We're all struggling to get over and break through into something or some realm that will make us feel happier or less miserable. Teenagers, of course, struggle and suffer the most, at least in their own heads. I went through emotional hell from age 13 to 18, and the only thing good about it, looking back, is that I grew past it. It could've killed me but it didn't.

Katie Jarvis in Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank.

I know that if a gifted filmmaker had made a study of this period in my life and turned it into...Read More

One super-efficient way to blow euros during an eight or nine day visit to the Cannes Film Festival is to eat out every night. It's much cheaper to (a) work late and (b) eat fruit, paninis, party food and bring home bottles of beer. But it's great to wander around and watch. Makes for a mildly dull video, I admit, but I'm glad I shot this. Mild contact high.

In his just-posted review of Francis Coppola's Tetro, which will open the Director's Fortnight program in Cannes, Variety's Todd McCarthy has at least one unqualified thing to say, which is that the film will "likely be most remembered for introducing a highly promising young actor, Alden Ehrenreich.

18 year-old Tetro costar Alden Ehrenreich.

"Allegedly first noticed by Steven Spielberg in a homevideo played at a bat mitzvah and subsequently discovered by longtime casting ace and producer Fred Roos, the 18-year-old Ehrenreich manages the remarkable feat of resembling by turns three of the leading actors from The Departed....Read More

The Playlist's Rodrigo Perez has posted a riff and some links about an alleged homoerotic subcurrent in Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes. It feels like a dicey presumption, but there's at least a possibility that Holmes could knock Humpday off the bromance pedestal.

"The dreaded 'bromance' term has been brought up several times in discussions surrounding Guy Ritchie's action tentpole, Sherlock Holmes," he begins. "But even more explicit -- much to the chagrin of producer Joel Silver, to be sure -- are claims from the actors in the film itself, who not so subtly have already suggest the 'gay' word in referencing...Read More

In view of LexG having posted a teardown video of jeffmcm on the Hot Blog, is this the beginning of a YouTube flame war between these two? I'm not in this, but you can't say it's not faintly amusing.

Funny People (comedy, Universal,7/31/09) -- R, "language and crude sexual humor throughout, and some sexuality." Bruno (comedy, Universal, 7/10/09) -- R, "pervasive strong and crude sexual content, graphic nudity and language."

This Michael Fleming story in Variety is nominally about a western called Unbound Captives, which is set to begin filming at the end of this year with Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz and Robert Pattinson in the leads. The heart of the story is about how Madeline Stowe, the once very-hot actress who (no offense) has been pretty much over for the last six or seven years if not longer, not only co-wrote the script but will now direct the feature. Read about her for twice turning down a huge go-away payday and tell me you don't respect that.

The animated 3D Up (Disney/Pixar, 5.29) is a comic adventure fable of a very high order. Even by Pixar's high standards it's a notch or two above the norm. Visually luscious and spunky and intriguing at every turn, it's an amusing (i.e., somewhat funny), sometimes touching, briskly paced film that's about...well, pretty much everything that relatively healthy, forward-thinking middle-class people care about.

Like finding your dreams, making a family, dropping your guard, warming your heart, and standing up for your friends, for starters. As well as the finding of courage and fulfillment, the blooming of love,...Read More

Orange Wifi Cafe inside the Palais, an hour after the finish of 10 am screening of Up (a reaction to which I'm currently banging out).

...which will screen at the Salle Debussy at 10 am.

IFC Films has acquired U.S. distrib rights to Cristian Mungiu's Tales From The Golden Age, an omnibus film which wil show in Cannes this week in the Un Certain Regard section. Pic is "a collection of Romanian urban legends from the communist era," written by Mungiu and co-directed by Ioana Uricaru, Hanno Hofer, Razvan Marculescu, Constantin Popescu and Mungiu. IFC previously distributed Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which won the Palmes d'Or only to be shat upon the Academy's foreign-language film committee when they declined to shortlist it. Golden Age won't see the light of a U.S. projector lamp until...Read More

Indiewire's Eugene Hernandez posted a piece last night that asks this question and offers answers in the form of quotes from Emerging Pictures Ira Deutchman, Sony Classics' Tom Bernard, MCN's David Poland (a longtime Cannes non-attender), the Sarasota Film Festival's Tom Hall, an anonymous insider who hasn't returned this year out of annoyance and frustration, and myself.

"One tried-and-true Cannes ritual is the Tuesday night dinner at La Pizza," Variety's Anne Thompson wrote last night. "With many travelers admonished by their bosses to watch their expenses this year, La Pizza is a relatively inexpensive option. Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeff Wells rounded up a gaggle of writers, some print (like the Washington Post's Ann Hornaday) and online (MSN and AMC's James Rocchi) as well as IndieWire stalwarts Eugene Hernandez and Brian Brooks. Julian Sancton will be blogging Cannes for the first time for VanityFair.com. Lionsgate, Fox Searchlight and Jere Hausfater were in the house, as well as the Alamo...

HE's Moises Chiullan on the variable IMAX experiences being offered, and more particularly on the much smaller, low-grade version being shown at AMC and Regal theatres.

