, clearly, is just what the world needs now -- a glossy girly-girl catfight comedy about duelling weddings at the Plaza condo-mart. The bottom...Read More

David Thewlis, star of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (Miramax, 11.14), speaking earlier this evening to Pete Hammond following a screening of the film at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. The film, directed and written by Mark Herman, is a World War II-era drama told from a child's point of view. It has a hell of an ending.

"In a campaign of almost continual surprise, shock, and even awe, we have just turned a corner that might prove Barack Obama either a political genius or someone very close to that," writes Daily Beast columnist Stanley Crouch. It may sound at first like Crouch is carrying water, but he's a very sharp observer and he seems to be onto something here.

"The Republicans may have mistaken their adversary for just another Democrat sleeping under a shade tree and looking like a mark. Not. In real terms, that assumption might prove as costly to them as Robert E. Lee underestimating Ulysses S....Read More

It's been written about before, but over the last couple of days industry people here began receiving Entertainment Weekly's "Recall The Gold" ballots via snail mail. They're being asked if they've changed their minds about the Oscars handed out in '03, '98, '93, '88 and '83. I have to cut out for a few hours, but if anyone wants to put up some suggestions for reevaluation, fire away. Don't tell me -- Titanic, right? But it deserved the Best Picture Oscar because of those last 20 minutes.

"The creative process for me is a process of elimination and distilling something to an essence that can be expressed in one or two notes, but those one or two notes have been infused with the meaning of everything else that surrounded it for most of the creative process. In the end you have to just strip it away and the last step is to just get rid of everything. That's the key." -- Ballast director-writer Lance Hammer speaking to Vanity Fair.com's Julian Sancton.

"Wondering if you're really a Democrat?," writes Tucker Carlson on the Daily Beast. "Here's a quick way to find out: Given everything the Democratic party has going for it this year -- the overwhelming financial advantage, the legions of new voters, George W. Bush -- do you believe the Obama campaign could still somehow, in the final moments, find a way to blow it and lose this election?

"If you answered yes, you're a Democrat.

"Two weeks out, only the Democrats in Washington think Obama might not win. That's not the result of a scientific study, but instead the conclusion I've reached...Read More

I decided for the nowhere hell of it to upload this clip of a bed-and-breakfast in Tuscany that Jett and I stayed in after the '07 Cannes Film Festival. It's in the small village of San Donato, some 25 or 30 kilometers south of Florence.

Untitled from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo.

We've all read about the similarities (or at least the comparisons) between David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Robert Zemeckis' Forrest Gump. The lifespan story of an oddball guy with an unusual but charmed condition, following him from childhood to maturity and all around the mulberry bush. And both films written, of course, by Eric Roth.

Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump; Brad Bitt as Benjamin Button.

But I'd prefer not to go there because of my still-lingering resentment of the Zemeckis film, which I and many others disliked from the get-go for...Read More

"You know what hurts a movie like Max Payne is the success of the Batman franchise. That obviously is about story and character so they think for all films of the genre it's gotta be about story and character and this whole backstory of him losing his wife. I don't care about that. I wanna see Max Payne shoot people. That's all I want from a movie like this." -- a quote attributed to "At The Moves" co-host Ben Lyons by Criticwatch's Erik Childress.

David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Paramount, 12.25), which currently has default front-runner status whether it wants it or not (especially with so many presumed award-level films recently dropping out or getting vaguely trash-talked over the phone) will start to peek out sometime during the second week of November. The press event (i.e., not a "junket") will happen in Los Angeles -- New York journos will have to travel or they'll be up shit creek. "The same precision and exactitude that Fincher invested in Zodiac, he uses here [but] in a warm and emotional vein," says a guy who's seen...

Just when I think I'm finally done with Armond White, he writes something that pulls me back in. Yesterday morning I read his review of Lance Hammer's Ballast following the announcement of the Gotham Independent Film Awards nominations, four of which went to Ballast. No one, I had to admit, had come closer to echoing my own thoughts (although my initial reaction last January was to cut Hammer's film a little more slack).

A new trailer for Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy (Oscilloscope, 12.10 limited), a.k.a., "A Poor Girl and Her Dog." Wearing short, dark mousey hair and bargain-basement clothes, Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain) looks and acts vulnerable-tough in this quiet little character piece. Good work; her first stand-alone lead role. Pic opens nationally in January '09.

"You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it."

"Gov. Sarah Palin, Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, McCain spokesperson Nancy Pfotenhauer and Rush Limbaugh have revealed that there is a measurable portion of this country that is not interested in that which the vast majority view as democracy or equality or opportunity. They want only control and they want the rest of us, symbolically, perhaps physically out.

"'We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington D.C.,' Gov. Palin told a fund-raiser in North Carolina last Thursday, to kick off this orgy of condescending elitism. 'We believe that the best of America is in these...Read More

Fans of downmarket torture-porn gore films, I mean. Okay, you can be a clever educated film buff and like this stuff (I respect Eli Roth's chops in some respects), but the blood, screams and disembowelment genre is primarily aimed at the animals out here. C'mon, we all know this. The point is that they go these films to have their souls frozen solid with fear and to be grossed out by arterial gushings, mutilated bodies and severed heads. And in a way that not's predictable...right?

Most horror fans will be going to Saw 5 this weekend, and I realize they can't be stopped...Read More

I forgot to respond to Tom O'Neil's latest Gold Derby Oscar prediction query. I tapped it out just now and then wrote him and asked if I could be put in on a last-minute basis. Here''s the current rundown as of 10.20.08 at 4:48 pm:

BEST PICTURE: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Paramount/Warner Bros.); Revolutionary Road (Paramount Vantage/DreamWorks); Gran Torino (Fox Searchlight), Slumdog Millionaire (Fox Searchlight) and Milk (Gus Van Sant)

BEST DIRECTOR: David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button); Sam Mendes (Revolutionary Road); Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire), Clint Eastwood (Gran Torino), Gus Van Sant (Milk).

BEST ACTOR: Leonardo DiCaprio...Read More

The new-movie battle this weekend will be between High School Musical 3: Senior Year (88, 22 and 7 -- almost totally under-25 females drawn in by Zac Effron) and Saw 5 (63, 44 and 15 -- tracking very well with younger males).

Gavin O'Connor's Pride and Glory (Warner Bros.), easily the best movie opening this weekend, is running at 54, 29 and 3. Weak.

The following week Clint Eastwood's Changeling (Universal -- opening limited on 10.24, wide on 10.31) makes its big play for mainstream America. Right now it's running at 65, 34 and 5.

The Haunting of Molly...Read More

Just a reminder that Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days came out on DVD last Tuesday, and that those who missed it in theatres...you know the rest. Set the time aside, make some popcorn or order in some pita and hummus, open a bottle of white wine, sit down with a significant other and pop it in. It's a landmark film, an unmissable classic.

Six years ago I wrote a short piece about a very touchy anatomical subject for my Reel.com column. I happened to come across it again today. It struck me as a very odd thing, and yet truthful. This is a slow news day so I'm re-posting with add-ons and modifications. The subject is why feet are almost never given close-ups in movies.

"Has anyone every wondered why directors and their cinematographers almost never include close-ups of actors' feet in movies? Because 90% of human feet are strange and alienating, is why. But it goes farther than that. For me, bare...Read More

Kim Voynar's Film Essent blog is now up at Movie City News. Kim hopes "to see many of you over there getting into some great discussions on film, politics, feminist issues and what-have-you." (Somebody has to tell me what "essent" means, aside from being a re-imagined root of "essential").

It's incredibly rare when a main-title sequence simultaneously (a) uses a very cool pop song, (b) is stylistically sharp and creative, (c) introduces the characters, (d) tells you a little bit about who the lead character is, and (e) manages to be smart and entertaining with exactly the right attitude (i.e., one that agrees with and expresses the milieu and spiritual world of the characters).

When's the last time any film managed to do all these things in a single credit sequence? I'm not saying it hasn't happened in...

Lance Hammer's austere, somber, incontestably over-praised Ballast has snagged four nominations for the upcoming Gotham Independent Film Awards, which will be held 12.2 at Cipriani Wall Street. The snooty elites have embraced this low-key atmospheric mood piece since it played at Sundance '08. I saw it there (i.e., at the Eccles) and went "uh-huh...okay...fine."

Cipriani Wall Street

I'm not saying Ballast doesn't deliver a nicely immersive sense of reality, or that it doesn't deliver credible, first-rate art-film chops. I'm saying I don't get the critics who've wet themselves after seeing it. Ballast never really got hold...Read More

Libertarian, Republican, Green, American Independent, Peace and Freedom, Democratic. Why are they listed in this order? Why isn't McCain-Palin at the very bottom instead of Obama-Biden? Who decides this? I wonder how many leftie votes will go to the combination of Cynthia McKinney and Ralph Nader?

This photo of Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio (apparently) taking a break from Revolutionary Road filming is so crisp and beautiful that it makes me wish that the film itself had been shot in black-and-white. I'm very interested in seeing this Cheeveresque period drama, but I'd be 50% more cranked if the whole thing looked this way. Not as commercial, of course, but I'm a falling-down fool for monochrome.

Revolutionary Road costars Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio in a series of on-set photos posted by Alex Billington's First Showing.net.

One of my journalistic dreams of...Read More

"Between 'Joe the Plumber', 'spread the wealth' and 'I'm not George Bush', John McCain at least now seems to have a few somewhat more constructive talking points. So some of those crestfallen conservatives might have moved back into the likely voter universe. What I don't know that McCain is doing, on the other hand, is actually persuading very many voters, and particularly not independents or registered Democrats.

"If that is the case, than McCain is likely to run into something of a wall very soon here, brought about [by] the Republicans' substantial disadvantage in partisan identification.

"People sometimes misunderstand the nature...Read More

"It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son's grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards -- Purple Heart, Bronze Star -- showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old.

"And then, at the very top of the...Read More

Posted a couple of days ago by Awards Daily contributor Ryan Adams. I could scratch off one or two more but what's the rush? It's not even November.

W. is clearly a project that the restless, edgy Josh Brolin dived into wholeheartedly. Is he comfortable with the thought that his performance may make people like Dubya more? "I dunno if they'll like him more, but I think they'll struggle with the humanity of him as opposed to just pointing the finger. He is more likeable. That's my point of view. But I think it allows your opinion of him to... (pause) I can see Republicans seeing this movie and saying, that's why he's so great. And I can see Democrats seeing this movie and saying, that's why he's a sociopath." --...Read More

"The average studio feature now costs $71 million to produce and $36 million to market, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, a 35 percent increase from the average at the start of the decade. In the world of independent films, costs are up even more -- 83 percent during the same period." -- from Brooks Barnes' 10.18 N.Y. Times article about the degree of color-blindness in Hollywood decision-making about which films to green-light. It's called "Race and the Safe Hollywood Bet."

Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke reported exit polling earlier today about W., and the bottom line is that "27% felt the movie was better than expected, 38% felt it was not as good as expected (this was consistent across all groups, especially liberals), and 35% felt it was as good as expected." Basically a 62-38 split favoring positive.

I alluded to this before but it can't hurt to reiterate. Just to be fair, as The Envelope's Tom O'Neil was on Friday and as Variety's Pamela McLintock was last Tuesday about Showeast reactions, Frost/Nixon reactions have been more mixed than outright negative (although two or three London Film Festival reviews obviously were).

"The real reason for The Soloist getting bumped into March '09? Every single test, every single cut, the scores kept going down. It's a non-audience picture and just a tank." -- a good and trusted fellow who tends to pass along good stuff.

And yet I wonder. How problematic could Joe Wright's film be if it's scheduled to open the AFI Fest a few days from now?

"I directly know three people who have seen The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, one in a rough state in the editing room, and they were all weeping in the end. Is it 2 hours and 45 minutes? Yes, but that's what it is. Except nobody wants to be a front-runner, so Paramount is going to keep it under wraps [until mid to late November]." -- passed along by one of those "guy" sources that have mildly irritated Patrick Goldstein for being off-the-record and not described but quoted all the same.

The major London papers have reviewed Quantum of Solace, the new 007 film, and the reactions are pretty good. Not ecstatic, but primarly enthusiastic and supportive.

One slight dissenter is the Telegraph's Mark Monahan who says the new film "lacks Casino Royale's narrative drive, and is less than the sum of its parts." He adds, however, that "those parts are often terrific. See it for them, and see it for Daniel Craig's fully-formed Bond: angry, icily unsentimental, and fleetingly borderline psychotic at the close."

Times Online critic James Christopher writes that "director Marc Forster...Read More

Gen. Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama this morning -- "a seal of approval [by] the most important military figure of the age," a Meet the Press commentator stated -- will almost certainly increase Obama's poll ratings with conservative over-55s and fortify the general movement in Obama's direction.

MSNBC's Joe Scarborugh said this morning that the race is going to tighten up by the end. "We're not a 60-40 nation," he said. "We're a 51-49 nation."

The term "kitchen sink cinema" refers to grittily realistic black-and-white British films made in the late '50s to early '60s about working-class characters afflicted by despair, banality and a sense of entrapment. I don't know how many of them were made exactly, but my favorites are John Schlesinger's A Kind of Loving, Tony Richardson's Look Back in Anger, A Taste of Honey, The Entertainer and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, Karl Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life. What is that, seven?

I've always thought the term "kitchen sink"...Read More

"Is Gen. Colin Powell getting ready to endorse Sen. Barack Obama on Meet the Press this Sunday? Two sources close to Powell, speaking on the condition of anonymity, predict that he will. On the record, a third, Ken Duberstein, a Washington lobbyist and former White House chief of staff, didn't flatly deny it. 'You can say what you want,' he told me, 'but I didn't tell you that and neither did Powell.'" - from Howard Fineman's Newsweek column, posted last night.

Talk about an essential viewing experience. Meet The Press airs on Sunday mornings at...what is it, 8 am?

The...Read More

Max Payne, a complete piece of video-game merde, is the weekend's #1 film with a projected $19.2 million by Sunday night. The Secret Life of Bees will come in second with $11.8 million with Beverly Hills Chihuahua, a movie that's already infamous for what it implies about semi-arrogant xenophobic attitudes among materialistic middle-class Americans, coming in third with $11.6 million.

W. -- easily the best new film out there -- is, according to my source, looking at a fourth-place finish with $11.5 million. (Nikki Finke, however, has been told it'll come in second with about $12 million.) Eagle Eye, another piece...Read More

As I didn't say yesterday, one reasons Paramount decided to takeThe Soloist out of the year-end awards game (i.e., shifting its release date from 11.21.08 to 3.13.09) was to open thngs up Oscar-potential-wise for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Revolutionary Road. Another reason, many suspect, was that Viacom's Sumner Redstone wanted to pass along a little "up yours" message to Soloist producer DreamWorks in the wake of their rancorous split.

On top of which the Joe Wright drama, which I did mention yesterday, is thought in some quarters to be a little schmaltzy and therefore perhaps lacking the stellar...Read More

Hats off and a smart salute to Nation editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel for her blunt condemnation of Minnesota Republican Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota and her attempt to paint Barack Obama and other liberal legislators as somehow un-American. The debate happened earlier today on Chris Matthews' "Hardball" on MSNBC. Pat Buchanan also weighed in, didn't agree with the anti-American statements, etc. But Vanden Huevel was beautiful.

Vanden Heuvel's remarks: "Chris, I fear for my country. I think what we just heard is a congresswoman channeling Joe McCarthy, channeling a politics of fear and loathing...Read More

Thanks to Jack Morrissey for a good laugh. It doesn't look staged to me, even if it was.

"It's interesting to see how each of the actors exhibit their own distinct variation of portraying gay men," says a Playlist review of Gus Van Sant's Milk (Focus Features, 12.5). "Diego Luna is the most flamboyant, James Franco is understated, and Emile Hirsch is the most precocious. And playing the father figure to these Lost Boys is Sean Penn, who has Milk's exaggerated podium gestures and Long Island accent down perfectly.

"Penn does a magnificent job of dividing himself in two, as Milk had to also manage, splitting his time and attention between his personal...Read More

"When I see that kid, I'm going to crack that big fucking nose of his. Then I'm going to tell him, 'say hi to your mother for me'...I'm going to go down to 30 Rock...and I'm going to slap him in the big nose...I guaran-fucking-tee you."

Culture Pulp's Mike Russell has written the following about Fox Searchlight''s The Secret Life of Bees, which opens today: It "falls into a loose, annoying subgenre of movies I'm going to call 'Ya-Ya Sisterhood Bullshit,'" he says. "These movies tend to be based on the sorts of books Oprah likes to endorse, and they contain some or all of the following:

* A precious, self-consciously offbeat title (Fried Green Tomatoes, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood).

* A condescending Hollywood interpretation of life in the South, in which people are either abusive racists full of hate...Read More

True story: a conversation among three or four guys with film-industry ties happened a couple of days ago in a major southern-region city. Included was a sound mixer who's been around a couple of decades. The subject was upcoming movies, and the sound mixer interjected at one point, "Guys, guys, I've seen the Best Picture Oscar winner, okay? And it's Benjamin Button." You've seen the whole thing? he was asked. "Most of it but that's enough," he answered. "Forget it, it's over. It's an eight-hankie movie and it's going to win."

Hurricane Season (Weinstein/MGM, 12.25) , a Lousiana-based sports saga with Forrest Whitaker as real-life basketball coach Al Collins who assembled a winning team composed of players who'd been displaced by Hurricane Katrina, has gotten the hook and been re-scheduled to open in early '09.

Whitaker told a friend a day or so ago that the 12.25 release date has been scuttled due to the film being "not ready," and that a tentative March 2009 release has been decided upon. The film was previously called Patriots.

The film costars Isaiah Washington, Bow Wow, Khleo Thomas, Courtney B. Vance, Lil' Wayne...

As I've said before, Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino has the stuffings of a Best Picture contender because it appears to be a story about change and redemption, which is what most Best Picture nominees are about. But it also seems to have a little built-in momentum because it deals with racism, which has been been a bigger hot-button issue this year than any time since the Civil Rights era of '64 and '65.

Barack Obama's presidential campaign has obviously brought the issue to the fore. Everyone has been talking about it, particularly with those YouTube videos showing the ignorance and ugliness...Read More

Weinstein Co. reps didn't have anything to say this morning about whether or not they're opening John Hillcoat's The Road, an adaptation of the post-apocalyptic Cormac McCarthy novel with Viggo Mortensen, Robert Duvall, Charlize Theron and Guy Pearce in the lead roles, in November or December or next year or what. I was told I'd hear something later today.

A release-date decision was supposed to be resolved yesterday, according to a 10.15 Stephen Zeitchik story in the Hollywood Reporter. Pic was originally skedded to open limited on 11.14 with an 11.26 wide release, but...Read More

N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis doesn't claim that Oliver Stone's W. is outright fiction, but she seems to imply it's the next thing to it. This doesn't square with my understanding that 98% of W. is taken straight from verified historical accounts. There 's a certain amount of dramatic embroidery all through W., of course, but the only baldly fictional portions are the Cheney/Dreyfuss conference room speech ("There is no exit strategy -- we stay") and the Oval Office dream sequence at the end, or so I've understood.

"Mr. Stone's take on the president, as comic as it is sincere, is...Read More

N.Y. Press critic Armond White is calling W. "the best example of American filmmaking courage since Munich." Intriguing thought, but the remainder of the graph indicates that White, incredibly, is in the tank for Bush. I've heard about White's pro-Iraq War positions from a colleague, but hadn't really read one of his political testaments until just now. It takes balls of steel to be a Bush guy at this stage of the game, especially for someone working in a liberal racket like film criticism.

"Our mainstream media's vindictiveness toward George W. Bush has dismantled even the illusion of fairness," he Read More

I got about ten to twelve seconds of face-time with Senator Joe Biden at last night's Pacific Design Center $5000-per-person fundraiser (which I was invited to but didn't pay for). I asked him if he'd seen Oliver Stone's W. and he said nope, not yet, how is it? And I told him it's more or less a Greek tragedy with a little comedy thrown in, and well worth seeing. Biden is obviously a little busy these days. I knew the drill before asking, of course, but I asked anyway.

Sen. Joe Biden during his Pacific Design Center...

Given the word about Joe Wright's The Soloist possibly being a bit "schmaltzy" and boilerplate concerns about Ed Zwick's Defiance that I presume don't need explaining, I wasn't completely surprised to read a 10.17 story by the Hollywood Reporter's Carl DiOrio that both pics have had their wide-release dates delayed into '09.

The Soloist's postponement seems particularly dramatic with its 11.21.08 wide opening being pushed back to 3.13.09. Defiance, which had a previous release date of 12.12.08, will now open wide on 1.16.09.

Defiance will be given a late-December Oscar-qualifying run, reports DiOrio, and it's possible (though not...Read More

I'm afraid there's something I don't understand, Alexsei. It's widely believed (though not absolutely dead confirmed) that there was a test screening of Zack Snyder's Watchmen last night at the Regal Lloyd Center 10 theater in Portland, Oregon. And yet there are no reader reviews posted at AICN yet. What's up with that?

Any notepad-and-shoe-leather reporter might regard this silence as an indication that reports of the alleged test screening were incorrect. If the screening happened, though, this is inexcusable fan-boy behavior. How long does it take to sit down and post a quick-draw response? Man up, grim...Read More

Max Payne (20th Century Fox, opening today) "is a nap-inducing special-effects fest, minus even the excitement of watching someone else play a game. Mark Wahlberg, who appears to have been hypnotized before each scene, plays Max, a cop whose family has been murdered by junkies. Or so it appears: In fact, his wife was eliminated for knowing too much about a new drug being manufactured at the corporation where she worked. Max spends his days filing in the cold-case department and his nights tracking her killers. Until he finds them. Yawn. This is as cardboard as action-movie-making gets: slo-mo bullets and...Read More

At last night's Al Smith Memorial Dinner in Manhattan:

And last night's crazy McCain rally lady skit on SNL's Thursday show. And some real-life rocket scientists at a recent political gathering in Ohio, dated. 10.13.08.

