This morning's New Moon/Comic-Con press conference began at 9:54 am -- almost a half-hour late -- inside a super-sized meeting hall within San Diego's Bayfront Hilton. The film's three stars -- Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner -- posed for photos and took questions from a throng of about 75 or 80 journalists. It was my first Comic-Con event, but I have to say that the most heartening aspect happened before it began.

The heart moment happened when MSN Movies' James Rocchi told me he...Read More

I'm sitting in an air-conditioned Super Shuttle van on Wilshire Blvd., and I can feel the inferno-like heat baking the sides of it. It's like we're cruising down 111 in Palm Springs or Palm Desert. You could fry a bloody egg on the sidewalk. Oh, yeah. Bloody hell. I'm sweatin' here. Roastin', bakin', boilin'...and San Diego will probably be a tad hotter, I won't arrive until midnight or thereabouts. Seeing Funny People first at the Arclight this evening.

Tina Brown's enormous media-changes thought #1, as passed along by the Chicago Tribune's Phil Rosenthal: "This particular wilderness that we're in will change," Brown says, "but it's a very difficult time for people in old media.

"It's most difficult, I think, for the people in their 50s who are part of a big media organization where they've spent most of their lives. They see it all changing around them and there isn't time for them to make the adjustment, or they fear making it."

And quote #2: "We're in a transitional period that I think will only last another few years...Read More

"What is cinema?," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in a piece about a mesmerizing Michael Jackson tribute site called Eternal Moonwalk. "André Bazin published a book of essays that tried to answer that question. But if somebody asked me for the short answer, I'd advise them to visit EternalMoonwalk.com. Seriously.

"On first glance, the site seems little more than a poignant goof: a tribute to the late Michael Jackson that draws its inspiration from the John F. Kennedy memorial in Washington, D.C., with its eternal flame -- but instead of a flame that never goes out, it's a video loop featuring variations...Read More

Tweeting about your arrival at LAX -- hardly any kind of big deal -- should suffice, but I may as well make it official by HE sights.

Delta flight to LAX was supposed to leave at 8:25 am, and we're only just now pushing off. Delightful experience. Did I just hear something about wifi above 10,000 feet? HE's six-hour dark period hereby begins.

Everett Sloane's finest acting moment was in Citizen Kane when his "Mr. Bernstein" character talked about the vagaries of memory. "A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn't think he'd remember," he said after William Alland's reporter dismissed the likelihood that Charles Foster Kane might recall a minor anecdotal event that had happened decades earlier.

"You take me," Sloane/Bernstein began. "One day back in 1896 I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out there was another ferry pulling in, and on it was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on....Read More

Tomorrow's JFK-to -LAX flight leaves at 8:30 am, requiring a pre-dawn wakeup. A few errands to attend to when I hit town and then a 7 pm screening of Funny People , which I'm told is an in-and-out, up-and-down, 145-minute ahem thing. In a respectable/honorable way, some feel. (Universal guy to journalist friend: "It's real, and some people don't want real.") Then then I'm driving down to San Diego and Comic-Con around 10 pm. I've rented a crappy little Craig's List cottage with a futon on the floor.

There are all kinds of parties and events, and starting early is key. (I wonder...Read More

I'm so delighted with the new Criterion Repulsion Bluray (out 7.28) that I've played it twice start to finish, and I only opened the package last night. I didn't sit there like a bowling pin and literally watch it twice. I watched it once and I ran it a second time as a kind of white-noise sideshow in the corner of my eye, tuning in and out and half-listening as I worked on the column.

It doesn't seem to have been de-granularized in the slightest and...Read More

The Ugly Truth (Sony, 7.24) is about a shrill and tightly-wrapped morning TV producer (Katherine Heigl) who decides to take guidance lessons from a sexist cock-of-the-walk talk-show guy (Gerard Butler) about how to land a prospective new boyfriend. Which gradually leads, of course, to Hiegl falling for Butler and vice versa and the other guy getting the blowoff. It was all there in the trailer.

I like Butler but he didn't have a chance with this steaming pile of uptown fantasy chick-romance horseshit. The crude craft and...Read More

Every bullshit cliche in the big-studio, high-adventure, CG-crapola pantheon, packed into one self-regarding, thoroughly self-amused franchise. It's Indiana Zorro 007 Jones in 19th Century London, for God's sake. It gave me instant cardiac arrythmia. I feel as if I've already sat through two screenings, been to the junket and watched it on a coast-to-coast flight. It'll probably do extremely well with the chumps. I'm betting right now that the pre-disposed Drew McWeeny will cream all over it.

