I can't imagine why any movie fan would give two hoots about Johnny Depp having said he won't play Cpt. Jack Sparrow in the fifth and sixth installment of Pirates of the Caribbean. But that's the big hot exclusive news delivered earlier today by Cinemablend's Katey Rich. I mean, who wanted to suffer through parts two or three to begin with? Who in their right mind would want to see part four, which Depp is apparently willing (or thinking about being willing) to star in?

Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Carribbean.

"The news that...Read More

In a discussion of the Polanski case, Vanity Fair's Julian Sancton notes that "the French, in particular, are constantly baffled at the puritanical fervor with which the United States pursue men they admire, from Woody Allen to Bill Clinton. Sexual deviance, they seem to believe, is a natural and acceptable side-effect of greatness."

Which isn't putting it fairly. The French may have a comme ci comme ca attitude about world-class artists and powerful politicians having certain perverse or flamboyant tendencies in their private moments, but that's not the same thing as calling such appetites (particularly those involving minors) acceptable. Because they...Read More

In a 9.28 piece called "Why Arrest Roman Polanski Now? Revenge," Newser's Michael Wolff says that last weekend's Zurich airport bust was "about the LA prosecutor's office's public relations." But it really happened, he feels, because the office felt goaded by Marina Zenovich's 2008 documentary about Polanski, called Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired.

"Prosecutors ignored Polanski for 30 years because it was a terrible case in which the prosecutor's office and the sitting judge, in the interest of getting publicity for themselves, had conducted themselves in all variety of dubious ways," Wolff explains. "But then, last year, a documentary,...Read More

I'm pleased to have been invited to visit London a couple of weeks hence for a 20th Century Fox/Fantastic Mr. Fox junket, so why didn't I get invited to the now-concluded Universal/Couples Retreat junket in Bora Bora that happened over the weekend? I'll tell you why -- somebody in Universal publicity doesn't think I'm whorey enough. I sorta faintly resent this. I can bend over as readily and willingly as the next guy.

Matira Beach in Bora Bora

Okay, my Bora Bora posts might have included zaps at this and that, but that's what makes Hollywood...Read More

If you were an independent DVD retailer, would you have gone into the store yesterday and put up a special Roman Polanski standee-display near the front? Like, you know, the way stores put up special displays whenever a major actor dies? When the iron is hot, strike it. And speaking of irons, this clip from a certain Polanski film carries an echo of what's in the air right now.

The Telegraph's Matthew Moore reported this morning that Wikipedia administrators have blocked filmmaker Roman Polanski's Wikipedia page from being changed after an 'edit war' broke out following the news of Polanski's arrest two days ago in Zurich on a 31 year-old beef that has been forgiven, to some extent forgotten (save for Marina Zenovich's documentary about the case) and has been clearly withering on the vine and yellow with antiquity except in the heads of L.A. prosecutors and the online moral-vengeance crowd.

In other words, the same battle that happened here yesterday has been happening among Wikipedia posters and...Read More

In Jason Reitman's Up In The Air, airports are cavernous antiseptic places in which people like George Clooney's Ryan Bingham feel very much at home. Comforted, even. That's my feeling also. No man-made atmosphere makes me feel quite as serene as an airport. When I'm waiting for a plane, I mean. (And after I'm through the security scan.) A blissful feeling of being neither here nor there. All my cares and anxieties suspended. It's actually kind of beautiful.

I know and accept, of course, that airport environments...Read More

I've been sensing that Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story might break through. Maybe not in a Farenheit 9/11 way but certainly in a better-than-Sicko way. Jay Leno saying he really liked it was a tipoff. An ex-Fox News broadcaster told me a week or two ago, "A Michael Moore film that's 'fair and balanced'? I'm as stunned as you are. Every tax-paying American needs to see this film immediately."

The limited opening this weekend resulted in the year's spiffiest per-screen average -- $60,000 on four screens for a total of $240,000. The Overture release has grossed a total of $306,586 since Wednesday's...Read More

William Safire, the witty and cogent N.Y. Times columnist and rapier wordsmith, died today at a Maryland hospice at age 79. Pancreatic cancer took him out.

The tightness and clarity of his prose was a huge influence upon my own meager scribblings. I so enjoyed his stuff ("Yamani or ya life?") that I decided early on to forgive Safire for having been a Nixon/Agnew speechwriter. On top of which I always half-loved those withering phrases he tapped out for Agnew -- "effete corps of impudent snobs," "nattering nabobs of negativism," etc. And like everyone else I rarely missed his "On...Read More

There are tons and tons of quotes but no clear through-line in Anne Thompson's 9.26 Indiewire report about Friday's Indie Crisis panel, organized by Rajendra Roy and Marian Koltai-Levine, at the Museum of Modern Art.

So let's focus on the positive side. Sellers, Thompson reports, "struck a more positive note. There's nothing to explain the shock in the specialty studio acquisitions market, said one lawyer. DVD rentals should compensate for the decrease in DVD sales. Theatrical numbers are robust, and pay deals, though receding slowly, still exist. Clearly, the irrational need to bid high at a festival has been replaced with...Read More

Roman Polanski was arrested yesterday by Swiss police for possible extradition to the United States for that largely discredited, over-and-done-with 1977 charge over his having had sex with a 13 year-old minor and then, after serving six weeks in jail, having jumped bail on 2.1.78 after learning of a prosecutorial betrayal that would have put him back in the slammer for God-knows-how-long.

