I just bought this the other day. Excellent visual and sound values for a 1960 film. But they should have called this western semi-classic The Magnificent Six. Because Robert Vaughn's aloof, relentlessly self-regarding gunslinger does nothing throughout the entire film. He talks incessantly about his issues and how he has to prove he's still got it. But does he even shoot his weapon? He pulls it out, yes, but does he fire? At anyone or anything?

Hollywood Elsewhere is currently sitting in Las Vegas's McCarran Airport, waiting for a 3:05 pm flight to Albuquerque. Expecting a four-hour drive (6 pm to 10 pm) from AB to Durango, Colorado.

I understand Jack Daniels & ginger ale. I understand vodka and grapefruit juice. I understand boilermarkers. I even understand mixing clam and tomato juice. But beer and clamato? Who would even sample this, much less buy it?

The first thing you see in Las Vegas's McCarran Airport every time you get off a Southwest flight from LAX/Burbank...every time....

The theological view of one Antonio Raimundo Montana. Which I happen to agree with.

A friend has asked for a quote about the apparent sleeper-hit status of Gavin O'Connor's Warrior (Lionsgate, 9.9), and specifically about whether it'll be getting any award-season action. "Not a chance in the world for Oscar impact," I answered. "Forget it. It's a good film, but not that kind of film.

"It's an emotionally rousing MMA sports flick, very intensely acted and atmospherically believable as far as it goes, but it's very calculated. You can see and feel the buttons being pushed and the levers being cranked. It's Gavin O'Connor making another Gavin O'Connor movie....Read More

Hotshot Connecticut-based columnist Scott Feinberg has just signed on with The Hollywood Reporter to provide awards-season coverage. His deal was only cut a couple of days ago because Feinberg was scrambling yesterday to figure out flights to the Telluride Film Festival. Wait until 72 hours before the start of an influential, very-hard-to-get-to film festival in a remote Rocky Mountain hamlet to buy the pass and get it together? Spend top dollar to arrange transportation and lodging at the very last minute? Only way to roll.

Reviewing from the Venice Film Festival, The Playlist's Oliver Lyttleton has given George Clooney's The Ides of March a solid B. "We had a blast," he says. "It's not as accomplished and impassioned as Good Night and Good Luck, but unlike Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, it's tonally assured, and unlike Leatherheads, it's, well, watchable. Very watchable in fact.

"Whether wider audiences enjoy it as much [as I did] remains to be seen. We're fairly sure that its early annointment as an Oscar front-runner will disappear quickly , but it at least happily confirms that...Read More

"There's no Scarface 2, no part three, none of that with this picture. There's just Scarface. And I think there's something to that." -- Al Pacino during last night's Scarface Bluray event at L.A.'s Belasco theatre (1050 So. Hill Street).

Why does Michelle Pfeiffer never take part in these tributes? She never records commentary tracks or is interviewed in any looking-back video essays...nothing. Her performance as the snotty trophy wife Elvira wasn't Lysistrata-level, but for what it was she delivered quite well. And Scarface certainly boosted her profile and made her known to...Read More

The Scarface Bluray (Universal Home Video, 9.6) is edge-enhanced, all right, but it's a better-looking home video rendering than I've ever seen before. Sharper, more vibrant, more detailed. Yes, it looks like two-thirds celluloid and one-third video game. Okay, maybe 75-25. But that, to me, is mostly okay, because it really looks good.

Particularly the well-lit outdoor scenes. Plus the hair texture and beard follicles. The sweat beads on Pacino's face during the Little Havana dishwash scene. The shimmer of Michelle Pfeiffer's dress in the first nightclub scene. But the darker scenes inside Lopez Motors and...Read More

Similar to Joel Schumacher's Trespass, that Nic Cage-Nicole Kidman hostage thriller, Michael Brandt's The Double -- an espionage thriller starring Richard Gere and Topher Grace -- is another another nearly-straight-to-DVD release. It's opening in roughly 100 theaters nationwide on 9.23 before hitting disc. Image Entertainment is distributing.

Jim Field Smith's Butter will play the 2011 Toronto Film Festival, of course, but you never know if it'll appear somewhere else first. I've been avoiding reading about it, to be honest. I mean, a little-girl orphan in Iowa (Yara Shahidi) with a natural butter-carving talent entering an annual butter-carving competition? Going up against the ambitious wife (Jennifer Garner) of the reigning champion (Ty Burrell)?

I know we're not supposed to judge a movie by its synopsis, but still...

I was going to embed A.O. Scott's Critics Picks' essay about Nicholas Ray's In A Lonely Place, but the N.Y. Times tech guys, as usual, haven't posted this video on YouTube yet. So the hell with it. Instead, in honor of the forthcoming Criterion Bluray of Wes Anderson's Rushmore, here's Scott's essay about that, posted two years and two months ago.

I only suffered once through Return of the Jedi (although I've watched pieces of it since on laser disc and DVD), but I remember the finale pretty clearly, and I'll bet at least $1000 that the version I saw at Loew's Astor Plaza in June 1983 didn't have Darth Vader going "noooo!...no!" when the Emperor is zapping Luke at the climax.

I haven't seen the forthcoming Jedi Bluray, and for all I know the clip below (a portion of the original mixed with an alleged audio recording from the Bluray Jedi ) is a phony. So...Read More

"My name is Molly" was first spoken in a good film by a cool actor (i.e., Joe Don Baker) in the legendary Charley Varrick ('73). The line returns in this scene between Ryan Gosling and whatsername...Evan Rachel Wood in George Clooney's The Ides of March.

No, I don't think anyone had this in mind when the line was written or when this scene was shot. But the instant I heard Wood say it, I immediately thought of Charley Varrick . Right away, less than second...wham.

The Ides of March will have...Read More

Not to sound like what I'm sounding like, but why wasn't this uploaded and passed around before X-Men: First Class came out?

N.Y. Press is no longer a print publication, having published its final edition on 8.24.11. The publication lasted for 23 and 1/2 years, give or take, starting on 4.13.88. And what of film critic Armond White? Most high-profile crickets are primarily online voices anyway so lacking a print component is hardly the end of the world. The Fake Armond tweets about this are funny.

With Phil Contrino's wifi knocked out by the moderate tropical rainstorm that began as Hurricane Irene, yesterday's Oscar Poker was just between Sasha Stone and myself. We talked about Hurricane Irene and possible Telluride Film Festival selections and the most likely Best Picture contenders. Here's a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

This Danish TV spot for Fleggaard was uploaded last January, and actually dates back to spring 2010. Fleggaard is a kind of Danish Costco. (Although the stores are located just across the German border.) For all I know everyone has seen this thing except me. I was a virgin until today.

Deadline is reporting that Josh Brolin will star in Spike Lee's Oldboy, a remake of Park Chan-wook's 2003 cult thriller. The script (which I wouldn't mind reading if anyone has a PDF lying around) is by Mark Protosevich. Pic will roll in March or seven months' hence. Brolin's next gig is Warner Bros' Gangster Squad. Then comes Oldboy followed by a June lensing of Jason Reitman's Labor Day, costarring Kate Winslet. Let's ignore the fact that Brolin is in Men in Black 3 -- nobody wants to think about that.

Albert Brooks' Real Life "hammers on a conundrum ducked by most documentaries, An American Family included: no matter how unobtrusive a filmmaker tries to be, his subject is still likely to react to the cameras by subtly altering his behavior, thereby making existence into a kind of performance, infusing life with fiction's DNA and creating a hybrid monster that's at once real and unreal." -- from a "Press Play" essay on this 1979 film by Robert Nishimura and Matt Zoller Seitz.

Update: Variety's Gregg Goldstein covertly reported on 8.23 (i.e., behind Variety's paywall) that Fox Int'l is working with David Dinerstein's D2 Films to give Gerardo Naranjo's Miss Bala a limited domestic release starting on 10.14, along with another Fox International production, The Yellow Sea. Indiewire also ran a story.

"News of both pics comes three months after Fox announced its Fox World Cinema label, designed to capitalize on the North American ancillary value of FIP films" Goldstein wrote.

Earlier: Acclaimed during last May's Cannes Film Festival and now scheduled to play at the...Read More

An 8.29 story in the French-language edition of Le Figaro says Muammar Qadaffi is hiding out in Bani Walid, a mid-sized town with an airport about 100 km southeast of Tripoli. Once he's captured, the Libyan rebels need to dramatize the former dictator's status to Libyan citizens. Bring him back to Tripoli and slowly drive him around the city inside a bulletproof, hard-plastic cage. Make it clear that he's over.

Didn't the Romans do this with defeated foes, forcing them to walk through the streets in chains, etc.? Same difference. The Romans weren't animals....Read More

This anti-meat-industry essay, narrated by Paul McCartney and initially posted in late '09, made me sick. That's the intention, of course, but also the reality. I'll never stop eating fish (especially salmon) but I never buy steak or hamburger or chicken or pork to bring home. The entire country is going to be overweight or obese by 2048, in large part due to fast-food meats. Face it -- the majority of fast-food eaters are probably going to vote for Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann.

Initially posted by Twitch and then by Badass Digest's Devin Faraci, this trailer for Jaime Osorio Marquez's The Squad (El Paramo) indicates an above-average ride. The Columbian-made thriller will open sometime in 2012. It may not be fully finished, which would be an acceptable reason why it's not playing at the Toronto Film Festival.

"All contact with a military base high in the desolate wastelands of Colombia has
been lost," the synopsis reads. "The authorities -- believing the base to have...Read More

A film-industry hotshot and festival maven has taken issue with Kris Tapley's certainty about how there are "always" holdovers from Sundance and Cannes playing at Telluride Film Festival. "There are actually Sundance films playing there only once in a very blue moon," the hotshot says. "Though it's not an officially stated rule, 99% of what screens there is a North American premiere, so it's Cannes, okay, but Sundance, not okay.

"In the decade I've been attending, the only exceptions that come immediately to mind are The Savages, which screened in large part due to Laura Linney, who met her future husband...Read More

Three and a half years old, I mean. Dennis Lee's Fireflies in the Garden, shown at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival and having played theatrically across the globe in '08 and '09 primarily, is finally getting a limited U.S. opening on 10.14. It has the earmarks of a rote family-dysfunction-and-abuse drama. Ryan Reynolds Julia Roberts and Willem Dafoe costar. It has a 28% Rotten Tomatoes average thus far.

"Hud thrives," the UnTexan wrote or or about 9.20.10, following the death of screenwriter Irving Ravetch, who co-wrote Hud with his wife, Harriet Frank. "His offspring litter their shit in McMansion-sized heaps across the landscape. They're everywhere and they go by various names. Texas Governor Rick Perry is a hardcore Hud-ite. Wasn't Jesse Jackson just warning President Obama to beware of Hud-ism and its many charms?

"Now Texas is all over the place. Hud's world is our world. It's the world of the minor character writ large. That makes it a scary place....Read More

"You know how to hunt"? I've privately interviewed Jennifer Lawrence and seen her at a couple of events and in four movies (Winter's Bone, The Burning Plain, X-Men: First Class and Like Crazy), and honestly? She doesn't really look like herself with dark brown hair. I suppose I'll get used to it, but why did they brown her up in the first place? Because Katniss Everdeen, her Hunger Games character, has dark hair? Who cares?

As rendered by Universal's new Bluray, Brian DePalma's Scarface "has, quite simply, never looked better," according to Bluay.com's Kenneth Brown. "There are a number of scenes that look quite good, fantastic even," he says. And yet "edge enhancement has been liberally applied, edge halos and minor ringing are apparent throughout, intermittent noise reduction takes a toll, and crush is a serious issue."

I need to take a night-school class so I'll know what Bluray "crush" is. And "ringing" -- I need to bone up on that one too. And "edge halos." And "macroblocking." And...Read More

It might be better for younger would-be viewers of Rod Lurie's Straw Dogs (Screen Gems, 9.16) to not see the 1971 Sam Peckinpah original, which is out on Bluray on 9.6. They're very similar films, and I for one couldn't stop thinking how similar as I watched Lurie's version. It's his best film ever, I feel, but seeing it clean without any back-and-forth going on in your head is preferable, I think, for Peckinpah virgins. See Lurie's film and then see the Peckinpah -- that's my advice.

DVD Beaver's Gary...Read More

Two days ago I wrote about Paramount's planned remake of Karel Reisz and James Toback's The Gambler ('74), and expressed curiosity about Paramount's hiring of William Monahan (The Departed) to rewrite Toback's jewel-perfect script. "Monahan is too good of a writer to just update or do touch-ups," I noted, "so I'm wondering if Paramount wants to make The Gambler into a somewhat different thing?"

Leonardo DiCaprio, James Toback at a Revolutionary Road luncheon, thrown by Manhattan blue-chip party madame Peggy Siegal and Paramount Vantage in the Plaza's Oak Room bar and restaurant -- Wednesday, 12.3.08, 1:10...

It's rare...well, relatively rare in films today for an actor to stop the action and converse directly with the audience. Most people think of this tactic as theatrical or uncinematic or bothersome, I gather. And if it isn't done right (and I mean with exactly the right touch and emphasis), it can be excruciating. I'm trying to think, in any event, of my favorite moments along these lines as well as my least favorite.

