I think it's fair to say that the people running the TCM Classic Film Festival are a little too restrictive and traffic-coppy and dare-I-say obstructionist in their dealings with the press. Okay, with me. They're running a very well-organized, very popular film festival here (all the screenings I've been to have been 80% or 90% sold) but today's experience in trying to get into a q & a with Warren Beatty and Alec Baldwin at the Chinese sixplex following a screening of Reds was needlessly problematic.

I just wanted to cover the q & a but...Read More

The usual concerns and distractions kept me from attending the TCM Classic Film Festival until 8:50 pm last night. I arrived at the big Chinese (a.k.a. "the Samaha-Kushner club") to see how Spartacus would look on the big screen. Answer: okay to so-so, and definitely not great.

I don't know if the projection was film or digital but the lamp wasn't that bright, the focus was soft, there was no extraordinary detail, the image felt a little too dark and shadowy and the sound was okay but unexceptional.

Honestly? What I saw last night was nowhere near as satisfying as...Read More

I try to isolate myself from the Kardashian gas chamber as much as possible, but every now and then it flanks and surrounds. Yesterday I ran into two Kim posters -- one on Santa Monica Blvd. in West Hollywood, another in a Hollywood Blvd. parking garage near the Chinese. Nobody blames KK, of course, for pushing her brand and hustling around. I'd pocket the dough if I were her.

But what can be said for under-educated women who even half-believe that a Kim Kardashian endorsement = coolness and intrigue? Could there...Read More

Earlier this evening on Twitter: "In the latest chapter of Quentin Tarantino's lifelong effort to make movies about other movies or books, but NEVER, EVER about life as he's lived it, thought it, felt it or dreamed it ALL BY HIMSELF & based on his own personal 'walk the earth' journey...

"...he's decided to direct a remake or re-imagine or re-stylize or amplify upon a 1966 ultra-violent Franco Nero spaghetti western called Django, which he'll be re-titling Django Unchained. Brilliant. Crawling even further up his own ass."

I meant to say it took me three tweets...

There's a 4.29 Wrap story about how former hotshot Hollywood journalist Anita Busch is still pushing her civil lawsuit against Michael Ovitz and AT&T for damages stemming from the Anthony Pellicano wire-tapping scandal, which will always be linked, of course, to that June 10, 2002 episode with the dead fish on Busch's windshield and the note that said "stop!," etc. Almost nine years ago and counting.

I understand why it's taken so long, and I definitely understand and respect tenacity and staying the course and snagging the dough if you can get it, but man...nine years of this? And how...Read More

One of the reasons that hustlers like Elie Samaha and Don Kushner believe they can get away with what they're apparently planning to do with the legendary cathedral that is Grauman's Chinese is that they know that most Movie Catholics are caught up in their own stuff and will pay closer attention to Transformers 3 trailers than to Samaha and Kushner's maneuverings.

HE is supposedly read and followed by a vocal and highly aware readership, and so far there are four lousy comments on the story about the Chinese-Studio 54 conversion (which was posted at...Read More

What a drag that it all ended with Eyes Wide Shut -- obviously engrossing and very carefully assembled but altogether the most lifeless and embalmed Stanley Kubrick film ever made. (Yet another hat tip to Awards Daily's Ryan Adams.)

Why go with this kind of photograph and particularly one with this angle if you're going to apply subtle Photoshopping to a part of the anatomy that would be otherwise visible? I don't really care and it's obviously not a huge deal, but the absence makes it noteworthy. (Hat tip to Awards Daily's Ryan Adams.)

To get into this you need to think about the cadence and phraseology of Eric Burdon's "San Franciscan Nights."

The first 25 minutes of Baz Luhrman's Moulin Rouge were so forced and frenetic that my head nearly exploded. (Just like that bald-headed guy with the glasses in David Cronenberg's Scanners.) On Monday, 5.2 at 3 pm, MTV.com is staging a livestream celebration of the film's 10th anniversary with Josh Horowitz interviewing Baz, Ewan McGregor, Nicole Kidman and John Leguizamo.

The TCM Classic Film Festival began last night with a screening of An American in Paris, but they wouldn't let me attend because...I don't know why and don't really care. There was a Vanity Fair-sponsored after-party following the Paris screening and VF reps are always giving off chilly-vibe, go-away, more-exclusive-than-thou attitudes. Or maybe Hollywood Elsewhere just isn't cool enough in a general sense.

I've already missed the 9 am screening of Becket due to writing about Elie Samaha and Don Kushner, but here are some of the classic films I'd like to see projected on big...Read More

Manhattan-based film curator Miriam Bale has called to complain about my having described a recent press release statement that the delayed Ishtar Bluray is "impending" as "apparent conjecture" on her part. I was told by 92Y's Sarah Morton that the term "impending release" came from Bale, but Bale says it was Elaine May's "people" who submitted that term.

The press release about May's 5.17 appearance at the 92nd Street Y in concert with the Ishtar Bluray release will be amended next week, she says.

I reported the other day that Sony Pictures Home Entertainment "will eventually, no doubt, release...Read More

LA movie fanatics need to savor the Old Hollywood aura of Grauman's Chinese theatre as much as they can between now and May 20th because after that date the notoriously oily Elie Samaha and his partner Don Kushner, the film and video-game producer (Tron: Legacy), will be transforming the legendary Chinese into a kind of mixed-venue Studio 54.

This is what I've been told by a source I spoke to this morning who's closely affiliated with the Chinese and has been observing walk-throughs by Samaha and Kushner and their associates and overhearing conversations, etc.

The...Read More

An HE reader attended a research screening last night at Manhattan's AMC Lincoln Square for Simon Curtis's My Week With Marilyn. The British-made drama, highlighted by a knockout performance by Kenneth Branagh as Laurence Olivier, is based on two books by the late Colin Clark about Clark's relationship with Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams) during the making of The Prince and the Showgirl in 1956.

Kenneth Branagh in some period film and not as Laurence Oliver in Simon Curtis's My Week With Marilyn...although he'll probably look vaguely similar to this in Curtis's film, minus the moustache.

It...Read More

I thought and thought and thought about it, and decided it was better, no disrespect, to get the sleep rather than wake up at 2:30 or 3 am Pacific to catch Prince William and Kate Middleton's marriage ceremony. Congratulations and best wishes to the happy couple.

On their own terms and in the minds and hearts of the principals, all weddings are joyous and hopeful events that everyone feels very good about, myself included. I was married in Paris at a small Catholic church called St. Julien le Pauvre in October 1987, and it was...Read More

"At one point during the preordained throwdown between the two colossi who stride through Fast Five, Dwayne Johnson rips off his bulletproof vest with the practiced economy of a 17th-century courtesan flinging off her corset," writes N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis. "His character, a professional tough guy bluntly named Hobbs, has just found his fugitive bad twin, Dom, the gnomic guru of the Fast and Furious franchise, played by Vin Diesel.

"They are the fast and, yes, the furious. Yet as these giants grasp each other's bulging muscles, their bald heads rearing in the frame with tumescent vigor, it's easy to...Read More

Deborah Chow's The High Cost of Living ("a dark love story about two people who meet after a car accident") played at last September's Toronto Film Festival, and I didn't hear a thing about it from anyone. Now it's available on demand via Tribeca Film. You'd think that Zach Braff's name would attract more attention.

The cost of "Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made," a serious film buff coffee-table book that started out costing many hundreds of dollars, is now down to $40.47 on Amazon. I think this might be the poor man's abridged version and not the first-edition, velvet-bound 35-pound version. Still, the markdown indicates that it didn't sell like Taschen was hoping it would.

I lived in a Soho tenement apartment on Sullivan Street from the summer of '78 through late '79. One day in late October near Prince and Greene streets I came upon an original Jean-Michel Basquiat SAMO graffiti that read, "Which of the following institutions has the most political power? (a) The CIA, (b) the Catholic church, (c) McDonalds or (d) SAMO?"

Taken during an early morning walk through Rome in late May, 2007

Later that year (or was it early '79?) I ran into Basquiat in a post office as I was sending a couple...Read More

CBS News correspondent Lara Logan has described in some detail what happened during that horrific sexual assault she suffered on Friday, 2.11 in Cairo's Tahrir Square. She's given an interview on the subject to N.Y. Times reporter Brian Stelter, and will also speak about it on 60 Minutes this Sunday.

The word "rape" surfaced in some news reports about the attack, and to most of us that word means what it means. Logan tells Stelter that for 40 minutes 200 or 300 men "raped me with...Read More

I must admit that last December's teaser trailer for Michael Bay's Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon (Paramount, 7.1) put the hook in, and coming from moi, a hater of the original who refused to even see Revenge of the Fallen, that meant something. Today the first major full-boat trailer arrived. It seems potentially less offensive that other CG actioners in the wings.

The paycheck standout is Frances McDormand in the Joan Allen-in-the last-two-Bourne-movies role. Costar John Turturro also pocketed a nice big fat one.

The 1979 six-part series that was John Irvin's Tinker, Tailor, Solder, Spy ran 290 minutes, or roughly 48 minutes per episode. Tomas Alfredson (Let The Right One In) has directed a much shorter feature film version. An undated draft of Peter Morgan's script, which was rewritten by Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan, runs 111 pages. That's a lot of cutting.

Alfredson's feature, which finished shooting last December, will be distributed by Universal Pictures sometime in the fourth quarter. I'll bet the execs who pushed along Fast Five and The Immortals are looking at this film with their...Read More

I've been presuming all along that Matthew Vaughn's X-Men: First Class (20th Century Fox, 6.3) is a prequel using a Cuban Missile Crisis backdrop because of the early '60s chic mentality created by Mad Men and furthered by Zack Snyder's Watchmen...right? They're basically following the stylistic lead of other films.

I've just re-watched JFK's Cuban Missile Crisis speech (part 1 and part 2). No mention of mutants, of course, but any chief executive would have kept this aspect...Read More

It was announced today that the 2012 Golden Globe Awards telecast will happen on Sunday, 1.15.12, or six weeks before the Oscar telecast on Sunday, 2.26.12. (The 2011 GG telecast happened on 1.16, or a full seven weeks before the 3.6 Oscar telecast.) GG nominations for 2011 films will be announced on 12.15.11.

"The mood around the Tribeca Film Festival had been a bit quiet and uneventful, but on Wednesday night a small documentary -- Semper Fi: Always Faithful -- delivered a much-needed bang," reports HE's Jett Wells. "It's this year's Tillman Story meets Erin Brokovich -- one man's investigation into the most widespread tragedy of mass pollution in American history since Love Canal.

Master Sergeant Jerry Ensminger in Rachel Libert and Tony Hardman's Semper Fi: Always Faithful.

"Rachel Libert and Tony Hardman tell the story of Master Sergeant Jerry Ensminger's quest to find the truth behind his daughter's death...Read More

Shortlist.com has posted a Quentin vs Coens art collection "celebrating both sides of the battle...collated and shown to warring film buffs. The pieces cover classics from both sides, including Pulp Fiction, The Big Lebowski, Kill Bill and Barton Fink."

If I'd called Fast Five director Justin Lin yesterday and asked for a quick meeting at the Urth Caffe, he would have blown me off. Lin probably feels at this stage that he's too much of a hot-shot to sit down with an online columnist. But let's imagine for a second that he might have recalled our chats in '06 about Better Luck Tomorrow and said "sure, fine...where and when?" Let's also imagine that we both showed up on time, and we both ordered herbal tea.

HE: Good to see ya again, Justin....Read More

As I said last month, if Will Smith wasn't such a sad little status-quo money whore (i.e., playing only "safe" cool-guy roles that pay his whopping salary), he'd agree to portray Barack Obama in Jay Roach and Danny Strong's Game Change. No one has been cast as Obama yet...right? Ed Harris is playing John McCain.

(l.) Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin in HBO's Game Change; (r.) caption unnecessary.

Apologies for failing yesterday to post Jett Wells' review of Massy Tadjedin's Last Night, which screened Monday night at the Tribeca Film Festival: "My first Tribeca Film Festival got off to a slow start last weekend due to my dog throwing up in the car before dropping him off at my mom's apartment, and then my shuttling down to D.C. to see a friend," Jett begins.

