"When you first start out you're always striving for greatness and perfection and then after some years reality sets in and you realize that you're not going to get it." -- Woody Allen between shots of his latest London-based film (allegedly titled You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger), talking to the Telegraph's John Hiscock in a piece than ran ages ago (i.e., 9.29).

Maybe you're "not going to get it" just so, but urgent creative strivings of talented young (or younger) directors looking to mark their mark tend to produce their best films. Allen seems to be saying he'll never...Read More

The Guardian's Daniel Nasaw reported today that Los Angeles authorities seeking to imprison fugitive film director Roman Polanski may face a new obstacle in the 32-year-old case -- the victim wants no part in it.

"Samantha Geimer, who was 13 years old when Polanski gave her drugs and had sex with her, today asked a Los Angeles court to drop the charges against the Chinatown director. Polanski fled the US in 1978 after pleading guilty to illegal sex. He was arrested in Zurich last month and is fighting extradition to the US.

"In a court filing today, Geimer said she has been...Read More

I'm tapping the iPhone while waiting for my number to appear at the Cole Avenue DMV, but the key casting decision for the Coen Bros.'s True Grit is the young-girl narrator (i.e., the Kim Darby role in the Henry Hathaway/John Wayne version). Not that the hiring of Matt Damon for the Glenn Campbell role and Josh Brolin as the baddy is inconsequential news.

I've reviewed Michael Moran's 50 Biggest Movies of 2010 piece in the London Times. The biggest money-makers, he means, which in itself implies a kind of synthetic Eloi quality. Because if these 50 were 2010's absolute best there would be cause to seriously think about calling off the 2011 Oscars.

But forget awards. All I want to see just to see 'em are (1) Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, (2) Hot Tub Time Machine, (3) Paul Greengrass's The Green Zone, (4) Phillip Noyce's Salt, (5) The Rum Diary, (6) Ridley Scott's Robin Hood (but only somewhat), (7) Eat Pray Love, (8)...Read More

It certainly is wonderful news about Ricky Gervais having signed to host next year's Golden Globe Award telecast. Okay, I was being facetious. It may be a good thing now that I'm actually thinking about it. Gervais can be agreeably blunt and cutting, and if he's really and truly been given free reign, this could be good. Golden Globe nommies will be announced on 12.15. The show will air live on 1.17.10 from 5 to 8 pm Pacific, 8 to 11 p.m. Eastern.

In Contention's Kris Tapley said this morning that Lee Daniels' Precious is "the frontrunner of this year's Oscar race." Reading this prompted an involuntary leg-muscle spasm so sudden and fierce that it tipped over my black office chair and sent me crashing to the floor.

Precious is a film to sincerely admire and respect as far as it goes. It moved me more than I suspected it would (based on the first half hour, I mean), but Mo'Nique's mom-from-hell performance almost makes it into a kind of grotesque horror film. What she does is a bit like Mary Tyler Moore's emotionally...Read More

"Oscar pundits are going 10-slot crazy this year, wondering whether the additional spots will go to the multiplex or to the art house," writes the Hollywood Reporter's Stephen Zeitchik.

"Whatever answers emerge, it's clear that with an expanded field, voters will have to make tougher choices than usual -- if not when mentally filling out their list of 10, then when they start anointing movies from among that list. With the widened field, there's a wider split between the feel-good contenders and the downbeat ones, between movies that depict the world as it is and those that show the world as we...Read More

There's no ducking out of watching This Is It!, the Michael Jackson doc coming out Wednesday. Every instinct and intuition tells me it's going to be a huge downer and a pageant of resounding phoniness, but it has to be seen and endured and commented upon regardless. I know I don't believe a single word that director Kenny Ortega says to Ben Sisario in this N.Y. Times story about the film.

In a N.Y. Times profile of Willem Dafoe (which is more or less linked to a forthcoming Public Theatre production of a play called Idiot Savant), Dave Itzkoff discusses the actor being "dismayed" about last May's Cannes Film Festival reception to Lars von Trier's Antichrist, in which Dafoe stars. The press screening was "a raucous" thing "that drew boos and mocking laughs," Itzkoff notes.

