I'm not saying that Renny Harlin's 5 Days of War (which recently opened in London and non-American Georgia as 5 Days of August) is strongly or somewhat reminiscent of Elie Chouraqu's Harrison's Flowers (2000) or Steven Silver's The Bang-Bang Club, but similarities do seem pronounced.

This is going to sound funny, but there are actresses and other very attractive women who easily or naturally associate with the beach-blanket bikini bingo world, and there are those who personality-wise or spiritually-speaking don't quite seem to belong in that realm. Emma Stone, no offense, belongs in the latter category. She's all about spirit, eyes, pizazz, snap. And she's not a blonde. And The Help looks like trouble.

If anyone has a copy of Diablo Cody's Lamb of God, a script about a young conservative woman who visits Las Vegas, please pass along. It was reported yesterday that Cody will direct the film (possibly later this year) with Mason Novick producing.

9:51 pm Update: I was sent a copy a couple of hours ago and have skimmed through it. That Michael Fleming logline about the main character, who's literally named Lamb, being a Christian who turns to stripping is incorrect. It is, however, a moral tale about a Christian girl among the hapless heathens. The Vegas strip but...Read More

In a piece called "The Movie Star," Grantland's Bill Simmons, the sports guy who writes brilliantly about movies every time he steps up to the Hollywood plate, says there are 24 male movie stars right now. The article is basically a two-parter that compares the careers of Ryan Reynolds vs. Will Smith, and how the latter is perhaps the only real movie star around and why Reynolds, for all his likability, good looks and talent, may never get there.

The Big 24, he says, are "Will Smith, Leonardo DiCaprio, Johnny Depp, Tom Cruise, George Clooney, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, Robert...Read More

In the view of New York Press critic Armond White, Larry Crowne "is the humanist opposite to Hollywood's self-congratulatory snark. It's irresistibly friendly, shot in vivid tones by Philippe Rousselot and, most importantly, is non-toxic" -- which characterized, White feels, Charlie Wilson's War, the last costarring vehicle for Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts. And then comes a classic Armond White line if I've ever heard one: "Larry Crowne's lack of cynicism requires an audience that doesn't hate itself." Well, that lets me out!

In the view of critic Jim Emerson, Jerzy Skolimowski's Four Nights With Anna -- theatrically unreleased and unavailable as a subtitled DVD, but playing this weekend at the Museum of the Moving Image -- is "a small-scale masterpiece about voyeurism" and also "a movie about movie-watching and movie-making.

"Leon (Artur Steranko), the conscience and consciousness of the film, is as smitten with the object of his desire (Kinga Preis) as can be, even though his drugged and slumbering beloved isn't conscious of their trysts," Emerson writes. "Unlike James Stewart in Rear Window" (but very...Read More

To call someone a "dick" is a colloquial shortform way of saying they've acted in a snide or petty or selfish or brusque manner. MSNBC contributor Mark Halperin is a rightie, of course, and since the topic at hand was (apparently) the debt-ceiling negotiations, what he was saying was that his Republican pallies have told him that President Obama was playing a kind of snippy hardball with them.

To which I say, "Then he's doing something right!"

You can't be mean and tough and "Chicago gangsta" enough when it comes to the radical...Read More

Box Office Mojo's Brandon Gray is reporting that the $37.3 million earned yesterday by Transformers: Dark of the Moon is a technical shortfaller. Although it earned 2011's biggest opening-day income, T3 nonetheless "pales compared to the opening day income of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and likely yielded fewer viewers than the first Transformers."

There are three reasons for this. One, a large percentage of moviegoers are always slow on the pickup as far as advance internet buzz is concerned, and so they haven't heard that the film has to be seen for the 45-minute attack-on-Chicago finale. Two, the crappy quality of...Read More

Columbia Journalism Review reporter Joel Meares has written a reasonable, fair-minded, occasionally amusing profile of Hollywood Elsewhere (and myself, of course). I don't know what else to say except I'm glad that it's balanced and kind and accurate and respectful. And not caustic or snippy. Thanks much to Awards Daily's Sasha Stone for saying all those nice, perceptive things.

I asked Meares to make two minor changes and he refused. I asked him to list a couple of other big names who read HE and he said "naahh." Then I said it sounds more natural and...Read More

How do you make a movie about Rod Serling, the creator of the Twilight Zone series? That's the intention of Bureau of Moving Pictures' Andrew Meieran and screenwriter Stanley Weiser (W, Wall Street), according to Deadline's Mike Fleming. But you can't just make one of those "this happens and then that happens" biopics. You need a thematic through-line and a compelling psychological undercurrent.

I thought about the project this morning and wrote Weiser (whom I've gotten to know a little bit over the years) the following:

"It strikes me that the only way to write...Read More

From the director of Let The Right One In, an adaptation of John LeCarre's slow-burn adult suspense tale (this time set in the '70s) about uncovering the identity of a Russian mole within the British Secret Service. Pure candy and ice cream for someone like myself, but for the under-30 Eloi crowd....? And for Joe Popcorn living in Dubuque and Trenton and Tucumcari?

Shot by the great Hoyte van Hotema (The Fighter) and costarring Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Mark Strong and Ciaran Hinds. And "opening" only two and half months from now...Read More

Tonight I finally watched the pilot for Tilda, the might-have-been cable series about a Nikki Finke-like online columnist (very nicely played by Diane Keaton) that HBO declined to pick up last February. Too bad because Hollywood Elsewhere has a brief insert-shot appearance near the beginning when Ellen Page, playing a studio employee who feeds dirt to Keaton, glances at a list of Hollywood websites before settling on Tilda's The Daily Circus.

You know what's funny? The "H" logo that sits to the left of Hollywood Elsewhere's URL in actuality is sitting to...

'Friends With Benefits meets No Strings Attached. Received today from Ben Churchill, the Blind Film Critic

Terrence Malick's 10.1.96 draft of The Thin Red Line was tight and true and straight to the point, and it had no alligators sinking into swamps or shots of tree branches or pretty leaves or that South Sea native AWOL section or any of that languid and meditative "why is there such strife in our hearts?" stuff. During the junket round-tables I got Jim Caviezel, George Clooney, Nick Nolte, Elias Koteas, Mike Medavoy and Ben Chaplin to autograph my copy.

"Larry Crowne makes no bones about its attempt to tell an upbeat story," writes Marshall Fine. "Undoubtedly, at a time when unemployment is soaring and lives are collapsing as a result, some may fault it for taking a sour subject - losing a job in a down economy - and turning it into a feel-good story. But Hanks' script - cowritten with Nia Vardalos of My Big Fat Greek Wedding fame - is about a guy with a positive attitude, with the will and resources to move forward.

"No doubt Larry Crowne will be criticized for all of the things it doesn't...Read More

This is an amazing video. It was posted five or six days ago, and I've watched it four times today. It isn't simulated. A seagull really did scoop up a tiny lightweight video camera and fly away with it. It happened in Cannes. (Initially posted by Awards Daily's Ryan Adams on 6.27.)

"Chicago is the great American city. New York is one of the capitals of the world and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic, San Francisco is a lady, Boston has become Urban Renewal, Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington wink like dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern Megalopolis, and New Orleans is unremarkable past the French Quarter. Detroit is a one-trade town, Pittsburgh has lost its golden triangle, St. Louis has become the golden arch of the corporation, and nights in Kansas City close early. The oil depletion allowance makes Houston and Dallas naught but checkerboards for this sort of game. But...Read More

No question about it: the 45-minute Chicago finale of Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon (Paramount, now playing) is absolutely jump-off-a-skyscraper insane. It's astonishing, exhilarating, relentless, pulverizing...and yes, finally exhausting. Even if you're a confirmed Michael Bay hater you have to give the guy credit for shooting this stunningly energized and visually giddy CG symphony of madness out of a shotgun and right through your 3D glasses. And none of it amounts to anything more than motion and chaos and fury designed entirely to sell tickets.

I didn't even see the extra-bright Platinum version (which I'm...Read More

Harrison Ford has allegedly told a Details inteviewer that Shia LaBeouf was a "fucking idiot" for publicly criticizing Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull in a May 2010 interview with L.A. Times writer Steven Zeitchik.

Nope, wrong. LaBeouf was being refreshingly honest about what everyone and his cousin believes was probably the worst of the Indiana Jones films, and he waited two years to say what he thought so what's the problem?

Ford has a bit of an old-school attitude about this stuff, but let's clarify that he hasn't called LaBeouf an overall walking-around...Read More

Two minor corrections for A.O. Scott's "Critics' Picks" commentary about the 1957 classic Sweet Smell of Success: (a) Scott adds a nonexistent "The" to the title; and (b) Clifford Odets' screenplay is not "based on a novel by Ernest Lehman" but a Lehman novella called "Tell Me About It Tomorrow," which originally appeared as a 1950 short story in Cosmopolitan magazine.

If the novella was ever sold in perfect-bound book form it's not purchasable or even referenced online. Newark Star-Ledger critic Stephen J. Whitty informs, however, that it was published "as a Signet...Read More

The War Horse teaser has all the well-known earmarks of a Steven Spielberg film, you bet. It totally reeks of his paintbox. I'm still holding out hope that the film, due in late December, will primarily be a horse-POV drama and secondarily about the people who love and use and exploit him. (Teaser initially posted by the Film Stage.)

The only dialogue in the teaser is spoken by A Prophet's Niels Arestrup.

This, I feel, is one of David Poland's best swipes at mainstream entertainment writer-reporters, particularly the L.A. Times' entertainment staffers who see themselves as providing a higher grade of professional-class writing-reporting than the online blogging community.

"It just goes to show you, surveys are skewed by the questions as much as the answers," Poland comments. "The above is an ad for awards advertisers from the LA Times. I would rephrase: What kind of entertainment awards coverage are you looking for? (a) The same old stale stuff, written by angry, jaded employees of a bankrupt corporation...Read More

"Live-action 3-D has been, at least since Avatar, a briar patch for filmmakers and a headache for audiences," says N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott. But Michael Bay's Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon, he says, "is one of the few recent 3-D movies that justify the upcharge. Mr. Bay clearly enjoys playing with the format, which is also to say that he takes it seriously. A lot of glass and metal comes flying at your head, and you feel surrounded, plunged into a universe governed by new and strange laws of physics.

"Nothing you see makes...Read More

Larry Crowne (Universal, 7.1) is a mild-mannered, lightweight, reality-skirting, cruise-along feel-good movie about a mild-mannered, trying-to-always-feel-good nice guy in his early 50s (Tom Hanks) who loses his job at Walmart...UMart, I mean, and has to find ways to live within new economic limits without getting angry or depressed or turning to drink or doing anything unattractive or unlikable, which, as we all know, is way outside Hanks' wheelhouse.

So Mr. Crowne buys a scooter and decides to take some classes at a small community college and kinda gets going with a couple of women in a very...Read More

It was the Dean Jones "Disney-ass name" line that did it. Warner Bros. has been screening it here and there but I won't see it until 7.5 because I'm special. (It opens three days later and can't be reviewed until 7.6) Directed by Seth Gordon, written by John Francis Daley and Jonathan M. Goldstein with a story by Michael Markowitz, etc.

The whole Tom Hanks, pre-Larry Crowne premiere, scooter-brigade-down-Hollywood-Blvd. thing went out the window yesterday afternoon when I threw my right leg over my scooter and my back dress slacks ripped open at the crotch. A big gaping hole with frayed threads, and it was 6:05 pm -- five minutes past the scooter get-together hour and 90 minutes before the start of Larry Crowne, the movie.

It would have been humiliating to schmooze around the Chinese and the after-party with my white briefs on display, so I definitely had to fix this. The smart thing would have been to drive straight home and...Read More

Congratulations to Mark Gill, one of the more candid wise men of the indie production-distribution field, for his new gig as president of Millennium Films. The idea is to "produce and finance five to eight star-driven, wide-release films per year with budgets between $20 and $80 million" as long as Gill can convince his bosses -- Avi Lerner, Trevor Short, Boaz Davidson -- that this or that project is a good bet.

If you've been around for 20 years and are a member of the club, you will always land a job sooner or later.

I've been saying for a long while that superhero movies are a pestilence, and that the genre is more or less over in all senses of the term unless the superhero-film-in-question has been directed or produced by Chris Nolan or is named Thor or Iron Man.