"Directed and written by Massy Tadjedin, Last Night is about the age-old question on whether to cheat or not to cheat. The film portrays a struggling,...Read More

More mythical-fantasy CG crap in the mold of Louis Leterrier's Clash of the Titans, and directed by Tarsem Singh. The bare-chested guy yelling "noooo!" at the beginning is Henry Cavill, the star of Zac Snyder's Man of Steel. The moustachioed guy in the cattle-horn helmet (i.e., "King Hyperion") is Mickey Rourke. And poor Freida Pinto (triple-devalued between You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, Miral and this thing) costars as Phaedra.

To mark the 15th anniversary of Saul Bass's passing, web designer Christian Annyas yesterday posted a Vertigo movie-poster-design page that includes some alternate images that Bass designed but weren't chosen as the primary. My favorite is the sexier lower-left image, followed by the despairing lower-right.

The upper-left was chosen for the '58 one-sheet but the hat worn by the male silhouette dates it, obviously. Here's my 7.16.10 riff on that awful brown suit worn by Vertigo star James Stewart.

The actual art was done by Bass associate Art Goodman. "Bass designed everything, but...Read More

20th Century Fox... I mean, MGM has created a new 70mm print of Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins' West Side Story ('61), and Fox Home Video will issue a Bluray, I'm told, sometime later this year. The 70mm print will screen it this Sunday at 7pm at the American Cinematheque under the aegis of TCM's Classic Film Festival.

The 1961 consensus, of course, was that West Side Story lacked the snap and vitality of the 1957 Broadway play, and that the play was an exuberantly jacked-up theatrical impression of street conditions among...Read More

Donald Trump's response to the White House's release this morning of Barack Obama's live birth certificate was frankly my own: why did they wait so long?

With all the idiots out there claiming President Obama was born in Kenya plus that huge block of Republicans who right now believe the Kenya scenario, what was the upside of not producing this document and putting the issue to bed once and for all?

The certificate was physically obtained in Hawaii at Obama's personal expense and flown back to Washington, D.C. yesterday.

From the HuffPost's Sam...Read More

So far Fast Five, a steroid male-attitude robot fantasy about muscles and possessions and whale-sized physiques and high-octane flamboyance and studly one-upsmanship, has an 81% Rotten Tomatoes rating. It is what it is (blah, blah, blah) and I'm not suggesting that Universal executives or director Justin Lin be indicted for a felony, but I'm going to rip it a new asshole tomorrow morning anyway.

Along with the smart critics who know better but have given it a pass because they know that the regular-guy mob is into it and they don't want to seem too fickle or prissy or metrosexual if...Read More

Some have been following the great Ishtar Bluray Delay saga since last January, but most haven't so let's recap the chronology. But first let's report the latest, which is that earlier today the 92nd Street Y announced "a rare screening and discussion" with Ishtar director-writer Elaine May on Tuesday, 5.17 at 7:15 pm. The 92Y press release mentioned the Ishtar "cult" that has taken form in recent years and also the "impending" release of the Ishtar Bluray.

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment will eventually, no doubt, release their Ishtar Bluray (i.e., the one that almost came out last...Read More

What's so awful about The Hangover Part II director Todd Phillips comparing his new film (Warner Bros., 5.26) to The Godfather Part II? Francis Coppola's 1974 classic is widely regarded as a sequel that was better (or certainly artier) than the original. Phillips is merely claiming in a droll, tongue-in-cheek way that The Hangover Part II is better than The Hangover...that's all. Hardly a crime, even if it turns out to be bullshit.

"I think there are very few sequels that have been made that live up to or exceed their...Read More

Hollywood Life editor-in-chief Bonnie Fuller has written an emotionally effusive girly article about Lady Diana Spencer for CNN.com. I'm not challenging Fuller's personal observations, but I don't see how anyone can write about Diana without at least touching on the basic fact that she's dead, and not from sheer happenstance. A tree didn't fall on her.

The former Princess of Wales essentially orchestrated her demise due to her atrocious judgment in choosing a profligate immature asshole -- Dodi Fayed -- as a boyfriend. Fayed was just foolish and insecure enough, jet-setting around with his father's millions and looking...Read More

AMPAS announced today that (a) the 84th Oscar ceremony will air on Sunday, 2.26, (b) the 2011 nominations will be announced on 1.24.12, the nominees luncheon will take place on 2.6.12, and final ballot deadline will be 2.21.12. Been here before, not radical enough but fine...whatever.

Weinstein Co. co-chief Harvey Weinstein was in very good form when he spoke to TheWrap's Sharon Waxman three days ago (Friday, 4.22) during TheGrill@Tribeca, a media and entertainment conference.

I don't really need the TCM Classic Film Festival (4.28 to 5.1) to see venerated older films or wallow around in old-movie sentimentality -- I can do that at home. But I am interested in seeing classic movies on big screens with presumably optimum (or at least signficantly better-than-average) projection in the company of large enthusiastic crowds -- to me that's special. So I'm feeling moderately cranked about this festival, which is now in its second year, and which I'm fully press-credentialed and ticketed for.

I have to hit the 7 pm Fast Five screening...Read More

For whatever reason I've been sent images of impressionistic paintings inspired by Joe Wright's Hanna. The copy implies that Focus Features paid three artists -- Jock, Aaron Minier, Alan Brooks -- to "capture the spirit of the characters and bring them to life in their own mediums," etc. But what for? It reenforces the notion that Hanna is an art thriller but everyone understand that now. I don't really get it but whatever.

Justin Lin's Fast Five (Universal, 4.29) will have its all-media screening at the Arclight in less than three hours. Hollywood Elsewhere will be there. The air is crackling with electrons. Some may have missed a riff I posted on 4.13.

I bought two large plants about a month ago, and in so doing condemned them. I'm more or less resigned to the fact that all plants that come to this apartment will die within four or five months. I've always made sure they get the right amount of water (i.e., every three weeks) and plenty of indirect sunlight, and every three or four days I mist their leaves. But the leaves inevitably turn yellow and then fall off, and before you know it the plants are stalks.

This is a House of Death and I am Vincent...

The guy in the apartment next to mine has been taking a shower for a good ten to twelve minutes so far. Will he go 15? Do we dare talk about 20? Now I know, in any case, who he is and what he's made of. 9:09 am update: He finally turned the water off after 13 or 14 minutes.

Like fingerprints or snowflakes the best actors of any generation are always unique instruments, playing their particular music no matter what the role. Meanwhile the second-tier actors, lacking this uniqueness or particularity, tend to draw from a generic grab-bag of mannerist ticks and tendencies in favor at a given cultural moment. The tendencies of young male actors in the mid '50s through the next 15 or 20 years were about trying to channel the sensitive anguish of Brando-Dean-Clift, etc. Every generation has its particular mode and attitude.

I'm saying this because I'm feeling more and more annoyed by second-tier GenY and younger GenX...Read More

Taxi Driver costars Jodie Foster, Robert DeNiro at the Cannes Film Festival, a bit less than 35 years ago. De Niro looks distinctly uncomfortable; Foster seems glassy-eyed but more or less accepting. Today's De Niro is a tad mellower (naturally) but is still the same guarded guy, obviously still thriving and punching even though -- let's be honest -- he creatively peaked as an actor years ago. Foster -- 13 then, 48 now -- has grown into my idea of a steady and together hyphenate, and her peak may be yet to come.

Photo found here.

Before Jesse Peretz's My Idiot Brother had been retitled Our Idiot Brother (8.26) by the Weinstein Co., it was slammed at Sundance by Hollywood Reporter critic John deFore. The film, he said, "shambles along with all the purposefulness of its title character, a kind of near-beer Lebowski who's neither reckless enough to cheer for nor misguided enough to disdain.

"Paul Rudd's Ned Rochlin, recently released from jail and broke, wanders through his three sisters' homes, inadvertently revealing that each has as much to answer for as their brother who sold dope to...Read More

It's already clear how Meryl Streep's Oscar-bait performance as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (20th Century Fox, late December) is going to be sold. One, as a tribute to a woman "who came from nowhere to smash through barriers of gender and class to be heard in a male-dominated world." And two, as a respectful salute to a tough, steely conservative who doesn't seem so bad compared to the Palin-Bachmann tea-bagger wackos.

Jim Broadbent (l.)as Denis Thatcher and Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in Phyllida Lloyd's The Iron Lady.

Yesterday I posted a fairly glum assessment of the fate of classic films on Bluray, but you can't get too down-hearted about this stuff. So here's a list of 30 films made (and for the most part released) in the 1950s -- most of them large-format, nearly all in color -- that need to be properly spiffed up and Bluray-ed. They certainly need looking after element-wise, particularly those released in the mid to late '50s up until '60 due to fading among those shot on "safety" stock.

Danny Kaye in The Court Jester

It doesn't matter if...Read More

Awards Daily's Sasha Stone and I have agreed to rent a car sometime in the afternoon on the day before the start of the Cannes Film Festival (i.e., Tuesday, May 10th) and drive into the hills above Cannes and Nice and maybe stop for a bite in Saint Jeannet, the smallish village seen from the home belonging to Cary Grant's John Robie in To Catch A Thief.

That Act One chase scene (cops in black car chasing Robie's marooon convertible) in Alfred Hitchcock's 1955 film is the basic inspiration -- i.e., to take...Read More

As I explained three weeks ago, mentioning that Jeffrey Wright's character smokes a pipe in a review of Source Code, however sloppy and unfortunate, is not a whackable offense. It's certainly something that now-former Movieline critic Elvis Mitchell, whose firing was announced last evening by Nikki Finke, could have finessed with one hand tied behind his back.

Former Movieline critic Elvis Mitchell

My guess is that Elvis didn't respond to his employer (MMC's Jay Penske) quickly enough with a reasonable-sounding explanation, or perhaps he doesn't respond with any details at all. Because impersonating...Read More

What kind of a raging butt-plugged Mussolini do you have to be to type "[Blogger X]" to avoid posting my name? MCN's David Poland did this in the process of re-posting a short 4.20 Glenn Kenny/Some Came Running riff about a Times Square Starbucks installing wall outlet covers to keep people like me from sitting at their tables for hours on end.

I admire Poland for many things (particularly his take-no-shit responses to Nikki Finke), but every now and then he just floors you with his Zampano-like obstinacy.

I'm assuming, by the way, that Kenny's...Read More

Nobody, it seems, has covered the Tribeca Film Festival so far the way I would have, and did last year. No q & a videos, no party photos, no random observations. I'm not feeling the aromatic, atmospheric stuff. All I'm reading are movie reviews.

Taken last year in front of Chelsea Cinema during Tribeca Film Festival.

A lot of people saw Gaukur Ulfarsson's Gnarr last night at the Tribeca Film Festival; I saw it today in my living room. It's a mild-mannered, good-enough doc about comedian Jon Gnarr running a half-farcical, half-sincere campaign for mayor of Reykavik. He ran as the candidate of the Best party, which was basically about throwing out the bums who'd played any kind of part in Iceland's (and the world's) financial crisis. And the voters did that, more or less, because Gnarr won...great! I wish this country had fewer Tea Party-ers and more Gnarrs.

A better film, I think, would have been...Read More

Why is a Bluray upgrade of From Here to Eternity that was supervised by Sony's Grover Crisp in '09 still without a firm release date (sometime in early '12 is the best guess so far)? Why does Paramount refuse to even talk about producing a mint-condition Bluray of the breathtakingly beautiful Shane, one of the jewels in the Paramount crown? Why did it take personal pressuring by Steven Spielberg before Paramount honcho Brad Grey agreed to fund the full-boat restoration of the three Godfather films?

And why right now are there only three Hollywood-based, studio-berthed restoration guys...Read More

Now that a trailer for Evan Glodell's Bellflower (Oscilloscope Laboratoreies, 8.5) is finally out, I'm reminding everyone to be extremely wary of too-cool-for-school critics (i.e., effetes who are so brainy and perceptive that they've levitated off the planet) who've praised it to the heavens. Because it is HE's humble opinion that Bellflower is one of the emptiest and wankiest time-wasters ever made.