A few years back Soshana Bush, the 20 year-old blonde female lead in Damien Wayans' Dance Flick (Paramount, 5.22), attended Redwood High School in Larkspur, just north of San Francisco, in the same class as my son Jett. They didn't run with the same crowd, Jett says, but they half knew each other. So it seems appropriate that Jett should catch a screening of Dance Flick in Manhattan this week and review it for Hollywood Elsewhere.

I'm not sure about my ability to sit down and really watch Watchmen again when it comes out on DVD and Bluray a little more than two months hence. With my full undivided attention, I mean. I suppose I could half-watch it -- i.e., write the column while running it in the adjacent living room as a kind of white-noise distraction, eyeballing it from time to time. But I do that all the time anyway.

The Bluray Director's Cut edition (out 7.21)...Read More

My first day in Cannes turned into a wifi nightmare on two fronts. The apartment's wifi is so awful that there's no choice but to demand a refund, and the air at the legendary Orange Cafe inside the Palais -- one of the fastest and most reliable wireless environments in years past -- has been flaky and twitchy. In and out, working and then not working, etc. This sounds like petty carping but it's not. There's nothing worse than bad air. It messes up everything.

Horaires des Projections Presse -- snapped in Orange Cafe on Tuesday, 5.12,...

"Despite the sheer volume of incident and action required of any film that includes young kids as a major portion of its target audience, Up is an exceptionally refined picture," Variety's Todd McCarthy posted early this morning. "Unlike so many animated films, it's not all about sensory bombardment and volume. As Pixar's process is increasingly analyzed, the more one appreciates the care that goes into the writing. The underlying carpentry here is so strong, it seems it would be hard to go too far wrong in the execution.

"Although the cliffhanger effects are augmented by 3-D projection, never do co-directors Pete Docter...Read More

"The Hollywood trades have ruled at Cannes and other film markets [in the past]," reports former Variety guy Rex Weiner, "but their dominion has dissipated with the advent of the Internet, and the proliferation of online sources of business information, including leagues of bloggers.

"Cannes advertising revenues for the trades this year are down as much as 20-30%, according to sources at both papers. Between Cannes and the awards season, this downward trend has hit The Hollywood Reporter and Variety hard, and layoffs over the past year decimated the editorial and sales forces on both sides of the street.

One result, Weiner...Read More

That NPR-spikes-Nathan Lee's-Outrage-review story is so cold you could wrap fish in it. It happened last weekend and Indiewire, slow on the pickup, ran a story about it four hours ago. Forget it, dead...this morning's news. The reason for the spiking is that NPR editors didn't want Lee to be able use a discussion of the content of Outrage to indirectly "out Idaho Sen. Larry Craig or Florida Governor Charlie Crist. Lee, naturally, was hugely pissed about this, and tried to post a protest.explanation on the NPR site. This too was removed by NPR.

My Three Days of the Condor Bluray arrived this morning. There's a certain level of '70s grain in Owen Roizman's cinematography. It's a New York-based film, after all, and it wasn't shot with the idea of looking "attractive." But it sure looks nice all the same. Some shots are so pleasing (I've only seen about 30 minutes' worth) they brought a smile to my face. This may be my last post before heading out to JFK.

I wrote publicist Phil Symes this morning about my keen interest in seeing Gaspar Noe's Into The Void in Cannes. I'm departing Cannes on Thursday, 5.21 and the first scheduled press screening is on Friday, 5.22, so I was hoping to catch a slightly earlier market showing. But Phil dashed my hopes.

A scene from Enter The Void that resembles a similar idyll-in-a-park scene at the end of Irreversible.

"There will be no screenings prior to the 14:40 screening on Friday 22nd," he replied. "The film is expected only to be completed the previous day. So...Read More

Its reputation as perhaps the best written, best acted mumblecore bromance flick of all time more or less intact/unchallenged, Lynn Shelton's Humpday (Magnolia, 7.10) could/should emerge as an indie summer punch-through -- here's hoping. But isn't it a basic rule of movie marketing that your two stars (in this case Mark Duplass and Joshua Leonard) should have the same stylistic appearance on the release poster that they have in the film?

Crop from a current Humpday release poster.

Mark Duplass (l.) and Joshua Leonard (r.) as they appear in...

Pretty much everyone seems impressed by Star Trek's $72.5 million haul on 7,400 screens. Dissings from various HE talkbackers aside, the word on the street is apparently pretty good so there's a better than decent shot at tripling the $72 mil and cresting $200 mil. But poor Wolverine's Sunday night figures were 68% less than last weekend's...all she wrote.

Kara Swisher of Boom Town/All Things Digital visits the Santa Monica home of Sharon Waxman, a.k.a. headquarters of The Wrap.

"I just saw Warwick Thornton's Samson and Delilah, an Australian film selected for Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival," says Down Under critic Joel Meares. "It's a tough slog that takes you into remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory (basically the outback) and is relentlessly grim in some ways. But also extremely touching. It delivers emotionally like little else I've seen recently.

