“As you might have guessed, I think World Trade Center is the first serious contender to be nominated for Best Picture this year,” David Poland wrote last night after slipping into an even-earlier screening than the earliest one I was told about yesterday…harumph. (Before we go any further, it’s clear what David’s saying but it would’ve been a better sentence if he had inserted “that deserves” after the word “contender” and before the word “to.”)

“I hate the release date,” Poland continues. “It really feels to me like a November movie. I wanted the sharp sting of cold air on my face as I walked out into the street.” (Except there are no sharp stings to be had from Los Angeles weather …ever. Poland is dreaming about seeing WTC in Chicago around Thanksgiving.)
“I wanted a hot drink and a long conversation with a fire crackling nearby. This is a heavy, heavy movie to be hitting America in August.” (I don’t know what that means at all. August is a time for all God-fearin’ folks to emotionally sidestep anything that isn’t Snakes on a Plane or Sherrybaby ?)
“But the weight I felt on my chest walking out of the theater was much like the weight I felt after Munich …” (thud, penalty buzzer) — “after Amadeus, after Million Dollar Baby, after In The Bedroom , after The Pianist, after In America. ” (I’m presuming Nic Cage doesn’t have any Paddy Considine “fee-fi-fo-fum” lines in WTC.)
“It was the weight of something that touched me in a deep, almost inexplicable way, greater than the sum of its parts.” (I know what this feels like when a movie kicks in just the right way, and seems to gather force in your chest the more you think about it afterwards, and yet you can’t quite figure exactly why.)
Anyway, point taken. I’m pumped, as other perhaps are. World Trade Center opens three weeks and one day from now — on Wednesday, August 9th.

And just to remind everyone, my choice for the first deserving Oscar nominee for Best Film of the Year so far, as I said in mid-June, is Paul Greengrass‘s United 93 — a film that many, many people are still too chicken to see, but is “truly a pulse-pounder for the ages, in part because it’s so stunningly well-made, but mainly because the extraordinary craft manifests in all kinds of haunting ways. Composed of a thousand details and a thousand echoes, United 93 is a film about revisiting, recapturing, reanimating…about death, loss and a portrait of heroism that, for me, was too much to absorb in a single viewing. I’ve seen it five times, and I can’t wait to watch and re-watch the DVD.”

British director Roger Michell being in negotiations to direct the next Bond movie for Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli is, I feel, a really bad thing for a good guy like Michell to get into ….except for the conpensation. Make a deal with Wilson-Broccoli and all bets are off. They’re chumps. (I was told that the Michell deal was in the works when I was at the Paramount Vantage-Al Gore party in Cannes two months ago, but it seemed so unlikely — bizarre even — that I didn’t touch it.)

Reuters’ Bob Tourtellotte on movies about GenXers putting off serious career moves until their early to mid 30s, in the vein of my 7.13 “Party On” piece.

Time‘s Richard Corliss goes kind of easy on M. Night Shyamalan and Lady in the Water. Or gets oblique or sheathes his sword or something. You could cherry-pick the critical parts and call this a hit piece, but it reads to me like Corliss and his editors heard the wolves snarling for Nights’ blood and decided to try to cut him a break by writing and structuring the piece just so.

A longtime St. Louis reader named Josh Capps has a fiance named Nadine, a PhD student who recently went to Lebanon to visit her mom and is now having trouble getting out due to the hostilities. He’s gotten his fiance on the evacuation list, though she’s behind a lot of others. Capps is asking me to pass along requests to readers to contact their House reps and Senators with the specific request of broadening the parameters of the evacuees to include special-case permanent residents and student visas. For what it’s worth…

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“I’m so tired of thinking about myself…I’m kinda sick of myself,” the 42 year-old Brad Pitt said on the “Today” show this morning. That’s good….I like it when movie stars say stuff like that. He’s not voicing despair (he’s just starting to see beyond his personal crap so he can focus more on his kids), but it put me right into the opening lines of Bob Dylan‘s “Queen Jane Approximately” anyway. Being sick of yourself is a very healthy place to be — a very significant philosophical touchstone. Because once you get there, you can then move on to someplace else.

Every now and then a distributor will get a little side-steppy about showing an upcoming film, like Focus Features was earlier this month about showing Hollywoodland (9.8). To guys like me, I mean. They had long-lead screenings of Allen Coulter‘s film in early June, and then a screening last Friday that a columnist colleague went to. But now it’s looking like I’ll catch it sometime in late July. Great…I’ve been following this film for about four years now.

Here’s a piece I wrote in August 2002 about the Polish Brothers and the version they were hoping to shoot at the time (Paul Bernbaum’s script was then called Truth, Justice and the American Way), and their interest in casting Kyle MacLachlan in the Reeves role.
Four years in the making, and Hollywoodland finally opens in seven weeks, and yet there’s no offficial website. And no decent photos of Ben Affleck as Reeves, or Affleck in the blue Superman suit. Or sizable photos of any kind from the film on the web. What’s up with all that?
Obviously an order has gone out to keep Hollywoodland under wraps until a certain date in (probably) early August, so I guess it’ll be like that next-to-last scene in The Wild Bunch with everyone sitting around until a deep-voiced publicist from Focus finally calls and says Bill Holden-style, “Let’s go.”