With Universal's Despicable Me (7.9.10), Hollywood has produced another mainstream animated feature with another morbidly obese boy in a prominent role. (Or in the trailer, at least.) This follows the precedent begun by Up's "Russell" character, a morbidly obese young boy scout voiced by Jordan Nagai

Meaning that once again Hollywood is presenting obesity as a normal and accepted adolescent condition, certainly as far as American culture is concerned. Let's imagine that instead of one out of three American kids being obese or overweight they...Read More

Fox Searchlight will distribute Scott Cooper's Crazy Heart, per a press release received an hour ago. Adapted from Thomas Cobb's 1989 book, the downbeat drama (country music, alcoholism, parenting, looking for closure) costars Jeff Bridges, Colin Farrell, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Robert Duvall.

The film was produced by Cooper, Judy Cairo, Rob Carliner and Robert Duvall. The film has an original soundtrack by T-Bone Burnett.

Here's a Library Journal summary of Cobb's book, which may or may not have been strictly followed by Cooper's script:

"Singer...Read More

"How did you get stahted with this stawrey?," a junket journalist asked Thirst director Park Chan-Wook early this afternoon. "What was the creativity in makin' this film?"

A few seconds later this same journalist asked me not to take photos of Park because she was sitting right next to him and didn't want her face in the picture. I took a few shots at the get-go because I didn't want the usual posed-smiling shots. I never thought about including any face-shots of any journalists sitting nearby, but being asked by this woman not to do this...Read More

I don't have to explain any particular stinking reasons about why I posted this. Okay, here's one. It's interesting in hindsight how this one scene created a vivid (one could say racial) stereotype -- the scheming predatory sociopath with the wild eyes and evil grin. The Treasure of Sierra Madre was released 61 years ago, and this type of villain -- i.e., so deeply in love with his evil nature that he can't help flaunting it -- is still with us. "I don't care if you think I'm a bad guy. Because I am a bad guy -- I admit it. And I...

I've seen Cold Souls. It's intriguing and mildly amusing at times, but for a comedy in which a New York actor literally plays himself (in this instance Paul Giamatti) it's no Being John Malkovich either. My usual reaction to seeing a comedy that doesn't entirely work is to complain that they should've toned down the schtick. But Cold Souls could've used a bit more schtick. Odd -- I never thought I'd hear myself say that.

I'm saying there's something a bit too dry and studied about...Read More

HE reader James Kent was at the Harkins Tempe Marketplace cinema in Tempe, Arizona last weekend, and observed the following: "My wife and I walked passed the theater entrance to Bruno and noticed hey had a big sign posted in front that absolutely no one under the age of 18 would be permitted without parent or legal guardian. They even posted an usher to check IDs at the door. There was also a big sign up at the main ticket counter. Now, just two doors down there were no such signs in front of the R-rated The Hangover or three doors down...Read More

"I don't know how much you follow the Emmys," writes HE reader Matthew Morettini, "but something noteworthy came out of last week's nominations. Entourage's Jeremy Piven, winner of three Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series awards for three years straight ('06 through '08), wasn't even nominated. And there are six nominees! My guess? His fellow actors were appalled by his walking thermometer Speed-the-Plow shenanigans and decided to send him a message about professionalism. David Mamet couldn't have written it better."

It takes a special improvisational Thelonious Monk-like approach to running a website business to forget to renew your domain name. Everything's jake now but my aversion to Sir Thomas More-like regularity made for a truly delightful morning.

And now I'm running to a Thirst junket that I'll probablly be a few minutes late for. All kinds of to-do's are piling up as I speak. No further filing until mid-afternoon. A screening of The Ugly Truth happens early this evening.

I would have been a lot faster and more enthusiastic in linking to Dick Cavett's recollection of his Richard Burton relationship if (a) I could make sense of the timeline aspect (i.e., Cavett meeting Burton during his 1960/61 Broadway run of Camelot as part of an effort to persuade him to appear on his show, despite Cavett's show having launched in 1968) and (b) if the Times webmasters would stop being stupidly protective of their video files by making embed codes available.