The victim forgave Polanski long ago, and Marina Zenovich's doc about the case, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, explained how prosecutorial corruption and misconduct by Judge Laurence J....Read More

The plug has been pulled on the 2010 CineVegas Film Festival, Indiewire's Peter Knegt reported earlier today. The Great Recession has turned Las Vegas into a City of Hard Times, and it would seem that festival chiefs Robin Greenspun and Trevor Groth were basically told "sorry, guys" by the Palms Resort & Casino, which has hosted the festival for the last several years. I could tell that the festival was trimming back slightly in '08 and a bit more so last June. I hope that things rebound.

Cinemascope's Yair Raveh is reporting that the Israeli academy has chosen Yaron Shani and Scander Kobti's Ajami as the Israeli Oscar submission for Best Foreign Language Feature. So that's all she wrote Academy-hoopla-wise for Samuel Moaz's Lebanon, which Sony Classics recently acquired.

A just-announced winner of five awards at the Ophirs (i.e., the Israeli academy awards), Ajami is described by Raveh as "a gritty crime drama about Israeli and Arabs in the Ajami neighborhood in Jaffa." The closing-night attraction in the Director's Fortnight program in Cannes last May, Ajami won Ophirs this evening for Best Picture, direction, screenplay, editing...Read More

With its supporter and friend Dick Cook out the door, Miramax Films is rumored to be in some jeopardy at Disney, according to L.A. Times entertainment reporter Claudia Eller. "Miramax has never appeared to be a priority for Disney CEO Bob Iger," she writes, "nor does it fit his strategy to focus on Disney's 'branded' mass entertainment," etc. A studio spokesperson tells Eller "we have no plans to sell Miramax...as we have stated before, we continue to look at the best way to run our lines of businesses most efficiently." In my experience rhetorical references to "efficiency" by management are usually cause...Read More

The reason Glenn Beck connects with his audience is not just his bulldog attitudes but that he blurts them out without editing. But when asked by Katie Couric to define what he meant by the term "white culture," Beck had no choice but to shimmy all over the place.

If I were Beck in that moment I would...Read More

The sight of a conspicuously planted product in a contemporary film is always jarring. It always says "the people who made this movie are on the take." And yet brand names are inevitable in any contemporary setting. Products in a film should appear in the same way most products appear in real life, which is never in a way that pops out of the constant corporate stream-blur. My eyes glaze over when I see big-brand ads on a street or a billboard, and it shouldn't be otherwise on a movie screen.

The attitude of the camera...Read More

"The American dream is not totally dead, but it's dying pretty fast. We're not in good shape. On bad mornings I wake up and think that we're turning into a Latin American country. But on good mornings I think, well, this is America. We've always in the past managed to turn ourselves around, and there is an FDR just around the corner if we could only find him. I was kind of hoping Obama might be FDR, but maybe not." -- N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman speaking on last night's Real Time with Bill Maher.

And Maher says in a 9.25...Read More

There was a rumble a while back about Weinstein Co. theatrical chief Tom Ortenberg leaving the company, but it was flatly denied so I let it go. Yesterday his resignation (for "personal reasons") was officially announced, on top of news that the company had cut loose another 35 employees on Wednesday. Ortenberg, a good guy, will be announcing a new business endeavor in two or three weeks, I'm told. Here's a Wall Street Journal assessment of upcoming Weinstein Co. releases. Bottom line: Nine's gotta do it or else.

Released 13 years ago to considerable acclaim and home-run financial success, Jerry Maguire remains Cameron Crowe's finest film. It's easily one of the most soulful and emotionally affecting movies about a troubled, emotionally-repressed, elite-business-class, fraying-at-the-edges white guy ever made. The writing is robust, sharp and knowing, the secondary characters are tangy and angular, and there's still no question that it contains Tom Cruise's career-best performance.

But something in me slightly winced when N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott included two of the film's three classic lines -- "You...Read More

Here we go again...The Road, I Am Legend, Terminator 4, etc. A loner survivor, charred remnants of an extinct civilization, marauding gangs of zombie goons. Beware any plot synopsis that involves "protect[ing] a sacred book that holds the secrets to saving humankind." As well as purple narration that uses lines like "something-odd years ago, the war tore a hole in the sky." The Book of Eli, starring Denzel Washington and directed by the Hughes brothers, opens on 1.10.10.

On 9.21 a Blu-ray disc of Rudolph Mate's The Black Shield of Falworth ('54), the medieval costumer in which Tony Curtis allegedly said "yondah lies the castle of my fodda," came out on Amazon.uk. Except the line isn't in the film. The belief that Curtis spoke it "clearly derives from American snobbery about Curtis's [New York] origins," says the BSOF Wikipedia page. "And yet Curtis did say a similar line in Son of Ali Baba ('52) that reads, 'This is the palace of my father, and yonder lies the Valley of the Sun.'"

I didn't even see Aaron Schneider's Get Low at Toronto, but it was clear early on that it had an impassioned critic fan base and that Robert Duvall's lead performance was being seen as award-worthy. But Sony Pictures Classics, which acquired it, will not be releasing Get Low this year and is planning a mid-2010 release.

So what's happened to Michael Hoffman's The Last Station distribution-wise since it drew enthusiastic notices (particularly for Christopher Plummer's allegedly Best Actor-worthy performance as Leo Tolstoy) at the Telluride Film Festival nearly a month ago? I'll tell you what's happened -- nothing. No deal, I mean, because the rights sellers are asking too much. Actually way too much, according to one source.