Topping the list, for now, is a scene when Dirk Bogarde addresses the audience in the opening moments of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Read More

If the Criterion Collection wasn't such an elitist, foo-foo, too-cool-to-schmooze-with-the-little-people outfit, I'd call to ask who's calling the shots on the design of their Bluray covers. The art on their Rules of the Game Bluray (due 11.15) is one of their best ever. I also think the photo used for their Fanny and Alexander Bluray is the most intriguing piece of ad art I've ever seen associated with this landmark Ingmar Bergman film.

Update: I checked the Criterion website and looked at all the copy I could find to see who...Read More

Three weeks and two days after the opening of Rise of the Planet of The Apes, the N.Y. Times runs a piece by Annie Eisenberg that states once again how 2011 performance-capture technology has made it very, very hard to tell that the apes in Rupert Wyatt's film aren't real? That's what they're bringing to the table as Labor Day approaches? Why didn't the Times wait until October? Don't half-ass being late to the table -- go all out.

Remember Steven Soderbergh intimating during a ComicCon panel last month that perhaps he might not retire after all? The first journalist to draw this conclusion, or so I recall, was Movieline's Stu Van Airsdale when he posted a riff that was titled "Steven Soderbergh Apparently Not Retiring After All." But read past the headline and Soderbergh didn't really say or imply anything like that.

Matt Damon in Steven Soderbergh's Contagion (Warner Bros., 9.9)

Soderbergh said that Matt Damon was indiscreet in passing along "this drunk conversation [I had] with him while shooting Contagion" in which SS said...Read More

Last night I finally visited The Old Place -- a McCabe and Mrs. Miller-type tavern in the small hamlet of Cornell, a few miles north of Malibu via Malibu Canyon. John Landis used the Old Place for a locale in Shlock, his early '70s debut film. TV actor Peter Strauss owns a big ranch across the street from the Old Place. Steve McQueen, Ali McGraw and Sam Peckinpah occasionally hung here in the early '70s. There's a biker hangout just down the road called the Rock Store.

I've known disappointment in my life and I've seen what disappointment can do to hardened professionals, but I've rarely seen the kind of panicky disappointment that CNN reporters are conveying right now. Suppressed but all the more for that. These people clearly realize that Hurricane Irene is a shortfaller, and is nowhere near the aggressive destructive force that the media has been warning everyone about for the last two days. And they don't know how to play this.

They're flopping around like beached flounders, the news anchors are. The "we're in for some big weather trouble!" current...Read More

A couple of Sundays ago in the L.A. Times seasoned critic Stephen Farber praised The Help in a curious way. Rather than shrugging his shoulders and going easy on the fact that it's a safe middlebrow film, Farber doubled-down and praised it for that. "Hmm, middlebrow...good!"

Appalled, Mark Olsen went to his LA Times editors and asked to write a retort. In so doing he managed to praise Amigo, Bellflower, The Color Wheel, Dennis Hopper and quote Neil Young. Here's what he wrote.

Olsen pull-quote #1: "The retort to Farber's position is simply and obviously this: Today is not...Read More

Earlier today a friend mentioned Tony Scott's interest in re-making The Wild Bunch. I speculated that just as Straw Dogs director Rod Lurie discovered through research that only about 2% of current moviegoers have heard of Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, much less seen it, Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch is probably similarly unknown.

To a typical 19 or 23 or 26 year-old a landmark western costarring a group of saggy, middle-aged men that came out in 1969 might just as well have been released when Douglas Fairbanks was an action star, or when the...Read More

I couldn't remember at first where I'd seen this style of drawing when I first caught sight of this Coen brothers Bluray box set (out on 8.30). It was inspired, I later remembered, by those turn-of-the-19th-century-era or Victorian-era posters for circuses and carnivals ("Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" and all that) and/or those illustrations that accompanied Monty Python shows and films of the '70s and '80s.

Me to Drive publicist: "I've seen that 'my hands are dirty' / 'So are mine' clip maybe 10 or 12 times. I'm actually tired of seeing it. Would it kill the powers-that-be to come up with a scene that hasn't made the rounds quite as much?" Drive publicist: "Hahaha...we have a bunch more coming out. Stay tuned!"

A five-star rave of Tomas Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, written by Empire's Angle Errigo, hasn't been posted on the Empire website. But it's been scanned and posted by Romangirl88. Sum-up verdict: "Utterly absorbing, extremely smart and -- considering this is a sad, shabby, drably gray-green world of obsessives, misfits, misdirection, disillusionment, self-delusion and treachery -- quite beautifully executed."

In an 8.26 Deadline story titled "Can Indies Steal Oscars Again?", Pete Hammond reported that Tomas Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy will no longer open stateside on 11.18, but on 12.9.

About 30 minutes ago an MSNBC reporter in North Carolina said that while Hurricane Irene was definitely wet, turbulent and howling, it was causing less damage than initially feared, and that this may be a source of some relief in the northeast corridor. As I said yesterday, Hurricane Irene will deliver the expected "driving rain and howling winds and tree branches snapping off and downed power lines", but it may turn out to be "a little bit like Carmageddon when all is said and done." It's only a Category 1, for God's sake.

The media likes scaring people a bit more...Read More

My first-ever Telluride Film Festival begins in six days, my arrival there in five, and the first leg of my journey there will begin in four -- i.e., a 12:30 pm Burbank-to-Albuquerque flight next Wednesday. Am I feeling jazzed? Yeah, sure, I was...until I read a summary of a recent "Telluride Best Bets" tweet by In Contention's Kris Tapley. He predicted that Alexander Payne's The Descendants, Steve McQueen's Shame and David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method will play there...fine. Entirely welcome, looking forward. But then came the other three.

Tapley's intuitive powers are telling him that...sputter, choke, cough....Sean...Read More

James Toback's autobiographical script of The Gambler, a fine 1974 Paramount film directed by Karel Reisz, is one of the most perfectly written, jewel-cut character studies to ever reach the American screen. Its portrayal of the typical gambler's risk-junkie mentality, partially borrowed from Fyodor Dostoevsky's "The Gambler" and partly from Toback's own compulsive past, is close to flawless.

James Caan 's first-act speech to his students, lifted directly from Dostoevsky, about how "sometimes a man knows, just knows without rhyme or reason but with poetic certainty, that two and two make five" is...Read More

Why does it take so long to figure out when Hurricane Irene will actually hit Manhattan? I know it's supposed to arrive Saturday around midnight or so, possibly an hour or two later (which would make it Sunday)...but why do you have to search around for this info? Why are news reports so averse to simply stating this likelihood in plain, standing-around-in- front-of-the-neighborhood-pizza-parlor dumb-guy language?

So it's travelling around 15 mph, and it's been downgraded to a level 2 from a level 3, and is expected to hit the general, all-spread-out New York City area by...Read More

The young-gangster-falls-for-nice-girl story in Rowan Joffe's Brighton Rock (IFC Films, opening today) has nothing -- repeat, nothing -- to do with the 1964 mod-vs.-rocker riots that happened in Brighton, England, in the summer of 1964. Joffe simply decided to mesh the original Grahame Greene story, set in 1938, with this tumultuous occurence, the mid '60s being a hipper backdrop than the late '30s, etc.

More than anything else my recent viewing of Brighton Rock recalled Franc Roddam's Quadrophenia (1979), which peaked with a rousing, contact-high recreation of the Brighton riots that is much...Read More

The Perry-Bush facemash spotted a week or so ago on Daily Kos. The full Ides of March poster.

I regret having missed out on the Washington, D.C./New York City earthquake, and I'm also sorry about missing Hurricane Irene this Sunday. If I was still in Manhattan I would put on a parka that morning and take the A train to Rockaway so I could see the big waves and feel the full force of the winds. I know people whose entire lives are about living in climate-controlled safety vacuums and avoiding the aliveness of nature at all costs.

During last night's Thelma and Louise screening at the Academy I fell in love all over again with Callie Khouri's dialogue. Especially that scene when Geena Davis's Thelma is explaining to Susan Sarandon's Louise that things just aren't the same any more, that something deep and transforming has taken hold of her. Thelma: "But, uhmm, I don't know...you know? Something's, like, crossed over in me and I can't go back. I mean, I just couldn't live."

And I love this back-and-forth as they're driving through Monument Valley:

Thelma: You awake?
Louise: Guess you could...Read More

The fact that Bruce Robinson's The Rum Diary, based on a book by Hunter S. Thompson, has been waiting in the dugout for a long time to open (principal photography having begun in March '09) doesn't necessarily mean that it blows. It might be half funny. It could be semi-original. The only problem in the trailer is an allusion to "some crazed hallucination." Thompson's book was begun in Puerto Rico in 1959 when the only drug around was alcohol. No lizard tongues back then.

Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist (Weinstein Co., 11.23) "is a winning 'success' and at the same time a half-and-halfer," I wrote on 5.15. "It's a film that delivers beautifully but also leaves you wanting in certain ways. It's a black-and-white silent drama with dashes of humor (i.e., I wouldn't call it a dramedy) that's first and foremost a tribute to the lore and sheen of 1920s Hollywood. And that much is fine.

"If you're any kind of film buff it'll work for you and then some, but I'm not so sure about the under-45 set. Monochrome...Read More

I've been invited to a special 20th anniversary screening tonight of Thelma and Louise at the Academy theatre in Beverly Hills, starting at 7:30 pm. Indiewire's Anne Thompson will moderate a q & a with three of the creators -- screenwiter Callie Khouri, costar Geena Davis and producer Mimi Polk Gitlin.

It would be cooler if the whole gang showed up, but costar Susan Sarandon and director Ridley Scott are otherwise engaged, I'm told. Ditto costars Brad Pitt, Harvey Keitel and Michael Madsen. And what about that rasta guy who blows pot smoke into...Read More

Last weekend's Oscar Poker chat got lost in the shuffle. It's mainly Sasha's fault for not sending me the link via email. Here's a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

The irony of the ABC-vs. Weinstein hassle over the initial red-band trailer for Our Idiot Brother (i.e., the network refusing to air it "unless TWC makes specified cuts") is that the substitute trailer is much better. Harvey Weinstein's official declaration: "We'd like to dedicate [the new trailer] to censorship everywhere...enjoy!"

Paul Rudd's hippie fool is a naive, trusting dipshit who's incapable of understanding that he needs to keep his nose out of the private,...Read More

I suppose this is the best that Star Wars prequel-haters can hope for come September 16th -- Episodes #4 through #6 for $39 and change through Amazon Prime. I'll just throw Return of the Jedi into the dumpster. As God is my witness I'll never watch that film again.

A guy I know and trust who's seen David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method is calling it "great, brilliant, precise and lucid," and that "among all Cronenberg's films the one it's closest to is Dead Ringers."

Oh, and the Ben-Hur restoration that will show at the New York Film festival prior to hitting Bluray "is tremendous," he says, "so brilliantly clear and sensitively done...the best I've ever seen it [look]. And Miklos Rosza's score should be heard to maximum effect."

The Obama campaign is sending out free bumper stickers to the faithful. The maniacal Rick Perry is probably going to win the 2012 Republican nomination for President, and because he's such a neanderthal-sounding, corporate kowtowing yokel (i.e., the new Greg Stillson), Barack Obama, despite his plummeting poll numbers right now, will eke out a victory...barely. Once Average Joes get a really good look at Perry, a slim majority will suck it in, shake their heads, exhale, hold their nose and vote for Obama. 50.3%...something like that. Maybe 51%.

With only six weeks to go before the 10.7 British 1release, Tyrannosaur director Paddy Considine -- "the Terrence Malick of trailer cutting" -- has finally delivered a trailer. It lasts 1:52, and conveys the tenderness and the rage with some nice, counter-balancing music. But it under-sells, I feel, the shattering performance by Olivia Colman as a battered wife. I'm serious. Colman and Olivia Spencer and (although I haven't seen Coriolanus) Vanessa Redgrave -- the Best Supporting Actress roster will have to include these three.

"Colman's performance comes as a revelation," wrote the Village Voice's...Read More

Most dreams happen during REM sleep, right? Sometime around 4 or 5 am? The ones you tend to remember and write about the next day are the ones that wake you up at this, the hour of the wolf. Within the last two weeks I've had two...I might as well call them nightmares. But they were't nightmares as much as disturbing short films with hateful predatory characters coming in for the kill, and both were about bad stuff that I've done coming back to bite me in the ass. Both were so unpleasant that I had to get up and shower and start...Read More

Everyone understands there are two Undefeated films out there, right? One is a piece of hagiography about Sarah Palin that you can throw in the dumpster (it's only made a lousy $100,000 since opening in mid-July), and the other is really, really good. I've just seen the latter, a deeply touching 90-minute doc about Memphis's Manassas Tigers, an African-American high-school football team trying to up their wins. But it's mainly about various team members toughing it out with personal struggles. And it really sinks in.

The Undefeated gang at Austin's SXSW film festival in mid...

I missed this morning's screening of Ralph Fiennes' Coriolanus, but at the 1 pm Undefeated screening two seasoned critics raved about Vanessa Redgrave's performance as Volumnia, the mother of Fiennes' titular character. Add Guy Lodge's Berlin Film Festival rave and there doesn't seem to be much doubt about Redgrave being a top contender for a Best Supporting Actress nomination.

