Sifting through some oldish mp3 files: (a) A practice recording of Capote review for a podcast thing I was working back in '06; (b) A favorite Humphrey Bogart clip; (c) A brief dialogue exchange from a certain Roger Corman production from the mid '70s; (d) Familiar but sound advice about the interweaving of comedy and tragedy.

"Well, what can I tell ya? Last year, two or three...it goes way back, I suppose. I can remember entertaining suicidal thoughts as a college student. At any rate, I've always found life...demanding. I'm the only child of lower middle-class people. I was the glory of my parents, 'my son the doctor'...you know. I was always top of my class, scholarship to Harvard, the boy genius, the brilliant eccentric. Terrified of women. Clumsy at sports. My home is hell. I left my wife a dozen times. She left me a dozen times. We stay together through a process of attrition. Obviously...Read More

Yesterday afternoon Los Angeles attorney Eric Spiegelman posted a time-lapse video -- 90 minutes compressed into 24 seconds -- of the enormous smoke clouds over the 818 and 626 areas over the San Gabriel mountains and near the La Canada, Flintridge, La Cescenta and Altadena areas. Indiewire's Anne Thompson and L.A. Observed posted it last night. I'm just tagging along -- a day late and a dollar short.

A horrendous flame monster threatening to eat your home is one of the worst...Read More

Compare the jacket art for the forthcoming Criterion DVD of Downhill Racer to the art for the two theatrical posters used during the film's original release. The middle poster is obviously the sexiest and most sophisticated. The electric-blue one on the right is...well, okay. But the Criterion DVD jacket looks like a robot-droid skiier -- like Peter Weller's Robocop negotiating a slope on the ice planet of Hoth.

(l. to r.) Jacket of forthcoming Criterion Downhill Racer DVD; theatrical release poster #1; alternate theatrical poster.

What was Criterion thinking? The...

A clean and handsome-looking Blu-ray of Phillip Noyce's nicely sculpted Dead Calm ('89) will be out on 9.8.09. Hard to believe it's been 20 years since I've seen it. A very tight and well-ordered thriller, to say the least. It's a little bit curious to consider the way Nicole Kidman used to look. Sam Neill looked so young back then! (Who didn't?) It'll be nice to get a copy before I leave for the Toronto Film Festival.

Noyce, currently in post on Salt, his Angelina Jolie Russian spy movie for Sony, told me yesterday he...Read More

I'm watching the Ted Kennedy funeral procession make its way to Arlington National Cemetery, and particularly the area adjacent to JFK and Bobby Kennedy's grave with the rough stones and the eternal flame with the biege-colored Custis-Lee Mansion atop the sloping green hill. I'm listening to MSNBC's Chris Matthews talk about Jimmy Breslin writing that 11.25.63 interview/profile of Clifton Pollard, the guy who dug JFK's grave. Here's that story.

The version of Alejandro Amenabar's Agora that'll screen at the Toronto Film Festival will run 126 minutes, give or take, which is roughly 15 minutes shorter than the Cannes version, which I believe ran 141 minutes. My Cannes observation: "I was surprised, really, that it moved as fast as it did."

The biggest tech headache of the year is about to take place in Toronto. There is no film festival anywhere in the world that makes people like myself suffer like the Toronto International Film Festival. Compared to Cannes and Sundance and given the generic expectation level of a major film festival, Toronto wifi is similar to the wifi in Oxford, Mississippi. Or nearly.

My iPhone was showing five bars this morning but the AT&T Communication Manager (i.e., the air card software) was saying no dice. It does this from time to time. Actually, more often. Technology lets you down...

The L.A. County coroner's ruling about Michael Jackson's death being called a homicide isn't specifically worded, to my understanding. The secondary definition of second-degree murder is "a killing caused by dangerous conduct and the offender's obvious lack of concern for human life...a middle ground between first-degree murder and voluntary manslaughter." Dr. Conrad Murray, Jackson's personal physician, had been thought to be suspected of manslaughter. What's the precise difference between manslaughter and the kind of second-degree murder described above, and what will be the penalties if Murray is charged with the latter?

"My relationship with Don Hewitt was never close," writes former 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman (who was played by Al Pacino in The Insider). "It was marked not just by arguments, but a kind of dance where he would regularly 'fire' me during my first decade at the program.

"But it finally disintegrated during a critical period in 1995 when CBS management and lawyers changed the rules, citing a little-used legal concept ('tortious interference') to justify killing an investigation of the tobacco industry that I was working on. Hewitt's acquiescence, and then public justification of management's decision, was the last straw....Read More

These three are contending that Cannes journalists over-reacted to Lars von Trier's AntiChrist, and in so doing revealed their emotionally timid natures plus a lack of historical perspective. Poland/Morgan/Gross have seen AntiChrist but had many weeks, of course, to prepare themselves. What were they going to do -- agree with the mob? Whatever their motives they're clearly bending over backwards to be contrarian for the sake of contrarianism. And they're flat-out ignoring how amateurishly awful Antichrist is. Forget shock value -- I'm talking about basic chops.

The slow-mo...Read More

Still looking for distribution, Alejandro Amenabar's Agora will show at the Toronto Film Festival. In my Cannes reaction, posted on 5.18, I called it "a visually ravishing, intelligently scripted historical parable about the evils of religious extremism. And I don't mean the kind that existed in 4th century Alexandria, which is when and where this $65 million dollar epic is set. I mean the evils of the present-day Taliban and the Neocon-aligned Christian right, and the way Agora metaphorically exposes these movements for what they are.

