Isn’t it about time to start showing Steve Zallian‘s All The King’s Men (Columbia. 9.22) to the press? It was presumed to be some kind of Oscar hopeful last fall before it was pulled, it was subsequently re-edited and refined (or so I was told), it’s been done for while now, it’ll be showing at the Toronto Film Festival before you know it, and playing in theatres in about seven weeks. I made three calls about this yesterday and today…zip. But I heard too many interesting things about this film last year. Has to be something estimable. Give it up, guys.

The Departed trailer minus the dreaded Mozilla X Plug-in factor, in Quicktime and Windows Media Player.

Mission: Impossible: III “is likely to gross close to $400 million worldwide at the box office and is projected to earn an additional $200 million in DVD revenue…[and yet] Paramount expects only to break even after star-producer Tom Cruise gets his share of the profit, which two informed sources estimate could be as high as $80 million.” This according to Claudia Eller‘s 7.31 L.A.Times piece about the diminishing interest that Paramount has in cutting any more fat deals with Cruise and his ilk. Paramount recently offered Cruise/Wagner Prods. an annual $2 million budget, Eller reported, instead of the annual $10 million C/W had been authorized to spend before. The bottom line is that the days of big-dollar gross players are over.

“In the New Hollywood, the power has shifted from production to marketing. And why not? When your aim is to make a franchise picture aimed at the whole family, the person you want at the helm is a brand-management expert, not a filmmaker-friendly production chief. Next summer is already jammed with another slew of sequels, including new installments in the Harry Potter, Spider-Man, Pirates of the Caribbean, Shrek, Fantastic Four, Rush Hour, Bourne and Ocean’s Eleven series. These are consumer products, not cinema.” — from Patrick Goldstein‘s 8.1 “Big Picture” column.

“It’s folly for studios to say we’re only going to make a movie we know how to market,” says World Trade Center producer Michael Shamberg. “The problem with marketing is that it’s based on what’s worked in the past. But audiences want freshness and new ideas, which is all about the future. If a studio is unwilling to be a home for fresh ideas or daring films, they’re ultimately not going to be competitive, because the top talent is going to go somewhere else.” — also in Patrick Goldstein‘s 8.1 “Big Picture” column. To which I would add, audiences don’t seem to really want freshness and new ideas — they want fresh spins on safe ideas. Lame as this sounds, the word “new” tends to put most people a little on edge, except for toddlers, tweeners, teens and 20-somethings.

Suddenly my old Fairfield County stomping grounds (Wilton and Norwalk) are part of the Hollywood-now cycle. The Dave Karnes character in World Trade Center (Paramount, 8.9) is shown watching the 9/11 tragedy on a TV set along with two or three coworkers at his job in Wilton, and now House of Sand and Fog director Vadim Perlman is in a legal skirmish over something that happened in a South Norwalk restaurant-bar. It sounds lame to bring this up, but if you lived in this neck of the woods and someone mentioned this to you at a party at someone’s home on Cheesespring Road, you’d smile and nod and go, “Yeah, interesting.”

I’ve seen thousands of films with rote, static, or unimaginative camera work, particularly those made between the nascent sound era of the early 30s up until the beginnings of the influence of Italian neorealism in the early ’50s and the hand-held, free-form era of the French nouvelle vague in the early ’60s. Laurence Olivier was, I suppose, not an especially exciting or inspired director, but his three best-known Shakespeare films — Henry V, Hamlet and Richard III — never struck me as being particularly labored or tedious or difficult to sit through.