Hearing from two journo pals doesn’t constitute a consensus, but June Guy and Friday Guy both like and admire Hollywoodland. Friday Guy is saying that Affleck’s performance as the doomed George Reeves is a kind of breakthrough for him. He didn’t exactly say it’s the best performance he’s given since Changing Lanes, but it sounds like it may be. It’s a supporting role. Affleck’s scenes are all flashbacks, as the film is mainly about a shamus, played by Adrien Brody, looking into Reeves’ apparent suicide.
Friday Guy says Affleck “has made some questionable choices in years past, but Hollywoodland shows how good he can be in the right part and in the right film, and with a very good director like Alan Coulter.” They both say it’s basically Brody’s film, but that Bob Hoskins and Diane Lane, as an MGM studio chief and his unfaithful wife, are also quite good. Robin Tunney, Joe Spano, Molly Parker and Dash Mohok also star.

“Why review [movies]? Why not let the market do its work, let the audience have its fun and occupy ourselves with the arcana — the art — we critics ostensibly prefer?,” asks N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott. “The obvious answer is that art, or at least the kind of pleasure, wonder and surprise we associate with art, often pops out of commerce, and we want to be around to celebrate when it does and to complain when it doesn’t.

N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott

“But the deeper answer is that our love of movies is sometimes expressed as a mistrust of the people who make and sell them, and even of the people who see them. We take entertainment very seriously, which is to say that we don’t go to the movies for fun. Or for money. We do it for you.”

Not me, Tony. I like writing stuff that people read and respond to, sure, but I mainly write this column out of feelings of profound reverence and worship. Hollywood Elsewhere is about monk-like servitude and grovelling. The movie theatres of today aren’t as cathedral-like as they were in the 1920s and ’30s, but the faith endures. Every time I walk into a plex or a screening room it’s like entering St. Patrick’s on Fifth Avenue or Sacre Coeur in Paris. If you’re not feeling awe as you enter a theatre, why go? What is moviegoing if not a ritual about great possibility? The chance that something jolting or transcendent might happen?

I don’t think typical Pirates 2 fans have the same attitude. Some may see going to a just-opened movie as a kind of cathartic Southern Baptist service (talking back to the screen, letting it all out, etc.), but most people probably see movies as a kind of sporting event or mass video game or amusement ride.

Astronaut Alan B. Shepard’s golf shot on the moon — February 1971

There’s an analogy between what I’m saying and Norman Mailer‘s feelings of reverence about the moon. During a 1971 promotion tour of his book “Of a Fire on the Moon,” and particularly during a visit to “The Dick Cavett Show”, Mailer sharply criticized astronaut Alan B. Shepard for hitting three golf balls on the moon’s surface during Apollo 14’s expedition, calling it a desecration of holy ground and a demonstration of American arrogance.

I think that today, 35 years hence, American moviegoers probably have more in common with Shepard’s attitude than Mailer’s. Movie plexes are a place they visit for temporary go-go diversion — places to meet friends in and eat popcorn and swallow soft drinks and check their text messages as they wait for the latest audio-visual blast-ride to begin. Nourishment, contemplation, meditation…? Dude, what are you on about?

It’s go-to-work-on-M.-Night-Shyamalan week, and today at the New York Times it’s Caryn James ‘ turn.

What’s with the Hispanic heritage of the four top-billed stars of Asylum’s Snakes on a Train — Alby Castro, Ryanne Ruiz, Giovanni Bejarano and Al Galvez? Obviously Asylum’s looking to steal some of the heat from New Line’s Snakes on a Plane (8.18) by releasing their straight-to- video knockoff three days earlier (Tuesday, 8.15). But any cheapo outfit making a ripoff DVD knows that spreading around the ethnicity of the lead actors — a couple of Anglo leads with one or two African-American and Hispanic actors rounding things out — broadens the commercial appeal.

The reason for director Peter Mervis ‘s decision to cast four Latino leads is all about the Snakes on a Train milieu — a Mexican train headed for the U.S. Eric Forsberg‘s screenplay is about a Mexican woman coping with “a powerful Mayan curse” that has caused little snakes to be hatched inside her (“slowly devouring her from within”), and so she takes a train heading for “the border” and into Los Angeles to get the help of a shaman who will provide an antidote. Except the snakes — flesh-eating-vipers — somehow crawl out of her and start terrorizing the passengers.
The problem is that the copy on the poster says “100 trapped passengers — 3,000 venomous vipers.” (Wait a minute….is it 2000 or 3000? The copy is too blurry to read.) One little Mexican woman has 3000 worm-sized snakes inside her, and then they instantly hatch and grow into full-sized fearsome creatures once they’ve slithered out of the womb-like body? Even a ludicrous tongue-in-cheek monster movie (my all-time favorite is Tremors ) has to make some kind of stupid sense.
Mervis’s last Asylum knockoff was The DaVinci Treasure, which apparently opened in theatres last May on the heels of The DaVinci Code. It starred C. Thomas Howell, Lance Henriksen and Nicole Sherwin. A IMDB poster from Israel named “ruberoid-tk” called it “the most cheap, cheesy and useless movie [of the] last decade.”