I haven't complained as persistently about mythological-medieval quest movies (wide-eyed innocents, cloaks, horses, shadowy forests) in the Joseph Campbell-J.R.R. Tolkien mode, partly because I feel that Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy exhausted all that jazz. Whatever juice it might have left will be re-exhausted by...Read More

I'm good to go for the Larry Crowne scooter-swarm parade down Hollywood Blvd, which will start sometime around 6:45 or 7 pm. I don't know how many scooters are going to take part, but me and my little white Chinese scooter will be a part of history tonight. I plan on taking some stills and video and posting it all tomorrow. I'll also be attending the big-deal premiere, of course, for Tom Hanks' film, which opens on 7.1.

The great Guillermo del Toro told me a little something about Alfonso Cuaron's currently-shooting Gravity at last night's Don't Be Afraid of The Dark after-party. He said that Cuaron and dp Emmanuel Lubezki (a.k.a. "Chivo") are again intending to push the cinematic envelope, although in a different way than they did with Children of Men. The 3D space-rescue drama costars George Clooney and Sandra Bullock.

Sandra Bullock, George Clooney within shouting distance of Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity set.

I've gotten hold of a second draft of Cuaron's script (written in '09). If anyone has a more recent draft,...Read More

Yesterday morning Deadline's Nikki Finke posted a letter that Transformers 3 director Michael Bay recently sent to projectionists. The letter urged them to project the 3D version of the film at super-bright levels to combat the underwhelming "dark, dingy" appearance of 3D films that viewers have been complaining about.

Bay's letter to projectionists about Transformers 3 light levels for optimum 3D projection.

"We have also created a new 'Platinum 6 version' of Transformers," Bay wrote, "for the ultimate in 3D experience, to be played in auditoriums capable of 6-foot lamberts of light on the screen...Read More

One of the unfortunate tasks for supporters of the First Amendment is that occasionally they're obliged to stand up for it. Sometimes doing this doesn't feel very good. Because sometimes it involves supporting creators and distributors of icky and odious ultra-violent movies and video games, which serve a termite-like function when it comes to diluting social-behavior standards that any morally decent society would want to stand by.

This is one thought, at least, in the wake of the Supreme Court having invalidated a California law banning the sale of violent video games to minors. The court said in a 7-2 ruling issued...Read More

Straight from Moscow, Drew McWeeny's Transformers 3 review posted this morning on Hitfix, and he's calling it "easily the best film in the series" and "an overwhelming sensory experience [with] a solid hour-long action sequence in Chicago that uses everything Bay's ever done before."

Transformers 3 is basically the latest pass at the kind of "personal story on an...Read More

Memo to Brad Bird, Bad Robot and Paramount: Please don't give us another effing Mission Impossible Tom Cruise franchise flick! Don't create action sequences based on the principle that you have to top the last similar-type sequence in the last big budget-busting action movie...begging you! Just figure out what your movie is about and do what feels right for your own purposes and then play it real and to hell with the competition.

I know you won't do this. I know you're going to be playing the same old "top the last action movie" game. I know...Read More

I wrote last year about the death of my Siamese cat Zak from pancreatic cancer at age 15. He stopped eating toward the end, prompting me to put Gerber's baby food on his nose so he would at least lick it off. He was obviously finished. Any country vet would have taken one look and said, "Take him home and make him comfortable, and if you want to put him to sleep towards the end, we'll do that for you. I'm sorry, but he hasn't long to live."

When I took Zak to TLC Animal Hospital in West Hollywood they managed...Read More

"Chris Weitz's A Better Life, which follows a gardener in East L.A. who struggles to keep his son away from gangs and immigration agents, found strong numbers in a limited debut. On four screens, Life managed a $60,000 gross, averaging a strong $15,000 per screen.

"Distributor Summit Entertainment noted that 92% of the audience rated the movie 'excellent' or 'very good', which bodes well as the film continues its platform release pattern over the coming weeks (including an expansion into 11 theaters on July 1)." -- from Peter Knegt's 6.25 Indiewire box-office report.

Fine, except A Better Life is not "about...Read More

Last night Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's "Nike: Write The Future" ad won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Festival of Creativity

Inarritu and dp Emmanuel "Chivo" Lubezki shot the footage a year and a half ago (January and February 2010) in Manchester, London, Madrid, Turin, Los Angeles and Kenya.

"It was made to to be show during the World Cup soccer tournament," Inarritu says in an e-mail from Beijing. "And it was an insane massive production because the logistics of shooting during the winter in Europe and the amount of football soccer stars plus...Read More

Some kind of congratulations are in order, I suppose, for Dream House costars Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz, who quietly married a few days ago. This would be a good time, obviously, to check out the Dream House trailer, but I can't find it anywhere. What's that about?

Dream House is a Universal/Morgan Creek production, and those guys know that any film coming out in 90 days has to at least have a teaser up. Wait -- I don't even see a website.

Jim Sheridan's haunted-house thriller shot roughly 13 months ago with...Read More

There's reportedly a movie called Cars 2 (don't care, won't see it) that will make $67 million by late tonight. Take no notice of the projected $31 million that Bad Teacher will earn this weekend. The C-plus CinemaScore grade plus Boxoffice.com's Phil Contrino declaring the word-of-mouth is "toxic" is a fate-sealer. And The Green Lantern dropped over 65% with an expected $18 million for the weekend. Justice is served.

Hollywood Elsewhere friendo Phillip Noyce (Salt, Clear and Present Danger, The Quiet American) toured around Vietnam last month to promote a Vietnamese-language edition of Ingo Petzke's "Phillip Noyce -- Backroads to Hollywood." He and his family visited Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi and several points in-between. And there's economic health everywhere, he says. There's a super-rich class (plus a middle-class and lower-class), thriving industries, friendly people, beautiful jungles and beaches. Delicious food, magnificent architecture. A nice place to visit.

Why exactly did 58,000 young Americans die over there between '62 and '75? To keep the...Read More

A DVD of Henry Hathaway's Woman Obsessed ('59) arrived yesterday. I watched about half of it last night. (It's slow and draggy.) There's a scene with Susan Hayward, Stephen Boyd and Hayward's kid visiting a circus and taking a look at "the fat lady" -- a side-show attraction. 50 years ago women this size were considered freaks; today they're considered Middle-American housewives.

In the '80s I flew across the country (Van Nuys to LaGuardia) in a four-seat Beechcraft Bonanza. The pilot was a Russian pediatrician named Vladimir. He'd agreed to take me and a guy named Gary in exchange for gas money. We left in the early morning, stopped for gas and lunch in Tucumcari, New Mexico, bunked in a St. Louis airport motel that night, flew out the next morning and arrived at LGA by the early afternoon. Anyway...

The fog was so thick when we were coming into St. Louis the air-traffic-controller guy had to talk...Read More

When the kids were toddlers they'd call this or that film is a "talking movie." People sitting indoors and playing verbal ping-pong, etc. Well, John Michael McDonagh 's The Guard is one these, but what talk! What delicious Irish ping-pong! It's a witty ramble-on thing that's simultaneously digressive and twinkle-eyed, and one of the best "cops and bad guys batting the ball around" movies in ages. I don't know if this indie Irish production will be eligible for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar, but it ought to be. It's all dessert.

Brendan Gleeson, star of The Guard, and director-writer...

Last night's passage of New York State's gay-marriage law was cause for celebration among decent people everywhere. I wish I could have taken part in the Manhattan celebrations outside the Stonewall near Sheridan Square, or on the 8th Avenue strip from 14th Street to 23rd Street. I wasn't in Berlin either when the wall came down.

Senator Mark J. Grisanti, a Republican from Buffalo, was the 33rd vote for the bill. "I apologize for those who feel offended," he said. "I cannot deny a person, a human...Read More

Most of the morning has been spent working hard on things that aren't yet column stories or items or reports. It'll all have to keep until I get around to it later this afternoon. It's very easy to fall behind in this daily-column racket. Al you have to do is wake up a little bit late, and then take your time getting into things...and before you know it the time is 12:59 pm.

Weinstein Co. is announcing that some kind of official HD trailer for Apollo 18 has debuted on Yahoo...whatever. Speculative NASA fantasy pic (with simulated "actual' footage) opens wide on 9.2.11. "While NASA denies its authenticity, others say it's the real reason we've never gone back to the moon," etc.

On June 10th L.A. Times/"24 Frames" guy Steven Zeitchik wrote about the coming of Nick Broomfield's anti-Sarah Palin doc, which I put a top-spin on the following morning. And today, 13 or 14 days later, Mike Fleming is reporting that "Deadline has learned there's another Palin doc in the works [from] Broomfield" that's "not going to be quite as favorable toward the former vice presidential candidate as The Undefeated."

Nope, no mistake -- Fleming is talking about same Broomfield documentary.

The exclusive part of Fleming's story is a clip from the Broomfield doc in which two former associates...Read More

"Let's create a luxury tax for Hollywood," Marshall Fine has suggested, "comparable to the one Major League Baseball invokes whenever a team tries to buy itself a pennant by stocking up on expensive star players.

"Except, in the case of Hollywood, this would be a tax that Hollywood would charge itself every time it makes a movie that costs $100 million or more. There would be a tax of X amount of dollars -- let's say 10 percent -- for every $10 million over the $99-million mark a movie's budget goes (and I'm including the cost of advertising and marketing, which can...Read More

Remember the old days when DVDs would deliver boxy, full-frame versions of films shot at standard Academy ratio of 1.37 to 1 (but which are routinely masked off at 1.85 to 1 when they're shown in theatres)? Those are pretty much gone, and I kinda miss 'em. I like height (i.e., lots of headroom) and I love boxiness. But the 16 x 9 fascists have pretty much killed that aesthetic. Old studio-era films (mid-1950s and older) are still mastered at 1.37, of course, but that's the extent of it.

Some day boxy frames will be regarded...Read More

Three months ago author-critic Richard Schickel told L.A. Weekly interviewer Richard Wasson that Martin Scorsese, the subject of a then-new book, "has an utter inability to say anything bad about any movie. I'd say, 'You know, this is a turkey, Marty,' and he'd say, 'Yeah, yeah, I know. But there's this shot in the third scene...' It's almost comical. I think that's the little kid in awe of the image on the screen, buttressed by the fact of how he knows how difficult it is to make a good movie."

Which reminds me: whatever happened to Fake Schickel? The guy...Read More

I don't like tweets in which journalists talk about being at a press junket without saying for what movie or especially what city or country. Travel always generates a slight quickening of the pulse, and I don't see why a traveller wouldn't want to share the particulars. It's not like they're working for the CIA. I'm guessing this is related to the Moscow junket for Transformers 3. Others are just saying, "Moscow...yeah!"

"At least Bad Teacher offers opportunities to ponder an evergreen pop-culture conundrum: At what point do professional performers with evident talent and a proven ability to make smart choices realize they're trapped in a film that -- due to lazy writing, style-free direction and visual design, and a general refusal to aim above the lowest common denominator -- simply can't be good?

"What compels someone like Justin Timberlake -- so charismatically contemptible in The Social Network, so often a saving grace on SNL -- to take a role centered on a cringe-worthy set-piece involving him dry-humping his real-life ex-girlfriend? Are actresses like...Read More

I was milling around a Hollywood hardware store sometime in the early '80s, looking for a screwdriver or something, when I heard raised voices. Two or three Joe Sixpack-type meatheads were having fun at the expense of Peter Falk, who was poking around like me, just wandering down the aisles. "Aaaaay...Detective Columbo!," one of them was saying with the rest joining in. They just had to treat Falk like some kind of visiting celebrity alien. They couldn't be decent about it. They had to be assholes.

And I remember how the perturbed Falk walked right by me as...Read More

Legendary screenwriter David Rayfiel, whom I had the honor and pleasure of interviewing about 15 years ago, died yesterday at 87. He was without question one of the greatest writers of adult romantic-emotional dialogue in film history, but he mostly worked as an uncredited pinch-hit guy for Sydney Pollack. Even in Pollack's lesser films there are portions that have a gently eloquent seep-in quality, and Rayfiel had a hand in most if not all of these.

The Gene Hackman-Jeanne Tripplehorn scene at the Grand Caymans bar in The Firm. The finale of The Way We Were between Robert Redford...Read More

HE reader Phil Garcia had a somewhat annoying time watching The Tree of Life in Scottsdale, an affluent suburb of Phoenix, at the Harkins Camelview on East Highland. But not because of his own reaction to Terrence Malick's film. Here's how he tells it:

Sign at Stamford's Avon theatre, posted yesterday (6.23) by Movie City News' Ray Pride.