These three films were mainly about text, acting and visual clarity, and Olivier’s shooting of them never got in the way of these things.
And yet here, out of the blue, is N.Y. Times DVD columnist Dave Kehr all but spitting on Olivier’s grave by saying his work may be slightly worse than that of Ed Wood’s — seriously — in a brief review of the Criterion Collection’s just-issued Olivier Shakespeare box set.
“Olivier might have been a great actor, but he was one of the klutziest directors who ever lived, and seeing these films, with their static arrangements of actors, pointlessly peripatetic camera movements and bizarre framing, makes one appreciate again the deep commitment to cinema represented by the work of Edward D. Wood.
“Hamlet is the best of the bunch, a Freudian interpretation focused on the prince’s sexual disgust with his adulterous mother (all ambiguity has been eliminated) and dressed up with billowing clouds of dry-ice and angular, expressionistic sets that strongly resemble Orson Welles‘s back-lot Macbeth of the same year. Richard III, now with its Technicolor buffed up and its VistaVision aspect ratio restored, still remains a mighty soporific. All three are better heard than seen.”
And Olivier’s Henry V concept of starting the film at London’s Globe theatre and gradually opening it up into big studio sets and outdoor locations….that was chopped liver? It was fairly out there idea for its day, and it’s still moderately engaging by today’s standards. Kehr must have a serious bug up his ass about something when he wrote this.

And while speaking of Shakespeare on film, what’s with Warner Home Video’s continuing delay in releasing a remastered DVD of Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s Julius Caesar (’53)? By my standards this superbly acted, exquisitely mounted black-and-white version is one of the best Shakespeare rides around, Hollywood-produced or otherwise. (Dave Kehr might piss on it and wish for more of a Plan 9 From Outer Space approach, but that’s his right as a critic.)

Marlon Brando‘s performance as Marc Antony may not exemplify the grunty, earthy Marlon of legend, but it’s one of his most striking performances. No one has ever delivered the “cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war” speech with more punch or pizzazz. It’s right up there in terms of rage and fire with his Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar…seriously. That moment at the end of Act Two when his newly empowered Antony walks up to a marble bust of the late Ceasar, puts his hand on the base and turns it toward him is one of Brando’s finest non-verbal bits ever… and people are barely aware of it.
James Mason‘s Brutus, Louis Calhern‘s Caesar, Edmond O’Brien ‘s Casca, John Gielgud‘s Cassisus, John Doucette‘s “carpenter, citizen of Rome”, John Hoyt‘s Decius Brutus, Greer Garson‘s Calpurnia….an awesome cast delivering one knockout moment after another. Not to mention Miklos Rosza‘s haunting score and Joseph Ruttenberg‘s luscious cinematography.
I thought WHV would issue this film for sure after Brando’s death in ’04, but nope. There’s no question this film is an essential, so whassup, Ned Price?

Another trailer mashup, this time selling the idea of a warm and uplifting Taxi Driver. Very well edited by Steven Santos…but I think we all got the idea with that Shining trailer that went around a couple of years ago.

The L.A. Times‘ Deborah Netburn with a recent sum-up of Gibson blogger riffs.

This Gibson-meltdown story from the Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell reads like something that should have run Monday instead of today….sorry, but news cycles are running almost hourly these days. That said, there’s a decent pull-quote from yours truly: “As Woody Allen might put it, Mel is toast with those of the Hebrew persuasion.” But maybe there’s a chance with Mel having asked to meet and sit down with Jewish leaders, etc. Doubtful but maybe.

There’s a kind of nascent rumble on Talledega Nights (Columbia, 8.4), which has its all-media showing in Westwood this evening: Will Ferrell‘s dumb race-car driver schtick is whatever it is (funny, very funny, amusing, vaguely exasperating), but the supporting stand-out seems to be Sascha Baron Cohen, whose comedic Borat (subtitled “Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan”) played in Cannes last May and is opening on 11.3 via 20th Century Fox.

“On many levels, Talladega Nights is reminiscent of Anchorman,” says Screen Daily‘s Tim Grierson. “Both films were directed by Adam McKay, both were written by McKay and Ferrell, and both feature Ferrell playing a pompous big shot cut down to size who ultimately finds redemption. If those comparisons aren’t enough, each project lovingly satirises its milieu while relying on over-the-top characterizations and hit-and-miss improvised humor for its laughs.”
And yet there are “many good comic moments early on,” he says, which is good because they “help to compensate for a sluggish second half.”
And it’s Baron Cohen, playing an effete French snob, “who gives the film acceleration,” Grierson writes. “As a testament to Baron Cohen’s importance to Talladega Nights, the film’s second-half dip can be partly blamed on his disappearance from the plot as Ricky withdraws from the limelight to regain his confidence before the big third-act race.”