I saw Isbael Coixet's Elegy (Samuel Goldyn, 8.8) twice before it opened -- once at a screening, again at the Aero theatre --and in so doing told myself and two or three friends that I rather liked it, or at least was okay with it. But I haven't been able to write a darn thing about it. Despite the fine lead performances by Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz and the secondary Patricia Clarkson, Peter Sarsgaard, Dennis Hopper, etc. Despite enjoying the upscale pedigree, the obvious intelligence of Nicholas Meyer's screenplay (based on Phillip Roth's "The Dying Animal"), the tasteful nudity, the general atmosphere of taste.

Why did I blow it off? Because there was something too glum and quiet and resigned about it -- something a little subdued, sensitive, talky. I enjoyed the quality vibe, I had no real problems with any of it, but it didn't turn me on in the slightest.

And because -- here we go with another shallow thought (and what would this site be without such things on an occasional basis?) -- I didn't like the idea of a hot brunette like Cruz going to bed with anold coot like Kingsley. He's too weathered, too nuts (Kingsley will always be Don Logan, and vice versa), his nose has gotten too bulbous with age (it was just the right size when he made Betrayal and Gandhi in the early '80s) and I didn't like bedroom scene with Clarkson when the camera just sits there and stares at the soles of his white feet for a couple of minutes straight. Call me empty, but that's why more people haven't paid to see it.

Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the people.

"Mr. [Blankety-blank], we have rules that are not open to interpretation, personal intuition, gut feelings, hairs on the back of your neck, little devils or angels sitting on your shoulder. We're all very well aware of what our orders are and what those orders mean. They come down from our Commander in Chief. They contain no ambiguity. Mr. [Blankety-blank], I've made a decision, I'm captain of this boat, now shut the fuck up!" -- an oft-repeated quote from (a) Run Silent, Run Deep, (b) The Enemy Below, (c) Captain Ron, (d) Two Years Before The Mast, (e) Crimson Tide, (f) Billy Budd.

Both Variety's Robert Koehler and CHUD's Devin Faraci have recently driven out to Claremont to see Religulous, and have today posted poz reviews, Koehler calling it "brilliant" and "incendiary" and Faraci saying that anti-religion barbs aside, it "stacks up really well" as a film.

On top of which The Envelope's Tom O'Neil, who caught the Bill Maher-Larry Charles doc at a New York screening in Tuesday, is saying it's clearly "in the derby" due to this week's Oscar-qualifying bookings, the rave responses and the fact that savvy big-time publicists Michele Robertson and Jeff Hill have been hired to push an awards campaign.

"The only recent comparable example of entertainers venturing into such serious cultural-political territory is Penn & Teller's Showtime series Bullshit!, which skewers sacred cows from a skeptical-libertarian perspective," Koehler notes. "Charles' previous smash, Borat, used funnyman Sacha Baron Cohen to make satirical/political points, but the particular intensity and seriousness of Maher's project are nearly unprecedented.

"Indeed, its arrival shortly after the death of George Carlin -- a profound influence on Maher's standup act and politics -- suggests the kind of film Carlin might have made in his prime.

"Considering he was once a minor comic on the circuit and a supporting thesp in generally awful film comedies, Maher's transformation into one of America's sharpest social critics is remarkable. He takes no script credit, but his periodic monologues to the camera are undeniably written, and written well.

"Ending minutes, though, will catch auds up short: Suddenly, the laughs die down, and as in his closing monologues on Real Time, Maher turns deadly serious with a final statement that will stir raging arguments in theater lobbies."

Laemmle's Claremont during construction phase prior to opening last year.

Faraci notes that "the basic concept has Maher traveling around the world talking to believers about what they believe, and most importantly why (or how they can believe it, for that matter). From the Holy Land to the Holy Land Experience theme park in Florida, Maher goes where the believers are and engages them on their home turf. That makes a huge difference in how the film feels, as does the fact that he actually confronts them.

"Religulous is directed by comic genius and Borat helmer Larry Charles, and it would have been easy to do this movie in a similar vein to that one -- letting these people dig themselves a ridiculous hole with their own words -- but Maher isn't interested in that. He wants to interact with these people, to confront them with the logic-hating aspects of their faiths and see what they come back with.

"That's where I think the movie succeeds the most, but also one of the main places where detractors will come after it. They'll say that Maher is looking just to clown these people, but that isn't the case. He's more than slightly exasperated with the cop-out answers that people give him (to the point where he actually gets kind of excited when a Jesus impersonater explains the paradoxical Holy Trinity by comparing it to the three states of water -- it's bullshit, Maher says, but it's interesting and new bullshit to him).

"This film is supposed to be funny so he's being funny, but he's also being fair. He's asking these people straight, direct questions. In return he's getting garbage like 'What if you die and find out you're wrong?'"

I sat down late this afternoon with Alex Holdridge, director-writer of In Search of a Midnight Kiss, and his two stars, Scoot McNairy and Sara Simmonds. Easily the best written, most recognizably "real" younger person's relationship drama I've seen since Richard Linklater's Before Sunset (and probably the most beautifully photographed), it opens in Los Angeles on Friday. I'll relate some of our conversation tomorrow.

