There are no particulars about the "tragic" skiing accident suffered by 45 year-old actress Natasha Richardson, and which has reportedly resulted in a "traumatic brain injury."

Richardson is currently at the Hopital du Sacre-Coeur de Montreal. She was initially being taken to Hospitalier Laurentien, which is close to Quebec's Mont Tremblant ski resort where the accident occured. Here's hoping for her survival and recovery. Support and condolences offered to husband Liam Neeson and their kids.

Duplicity, which I saw again at last night's Zeigfeld premiere, goes down much more easily and understandably the second time. My ex-wife Maggie, who saw it with me, said that with one relatively minor exception she found it engrossing and unconfounding. Julia Roberts more or less looks her age in the film, which is fine, but she was luminous last night, especially with the blonded hair and a slightly trimmer physique. Director-writer Tony Gilroy offered some gracious and spirited pre-screening remarks, thanking everyone but particularly (i.e., lastly) his wife.

Julia Roberts at last night's Duplicity premiere at Manhattan's...

Whatever Sam Mendes' Away We Go (Focus Features, 6.5) actually is, this just-posted trailer sells the impression of a wise and witty upscale family comedy with a truth-sadness undercurrent. It's about an expectant couple looking for the ideal place to live. My only concern is the casting of The Office's John Krasinki and SNL's Maya Rudolph in the leads. This will sound odd, but as I watched I was saying to myself, "They look too much like real people." I didn't even recognize Krasinki with the beard. Not that he'd be Mr. Charisma without it.

Read More

In my passing-of-Ron Silver piece two days ago I said that "history will not judge him kindly" for becoming a 9/11 Republican and supporting Bush Cheney in '04. But the final graph in Bruce Weber's N.Y. Times obituary, which appeared in yesterday's print edition, amends this assessment somewhat. Silver's brother Mitchell tells Weber that the actor voted for Barack Obama last fall.

Mitchell Silver, who lives in Newton, Mass., said that his 62 year-old brother's "acting awed them, [but] his conservative streak confounded them." His quote: "Ron's politics, as far as I know, were not shared by anyone he knew,...Read More

"An ultra-sophisticated love story between two corporate spies with pronounced mutual trust issues, Duplicity is a brainy, non-violent Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the film Intolerable Cruelty wanted to be, a Trouble in Paradise for modern times," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy.

"Smart, droll and dazzling to look at and listen to, writer-director Tony Gilroy's effervescent, intricately plotted puzzler proves in every way superior to his 2007 success Michael Clayton. The twisty, time jumping narrative forces viewers to keep on their toes, and it could well be that Duplicity is too smart for its own good as far as the popcorn masses are concerned....Read More

The Weinstein Company has bought US rights to Sam Taylor Wood's Nowhere Boy, the John Lennon teenaged-years biopic that began principal photography on March 8th. (Latin American and German rights were also purchased.) I've read Matt Greenhalgh's screenplay, and the scruffy British dialogue sounds as true and authentic as it does in Greenhalgh's script of Control, which, for me, is as good as it gets.

I posted a piece in late January that said "if you take out the born-during-the- German-blitz scene in 1940, the story spans from 1955 to 1960 -- years...Read More

After decades of absence, a first-rate DVD of Andrzej Wajda's Danton ('83) is due from the Criterion Co. on 3.31, or nearly two weeks hence. I've seen this superbly composed historical drama only once, and have never forgotten the vivid writing, the bold performances (particularly Gerard Depardieu's as Georges Danton) and the mesmerizing recreations of early 1790s Paris.

$35 friggin' dollars for a standard DVD, even if it does contain two discs with many bells and whistles? It gave me pause, I must admit. But this is an epic film, and the transfer quality...Read More

What it's like to have your head chopped off? What would you feel and think? Would there be anxiety and terror or...? I've read that the head lives for one to two minutes before expiring so you can presumably see, hear, smell and even taste things before blacking out.

I remember being stoned one night and imagining a conversation between myself and a kind of spectral administrator of in-between states just after my head and body had been separated. "I've got a couple of minutes left and I want to be both," I told the administrator. "I've felt the organic totality of...Read More

Tony Gilroy's Duplicity "is a breathlessly enjoyable mind-game, the kind of movie that uses romantic comedy as both leavening and misdirection from its true intent, even as it revels in the heated interaction between its two leads," critic Marshall Fine posted this morning.

"Built like a devilish puzzle - with emotional variables that alternately underline and undermine the logic of the solution - Duplicity is giddy fun, something that's been in short supply at the movies. While there have been other jigsaw movies that keep your brain racing as you attempt to connect the disparate pieces, movies that played with time-structure such...Read More

Imagine yourself hanging out in a faintly smelly blue-collar saloon in Austin, Texas (i.e., in a less enlightened section of town), and one of the guys at the bar asks what you thought of Sacha Baron Cohen's Bruno, or rather the preview footage you've just seen at a South by Southwest event. And you say to him without skipping a beat that it's "wildly, paralytically funny and brilliantly transgressive."

The beer boys wouldn't like that, trust me. If I was a chunky Austin guy who drove a forklift at a soft-drink company and some smartypants in...Read More

I've written the Twitter tech support guys twice over the past week about my password not being accepted on the iPhone despite changing it on the computer. Nothing back. Dicks.

Another sad aspect of Ron Silver's passing, as noted this morning by Hollywood & Fine's Marshall Fine, is that he would have been a perfect choice to play Bernie Madoff if someone had managed to finance a feature or a made-for-HBO thing. Silver, 62 when he passed, would have been the right age. He could have easily been made up to resemble Madoff, he shares Madoff's tribal heritage, and, of course, he was a first-rate actor.

Ron Silver (l.), Bernard Madoff (r.)

I think my Madoff Escapes and Cavorts With Hookers Around The...Read More

In today's "First Read" column on msnbc.com, it says that President Obama "has a late-night date with Jay Leno on Thursday when he travels to California. Just asking: when was the last time a sitting president did the Tonight Show?" There's no mention of the drop-by on the show's calendar.

Actor Ron Silver, whose immense talent and fine, irony-tinged performances (Reversal of Fortune, The West Wing, the original B'way production of Speed The Plow) were diminished and compromised in the public mind when he became a "9/11 Republican" and gave his earnest support to one of the most destructive and dysfunctional Presidents in U.S. history, died Sunday morning from esophegal cancer.

The 62 year-old actor had been fighting the disease for two years. Too soon, tragic news, sorry to hear it, condolences to his family and friends. I loved Silver's acting and would like to forgive him for giving a speech...Read More

The prevailing character trait in Christine Jeffs' Sunshine Cleaning is a curious obsession on the part of Rose Lorkowski (Amy Adams) that she needs to look out for her wayward younger sister Norah (Emily Blunt). If you can relate to this on some level, the film might work for you. But it never did for me. It felt fake, or certainly strained.

I'll always be ready to help my younger brother if he's in a corner, but never to the point of a week-in, week-out constancy that would interfere with my own progress. I have my own...Read More

"Let me simply say, I feel like the old Alan Sillitoe short story 'The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner'...and that's what this is, by the way -- a long-distance run." -- Former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, speaking on 1.8.09.