All, finally, is half-well as far as my Comic-Con plans are concerned. Comic-Con's p.r. director graciously and generously approved my press credentials despite all kinds of problematic issues that stood in the way, not the least being that I applied quite late. I'm also in-like-Flynn with the Avatar presentation on Thursday, which is to say the 20th Century Fox people were also enormously helpful by providing a VIP pass that will save me from having to wait in line for two to three hours. I thanked them all before; I am doing so again. They restoreth my soul.

I'm in for three...Read More

In a N.Y. Times profile of In The Loop director-writer Armando Iannucci, Sarah Lyall riffs on Peter Capaldi's throttled portrayal of the sewer-mouthed Malcolm Tucker -- a senior British government official and spinmeister. "Few can match [him] for sheer verbal brio," she writes. "He uses his dark arts to fine result when he persuades reporters to backtrack on stories critical of the government. 'Whether it has happened or not is irrelevant -- it is true,' he yells in one scene, making the case for reporting something that did not in fact happen.

Peter Capaldi in In The...

So Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince opened with $51.8 million Wednesday, [followed with] $21.9 million Thursday, $26.8 million Friday and $29 million Saturday from 4,275 theaters, according to Nikki Finke's copy. (I'm in the Connecticut woods and happy for whatever big-city news I can get.) That makes a $79 million three-day weekend and a $159 million five-day cume.

Bruno, meanwhile, is morgue material with a projected $8 million weekend. The $2.8 million it earned on Friday represented an 80% drop from the previous Friday's take, and Saturday's $3 million haul amounted to a 66% drop from the previous Saturday. But...Read More

The copy line "first love burns brightest" sounds like it's aimed at younger women but the film, a rigorous visitation and recreation of early 19th Century England, is made to order for 30-plus women, older couples and X-factor types. I'm just imagining the reactions of the most notoriously vapid demographic in the history of civilization to Jane Campion Barry Lyndon-ish capturings through Greig Fraser's Vermeer-like photography.

I'm told that the people in charge of steering Sony Classics' An Education into awards season and Oscar noms -- Best Picture, Carey Mulligan for Best Actress, Nick Hornby for Best Original Screenplay, Alfred Molina for Best Supporting Actor, etc. -- are concerned about the film peaking too early. I get that. It should all be turned down for the remainder of July and the entirety of August -- for the next six weeks or so.

I've also been told, by the way, that a smattering of journalists who've seen it are going "okay, not bad but meh." The snobs, it sounds...Read More

Marc Weber's (500) Days of Summer isn't so much about a relationship that can't work as much as one that the guy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is unable to recognize as such. So lost in the idea of perfect love that he can't see or think straight, he's incapable of stepping back and regarding the object of his longing and affection (Zooey Deschanel) with even a faint degree of dispassion or clear-headedness.

This is frustrating because it's obvious -- glaringly obvious -- that Deschanel's Summer is a lady any self-respecting guy would take with a grain of...Read More

We all know who "they" were back in 1956 when Kevin McCarthy shouted his hysterical warnings. If you were asked to point to a particular cultural group or force in the world of 2009, who would "they" be right now? Or does the metaphor even apply these days?

Everybody needs something. Posted on 7.9.09, just saw it for the first time. It mostly works -- a clean, fresh idea/story. Written & performed by Kres Mersky, directed by Theodore Gersten. I would have very slightly toned down Mersky's performance as she's clearly "acting" -- she wants/needs the audience to take a certain emotional journey, etc., but the piece would have been stronger if she'd just told the story straight without concern as to whether her telling is sufficiently engaging.

"A dentist's son who began his career as a radio announcer in Kansas City, Mo., Walter Cronkite wasn't glossily good-looking in the starched, blow-dried way of so many of his successors; if anything, he was closer to homely than handsome. But behind a crisp speaking style, he had a natural, unaffected demeanor that made him more inviting than other television reporters.

"When he took over from Douglas Edwards in 1962, Mr. Cronkite would announce the day's events, and then, as anchors do now, turn to correspondents in the...Read More

If you see this look on the face of a woman you're seeing, the relationship is as good as dead. And there's not a damn thing you can do about it except pack your bags. I know it well. It's the look of a lady who hasn't yet said "we need to talk" but is definitely working her way up to that. Except there's no need. You're history and that's that.

Guys don't use this look because they don't tend to call things off (although sometimes they do). They just keep nodding and smiling as they try...Read More

"An Evening with Judd Apatow" has been scheduled for next Wednesday, 7.22, by the Museum of the Moving Image. Florence Gould Hall, 55 East 59th Street at 7 pm. A screening of Funny People will follow. Apatow will discuss his career in a conversation with clips moderated by chief curator David Schwartz.

