Last week a serious dolphin lady and longtime friend named Gini Kopecky-Wallace, whom I've known since '79, went to see The Cove (Roadside, 7.31). An off-and-on participant with a research project studying wild dolphins for more than 20 years, Kopecky-Wallace writes about dolphins, whales, diving, islands and oceans any chance she gets. Here's her review:

It wasn't an especially dolphin-loving crowd that showed up for last Wednesday's screening of The Cove -- the Jim Clark/Louie Psihoyos documentary about a group of filmmakers, free divers, surfers,...Read More

The key sentence in Michael Fleming's Variety story about this morning's whackings of seven senior Paramount execs is found in the fifth paragraph, to wit: "Not surprisingly, the exiting execs were aligned with [the recently whacked Paramount Film Group president] John Lesher and president of production Brad Weston."

The whackees are Physical Production chief Georgia Kacandes, senior vp production Ben Cosgrove, exec vp of production Dan Levine, head of casting Gail Levin, Paramount Vantage honcho Guy Stodel, senior vp of visual effects Kim Locasio, and Aimee Shieh, head of Paramount's New York literary office.

Levine, it is noted, "shepherded" G.I. Joe: The...Read More

Remember beaming? Sending your info (or a memo or a short message) to another with a touch of a button. It was a big thing eight or ten years ago with owners of Palm Pilot Vs and I-don't-which-other-handhelds. When it first came in I used to think it was so amazing. No more writing stuff down! But it's gone now...a vanished technology. Even the Palm Pre doesn't have it.

In Contention's Kris Tapley is now a comrade-in-arms regarding Lone Scherfig's An Education, which he saw last night and is calling "near perfect," a "knock-out" and "something close to a miracle -- that rare occasion when a filmmaker taps into profound truths with the help of a cast that gets it, the themes surging through every vein, a driven vehicle of purpose.

"Most of the end-of-year awards talk will surely surround Carey Mulligan's absolutely peerless and incredibly refined leading performance, as well it should. She won't need much of a boost into the Oscar race when people get a load of...Read More

It only took the Minnesota Supreme Court seven and three-quarter months to hear the arguments, evaluate the data and decide that Al Franken should be certified as the winner of that state's ridiculously prolonged Senate race. May the scumbag Republicans who goaded Norm Coleman, Franken's vanquished Senate race opponent, into contesting this thing well past the point of rational dispute suffer some form of payback.

The N.Y. Times is reporting that Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty, whom I suspect has been a secret go-along scumbag in this affair, "had indicated as late as Monday that he was willing to certify Mr. Franken as...Read More

Laugh-out-loud amusing and "outrageous" as it sometimes is, Sacha Baron Cohen's Bruno (Universal, 7.10) -- oddly -- isn't all that funny. Certainly not in a convulsive sense. It is sort of heh-heh funny in a dry, observational, "is that all there is?" sense... but what's that? It's basically a series of misanthropic "screw you" jokes -- 82 minutes worth of effete put-on gags, each one meant to provoke homophobic reactions to SBC's flamboyantly gay, blonde-coiffed Austrian fashion reporter. The point being to "get" the constipated illiberal, small-minded types by making them look bad.

All I can...Read More

"Is it a sign of impending apocalypse that two terrible Nia Vardalos movies have been released in one month?" asks critic Marshall Fine. "It seemed unlikely that Vardalos could star in a movie flatter or more desultory than My Life in Ruins. But she's outdone herself with I Hate Valentine's Day (IFC, 7.3), which she wrote and directed and stars in.

John Corett, Nia Vardalos in I Hate Valentine's Day

"For good luck, apparently, she cast John Corbett - her love interest in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, - as the male lead. But she could have...Read More

A friend wrote last night that "there's a rumor starting that Eddie Murphy wants to play Michael Jackson in a biopic." Patently absurd on more levels than I'd care to list, I wrote back. He's too old, for one thing. He doesn't remotely resemble Jackson. His voice is all wrong. He isn't willowy or feathery or girly enough. "I don't even know why I'm pointing this stuff out because it's one of the silliest casting ideas I've heard in ages," I concluded.

There's a film, obviously, in...Read More

MSNBC switched over to high-def today, although it won't show up on all the cable systems until early August. It kicked in with my provider, Century Cable, three days ago. So I tuned in this afternoon -- channel 723 instead of the regular analog channel 23 -- to see how good it looked, and it looked like hell. All pixellated and degraded -- basically an analog image with a 16 x 9 aspect ratio. I know what the real thing looks like. This is crap.

Variety's Anne Thompson has a decidedly negative view of Michael Mann's decision to "immerse the audience" in the 1930s by shooting Public Enemies in high-definition video. "HD is clear, harsh, honest" she notes. "It works fine in a contemporary setting like Collateral or Miami Vice. But when audiences watch a period film, no matter how authentically recreated, they aren't expecting it to look like this."

On 6.24 I posted the same initial reaction -- this is different! not my father's 1930s! -- except I found it...Read More

Heath Ledger "was always hesitant to be in a summer blockbuster with the dolls and action figures and everything else that comes with one of those movies," the late actor's friend and agent, Steven Alexander, tells Peter Biskind in an upcoming Vanity Fair. "He was afraid it would define him and limit his choices."