The other night I asked a hypothetical question of an acquisitions veteran who knew the score. If, in your estimation, the realistic market value of The...Read More

The only slightly "off" element surrounding last night's A Serious Man premiere was that it was happening under the auspices of the Friars Club Comedy Film Festival. This suggests that Man traffics in a form of rollicking Milton Berle schtick when in fact it's one of the greatest and darkest "no-laugh funny" movies of all time. It's undeniably brilliant and masterful but almost all the humor is of the LQTM ("laughing quietly to myself") variety. Which is actually the kind of humor I prefer.

I spoke to Michael Stuhlbarg, who truly needs to be in a...Read More

Jonathan Mostow's Surrogates is the likely weekend champ among the new wide releases, according to today's tracking. Surrogates has a First Choice Open & Release rating of 18 vs. an 11 for Fame and a 7 for Pandorum. The best films, as is often or usually the case, are among the limited or regional releases -- Scott Hicks' The Boys Are Back (with a 70% Rotten Tomatoes rating), The Other Man, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, and Stanley Tucci's Blind Date. I won't even see Brief Interviews With Hideous Men until this evening.

Please forgive the sluggish postings. I'm looking around for the right place to move to and most of you presumably know what an all-consuming, tangled-up process this can be.

Breakdown ('97), an above-average Kurt Russell thriller, convinced me that its director, Jonathan Mostow, was a skilled and disciplined helmer of high-end Bs. I was doubly persuaded three years later when his next, U-571 ('00), came along. And then my enthusiasm waned slightly with Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines ('03). Now he's back after a six-year lull with Surrogates, a cyber-replicant thriller with Bruce Willis that opens today.

The critical reaction is mixed (50% at Metacritic, and 46% among the RT hoi polloi) but...Read More

Wizard of Oz balloon being gassed up outside Manhattan's Tavern on the Green -- Thursday, 9.24, 6:10 pm. Here's a still of same with a truer sense of light.

1. Werner Herzog's Rogue Film School will be in the form of weekend seminars held by Herzog in person at varying locations and at infrequent intervals.

2. The number of participants will be limited.

3. Locations and dates will be announced on this website and Werner Herzog's website: www.wernerherzog.com approximately 12 weeks in advance.

4. The Rogue Film School will not teach anything technical related to film-making. For this purpose, please enroll at your local film school.

5. The Rogue Film School is about a way of life. It is...Read More

Earlier today I was told a perverse relationship story that allegedly happened near the start of filming of Steven Soderbergh's Kafka, which was shot in Prague in 1990. The original source was Soderbergh, I've been assured, but since I'm hearing this second-hand please take it with a grain.

La Femme Nikita star Anne Parillaud had been cast as Gabriela, the female lead/significant girlfriend of Franz Kafka (Jeremy Irons ). Filming had just begun and she and Irons went out to dinner together, as actors just starting to work together often do. And Parillaud went back to Irons' hotel that night, and...Read More

I was a "permalancer" for People magazine for two years ('96 to '98). At times the climate at People was the most miserable I've ever experienced. Except for my short tenure at Entertainment Tonight, that is, which Iasted two or three months during the summer of '98. Absolute hell, in part because I had to be at work at 5 am and in part because of the acutely political competitive-female vibe under boss lady Linda Bell Blue.

Will they fire me next month, next week...tomorrow? Why are...Read More

Ned Price, Warner Home Video's vp of mastering for technical operations, delivering this morning's opening remarks about the steps taken to render the new Wizard of Oz Blu-ray, which will street on 9.29.

I spent some time earlier today at Warner Home Video's Wizard of Oz Blu-ray junket. I've already discussed it twice -- on 9.18 and 9.19 -- and said (a) it's the sharpest, best looking, most luscious Oz yet even though (b) the grain structure is too vivid. I'll soon be shooting a big Wizard of Oz aerial balloon in Central Park, and then it's off to the Coen Brothers A Serious Man at the Ziegfeld plus an after-party.

I shot this two inches away from a huge Wizard Of Oz frame blowup inside a 2nd...

Last night I managed to attend a hard-to-penetrate screening of Oliver Stone 's South of the Border at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade theatre. Being the ardent lefty that I am and always will be, I was somewhat pleased and even comforted by what I saw. Is Stone's documentary a hard-hitting portrait of South American political realities and particularly the reign of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez? No, but it's a perfectly reasonable and welcome counter-view to the U.S. mainstream-media Kool-Aid version, which has always been reactionary and rightist-supporting and hostile to nativist movements.

Bolivan president Evo Morales, South of...

Speaking before the N.Y. Film Festival press corps this morning via projected video, Antichrist director Lars Von Trier called Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho "a classic, but not because it was scary. In horror films, the scary things are not what I remember. I remember a style or a mood. I didn't find The Shining very scary, I must say. But today, I'm rather involved with it. I think that, as with all other films, it has to do with a personality that you feel in it as you watch what happens in it." -- as reported by Movieline's Stu Van Airsdale. (I was...Read More

Mackenzie Phillips' admission that she and her father, Mommas and the Poppas creator John Phillips, had a ten-year incestuous relationship has blackened the late musician's rep for all time and poisoned that good old Mommas and the Pappas vibe, to say the least. I now think of Phillips in the same light as Ray Winstone's character in Tim Roth's The War Zone.