The man is a conservative snapping turtle. It's partly what he says on the show but also that repulsive-looking 1955 flat-top haircut. I wrote months ago that he's like some kind of snorting hot-breathed wildebeest -- an animal. I love the part when he screams so loudly that his voice goes into falsetto mode.

Robert Rodriguez will he doing the old film-buffy genre-wallow later this month when he begins shooting Machete, a feature inspired by a mock Grindhouse trailer. The film will star Danny Trejo (Heat) and will reportedly use Austin locations. It's being reported that Robert DeNiro, Jonah Hill and Michelle Rodriguez might be cast, but that sounds a little dicey. Steven Seagal and Lindsay Lohan could also be involved. What was it about the failure of Grindhouse that Rodriguez didn't understand? Genre spoofs are only for film snobs.

The witty David Rasche (Sledgehammer!) talking to a couple of grinning ABC news guys about the real-life political parallels in Armando Iannucci's In The Loop. (I hate sites that don't offer easy-to-grab embed codes.) "Trust me -- I know what I'm doing."

During her Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Judge Sonia Sotomayor "took refuge in the impenetrable language of the law, and in what seemed (and this is becoming a regular strategy in politics) to be the deliberate jumbling of syntax, so people at home won't be able to follow what is being said," Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wrote today.

"To be clear and succinct is to look for trouble. Better to produce a mist and miasma of jumbly words, and sentences that do not hold. You're talking, so you'll seem alive -- in fact people using the syntax dodge are often...Read More

I don't mean to make light of Mischa Barton's sad situation, but what do you have to do or say to persuade the authorities that you're a "5150" and need to be placed under involuntary psychiatric hold? Someone's misery is not a joke and I'm not looking for laughs, but I know that all my life I've held onto a single concept of what it means to totally lose it and be seen as someone who needs a straightjacket. And it comes from a specific movie. And it involves heavy traffic on a busy city street.

...

Summit's gradual Hurt Locker rollout is more or less patterned after the successful territory-by-territory, word-of-mouth-building expansions that resulted in big returns for Slumdog Millionaire and Gran Torino, reports Forbes' Laura Myers. She states that Kathy Bigelow's film "may become the year's independent breakout by combining early box-office success with critical acclaim."

But the proof will be in the chocolate pudding as the film expands to 93 siutations this weekend and then to 200 situations on 7.24. The key, of course, given the general laziness and scattered ADD mentalities out there, will be TV advertising. Word of mouth is well and...Read More

In a N.Y. Times profile published today, David Carr writes that with the sale of Deadline Hollywood Daily to Mail.com, Nikki Finke "stands to make more than $5 million in the next eight years, and her deal could go as high as $10 million, according to one of the people involved in the deal who declined to be quoted citing the private nature of the negotiations." So much for the $14 million sale figure reported by The Wrap on 6.23.

I love the following passage at the end of Carr's piece, by the way:...Read More

As with any subway map, you need to focus on the legend and proceed from there. Consider the partial images below and then click on the big version.

Best wishes and favoring winds to Anne Thompson and her plan to base Thompson on Hollywood on Indiewire starting August 1st. Her deal with SnagFilms and IndieWire CEO Rick Allen, according to a Paid Content story (which links to a Sharon Waxman Wrap story), says she'll handle her own ads. She'll of course receive promotion and visibility through the Indiewire hookup. My understanding is that Thompson was looking hard at the Indiewire thing a couple of months ago.

The most uncompromised aspect of Nikki Finke's 7.16 post about Bonnie Fuller's hiring by Mail.com Media Corporation (MMC) to run HollywoodLife.com is -- of course, as ever -- the reader comments. I was particularly struck by the following comment posted at 10:53 pm last night by "Stacy," to wit:

"Egads...Bonnie Fuller? Queen of Tabloid Lies? That woman has zero conscience when it comes to lying about celebrities, making up stories based on the pictures, terrorizing her staff and making a mockery of the media's first amendment rights.

"Fuller is a cat with nine lives....Read More

A fairly recent recording of an information/blistering critique line at the Diamond Cinema in Navan, Ireland -- roughly 50 kilometers northwest of Dublin. The Diamond guy who recorded this clearly has issues with the champagne bottle scene. That or he's a frustrated critic who needs his own film blog. Diamond phone #: 353.046.907.4755.

