Ridley Scott‘s developing biopic about the famed Gucci family, on which World Trade Center screenwriter Andrea Berloff is now working, will not be any kind of chick flick. To judge by the melodramatic soap-opera basics of the family’s history, it’s going to be Visconti’s The Damned.

Last Thursday night (6.22) as the L.A. Film Festival was unveiling The Devil Wears Prada in Westwood, a quiet research screening of David Fincher‘s Zodiac happened at the Chinese 6 on Hollywood Blvd. (where an all-media showing of Bryan Singer‘s Superman Returns was unspooling as well). The Fincher was shown under the title of The Chronicles (oh, God… we’re back to that one again…don’t ask), and three guys have posted reactions on Ain’t It Cool.

Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo in David Fincher’s Zodiac (or is it The Chronicles?)

The cut ran just over three hours, and 66 and 2/3 percent of the posters respected and admired it to varying degrees. (A third feels it may get there with further editing and fewer laughs.) Obviously Paramount’s motive for researching Chronicles/ Zodiac is that they want to give Fincher reasons to prune it down and make it shorter. (The eternal distributor mantra.) You may have read here (as well as on the IMDB and Coming Soon)that Paramount intends to bypass a late ’06 release and open Chronicles/Zodiac in January ’07, although that may just be an attention-getting diversion strategy with a plan to open it platform-style in New York and Los Angeles in mid to late December for critical and awards-consideration. Anyway, the most interesting passage of the three reviews is from a guy called “One Time Only”. “I go to test screenings all the time but never write in because I think the filmmakers shouldn’t have to have their rough draft scrutinized on the net,” he says, “but I’m breaking my silence on this one time because I’m concerned the film will get butchered by ‘the process’. As it stands now The Chronicles (or is it just Chronicles?…unsure) is over three hours long. It’s loose, slow, over-ambitious and it may just might be a masterpiece. It’s much more seamless than some of his other films in which the visual style calls attention to itself. What we end up with is a very visually interesting movie that doesn’t attack your senses. The filmmakers did an excellent job capturing the 70’s to the smallest of details as well. I heard someone in the audience gripe that the film felt like a novel, which actually strikes me as a fair assessment. This is a seven-course meal no doubt about it. To call this ‘another serial killer film from Fincher’, as I foolishly did in the past, does an enormous disservice to the film. This is not Se7en 2. This is a serial-killer film the way Heat is a cops-and-robbers film.”

“I will now retire to the green room and the fortification of a drink in order to cope with the inevitable moral pneumonia that always follows a blizzard of praise.” — Leonard Cohen to a live audience at Hollywood’s John Ford Anson theatre on Saturday night (6.24), prior to an L.A. Film Festival screening of Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man.

Fashion Abrasion

To the already-formed consensus on The Devil Wears Prada (20th Century Fox, 6.30), I have nothing new or startling to add.
Without Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci’s performances, this very carefully measured girl movie set in the never-jangled world of a big-time fashion magazine — a tale of a young woman getting bruised, and then wising up and finding her way through a very tough racket — would be okay but only that. But with them — because of them — it’s savory as hell at times.

Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep in David Frankel’s The Devil Wears Prada.

I don’t like chick flicks any more than the next guy, but this is a reasonably sharp and grown-up one with an above-average, big-city IQ.
It could be a little more wicked. I don’t know the fashion industry, but I’m sure it’s a lot darker, druggier, randier and more complex than the way it’s portrayed in The Devil Wears Prada. But this is a 20th Century Fox enterprise aimed at women with certain limitations (cultural, educational), and as such is above average.
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Anne Hathaway’s performance as Andy Sachs, the main protagonst, is fine…but she’s been drawn with a soft pencil and it’s easy to give up on her — the character — early on because she feels too clueless and unparticular…too vaguely motivated as to why she’s working for Streep’s Miranda Priestly, the editor of a hugely successful fashion magazine called Runway.
One particular beef: Andy, we’re told, majored in journalism and edited a school paper, and yet, we’re told, she’s never heard of Priestley or Runway when she first interviews for the job. What would your opinion be of a real-life journalism major from a big school who’s never heard of Vogue or Anna Wintour?
I have some perspective on Adrien Grenier’s performance as Nate, the cute boyfriend whose purpose is to show us how Andy is relinquishing her everyday menschiness in order to perform her job. Nate, I can tell you, was a total drag in the Prada script that I read last year — too mopey, a guilt-tripper — but Grenier has given him extra flavorings and humor and made him more intriguing.
All this is secondary, of course, to Streep and Tucci, Streep and Tucci, Streep and Tucci…