Two days ago the legendary, famously cantankerous Armond White, film critic for the New York Press, was (a) re-elected as the 2009 chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle, and (b) also elected 2008 vice-chair. The Hollywood Reporter's Gregg Goldstein reported yesterday that the NYFCC will vote on the year's best Dec. 10 vote on 12.10, and that the awards ceremony will happen on 1.5.09.

When I think of White, I think of his uniform approvals of (to the best of my recollection) just about every Steven Spielberg film ever made, including "the excellent, excellent" Munich. I'm also reminded of...Read More

The answer to the Touch of Evil aspect-ratio controversy contained in the release of the 50th anniversary DVD is simple, and shame on those who would needlessly complicate it. All 1950s film that were captured with a protected aspect ratio of 1.37 to 1 should always be mastered for DVD at that aspect ratio. Or at least at 1.66 to 1. I can't over-emphasize how despicable I find 1.85 to 1 croppings of Eisenhower- and Kennedy-era films.

There is no aesthetic benefit at all -- zero -- to chopping the tops and bottoms off...Read More

My earlier absence today was due to errands, two meetings and aimless running around. I also had to buy a nice shirt-and-tie combo to wear at a $5000-per-person Joe Biden fundraiser I'm attending at the Pacific Design Center starting at 6 pm. But the real action this evening will be on Late Night with David Letterman when John McCain finally shows up and sits there and plays the good sport. Will Letterman take pity or...?

Created by the guys at 23/6.

Here are some stats provided by Fandango about "more than 3,000 moviegoers" they've interviewed who are planning to see Oliver Stone's W. (opening tomorrow).

51% are male, and 58% are ages 25 to 49. 23% classify themselves as liberal; 22% as moderate and 18% as conservative. (What about the other 37%?) 34% say they voted for George W. Bush in a previous election. (People are admitting to this?) 27% say they will vote for John McCain, and 53% say they will vote for Barack Obama.

67% want to see it because of Oliver Stone's reputation as a controversial filmmaker. 10% say...Read More

So what's the deal with Max Payne (20th Century Fox, 10.17), the Mark Wahlberg actioner that's based on an effin' video game that I wouldn't see at knifepoint? On one hand, you have a 10.15 review from Variety's Justin Chang; on another (and I never do this), you have a reaction from cre8ed@hotmail.com on the film's IMDB page.

And I don't know, man. I'm feeling a somewhat cautious, carefully parsed current from Chang but a kind of no-holds-barred, bolt-of-clumsy-truth vibe from cre8ed.

It was obvious from the ads and the trailer that...Read More

"It is often said in politics that a candidate's strength is also his weakness," writes Matt Bai in a 10.19 N.Y. Times Sunday Magazine piece about Barack Obama and working-class whites. "Obama's greatest asset as a candidate, the trait that has enabled him to overcome both a thin resume and the resistance of his own party's establishment, is his placidity.

"Even more than through his ability to give a rousing speech (plenty of other candidates, from Ted Kennedy to Howard Dean, could do that), Obama has differentiated himself from recent Democrats by conveying a sense...Read More

Art by Barry Stock adorns the cover of this week's Willamette Week, which calls attention to the Oregon weekly's election recommendations.

As I wrote a week ago, Tomas Alfredson's Let The Right One In (Magnolia, 10.24) "is easily the most strikingly unusual vampire pic that anyone's seen in I don't know how long. The fact that Overture Films and Spitfire Pictures are developing a U.S. remake with Cloverfield's Matt Reeves to direct speaks volumes. It's one of the standout originals of '08." Here's the trailer:

MCN's David Poland and L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein got angry earlier today about not being invited by Universal to see Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon in time to run reviews concurrent with Variety's Todd McCarthy review, which was posted today, as well as a review by the Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt.

In fact Goldstein and particularly Poland were miffed that they weren't invited to a specific screening held two days ago (Monday, 10.13.08) that McCarthy and Honeycutt were invited to and attended.

Poland makes some valid points in criticizing Universal's trades-first Frost/Nixon screening policy. However, he also went...Read More

Two more Frost/Nixon reviews from London -- a pan from the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw and a positive four-out-of-fiver from the Times Online's James Christopher.

"Frost/Nixon is an effective, straightforward bigscreen version of Peter Morgan's shrewd stage drama about the historic 1977 TV interview in which Richard Nixon brought himself down once again," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy. So do terms like "effective" and "straightforward" counterbalance the less enthusiastic descriptions that have emerged? Calling a movie "effective" and "straightforward" is...how to say it? It's a bit like describing a girl you met at a party last weekend as "smart," "friendly" and "really nice."

Ron Howard's movie, says McCarthy, "isn't out to 'get' its much vilified subject as much as it tries to cast him as something of a...Read More

The only people out there who are truly offended by liberal humanistic values in Hollywood movies are the rabid reds, who live in a different country anyway so let 'em stew on their side of the fence. I've scrapped tooth and claw with the Dirty Harry's of the world and I know who and what they are. They're about hammering all day and into the night. They're the nephews, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Westbrook Pegler. They actually believe Sarah Palin will be a formidable presidential candidate in '12. They're not necessarily the ones holding up Obama monkey dolls and shouting "kill...Read More

The AP's David Germain is reporting that "about 15 newspapers and several TV stations and cable channels" are refusing to run ads for Kevin Smith's Zack and Miri Make a Porno because they find the word "porno" objectionable. "Commercials for the film during Los Angeles Dodgers games on Fox Sports were dropped at the team's request," says Germain, "after some viewers complained."

If my six-year-old kid asked, "Dad, what's 'porno' mean?," I'd say "a porno is a dumb movie made by people with no talent who take their clothes off and roll around and...

It's being pointed out by Jack Morrissey and others that when you visit this Palin as President interactive visual site (which you can't access on an iPhone) that (a) clicking on many items many times produces different results and (b) that visitors should turn their computer volume up. Particular suggestions: Click on the door a few times, and then the deer. Open the blinds. Open the left window. Click on the portrait, the empty frames, the presidential seal on the wall, and, without fail, the red phone. (Updated daily until November 4th.)

Movie titles with a secondary subtitle -- titles like Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Robin Hood: Men in Tights and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo -- usually indicate mediocrity or at least uncertainty on the part of the distributor. But the practice suggests an interesting riddle game. The idea is to come up with a tight and expressive subtitle that indicates what the movie delivers (or seems to promise) on a primal popcorn level.

Example: In discussing Truman Capote's In Cold Blood some 35 years ago, Tom Wolfe claimed that a key line came when Dick Hickock said to Perry Smith prior...Read More

An insider on the new Bad Lieutenant team, responding to the Abel Ferrara item posted earlier this morning, explains it all: "The whole reason the film was made was because [executive producer] Avi Lerner got hold of the rights, which he bought from Ed Pressman for an undisclosed sum. And he went out and pre-sold the film in ten countries for $30 million, or an average of $3 million per country.

"Lerner funded the film for $20 million, and pocketed $10 million for himself. Nic Cage, who likes New...Read More

"Oddly bloodless," "coldly unilluminating," protagonists who "rarely emerge as living, breathing people," and a "doggedly linear approach to storytelling [that] only gets Ron Howard so far"? In Contention's Guy Lodge has delivered a fairly stiff slapdown to Frost/Nixon following a showing today at the BFI London Film Festival. I know how satisfying Peter Morgan's play and Frank Langella's Nixon performance are (or were on stage) so on one level it's puzzling. But it's not as if restrained or muted reactions haven't cropped up before.

Original Bad Lieutenant director Abel Ferrara feels angry and slighted for not being asked to direct the new Bad Lieutenant, which Werner Herzog has hired to helm instead with with Nic Cage in the title role. The newbie isn't a remake but some kind of continuation of a theme, or so I've read. Ferrara's best line is that producer Ed Pressman "sucks cocks in hell." (Very Catholic sentiment, that -- cribbed from William Friedkin's The Exorcist.) Here's a portion of the Filmmaker magazine q &a in which Ferrara lays it all out:

Filmmaker: "What are your feelings about Werner Herzog doing his...Read More

Frost/Nixon director Ron Howard, posting today in the Times Online, says he hopes "the film does [for audiences] what Peter's play did for me -- reminds us that accountability matters.

"When the system allows our leaders to hide behind verbal gymnastics, or to have their sins blithely rationalized by the complexity of the office they hold, it is up to the people to demand a reckoning. And while the media is an industry vying for customers, it must somehow also be that instrument of enlightenment for us, the public who so desperately rely upon it." (Which is precisely what Dan Rather...Read More

Lawrence O'Donnell is predicting that former Secretary of State Colin Powell will soon endorse Barack Obama and thereby hammer "the final nail" into the McCain candidacy. Powell has been reportedly leaning toward this since last summer. Mulling, sorting it all through, weighing pros and cons. Powell needed to see all three debates before making a decision? Will he wait another week? Two? I don't respect the dilly-dally.

Post-rehab Colin Farrell has become a kind of born-again actor, as I've been saying over the past year or so. His confession about his substance-abuse period, starting around the five-minute mark, is eloquent. Farrell has had practice at meetings, of course, but it's good stuff all the same. The interviewer is BBC One's Jonathan Ross. (This video was first posted a shocking five days ago....five!)

Another yahoo yelled out "kill him!" today, and he/she wasn't referring to David Letterman. It happened this time at a Sarah Palin rally near Scranton, while she was being introduced by Republican Congressional candidate Chris Hackett. Palin said nothing, of course, when she got to the mike about this kind of talk being unacceptable. A few minutes ago MSNBC's Keith Olbermann opened up on John McCain with both barrels for not repeating clearly and emphatically to the faithful that hate epithets are out of bounds.

.

Sony Pictures Classics has two and arguably three of the top Best Actress contenders under its roof right now -- Kristin Scott Thomas in I've Loved You So Long, Anne Hathaway in Rachel Getting Married and Melissa Leo in Frozen River. They have, it can be argued, a special heat in that their performances are urgent and hurting -- each telling the story of a hard-luck underdog coming from a place of desperation -- and are not highly toned, massively-funded Oscar turns with expensive key-light halos around their heads.

And with this comes a very delicate political dance in which SPC can't be...Read More

"If the elections were held today, Barack Obama would receive support from 53 percent of voters, against John McCain's 39 percent, the latest New York Times/CBS News poll has found."

A. O. Scott takes a look back at the 1987 Oliver Stone film "through the prism of today's financial crisis," as the copy says. But the line that stands out is Scott acknowledging that while Wall Street was intended as a cautionary tale, it has since turned into -- i.e., become regarded as -- "one of the most enjoyable and effective advertisements for capitalism ever made."