In Search of a Midnight Kiss costars Scoot McNairy (l.), Sara Simmonds, director-cowriter Alex Holdridge (r.) at West Hollywood's Le Pain Quotidien -- Wednesday, 8.21, 6:15 pm

Holdridge, McNairy

Sara Simmonds

Should I stay or should I go?, asks Jean Arthur's "Bonnie." But Cary Grant's "Jeff" isn't the declarative type, so he suggests a coin flip -- heads you stay, tails you go. He flips the coin. "Heads -- what about it?" he asks. "I'm hard to get, Jeff," she says, hurt. "All you have to do is ask me." He gives her the coin, a kiss, out the door, "See ya, Bonnie!" The plane he's co-piloting with Allan Joslyn is tearing down the runway when she looks at the coin. The scene starts at 7:55.

Firstshowing.net's Alex Billington has posted the European (i.e., German subtitled) trailer for Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon (Universal, 12.5).

For what it's worth, Frank Langella seems a little more Nixon-like in this than he did in the Broadway play, which required broader strokes and playing to the upper balcony. (On top of which his size -- Langella is a big man -- couldn't be disguised on stage, but it can here.) Michael Sheen, also, naturally, seems to be using more subtlety in his performance as David Frost.

But you know what I'm also feeling? That the name-level supporting players -- Oliver Platt, Sam Rockwell, Rebecca Hall, Toby Jones, Matthew Macfadyen -- are going to deliver first-rate snap, edge, smarts. We know Langella and Sheen are going to score, but the second bananas are going to bring it home.

Old news, happened five days ago, etc., but let no one say Bill Murray lacks that quietly confident machismo thing -- perhaps churning within (who knows?) but dry, calm, self-amused. Grace under pressure. But whatever happened to jumping on your own and pulling your own ripcord? It's a bit pussy-ish to jump with a guy on your back...no?

Yesterday Variety's Anne Thompson did some good spade work in uncovering what really happened between Warner Bros., Tom Cruise and The 28th Amendment. Alluded to by L.A. Times reporter Rachel Abramowitz, yes, but not as specifically as Thompson explains. What it all boiled down to was that Cruise wanted to play a beleagured U.S. president fighting a shadow cabal or the reins of power, and WB basically said nope, can't do it, won't fly. As Thompson says at the very end of the piece, "Wow."

Those Robert Harris-supervised restorations of The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II will be shown theatrically starting on 9.12 at New York's Film Forum, with concurrent bookings in Los Angeles and San Francisco. It's all a plug for the 9.23 DVD/Blu-ray release of these two (plus The Godfather, Part III, which no one cares about). Harris did his usual first-rate work under the direction of Francis Coppola and the legendary Gordon Willis.

T-shirt worn by waitress at special screening of Harris-restored Godfather on the Warner Bros. lot several months ago.

"Two nights ago, Fox News aired the first of two presidential candidate documentaries called 'Character and Conduct.' First up [was] Barack Obama, whose documentary pretends really hard that it's not full of stereotypes and insinuations. Couldn't stomach it Monday evening? We've got it for you in a minute." -- from a video-piece introduction by the 23/6 guys, posted today. [Thanks to Jett, who linked to this today in one of his first postings for The Beef.]

The people who will make Beverly Hills Chihuahua (Disney, 10.3) a hit when it opens are are not "bad," but their support of this film, which I see as a metaphor for the shopping-mall plasticity and icky phoniness that has taken over this country's middle-class culture, will signify a kind of spiritual tragedy in this country. Just as you can look at, say, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and say, yup, on some level that was America in 1937, Beverly Hills Chihuahua is a kind of reflection of us.

Because the indications are that this movie is the worst. The trailers are giving me a kind of celluloid Cancun vibe, and I've been to Cancun and seen the dead expressions in the faces of the people staying in those awful swanky hotels, so don't tell me.

I used to take my young boys to every crappy kiddie movie that came along back in the '90s, and so I obviously get why today's parents will be doing the same with Chihuahua. It's just a movie and who cares...right? But the grotesque attitude and sensibility behind this film, to judge by the trailers, is wretched and stupefying. A spiritually healthy country -- one with its head and heart in the right place, and its communal soul connected to something other than the latest cheap consumer high -- would pay it little mind. And here I am sounding like a grouch for saying this.

But there's another grouch who will benefit, I strongly suspect, from the people who will love this film, and I mean John McCain. Fairly or unfairly, delusional or dead-on, I have come to believe that the mentality that supports McCain draws water from the same well that will "heart" Beverly Hills Chihuahua. You have to be a little bit dumb and lame of spirit to not be appalled by the Chihuahua trailers, just as I believe that a significant slice of McCain's support (though obviously not all of it) is coming from the easygoing, sandals-and-white-socks-wearing clueless class.

The racial-minded, low-information, 55-and-over whites who react to media-cycle spasms and shift allegiances at the drop of a hat are moving away from the skinny mulatto guy and shifting towards the old white guy. It may as well be faced. The election could go the wrong way, and the wrong people -- led by a curmudgeonly old coot who doesn't know from computers and gets details wrong left and right and who will surely bog us down in the muck of the Middle East and add an attitude of smug belligerence to foreign policy, and who will surely allow the climate-change situation to worsen, and who will almost certainly serve only one term -- could take hold of the reins next January.