My all-time favorite saloon shoot-out, hands down. Will someone please save this film from public domain hell and figure out a way to remaster it and make it look as sharp and rich as possible? Bartender: "Mister, you really killed him." Gunslinger: "Awww."

The big bearded British guy in McCabe and Mrs. Miller -- the hired assassin who carried an elephant shotgun around and wore big boots and a huge sheepskin coat and a huge wide-brimmed hat, and who was shot in the forehead with a single-shot derringer by Warren Beatty at the very end -- has pushed off in real life. His name was Hugh Millais, and he was 79 years old. He was about 40 when he made McCabe.

And the verdict is...?

Here's an appreciation of Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place, which will play at Manhattan's Film Forum from Friday, 7.17, to Thursday, 7.23. Editing by Matt Zoller Seitz, words and narration by Kim Morgan, adapted from a Sunset Gun post. Here's Michael Joshua Rowin's L Mag review. The last DVD version (released in '03) delivered a severe grainstorm -- here's hoping the situation has changed.

If this 7.16 N.Y. Times story isn't a Michael Mann film, I'll eat my Elph digital camera. Mann can save himself by pouncing on this one right away. If I were him I'd be all over it like a spider. I'd have a screenwriter hired and working on it as we speak.

"Last weekend, the arrest of a senior figure in a Mexican drug cartel known as La Familia led to a wave of coordinated attacks by the cartel against federal police posts and one military base, killing three federal officers and two soldiers," N.Y. Times reporter Robert Mackey wrote today.

One of the many things that make Cary Grant feel angry and humiliated in Bringing Up Baby is Katherine Hepburn's decision to refer to him as "Mr. Bone." I thought of this because poor Jennifer Aniston must feel angry and humiliated by the tabloid media's characterizing her as "Mrs. Bone" -- i.e., a woman who rarely if ever sleeps alone, and who never seems to settle.

The best acting she ever did was in The Breakup, but after that, what? I don''t like submitting to tabloid chatter as topics of mosquito conversation in my head, but when I think of Aniston I...Read More

Being a fan of Jess Weixler's performance in Alexander The Last, I contacted Rod Lurie and urged him to consider casting her in the Susan George role in his Straw Dogs remake. He took my advice and sat down with her, but finally decided to go with Kate Bosworth.

Lurie has written the Straw Dogs script and will begin directing it in rural Mississippi in August. He told me a while ago that he did a lot of research on the original Sam Peckinpah version, including reading old yellowed drafts of the script and asking Dustin Hoffman for advice about...Read More

I need to say one thing about yesterday's Natasha VC Gawker piece about supposed directorial paycheck movies having "ruined" or seriously compromised the reps of David Fincher, Curtis Hanson, Jonathan Demme, Ang Lee and Steven Soderbergh.

As lame and ill-informed as the article is, it at least starts out with a fair and accurate assessment of the motives of certain directors at certain stages in their lives, which is that sometimes they direct certain films because they need to bolster the bank account.

Shocking as this may sound to the likes of David Poland and Karina Longworth, it's...Read More

I saw The Cove last night at a special celebrity-attended screening, and I'm now officially and emotionally among the ranks of the persuaded and the blown-away. It's easily one of the best films I've seen this year, and without question my choice for the best documentary of 2009 so far. It's this year's Man on Wire -- almost certain to keep playing and gathering steam all through the year and into Oscar season.

You don't come out of The Cove simply saying "really good movie!" (although...Read More

This looks like the same Nine trailer that the Weinstein Co. showed journalists in Cannes last May, but I could be mistaken.

FilmBuff, a video-on-demand channel for connoisseurs of high-quality, indie-level cinema as well as classics from all studios and realms, began to appear today on a couple of dozen cable systems, including Verizon's FiOS and Charter. Cinetic Rights Management's John Sloss and Matt Dentler, who told me about their new operation earlier today, said FilmBuff would be available on all the cable systems within two months time (i.e., by mid September).

Half of the films shown will be brand-new, unseen features or newish features that haven't received the theatrical exposure their backers or fans felt was appropriate...Read More

It sure is wonderful news that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince made close to $20 million last night. Friends in high states of excitation have been calling for the last hour or so. We're all getting together this evening to celebrate over drinks.

An HE reader wrote this morning that he's just "finished the script for Jason Reitman's Up In The Air, the George Clooney vehicle. It's a hell of a piece. Clooney should kill in the role. The style is very reminiscent of Thank You For Smoking."