Available on Amazon UK on 3.24.

The ruins of Detroit on Time's site and also the French reliques site: An HE reader called "x" asks, "Why not have Hollywood film all of its post-apocalyptic movies there? It would make money for Detroit, and it's got to be even cheaper than filming in Canada. You don't even have to build the sets before you burn them."

Nobody has a softer spot for traditional Irish music than myself, so I think I know where I'll be on Tuesday evening. Manhattan's St. Patrick's Day parade has always been a must-to-avoid because of the thousands of drunken pigs who flock to Fifth Avenue; ditto most of the city's Irish bars. But the Half King (where I had lunch last week) might be a different vibe. It's an old-fashioned place with plain wooden tables and pub food. My sense is that it doesn't cater to the ESPN crowd.

When I was married I visited...Read More

With St. Patrick's Day two days away, it seems like the right time to explain a phobia that I've been grappling with for years. I hate the name Danny. It's a cruel and idiotic prejudice, obviously, but there it is. I just hate the damn sound of it. Anyone or anything called Danny is therefore diminished if not discredited. Sorry.

Dan and Daniel are cool, but Danny is a cheap 1950s Irish punk street name. I've always disliked the Irish ballad "Danny Boy" because of the odious aroma in the title. If Daniel Stern, Dan Futterman or Dan Aykroyd had begun their careers...Read More

Those connected with or working for Julia Roberts and her about-to-open film, Duplicity, have to be grinding their teeth about a nip-nip snark piece by Newsweek's Ramin Setoodeh that asks, "Is Roberts over?" They have to be especially chagrined about such a piece appearing a day before the big New York premiere of Tony Gilroy's deceptive brain-tickler and six days before it opens nationwide.

The answer, as I've written, is yes, time moves on but no, Roberts isn't "over." She is, however, in her Bette Davis/All About Eve phase now, which...Read More

It's commonly known that Clint Eastwood's The Human Factor, which Warner Bros. (a.k.a., the "Death Star") will release next December, is based upon John Carlin's "Playing The Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation." Yesterday's news is that the first half-decent set photos turned up on TheBadand the Ugly. All shot from a distance, no close-ups, fuzzy.

Matt Damon, Clint Eastwood on the South African set of The Human Factor (Warner Bros., 12.09). This and other pics were posted yesterday afternoon by TheBadand the Ugly. I have the script on PDF,...

Unless he somehow manages to commit suicide, Bernie Madoff is going to die in jail. That seems appropriate to me, but I'm wondering why he didn't just run for it when he had the chance. He knew the Feds were on his tail and it was just a matter of time. I'm asking because something in me can't help but sympathize with a caged bird, especially when he/she is looking at life in the slammer.

If I was Madoff I would have prepared for my escape and disappearance during my ponzi-scam days. All criminals need to face the fact that sooner or later...Read More

John Hamburg's I Love You, Man "cranks out the kind of lowball humor that makes you gag on your own laughs," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy. "Ever alert for opportunities to drop dirty bombs -- and compelled to repeat every below-the-belt joke at least one time too many -- pic never surmounts a deeply lame central premise that makes most of the action seem fraudulent and thoroughly unnecessary.

I Love You Man's Jason Segel, Paul Rudd

"[It] is propelled by the perplexing notion that a young man isn't properly prepared for marriage or life in general unless he...Read More

Everyone expected Watchmen to experience a steep revenue drop (40% or 50%) on its second weekend. Hardcore geeks contributed $55 million and change last weekend, but the mainstream crowd wasn't expected to follow suit. But a drop of 71%, as reported by Big Hollywood's Steve Mason, is devastating. And a 73% drop, as reported by Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke, is obviously worse news.

The weekend's #1 film is Disney's family-friendly Race To With Mountain, which will probably earn $24 million and change.

"In the last couple of years the industrious Joe Swanberg has managed to turn himself into an identifiable independent name despite having evinced little initial filmmaking talent," N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis has written. "Things look better, however, in his latest effort, Alexander the Last, a 72-minute (including credits) series of loosely connected scenes.

"For starters, he finally has a real actress to look at and undress, the charming, vibrantly alive Jess Weixler, who plays Alex, a rather less appealing actress struggling with the divide between life and art. As important, Alexander comes with an imprimatur...Read More

I've been waiting to see Gerald Peary and Amy Geller's For The Love of Movies: A History of American Film Criticism for a long time. It's been in the works for years. So many, in fact, that one of the talking heads appears as a young, lean-faced guy with a shock of dark hair (in footage that was shot around 2000) and as an older, fuller-faced guy with less hair. Happens to all of us, but this may be a first. Same interview subject, two biological incarnations.

Thanks to HE reader "bmcintire."

Speaking last night at the School of Visual Arts, Tyson director James Toback told a story about Focus Features' chief James Schamus. He was the first Hollywood hotshot to be offered the film at Cannes, but he passed. Flash forward a few months when Toback's agent calls Toback with the news that Schamus had told a mutual friend that he not only loved Tyson, but said it was by far the best thing he'd seen at Cannes.

Toback called Schamus right away. "From what I'm told you were at a Tyson screening in Cannes, and you passed," he said. "But now I'm...Read More

I spoke with Alexander The Last director Joe Swanberg a day or so ago. It had to be a phoner because he lives in Chicago. The chat lasted 18 minutes. He agreed that he's less a story-driven director than a framer and coaxer of emotions, personalities, situations, moods. Either films of this type get you or they don't. I made it clear last Tuesday I'm a sucker.

Joe Swanberg during filming of Alexander the Last

Alexander the Last will be available on IFC Movies on Demand, concurrent with its screening at South by Southwest....Read More

Conservative-minded actor Gary Sinise had made a support-the-troops Iraq War doc called Brothers at War. Who's seen it? Is there an on-demand plan of some kind in the works? A filmmaker friend says Sinise's film has "been suspiciously absent from festivals and just started a small run starting in military communities."

Why not air Brothers at War on HBO, which has attracted huge numbers by playing the red-state card with recent airings of Ross Katz 's Taking Chance? As I've noted once or twice before, Taking Chance's success is due to the way it...Read More

The guy who lives upstairs is so fat that you can't just hear the stairs and floor beams buckling and groaning under his weight -- you can feel the whole building doing this. It's very unsettling. Imagine a Vietnamese water buffalo walking around on its hind legs, and sensing the tonnage as it trudges up and down a sagging staircase.

Truth be told, the building I'm staying in (which is probably 60 or 70 years old) was built from second-rate materials. It's not the age of it. I've stayed in apartment buildings in Paris and Rome that are 150 or 200 years...Read More

"Once he had Mad Money's Jim Cramer at his desk, Jon Stewart showed...embarrassing clips from a 2006 interview with the website [Cramer] founded, TheStreet.com, in which he too candidly explained how hedge fund market manipulation really works.When Cramer explained, 'There is market for it and you give it to them,' Stewart stared at him in disbelief, exclaiming. 'There's a market for cocaine and hookers!'" -- from Alessandra Stanley's 3.13 N.Y. Times story about the 3.12 Daily Show interrogation.