"I saw Bellflower almost two months ago at Sundance," I wrote during SXSW, "and my general reaction was split between pique, boredom and watch-checking agony. There's nothing going on...Read More

I was disappointed to read yesterday that the Arrow Academy Bluray of Rififi (out May 9th) is Region 2, which leaves Regon 1 Bluray player owners like me out in the cold. (And don't start with the "re-program your BD player software to make it all-region" -- I'm not smart enough to do that and half the time it doesn't work anyway, I've been told.)

This plus the French Gaumount Bluray lacking English subititles means Rififi-lovers like myself are screwed both ways. (I could actually roll with the Gaumount...Read More

Rob Pattinson's marquee attraction has apparently served Water for Elephants well. 20th Century Fox was reportedly estimating that Francis Lawrence's sadistic circus drama would bring in $13 to $15 million (a deliberate underprojection) on its first weekend. Last night Deadline's Nikki Finke reported $7 million for Friday and $18 million for the weekend -- "overperforming." And Boxoffice.com's Phil Contrino is forecasting $16.8 million with an entirely decent $5964 average on 2817 screens. So at best it'll end up domestically with $50 million theatrical...right?

Needless to add if anyone paid to see Elephants last night and is so moved...

My sense of things when I wrote my Water for Elephants pan two days ago was that Christoph Waltz had (a) erred by playing the Hans Landa card again or (b) has no other cards in his deck. But goofing on it somehow makes it less bothersome. Waltz will have his best shot at putting Landa to bed in Roman Polanski's Carnage (formerly known as God of Carnage).

Lindsay Lohan doing another 120 days for parole violation (and not, apparently, over that "borrowed" necklace episode) isn't a bad thing as long as it doesn't get in the way of her playing Kim Gotti. Jail builds character, gives you street cred, persuades you to improve your social skills, etc.

I've watched the All The President's Men Bluray a couple of times since buying it last February. And the thing that sticks out right away is the over-saturated color, especially the appearance of the red and blue chairs in the Washington Post newsroom. The overall appearance looks like celluloid and that's cool, but someone turned up the saturation plus it looks a little too dark here and there.

I shared my opinion yesterday morning with a technical guy who knows all about Bluray and DVD masterings, and he told me that Warner Home Video, incredibly, had...Read More

"You didn't hear this from me," says a Boston-based movie critic, "but Paramount just moved the press screening of Thor, a PG-13 film, from Tuesday, 5.3 -- or three days before the 5.6 opening -- to a 4.30 Saturday morning screening at 10 am, presumably with a packed kiddie audience. And this is Boston's only press screening, mind. My guess is that they're doing this everywhere outside New York and LA."

If I was back east I'd be doing all the Tribeca Film Festival screenings and events this weekend and running around and seeing everyone and taking pictures -- pig heaven. But I'm stuck in Los Angeles...well, not "stuck" but I have to say no to certain things or I'll be broke by Labor Day...and relying on the filings and photography of Jett Wells, HE's TFF New York correspondent. And...well, the theoretical option of watching a few festival entries online.

I say "theoretical" because I just tried to watch Massy Tadjedin's Last Night...Read More

Two months ago Wordsandfilm's Christine Spines wrote about Harvey Weinstein's reported recutting of Richard Ayoade's Submarine (Weinstein Co., 6.3), and hence the return of the mythical Harvey Scissorhands. I'm not aware that much has been cut from this well-reviewed film, but I'm still wishing I'd made a greater effort to catch it in Toronto.

Shekhar Kapoor's tribute to India's admired-and-deeply-loathed Bollywood genre -- Bollywood: The Greatest Love Story Ever Told -- will screen out of competition during the 64th Cannes Film Festival. I probably despise Bollywood musicals a little more than Asian martial-arts films so I can't wait not to see this thing. The doc was directed by Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra and Jeff Zimbalist. It runs 81 minutes.

Gavin Wiesen's Homework was recently retitled as The Art of Getting By. During Sundance 2011 I wrote that star Freddie Highmore "delivers every line and emotion exactly the same way with the same faintly self-amused expression, the same faint intellectual-hipster smile, the same space cadet/distracted-artist vibe, the same glassy-eyed stare. I wanted to see him get hit by an MTA bus."

Fox Searchlight is opening the quirky Manhattan-based romance on 6.17.11.

Received this morning at 12:12 am Pacific: Pool Report #5, Los Angeles, CA
04/21/2011 / Maeve Reston, Maeve.Reston@latimes.com:

"President Obama arrived at his final fundraiser of the evening at around 8:20pm after speeding down Interstate 405, which had been completely shut down for the motorcade ride from Culver City to Brentwood. The dinner was held at The Tavern in a private room that held about 50 people. Major celebrity wattage at this event.

"Calif. Gov. Jerry Brown and his wife were seated a table in near the middle of the room. Other celebs included George...Read More

"Christoph Waltz plays August, the tyrannical leader of the Benzini Traveling Circus, as if he has nothing to lose...except, that is, the respect he gained from his Oscar-winning turn in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. For Waltz is channeling the villainous Hans Landa one more time in a performance he could have done in his sleep." -- edited/compressed quote from Brad Brevet's 4.22 Rope of Silicon review of Water for Elephants.

A little more than a year ago I saw and reviewed James Rasin's Beautiful Darling: The Life and Times of Candy Darling, Andy Warhol Superstar as part of the New Directors, New Films series at the Museum of Modern Art. It opens tomorrow at the IFC Center so here's the review again.

Boilerplate synopsis for Ruben Fleischer's 30 Minutes or Less (Columbia, 8.12): "After hiring an assassin to murder his father for his insurance money, chubby asshole antagonist Dwayne (Danny McBride...who else?) and partner-in-crime Travis (Nick Swardson) kidnap a pizza delivery driver (Jesse Eisenberg) and force him to rob a bank with a bomb vest attached to his chest in order to pay for the hit job." Aziz Ansari costars.

You realize, of course, that Will Beall's Gangster Squad is The Untouchables all over again, except it happens in '50s Los Angeles with temperamental hair-trigger gangster Mickey Cohen (to be played by a bald-headed Sean Penn) being the target instead of Robert De Niro's Al Capone.

Otherwise, as a friend who's read the script puts it, "Brian DePalma and David Mamet might want to think about a plagiarism lawsuit." He didn't mean that literally but in a flip, drink-in-his-hand sort of way.

Ryan Gosling has the Kevin Costner role and Josh Brolin...will he play Sean Connery? The Warner Bros. film will...Read More

After Tuesday night's The Greatest Movie Ever Sold experience in North Hollywood, I dropped into a brand-new joint called Phil's Diner -- a recreation of the old small diners of the '20s, '30s and '40s (actually modelled on a dining car) with a healthy menu and nice wood panelling and all. The idea, I was told, is to create a Phil's franchise network all over Los Angeles and perhaps beyond, which would be great.

In the mid '90s I attended a lecture about screenwriting by the great Robert Towne (Chinatown, The Last Detail, The Firm), and I remember his stressing the importance of being able to weave refrains into a script. He was referring to a line or a thought or an offhanded remark that is used or understood in one particular way early on, and then is used again in Act Two or Three in a way that adds to the first meaning and perhaps even doubles back and reverses it in some way. Most HE readers know what I'm talking about, and I'm trying to...Read More

This is a courtyard of an apartment I rented for two days in Venice, Italy, in May 2007. The place is called Ca Guardiani (Calle Dei Guardiani 2403, sestiere Dorsoduro). Hanging outside around dusk with a glass of white wine and doing nothing in particular is one of the most peaceful things I've ever done or felt in my life.

On 3.28 I ran a heavily pixellated blowup of the Tree of Life raptor, and today -- 23 days hence -- The Playlist's Kevin Jagernauth, Movieline's Christopher Rosen, and Indiewire's Anne Thompson ran sharper, larger, better-looking versions of the same shot. Is that enough?

"Clearly, Terrence Malick has an attachment to secrecy. He seems to live for it almost. To be able to work within such an utterly secret vacuum that no one is able to learn any substantive-sounding information is perhaps (who knows?) the bottom-line electric lightning-bolt element in Malick's life and head. Secrecy! But with all the sniffing around no one, it seems, has stopped to consider the absolute lunacy of attempting to blend a story about an anxious 20th Century man (Sean Penn) and recollections of his distant father (Brad Pitt) with prehistoric pre-time elements, including [in a script description that I heard 20...Read More

In Morgan Spurlock's The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, "the viewer is left to wonder who is getting played: the brand, the filmmaker or maybe even the audience," writes N.Y. Times media columnist David Carr. "Ralph Nader has spent much of his career speaking out against corporate manipulation of consumers. But in one of the movie's funnier moments, he receives a gift from Mr. Spurlock of Merrell shoes -- one of the film's sponsors -- and proceeds to give the company a pretty nice endorsement on the spot."

"'Ralph told me that you have to be careful with...Read More

Francis Lawrence's Water for Elephants (20th Century Fox, 4.22) would be your mother's or aunt's idea of a nice circus movie with a love story...if it weren't for Christoph Waltz, or what should probably be called the "Waltz effect." I'm speaking of any character this 54 year-old actor plays that's strongly reminiscent of his Oscar-winning turn as Col. Hans Landa, the grinningly sadistic Nazi "Jew hunter" in Inglorious Basterds.

Waltz plays August, a sadistic travelling-circus owner with a faint Austrian accent who likes to bully and threaten his economic dependents and also torture...Read More

Morgan Spurlock's The Greatest Movie Ever Sold (Sony Classics, 4.22) is a divided experience. 50% of it...make that 66% is a possibly audacious, mildly amusing, totally transparent hall-of-mirrors doc about Spurlock humorously "selling out," which is to say trying to fund a doc about product placement (i.e., this one) entirely with product placement deals while -- this is fundamental -- winking at the audience and therefore not "really" selling out but commenting on it and delivering if you will the irony of it all.

The other 33% is about Spurlock and his...Read More

At 1 pm on Wednesday, 4.20, People's Liz McNeil posted the following: "Lindsay Lohan can fuggedabout playing Victoria Gotti on film. 'We are not talking any further about Lindsay playing Victoria,' says Marc Fiore, producer of Gotti: Three Generations. "She is no longer being considered. The talks have stopped. We are going to meet with other people [for the role]."

Two hours and 27 minutes later on the same day, Variety's Dave McNary posted the following: "Lindsay Lohan has signed to portray Kim Gotti opposite John Travolta in Fiore Films' drama Gotti: Three Generations. Fiore Films announced the signing Wednesday as...Read More

There's a brief segment in Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives in which Allen's character reads a short story about a champagne-sipping womanizer envying the married guy who lives down the hallway, and vice versa. David Dobkin's The Change-Up is a feature-length riff on this idea, goaded by a supernatural premise.

I used to ask myself if Ryan Reynolds will ever topline a really well-made commercial mainstream movie. Not a pretty good one like The Proposal or an interesting but unsatisfying indie-exercise pic like Buried, but a sharp, snappy, laugh-out-loud exception on the level of...Read More

A screenwriter-editor friend "got an email from the Consulate General of Brazil in Los Angeles promoting Brazilian-shot films," he says, "and I noticed their version of the Fast Five poster includes a small image of that giant Christ the Redeemer statue that stands on a Rio de Janiero mountaintop. But in Fast billboards around LA the Jesus statue has been erased.

Crop of Brazilian Fast Five poster includes the famous Rio de Jainero Jesus -on-mountaintop statue.

Jesus statue has been painted over or otherwise removed in LA billboards

A good portion of Fast...Read More

Most of my life I've been somewhat interested in seeing Robert Frank's Cocksucker Blues ('72), a 93-minute doc about the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street tour in '72. But it's never been a burning obsession and I've never quite gotten around to it. This morning, however, I discovered that it's on YouTube, and in what looks like fairly good quality.

My first aesthetic reaction? Franks' camerawork is sloppy, scattershot and raggedy-assed. I hate it when photographers are always going for the jumpy-antsy closeup and seem indifferent to even trying...Read More

Restrepo co-director and Vanity Fair contributor Tim Hetherington, whom I met and questioned during a Lincoln Center q & a last June, has reportedly been killed in Misrata, Libya, while covering the fighting there. I suspect that if given an either-or choice, Hetherington would have opted for this while in his 60s or 70s rather than dying warm in his bed at age 87. He was a war junkie. But it's a deeply sad thing, of course, and I'm very sorry. Sincere condolences to his friends and colleagues.