"As...Read More

On what planet could a 53% second-weekend drop be considered "solid"? This is how box-office analyst Steve Mason has described the projected Inglourious Basterds fall-off this weekend, based on yesterday's figures.

In the old days a 25%-to-30% second-weekend fall-off was considered a decent hold, a 40% fall-off was thought to be worrisome and a 50% fall-off was a major "uh-oh." But in today's era in which some highly-touted films have fallen off 60% and even 70% on their second weekends, a 50% drop is now considered par for the course as in "not great but not catastrophic." Perspective is all.

Warner...Read More

The decent, obliging thing to do if you've seen Robert Siegel's Big Fan is to give it a pass. If you care about independent cinema and you'd like to see at least a trickle of blunt, feisty, low-budget character dramas turning up at Sundance and Toronto and Cannes for years to come, you'll put away the things that bothered or half-bothered you and just say, "Okay, very cool! Love that pudgy Patton Oswalt angst and the whole lower-depths, lower-middle-class Staten Island loser thing...love the grayness, the bleakness and the spirit-deflating self-loathing...love the shitty story...love the whole package."

...

"The tragedy of Tarantino is that he could have been so much more than the Schlock and Awe merchant that he has devolved into," writes London Independent columnist Johann Hari. "If he had stopped mistaking his DVD collection for a life, he -- to borrow a phrase from a real film, etched with real pain -- could've been a contender.

"When I remember the raw force of Reservoir Dogs, I still hope that he will. It's not too late. He could do it. How about it, Quentin? Step out into the big world beyond celluloid, and use your incredible talent to...Read More

Susan Siedelman's Smithereens, which I saw at a Daily Motion/Cinetic rooftop party last Wednesday night, is now streaming free all weekend. Susan Berman 's Wren is one of the most self-involved, alienating lead characters of all time, but the film is a mildly diverting time-capsule thing. It's cool seeing the young (i.e., 32 year-old) Richard Hell again.

Is Steven Seagal: Lawman an actual A & E reality series? "The show's real real...this is not a joke," Seagal says in the clip. No script, no stunt double, no second chances. It's getting to a point in which everything is suspect. Nothing is "real" and everything is in quotes. Even if several news sites are writing about it with a straight face. I trust no one. This must be a put-on...no?

Kansas congresswoman Lynn Jenkins yesterday tried to backpedal her 8.19 remark about fellow Republicans seeking a ''great white hope'' to challenge President Barack Obama in 2012. The woman was obviously caught in a Freudian slip and is a flat-out liar for saying the remark has been misunderstood or taken out of context. There's no shortage of ugly in this country. There is in fact a bottomless well of the stuff, most of it coming these days from the white hinterlands. (I should have posted this yesterday.)

"I just watched Guillermo Arriaga's The Burning Plain with Charlize Theron and Kim Basinger on VOD last night," entertainment journalist Lewis Beale wrote this morning. "I was surprised it had suddenly popped up on my local cable system, so I went to the IMDB and found it had gone the festival route (Venice, Toronto, Seattle), and that the official TV premiere release date was 8.21.09.

"Okay, it's not that great a film. Another one of those circuitous, three-stories-that-come-together-eventually plotlines that Arriaga seems obsessed with, except in this...Read More

Bizarre as it may seem, the comic material in Grant Heslov's The Men Who Stare at Goats (Overture, 11.6) is based on reported truth, or more precisely Jon Ronson's 2004 non-fiction book about the U.S. Army's exploration of New Age concepts and the potential military applications of the paranormal. Does the trailer convey a verite element? You tell me.

Trailers always rely on the crudest and broadest selling points, of course, but this one is clearly suggesting that the tone of Heslov's film...Read More

I found this official release poster for Capitalism: A Love Story on In Contention. And then I read some of the comments. Every In Contention reader who says the one-sheet is cool but they need to remove Moore is dealing from a short deck. One, Moore is always the star of his films. His mentality/attitude/snark is the point. He's the roly-poly Gary Cooper figure ready to stand up to City Hall and/or the Frank Miller gang. And two, he's depicted as a small-scaled monochrome figure, which suggests a contained ego.

"In Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino has gone past his usual practice of decorating his movies with homages to others," writes New Yorker critic David Denby. "This time, he has pulled the film-archive door shut behind him -- there's hardly a flash of light indicating that the world exists outside the cinema except as the basis of a nutbrain fable. The film is skillfully made, but it's too silly to be enjoyed, even as a joke.

Jeremy Piven's Speed-The-Plow/sushi defense debacle -- a p.r. embarassment that will color Piven's reputation for the rest of his life -- has come to an official end. No more legal threats or fines or procedural hassles...done.

Variety's Gordon Cox reported this afternoon that independent arbitrator George Nicolau has found that the actor did not breach his employment contract with producers of Speed-the-Plow, the Broadway revival Piven that abruptly abandoned last December, blaming sushi poisoning.

Let me explain something. No one has ever believed and no one will ever believe Piven's mercury-poisoning excuse for leaving that show. (It's never been a secret about...Read More

In a press release from Fathom Studios, the Atlanta-based production company behind Delgo, a spokesperson says that "from what we have seen, we are amazed by the visual similarities" between Avatar and Delgo, "and we are reviewing what legal options may be available to us."