In Contention's Kris Tapley has linked to a quote from Cove hairshirt star Ric O'Barry that gives credit to Ben Stiller for playing a key role in getting the film screened at the Tokyo International Film Festival. I reported on 9.16 that TIFF jury president Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu was a prime mover behind the inclusion, but whatever. The point is that everyone who wanted The Cove to be seen at this festival got together and cajoled and finagled and made it happen.

Samuel Moaz's heavily-hyped Lebanon screened for the New York Film Festival press early this afternoon, and my sense of the reaction in the room was...well, a little subdued. A bit of sneering going on. A "disappointment," one guy declared. "Didn't love it, didn't hate it...it's okay." Who was it who wrote the seminal rave review of this?, I asked another fellow. He wasn't sure, he said, but he'd "like to find him and beat him up."

The problem, I suspect, is that people had it in their heads...Read More

A fresh thought hit me as I watched this E.T. spot on Rob Marshall's Nine. One look at the Italian-suited, stylishly unshaven Daniel Day Lewis brooding and strolling around all these women and wearing that look of "oh, my...it just hasn't come together yet, has it?" and I said to myself, "I don't know if I care if DDL's character has his vision together or not. I don't know that a guy like this cracking the code and finding creative fulfillment is all that important to me.":

I mean, I love Rome and the look of cavernous sound stages and the beautiful...Read More

"I need to post this," Awards Daily's Sasha Stone wrote a few minutes ago, "because Jeff Wells just posted an absurd run-down of why the [Awards Daily Oscar Poll] is wrong. He gives various reasons why [although] most do not hold water. A Single Man has 'gay-o-vision,' Amelia has been dissed by an 'insider' and therefore has no shot, Food, Inc. is a 'doc' and therefore has no chance to make the Best Pic cut. Um. Lebanon is a foreign language and therefore won't make the cut. Um. Sherlock Holmes is a 'joke suggestion' -- I could go on. But...Read More

This E.T. "exclusive footage of Nine" spot was posted on 9.18, and I don't see what the big deal is. It's just another whirling smorgasbord of glamour cuts and black-and-white rehearsal footage. (I would be earnestly salivating right now if the entire film had been shot in monochrome.) Since I never watch E.T. the standout element is the Stepford Showbiz News delivery style of co-host Mark Steines. His plastic-complacent manner is a self-directed parody. Don't copy-reading styles ever evolve?

Listen sometime to the way TV announcers...Read More

Ryan Adams' Best Picture poll on Awards Daily asks readers to choose 10 likely finalists among some 55 or 56 suggestions. The ten I've chosen (listed alphabetically) are Bright Star, An Education, The Hurt Locker, Invictus, Nine, Precious, A Serious Man, The Tree of Life, Up In The Air and Where The Wild Things Are. (I obviously haven't seen Malick's Tree but...well, you know. And haven't I read two men-weeping stories about Wild Things? Or just one?)

Here's why Adams' other suggestions don't rate, with due respect: Amelia (unseen but said by an insider to simply not quite cut it in...Read More

To hear it from loyal HE reader "Lipranzer," a Manhattan screening tonight of Capitalism: A Love Story was projected slightly out of focus because the projector was using special night vision lenses to prevent people in the theater from recording the movie and then selling pirate copies. Unless, you know, the security guy who allegedly said this was full of shit. Here's the story:

"Tonight I attended a screening of Capitalism: A Love Story at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square at West 68th Street and Broadway," he begins. "Right away the trouble started. After the initial credits over a black screen, we saw...Read More

Variety's Michael Fleming reported today that three key roles in David Fincher's The Social Network -- a.k.a., the "Facebook movie" by way of Treasure of Sierra Madre -- have been cast. Jesse Eisenberg will play Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (rumored, expected); Justin Timberlake will play Sean Parker, the Napster co-founder who became Facebook's founding president; and Andrew Garfield (Red Riding) will play Eduardo Saverin, the Facebook co-founder who fell out with Zuckerberg over money. The Scott Rudin-produced, Aaron Sorkin-scripted drama will shoot next month in Boston and then move to Los Angeles. Sony will distribute.

As Tip O'Neill said decades ago, all politics is local. The Hispanic Party Elephant who resides upstairs became seriously angered over last weekend's party-noise dispute (i.e., the one in which I was the bad guy for wanting to get some sleep at 1:45 am) and spoke to his pal the building owner, who then spoke to the lease-holder of this apartment. The long and the short is that the HPE has won and I'm moving out as of November 1st. And now I have to decide fairly quickly whether to hump it back to my affordable West Hollywood apartment or try and...Read More

Magnolia Pictures has acquired North American rights to Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love, the Milan-based, Luchino Visconti-ish melodrama about a wealthy family with Tilda Swinton starring.

Last night Some Came Running's Glenn Kenny didn't really get into last weekend's Wizard of Oz original-grain-structure discussion, but he summarized my postings and has gotten hold of a copy and run some screen shots, etc. To be continued.

This columnist will be Straw Dog-ging it down in Shreveport, Louisiana, at the end of next week. Roughly two days, in and out. Director-writer Rod Lurie, costars James Marsden, Kate Bosworth, Alexander Skarsgard, James Woods and Dominic Purcell. I'm going to definitely visit the Stray Cat on Travis Street -- i.e., the place where Josh Brolin and Jeffrey Wright got into a situation with the local fuzz during the shooting of W.. The wifi had better be good or else.

Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man was named the best narrative film of the Toronto Film Festival in a just-posted Indiewire poll of attending critics and bloggers. And Erik Gandini's Videocracy was named best documentary.