"I just finished listening to Oscar Poker # 36 where you comment that you cannot imagine anyone hating The Tree of Life," he writes. "Well, I went to a 6 pm screening on opening day. The theater was...Read More

I'm sure I'll eventually read how they digitally pasted Chris Evans to the face of a ten year-old kid but if anyone has the lowdown, please inform. I presume it's the same technology that allowed Brad Pitt to become a dwarf-sized codger in Benjamin Button and Armie Hammer's face to replace a stand-in's in The Social Network.

Four days ago I reported on an LA Film Festival screenwriter seminar in which Diablo Cody said that her dream project would be a biopic of Brian Wilson. (Which seemed like a cool idea.) And today River Road Entertainment announced it has secured the Wilson's "life rights" (as well as those of his wife Melinda Wilson) and is actively developing a feature film about the legendary singer, songwriter and leader of The Beach Boys with Oren Moverman (director and co-writer of The Messenger) handling the script.

What's done is done...fine. But I could feel the passion in Cody's words and...Read More

You can agree with Movieline's Christopher Rosen and suggest that Transformers 3 star Shia LaBeouf is shilling insincerely by saying that "the last hour of this movie is the greatest action sequence of Michael Bay's career, which would put it on the same level as the greatest action ever made.

"You don't breathe for the last hour. There's just no letup, but it's also not completely overwhelming and disconnected, as the second movie was. You didn't know what was fighting what or where you were geography-wise. There was no way to be able to tell a...Read More

Jake Kasdan's Bad Teacher (Sony, 6.24) isn't funny. It's horrible, in fact. I'm sorry to be judgmental but any film critic who's given this catastrophe a pass or called it...you know, amusing or enjoyably raucous (and there are plenty who have) really does have to be sent to detention and regarded askance. Some people can't be trusted with comedies, and anyone who looks at this film and says "yeah, has some funny bits, not bad" has truly questionable values, not just as a cineaste but as a human being.

Because the first 44 minutes of...Read More

Jason Staham has starred in exactly one good movie -- The Bank Job. (He co-starred in Lock Stock, etc.) I guess that'll never happen again . Memo to Clive Owen (plus his agent and manager): Don't ever wear a moustache in a film ever again.

If I was all bloody and tied down to a chair, I'm fairly sure I could manage to do an aerial back flip and then land just so. Did I say "fairly sure"? I know I could!

"In modern American politics, Michelle Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy. Not medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy -- crazy in the sense that she's living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies." -- from Matt Taibbi's "Michelle Bachmann's Holy War" (Rolling Stone, posted 6.22).

So Monday's guess/presumption was right: Warren Beatty's just-announced Paramount film, which Deadline's Michael Fleming said would be a comedy, will be about Howard Hughes. The 74 year-old Beatty will play the withered mogul with "part of the plot involving an affair he had with a young woman in the later years of his life," says Fleming. The woman might be played by Evan Rachel Wood or Rooney Mara. Other possible costars include Andrew Garfield, Alec Baldwin, Annette Bening, Shia La Beouf and Jack Nicholson.

Boston Herald critic Jim Verniere picked up this poster at Intemporel, a Paris shop at 22, rue Saint-Martin. He paid about 320 euros, or about 30 euros off the official price.

I had a persistent thought while watching Chris Weitz's A Better Life (Summit, 6.24) that Damian Bichir has given the best male lead performance I've seen this year. Yes, better than Brad Pitt's permanently-pissed-off dad in The Tree of Life and as strong and winning as Paul Giamatti's small-town wrestling coach in Win Win. Most of the award-worthy performances will emerge after Labor Day, of course, but Bichir is a contender right now.

He portrays a Los Angeles-based illegal alien who works as a tree surgeon and has a son (Jose Julian ) who pities and...Read More

TheWrap's Tim Keaneally is reporting that Jackass star Ryan Dunn had a blood-alcohol concentration of .196, or more than double the legal limit, when he bought the farm in a flaming car wreck in Pennsylvania on Monday morning.

(l.) Roger Ebert; (r.) the late Ryan Dunn.

Roger Ebert apologized yesterday to Dunn's friend Bam Margera and other tweeters who jumped all over him for criticizing the stupidity of Dunn driving under the influence, and for saying "friends don't let jackasses drink and drive."

Ebert needs to go right back on Twitter right now and tell...Read More

George Clooney and Elisabetta Canalis have parted ways, most likely because two weeks ago Canalis said in Italy's Chi magazine that "for the time being I am happy" but "I am a firm believer in marriage" and "in the future I will be married."

When Canalis said "for the time being" what she really meant was "I'm getting fed up with this shit, if you really want to know" and "the time is fucking nigh." And one way or another this came out in private discussions with George and that was all she wrote.

Sooner or later all stunningly...Read More

It's generally agreed that the Academy's new Best Picture tabulation system (i.e., a film must earn at least 5% of the first-place votes to earn a Best Picture nomination) does no favors for those "very good but not quite creme de la creme" contenders that might have landed Best Picture nominations in '09 and '10 as one of the "lower five," so to speak. Movies like A Serious Man or Blue Valentine or The Kids Are All Right or Up In The Air.

TheWrap's Steve Pond has now proven the point by measuring the strength of various Best Picture nominees from...Read More

Star's Dylan Howard is reporting that Brad Ruderman, a junior-league Bernie Madoff now doing time for bilking investors out of $25 million with a ponzi scheme, lost $311,300 to Tobey Maguire in a 2007 high-stakes poker game, including one losing hand of $110,000.

And now Maguire is being sued by lawyers for clients whose funds were embezzled by Ruderman "in the hope of recouping some of their lost savings," the story says. Others being sued over this same issue include The Notebook director Nick Cassavetes and Welcome Back, Kotter star Gabe Kaplan.

Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben...Read More

It seems almost shocking that this film came out 28 years ago. I'm extremely sorry that so few director-writers these days (including the present-day incarnation of James L. Brooks) seem to know much about mixing refinement, uptightness and understated bawdyness to just the right degree. The look in Jack Nicholson's eyes when he says "a lot of drinks" is pure elation. Indiewire columnist Anne Thompson was the unit publicist on this film.

What's the point of using your right hand to cover a portion of a breast when your left arm is covering it anyway? What's the point of being so prim and chaste that you feel a need to cover a portion of a breast when the basic allure of the ad is about your being nude in the first place? If you're going to pose for that kind of photograph, get down and do that thing and don't be such a prude about it. That's all I'm saying.

I'm actually also bothered by the shiny, air-brushed, mannequin-smooth sheen...Read More

I couldn't get into James Franco's The Broken Tower last night, but according to Indiewire's Eric Kohn I didn't miss a masterpiece. Franco's study of the life of poet Hart Crane, which Franco stars in and directs, is "shot in a scrappy, handheld style nimbly lifted from early Godard, [and is] meant to represent Crane's creative process. [It's] predominantly a cerebral exercise in experimental analysis, but it feels stationary, repeating the same motifs and attitudes ad infinitum until the credits finally roll.

"Notwithstanding cameos from Franco friends and colleagues, including Michael Shannon in the fleeting role of a sailor, the movie...Read More

Lee Tamahori's The Devil's Double (Lionsgate, 7.29) is an absorbing, professionally made, (mostly) true story by way of a visit to a Middle Eastern nouveau riche insane asylum. In his first lead role, Dominic Cooper portrays the homicidal and demonic Uday Hussein as well as his double, Latif Yahia. The film uses Yahia's story (which is partly fictionalized) to create a portrait of evil and cruelty and madness extremis.

It played last night at the LA Film Festival. I saw it at Sundance '11 and found it generally engrossing as far as it went. But...Read More

In response to this morning's Glenn Kenny/Some Came Running article containing a 12.8.75 letter from Stanley Kubrick to projectionists which specified that Barry Lyndon was shot in 1.66 and should be projected this way, former Kubrick assistant and keeper of the Kubrick flame Leon Vitali has sent me a long and detailed reply:

"Thanks for this," Vitali begins. "Hopefully (though I'm sure, probably not) I can explain fully the situation as to the origin of the confusion. I can also tell you what Stanley explained to me and under what circumstances. I will try to make everything as clear as possible...Read More

The Manhattan-based Edith Zimmerman has written a rash and brash but nicely phrased profile of Captain America star Chris Evans in the July GQ ("American Marvel"). It's actually more of a first-person, the-dog-ate-my-notes, this-is-how-I-kind-of-screwed-things-up confession piece, which is what I like about it. It's kind of a Hunter S. Thompson approach to a 21st Century celebrity profile from a tradition-defying, Bridesmaids-influenced, hang-it-all journalist who isn't much for kissing celebrity ass.

(l.) Chris Evans; (r.) Edith Zimmerman.

Or...no, wait. She is into "celebrity ass", so to speak, when she's doing the interview and...Read More

Some Came Running's Glenn Kenny has published a copy of a 12.8.75 letter written by Stanley Kubrick and sent to projectionists that states unequivocally that Barry Lyndon was shot at 1.66 and that it should be projected at this aspect ratio, "and in no event at less than 1.75 to 1."

12.8.75 letter from Stanley Kubrick to projectionists about the particulars of presenting Barry Lyndon in theatres.

This is the irrefutable, concrete, smoking-gun proof (which was supplied to Kenny by screenwriter and former Time critic Jay Cocks) that I've been right all along about...Read More

As Keith Olbemann's new Countdown-on-Current debuted last night at 8 pm, I was watching Anne Buford's Elevate -- a humane, heartfelt and well-crafted doc about young basketball players from Senegal -- at the LA Film Festival.

Here's the last ten minutes of Monday night's show. Each night's broadcast will re-air at 9 am, 12 noon and 3 pm the following day. (That's what it says on my Time Warner guide.) It's lamentable that it's not airing in high-def, but I guess I can roll with the 1990s look of it....for now.

Aired last night, posted by Deadline at 5:51 am this morning:

Some editor...actually probably at least a couple of editors at the L.A. Times thought the older beardo on the left with the Dodgers baseball cap was Steven Spielberg. My initial thought was that he looks like Art Linson. I'm presuming that when Matt Donnelly, author of the "Ministry of Gossip" story about Spielberg-Bay-LaBeouf-Fox, first saw the layout he said to himself, "Oh, Jesus God no...no!"

6.21, 8:30 am Update: The error was corrected last night around 11:15 pm. The Times' editor that "this post originally contained a picture mislabeled by the photo service as a...Read More

The only Warren Beatty project I know of that could reasonably deploy his talents as a director, producer, writer and star would be his Howard Hughes property. Because he's too old to play Dick Tracy again...right? A septugenarian comic-book hero sounds like lunacy. TheWrap and Variety reported late this afternoon that a Beatty pic with the 74 year-old hyphenate doing all the above will roll later this year for Paramount. No title, no announced subject...keep 'em guessing.

Warren Beatty, Brad Grey at 2007 Golden Globes after-party. (Pic taken by yours truly.)

Deadline's Michael Fleming reported...Read More

Awards Daily's Sasha Stone, Boxoffice.com's Phil Contrino and I recorded Oscar Poker #37 this morning. We spoke of Drive and The Green Hornet and The Broken Tower and I-forget-what-else...but we covered eight or nine topics. Here's a non-iTunes, stand-alone link. The intro-exit music is from a Bruce Springsteen + Clarence Clemons track that Sasha hasn't yet identified.

This is a minor deal, but the first time I heard the line "we had creative differences...I was creative, he was different" was from Nicholas Meyer. I heard him say it at a party at Michael Phillips' home in 1985. He was referring to a dispute he'd had about a Spanish Civil War movie with the late Stephen J. Friedman, whom he described as "that horrible man." Does the line go back earlier? Did it come from someone else?

Hey, that's an idea for a discussion thread. What people have you come to know in the film industry whom you...Read More

Last week at the Landmark I happened to see this trailer for Michel Leclerc's The Names of Love (2.24). t played right after the trailer for Crazy Stupid Love, and it seemed right away that the French film is more relaxed, less formulaic, more mature, funnier, more natural and less agitated.

Directed and co-written by Leclerc (along with Bya Kismi), The Names of Love is "a semi-biographical film documenting the life of a young woman who uses sex as a weapon to influence right-wing individuals and conservative Muslims."

Bahia Benmahmoud...Read More

I've been saying for years that many Saul Bass one-sheets have seemed "better" than the films they've promoted. But Bass doesn't have a monopoly on this type of thing. One example is the one-sheet for Don Siegel's Baby Face Nelson ('57) which, I feel, is more successful as a piece of high-impact design than the film is on its own terms. I don't think Siegel's gangster film stinks -- it's good pulpy fun, but the intense poster promises more than Mickey Rooney and Carolyn Jones deliver.