Fathom certainly has a case, but this p.r. release is bullshit. If they were going to sue James Cameron and 20th Century Fox, they would be making private backrooom maneuvers instead of rattling their saber. Those who can, do. Those who can't, talk to the press. (HE wasn't deemed important enough to receive the press...Read More

There's an 8.27 Onion piece written by "Meryl Streep" that argues she's never starred in a truly classic film. Which all legendary stars have managed at least once or twice. Al Pacino in The Godfather and Dog Day Afternoon. Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All The President's Men. Gene Hackman in The French Connection. Robert De Niro in Raging Bull and Taxi Driver. Ellen Burstyn in The Exorcist. Diane Keaton in Annie Hall.

Meryl Street

Run down the list of Streep's finest movies and none can really be called classic. Good...Read More

The blue-background, unambiguously hetero Humpday DVD cover doesn't surprise me. Magnolia marketers are making the assumption that the average DVD browser is a stone monkey who hasn't heard word one about Humpday over the last seven months, or read a single Humpday review. Of course not! Why would anyone? And so he/she can't be expected to know it's a straight bromance. So Magnolia is spelling things out -- that's all.

Humpday DVD cover art; original theatircal poster

In short, they just don't want anyone getting the idea that Mark Duplass and Josh Leonard, like,...Read More

Every time somebody posts a great movie-deaths piece (the latest is a Rope of Silicon article by David Frank), I post my dog-eared "nobody died like Marlon Brando" piece, the first version of which I ran back in '95. Why stop now? I haven't posted it since 3.1.07, or two and half years ago.

My suggestion was that Brando's best death scene was in Edward Dmytryk's The Young Lions ('58), and that no one has died with such remarkable delicacy and finesse since.

Brando's Christian Diestl...Read More

"One of the lovely things about the Edward M. Kennedy story was that here you had a guy who everybody thought had one destiny, at which he failed utterly," writes N.Y. Times columnist Gail Collins. "[But] who picked himself up and found his own purpose at which he was better than anybody else in the world.

"In late middle age, he built a truly spectacular career in which he probably became the Kennedy who served his country best. Kennedy was one of the worst presidential candidates ever and you couldn't blame people for resenting this guy assuming he had an innate right...Read More

The latest installment in Roland Emmerich's world-ending idiot franchise (20th Century Fox, 11.13). The height of putrid paycheck performing by John Cusack. A simultaneous appeal to the Biblical End of Days crowd and liberals convinced that global warming will usher in the worst. The usual nausea, in short.

But there's something about massive heaving seas that fascinates me. The CG looks better than it did five years ago in The Day After Tomorrow, and much better than the work in Independence Day. I hate myself but...Read More

It's part of the online burden these days that Hitler/bunker/Downfall mash-ups about any perceived problem with any big product or film are going to pop up on YouTube, whether we like it or not. And in a sense I'm sorry for this. That said, I laughed out loud at this. The writing is quite snappy. There are a couple of "who/that" grammar issues, but you can't say it doesn't reflect actual carpings.

Highlights: (a) "Cameron has spent too much time underwater, and has taken the Hollywood opiate...Read More

Here's an expanded, more particular rewrite of my brief Cannes reaction to Jane Campion's Bright Star (Apparition, 9.18). I'm running this as an accompaniment to the re-tooled trailer (i.e., the original narrator having been dumped) that recently posted.

Bright Star is about the subdued and conflicted passions that defined the brief love affair between poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and seamstress Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) from 1818 until Keats' death, at age 25 from tuberculosis, in 1821.

By...Read More

It was the fall of '03 when I spoke to Dominick Dunne about Play It As It Lays ('72), the affluent-existential-despair Hollywood drama that he produced for Universal, and which Frank Perry directed. The film was about to play at the American Cinematheque and I was trying to drum up support for a DVD release. Here it is six years later and Play It As It Lays still isn't on DVD. But Dunne died today at age 83, so I thought I'd re-run my '03 piece in his honor.

"There's this better-than-pretty-good film about...Read More

Michael Cieply's N.Y. Times story about a controversial decision to close a Motion Picture and Television Fund old folks' home in L.A.'s San Fernando Valley is, stunning surprise, a portrait of greedy corporate priorities leading to less-well-off folks possibly getting tossed into the street. (Metaphorically speaking, of course.) All I know is that my mom is in an assisted-care facility, and while it's a very nicely run facility with caring assistants, there's kind of a creepy waiting-for-the-end atmosphere in these places that really doesn't feel right. I would much rather keel over on a busy street in Paris at age 77...Read More

There are days when I feel as if I'm covered with liquid chewing gum or taffy or gelatin or something. I try to think and type and shift gears and get to my check-list of things to do. But something stronger than myself has hit the slow-motion button or something. I have trouble lifting my arms. Or my eyebrows. So much to do that I can't seem to do anything. And then this thing turned up a few minutes ago. No matter how hard you work to make your point understood with precisely the right English and emphasis, most people are going...Read More

I've watched and re-watched this Lovely Bones trailer, and I'm still locked into two basic impressions. One, Alice Sebold's novel has been heavily milked, which is to say given a florid Jacksonesque tone ('70s-era impressionism mixed with a kind of otherwordly photo-realism) with plot points heavily telegraphed. Jackson isn't going to let anyone imagine anything for themselves -- he's going to damn well point stuff out.