Narrative runners-up were (in this order) Chuan Lu's City of Life and Death, Jason Reitman's Up In The Air, Jacques Audiard's A Prophet, Giorgos Lanthimos' Dogtooth (respectful disagreement!), Lee Daniels' Precious, Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love, Bruno Dumont's Hadewijch, Tom Ford's A Single Man and Samuel Maoz's Lebanon.

The doc runners-up were Chris Smith's Collapse, Don Argott's The Art of the Steal,...Read More

Not to be in any way disrespectful, but did anyone know -- or know of -- Steve Friedman, the Philadelphia talk-radio host and film expert who died the night before last (i.e., Sunday) of kidney disease just hours after completing his Mr. Movie program on WPHT-AM (1210)? I didn't know the guy but I'm sorry. 62 is too young to be wrapping things up.

Since 1999 Friedman joined Steve Ross and Jimmy Murray on their "Remember When" radio show from 10 to midnight, and then continued with his own show until 1 a.m. Previously, he had stayed on...Read More

I decided a year ago that Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes (Warner Bros., 12.25) movie would be largely dismissable. Because I knew it would be made, like all super-expensive high-concept CG adventures, for the under-25 mongrel moviegoing culture which "doesn't want to know from 19th Century London" and "cares only about eating popcorn and scratching their balls during the trailers." About eight months ago a Sarah Lyall N.Y. Times article reiterated the same impression.

"This is surely evidence of a degraded culture," I responded. "The...Read More

"In capitalism as envisioned by its leading lights, including Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall, you need a moral foundation in order for free markets to work," Arianna Huffington writes in a current piece. "And when a company fails, it fails. It doesn't get bailed out using trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. What we have right now is Corporatism -- i.e., welfare for the rich. It's Wall Street having their taxpayer-funded cake and eating it too. It's socialized losses and privatized gains.

"Which is why -- although...Read More

"I think John McCain would have been worse for the country than Barack Obama," Glenn Beck actually says to Katie Couric in a debut episode of her new web show, @katiecouric, which posts tonight at 7 pm.

Watch CBS Videos Online

"I can't believe I'm saying this," Beck adds. "I think I would have much preferred [Hillary Clinton] as president and may have voted for her against John McCain." He describes McCain as "this weird progressive like Theodore Roosevelt was."

Salon doesn't like to assign specific dates to its Tom Tomorrow cartoons, which appear every week or so, but this one, I think, went up today.

I don't get the "I was actually black before the election" line. Meaning what? A certain segment of the audience gets riled up, Obama said in his typical Zen-calm way, when significant economic changes are being proposed. Significant economic change with Geither and Summers, with Wall Street reverting to its wildly speculative practices, with a deballed health care bill that delivers no public option, with a bottomless Afghanistan pit sucking up billions, etc.? I am one of the riled. Make that pissed. Obama's mellow 'tude is starting to actually bother me.

Watch CBS Videos Online

I had to read A.O. Scott's 9.20 Steven Soderbergh profile twice to grasp what it really was -- a highly observant and mostly affectionate portrait of a detached (but impassioned!) tech-head who makes films about unknowable characters. Scott almost seems to fundamentally regard Soderbergh as a brilliant ditzoid -- Fred MacMurray in The Absent Minded Professor? -- who, like all scientists, cares more about his laboratory, test tubes, glass beakers and bunsen burners than he does for the public who may or may not buy the products that result from his experiments.

(l.) director Steven...

From tonight's Michael Moore/Tina Brown q & a following a New York Film Festival screening of Capitalism: A Love Story at Alice Tully Hall -- 9.21.09, 9:05 pm. "A nation of semi-literates and ignoramuses!"

Okay, a bit on-the-nose and literal-minded in some of the cuts, but there is a Brando-Beatles bond...I see that now. The masher is Mark Beers, who hails from "some shit town in Canada." "Go on, tell me, you pigfucker...cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!" Excellent job.

I tend to have problems with lead protagonists who aren't very smart or clever or self-protecting, especially if they're journalists. Blokes who just blunder in, regardless of the climate or threat levels in the room, and state their business or line of inquiry without ever seeming to realize that without showing a little finesse and caution and without some idea of what might happen among territorial types when a blundering snoop starts poking around that he might very well get hit, kicked, gouged, cut and bruised very badly.

In Julian Jarrold's 1974, the first installment in the Red Riding trilogy, Andrew Garfield (Lions...Read More

New York Film Festival press screenings began today. I missed this morning's showing of The Art of the Deal, but I'm definitely planning to catch all or most of the Red Riding trilogy at Magno, which begins at 4 pm. There's also a Michael Moore-Tina Brown q & a about Capitalism: A Love Story that I'm going to try and attend at Alice Tully Hall staring around 8:30 or thereabouts. So that's it for the column until much later tonight.

More than 20 months after playing the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, Stanley Tucci's Blind Date will suffer a cruel and humiliating exhibition fate -- an opening this weekend at Manhattan's Cinema Village on 12th Street. (Variance Films has booked it there on the way to DVD.) And now its delayed appearance has taken a toll in another minor way.

Patricia Clarkson, Stanley Tucci in Blind Date.

Marshall Fine's positive review reminded me that Blind Date is about a husband and wife (Tucci and Patricia Clarkson) role-playing a series of blind dates. This, it turns out,...Read More

We can't expect Hollywood's Eloi-catering commercial forces to pay official tribute to an almost 70-year-old classic film, but it seems fundamentally wrong that there isn't some kind of official memorial somewhere to Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. And what better place to have this memorial than the Palace theatre on Broadway and 47th, where Kane had its grand debut in on or about May 1, 1941?