I've just realized I've had a copy of this script in my script folder for months and I haven't even skimmed it. Lazy ass. I'm presuming DreamWorks will open it sometime this fall and that it may show up at the Toronto Film Festival. But there's no specific projected release date that I can find.

The IMDB plot...Read More

Carey Mulligan's "this is what I really think and feel and want" scene with Emma Thompson (starting at 3:22) will, trust me, be used again and again in video pieces about Mulligan's work in An Education, starting in September. For obvious reasons. Update: The YouTube clip I found and posted earlier this morning had to be taken down. But I'm keeping the item up for the comments.

The greatest sensual pleasure to be had from coffee beans is putting your nose into a bag of freshly ground beans and having an aroma orgasm meltdown. Nothing else in the coffee world approaches that. Because every time you get high from that great aroma you think "Aahh, what a great cup of coffee will come from this!" And of course, the coffee never tastes as good as the aroma promises. No matter how well prepared, the sip always falls short.

Ground coffee-bean aroma is right up there in the top-ten pantheon, which also includes (a) the smell of burning leaves on an...Read More

Here's President Obama doing ten minutes of play-by-play commentary with Chicago White Sox announcers Joe Buck and Tim McCarver. "I don't hate the Cubs. I just don't root for them, that's all."

One of David Carradine's final performances was in a just-released piece of exploitation crap called Break. Look at the idiots standing around in the scene shown below. Where do they find people with such neutered expressions? I can feel Carradine's pain as I watch it. A strong and steadfast actor dies but once, but actors who perform in films like Break suffer repeated smotherings of the soul.

I'm as much of a fan of this kind of photo as the next guy, but it seems as if Scarlet Johansson has stopped acting for a reason. Maybe she's figuring "what's the point?" She needs to get back into it again, only this time appear in some good films. Because I don't know or care what Mango is.

An Education's Carey Mulligan playing verbal table tennis with the charmingly rat-a-tat-tat David Poland. That's my girl you're messing with, pal! Kidding.

I believe none of what I hear and only half of what I see, but a Sydney reader named Warren wrote a few minutes ago saying "you may be interested to know that Steven Soderbergh is directing a play for Cate Blanchett's Sydney Theatre Company here in December this year. Maybe that's where he sees his future." "Mystery project" alluded to and half-assedly confirmed by the website.

Jacket art for the forthcoming North by Northwest Blu-ray, expected sometime in November in the U.S. and U.K. Posted yesterday by www.blu-ray.com. Cary Grant isn't running with any particular conviction. He could have just come in from a rainstorm and is running through an apartment building lobby and trying not to slip. Poor-ass choice on someone's part.

Vanity Fair's Julian Sancton has compiled a list of critics who've used the term "fish in a barrel" in their critiques of Bruno.

The Toronto Film Festival has announced four gala presentations and eighteen special presentations that will play from 9.10 to 9.19. I've been unofficially told that An Education is going to Toronto but it's not on this particular list -- no biggie. But where's Nowhere Boy? That one has to go to Toronto. Harvey wouldn't dare not bring it...would he?

Kristin Scott Thomas, Sergi Lopez in Catherine Corsini's Partir

Here's a partial rundown and some gut reactions:

Get Low (d: Aaron Schneider). Robert Duvall, Bill Murray, Sissy Spacek, Lucas Black. Fringe-y 1930s rural period drama. Gut reaction:...Read More

I've been listening to Judge Sonia Sotormayor's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. She's basically okay -- prudent, fair-minded, intelligent. Not anyone's idea of a dazzling intellect but her heart's in the right place and confirmation is a lock. But people who use the word "absolutely" as a way of trying to convey emphatic resolve and agreement are a problem to me. I think it's a term that less-than-fully-honest people use to snow others with. Not maliciously but as a mild sidestep move.

When I hear "absolutely" my eyes narrow involuntarily and I start to pull back a bit. People in sales use...Read More

Steven Soderbergh, clearly in a dispirited post-Moneyball mood, has told the Guardian's Henry Barnes that he's feeling marginalized and roughed up and may be looking at a diminished future. "In terms of my career, I can see the end of it," he says. "I've had that sensation for a few years now. And so I've got a list of stuff that I want to do -- that I hope I can do -- and once that's all finished I may just disappear.