And two, there's an excellent reason for the florid vibe considering the post-mortal vantage point of Saoirse Ronan's character. So there's...

I never felt that the story told by Terrence Malick's The New World really worked, particularly the last third, but I've always been in love with the primeval splendor of the thing. As I tried to explain in my initial review: "[During] those first two thirds, The New World is a truly rare animal and movie like no other...a feast of intuitive wow-level naturalism that feels as fresh and vitally alive as newly-sprouted flora."

Which is why I intend to purchase the forthcoming New World "Extended Cut" Blu-ray. For those first two...Read More

It will be a travesty if the Massachusetts political process somehow fails to quickly appoint a liberal, public-option supporting replacement for the late Sen. Ted Kennedy -- obviously the thing to do in the wake of his passing last night. Kennedy's greatest legislative dream was to enact meaningful health-care reform. For his voice not to be posthumously heard during the Senate roll call would be an obscenity.

As Sarah Wheaton reports this morning in the N.Y. Times, "One of Senator Kennedy's last public acts before he died on Tuesday was an emotional plea to Massachusetts state...Read More

Originally posted on 5.15.09 in Cannes: "I don't know what I was expecting exactly from Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock (Focus Features, opening today), but what I saw didn't deliver. This backstory saga about the legendary Woodstock Music Festival of '69 works in spots and spurts, but it too often feels ragged and unsure of itself, and doesn't coalesce in a way that feels truly solid or self-knowing.

At best it's a decent try, an in-and-outer. Spit it out -- it's a letdown. I wish it were otherwise. I'd like to be more obliging because...Read More

In the old days negative critical word was naturally regarded as a bad thing. If a majority of film critics said a certain film really stinks this was definitely thought to be a harbinger of box-office calamity, and more often than not the box-office tallies tended to bear this out. Nowadays, of course, the Eloi and the Joe Popcorn crowd will pay to see whatever the hell they want to see regardless of good or bad critical buzz. True, within a certain rarified strata of moviegoers (i.e., that miniscule micro-minority that actually cares about seeing good stuff), the views of critics and online...Read More

Observe how Conan O'Brien becomes more and more uncomfortable as Bill Maher gets more and more adamant about how stupid people are and how President Obama needs to just push through health care and ignore the crazies, etc. Seriously, look at O'Brien. The man is obviously in pain. Maher says toward the end of the stint that "your eyes are watering." Pathetic.

Here's an over-cranked music sequence from Ashutosh Gowariker's What's Your Rashee?, which will show at the Toronto Film Festival. Imagine how this seqence could have played if the guy (Harman Baweja) had played his guitar in a natural, sitting-in-a-car sort of way and just sung along with his own unamplified voice. This is the Bollywood-influenced aesthetic that has made Indian films into unwatchable junk.

The pretty girl, by the way, is Priyanka Chopra, who plays 12 diferent parts in the film. Notice how she refuses to look...

And by the way that isn't a damn "driedel" -- it's a plain old spinning silver top. I'm not Hassidic and I didn't go to school in Tel Aviv. They're called tops. That's what they used to call them in Westfield, New Jersey, where I grew up was a kid and a young teen.

I took some time earlier today to think about my contribution to Peter Howell's annual Toronto Star "Chasing the Buzz" feature, in which a selection of hardcore know-it-alls get to pick three Toronto Film Festival films they're most looking forward to. That's pretty limiting in itself but you also have explain why in one sentence...Jesus. I might change my mind but right now my faves are Jason Reitman's Up in the Air, Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man and Rodrigo Garcia's Mother and Child. I'll figure out the copy later on.

Mother and Child director...

Originally posted on 8.22 by Movie City Indie's Ray Pride. who took it from Ben Stiller's Facebook page and Twitter postings (Twitter.com/RedHourBen).

In Contention's Kris Tapley's hasn't read the script for Chris Nolan's Inception, but a source has so KT has decided to pass along a second-hand synopsis of the plot. He says he can't be 100% sure of the particulars because WB publicity won't comment "but it all seems fairly legitimate to me."

The Big McGuffin, he says, is that some kind of ability/technology used by a team of shady espionage operatives led by Leonardo DiCaprio's "Cobb" to nefariously dive into people's dreams and extract information.

Leo's team members (this will eventually become a kind of Mission Impossible-like TV series with...Read More

Somebody asked me to name off my favorite under-40 female critics the other night. I forget how the subject came up or why under-40 was mentioned as opposed to under-30 or under-50, but off the top of my head I said Kim Morgan, Karina Longworth, Kim Voynar, Katey Rich, and...and...and I ran out of names.

There must be at least four or five I'm not thinking of so I'm asking for names and links and quotes. If LexG or anyone of that attitude/mindset mentions looks or hotness I'm going to erase the post -- fair warning.

Tossing aside...Read More

In the space of a few hours, In Contention's Kris Tapley, Rope of Silicon's Brad Brevet, and Awards Daily's Ryan Adams have suddenly seized on the notion of Trucker's Michelle Monaghan being this year's Melissa Leo -- an out-of-the-blue Best Actress contender for an allegedly exceptional performance as a negligent mom coping with an estranged son.