I feel roughly the same way about the poster for Robert...Read More

The LA Film Festival information page for James Franco 's The Broken Tower, a black-and-white drama about gay poet Hart Crane, says that "this program contains mature content...no one 17 and under will be admitted." That's one way of confirming that the film contains a graphic gay sex scene. It shows tonight at 8 pm at LA LIVE Regal.

I still don't have a ticket and no one I've appealed to has responded, so I guess my only shot is to wait in the rush line and hope for the best.

The Broken Tower...Read More

This 24-minute clip is a couple of days old. I only just got around to it late last night. But this is my idea of stirring gladiatorial combat between a highly intelligent, fast-footed leftie comedian-commentator and an opportunistic, stonewall-minded rightwing TV newsman.

42West announced the full cast of Woody Allen's The Bop Decameron, which will begin shooting in Rome on 7.11. And it's hard to imagine that a film costarring Jesse Eisenberg, Greta Gerwig, Penelope Cruz, Roberto Benigni, Woody Allen, Alec Baldwin, Judy Davis and Ellen Page could be a problem. Costars include Ornella Muti and Alison Pill (i.e., Zelda Fitzgerald in Midnight in Paris). I'll be expecting at least one scene featuring Eisenberg or Gerwig buzzing around on a scooter.

Warner Bros. marketers are trying to sell the notion that Glenn Ficarra and John Requa's Crazy Stupid Love (Warner Bros., 7.29) is another Steve Carell formula comedy in the vein of The 40 Year-Old Virgin (i.e., insecure, socially clumsy, sexually-inexperienced schmuck tries to make out with girls). But I'm told the film is more of a La Ronde-type ensemble piece with all kinds of criss-crossing fates, and that it's nicely written by animated-feature and Fred Claus screenwriter Dan Fogelman. We'll see.

It turns out that in the separation of Megan Fox from Transformers 3, Michael Bay, who ostensibly fired her, was only Charlie Partanna. According to a statement made by Bay to London's Daily Mail, the whacking of Fox was ordered by none other than Don Corrado Prizzi -- i.e., Steven Spielberg, the film's executive producer.

Fox, who costarred in the first two Transformer pics, had been cast in Transformers 3. But in September 2009, shortly before production began, she gave an interview to Wonderland, a British rag, in which she said Bay was like Hitler on his sets. Bay told...Read More

I attended an LAFF "Coffee Talk: Screenwriters" panel at 5 pm today at LA LIVE Regal. The two "stars" (in terms of the number of questions asked by the audience) were Diablo Cody and Dustin Lance Black; Christopher Marcus & Stephen McFeely (The Chronicles of Narnia, Captain America) and Josh Olson (A History of Violence), no offense, were back-up.

(l. to r.) Josh Olson, Dustin Lance Black, Diablo Cody and (I think) Christopher Marcus.

The most exciting bit of information was Cody announcing that her dream writing project, which she hasn't begun working on (not even in...Read More

A couple of weeks ago I drove out to El Monte and bought a little white Chinese-made scooter for $1500 -- brand new, tax and license and registration, all in. It costs $60 bucks to fill up my car and $5 to fill up the scooter tank, and it gets about 100 mpg. And I can get to places much faster on the scooter than I can with the car, and you never have to pay for parking, ever. And it's a lot of fun. I rode a scooter through Paris three weeks ago and it was heaven.

Reggie Brown is a fairly decent Obama impersonator, but his jokes about Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Michelle Bachmann and other righties, delivered last night at the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans, were deemed overly scathing. And so he was booted...er, escorted off the stage. That's the right for you -- fall into lockstep and "talk the talk" and don't be any kind of impudent smartass, or you're gone. Here's a longer clip.

Boxoffice.com is projecting that The Green Lantern's total domestic theatrical gross will top out around $135 million after earning $52,685,000 this weekend. Indiewire's Anthony D'Allesandro reports that Green Lantern grosses "fell 22% between Friday and Saturday with another 15% today [i.e., Sunday]."

Warner Bros. will pocket around 90% of the $52 mill and maybe...what, 75% or 80% of the grand total? Even when you factor in overseas revenue, DVD/Bluray and pay/cable, etc., it still looks like a shortfaller considering the $300 million tab ($200 million to actually make the damn thing and, according to WB honcho...Read More

This Jack Torrance Father's Day card was initially tweeted (I think) by Toy Story 3 director Lee Unkrich.

My father (who passed in 2008) turned me on to a few films that I admire, respect and still watch every now and then: The Four Feathers, Twelve O'Clock High, High Noon, Hiroshima Mon Amour, The Gunfighter, Gunga Din, Battleground, Sweet Smell of Success. I tried to return the favor occasionally, and he was generally receptive in the '70 and '80s and early '90s. But I gave up on him when he called The Limey a piece of...Read More

I've got an hour's bike ride and other Sunday morning stuff to accomplish so I don't know about attending the LA Film Festival's Coffee Talk with Directors panel, which starts at 11 am (or 44 minutes from now) at Regal Cinema #12. The three panelists will be Phillip Noyce (Salt, Clear and Present Danger, Rabbit-Proof Fence), Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko, The Box) and Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland, 30 Minutes or Less).

I'll definitely be attending the 5 pm Coffee with Screenwriters panel with Dustin Lance Black (Milk, J. Edgar), Diablo Cody (Young Adult, Juno), Christopher Marcus...Read More

This morning at 8:51 am Glenn Kenny (@ExtAngel) tweeted that "reams and reams of furious debate and still no input from @wellshwood means 'cultural vegetables' (being re-discussed by Dan Kois, A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis in tomorrow's N.Y. Times) is really a complete non-issue."

I didn't get into it because I said it all on 5.4 in response to Kois' original N.Y. Times Sunday Magazine article, and I was re-posting an old piece at that. Because I'd addressed the issue 12 years ago in an essay that basically said that vegetable-like, ever-so-slightly boring films are generally...Read More

"Overall, the film is incredible. In the oldest sense of that word, it is awe-inspiring and grotesque. Stunning and heartfelt. It's a love letter to a country, a time and a frowning clown singing mournfully about a weeping trumpet. We are all bad people. We hurt the ones we love. There can be no laughter without suffering." -- from a 10.5.10 Film School Rejects review by Cole Abalus.

"God gave Mitt Romney the dashing handsome looks of a commanding Presidential candidate, but he stopped at the voice." -- Albert Brooks during last night's Drive after-party at the Standard Hotel.

I was heartbroken earlier this week when I failed to capture iPhone video footage of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. discussing the issues behind The Last Mountain at the Westside Pavillion, so here's a pretty good David Poland interview with Kennedy and Last Mountain director Bill Haney.

I talked last night to a geeky guy at the Regal as we waited for Drive to begin, and he said he "loved" The Green Lantern. I also met a 30something mom and her daughter who really liked Lantern and had no trouble following the plot threads. "But all the critics hate it!," I said to the mom. "I mean, really hated it." She shrugged her shoulders.

What is this? Tell me there's not a big wave of genuine hoi polloi support for this thing. Box-office numbers for CG megaflicks don't mean a thing...

The more I stare at those intelligent ape eyes and seething expressions, the more intrigued I am. And the San Francisco ape rampage looks exciting (if a little too hard-drivey). Could Rise of The Planet of the Apes (20th Century Fox, 8.5) be a decent film after all?

The IMDB says Harrison Ford has nothing lined up for the future. Cowboys & Aliens (Universal, 7.29) was his last activity. It's probably the same old "I get my quote before I read the script" thing. If Ford was smart he'd just get to work with anyone who sounds or looks good, playing the crusty, weather-beaten oldster who can't quiet bring himself to holster his six-shooter. Imagine Ford in a Nicholas Winding Refn film.

I saw Drive again last night, and it felt just as assured and double-downed and Peter Yates-y as it did last month in Cannes. And then I ran into the very cool Albert Brooks at the after-party, which was held on the rooftop of the Standard Hotel on Flower Street. And he told me a few things about his part and the film and paid me a nice compliment ("I've read you all along, and you're the 'fuck you to the studios' guy...somebody's gotta do that, right?") and...well, it was all to the good.

Friday, 6.17, 10:55 pm

I recently got my mitts on some Twilight Zone action figures, and right away I was taken aback by the footwear worn by Richard Kiel's Kanamit character from To Serve Man (episode 89, season 3). Kiel was chosen to play an alien because he's tall, and to make him even taller the producers had him wear high platforms...fine. But why would an actual Kanamit wear platforms? It makes no sense. Short people who can't accept themselves wear platforms -- not tall people. Why would a fat person wear a fat suit?

The odd thing is that the...Read More

I see or hear Danny McBride, and I stop laughing. Not only has he never, ever been funny, but there's something about his Irish warlock eyes and grizzly unshaven hobo face that just suffocates all thoughts of wit or merriment. I see him and say to myself, "Okay, here comes the boorish lowlife with the pot belly who think he's funny...Jesus." The only McBride performance I've even half-liked is the reluctant birdegroom in Up In The Air.

EMBED-30 Minutes or...

The Criterion grain monks of the Abbey of St.Martin have done it again. They've taken a splendidly captured black-and-white classic -- in this case Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955) -- and made it look a little bit grainier and fuzzier in certain portions than it did on the last DVD version. And, paradoxically, sometimes a little better. And with a wider image. So it's not bad, but it hasn't given me one of those Bluray highs that I live for either.

All I know is that I was 100% delighted with the MGM...Read More

Tree of Life cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezski (a.k.a. "Chivo") has told Cahiers du Cinema that Terrence Malick is working on a six-hour version of the Pitt-Penn-dinosaur flick.

"What I've seen [of this] is absolutely incredible," Lubezki says. "It's wonderful. The longer version will likely, for the most part, relate to the children part. There were outstanding things...we've shot many, many things about Jack's childhood -- his friends, his evolution, his changes, his awareness of the loss of his childhood. I don't know if I'm supposed to say all of this!"

On 5.17 I wrote the following from Cannes: "I heard from...Read More

The Regal Cinema theatre where Bernie played last night is huge -- as big as the Radio City Music Hall is you don't count the multiple balconies in that famous house. The ceiling near the front has to be 75 or 80 feet high. The screen is the biggest I've ever seen in Los Angeles. (Really.) I was sitting in the fourth row, and it was like I was two or three years old and seeing my first movie. The image was massive.

Bernie director Richard Linklater at LAFF after-party -- Thursday, 6.16, 10:55 pm.

...

I went to the opening night of the LA Film Festival last night (i.e., Richard Linklater's Bernie plus the after-party). I drove into the underground LA Live lot around 5:15 pm and left around 11:30 pm, and it cost me $25 bills . I'm not going to pay between $200 and $225 to see movies down there over the next nine days. I don't know what I'm going to do, but I'll probably park 1/3 or 1/2 mile west of the Regal and then ride my bike the rest of the way.

There's apparently some friend-of-the-festival deal that lets you park in...Read More

I love that Donald Sutherland and Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi will be occasional guests on Keith Olbermann's new "Countdown" show, which debuts on Current TV on Monday, 6.20 at 8 p.m. I've never watched Current before (it's channel 142 on my Time-Warner system) but I guess I will now. I'm disappointed, of course, that it's not available in high-def. I don't like 1.37 to 1 analog images.

Current TV is available in 60 million homes; during the last quarter it reportedly averaged 30,000 viewers in primetime.

I experienced a form of mild humiliation during last night's LA FilmFest opening-night soiree. It was due to a light-hearted ping-pong volley that was mostly about, I'm ashamed to admit, astrology. I listened because she was somewhere between an 8.5 and a 9, but by the time it was over I got an earful, you bet.

To some extent I can understand, I think, what it was like to be a black man in the Jim Crow South, a Jew in Weimar Germany of the early 1930s, and a gay man in the pre-Stonewall era. Because I am a Scorpio -- an astrological...Read More

Yesterday afternoon I spoke with novelist-screenwriter Roger Simon, who wrote the early versions of A Better Life (he ended up with a "story by" credit) before being rewritten by Eric Eason. But the basic bones of the screenplay are his. We did about 20 minutes in the offices of IDPR on Hollywood Boulevard.

Simon is CEO of Pajamas Media. He's the author of ten novels, including the Moses Wine detective series, and six screenplays including Enemies, a Love Story, Bustin' Loose, My Man Adam and Scenes from a Mall. His first non-fiction book, Blacklisting...Read More

Environmental activist and Last Mountain star Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. delivered some brilliant and impassioned remarks last night following a special invitational screening at the Westside Pavillion. I only managed to capture a small portion of what he said (you don't want to hear my excuses), but at least I captured a good riff about how you can't rely on the news media to report the really tough stories because most of the news orgs are compromised to varying degrees by their corporate owners.