"I know Jim Cramer a little," Andrew Sullivan...Read More

Yesterday the New Yorker's Richard Brody lamented the recent departure of Film Society of Lincoln Center's film programmer Kent Jones while offering a possible reason for his having resigned (i.e., left for reasons not of his own making).

(l.) Recently departed Lincoln Center film programmer and Film Comment contributor Kent Jones; (r.) FSLC exec director Mara Manus.

"I haven't heard from [Jones] recently and don't know the specifics of the situation, his departure is emblematic of a greater problem at the Film Society," Brody wrote.

"In December, the Film Society presented 'Spanish...Read More

HE reader Eddie Garcia-Rivera attended the Joaquin Phoenix performance Wednesday night (i.e., Thursday morning around 2 am) at Miami Beach's LIV nightclub, inside the Fountainebleau hotel. He filmed the entire "performance" and apparent fight that ensued. The action starts around 2:48.

I love the way a big clump of hair is sticking out of the back of Phoenix's head. The only way you can get hair to do this (if it's dense and curly, that is) is to sleep on it for...

I became convinced after watching Joe Swanberg's Alexander The Last that star Jess Weixler would be a near-perfect choice to play the Susan George part in Rod Lurie's reimagjned remake of Straw Dogs. Weixler puts out waves of soulfulness and emotional connectivity in Swanberg's film, and I have an idea that she'd deliver something deeper and more layered (in a whole-hearted feminine sense) than what George and director Sam Peckinpah came up with for the 1971 original.

As long as we're on the subject, are there any ideas as to who else could handle George's...Read More

God of Carnage? Fierce, hilarious, appalling -- a very dark dysfunctional farce. It's very funny, outrageously so at times. Sharply written and acted with dazzle and finesse by four crackling leads -- Jeff Daniels, Marcia Gay Harden, James Gandolfini and Hope Davis. Who play suburban couples meeting to discuss a violent altercation between their respective sons. You may go in knowing what's to come, but the anger, disdain and self-disgust that gradually push through are snarlier and more manic than you might expect.

And if you have any rot or mildew or serpents festering inside, a...Read More

Conor McPherson's The Eclipse, a kind of supernatural, death-dodging love story with Ciarin Hinds and Aidan Quinn, appears to be one of the more intriguing Tribeca Film Festival selections. It'll be shown next month as one of the World Narrative Feature competitors. I was alerted when an HE reader pointed out McPherson's illustrious track record as a playwright -- The Weir, The Good Thief, This Lime Tree Bower, Dublin Carol, etc.

Based on a story by Billy Roche, who co-adapted with McPherson, The Eclipse is about a widower (Hinds), who befriends Lena (Defiance and High...Read More

In order to address financial concerns, a corporate bitch or bastard is hired to run a family-type organization. He/she soon institutes a reign of terror that would give the ghost of Robespierre pause. Employee after loyal employee is isolated, accused and sent to the guillotine. Those that are spared are focused on two things -- shuddering and deciding whether or not to buy a pack of Depends.

Mara Manus, executive director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center

We've all seen this movie before, and the melodrama that's been going on at the Film Society of...Read More

"While griping about unappreciative bosses has been rampant among William Morris underlings, one of Endeavor's founding partners, Tom Strickler, has cultivated internal good will with gifts as elaborate as reconstructive jaw surgery for one employee and an Argentine polo pony for another." -- from a 3.11.09 N.Y. Times story about a possible Endeavor-William Morris Agency merger, reported by Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply.

Only saps believe you can somehow discern or predict the future. Because saps are especially afraid of what the future might bring, living as they do with a kind of suppressed undercurrent of anxiety. These are the same intrepid souls who believe in numerology, the biblical End of Days and the general theology of supermarket reading. It follows that Knowing (Summit, 3.20) is made for them -- i.e., folks who are under-educated and eat the wrong foods and have problematic taste in clothing.

And yet --...Read More

The money footage starts at 3:50: "Are you proud of the economic record of George W. Bush?"

Question: What film is the above line of dialogue -- the full line is "Pound them, Charlie...pound them" -- taken from?

"DreamWorks' big-budget bet, Monsters vs. Aliens, has faced one hurdle after another -- including a whipping from the blogosphere over its extravagant Superbowl ad in January," The Wrap's Carolyn Guardina reports. "But now comes the worst news yet: Fewer than half of the theaters that were supposed to be ready for digital 3D projection will be ready by the movie's release on March 27.

"DreamWorks announced a year ago that it expected 5,000 theaters to be 3D-ready for a wide 3D opening of Monsters. But the economic recession has further delayed the already-long-delayed conversion of movie...Read More

Universal will open Sam Raimi's latest film, which is about the joy of making heartless bank officers suffer, on May 29th. Alison Lohman's character is apparently less heartless than her boss.

The best part of Watchmen, hands down. Posted today by JoBlo.com

Among the out -of-competition 2009 Tribeca Film Festival highlights (for me)...

* Don McKay (director-writer: Jake Goldberger). Thomas Haden Church as a guy returning to his hometown at the bidding of his cancer-stricken ex-girlfriend (Elisabeth Shue). Costarring Melissa Leo.

* An Englishman in New York," (director, Richard Laxton -- screenwriter, Brian Fillis). John Hurt revisiting real-life writer, actor, and gay icon Quentin Crisp. Focusing on the 72-year-old star's move to New York in 1981, and the fallout from a reckless comment about the burgeoning AIDS epidemic.Costarring Cynthia Nixon, Jonathan Tucker, Swoosie Kurtz.

* Serious Moonlight (director, Cheryl Hines -- screenwriter, Adrienne Shelly)...Read More

Whenever a guy goes postal, nobody who knew him in any capacity ever cops to noticing anything askew about his manner. (Has a woman ever gone on a shooting rampage?) The guy is invariably described as nice, quiet, considerate, well liked, etc. Because admitting to having noticed even the faintest sense of turbulence or unrest in a shooter-to-be would mean that the observer might be regarded as being very slightly responsible for the carnage. It's safer to say you detected nothing.

Speaking as a full-fledged workaholic, I'm guilty of all of these bad workaholic habits except for the drinking and the fast food. Okay, I still go to Burger King now and then. But since living in NYC I've done a lot more walking

Holllywood & Fine's Marshall Fine has creamed twice over Mary Stuart Masterson's The Cake Eaters, two days in a row -- yesterday and today. It opens Friday in an assortment of indiewood theatres.

It's my fault that I haven't gotten to this. I was invited by a PMK/HBH publicist pal in Los Angeles, but I didn't try to reach the local NYC rep and she hasn't tried to reach me. Hello, Lauren Auslander! In fact, hello to all the NYC publicists whom I'm still having to chase in order to go to...Read More

There will come a day when all the online, newspaper and magazine editors who've insisted on capitalizing the "i" in internet for the last 15 years or so will try to evade responsibility for this. They'll look colleagues in the face as they deny supporting it -- "Who, me?" -- when in fact they're now enforcing one of the most outrageous and illogical style charades in editorial history.