The latest Zogby-Reuters poll suggests it could happen. The last best chance this country has to turn things around could be lost, and the sentiments of the dug-in rural dumb-asses could indeed turn the tide. Barack Obama has the older women and men against him and isn't making the headway that he should, and people like me are seriously scared. It could even be over as we speak, as N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd has sardonically suggested. I feel grim as hell. Especially if the feared Bradley Effect means than Obama may lose 5% of his lead in the polls (if he has such a lead come Election Day) when people actually go into the voting booths.

If I were Obama I would swallow my pride and self-emasculate by choosing the hateful, hollow and thoroughly demonic Hillary Clinton as his vice-president. Then, at least, he'd have a real scrapper on his team, and he'd pull in a good portion of the resentful Hillary hold-outs, and his numbers would kick up. It's hard to suggest this with a straight face, but at least, then, he'd have a decent shot at winning. And isn't that better than losing to the white-haired guy and ushering in the same old instincts and syndromes that have taken this country down?

A major turning of the page -- an historic cultural turnover, a generational changing of the guard -- would happen with an Obama victory. I wish there was some way to analogize this without comparing Team Obama -- a fairly unradical bunch with moderately progressive ideas and intentions -- to 20th Century communists, but the fact is that the "reds" in this country -- dominated by the insufficiently educated rurals over 55 -- are opposed to Obama in much the same way that the counter-revolutionary "white" Russians were opposed to the Bolsheviks, the conservative, plantation-owning Cubans were opposed to Castro, and the friends and allies of Chang Kai Shek were opposed to and tried to undermine the Chinese Communists after they took over in 1949.

In each case the Russian, Cuban and Chinese socialists went after the counter-revolutionaries like gardeners go after crab grass and dandelions, and it wasn't pretty. Acts of political vengeance never are. All I can say is that as horrible as any act of political repression is and always will be, there's a part of me that at least understands why the Russians, Cubans and Communists Chinese acted as they did. Because I despise the American "reds" as a cultural pestilence. They stand for and support everything that is regressive, selfish, racist, shallow, corpulent and hee-hawish in this country. They are the Chihuahua-embracers, the WALL*E tele-tubbies -- and God save us if their boy wins.

It certainly is exciting trying to calculate if Tropic Thunder will hold on to its #1 slot this weekend minus the Beijing Olympics competition, or whether Jason Statham's Death Race, which no one with a smidgen of taste, education or discernment cares about seeing, might nudge ahead by a million or so.

Followed, almost certainly, by The Dark Knight in third place with $9 or $10 million, with the $500 million mark now in sight. The Ana Faris comedy The House Bunny -- why is there a "The" in that tile? -- will probably be fourth with $7 or $8 million. The pink being used in the one-sheets and trailers is a signal to shallow under-25s females who are jones-ing for another Legally Blonde-type experience. Life is all about blondness, charm, heart, empathy, being loved and desired and going "oop-boop-bee-doop."

Fox's The Rocker, getting little traction despite (or because of?) Office star Rainn Wilson, will be fifth.

Directed and written by Darren Grodksy and Danny Jacobs, Humboldt County (Magnolia, 9.26) is an eccentric comedy about a failed medical student (Jeremy Strong), his new girlfriend (Fairuza Balk) and a community of eccentric pot-growers (or pot users or whatever) in northern California. Peter Bogdanovich, Frances Conroy and Brad Dourif costar.

A dull and poorly focused shot of the new Body of Lies billboard in Times Square, posted by some guy at Reel Suave. It looks like it was taken with a cell-phone camera. If I'd been there with my Canon I'd have gotten something. I am the Times Square billboard-photographing Zen master when I'm there.

A moderately enjoyable time-waster, if that's what you're looking to do.

I thought that basic primer articles about the RED digital camera happened a couple of years ago and now we're on to bigger and better things. Nonetheless, here's an 8.18 Wired aticle by Michael Behar that reads like one of those "hey, have you heard about this?" run-downs. There must be something new about it that I'm missing.

I've seen a Red Cam up close and it didn't have this metal insect look with the extensions and doohickeys.

"It's the first digital movie camera that matches the detail and richness of analog film," Behar writes, by "recording motion in a whopping 4,096 lines of horizontal resolution -- 4K in filmmaker lingo -- and 2,304 of vertical.

"For comparison, hi-def digital movies like Sin City and the Star Wars prequels top out at 1,920 by 1,080, just like your HDTV. (There's also a slightly higher-resolution option called 2K that reaches 2,048 lines by 1,080.) Film doesn't have pixels, but the industry-standard 35-millimeter stock has a visual resolution roughly equivalent to 4K.

"And that's what makes the Red so exciting: It delivers all the dazzle of analog, but it's easier to use and cheaper -- by orders of magnitude -- than a film camera. In other words, Jim Jannard's creation threatens to make 35mm movie film obsolete."