Yes, Kennedy has a hoarse and scratchy voice but he's a...Read More

I ran into Warner Bros. Entertainment president & COO Alan Horn last night during an after-party for The Last Mountain at the Westside Pavillion. I asked him about that $300 million figure that some say is the tab for The Green Lantern. Correct, he said, if you count marketing. The film cost about $200 million and the worldwide marketing total is about $100 million.

Paddy Considine's Tyrannosaur, one of the most assuredly artful and emotionally affecting films I've seen this year, is playing on Friday (i.e., tomorrow) and Sunday at the L.A. Film Festival. I'd been presuming that an opportunity to interview Considine would be there for interested journalists. But Considine isn't attending the festival deu to being on a shoot somewhere, and he's not doing any phoners either, I'm told.

Tyrannosaur costars Peter Mullan, Olivia Colman, Eddie Marsan.

And there's no YouTube trailer, although I'm informed that one is being finalized as we speak. I don't get the absence...Read More

This is one of the most romantic and beautiful couple-in-love photos I've ever seen in my life. It was taken last night in Vancouver by Getty Images' Rich Lam, and wasn't, it would appear, "staged." It's not just in the same league as that "Kiss by the Hotel de Ville" photo taken in Paris in 1950 by Robert Doisneau as well as Alfred Eisenstaedt's "sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J Day" -- it's also a lot sexier.

Official caption: "A couple kisses while police walk in the streets during riots following...Read More

If the past is any indication, for the rest of his life Elvis Mitchell is going to lose or quit a never-ending series of cool film-industry jobs. And within two or three months of each departure he's going to land another new cool film-industry job. Since the '90s he's been one of the most frequently hired guys in liberal Hollywoodland. And a cat -- incapable of not landing on his feet. Mitchell's latest bounce-back, announced by Indiewrie's Anne Thompson, is a gig as "outsourced film curator" at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Mitchell will book films and guests.

Rep. Anthony Weiner will resign this afternoon. Revealing your tumescent animal member on any social-media platform robs you of any aura of authority. The more you allow Mr. Happy to run the show, the weaker and stupider you are. And it breaks my heart because Weiner's speeches about the corrupted dynamic of Washington power were right on the money.

I'm hearing that Weiner isn't independently wealthy and needs a job. What's he going to do? Who's going to hire the poor guy? He's radioactive.

Until Monday night's Republican presidential contenders debate, I hadn't quite realized how tiny Rep. Michelle Bachmann is. Notice how shrimp-like she seems compared to the other guys (i.e., much shorter than Ron Paul, who's about 5'9"), even in heels. She appears to be 4' 11", which is right next to dwarf territory. And nothing I'd heard or read about her previously even mentioned the height factor...odd.

(l. to r.) Former Sen. Rick Santorum, Bachmann, former House speaker Newt Gingrich, former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney, Texas Rep. Ron Paul, Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, businessman Herman Cain (i.e.,...

All this time I've been presuming that the big Moneyball dynamic would be between Brad Pitt and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. And maybe it will be in the actual film. But in this just-out teaser it's between Pitt and Jonah Hill. You can feel the almost Martin-and-Lewis-like rapport. Pitt is the energy guy with the rap and the set-up, and Hill (pre-weight-loss) delivers the punchline.

Sony/Columbia will open Moneyball -- directed by Bennett Miller, written by Aaron Sorkin, Stan Chervin and Steven Zaillian, and produced by Scott Rudin, Michael De Luca and Rachael Horovitz -- on 9.23.

HE's Dylan Wells attended the New York premiere of Andrew Rossi's Page One: Inside the New York Times (Magnolia Pictures/Participant Media) on Monday, 6.13, at the new Elinor Bunin Monroe Film Center on West 65th. It's interesting to hear a view from a 21 year-old art student who's developed a half-notion or suspicion that the Times, solid organization that it clearly is and always has been, isn't necessarily the most trustworthy news source around.

CBS newsman Morley afer, N.Y. Times media columnist & reporter David Carr during Page One after-party at the Elinor Bunin Monroe Film Center.

In agreeing to play Jor-El, the biological father of Superman, in Christopher Nolan's Man of Steel, Russell Crowe has essentially taken out a huge trade ad that says, "I am now a high-end character actor....I am no longer the bankable movie star I was when I made The Insider and Gladiator and Master and Commander and Robin Hood. If Marlon Brando could take this paycheck role in the 1978 Superman, so can I. And if Nick Nolte could downshift and become a cool character actor in the '90s, so can I. It's all cool."

John Edwards' mug shot photos, taken earlier this month, were released this morning. To me that smile says, "I didn't do anything that bad, not really, and I'm going to charm and finagle my way out of these charges...yeah!" Or it says, "I'm not going to frown and look contrite...eff that...that's for people who are guilty, unlike myself!"

If I was a six-foot-eight gay black guy doing a life term in a prison that Edwards might conceivably be sentenced to, I'd be wetting my lips right now. If Edwards does any kind of prison time anywhere, his...Read More

Comic-book CG-crap moves like The Green Lantern don't absolutely need major fanboy sites to cheer them on, but they're definitely in trouble if brilliant, high-end geek critics like Hitfix's Drew McWeeny give them a thumbs-down. This morning McWeeny shoved his gleaming switchblade between the ribs of this hugely expensive (reportedly $300 million) Warner Bros. film. I think it's over now. It's a dead movie.

"I want to like Green Lantern," McWeeney begins. "I don't want to be the guy who calls the time of death at the scene of the crime. [But] I don't like Green...Read More

After joining Carey Mulligan, Zoe Kazan and Paul Dano at the Lincoln Center Institute's Junior Spring Benefit at the Grammercy Park Hotel, the N.Y. Observer's Nate Freeman asked Mulligan about a book adaptation she'll be making soon.

"What book adaptation?" Ms. Kazan gasped.

"Oh, I'm doing this little known thing, The Great Gatsby."

"Oh my god, that's amazing!" Kazan said. "Are you playing Gatsby?"

"Yes," Ms. Mulligan said. "I'm playing Jay Gatsby. It's a really big role for me, I'm gonna wear a sock down my trousers, give it everything."

The future Daisy Buchanan said filming would start in September, in director...Read More

HE reader Bill McCuddy suggested this morning that my recent riff about Midnight In Paris "being better the second time would make a good column where we all weigh in. Not the bona fides but surprises that underwhelmed the first time and then get better with each subsequent viewing.

"For me, two come to mind immediately. One is Michael Clayton, which I only liked the first time and love now. The other is Duplicity, which is so much fun to listen to now. Great writing, giant shaggy-dog story, good fun. Other suggestions?"

Wells to McCuddy: Tony Gilroy makes movies that take a...Read More

I don't have a big argument with yesterday's decision by the Academy to install a merit system into the voting for Best Picture, but I'm asking myself "what's the upside?" In 2009 the Academy expanded the Best Picture field to ten nominations. Now the Academy is requiring a minimum of 5% of first-place votes in order to receive a Best Picture nomination, which could result in only eight or seven or nine Best Picture finalists. Or five, even.

So basically they're declaring that it's better to weed out some of the pikers -- to focus...Read More

This morning a publicist working for Nicholas Winding Refn's Drive was wondering why I was so keen to see it at the LA Film Festival this weekend, since I'd already seen it in Cannes. That's true, I said, but with only half of my hearing. My right ear was totally clogged during my Thursday evening screening (5.19) in the Grand Palais, I explained, and I'd love to see it again now that both ears are back in operation.

Nice things that put you in a great mood are rarely interesting. It's always more fun to write about anger or irritation and opposition...Read More

Honestly? I think this new Screen Gems one-sheet is just as creepily effective in its own way as the original Sam Peckinpah-Dustin Hoffman version. Okay, they could have done without the slogan. The art very clearly conveys what the basic conflict is.

L.A. Times blogger columnist Randy Lewis (Pop & Hiss) is reporting that Martin Scorsese's George Harrison: Living in the Material World, a documentary about the deceased former Beatle, will be out later this year. Lewis recently got the skinny from Olivia Harrison, widow of the late George Harrison, in Las Vegas,

And that's all -- no extra questions, no digging, no curiosity, no nothing.

"I just came from New York and Monday I'm going to see [the film] again," Olivia tells Lewis. "We're real excited about it...Marty is such a great storyteller, and of course...Read More

After having written what some considered to be a tone-deaf, doesn't-wanna-get-it pan of X-Men: First Class, L.A. Weekly critic Karina Longworth has now slapped down Martin Campbell's The Green Lantern (Warner Bros., 6.17). Not that Longworth isn't "right" -- the across-the-board word is that this $300 million dollar film stinks -- but she's now presumed to be semi-unreceptive to this kind of film going in.

The Green Lantern "never bothers to suggest that [character and plot elements] really matter," she laments. "Campbell's ADD style privileges spectacle over story -- so much so that...Read More

It suddenly hit me yesterday when I picked up my LA FilmFest press pass and newsprint schedule (which uses what looks like five-point typeface) that there are 15 if not 20 films and events that I'd like to catch over this 11-day film festival. Of which I might actually catch 10 or 12. The mitigating factor, of course, is that every one of them requires a 35- to 40-minute trek from West Hollywood to downtown, and then having to find parking, etc. I'm putting my red bicycle on my car's rear bike rack...cooler that way.

As...Read More

The Hello! story summary that accompanies this photo of Mildred Beana and her 13 year-old son Joseph feels a wee bit fake and gussied up. I'm not sure that copy is required to begin with anyway.

"Once upon a time in Louisiana, waaaaay back in early October 2009 when we were all 20 months younger and our hearts were lighter and Barack Obama was about nine months into the first year of his administration, I visited the Shreveport set of Rod Lurie's Straw Dogs..."

Red River (yes, the same one that John Wayne and Montgomery Clift crossed) adjacent to the Sumner house used for Rod Lurie's Straw Dogs.

I'm sorry but it's very hard for me to write up a set-visit story that happened this long ago. I tried to do it about an...Read More

I heard this morning from an old friend whom I hadn't spoken with since the early '80s. He told me that his 2005 divorce from his former wife, whom I knew in the old days, was basically about her decision to become a full-time gay woman after flirting with bisexuality for many years. You have to roll with these situations when they happen, but imagine living in a kind of limbo state about your true sexual nature for five or six decades. My first thought is always, "What took you so long?"

The typical beer-drinking, ESPN-watching, straight-guy response to this kind of...Read More

It's odd, I think, that Variety's Justin Kroll (or his editor) would use quote marks to highlight the name of the rock group that Mick Jagger has been playing with for the last 49 years. It just seems weird that a writer or editor for the oldest showbiz trade in existence would do that. Editor: "Hey, Justin, a rock group's name is like a play or a book title or a title of a movie...right?" Kroll: "Yeah, I guess so. It's a performing act and you have to pay to see them....same difference."

Quotes are a...Read More

You're good for most LA Film Fest screenings and events if you have a yellow press badge, but you have to specially RSVP for certain special screenings and events. One of them is "An Evening With James Franco" on Monday, 6.20. So I RSVPed to it this morning, and soon after received this reply: "Jeffrey -- We have limited tickets to this event so we'll note your request and let you know of the status closer to the event."

So I wrote back and said, "Can I be honest? I don't care that much about attending this thing anyway." In response...Read More

Three days of coverage about Tennesse's Bonnaroo Music Festival (or whatever it's precisely called) from Whoa magazine's Jett Wells -- Day One, Day Two and Day Three. Driving his mom's car, Jett and Emily left Sunday morning from Manchester, Tennessee; they arrived back in Brooklyn at 3:15 am this morning.

I only just caught up yesterday with Robin Harris' 5.18.11 piece about how streaming video is bringing about the death of Bluray. It made me very, very angry. Here are several statements from the article coupled with my reactions.

Harris: "The Bluray gamble has failed. Streaming has won the war for consumer's hearts and minds. Bluray will limp along, but the action is in streaming."

Wells comment: In other words, access to fresh content matters much more than quality of image? I watched Mike Nichols' Day of the Dolphin on Netflix Streaming three or four weeks ago. It didn't...Read More

Awards Daily's Sasha Stone, Boxoffice.com's Phil Contrino and I recorded Oscar Poker #36 on Sunday afternoon. The best part of the discussion happens when we get into the waning career of Jim Carrey (Mr. Popper's Punguins), and where he seems to be at these days, etc. Do all comedians experience a hot-flash period followed by the inevitable slowdown and decline?

