It was in the cards for several weeks, and now Miramax president Daniel Battsek has finally announced his acquisition of Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi, a profoundly gripping drama that I saw and wrote about during the latter stages of the Toronto Film Festival. More in the vein of Walter Salles’ Central Station than Fernando Meirelles’ City of God, Tsotsi has the chops to shoot right to the top of the list of Best Foreign-Language Feature hopefuls.

If you have the slightest appetite for good political theatre, reading this Daily News story about Warren Beatty’s anti-Arnold-Schwarzenegger speech in Oakland the other day will get your blood going. There are those who would love to see Beatty run against Schwarzenegger, but I there’s no way he’ll ever drop his Artful Dodger mentality and hang his hide over the side. It would be terrific, of course, if he did run. And I don’t agree at all with the view of Dick Rosengarten, co-publisher of California Political Week, that a Beatty candidacy wouldn’t fly. “I’m not sure two movie stars can run [against each other], not even here,” he told the News. Wrong — two former movie stars battling it out for the California governorship would be a totally natural and logical expression of the way Hollywood and politics have been bleeding into each other and upping the ante over the last 45 years.

The Great Liberal Hope who might actually pull the trigger some day will be Ben Affleck. Truth, Justice and the American Way will probably result in a career upsurge so it won’t happen any time soon, but when Affleck hits his next career pothole (five or ten years from now…who knows?) he might actually start making the moves. If you saw him on the political talk shows during the ’04 Democratic Convention in Boston, you know he’s got the makings.

You should have heard the crowd chortle with delight when Bill Hurt went into his irritated-older-brother shpiel in the last act of A History of Violence at the Grove yesterday afternoon. Hurt had them in the palm of his hand. He got a laugh with almost every line, every facial tic…and it was fantastic to feel a performance work as well as this. Being there put all doubts to rest: Hurt will be one of the Best Supporting Actor nominees when they’re announced in January. A performance that rocks as well as this one can’t not be recognized. Hurt nails it the way Beatrice Straight nailed it with that one marital-outburst scene in Network, opposite Bill Holden. There was a 4 pm and a 5 pm show on Saturday (I went to the latter), and nearly every seat was taken. And that ending…whoa.

Stephen Frears’ Mrs. Henderson Presents is a nicely confident British period piece…funny, ascerbic, touching at times. And it sinks in, yes, but not that deeply — it has that wry Frears sensibility, and satisfies only as far as it goes. If you’re looking for a delightful time at the Royal in West Los Angeles, it does the trick…but it’s not an A-list Best Picture contender. Why? It’s more of a chuckler than a feeler — it’s emotionally earnest and Judy Dench is terrific in the lead role (ditto Bob Hoskins as her stage manager), but even with the dead-son element it doesn’t quite put a lump in your throat. Almost, close…but not quite.

And yet Curtis Hanson’s In Your Shoes, dismissed by a certain columnist as a good commercial film but not an awards-calibre thing, has an emotional resonance factor (it’s not about shoes or bickering sisters but resolving family hurt) that might persuade some in the Academy to think about Oscar-ish distinctions. Maybe I’m alone on this one, but I don’t think so. It got to me (and I can be kind of a hard-ass), and I’ve felt how it plays with a crowd. If any- one catches In Your Shoes at one of those sneak preview screenings being held across the country this evening (Saturday, 9.24), I’d appreciate some reactions.

“A masterpiece of indirection and pure visceral thrills, David Cronenberg’s latest mindblower, A History of Violence, is the feel-good, feel-bad movie of the year,” N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis declared in her 9.23 review. “That sounds far grimmer or at least more relentlessly grim than this shrewd, agile, often bitingly funny film plays. The great kick of [it] — or rather, the great kick in the gut — comes from Mr. Cronenberg’s refusal to let us indulge in movie violence without paying a price. The man wants to make us suffer, exquisitely. Decades of mainlining blockbusters have, for better or perhaps for worse, inured us to the image of bullet-chewed bodies and the pop-pop-pop of phony weapon fire. For the contemporary movie connoisseur, film death is now as cheap as it is familiar. To which Mr. Cronenberg quietly says, ‘Oh, yeah?'”