Do these guys have the same dope dealer? There are more than a couple indications that Trucker ain't no Frozen River, and that it may be no...Read More

My favorite shot is the water-in-a-glass tipping into a steep angle.

The Envelope/Gold Derby's Tom O'Neill reports that while Harvey Weinstein intends to use a "last-minute, ambush strategy" for Rob Marshall's Nine, he plans to use the Crash campaign model for Inglourious Basterds.

"Because the DVD will be a mass release, it won't need to be watermarked with numerals identifying each disc with the name of an academy member or other award voter," O'Neill writes. "That's one of the sneaky ways Crash beat front-runner Brokeback Mountain for best picture of 2005 -- Lionsgate blitzed Hollywood with more than 120,000 cheap DVDs."

The only Inglourious Basterds Oscar nomination that's going to happen...Read More

Only two weeks and two days before the Toronto Film Festival begins on Thursday, 9.10 (which requires flying there and getting all set up on Wednesday, 9.9). New York-based producers and distributors know what goes, but I'm reminding everyone anyway that people like me tend to see maybe 25 films during the festival and that I now have about 33 films on my list not counting the two or three unexpected "finds" that you always hear about and want to squeeze in during any festival. So please get in touch if there's anything to be seen here in Manhattan between now...Read More

Here's my two cents about Roger Friedman's 8.21 piece assessing the leading Best Actress contenders of the moment. Right now it's a two-actress race -- Carey Mulligan in An Education vs. Meryl Streep in Julie & Julia (with possible fortification coming from her It's Complicated performance.). Obviously there are four months to go and anything can happen, but right now the Oscar is Mulligan's to lose because of (a) the old "Streep nominated again?" factor and (b) Mullligan's performance is delightful/exciting while Streep's is merely expert.

(l. to r,.)...

"The debate over the public option has been depressing in its inanity," writes N.Y. Times Paul Krugman in today's (8.24) edition. "Opponents of the option -- not just Republicans, but Democrats like Senator Kent Conrad and Senator Ben Nelson -- have offered no coherent arguments against it. Mr. Nelson has warned ominously that if the option were available, Americans would choose it over private insurance -- which he treats as a self-evidently bad thing, rather than as what should happen if the government plan was, in fact, better than what private insurers offer.

"But it's much the same on other fronts. Efforts...Read More

"If you are splashing around with a bunch of guys who are 93 percent white, an average of 45.62 years old and look as if they've done this before, you must be swimming in the studio directors' pool," wrote Michael Cieply in yesterday's (8.23) N.Y. Times.

"Such is the profile of studio filmmakers, based on a survey of those who directed the 85 or so live action movies that have been released, or will be, in 2009 by the six biggest film companies -- Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures, Walt Disney...Read More

The moral basis in Inglourious Basterds for the Basterds' delicious slaughter of German troops is that said troops were serving an evil criminal regime and therefore THEY, the troops, were evil and criminal as well as viciously anti-Semitic, so snuff 'em out like rats. Shoot 'em, club 'em, exterminate 'em.

IGB is basically a table-turning game in which Tarantino decided to have fun by letting Germans suffer en masse the way Jews suffered en masse at the hands of the SS and other Nazi command types who carried out the Holocaust.

It is still shocking news to some ostrich-heads out there that Americans...Read More

An HE reader who's friendly with an LA movie buddy of mine wrote the following over the weekend: "My Dad and I saw Inglourious Basterds, which we loved. I'm so mad at the critics for thinking the movie is too violent or cruel, or Wells' whole diatribe about the Basterds behaving no better than the Nazis they're after. It's a movie! Let's have fun! If we can't laugh at Nazis, what can we laugh at?."

Wells response: It's a movie! Have fun with the fake Nazis! Club their heads in for refusing to betray their friends....hoo-hoo!

The thumbnail plot for Jerry Bruckheimer's Pirates of the Caribbean 4, a connected friend confides, is a search by Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) and other parties for the fountain of youth. This is the same MacGuffin plot that George Lucas was supposedly considering for an Indy sequel. There will also be some kdin of Captain Nemo-type villain utilizing new-style technology. Sounds like they're invoking the "steampunk" style we've seen gain more and more of a foothold in genre conventions, including Comic Con.

Doug Pray's Art and Copy opened two days ago in Manhattan. At last January's Sundance Film Festival I said it had "turned out to be a little thin. It's basically a chapter-by-chapter history of the most legendary ad campaigns of the last 45 or 50 years, each chapter with a corresponding flattery profile of the advertising exec (or execs) who dreamt each one up.

"But there's no arching theme to it, no undercurrent, no inquiring line of thought. Pray doesn't begin to think about the odious implications of modern advertising (as Adam Curtis did in The Century of the...Read More

The big challenge with Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein's No Impact Man (Oscilloscope, 9.11, NY and LA) is not to fight it. You need to let it in and let it swim around and settle in of its own accord. Or not. But you have to at least give it a chance. Because if you do...well, no guarantees. But you may find yourself looking at your habits in a slightly more earth-friendly manner, and how can that not be a good thing?

I hated the idea...Read More

I don't know exactly what happened or why, but Inglourious Basterds ending up with $37.6 million domestic (obviously no sharp Saturday fall-off occured) and $65.1 million worldwide is a very good score for the Weinstein Co.