The internet is a network of technological realms and pathways that enable the exchange of digitally-coded information. Just as the nation's highway system is a network of elevated and land-topped concrete roadways that enable...Read More

35 years and six months ago, Roger Ebert wrote a perceptive, positive and fair-minded review of John Flynn's The Outfit -- a crafty, brass-tacks crime pic that I mention every so often in hopes of goading Warner Home Video into putting it out on DVD. My most recent mention was spurred by the recent death of Donald Westlake, who wrote the book the film is based upon.

Ebert called it "a classy action picture, very well directed and acted, about a gangster's revenge on the mob for the death of his...Read More

When Geoff Gilmore left his Sundance Film Festival director gig on 2.17 for the shape-shifting, brand-expanding Tribeca Film Festival, I assumed right away that longtime Sundance program honcho John Cooper would take over. But it took Robert Redford and the Sundance board three weeks to come to the same conclusion. Variety's Dade Hayes has reported that Cooper faced competition from fellow Sundance vet Trevor Groth for the top job.

A link to a 125-page transcript of a five-day-long conversation between Steven Spielberg, George Lucas (pre-demonic) and Lawrence Kasdan giving birth to Raiders of the Lost Ark. The talks happened between 1.23.78 and 1.27.78. What was I doing back then? Trying to pay the rent on my first New York apartment.

I wanted to see The Robe on Blu-ray because I wanted to really see what the very first CinemaScope film looked like in the finest technical sense. I'd seen it once before and knew, of course, that it's not much of a drama. So getting the Blu-ray was strictly a visual looksee deal, and that's what I got. Or all I got, for the most part.

Martyrobe from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo

I've never read a positive critical re-assessment piece...Read More

I've watched two South by Southwest movies on disc today (on top of banging out that piece called "Things Change"). I'll let the first one go but Joe Swanberg's Alexander The Last, which will show simultaneously at SXSW and on IFC Demand on Saturday, 3.14, is the shit. Seriously. I knew something a cut above was underway within two or three minutes.

Jess Weixler

Talk about your platinum calling-card movie for Swanberg and his two lead actresses, Jess Weixler (who won a 2007 Sundance Special Jury prize for her performance in Teeth) and Read More

In any real-life scenario, saying "I love you" to someone is a very dicey thing. It's not a rumor -- "show it, don't say it" does tend to work. I know that an actor blurting this out to another in a movie is risk times infinity. One reason these words don't appear that much in screenplays is that "I love you" can't be confessed by just anyone. And I'm not saying that only great actors can say it and make it stick. The key thing is a mixture of open-heartedness and bravery and a kind of steadiness of the soul, and I'm not...Read More

"Steve Carell's next film would appear to be definitely Date Night with Tina Fey," a guy I know confides. "Their respective windows on both their series necessitates it." One look at this and it seems to be primarily about the pairing of names, and secondarily about Josh Klausner's script. (His last two gigs were the third and fourth Shrek films.) The other concern is that it's being directed by Shawn Levy, which means a certain been-there-eighteen-times-before quality.

"You're about twenty-five years old, and you're no more than, shall we say, intermittently employed, so you spend a great deal of time talking with friends about trivial things or about love affairs that ended or never quite happened; and sometimes, if you're lucky, you fall into bed, or almost fall into bed and just enjoy the flirtation, with someone in the group.

"This chatty sitting around, with sex occasionally added, is not the sole subject of 'mumblecore,' a recent genre of micro-budget independent movies, but it's a dominant one. Mumblecore movies are...Read More

"In finding his voice as a comedy director with the making of Bringing Up Baby, Howard Hawks set up archetypes of theme and performance that are still valid," writes New Yorker Richard Brody. His article is a nod to MOMA screenings of this 1938 classic from 3.11 to 3.13.

"He turned Cary Grant into an extension of his own intellectual irony, an absent-minded professor who seems lost in thought but awaits the chance to unleash his inner leopard. He reinvented Katharine Hepburn as a sexually...Read More

(l. to r.) Tribeca Film Festival's Genna Terranova, 42 West partner Cynthia Swartz and IFC Films honcho Ryan Werner at last night's party for a "Focus on IFC Films" program at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (3.6 to 3.12).

Speaking as a former stage actor (seriously -- I acted in two plays in the mid '70s), it feels good and creates a sense fo comfort to be able to project in a raspy voice if you can summon one that sounds right. Because raspy is a macho bit that keeps the audience from peering into your inner child.

History will always regard the finest Movieline era as the one that transpired in the late '80s and '90s with that very knowing, vaguely snooty and dismissive, sell-that-horseshit-somewhere-else incarnation that came to pass under editor Edward Margulies and editor-contributors Virginia Campbell, Stephen Rebello, Martha Frankel and Josh Mooney.

Suffice that the late-Bush '41 and Clinton-era Movieline cut things down. Yeah! And that Margulies & Co. would have choked on the idea of writing "unabashedly" about love for all things Hollywood, which is what the next generation of Movieline guys -- Defamer's Seth Abramovitch, S. T. VanAirsdale and Kyle Buchanan -- are claiming...Read More

Duplicity director-writer Tony Gilroy "loves puzzles," writes New Yorker profiler D.T. Max, "and Michael Clayton was full of them. So is Duplicity (3.20), with its scheming, warily passionate spies.

"'If I told you I loved you, would it make any difference?' Claire (Julia Roberts) asks Ray (Clive Owen) at one point. 'If you told me or if I believed you?' Ray responds. Gilroy calls the film 'counterprogramming -- not the normal thing to do next.' It is fast, lighthearted, and intense. Even though, as Gilroy explains, 'Michael Clayton could have been a novel [but]Duplicity could only exist as a...Read More

I heard an idea for a Hurt Locker copy line, something that's close to or sounds like "the world's hardest job" -- the job being a bomb defuser in Iraq. Except that's not it. At all. Jeremy Renner's Sgt. James character doesn't see defusing bombs as satisfying because of the difficulty factor -- he loves it because it puts him right next to death, and every time he successfuly defuses it gives him an "adrenaline fix" (a term used by Brian Geraghty's character) like nothing else.

The line Summit's marketers need to be thinking of, then, is a line spoken by...Read More

In February's Conde Nast Portfolio Amy Wallace wrote about last year's decision by 20th Century Fox to rewrite Stephen Schiff's Money Never Sleeps, an allegedly sturdy Wall Street sequel with Michael Douglas again playing Gordon "greed is good" Gekko. Stephen Frears (The Queen) wanted to direct Schiff's script and everything looked good.

But after last fall's financial collapse Fox decided Schiff's script "suddenly felt out of touch," according to production co-prexy Alex Young, so they hired another writer, Allan Loeb (21), to make it...Read More

"I was watching Rush Limbaugh the other night, and I was horrified. I would have Rush Limbaugh drawn and quartered. He was sticking up for these Wall Street pigs. [I think] there should be public show trials, mass denunciations and executions." -- director-screenwriter John Milius, renowned for his conservative political views, speaking to CNN's Thom Patterson.