My Week With Marilyn (Weinstein Co., 11.4) "belongs to Michelle Williams and she alone. That is all anyone will be talking about once people actually see the movie. There is absolutely, positively no doubt that Williams is right alongside Meryl Streep and Glenn Close at the very front of the Best Actress race." -- quote from smart, well-connected guy who's seen it, quoted on 8.15.

Set in 1914 or thereabouts, David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method (Sony Classics, 11.23) is about a kind of perverse relationship between the young Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), his mentor Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), and Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), a lady with "issues," as we would say today. But if I didn't know the background and was just strolling around a theatre lobby in an orange T-shirt and cutoffs with a pot belly and big tub of popcorn, I'd be presuming that Knightley is playing a ghost of some kind...right?

This "Funny or Die" video about Dave (brother of James) Franco effing himself is...what, mildly amusing? Less so? it's also a little "enough already" given the cavalcade of gay-themed roles and films that James has made over the last couple of years (playing Scott Smith in Milk, Allen Ginsberg in Howl and Hart Crane in The Broken Tower plus having directed that Sal Mineo movie).

The Franco brothers aren't exactly Olsen and Johnson or Laurel and Hardy, but they've made videos together and are known as having started in the same genetic dugout, and between...Read More

Four highly cool New York Film Festival extras were announced this morning. The coolest, for me, will be a screening of the first three episodes of Oliver Stone's The Untold History of the United States, the forthcoming Showtime series. They segments will focus "on the events leading up to America's entrance into World War II, the war itself, and the unjustly forgotten figure of former U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace," says the release.

The Untold screening will be followed by a panel discussion featuring Stone, co-writer Peter Kuznick, historian Douglas Brinkley and The...Read More

Every year I say the same thing about the possible influence of MCN's Gurus of Gold chart, and I might as well say it again with awards season about to kick off the weekend after next and with the first testing-the-waters Gurus of Gold chart having gone up yesterday.

Every year I ask what could be more worthless or contemptible in the eyes of any fim lover with the slightest trickle of blood in his or her veins than a group of online journos saying, "What we might personally think or feel about the year's finest films is not our charge. We...Read More

"Hollywood Elsewhere's view is that nothing is so objectionable as 'conventional industry wisdom,' especially as reflected in Gurus of Gold charts and other tabulations in this vein. Unless, that is, conventional industry wisdom happens to be in synch with what we strongly feel and/or believe in. Hah!" -- a quote from a Hollywood Elsewhere's 2011/12 advertising pitch letter.

One noteworthy thing about the season's first Guru chart are the indications of affection and prejudice toward certain films, a "1" vote idiotically being the highest and a "10" being the lowest. In what upside-down, hairy-kumquat...Read More

Yesterday I posted a podcast between myself, Jett Wells and Nathan Mattise on their weekly Whoa! magazine podcast. Mainly we discussed Telluride, Toronto, Drive, Andy Serkis and Warrior's Tom Hardy. And then it un-posted itself. Apparently there's a gremlin in the system.

Amy Winehouse's toxicology tests show that no illegal drugs were present in her body at the time of her death, the AP reports. She had booze in her system, but that's generally not a fatal condition. A Winehouse family spokesman released a statement today saying that "toxicology results returned by authorities have confirmed that there were no illegal substances in Amy's system at the time of her death."

So what happened then? What 27 year-old just up and dies? What 27 year-old body says, "You know something? I'm getting really weary. I think it might be time to shut down. I've been...Read More

The last time I looked the Civil Rights movement of the '60s was about empowering the disenfranchised, particularly by ensuring that people of all ethnicities had the absolute right to vote. Today Gov. Rick Perry equated that struggle to the current efforts of right-wing, corporate-fellating serpents to lower taxes on business-owners and the corporate well-to-do. This, to him, is what American "freedom" is all about.

No doubt about it: there were iPad-like devices in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. They sure do look like iPads -- same size, similar illumination, etc. Which doesn't bode well for Apple's attempt to prevent Samsung from selling its Galaxy Tab.

"Apple and Samsung are currently engaged in a high-stakes intellectual property battle, with Apple [looking] to stop Samsung from selling its Galaxy Tab and other Android-based products," MacRumors reported this morning. "Apple claims that Samsung has infringed upon Apple's intellectual property rights by copying the designs of popular Apple devices such as the...Read More

Luc Besson's The Lady is a Toronto Film Festival-bound drama about the decade-long house arrest of the Burmese politician Aung San Suu Kyi (Michelle Yeoh), and also about her marriage to the late Dr. Michael Aris (David Thewlis). Honestly? The first three things that came to mind were as follows:

(a) A movie about a good woman being kept under house arrest for ten years?

(b) A movie about the not-exactly-Cary Grant-like Thewlis enjoying conjugal privleges with the beautiful Yeoh? Has Thewlis ever enjoyed nookie from any attractive woman in any movie, ever?...Read More

A 5.9 magnitude earthquake has happened in northern Virginia, and was acutely felt in Washington, D.C. Obviously an unusual occurence in the northeast corridor, but nothing to hyperventilate about. People in Manhattan felt it also. I've just heard a report just heard that tremors were felt in Martha's Vineyard. But seriously, folks -- hardcore Southern Californians are used to this. Earthquakes can be devastating and deadly, but most of the time they're a metaphor for the general unpredictability of life and the instability of things.

We need video of stuff falling off shelves and ceiling-hung fleurescent...Read More

I've got 45 films on my Toronto Film Festival list, 20 of which I probably won't get to see, and a bunch more titles have just been added? Thanks, great...this festival is ridiculous. It's a tsunami that washes over you and the riptides carry you along, and it's all you can do to hang on to your Macbook Pro and keep your head above water. Too. Many. Films.

Aki Kaurismaki's Le Havre, Gus Van Sant's Restless, Alexander Sokurov's Faust, the Dardennes' brothers' The Kid With a Bike, Bruno Dumont's Hors Satan, Bela Tarr's The Turin Horse; and Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a...Read More

Responses to Ryan Gosling's Manhattan street-fight intercession (which may have happened on Sunday, 8.21): (a) The way the two combatants are half-wrestling and half slapping-and-jabbing is how most fights happen in real life, (b) Hollywood guys take an oath at an early age to never portray this kind of fight in movies, (c) the narration by the woman who's shooting the video ("The Notebook guy?...you're lying, you're lying, you're lying, you're lying...oh, it is!") is breathtakingly lame, and (d) great camerawork with the hands and fingers in front of the lens (or is that some idiot security guy)?

Last Saturday morning Jett Wells and Nathan Mattise invited me to discuss Telluride, Toronto, Drive, Andy Serkis and Warrior's Tom Hardy on their weekly Whoa! magazine podcast. Jett and I squabbled a bit.

Red Dog, a possibly unsubtle but apparently likable Australian-made flick about a bright orphan dog who gets adopted by a community, has become a hit since opening in Australia on 8.4. By Australian standards, that is. It's earned $8.5 million so far, which is apparently an excellent haul for that market and for a locally-made film. No U.S. distributor has snagged the rights so far, presumably for a reason. Too on-the-nose? Too "Australian" in some way?

The Red Dog trailer does a decent job of selilng what seems like an okay lovable-dog popcorn movie....Read More

"Trying to orient yourself in a work of chaos cinema is like trying to find your way out of a maze, only to discover that your map has been replaced by a reproduction of a Jackson Pollack painting," says critic Matthias Stork in a video essay called Chaos Cinema. It's must-viewing, this piece. It articulates and clarifies a lot of things that many of us have been feeling for a long while. "The only art here," Stork declares, "is the art of confusion."

Action films of the late 20th Century embraced classic cinema language, he explains....Read More

All my life I've been asking myself, "What does it mean for somebody to be 'crockin' all the time?,' which is how Elvis Presley described some guy he doesn't like or respect in the 1956 pop song "Hound Dog". When I learned this morning that Jerry Leiber, the guy who co-wrote the song with Mike Stoller, had passed at 78, I checked the Hound Dog lyrics and read that the lyric is "cryin' all the time" and not "crockin'."

Jerry Leiber (l.) and Mike Stoller (r.)

You know something? The hell with that....Read More

Jon Huntsman is the only sane, more-or-less reasonable-sounding Republican candidate for the Presidency outside of Mitt Romney, who has disqualified himself for being a slithering, say-anything shape-shifter. Huntsman's mildly thoughtful, fair-minded mentality, however, is presumably going to cause him great difficulty with the impassioned wingnuts who are expected to vote heavily and devotedly in the 2012 Republican primaries. Some commentators are saying Huntman is dead -- he's way too measured and logical to make it with the wackos.

I'm going to suppress my anger and vote for Obama in 2012, but if a Republican were to...Read More

Martin Scorsese's George Harrison: Living In The Material World, a 208-minute documentary portrait of the late musician and one-time Beatle, will play at the New York Film Festival before premiering on HBO and then becoming available on 10.10 from Amazon.

It's fairly astonishing that in 2011 -- 49 years after the debut of Dr. No, the first James Bond film, and 46 years after the first wave of 007 spoofs -- that there's still a market for another Pink Panther-meets-Austin Powers film. Tens of thousands will pay to see Johnny English Reborn (Universal, 10.28) and go "hah-hah-hah!" and wipe tears from their eyes, etc. The first Johnny English ('03) cost $40 million to make and only made $28 million here, but the worldwide gross was $160,583,000.

I'll admit that the chopper-trimming-the-tops-of-cypress-trees...

Tall can marry short...it happens. But the "birds of a feather" rule is obviously the basic universal aesthetic -- super-tall lanky guys hooking up with extra-tall or at least sizable women, shortish women with guys who aren't much more than three or four inches taller, etc. It therefore seems not just odd but borderline perverse to see a couple that is 19 inches apart -- the almost-freakishly-tall New Jersey Nets basketball player Kris Humphries and the under-sized Kim Kardashian -- get married.

What kind of bizarre pyschologies would lead these two to hook up, much...Read More

Some truly ghastly and horrific acts have been committed against civilians by pro-Gaddafi forces. Now that the conflict is coming to an end with rebels holding most of Tripoli and the last of the loyalists fighting back as we speak, decisions are being made about how to deal with pro-Gaddafi brutes (including the militant pro-Gaddafi female news anchor Hala Misrati, who was taken prisoner two or three hours ago). War is cruel, and the one centuries-old constant whenever a tyrant is overthrown is that the rebel forces will know the satisfaction of payback.

Gaddafi...Read More

In an 8.20 interview with Le Figaro's Jean-Paul Chaillet, Sean Penn basically threw up his hands and said "what the eff?" in a comment about The Tree of Life and the creative workings of Terrence Malick.

"I didn't at all find on the screen the emotion of the script, which is the most magnificent one that I've ever read," Penn said. "A clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact. Frankly, I'm still trying to figure out what I'm doing there and what I...Read More

A couple of nights ago I popped in a Bluray of Get Shorty ('95). For old times' sake or whatever. Sixteen years ago and it feels like...I don't know, six or seven years ago. And it hit me as I watched that most of the people who costarred in this thing are kind of done now, and they were so hot and kicking and on their game back then, or so it seemed. Savor the moment because it doesn't last long.

The only two cast members who are still happening are John Travolta and James...Read More

Yesterday afternoon I posted some commentary -- 95 words, to be exact -- along with the latest trailer for Vera Farmiga's Higher Ground (Sony Classics, 8.26), which I'll finally see Monday night. What I said was fairly dismissive about the concept of "God", believers in Christian theology and/or those who live life in search of divine guidance. An hour or two after the post (which I called "God Is A Drag") appeared, it un-posted itself and refused to appear.

The reason, I naturally and immediately assumed, was that some sort of cosmic force had decided to...Read More

HE readers know that I've been a blown-away fan of Paddy Considine's Tyrannosaur since catching it at Sundance 2011. But I've been feeling frustrated ever since that no online trailer has turned up. I learned today that Considine, in defiance of any basic concept of fend-for-yourself distribution survival, is still cutting it together, despite Tyrannosaur being locked to open in England seven weeks hence. Who takes this long to finish a trailer?

(l. to r.) Paddy Considine, Peter Mullan, Olivia Colman during Sundance 2011.

Marcu Hu's Strand Releasing is planning to open Tyrannosaur stateside sometime in...Read More

I've tried and tried to find the right-sounding Godzilla ringtone, and this is the best I can do. The "ahrrOOM" sound at the end needs to sound deep and thundering, like it's coming out of a beast that stands 120 feet tall. The "ahrrOOM!" here sounds like it's coming out of an AM car radio.

Two days ago I shared my Albuquerque-to-Telluride driving itinerary, and only one guy -- CMed1 -- pointed out that 550 north to Durango is the fastest way of all. I did some checking and realized this was so. Three to four hours driving time. So no more Chama -- that's history. Thanks loads to all the experienced, knowledgable drivers who've travelled between these two cities and failed to mention the 550, and thanks especially to CMed1.

Yesterday's "They Just Knew" post began with Fred Zinnemann's story about the August 6, 1953 opening of From Here to Eternity. 15 months ago I ran an update about Sony Home Video's long-delayed Eternity Bluray. The high-def restoration was done in the summer of '09 by Grover Crisp. A print was shown at the Academy in the fall of '09 and then at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. In May 2010 I reported that Sony intended to release the Eternity Bluray in late 2011, but that's been pushed back to sometime in 2012.