Willem Dafoe

"It's a hothouse environment, and they like scandal," Dafoe comments. "You see who holds the cards and what plays, what doesn't play. Where the idiots are, where the thoughtful people...Read More

The one disconnect I've had with director-writer Paul Haggis (In The Valley of Elah, Crash, Million Dollar Baby) all these years was his being a member of the Church of Scientology. I presume I don't have to explain the odious aspects of such a relationship. But being a major fan of Elah and the MDB script I didn't want to contemplate it or go there, so I just pushed it aside.

Paul Haggis (l.); Church of Scientology lieutenant Tommy Davis

Now Hollywood Reporter columnist Roger Freidman has reported that Haggis has walked away from...Read More

Late Sunday afternoon I attended a Word Theatre poetry reading called 'Tongues on Fire" in West Hollywood. The big draw was actress-poet Amber Tamblyn reading from her latest volume, Bang Ditto. The passages she read were mostly about relationship rage ("I would sleep with your friends if you had any") and were delivered with a certain arch-deadpan tonality, like pithy fire-drill alarms.

Russ Tamblyn, Amber Tamblyn following Sunday evening's Word Theatre presentation of 'Tongues on Fire: An Evening with California's Finest Poets" at Restaurant3 in West Hollywood -- Sunday, 10,.25, 6:25 pm.

Tamblyn's writing is fierce,...Read More

In a profile of The Box director Richard Kelly, N.Y. Times contributor Ari Karpel writes that his "trippy films" -- Donnie Darko, Southland Tales -- "have made people assume he's like Edward Scissorhands living up in some weird castle." Says Kelly: "That's certainly not who I am."

"In person Mr. Kelly comes across like a former fraternity guy, his torn jeans and gelled hair complementing a T-shirt that reveals an obsessive weightlifter. 'My dream is to be able to have thought-recognition software that, as I'm exercising, will just write the script,' he said.

"His Twitter feed (with more than 5,000 followers) has...Read More

I intend to buy the Public Enemies Blu-ray when it comes out on 12.8. I love the film itself and the high-def digital photography is sure to look killer-diller. But it would look even better if director Michael Mann decided to create the Blu-ray from the original digital images for the transfer (i.e., the pure video version) instead of the digital-converted-to-film version that played in theatres.

Mann's idea in shooting digitally, as I understand it, was to provide a certain aliveness and immediacy that would sharply differ from traditional photography used in other 1930s-era features...Read More

David Carr's decision to retire from his N.Y. Times Oscar-beat "Carpetbagger" column, announced on 10.21, threw me somewhat. I'm sure his replacement, Melena Ryzik, will perform brilliantly once the change-over happens on 12.1, but I like Carr and his writing alot and didn't want to see him go.

(l.) David Carr; (r.) Melena Ryzik.

I finally got around to saying this in a note sent this morning. "So David, your strategy is to lower your profile," I said, "and not continue to do the one thing that aside from your book has put...Read More

I was genuinely startled this morning by the use of periods at the end of "the internet is under new management" and "yours." Ad agencies these days are infamous for ignoring correct punctuation. I grind my teeth every time I see an ad sentence with a missing comma, dash or semi-colon, or one with poor construction. I took this shot because of this disregard; because it's become so utterly routine.

Amelia has a pathetic 12% creme de la creme rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 38 score on Metacritic. The three biggest supporters on the latter site are the Hollywood Reporter's Ray Bennett, Roger Ebert and the Philadelphia Inquirer's Carrie Rickey.

Ebert's review isn't all that ardent. It's really more of a mixed reaction that includes some bending over backwards in order to dispense generosity and graciousness. But there's one thing he says about Billy Wilder's The Spirit of St.Louis -- a much better film about a legendary flyer --...Read More

Awards Daily's Sasha Stone has suggested five rules to follow if you're trying to launch a grassroots/word-of-mouth Oscar nomination talking campaign. So I've come up with a few arguments, counter-suggestions and "oh, yeah?"s.

Stone Rule #1: "Never strong-arm people into voting for someone or something. People hate to be told what to do in general. No one wants to be thought of as stupid or out of touch."

Wells response: Yeah, except the majority of people out there are out of touch (or at least not as in touch as they should be). It's also a pretty safe bet that the...Read More

I read that 10.20 Playlist review of Anthony Peckham's Invictus script, sure. Key quote: "We get into a rhythm with Morgan Freeman's Mandela, but as the story expands to encompass the rugby storyline, Matt Damon's Francois Pienaar character and the country at large, we lose rhythm and end up flopping about in the middle of the familiar sea of cinderella-sports-story cliches." It mainly inspired me to read the damn thing myself. In fact, no...I only have an '08 draft. If anyone has a more recent version, please send along and I'll have at it.