A 8.18 Hollywood Reporter story by Elizabeth Guider and Paul J. Gough says that the Hollywood actors expected to attend at least some of the Democratic National Convention events in Denver (Monday, 8.25 through Thursday, 8.28) includes Ben Affleck, Josh Brolin, Annette Bening, Spike Lee, Anne Hathaway, Susan Sarandon, Richard Schiff and Kerry Washington.

That's it? Feels thin. There must be many, many more going than this. Especially if you throw in directors, producers and screenwriters.

Maybe some celebs are keeping their Denver plans deliberately under wraps? If I were running the Obama Denver effort I would want to keep news about Hollyweirdos attending the convention and going to private parties down to a bare minimum. The rurals who believe that wearing flag pins on your lapel is a significant issue will surely resent hearing about celebs drinking Pinot Grigio at elite Mile High gatherings. But then they're good at that. Resentment, I mean.

Once again the question about an upcoming movie possibly being "too long" is giving concern to writers with quarter-of-an-inch-deep sensibilities. (Like, for example, the Vulture writer behind this piece.) Unless a movie is absurdly long, all that matters to anyone who knows anything is "how good is it?" Nothing else matters.

I didn't feel that Steven Soderbergh's 4 hour and 20-something minute Che was long in the least when I saw it in Cannes. But I guarantee that House Bunny (Sony, 8.22) is going to feel very draggy for some of us within 15 or 20 minutes. (Unless there's lots of nudity.)

Anne Thompson has reported that "the early word on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is that [director] David Fincher has handed in a movie to Paramount that is quite long." Please! Then she delivers an update that says, according to the studio, that Button ran two hours and 43 minutes as of their last research screening. Fincher is still cutting to find "the length he is happy with," said one spokesman. "The final print is due in October."

It's become such an absolute given that Terry Gilliam's movies have stopped selling tickets that I couldn't find the energy to comment on Stephen Zeitchik's 8.15 Hollywood Reporter piece. It said buyers were wary of Gilliam's latest, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, despite the presence of Heath Ledger in this, his very last film. The title alone puts the fear of God into me. Zeitchik is hearing what he's hearing because every distributor in the world knows it will put the fear of God into everyone on the planet Earth.

Sad to say, the signs and indications are that Gilliam is probably over. The last film of his that I even half-liked was Twelve Monkeys, which came out 13 years ago. The most interesting thing he made before that was The Adventures of Baron Munchausen ('88), which I loved in certain respects but nonetheless made me fidget around in my seat and constantly scratch myself. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ('98) was a chore to sit through -- be honest. And Tideland ('05) was sheer torture. And yet Gilliam is a film artist, and the world of movies is richer even for his attempts to make his films work on some level. The thing no one wants to admit is that the more recent ones have been hell to sit through.

If I were Saul Dibb, director of The Duchess (Paramount, 9.19), I would have changed my name the day I decided to become a filmmaker. Saul Dibb could be an architect, a restaurant owner, a tailor, a stockbroker, the owner of a roofing company, a garment-district clothier, a cab driver or even a stage director, but something doesn't feel quite right about a guy with that name delivering an upscale period piece aimed at the ladies. It seems to somehow diminish that sexy, elegant 18th Century vibe that films of this sort are supposed to deliver.

Keira Knightley

No comment on the film itself, mind -- I'm just saying that "Dibb" rhymes with "bib," "fib" and "squib." I wouldn't want to see a Barry Lyndon-era romance directed by Maury Schlotnik, Sidney Schwartz, Lenny Bruce or Mort Sahl either.

A guy in the business (not a journalist) recently caught up with The Duchess and called it "a commercially serviceable but cinematically unremarkable piece of faux lit-chick (chicklit?) fare, with all possible Diana/Charles analogies brought to the fore and spelled out in boldface.

"Keira Knightley acquits herself capably, though it's not much of a stretch or progression following on from her strong performance in Atonement. Those who enjoyed Jason Schwartzman's performance as an Emotionally Bored Royal With One Expression (in Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette) will be happy to know that Duchess costar Ralph Fiennes has taken note and upped him, though at least has the benefit of adding Sexual Predator to the character arc. (Plus the dude's in shape. Men's Health, call his agent.)

"It'll make money. Women and girls will probably dig it. But anyone who has the film on their Oscar charts needs to arrange a revision, aside, perhaps, for the pretty costumes."

Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Three Monkeys, which I was awe-struck by in Cannes, is also slated to show in Toronto. For those who weren't in Cannes or may have missed it for whatever reason, fit this into your Toronto schedule. Highly recommended, top of my list.

I never read enough of Manny Farber's stuff to be able to liberally quote him or, frankly, feel all that close to the guy. If you're talking majestic old-timers I was always more of an Otis Ferguson or a James Agee man. I always knew -- recognized -- that Farber was one of the great all-time film critics, but...ahhh, I can't do this. I can't say it like I ought to because I'm not feeling it because I'm under-informed.

All I know is that Farber was a wonderfully jazzy writer, and that he'll always warrant respect. He died sometime Monday in San Diego, but he lived until age 91 so he had the right genes or the right diet or something.

Of all the essay-obits I've read this evening since coming home at 11 pm, I liked Village Voice critic Jim Hoberman's the most, followed by Glenn Kenny's on Some Came Running.