(l.) Tim Hetherington, Rachel Reid during 6.19.10 q...

What are the odds that a Texas skating-rink movie set in the '80s called Skateland (Freestyle, 5.13) would open within three weeks of a somewhat well-regarded dystopian horror flm called Stake Land (IFC Films/Midnight, 4.22)? I've known about them both for weeks and have been marvelling at the idiocy of the timing. You can't make this stuff up.

Producers of both films presumably eyeballed each other and figured it wouldn't matter if they opened this close to each other...amazing. They actually decided that moviegoers wouldn't feel the least bit confused or...Read More

TheWrap's Brent Lang is reporting today that over twenty big-name directors and producers -- including James Cameron, Michael Mann, Peter Jackson, Guillermo del Toro, Gale Ann Hurd, Michael Bay, Brett Ratner and Hangover director Todd Phillips -- have signed a letter urging studios to reverse their much-debated VOD plan that would release films on DirectTV 60 days after their theatrical release.

The argument for the plan is that anyone with a pulse is going to catch any new film worth seeing in a theatre within three to four weeks, or more likely within one to three weeks, and what does it matter...Read More

Yesterday The Playlist's Kevin Jagernauth reported about Sacha Gervasi's My Dinner With Herve, a drama about a 1993 interview Gervasi did with Herve Villechaize ("The plane! the plane!") days before the dwarf-sized Fantasy Island actor killed himself. The director of Anvil! The Story of Anvil is looking to snag James McAvoy as the journalist; Peter Dinklage will play Villechaize.

This story gives me an excuse to post a clip of Villechaize's gay cowboy scene in Robert Downey, Sr.'s Greaser's Palace ('72). I saw this film in its entirety once sometime...Read More

So what's the actual down-and-dirty motive for Mark Cuban having put Landmark Theaters and Magnolia Pictures up for sale? What's the real "real" reason, I mean? And what's the connection between this and TheWrap's Steve Pond having written about the difficult task of Film Independent replacing the Academy-bound Dawn Hudson without throwing in names of possible candidates? I'll tell you the connection. Neither of these stories has nutritional value.

Before reading about his death earlier today, the last time I'd even thought about actor Michael Sarrazin was when I ran into him at Barney's Beanery ten or eleven years ago. He was a very friendly guy with a nice easy laugh, but I couldn't help feeling badly that he was hanging out at a joint that's only a couple steps up from a dive.

Sarrazin had a strong jaw and gentle eyes and a face that exuded vulnerability and a slight but persistent sadness. His two strongest performances were in They Shoot Horses,...Read More

"Fake Armond" is my favorite Twitter voice. I smirk almost every single time he posts. What I don't get is why the Real McCoy doesn't chime in with his own stuff. "Fake Armond" has upped his fame/notoriety factor and created a Twtter springboard.

The same five or six stills from Pedro Almodovar's The Skin I Live In are all over the web. Clearly a metaphor for certain social tendencies and surgical practices of our time, and most certainly not a horror film. Pedro doesn't do "genre" -- he does Pedro movies. Although it seems to contain echoes of George Franju's Eyes Without A Face and, to a lesser extent, William Wyler's The Collector.

"Richard Lafargue (Antonio Banderas) is an eminent plastic surgeon haunted by dirty secrets. He has an operating theatre in the basement of his chateau and...Read More

The 64th Cannes Film Festival competition jury is as follows: Robert De Niro (honcho), Jude Law, Uma Thurman, Argentinian actress-producer Martina Gusman, Chinese producer Nansun Shi, Norweigan critic/writer Linn Ullmann -- daughter of Liv Ullmann) and directors Olivier Assayas (Carlos), Mahamat Saleh Haroun (A Screaming Man) and Johnny To (Exiled, Election).

The one I feel closest to and who seems the most vital among this bunch is Assayas, mainly because of Carlos. De Niro is Mr. Cash-In, Law is thought to be either over or fading, Thurman has been fading since Kill Bill, and To is a respected...Read More

Is Gary Busey now in danger of becoming afflicted with Stephen Baldwin disease and thereby find it harder to get work in this town, for obvious reasons? And what happened to his face? I keep thinking how he looked 24 years ago in Lethal Weapon.

To me, learning that two respected actors (Joseph Gordon Levitt, Marion Cotillard ) have officially been added to the cast of Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises is like reading that Ozeki Masuiyama and Sekiwake Fujizakura have been named as Japan's top sumo-wrestlers.

Ten days from now millions of emotionally needy Californians will be getting up at 2:45 am to watch the royal nuptials between Prince William and Kate Middleton. I got up at that hour nearly 14 years ago for Lady Diana's funeral, but as Hal Holbrook said in All The President's Men, "This is different." I think this attitude might put me in the minority with 2 billion viewers expected to tune in.

Mostly females, of course. I know for a fact that no self-respecting straight male will pay the slightest heed.

I realize that the trailer for Chris Weitz's A Better Life (Summit, 6.24) has persuaded some that it's more or less a white man's movie about a Hispanic father's issues (i.e., struggling within the LA immigrant workplace to retrieve a stolen truck and save his teenaged son from a gangbanger life).

The reason, of course, is that the trailer is showing too much English-speaking among Latino characters who, in reality, almost always speak Spanish to each other in casual conversation.

And yet L.A. Times reporter John Horn wrote last...Read More

Can I post Darren Aronofsky's new Yves Saint Laurent men's fragance spot too? I'm not that late. Starring Vincent Cassel (Black Swan), written by Ari Handel and Mark Heyman, and composed by Clint Mansell.

There's something Lindsay Lohan-ish about Emma Stone. Vaguely, I mean. She's funny, sassy, snappy...basically the funnier, more together version of LiLo without the train-wreck past or the boobs.

I've been saying for a few weeks now that the beauty of Oscar Poker outside awards season is the ramble-on quality. Only somewhat important things to talk about but a fair amount of free association and sometimes way outside the usual topics. Awards Daily 's Sasha Stone, Boxoffice.com's Phil Contrino and I poking at the campfire with thick pine branches with the needles shaved off. Here's a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

We all have a sense of what's right and fair when we open a menu. Last night I went to Malibu's Paradise Cove eatery, which is okay but nothing special and almost kind of a trailer-parky place. And it struck me that the prices for their blue-collar plates were all about four or five or six bills higher than they should be in a fair and just world. A hamburger and tasteless, room-temperature fries for $16 dollars? Why don't they man up and charge $20 or $25?

And yet this is one of the very...Read More

This radio broadcast copy appears on page two or three of Lorene Scafaria's Seeking A Friend At The End of The World, which Scafaria will reportedly direct with Steve Carell and Keira Knightley costarring. Shooting begins in Los Angeles in May. I'm not convinced that the term "romantic comedy" quite describes it.

"Melancholia, [which is the name of] the planet, is kind of ten times bigger than the Earth, and I liked the idea of being 'swallowed' by Melancholia. I thought that was quite nice. And then I read today that that's actually one of the virtues of romanticism -- willingly being purified by dying. In fact, the film contains maybe more of the original idea of romanticism. I'm just saying that a lot of films today, their interpretation of romanticism is...quite boring, I think." -- director Lars von Trier talking about Melancholia with Empire's Damon Wise.

I'm always getting beat up for having an allegedly cavalier spoiler attitude, but I would never run the kind of spoiler piece that Movieline's Dixon Gaines posted on 4.17 -- let's at least be clear on that. I have almost no respect for Scream 4 and don't feel from a reader's perspective that Gaines' article is that big of a deal, but I would never divulge a big third-act reveal this early in the game (i.e., two days after opening).

This morning Napier News' Daniel Sarath reported that Great Britain's Icon Distribution UK is still claiming (or freshly claiming) that they'll open Terrence Malick's The Tree of LIfe in England on Wednesday, May 4th, or about a week or so before its scheduled "debut" at the Cannes Film Festival.

This despite a 3.31 statement from Summit Int'l senior vp marketing and publicity Jill Jones (which I ran that same day) that Icon "does not have the right to distribute The Tree of Life in the UK, as it is in default of its agreement."

I ran this eight years ago in the old HE Movie Poop Shoot column:

Guy #1 has just walked into a convenience store, only to notice that Guy #2 is lying on the floor next to the cash-register guy, who's obviously not the cash-register guy but some hot-head thief who just happened to be ripping off the store. Guy #1 doesn't want anyone to get hurt, so when he spots Guy #2...

Guy #1: Oh, Jesus, don't shoot him. Please. Don't...

Hot-head thief pulls a gun on him.

Guy #1: Let me tell ya, there's a crime scene right down the block. You...Read More

The only emotional plug-in I'm getting from the just-announced Cannes Critics Week selections is the inclusion of Jonathan Caouette's Walk Away, Renee -- a doc about Caouette's schizophrenic mom, Renee Leblanc. I'm one of many who admired Caouettte's autobiographical Tarnation, and one of those who interviewed him at the May 2003 Cannes Film Festival.

Seven feature films will comprise the main Critics Week selection along with four special screenings and ten shorts. I gather I'm supposed to take special notice of Jeff Nichols' Take Shelter, which I naturally missed at Sundance 2011. There's also My...Read More

Earlier today I was sent a seven-year-old Coen Bros. draft of Gambit, and I'm guessing it'll probably end up being reasonably close to the shooting version because the Coens don't usually write sloppy-ass, not-quite-there, tossed-salad first drafts.

A remake of the 1966 Ronald Neame film, the Coens' Gambit will reportedly costar Colin Firth and Cameron Diaz in the Michael Caine and Shirley MacLaine roles. CBS Films will distribute.

If I was looking to present a genuinely favorable impression of an about-to-open 20th Century Fox film, I probably wouldn't run top-of-the-ad quotes from Fox TV's Jake Hamilton (out of Houston) and Fox TV's Kevin McCarthy (out of Washington, D.C.), who are basically affable junket guys. I would have led instead with the blurb by MSN's James Rocchi ("a gorgeous romantic tale full of live, love and beauty"), who brings top-tier cred and integrity.

From today's N.Y. Times.

Water for Elephants opens on Friday, 4.22. It'll screen on Wednesday.

I've been hearing for years about technology that can break down the sound of a person's voice into an array of vowels and consonants and digitally assemble them and make that "voice" say anything. I was hearing about this 15 or 20 years ago. Roger Ebert's talking "Alex" is cool for what it is, but he needs to sound like himself. There are thousands of hours of tape of him talking. It can't be that hard.

Since buying an iLIVE sound bar for $130-something and hooking it up to the 50" Vizio, I've been very pleased by the added volume and the increased bass and treble tones. Then it suddenly hit me last week that the Bluray sound is ever-so-slightly out of synch. The sound arrives just a tiny bit late. People's lips move a split second before you hear them speak, and it's terrible.

Once you're attuned to this tendency it becomes impossible to watch a film. All you can do is study lip movement.

So I unplugged the soundbar and...Read More

Variety's Richard Kuipers, filing from Sydney, has given Kenneth Branagh's Thor a half-pass, at least in terms of satisfying primitive action-flick criteria. I'm sure I'll find reasons to hate it -- where there's a will there's a way -- but the possibility has been raised that Thor may be at least semi-tolerable.

The Paramount release is "neither the star pupil nor the dunce of the Marvel superhero-to-screen class," Kuipers writes. "[It] delivers the goods so long as butt is being kicked and family conflict is playing out in celestial dimensions, but...Read More

Thanks to all those who sent along PDFs of George Clooney and Grant Heslov's The Ides of March, Eric Roth's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Alexander Payne's The Descendants and Steven Knight's Unitled Chef Project.

As long as I'm on a roll and people are in a giving/trading mood, I'm also looking for the following: Memphis by Paul Greengrass, Moonrise Kingdom by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola, Seeking A Friend For The End of the World by Lorene Scarfia, The Little Things by John Lee Hancock, Raw Knuckles by S. Craig Zahler, Inherit The Earth by JT Petty, Hypoxia by Daniel Silk, Gangster...Read More

"There is a specific kind of narcissism that the social web engenders," writes N.Y. Times media columnist David Carr in a 4.17 piece about hand-held etiquette called "Keep Your Thumbs Still When I'm Talking to You". "By grooming and updating your various avatars, you are making sure you remain at the popular kid's table. One of the more seductive data points in real-time media is what people think of you. The metrics of followers and retweets beget a kind of always-on day trading in the unstable currency of the self."

if Hangover 2 director Todd Phillips is even 25% serious (which I doubt), the issue isn't the film's star monkey getting addicted to cigarettes during filming. It's allowable, I feel, for an animal to develop a nicotine craving if it happens in the service of art. The issue is enablers (people on the crew of Cameron Crowe's We Bought A Zoo?) feeding the monkey's habit by supplying him with smokes.

