Has anyone seen this Sydney Pollack-directed turn-off-your-cell- phone spot (which he also stars in) that reportedly began playing in Regal and AMC Leows theatres this weekend? I’ve been searching for it online but I guess it’s not viewable this way.

Here’s a piece listing the screen’s great pirate characters …dismissable. A more diverting subject stirred by Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest are two other eye-filling films about ships at sea, both released in the early ’60s, that aren’t available on DVD.
The one I’d like to see the most is Peter Ustinov‘s Billy Budd, a 1962 Allied Artists release that bombed when it came out. I have fond memories of Budd ‘s widescreen black-and-white Scope (2.35 to 1) photography, and think it’s criminal — derelict — that it’s only been transferred on a pan-and-scan VHS basis so far.

Budd lacks the moral complexity of Herman Melville’s novel but I’ve always found it fairly satisfying. It has four or five fascinating performances including those by Terrence Stamp (Budd), Ustinov (a too-likable Captain Veer, but interesting for the specificity and discipline that Ustinov brings to all his performances), Robert Ryan (an especially dark and decadent Claggart) and Melvin Douglas (Dansker).
The other (and I’ve been mentioning this for years) is Lewis Milestone‘s Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), which falls apart at the end but is moderately stirring in an obvious mainstream-Hollywood way for the first two thirds (or is three quarters?), the high points being the rounding-the-horn and mutiny sequences.
The thing that needs to be captured and restored by a good DVD producer is the high-quality photography, since Bounty was shot by dp Robert Surtees in the Ultra Panavision 70 process (which delivered a 2.76 to 1 aspect ratio) and has really never been seen in its full visual splendor since the roadshow engagements that happened during Bounty‘s initial run in late 1962.

Bielinsky’s Spooker

Having finally seen Fabian Bielinsky’s The Aura Saturday night, I understand why IFC Films picked it up and will open it in early September. Quiet, low-key and haunting in the manner of a half-awake dream, it’s a very unusual hybrid by the standards of American films — a heist film mixed with a psychological spooker.
Bielsinky’s screenplay was obviously influenced on some level by Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, which is about a journalist (Jack Nicholson) who abandons his life and identity in order to “become” a recently-deceased arms dealer whom he closely resembles.

The late Fabian Bielinsky (r.), director of The Aura, in a 2000 publicity shot taken to promote Nine Queens

The Aura is about a Buenos Aires taxidermist named Espinoza (Ricardo Darin, star of Bielinsky’s Nine Queens) with an active fantasy life (he dreams of pulling off the perfect bank job) who accidentally kills a complete stranger named Dietrich during a hunting trip in the Patagonian forest.
Instead of simply reporting the shooting to the authorities, Espinoza decides to poke into Dietrich’s life and learns fairly quickly he was involved in a scheme to rob an armored truck — a job due to happen in two or three days’ time. A bit curiously, Espinoza slowly begins to introduce himself to Dietrich’s friends and co-conspira- tors as a confidante whom Dietrich has asked to take his place.
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
Suddenly immersed in a world of complex deceptions and lurking hair- trigger violence, Espinoza’s willingness to play this very strange game puts him in big danger, and it gets a little bit creepier with each lie he tells or is forced to cover up. On top of which Espinoza has periodic epileptic fits that send him into blackouts at the worst possible times.
The Aura is superbly acted, shot and scored — a big leap for Bielinski beyond the rote minimalism of his last hit, Nine Queens, which came out six years ago. The quietly creepy music is by Lucio Godoy, the superb color-desaturated photogra- phy is by Checco Varese, and it’s all been cut together in first-rate fashion by Alejandro Carrillo Penovi and Fernando Pardo.

The Aura star Ricardo Darin, director Fabian Bielinsky during shooting in early ’05 in Argentina’s Paragonian forest.

Nothing was going to keep me from seeing The Aura at its final L.A. Film Festival showing. I’d been keen to see it all along, but Bielinsky’s death last Thursday in Sao Paolo upset me and made me resolve to go no matter what, if for nothing else than as a tribute to a director I respected and a guy I didn’t know very well at all, but who was always friendly and gracious to me when we communicated.
Before the film began an actress named Hebe Tabachnik, who is serving as the L.A. Film Festival’s Shorts Programmer and Latin American programming consultant, told the audience about Bielinsky’s sudden death.
Trying for a dignified tone while fighting back tears, Tabachnik described Bielin- sky’s career as an assistant director on several films in the late ’80s and ’90s before getting his big break in getting the chance to direct Nine Queens.
I asked Tabachnik after the screening if she knew what had happened to cause his death. 47 year-old men generally don’t just keel over and die without warning. She said she had no information, although it can probably be said that Bielinsky either had a heart condition that he genetically inherited, or he simply didn’t know his body or chose to ignore the warning signs or whatever.