Since In Contention's Kris Tapley has broken the news that Rod Lurie's Nothing But The Truth is going to the Toronto Film Festival, and since he's offered some favorable impressions of the lead performances (having seen a version a while back), I may as well admit I've also seen a not-quite-finished cut and that I feel it's Lurie's best, hands down.

Alan Alda, Kate Beckinsale, Matt Dillon

"Best" because it's feels smoother and crisper and more confidently dug into the soil than The Contender or Resurrecting The Champ or The Last Castle. It's a growth-spurt thing, a movie that says, almost with a kind of shrug, "Okay, now I really know what I'm doing." And because each and every actor nails what they've been hired to do like the pros they are, and I don't just mean the leads -- Kate Beckinsale, Vera Farmiga, Alan Alda and Matt Dillon, all of whom hit triples and homers.

I also mean costars Noah Wyle and David Schwimmer and even the homie-girl actresses who play Beckinsale's cellmates when she goes to the pound for refusing to give up a source. I mean everyone up and down. Everybody delivers, nobody "acts."

The story and theme of NBTT won't cause the tectonic plates to shift under your feet, but it's not coming from that kind of place. It's simply an efficient political drama -- no small feat! -- that reshuffles the cards provided by the Valerie Plame-Joseph Wilson episode. Beckinsale isn't Judith Miller, thank God, but a hungry journalist for a major Washington Post -like daily who learns the identity of a CIA agent (Farmiga) from an unlikely source and, for reasons too complex to get into, reveals this in a front-page story.

And is soon being pressured by a tough special prosecutor (Dillon) to give up her source. And who's counselled by a smoothie defense attorney (Alda). And who isn't supported enough by her husband (Schwimmer). And who misses her kid(s) and is eventually carrying the cross -- incarcerated, traumatized, no makeup, blue.

The film has a little bit of that Alan Pakula '70s paranoia going on. Everyone is fairly above-board as to their actions and motives, yes, but the world of Nothing But The Truth is faintly unnerving in that one always senses what may be waiting around the corner, patiently and with a court order.

One could call NBTT a prime example of the kind of smart, middle-budget movie that producers and studio guys are making fewer and fewer of these days. I for one worship the ground films like this walk on. Lurie's film is as good as the highly satisfying Recount, the HBO political drama with Kevin Spacey, and that's a serious compliment. I know the marketing people always go "eeeek!" when they hear someone say this, but it's a badge of pride and distinction.

NBTT has been well shot by Alik Sakharov -- unpretentious, nicely shaded. The political tension is leavened by occasional servings of wit, humor, attitude. It feels believable in terms of milieu and even the small performances (even Lurie is good in a brief cameo), and basically has every key aspect nailed down and humming and completing the whole.

Each and every performance works, but the best, for me, is Alda's clothes-horse attorney. (I particularly loved his work in a delicious restaurant scene with Schwimmer, which I can't explain without spoiling.) Beckinsale's work is absolutely her finest ever, such that I'm almost persuaded to forgive her for Pearl Harbor and those two awful vampire films. Farmiga's anger moments are grounded and pan-fried, and I felt completely accepting of (and half-enjoying, in a perverse way) Dillon's right-wing prosecutorial hard-ass.

And I was very impressed with a conjugal prison scene between Beckinsale and Schwimmer, whom I don't want to overlook -- he's solid and true in every at-bat.

I came away from this film satisfied and sated (except for a slight reservation about the ending). I had read the script several months ago and yet the film played better than what I expected. That happens every so often, and sometimes the film isn't as good as the script. All I know is that about 10 or 15 minutes in, I was saying to myself, "Okay, this is entertaining, this is very good, I'm liking each and every scene, there's no fat, the actors are at the top of their game," etc.

Yes, I know and am friendly with Lurie, but I know good craft and good material when I see it, and I'm sure as hell not going to sit on what I know and feel because of a reverse-blowjob concern.

On Thursday evening the remnants of the company once known as New Line Cinema -- 48 people, although it could be more like 45 -- will be celebrating their annual summer shindig at Sky Bar. The theme of the party, I've been told, is "hey, we didn't get whacked!" Okay, I wasn't really told that.

Something in the vicinity of 450 L.A. New Line employees were guillotined last April as part of the Warner Bros.-mandated engulfment-and-downsizing, and that's not counting the New York staffers who were also given their walking papers. It's an old New Line tradition to have a big summer celebration in August and also a holiday party in December. NL production chief Tobey Emmerich could have decided to cancel the Thursday party as a gesture of mourning for the chopped ex-employees, but you have to grim up and live in the now.

Please, please, please -- not Gov. Tim Kaine for Obama's vice-presidential candidate.

Bill Maher and Larry Charles' Religulous, the Lionsgate doc that will play at the Toronto Film Festival roughly two weeks hence but won't open in theatres until 10.3, is now playing twice daily at Laemmle's Claremont 5, about 20 minutes east of downtown Los Angeles. Here's the link to the Yahoo page showing the current Claremont 5 listings, and here's the recording.

No reference to the crybaby musical genre -- it's just that the letters "clar" and "nt" were dark when the shot was taken.