I didn't sense the least amount of coolness from Kristin Scott Thomas during our interview yesterday afternoon at the Four Seasons hotel. She has a bit of that chilly rep with some journalists, in part, I suppose, because of her having played a few bright and particular women in films, but I felt mostly openness and vulnerability. Really.

Along with some excitement and fatigue, of course, as she'd flown out from Manhattan (where she's currently starring in a hot-ticket stage version of The Seagull) to be here only one day. She didn't throw any pre-recorded...Read More

Is there a bigger Hollywood pretzel-contortionist than Dennis Hopper? He starts out in the '50s as the moody, intense young actor who's influenced by James Dean and that whole alienated, tortured, wandering-in-pain thing. Then he becomes lysergic Dennis of the '60s and '70s -- the visionary director of Easy Rider and The Last Movie, brazen and wild-maned, a "lesbian chick" rollicking in Taos, beset by increasing drug use.

And then he shifts into sobriety and the older, cleaned-up, more clear-headed version that emerged in the mid '80s. And then into being a Bush-supporting Republican over the last 20 years (having voted for...Read More

David Alan Grier, host of Comedy Central's new Chocolate News (which debuts tomorrow night), has fun with the old "Obama isn't black enough" routine and says older whiteys need to chill.

Weather Underground co-director Sam Green has posted a short statement about William Ayers, his friend, on A.J. Schnack's All These Wonderful Things site. Reading it reminded me how infuriating the sentiments of the Sarah Palin flock about Ayers' radical past have been. Would they condemn the sometimes violent acts that came out of the anti-abortion movement of the '90s with the same outrage, the same certainty? It appears likely, in any event, that McCain will bring up Ayers at Wednesday night's debate, so it's worth reviewing.

No society can or should tolerate terrorism, but political hot-heads determined to strike...Read More

"Oliver Stone gets points for speed and efficiency -- he shot the picture over 46 days this spring and summer on a tiny $30 million budget and gave it a rich, polished look -- but not for the scope of his vision," writes Time's Richard Corliss. "W. isn't tragedy or farce; it's illustrated journalism, based mostly on extant Bush biographies and memoirs of early Bush appointees. All the incidents are there but not the insight. What's missing is the one thing Stone films have never lacked: a point of view."

W. says Bush is a mediocre Oedipal figure (i.e., driven by...Read More

"We (and you) were none too pleased when Ben Lyons joined Ben Mankiewicz as the host for At the Movies earlier this year, particularly when we considered Lyons' track record as something of a half-wit Richard Roeper to Mankiewicz's low-rent Roger Ebert. And while Mankiewicz has settled in relatively well in the last six weeks, we continue to cringe at the sight and sound of Lyons fluffing away at Hollywood loins in his blurb-fertile reviews.

"Still, we knew he was a hack; what we didn't know (at least to the extent we do today) was the...Read More

Early Monday afternoon Defamer's Kyle Buchanan rapped the knuckles of Owen Gleiberman, Anthony Lane and yours truly for bringing up -- mentioning! -- the racially-diverse-couple aspect of Rachel Getting Married. The piece is/was called "How Older, White Critics Have Missed the Boat on Rachel Getting Married."

Buchanan's view is that the only acceptably enlightened way to approach the above-described aspect of Jonathan Demme's latest is to ignore the undercurrents, as the film pretty much does. Right!

But how come Buchanan waited nine days to get into this? I ran my original Rachel piece on 10.4. Shouldn't counterpunch pieces run within...Read More

Footage of this sort would never be included in a major film today. Sexist, objectifying, poolside porn-drivel. Certainly not with a major star. The internet (that's right, no capital "I") has cornered the titillation market. A scene of this sort, which feels even more ridiculous due to that idiotic reaction from Phil Silvers, feels as removed from '08 as a 1930s Busby Berkeley musical number.

I don't consider Quentin Tarantino's decision to add Julie Dreyfus, Michael Bacall and Omar Doom to the cast of Inglorious Bastards to be hot news. But the poster that accompanied the original Playlist story is cool. Obviously meant to look like a Nazi souvenir that's been sitting in some World War II vet's attic for the last 60 years.

With Wrestler star Mickey Rourke talking these days about how his career went plop into the toilet in the '90s, I found this Entertainment Weekly piece I filed from the '92 Cannes Film Festival interesting. It was just a few days after the L.A. riots when I came across a Rourke quote about those he felt were responsible. A few hours later I ran into Spike Lee at a party, showed him the clipping, and he grabbed my tape recorder and said what he said.

Late May 1992 EW clipping

You are not a true film person unless you know what CRM-114 means -- what film it's from, what its function was, who first mentions it, etc.

Everyone regards MSNBC's Chuck Todd as a brilliant political pulse-taker, but he and his First Read team are consistently the most cautious and conservative estimators around.

Today, three weeks from Election Day, Todd & Co. are only giving Obama a modest 101 electoral vote lead over McCain, 264-163, with 111 votes (Nevada, Colorado, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida) in the toss-up column. This at a time when almost everyone else regards Ohio, Colorado, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida as leaning-Obama states, at the very least. (Okay, one or two polls...Read More

Jamie Stuart again grapples with existential conundrums, an unfaithful (or at the very least weak and malleable) woman, phantom creeps on the street and other stuff that feels a little too poised and over-considered. Sooner or later all artists accept the fact that an orange is an orange is an orange.

And oh yeah, Wrestler star Mickey Rourke talking about his movie-career detour is cut into all this.

Here's a flattering assessment of Stuart and his work by the Washington Post's Ann Hornaday, posted yesterday.

I love the brief Mac screen shot of an entry or password code: "Read More

Marlon Brando out-gunning Karl Malden at the end of One-Eyed Jacks is, by my yardstick, the second most satisfying drilling of a bad guy in the history of westerns. (The most satisfying is still Alan Ladd pulling faster than Jack Palance in Shane, and the third most satisfying is Kevin Costner and Robert Duvall 's third-act triumph in Open Range.)

It's a shame that One-Eyed Jacks, which was issued on a decent-looking laser disc in the '90s, is available only on crummy-looking public domain DVDs these days. Charles Lang's cinematography...Read More

"Much of the atmosphere and the action of Body of Lies is familiar [with] director Ridley Scott flipping back and forth from Washington to the Middle East, from drone surveillance to the street, from explosions and scenes of torture to men tearing across the desert with guns blazing. But the movie is smart and tightly drawn; it has a throat-gripping urgency and some serious insights, and Scott has a greater command of space and a more explicit way with violence than most thriller directors." -- from David Denby's New Yorker review, dated 10.13.08.

I sat...Read More

Elia Kazan's Viva Zapata (1952) is the only Marlon Brando film that hasn't been decently mastered for DVD. Why? I love and miss this film. It's one of Bud's three golden-era Kazan collaborations, two years before Waterfront and a year after Streetcar. And he's truly great in the part. Ditto Anthony Quinn and Joseph Wiseman. (I love how Wiseman shouts in a crazy manic stream, "Zapata, in thenameofeverythingwefoughtfor don't go!") And Brando's death scene near the finale (i.e., getting shot 112 times) is a classic of its kind.

Guillermo del Toro once told me he won't...Read More

"We wanted to focus on the mind-set of this man. We don't change anything in his true story. Don't have to, because it's a great story. Dickens would do it. Mark Twain would write a great book. This guy who is basically a bum becomes president of the United States." -- W. director Oliver Stone speaking to N.Y. Times writer Richard L. Berke.

I wouldn't have paid attention to this 10.4 SNL clip if Mark Wahlberg hadn't recently complained about it. I think it's mildly funny. The guy doesn't sound like Wahlberg, but he has his speaking style down pat.

Another expression of down-home rural attitudes, this one captured outside of a Sarah Palin rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania yesterday -- 10.11.08. And here's a story about the incident from CBS News' Scott Conroy. And here's a story about a weaselly McCain worker named Jeffrey Frederick in Gainesville, Virginia. (Imagine what it must be like to be that guy.) The racial pus is seeping out more and more, I think, because it's been hitting the rightwing rurals that Obama might actually win and some are starting to freak out, which leads to acting out.

One of the perks of attending college in London is flying cheap to Europe via Ryan Air. So it fits the paradigm that Jett, currently enrolled at Syracuse University's London annex for the fall semester, and his roommate Kyle Burda are off to Prague and Budapest next weekend. I've been to Prague three times -- in '87, '92 and '00 -- so I sent Jett some photos this weekend and suggested some places he might want to visit.

Anyway, this all reminded me of a wild train-trip drama during my first trip there, which happened six...Read More

The reason for Dennis Lim's career-review article about director Abel Ferrara in today's N.Y. Times is -- wait three years for it -- the 10.17 opening of Ferrara's Mary at the Anthology Film Archives.

Abel Ferrara

A compressed, probing, well-ordered drama about eroding values and the lure of mystical transformation, Mary -- which stars Juliette Binoche, Forest Whitaker, Matthew Modine, Heather Graham and Marion Cotillard -- was completed and began to be shown three years ago. No U.S. distributor wanted it. That's not fair or correct in a sense. I wrote during the...Read More

A warning from Gayle Quinnell, 75, of Shakopee, Minnesota. Originally posted by www.theuptake.org.

Two days ago David Poland referred to columnists who'd been fed certain argument points in the Scott Rudin-Harvey Weinstein tussle over The Reader as "typing monkeys." I laughed out loud (which I almost never do, being a LQTM type) because the term has personal meaning.

The term "typing monkeys" refers to a Paleolithic Bob Newhart joke about a theory that "if you take an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of typewriters, sooner or later they would write all the great books." But if this theory were put to a literal test "they'd have to hire guys...you know,...Read More

Atlantic political blogger Marc Ambinder has provided a transcript and mp3 file of an invocation spoken by a pastor named Arnold Conrad this morning in Davenport, Iowa, prior to a speech given by Sen. John McCain. McCain repudiated Conrad's words when he got to the lecturn.

As Ambinder writes, "This pastor sees the election as a religious war. Either that, or Bill Maher paid him to promote Religulous."

Here's the transcript: "I also would also pray, Lord, that your reputation is involved in all that happens between now and November, because there are millions of people around this...Read More

Here's a relatively new Nike commercial directed by David Fincher and shot by Emmanuel Lubezki.

John Lewis and Barack Obama on the deliberate agitating of low-information wingnuts by McCain-Palin at rallies. And McCain's harumphy response.