"This is definitely one to look out for. It's probably the best and most profound thing to come out of this country for a few years at least. Two leads,...Read More

I just got back from a 7:45 pm show of Kirby Dick's Outrage! at the Clearview Chelsea plex on 23rd Street. Two tickets cost me $25 bills, which I didn't like at all. Why didn't they charge $15 a pop? And then I noticed maybe 30 people in the theatre. Chelsea is a gay neighborhood and the locals can't be bothered to patronize one of the strongest and toughest films about the Washington realpolitik and the denial of gay civil rights? What are they doing, sipping Chardonnay and looking for action?

And then the trailers...Read More

I've got a summer cold right now -- sniffles, sneezing. It's not a fever or a flu, but to knock it out I've been taking Emergen-C, my Chinese herbal pills, an antihistamine, nasal decongestant spray. In any case I'm standing at the SW corner of Prince and Broadway around 3 pm today, waiting to cross the street, and just as a family van passes in front of me I sneeze. Ah-choo!, moving van with open windows ...perfect synch.

And a split second after I sneeze the guy driving the van yells out "thank you!" The guy is moving maybe 20 miles an...Read More

Two days ago L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein warned Judd Apatow that he needs to shorten the running time of Funny People (Universal, 7.21), currently around 150 minutes, or else.

"Two and a half hour comedies don't work," he wrote. "The form isn't meant to carry that much weight. If you're doing a comedy, especially one set in the world of stand-up comics, less is more. Always. Comedy is a form that rewards quick set-ups, sharp, fast editing and a rapid pace. They may share the first letter, but in comedy, languid, listless...Read More

Laughing at the wrong moments and then trying desperately to suppress this laughter can be, as we all know, excruciating. But why do I remember the most intense laughter-killing episodes of my life with such fondness? I smile every time I think of them. It all comes back.

Before I started trying to make it as a journalist I worked as a tree surgeon. Ropes, chain saws, pole saws, leather saddles, metal spikes, etc. In L.A. I worked for an eccentric guy who had a temper. He usually...Read More

A friend sent me a demo site URL for the Phillips 21 x 9 Ambilight. A little over $5 thousand bucks so you can watch a 56-inch wide Lawrence of Arabia without black bars on the top and bottom. 21 x 9 = a 2.3 to 1 aspect ratio, which means you'd still have black bars on the tops and bottoms when you watch Ben-Hur or the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty, which have been mastered at the old Ultra Panavision 2.76 to 1 aspect ratio.

The Philips Cinema 21:9 is a full HDTV system with...Read More

My $60-something-per-month AT&T air card service is golden. It can be twitchy now and then but 97% of the time it hooks me up almost anywhere I happen to be, and usually with four or five bars when I'm in Manhattan. But you can't use it in Europe unless money is no object.

AT&T is offering international air-card service but -- get this -- only if you sign up for a year's contract at $260-something dollars a month. So starting Tuesday morning it'll be the same old routine in Cannes. Excellent free wifi in the bunker and in the American Pavillion tent,...Read More

"In the Star Trek prequel, Spock's father tells him, 'You will always be a child of two worlds,' urging him not to keep such a tight vise on his emotions. Mr. Obama is also a control freak who learned to temper, if not purge, all emotion. But as a young man of mixed blood, he was more adept than Young Spock at learning to adjust his two sides to charm both worlds, and to balance his cerebral air with his talent for evoking intense emotion.

"Just as President Spock pledged to make hope and government cool again,...Read More

"Currently, more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month," wrote David Martin, vp primary research for Nielsen Online, on 4.28. "In other words, Twitter's audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month's users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent. For most of the past 12 months, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention."

In short, a majority of users are finding that the lustre of Twitter fades after a period. That it's a bit of an OCD pain in the ass. That it's one more digital-electronic circle-jerk distraction that...Read More

"A government without newspapers is not an option for America, " President Obama said last night at the White House Correspondents' dinner. "We count on you to help us make sense of a complex world [and] we look to you for truth, even if it's always an approximation. This is the season of renewal and reinvention, which is what journalism is in the process of doing. It's not short on talent or creativity or passion or creativity or commitment...qualities that certainly prove that journalism's problems are worth solving."

"The real question," N.Y. Times columnist Frank Rich wrote this morning, "is for the public, not journalists: Does it want to pony up for news, whatever the media that prevail?

"It's all a matter of priorities. Not long ago, we laughed at the idea of pay TV. Free television was considered an inalienable American right (as long as it was paid for by advertisers). Then cable and satellite became the national standard.

"By all means let's mock the old mainstream media as they preen and party on in a Washington ballroom. Let's deplore the tabloid journalism that, like the cockroach, will...Read More

The Three Days of the Condor Bluray arrives Monday morning, two or three hours before I leave for Kennedy airport. Just barely time to pop it in and watch most of it. It's probably not going to be visually stunning, but it'll certainly look "better" than anything that's come before. I love David Rayfiel's dialogue, and I'm telling myself, however illogically, that the sharper visuals will somehow make it sound a tad better. The speakers are Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Max Von Sydow, Cliff Robertson and John Houseman.