John Milius; medieval stocks and pillories

Milius has rarely been more right-on. I'm saying this because I said more or less the same thing in early January, calling not for mass executions but recommending that the Wall...Read More

Consider this trailer for Marleen Gorris's Within The Whirlwind, a Soviet gulag survival drama based on Eugenia Ginzburg's novel with Emily Watson as Ginzburg. It looks like a boilerplate Oscar-bait performance, but why wasn't this German-produced film seen and reviewed at last month's Berlin Film Festival? And what a godawful title. The final kiss of death for me was reading a 1.30.09 story in Variety that Telepool, which co-financed/produced, has been investing in "family entertainment" over the last couple of years.

How many really good films have been set in small confined spaces for their entire length? This classic Sidney Lumet film, Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat, Louis Malle's My Dinner With Andre, Richard Linklater's Tape and how many others? Maybe I like this kind of film because it's a lot like theatre, and because the theatre influence has been diminishing for a long while now.

So what's the final verdict on the Watchmen shortfall this weekend? Do we all say "hey, $57 million for an R-rated misanthropic geek-noir epic that most women want nothing to do with...that's not bad!" plus it's the sixth-highest opening for an R-rated film? Or do we say, "Well, it should have done $65 or $70 million, so the word-of-mouth must have caught up with it late Friday night...there's no way this isn't a disappointment. Plus it's probably a harbinger of a much-weaker second weekend." I have no dog in this race. I really do think $57 million isn't half bad. But did it...Read More

Sometimes a breakup might just be an argument that ended badly. Which, when suspected, leads couples to think about maybe having another go. But when they break up a second time (i.e., within two or three months of patching things up), forget it.

Whatsit from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo.

elephantstomp from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo.

There's an exceptional Thomas L. Friedman column called "Is The Inflection Near?" in today's N.Y. Times (although it's technically dated 3.7.09).

"We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China," it explains, "powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff...Read More

"All I can think of, right here and now, is how wrong every inch of this production felt, from start to finish (minus that nifty opening credits montage)." -- from Kris Tapley's Watchmen pan. Which, he writes, "should go at least some small way toward disproving your 'fanboys will love it when the rest of us don't' thing."

To commemorate the ten-year anniversary of the death of Stanley Kubrick , I'm going to run a March 2000 trash piece called "Stanley Was Slippin'," which I re-posted last June. It's not that I don't love and worship Kubrick's films (with the exception of Fear and Desire and Eyes Wide Shut); it's just that this is the cleanest and tightest thing I've ever written about him:

"I [once] referred to Eyes Wide Shut as a 'perfectly white tablecloth.' That implies purity of content and purpose, which it clearly has. But Eyes Wide Shut is...Read More

Big Hollywood's Steve Mason reports that while that $25.2 million Watchmen figure from yesterday is accurate, the Warner Bros. release is downticking "due to running time and shaky word-of-mouth." Mason is now projecting $57 million instead of $70 million by Sunday night and a grand domestic tally of $145 million.

So where's the Blu-ray of this one, Criterion?

If by clapping my hands three times I could Dr. Manhattan the right-wing teardown agents who are doing everything they can to block and tarnish Team Obama without offering anything in the way of constructive ideas or strategies for getting us out of this rancid mess (which the righties got us into with their free-market coddling of Wall Street sociopaths), I would clap my hands three times. If there was ever a time in this country's history in which the term "smite the Philistines" needs to be literally acted upon...

The mood-setting visuals before the strum-and-wail music portion are striking, to say the least. Exquisite photography and a generally fine job by Portland-based actor-director Scott Coffey (Ellie Parker). The band is the Handsome Furs.

Handsome Furs "I'm Confused" from Sarah Marcus on Vimeo.

I had a nice plate of Eggs Benedict and some very cool conversing this morning with Duplicity director-writer Tony Gilroy at BLT, an upscale country-type restaurant at the corner of Sixth and Central Park South. An industrial espionage caper romance with Clive Owen and Julia Roberts, Duplicity is agreeably layered and much sharper and more agile-minded than yours truly. That's a compliment. Don't people hate thrillers they can figure out too easily? Those smarter-than-me types, I suspect, are going to love this.

Duplicity director-writer Tony Gilroy -- Saturday, 3.7, 9:35 am.

For what it's worth, Joel and Ethan Coen recently told a director pal who ran into them socially that they're not going to Cannes this year. So I guess we can all forget seeing A Serious Man there. Unless...you know, the boys decide it'll be ready in time and they're into it after all. Focus Features will be releasing it early next October. A Toronto Film Festival preem...right?

Described on the Wikipedia page as a "gentle but dark period comedy" (i.e., 1967), A Serious Man "is based loosely on the Coen's childhoods in a Jewish academic...Read More

"That Runaways script has to be the biggest load of dog crap I've ever read. Every other word is 'dog cunt' or 'dogshit, and Joan Jett is always taking a piss or rubbing her crotch. It is really a poor excuse for a screenplay, and I can't believe that Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart are signed for it." -- Written by a moderately long-of-tooth mainstream journalist friend who read Floria Sigismondi's script a day or so ago.

This opinion obviously isn't the last word, and I'm not so sure I found the idea of Kristen...Read More

"It is easy to appreciate Anna Faris: a cult is forming around her. It is less easy to shed the slightly moralistic hand-wringing that accompanies much of the acclaim she has received - the idea that she is wasting her talent on bad projects; that her collaborators should recognize her skill set and exploit it; and that serious fans are only 'mucking about' in bad movies for the certain redemptive quality that her great turns bring to these (largely) unworthy titles." -- from a Zachary Campbell piece on rouge.com.

This columnist will never get on the Anna Faris cult bandwagon until she...Read More

Rush Limbaugh reportedly suggested today that Sen. Ted Kennedy would be dead by the time health care reform legislation passes. "Before it's all over, it'll be called the Ted Kennedy memorial health care bill," he said. A sound file containing the comment is embedded in this HuffPost news page.

The gist of this Anne Thompson/Daily Beast analysis piece is that Watchmen doesn't have the moxie, the muscle or the love needed to perform strongly after this weekend. The conventional wisdom is at least $70 million by Sunday evening.

Watchmen's opening main title sequence is as nicely rendered as I'd heard, and I didn't have a huge problem listening to Dylan's "The Times They Are A'Changin'" as it happened. I was taken with the portion that lays out Dr. Manhattan's (i.e., Billy Crudup's) history. The Dr. Manhattan full-blue-schlong footage probably will make it more routine for male genitalia to appear in mainstream movies henceforth. (Although I'm not sure that's any kind of major blessing.) And yes, Jackie Earle Haley's Rorschach does deliver in a hard, tight, snarly way.

And the CG depiction, by the way, of...Read More

HE reader "Geoffsongs" discovered last night that while while Larry Cohen's The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover is not available on DVD, anyone with a Netflix subscription can watch it online through the website's "watch instantly" feature via Starz, with the Starz intro/logo popping up just prior to the start of the movie.

Where's Jim Hoberman's review? Isn't he a longtime Cohen-head? All I can dig now are the MRQE reviews, which are mostly plans (including one from Dave Kehr).

Off to my 10 a.m. Watchmen IMAX screening at Leows Lincoln Plaza. Some kind of breathless-but-thoughtful reaction by 2 pm or thereabouts. I won't catch Every Little Step at MOMA at 1:30 pm...it's that or write. Then Tony Gilroy's Duplicity at 7 pm. Catch as catch can. One of those days.