During the W. junket Oliver Stone announced that there will soon be a website up that explains all the research sources for all scenes in the film, the accuracy of which may soon be questioned in conservative quarters. I suggested to W. screenwriter Stanley Weiser during our interview that the site should be up before opening day to make it easier for journalists working on serious analysis pieces a chance to reference, etc. Anyway, the film opens in six days and there's no trace of the W. fact site. Yet. As Luis Guzman's character says in The Limey, "You could see the sea...Read More

Doug Dowd, 89, is a widely respected political economist, economic historian and lefty political figure from way back. Now semi-retired and living in Bologna, he's the father of Jeff "the Dude" Dowd, the producer's rep and Hollywood mover and shaker. Jeff recently sent me a letter from his dad that does a nice, clean job of explaining the financial pickle we're now in. It's windy but Howard Zinn-like and easy to follow.

If you'd rather not read it and would prefer a summary, it basically explains how the seeds of today's calamity have been germinating in his country's financial system...Read More

"The first and perhaps only great mayor was Greek -- he was -- Pericles of Athens and he lived some 2500 years ago and he said, 'All things good on this earth flow to the city because of the city's greatness.'" That means, in part, beautiful women. Not necessarily the best in terms of character or loyalty, but looks, brains and talent have always been drawn (and will always be drawn) to power and the hustle-bustle.

Electoral Vote projects Obama over McCain, 343 to 184 electoral votes (and 11 unaccounted for). Yahoo's Dashboard foresees Obama taking 330 to MCain's 175. And fivethirtyeight is estimating 384.3 to 189.7, Obama again favored. Without a new Great Depression Obama would have won by a smaller margin, but he would have taken it. 24 days to go and the question everyone's asking is whether a game-changing shoe will drop and tighten things up. I'm 95% sure nothing jarring will happen during the final debate. If it's anything it'll be a big move in -- or from -- forces in the...

I love the loud red and blue colors on the current Lionsgate W. ad banners (they showed up yesterday, replacing the original somber design) and particularly the backwards digital clock. They're vivid, exciting, audacious. You can't say they don't jack up your interest levels on W. I'm genuinely sorry for any crashed browsers out there. (There've been a couple of complaints.) Just to be limber and fluid I use four browsers -- the latest Firefox, Internet Explorer 8, Safari for Windows and Flock (a newbie from the guys behind the old Netscape).

Beverly Hills Chihuahua -- America's favorite hide-away-from-economic-calamity movie -- is #1 again this weekend, projected to take in $19,900,000 by Sunday evening. Quarantine, reportedly the top grosser on Friday, is projected to come in second with $14.3 million. And Ridley Scott's Body of Lies -- a not great but reasonably decent thriller with the usual satellite-camera pizazz and a solid, appealing Leonardo DiCaprio performance -- is apparently a third-place shortfaller with a projected weekend haul of only $12.5 million.

This despite earlier projections of $15 to $17 million, and despite a reported second-place showing yesterday....Read More

MCN's Len Klady has called Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky (Miramax, 10.10) "a miracle." I don't know about that. No, I do know about that. I know how this very well-made movie made me feel. It made me feel like I was in a jail cell with Bobby Sands, but eating really good food.

HGL is a very "together" and confidently made film. It knows itself and what it's up to. Leigh, after all, is one of the finest directors around; he has been for a couple of decades. And as I wrote last month, Sally Hawkins' performance as the cheerful and indefatigable...Read More

I understand and accept that Twilight is going to kill, but why...forget it. I give up. Forget I said anything. Nothing matters. You can't fight City Hall. I'm quitting early today and driving down to see Body of Lies. Report at 11 pm.

Some Vanity Fair editors threw together a list of the 25 best documentaries of all time, and they don't mention the Oscar-winning The Times of Harvey Milk? Which is hands down one of the most emotionally affecting films ever made (i.e., including features). And they blow off Grizzly Man? And Sicko? And Que Viva Mexico? And...forget it. These guys weren't that serious.

The November 4th writing is on the wall, many if not most never-say-die righties are admitting to the likelihood of Barack Obama's election, and John McCain, who surely understands the math, has one decision to make: does he go down slimy or does he go down clean? Because if something terrible happens, God forbid, it's not just McCain who will have blood on his hands -- it'll be the rightie-kook wing of the Republican party

He could decide to stop the inflammatory hate rhetoric and winking at (or certainly doing nothing...Read More

The Envelope's Tom O'Neil has posted another Oscar prediction chart. The participants voted big for Frost Nixon. They include Rolling Stone's Peter Travers, the Daily Beast's Tom Tapp, Richard Rushfield of LATimes.com, The Envelope's Mark Olsen, Variety.com's Jeff Sneider, T.L. Stanley of the Hollywood Reporter, In Contention's Kris Tapley and Star magazine's Marshall Fine.

My Tuesday chat with W. director Oliver Stone at the Four Seasons. And here's the press conference with Stone, Josh Brolin, Scott Glenn, Richard Dreyfuss, Rob Corddry, Thandie Newton, Elizabeth Banks, James Cromwell. There's a bizarre moment at the beginning of the press conference recording when an electronic fire alarm goes off.

W. director Oliver Stone at the Four Seasons -- Tuesday, 10.7.08, 6:15 pm

I just wrote L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas about an interesting terminology matter that's cropped up over the past week or so. It's basically about the 21st Century definition of porn, or rather the expanded cultural "street" definition that doesn't apply to sex. I love chasing new terms and understandings, but I'm not quite 100% on all the wrinkles here so I'm asking for counsel.

"I was amused by and posted a comment from a reader who said that Revolutionary Road "looks to be the Citizen Kane of Gen X marital-strife porn." It may be that a certain party on the DreamWorks marketing...Read More

Film Experience guy Nathaniel R. wrote to say he's glad I liked his redo of the Blob poster, which I posted last week. Also glad to see I'm still championing Things We Lost in the Fire. But he doesn't get where I'm coming from at all with Rachel Getting Married, which he feels is the best of the year thus far.

And I wrote back that while I admired and enjoyed much of Rachel Getting Married, I couldn't accept it as anything other than an expression of director Jonathan Demme 's soul and sensibility and world view. Which is fine...Read More

There's nothing much to add to Patrick Goldstein's story (posted late yesterday afternoon) about powerhouse producer Scott Rudin walking away from The Reader (Weinstein Co., 12.12), the David Hare-scripted WWII drama with Kate Winslet.

I know that Rudin and Reader director Stephen Daldry are allies and amigos, having worked together on The Hours (which was also written by Hare). And that Daldry is pretty much on his own in the rush to finish The Reader in time for the early December release date that Harvey Weinstein has...Read More

Newish one-sheets for a pair of major year-end releases came through yesterday -- the Australian-market poster for Baz Luhrman's Australia (which opens in Oz on Thursday, 11.13, according to the IMDB, preceding its Wednesday,11.26 U.S. release by 13 days) and a fresh image -- less communal, emphasis on Daniel Craig's studliness -- for Ed Zwick's Defiance (Paramount Vantage , 12.12). The latter was exclusively previewed late yesterday afternoon by Kris Tapley's In Contention.

Ed Zwick's Defiance (Paramount Vantage, 12.12); Baz Luhrman's Australia (20th Century Fox, 11.26)

There's something a bit unusual about the...Read More

"Over the past few days I've noticed something worth commenting on," writes Spoutblog's Karina Longworth. "A number of writers, including Keith Uhlich, Michael Joshua Rowin, Nick Schager, Leo Goldsmith and Daniel Kasman have written reviews which incorporate the criticism that Steven Soderbergh's Che is 'dispassionate', that Soderbergh has a 'disposable, inconsequential attitude' towards his subject, that the whole thing amounts to a 'prolonged and wearying exercise in disinterest.'

"I'm sure there are more examples out there, but I think the five of them plus me are enough for a focus group. All six of us not only write for what could...Read More

Alicia Keys and Jack White's "Another Way To Die," a agreeable-sounding throb cut serving as the official Quantum of Solace theme song and, obviously, official music video.

Hollywood Elsewhere is going to shift operations to Manhattan starting on 11.5 -- the day after the election. Six months, maybe longer. Not that this will affect things in any way I can imagine. Same screenings, same folks, same junkets, same action. I just want to be closer to my sons and my mom for a while -- that's all. I'll be parking it in North Bergen, New Jersey -- right across the Hudson, view of Manhattan, a little north of Hoboken, 15 minutes into town by shuttle.

Oliver Stone on W: "The movie's not a smear job. I wouldn't want to spend a year of my life making something that is demeaning to somebody, being malicious. That's the wrong approach to art. It's not a political film, but a Shakespearean one. It's a film about George W. rebelling against his father, doing better than his father, believing that he's stronger than his father, and outdoing his father...and it's about the colossal mistakes he made and the lies he told. In a way it's Oedipal. One can say he did kill the father because he did destroy the legacy, the name....Read More

"The truth is that it is the excesses of McCain's own party from which the country needs to be saved. That McCain is now attempting to seize the mantle of 'change' for himself is profoundly absurd. And that he expects the American people to swallow it is profoundly insulting." -- from Esquire's endorsement of Barack Obama editorial, the first such declaration in the magazine's history. Coming at this stage of the game with Obama heavily favored, the impact isn't what it might have been. If Esquire had run this last June or July, it would have been a different deal.

The Iraq War movie curse will be put to the test this weekend when Ridley Scott's Body of Lies opens on Friday. It cost a lot of money (I've heard $90 to $100 million) and most handicappers will be surprised if it makes more than $17 or $18 million by Sunday night. Even if God smiles down and it nabs $20 million (which won't happen) it would probably top out in the vicinity of $60 or $70 million.

Today's Body of Lies tracking is 78 general, 37 definite interest and 13 first choice, up from last Sunday's tally of 70, 37 and...Read More

So how does John McCain "pull this one out of the pooper?," Stephen Colbert asked MSNBC's Joe Scarborough last night. You have to hand it to Scarborough for not mincing words.

Richard Linklater's Slacker (1991) now playing gratis on Hulu.

Kathryn Bigelow's Hurt Locker is opening in Italy tomorrow, hence the availability of this Italian-language trailer plus four clips. The Italian dubbing takes it down two or three notches. If anyone has an embed code for the English-language version...

HE reader Mike Schaefer writes that "if you didn't see South Park last night, you need to catch the encore tonight at 10 pm. They mercilessly skewer Steven Spielberg and George Lucas for a half-hour. I thought of you all through the episode." Schaefer didn't mention that the show includes graphic dream-sequence footage of Spielberg and Lucas having their anal way with Indiana Jones.

Here's a Comedy Central clip from the show. Here's another one. Not since Deliverance has the viewer been jolted by such a depiction of violation.

I'm way late to the table, but this audio file of a New Yorker Festival discussion last weekend about various election matters is worth a listen, especially as it includes Henrik Herztberg's quote that John McCain is right now "down to stems and seeds." Hosted by Dorothy Wickenden wth Hertzberg, Ryan Lizza and George Packer participating.

"My name is Joel Goodson. I deal in human fulfillment. I grossed over eight thousand dollars in one night. Time of your life...huh, kid?"