I frankly expected a steep Saturday fall-off based on disappointed word-of-mouth, but that didn't happen. Against all logic and all good taste, a lot of people seemed to like IGB and have been telling their friends. The rumble is simple and clear. The Weinsteins have won themselves a breather! But only a breather. Deliverance and salvation has to happen steadily over the next few months....Read More

If anyone has seen the teaser playing this weekend for Chris Nolan's Inception (which I've been too lazy or too cheap to pay to see in theatres), perhaps they can add to the following description offered by two Playlist correspondents a day or so ago? The film is shooting as we speak, having only begun principal photography on 7.13.09, so it's unusual, by my sights, for a teaser to already be playing in theatres.

"[It] starts with an affected WB logo, then goes to footage of a spinning dreidel" -- who knows what a dreidel is? I didn't until two...Read More

I need to ask a rhetorical question. If you had a fairly tall and strapping lead actor in your film like Leonardo DiCaprio, would you have any concerns about casting the winky-dinky-sized Ellen Page in a costarring role? I'm just struck every time I see her in a movie still alongside this or that actor how she looks like she's maybe 9 or 10 years old, if that.

Ellen Page (l.) and Leonardo DiCaprio (r.) in a still from Chris Nolan's Inception.

Just look at the above shot of her walking in front of DiCaprio. I'm sorry...Read More

Former Army lieutenant William Calley made his first public apology four days ago (i.e., 8.19) for the infamous 1968 My Lai massacre, in which he participated and for which he was convicted for the premeditated murder of 104 women, children and elderly folk on 3.16.68. Nearly 500 non-combatants were reportedly slaughtered that day in the village, which was actually called Son My.

(l.) George Lois's famous Calley-and-the-kids Esquire cover; (r.) an August 1971 National Lampoon cover.

"There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened...Read More

Miguel Arteta's Youth in Revolt (10.30 following a Toronto Film Festival debut) appears to be an above-average, early 20s, angsty sex-and-relationship comedy. Odd that it's a Dimension release, which signifies primitive and coarse. The YIR trailer is selling a smart upscale thing with clever concepts, wit and half-decent laughs and a role for one-trick-pony Michael Cera that smacks of tension and challenge and complexity, partly by way of a moustachioed alter ego named -- yes, a dumb name -- Francois Dillinger.

The implication I'm getting is...Read More

I always felt that thirtysomething, the zeitgest-reflecting, essential-viewing yuppie series that ran from 9.87 through 5.91, was too sensitive-wimpy. As honestly written and impressively acted as it often was, the show suffered from an almost oppressive self-examination syndrome -- a constant exercise in fault-finding and angst exploration -- among its boomer characters and their difficulties in managing and/or growing into adulthood and parenthood. To varying degrees everyone on the show wore a hair shirt, suffered or caused suffering, and was afflicted (if not wracked) with self doubt.

(l. to r.) Timothy Busfield, Patricia Wettig, Polly Draper,...

I haven't been able to precisely feel one way about the drunk-driving tragedy that befell director-writer Roger Avary (Beowulf, Pulp Fiction) last year, and which killed a 34 year-old friend named Andreas Zini when Avary piled his car into a telephone pole in Ojai. Avary, a friend and a great spirit whom I've known since the Pulp Fiction/Killing Zoe days, pleaded guilty last Tuesday to DUI and manslaughter. He'll face sentencing sometime next month.

My basic feeling is that after a certain interval of mourning and atonement, you have to move on and make the best of your life in the aftermath...Read More

I can't explain how or why I find the substitute song track in this scene from The Apartment oddly hilarious, but I really do. On top of which it's perfectly mixed in (just the right sound levels, cuts out at the right instant) and it doesn't get in the way of what's going on in the scene.

Congrats to the Weinstein Co. marketers for yesterday's Inglourious Basterds haul of $14,350,000, which will probably translate into a $35 million weekend haul by Sunday night. Unless, of course, Saturday's business suffers a sharp drop. Which could happen if the Joe Popcorn-Eloi reactions are similar to what a significant portion of the critics have said. But if it hangs in there, great. The Weinsteins will have earned themselves a breather. Nobody wants the Weinsteins to go away.

There were two things different about last night's 3D IMAX previews compared to the San Diego/ComicCon footage shown last month. The reel I saw here was, of course, shorter -- 15 or 16 minutes compared to 24 minutes in San Diego -- and the ending has a hurried montage ofAvatar's second half (the clash between Stephen Lang's military commandos and the Na'vi with Sam Worthington's Na'vi hybrid sure to take sides against his own). But there was another distinction. Actually a distraction.

The Avatar footage, projected onto the huge IMAX screen inside Leows Lincoln Square, wasn't quite...Read More

Okay, DVD Beaver has convinced me. Paramount's upcoming Sapphire Series Blu-ray of Mel Gibson's Braveheart (out on 9.1) is a knockout. The DVD vs. Blu-ray frame-capture comparisons make this clear. The problem...I don't know that this actually is a problem, now that I think of it...is that I'm not sure I want to watch Braveheart again.

DVD Beaver frame-capture of new Paramount Home Video Blu-ray of Mel Gibson's

Seeing it once 14 years ago may have been sufficient, I mean. I don't think I can take watching Gibson yell "freedohhm!" again. I'd watch a bootleg DVD...Read More

"Power is not a toy we give to good children. It is a weapon. And the strong man takes it and uses it. And the man who doesn't use it has no business in the big league. Because if you don't fight, the Presidency is not for you. And it never will be." Tough words that arguably apply to President Barack Obama in light of his apparent "knee buckling" on public option health care and trying to "nice" the Republicans into being cooperative and bipartisan.