Kathy: You...you have a lot of very fine...Read More

"Kehr, Dave. Third- or possibly even fourth-string New York Times movie critic. Though often relegated to reviewing DVD releases, he is preferred by Snobs over A. O. Scott, Manohla Dargis and Stephen Holden." -- 2005 passage from The Film Snob's Dictionary. Does Kehr still enjoy said status?

I've assembled my four favorite passages from Anthony Lane's 5.18 New Yorker review. He follows Variety's Todd McCarthy and myself by taking note of James Tiberius Kirk's mood hair (i.e., veering from dirty blond to blondish red). It's not a pan, and I wouldn't agree if it were. But it's great succulent stuff -- the best Lane reviews always are.

Excerpt #1: "This new Star Trek is nonsense, no question ('Prepare the red matter!'), but at least it's not boggy nonsense, the way most of the other movies were, and it powers along, unheeding of its own absurdity, with a drive...Read More

I'm presuming, naturally, that several HE regulars were among last night's Star Trek viewers, and that given the 96% positive Rotten Tomatoes rating some are focusing on aspects of the film they weren't entirely satisfied with. Because it's more fun to be contrarian. Not to dump on the film (which I liked), but that's where the percolation is right now.

You might want to read Anthony Lane's New Yorker review as a starting-off thing. Ignore it, debate it or join the praisers but please add something specific. Comments that just say "I liked...Read More

Here's a public shout-out for Santa Barbara Film festival chief Roger Durling and all his regional friends and colleagues, hoping that they're not feeling too freaked out and that their homes are still standing as they stare at those massive Armageddon fire clouds caused by the Jesusita inferno, which has been raging for four days now. Sea valiente, sea fuerte y confianza en dios.

"Fire officials have more than doubled their estimate of how many acres have burned in the Jesusita wildfire [that's been] raging along...Read More

The collapsing Eiffel Tower scene starts to make it, almost makes it...and then doesn't. That green metal-melting effect is crap, and they don't show the tower crashing full force into the bridge. (They cut just as it hits.) It generally looks a little too CG. Sorry, guys.

I spoke earlier today with Outrage director Kirby Dick. The Magnolia film is opening in several cities today. We discussed the film, of course, and my admiration for Dick's direct, sharply-honed cutting style. And the recent bizarre confrontation between political blogger Michael Rogers, one of the principal talking heads in Dick's documentary, and Washington, D.C.-based talk show host Doug Mckleway , of Channel 8's "Let's Talk Live!"

Kirby Dick following the first Tribeca Film Festival screening of Outrage.

Dick's aim, I wrote in my recent review, "is to expose a bizarre...Read More

I caught the B'way production of Eugene O'Neil's Desire Under The Elms last night, and was 90% floored. For me, Carla Gugino's Abbie seems like a revelation because she's never had a role as searing in a film. She's eye-popping, breathtaking. I know she has a fair amount of stage experience but it still felt like one of those "where did this come from?" performances.

Carla Gugino, Pablo Schreiber.

Actors are generally ill-served by Hollywood in that their the roles often seem limited and familiar, and the kind of acting they're asked to deliver is...Read More

At long last, a DVD of Lonely Are The Brave, a 1962 low-key western that is arguably the finest character-driven film that Kirk Douglas ever starred in (or produced, for that matter), will be available on July 7 through Universal Home Video. (The best issue-driven film he starred in and produced was Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory.)

Directed by David Miller and written by Dalton Trumbo, Lonely Are The Brave was handsomely captured in in black-and-white Scope (which I'm a total fool for) by Philip Lathrop.

I can't honestly call it a great or classic...Read More

HE's Moises Chiullan caught the same Austin showing of Up (i.e., about two weeks ago) that Harry Knowles posted a review off, and he's not aware of any embargo so here we go.

"To say that Russell is eager to please would be a massive understatement," Chiullan writes. "He wants Carl to like him and approve of him so much it hurts. He's an overeating, junk food-inhaling kid due to things he has trouble coping with that are made clear as the film progresses. He's not overweight and inactive due to outright laziness and disinterest in being healthy.

"Russell is a...Read More

The 2009 Cannes Film Festival screening schedule went up online yesterday. Since I'm only staying for nine days (Tuesday, 5.12 to Thursday, 5.21), I have to figure something out about two films showing on Friday, 5.22 -- Gaspar Noe's Into The Void and Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. I'll basically need to hunt these down at "market" screenings, which sometimes happen prior to press and public showings. Honestly? I'll survive if I miss the Gilliam.

Yesterday evening I attended a meet-and-greet at HBO headquarters for Burma VJ, a doc by Danish director Anders Ostergaard. A portrait of bravery and spirit in the face of repression, it portrays the 2007 "Saffron Revolution" in Burma/Myanmar through smuggled footage taken by Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), the independent journalist group.