My name is Jeffrey Wells, daily column writer, and I've been monitoring Dave Kehr's DVD column for the New York Times for a long time now, and I'm amazed that Kehr, a dedicated proselytizer and torch-carrier for film-dweeb DVDs -- anything pre-1960, Criterion-released, silent, foreign, early talkie, Howard Otway-ish, auteur-stamped (Dassin, Minnelli, Bunuel, Welles, Godard), downtownish, MOMA-ish, Film Forumy -- would write about anything as studio-stamped and mainstreamy as the 25th...Read More

Whenever I have a mild problem with a Kevin Spacey performance (like in 21, say), I replay clips like this and all, temporarily, is forgiven.

Yesterday Blogger Interrupted's Tim Russo posted a video composed of several McCain-Palin supporters sharing their fascinating views before Wednesday afternoon's McCain-Palin rally in Strongsville, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland.

"My camera was rolling for literally seconds before people happily said to me, on camera, that Barack Obama is a terrorist," Russo writes. "If I hadn't spent most of my time at the event inside, waiting for the candidates to show up, I could have gotten dozens of these people on tape."

I don't know if this is any kind of approved one-sheet from Summit Entertainment, but it's a strong, simple conveyance of the tension vibe that permeates Kathryn Bigelow's film through. A marketing friend told me he doesn't think it'll make much money. "Whaddaya mean?," I said. "It's a high-anxiety thriller...it's Aliens." It doesn't matter, he said -- people still won't go to an Iraq movie. The same reason Body of Lies is going to commercially disappoint, he added. I got pissed at that point. "But...but...but...but."

Freddie Jones' famous line from Juggernaut, fans will recall, is "cut the...Read More

I'm told that the deal is sealed for Josh Brolin to star in Jonah Hex, based on the graphic novel and directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (Crank, Game) and to be funded and released by Warner Bros. Brolin's rep is not only denying this but claiming Brolin is "not attached," but a voice is telling me to consider the word of a friend who tells me the deal was locked down last night.

Josh Brolin; Jonah Hex

Jonah Hex is a western comic book anti-hero created by writer John Albano and...Read More

Cedric B. Glover, Mayor of Shreveport, Louisiana, has responded to Josh Brolin's account of the famous altercation that happened at the Stray Cat bar in Shrevesport last July.

I ran Brolin's statement yesterday in a piece that came out of an interview at the W. junket. Glover read it and sent his response by e-mail to Shrevesport Times reporter Alexandyr Kent. Here it is:

"There is an interesting presumption of privilege in Mr. Brolin's comments. He appears to be blurring the line between reality and his on-screen persona. As Southerners we inherently go out of our way to make...Read More

The heat is obviously on for W. right now with the big junket last weekend, the ads everywhere and Lionsgate opening it on something close to 2000 screens on 10.17. But Portland critics aren't feeling it because Lionsgate won't be screening the Oliver Stone biopic for them. In Seattle, yes, but not Portland. And Oregonian critic Shawn Levy , understandably put off, is declaring that he won't run a wire-service review and neither will Portland's two alternative weeklies, Willamette Week and the Portland Mercury.

Lionsgate "blew off three lead stories [in these papers] by not screening it here,"...Read More

The New York "Vulture" guys were right, of course, in reporting yesterday that the first reactions to Oliver Stone's W. -- the reviews by Variety's Todd McCarthy and the Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt -- weren't so hot. But the reaction among junket journalists I spoke to yesterday was mostly approving. Really.

They weren't exactly Redbull-ed by it, but then neither was I. My reaction was one of intrigue, engagement and finally sadness, having been moved by the tragic aura around this poor dope. The film is brisk and mordantly funny as it rushes along, but it's finally a sad story about...Read More

Ruffled feathers at Fox News over an unflattering photo of Sarah Palin on the cover of the current Newsweek. If they were so inclined, could the Newsweek guys have run a more flattering shot of the Republican vp candidate? Certainly. Did they go with this one because certain parties at Newsweek (along with every blue-minded voter in this country) find her despicable? Don't know, can't say.

John McCain is losing and knows it. He feels, in fact, that he's trapped in a kind of jail cell -- a cell of ugly rhetoric and impossible taskdom, given the his poll numbers since the economic meltdown -- that he can't escape from. How do I know this? Because earlier today in Pennsylvania McCain said, "Across this country this is the agenda I have set before, my fellow prisoners." Maybe we're all prisoners in a mortal existential sense, but McCain was clearly revealing the Freudian undertow.

The latest Gallup Poll Daily tracking report, taken from 10.5 to 10.7 (i.e., before last night's debate) shows Barack Obama with a 52% to 41% lead over John McCain. Between McCain's "that one" gaffe, his leaving the studio right after the event (while Barack and Michelle stayed and chatted), and the worldwide economic calamity vibe it really does feel as if the ship has sailed on the 11.4 outcome. The lead may expand a bit in the next poll, given the general consensus that Obama "won" or at least did better last night. The only thing to factor in on top...Read More

Who's keeping the definitive list of whacked movie print critics? The Salt Lake Tribune's Sean Means? He's probably already added Arizona film critic Craig Outhier, but in case he hasn't here's the announcement. Arizona's East Valley Tribune (which publishes affiliate local papers in Scottsdale and Tempe) will cut loose 46 editorial employees come January, Outhier included.

Whenever someone gets it like this I always think of Joe Pesci's death in Goodfellas. "Oh, no!"...thunk, body flop in the linoleum floor, blood spreading out and the old-guy shooter saying with finality, "That's that."

I love this. I certainly respect the speed factor -- it was up two or three hours after the close of last night's debate -- but the art isn't quite right, dammit. The capital "t" and "'08" don't seem proportionately rock 'n' roll. Trying to figure why "amost"-level logos and style designs don't work can drive you nuts. Someone should re-do it and get it right and then the buttons, bumper stickers and whatnot could begin to circulate. For fun, I mean. A keepsake.

Everyone remembers W. costars Josh Brolin and Jeffrey Wright being arrested last July at a bar in Shreveport, Louisiana, along with five other W. crew members who had worked on the just-wrapped Oliver Stone movie. Brolin was maced; Wright was tasered. [Note: Stone told me today the initial discord was due a racist attitude.] Some or all of the W. guys were taken down to the station and had to post bail.

W. star Josh Brolin (slight grin) -- Tuesday, 10.8.08, 5:15 pm

There was said to be a cell-phone video of part of...Read More

Page Six has reported that Clint Eastwood "made clear" his feeling that Sarah Palin won the vice-presidential debate in a public interview he did last Saturday with writer Lillian Ross.

"'One of the candidates the other night seemed more prone to telling the truth than the other," Eastwood said. This was followed by Ross saying, 'I liked her, too!' Eastwood went on to talk about how well 'she' did, although he stopped short of a ringing endorsement.

"The Post's Kyle Smith asked Eastwood, who describes himself as a libertarian, what qualities he believed would be ideal in a presidential candidate. Eastwood...Read More

According to Tom Tapp on the newly launched Daily Beast, Steven Spielberg has said he'd like to start this Lincoln project in "early 2009, because it's Lincoln's 200th anniversary." And this is supposed to make sense to someone? Spielberg has been shilly-shallying on this thing for years but now he wants to "start" working on it -- filming, I presume this means -- because of a birthday in 1809? Which means the movie will come out in 2010 or '11, or a year or two after Abe's 200th anniversary. I have an equally brilliant idea. Why doesn't Spielberg delay shooting until...Read More

"I was able to catch an early screening of Milk in Portland this weekend, and can confirm that it's stellar," a critic friend wrote last night. "It's impassioned and immediate, with beautiful use of light. It looks as if Gus Van Sant shot every major scene around 4:30 pm -- not the 'golden hour' but that especially crisp hour right before.

"I'm not much of a Sean Penn fan --- I generally find his showiness distracting -- but he disappears into Harvey Milk. I think he's a lock for a Best Actor nomination. James Franco is also exceptionally subtle, though I suspect...Read More

Say what you will about the matter-of-fact unfolding of Oliver Stone's W., about the inescapable intrigue coupled with a relatively rote approach, about the mild-mannered, low-style precision that if anything bends over backwards to be fair to our 43rd U.S. President, and about Josh Brolin's performance as George W. Bush being dead perfect but -- and this, I believe, is a crucial distinction -- appropriately hollow. Which means that on some level the performance, like the film itself, leaves you feeling a wee bit flat and wanting more. But wait.

This is part of a deceptive strategy,...Read More

It seems that An American Carol director David Zucker is looking into a possible exhibitor conspiracy to switch tickets and pull other pranks in order to make it seem as if his film isn't doing as well with ticket-buyers as it actually is. Not displaying Carol posters as prominently as they could be, misrepresenting the film's rating (it's PG-13, not R) , not giving it marquee space and so on.

"We have had heard" -- the extra "had" is obviously a typo -- "from numerous people across the country that there has been some ticket fraud...Read More

Two anti-Obama hate epithets were shouted today at rallies for John McCain and Sarah Palin, one calling for his death.

In Albuquerque, New Mexico, McCain "pushed his campaign's most recent line of attack against Obama: that the Democratic nominee represents a relatively unknown risk," reports CNN's Politicker Ticker.

"'All people want to know is: What has this man ever actually accomplished in government?," McCain said. 'What does he plan for America? In short: Who is the real Barack Obama?' Someone in the crowd responded by yelling: "Terrorist!" The crowd roared, and McCain seemed startled, but it is unclear whether he actually...Read More

"I've seen Gus Van Sant's Milk (Focus Features, 11.26)," a director-actor friend wrote about 18 hours ago. "It's really really good. Sean Penn and Emile Hirsch are incredible. It's romantic and sexy and intimate and totally moving." I called the guy three times to try and get a little bit more, but no go. (Or not yet.) I was told today that the running time is just over two hours.

"A blogger is an ignorant, often times uneducated person. They are a member of a socially disadvantageous class of people. A blogger can soon become a legitimate journalist, but they don't abide by any certain rule of grammar. Being a 'blogger' means you don't get paid. It means being on the same evolutionary backporch step as a fetch-happy dog.

"An internet media journalist is not a blogger, but a blogger can be an internet journalist. I am far too intelligent and well educated to be classified as a blogger." -- from a Movieweb rant by an...Read More

Tomas Alfredson's Let The Right One In (Magnolia, 10.24) is easily the most strikingly unusual vampire pic that anyone's seen in I don't know how long. The fact that Overture Films and Spitfire Pictures are developing a U.S. remake with Cloverfield's Matt Reeves on board to direct speaks volumes. It's one of the standout originals of '08.

Let The Right One In director Thomas Anderson -- Monday, 10.6.08, 11:55 am.

I spoke to Alfredson earlier today -- here's the mp3 file

Let The Right One In doesn't compose with the usual brushstrokes. The vampire (Lina...Read More

This morning director John Hancock (Bang The Drum Slowly, Weeds, Prancer) got in touch about a screenplay he's written about Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, based on Ayers' memoirs "Fugitive Days." McCain-Palin has made Ayers is a hot topic over the least couple of days but I was buried at the time, so I hooked him up with Politico's Jeffrey Ressner and here's what resulted.

