That website put up by old-line James Bond fans that’s basically about trashing Daniel Craig is back up after going down earlier today. The anti-Craig thing is a bore anyway. He’s a well-planted actor with a cold flinty interior, which is precisely what the Bond films haven’t had since Sean Connery walked. So he’s not quite as tall…big deal. As Roger Moore says….

I’m using this
conversation with Running Scared director Wayne Kramer to fill up most of today’s “Elsewhere Live” broadcast, but here it is in advance. Kramer talks for a bit about his next film, Evilseek, a satanic supernatural thriller mixed with social commentary that Kramer describes as “Heaven Can Wait meets Seven.” The Weinstein Co. production will star Thomas Jane (or Tom Jane…which is it?) with lensing to begin in the late spring or early summer.

Went to one of the most serenely cool parties of my Hollywood life last night — a gathering for Capote‘s director Bennett Miller, thrown by his agents at Endeavor, inside a candle-lit sixth- floor suite at the Chateau Marmont with a sizable, south-facing balcony. Low-key, not crowded, soothing (the view of West Hollywood is what did it), waiters constantly hovering with hors d’oeuvres. Plus a few prominent names to lend a certain punctuation — Naomi Watts, Adam Sandler (whose next film, Reign O’er Me for director-writer Mike Binder, will start shooting in a week or two), Jake Gyllenhaal, Capote screenwriter Dan Futterman, Tobey Maguire, Annapolis and Tristan & Isolde star James Franco, Courtney Love (who scares me a bit), World Trade Center producer Michael Shamberg and Paramount Pictures president Gail Berman. That piece I ran two weekends ago from an agent who has beefs about Berman (“Scent of Toast”) made talking to Berman kind of a “naah, don’t think so” proposition, so I steered clear. The talk was private, but thanks to Bennett for paving the way and PMK/HBH’s Joy Fehily for facilitating.

The thing that killed the belief in Will Ferrell being a hot star, I gather, is the relatively paltry $62 million and change earned by Bewitched last summer. It didn’t make more, producers and agents decided, because Ferrell can’t be and never will be a romantic star (not with that chest-hair problem). And now there’s a faint aroma of concern over his next big studio movie, Stranger Than Fiction (Columbia, November ’06). Directed by Marc Forster (Neverland, Monster’s Ball) from a clever script by last year’s hip-screenwriter-of-the-moment Zach Helm, it costars Maggie Gyllenhaal (as Ferrell’s romantic interest), Dustin Hoffman, Queen Latifah, Emma Thompson. Thing is, the cleverness of it feels to me like it might wear thin after 20 minutes, at which point the film will have to sink or swim based on the audience liking and identifying with Ferrell’s character, a dull IRS auditor. The hook is that he suddenly starts hearing his life being narrated as it happens. Helm’s script isn’t a cute-romance thing (it deals with death) but I don’t know. I started reading it a few months ago and went, “Okay…this is amusing…good idea”…but I wasn’t strongly pulled along and put it aside. I tried reading it again a couple of weeks later…ditto. (But I haven’t given up.) Meanwhile Winter Passing (Focus Features), a downerish drama about suffering writers that Ferrell costars in with Zooey Deschanel, is fizzling (the “cream of the crop” reviews were 42% positive on Rotten Tomatoes), but his next one, Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, an oafish, blue-collar NASCAR comedy (Columbia, August ’06), should do well. Ferrell’s next two films, apparently, are Blades of Glory, a sports drama about Olympic skaters, and David Mamet’s Joan of Bark: The Dog That Saved France.

This is most definitely a movie that I would pay to see. (A significant admission from a journo freeloader like myself.) Earlier this week six armed British thieves nabbed $40 million pounds in cash (which is what…roughly $75 million U.S.?) in the area of Kent. It’s not just the size of the haul that gets me, but how exactly do six guys hold on to that much dough (roughly $12,500,000 U.S. dollars each) without someone getting wind and ratting them out? How do they get the cash out of the country? Is it smarter to try to move the whole load and then split it up, or do they divide up in England and then it’s every man for himself? Where and how do you live with this responsibility? It’s a fascinating logistical challenge. Are these guys actual adults who won’t follow the Rififi script, or will most of them be arrested due to stupidity and panic within the next couple of weeks?

This Peter Howell blog riff (basically a q & a with himself) underlines the general consensus that the last possible cliffhanger element in the March 5th Oscar telecast — i.e., will it be Cinderella Man‘s Paul Giamatti or Syriana‘s George Clooney taking the Best Supporting Actor Oscar? — has been settled. Clooney will win it because he’s the charming get-around Guy of the Moment, and has been credited with doing the most to launch the current wave of political films, and because Academy folks want to hand him something for Good Night and Good Luck and most of them know that this black-and-white political film isn’t fated to win in the categories it’s been nominated for, so Clooney’s acting Oscar will be kind of a Good Luck gimmee. Plus he gave his career best performance in Syriana. Plus he got fat for it. So no contest.