Bielinsky’s Variety obituary said he “reportedly had had hypertension for some time.”
He was in Sao Paolo casting for an advertising project when a heart attack killed him.
The Aura received six Condors de Plata on Monday, 6.26, at the 54th Argentine Association of Film Journalists Awards ceremony in Buenos Aires. The thriller won for best film, director, original screenplay, sound, cinematography and lead actor (Darin).

In the late ’90s director Jonathan Kaufer (Bad Manners) used to invite pallies and media allies to occasional DVD parties, at which everyone would decide which cool DVD to watch (films by Bresson or Antonioni or Wilder never seemed to make the cut) while sipping good wine and eating delicious Chinese take-out food.
The parties happened at a big McMansion on Summit Drive in the gated Beverly Park community which Kaufer was sharing with then-wife Pia Zadora and their children, and in going to these parties I got to know their swanky neighborhood a bit. It’s very soothing to bask in the aura of great wealth, but Beverly Park feels a little bit like something built for Disney World in Orlando — “Ostentatious- Rich-People-Who-Don’t-Quite-Get-It Land.” Flamboyant and luxurious and well- tended, but with a declasse faux quality everywhere you turned.

All to say this N.Y. Times Sharon Waxman piece about the residents of Beverly Park struck me as hilarious. The funniest part describes how some residents decided to get in the face of their neighbors Jeanette and Robert Bisno (who live next door to Pheonix Pictures honcho Mike Medavoy and his wife Irena) for essentially degrading the neighborhood with their appalling lack of taste (“Vegas”- style gates, a dinosaur topiary viewable from the street, “an eight-foot abstract sculpture in their front courtyard of what some interpret to be a woman on her back with her legs in the air“).
I was attacked last year when I wrote that aesthetic choices made by people whose last names end in vowels could rarely be trusted, but sometimes the proof is in the pudding. You can’t instill good taste in people. Taste is a result of a thousand distastes, and either you’ve been around and seen the world and developed a sense of some refinement and a respect for venerated aesthetic traditions…or you haven’t.
Zadora and Kaufer’s home, by the way, was built on land where Pickfair, the celebrated Spanish-style home of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, once stood. Zadora and her former husband Meshulam Riklis bought Pickfair in 1988 and destroyed it soon after to make way for their McManse.

I had a very funny Tom Arnold moment six or seven years ago when I was approaching Jonathan Kaufer‘s home for one of those DVD parties, and it convinced me for life that Arnold has a cool attitude. Kaufer would give his guests the number code to get them through the front gate, and yet a group of three or four people — Arnold among them — was standing that night in front of the gate when I arrived. They had the wrong code or something. It was very dark and all I could see were vague shapes. I said in a joking flippant way as I approached, “Hey, how come everyone’s just standing around?” And Arnold said, “Because we’re assholes?”

“I don’t know whether it’s just because I’m me, but I am surprised by what degree it looks familiar,” says Bill Nighy about his performance as the squid-faced Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, in an interview with L.A. Daily News critic Bob Strauss. What’s remarkable is that Nighy’s inflections come through anyway. “It’s spooky, obviously, because it’s a weird experience,” he says. “And it is satisfying to see that the movement, the physical stuff, and the attitudinal decisions that I made at the time survived . They’re in it, they’re there, even though they are delivered by this weirdo.” [Note to readers : MCN’s David Poland linked to Strauss’ article last night so that means he kind of owns it, and if anyone else mentions or riffs on it, they’re infringing on some level and a kind of poacher. HE recognizes that MCN linked to the Strauss piece first, and profusely apologizes for offending Poland’s acute sense of territoriality.]

Superman Returns did $19.3 million yesterday (7.1), which is a very good number…but as Travis Bickle once said, “Thank God for the rain.” It poured on the eastern seaboard yesterday and today it’ll be raining in the midwest and the south, and this obviously bodes well for exhibitors all over. The Devil Wears Prada took in $9 million, Click did $6.8 million, Cars $5.2 million, Nacho Libre $2.1 million…zzzzzz.

Joel Cohen, vp business development for MovieTickets.com, has told Reuters that “we are really off the charts” in comparing Pirates 2 box-office prospects to what the first Pirates made. The story says that “advance ticket sales are already more than 20 times higher” than that of the original. Exhibitor Relations guy Paul Dergarabedian, whose observations have caused my eyelids to droop more than any other spoksperson in any other field, says that “the buzz around the campfire in Hollywood is, ‘Could this be the film to post the biggest opening weekend of all time?” (The phrase is “word around the campfire ,” not “buzz”). The Big Kahuna record holder is Sony Pictures’ Spider-Man, which opened with $114.8 million in ’02. Of course, the Reuters story ignores all considerations about what this sight-unseen enthusiasm for Pirates 2 means in terms of our fast-food culture and the aesthetic sophistication levels that seem to exist among the young. Money, popcorn, abundance…what else matters?