"I'm looking at the landscape and I'm thinking, 'Hmmm, I don't know....Read More

An interesting group attended last night's In The Loop premiere at the IFC Center. Hangover star Zach Galifianakis was there (and giving me what felt like a bit of a dirty look as the theatre emptied out). Three or four Sopranos guys (Paulie Walnuts, Artie Bucco, Big Pussy, Furio) came at the invitation of Loop costar James Gandolfini. Famke Janseen (Nip/Tuck, Taken, "Jean Grey" in X-Men) was there; ditto Tom Arnold. Several great-looking women with legs to die for were waltzing around the after-party. Plus the usual assortment of journalists (myself and Jett among them).

James Gandolfini, Federico...

The gradual left-to-right degradation of the cellar wall opposite the bathrooms in the basement level of the IFC Center (i.e., the way it goes from a faux natural jagged-brick texture to a smoothed-over Mexican restaurant look) reminds me of a bit Lenny Bruce delivered toward the end of John Magnuson's Lenny Bruce Performance Film ('65). "This is a real classy wall...looks good, good, decent...and here's where the brother-in-law took over. 'People don't know quality, they'll settle for shit, let's give 'em shit.'"

Basement wall opposite bathrooms at Manhattan's IFC Center -- Monday, 7.13, 7:25 pm

The only thing that concerns me about Neill Blomkamp's District 9 (Sony, 8.14), which is about insect-like aliens being imprisoned and ghettoized and treated worse than Darfur refugees, is Blomkamp's visual effects background. This tells me the film will mainly please fanboys and leave people like me wanting more. But maybe not.

I'm also concerned with the dreaded Peter Jackson having produced and the Jackson-allied screenwriter Phillipa Boyens having a co-producer credit. This means that the over-emphatic Jackson stamp -- grandiose and hammering visuals without a...Read More

This is three or four days old, but anyone who saw/liked/was aroused by Michael Moore's Sicko absolutely needs to watch this scalding Bill Moyers Journal interview with Wendell Potter, former vp corporate communications for CIGNA and current health-care activist with the Center for Media and Democracy. Part #1 is below; here's part #2.

Bill Moyers: So what did you think when you saw that film?

Wendell Potter: I thought that he hit the nail on the head with his movie....Read More

I love the lead sentence in Stu Van Airsdale's 7.13 Movieline piece about Zooey Deschanel, to wit: "[She] has long been something of an emo-dork wet dream for more than just her striking features, lilting voice and commanding screen presence." Feeling no kinship with emo types or dorks, I've never felt the slightest anything for Deschanel. She's just...whatever. I can roll or not roll with her, but in no way does she push the buzzer.

That said (and as I said on 6.20), 500 Days of Summer "may be, in fact, be the most...Read More

The official Sony Classics one-sheet for Lone Scherfig's An Education debuted today on Movie City News. What does it "say"? Period, obviously. A certain poise, a touch of class. But not necessarily an older guy-younger lassy relationship. (Peter Sarsgaard has been Photoshopped to look 26 or so, and Carey Mulligan could be 22 or 23.) What it doesn't say -- and what it should say, I feel -- is "a mid '60s John Schlesinger film." In sum, it feels a shade too cautious. But what do I know?

I've only just decided to hit San Diego Comic-Con next week due to an opportunity that was recently presented to me (by Brazilian journalist and HE pally Pablo Villaca) to participate in a forthcoming InFilm tour/seminar. So yesterday I wrote ComicCon's press guy Christopher Jansen, and seconds later I got a form letter saying that press registration Comic-Con 2009 is closed, and that there will be no onsite registration. It also said "due to the high volume of emails it may take several days before I can get back to you."

So this is...Read More

HE reader Ray Ciscon has passed along an article on a US Army-related website in which The Hurt Locker is discussed. Some commenters voice relatively minor realism and credibility issues with the portrayal of U.S. soldiers (particularly Sgt. James) in the film. A persistent theme throughout the article is that a good percentage enjoyed it and would in fact recommend it to others.

In a just-posted discussion with Ain't It Cool's Mr. Beaks, Kick-Ass director Matthew Vaughn has shared an observation about Aaron Johnson's performance as John Lennon in Nowhere Boy, which Vaughn has seen.

Kristin Scott Thomas as Aunt Mimi and Aaron Johnson as John Lennon in Nowhere Boy.