At yesterday evening's HBO party for Burma VJ, three Burmese Monks who led '07's Saffron Revolution (l. to r.) -- Venerable U Agga Nyana, Venerable U Pyinar Zawta, and Venerable U Gawsita.

Burma VJ director Anders Ostergaard.

Oscilloscope Laboratories...Read More

This Regan MacNeil Exorcist figure looks like a class job -- correct colors and fabrics, realistic bedpost wrappings -- and costs a mere $36 and change plus shipping. But where would you put something like this? On your fireplace mantle? On your dresser in your bedroom? Inside a specially constructed glass case in your den? Imagine looking at this thing every day for the rest of your life.

Time's Richard Corliss has declared that Pixar/Disney's Up "will, like last year's WALL*E, prove to be one of the most satisfying movie experiences of its year. The story of a septuagenarian grouch who uses his cane, hearing aid and dentures to thwart all evildoers; a buddy movie whose pals are separated by 70 years; a love story that transcends the grave -- has there been a movie like this in the history of feature animation?

"Extending the patented Pixar mix of humor and heart, this is the studio's most deeply emotional and affecting work, sending...Read More

Pixar and Up co-directors Pete Docter and Bob Peterson to Worldwide Audiences: This is Russell, the lead adolescent in our film and our idea of a cute kid. And let's not have any jabs about his weight -- it's who the kid is inside that counts. Corpulence doesn't matter. Besides, obesity is normal among American kids these days so why not reflect that?

Disney/Pixar's Up will open on 5.29.

Russell, you can assume, eats loads of fast food, sits around a lot and, barring a major attitude change, will eventually grow into an full-sized Jabba...Read More

"With J.J. Abrams' reboot of the Star Trek franchise about to hit theaters, critic and new L video essayist Matt Zoller Seitz muses on the appeal of Mr. Spock, the duality of man, all that stuff" -- Preface to "Vulcan: The Soul of Spock" on L site, posted two days ago but unannounced by Seitz until this morning.

Sasha Grey's redefined coolness factor, nicely established by her appearance at Brandeis last week, just dropped about 15 points.

Like In Contention's Kris Tapley, I saw Angels and Demons last night also. But I'm not reviewing today because I thought there was some kind of embargo in place until next week...no? Tapley has written that he decided against reviewing because "the idea of tearing a film apart just doesn't quite appeal to me, believe it or not."

It's cruel and heartless to publish high-quality telephoto-lens shots of over-40 actors and actresses in bathing suits on the beach. The attitude behind it is pure Day of the Locust. You're on a beach in Maui and notice a woman of 42 or so in a bikini who's had a couple of kids, and it's nothing. But put a photo of same in the Daily Mail and it's deliberate aggression on the part of the publishers and readership alike.

Arizona Star film critic and feature-writer Phil Villarreal has just been zotzed out of his movie job. He's been informed that he'll henceforth be on "general assignment on the Metro desk" and that they're "not replacing the [film critic] position."

My point earlier today about the porn industry being icky [and] filled with untalented and under-educated people didn't convey the whole equation. The other half is that a fairly healthy percentage of the people who watch porn aren't exactly sophisticated either. The proof is that not one porn film to my knowledge has ever been shot in black and white. The reason is that porn producers are afraid black-and-white films wouldn't make any money because they know full well that most of the fans are commoners -- no offense.

I've said two or three times...Read More

Gay political blogger Michael Rogers was recently threatened with a physical beating during an on-camera interview by Washington, D.C.-based talk show host Doug Mckleway, of Channel 8's "Let's Talk Live!" Rogers is a principal talking head in Kirby Dick's Outrage (opening 5.8 in several cities), and Mckleway was expressing his extreme anger and discomfort at the idea of outing closeted Washington, D.C. legislators, which is what the film is about.

Without hinting or suggesting anything, please watch the clip and offer thoughts about what is suggested by Mckleway's telling Rogers that he'd like to take him outside and...Read More

Detective: I was just reading your play. I liked a lot of it. I don't like the main character though. This Marine. Sounds like a real jellyfish. I guess you're supposed to like him because he's against the Marine Corp. S'that it?
Suspect: Something like that.
Detective: Why doesn't he do something? I mean, go over the hill, refuse an order...? I couldn't sympathize with a character like that.
Suspect: Not everyone did.
Detective: The Marine in the play, that supposed to be you?
Suspect: No.
Detective: Maybe a little?
Suspect: Maybe on some level.
...Read More

Life is hard and then you die, and we're all going to get there. Most of us push it away in our heads (I certainly do), and yet sometimes it seeps through anyway. And now 62 year-old Farrah Fawcett has decided to become an agent of one of these intrusions. A cancer sufferer since '06 and apparently not far from the end, she and producer/friend Alana Stewart have shot a two-hour video diary that will be broadcast on NBC on Friday, 5.15, from 9 to 11 pm. It's called Farrah's Story.