I wonder what time on 5.21.11? Because I'll be in France. Presumably the American spiritualists who paid for the billboard (located on Hillhurst north of Hollywood ) expect the end to come during daylight or early evening hours in one of the four US time zones.

I was just thinking: Lars von Trier went into a somewhat similar dark forest with Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg living in a cabin and found a bloody fox talking in a deep voice. And here's another side...

If I was Jon Favreau, directing a super-broad ComicCon popcorn comic-book flick with an instant worldwide appeal, I would naturally be focusing on the basics (including, yes, refining the CG and sound design and making sure the alien space ships look extra cool) but I would mainly be working on the small stuff -- honing the dialogue, pruning down the running time, and generally making sure that all those little connective-tissue moments and fine narrative fibres are blending just so.

I can almost guarantee you that right now Favreau, who revealed who and...Read More

Maggie Jones has written a 4.17 N.Y. Times Sunday Magazine piece about newish findings that you really do need 8 hours of sleep to perform at your best, and that people who sleep for 5 or 6 or even 7 hours are putting themselves behind the eight ball.

That's me, all right. My sleeping hours, at best, are from 1 am to 7 am. It's fairly unusual to flop at midnight, although it happens from time time. But forget about going to bed at 11 pm -- that's Bluray time, write-the-last-article time, Bill Maher or Charlie Rose time, do-tomorrow's-research time, PDF...Read More

TheWrap's Josh Weinstein is reporting that Ryan Gosling is in talks to costar with Johnny Depp in Jerry Bruckheimer and Gore Verbinkski's The Lone Ranger for Disney...which I presume is going to be some kind of big-budget western wank. What else could be expected from the guys who teamed on the first three Pirate pics?

I don't want to get all cranky on a Friday afternoon but this strikes me as one of the most laughable and pathetic sell-out prostitute gigs by an exceptionally expressive and widely respected actor in Hollywood history. It's not unlike Montgomery Clift agreeing to costar in...Read More

The first thing I noticed this morning was that Janet Grillo's Fly Away, which I'd been planning to see sooner or later, has an 88% positive on Rotten Tomatoes -- technically the highest rating of all the narrative films opening today. Only eight top-tier critics have posted reviews so take the rating in context, but I still felt excited and freshly enthused about seeing it.

Had I been invited to a screening or been sent a screener? Nope.

Fly Away is about a divorced mom (Beth Broderick) dealing with a daughter (Ashley...Read More

Does anyone have PDFs of George Clooney and Grant Heslov's Ides of March script, Will Beall's Gangster Squad or Richard Curtis and Lee Hall's script for Spielberg's War Horse? Because a script pally is offering to swap these for copies of Eric Roth's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Andrew Niccol's Now (i.e., formerly I'm.mortal), Alexander Payne's The Descendants, and Steven Knight's chef project, among others

There's been a certain disparity of opinion so far about Paul Feig's Bridesmaids (Universal, 5.13). SXSW geek critics found it brilliant, hilarious and innovative, but Variety's Joe Leydon trashed it. Universal won't show this Judd Apatow-produced pic to critics and online columnists until early May, but they're been screening it for editors and feature writers.

Written by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, Bridesmaids is about feuding bridesmaids played by Wiig and Rose Byrne (Damages). Maya Rudolph plays the bride. Melissa McCarthy, Jon Hamm, Matt Lucas, Ellie Kemper, Dianne Wiestand, the late...Read More

What a pleasure to hear President Obama talk about blunt realpolitik conversations with reps of John Boehner and Paul Ryan without the usual measured, turn-the-other-cheek tonality that he always puts out during press conferences and official announcements. Eat it, suckah!

During last year's Cannes Film Festival I brilliantly managed to avoid seeing the winner of the Semaine de Critiques Grand Prix prize winner -- Janus Metz's Armadillo, a Danish-produced Afghanistan war doc which Kino Lorber is opening today in New York. The trailer suggests something riveting and impressionistic , and the doc's Rotten Tomatoes rating (88%) is tied for the highest of any film opening today.

The other 4.15 opener with an 88% rating is Janet Grillo's Fly Away.

I'm expecting an Armadillo screener to arrive tomorrow. I asked the...Read More

With its 1.33 cropping and squawky Japanese-transistor-radio sound, this YouTube clip of the main-title sequence from Clive Donner's What's New, Pussycat? feels a bit underwhelming. But it's still one of the liveliest, bounciest and most vigorously designed main-title sequences ever thrown together for a '60s film.

More to the point, for an anarchic, occasionally amusing but not-especially-good '60s comedy. Because that's the category we're dealing with here -- great opening credits followed by a letdown movie.

The only other two examples I can think of are the '60s montage...Read More

The 2006 Koch Lorber DVD of Lina Wertmuller's Seven Beauties looks fine, but this 1975 Italian-made classic should be upgraded to Bluray. I was ripped the first time I saw it, and I remember laughing helplessly during the opening credits...oh, yeah.

Bertrand Tavernier's The Princess of Montpensier (IFC Films) opens today in theatres and 4.20 on demand. Here's my 3.9 review: "The initial response at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival was not wildly enthusiastic, so I was rather surprised to find that this historical drama of intimacy, set in 16th Century France during the Catholic vs. Huguenot wars, is one of the most intriguing erotic trips I've taken in a long while.

"Partly because the occasionally undressed lead, Melanie Thierry, performs in a way that feels rather prim and Grace Kelly-ish, an all-but-extinct...Read More

Another Cannes 2011 trailer, this time posted from Vimeo by Awards Daily's Ryan Adams:

Sleeping Beauty from Pollen Digital on Vimeo.

Coped from a Rope of Silicon/Brad Brevet post.

I missed the 4.12 announcement about Lindsay Lohan snagging the role of Victoria Gotti in a feature biopic about the latter's late mobster dad. So Lilo isn't doomed after all. If you have any compassion or charity in your heart you have to feel fairly good about this. Second chances don't come along that often.

I've tried three times to write a Scream 4 review, but the K-Mart-level cynicism and detachment in this film is so dull and yet nauseating I couldn't do it. I just couldn't put words to screen. To think that these movies actually used to be about playing it half-straight and making people feel scared from time to time.

(l. to r.) Scream 4's Erik Knudsen, Rory Culkin, Courteney Cox and Neve Campbell.

I happened to watch part of Gore Verbinski's The Ring on TV the other day, and that is still very frightening at times....Read More

So what happened to the original title of Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage play in its transition into a Roman Polanski film? Sony Classics announced this morning that they'll be releasing Polanski's Carnage, which costars Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly, Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz, at the end of the year. But without explaining why they (or producer Said Ben Said) have dropped the words "God of."

3:45 pm Update: A publicist for the film just told me that the decision to change the title "was made by the producer [Said Ben Said] and Polanski." She also said...Read More

"Each generation gets the monster it deserves. The Depression era received King Kong. The Atomic Age got Godzilla. The 1980s saw a mob of faceless, personality-vacant slasher killers dominate the screens. And the 1990s saw the rise of intellectually brilliant sociopaths like Hannibal Lecter charm audiences. In the Bush era -- an age of rampant stupidity, greed, open political corruption, illegal wars, and religious/political demagoguery -- we get Daniel Plainview." -- Derek Hill.

I would add that the '40s got The Invisible Man and Val Lewton's catwomen and zombies. Who/what was the reigning monster figure of the '60s and '70s? This needs...

I meant to post this Bill Maher clip last weekend -- a major statement that drills right to the heart of everything. Jon Stewart also went there last September (i.e., at the very bottom of the post).

Not a single line or move in this entire four-day-old Beastie Boys "Fight For Your Right" bullshit video is funny. I didn't crack a glimmer of a grin at any of it...blecch. Nothingness, insincere "quote" humor, silly, strained and totally flat on its feet. The people involved don't have clue #1 about being funny, and the actors (Rogen, Black, McBride, Ferrell, Tucci, Sarandon, etc.) need to look in the bathroom mirror. A huge embarassment.

The first time I saw this What's Up, Tiger Lily? clip was 35 or 40 years ago and the last...Read More

The official lineup of the Cannes Film Festival dropped early this morning in Paris, and my straight-from-the-heart first reaction? Honestly? The selections seem enticing but they're not quite enough. The festival needed but didn't deliver one or two of those "who expected that?" selections. Almost everything chosen had been predicted or spitballed by guys like Screen Int'l's Mike Goodridge, etc.

Why couldn't the festival have snagged Steve McQueen's Shame? Or Steven Soderbergh's Haywire? Or Jonathan Levine's 50/50 (a.k.a. Live With It and/or I'm With Cancer)? Or Tom Hanks' Larry Crowne? Or Tomas Alfedson's Tinker Tailor...Read More

Here's a rundown of all the movies, DVDs or Blurays, TV shows (i.e., Man From Uncle episodes), books and screenplays consumed and paintings painted by Steven Soderbergh from 2.1.10 through 3.23.11, day by day. The coding is as follows:

Update: Apologies for missing the original posting. The list initially came from an encounter that Kurt Andersen had with Soderbergh at Pratt Institute.

With Sony distribution joining forces with MGM, the James Bond franchise (presumably in the form of Bond 23 with Daniel Craig starring and Sam Mendes directing) is alive again. On 10.5.12 the 007 franchise will be a half-century old. It won't die. I thought the brand was over when George Lazenby came along, but the dry comedic tone of The Spy Who Loved Me re-energized it. Then I thought it was over 20 years ago and along came the Pierce Brosnan phase. And then Casino Royale revived things again. So what do I know?

It was announced late today that Sally Field will play Mary Todd Lincoln, the wife of the nation's 16th President, in Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, which begins filming next fall for release in late '12. The Oscar-winning Field obviously resembles the former First Lady and will, I'm sure, play her with snap and spunk to spare. But if I'd been casting, I'd have given the role to Marcia Gay Harden.

No offense but I think Field is too old to play the role and that Harden would...Read More

So Confessions of an Eco-Terrorist might possibly be seen at what upcoming special venue or festival...? And the name or email address of the publicist handing out press screeners is...? Here's an article about it from the L.A. Times Dean Kuipers.

In a recent interview to promote The Conspirator (American, 4.15), director Robert Redford said that "the country is made up of three categories." And yet his description of same differs from HE's preferred Planet of the Apes breakdown -- gorillas (i.e., skilled labor, working-class, K-Mart employees, Tea Party), chimps (educated professional class) and orangutans (governmental-financial ruling elite).

The three categories, says Redford, are "traditionalists, cultural creative people and the moderns. The moderns are the hi-tech Silicon Valley people. The traditionalists on the lower end of it are the people who don't want...Read More

From Huffington Post contributor Steven Weber: "The Right's relentless and confounding opposition to President Obama can be explained by paraphrasing Arthur Conan Doyle's famous detective: when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

What explains "the Right's almost carnal embrace of apocalyptic rhetoric and unprecedented displays of nonsensical and stunningly counter intuitive/hypocritical/contradictory behavior since his inauguration?

What explains "the suddenly awakened consciences of the conspicuously caucasian Tea Baggers who, rather than easily grasp that the causes they trumpet are actually empirically proven to be detrimental to their own interests, opt instead to bleat banal credos which...Read More

3:29 pm Update: James Rocchi's 2011 Guilty Summer Pleasures piece has finally been posted by MSN Movies! Cue cheering, loud exhales, sound of soggy tomatoes hitting the wall, etc.

Earlier today: The night before last (i.e., the evening of 4.11) MSN's James Rocchi asked his online pallies to submit guilty pleasure pics opening between now and August. I asked when the piece would appear so I could post a link + excerpt. Rocchi figured it would go up sometime yesterday...but it didn't. And it hasn't gone up today either.