You can find memorial statues and stones and museum exhibits at every major historical site in this country, from the remnants of the Alamo in San Antonio to the huge sloping field...Read More

Sony Pictures Classics has picked up Samuel Maoz's Lebanon, a Hurt Locker-ish view of war from inside an Israeli tank during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The film will play at the forthcoming NY Film Festival and screen for press two days hence -- can't wait.

The idea would be to position Lebanon as a contender for the 2009 Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar, assuming that Israel submits it as an official entry. (And this isn't a done deal.) SPC has recently shown a special allegiance for Israeli-made dramas, picking up Ari Folman's Waltz With Bashir (also about Israel's Lebanon invasion) and...Read More

I can't imagine anyone disputing, as I wrote last May in Cannes, that Lee Daniels' Precious is an "immensely sad, fully felt and deeply compassionate film." And I wouldn't vigorously dispute Roger Ebert's 9.19 prediction that Precious became an even likelier Best Picture nominee last weekend after winning the Toronto Film Festival Cadillac audience award (after having won with the same award in Sundance last January).

Mo'Nique in Lee Daniels' Precious.

But I need to admit what I've been saying to myself since Cannes, which is that I have no interest in seeing Precious...Read More

I heard the somewhat raspy, high-pitched voice of H.G. Wells for the very first time this morning, when the link to this early 1941 radio chat with Orson Welles landed in my inbox. All my life I've been saying "H.G., not Orson" when anyone's asked about spelling my family name. Nothing more than that. (Thanks to Michael Bergeron.)

Too many stars, Gary Marshall directing, Love Actually without Brits, out the window.

With almost any other screenwriter or screenwriters, this scene -- this line, I mean -- would just a good, vulgar, funny throwaway. But with the Coen brothers, it's an integrated plot thread. Because Tara Reid's Bunny Lebowski really does need money, and to such a degree (we'll eventually learn) that she'll soon be a willing pawn in a fake kidnapping plot. This is what good screenwriting does. It decides that even a seemingly innocuous sex gag will feed into the whole.

"Movies that rise above, like A Single Man or Bright Star, will have a theatrical life for quite a while," Apparition's Bob Berney tells Indiewire's Anne Thompson. "For financial reasons, not enough good films were for sale for buyers. A lot of films were misses. If a film is not really special, there is no in-between. It will not get a theatrical release. If it's a halfway movie, audiences will skip it and watch it at home."

You know what isn't a halfway or an in-betweener? Chris Smith's Collapse. Where's the disribution announcement on this one?

Producer Jonathan Dana provides the...Read More

Awards Daily's Sasha Stone dislikes Indiewire's decision to refer to certain columnists (such as myself and Indiewire's Anne Thompson) as "critics" in their Toronto Critics Poll. "I'm not dissing these guys," Stone writes, "[but] not just anyone can write about movies and be called a 'critic.'"

I wouldn't call myself a "critic" either. Certainly not in the Marshall Fine/Dana Stevens/Scott Foundas/Stephen J. Whitty sense of the term. Which can be otherwise defined as seeing every last film that comes along and sitting down like a rank-and-file machinist in Detroit and reviewing every last one (including and especially the awful-awfuls) and...Read More

Did David Poland tip off Informant! director Steven Soderbergh about his shooting angle idea for this interview, and did Soderbergh drive over to nearest shoeshine stand to spiff up before Poland arrived? Imagine how the piece would've played if Soderbergh was wearing beat-up Converses. Or, for that matter, canary yellow sneakers. Key quote: "I think we got the money for the Liberace film...so it's gonna be next summer."

I was asking a few days ago why Oliver Stone's South of the Border, a reportedly flattering portrayal of Venezuela president Hugo Chavez that recently screened at the Venice Film Festival, wasn't showing at Toronto. And then lo and behold I received an invite this morning to catch it on Wednesday evening (9.23) at the Walter Reade Theater. Stone will attend and do a q & a with Lincoln Center Film Society chief Richard Pena following the screening.

Bolivian president Evo Morales (interviewed in the doc) will also be there. It's only a guess but it wouldn't surprise if the...Read More

I was momentarily seized this morning by a desire to see The Wild One in full balls-out Technicolor. What I mean is that I decided I'd break my vow of chastity and actually watch or even buy a colorized version. If, that is, someone were to colorize it in such a way that would make it truly Technicolorish, which has never been done and is probably impossible. I'm merely saying that in a blink of an eye I fell in love with that red motorcycle. I saw it and wanted more. These things happen from time to time.

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I should have already linked to this 9.17 Steven Zeitchik/Risky Business piece about Samuel Maoz's Lebanon, a purportedly tense account of an Israeli tank crew fighting in the Israel-Lebanon war in 1982 (and, of course, another Toronto movie I didn't manage to see).

"It's inevitable, given both the gritty battlefield setting and the North American festival where it made its splash, that Lebanon would be compared to The Hurt Locker," Zeitchick observed.

"There are a couple of important differences between Kathryn Bigelow's hair-raising look at American bomb-defusers in Iraq, which premiered at Toronto in...Read More

My spitball prediction for the weekend, had I given enough of a damn to make one last Wednesday or Thursday, never would have had Steven Soderbergh and Matt Damon's The Informant! beating Karyn Kusama, Diablo Cody and Megan Fox's Jennifer's Body. And yet the former will probably come in third (right behind Tyler Perry's I Can Do Bad All My Myself) with something close to $10 million (okay, perhaps closer to $9 million) and Jennifer's Body will end up with slightly less than $7 million. The latter was cheaply produced, but that doesn't make it any less dead as we speak.