And people whose lives are, in their minds, basically about finding spiritual fulfillment and deliverance after they're dead are ridiculous figures. They're certainly appalling. The only reason religions are good for society is that they keep the nutters (i.e. those who would otherwise be seeking solace in alcohol or drugs or in the ravings of some antisocial cult leader) in line, and they instill a sense of moral order and temperance among people who lack the intelligence or drive or hunger to seek spiritual satori on their own.

Make it easy for Gaddafi to leave office and don't threaten to go after him. If you say "we're coming after you when you leave, we're going to put you on trial in the Hague and make your life hell"...where's the incentive for him to leave? Then again "if I leave I won't get killed" is a pretty good incentive.

In my 4.9.11 Sidney Lumet obit I insisted that "Lumet's masterpiece is Prince of the City -- a nearly three-hour-long drama about the morality of finking out your friends in order to find your morality, and entirely about New York cops and mob guys and district attorneys and junkies, most of it set in the offices of this or that prosecutor with guys dressed in suits and shirtsleeves with cold takeout food and tepid coffee on the desk."

I was therefore delighted to come upon Steven Santos' two-part video essay about this 1981 drama,...Read More

Joel Schumacher's Trespass, a thriller about some baddie-waddies kidnapping a well-to-do couple (Nicolas Cage, Nicole Kidman), will play mid-September at the Toronto Film Festival, open theatrically on 10.14.11 and then...wham, hit the Bluray shelves on 11.1, only two and a half weeks later. That's pretty much a straight-to-Bluray release with a blink-and-you'll-miss-it theatrical pit stop. Have Cage or Kidman ever starred in an almost-straight-to-video flick before?

Congrats again to Sony Pictures Classics on its announcement that Woody Allen 's Midnight in Paris has surpassed $50 million at the domestic box office -- $50,062,843, to be exact. It's now Allen's biggest all-time North American earner even more so. If, that is, you don't adjust the grosses of Annie Hall ('78), Manhattan ('79) and Hannah and Her Sisters ('86) for inflation. If you do that, as I pointed out on 7.18, their respective earnings are $135,027,530, $129,427,567 and $80,568,922. But there's nothing wrong with popping the champagne over Paris. Good show all around.

If the Big Lebowski Bluray has been DNR'ed or edge-enhanced, as DVDBeaver's Gary Tooze and Bluray.com's Jeffrey Kauffman have charged, then give me more of that. Joel and Ethan Coen's stoner classic has never looked so luscious or micro-detailed. The values are richer and more robust than I've ever seen in any format, including the damp celluloid print that I saw in a screening room 13 and 1/2 years ago. It's perfect, delicious, a must-own.

Director Fred Zinnemann was in Los Angeles when From Here To Eternity opened at New York's Capitol theatre on August 6, 1953. He was a bit worried about an August opening since it was very hot and muggy and the Capitol had no air-conditioning back then. For whatever reason Columbia chief Harry Cohn had decided to open the film quietly. "No premiere, no limousines, nothing," Zinneman later recalled.

And then Marlene Dietrich, whom Zinnemann barely knew, called from New York at 9 pm Pacific. "She said it was midnight there but the Capitol theatre was bulging," he said, "and that...Read More

Nicholas Winding Refn's Drive "is stylistically inspired with beautiful cinematography, perfect balance, steely cool grit and truly hilarious gore, and many silent eye-contact moments that are ten times sexier than any steamy motel romp," writes HE's part-time Manhattan correspondent Jett Wells. "Not only is this the coolest movie I've seen all year, but it's the best thing Ryan Gosling has ever done.

Carey Mulligan, Ryan Gosling

"There are many things about his nameless character that throw you off. Masked by his half-man, half-machine attitude, Gosling is a quiet gentleman filled with pain and loneliness but who transforms into a...Read More

Michael Winterbottom's Trishna is an adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'ubervilles, which is a fairly dark and fatalistic piece. You'd never know that from the generally pleasant, almost festive tone of this trailer. Pic is about an ill-fated romance between Jay (Riz Ahmed), a well-born smoothie, and Trishna (Freida Pinto), who comes from near-poverty. Will Pinto achieve a performance breakthrough of some kind? She could use that.

It never fails. If you've read six or seven pans of a new movie before going to see it, it will never seem as bad as it would if you'd just seen it cold. That's what happened yesterday when I caught Lone Scherfig's One Day. I had spent a good 15 or 20 minutes reading numerous Rotten Tomato slams, and so I went in expecting to despise it. And it wasn't as awful as all that.

One Day isn't very likable and is more irksome than not, and it's certainly draggy and even numbing...Read More

I still don't understand why Ami Canaan Mann's forthcoming Texas Killing Fields (Anchor Bay Films, 10.7), which will play the Venice Film Festival later this month (or in very early September), doesn't have a website up. Or why Anchor Bay doesn't at least include basic information and promotional art for the film on its website. They need to get on the stick.

For whatever reason Texas Killing Fields won't be playing the Toronto Film Festival or any other festival besides Venice. Don't dark policiers of this sort need the critics to rally round?

I...Read More

Could there be anything more desperate-sounding than a director announcing an intention to direct some kind of sequel or companion piece to a cult film he made decades earlier? The presumption is that Ridley Scott's Son of Blade Runner will probably get made because the money is there, and not because anyone has a super-brilliant idea for a sequel.

The story's been told and there's nowhere to go with it. Nobody cares about Decker or the unicorn or Roy or Douglas Trumbull's steamy been-there, done-that Los Angeles or Sean Young's replicant any more. All the various cuts of this film have...Read More

Magnolia is releasing Anne Sewitsky's Happy Happy in New York and Los Angeles on 9.16, and it's now starting to be shown to journalists. But there's no subtitled trailer to be found on YouTube, the film isn't listed on ComingSoon.net, and it can't be found on Wikipedia. So here's the 2010 Norweigan trailer. It's pretty easy to tell what the film's about, and the tone of it.

Happy Happy is a sexual comedy of sorts, but not in the American sense. It's a frank, plain-spoken, curiously skewed film. It's "funny" but not...Read More

I've seen this film so many times I can say almost all the dialogue in synch with the actors, Rocky Horror-style. But nobody is more queer for high-end black-and-white Blurays than myself, and so I have no choice. None whatsover. I won't even bitch if it's grainy, which it probably will be to some extent. It's the old thready textures of the 1950s clothing that I'm looking forward to. That and being able to study the sweat beads and beard follicles of the twelve-man cast.

Two days after the Depardieu plane-urination incident, a Bluray of the original "pee on the rug" movie is in video stores and purchasable on Amazon. Excellent timing. My copy is being messengered over as we speak. Word is that the bowling-alley scenes have that extra-shimmering Bluray pop-through quality, and that the rest of of the film...let's wait.

Reports indicate that the suicide of Russell Armstrong was prompted by terrible financial despair. He apparently spent himself into debt in order to keep his Real Housewives of Beverly Hills wife Taylor Armstrong in clover (or the appearance of same), and eventually found himself in neck-deep quicksand and more or less said to himself, "I can't stand this any more....I'm outta here."

This sadly exposes the kind of pathetic relationships that are rife in this community -- the wife is a total money-and-attention whore and the guy, usually older and not her physical-attraction equal, understands that the only way...Read More

Yesterday CNN's Anderson Cooper got the giggles at the end of a segment about the Gerard Depardieu peeing-on-a-plane incident. It starts around the 2:40 mark. It's funny and infectious but (a) the reason Cooper is laughing this hard is not really about Depardieu but something cathartic that only Cooper understands, (b) his laughter has this fluttery falsetto (amost eunuch-y) sound, and (c) the last syllable of Depardieu's name is pronounced "dyeuh," not "doo."

Cooper's breakdown reminded me, of course, of a similar scene in Michael Ritchie 's The Candididate ('72). I prefer Redford's...Read More

The mileage estimate websites claim that the drive from Albuquerque to Telluride is 207 miles. Yeah...as the crow flies. But if you're driving it's more like 310 or 320 miles. The more scenic eastern route (Albuqerque, Santa Fe, Chama, Durango, Dolores, Telluride) is 309 miles; the western route (Albuquerque, Gallup, Dolores, Telluride) is 320, but the roads are a bit flatter and faster.

I was half-watching a DVD last week of Alan Parker's Evita (1996), and it looks like hell on a 50-inch screen. For its upcoming 15th anniversary, Hollywood's best all-singing musical opera (yes, better than Sweeney Todd) needs to be Bluray-ed. For me Darius Khondji's widescreen cinematography is compositional heaven -- each and every frame has an exquisite painterly balance, and is lighted to perfection. And Gerry Hambling's lively cutting is a perfect compliment to the musical rhythms and rhymes.

And it's a very fine film for what it is, and the music is entirely catchy...Read More

As might be expected from a 8.19 release that was press-screened for people in my short-lead realm for the very first time yesterday morning (i.e., three days before opening), Lone Scherfig's One Day (Focus Features) is getting badly beaten up over at Rotten Tomatoes (27% positive) and somewhat less so at Metacritic (47%).

The writing has been on the wall for several months. In a 5.30 posting called "Oy! Dumb Girls!," I wrote that "'destined to be together but indecisive and unable to pull the trigger for 20 years' is not my...Read More

This group shot from Bruce Beresford's Love, Peace and Misunderstanding, a family relationship drama in which Jane Fonda plays an ex-hippie grandma, is presumably meant to resemble the cover of Crosby Stills & Nash's first album, or at least the yellowish eggshell paint on the clapboard exterior of the home plus the light green windowsill trim.

Set to play at the Toronto Film Festival, Love and Misunderstanding sounds like like a right-down-the-middle, straight-across-the-plate family confection in a Golden Pond-ish vein. Neurotic attorney (Catherine Keener) brings her teenage kids (one...Read More

Two days ago I asked about when Juan Antonio Bayona's The Impossible might be released. Sometime next year, yes, but spring, summer or fall? This morning Bayona responded: "I can only say that we're on schedule and working really hard on the editing and visual effects. We didn't wrap last fall, as you metioned in the article. We finished in February and did three weeks of technical shooting (scale models and water) in June. The film will be completed early 2012, but there's still no release date from Summit." It's my understanding that Bayona will screen a rough cut for friend...Read More

Last Saturday morning I reported that (a) a March 2009 draft of Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott's The Lone Ranger script was about Native American mysticism and a werewolf predator that tore men into pieces, and that (b) the CG needed for the werewolf stuff was at least one of the reasons for the film's $250 million budget, which Disney execs felt was excessive and led them to shut the movie down.

Now The Hollywood Reporter's Kim Masters is reporting that the spirits-and- werewolf stuff has been "jettisoned" and that "sources who have read recent drafts" say they contain "three...Read More

Yesterday's rug-peeing incident involving Gerard Depardieu whizzing on the floor of a Paris-to-Dublin CityJet was completely avoidable. And almost predictable. Flight attendants, security guards and other uniformed functionaries who try and tell movie stars what to do and what not to do will always lose. The same lesson has been taught a million times and they won't listen. Don't fuck with the Godz because the Godz have been taught that they can always sidestep rules if they need or want to. That's the way the world works...hello? If a swaggering, big-bellied, larger-than-life French actor and winemaker needs to slip into the can...Read More

Last night I watched Jane Fonda's appearance on Charlie Rose. It was about plugging her just-released book "Prime Time", which is about living and aging well in what she calls "the third act of your life." It was an open, honest interview. But what got me is her face. She's had "work" done, of course, and she looks great for someone born in 1937, no question. But there's something a bit strident in her face now. It hasn't been "stretched," thank the Lord, but she does look super-sculpted.

(l.) Jane Fonda...

The final 49th New York Film Festival choices have been announced, and the big news is the selection of Alexander Payne's The Descendants (which boasts a very well-written script) for the closing night gala. So that's it for poor Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy despite Gary Oldman's willingness to attend the gala. Whatever, water under the bridge. I'm also glad that several major Toronto Film Festival entries have been included as it'll take the strain off. Several Cannes and Berlin entries also buck up the slate.

George Clooney in Alexander Payne's The Descendants.

Also to be shown at...Read More

The main problem with Fright Night (Touchstone, 8.19) is the title. They might as well have called it Generic '80s Horror Film That They Remade in 3D. But it has two selling points: (a) an above-average script, as indicated by the trailer, and (b) Anton Yelchin and Colin Farrell costarring. The HE downside is that Touchstone p.r. hasn't invited me to squat. This morning I wrote Fright Night producer Mike DeLuca and said, "Hey, Mike, can you help me out?"

This looks good -- The Others, The Innocents, The Nightcomers, etc. You might think that with the Harry Potter franchise over and that carte blanche effect at an end, Daniel Radcliffe 's markedly short stature may be an issue from time to time. But he's about the same height as Al Pacino, and he's got Mickey Rooney beat by a good three inches.

Friend-of-HE Nick Clement -- a.k.a. "Action Man" -- just got out of a Connnecticut screening of Jonathan Levine's 50/50 (Summit, 9.30) "and wow, I was not prepared for how accomplished it was," he says. "Holy shit, what a great movie! Powerful. Sad but oddly uplifting. And funny. Genuinely funny.