In Lauren Weisberger’s best-seller of the same, Miranda Priestly was a shrieking banshee and a fit-thrower. (She’s based, accurately or not, on Wintour.) But Streep, very wisely, has toned the character down and, to a certain extent, humanized her.
I’ve been telling friends that Streep gives a performance very much like Al Pacino’s as Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Part II . Everything she says is quiet, muted, almost whispery…but there’s always something ferocious and vaguely malignant going on beneath the surface.
Miranda’s readiness to dismiss, berate or crush her underlings with the slightest facial gesture is a hoot. No one has ever made the words “that’s all” sound so resoundingly like a smart slap across the face. Streep’s final on-screen moment — I won’t describe it except to say it’s all about thoughts she’s having as she sits in the back seat of a chauffeured car — is hilarious.
And yet you can sense Miranda’s desperation and loneliness from time to time, and almost always her apartness. She loves her job and her power and won’t suffer fools, but you wouldn’t call her “happy.” (Or maybe you would.) Either way, this is an instant Oscar-contender performance, probably in the supporting category.
I don’t know many gay guys Tucci has played over the last five years, but he knows this turf and plays it like a champ every time, even when he doesn’t have much of a role, as in Prada. He’s playing Nigel, Streep’s right-hand man who’s also a caring friend of Andy’s, and he’s exactly right in every scene.

Emily Blunt gives a feisty, brittle performance as Emily, Miranda’s top assistant who’s so concerned with inner-office status that she’s always on the brink of nervous collapse. Thing is, I didn’t much like her. Always saying something bitchy or fuming, or acting hurt or shocked, or beset by a cold with sniffles and swollen red eyes. All reaction…nothing centered.
You can certainly detect the influence of director David Frankel’s having directed several episodes of Sex and the City and Entourage.
When I first saw Prada in a suburb north of Las Vegas, I was sitting in the midst of a group of women in their 30s and 40s. When it was over I could feel their reactions. They were okay with it, but the emotional impact wasn’t much. They weren’t lifted out of their seats. I don’t know if this means anything or not.
The weakness, I know, is with Andy and not Miranda or Nigel. It’s not a fixable problem at this stage, so either you roll with it or you don’t.

Just after the 2 pm Saturday showing of Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater — Majestic Crest, Westwood Blvd. south of Wilshire

(a) Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater producers C.C. Goldwater (l.) and Tani Cohen during brief q & a session — Saturday, 6.24.06, 4:10 pm; (b) Mr. Conservative director Julie Anderson — Saturday, 6.24.06, 4:08 pm; (c) poster in Crest lobby.

I always respected the late Barry Goldwater, the conservative Arizona Senator and 1964 Republican Presidential candidate, for being more candid than most politicians and especially for sticking to his philosophical guns at all times. But after seeing Julie Anderson ‘s Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater, an L.A. Film Festival selection that’ll have its nationwide debut on HBO on 9.18, I’ve come to realize he was a man of even greater substance than I knew.

The movie, produced by C.C. Goldwater (the senator’s granddaughter) and Tani Cohen , is an engaging, wholly successful attempt to remind the public who Goldwater really was in terms of core beliefs and personal integrity. The basic message is that by today’s standards, and particularly over the last 25 or 30 years of his life, Goldwater sounded more and more like a liberal. And from my leftie perspective, that’s reassuring.

I somehow never realized until today that Goldwater literally despised Richard Nixon. We’re told that when former Nixon’s White House counsel John Dean, a friend of Goldwater’s son Barry Jr., came to Goldwater for advice prior to testifying in front of the Senate Watergate Committee in April 1973, Goldwater told him “that sunovabitch was always a liar so go ahead and nail him.”