I wrote the following on 9.19.09: "Shot over a two-day period last March, Collapse is basically a Spalding Gray-like soliloquy piece in which Michael Ruppert, a former LA police officer turned independent reporter, author and truth teller, explains in a blunt spoken, highly detailed and extremely persuasive way that our economic and energy-using infrastructure is on the verge of worldwide collapse.

"There's too much debt, too much greed, not enough oil and it's all going to start falling apart -- in fits and starts, bit by bit...Read More

In tribute to tonight's BAM screening of John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (as part of the New York Film Critics Circle 1962 series), the New Yorker's Richard Brody has assembled a video piece and written a few words, among them a declaration that it's "both the most romantic of Westerns and the greatest American political movie.

"The Western is intrinsically the most political movie genre, because, like Plato's 'Republic,; it is concerned with the founding of cities, and because it depicts the various abstract functions of government as...Read More

I sat down late yesterday with Bright Star's Abbie Cornish, whom I found quite personable, steady, friendly and straight-shooting. And a serious knockout, of course. She'll most likely land a Best Actress nomination for her performance as Fanny Brawne. I mean, does anyone see this not happening? There's never a second in which she isn't fully submerged in that character and Bright Star's milieu (i.e., early 1800s London) and the intense romantic stakes. By any standard it's a fairly serious sink-in.

I forgot Cornish was playing this...Read More

A Blu-ray of Kevin Reynolds' Waterworld came out last Tuesday. It's been 14 years since it opened and I've never seen it twice. I honestly don't know if I'd even watch a free screener, much less rent or buy it. The more I think back on it the more nothing it seems -- an over-produced high-concept thing that nobody really wanted to see to begin with.

Kevin Costner in Waterworld.

Lifeboat.

The story is hugely disappointing, particularly the windup over last 20 or so minutes. The only things that have lingered...Read More

Almost every time I drive back to Los Angeles from Santa Barbara, I stop at this location and just stare for five minutes or so. Everyone needs an atmospheric submission moment from time to time. Coastlines are like non-denominational churches, providing comfort to all seekers, even the lowest of the low. Even the Hispanic Party Elephant from North Bergen could savor this.

I was graciously guested last night into Kooza, the latest Cirque de Soleil spectacular that is nothing short of brilliant. It's ballet, slapstick, harmony, transcendence, gymnastics, derring-do, poetry, wonder and thrills. The show runs just short of three hours with a 30-minute intermission. I spilled half of an 18 oz. can of Beck's on my right pant leg and it didn't faze me a bit. The Santa Monica engagement began on 10.17. Upcoming engagements are scheduled for Irvine, San Diego, Portland, Seattle and Vancouver.

Cirque de Soleil tent adjacent to Santa Monica pier -- Friday, 10.23.09,...

In the view of Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman, Joel and Ethan Coen "should seriously consider making a gloriously skewed pop musical.

"I'm more convinced of that than ever having seen the spectacular use they make of the Jefferson Airplane song 'Somebody to Love' in A Serious Man," he eexplains. "This is one of those pop-music epiphanies worthy of Tarantino, Scorsese, or Paul Thomas Anderson -- and the strange thing is, it's just there, so unlikely yet so sublime, sitting right in the middle of the Coens' highly personalized movie about a nebbishy Jewish family trying to make its way in Middle...Read More

A just-released official Obama family photograph by Anne Leibovitz, snapped in the White House Green Room on 9.1.09.

A high-resoluton version delivers much better clarity and tonalities than my 460-pixel version.

Everyone had heard or suspected that Mira Nair's Amelia would be bad, but I was nonetheless stunned by the boredom and general flatness that leapt -- seethed? -- out of every scene and frame. Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan's script is amazingly drippy and mundane. The roteness of Nair's direction is suffocating. This is probably the last American-funded directing gig she'll have in a long time. Put her in movie jail and throw away the key.

Hilaryu Swank, Richard Gere in Mira Nair's Amelia.