I'm sorry but in this era...Read More

Being a huge fan of Robert Weide's Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl docs, I'm delighted that he's assembled a three-hour "American Masters" Woody Allen doc that will air this fall on PBS.

Cynthia Littleton's 4.13 Variety story says that Woody Allen: A Documentary will cover the whole magilla (childhood, early career as a TV writer and standup comic, What's Up, Tiger Lily?, Louise Lasser, What's New, Pussycat?, the stage play of Play It Again Sam) through his most recent pic, Midnight in Paris, which will open the Cannes fest next month.

"The...Read More

What are you supposed to do with horrible parental guilt that you can't deny or ignore? Dramatically, I mean? All you can hope to do is...what, do or create something that will somehow counter-balance the bad thing? That's as far as my thinking takes me.

Mia Wasikowska is obviously a highly skilled and communicative actress -- a young Meryl Streep-y type -- but she's never really gotten to me on a deep-down level because she's rather plain-looking and her acting, while honest and captivating, is, I feel, probably a little too inward and technique-y. She was as direct and solemn and soulful as she could have been in Jane Eyre, but...it's hard to express but she wasn't enough for me.

I greatly admired/enjoyed Wasikowska's performances in HBO's In Treatment and in The Kids Are All Right, but...Read More

Rob Cohen's The Fast and the Furious ('01) was a moderately satisfying car-chase film with an unusually fine ending -- i.e., Paul Walker, an undercover cop, making good on a promise by allowing the felonious Vin Diesel to skip at the end by giving him keys to a muscle car. It was a finale about character, friendship, guy-to-guy values and faith.

And then it was down, down, down into the toilet-bowl remake cycle with a trilogy of Fast films that downplayed character in favor of exhaust pipes, roaring engines and stunt-driving razmatazz --...Read More

Just for the record, I saw Certified Copy at last year's Cannes Film Festival and took a couple of hours to review it, and then I took another hour to respond to a putdown written by Glenn Kenny.

Take five minutes and read Lea Shafer's Amazon.com review of David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas," which will be co-directed by Andy and Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer for Warner Bros, with Tom Hanks playing one of the lead roles.

The book tells six stories about six connected characters in different places and eras, so obviously the Wachowskis and Tykwer are going to divvy them up. Will they go 3 for each or 4 for the Wachowskis and 2 for Tykwer? But consider the entire package and tell me this movie isn't going to be one fascinating six-legged grizzly bear of a...Read More

Fact #1: Joe Wright's Hanna came in second last weekend behind Hop, but it was the most popular new film with $12.4 million, edging out out third-place Arthur by $200,000.

Fact #2: CinemaScore polling gave Hanna a C-plus (which is a fairly shitty grade as CinemaScore respondents tend to err on the side of politeness and noblesse oblige) and Arthur a B.

Fact #3: Hanna's Saturday-to-Sunday earnings dropped 37% for a $3.2 million haul while Arthur fell 46% over the same two-day period, bringing in $2.7 million on Sunday.

How does that work exactly? What kind of Harvard Law...Read More

I meant to comment about Sunday's duelling Snow White movie 'Power Grid" posting by TheWrap's Josh Weinstein, but I'm only just getting around to it now. If I was Hollywood's moral-aesthetic emperor with absolute power and a terrible swift sword with no responsibility to deliver profits, I would shut both of these projects down immediately without the slightest hesitation, and I would order the supporters and financiers of these projects at Universal and Relativity to take two-year nature sabbaticals in Africa or Antarctica, or go to Japan and help with the radioactive clean-up.

Why? Because the...Read More

Last night HE attended the lavish hoo-hah opening of the City of Light City of Angels (COLCOA) Film Festival at West Hollywood's DGA building. Elegant surroundings, cool-cat supporters (including directors Michael Mann and Larry Kasdan), great champagne, etc. I'll be dropping into several screenings later this week because I find French films enormously soothing and transporting, and because they tend to be more emotionally supple and mature than American films.

Monday, 4.11, 8:45 pm.

DGA lobby -- Monday, 4.11, 8:45 pm.

Usually the opening-night attraction at any festival is on the bland...Read More

The 48 frame-per-second Director's Club now numbers three -- James Cameron, Douglas Trumbull and Peter Jackson. Late yesterday Jackson explained on his Facebook page why he's shooting The Hobbit at 48 fps.

This is obviously a digital technology deal when it comes to exhibition (i.e., theatres that are still using reel-to-reel analog projection could never project at 48 fps) but what would this mean percentage-wise? How many top-tier urban theatres will likely show The Hobbit, Avatar 2 & 3 and Trumbull's untitled latest in this format? And what about those behind-the-times houses in the...Read More

So a network anchorman openly deriding what he sees as the foo-foo pretensions of Brooklyn hipster culture needs to be processed in quotes? Because the Brian Williams script, obviously, is basically saying that X-factor Brooklynites haven't a culturally sincere bone in their bodies, and that they see and process everything in ironic terms.

You know what? Too much friggin' stuff is in quotes nowadays. There's something to be said for the old John Wayne-James Cagney ethos of planting your feet, looking the other guy in the eye and telling the fucking truth without...Read More

HBO publicists didn't invite me to see Todd Haynes' Mildred Pierce miniseries in advance, but I've seen two episodes so far (#1 and #3) and found it pretty absorbing. I'd read that it might be a wee bit sluggish, but I wasn't the least bit impatient or disengaged with any of it. I believed every shot, line and scene. And it's obviously very well acted by everyone (and I haven't even gotten to Evan Rachel Wood's section yet).

Kate Winslet's performance as the struggling titular character, a role previously owned by Joan...Read More

Okay, maybe not "dead" but I'm getting enervated expectation vibes from all but a few April films. It feels worse than January-February right now. I haven't yet seen The Double Hour (opening Friday) or Water for Elephants (4.22) or Prom (which screened for karaoke-singing junketeers last weekend) or Atlas Shrugged (the Tea Party movie) or 13 Assassins or Stake Land or Rio but I'm scanning the list and muttering to myself, "This?"

And with May just around the corner the summer-crap tentpolers (Pirates of the Caribbean, Effin' Thor, The Hangover Part II, Kung Fu Panda 2) will soon be ruling (smothering?)...Read More

A five-second clip of a CG WETA monkey from Rise of the Planet of the Apes (20th Century Fox, 8.5)? That's it? But this, for me, is a more interesting hybrid-simian than the kind Tim Burton created ten years ago, and way better than the Rodeo Drive monkeys in Franklin J. Schaffner's 1968 original.

This is a chimp, obviously. It looks more or less like a "real" one instead of a human wearing...Read More

Giuseppe Capotondi's The Double Hour (Samuel Goldwyn, 4.15) "is a tremendous flick that [will] probably be remade by Hollywood with Katherine Heigl starring and McG directing with a tacked-on happy ending. Until then we have the original -- a brutal, beautiful fusion of The Vanishing, A History of Violence, Mulholland Drive and Les Diaboliques" -- 3.28 Quickflix review by Simon Miraudo.

Miraudo also called it "a haunting meditation on grief and guilt masquerading as an intense psychological murder mystery."

John Anderson's 4.8 N.Y. Times story about spoilers mentioned that...Read More

Earlier today an HE reader ran a portion of my quote from John Anderson's 4.8 N.Y. Times piece about spoilers, so here's the whole thing: "There's no holding on to anything these days. It's just a matter of minutes of searching around. And it's a shame, because the greatest thing is seeing a film fresh, with no advance buzz. Now you know everything about a film before you go see it. But I'm part of that process, so who am I to complain?"

My point was that none of us can go home again. I used to see long-lead screenings of new...Read More

One of the really great things about dogs is that they actually look at the camera when you take their picture. Cats might glance at it for a second, if that.

Sonya Kirasirova, Joey, Jett Wells somewhere in Central Park -- Sunday, 4.10.

"You know what we haven't seen? That small-town wrestling movie...what's it called? Somebody told me it's really good. You didn't read the reviews? Paul Giamatti? You know and I know critics who do unqualified cartwheels over Meek's Cutoff can't be trusted, but they all really liked this thing. You don't wanna...? Sure? 'Cause I really don't wanna see Arthur."

Yesterday's Sidney Lumet tribute by Salon's Matt Zoller Seitz was the most perceptive and best written of the nine or ten I've read so far. Lumet's style of directing "has a subliminal effect on what we're feeling as we sit there in the dark," he said. "He thought about the story from the inside out, letting text and performance dictate visuals, rather than superimposing meaning.

"It's not the only valid way to make a movie, but it's demanding and illuminating, and there are not as many rewards in it as there are...Read More

I doesn't matter if I'm the last guy on the web to post this. Somebody has to be.

Why is it even slightly interesting to anyone that Michael Shannon has been cast as General Zod in Zach Snyder 's Man of Steel, the Warner Bros. Superman flick? Decisions like this are about the same rote, knee-jerk thinking that Hollywood always buys into.

As I said three months ago, if an actor is gifted and cool but doesn't look like Justin Timberlake or Nic Cage he gets tagged and bagged as a villain, a creep or an obsessive.

And Shannon will probably be stuck in that jail for life. (Unless he lands a good part in an interesting...Read More

I have this tendency to space out occasionally, especially if I'm tired, and leave valuables like credit cards and phones and shopping bags in stores and cafes. (I used to be much worse when I was in my teens.) Three days ago I left my black leather bag with my 13" Macbook Pro inside it at LASC, a stylish gay-man's clothing store on Santa Monica Blvd.

When I called the next day they said they had it somewhere in the back -- relief! -- but when I showed up an hour later the bag had disappeared. It was apparently nipped by...Read More

Thursday night Deadline's Michael Fleming reported that Ben Stiller will probably play the lead role in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, a film based on a 1939 James Thurber short story that first appeared in The New Yorker.

The 20th Century Fox project has been kicking around forever, but a new script by Steve Conrad , writer of The Pursuit of Happyness, persuaded Stiller to sign on, and now a director is being sought for a late-fall start.

I haven't read Conrad's script and that would be the whole thing, of course. But a film about a guy...Read More

Hop dropped 44% from last weekend but is still the weekend's #1 performer. Hanna performed decently but how will Joe and Jane Popcorn respond to its arty fantasia chops later this week and next weekend? Your Highness and Arthur are the weekend's big shortfallers with Soul Surfer doing only so-so.

Hop did $5.5 million yesterday at 3616 situations, and will finish Sunday night with an estimated $21 million.

Boxoffice.com's Phil Contrino is estimating that Arthur will earn $12.7 million for the weekend. It did $4.5 million yesterday in 2276 theatres. That's definitely low with weekend estimates forecasting $15 to $17 million.

Hanna...Read More

Last night Variety's Jeff Sneider reported that The Hangover Part II director Todd Phillips has cut Liam Neeson's cameo (i.e., the one that Mel Gibson was going to play until the cast revolted) because the scene had to be rewritten, and so he re-shot it with Nick Cassevetes because Neeson was in London shooting Clash of the Titans 2...another paycheck.

I've read the story three times and don't understand what the big deal is. People who passed it along were saying"uh-oh," "this one looks sticky" and so on. Maybe...but the only problem with this film (Warner Bros., 5.26), I'm told, is...Read More

The great Sidney Lumet -- a gifted and tenacious explorer of urban crime-and-punishment realms, and easily the most New York City-steeped director of the 20th and early 21st Century -- died this morning in Manhattan at age 86. This is a tough one for me. All my adult life I've felt a special kinship with Lumet, who not only understood good gritty drama but especially (given my New Jersey, Connecticut and Manhattan background) what it is to grapple with and bathe in New York City moods, currents, aromas and atmospheres.

Sidney Lumet on set of Dog Day Afternoon with...

In their 4.7 N.Y. Times profile of IDPR's Kelly Bush, Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes run an observation about Bush from Extra's Lisa Gregorisch: "A lot of publicists still see their job as blocking the press -- when you call they either run for the hills or lie -- and Kelly is smart enough, in the age of the internet, to know that never works."

Kelly Bush, founder and honcho of IDPR.

And thank God for that. Many publicists, in fact, are far more accessible and conversant and generally more pleasant these days than they used...Read More

2011 is over 25% gone, and so far there have been eight winners. Which, if any, will figure on ten-best lists nine months from now? Win Win, I'm thinking. What have I omitted?