"Brutality is not merely part of [Watchmen director Zack] Snyder's repertory of effects," writes N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott . "It is more like a cause, a principle, an ideology. And his commitment to violence brings into relief the shallow nihilism that has always lurked beneath the intellectual pretensions of Watchmen.

"The only action that makes sense in this world -- the only sure basis for ethics or politics, the only expression of love or loyalty or conviction -- is killing. And the dramatic conflict revealed, at long last, in the film's climactic arguments is between a wholesale, idealistic approach to mass...Read More

A critic friend predicted last night that Watchmen's Rotten Tomatoes rating -- now standing at 65% positive among the grunts and 44% positive among the creme de la creme -- is "going to collapse" when the regular daily critics starting being heard from tonight. (Partly, he suspects, because Warner Bros. publicists kept big-name critics waiting in sub-freezing temperatures outside of the theatre where the Manhattan all-media occured last Tuesday night.)

But you know something? 44% of the elite reviews being positive (including Roger Ebert's) is nothing to sniff at. The movie clearly has merit for some, and this should be...Read More

"I grew up in the comic-book generation and still found plenty of reasons to not love Watchmen," says Film.com's Laremy Legel. "I don't think it's a generational issue. It's more a matter of rabid fanboys vs. everyone else in the world."

Hats off to that exceptional missing-arm effect in Christine Jeffs' Sunshine Cleaning, which I saw last night for the very first time, having missed it at Sundance '08. It's a teeny bit mystifying as to why the nice-guy character, played by Clifton Collins, Jr., has a missing left arm, but that's the deal. I'm just trying to pat some folks on the back.

Sunshine Cleaning costar Clifton Collins, Jr. It appears in this still that his left arm is attached.

This is my kind of visual effect -- i.e., the kind that doesn't look like one and...Read More

If anyone has PDFs of the following I'll be happy to trade: (a) Alex Garland's Never Let Me Go, a sci-fish drama that will costar Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan under director Mark Romanek; (b) Floria Sigismondi's The Runaways, a mostly true-life story about the Runaways that will costar Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett and Dakota Fanning as Cheri Currie; and (c) Bennett Miller's Foxcatcher, written by Capote's Dan Futterman with Ryan Gosling starring.

The Playlist is offering six or seven reasons why Watchmen fails in a post-Dark Knight landscape. Reading the article top to bottom makes the points more clearly than the reading of the headlines, but here goes. One, nothing seems to be truly st stake. Two, the tone is goofy. Three, faithful fidelity to the graphic novel was a bad idea. Four, the '80s are cornball. Five, dark and cartoony doesn't make it. Six, emotion, truth and grittiness are sold separately. And seven, the music blows.

I agree with the other guys. This could be a problem. It's the growling and the grimacing, for the most part. I don't need Wolverine-Jackman to scream and flex and make his blood vessels pop. I just need him to be cool and sardonic and do the thing like it's no sweat at all. I want him to be a smart-ass. Instead, this trailer has convinced me that the film -- whatever it actually will be -- is totally generic, and will surprise me not.

Many moons ago (i.e., last summer) a story broke about James Franco's deal to play Allen Ginsberg in a Gus Van Sant-produced biopic called Howl. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman were announced as the co-directors and co-writers of the drama, which will mainly be about the obscenity trial that followed the 1957 publication of "Howl," Ginsberg's legendary poem. The film will begin shooting just a few days from now.

James Franco (l.), the youthful Allen Ginsberg (r.)

I happened to reconsider the Howl project after reading Roger Friedman's story today about...Read More

Vanity Fair.com's Frank DiGiacomo and illustrator Frank Harris have imagined a "new breed of Washington, D.C.-based superheroes, battling one another for dominance even as they wage a desperate war against their common enemies: Mortgage Mash, Mr. Credit Freeze, and the un-tame-able Afghakistan. Will they save the world, or kill each other trying?"

Washmen lineup (l. to r.): Megalomandias, Bad News Joe, 'Night Dow, Dr. Chicago, Phantom Pantsuit, The Buccaneer, Rushhack and The Jokerer.

Oh, and by the way: I'm not the only guy who thinks N.Y. Post critic Kyle Smith went a...Read More

In a comment about the previous item, HE Reader "Cahuenga Kid" supposed that the driver in question "must have been going really fast to lose control." Well, not according to this analysis, which was thrown together with some fairly primitive software back in '90 or thereabouts.

Cholame crash from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo

I came across this California landscape photo this morning, which was taken almost exactly eleven years ago, in either February or March. Without giving away any hints, something happened here in a movie-related sense. And you have to tell me what.

Taken with a drugstore instamatic camera in the early days of the Monica Lewinsky scandal

Yesterday evening an HE reader accused me of "wanting to hate Watchmen all along." No, I haven't been wanting to hate it all along, I replied. I have hated it all along. But what exactly do I mean when I say "it"?

Not the Alan Moore-Dave Gibbons-John Higgins graphic novel, which is actually a fairly deep, teeming-with-inner-realms thing with offbeat flavors and weirdnesses -- a story about alienation and aloneness and being adamant of mind, and well told with rich noir flavoring and a nice use of time-shuffling imagination. "It" means the vast multitudes of superhero movie fans going...Read More

Why would anyone alive and alert in the city of New York who hasn't yet seen The Hurt Locker not want to attend tomorrow night's (i.e., Thursday, 3.5) 7 pm showing at Lincoln Center? What could possibly constitute stiff competition, outside of theatre tickets or a secret meeting at a hotel with someone married?

The Hurt Locker is "less a combat picture than a thriller about the risks and intoxications of professional passion," N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott wrote the other day. "The main character, brilliantly played by Jeremy Renner, is consumed by his...Read More

Here's to the just-passed Horton Foote, whom I'll always admire and feel really close to because of his screenplay of Tender Mercies, perhaps my all-time favorite rural relationship film played on a subdued and generally calmed-down key. (Whadja think about that one, Watchmen fans? Was it visually fierce enough for ya? The only problem was that Duvall's Mac Sledge never put a superhero costume on.) His To Kill A Mockingbird screenplay was perhaps the first adult-level thing to get to me as a kid.

"Look at Watchmen from the back to the front," David Poland finally wrote today at 5 pm Pacific, after seeing Zack Snyder's forthcoming weekend winner last night. "Do you care about what has happened to any of these characters, except Rorschach, by the time you leave the theater?

"Not 'did you think the glass thing on Mars was really cool?' Or 'is the prison sequence easily the best thing that Zack Snyder has ever done?' Or 'did you like seeing Malin's ta-tas? Or 'Is 'Archie' cool as hell?' Or 'how cool is it watching people explode and then seeing the guts drip...Read More

N.Y. Post critic Kyle Smith filed a Watchmen rave last night. Sounds like too much of a rave to me. ("Thrillingly sophisticated"?) But I was expecting Smith to be favorably disposed because he's a comic-book generation guy, or close enough to it.

I said it a couple of weeks ago but it bears repeating: Take with a grain of salt the views of any Watchmen reviewer who grew up reading superhero comics, which is pretty much anyone under 40, give or take. They have their life savings invested in this bank, so to speak, so I know what I'm talking about...Read More

Felicity Huffman talking about Piven sushigate on Letterman last night.