Bill Ayers young annd old -- former Weatherman activist, currently professor of education at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

Hancock finished Fugitive Days "over the summer...Read More

Perhaps the most dangerous, Obama-threatening paragraph in recent weeks was posted yesterday by New Republic columnist Howard Wolfson (a.k.a., "The Flack"). "Perpetually fretting Democrats will not want to accept it," it begins. "The campaigns themselves can't afford to believe it. Many journalists know it but can't say it. And there will certainly be some twists and turns along the way. But take it to a well capitalized bank: Bill Ayers isn't going to save John McCain. The race is over."

He may well be right, but there are at least five reasons why these words shouldn't be spoken.

One, it ain't...Read More

Mean Mag has a short video of Bill Hader being Bad Lieutenant (the old Abel Ferrara-Harvey Keitel version, not the new Herzog). No video screen because Mean's embed code doesn't adjust to column size -- brilliant!

Arizona Daily Star critic Phil Villarreal reported this morning that An American Carol director David Zucker shot a cheapshot bit aimed at Sen. Ted Kennedy but apparently (and understandably) decided to cut it due to Kennedy's recent struggles with brain cancer.

Zucker "had a Ted Kennedy look-alike offer a ride to someone at a convention," Villareal reports. "When he opened the car door, water spilled out. It's a reference to the 1969 incident in which Kennedy drove off a bridge with Mary Jo Kopechne as his passenger. Kennedy survived but Kopechne died.

Villareal says he "got this tidbit from former Tucsonan Jillian...Read More

It's been a long wait, but Oliver Stone's W. (Lionsgate, 10.17) is finally done and being shown to print press (tonight and tomorrow morning) prior to tomorrow's press junket. This is a very big deal in my world. I'm so keyed up, in fact, that all I've done this morning is surf and research and surf again and call around. Ten stories circling the airport and I haven't brought a single one in for a landing. And it's mainly due to the pre-screening heebie-jeebies.

Josh Brolin in Oliver Stone's W./

I'm presuming -- we're all presuming -- that...Read More

Posted on Slate. Produced, narrated and edited by Andrew Bouve; written by Torie Bosch. A tale without a finish.

In a 10.3 N.Y. Times piece wondering about the commercial potential of Ridley Scott's Body of Lies (Warner Bros., 10.10), John Anderson writes, "To paraphrase the old Vietnam-era bumper sticker: What if they gave a war movie and nobody came?" I sense interest in Scott's war thriller, but not excitement. The real voltage will happen, I predict, with the arrival of Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker. Which Summit Entertainment is afraid to release this year. (Or was the last time I looked.)

A 10.5 AP report states that Sarah Palin's claim that Barack Obama is "palling around with terrorists" is "unsubstantiated" and carries "a racially tinged subtext that John McCain himself may come to regret." That ain't the half of it. If McCain wants to play the guilt-by-association game...

I happened to turn on Susanne Bier's Things We Lost in the Fire on HBO a little while ago, and it got me once again. I'm now more certain than ever that the critics and audiences who turned away from this faintly flawed but deeply moving film really missed the boat. Maybe this'll hit some of them down the road and they'll ask themselves, "What was I thinking?"

I really like this section from my 10.5.07 review:

"There can be no beating around the bush about Benicio Del Toro's performance as Jerry the junkie, a...Read More

The Globe cafe and bookstore in Prague (south of Narodni, on Pstrossova 6) will be showing the second Obama-McCain debate on Wednesday morning, 10.8, at 3 am, with a re-broadcast at 11 am later that morning.

Nikki Finke reported about two hours ago that original DreamWorks partner David Geffen is moving on after 14 years. She got this from an early look at a press release "to be issued about the formal separation of DreamWorks and Paramount," blah blah. It also says that "a decision on who will be the new distributor for DreamWorks 2.0 will be made at the beginning of the week by Steven Spielberg. No suspense about this as everybody's figuring Universal.

Why don't I care more about this? Because I've always chosen to regard the comings and goings of powerful rich guys as...Read More

Sometimes car accidents can be...well, not too bad. Sometimes they can be shrugged off with no cops, no insurance, no injuries, no nothin'. I learned this around 5:30 in the morning on the Hutchinson River Parkway when I was 18 or 19, and I've never forgotten the lesson. Not everything that goes badly needs to be catastrophic.

Three of us had done an all-nighter in Manhattan, wandering around the streets on mescaline, the usual West Village-East Village walk-around, not much cash, soaking up the energy. We drove back to Connecticut around 5 am, the light starting to break. And somewhere around Rye,...Read More

A 10.5 Columbus Dispatch poll of 2262 likely Ohio voters favors Obama over McCain by 49-42. The poll covers 9.24 to 10.2, doesn't reflect the Biden-Palin debate effect, and has a two-point margin of error. And the N.Y. Times is calling Ohio a toss-up state? I'd at least call it a "leaning Obama" light blue state...no?

"Falling far behind in Ohio is a nightmare scenario for McCain," the New Republic's Michael Crowley wrote today. "He almost surely can't win without it. And remember, absentee early voting has already started there. Obama's support among African-Americans in Ohio: 94-2.

"Update: I had...Read More

"It is intellectually slovenly to demean religion based on what goes wrong in secular society," writes N.Y. Press critic Armond White. "Bill Maher's one-sided view never looks deep enough to respect other people's views. Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest hit greatness in its mysteriously ambivalent repentance scene. And Christopher Durang's classic play, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, conveyed the anguish of a lifetime spent in moral contemplation.

"Neither art nor philosophy, Religulous highlights Maher's sourpuss for nearly two hours of flimsy barroom rhetoric. 'Religion must die for man to live,' he summarizes. Maher became a theology...Read More

"The [Vice-Presidential] debate's most telling passage arrived when Joe Biden welled up in recounting his days as a single father after his first wife and one of his children were killed in a car crash. Sarah Palin's perky response -- she immediately started selling McCain as a 'consummate maverick' again -- was as emotionally disconnected as Michael Dukakis's notoriously cerebral answer to the hypothetical 1988 debate question about his wife being 'raped and murdered.' If, as some feel, Obama is cool, Palin is ice cold. She didn't even acknowledge Biden's devastating personal history." -- from Frank Rich's 10.5 N.Y. Times column, titled...

Jason Sudeikis' "Joe Biden" riff about Scranton, Pennsylvania (begins around 6:10) was the single funniest bit in last night's Biden-Palin debate on SNL. Second best line: "God love hm, but he's a raging maniac and a dear friend." In my humble judgment, the most appealing thing Queen Latifah has ever done.

"John McCain's campaign has decided it can't hold back on the serious mudslinging any longer. Sarah Palin tipped their hand today by spinning the David Ayers thing into "palling around with terrorists."

"This is only the beginning. It's going to get much, much worse. McCain has already shown he will trash his reputation for this in small ways, and now the big guns are coming out as it dawns on McCain, Schmidt and the others that the polls are going the wrong way and this is his last shot at the Presidency. We're about to see the...Read More

In some of his films director Jonathan Demme has revealed a profound affection for Caribbean culture and music, and occasionally for African-American characters and subject matter. Examples include his two Haiti docs -- 1988's Haiti: Dreams of Democracy and '03's The Agronomist. His 1998 adaptation of Toni Morrison's Beloved. That Hannibal Lecter-in-the-Bahamas scene at the end of The Silence of the Lambs. The end-credit singing of "Wild Thing" at the close of Demme's Something Wild by Jamaican singer "Sister" Carol East.

Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt

So it feels very Demme-ish that the union that's endlessly celebrated...Read More

Last night I saw Mark Brecke's They Turned Our Desert Into Fire, an intelligent, impassioned, well-sculpted doc about the horrors of the Darfur genocide, which apparently will never be stopped by anyone because it's not in their economic interest to do so. Pic was shown to a modest-sized crowd under the auspices of the Artivists Film Festival at the American Cinematheque's Egyptian.

They Turned Our Desert Into Fire director Mark Brecke (center); his wife stands to his right; friend-supporter Svetlana Cvetko to his left.

How does it compare to Ted Braun's Darfur Now and...Read More

A respected acquaintance with friends in the banking world says he's been told that barring an unlikely miracle, three Hollywood-based distributors will go under before the end of 2009. And no, he wasn't referring to the Weinstein Company. At least two financial specialists have told him this is in the cards. Partly due to huge debt and the near-collapse of the country's financial institutions in recent days, partly due to much of the industry's activity over the last two years having been financed by funny money. I could name the three studio-distributors but it might be more intriguing to ask for speculations.

Barack Obama's chances of being elected on 11.4 look pretty good now, but the worst thing his supporters can do is get cocky or complacent. Then again a little celebrating never hurt anyone. Here's another reminder about an Obama fund-raiser being held on Sunday, October 5th, at Cedering Fox's very cool home from 4 pm to 7 pm. They're looking for $250 a head but they'll take $175 if you're strapped. I'll probably attend.

I absolutely take this video at face value. At first you think "no, can't be real, too appalling"...but it's not a put-on. The obviously desperate Dan Aykroyd is channelling Ed McMahon as he plugs a new luxury vodka that comes in bottles shaped like crystal alien heads. Just like the ones in Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Crystal Skull. Who would care about a hustle like this? I know, I know -- I'd be surprised.

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Willamette Week's Aaron Mesh reported yesterday that director Todd Haynes (I'm Not There) is "in talks to produce a television adaptation of Mildred Pierce, the 1945 Joan Crawford tearjerker. The wrinkle is that Haynes intends to base his film on the original James M. Cain novel instead of the Michael Curtiz film.

"I read the book recently, and it's so different from the Crawford film," Haynes said. No casting ideas, he said. He said he's writing the script with Old Joy screenwriter Jonathan Raymond, and plans to move the...Read More

I'm wondering what the tolerance levels are for that cell-phone-dropped-in-the-gross-toilet scene in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist. I realize this may be a cultural failing on my part, but I have a real problem with body-waste humor -- in movies, in real life, anywhere. Did I just write that? The grossification of movie comedy continues on a downswirl. It used to be that seltzer bottles and custard cream pies were laugh props; today, the brown torpedo.

What would the ghosts of Irving Thalberg, Preston Sturges, Ernst Lubitsch or Billy Wilder...Read More

Yesterday The Envelope's Tom O'Neil asked a few columnists to respond to one of his impassioned topic du jours -- i.e., does Oscar have a grudge against Angelina Jolie? Sucker that I am, I bit. I meant to tap out a brief reply, but it turned into something longer. Happens every time.

Angelina Jolie during filming of Changeling

"She hasn't been nominated since 1999," O'Neil argued. "And last year she won heavy praise for her Mighty Heart performance (receiving Golden Globe and Spirit award noms, among others) but got snubbed by Oscar. Is this the price that Hollywood's...Read More

Which venerated directors who made their bones in the '70s and '80s have more or less become dead meat in terms of landing hired-gun film gigs or getting their pet projects financed?