I'm not very plugged in...Read More

Envelope columnist Scott Feinberg interviewed Girlfriend Experience star Sasha Grey six and a half days ago -- Thursday, 4.30 -- at the Edie and Lew Wasserman Cinematheque on the Brandeis University campus. It's a fairly intriguing piece. Feinberg is polite and respectful but professionally direct at certain points in the chat. Grey comes off as shrewd, mature, intelligent and -- sorry -- faintly tragic. Because she works in an icky industry filled with untalented and under-educated people, and because no porn star has ever walked away from it intact.

Yesterday afternoon Nikki Finke tore into Sony Pictures Classics' Michael Barker and Tom Bernard, calling their operation "clueless about getting attention for itself and even its Oscar-nominated films for years." Today Movieline's Stu Van Airsdale zinged her back on Barker and Bernard's behalf, and quoted three responders on Nikki's site who had done the same.

I met director Marc Rocco 14 years ago during post-production on Murder in the First. Rod Lurie provided the introduction, as I recall. (Lurie's current producing partner Mark Frydman was a Murder producer.) I honestly never thought that Murder in the First was all that great a film, and a certain dialogue error and one or two technical ones I noticed told me that Rocco probably wasn't going to turn into Michael Mann. Anyway, the poor guy has been found dead. I'm very sorry all around. Kris Tapley has done the reporting.

Holmes: No, no. I'm not criticizing. Obviously you work out. You look good, man. Really.
Watson: Thank you.
Holmes: How's that chick I saw you with the other night?
Watson: Which one?
Holmes: Dark eyes. Italian-looking. Nice ass.
Watson: Ramona.
Holmes: Right, Ramona. You good with her?

From a 5.6 USA Today spread; I couldn't figure how to copy them so I borrowed pic from Sasha Stone's Awards Daily.

Watson: Possibly. I think so. One day at a time and all that. But sure, she's lovely. (Two beats.)...Read More

When's the last time that a film proclaimed the creator, the title and the top star on a single "card" in the opening credit sequence? This hasn't been done since the early to mid 1930s, at the latest. The title card in this three-minute clips says "Francis Coppola's TETRO starring Vincent Gallo."

"Neither disastrous misfire nor bold reinvention, J.J. Abrams' Star Trek ultimately works as an entertaining diversion and little more. For that reason alone, it might strike some as a success in the face of impossible expectations. But it's really just an average accomplishment. The movie simultaneously reveals Abrams's directorial strengths and weaknesses: He can craft sensational action sequences and tell an immersive story, but not at the same time. As a result, Star Trek soars for 45 minutes before devolving into a familiar spectacle, albeit an impressive one." -- from Eric Kohn's recently-posted review on movingpicturesmagazine.com.

Last January I asked why the promise of Ryan Reynolds -- i.e., that he might one day become the next Robert Redford -- didn't seem to be happening. And yet it could, I thought at the time. Reynolds has the looks, some decent chops and a certain planted quality that could put him into a special realm (perceptually, at least) if he were to land the right parts.

But now that Reynolds has been announced to star in his own Deadpool movie in another 20th Century Fox X-Men spinoff, I think that's all she...Read More

This poster is amiable and easy, but Larry David just pantomining the title...I don't know, it doesn't seem like enough. Shouldn't poster art crank up the intrigue levels a tad more? Shouldn't it add context and counterpoint? I'm asking.

Whatever Works is "partly stiff and unconvincing and perhaps a bit too mean-spirited, even for a film about a bitter misanthrope," I wrote on 4.22. "And yet it turns around and goes easy at the end, which I oddly liked and didn't like at the same time. It sure as hell isn't about realism, and yet the...Read More

Senior Sundance Film Festival programmer Trevor Groth is taking John Cooper's gig as director of programming for the Sundance Film Festival, effective immediately. The word around the campfire had been that both Cooper and Groth were trying to land the top Sundance job in the wake of Gilmore's departure, although it always seemed a fait accompli to me that Cooper would be named successor, by virtue of seniority. Groth will hang onto his other job as Artistic Director for the CineVegas Film Festival, which he's been doing since '02.

Mia Farrow's Darfur-related hunger strike is brave and admirable. She's trying to get President Obama to stop "lagging" about making moves that will somehow allow the 16 aid agencies which have been kicked out of Darfur, Sudan, to return. The expulsions have been ordered by Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who was indicted for war crimes in March by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. But how far will Farrow take this? What does she need to see happen?

It just hit me that Brad Silberling's Land of the Lost (Universal, 6.5) will be gradually boosting its media presence over the next few weeks, and deserves... well, a semblance of acknowledgement. The final two weeks of hype will commence near the end of the Cannes Film Festival, and then during my annual 9-day roamaround so my attention will be compromised. Except there's nothing to say about something like this...is there? The less said the better. Just shut up.

Big-studio effects-driven comedies are all the same mish-mash....Read More

"I don't really have a plan, because [I] don't know what the next 18 months will bring and I don't want to think that much about it. I like not having a safety net. I like the risk of not knowing. But I will be involved in all kinds of great things."