"Joseph Gordon Levitt kills it -- very understated, never going too hard for the emotions, always feeling 100% natural. And say what you will about Seth Rogen, but he's perfect in this movie -- and for the film to work at all, it needed a...Read More

"In 1873, the first electromechanical vibrator was used at an asylum in France for the treatment of female hysteria. While physicians of the period acknowledged that the disorder stemmed from sexual dissatisfaction, they seemed unaware of or unwilling to admit the sexual purposes of the devices used to treat it. In fact, the introduction of the speculum was far more controversial than that of the vibrator." -- from "Female hysteria" Wiki page.

The Relativity guys are taking Machine Gun Preacher on the road before the Toronto Film Festival, showing it to journos in various burghs & arranging interviews with talent. Me: "Can I see it early too? I'll hold the review until the festival, of course. It would just help to be able to bag this one early." Them: "But seeing it at the festival will be so much more exciting! With a big crowd and all!"

Me: "Yeah, but all the publicists say that, and it's impossible to see all the films I want to see once the...Read More

For some reason this photo of the River Bend Lodge in Chama, New Mexico, makes me feel soothed and peaceful-like. Maybe it's the green lawn or the log-cabin vibe or the buffalo statue or all of it. I'm staying here on the night on Wednesday, 8.31, as part of the first leg of a five-hour drive up to the Telluride Film Festival from Albuquerque, New Mexico. They have cabins with loft beds, and a river outside with the smell of pine trees in the air. I love mom-and-pop places and I hate corporate-type hotels.

...

The well-connected Patricia Bosworth has always been a succinct, carefully phrased writer and a perceptive and trustworthy biographer. (I've read her 1978 book about Montgomery Clift twice.) I was reminded of her skills when I began reading a Vanity Fair excerpt from her latest biography, Jane Fonda: The Private Life of a Public Woman earlier today. It also hit me again that the story of Fonda's life from the early '60s to early '70s is a stirring one, particularly in the arc of her relationship with French director Roger Vadim.

The bottom line...Read More

This won't qualify as a substantial observation, but I've noticed over the past couple of days that Gov. Rick Perry has only half a neck. He's got a fairly large head that seems to mostly just sit on his shoulders, and what little he has in the way of a neck is hidden by those high-and-wide elephant collars he loves to wear. I'm not saying he has no neck at all, which is how it was with Mickey Spillane. And it may be an optical illusion as much as anything else.

In the '80s, '90s and early aughts Liam Neeson starring or playing a supporting role in a film was a better-than-half-likely assurance of quality. No longer. Now Neeson's participation means there's a better-than-50-50 chance that the film is a piece of action shit. Because his name, sorry to say, has nearly become a synonym for the bend-over paycheck theology. Neeson hasn't quite attained the status of Jason Statham, whose action films are almost always garbage (i.e., 90% or 95% of the time), the last exception being '07's The Bank Job. But he's getting there.

Not that it matters because action...Read More

In addition to my previously posted list of 35 Toronto Film Festival must-sees (26 features, 9 documentaries) I'm today adding nine more films, selected from a new batch that TIFF announced this morning, which brings the total to 44. At best I'll get to see maybe 25 of these. (My usual festival tally is between 20 and 25.) At least there's the comfort of knowing that many if not most of the 2011 Telluride selections will overlap and therefore dent.

Rachel Weisz in Terrence Davies' The Deep Blue Sea.

This morning's add-ons:

Guy Lodge's...I meant to say Terrence...Read More

At the 31-second mark N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman suggests that if there was a huge government-spending program brought about by an emergency, like the spending prompted by the Great Depression and World War II, it would bolster our economy and make it robust, even, in less than two years. And then at 1:04 he theorizes that such a program could be brought about by the threat of invading space aliens.

Almost exactly the same point was made in a slightly different context by President Ronald Reagan in December 1985.

Speaking about sharp nuclear-policy...Read More

While Movieline and Awards Daily readers enjoy a recently-posted "greatest improvised or unscripted lines" video, they should understand that Dustin Hoffman's Midnight Cowboy encounter with a cab (which is included in the video) was definitely planned, scripted, choreographed and rehearsed. Producer Jerome Hellman explains in this commentary clip:

Yesterday's Oscar Poker chat was enjoyable enough. The usual Phil Contrino box-office commentary, and then Sasha and I discussing The Help and Telluride and The Lone Ranger, etc. Here's a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

The drift is basically Guillermo del Toro telling Josh Horowitz about Alfonso Cuaron & Co. having achieved the next Big Thing (which he declines to describe) in the 3D Gravity (Warner Bros, 11.20.12). Sidenote: The video embed codes provided by mtv.com are infuriating, second only to the N.Y. Times in terms of making me want to mail a plastic sandwich baggie filled with dogshit to their offices.

My Week With Marilyn Observation #1: "Good lord, when are people going to figure out that this show belongs to Michelle Williams and she alone? That is all anyone will be talking about once people actually see the movie. There is absolutely, positively no doubt that Williams is right alongside [Meryl] Streep and [Glenn] Close at the very front of the Best Actress race."

My Week With Marilyn Observation #2: "It's totally Michelle Williams' film. She's the only justification for making it and for watching it. She really captures Marilyn's whispery allure, drifting attention span, lack of...Read More

For me the weekend's best stand-out tweet came from Joseph Kahn.

Forgive me for presuming that Juan Antonio Bayona's The Impossible, the Asian tsunami drama with Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor which wrapped last fall, might be ready for release sometime later this year. But no. Summit acquired domestic rights in May 2010, and there hasn't been a peep out of them since. A rep said he didn't know when they'll be releasing it, but all indications point to 2012.

I asked Orphanage producer and Bayona confidante Guillermo del Toro what he knows. No reply as of yet.

The Impossible is a true account of a family swept up...Read More

The New York Film Festival's closing-night film will be announced later this week, but for now the big announcement is that David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method and Pedro Almodovar's The Skin That I Live In will both get the gala screening treatment. The voltage is entirely with the Cronenberg, a kind of Freudian-Jungian romantic-obsessive period piece that is said to be quite good. Almodovar's film was seen last May in Cannes and was in large part tagged as a toney, intriguing but somewhat minor work.

The most promising aspect of the Cronenberg? From a distance, at least? The fact that Vincent...Read More

This scene in Juan Antonio Bayona's The Orphanage ('07) in which Belen Rueda summons the ghosts of several children by playing the game "Uno, Dos, Tres, Toca la Pared" (i.e., One, Two, Three, Knock on the Wall), is one of the most genuinely creepy and unnerving scenes in the annals of adult (i.e., subdued) horror cinema, and it was done without resorting to a single visual effect.

Somewhere between 98% and 99% of horror filmmakers wouldn't be able to deliver a scene like this if their lives depended on it -- the idea...Read More

I can't reveal particulars, but another source is disagreeing with the hat-in-the-air praise for Kenneth Branagh's performance as Laurence Oliver in My Week With Marilyn that I passed along last April. This on top of a similar view posted yesterday by "Yahoo" has persuaded me to think, "Okay, let's take it easy with the K. Branagh thing." Particularly since the most recent opinion comes from a very perceptive fellow.

Every now and then an actor delivers a performance that is so odious and unpleasant to settle into that even sophisticated filmgoers find themselves resenting the actor on some level, despite the obvious. If the performance is off-putting enough, it can seriously harm or stall an actor's career. For me Ezra Miller's inhabiting of an evil, acid-spewing fiend in We Need To Talk About Kevin is one of these. I instantly knew while watching Lynne Ramsay's film in Cannes that I'd be avoiding seeing this guy in anything else, if at all possible.

Unfair? A...Read More

It's been 16 or 17 years since Gabrielle Anwar "disappeared" from features and moved over to television. The last thing she did that really mattered was that tango dance scene with Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman ('92). I'd very nearly forgotten her. Things fall away and you move on. And then wham...her face (perhaps even more stimulating at 41 than in her early 20s) popped up in a trailer for The Family Tree (Tuckman Media, 8.26).

There's something about faint signs of age settling into the face of a strikingly beautiful woman that...Read More

Maybe not a great ending, but one that definitely works because it make a moral point in a tough, unflinching way. Plus that nice little Third Man homage. Start it around the 3:20 mark or thereabouts.

In his N.Y. Times profile of Stephen Lang, John Anderson describes the 50ish actor as having been "scarier than John Dillinger in Public Enemies." No -- Lang was snarlier, but while playing a flinty, straight-up lawman with a sense of honor and dignity about him. Lang was also the co-deliverer (with Marion Cotillard) of that film's great emotional finale. It's appalling that I can't find a decent, unsqueezed clip of this scene.

Avatar's Zoe Saldana gets to do the same old avenge-the-death-of-my-parents crap in the vein of a typical Luc Besson, hard-tack, badass-hot-chick La Femme Nikita, blah, blah. And why call it Columbiana? Why do the makers of these films insist on making them all the same way, which is to say in the manner of a Cannon film transposed to the present? Why don't they try to make it in a Steven Soderbergh mode?

Q: "So how secure do we build this? How many guy wires? Do we make it strong enough to hold up in heavy winds and howling rainstorms, or just strong enough to stand in good weather or what?" A: "Or strong enough to withstand an earthquake, you mean? C'mon, man...we have to stay within our budget. We don't want to go nuts here. I have mouths to feed. Just build it the usual way."

Five people died in this calamity. A horrible thing all around. But I have to say that the above video footage reminds me...Read More

I've misheard song lyrics all my life, and over time those wrong lyrics have sunk into my system and become frozen in amber, and now I can't hear the correct lyrics to save my life. Most of the mis-heard lyrics were absorbed when I was a kid or a teenager, for the most part. I know it sounds silly but these idiotic re-wordings have stayed in my head.

Example #1: "All Shook Up," Elvis Presley. All my life I've been hearing "I'm itchin' like a man on a buzzin' tree" and "mah friends say I'm actin' wide as a bug." The correct lyrics...Read More

Before this scene in Paul Schrader's American Gigolo ('80), had any film from any country ever shown a guy getting high over the clothes he'd be wearing that day, and experiencing the joy of picking exactly the right shirt, tie and, jacket and shoe combos? Narcissim and shallowness, of course, but this kind of sensual enjoyment is rare in films. It's appropriate that Richard Gere speaks Italian in this clip since the carefully chosen clothes were mainly from Milan.

Whatever happened to IGN's Stax Flixburg? Or rather, what happened to his stories? I only know that I used to link to his IGN reports from time time, but that hasn't happened since July '07. I just noticed him today on Twitter, etc. It's funny how you can just sort of slip away and disappear without anyone noticing. That'll happen to me some day.

I quite like this moody, Antonioni-esque, Guy Peelaert-styled image from Simon Curtis' My Week With Marilyn (Weinstein Co., 11.4). But I'm still waiting for a trailer or even an image that will offer a slight taste of Kenneth Branagh's performance as Laurence Olivier, which I've been told is the film's highlight.

I ran a piece on 4.14.11 about the decision to remove the words "God of" from Roman Polanski's adaptation of Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage, and to therefore call it Carnage (Sony Classics, 11.18). I was told by a publicist that day that the decision "was made by the producer Said Ben Said and Polanski." Most people felt this was an odd call but whatever. The movie's the thing, right?

My suspicion is that Carnage was adopted because of the U.S market, and particularly a fear that hinterland yahoos might react negatively to the word...Read More

Even in 1984's Footloose the idea of dancing being banned in a small Midwestern town was ridiculous. Yes, the script came from an actual dancing ban that had been enforced in the town of Elmore City, Oklahoma, and was finally revoked in 1980. But the banning of dancing -- not the jitterbug or square-dancing but suggestive pantomining of sexual congress, which is what modern dancing more or less is -- is like some ghostly remnant of America's buried puritan past.

The idea, in short, comes from those small-town preachers and community leaders who were...Read More

On top of everything else, Gov. Rick Perry's Supercuts hair style is really quite awful. His hairline is too close to his eyebrows and seems to crowd his facial features. And those fat yellow ties and those awful elephant-collar businessman's shirts he wears with his suits. There's just something oozy and odious about Perry. He makes you want to leave the room.

Last night an industry-connected HE correspondent wrote to say he'd "just returned from a PGA screening of The Help at the WGA theatre," and that his wife "was in tears" and that the overall response was quite emotional. "The crowd name-checked the credits, clapping five different times," he wrote. "Crazy applause. An entertainment attorney was sitting next to me, a guy in his mid '50s, and he wasn't just saying at the end 'yeah, pretty good, whatever' but 'man...amazing!'

"Chris Columbus and Michael Barnathan and other producers did a q & a. They seemed very confident and self-satisfied, but in a good...Read More

The reason The Lone Ranger's budget was so astronomically high that Disney execs decided to shut it down was because it's an effects-heavy CG thing due to being a kind of an Indian-spirituality werewolf movie -- a.k.a., The Lone Ranger Meets the Wolfman. Yes, I'm serious. A 3.29.09 draft of Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio's script makes it clear it was going to be at least partly about some kind of Native American wolfbeast tearing victims apart and leaving a bloody mess.