A TV comedy show is usually two things — what the creators intend it to be in their heads as they’re fine-tuning the season opener, and what the creators change it into after they’ve shifted into panic mode after an initial bad review or two, or when the ratings are much lower than expected. So let’s see what happens with Comedy Central’s The Showbiz Show with David Spade from here on…

The instant a film is described as a “romantic comedy,” it’s dead to me. That’s why I wouldn’t watch Dirty Love on a plane…even if I was dead-bored. You can always depend on a “romantic comedy” to be arch, off-the-ground and phony as a three-dollar bill. There have been exceptions, yes, but 96% of the time the term means the movie will be farcical and dumb-assed. It will contain nothing angular or vaguely thoughtful, nothing perverse, no laughs… and it will have a juvenile and relentlessly hyper attitude about sex. It means loyal readers of Star, In Touch, People and Us will be there on opening weekend (maybe).

I don’t believe in airing dirty laundry if you’re profiling someone involved with a new film (actor, director, etc.) for its own sake. However, you should absolutely get into it if it applies to the work. Naturally, being an L.A. Times piece, you won’t find this criteria in Michael Goldman’s interview with Jenny McCarthy about Dirty Love (First Look, 9.23). Starring and written by McCarthy, the film is described on the IMDB as “an edgy comedy about a girl who has fallen out of love” and more particularly about “a jilted photographer who sets off on a mission to get back at her philandering model boyfriend.” It is therefore not only allowable but necessary to ask if the reason for McCarthy’s divorce from John Asher, the film’s director, is echoed in the movie’s plot. Goldman wimps out, of course. He writes that the divorce was due to “irreconciliable differences” and quotes Asher as saying that getting divorced “was something that Jenny felt she had to do.” Damn it, did they get divorced because Asher cheated or what? Did the idea of a “philandering boyfriend” come to McCarthy as she was writing the script because of marital experience with Asher…yes or no? If not, what real-life experience was McCarthy drawing from? The decision by Goldman and his Times editor to sidestep this was cowardly.

I love that they’re trying to sell the new four-disc Ben-Hur
DVD to the religious right, offering to Christian retail outlets a “Ben-Hur Bible Study Guide” by the Rev. Robert H. Schuller and his son, the Rev. Robert A. Schuller, the co-chairmen of Crystal Cathedral Ministries. This is just as phony a sales pitch as the original author, General Lew Wallace, calling his book “A Tale of the Christ.” As co-screenwriter Gore Vidal explains on the “making of” doc, Ben-Hur is the story of unrequited love, betrayal and revenge between a Jewish boy and a Roman boy. Rage and bitterness are washed clean at the finale by Christ’s blood trickling into a stream, fine..but Ben-Hur never would have never been made into a film if the character of Judah Ben-Hur had followed the Nazarene’s teachings. If Judah (Charlton Heston) had returned from Jack Hawkins’ villa in Rome and decided to turn the other cheek and forgive Messala (Stephen Boyd) after learning that his boyhood friend had condemned his mother and sister to prison and the scourge of leprosy (instead of doing what he does in the film, which is to challenge and then defeat Messala in the chariot race, which results in Messala being trampled to death by horses), Ben-Hur never would have been greenlit.

Speaking to the Hollywood Reporter‘s Anne Thompson, Steven Soderbergh says the “skewed studio system” — i.e., the overall economics of cost vs. revenue — “needs to be rethought. People need to be made true partners in the real risk/reward ratio. Everybody needs to be talking about fair compensation and participation. It can be done. The force of economics is irresistible.” In other words, stars should risk it like the producers do…in line with the Robert Evans philosophy of “everybody risks it…if the movie hits, everybody makes out…if it doesn’t, at least nobody gets hurt.” That means putting a harness on their agents and pay-or-play deals…right?