Call it a mildly agreeable time-waster if you want, but if you...Read More

The once-legendary Soupy Sales, an immensely likable josher, has died at age 83. This video reminds that the best part of the New York-area Soupy Sales Show (also called Lunch with Soupy Sales) was the offscreen laughter from the crew. Sales' career peak happened during a live engagement at the Paramount theatre during the 1965 Easter holiday. I'd love to find a YouTube of Frank Sinatra's visit to Sales' show the same year.,

Here's a tip-of-the-hat to whomever makes the in-flight video programming decisions for Continental Airlines. All airlines program contemporary crap (i.e., Land of the Lost, Transformers 2) but very few include classic films. I'm just saying it was enormously comforting to watch John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath and Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby during Wednesday's JFK-to-LAX flight. It mitigated an otherwise close-to-hellish experience (i.e., stuck in a cramped seat on a seemingly interminable flight).

Dogwood Entertainment and Freestyle Releasing have pacted on a limited theatrical release of Scott Teems' That Evening Sun, which reputedly boasts an award-level performance by Hal Holbrook. Pic will open in New York on 11.6 and in LA on 11.20. Holbrook will reportedly make appear at each theater on the film's opening nights in New York and Los Angeles.

Variety's Joe Leydon has called it "an exceptionally fine example of regional indie filmmaking [that] deserves savvy handling by a venturesome distrib to maximize its potential to attract...Read More

"As everyone knows before I started making movies I was working in a video store. I made my first movie is '92...well, '91. And somebody asked me the question, 'In 1988, if someone had told you [that] you were going to be getting the Kirk Douglas Excellence in Filmmaking Award, given to you by Kirk Douglas... would you have believed it? And it actually stopped me completely in my tracks on the red carpet. 'No,' I said. 'That would have been unfathomable."

Diane Kruger, Kirk Douglas, Quentin Tarantino at last night's Santa Barbara Film Festival presentation of the...

An intriguing similarity between Amelia and Up In The Air has been remarked upon by Eric Kohn in Moving Pictures magazine.

I need to hump it up to Santa Barbara's Biltmore Hotel tonight for a special fundraiser honoring Quentin Tarantino and Inglourious Basterds. "Why are you going if you're not a huge fan of Basterds?," a guy asked me earlier today. Well, I said, because I've long enjoyed, savored and respected the Tarantino brand -- sometimes less so, sometimes more so, depending. And gatherings like this are as much about honoring the life work of the honoree as the latest film.

The Weinstein Co. obviously wants Basterds to be one of the ten Best Picture nominees and Quentin to land a...Read More

Everyone remembers the concept of dog or cat heaven from childhood. Toddlers needed to be comforted about the death of Fido or Snickers, and from this the theological concept of separate heavens for each and every animal species was born and passed along by parents. It follows, of course, that if dogs have their own heavenly realm then there must also be an ant heaven and a mosquito heaven -- a place in the clouds in which triillions upon trillions of ants and mosquitoes fly around with little insect angel wings.

Not to mention snake heaven, wildbeest heaven, bird heaven, giraffe heaven,...Read More

If Warner Home Video's new North by Northwest Bluray has a kick-around issue, it's the somewhat darker tones. I chose these comparisons (lifted from DVD Beaver's NXNW page) because the 2004 DVD seems to deliver a more naturally-lighted version of what an agricultural area in southern Illinois might look like. (Yes, I know -- the crop-duster scene was actually shot somewhere around Bakersfield.)

Frame capture from Warner Home Video's forthcoming North by Northwest Bluray.

From WHV's 2004 DVD.

What does it say about the state of U.S. culture (or at least the Los Angeles version of it, which is generally thought to be more scattered fizz-pop ADD than in other regions of the country) that Ennio Moricone's "Once Upon A Time in Hollywood" concert at the Hollywood Bowl, scheduled for Sunday, 8.25) has been cancelled. My assumption is that this happened due to lousy ticket sales. If so then woe unto thee, O Hollywood Babylon -- you have sinned a great sin against the Movie Godz.

Ennio Morricone

Morricone, the winner of a...Read More

"If there's a Precious backlash -- 'if,' I say -- it's due to the oppressively ugly, emotionally sadistic vibe generated by Mo'Nique's 'mom from hell' character. It's a movie about compassion and, at the end, a ray or two of light breaking through the clouds, but the cruelty we are obliged to endure (along with poor Gabby, of course) is quite awful. Mo'Nique sells malicious monsterhood like a champ. So if -- IF -- there's a certain hesitancy or resistance to Precious, it's that."