I asked Contrino to explain the bigger-than-expected numbers for Super 8, and the lower-than-expected numbers for X-Men: First Class. The "monster stuff doesn't work at all," Sasha said, but her daughter "loved it." We also discussed two...Read More

Madonna's W.E., opening later this year from the Weinstein Co., is an oddball title. Right away I said to myself, "Nope...doesn't work." I'm not sure if it stands for (a) Windsor Estate or (b) Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII, or something else.

The movie is a time-jump thing "about two fragile but determined women -- Wally Winthrop and Wallis Simpson -- separated by more than six decades," says the synopsis. "In 1998 Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish) is obsessed with the story of King Edward VIII's (James D'Arcy) abdication of the British throne for American divorcée Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough). But...Read More

N.Y. Times guys Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes are reporting that the big studios are feeling a bit antsy about bringing their films to ComicCon 2011. Warner Bros., Disney, DreamWorks and the Weinstein Co. are sitting it out this year, and Marvel also might not attend.

This change-of-heart is essentially due to a conclusion, they say, that ComicCon buzz about this or that film, however enthusiastic it may be inside Hall H, is hermetic and unto itself and doesn't translate to the general public. And if your movie tanks with the ComicCon crowd then you're...Read More

My profound regrets over the death earlier today of producer Laura Ziskin, 61, from cancer. I never thought of her as a friend but she trusted me as far as it went when I called for help on various Entertainment Weekly, L.A. Times and People magazine stories in the '90s . She dealt with me fairly, considerately, respectfully, and I tried to return those tributes in kind.

Ziskin's producing credits included Hero ('92), To Die For ('95), As Good As It Gets ('97), the three Spider-Man films, the 2002 and 2007 Oscar awards and Stealth ('05). Actually, she wouldn't take my...Read More

For what it's worth I saw Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris again last night. (My first viewing was on 5.11 at the Cannes Film Festival.) I presumed it would play more or less the same, but to my surprise it gained. It's a little bit cleaner and more carefully structured than I remembered. So I understand the popularity -- it's a very likable and highly satisfying film in a sort of easygoing, light-touch way.

The Westside Pavillion theatre I saw it in (#1) was completely filled. It's weird to see movies projected at what looks...Read More

Earlier today two photos of the recovering Rep. Gabrielle Giffords were posted on her Facebook page. They were taken almost four weeks ago, on 5.17 -- roughly 21 weeks after she was shot point blank in the head during a Tuscon political gathering. She looks serene and mentally attuned (as far as visual impressions can convey this). She's suffered a slight alteration in the appearance of her left eye, but otherwise it's amazing that she looks so good.

I'd like to know how much she's really recovered and what her actual prospects are, but that information isn't...Read More

"At nearly three hours, The Big Country takes its time with each scene," writes Tony Dayoub in a 6.8 posting on Nomad Editions Widescreen, an iPad publication. "But [it does so] with a deliberate purpose and payoff that can now be fully appreciated [on the Bluray version].

"Take my favorite scene, near the climax: The Major (Charles Bickford) has brought loyal foreman Leech (Charlton Heston) and his men to the narrow entry into Blanco Canyon, which separates his ranch from Hannassey's. They've been lured there after Rufus Hannassey (Burl Ives) had ordered Julie Maragon...Read More

Could someone please explain why Act of Valor, a "very patriotic" Navy SEALS film costarring actors with zero name value (i.e., not even on an indie-cred Spirit Awards level), written by the author of 300 and directed by a couple of stuntmen (Scott Waugh and Mike "Mouse" McCoy, a.k.a. "the Bandito Brothers") would be of any interest to discerning moviegoers like myself? Because it feels like a something made for machismo whores and mutton-brained righties and captive audiences on military bases.

Honestly? It sounds to me like a film that could be double-billed next...Read More

It's well and good that Super 8 will do $38 million this weekend, topping Phil Contrino's boxoffice.com projection by $7 million. A B+ CinemaScore obviously indicates audience reservations to some degree, but let's see what happens next weekend. The surprise, for me, is that X-Men: First Class dropped between 53% and 55% for a second-place showing of $25 million. I thought it would decline more in the range of 25% to 30%. I was under the distinct impression that word-of-mouth was somewhere between very good and excellent on Matthew Vaughn's film.

Two days ago Movieline (which goes to sleep on weekends) noted that Raiders of the Lost Ark opened exactly 30 years ago -- on June 12, 1981. It cost $18 million to make and earned $384 million and change worldwide.

This, for me, was the movie that finally persuaded Hollywood that infantile Spielberg-Lucas fantasy-trip movies were the thing to invest in or at least try to imitate, and that dark/smart moody movies about narcotics detectives and oddball-rebel piano players and doomed extra-marital love affairs probably weren't worth the trouble.

I remember muttering to myself...Read More

Two days ago I scolded Deadline's Mike Fleming for not even mentioning the Phil Spector movie that Barry Levinson and Al Pacino had decided to make together (according to a 10.8.10 Brooks Barnes N.Y. Times story) in the midst of a 6.10 Levinson interview piece.

Well, it turns out that David Mamet, rightwing author of the Spector biopic screenplay, is going to direct, and not Levinson. Mamet confirmed this to Financial Times writer Jon Gapper in a piece that went up yesterday.

Mamet "is in New York with his producer to scout...Read More

I've watched trailers for Larry Crowne (Universal, 7.1) maybe seven or eight times now, and I feel as if I've absorbed most of what this Tom Hanks film has to offer. Is there more to the feature than what the trailers have shown? Of course. A whole lot more. Trailers only use the lowest-common-denominator stuff. Why, then, do I feel I've already gotten the gist and that the movie will just be longer? An unfair thing to say, I know.

"The movie is about combating cynicism," Hanks has told W magazine's Lynn Hirschberg. "People are...Read More

Sanjeewa Pushpakumara's Flying Fish, a Sri Lankan civil war drama, has been praised by Indiewire contributor Meredith Brody for having "striking and assured compositions" with "astonishing saturated colors" and "more beautiful shots, I think, than in The Tree of Life."

Brody caught Flying Fish at the 2011 Seattle Film Festival. It's also been seen at the Rotterdam Film Festival, and is reportedly slated to play at the Museum of Modern Art's Contemporary Asian Film series (July 7th through 13th) as well as the forthcoming 47th Chicago International Film Festival next October.

So why isn't...Read More

The recently released Big Country Bluray is a wow, all right. It looks like real film, and offers delightful razor-sharp detail and colors that pop vividly but not inorganically, etc. I'm told that the restoration cost somewhere in the low six figures, and it certainly looks like big money was spent. I saw a very clean print of this 1958 William Wyler film projected at the Academy theatre with ample light three or four years ago, and yet somehow the Bluray is more of a thrill.

The reason for the extraordinary detail and image quality,...Read More

I felt suitably adrenalized while watching Fred Cavaye's Point Blank (Magnolia, 7.29), and moderately pleased while thinking about it later. Set in Paris, it's a violent chase film about a hospital worker and his pregnant wife hurled into a high-pressure, do-or-die, move-it-or-lose-it situation. Cops, thieves, criminals, corruption, fists, guns, etc.

You've seen aspects of this before but the pacing feels just right. It's fast and furious but not overly pushed or accelerated to the point of audience fatigue or numbness. And the dynamic -- an innocent man pools forces with a lone-wolf criminal as they...Read More

I remember a National Lampoon article summarizing the first term of Robert F. Kennedy's presidency. The point was that Kennedy would have become a moderately cautious liberal and boilerplate cold warrior, and a far cry from the "change" candidate that RFK ran as. Like someone else I could mention. Promise and potential are eternally attractive, but nobody's a miracle worker. Reality will always compromise the dream.

There's obviously very little new material in this Cowboys & Aliens trailer. It's the same old iconic-western-characters-and-situations-in-quotes crap with alien craft zooming overhead....so what? Is this movie (out 7.29) holding any face cards, or is at all genre-goof razmatzzz? How many times are we going to be shown the same shot of Olivia Wilde standing naked in front of a bonfire?

There can't be too many who haven't seen through Sarah Palin by now. She's a conniving, under-educated opportunist, living in a walled-off realm and out for whatever money and power she can grab by playing the part of a right-wing Annie Oakley bigmouth (and sex symbol). It's good to hear nonetheless that Nick Broomfield has been working on a presumably anti-Palin documentary, and that the negligible political effect of The Undefeated (which will open exclusively at several hinterland AMC theatres on 7.15) will be counterbalanced to some extent. The Broomfield doc was written about last night by L.A. Times Stephen...

Now that Super 8 is semi-officially "overperforming" with a reported $12 million earned Friday and a projected $35 million by Sunday night (i.e., $4 million more than what Boxoffice.com's Phil Contrino predicted two days ago) and averaging roughly $10,358,000 at 3,379 locations, what are the reactions from those who saw it today?

Last Tuesday night HE Manhattan correspondent Dylan Wells caught Cindy Meehl's Buck (Sundance Selects, 6.17). "What stands out," he reports, "is not the indisputable charm of Buck Brannaman or the harrowing story of his childhood. Nor the beautiful photography or even the numerous laughter and heart moments.

Buck Brannaman, Cindy Meehl and IFC Films' Jonathan Sehring at last Tuesday night's (6.7) screening.

"Rather it is the many universal truths that Buck discovered throughout his growth as a prodigal cowboy and horse trainer. Truths that he bestows generously and often in first-time-director Cindy Meehl's impressive documentary. Truths that...Read More

When a black-and-white film looks as tonally rich and laser-sharp as the Some Like It Hot Bluray, it becomes something more than just a transfer. It's something else, a kind of realism-plus...in a sense more pronounced than color. It's now at the top of my list of the finest black-and-white Blurays ever -- even with (and perhaps even a notch better than) Psycho, Casablanca, Sweet Smell of Success and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

I realize that David Mamet's script for that Phil Spector HBO flick that Barry Levinson and Al Pacino have reportedly agreed to do is in a "very early" stage of development (or at least that N.Y. Times Brooks Barnes reported this eight months ago). But shouldn't Deadline's Michael Fleming have at least mentioned the Spector project in passing while reporting about two other Levinson-Pacino collaborations, Gotti: Three Generations and an adaptation of Phillip Roth's The Humbling?

Our Idiot Brother sounds wrong because a family of any size never agrees on any particular view or opinion, especially negative ones. Derogatory putdowns are almost always expressed by individuals. One or two members of a family might think Paul Rudd's character is an idiot, but three or four others are sure to use another term. The Weinstein Co. should have stuck with My Idiot Brother, which is what it was called at Sundance 2011.

Our Idiot Brother sounds like the whole clan has dismissed Rudd as a tool, and that no one is on his side....Read More

Marshall Fine is complaining about having been recently subjected to 20 minutes' worth of ads and trailers at an AMC theatre prior to showtime. He should try attending a movie in Paris. On 5.27 I sat down just as the 7:45 pm show of Very Bad Trip 2 was starting at the Pathe Wepler, adjacent to Place Clichy. I sat through 27 minutes' worth of trailers and consumer ads before the feature began. (I timed it exactly.) The average time for trailers and ads in a typical U.S. theatre is what? 10 or 12 minutes worth?

Like everyone else I'm feeling moderately excited about Tetro dp Mihai Malaimare Jr. not only shooting Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, but partly in 65mm. My understanding of the view of most dps (including Roger Deakins) is that 65mm doesn't deliver anything above and beyond what today's digital can provide. So shooting in 65mm is either a sentimental gesture on Anderson's part or it's being used to compose FX shots.

Will I have to drive down to Newport Beach or Costa Mesa to see The Undefeated, the pro-Sarah Palin documentary, when it opens on 7.15? I'm presuming that the distributor, Cinedigm Digital Cinema, won't be screening it for Los Angeles-area journos...right? Deadline is reporting that Stephen K. Bannon's film will open in other red-access burghs like Dallas, Denver, Oklahoma City, Orlando, Atlanta, Phoenix, Houston, Indianapolis and Kansas City.

AMC Theatres will be the exclusive exhibitor of The Undefeated. Pic was produced by Victory Film Group and "financed independently," Deadline reports.