There’s an anecdote about Goldwater being denied a chance to play golf at a certain country club back in the ’50s because of his Jewish name, and that he replied, “Well, I’m only half-Jewish from my father’s side so what if I play nine holes?”

There’s the acknowledgement of Goldwater being the father of the modern conservative political movement, but also reminders that he started to become more and more libertarian after Ronald Reagan‘s election. He believed that abortion and sexual persuasion were private matters and that the government had no right to say anything about them. He said in the late ’80s that religious right types were “a bunch of kooks.”

A few years later he urged Republicans to lay off President Clinton over the Whitewater scandal, and he also criticized the military’s ban on gays.

“You don’t have to be straight to be in the military,” he reportedly said. “You just have to be able to shoot straight.”

Barry, Jr., says in the film that his dad gave him two points of advice about his then-penchant for hound-dogging: “One, keep it out of town. And two, if you don’t get lucky by midnight, go home and get a good night’s sleep.”

Barry Goldwater was probably one of the purest guys to ever succeed in big-time politics, and this film reminds you what a rare and exotic and truly noble bird he was.

“The voice and spirit” behind Kevin Smith‘s Clerks II “are as brash and unmistakable as ever,” says Caryn James in the N.Y. Times , although she includes a tough assessment earlier in the piece: “In the six films Mr. Smith has made since, his gifts have become clearer: he is terrific at irreverence, as in the Clerks movies and the underrated Dogma; he can be awful at emotional sincerity, as in Jersey Girl and the weaker parts of Chasing Amy.”

I still say August 18th is too long a wait for Snakes on a Plane to finally show up in theatres. It’ll do pretty dynamic business, I expect, but it should be opening during one of the weak weekends in July. My son Jett is leaving for college only a few days after August 18th, and thousands of other freshmen, I presume, are looking at same or similar schedules. Won’t this interfere with the usual word-of-mouth cycles and possible repeat business?

Those estimates of Click reaching the mid ’40s may turn out to be optimistic. I’m hearing $39 million and change for the weekend, and that doesn’t factor in any Friday-to-Saturday dropoff due to the possibility that some out there might agree with Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern and tell their friends that this latest Adam Sandler comedy is “an abomination.” Cars is looking at $30 million for the weekend with an estimated Sunday night cume of $155 mill. Jared Hess’s Nacho Libre is down 55% from last Friday’s opening and looking at a $12.5 million weekend haul. It might wind up with $60 to $70 million by the end of the run, compared to $44,540,956 earned by Napoleon Dynamite.

Jean Luc Godard‘s “influence is immeasurable, yet his popular reputation stems from only a small fraction of his output,” remarks a Sunday (6.25) N.Y. Times piece by Nathan Lee. “From 1960 to 1967 [Godard] became immensely famous for a series of radical entertainments that fused youth-quake insouciance and jazzy improvisation to genre deconstruction and high-culture formalism. They were genre movies with a twist: pseudo gangster films (Breathless), thrillers (Le Petit Soldat), war movies (Les Carabiniers) musicals (A Woman Is a Woman), science fiction (Alphaville). He is the original meta-movie maestro, the first director as D.J. He is also an accomplished film critic, and has always maintained that writing and directing are two sides of the same coin. But when the familiar reference points to Hollywood vanished in the 1970’s, as he became more occupied with Marxism and avant-garde video, people stopped paying attention.” I remember a story Andrew Sarris told me in the late ’70s about the moment he informed Richard Roud and other Manhattan-based Godard acolytes that he had gotten “off the boat.” I’ve been a Godard dilletante all my life — there for the classic entires (my all-time favorite is Weekend) and spotty on his more recent stuff (In Praise of Love, Our Music). And yet I’m unquestionably into seeing, for the first time, Masculine Feminine at the L.A. Film Festival next Thursday, 6.29.

Bring me the head of the Phillip K. Dick android. When you find it, I mean. Gotta be somewhere.

Critic Joe Leydon on Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth — exceptionally well-written.