Perhaps the funniest Black List script from last year is Kyle Killen's The Beaver, about a chronic depressive whose life is taken over by his beaver hand puppet. It's said by two sources to be in Steve Carell's corner. That is, if the term "attached to" means anything. "But he's also attached to a great many things," one guy cautions. "I've heard they're readying the next Get Smart for his next hiatus. Carell also has a teaming with Tina Fey in the works, but it's pricey. He wants to spend time with family, so I've heard they're planning to shoot whatever his...Read More

David Mickey Evans' Ace Ventura Jr. Pet Detective hit the video shelves yesterday. I see in the jowly face of that kid, Josh Flitter, the essence of the American cancer that the Taliban is dead set against. And you know what? They're right. (Thanks to Jack Morrissey for the tip-off.)

As of one hour ago (i.e., 9 am Pacific) 90% of the advance-purchase Fandango action was being slurped up by Watchmen....surprise! 3% of the early-buy money was going to the Jonas Brothers 3-D Concert Movie, 1% was being hammered by Slumdog Millionaire, and so on down the line. We'll be looking at a cultural avalanche this weekend. See how much effect all those neg-head reviews and pissed-off fanboy postings have had, Warner Bros. publicity?

An mp3 recording of a clip from Armando Ianucci's In The Loop, which I creamed over last January and which IFC will be releasing sometime this year: "Don't apologize for me, apologize for yourself....not a fuckin' little Jane Austen novel!...walk the fuckin' line!...not a good time, I'm busy, fuck off!....lubricated horsecock...well within my purview...those kids make you sound like Angela Lansbury."

"It used to be the case that western movies about India were about blonde women arriving there to find, almost at once, a maharajah to fall in love with," Salman Rushdie wrote for a piece in last Saturday's Guardian. "Or they were about European women accusing non-maharajah Indians of rape, or they were about dashing white men galloping about the colonies firing pistols and unsheathing sabres, to varying effect.

"Now that sort of exoticism has lost its appeal; people want, instead, enough grit and violence to convince themselves that what they are seeing is...Read More

Jeffrey Wells to William Friedkin: The French Connection was obviously your film when you were developing, shooting and cutting it, and certainly your film when you were promoting it in '71. And you were most responsible for winning the Best Picture Oscar, clearly. But those days are over, pal, and while you may feel some form of residual parental ownership rights today, you're out of line. At least as far as revisionist futzing rights are concerned.

Frame capture from David Lean's revised version of Lawrence of Arabia.

Whatever your attorney has told you or the contracts...Read More

Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art is showing William Friedkin's degraded revision of The French Connection for six days starting today. This morning I sent a letter this morning to Rajendra Roy, MOMA's chief curator of film. 11:55 am Update: Roy and I just spoke. A summary of his comments is pasted below.

(l. ro.) Owen Roizman, frame capture from French Connection Blu-ray, William Friedkin.

"As you may have heard or read, French Connection cinematographer Owen Roizman, speaking last week in an online radio interview, has called William...Read More

It would be very cool conceptually if U.S. forces in Afghanistan could deploy 80-foot tall Terminator skeleton robots with laser blasters to fight the Taliban/Al Qeada forces. But of course, the robots couldn't blast their way into caves (you're talking billions of tons of solid prehistoric rock) and they couldn't see through rock and earth to begin with (there being no such thing as Krypton super-vision), so the whole idea is a wash. But I had this thought nonetheless when I saw this trailer yesterday.

Certainly not as much as McQueen's legend suggested. From Shawn Levy's Paul Newman: A Life (Harmony), out May 5th.

Tomorrow afternoon's Bill O'Reilly TV appearance has been cancelled. As Elliot Gould famously said two or three times in The Long Goodbye, "It's okay with me.

Hey, I know that Chicago street and building in the background. It seems almost generic, having been used in Brian DePalma's The Untouchables and John McNaughton's Mad Dog and Glory.

Phillip Noyce's Salt began shooting today in Washington, D.C. I know what it is, having read the original Waldo...kidding!...having read the original Edwin A. Salt, which Tom Cruise had thought seriously about starring in. Nobody kicks big-studio thriller ass like Noyce, but I honestly believe they have to come up with a more engaging title. Salt is either abrasion and agitation (i.e., "salt in your wounds") or something you sprinkle on chicken.

Angelina Jolie as she'll alternately appear in Phillip Noyce's Salt.

This USA Today story by Anthony Breznican describes Salt as a spy thriller...Read More

MCN's David Poland has posted a list of the last film critics still working in America (and numbering 117 as we speak). But he wants to hear about anyone he might have missed from anyone who knows for sure. Poland is looking only for full-time death row film critics who do nothing else but go to movies and write reviews and sit at their desks waiting to be canned.

The vast majority of the threatened work for publications that are primarily print (or at least which began on paper way back when). Are there any online-only film critics facing the axe?...Read More

"'To live my my life like I want to,' he said, 'is the least I can do.' And that had worked for him. And when it was over, he knew it was over and required no explanation. He had spent half a life blowing his brains out with booze, and the bullet was just a period at the end of no sentence in particular." -- the last line of dialogue in a 2006 draft of Bruce Robinson's The Rum Diary, an adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's revised version of a novel by the same name which he originally wrote in 1959.

In a disconnect-from-reality interview that will live in the annals of psychedelia, French Connection director William Friedkin has waved off cinematographer Owen Roizman's very sharp disparaging of the recently-released French Connection Blu-ray, which Friedkin supervised. The result was an abomination that made this classic 1971 cop drama look (and this is me talking) bleachy, blotchy, ultra-grainy and, by any visual standard, degraded. And Friedkin, not unexpectedly, thinks it's just peachy.

In an online audio interview last week with Back By Midnight's Aaron Aradillas , Roizman called the transfer "atrocious" and "horrifying." Freidkin, talking with Aradillas last night, said...Read More

Ain't It Cool's Mr. Beaks wrote earlier this evening that he's been "receiving emails from people who've 'heard things' about what Terrence Malick is up to in Austin, Texas, regarding work on The Tree of Life. One thing he's heard is that legendary visual f/x legend Douglas Trumbull is working with Malick in some capacity.

"Is he assisting Mike Fink on the dinosaur footage?," Beaks writes. "I don't know just yet. But he has been seen knocking around Austin with Malick's crew, and I can confirm that he has been shooting footage of some sort fairly recently. Personally, I hope he's involved...Read More

I'm slated to go on Bill O'Reilly's show on Wednesday to get slapped around again, this time about my dislike (or more precisely my lack of comfort with) the under-message delivered by Ross Katz's Taking Chance, which I wrote about yesterday.

With this video clip, Julie Ferrier has, in a manner of speaking, popped out. I mean, I didn't know her at all before this.

Indiewire's Peter Knegt is reporting that Woody Allen's Whatever Works, the May-December relationship dramedy with Larry David, Evan Rachel Wood, Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley Jr., will open the Tribeca Film festival on Wednesday, 4.22. It opens theatrically on 6.19. Does this mean it won't be Cannes?