The conventional...Read More

I was awakened at 1:45 am by the upstairs party elephants and their usual (i.e., roughly two times per month) thundering weekend stomp-around. Walla-walla, clomping feet, throbbing Latino music, kids running around and shouting, creaking floorboards. They care about nothing but their own inalienable right to party as late and as loudly as they choose. So I did my usual-usual, which was to call the cops. Except this time I filled out a written complaint, requiring the obese pater familias upstairs to appear in court on 9.29.

It took a little more than an hour for his guests to leave -- it's...Read More

Listen to John Cassidy and James B. Stewart talk about President Obama's failure to get tough with Wall Street, and try not to succumb to depression.

In a clip from Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story, a simple statement resonates. In a reference to the ascension of Treasure Secretary Timothy Geithner, a financial expert remarks that "people in Washington who will give you the wrong answer but the answer you want are invaluable. And they often get promoted precisely because they're willing to say and do absurd things."

A 9.20 N.Y. Times story by Neil Lewis reports that former Senator John Edwards, facing a federal grand jury probe about possible illegal use of campaign donations funnelled to Reille Hunter in order to keep his affair with her secret, is "moving toward an abrupt reversal [by] declaring that he's the father of Hunter's 19-month-old daughter, something that he once flatly asserted in a television interview was not possible."

What a detestable scumbug, at long last suffering his just desserts. Lewis's story is highly pleasurable in its assessment of Edwards' downfall. The best part of the story focuses on "the account...Read More

The winner of the Toronto Film Festival's People's Choice Award for the most popular feature film is Lee Daniels' Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire. The runner-up is Bruce Beresford's Mao's Last Dancer (saw some of it, found it cutesy and on-the-nose), and the third-place winner is Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Micmacs. The documentary award went to Leanne Pooley's The Topp Twins, and Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story came in second. The Midnight Madness award went to Sean Byrne's The Loved Ones, and the runner-up prize went to Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig's Daybreakers.

Last night Bill Maher called the just-released health care bill from Senator Max Baucus "everything you could want in a reform bill except, you know, reform. It is a watered-down, ineffectual blow job to the health insurance industry. No public option. Could cost the middle class a lot more. Encourages employers to drop coverage. Insurance companies can charge whatever they want. [And] we waited eight months for this thing to come out of Senate finance committee."

This morning I heard from and then spoke to restoration guru Robert Harris (The Godfather, Lawrence of Arabia, Vertigo, Spartacus) about my 9.18 reaction to the forthcoming Wizard of Oz Blu-ray -- i.e, "much sharper and more vivid, bursting with color, splendorific," etc. Harris admires the disc as much as I do and probably more so. He's fine with the grain. But he didn't disagree with my observation about it being "somewhat grainier," and conceded that the film now looks different than the one that 1939 audiences saw.

The new Wizard is an example of "a...Read More

David Poland's amusing response to Tom Ford's A Single Man went up four days ago, but I was running around too much to settle in and counter-riff. I laughed because in an exceptionally refined and immaculate and gourmet-ish way it has been filmed, in a manner of speaking, in "Gay-O-Vision."

Colin Firth and Julianne Moore in Tom Ford's A Single Man.

I briefly described A Single Man during my Toronto frenzy as lulling and haunting and reminiscent of Michaelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert (and even L'eclisse in a certin way) and undeniably enhanced by Colin Firth's...Read More

I regard Harry Brown as the return of Michael Caine's Jack Carter, obviously older but no less expert at dispensing brute justice, rising from the grave and squaring off with a gang of young London animals. A tougher, snarlier Gran Torino? I missed it in Toronto, but that's what Toronto's partly about. Feeling angry over films you've missed, I mean. Lionsgate is opening Harry Brown in England in November.

There are two statements from Jennifer's Body producer Jason Reitman in a 9.16 q & a with Dark Horizons' Paul Fischer that I find misleading, not credible, and pretty much astounding.

The first is Reitman referring to Jennifer's Body as "nostalgic...it harkens to a movie from 20, 30 years ago, when horror films were warm, and they embraced you. Like Carrie [and] A Nightmare on Elm Street. I mean, you know, the movies I basically grew up on." He could have also mentioned Heathers, which is what I was hoping Jennifer's Body might be. But even...Read More

The much-anticipated Wizard of Oz Blu-ray was waiting in the mail bin when I got home today from Toronto. I watched it start to finish, and then popped in the 2005 DVD version for comparison. The Blu-ray is much sharper and more vivid, and bursting with color in a natural-seeming, straight-from-the-Technicolor-lab, if-only-Victor-Fleming-could-have-seen-this sort of way. But it's also somewhat grainier.

This is the basic Blu-ray trade-off. The grain that is in the negative is brought out in a way that catches your eye like never before. It's not a problem, but there's no ignoring it....Read More

I saw the Daniel Ellsberg doc in Toronto and found it stirring but fawning. Nobody cares about Tyler Perry films -- they're dependably bad, they make money, they go away. I saw 35 Shots of Rum, a worthy Claire Denis film, at last year's Toronto Film Festival. I don't know from Amreeka. I saw the better-than-decent The September Issue at Sundance and concluded that Anna Wintour wasn't half the monster she'd been portrayed to be. I wasn't even invited to see The Other Man, presumably for the usual reasons.