The preceding was spoken by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and published today in a N.Y. Times piece by Jennifer Steinhauer about this time and influence in Sacramento beginning to wind down. The quote is disingenuous in certain ways. It got me all the same because it reminds me of...Read More

Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'

Reasonably good news from Variety's Todd McCarthy in his just-up review of Ron Howard's Angels and Demons. One, this "cleverly produced" film is "less turgid and aggravating than its predecessor." Two, "the climax, however far-fetched, is visually spectacular and dramatically both evenhanded and unexpected." Three, Tom Hanks' Robert Langdon is fitter looking than he was in The DaVinci Code, and has changed hairdressers (i.e., no more DaVinci mullet). And four, Ewan McGregor's performance is "OK."

Last Saturday night I caught a showing of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Three Monkeys at the Cinema Village. As many have noted, it's beautifully shot but slowly (some would say glacially) paced. I adore this Antonioni-esque quality but a 20something couple who sat in front of me started to get bored somewhere around the three-quarters mark and began to yappity-yap. Not whispering, which would have been bad enough, but actually talking.

I cut them a break at first, thinking they'd stop of their own accord -- but they didn't. So I signalled my irritation by coughing twice, which they ignored....Read More

"Perhaps Mike Tyson was fortunate to have avoided school and society, inasmuch as his grim early years were the only background that could have produced the inexorable force that he became," writes New Yorker critic David Denby in his current review of James Toback's Tyson. "What this early life couldn't do, however, was protect him from the many dangers outside the ring.

New Yorker illustration by Tom Bachtell.

"Without the guidance of Cus D'Amato (who died when Tyson was nineteen), he fell among idolaters and users, and blew tens of millions of dollars, as he admits,...Read More

The Playlist's Rodrigo Perez has taken note of a 5.5 Jessica Biel interview by the Orlando Sentinel's Roger Moore in which she says that David O. Russell's Nailed, the financially-plagued Capitol Films production that went through at least four shutdowns last May and June, is an unfinished write-off. "I'm devastated that it's not finished," she said, "and who knows when it will be and will come out. I still have my fingers crossed that something good will come of it, that it will be finished."

With Michael Mann's Public Enemies set to open July 1st, it's not surprising that the high-profile Los Angeles Film Festival has arranged to screen it a few days prior. The 1930s high-def gangster flick will show as the fest's Centerpiece premiere. The L.A. Film Festival runs from June 18th to 28th. Here's the lineup on PDF.

I'm very much at peace with never having listened to a single Jessica Simpson song, including "I Want To Love You Forever." I didn't mind her performance in The Dukes of Hazzard, but I didn't think it was very good either. I really hate conservative-minded entertainers who talk about having conversations with God. Simpson has probably done as much to recruit Taliban followers as Sex and the City or the Charlie's Angels movies. A lot of us believe that the world would be a better place if she'd never become famous for anything.

Why has...Read More

My favorite Dom DeLuise moment -- the funniest, I mean -- is the most appalling in terms of homophobic attitudes. It's the "French mistake" dance scene, of course, in Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles ('74). "Wrong!!!....watch me faggot!...sounds like steam escaping." Sorry but it's funny. Brooks is the principal offender, of course -- DeLuise just went with it. Brilliantly. His end came last night in Santa Barbara. He was 75. We all have the time that we have, and then we don't.

I had a smooth and relaxing late-breakfast sitdown with Star Trek director JJ Abrams about two hours ago. We've been corresponding four or five years but had never met so it was cool to finally do so. My being a moderately big fan of the film (I gave it an HE grade of 8.7 or 8.8 last week) along with the softly-lighted setting of the lobby of the Four Seasons hotel only enhanced the vibe.

Abrams is full of pep and positivism, and about as sharp as they come. He's almost certainly a as much...Read More

That's not just Tom Hanks with a worried look on his face -- it's also me. Or at least a portrait of how I'm feeling. The guys in red and gray tunics and hats are journalists and Sony publicists who may be harboring secret information about a screening this week of Angels and Demons. I'm worrying about other stuff besides (i.e., most of it having to do with pre-Cannes issues), but this, right now, is certainly front-and-center.

Ron Howard's film is opening stateside a week from Friday (i.e., on 5.15), and of course I leave...Read More

A guy sent me a script of Aaron Guzikowski's Prisoners, which is looking like another Christian Bale-Mark Wahlberg pairing. (Their first co-venture will be in David O. Russell's The Fighter.) The rumor mill says Bryan Singer, whose once-formidable rep has been diminished by Valkyrie and who naturally needs to restore face, is apparently considering a shot at directing.

Prisoners is a kidnapped-kids thriller -- Taken meets Gone Baby Gone meets Se7en meets the ravenous hunger of producers and distributors looking for the next big thing. It's about monsters in our midst in at least two senses of that term, and...Read More

"There's the whole notion that you need to persist in the illusion of immortality," Tyson director James Toback recently said to Roger Ebert. "Because we say, well, yeah, but I'm not really dying because I'm going on to the next life. I don't mean just to be cute about it, but people like that need to look at the Hubble telescope photographs and say, this is where we live.