The tough words are from Franklin Schaffner's film version of...Read More

As I explained earlier today in a talkback forum, Joe Popcorn is a different guy than Joe Sixpack. The latter is a cultural figure who responds to various hot-button issues in the political realm. They know each other, live in the same neck, park their cars in the same garage. Except Joe Popcorn is a kind of older movie-buff who sees movies once every two or three weeks.

His movie-love, granted, is defined by a limited attitude and education (having never watched films like L'avventura or The Hit or Office Space or Martin Scorsese's American Boy) and diminished/conventional spiritual vistas. But that's our...Read More

"There's a point at which realism shades over into weakness, and progressives increasingly feel that the administration is on the wrong side of that line," N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote yesterday for a piece in today's issue. "It seems as if there is nothing Republicans can do that will draw an administration rebuke: Senator Charles E. Grassley feeds the death panel smear, warning that reform will 'pull the plug on grandma,' and two days later the White House declares that it's still committed to working with him.

"It's hard to avoid the sense that President Obama has wasted months trying to...Read More

Okay, I have to hit town for my Avatar encounter at Leows Lincoln Square. I'm told that the AMC IMAX on 42nd Street is fake IMAX, as are all the other IMAX theatres in town except for the AMC Lincoln Square. Repeating: this is the only Manhattan theatre showing the footage in genuine 3D IMAX. Simulated IMAX is like going to the Venetian in Las Vegas and saying afterwards, "Well, I've been to Venice. Love the people and the food. Love those gondolas!"

A Back by Midnight chit-chat with Tyson director James Toback.

"There's a real question at stake now," Jon Voight has told the Washington Times. "Is President Obama creating a civil war in our own country? We are witnessing a slow, steady takeover of our true freedoms. We are becoming a socialist nation, and whoever can't see this is probably hoping it isn't true. If we permit Mr. Obama to take over all our industries, if we permit him to raise our taxes to support unconstitutional causes, then we will be in default. This great America will become a paralyzed nation."

Here are a few Twitter messages from Yair Raveh's Twitter page about the now-concluded Avatar-reel screenings in Tel Aviv. Same old snarky/bitter fanboy stuff.

There are three reasons why Michael Moore's docs connect with people. One, they always exude a kind of working-class, regular-fat-guy, American common-sense attitude about whatever the subject is. Two, they're always mildly funny or amusing but in a way that pushes along the investigative/rhetorical thrust. And three, they always end with some kind of emotional touchstone moment.

I'm sure this will all kicks in with Capitalism: A Love Story, but my first reaction to this trailer was "haven't we seen Moore dealing with security guys while...Read More

Paramount has yanked Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island out of its long-scheduled 10.2 opening and bumped it into early 2010. The moody insane-asylum thriller with Leonardo DiCaprio, which was heavily ballyhooed with billboard ads at the Cannes Film Festival, will now open on 2.19.10. This despite a report that it's gotten excellent test scores (high 80s to low 90s). So what happened?

I think Paramount just decided that Shutter Island isn't a fall (i.e., awards-potential) film and decided to punt. Shutter Island has always looked impressively dark and...Read More

Most of us remember the pre-Titanic buzz during the spring and summer of '97 -- Jim Cameron's folly, a wipeout waiting to happen. But it ruled after it opened because it delivered something close to unique and, if you ask me, un-repeatable. Trash it all you want (and it's an article of faith among most people I know that you must despise it), but Titanic didn't became a worldwide megahit because it offered a highly believable depiction of a sinking luxury liner.

I've explained this before but I...Read More

It's noteworthy and then some how quickly things have changed for Avatar in the space of 24 hours. Yesterday morning before the online trailer hit, James Cameron's upcoming film was (a) the most keenly awaited scifi/fantasy of the year, and (b) about to have its profile bumped up big-time with a nationwide IMAX 3D quickie preview that would surely whet the public's appetite for the full-length version that'll open on 12.18. Huge event, crackling excitement.

But in the wake of yesterday's trashing of the trailer by the elite cineaste/fanboy community and the negative ripple effect this has surely created to...Read More

I just want to make it clear, as I tried to do yesterday, that seeing Avatar in its proper form at ComicCon -- big-screen 3D IMAX -- revealed a fusion of CG/organic realism that seemed like something really "extra." It felt to me like an immersion into a real-seeming fantasy place than anything I've ever seen in a similar-type realm. (The CG in the Rings trilogy being one example.)

But I'm unqualified to get into the comparisons between Avatar, Delgo and Ferngully because I haven't seen the latter two animated films. (You know me --...Read More

Some days ago George Hamilton, whose early life inspired My One and Only, explained his man-wth-a-tan persona to Movieline's Stu VanAirsdale. The piece went up late this morning: "Originally my brother said to me, 'You look paler than a nun's butt,'" Hamilton recalls. "'You need to get tan.' So my brother would have me sit out with this reflector for about 15 minutes, and that would be it. Cary Grant told me and he told Tony Bennett, 'Always have a tan. You look better.'