To hear it from Variety's Anne Thompson, five victims of this MIA syndrome are Lawrence Kasdan (Grand Canyon), Joe Dante (Gremlins), Phil Kaufman (The Right Stuff), Jim McBride (The Big Easy) and Robert Towne (Pre, Personal Best).

The above-named directors were "once reliable makers of modest studio hits, enjoying both popular and critical success," Thompson notes. "But they're rarely tapped for new film projects. And they often hit a...Read More

The first ten minutes of David "Fredo" Zucker's An American Carol (opening today, not screened for critics) is viewable on the Moviefone site.

I'm a little embarassed to admit this, but I laughed three times at the Jack Benny-level Middle Eastern ethnic humor, even if the point is that (I'm going to use an appropriately crude term that fits the level of humor) terrorist towelheads are doofuses.

And while his performance may wear thin over 90 minutes, Robert Davi's terrorist is moderately funny -- it may be the most enjoyable thing I've ever seen him do in a film....Read More

It's my sad duty to report that N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis, always a thoughtful and delicious read, has more or less sided with the "where's the beef?" critics of Steven Soderbergh's Che.

"Divided into two sections -- once called The Argentine and Guerrilla -- the now monosyllabically titled Che tracks the guerrilla leader over mountains and through his tactical successes in Cuba before moving on to his catastrophic bid to bring revolutionary socialism to Bolivia," she writes. "The movie has been described as dialectical, but two parts do not a dialectic make: something...Read More

At a recent New York Film Festival Changeling press conference, director Clint Eastwood announced that he's not on the team for Obama or McCain, despite a general understanding that he's always been a right-of-center type of guy. Which he is, except in a Libertarian vein. (I've never felt negatively toward Libertarians -- I've always respected where they're coming from.)

Eastwood said that first political alignment, which happened in the early '50s, was to become an "Eisenhower Republican." Clint used the exact same term with me during a Bridges of Madison...

The two funniest things in this Fox News video report are (a) the white-haired wife in the rear pushing her husband's hand down when the reporter says "who's for McCain?" and (b) the sound of people in the room (mostly 65-plus) chortling when the reporter says the vote is generally split with a little bit of a lean for Obama.

Corrected: Given Thursday morning's thumbs-up capsule review from a friend of Ridley Scott's Body of Lies, this slam review by Variety's Todd McCarthy came as a bit of a shock.

"Neither the location-based verisimilitude of Ridley Scott's shooting style nor the estimable Middle East expertise of source-material author David Ignatius can disguise Body of Lies as anything other than the contrived phony-baloney it is. Coming on like an inside account of CIA operations against jihad-minded terrorists, pic shows its true colors by featuring a shootout, chase or big explosion every 10 minutes or so, on its way to a climax...Read More

Joe Biden won last night's debate with a steadier presence and much more explicit and comprehensive explanations compared to what Sarah Palin had to say (although form-wise she handled herself half-decently). But he also made the strongest emotional impression with his story about taking care of two boys alone and essentially conveying his understanding of how life can hurt badly at times and what it's like to struggle with a limited income. That was it, that was "the moment."

"I last saw him a few months ago. He'd been in and out of the hospital. I knew what the deal was, and he knew what the deal was, and we didn't talk about it. We talked about what was on our minds: the election, politics, what needed to be done. Ours was a relationship that didn't need a lot of words.

"Mostly I'll miss the fun we had. We played lots of pranks on each other. I used to race cars, and after he took this rare Porsche I owned for a drive, he began to get into racing. He had incredible...Read More

I have to leave for a black-tie dinner party honoring Appaloosa director Ed Harris in Santa Barbara. Have to be there in time to watch the Biden-Palin debate at 6 pm. Debates are always hyped by the news media, and they almost always disappoint. Biden is going to try to play it genteel and deft; Palin obviously wants to appear a little more secure and knowledgable than she did with Katie Couric the other day. I don't think much is going to happen. I would love to be wrong.

"We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major crisis of policy. So much of the Presidency, as they say, is a matter of waking up in the morning and trying to drink from a fire hydrant. In the quiet of the Oval Office, the noise of immediate demands can be deafening. And yet Barack Obama has precisely the temperament to shut out the noise when necessary and concentrate on the essential.

"The election of Obama -- a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of...Read More

The gist of John Horn's 10.2 L.A. Times piece about John Madden's Killshot, the release of which has been delayed "at least" five times by the Weinstein Co., is that it will finally come out in January 2009. After sitting around for three years. Why don't they show it to guys like me, just to get a reaction and see what's what?

Diane Lane, Thomas Jane in Killshot

The adaptation of Elmore Leonard's late '80s novel stars Thomas Jane, Diane Lane, Mickey Rourke and Joseph Gordon Levitt. Apparently Harvey believes that the heat generated by Rourke's highly...Read More

If and when the proposed $700-billion bailout is approved by the House tomorrow, Hollywood will receive "tax breaks worth more than $470 million over the next decade for movie and TV producers that shoot in the U.S.," L.A. Times reporter Richard Verrier wrote last night.

"That's not a lot of money, given that the average studio movie costs $106.6 million to make and market, but it could keep some low-budget productions -- and jobs -- from going offshore.

"Hollywood has long sought measures to curb so-called runaway production, which it blames for causing thousands of job losses in Southern California as filmmakers...Read More

On 10.1 L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein ran his annual piece about how the Oscar handicapping racket is, as he put it yesterday, "wreaking havoc on high-end movies." He also said that "the film industry's obsession with chasing Oscar glory has created an insupportable financial model for quality films and quality filmmakers."

Maybe, maybe not. Half of me agrees but the other half recognizes that Oscar season is gravy time for sites like mine so why should I bite the hand? Why, now that you mention it, is Patrick biting the hand after...Read More

This College Humor-produced trailer, an impression of a Disney film about an Alaskan hockey mom who becomes Vice President "in the wackiest family comedy of the year," went up on 9.25. But the embedded YouTube version only became available today. The piece was inspired by Matt Damon's quote about Sarah Palin's candidacy being something out of a Disney film, or words to that effect.

I don't own Con Air (why is that?) but I've always loved the double-tracking thing it has going on -- a blend of ultra-slick action-movie chops along with an attitude of subversive genre parody. I've said before that Con Air is primarily a wickedly funny and (at times) almost surreal conceptual comedy, and secondarily an action thriller. Or is it the other way around?

I remember calling it "Hellzapoppin" after I first saw it. A movie that plays the action thriller game -- it's a very handsomely shot and well-edited thing -- while mocking and toying...Read More

"Just saw Body of Lies," an industry friend wrote last night. "I thought it was a really terrific, smart studio movie for grownups. Very astutely directed with a strong central performance from Leonardo DiCaprio (albeit with unfortunate facial hair - though perhaps needed because he still has serious babyface). Russell Crowe is serviceable as the fatty neo-con who isn't actually the main villain, which is what I was expecting. Very much the sum of its parts - great script, great director, great cast. Bullseye."

"I was at a Best Buy the other day trying to pick up a double disc of Citizen Kane on sale for $10, but I couldn't find it. So I asked the girl in the department for help and she said she'd never heard of Citizen Kane or Orson Welles. I almost asked her if she was retarded. Instead I wept openly and asked her to just point me to the latest Kate Hudson crapfest. Full Disclosure: I am 39, and she said she was 24." -- posted at 5:09 pm by HE reader Buck Swope.

The enthusiasm that MGM is showing for Robert Weide's How To Lose Friends and Alienate People (Friday, 10.3) is clearly not what it could be. A friend says he hasn't seen any TV ads, but the main indicator for me is that 42 West, the agency hired to screen HTLFAIP for MGM, has barely screened it. On top of which I never received an invite for last Monday afternoon's screening at 4 pm. And when I wrote asking why earlier today, it took them six or seven hours to reply.

There was one other L.A. screening...Read More

Leonardo DiCaprio, Forest Whitaker, Benicio del Toro, Sarah Silverman, Dustin Hoffman, Ellen DeGeneres, Jonah Hill, Jamie Foxx, etc., have made a plea to the self-absorbed sociopaths out there who haven't yet registered to vote. That would mainly be, of course, the under-25 hoo-hoos, also known as the Generation of Shame. I love how Leo, Benicio and friends are clearly talking down to this crowd. As if it's clearly understood that these people are infants who can't see one centimeter beyond their little personal dramas, attitudes, whims and appetites.

Toward the...Read More

"I mean, if I knew it would take me 15 years to get back in the saddle and work again because of the way I handled things, I really would have handled things differently. I just didn't have the tools. I'm doing things differently this time around -- understanding what it is to be a professional, be responsible and to be consistent. Those are things that weren't in my vocabulary back then. Change for me didn't come easy; I didn't wanna change until I lost everything, until I realized that you better change, or, you know, blow your fucking brains out. Either you...Read More

How Rhodes Scholar-ish is Kirsten Dunst? I've always suspected she's not that intellectually agile but I've never cared enough to get into it. I've never seen any indications of same. But now I have, courtesy of MTV.com's Josh Horowitz. Unless, you know, Dunst was putting him on. But I doubt it.

Horowitz recently interviewed Dunst and her How to Lose Friends and Influence People costar Simon Pegg, and decided at one point to digress into a minor two-question Star Trek quiz. Pegg, an ostensibly nerdy type, blew his answer and then Horowitz turned to Dunst, who explained before answering that...Read More

Jim Sheridan's Brothers, which I've been very much looking forward to, being a fan of Jim's work and Susanne Bier's original 2004 film, is being bumped into '09 -- possibly a late summer release, or possibly one in the fall. MGM had planned it to open it on 12.4.08, but now they'll be taking it to next May's Cannes Film Festival. Draw whatever conclusions you want, but the implication is that it's not a quality issue as much as a concern that it might suffer against the heavy year-end competition.

Brothers director Jim Sheridan, costar Jake Gyllenhaal

This...Read More

New Quinnipiac University surveys taken last weekend and concluded on Monday show Barack Obama leading John McCain in Florida 51 percent to 43 percent, in Ohio 50 percent to 42 percent and in Pennsylvania 54 percent to 39 percent. These three states are the game. if these figures hold, Obama is as good as in.

QU polls conducted before and after the debate show post-debate gains in all three states. In Florida, Obama was up 49 to 43 pre-debate and 51 to 43 post-debate. In Ohio, Obama was up 49 to 42 pre-debate and 50 to 42 percent post-debate. In Pennsylvania Obama...Read More

"We're all connected. As others have pointed out, you can't save Main Street and punish Wall Street anymore than you can be in a rowboat with someone you hate and think that the leak in the bottom of the boat at his end is not going to sink you, too. The world really is flat. We're all connected. Decoupling is pure fantasy." -- -- From a 9.30 column by N.Y. Times guy Thomas L. Freidman.

Friedman also said, "I totally understand the resentment against Wall Street titans bringing home $60...Read More