The reason for the early booking is the Academy's Rule 12, which states that to be eligible for a Best Documentary Feature "a documentary feature must complete both a seven-day commercial run in a theater in Los Angeles County, and a seven-day commercial run in a theater in the borough of Manhattan between September 1, 2007 and August 31, 2008."

That means Religulous is probably playing in some out-of-the-way theatre in the Manhattan area also. No critics will be reviewing off the Claremont booking. Even though, it must be noted, N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis reviewed Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired off of a qualifying booking in a theatre in Yonkers last March.

Eleven or twelve years ago Robert Evans shared an unfortunate biological truth with me, which is that "when you get older your nose gets bigger, your ears get bigger and longer and your teeth get smaller." This is what came back to me, in any event, when I read Elizabeth Snead's photo-comparison article about nose jobs.

Snead puts it thusly: "Ears and noses are made mostly of cartilage that may continue to grow as we age. So when a person's nose is perceived by others to be getting smaller and more refined over the years, it raises question for the eagle-eyed star watchers."

Cheers to Owen Wilson for holding back, standing his ground and not going with the flow.

I'm one of the many people in this town who are grieved to hear about manager Joan Hyler's traumatic accident last Friday night. She was hit by a car while crossing Pacific Coast Highway. She sustained "severe and multiple injuries" and lost a lot of blood. I called the UCLA hospital where she's being cared for and was told to go to www.carepages.com -- my first internet attempt to check up on someone in a hospital and wish them well. My best wishes to Joan. She's always been a good egg and a kind soul.

In response to hopes that the recently finished W will show up at the Toronto Film Festival, HE talk-backer Rodrigo called this an unlikely scenario. He's forgetting that W director Oliver Stone is a very fast editor (he whipped JFK together in near-record time). He also needs to be reminded of the production schedule of Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder, which began shooting on 3.23.59, wrapped on 5.15.59 and opened on 7.2.59. It was later nominated for seven Academy Awards.

As one who's reported on the shortcomings of movie-ad campaign decisions by Lionsgate marketing vp Tim Palen (such as Dane Cook's 8.12 complaint about the one-sheet for My Best Friend's Girl) and voiced my own issues from time to time (like the gay-metrosexual ads for 3:10 to Yuma), I have to take my hat off and say "job well done" regarding those new W ads.

The slogan, in particular, is a bulls-eye: "A Life Misunderestimated." (And it's not finessed. About.com's Daniel Kurtzman has reported that Bush said "they misunderestimated me" in Bentonville, Arkansas, on Nov. 6, 2000.) Crew Creative was hired to turn out the ads, but the final creative call always rests with the top in-house marketing guy.

Ad Age's Claude Brodesser-Akner is reporting that the W posters will be billboarded in Denver and Minneapolis during the respective Democratic and Republican conventions. The piece doesn't make clear if the more swaggering poster image of Josh Brolin's Bush (look of calm and confidence, cowboy boots up on desk) will be used in Minneapolis while the more doofusy-looking one will be used in Denver, or if the posters are meant to be regarded side by side.

It would be great, of course, if W is on tomorrow morning's list of the final Toronto Film Festival titles. Here's hoping. W is opening on 10.17, or slightly more than a month after the festival concludes.

Sidenote: A page on Crew Creative's website takes credit for the much-maligned poster for My Best Friend's Girl....whoops.

I've been looking at some of my old Mr. Showbiz columns for the last half-hour or so and was struck by this particular "What's My Line? query. They were fun, these things. But a pain in the ass to select and transcribe.

Guy No. 1: Are you a beer drinker, sir, or would you like to share a martini with me?
Guy No. 2: A martini? Oh, that would be... I'd love a martini.
Guy No. 1: I think you'll find these accommodating. They're quite dry.
Guy No. 2: Don't you use olives?
Guy No. 3: Olives? Where the hell d'ya think you are, man?
Guy No. 1: We do have to make certain concessions to [the situation we find themselves in].
Guy No. 2: Yes, but a man can't really savor his martini without an olive, you know? Otherwise, you see, it just doesn't...quite...make it. (Plop.)

Both The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan and Daily Kos's "rickrocket" wondered aloud today about the origin of John McCain's "cross in the dirt" story, which the presumptive Republican candidate repeated yesterday during his Saddleback Church discussion segment. Sulllivan and "rickrocket" aren't making firm claims, but they're both noting that the story is remarkably similar to one recounted by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago (or perhaps in Burt Ghezzi's The Sign of the Cross -- one or the other).

"I loved The Prestige but didn't understand The Dark Knight," Robert Downey, Jr. said to a Moviehole correspondent two weeks ago. "Didn't get it, still can't tell you what happened in the movie, what happened to the character and in the end they need him to be a bad guy. I'm like, 'I get it. This is so highbrow and so fucking smart, I clearly need a college education to understand this movie.' You know what? Fuck DC comics. That's all I have to say and that's where I'm really coming from."

As the intensely despised Stars Wars: The Clone Wars opened this weekend to a kind of half-dud response ($15 million and change), and since it's been called the absolute end of the road by many a longtime Star Wars fan, I thought it appropriate to rewind nine years and three months to the first major display of Star Wars prequel-mania.