Having made a relatively decent $31 million and change from Paul Greengrass‘s United 93 (i.e., “decent” considering all those thousands of people who said they wouldn’t see it), Universal is donating an extra $250,000 to the United 93 memorial near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Cheese Ball

Jeff Garlin’s I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With, which I caught Friday night at Westwood’s Crest Majestic, is the most entertaining and engaging audience- friendly film I’ve seen at the L.A. Film Festival over the past eight days. And it definitely has the makings of a theatrical hit if it’s shaped up and sold right.
It’s a small-scaled, funky-looking thing in a handheld 16mm vein (it could have been shot in the ’70s or ’80s…there’s nothing here-and-now digital in its technique or emotional approach), but it’s warm and engaging and pretty damn funny.

Star, director and writer Jeff Garlin (l.) and Sarah Silverman in I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With

Director-producer-writer Garlin — best known for his ongoing role as Larry David’s manager in HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm — and his fellow performers (Bonnie Hunt, Sarah Silverman and a team of Chicago-based actor pals) are all top-notch. And in an unassuming little-movie way with the emphasis on spirit and tone and quirky-hip humor, Cheese works.
I could feel the satisfaction levels in the house right away. The audience was totally grooving on it until the very last scene, but this is a fixable problem. The Weinstein Co. is in the process of acquiring, and if I know Harvey he’ll be pressing Garlin to re-cut or re-shoot the ending, which isn’t “bad” as much as vague.
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
If the finale is re-tooled in the right way, Cheese could catch on and then some. The word will get out that it’s kind of a Big Fat Greek Wedding for witty fat guys, only without the wedding or the slobbery cattle-yard relatives.
Garlin said last night he’s totally at peace with the ending and his heels are dug in, so maybe the film will go out as is. But even if it does critics and auds will still speak highly of it and it’ll do some decent business.

Cheese producer whose name I didn’t write down, Garlin and costar Bonnie Hunt during q & a at Crest Majestic theatre — Friday, 6.30, 8:50 pm.

Cheese is a sharply written (here and there genius-level) comedy-drama about a witty, likably humble Chicago comedian named James (Garlin) who lives with his mom but badly wants a soulmate girlfriend. Vaguely fortyish, James is saddled with a yen for slurping down junk food late at night (which costs him in the roman- tic department), and he’s pretty good at getting shot down or turned down or fired.
But as gloomy as James sometimes gets (and for good reason), he’s tenacious in a shuffling, good-natured, comme ci comme ca way, and you can’t help but feel for the guy and want him to succeed.
Garlin’s model, obviously, is Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty, which his film is a kind of tribute to. The Oscar-winning celluloid version of Chayefsky’s play, directed by Del- bert Mann and released in 1955, is brought up several times, and Garlin uses a theatrical staging of the play in Chicago as a plot point.
Cheese isn’t as sad or tear-jerky as Marty, and of course, being a Garlin thing, is coming from a wittier, schtickier place. Marty was about heartfelt pathos and the loneliness of a homely Brooklyn butcher (Ernest Borgnine). Garlin’s world view (and his film’s) is that of an always-candid, whipsmart, vaguely self-loathing Jewish comic…big difference.

Curb crew (l. to r.): Susie Essman, Garlin, Cheryl Hines, Larry David

Hunt has what should be the lead female role — a neurotic elementary school teacher who’s a secret chubby-chaser, and who right away seems like James’ best romantic bet. But Hunt doesn’t make as big an impression as the always-brilliant Silverman does in a secondary role, that of an impulsive wackjob whom James has a fling with.
And that’s a problem. An extra scene or two with Hunt (a brilliant comedian who’s quite good in the scenes that she has) needs to be added toward the end, some- thing involving an emotional catharsis or confessional of some kind. Garlin knows what I mean — a James L. Brooks scene.
David Pasquesi is also underdeployed as Luca, James’ aloof and very logical- minded pal. Mina Kolb is quite good as James’ overbearing mom. Amy Sedaris has an amusing cameo as a therapist. A bunch of other Chicago actors whose faces I vaguely recognized (or so I told myself) are also very fine.
Garlin originally performed the material in a one-man show under the same title. He said during the q & a last night that Silverman’s character is based on a woman he once had a thing with, and who half-tortured him to death. Obviously his Second City improv skills (and also Hunt’s — they knew each other as nascent Chicago comedians) are the basis of the film’s tone and attitude, and good for that.

(r. to l.): Garlin, Hunt, mystery Cheese producer, L.A. Film Festival programmer Rachel Rosen

I hope the Weinstein Co. pushes I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With in the way it deserves, and that it connects with the public in some kind of vigorous way. And let’s hope Garlin keeps writing and acting and directing because he’s one very sharp dude.
I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With played at the Tribeca Film Festival two months ago, and here’s Garlin’s “director’s statement” that appeared in that festival’s online catelogue.
And here’s a N.Y. Times Magazine profile of Garlin by Alex Witchel that ran a few days ago.
Garlin’s previous credits include a supporting role in Daddy Day Care (which I will never see if I can help it), Full Frontal , Bounce and Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. He serves as an exec producer on Curb Your Enthusiasm and has shot a pilot that no one will ever see unless he puts it up on YouTube.