Don't take my word for it -- look at the below photo capture...Read More

Two days ago Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney shot himself in the foot and the head with his "corporations are people, my friend" comment. I really think he's killed his candicacy with that remark. Because one of the key seminal concepts of the aughts, articulated by Joel Bakan's "The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power" ('05) and the 2004 documentary of the same name and recognized by every person on the planet with an IQ over 50, is that corporations are not people -- they're sociopaths.

Bakan's book (which oddly came...Read More

Deadline's Mike Fleming reported a while ago that Disney has shut down Jerry Buckheimer and Gore Verbinski's The Lone Ranger, the Johnny Depp-Armie Hammer western that's currently in pre-production, and which would have begun principal photography in October. The problem, says Fleming, was that Disney wanted the all-in cost to be $200 million and that the production tab was either $232 millon or $250 million or...whatever, too high.

I don't know anything but cheers (I think) to the Disney execs who approved this. Mainly because The Lone Ranger isn't, according to the grapevine, about fighting aliens or the Mexican Army or...Read More

I've just spoken with Gold Derby's Tom O'Neil about the likely award-season strategies for The Help's Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer, and he's convinced me that Disney is going to push Davis as Best Actress and Spencer as Best Supporting Actress.

Octavia Spencer, Viola Davis in The Help.

As O'Neil partly says in a recent "Awards Tracker" article, Spencer has the best shot at winning between the two because she's playing an impudent back-talker and that this is the kind of performance -- spunky, spirited -- that tends to win in that category.

"They have to...Read More

In a piece based on a chat with J. Edgar director Clint Eastwood, EW's Anthony Breznican writes that "while the screenwriter...believes it was J. Edgar Hoover's suppressed sexuality that twisted him into the ultimate control freak with ultimate enforcement power, the screenplay keeps things somewhat ambiguous. After all, the premise is that failing to be able to feel something for another person is what warped Hoover, leading him to see everyone from Martin Luther King Jr. to Robert F. Kennedy as enemies of the state."

In other words, J. Edgar is, in a sense, a cautionary tale...Read More

Almost every ATM I've used in this country, Europe and/or Africa (and we're talking hundreds) has refused to give me the cash until I withdraw the debit card, which always quickly spits out after you punch in the data. Bank of America ATMS are the only ones in the world that give you the cash first and then, very slowly, spit the card out.

The B of A people know that people who are scatterbrained and in a hurry tend to grab the cash and run and forget the card. They obviously know this, and for...Read More

This Best Buy Exclusive Bluray of Midnight Cowboy came out last May, and I guess with Cannes and everything it slipped between the cracks or something. I happened to spot it on a rack last night at a Best Buy on La Brea. The film looks exactly as it should, like a moderately grainy 1969 film that was deliberately under-exposed by dp Adam Hollender, who wanted a verite, un-prettified, grubby-Manhattan-streets aesthetic. And he got that. And I'm fine with it. The Oscar-winning classic has never looked better.

I tried to write a 30 Minutes or Less review three times over the last five or six days, and it wouldn't come. Mainly because I just sat in my seat and pretty much waited for it to be over. It's strenuous but almost entirely unfunny -- I know that much. I knew going in that I didn't want to see a movie about a guy forced to assist in a robbery because a device with plastic explosive is strapped to his chest because it happened for real in '03 and the guy died. Sue me but I just didn't want to...Read More

The bargain-basement, almost comically fake monsters in Attack the Block are harbingers of a new wave, I think. Aren't we all sick of movie-club monsters that cost millions and take months to design? I want to see movie stars earnestly fighting "ironic" monsters that look borderline fake and stupid...but not entirely. Monsters that honestly admit to being creations. Almost in the vein of those stupid Toho monsters from the '60s. To go by Guillermo del Toro's description of his Pacific Rim monsters, I don't think he's into this.

Forrest Wilder's 8.3 Texas Observer piece about the ties between Texas Gov. Rick Perry and a Pentecostal-on-steroids holy-roller nutbag sect called the New Apostolic Reformation doesn't exactly say Perry is in the tank for these guys...but he's clearly winking at them a lot. In Perry the NAR "may have found their vessel," he writes, "and the interest appears to be mutual.

"Why would Perry throw in with this crowd?," Wilder asks. "One possible answer is that he's an opportunistic politician running for president who's trying to get right, if not with Jesus, with a particular...Read More

Two days ago I wondered aloud if anything resembling the London riots might happen in this country. Not the underclass burning and looting but Average Joes expressing "basic fundamental rage about how the corporate elites are turning this country into South America, and how the radical legislative right has gone completely insane," etc. Even though I said it could never happen here, I was beaten up for expressing some kind of adolescent excitement buzz. Glenn Kenny, Guy Lodge...they all piled on.

What I was basically saying, to repeat, was that street action of some kind was better than muttering into glasses...Read More

Something's off here. The Stiller Foundation is real and earnest, and I understand Stiller not wanting to sound overly solemn and sanctified. But the tone of this video implies the whole thing might be a put-on. And with all the talk about "See Jennifer Aniston Naked Foundation...forget it. I'm being too literal.

Without disagreeing with the views of The Association of Black Women Historians and MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry about The Help, I still maintain (as will most critics) that Viola Davis's performance is strong and stellar. Harris-Perry doesn't dispute this either. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

If only director Rick Mereki and his travelling buddy (i.e., the guy in the video) had made sure that the guy wore the same duds every time they shot. Then the effect would be stunning. Learn and Eat are pretty good also.

Another rightwing Christian-yokel Texas governor who has a Supercuts hair style and wears cowboy boots and fat yellow ties over blue shirts, and who talks like a shitkicker and believes in American exceptionalism? The presumption is that Gov. Rick Perry will eventually knock out Bachmann and may even prevail against Romney. (Possibly.) Republicans are actually toying with nominating a guy who's basically Dubya with modifications?

Editor-screenwriter David Scott Smith recently sent me four episodes of Dead Island, a kind of comic video-game component. This led to me wonder if anyone has tried to create a TV or cable series about a family of flesh-eating ghouls called...I don't know but let's call them The Munchies. Call it a cross between The Munsters, The Addams Family, True Blood and The Flintstones.

A series about a typical suburban family living in some ghastly tract-home development (or in an upscale trailer park), except they're zombies who need to occasionally prowl around and eat fresh victims. They could be mindlessly consumptive...Read More

Having enough money in the bank and knowing more is on the way in and being able to roll along comfortably within a reasonable framework, paying for this and that and going out to dinner every so often without getting the willies or waking up with sweat and worry at 3:30 am, is a truly peaceful and wonderful thing. I say this as someone who's been sweating money issues for a long time. Hell, most of my life.

I would be very loath to give up this hard-won feeling of economic assurance. This instinct to guard against any kind of economic relapse and...Read More

I feel nothing but admiration and affection for Peter Bogdanovich, and I've been enjoying his Indiewire "Blogdanovich" columns all along. But his 8.9 praise piece about John Ford's The Searchers doesn't feel especially fresh and in fact has a tired pulse. Bogdanovich is a Ford scholar par excellence, of course, but we've been hearing this same old stuff about The Searchers for decades ("not only among the very best, but also among the final Western masterworks of the movies' golden age"). So why re-state it?

The first significant "take a fresh look at The Searchers" piece was...Read More

This looks like Ian McKellen's Richard III ('95) all over again. You'd never know it from this trailer, but the standout performance in Ralph Fiennes' Coriolanus is Vanessa Redgrave's. Last February In Berlin In Contention 's Guy Lodge predicted that Redgrave will land a 2011 Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

It was reported some time back that a Nicholas Ray double-bill -- We Can't Go Home Again, his last film, plus a doc about his life and career by Susan Ray, the late director's widow, called Don't Expect Too Much -- will screen at the the Venice Film Festival on 9.4. The program will also screen at the N.Y. Film Festival, I learned earlier today.

(l.) James Dean, (r.) Nicholas Ray during the making of Rebel Without A Cause in early 1955, when Ray was 44 or thereabouts.

If you want to be in good standing with...Read More

Earlier today Deadline's Mike Fleming reported that 42West partner Cynthia Swartz is "negotiaing her exit" to form her own p.r. shop. A source tells me rumors were making the rounds as early as last January that Swartz, a highly respected and admired Oscar-award campaign strategist, would be breaking off from 42West.

(l. to r.) Tribeca Film Festival's Genna Terranova, 42 West partner Cynthia Swartz and IFC Films honcho Ryan Werner at March 2009 party for a "Focus on IFC Films" program at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Swartz's new operation will be up and running fairly quickly,...Read More

"A young woman I talked to at the airport last week said that she will not vote in the next election. I hate to hear that. I think if you don't vote, you have no right to complain the next time around. You have voluntarily ceded your voice in this democracy. I told her that and she said, 'After Obama, what is there left to hope for?'" -- from Cenk Uygur's 8.9 firedoglake.com column, "Obama's Tipping Point."

Matt Damon is a thoughtful, articulate, activist-minded actor who's 40 years old -- five years older than he needs to be to run for U.S. President, and three years younger than JFK was on election day in 1960. When Ronald Reagan ran for the highest office in 1980, he was a charismatic, not especially thoughtful, slogan-spouting actor who was 69 years old. Who's to say which man is or was more suited to the task?

I'll grudgingly vote for Obama in 2012 because I'll have nowhere else to go. It'll be like voting for Hubert...Read More

Focus Features is naturally declining to indicate whether Tomas Alfredson's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (opening 11.18) will play at the Telluride Film Festival (and therefore get reviewed sometime between 9.2 and 9.5) or perhaps occupy the closing-night slot at the New York Film Festival, which would occur well after the film's 9.16 release date in England. It would be a far cooler thing to have the debut showing at Telluride, of course, as this would be roughly concurrent with TTSS's other big screening at the Venice Film Festival. The Toronto Film Festival is out, as previously noted.

...

"The earth would survive our folly. Only we [perhaps] would not. A million years is nothing. We've only been here for a blink of an eye. if we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.

It's heaven to hear a guy like Al Gore just spit out what he damn well knows about climate change and the scientist whores who've been paid to say differently, and say it like a longshoreman. Listening to this is like standing under a waterfall in the Amazon rainforest and just getting soaked with clarity. If only President Obama had the cojones to be 1/3 or 1/4 as blunt and candid as Gore is here...the clouds would part.

In an exceptionally emotional but on-target outburst, MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan said yesterday that he'd like President Obama "to go to the people of the United States of America and say, 'People of the United States of America, your Congress is bought, your Congress is incapable of making legislation on healthcare, banking, trade, or taxes because if they do it, they will lose their political funding and they won't do it.

...Read More

Early yesterday morning The Miami Herald's Rene Rodriguez wrote that Rod Lurie's Straw Dogs (Screens Gems, 916) is "exceptionally well-acted and shot" and is "easily Lurie's best work as a director." But he said some other things besides.

After seeing the film, he said, "I was immediately struck by two things: (1) The film is practically identical to Sam Peckinpah's original, yet feels completely different; and 2) the violence isn't nearly as shocking in 2011 as it was in 1971, but it doesn't feel as cathartic or rousing as I expected. Instead, the mayhem felt vaguely depressing -- a graphic,...Read More

N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis has trashed The Help, calling it a "big ole slab of honey-glazed hokum." And she's pretty much dismissed every performance in the fiim except for Viola Davis's, which means, I suspect, that unless the entire world disagrees Davis has the heat and Octavia Spencer is out and that's it.

(l. to r.) Emma Stone, Octavia Spencer and Viola Davis in The Help.

Same thing from New York's David Edelstein and Movieline's Stephanie Zacharek: Davis is a solid standout in an overly gauzy, so-so film.

Which is too bad because I...Read More

Some of us can tell right away when we've seen an Oscar-calbre performance. Others can spot this and which category the actor/actress can reasonably be expected to compete in...just like that. If you had to think last year about whether Another Year's Lesley Manville should have run as Best Actress or Best Supporting Actress, you were already behind the eight-ball. It was dead obvious she had to run in as supporting, even with literalists like Coming Soon's Ed Douglas more or less saying that Manville is a lead, the film is mainly about her, her character has the strongest and saddest arc, etc....Read More

I don't care if this interview between Bill Moyers and Oliver Stone is 20 months old. It's the most nourishing and sobering thing that's seeped into my head all day. It's basically Stone talking about his time as an infantryman in Vietnam, and how that experience has informed his views of the current debacle in Afghanistan, and convinced him that Obama has made a terrible mistake by trying to go for some kind of win over there, which of course is futile.

Forget segment #1 -- start with segment #2 and then watch segment #3,...

I don't know what I ought to know about music, so I'm guess I'll be listening to this weekly podcast so I'll have a clue the next time I'm shuffling around Hollywood Ameoba (Sunset and Cahuenga). Co-hosted by the currently untethered Jett Wells and Syracuse U. pally Nathan Matisse, now working in some fringe capacity at Wired. Did Keanu Reeves invent the term "whoa"? No, but he owns it. You can't say it without thinking of him in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

My whole life has been about avoiding and hating films like this, and doing everything I can to persuade others to follow suit. I'd also like to devote my next life to same, even if I come back as a horse or a rabbit or a drop of water in a fountain.