Jonah Hill, Paul Rudd, Seth Rogen and Jason Segel, a.k.a. "Pretty Young Things."

(;l. to r.) Rudd, Rogen, Hill, Segel.

Summit never got back to me last Friday when I asked about the 6.26 release date for The Hurt Locker, but Rentrak, the box-office tracking website used by the majors, has it opening as follows: June 26th (NY/LA); July 10th (limited) and July 24th (expansion).

"I've seen Watchmen twice now and enjoyed it as much the second time as the first," writes the usually perceptive and tough-minded Marshall Fine. "I'm a fan of the comic, if not a devotee. But I think it will divide audiences right down the middle, inspiring either love or hate, with little middle ground. Love is a strong term but it was as satisfying a distraction as I can remember.

"And yet what is Watchmen but yet another distraction - a bit of apocalyptic storytelling meant to take our minds off the apocalypse now?

"That's what I hate about this moment in...Read More

Field of Dreams "is only movie I've seen that makes me cry every time I see it," writes Arizona Star critic Phil Villarreal in the first of a series. "And instead of hardening over time I grow more pliable to its potent father-son sentiment.

"Each viewing, I sob not only when Kevin Costner asks his time-traveling ghost dad (Dwier Brown) for a game of catch, but also during James Earl Jones' passionate, nostalgia-sopped 'people will come' speech about baseball and its relationship to fleeting childhood memories...Read More

This is the jukebox tune heard over the opening credits of Lone Scherfig's An Education, which Sony Classics probably won't be showing anywhere until the Toronto Film Festival. I'm not going to name the cut except to say it was released close to the time that Nick Hornsby's story takes place. I haven't been able to get it out of my head since Sundance.

The only reason I've posted a video of this morning's snowfall [see below] was that I hoped it might be able to capture the visual density of the falling muckflakes, but no. Cameras never capture what the eye sees in this respect. I guess you need IMAX or Showscan for that.

If the New Yorker's Anthony Lane doesn't like a film, he'll disdain it to death. He never gets worked up, not really, although every so often he'll allow a current of profound disgust to seep into his prose. Which is why, for me, this just-posted Watchmen pan is such a kick-and-a-half. Lane hates it! He's all but vomiting on the sidewalk.

"The world of the graphic novel is a curious one," he begins. "For every masterwork, such as Persepolis or Maus, there seem to be shelves of cod mythology and rainy dystopias, patrolled by rock-jawed...Read More

"It strikes me that many of the surviving critics at metropolitan dailies are bloggers," Variety's Anne Thompson wrote last night. "It may be coincidence, but critic/bloggers are able to make claims for their readership numbers. Bloggers can build measurable fan bases, interact with readers in a more personal way, and demonstrate their strength with online traffic stats.

"Among the more robust critic/bloggers: The Salt Lake Tribune's Sean Means, The Philadelphia Inquirer's Carrie Rickey, the Oregonian's Shawn Levy and the Boston Globe's Ty Burr. And let's not forget the most aggressive blogger of all: the Chicago Sun-Times' Read More

I've just clarified the source of a 1995 Los Angeles magazine article about Terrence Malick that "TheJeff" excerpted last night, called "Waiting for Godot." And I may as well make this a front-pager. The '95 article was essentially based on a 1991 Malick piece I had worked on for months but failed to sell, called "Malick Aforethought." A spruced-up, cut-down version was published by a Los Angeles editor, Andy Olstein, which I was pleased with and conflicted about at the time. The backstory still bugs me a little bit.

Terrence Malick...

"We're just starting work on a project for Terrence Malick, animating dinosaurs, the film is The Tree of Life, starring Brad Pitt and Sean Penn. It'll be showing in IMAX -- so the dinosaurs will actually be life size -- and the shots of the creatures will be long and lingering." -- from an Empire magazine interview with VFX artist Mike Fink that some sources claim to have read but which can't be located by the mag's search engine.

Some 18 years ago I over-wrote a very long piece about Malick, a where-is-he? thing called Malick Aforethought. It later ran in truncated...Read More

"Rush Limbaugh is the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party. He has laid out his vision, he's been very up front and I compliment him for that. He's not hiding. He's called for President Obama to fail. He has been up front and hasn't stepped back from that. And that's what he has enunciated. And whenever a Republican criticizes him, they have to run back and apologize to him and say they were misunderstood." -- "Rahmbo" speaking this morning in CBS's Face The Nation.

Casting rumors about the Farrelly Brothers' Three Stooges project have been circulating for so long (four or five years now) that they go in one ear and out the other, but a well-placed friend confides that Bobby and Peter "have been talking to Johnny Depp for the role of Moe and Sean Penn as Larry." Variety's Michael Fleming reported last November that the Stooges film had been revived with MGM financing and that the new film would be released in November '09.

Perhaps the key reason why audiences were so moved by Gone With The Wind when it opened in late 1939 was because they saw the Civil War agonies endured by Scarlett O'Hara as a metaphor for the deprivations of the Great Depression. On top of which they knew from experience that what matters in hard times is backbone and gumption, which is why they saw Vivien Leigh's Scarlett, a selfish but feisty survivor, as one of their own.

Which is why Gone With The Wind is probably striking...Read More

An HE reader passed along some kind of official casting notice for a new Alexander Payne film called Downsizing. I'm going to assume that it has nothing overtly to do with cutting people from the payroll, but check out the topliners -- Sacha Baron Cohen, Paul Giamatti, Meryl Streep and Reese Witherspoon. It'll be cool if this cast comes together, although a very-close-to-the-action source says it's a little early to say.

(l. to r.) Paul Giamatti, Reese Witherspoon, Meryl Streep,. Sacha Baron Cohen.

"Nothing is locked down at this juncture,...Read More

In a just-posted N.Y. Post column film critic Kyle Smith praises Ross Katz's Taking Chance, currently airing on HBO, as "a work of transcendent sorrow and infinite dignity." Smith has made no secret in the past of his conservative-minded views, but here he's right in a more basic sense.

There's a reason, he says, why Taking Chance was watched by roughly two million viewers during its first HBO airing last Saturday, which is the best for an HBO original flick in five years. It's paying tribute to America's Iraq War casualties with an...Read More

Yesterday an HE reader named Ephemerinko called me out on being too conventional in my choices about what to see at the big film festivals. "I'd like to see you take more chances, "he wrote. "True, you gotta kiss a lot of frogs, as they say, but when something pays off there's no better feeling in the world. Festivals are about discovery, not being force-fed what the studios want you to see. Your site would certainly be better for it."

He had a good point but he was also missing the particulars. Yeah, I could take more chances and kiss more frogs,...Read More

"It's not rocket science," USC academic Martin Kaplan tells N.Y. Times reporters Michael Ceiply and Brooks Barnes. "People want to forget their troubles, and they want to be with other people."

Kaplan is explaining two facts: (1) 2009 ticket sales are up 17.5 % over last year for a tally of $1.7 billion, according to Media by Numbers, and (2) attendance has also jumped by nearly 16 %. Ceiply and Barnes conclude that "if this pace continues through the year, it would amount to the biggest box-office surge in at least two decades."

Which underlines the old adage about the movie...Read More