Vaughn: I nearly postponed the movie for a year because I couldn't find Dave Lizewski [the lead character in Kick-Ass]. I just couldn't find Kick-Ass. It was a Friday morning, and I said to the guys, 'We're going back to London tonight, and we're postponing the movie...Read More

"I'm trying to think of another American comedy that has this kind of vigor and springy step," I said this morning during a breakfast interview with In The Loop director Armando Iannucci. "The overwhelming majority of American comedies are geared for guys like Turtle on Entourage, and they don't have a fraction of the mental alertness, that special Preston Sturges-like quality, that In The Loop has."

I forgot to snap a photo this morning of In The Loop director Armando Iannucci, but this is where we sat for breakfast at the Cooper Union hotel.

I...Read More

"Simply put, Criterion's Blu-ray of Roman Polanski's Repulsion outperforms every other release I have seen. Contrast is excellent, clarity very impressive and detail simply fantastic. The color-scheme is also superb - blacks are deep and lush while whites are gentle and natural looking. Additionally, this is a pure, unfiltered print with plenty of healthy grain." Plenty? Healthy? "To sum it all up, Criterion's Blu-ray release is nothing short of a revelation." -- from Svet Atanasov's 7.10 review on Blu-ray.com.

Here's Gary Tooze's review and version comparisons on DVD Beaver.

Amazon UK has a PAL version of Warner Home Video's North by Northwest Bluray being released on 11.16.09.

The Towering Inferno was entertaining crap when it opened 35 years ago, and the exact same deal applies now that it's on Blu-ray. But Paul Newman and Steve McQueen are honorable and oak-solid in their starring roles. This is impressive given the fact that neither actor has a real part to play -- they were just paid to show up and go through the Irwin Allen paces. They knew it then and we know it now, but they deliver the goods anyway. That's professionalism and star power.

"The Palinist 'real America' is demographically doomed to keep shrinking," notes N.Y. Times columnist Frank Rich. " But the emotion it represents is disproportionately powerful for its numbers. It's an anger that Sarah Palin enjoyed stoking during her 'palling around with terrorists' crusade against Obama on the campaign trail. It's an anger that's curdled into self-martyrdom since Inauguration Day.

Illustration by Barry Blitt.

"These are the cries of a constituency that feels disenfranchised -- by the powerful and the well-educated who gamed the housing bubble, by a news media it keeps being told is hateful, by the...Read More

Last night some friends and I sat down with the recently-released DVD of Lonely Are the Brave. I haven't seen it since '96 but it really and truly works. Still. It's an honest, well constructed, beautifully shot (in ravishing black-and-white Scope), deeply sad film with small servings of comic absurdism on the part of the secondary lawmen characters (i.e., not Walter Matthau's but everyone else).

Lonely Are The Brave is probably Kirk Douglas's finest film, and his performance as the sentimental but obstinate Jack Burns is...Read More

Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke ran a boxoffice update yesterday that said Bruno, which enjoyed a strong $14.2 million Friday kickoff, experienced a devastating 37% Friday-to-Saturday dropoff, resulting in a dispiriting $9 million Saturday haul.

So instead of Bruno earning a potential $40 million or so (which would be indicated by Friday's earnings, no?) the comedy will finish this evening with about $30 million (a per-screen average of $10,881 in 2,757 situations). That's okay from a certain perspective but throw in Bruno's reported "C" rating from CinemaScore and you have two clear indications that Bruno has no future-- that it's...Read More

In Michael Powell's N.Y. Times profile of Andrew Sarris, it is noted that the legendary film critic has been entirely cut loose by the N.Y. Observer. Which wasn't supposed to happen. Life is hard and people lie. The solution, of course, is for Sarris to immediately switch to an online berth. As I wrote about his situation on 6.11, "All writers need to keep on chooglin' until they drop. There is no spoon and there is no retirement."

The initial reports on 6.10 and 6.11 were that diminishing revenues had forced Sarris's Observer editors...Read More

You can tell within seconds that John Huston's Moby Dick understands the look and culture of mid 19th Century New England, and that you're in the company of seasoned actors and a sturdy script. I've been a fool for this film for years, largely due to my love for Oswald Morris's desaturated half-color, half black-and-white scheme, achieved by the blending of a color and a monochrome negative in post.

If you'd asked me a few years ago (sometime, say, between '01 and '03) if I thought Mary Louise Parker was a firecracker, I would've said, "Uhh, well...she's attractive but not really." MLP used to be a semi-struggling actress who did solid work in films like Fried Green Tomatoes and Angels In America, and on-stage in productions like Proof. Then she began starring in Weeds four years ago and now she's totally reinvented as smokin' material.