"It was vanity, but then when I was doing westerns, it made no sense whatsoever to go...Read More

"Can it really be so hard for a museum with a budget of $74 million last year to cover a loss that averages out to $100,000 a year?," asks Time's Richard Lacayo in a piece that posted yesterday about the recently announced decision by Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, to more or less deep-six the film program.

LACMA director Michael Govan

"The good news, maybe, is that some re-thinking already seems to be underway -- a rethinking of the whole idea of abandoning the program. Govan may have been taken by...Read More

Joe Johnston's The Wolf Man (Universal, 2.10.10) looks like just another growling howling saliva-spewing bullshit CG wolfman movie, except it's in period with bearded Anthony Hopkins chewing the supporting scenery. Love me some Hopkins! The fact that it's set in what looks like 1890s England or thereabouts makes the casting of Benicio del Toro seem odd. He plays an American but let's face it -- he looks like a dressed-up Tijuana narcotics detective.

The Avatar trailer has been up for a little less than two hours, and if HE reader reactions so far are any indication of how sophisticated cineastes and elite geekboys are going to respond to James Cameron's super-fantasy CG epic when it opens on 12.18, Cameron and 20th Century Fox have reason to be concerned. Maybe only a little; more more than that. You tell me.

People are reacting only to the look and style of the the thing (the trailer has no dialogue and the emotional/thematic impact is unknown), but no one seems to be...Read More

The Avatar trailer on the Apple website as well as French MSN website is up and running. Dialogue-free and just over two minutes long, it doesn't provide anything close to the 3D, super-vivid, here-we-go impact I got from the 24-minute ComicCon reel (which had plenty of dialogue), but it's an intriguing taste. So...first impressions? Considered reactions?

Sam Worthington's hybrid Na'vi in a frame grab from James Cameron's Avatar.

The fine fellow who proofed the Apple website copy needs to taken outside, tied to a fence post and Marlon Brando bull-whipped (a la One-Eyed Jacks)....Read More

Toronto Film Festival's "Masters" slate will include Lars von Trier's absurd and ghastly Antichrist (the TIFF p.r. notes say that Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe give "courageous" performances...hah!), Amos Gitai's Carmel (not about Gitai becoming a U.S. citizen, moving to Carmel, California, and running for mayor), Goran Paskaljevic's Honeymoons (not a companion piece to Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau's Couples Retreat), Suzana Amaral's Hotel Atlantico, Mira Muratova's Melody for a Street Organ, Francois Ozon's Le Refuge, Marco Bellocchio's Vincere (young dashing Mussolini), Margarethe von Trotta's Vision (nun movies scare me ...sorry), Claire Denis' White Material, Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, and Buddhadeb Dasgupta's...Read More

Werner Herzog's My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? is, in my mind, a major Toronto Film Festival attraction. Has there ever been a Herzog film that didn't haunt and mesmerize on some level? How can this latest be an exception, I'm asking myself, with Michael Shannon, Willem Dafoe, Chloe Sevigny, Brad Dourif and Michael Pena in the lead roles? Well, I guess it could. Anyone and anything can disappoint. To be off your game is human. (What was that gung-ho finale in Rescue Dawn about?)

I...Read More

Last Friday I ran a story about how Spoutblog's Karina Longworth, Movieline's Stu VanAirsdale, In Contention's Kris Tapley, Cinemablend's Katey Rich and The Playlist's Rodrigo Perez were kind of clearing their throats and wondering if the upcoming Toronto Film Festival would give them a press badge or not. Well, I heard today that VanAirsdale and Longworth are good to go.

In a current but undated N.Y. Times "Take 5" fashion spread/q &a piece by Lynn Hirschberg, An Education's Carey Mulligan is described in now-familiar terms. Her "bravura turn has landed her center stage," "the movie was a sensation at Sundance largely because of [her] performance," and that she was "suddenly...being compared to Audrey Hepburn," etc. There's also a "Screen Test" video piece.

(l.) An Education's Carey Mulligan; David Janseen as Harry O.

The Times doesn't let you copy the photos but Mulligan makes an amazing admission midway through the discussion. She doesn't drive...Read More

In an article posted this morning on Splice Today about the Roger Ebert-Armond White brouhaha called "Why Are Movie Fans So Sensitive?", John Lingan criticizes Ebert for defending White and then recanting his defense, and especially for "perpetuating the ridiculous idea that film critics' likes and dislikes matter more than their knowledge of movies." Here's the final paragraph:

"Only in film criticism will people with a purported interest in the art demean the opinion of an expert because he dares to disagree with them. The path to greater knowledge and appreciation of movies seems pretty obvious to me: watch as...Read More

Ronald Reagan recorded this visionary statement in 1961, five years before his election as California governor. What a reptile. I mentioned this last month but last fall's economic collapse has, I think, in the eyes of history, sealed Reagan's reputation as the godfather of the greedhead funny-money economy that kicked off in the early '80s. N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman explained it all on 5.31, in a piece called "Reagan Did It."

60 Minutes creator and longtime CBS newsman Don Hewitt, who was on the job until '04, died this morning of pancreatic cancer at age 86. He should and would be regarded as a blemish-free journalist of the highest order. He was involved in the documentary news show See It Now, directed the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon presidential debates, and exec produced the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. His crowning achievement was launching 60 Minutes in 1968 and staying with it for three-plus decades. Except, sadly, there is a blemish, and a prominent one at that.