I'm expecting Steve McQueen's Shame, a film about a Manhattan guy (Michael Fassbender) coping with porn/sex addiction, to be some kind of exception, especially with Carey Mulligan playing his frazzled-flaky sister. And I'm not just coasting on a presumption that the guy who directed Hunger must be on the stick. I'm also impressed by the fact that Shame began shooting only about 14 weeks ago, and it's already locked into the Venice Film Festival.

Shame costars Nicole Beharie, Michael Fassbender.

Six months between the first day of shooting and the first festival viewing! That's not as...Read More

On 6.17 I noted that the 50th anniversary Ben-Hur Bluray will, of course, arrive almost 52 years after William Wyler's film opened on 11.18.59. In response Warner Home Video's Ronnee Sass has forwarded the following statement from Warner Home Video exec vp Jeff Baker:

"At WB we are more than acutely aware of the age of Ben-Hur -- i.e., 52 in 2011. It was our intention to release this film in Blu-ray in 2009, but the film restoration was complex, and the 8K scan was the optimal solution vs. 2K or 4K, therefore we took our...Read More

I tried to get into a couple of Guard screenings at Sundance...couldn't. Tried to make an LA screening last week...didn't. Want to attend a screening next Monday evening (6.13)...we'll see how that goes. Something is holding me back.

From my 9.13 Toronto Film Festival review: "Who in Errol Morris's Tabloid can you believe? Or rather, who do you want to believe? Or what slant on the Tabloid story do you feel better about accepting as probable truth?

"That's the key consideration, I think. Apart from the fact that everyone should try to see this deliciously entertaining, thoroughly bizarre comedy doc."

Tabloid will ostensibly open via Sundance Selects on 7.15 (although you'd never it from the website).

On 5.27 I described Elle Fanning's big moment in Super 8 -- a moment that suspends the film in a kind of crush vibe for about 30 or 40 seconds.

N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott agrees. Having joined the cast of a super-8 zombie movie called The Case, Fanning's Alice character delivers "the best moment in both that movie and Super 8, a scene in which Ms. Fanning and her character, in different ways, demonstrate their impressive acting chops."

The assumption is that all slips of the tongue are 100% Freudian -- that all accidental utterances are very much on the speaker's mind. I guess there's no other explanation. I love the pleading look ("No...tell me I didn't just say that!") flashing on the face of WDBJ anchor Holly Pietrzak. Uploaded on 6.8; famous forever.

Last night's Super 8 premiere offered (a) a spritzy party vibe inside the Fox Village lobby and theatre before the film began (i.e., roam-around, schmooze-around) and (b) a post-premiere outdoor street soiree with all kinds of Middle-American munch food (corndogs, taters, Fatburgers). I chatted with director JJ Abrams and almost everyone else except costars Elle Fanning, who apparently left the after-party early on, and Kyle Chandler.

Elle Fanning facing shouting-animal paparazzi prior to last night's Super 8 premiere screening at Westwood's Fox Village -- Thursday, 6.8, 6:55 pm.

Super 8 producer Steven Spielberg came to the screening...Read More

I'm not saying TotalFilm's Jamie Graham is necessarily a guy to listen to, but why the mysterious shroud of silence hanging over those Bad Teacher screenings that happened last weekend? I only know that the trailer-fed optimism of early May seems to be ebbing.

No unshot movie will ever fill me with such apoplectic loathing as Jerry Bruckheimer and Gore Verbinski's The Lone Ranger, which will hit screens in December 2012. There's no option for Johnny Depp but to portray Tonto as a Native American Jack Sparrow. And poor Armie Hammer, such a perfect fit as the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network, using his straightforward blue-eyed jockiness to play the Lone Ranger? In a script written by the thoroughly corrupted Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio? The only element affording a sliver of hope is that Revolutionary Road screenwriter Justin Haythe is co-credited.

Earlier today Boxoffice.com's Phil Contrino told me he's predicting a $31 million opening for Super 8 this weekend.

"I think the opening weekend is not nearly as important for a film like this because it has the potential to show some serious staying power once all the secrets are out and people start talking about it," Contrino observes. "People are too quick to label something a flop. With Super 8, I want to see how it does over the course of three weekends, not just one.

"The elephant in the room is X-Men: First Class. The buzz surrounding that one is...Read More

Awards Daily's Sasha Stone and I recorded Oscar Poker #35 a day and a half ago. We discussed Beginners and X-Men: First Class, but mainly got into speculating about the likeliest 2011 Best Picture nominees. Here's a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

Chris Weitz's A Better Life (Summit, 6.24) is a simple, earnest, bare-bones drama. It has dignity and humanity and, for me, across-the-board believability. It's a solid, honest film that deserves patronage and respect and year-end tributes. Particularly because of strong co-lead performances from Damian Bichir and newcomer Jose Julian. I can't put it any plainer than that.

A Better Life is basically an LA Latino riff on Vittorio De Sica 's The Bicycle Thieves (whether it was intended to be seen in this light or not) and as such is genuinely moving, if a little...Read More

It seems nothing short of surreal that the MGM Home Entertainment guys would choose to offer an exclusive special reduced price to Walmart shoppers on their recently released Bluray of William Wyler's The Big Country (1958). Walmart shoppers! Surely the lowest of the low in terms of having a cultivated appetite for classic westerns and particularly in terms of knowing what a truly special thing it is for a large-format Technirama film to be transferred to Bluray.

You can buy The Big Country Bluray on Amazon for $24.99 (which is what I did early this...Read More

I don't see how the Screen Gems marketing team could possibly go wrong in pushing Rod Lurie's Straw Dogs (9.16) by using the same basic design of the old 1971 Sam Peckinpah-Dustin Hoffman one-sheet. Because it's still one of the most psychologically unnerving and suggestively violent images every delivered by a movie poster. I would just ignore that 2009 Tyler Perry one-sheet and go for it.

The seeing-is-believing factor is so completely null and void and out-the-window in the CG behemoth Transformers realm that when flying stunts are performed for real it means absolutely nothing to Joe Popcorn. As far as most of us are concerned everyone and everything is digitally reconstituted. The guys who did the actual wing-flying are probably dismayed to hear this, but this is the world we've created.

Even my own physical-biological self, the entity known as Jeffrey Wells that I've been inhabiting all these...Read More

Update: Apparently it wasn't a symmetrical no-brainer for Paramount/Amblin/Bad Robot to hire Drew Struzan, the illustrator who did all those hand-painted posters for the big Lucas-Spielberg-Zemeckis flicks of the late '70s and '80s (Star Wars, E.T., Indiana Jones series, Back to the Future), to create a retro Super 8 poster. Because it's a fan poster. Not by Struzan. Fake.

I'll be attending the big Super 8 premiere screening and after-party tonight in Westwood. Abstract impressionism, photos, videos, JJ Abrams-isms, etc. Perhaps a photo of Drew McWeeny?

The September release of the 50th anniversary Ben-Hur Bluray will, of course, arrive almost 52 years after William Wyler's film opened on 11.18.59. So the marketing exec who decided to call it a "50th anniversary" release was tripping on something. His own ass-fumes?

The 212-minute-long Oscar-winner, restored from the original 65mm negative and remastered in 1080p, will be contained on two discs along with (a) a commentary track recorded by film historian T. Gene Hatcher and star Charlton Heston, and (b) a music-only track containing Miklos Rozsa's award-winning score. Plus a feature-length "making of" documentary...Read More

Who likes to slosh around in the surf with a thoughtful, pensive look on her face, and then picks up people who happen to be walking by and puts them into her raincoat pocket. Is the ghost mermaid here to resuscitate a buried Wold War II memory? Something to do with a kid who hid in the basement to avoid being carted away to a Nazi concentration camp? Okay, but what's this to do with a giant phantom who looks like Kristin Scott Thomas?

Larry Karaszewski and Peter Fonda need to understand that I'll be attending this Aero double bill of The Hired Hand and The Limey on Friday, June 10th, and politely requesting an explanation from Fonda about his Cannes Film Festival statement, quoted in the Telegraph, that he's "training [his] grandchildren to use long-range rifles....for what purpose? Well, I'm not going to say the words 'Barack Obama' but ..."

Seven days ago Blake Lively was a fetching actress I was half-aware of in the periphery of my vision but whom I was never, to be honest, hugely interested in. I'd never seen a single episode of Gossip Girl, and I didn't see The Private Lives of Pippa Lee because I didn't care to.

Yes, she stood out in Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants and yes, she was reasonably persuasive as a barroom floozie in Ben Affleck's The Town. And her sassy, sad-eyed features have always had a kind of folksy, arresting quality that said "actress."...Read More

Five or six days ago Sasha Stone posted a list of films she believes are the most likely contenders for 2011 Best Picture nominations. She began by listing the favorites posted by the mysterious "Peter" at Awards Corner. Sasha and I discussed this during yesterday's Oscar Poker recording. So I've decided to post my own top ten.

HE's Most Likely 2011 Best Picture Contenders (in this order): 1. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (d: Stephen Daldry, screenwriter: Eric Roth); 2. The War Horse (d: Steven Spielberg); 3. The Ides of March (d: George Clooney); 4. The...Read More

Celluloid Junkie's Patrick von Sychowski tweeted a little while ago that he's "seen [the] French thriller Point Blank at Hospital Club...pure adrenaline...I predict a Hollywood remake within 18 months."

Magnolia Pictures acquired North American rights to Fred Cavaye's thriller, "billed as an action film in the vein of Tell No One," last February. Gilles Lellouche stars "as a man racing against time through the streets of Paris to save his pregnant, kidnapped wife," etc.

The Lawrence of Arabia Bluray doesn't come out until next year so Sony Home Video can say "50th anniversary" on the packaging. So N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott is getting the jump or doesn't care about timing or...oh, I get it: the Arab spring parallel.

Okay, so Rep. Anthony Weiner was dumb enough to tweet the bulge photo. That's what I can't get over -- the rank stupidity of it. When Mr. Happy steps into the room, intelligence flies out the window. Thank goodness, at least, we have Andrew Breitbart and the professional right-wing hypocrite machine to remind us that sexual indiscretion is mainly practiced by liberals.

Regular, industrious, mild-mannered middle-class parents churn out mass murderers all the time...right? Totally routine, there but for the grace of God, Harris and Klebold's parents had nothing to do with it, luck of the draw, etc. Bullshit.

Millennium's Shadows & Lies, a Martin Donovan-James Franco crime drama, streets tomorrow on DVD & Blu-ray -- stills, trailer, DVD box art, Bluray box art.

With nothing else to write about and to accompany a trailer I hadn't paid any attention to until a Donna Daniels p.r. person alerted me, I'm posting for the third time my three basic observations about Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood's Magic Trip (Magnolia, VOD 7.1, theatrical 8.5). They were originally posted on 5.10.

One, Magic Trip is basically about new footage of the 1964 Merry Pranksters bus trip -- that and very little else that illuminates.

Two, there's no mention whatsoever of Tom Wolfe or his book that almost single-handedly sculpted the Kesey/magic bus...Read More

Slate's Christopher Beam and Jeremy Singer-Vine have used a database of post-1985 Rotten Tomatoes ratings to create a search engine called the Hollywood Career-O-Matic. What it basically says about career trajectories (other than re-posting the steady downward slump suffered by M. Night Shyamalan since The Sixth Sense) is that over time directors are more likely to experience critical upswings than actors.

"What does the average Hollywood career look like?," Beam and Singer-Vine ask. "In the Rotten Tomatoes database, more than 19,000 actors and 2,000 directors had their first film released in 1985 or later. The...Read More

Here's the story according to paulreverehouse.org: "In 1774 and the Spring of 1775 Paul Revere was employed by the Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Massachusetts Committee of Safety as an express rider to carry news, messages, and copies of resolutions as far away as New York and Philadelphia.

"On the evening of April 18, 1775, Revere was sent for by Dr. Joseph Warren and instructed to ride to Lexington, Massachusetts, to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock that British troops were marching to arrest them.

"After being rowed across the Charles River to Charlestown by two associates, Revere borrowed a...Read More

I don't necessarily agree with Emma Stone being honored as 2010's Best Comedic Performance in Easy A, but I can tolerate the opinion. But imagine being genuinely convinced that The Twilight Saga: Eclipse was the best movie of 2010 on some level, and that Kristen Stewart and Rob Pattinson gave the year's Best Female and Male Performances in that...God, that numbingly trite film! Jesus!