I was off the boat like that after seeing The Phantom Menace, but to think that it took others nine years to come to the realization that bloated Beelzebub George Lucas had spiritually destroyed his own franchise while making money hand over fist is amazing. Nine years of holding on and keeping the faith, and for what?

I've scanned five pages of my Mr. Showbiz article, which ran in early May 1999 and which I called "The Fandom Penance." Here are page #1, page #2, page #3, page #4 and page #5.

Here's hoping or presuming that Enrique Rivero's Parque Via, which today won the top prize at the Locarno Film Festival, will turn up at the Toronto Film Festival. If it's already been programmed or listed, great -- I just haven't found it yet. Which means nothing. Here's Derek Elley's Variety review.

Parque Via helmer Enrique Rivero

Be an American Caroler -- sign up, take the pledge, support your country.

The old Siskel and Ebert movie-review show was the first to teach hoi polloi film lovers that "the argument was the thing -- that art itself was arguable, and that was okay," Chicago Tribune guy Christopher Borelli said today.

"Ebert still writes dazzling reviews for the Sun-Times that make complicated points in approachable language, as does [Michael] Phillips, for the Tribune. Richard Roeper continues as a Sun-Times columnist. And there are more than a few thoughtful voices left in criticism, of course -- outside Chicago, even.

"But it's hard to overstate the importance of a nationally syndicated TV show that speaks up for small fine movies without marketing budgets and reinforces names such as Werner Herzog, Robert Altman and Spike Lee and, oh, say, a David Gordon Green. Indeed, it wouldn't be an overstatement to say that for a generation or two of moviegoers, it was Siskel and Ebert who introduced the idea that good criticism is not about finality or consensus or putting your thumb up or down.

"It's about argument itself.

"The irony, of course, is that it wasn't so long ago that Ebert and Siskel themselves and those opposing critical digits were often raised as the primary catalyst in the dumbing down of film criticism. But I bet for the average everyday moviegoers who rarely think beyond 'I liked it' or 'I hated it' and who rarely consider aesthetics or polemics or politics when they go to a multiplex, the end of the original incarnation of At the Movies will feel like the finale of film criticism itself.

"The argument has ended. The informed movie review can be placed officially on the endangered species list. On TV, let's just declare it extinct."

I keep expecting Barack Obama to say something electric or wowser when he's interviewed, as he was yesterday by Pastor Rick Warren during yesterday's Saddleback Church civil forum. It's not that he lacks charm or feeling when he speaks, or that he fails to express his beliefs plainly or concisely. I guess I've just heard him speak so often that he holds no surprises. He can't not be careful. Not that I expect him to be cavalier. Not in this rancid predatory climate.

I know he'll probably make history when he delivers his big closing-night speech in Denver, which will happen a week from this coming Thursday. I guess I'm just easily bored because whenever he speaks off the cuff, he always seems to go for the bunt. What I'd like to hear him say, I suppose, is something Eric Rothian or Tom Stoppard-esque or early David Mamet-level. Zappers, zingers, sliders. As it is now I feel like I know what he's going to say before he says it, and it's always right across the plate. And more often slow than fast.

As for the content of yesterday's Saddleback discussion, I'm more or less with Zennie Abraham.

"What is widely known is the skin-deep, out-of-date McCain image," writes N.Y. Times columnist Frank Rich in an 8.17 column. "As this fairy tale has it, the hero who survived the Hanoi Hilton has stood up as rebelliously in Washington as he did to his Vietnamese captors. He strenuously opposed the execution of the Iraq war; he slammed the president's response to Katrina; he fought the 'agents of intolerance' of the religious right; he crusaded against the G.O.P. House leader Tom DeLay, the criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff and their coterie of influence-peddlers.

"With the exception of McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, every aspect of this profile in courage is inaccurate or defunct."

The Criterion guys are coming out with a restored high-definition digital transfer DVD of Martin Ritt's The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1965). And as much as I respect and appreciate this company and their first-class efforts, my first thought when I read about this was "uhhm...what for?"

It's not as if the existing DVD, which Paramount Home Video put out in July 2004, is anyone's idea of poor quality or underwhelming or whatever. It allegedly suffers from dirt and scratches, but they've has never caught my attention, much less bothered me to any degree. All I knew when it came out is that the PHV DVD was a big improvement over the godawful versions that had played on the tube in decades past.

The Criterion web page for their Spy Who Came In From The Cold disc says that their "new high-definition digital transfer was created on a Spirit Datacine from a 35 mm composite fine-grain master positive," and that "thousands of instances of dirt, debris, and scratches were removed using the MTI Digital Restoration System." Okay...if they say so. I sound like a rube who doesn't get it, but I know the difference between so-so and high-quality monochrome, and the Paramount DVD is a lot closer to "very good" than "good enough." By my standards, at least.

The Criterion disc extras sound to me like the usual upscale fellatio. They include (a) new interviews with original book author John Le Carre and cinematographer Oswald Morris; (b) The Secret Center: John Le Carre (2000), a BBC documentary on the author's extraordinary life and work; (c) Acting in the '60s: Richard Burton, a 1967 interview with the BBC's Kenneth Tynan examining the actor's performances and accomplishments; (d) a gallery of set designs; (e) a theatrical trailer for the film; and (f) a booklet featuring a new essay by critic Michael Sragow and a reprinted interview with Ritt.