This was my response when The Envelope's Tom O'Neil e-mailed me yesterday about "the shocking omission of Precious:...Read More

Please ignore that idiotic news story linked to by Movie City News about yesterday's Tokyo Film Festival screening of The Cove (or more specifically about a letter of complaint from a Taiji fisheries cooperative plus a bullshit threat to sue over suspected "factual errors"). And focus instead on a first-person account of the screening by Cove director Louie Psihoyos, posted a few hours after the screening.

"Today was surreal," he describes. "Teams of news crews were turned away and banned from the film festival property. The festival planners roped off the green...Read More

For years I've watched Heather Graham in this and that, liked or was at least okay with her performances...meh. After catching this YouTube "public option" spot, I suddenly felt with her. Partly the message, of course, and -- okay, I'll admit it -- partly the contortionist stretching exercises.

Australian critic Don Groves (whom I know from previous correspondence) has sent along a review of Richard Kelly's The Box (Warner Bros,. 11.6): "Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko, his 2001 debut feature, earned him a cult following although the opaque drama earned just $1.3 million in the US. Southland Tales, the writer-director's second feature, bombed worldwide. So will Kelly finally find a hit with The Box, his third attempt at mainstream success?

The Box director Richard Kelly (l.) star James Marsden (r.)

"I strongly doubt it. This period sci-fi thriller (i.e., set in the mid...Read More

Most of my late brother's business was taken care of yesterday afternoon and evening. I'm tapping this out over breakfast in a folksy '50s-style diner in Darien, Connecticut. I'm heading back to the city a few minutes with the idea of catching a 1:05 pm Continental flight to LA.

Irate passenger: "Now see here -- this ship is scheduled, most definitely scheduled to leave port at 12 midnight!" First mate: "Scheduled, Mr. Helms, but not, I fear, destined to do so."

It took about seven or eight hours to pack and load up, drive over to Brooklyn, unload and unpack. And then I had to wait an extra hour for the cable guy. Now I have to drive up to Wilton, Connecticut, and sort things out with the detective handling my brother's death, the owner of the place where he was living (and where he died the day before yesterday), the state medical examiner in Farmington, and finally visit my mom up in Southbury.

Dana Goodyear's profile of Avatar director-writer James Cameron, titled "Man of Extremes," in the current New Yorker is smoothly, beautifully written -- a pure-pleasure, warm-butter read. Cameron "is six feet two and fair, with paper-white hair and turbid blue-green eyes," she begins. "He is a screamer -- righteous, withering, aggrieved.

"'Do you want Paul Verhoeven to finish this motherfucker? he shouted, an inch from Arnold Schwarzenegger's face, after the actor went AWOL from the set of True Lies, a James Bond spoof that Cameron was shooting in Washington, D.C. (Schwarzenegger had been giving the other actors a tour of the Capitol.)...Read More

I was distracted yesterday, to say the least. And then I saw Amelia, which I'm not supposed to get into for a couple of days. And then I came home and watched the North by Northwest Bluray, which looks like a mint-condition celluloid print and not some digital recreation, which feels right. It's "film" and not some razor-sharp, spiffily tweaked upgrade, all glistening and heightened to a fare-thee-well. It's like watching it on opening day (8.6.59) at the Radio City Music Hall, dead center in the twelfth row.

Some of the shots and scenes seem a tiny bit darker than expected. Eva...Read More

I don't how to break this except to just say it. When things happen I write about or at least mention them, and something happened today. Last March my younger sister Laura died of cancer. Last June my father, James Wells, passed away from old age and disease. And today I was told that my younger brother Tony, a house painter who was having a very tough time with the recession, died yesterday at his home, apparently from advanced swine flu (although no one is currently certain what got him). But it happened. It's there to face and deal with. And now...Read More

Unlike the recently released Wizard of Oz Blu-ray super-package, the North by Northwest Blu-ray (which just arrived via FedEx a half-hour ago) doesn't come with goodie knick-knacks. It's just a disc in a hard cardboard case with a nicely written and illustrated booklet. And no, I haven't popped it in yet.

But if goodie knick-knacks had been part of the package, it would have been great to find that white matchbook with R.O.T. -- the initials of Cary Grant's advertising executive Roger O. Thornhill -- printed on the cover. (Robin Wood's brilliant but very literal-minded...Read More

I was invited a while back to take part in Sasha Stone's Awards Daily "Virtual Oscar Roundtable," but with London and moving to a new place and my usual crazy-hair ADD I wasn't able to muster the focus to participate. On average I'd say that I fail to do about 40% of the things I plan to do every day. Even when I write them down in the morning. Each day is a struggle in this regard.