I'm sure John Wood was extremely grateful when he landed the part of has-been playwright Sidney Bruhl in the stage version of Ira Levin's Deathtrap, which opened in February 1978. For the dryly debonair and deliciously decrepit manner Wood lent to the role was so popular with everyone that he became a major character actor in Hollywood films through the '80s and '90s. The irony is that he never found a part in any Hollywood film that was as much fun to play (or watch) as Sidney Bruhl. Not one. Not even close.

Wood at Dr. Stephen Falken...

The one thing I didn't like very much about Rise of the Planet of the Apes is Ceasar's unnaturally deep, vaguely creepy voice. This was a concession, I felt, to a basic Hollywood notion that formidable warrior figures have to sound snarly and tough and commanding in some primal way. But if you've seen footage of a talking ape (as I have) you know they don't have deep, dark voices but ones that are on the soft, high-pitched side. They sound like very old white men. So while the line "Ceasar is home" worked, the delivery didn't.

Reports about Anne Hathaway's stunt double having driven her Catwoman chopper right into an IMAX camera yesterday (i.e., Monday) on the set of The Dark Knight Rises don't say if the camera was totalled or partly damaged or what. The TMZ Video shows the bike hitting the camera at a relatively slow speed, and that some of the damage (whatever it amounts to) will be from the IMAX camera having been dropped by the cameraman.

What does an IMAX camera cost? $350,000? A half million? Even if was completely destroyed (which I doubt), keep two...Read More

The same basic despair expressed by my recent "Hillary Should Have Won" riff was concurrently written and reported about by The Daily Beast's Leslie Bennetts. "During the last few days, the whispers have swelled to an angry chorus of frustration about [President] Obama's perceived weaknesses," she wrote. "Many Democrats are furious and heartbroken at how ineffectual he seemed in dealing with Republican opponents over the debt ceiling, and liberals are particularly incensed by what they see as his capitulation to conservatives on fundamental liberal principles."

The American middle-classes have never and will never take to the streets to vent anger about anything, ever. Despair and quiet grumbling and prescription drugs is as far as it goes over here. But wouldn't it feel...well, therapeutic on some level if something could happen in the streets of the U.S. of A. that would express basic fundamental rage about how the corporate elites are turning (have turned?) this country into South America, and how the radical legislative right has gone completely insane, etc.?

I know what's going on in England right now -- young have-nots are...Read More

Why have Warner Bros. and Clint Eastwood decided not to screen J.Edgar at both the Toronto and the New York Film Festivals? The first thought, of course, is a slight "uh-oh..." but that kind of dissolves once you think it through. This won't be the first time an Eastwood fllick hasn't made the festival rounds so it's not that big a deal. Clint has never been a big festival guy.

The fact that Toronto critics beat up Hereafter pretty badly is a possible factor, okay, but they might simply have decided it's better for the buzz...Read More

To put it as succinctly and shallowly as possible, I'm not a fan of Justin Timberlake's tennis-ball coif in Andrew Niccol's In Time (20th Century Fox, 10.28). His Social Network hair was cool, but the Buchenwald cut is a stopper. And it didn't look good on Brad Pitt either in Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

Plus I've been scared of Niccol ever since Niccol's script of The Truman Show because it ends kinda badly -- Jim Carrey should have escaped at the end of Act Two and then returned to the fake superdome world...Read More

Emotional dialogue doesn't have to be treacly or obvious. It's fairly awful, in fact, when filmmakers have their characters say "this is who I really am and this is what I've always wanted," etc. I can't think of a more sickening use of the gooey stuff than in the middle-school graduation scene in Crazy, Stupid, Love. And I can't think of a better, less sentimental, polar-opposite case than Thomas Mitchell's death scene in Only Angels Have Wings.

Mitchell's "Kid" is lying flat. Cary Grant's "Geoff" is standing a foot or two away, looking down. A few others...Read More

For the first time in my professional life I'll be attending the Telluride Film Festival, which starts in three and half weeks and runs from 9.2 through 9.5. Thanks to Shannon Mitchell for cutting me a nice break with the press credential deadline, and also to co-directors Tom Luddy and Gary Meyer for presumably approving this. I've read and heard about this festival for so many years, and now...finally.

I've never done Telluride before because of the high cost, but I'm doing reasonably well these days and I've figured a way to afford it, despite the Read More

As I understand it, today's appalling Dow tumble of more than 600 points is primarily in response to Standard & Poors dropping U.S. credit rating from AAA to AA+ along with the shaky European economy plus the bad unemployment figures. But the real cause, of course, was the volatile climate brought about by rightwing terrorism over the debt-ceiling and budget-deficit standoff. Sen. Mitchell and Speaker Boehner are partly to blame for this, but Cantor, Walsh, Bachmann and the other 60-odd right-wing loonies in the House bear particular responsibility. Damn them to hell.

Here's N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman...Read More

One of the best ideas to come out of yesterday's Oscar Poker discussion (i.e., # 43) was a suggestion by Awards Daily's Sasha Stone that SAG members could organize an open debate about the performance-capture issue triggered by the righteous talk about Andy Serkis deserving a nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Face the issue and battle it out, guys, and let journalists take notes. It's the future, after all. More and more exciting performance-capture tour de forces are going to happen in years to come. Can't live with your heads in the sand.

Here's a...

A pair of conservative bloggers are freaking over a just-out Newsweek cover photo of Rep. Michelle Bachmann, claiming in effect that Tina Brown's publication is doing to the radical-right Congressperson what Life magazine did to Charles Manson in 1969. Except Bachmann does project what Chris Matthews once described as a "moronic stare" -- ditzoid, glassy-eyed. It's not Photoshop. That's how she looks.

An appalled Noel Sheppard of newsbusters.org wrote, "Exactly what were the editors thinking putting this kind of a picture of a sitting Congresswoman and presidential candidate on their cover?"

An unidentified...Read More

Two months after it became available through Walmart online and Amazon.com, DVD Beaver has finally posted a review of MGM's The Big Country Bluray, which I reviewed on 6.11. Gary W. Tooze writes that he "had a dickens of a time trying to get it." Is there some reason why he couldn't order it online like I did? What he means, I suspect, is that he had a dickens of a time getting his mitts on a freebie.

So I won't be attending the Telluride or Venice film festivals (as usual) but I'll be doing Toronto and New York. The latter will be mostly about catching Roman Polanski's Carnage, possibly Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, that 2.76 to 1 Ben-Hur screening at Alice Tully Hall, My Week With Marilyn and possibly Martin Scorsese's George Harrison: Living in the Material World. Wait...did I read something about Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar possibly preeming there?

And now it's time to prune down the 2011 Toronto offerings to a manageable slate of 20 or 25, which is...Read More

The subject was broached on Real Time with Bill Maher the night before last. Maher lamented that "the magic is gone" and asked if lefties were starting to have "buyer's remorse" about President Obama. Liberals still like Obama, Maher said, but things have deteriorated to that point "after a giant fight" in a bad marriage in which "you've said so many nasty things that you know you're never really going to get it back together."

Yes, Obama and liberals will ultimately stay together because "who are you gonna date, Mitt Romney?," he said. But Maher also believes that caving to the Republicans...Read More

Many times I've riffed on a dark, delicious fantasy about rounding up Tea Bagger types and sentencing them to green re-education camps for minimum one-year terms. Not to punish per se but to expose these contemptible morons to facts, to truth, to the way things really are and how they're being played by the rich, and the fact that Boomers have taken almost everything and that diminished lifestyles and economic security are being bequeathed to Genx and GenY for decades to come, and that the best is definitely over. The infra-structure that once provided decent, fair-minded quality of life to middle-class people...Read More

The estimated $54 million that Rise of the Planet of the Apes will earn by this evening obviously betters yesterday morning's projection that Rupert Wyatt's film "might actually hit $50 million," which itself was significantly higher than the $30 million projected by 20th Century Fox three or four days ago.

You might logically presume that the film enjoyed a Friday-to-Saturday uptick, and yet Boxoffice.com's Phil Contrino reports that Apes "did $19.7 on Friday and then went very slightly down on Saturday $19.4 on Saturday...which is pretty good nonetheless. It indicates a steady positive word-of-mouth. And it got an A-minus from CinemaScore,...Read More

A portion of last night's visit to North Hollywood -- NoHo -- involved a pleasant chat with the co-owner of Phil's Diner. She suggested that I check out Boomermania, a musical that's just opened at the Noho Arts Center. Unless the designers of the ads are hiding their cards, it's clearly a nostalgia show. I half-smiled and shrugged my shoulders and told her that it's an odd time in our country's history for someone to put on a bouncy, good-time show that celebrates the most reviled generation in American history.

Boomers started out as '60s rebels...Read More

There are several thousand things more interesting to talk about than feet, but there's something about their appearance that triggers odd primal reactions in people, particularly (or should I say naturally?) when they belong to actors. In movies every aspect of every actor's anatomy is theoretically fair game, although all directors and cinematographers understand that feet need to be avoided for the most part. There's the ick factor, of course, but also the other side. Just ask LexG. Or for that matter Katharine Hepburn.

Unfortunate insert from the abominable Casino Royale (1967).

If I recall correctly one of...Read More

Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes might actually hit $50 million by Sunday night. Nobody wants to think about The Smurfs, but Cowboys & Aliens has taken a 64% revenue nosedive compared to last weekend's receipts. And The Change-Up is an El Floppo, probably (or at least partly) because the word is out among 20something women that it's not for them. Any Apes reactions?

I remember watching the 434-minute Godfather Saga on NBC some 34 years ago. It played four consecutive nights, and I stopped my life to take part in it. I was like a priest doing vespers. I knew I wasn't watching a "better" version of the first two Godfather films, and that the Saga was just longer (including 75 minutes of previously un-seen scenes) and chronological, etc. But I loved sinking into the all of it, the sprawl of it.

And it's really not right, I feel, for Francis Coppola to stand in the way of...Read More

A month ago I wrote that if Richard Nixon returned to earth "with the same mind and spirit and perspective that he had before he died in the '90s but in the body of a go-getter Congressman from Southern California, he'd probably have a tough time getting re-elected because he'd be considered too moderate, too thoughtful, too practical...a guy who doesn't get the ideological fever of the Tea Party or the debt-ceiling shutdown or any of the things that Eric Cantor or Michelle Bachmann believe in. He could almost be a centrist Democrat by today's standards."

Now...Read More

I have a curious affection for L.A. supermarkets that have resolutely refused to get with the 21st Century super-flamboyant, super-abundant, jack-up-the-prices modernization trend. A couple of days ago I visited this dumpy little Vons at the corner of Santa Monica Blvd. and Barrington, and was amazed to note that it has exactly the same facade as it did 28 years ago, when I first arrived out here. It isn't rustic enough to qualify as a classic landmark or anything, but there's something vaguely cool about a market that just stands up to the scuzz by refusing a facelift.

Many years ago Ben-Hur screenwriter Gore Vidal dismissed the meaning of the title of Lew Wallace's 1880 novel, "Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ." "It isn't a tale of the Christ," said Vidal. "It's the tale of a war between a Roman boy and a Jewish boy."

Which is why the movie ends after the chariot race sequence. Finito, resolved. Even though it continues for another half-hour or so because director William Wyler needs to be faithful to Wallace's pious novel, and so we're stuck with the sloggish remainder. And all you can do is look at your watch.

Trailer uploaded today, feature playing Toronto Film Festival, skepticism about the hand of Roland Emmerich prevailing, etc. I'm not fully persuaded that Anonymous, which sounds like kin to Untitled, is the greatest title.

This was posted more than three weeks ago, and went right by me.

Critical response to Rise of the Planet of the Apes is 80% wowser, over-the-moon, delirious and ecstatic. The general tone isn't "yeah, pretty good film, worth seeing" but "this is really an exception...summer's best popcorn flick...Serkis deserves an Oscar nomination...much better than expected," etc. And about 20% of the critical community just can't seem to get it. Not in a somewhat or mostly negative way, but sharply, at times harshly...right into the trash bin. I haven't read a single half-and-halfer except for Peter Debruge's Variety review.

Here's a Vulture summary of Oscar nomination shout-outs for...

What am I supposed to do with this? Black-attired Anne Hathaway with black goggles, riding a totally standard fat-tire Batman motorcycle, etc., etc. Should I feel relieved that she doesn't have cat ears? Fine.

As I noted earlier this week, the second half of The Change-Up is better -- certainly more tolerable -- than the first half, which is mostly foul, rancid and sub-mental. And there's one second-half bit that got me. I didn't laugh, exactly, but I guffawed or tittered in some kind of pleasurable way. Because I recognized the moment. Because I've been there.

Ryan Reynolds is inside Jason Bateman's attorney body, and is working late at the office. And Bateman's wife, played by Leslie Mann, calls him about something or other. The punchy Bateman listens for a few seconds and asks, "Uhm...who is...Read More

I make factual and typographical mistakes each and every day on this site. Which I try to correct as quickly as I can. So I'm sure MCN's Michael Wilmington will appreciate being told that he's made a mistake in his 8.3 review of John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate ('62), or the MGM Bluray rather. Apart from the fact that Wilmington doesn't mention that the quality of the Bluray is highly unexceptional, I mean, and smothered in digital mosquitoes.

The error, which readers are invited to spot, is in the following graph: "Now, as...Read More

The fact that Mike Huckabee didn't realize that 9/11 and War on Terror, his company's latest animated educational video for children, would strike most people as highly distasteful speaks volumes about Huckabee's insular mentality. The apparent purpose of LearnOurHistory.com, other than to make money, is to plant favorable impressions of rightwing theology upon young minds. Not a new concept.