Alexander and other confidantes tell Biskind that "one of the reasons Ledger agreed to do The Dark Knight was that it would be such a long shoot it would give him an excuse to turn down other offers. Ledger had a...Read More

Not every day can be well organized and super-productive. I was going to bang out my Bruno review (the green light is up) but it wouldn't happen. When the plane doesn't lift off the ground and it's suddenly 4:30 pm when it was only noon an hour earlier, you just have to suck it in and try to do better the next day. And now I have to catch a 6 pm screening of Nia Vardalos' I Hate Valentine's Day. And my early-bird DVD seller still doesn't have Lonely Are The Brave, which streets on 7.7.

There's just no end to the ick factor in the Michael Jackson tragedy. Everything that's being reported sounds sordid and sad. Or it's been made up. The Sun posted a story today about the late pop singer's ghastly physical state -- appalling -- and then TMZ reported that the story is fake. And 95% of the world is repeating the same mantra -- "Ignore the facts, deny the damage, ignore what Michael Jackson became -- just listen to the music and focus only on his peak-of-popularity years in the '80s and early '90s."

I found it moderately unpleasant to watch Al...Read More

Denby Delighted: "Michael Mann's Public Enemies is a ravishing dream of violent gangster life in the thirties -- not a tough, funny, and, finally, tragic dream like Bonnie and Clyde but a flowing, velvety fantasia of the crime wave that mesmerized the nation early in the decade.

"The scowling men in long dark coats and hats, led by the fashion-plate bandit John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), march into a grand Midwestern bank with marble floors and brass railings, take over the place, throw the cash in bags, and make their getaway, jumping onto the sideboards of flat-topped black Fords -- beautiful cars...Read More

In recognition of Bernie Madoff having been sentenced to 150 years behind bars, here's a re-link to that 3.14.09 piece about how I would have escaped and cavorted it if I'd been in Bernie's shoes. Excerpt: "I'd hire three full-time prostitutes to travel with me, but they'd have to be prostitutes who know how to sail."

Why didn't Madoff get 500 years? Or a thousand? I've always loved the poetic ring of 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, which is the title of a 1932 Michael Curtiz crime-prison drama with Spencer Tracy and Bette Davis. It comes from author Lewis E....

I may as well join the crowd and post this HD trailer for Ricky Gervais and Matthew Robinson's The Invention of Lying (Warner Bros., 9.25). Trailers always seem to misrepresent what a film actually is (i.e., how it plays) so you always need to take them with a grain. But the basic impression I'm getting is that TIOL may be a little too on-the-nose -- an explicit comic thesis going through the movie motions. But maybe not.

Responding to my recent praise for Michael Mann's Public Enemies, legendary film critic F.X. Feeney shared some thoughts earlier this evening, focusing especially on Mann's history of writing strong and defiant female characters.

"I'm so glad we agree about Public Enemies," he began. "I think it's a beautiful confluence of everything I ever loved about Last of the Mohicans and Heat -- especially in its sense of America as a still-embattled frontier where men and women continuously invent and re-invent themselves, and protagonists (whether they live within the law or without it) who are defined by their refusals to conform.

"This...Read More

"I respect your love for Public Enemies," a critic friend wrote this evening. "I have to say it didn't bowl me over -- it's too diffuse, too uncertain on what story it really wanted to tell. Although, agreed, Marion Cotillard is terrific and there's no doubt the film looks wonderful, like every Mann project.

"But there's a point here -- and maybe a post -- in how the externals of last Thursday's big NY screening at Leows' 84th Street may have critically affected its reception.

"As I'm sure you know, the Manhattan screening was a clusterfuck --...Read More

The L.A. Film Festival Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature went to Cyrus Nowrasteh's The Stoning of Soraya M. -- a valuable selling point. (I respected and admired it but couldn't get past the horrific subject matter.) The Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature went to Jeffrey Levy-Hinte's Soul Power. And Eva Norvind's Born Without won the Audience Award for Best International Feature.

The Target Filmmaker Narrative Award -- the confusing moniker for the jury award -- went to Sam Fleischner and Ben Chace's Wah Do Dem (What They Do), which I didn't see and which...Read More

Here's Part 2, Billy Bob Thornton's segment, New Rules.

This portion of a paragraph from a two-day-old Patrick Goldstein column made me blink: "When they weren't dancing, Brett Ratner and Michael Jackson would watch movies together. [Ratner] says they must've watched the original version of Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory 50 times over the years." Ratner is exaggerating, of course, but still. Speaking as someone who's watched some great films as many as 25 or 30 times (like North by Northwest, say), the idea of anyone eagerly watching that 1971 film more than four or five times seems awfully strange. It's good but not that good.

Why hasn't Warner...Read More

Variety's Pamela McClintock is reporting that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen has earned an estimated domestic haul of $201.2 million domestic, a result of business at 4,234 theaters. This is the biggest five-day haul ever after The Dark Knight. Pic's worldwide total through Sunday was $387 million, one of the best global debuts of all time.