And if you weren't genuinely convinced of this, imagine being willing to publicly and shamelessly declare this all the same on the MTV Awards. Imagine the green scum hanging in hunks and seaweed...Read More

This scene is not taken from the new Barry Lyndon Bluray; it looks considerably better than this. And five or six interior candlelit scenes have values that haven't been seen since Stanley Kubrick's classic opened theatrically some 36 years ago. And for the first time in my life I've realized that the man walking outdoors with Barry's mother near the beginning isn't Ryan O'Neal, but an actor playing a suitor. The Bluray finally allowed me to see his features that clearly.

But it's wrong, wrong, terribly wrong to present this film at 1.78 to 1. If I...Read More

"And may the first child be a masculine child..." Not only can bloodless vampires achieve a nonsensical state of rock-hard tumescence; they can also produce crystalline ejaculate that can merge with a fertile human egg to produce "results," as it were. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you...Little Edward?

X-Men: First Class will pull down about $56 million this weekend -- fine. But that's only a little bit more than Bryan Singer's first X-Men, which cost $75 million to make compared to the current version's $160 million. Plus it didn't perform as well as X2 or X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and it made a lot less than the most critically loathed of all the X-Men films, Brett Ratner's X-Men: The Last Stand, which earned a first-weekend gross of $102,750,665.

This is a fitting parody of an obviously bright and perceptive but notoriously crabby, internet-hating critic. Not as funny as FakeArmond, which has a jauntier put-on attitude, but worthy of a man called a "sourpuss supreme" by Vanity Fair's James Wolcott.

"The problem with the old guard [of film critics] is they want to talk about the actual film," VF talkbacker cowboyandthemonk.com wrote on 6.30.10. "There's hardly much point in critiquing an art form that has already eaten itself. There was once a time when movies reflected the collective conscious and then served it back...Read More

Yesterday afternoon's viewing of the second half of Mike Mills' Beginners (Focus Features, now playing) was just as nourishing as my Thursday night viewing of the first 60 minutes. So I'm still in the tank for this heartwarming, patchwork-quilt relationship film -- no Sunday morning quibbles or after-thoughts.

Beginners' director-writer Mike Mills, Santa Barbara Film Festival chief Roger Durling during yesterday afternoon's after-party.

Hands down, this is one of 2011's best films so far.

I caught Beginners late yesterday morning at Santa Barbara's Riviera theatre. And then sat through a...Read More

In this Godather II screen-test clip, Sam Fuller's Hyman Roth is a bit too affable, too menschy...no scent of menace or perversity. He could be the manager of a minor-league baseball team. I've watched two or three big-name actors run through lines and try stuff out on movie sets prior to shooting, and I was reminded each time that most readings aren't anything to write home about.

In other words, even the best actors aren't instant "get it right the first time" geniuses. Like anyone else they need to find their way through trial and error and...

A trailer for a mopey-griefy 2012 Valentine's Day movie? That's almost nine months from now. Reminder: Rachel McAdams has always looked better with nut-brown hair, but super-dark or black hair (which she has The Vow) doesn't work.

Is it okay if I like Super 8 (Paramount, 6.10) for the stuff that really matters and not so much for the scary-spectacular CG hoo-hah? Super 8 was greenlit because of the latter, of course, but what matters most to me (and, I suspect, deep down, to director JJ Abrams) is the material that was woven into this Goonies-meets-Close Encounters-With-a-Mistreated-Alien-Dog film to give it heart, and to make it feel like a special Spielbergian, small-town, emotional time-machine visit.

Lots of stuff is shown in Super 8 and a lot of plot teasers are thrown around, but the...Read More

I'm watching the new Bluray of John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King ('75), and marvelling...where do I start? At Oswald Morris's vibrant, immensely comforting photography and how each and every shot seems so perfectly, naturally framed. And how young Christopher Plummer, who plays a moustachioed Rudyard Kipling, looks compared to his chuckling, white-haired self in Beginners. That'll do for now. I've got a screening to catch.

I was going to post a longish riff on X-Men: First Class as a follow-up to last night's truncated rave, but it's 2pm and I have to get ready for the 4pm IMAX screening of Super 8. Tomorrow morning then. Nobody is obliged to like anything if they aren't receptive, but I'm nonetheless startled by how completely immune L.A. Weekly/Village Voice critic Karina Longworth is to this obviously together and tightly written film.

I knew five minutes into Mike Mills' Beginners (Focus Features, opening today) that it was more than just a slightly cutesy-poo "dealing with my newly declared gay dad who has a non-verbal talking dog" movie that the trailers have been selling. Marketing execs! If there's any way they can persuade you that a rich and well-sauced meal is a candy bar, they will.

And they succeeded! Before seeing Beginners they had me thinking that a surprisingly mature, time-shifting, patchwork-quilt film with a gently probing nature and off-kilter moods would be a banal straightforward thing --...Read More

John Edwards' grand jury indictment today for conspiracy and illegal campaign contributions and generally behaving like a titanic lying asshole, all to cover up his Rielle Hunter pregnancy-hideaway scheme of '07 and '08, is, of course, manna from heaven for Aaron Sorkin's The Politician.

Now Sorkin has his arc -- a ghastly and tragic fall from grace for a one-time golden boy of Democratic politics. One strategic-screenwriting response on Sorkin's part, as TheWrap's Brent Lang Read More

I think we've got Richard Phillips figured out for the time being. He buddies up with somewhat damaged or degraded hotties struggling on the fringe of respectability and looking to refine their image by appearing in artified, Antonioni-esque short films that are sure to get a fair amount of internet play. Phillips knows how to shoot ennui-laden mood photography so he steps in, gets it...bang.

The difference is that Lindsay Lohan can act while Sasha Grey has so far only shown that she can (a) look solemn and pouty for Steven Soderbergh and (b) feign...

Today doesn't mark any special anniversary for James Whale's Frankenstein. The 80th anniversary of its commercial debut will happen on 11.21.11. I just happened to come across this faded newspaper ad for its debut at the Mayfair (renamed the DeMille in the late '50s) on Broadway and 47th.

For whatever reason I'd never read or understood until today that poor Colin Clive died of alcohol-related tuberculosis in 1937. He was only 37 years old, for Chrissake, so he was only 30 or 31 when he played Dr. Henry Frankenstein in Whale's film A drinking...Read More

I'm too whipped to write a review, but 20 minutes ago I tweeted the following: "X-Men: First Class is the best superhero origin flick ever, arguably the best X-Men flick of all. Tight, lucid, gripping every step of the way. Director Matthew Vaughan exonerated for past sins. Magneto may be Michael Fassbender's best performance ever (or perhaps 2nd to his Hunger perf...I haven't thought it through). I liked 1st half more than 2nd half, but I was never bored or irritated. It really works -- every element fits together like the parts in a good Swiss watch."

I saw this trailer at the Pathe Wepler last weekend in Paris, just before submitting to "The Hangover, Part II. Rise of the Planet of the Apes opens on August 5th.

After missing screenings of Beginners (Focus Features, 6.3) for nearly two months I'll finally get to see it tonight at a 7:30 pm screening. Partly, I mean, because I also have to attend a 9 pm showing of X-Men: First Class (20th Century Fox, 6.3). A shame to duck out of any film, but especially one that's said to be better-than-okay. (Ditto X-Men, I'm hearing.) I didn't arrange the schedules. I had to blow off tonight's Super 8 IMAX screening in Burbank to do this.

For whatever reason Fox publicity labored mightily to keep this kind...

My very first thought was "Jessica Biel's working on making her lashes just so for a short little guy in a suit?" If I were Biel I wouldn't give a damn how attractive I am to a guy like Pharrell. I'd enjoy his company or his music or shoot the shit with him. But you're thinking "him?...he's lighting her fire?" The director is Darren Aronofsky.

After seeing Cindy Meehl's Buck at South by Southwest, I wrote the following: "At first I had a notion that Buck (IFCFilms, 6.17) was just a nice emotional atmosphere film that didn't have any wider echoes or implications, but I gradually began to see it's as much about healing humans as horses.

"As it reveals more and more about Buck Brannaman's work and personal life, Buck passes along lessons about getting past childhood trauma and correcting parental errors and ways to heal...all that good stuff. The fact that youngish horses are the recipients of said...Read More

I received a screener of Bill Haney's The Last Mountain, another evil corporates vs. angry locals doc, just before leaving for Cannes, but I didn't get to it. I don't know why I'm not disciplined when it comes to screeners but for some reason I'm not. Only when a movie's release date is breathing down my neck do I pay attention. It opens in New York this Friday and in Los Angeles on 6.15.

Lewis Beale feels that The Last Mountain "is scarier than any Saw, Alien or Friday the 13th film ever made....Read More

I personally know four women of a certain age -- all movie-lovers, all with a fair amount of living and life-wisdom under their belts, three with elegant educations and top-level jobs -- who know nothing about the plot of Luis Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel ('62). Is that a crime? No. But one unfortunate result is that these four women didn't get the joke about Bunuel and this film told by Owen Wilson in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. It sailed right over their heads and out into space.

Now I'm getting the idea that perhaps this...Read More

Nobody outside the pseudo-hip film-fanatic fraternity cares about seeing Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained...no one. Will Smith as a slave? Leonardo DiCaprio as a snorting, squinting badass? Another '70s grindhouse exercise, another movie-in-quotes, an hommage to the Sergio Leone westerns (shoot it in Tabernas!) and Jodorowsky's El Topo, blah, blah. Western archetypes covered in sweat and stink and crud and grease. If Christoph Waltz winds up costarring it'll be the ultimate self-referential circle-jerk.

Two factors appeared today in Bradley Cooper's favor: (a) He'll be costarring with Ryan Gosling in a Derek Cianfrance drama called The Place Beyond the Pines, which'll begin filming on 7.25 in upper New York State; (b) it was revealed that he's fluent in French.

Do these counterbalance Cooper's work in The Hangover Part II, The A-Team and All About Steve? No. But like those who play piano and can quote Shakespeare at length, I've always been impressed by French-speakers. Others in this small Hollywood fraternity include Oliver Stone, Todd McCarthy and Sharon Waxman.

It was officially okay to review Super 8 (Paramount, 6.10) as of 12:01 am today. Nothing yet from Metacritic, but the Rotten Tomatoes score is now at 92% positive. If you read the reviews a certain portion are mixed-positive rather than flat-out raves. I've only seen an incomplete version; I'll be reviewing after catching an IMAX version tomorrow night.

This British half-poster for David Fincher's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is intriguing enough, but the French version, for me, is more erotically charged.

Cameron Crowe was in New York in April when The Union, his Elton John-Leon Russell doc, played at the Tribeca Film Festival. But has he submitted to any kind of public q & a in Los Angeles, which will happen at the Aero theatre 12 days hence, since the double debacle of Elizabethtown ('05) and the never-filmed Deep Tiki (late '08)?

The ostensible topic of his 6.12 discussion with Peter Bart at Santa Monica's Aero theatre will be Harold and Maude, but c'mon...this is a coming-out event, no? Crowe has directed and written We...Read More

So the bootleg redband Girl With the Dragon Tattoo trailer (i.e., the shaky-cam version that hit YouTube on 5.28) is finally gone and an official Sony green-band version is up. I don't get the strategy in toning things down. The redband version was cool and everyone knows it. Whatever.

Two remarks about that United Airlines D.C.-to-Ghana flight that returned to Dulles airport on Sunday because two guys had come to blows when one reclined his seat too far back, etc. The Washington Post reported that a passenger behind the reclining offender "smacked [his] head. A fistfight ensued, the plane returned to Dulles, and two F-16s from Andrews Air Force Base shadowed the flight until it landed safely."

One, the guy who slapped the seat-reclining douche deserves thanks and praise from tens of thousands of air-travellers who've suffered from this. Two, one should never get into a slapping match with...Read More

I'm watching the new Bluray of Henry King's Twelve O'Clock High -- a highly regarded 1949 military drama about Americans running daylight bombing runs out of England in the early days of World War II. And within ten minutes I'm reminded of the difference between a highly competent, good-enough director (in this instance Henry King) and someone with a little more visual pizazz.

It begins in 1949. After buying a toby jug at a London curio shop, a now-retired officer (Dean Jagger) visits the 918th's abandoned airbase at Archbury. Memories...Read More

When I buy a Bluray of an older film that I've seen several times in various formats (projected, broadcast, cable, VHS, DVD), I want it to look better, dammit. It has to be an improvement of some kind -- sharper and more vivid, deeper blacks, that "straight from the lab" look...something. In this regard Fox Home Video's Bluray of The Hustler is a disappointment. It looks exactly like the DVDs I've been watching over the last decade or so. In fact, it looks a bit soft at times. The more I watched, the more my spirits sank.

I...Read More