I may as well post an mp3 of Oscar Werner's summation speech to the East German tribunal, even though I've posted it at least once before. I love his pauses, particularly after he says "with the advantage of hindsight"; I love the way he says "quite" and his decision to use the word "grotesque" to describe an erroneous conclusion; I love the way he respectfully cautions the tribunal not to fail to appreciate the "full bestiality" of a crime committed by a rival East German agent.

An HE reader saw Jim Sheridan's Brothers, which I briefly discussed yesterday. I asked him to elaborate and he did, but I found his claim that Tobey Maguire's performance is the "revelation" as opposed to Jake Gyllenhaal and Natalie Portman's, whose performances he described as "sweet."

Maguire plays the solid, responsible, hard-wired husband-father who's captured by the bad guys during a skirmish in Afghanistan and is thereafter presumed dead; Gyllenhaal plays his younger, irresponsible, substance-abusing brother who gradually begins to take Maguire's place with his bereaved wife (Portman) and the kids. (There were two girls in Suzanne Bier's 2004 original, or so I recall.)

"Teeem" claims to have attended a test screening at Sony a month ago. "I also saw [Bier's] original Brothers a year ago, [after which] Sheridan himself questioned the audience for feedback about what they liked and didn't like, what would work better, etc. That's why i was especially interested in seeing what he did with it. He ignored or couldn't work in my comment to him about the KIA/MIA problem, which was also in the original.

"I felt the original was a bit weak, reminding me of Things We Lost in the Fire. I did fall in love with Connie Nielsen, but didn't buy the military character as portrayed by the lead from The Celebration, which I absolutely loved.

"Jake and Portman were sweet; Sam Shepard adds a small but interesting motivation that i don't remember from the other version; Tobey is the revelation."

Here's another mediocre old film that not even bad-movie buffs are likely to ever see or even think about it (except for the brief blip afforded by this item) due to the 99% certainty that it'll never see the light of a DVD or Blu-ray release. There are hundreds if not thousands of films that exist on this nowhere level, and yet their titles and artwork once blazed from super-sized marquees and wall paintings on Times Square, causing talk and suspicion and hoo-hah. Here's Edward Margulies' review, stored in the Movieline archives.

A curiously undated N.Y. Times Home and Garden piece called "Far From Conservative" offers a slide-show presentation of director Roland Emmerich's radical abode in London's Knightsbridge section. The photos tell us that Emmerich is an nouveau-riche anti-traditionalist with a sensibility that is almost entirely defined by news-channel impressions of the last 15 or so years; the bad news is that Emmerich likes stuffed zebras.

The shot of Emmerich's living room, of course, immediately recalled Patrick McNee's living room in A Clockwork Orange (designed by John Barry) as well as the Crab Key interrogration room in Dr. No (designed by Ken Adam). As Emmerich's home is filled with nothing but reflections and duplications of cultural-political icons, it would be entirely in keeping for Emmerich's designer to have taken inspiration from these two films.

My favorite is the man-bed with the little George Bush action figure, dressed in his famous "Mission Accomplished" Air Force jump suit, lying dead center, along with a photo of a shirtless Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ("I'm a dinner jacket") on the night table.

I once rode shotgun on a cross-country flight (Van Nuys airport to La Guardia Airport) in a 4-seat Beechcraft Bonanza. The pilot was a Russian pediatrician named Vladimir. It was a two-day trip, and I'll never forget flying blind through heavy fog as we approached St. Louis and having to be talked down by the air-traffic controller there. You couldn't see a blessed thing for minutes on end, and all you had to go by was the voice of this kindly, intelligent and very comforting man on the radio speaker.

And then suddenly the air-strip lights appeared, and as anti-religion as I am today and was before, I nearly wept when it hit me that the lights really do form a crucifix. William Wellman knew whereof he spoke.

"I am so sick of Anakin Skywalker. Why does George Lucas repeatedly try to shove this guy down our throats? Remember when we all loved Luke and Han? What happened to those characters? If you want to do a cartoon so bad, what about one about those guys? Nope. We get Anakin.

"Do you know why people never quite latched on to Anakin like they did to Luke? Lets see... in the future he will: kill his wife, burn Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru to death, kill Ben Kenobi, freeze Han Solo, and sever his own son's hand. Nice guy. Well that is just gold ole' 'Sky Guy' for ya. Not to mention the scene where he gets caught in that tree and swings vine to vine leading a pack of monkeys...oops, sorry, wrong terrible George Lucas sequel." -- from an 8.14 slam of The Clone Wars called "I Denounce You, Star Wars," written by author of A Midwesterner's Guide to Living in New York City.

Simon Pegg, who was in talks to play British Lt. Archie Hicox in Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards, has had to bail because of a scheduling conflict, according to a post on Pegg's Myspace page. Pegg would have acted alongside Mike Myers, who recently signed on to play a British general. An 8.16 post on "The Playlist" stating that actors are "dropping like flies" off of the WWII film is a reference to David Krumholtz having also left the project. Two flies, to be precise.