Stone's request, in any event, was for participants to pick/spitball the directors with the best chance right now of being of the five Best...Read More

Hollywood and Fine's Marshall Fine is calling Jonathan Parker's (Untitled) "a laugh-out-loud satire with a dry-martini wit [that] manages the neat trick of poking wicked fun at the worlds of experimental music and art -- from all angles -- even as it gives a humorously sympathetic look at the plight of the serious artist working far outside the commercial mainstream.

Adam Goldberg in (Untitled).

Three thoughts about the widely respected Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (The Lives Of Others) being chosen to direct The Tourist, a Spyglass-produced espionage thriller starring Angelina Jolie, with filming expected to begin next February for a 2011 spring/summer release.

The first thought is "excellent news." Florian, whom I personally know (and who's been living in Los Angeles since, I think, sometime in early '07), is a brilliant, gracious and good-natured fellow, and it's a good thing (and frankly about time) that he's landed the proverbial follow-up gig.

The second thought or question, really, is why did it take the director-writer of...Read More

The first half of New York City's late spring/summer season was mostly about rain. Then the rain broke and a sweltering Panamanian heat wave descended and would't leave until late September. Then some nice fall weather blew in for two weeks and now it's suddenly winter. Hell, it's February out there -- wet, cold, windy, miserable. A half hour ago a wind gust blew out my cheapie umbrella with two or three loose spokes flopping around in the chill. Weather like this builds character, I realize, but why does it have to be so damn miserable? I feel cheated, spat upon. I'm almost...Read More

The name-brand critics not so high on Spike Jonze's Where The Wild Things Are include Variety's Todd McCarthy, Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt, Village Voice's Jim Hoberman, New Yorker's David Denby, Charlotte Observer's Lawrence Toppman, Miami Herald's Rene Rodriguez, Chicago Reader's J.R. Jones, Slate's Dana Stevens, S.F. Chronicle's Mick LaSalle, N.Y. Post's Lou Lumenick, Toronto Globe and Mail's Liam Lacey, L.A. Times' Kenny Turan, Salon.com's Stephanie Zacharek and Time Out's Keith Uhlich. So hold up on that positive emerging consensus I alluded to a day or so ago.

In a 10.18 piece about the BAM/NYFCC 1962 tribute, which starts on 10.23, N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott writes that "one lesson of the great films of 1962 is that the old is always sending out a few flickers of glory even as the new is restlessly being born...the moment of change is always now."

That's a rich and exciting thought, but otherwise Scott's article is an elegantly phrased hand job. The BAM/NYFCC '62 tribute is far too modest -- almost a token shell of a program. As I pointed out in a 10.6.09 HE article, Armond White's selections --...Read More

The one-year anniversary of Barack Obama's election is fast approaching, and I'm almost ready to throw him under the bus and start working for Rep. Marcy Kaptur. I'm so frustrated with his unwillingness or inability to stand up and show some steel cojones that I'm starting to feel actual anger towards the man.

For me the tipping polnt came when he wimped out on pushing hard for public option health insurance. I can honestly confess now to hating Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner almost as much as Dick Cheney or any other loathed Bush adminstration figure. Obama wants to adopt a middle-ground approach...Read More

WHV's long-awaited, 8K-scanned North by Northwest Bluray arrives at my doorstep sometime tomorrow. It streets on November 3rd. I'm told that some kind of special theatrical screening will happen in Los Angeles within the next week or so. If anyone knows the particulars...

Six weeks ago I complained about Criterion's choice of a jacket cover for the forthcoming Downhill Racer DVD (due 11.17). I said I preferred the original 1969 movie poster -- a bedroom metaphor for the glamour of Olympic-level skiing -- to designer Eric Skillman's concept of a droid skiier (Robocop negotiating a slope on the ice planet of Hoth) that came from a Downhill frame capture.

On 10.1 Skillman blogged about the various options he came up with for Criterion and why the robot-droid art was chosen, etc.

"The concept...Read More

My son Jett, a Syracuse senior, saw Paranormal Activity tonight and sent along the following as soon as he got home: "I'm not a horror fan, and certainly not by present-day standards with torture porn, decapitation and brutal rape repping the norm. Paranormal Activity, on the other hand, does so much less and scares you so much more.