HE's best so far, in this order: Win Win, Hanna, Source Code, Cedar Rapids, In A Better World, Super, Applause and The Lincoln Lawyer.

Good, Okay, Approved: Rango, The Housemaid, Meet Monica Valour, Making The Boys (doc about Mart Crowley and The Boys in the Band), Insidious, The Last Lions.

Respectable But Doesn't Get There: The Way Back, The Adjustment Bureau, Jane Eyre, The Dilemma, The Company Men,...Read More

Charles Martin Smith's Dolphin Tale (Warner Bros., 9.23) is a true-life saga of a wounded dolphin who'd lost his tail in a crab trap, and who was rescued and given a prosthetic replacement. I'm a softie for dolphin movies as long as they're not Flipper-related. I saw The Cove three or four times, of course. I even accepted the sentimentality in Mike Nichols' The Day of the Dolphin. This one looks a little obvious.

Nathan Gamble plays the proverbial cute kid who bonds with the dolphin (who came to be called Winter) early...Read More

You're making an arduous journey across the arid eastern Oregon plains in 1845, and there's reason to be worried about available water and therefore survival itself. Bruising, punishing, chilling...no picnic. And then an oblique sense of salvation when you come upon a half-dead, spread-out pine tree -- an indicator of underground water and more greenery to come. And so you stop your wagons and walk over to savor its aroma and shade, and to generally take comfort.

And you say to yourself, "I don't know what the hell movies are because they won't...Read More

Dawn Hudson can thank the debacle of the James Franco-Anne Hathaway Oscar telecast for her new job as CEO of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Otherwise the change-averse board of governors would have probably given the gig to status-quo functionary Ric Robertson, and the show would have probably continued its gradual slide into cultural irrelevance. Robertson has accepted what some are calling a humiliating second-in-command COO position under Hudson.

(l.) Dawn Hudson; (r.) Ric Robertson.

As one who feeds at the AMPAS/Oscar trough, I'm somewhat encouraged by Hudson's appointment. Her years as...Read More

I can't help but flinch and scowl when I hear/see Republican legislators with a Southern accent recite their rhetorical blah-blah on a news show. Do these guys exaggerate their yokel patter in order to project more of a country-ish, Tea Party-appealing persona? This plus their corporate-serving views...God.

The main barrier preventing a budget=cut agreement between the Obama administration and Republicans is reportedly over a "rider" that would completely defund Planned Parenthood -- a culture-war sop to hinterland primitives because PP advises and assists in abortions.

Originally posted on 3.13, re-posted for current NY and LA openings: Super is partly a dark and bracing satire of superhero movies, partly a withering "eff you" to T-shirted ComicCon culture dweebs who live for superhero fantasies, and partly a violent, surreal-ish Troma comedy. However you want to slice it, it is not selling the same old bilge about a lonely neurotic dork finding transcendence and salvation by adopting a super alter-identity and kicking criminal ass and getting the girl of his dreams, etc.

The fact that it's dopey-funny in a dry and anarchic way...Read More

2011 looks like the year that Mixed Martial Arts goes mainstream. We've got four MMA movies awaiting release and/or in the pipeline, and that obviously spells a trend. And I've never watched a mixed-martial-arts bout in my life. Who does? ESPN mainliners, guys who drink Four malted beverage and watch Mexican wrestling, etc.?

Gavin O'Connor's Warrior, which allegedly screened through the roof for exhibitors last week in Las Vegas (and which I briefly mentioned earlier today), is one. Another is Michael Tucker's Fightville, which generated good buzz at last month's South by Southwest (Cinematical's...Read More

I completely understand and sympathize with Javier Bardem's decision to accept a straight paycheck acting gig (i.e., portraying gunslinger Roland Deschain in a three-part TV mini based on Stephen King's The Dark Tower) that's well beneath his usual aesthetic pay-grade. He's doing it, almost certainly, to fortify the nest for the sake of his and Penelope Cruz's recently arrived son Leo. All acting parents do this when a baby comes along -- they go for the money and feel just fine about it. Just a fact of life. I'd do the same in his position.

I'll always be an admirer of Gavin O'Connor for Miracle, one of the best sports movies ever made because -- this is important and fascinating -- the hockey coach (Kurt Russell) was a bit of a stubborn, obstinate, broomstick-up-his-ass prick, and yet he brought it all home. I just hope O'Connor's latest, which obviously stars Joel Edgerton (Animal Kingdom) and costars Tom Hardy (and not the other way around, as publicists for the film have it) doesn't go in for too much hugging and weeping.

Judge: "Somebody has to take the blame for Your Highness. It's too awful to just ignore or wave off. Pledges of allegiance to basic cinematic-craft standards have to be asserted, and one or two people have to be punished for the good of the community. I'm sorry but sometimes these things have to be done.

"I'll never believe that former Moviefone editor-in-chief Patricia Chui wrote that incredibly stupid and arrogant letter to AOL freelancers on her own volition, but she had to be whacked for it all the same -- same principle here. And I think I'm being liberal by demanding...Read More

So Kat Dennings is a dryer, more deadpan, slightly more opaque version of Emma Stone? Or is Emma a brassier, more mainstreamy, young-Eileen Brennan-without-the-deep-voice version of Kat? Dennings is obviously the erotic raison d'etre behind Daydream Nation (Anchor Bay, 5.6). On the same day her costarring performance in Fucking Thor will also be assessed.

The trailer for Crazy Stupid Love (Warner Bros., 7.29) suggests that Ryan Gosling is playing a glib, semi-shallow, mind-fucking hound. That's just what the doctor ordered for this fine and exceptional actor who, I've long felt, is too caught up in fascinating technique. He needs to play an average dipshit in a semi-average way. Steve Carell, Julianne Moore and Emma Stone costar. The film is written by Dan Fogelman and directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (I Love You, Phillip Morris).

Here's...Read More

The just-out official teaser for Roland Emmerich's Anonymous (Sony, 9.23), an Elizabethan period drama that explores whether Edward de Vere (Rhys Ifans), the 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote the plays attributed to William "Bardo" Shakespeare (Rafe Spall), begins with a present-day sequence in which a lecturer (Derek Jacobi) suggests/speculates that Will "never wrote a word."

But the teaser, obviously, is selling anything and everything but literary authorship.

Inside Guy: "That's because it's not about literary authorship! It's about more than that, I mean." HE: "I'll say...sound and fury, a naked...Read More

Is this one of those concepts that kicks in nicely as a trailer, but would run out of steam as a feature? Because I love this trailer. If I wasn't on screening lists I'd definitely pay to see a 94-minute version. Grampires and other FunnyOrDie shorts will screen tonight at downtown L.A.'s L.A. Comedy Shorts Film Festival opener.

Kim Cattrall's performance in Meet Monica Valour (limited, 4.8) has, I feel, broken her out of that MILFy blonde-sexpot Sex in the City persona and shown she can get down, dig deeply and go for broke. This on top of her less-than-large-scaled but respectable performance Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer, I mean. She's forgiven, she's cool...she's earned entry into the serious-over-40-actress club.

Now, if only I could learn to shut up when an interview subject is talking and not go "hmm," "uh-huh" and "yeah" all the time. I need to go to school...Read More

The Rotten Tomatoes consensus so far is that Arthur (Warner Bros., 4.8) blows the big one. The only guy who's given it a semi-pass is MSN's Glenn Kenny. (Can Kenny be trusted when it comes to romantic comedy? The watchword is "caveat emptor.") My personal view is that it's not awful, but it sure is unnecessary.

Greta Gerwig in the new, not-so-hot Arthur.

The vibe in the Arclight theatre during last night's screening felt flat, like a lot of underwhelmed people waiting for a high-school study hall to end. The 1981 original should have...Read More

Staring at a computer screen for seven or eight hours a day has been playing hell with my eyes over the last few months. My left eye, I mean -- redness, puffiness, watering. And so I started wearing these IMAX 3-D glasses on top of my regular glasses to cut down on glare. They're the only device I've found so far that doesn't make everything look too dark and is fairly comfortable to wear.

I'm told the that the Gunnar people make good glare-reduction glasses. If anyone knows of other options, please inform.

Indiewire's Anne Thompson has reported that a 4.27 Academy screening of a new digital restoration of Bye Bye Birdie, the 1963 musical comedy that was old-hat the day it opened, is sold out.

I wouldn't go this screening with a gun at my back + a promise of free quaaludes. The movie is strictly squaresville -- a take on the hype and inanity of the rock 'n' roll industry by people whose careers peaked in the '40s and '50s.

The original 1960 B'way show reflected a stodgy middle-class...Read More

Two days ago a fan-made, early '60s-style main title sequence for the forthcoming X Men: First Class (20th Century Fox, 6.3) got 2000 hits. Yesterday it got 40,000 and today (as of 4:30 pm eastern) it's at 50,000 and counting. The creator is Joe DiLeonardo (a.k.a. "Joe D") of Trenton, New Jersey.

X-Men: First Class Title Sequence from Joe D! on Vimeo.

The sequence is a bit slow and lumpy here and there, but Joe (whom I spoke to a few minutes ago) threw it together very quickly, and at least he's...Read More

Every time I use a big bath towel in a hotel or a rented home, it's very natural-fibre feeling and nicely absorbent. I love it. And every time I try to buy a nice high-quality bath towel for myself at Nordstrom or Bed, Bath and Beyond, I come home with something that's a little too soft and smoothly pampered -- not natural feeling enough with that 100%, slightly rough cotton touch. It's infuriating.

L.A. Times guy Steven Zeitchik is calling the currently-rolling Playing The Field, a Gerald Butler film directed by Gabriele Mucchino, "a dramedy about soccer, the suburbs and sexual attraction" and "a kind of Shampoo set amid American manicured lawns."

It's about a Beckham-like soccer star (Butler) who returns to his estranged American wife (Jessica Biel) and child to try to redeem himself after tom-catting around Europe for a long spell. He starts coaching youth soccer to show he means it, but various local women convey a certain moist receptivity, including characters played by Uma Thurman (the wife of Dennis Quaid's character),...Read More

Three years ago the word went out among a rarified strata of film critics and feature writers that seriously praising House Bunny star Anna Faris was a hip thing to do. And now New Yorker writer Tad Friend is calling her "Hollywood's most original comic actress" -- sorta kinda Judy Holliday in a coarse-obvious-stoner vein.

Maybe, if you say so, but Faris, I swear to God, is never very funny. Puckish and animated but...huh? Always playing highly spirited, slow-on-the-pickup (okay, semi-stupid) women who are parked (or driving around in circles) in their own cul de...Read More

Why do the N.Y. Times tech guys insist on using titles and reducing the video image and forcing it over to the left margin? Just offer the video in the style of YouTube or Vimeo and let it go at that.

David Gordon Green's Your Highness (Universal, 4.8) is so poorly written, so uninvested in genuine stoner humor (a la The Big Lebowski and Wonder Boys), and so appallingly unsuccessful that it's a bit of a challenge to accurately describe it. But it's definitely not funny -- that you can take to the bank.

I'm not exaggerating in calling this a landmark in the annals of crapitude and dick jokes and the fine corporate art of farting in the audience's face. It's easily one of the worst films I've ever seen in my life....Read More

Michael Fleming's 4.4 interview with civil-rights activist and Martin Luther King confidante Andrew Young, posted last night, is one of the best things I've ever seen on Deadline.com -- a thoughtful, highly revealing discussion with a respected, well-meaning historical figure who's nonetheless an apparent obstructionist-in-denial when it comes to two proposed MLK biopics -- Scott Rudin and Paul Greengrass's Memphis and Lee Daniels' Selma.

Fleming reported last Friday that Universal Pictures had scuttled Memphis after Young and "the King estate" applied pressure. Young confirmed to Fleming in the interview that he did indeed contact Universal...Read More

"Great screen comedies that feature a severed Minotaur's penis as a key prop are, sadly, few and far between," writes Hollywood Reporter critic Kirk Honeycutt (who attended the same screening earlier this evening that I did). "Your Highness aspires to such greatness but falls instead into a deep chasm of such comic lowness after less than five minutes that it's unable to extricate itself. Things get so bad you half expect a cameo by Nicolas Cage.