I can't keep up. Well, I can...Read More

Before reading Marc Graser's Variety story about Walt Disney Studios chairman Dick Cook being suddenly job-less, I knew it wouldn't contain the slightest hint or motive or industry rumble as to why. Then I clicked over to Nikki Finke and her report that a Disney insider has confided that "Cook himself is telling Hollywood tonight" that he was "fired." And that's the way it tends to work. Variety delivers the boilerplate; Finke provides the sizzle.

The Weinstein Co. has decided to bump Miguel Arteta's Youth in Revolt out of a previously slated 10.30 opening in favor of a winter doldrums counter-programming slot on 1.15.10. Presumably Bob and Harvey have figured that Michael Jackson's This Is It, which opens wide on 10.28, along with the other 10.30 openers -- Endgame, Gentlemen Broncos, The Boondock Saints: All Saints Day, etc. -- comprise too much competition. And that the new 1.15 competitors -- Book of Eli and the Weinsteins' own Hoodwinked Too! -- are less so.

Naah, that's not it. It's something...Read More

"But you know, I want [a public option]. I want that. I want, not for personally for me, but for working Americans, to have a option, that if they don't like their health insurance, if it's too expensive, they can't afford it, if the government can cobble together a cheaper insurance policy that gives the same benefits, I see that as a plus for the folks." -- Bill O'Reilly during an interview two days ago with the Heritage Foundation's Nina Owcharenko.

I paid an extra $50 to hop on a 12 noon plane out of Toronto. If I was extra hardcore I would hump myself and my three bags up to Lincoln Center and pick up my New York Film Festival credentials...but I'm not. I'm amazed that last night's peep-peep car riff was taken seriously. I was Sacha Baron Cohen-ing about the sad machismo that guys infuse into their attitudes about cars. I'd drive a dinky rig like that. I've never owned a muscle car in my life.

This dinky little vehicle, parked earlier this evening next to Sassafraz on Cumberland Street in the heart of Yorkville, is only slightly larger than the little convertibles that toddlers sit in at amusement parks. How can a Jean Paul Belmondo guy be a real man and own something like this? How can he perform sexually with his Jean Seberg-like girlfriend? It's humiliating. Bring back those effin' gas-guzzling Cadillacs with fins!

Here's some of what I learned from the films, the current and my personal experience at the Toronto Film Festival, which I'll be taking leave of tomorrow:

(1) Jason Reitman's Up In The Air is now the lead contender to win the 2009 Best Picture Oscar, and it may continue to be that even after Clint Eastwood's Invictus comes along. That's because the subject of Invictus is somewhat narrower -- institutional racism, South Africa, Nelson Mandela, etc. -- and the focus of Up In The Air is about what people of all tribes and denominations are feeling (i.e., afraid of) right now.

Beautiful photography, amusing finale...a first-rate piece.

A press release announcing Criterion's December releases arrived today in the inbox, and the long-awaited DVD/Bluray of Steven Soderbergh's Che wasn't included. This despite Variety's Peter Debruge having reported on 9.1 that "Criterion will put out Soderbergh's two-part biopic Che on both DVD and Blu-ray in December." Am I missing something?

Directed by Kirk Jones (Nanny McPhee, Waking Ned Devine), Everything's Fine (Miramax , 12.4) is about a widower (Robert De Niro) who sets off on a road trip to reunite with each of his grown children. Costarring Kate Beckinsale, Drew Barrymore, Sam Rockwell, Katherine Moennig and Melissa Leo. The film may indeed be fine, but the narration is bothersome.

Tim Blake Nelson's Leaves of Grass, a rowdy pot-dealing dramedy about twin brothers (both played by Ed Norton) with radically different attitudes and lifestyles -- wasn't what I wanted to see this morning. Actually I'd never want to see a film like this. Most of it is set in some Oklahoma backwater, and I realize how this may sound but it has too much of a greasy, fast-food, good-old-boy attitude for someone like myself. Every so often Nelson's screenplay avoids the broad-brush approach, but too often it stomps and grins and goes "yeehaw!"

I just don't give a damn about mangy bearded pot...Read More

So how much will it cost to get Variety after the paywall goes up in early 2010? I'll go for $20 bucks monthly and $150 annually -- no more. And it seems strange that the Hollywood Reporter is apparently planning to dump its print version before the end of the year, which means, of course, it'll lose out on a good amount of Oscar ad pages.

Nikki Finke reported earlier today that the online-only switch-over date date considered was 10.167.09, but now that's been pushed back. I'm not...Read More

I never wrote anything about Patrick Swayze's passing. I should have and I'm sorry -- he was way too young and caught a bad break -- but the guy just never appealed to me all that much. Not in a deep down sense, I mean. I never loved or bonded with him. I wasn't even that taken with him in Point Break. So in the midst of all the Toronto hubbub I kind of allowed myself to put off sitting down and paying the poor guy some form of appropriate respect. I'm playing catch-up here. Anyway, I'm sorry. Rest well and sail on.

I went right over to my favorite Starbucks work station (at Bay and Cumberland) right after seeing Chris Smith's Collapse, which jolted and melted me down like no documentary has in a long, long while. And as I started to work on a reaction piece, I discovered that Hollywood Elsewhere had gone down. Yes, again. A similar-type wipeout happened last April, and there's just no alternative at this stage but to sign up with another server, which I'm in the process of doing. HE is back up again, but that's all she wrote for the Houston-based Orbit/The Planet.

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