"We are in an invisible speck of dust. 'We' meaning our whole solar system but if you wanna narrow it down further, our planet, and if you wanna narrow it down further,...Read More

Making a marriage work always gets difficult sooner or later, and once the hard stuff starts in there's no going back to breezy and easy. At times summoning the strength and patience and discipline you need to get through the rough patches can be exhausting, and certainly draining. There are always farts and potholes and speed bumps along the way, and sometimes worse. I've been there; it's work. Which is why I never bought all that malarkey about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward being a more or less perfect couple.

Hollywood Elsewhere is now definitely covered as far...

I know Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox (20th Century Fox, 11.13.) has been testing in the New York area because I was invited to a New Jersey showing several weeks ago. I tried to RSVP on the up-and-up with my own name, but they said no-go because I wasn't from the right age group. In any case another showing of this animated stop-motion film happened yesterday and some guy who...like, allegedly attended has passed along a vaguely written impression to Nathaniel Rogers of The Film Experience.

"A beautiful union of filmmaker and material," the...Read More

Wolfram Alpha, the name of a new super search engine that will debut later this month, doesn't sound like a software application. It sounds like a New Age spiritual cult led by a German cyborg. It could be a kind of horror film directed by the ghost of Fritz Lang.

Plus "Wolfram" -- the last name of the software's creator, Stephen Wolfram -- is a little hard to pronounce. Anyone with a smidgen of marketing sense would know that teenage and 20somethings are...Read More

Publicist Kathleen Talbert said a while ago that Francis Coppola's Tetro, which will open the Director's Fortnight program in Cannes, is in black and white and color. A slight exaggeration, it seems. There are dabs of red in the manner of Rumblefish and Schindler's List , but the trailer is 97% monochrome.

"When a movie comes out great, I'm not even happy it came out great. I just think, 'Wow, whoo. That could have turned out really badly, and I escaped a horrible situation.' " -- Funny People director Judd Apatow quoted by N.Y. Times contributor Dave Itzkoff in a Sunday piece called "Funny Men With Serious Ambitions."

I love this quote because it precisely echoes the bottom-line attitudes and personalities of many if not most comedians. Dour, glum, guarded.

"Green is good, but there is no ecological benefit in recycling intellectual properties or in treating pop-culture treasures like so much scrap material," A.O. Scott also wrote this morning in one of the Memos to Hollywood published today. "So let us read our comic books and watch our DVDs of old movies and television shows and try to capture our imaginations with something new.

"Enough with the serial killers (unless you're David Fincher); period dramas; movies in which children die or are endangered; (bad) literary adaptations; superhero epics; tween-pop exploitation vehicles; scenes with bubble-breasted women working the pole in strip...Read More

In the view of the Observer's Ryan Gilbey, "the early years of Quentin Tarantino's career" -- Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, his screenplays of True Romance and Natural Born Killers, his pinch-hitting screenplay work on Crimson Tide -- "were the most dynamic by a long chalk."

Which makes it understandable why "some of us are eager to know what happened to the Tarantino who gave U.S. cinema a hefty adrenaline shot to the heart, much like the one administered to Uma Thurman's Mia Wallace.

"Perhaps the very act of expecting Tarantino to mature and...Read More

"The Oscars are just not working," N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott declared this morning among several "Memos to Hollywood" (which are co-authored by Manohla Dargis). "The Academy Awards broadcast, with its mixture of snark and high-mindedness; the pool of pseudoserious, faux-prestigious specialty-division B-pictures; the long, dreary slog of the awards season. You're losing touch with the mass audience on one side and the tradition of popular art on the other. Take some risks, rejigger the formula, expand the membership pool. Do something!" And then he says disregard and just "kill the Oscars" altogether.

Rejigger and rejuvenate by all means, obviously, but never...Read More

The Birth of Benjamin Button, the feature doc on the Button Criterion Bluray, "clocks in ten minutes longer than the movie -- 2 hours and 55 minutes. And it covers almost everything one could want. Nearly half the running time focuses on the various stages of practical and CG work, and rightfully so. I found myself replaying each of the post-production chapters covering the replacement effects after watching the whole thing in one go.

"The consummate professionalism brought to the production value of this doc is why a single-disc edition wasn't going to cut it. The...Read More

If you couldn't hit a note with a gun to your head, would you sing "Take Me Out To The Ball Game" in front of 50,000 people -- as Denise Richards did yesterday at Wrigley Field? Singing this badly is a felony in most states. Ghastly.

Last night I attended a Tribeca Film Festival showing of Barry Levinson's Poliwood, a blah-fine-whatever documentary about Levinson and his Creative Coalition pals attending numerous meet-and-greets at last year's Democratic and Republican conventions, and then milling around at Barack Obama's inauguration last January. And it's mainly....well, footage of this dedicated crew of actors (including Tim Daly, Anne Hathaway, Susan Sarandon, Ellen Burstyn, Alan Cumming, Josh Lucas, Matthew Modine, Richard Schiff and Rachael Leigh Cook) talking about how they're looking to learn and contribute and how their fame doesn't disqualify them from participating, etc.