"The surprises here are twofold: One is that David Gordon Green, whose early films such as George Washington and All the Real Girls showed genuine promise,...Read More

The new Film Society of Lincoln Center movie theatre on West 65th that nobody will ever remember the name of is opening on June 17th. With presumably state-of-the-art digital sound and projection, and a very fine doc -- Andrew Rossi's Page One: Inside the N.Y. Times -- kicking things off. The smallish twin cinema is being called the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center (presumably because Elinor Bunin Munroe made a big contribution to the construction fund). It should be called Film65 or something like that...c'mon.

Rose Kuo, executive director, and Richard Pena, program director, in the Film Society...

"Hesher is not shit -- it has its own vision and personality and delivers a form of anarchic-idiot behavior that I've never quite seen or contemplated before," I wrote on 3.16. "And it does have a startling, amusing-at-times Joseph Gordon Levitt performance as a hair-trigger hippie Rasputin slash animal-house provocateur. And a very fierce and touching one from the tweener-aged Devin Brochu.

"And there's some nicely twisted humor going on in the story of Levitt moving uninvited into Brochu's San Fernando Valley home and gradually rousing him and his depressed dad (Rainn Wilson) out of...Read More

The Hollywood track record of producer Jerry Weintraub, the focus of an HBO doc airing tonight called My Way, is nothing to crow about. Out of 46 films he's produced since the mid '60s, three could be called good -- William Friedkin's Cruising, Jean-Claude Tramont's All Night Long, and Barry Levinson's Diner.

Yes, Weintraub exec produced Robert Altman's Nashville, but he was probably just a money guy and had zilch to do with content. The other 40 or so...Read More

I've never had four remotes before. Left to right: the 50" Vizio plasma remote, the Time Warner cable remote, the Samsung Bluray remote and an iLive remote for an external sound bar I bought last weekend for $130 or thereabouts -- adds agreeable bass and sharpness and much-needed volume when watching Blurays.

The just-released official poster for the 64th Cannes Film Festival sounds a familiar note in certain circles. "That '70s vibe will never be with us again so let's look backward"...right? Obviously a sultry and highly glamorous image of Faye Dunaway, of course, taken when she was about 30.

It was snapped during the shooting or promotion for Jerry Schatzberg's Puzzle of a Downfall Child ('70), which didn't play all that well for me when I saw it in the '90s. It's an impressionistic time-shifty mood piece about a depressed and half-suicidal model turned actress,...

Could big-name actors and actresses of the '30s, '40s and '50s have made it in subsequent decades? Would Cary Grant or Gary Cooper or Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn would have been as big in movies if they'd been born, say, in 1950 or thereabouts? Would their temperaments and acting styles have meshed with the '70s, '80s, '90s and afterwards, or were "Cary Grant," "Cary Cooper," "Bette Davis" and "Katharine Hepburn" manifestations and brands that could only have been shaped and refined and taken flight in the '30s, '40s and '50s?

And what about the reverse? Could...Read More

Robert Towne (Chinatown, The Last Detail, The Firm) being hired to write a Sony miniseries based on Robert Harris's "Pompeii" -- the same property that Roman Polanski tried to adapt into a feature only to abandon in '07 -- is an okay thing and a mildly interesting move. Because one might speculate that the Chinatown-resembling elements in Harris's story had a bit to do with Towne's involvement.

The main protagonist is Marcus Attilius Primus, a Roman engineer in the mold of Charlton Heston's character in Earthquake -- a willful and sympathetic character with...Read More

Earlier today Awards Daily 's Sasha Stone, Boxoffice.com's Phil Contrino and I chewed the usual fat. Actually, not usual -- interesting, sometimes amusing fat. Source Code, France again, early VOD windows, 48 to 60 fps photography, Sasha's belief that Woody Allen has been off his game since the mid '90s, etc. Here's a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

So Movieline critic Elvis Mitchell might have read an early draft of Ben Ripley's Source Code screenplay and remembered a line about Jeffrey Wright's character smoking a pipe, and somehow this recollection found its way into his review of the film...in which Wright doesn't smoke a pipe. So effin' what? Every so often processed information and impressions and memory fragments bleed into each other and scramble around. And then you fix it.

Anton Corbijn's Control, which I first saw at the 2007 Cannes Filn Festival, is probably the most beautiful black-and-white film of the 21st Century. (Francis Coppola's Tetro is a close second.) It's been crying out for a Bluray, and so far the Weinstein Co. hasn't announced one. Today I ordered the Alliance Region-A Bluray -- sure to look great on the 50" plasma.

At the end of Source Code is Jake Gyllenhaal's Colter Stevens finally over as a half-living entity (i.e., dead), or is he living a happy smiling life with Michelle Monaghan in the Source Code realm, or is he "alive" in the body of Sean Fentress, the guy he's been inside all along, in the real-world realm? I'm not recalling all the particulars. Consider this bold-faced spoiler warning before watching the video. (Thanks to Rope of Silicon's Brad Brevet for starting this off.)

Last Wednesday I did a phoner with Paramount's Ron Smith, the restoration guy who quarterbacked the work on the Ten Commandments Bluray. (And on the theatrical version.) A ten-minute portion of our chat is on the video. The film is best appreciated as "a Cecil B. DeMille proscenium arch experience," as I put it. It's immaculate old-world fakery, shot almost entirely on a sound stage. The 44 days spent shooting location footage in Egypt mean nothing to me. The Exodus scene could have been shot in the Mojave desert.

Here are the DVD...Read More

Sunday night update: TMZ is reporting that during tonight's Torpedo of Truth show in Chicago, Sheen said "he'd go back to Two and Half Men, but that the people who run it are bloodsuckers. He [also] called Jon Cryer a 'rock star.'"

Earlier today: "The word is from one of Charlie Sheen's friends is that he's in talks to return to Two & A Half Men, but along with traditional rehab he will have to write formal letters of apology to CBS, Warner Brothers and producer Chuck Lorre as well as make public statements to the same. There will be provisions in...Read More

25 minutes at Gallery 825 on La Cienega and then a drop-by at Bergamot Station where a swarm of bicycle night-riders poured into the main parking lot (like a scene from Fellini's Roma or Blow-Up) as a thrash-rock band started playing [see video below]. Quite a moment. And then finally down to Culver City for some food. We passed on Harrison Ford's...I'm sorry, his son Ben's Montana food joint (i.e., Ford's Filling Station).

The night before I spent some time at a mini-street festival on Abbot Kinney Blvd. In the late '80s and '90s this...Read More

This is really "beat up on poor Charlie Sheen" day, isn't it? First Mark Ebner's 1998 Details piece about the old poontang days, and now an account of Sheen's disastrous debut show ("boos...walkouts..unmitigated disaster") in Detroit by Entertainment Weekly's James Hibberd.

Update: Here's the first YouTube clip I could find. Posted six or seven hours ago. Tiger blood. Cranked. A man on a mission to...what? Prove to the world that he still matters commercially despite the loss of his TV series? To spread the gospel of an egoistic theology called "winning"? I'm guessing it...Read More

As I've heard it (but take this with a grain), the problem with The Hangover 2 is that it primarily feels like The Hangover transposed to Thailand. No deepening intrigue. "Here we go again!" in spades. What do I actually know? Nothing.

"Your suspicions about Your Highness (Universal, 4.8) were correct -- it's pretty lousy," says a trusted reader. "It's one of the laziest films I've ever seen. I suspect the geeks will attempt to explain this as a kind of purposeful charm but I'd just call it shitty. It has some great lines but they gave most of them away in the first red-band trailer. It's essentially 30 iterations of Danny McBride saying stuff with an olde English accent with an f-bomb tossed in."

I for one would have loved to see Memphis, the Paul Greengrass-Scott Rudin project about Martin Luther King that Universal has just scuttled, possibly over "factual liberties" taken by Greengrass's script but more likely about the MLK estate having sided with a competing MLK DreamWorks project that has a script by Ronald Harwood (The Pianist). Rudin and Greengrass are presumably shopping Memphis around so here's hoping.

Taken by yours truly on 2.5.09.

I've written that Greengrass's shakycam shooting style has run its course, but something tells me it might work very well on a...Read More

In 1998 Details magazine hired Mark Ebner to track down and interview Charlie Sheen's ex-girlfriends. It was an assignment "as simple as walking out my front door," Ebner writes on Hollywood Interrupted. Ebner says he "found no shortage of women willing to get honest about their experiences with a shell of a man who has proven incapable of being honest about himself." But the Details article only mentions three.

A line in Steve Pond's 4.1 Wrap interview with Win Win producer Michael London made me wince a little. The topic is Win Win's modest expansion this weekend to 149 theatres, and then 200 next weekend. Pond says London "always figured" that Tom McCarthy's small-town dramedy, which is easily the best film out there right now, "would be a tough sell to mainstream audiences...with the film shifting tone from drama to comedy" and back again.

Win Win costars Paul Giamatti (l.) and Amy Ryan (far r.).

That's not entirely true. Win Win is mostly about sly humor,...Read More

Earlier today Awards Daily's Ryan Adams linked to a 4.1 reel3.com story by Jason Haggstrom that has a clip of the original sexual metaphor finale from Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (i.e., the train going into the tunnel). The best part is an "excerpt" from Hitchcock/Truffaut that explains it.

This is the last one of the day...promise.

I'm not one of those literalists who demands practical, reasonable answers for everything he sees in a film, but how exactly does a vampire attain stiffitude? Don't you need warm blood rushing to the loins, etc.? I'm not arguing with the notion of Edward and Bella doing it -- it's fine, and thank God the series is almost over -- but did Stephanie Meyer ever try to explain how Edward manages the act? Not criticizing -- just asking.

Every now and then...well, actually on very rare occasions Criterion decides to lower itself into the vaguely disreputable, ball-scratching realm of popcorn cinema (Armageddon, The Rock) as a way of sloughing off their elitist, butt-plugged, too-cool-for-school reputation. Their latest release in this realm will be Douglas Cheek's CHUD (1984), which Criterion will street on July 12th. One question: why?

True fact: In 1983 I sat one evening at a table in a West 72nd bar with CHUD star John Heard and at least one other CHUD costar (Daniel Stern?) plus a couple of other actor...Read More

Sony Home Video's Taxi Driver Bluray (out 4.5) is easily the best non-theatrical version of this film ever seen. It's very celluloid-looking, thickly colored, like you're watching a freshly-struck 16mm print in your darkened living room. It's nothing to jump up and down about, but it's as good as this ratty little classic -- shot on 16mm (or was it a combo of 16mm and 35mm?), appropriately reflective of the slimey tones and textures of mid '70s Manhattan -- is ever going to look.

I haven't even touched the extras but I'm hearing they're top-of-the-line.

...

22 days ago I reviewed Duncan Jones' Source Code, and here's a re-posting to link with today's opening: "This is an engaging, somewhat sentimental and yet trippy, spiritual-minded sci-fi thriller that deserves a thumbs-up for several reasons, but I was especially delighted that it hasn't been dumbed down.

(l. to r.) Source Code costars Vera Farmiga, Michelle Monahan and Jake Gyllenhaal, and screenwriter Ben Ripley (far right) on stage at Austin's Paramount theatre following this evening's screening.

"It's an exciting nail-biter, but is essentially cerebral in the manner of an above-average Twilight Zone episode from...Read More

"Will Ferrell does a serious turn in Everything Must Go with mixed results," Hollywood Reporter critic Kirk Honeycutt wrote during last September's Toronto Film festival. "Playing an alcoholic at a crucial crossroad in his life, he uses his middle-age slacker persona well to convey a guy lost in his own immaturity and low self-esteem. And he nicely finds humor in an otherwise pathetic situation.

"But the performance is too one-note. Using an acting muscle hitherto ignored, Ferrell isn't able to track the ups-and-downs in the story's dramatic beats. Instead he falls back...Read More

Forget what Hanna (Focus Features, 4.8) is about because you've seen this fists-of-fury action-girl fantasy stuff before in Kickass, Salt and Sucker Punch -- the same crap about a young 115-pound female hardbody wailing on much bigger and heavier adversaries, etc. But if you focus on Hanna's throttling symphonic style -- the high-grade chops and adrenalized tone and choice fashion-flash photography, and the way it pounds into your head with a loud, throbbing techno-score by the Chemical Brothers -- you may feel a special wow.