"I saw it tonight with my buddy Ryan at the Carousel Mall in Syracuse, NY. The mall was packed with kids and a huge line was wrapped around...Read More

Once costars Glenn Hansard and Marketa Irglova fell in love sometime in the summer of 2007, during a tour to promote the film. And now, roughly 15 or 16 months later, they're toast. But they're feigning a kind of serene acceptance of this melancholy fact (or so it seems to me) for the sake of promoting Strict Joy, which everyone is calling their "breakup album."

Marketa Irglova, Glenn Hansard

And now N.Y. Times guy David Carr, in a very nicely but carefully written profile, has passed along their recent history (the success of Once and...Read More

My London adventure also diverted me from Pete Hammond's 10.14 "Notes on a Season" piece about Amelia, which asked whether Fox Searchlight has something to hide given the lack of screenings. The answer is that it doesn't. Amelia isn't just set in the 1930s but plays, apparently, like a film made with semi-schmaltzy 20th Century chops, which should be an allowable thing. And yet there's a guarded feeling about it.

Hillary Swank in Mira Mair's Amelia.

"There were two screenings on the Fox lot Oct. 7 that were projected digitally because film prints were not even ready...Read More

In a 10.16 N.Y. Times editorial observer piece called "Mad Men and the Thrill of Other People's Misery in Sour Times," Adam Cohen observes that AMC's Mad Men is offering beleaguered Americans heaping helpings of other people's misery...to a generation beaten down by skyrocketing unemployment, plunging retirement savings and mounting home foreclosures, Mad Men offers the schadenfreude-filled message that their predecessors were equally unhappy -- and that the bleakness meter in American life has always been set on high."

Producer Daniel Melnick died last Tuesday, which was right in the middle of my Fantastic London sojourn. And then I kind of kicked it around in my head after returning to New York two days ago (i.e., Thursday). And then I remembered two or three phone conversations I had with Melnick in 1994, when he was 62.

They were all about the then-unfolding Heidi Fleiss Hollywood hooker scandal, which involved suspicions that certain actors and producers and studio execs had enjoyed Heidi's girls with money siphoned or skimmed off production budgets. None of this was ever proven, but it sure was...Read More

Today is a half-moving day, hence my half-absence for the last several hours. The effort that goes into finding the right-sized, not-too-wide bookcase, and then finding the right delivery guy at the right place to meet me at the buying location in Queens (and everyone has their particular demands and schedules and fees)...something like this just vacuums up your day. But it has to be done.

Like so many trailers, this recently released one for Mira Nair's Amelia (Fox Searchlight, 10.23) seems to deliver a compressed version of the whole film (except for the last 10 or 15 minutes). Sitting here, having watched various versions for the last two or three months, I feel that I have seen it. There's a screening early next week for people like me (i.e., late-to-the-table types).

"Most conspiracy theorists don't understand this, but if there really were a C.I.A. plot [involving the assassination of President Kennedy], no documents would exist." -- Author Gerald Posner ("Case Closed") speaking to N.Y. Times reporter Scott Shane in a 10.16 story about whether the Central Intelligence Agency might be "covering up some dark secret" about JFK's murder? "Probably not," Shane writes. "But you would not know it from the C.I.A.'s behavior."

My London trip allowed me to see Tony Scott's The Taking of Pelham 123 twice -- on the way over and the way back. And don't laugh but I think it deserves to be one of the ten Best Picture nominees. The idea in nominating ten is to promote and celebrate a movie or two that guys like Scott Foundas and Dennis Lim don't approve of, right? That Average Joes paid to see and actually enjoyed?

This is precisely the kind of shrewd, sharp-angled, deftly layered urban...Read More

This BBC story about the re-opening of the Pennan Inn in Pennan, Aberdeenshire took me back to Bill Fosyth's Local Hero ('83). The inn is the one visited by Peter Reigert and run by Denis Lawson in this beloved film, which...good God, I can't believe it's been 26 years since I first saw it at the Warner Bros. screening room on 50th Street. Is there anyone who's seen this poignant and bittersweet love story/fairy tale who hasn't felt some kind of meltdown effect?

You...Read More

In an interview with Bloomberg's Al Hunt, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D., West Virginia) said it's Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's call whether or not to include a public option in the Senate health care bill. So it could actually happen? Rockefeller warned that stripping the public option simply to win Sen. Olympia Snowe's vote will cause Democrats "to lose our leadership and our momentum."