Tom Cruise is reportedly keen to play the Glenn Ford bad-guy role in James Mangold’s forthcoming remake of 3:10 to Yuma, a 1957 black-and-white western directed by Delmer Daves and co-starring Van Heflin. (I’ve never seen this High noon-type drama, but something tells me I’ll be looking at the DVD fairly soon.) And yet, according to Variety‘s Michael Fleming, Cruise hadn’t even sat down with Mangold to chew things over. He just likes Stuart Beattie‘s rewrite of the Michael Brandt-Derek Haas script, and has funnelled news of his interest to Fleming. If the Yuma thing happens it’ll be Cruise going back to Collateral territory, playing another charming psycho type. A riff on the ’57 film says that “Ford practically steals the film in one of his best performances ever: calm, cool, and confident…a ruthless killer with polite manners and an honorable streak.”

Is Stuart Beattie prolific or what? The 3:10 to Yuma re-writer (who broke into the big-time with his Collateral screenplay) and Baz Luhrman have co-written “a sweeping Aussie [period] romance in the tradition of Gone with the Wind” that will costar Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman, according to Dark Horizons. “Despite the amusing working title of ‘Project Oklahoma’, Luhrmann says that ‘it’s not a musical [but] uses the sweeping landscape of Australia and spans from the mid-1930s to the bombing of Darwin during World War II.” Luhrman says he’s going the non-CGI, Lawrence of Arabia route in the filming of the big outdoor eye-filling moments. The idea, said Luhrman, is “to do what David Lean did. He shot in Wadi Rum [in Jordan]. We’ll be shooting in the Kimberleys.” Filming will start in August “with backing from 20th Century Fox,” says the report. The budget is rumored to be somewhere around $30 million. Rehearsals begin in Los Angeles in two weeks.

Variety‘s Justin Chang is calling Wayne Kramer’s Running Scared “a ferociously energetic piece of filmmaking,” a “potent” and “nasty little number offering a harrowing descent into a New Jersey underworld replete with hoods, hookers and hot merchandise.” Wait a minute…this New Jersy-based thriller was shot largely in Prague? Odd. I’ve been there three or four times and didn’t spot a hint of this.

“Sexy tomboy beanpole” Keira Knightley is the statistical favorite to win the Best Actress Oscar on March 5th. Film Jerk has run the numbers and balanced it all out, and this is how it shakes down. Really. She’s not expected to actually win, but…

A Matt Dillon interview by the AP’s Jake Coyle ran on 2.21, and of course — naturally! — the piece manages to refer to Dillon’s City of Ghosts, his directorial debut that I saw and quite admired in March of ’03, in terms of its financial failure instead of how atmospherically pungent and dramatically haunting it was as a film. I described it thusly: “A guy on the lam, a sense of existential flotation, an exotic Southeast Asian locale full of offbeat eccentrics, a running away from one’s self only to be faced with a final ethical reckoning — yup, this is Joseph Conrad territory, all right. Dillon has said repeatedly that the screenplay he wrote with Barry Gifford (Lost Highway, Wild at Heart) was inspired by Conrad’s novels (‘Heart of Darkness’, ‘Lord Jim’). They seem to have taken special inspiration from Carol Reed‘s Outcast of the Islands (1952), another Conrad adaptation in which Trevor Howard gave one of his finest performances as a Jimmy Cremming-like character hiding out in a South Seas paradise, a refugee from a morally compromised past. If this sort of film rings your bell, if you liked Phillip Noyce‘s The Quiet American (which Ghosts resembles in certain ways, particularly regarding Jim Denault’s cinematography, which is in the same league as Chris Doyle‘s), if you love Outcast and that whole ball of wax, City of Ghosts will in no way feel like a burn, and may even get to you like it did me.”

Variety‘s Ben Fritz noted last Sunday that “if there’s one thing the Academy can’t be accused of this year, it’s catering to popular whims,” adding that “in a year when the five best picture nominees combined grossed only about $200 million domestic- ally, and four of them can be called hits only compared with their low budgets, some argue there’s a profound disconnect between what appeals to the industry vs. the public at large.” What…that lament again? Oscar winners need to be big money-makers or they somehow aren’t legit? Shit, sonny. “But it’s not just the Best Picture nominees. Across the board, 2005 was a brutal year for all but a handful of prestige movies. Whether ultimately praised by Oscar voters or not, pics from respected helmers including Ron Howard, Steven Spielberg, Curtis Hanson, Rob Marshall, Ridley Scott, Lasse Hallstrom, Cameron Crowe, Sam Mendes, Niki Caro, Roman Polanski and Terrence Malick all underperformed in American theaters.” And then the Bagger (a.k.a., N.Y. Times Oscar columnist David Carr) responded by saying, “You can say that again, although you don’t have to. Remember Jarhead? What about In Her Shoes? Still trying to forget, right? And Elizabethtown? Well, the Bagger is still trying to excise that sucker from his brainpan.” His basic point is that Fritz’s story “failed to bring up one immutable fact: A lot of the movies that came and went stunk.” Whoa, whoa…hold up there. In Her Shoes didn’t stink, not by a long shot. It’s one of the best chick flicks ever made (and still is..right up there with Terms of Endearment), which means it wasn’t a chick flick in the end because it so completely surpassed the usual quality levels common to that genre, and it contained two performances — Toni Collette’s and Shirley MacLaine’s — that should have resulted in Oscar nominations for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, respectively. The idea that Keira Knightley was nominated in the former category and Collete wasn’t is nothing short of appalling.