Excuse me but I need to go slit my wrists now.

The good news is that The Hurt Locker had a great opening also. The three-day estimate is $144,000, which came from playing at four theaters for a per-theater average of $36,000. Some were guessing...Read More

However Michael Mann's Public Enemies winds up faring commercially and critically, Marion Cotillard's performance as Billie Frechette, the girlfriend of Johnny Depp's John Dillinger, is an award-quality nail-down. No dramatic actress in recent memory has conveyed as much intestinal steel, and it's all in her eyes. In each of her scenes they have a straight-from-the-shoulder, no b.s. quality. Every time you look at those watery French peepers and think, "God she's beautiful," a subsequent thought happens a split second later: "Man, she's tough."

Marion Cotillard in Public Enemies

Even when Cotillard visibly melts at the end when...Read More

I'm feeling a certain hesitancy about the fate of Public Enemies because of what I heard from a couple of critics after last Thursday night's screening. (Others felt it was brilliant, which is also my view.) Like I said before, the critics and moviegoers who like their meatloaf, mashed potatoes and green beans are going to have problems with it. Public Enemies is a first-rate cops and robbers 1930s time-trip highdef-video art movie, but it ain't meatloaf and it sure as hell ain't McDonald's. It's a dish of almond praline semifreddo with grappa-poached apricots. Yes -- a high falutin' dessert, as in...Read More

I must have stuck my head into a couple of dozen bars, restaurants and clothing stores yesterday, and there were very few that weren't playing tracks from Thriller. Clothing stores especially. "Billie Jean" in particular. And not once did I hear "Will You Be There?" It's a little drippy here and there, but I've always felt this was Michael Jackson's best song. As much as I deplored who and what Jackson became over the last 16 years of his life, this song makes me put all that aside. I love the central melody and particularly the rhythm track -- clap-clap, clap-pa-clap-clap.

I'm thinking I might do the odd thing and not sit here all day and write column stories. I've been telling myself I need to visit the Francis Bacon exhibit at the Met before it closes in August, and I'm thinking this is the day. I've worshipped his paintings nearly all my life, starting with my first viewing of Last Tango in Paris.

An important tenet of auteurism is that the best films are always driven by an intimate connection between the director and the lead character. Alfred Hitchcock and James Stewart's Scotty Ferguson in Vertigo, Martin Scorsese and Harvey Keitel's Charlie in Mean Streets, etc. And it doesn't really matter if the director admits to (or is even aware of) self-portraiture. Never trust the artist -- trust the tale.

It hit me last night as I was preparing my questions for last night's q & a with Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow that there's a certain kinship between herself and Jeremy Renner's Sgt. James...Read More

"Godfather should have never had more than one movie," Francis Coppola has told Movieline in an interview. Meaning what? That The Godfather Part II never should have been made? Or that the Corleone family saga should have been released in an epic, all-in-one sequential form from the get-go? Either way it's a silly and unrealistic thing to say.

I've always wanted to see a decent DVD mastering of the Godfather Saga -- the beginning-to-end version with added footage that showed on network television in the late '70s. Why doesn't Paramount Home Video put it out? Where...Read More

Let me get this straight. England's Optimum Home Entertainment is bringing out Bluray versions of both parts of Steven Soderbergh's Che two days from now and Criterion still hasn't officially announced they'll be putting out their own Che Blurays sometime in the fall? They're still playing the cartoon hinting game? Why is Criterion so slow and Optimum so fast? That's it -- I'm getting a multi-region player.

And no excuses about how Criterion needs more time because they always put together a great package. When another region commercially releases a Bluray title that I've...Read More

I'm among a small group of Hurt Locker-admiring journalists who've been asked to do short before-the-audience interviews with director Kathryn Bigelow (and, I gather, producer/screenwriter Mark Boal) prior to evening showings at lower Manhattan's Sunshine Cinemas. (Coming Soon's Ed Douglas did one last night.) My chit-chat will start just prior to tonight's 7:10 pm show. The Sunshine website says Bigelow will also make an appearance prior to the 9 pm show so I guess another journalist will be doing the honors. It's a daisy chain.

Asked by GQ's Alex Pappademas about alleged pressure upon Quentin Tarantino to significantly trim Inglourious Basterds (the Wrap's Sharon Waxman reported that the film might conceivably lose as much as 40 minutes), Harvey Weinstein responds with emphatic denials -- "this is nuts," Quentin "won't cut," "I don't think it's going to be shorter," etc. And then he says that the film actually will be cut down somewhat.

"Those stories are all untrue," Harvey says. "There's no fucking way. Here, read my lips: That is nuts. Please don't even write that -- it's insanity. There's not even a question of that. Whatever you're...Read More

Telegraph music critic Neil McCormick yesterday posted the best written and most bluntly honest reaction to Michael Jackson's life and passing that I've read thus far. Wait for dusk, take the IRT down to Astor Place, walk over to First Avenue and find a clean car to lean against, take out your iPhone or Blackberry and read it that way. Trust me.