Spike Jonze's Where The Wild Things Are, in the view of N.Y. Times cricket Manohla Dargis, "startles and charms and delights largely because Jonze's filmmaking exceeds anything he's done in either of his inventive previous features, Being John Malkovich ('99) and Adaptation ('02). [Now] he has made a work of art that stands up to its source and, in some instances, surpasses it.

It's a film "that often dazzles during its quietest moments, as when Max (Max Records) sets sail, and you intuit his pluck and will from the close-ups of him staring into the unknown. He looms large here, as...Read More

There are two indications of trouble in this trailer for Martin Campbell's Edge of Darkness (Warner Bros., 1.29.10). One is the way-too-blissful smile Mel Gibson wears as he hugs his grown-up daughter and says, "Let's go home." I know all about grown-children dad hugs and you never smile like that unless you're an idiot -- you keep it tucked inside and project an air of mild serenity.

The other problem is that Gibson takes his eyes off the road twice -- twice! --...Read More

So no more Penn/Pitt/dinosaur jokes until sometime next year (maybe) with Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life not so much bumped from a speculative/hoped-for late '09 release date as much as Apparition's Bob Berney finally deciding to tell a journalist (Indiewire's Anne Thompson), "Wait...you thought it was coming out later this year? Wow, I could have straightened you out on that weeks ago."

The noteworthy thing isn't that Tree of Life won't come later this year (that was becoming more and more obvious with no marketing materials anywhere in sight) but Berney admitting (a) "he doesn't know when it will come...Read More

"The richest 1 percent of this country owns half our country's wealth -- five trillion dollars," Michael Douglas's Gordon Gekko declared 22 years ago in Oliver Stone's Wall Street. "One-third of that comes from hard work, and two thirds comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulating to widows and idiot sons and what I do -- stock and real-estate speculation. [And] it's bullshit.

"You got 90 percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own. We make...Read More

Fifteen seconds after my London flight arrived at JFK this afternoon I learned of Patrick Goldstein's bullwhip piece accusing me of showing no balls during my interview with Fantastic Mr. Fox director Wes Anderson .

The Big Wimp-Out happened, in Goldstein's view, when I questioned Anderson about that 10.11 Chris Lee L.A. Times piece that repeated gripes from Fantastic Mr. Fox dp Tristan Oliver and director of animation Mark Gustafson that Anderson (a) made their lives miserable by being an overly-demanding nitpicker (or something like that) and (b) not being on-set and directing the...Read More

The IFC marketing guys are trying to keep the viral Antichrist thing going by asking graphic designers and horror fans to design a final official poster. Blood-soaked fox fur, afterbirth, falling toddlers, clitoral scissors, leg anvils, etc. "Delve into the darker parts of your creativity to create an original poster design for this beautiful and horrifying film," the statement says, blah blah. Antichrist opens a week from Friday (i.e., 10.23).

For whatever inexplicable reason there's no YouTube trailer for Danis Tanovic's Triage, which I missed at the Toronto Film Festival. But here's one on a European site. Here's the initial reaction that first got me going.

The Fantastic fanfare was great while it lasted but it's over -- grim up and pack the bags. Training to Heathrow in less than an hour, and late as usual. Plane departing at 11 am (or something like that), back in New York by this afternoon, etc.

Fantastic Mr. Fox voice-star George Clooney, TV-hostess girlfriend Elisabetta Canalis at last night's post-premiere, London Film Festival party at Chelsea's Saatchi Gallery.

Prior to last night's London Film Festival premiere screening of Fantastic Mr. Fox

The cigarette-smoking crowd outside...

I have to get over to the Fantastic Mr. Fox gala screening that kicks off the London Film Festival. The day just flew and now it's 5:50 pm. I was going to take two or three hours and do this self-orchestrated walking-around-London Beatles tour (i.e., visiting their various residences during the '60s) but realized too late there wouldn't be time. And I have to leave tomorrow morning. Too bad. I could easily live here.

I don't know why Susannah Breslin, a very tough, talented, and truthful writer who's been around, would want to write about the porn industry, which always has been and always will be composed of the absolute dregs of show-business culture -- i.e., people who want to be famous and live pulsing lah-lah lives but who have absolutely no acting or filmmaking talent whatsoever, and who generally aren't the sharpest tools in the shed either. But she does write about this damn industry, and very well at that. But I'm asking her straight out -- why do you write about these...Read More