Brett Ratner and Don Mischer will co-produce the 2012 Oscar telecast, it was announced earlier today. Ratner has promised an emphasis on laughs. Something tells me he doesn't mean the brainy Steve Martin or Bill Maher kind...no offense. I'm guessing he'll coarsen things up and take the show in a kind of drop-your-pants Animal House direction. I'm just guessing. It's probably safe to say that the show will also be a little less gay, by which I mean it'll have less of a song-and-dance Las Vegas glitter vibe.

Movieline's Christopher Rosen nailed it when he wrote that "the only way Tom Sherak...Read More

My first reaction to Glenn Kenny's Some Came Running pan of Evan Glodell's Bellflower was, "Hey, he likes using the term 'beardo' as much as I do!" I don't know when it began to catch on, but I've used "beardo" a lot over the last two or three years (and twice in Bellflower riffs). It basically means "pretentious or self-centered jerkoff who wears a beard."

"In his review of the inventive enfant-terrible indie Bellflower for The A/V Club," Kenny writes, "Keith Phipps hits on something crucial about the film that I've...Read More

"Dow's 512 point drop [earlier today] underscores the state of unreality in DC.," Howard Kurtz more or less tweeted about a half-hour ago. "Pundits felt crisis was over when a deal, however lousy, was reached." If you consider the perspective offered by a ten-year graph, what happened today doesn't seem quite as bad.

This morning the Film Society of Lincoln Center announced a special New York Film Festival showing of William Wyler's Ben-Hur ('59), or more specifically a digitally restored 8K version that is the source of the upcoming Warner Home Video Bluray that streets on 9.27. I'm told that the NYFF showing will probably happen on Saturday, 10.1, starting sometime in the morning.

The interesting angle is that the NYFF will be showing the Biblical epic at the full Camera 65 aspect ratio of 2.76 to 1, which may (emphasis on that word) be the very first...Read More

The most distinctive things about Henry Cavill's appearance in Zack Snyder's Man of Steel are (a) the subdued rosey-pinkish tone of red in the cape and chest logo, (b) the gray body suit with the criss-cross texture, and (c) the knife pleats fanning out from the shoulder-origin section of the cape. There's no point in wearing knife pleats unless you drop the suit off at the cleaners each and every time after wearing it. Christopher Reeve and George Reeves' Superman capes were more natural looking...they just hung loose.

I read a riff the other day that said the American Dream used to include a nice home in the suburbs with a white picket fence, but that today's big dream is just to survive (i.e., keep up with the payments) with maybe a little mad money on the side. Like it or not, that's the 2011 reality that the best and the brightest are looking to fulfill. Eat healthy, stay in place, no falling off the treadmill.

Another thing that needs to change is people who work at offices always going to lunch. I just tried to reach three of four people...Read More

With this morning's announcement about Simon Curtis' My Week With Marilyn (Weinstein Co., 11.4) having been chosen as the Centerpiece for the 2011 New York Film Festival, Manhattanites will get an early look at what I've been told is an extraordinary, highly enjoyable Kenneth Branagh performance as Laurence Olivier.

Laurence Oliver, Marilyn Monroe sometime during the moderately hellish ordeal that was the making of The Prince and the Showgirl.

Last April an HE reader attended a New York research screening of Curtis's film, which stars Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe, and had this to report:

"Branagh is...Read More

"I had three reactions to Asif Kapadia's Senna, an absorbing, somewhat affecting doc about the late Ayrton Senna, the legendary Brazilian race-car driver and Formula One champion who was killed during a race in 1994 at the age of 34. They were (a) 'very well-made film, stirring story,' (b) 'Senna's death was very sad' and (c) 'shit sometimes happens when you drive at exceptionally high speeds in the pursuit of beating others to the finish line."

"A race-car driver who dies in a pile-up is like a mountain climber who...Read More

The line is from Tom Stoppard's Hapgood, a 1988 play about double and triple agents and quantum physics and making audiences feel lost and clueless. Aaah, for the simplicity of a story about the uncovering of a mere double! A popcorn movie in relative terms. TTSS being set in the '70s is like extra butter.

Warner Bros. has announced that Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar will open on November 11th, and that Stephen Daldry's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close will debut on December 25th. They obviously have big Oscar campaigns in mind for both. The latter is an emotional 9/11-related drama costarring Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock. All kinds of nommies will presumably be sought for Eastwood's Hoover biopic -- Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor (Leonardo DiCaprio), Best Supporting Actor (Armie Hammer) and so on.

The new Moneyball trailer isn't much different from the first one, which surfaced on or about June 16th. What about Robin Wright, Kathryn Morris, Tammy Blanchard? Don't they have any good lines? I think it's time to show this sucker. Just lay it out there. Any sports movie that doesn't end with rowdy jowly guys yelling "we're number one!" gets my vote.

Variety's Peter Debruge -- the guy who wrote an impassioned thumbs-up review of the reprehensible Crazy, Stupid, Love -- seems unsettled by Rise of the Planet of the Apes offering a "curious chance for humans to revel in their own destruction." He also wonders if audiences "[will] mind witnessing the annihilation of their own species" as "there's something undeniably subversive in asking auds to cheer" as humankind begins to lose the battle for earthly dominance.

And yet for a film that "could have been a disastrous gamble," Rise of the Planet of the Apes "makes for an impressive, if predictably...Read More

So the reason Martin Scorsese's George Harrison: Living in the Material World wasn't included in today's announcement release about 2011 Toronto Film Festival docs is that it'll probably wind up debuting at the 2011 New York Film Festival instead. NYFF honchos didn't reply so no confirmation, but I was told earlier today that discussions are underway for Scorsese's 210-minute doc to premiere at their festival.

I was expecting the Harrison doc to play Toronto because Scorsese's Bob Dylan: No Direction Home, which also ran long (208 minutes) and was cut by the same editor (David Tedeschi) who cut Material World, played...Read More

All Pat Buchanan had to say to the Rev. Al Sharpton as he referred to President Obama was "your guy in the ring" instead of "your boy in the ring"...that's all. Same meaning, same inference. But Buchanan is either getting tone deaf or getting old or becoming subconsciously whatever.Question: would Buchanan had gotten in as much trouble if he'd said "your homie in the ring"?

A compassionate assessment of David Dobkin's The Change-Up (Universal, 8.5) would be to call it a schizophrenic experience -- a film with a split personality. It's awful at first -- "odiously vulgar" and "oppressively unfunny" are fair descriptions of the first 45 or 50 minutes. But then it improves when the characters suddenly "get real" and settle into intimacy and character and reality-facing issues, and the film stops playing to the cretins out there who squeal with laughter at poop, piss and dick jokes.

Ryan Reynolds, Jason Bateman in .

The first section, seemingly written and...Read More

I'm of the opinion that Andy Serkis's performance-capture emoting as Ceasar-the-chimp in Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a little too broad and underlined...just a tad. But I have no argument with those who feel Serkis and director Rupert Wyatt have done something truly exceptional here. There's no question that Serkis's performance is the emotional lynchpin of the film, and that, in a braver, fairer world, it would be fully justified and appropriate to nominate him for Best Supporting Actor.

As I said last night, the actors branch of the Academy,...Read More

20th Century Fox's Rise of the Planet of the Apes opens this Friday, and the town's big-gun critics only just saw it tonight. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the standard term for showing a movie this late in the game is "hide the ball." Which publicists tend to do when the movie in question isn't very good. Except Rise of the Planet of The Apes is really good. It's easily the best Apes movie ever made, and that includes the original.

Rise is sharper, tighter, more emotional...lacking a Statue of Liberty finale, okay, but nonetheless...Read More

"I just saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes," a friend wrote a couple of hours ago, "and even though I'm not supposed to say anything, I enjoyed it thoroughly as a fun, not-intellectually-taxing summer entertainment. (Full disclosure: I love the Apes franchise, except for the Burton atrocity.) But my wife, who also had fun with it, was wondering: who's the audience? Other than the Apes cultists -- and they're out there -- there doesn't seem to be a must-see factor here. Am I wrong?"

Rise opens on Friday, 8.5 -- three days hence. How eager is the want-to-see?

What everyone loves about sitting on the beach is that you know that the way the surf looks and sounds and smells today, right now, is pretty much exactly as it looked, smelled and sounded 49 years ago when Marilyn Monroe posed for this shot. Or 500 or 750 or 2,000 years ago. It never changes. I'm writing this because I like the photo, and I wish right now I could be sitting in this exact same spot. Except I have to go see Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

I had to run out to an 11 am screening of Gavin O'Connor's Warrior (Lionsgate, 9.9), a rousing, emotionally emphatic, Mixed Martial Arts family drama that I'm not allowed to review at this time. But Tom Hardy is the shit in this thing. The instant he appeared on-screen I knew he was up to something extra-special and quite fierce. He gives one of the most intense burn-through, seething-machismo performances I've ever seen in a mainstream feature.

Hardy's Warrior character is an AWOL Marine who eats his MMA opponents in the cage. He's a quiet animal in...Read More

Longtime HE reader James Kent has written to explain why he'll no longer be following the column. The reason is basically LexG, he says. I realize there's a major annoyance factor out there, and I also think I've made it clear I won't tolerate LexG's self-pitying remarks about women or loneliness and/or occasional threats of suicide. But I respect good writing from any corner and the wisdom and the ability to cut through the crap. I wish more commenters had that slash-through quailty, and I also wish LexG would try to develop more personal discipline.

It could be inferred that Kent reps the...Read More

Reason TV, a libertarian channel, has posted footage of Matt Damon debating the role of teachers during a Save Our Schools rally outside the White House on 7.30.11. The purpose of the event: "To put the public back in public schools." The six-minute video [click here] was produced, shot and edited by Jim Epstein. Hosted by Michelle Fields.

The Good Will Hunting clip is a snarky editorial comment about Damon being a weepy liberal type -- ignore it. The last line is great.

There's a review embargo in place on The Change-Up (Universal, 8.5) until 4 pm today But I half-liked it to my surprise, and my evening was made at the after-party when costar Jason Bateman came over to say hi and tell me that he's a regular HE reader/fan/admirer. Then he said, "Thanks for classing up the internet" or words to that effect. There are haters who would disagree (and I don't want or need that debate right now), but it felt great all the same.

I spoke to Jonah Hill briefly about Moneyball ("See you in Toronto!"), and...Read More

In honor of Jeff Prosserman's forthcoming Chasing Madoff (Cohen Media Group, 8.26), which I'll finally be seeing on Wednesday, here's a re-posting of a pretty good March 2009 piece about how Madoff might have lived his life and spent his time if he'd decided to lam it.

David Dobkin's The Change-Up (Universal, 8.5), an allegedly raunchy body-switch comedy starring Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman, is having a big Westwood premiere tonight. The trailer has me scared because it has Bateman and Reynolds shouting "aaahhh!" when they realize they're no longer themselves and have switched lives. It also implies that the film likes poo-poo and pee-pee humor, and that's not good either. Plus I don't like gags about guys getting all frazzled trying to take care of wailing babies. I'm just being honest.

It's not funny when actors go "aaaahhh!"....ever. If you play a...Read More

I sent an inquiry about the Academy's current Best Picture voting rules to TheWrap's Steve Pond, Deadline's Pete Hammond, Awards Daily's Sasha Stone, Indiewire's Anne Thompson, EW's Dave Karger and Anthony Breznican, In Contention's Kris Tapley and Gold Derby's Tom O'Neil. The bottom line is that the Academy's "surplus rule," which only Pond and maybe 13 or 14 other people in the world fully comprehend in all its labrynthian detail, means that the 5% rule (or is it a 9% rule?) doesn't apply all that strictly.

WARNING: The following is one of the...Read More

Deadline's Nikki Finke is reporting that last weekend's box-ofice actuals have Cowboys & Aliens just barely nipping ahead of The Smurfs for the #1 position. Jon Favreau's somewhat disappointing, sensory-assault CG-aliens western made $36,431,290 compared to $35,611,637 for Sony's odious animated family comedy.

A margin of just over $800,000 ain't hay, but it's not much overall.

I'm not sure that this technical victory matters all that much in the greater scheme because the shorthand Twitter legend -- i.e., Cowboys & Aliens having been lasso'ed or hog-tied or stunned or otherwise humbled by this awful little family film -- has already sunk...

I tweeted this yesterday, but I've decided that the worst-rhyming rock-tune lyric is the following: "Hey, there, Mr. Brontosaurus / don't you have a lesson for us?" It's funny how you just snap into these realizations while driving on a freeway.

"I saw Stupid, Crazy, Love over the weekend," critic Lewis Beale wrote this morning in an email. "Now I understand what you were so worked up about. That scene at the middle school graduation is so terrible, so unreal, so cringe-worthy, it practically destroyed what was otherwise a nice, entertaining rom-com.

"I always wonder about scenes like that. Don't the filmmakers understand how ridiculous they are? Are these endings imposed by the studio? Glenn Ficarra and John Requa have done good work in the past. What were they thinking?"

Wells to Beale: Agreed, but you're being too kind by calling Stupid, Crazy,...Read More