An English translation of Ken Watanabe‘s dialogue in that Flags of Our Fathers/Letters From Iwo Jima Japanese trailer that went up yesterday. It’s obvious that Watanabe, playing a real-life general named Tadamichi Kuribayashi, is giving his troops some kind of threatening pep talk, but here’s a Wells-edited version of what he’s probably saying: “For the sake of our country, regardless if you’re the last soldier, our mission is to kill the enemy on this island. Keep in mind you can never go back to the homeland.” And then the titles supposedly read, “Never forget the heroes of Iwo Jima — Japan and United States — each country√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s story — Academy Award-winning director Clint Eastwood — Flags of Our Fathers, 10.28.06 — Letters from Iwo Jima, 12.9.06″

Inspired by Scott Weinberg‘s Cinematical piece about how he can’t find any Snakes on a Train DVDs anywhere, I called Asylum Video, the L.A.-based producer of the Snakes on a Plane ripoff flick, and asked a distribution rep what’s wrong. Nothing, she said — it’s available at all corporate Blockbuster outlets as well as all Hollywood Video and Movie Gallery stores, she said. It’s the mom-and-pop stores and the online-ordering sites that aren’t yet stocked. It turns out Asylum moved from an office on Sunset (at Windows of the World) to new offices on Sycamore a couple of months ago and the big California distributor — VPD in Sacramento — somehow missed the e-mail notification. “It was just one of those weird fall-through-the-cracks things,” the Asylum rep said. The other two distributors to contact, she said, are Baker and Taylor out of Momence, Illinois, and Ingraham in LaVerne, Tennessee.

A newly restored print of Warren Beatty‘s Reds (’81) is going to be screened at the N.Y. Film Festival in late September, presumably with Beatty dropping by for a post-screening q & a. And then Paramount Home Video is releasing this spruced-up version as a 25th Anniversary DVD on 10.3.

The Amazon page doesn’t say if Beatty recorded a narration track or participated in a retrospective documentary, which would be par for the course for a DVD of this sort. (The Paramount Home Video folks didn’t know about this, Beatty biographer Peter Biskind didn’t know anything either and Beatty wasn’t around when I called.)
Martin Blythe, the p.r. go-to guy at Paramount Home Video until ’04 or thereabouts, told me five or six years ago that Reds had been remastered and looked great (a superb-looking version showed at the San Francisco Film Festival four years ago) but the hang-up was getting Beatty to record a narration track and/or participate in a DVD documentary…which I know he’s been loathe to do previously.

“We did the best film we could, and it’s just snakes on a plane. It’s not ‘Snakes on Brokeback Mountain.'” — the compulsively honest Samuel L Jackson speaking to The Independent‘s Leslie O’Toole.

“Riddle me this,” David Poland wrote this morning. “Is a 20 minute clip, some free hors d’oeuvres, a handshake and a smile from a singing diva, and a Japanese trailer really enough to lock up the Oscar season for people now?” The implication seems to be that it’s too early to make a call about Flags of Our Fathers and Dreamgirls looking like the hottest Best Picture choices. That or he thinks I’m full of gas for joining Tom O’Neill in saying so. Or something like that. I’m not quite sure.
Let’s just repeat the Flags basics without comment: (a) I’ve read the script of Flags of my Fathers and have a pretty good idea of how it unfolds. (b) Plus the Japanese trailer — the desaturated color, the texture of it, the versimilitude, the moody whatever — drove it in deeper. I also said in yesterday’s piece that (c) Flags might not stand up on its own (one never knows anything, it hasn’t been seen) but it’s safe to say that this latest Eastwood/Haggis collaboration will most likely have some measure of poetic refinement…a certain spareness and sureness of touch, etc.
And then you need to add three things to this: (d) the personal-anguish-of- soldiers factor, which will likely resonate in the hinterlands among the support-our-troops-in-Iraq contingent, (e) the big-scale tribute to the World War II generation is going to sink in big with boomer-aged Academy members, and (f) the Flags-plus-Letters from Iwo Jima factor is going to impress the hell out of Academy members for the same reason that actors who gain weight or put on fake noses or speak in exotic accents always tend to get Oscar-nominated — because the effort that went into it is so obvious, and because no director has ever done something like this before.
I said in the piece also that something else might pop through between now and December 31st (“something always does”) and so on.
And if Poland has yet to be convinced that Dreamgirls is probably the other leading Best Picture contender at this stage, then he really does need a doctor-supervised schedule of daily enemas.
Oh, I’m sorry…that’s getting personal. But of course, Poland started it by posting this cleverly done HE banner with Quentin Crisp in place of myself. Poland is making a point about personal proclivities ouside the bounds of journalistic endeavor. Are you noticing the sophistication levels here? This is really mature, stirring, erudite stuff. Welcome to the fucking sandbox.

Just to continue the foolery, here’s a Wells-vs.-Poland q & a thing on DVD Newsroom.

L.A. Times writer Deborah Netburn has asked editors of some of the top geek sites if Snakes on a Plane (New Line, 8.18) is coming out past its hip prime. I thought this was a settled issue. Of course it’s coming out too late as far as the hip online community is concerned. Thing is, the 100% support of this crowd isn’t enough to make Snakes a serious hit.
To broaden general interest levels New Line Cinema began in June tand July to reach out to the less-hip, the squares, the newspaper readers, the slow-on-the-pickups — in effect dumbing down the ad campaign.
I’ve been hearing for weeks now that the definitely-not-interested percentage on tracking reports was fairly high — over 20% — but these are primarily the two older quadrants talking. Snakes is obviously a younger-person’s movie. On top of which there are probably a lot of people out there who are squeamish about snakes and just don’t want to see a movie about them, period.
I don’t know what to expect this weekend…yet. I just know that Snakes was cool six months ago, but it ain’t so cool now.
Two quotes from Netburn’s piece: (a) “Fact is, those mother-f***ing snakes are getting on my mother-f***ing nerves. And I know I can’t be the only one who feels this way” — Cinematical’s Eric Davis; (b) “They’ve done a pretty good job with the buzz, but because it has taken so long for the film to come out they felt the need to show more of the film to keep people interested. When people knew nothing about it short of the concept they were excited — now they are saying it is a cheesy Samuel Jackson film.” — Dark Horizons’ Garth Hudson.

The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neill got Dreamgirls costar Jennifer Hudson to tell him about the filming of the scene in which she sings “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” — the classic tune that Jennifer Holliday sang in the original B’way stage version that ran in the early ’80s, and which won more or less won her a Best Actress Tony Award.
For Hudson’s performing of “the most anticipated scene in one of the most eagerly awaited movies of the year, director Bill Condon fretted so much over shooting it that he saved it up for last and shut down the set so no one could spy on the scene,” O’Neill writes. “All early buzz indicates that Dreamgirls is about to transform Hudson into a superstar,” he adds. “[And] she’s already the frontrunner for the Supporting Actress Oscar.”
O’Neill is correct about this — Hudson is the one to beat right now. I saw the Dreamgirls scenes Monday night at the Pacific Design Center and listened to Hudson belt out three tunes like a champ. She’s got the hot role in Dreamgirls — the one with the most soul and punch and heartache.
I didn’t think I’d be saying this, but the great Meryl Streep needs to put herself into the Best Actress category after all for her Devil Wears Prada performance. If she goes for Best Supporting Actress she’ll almost certainly lose to Hudson.

Walter Becker and Donald Fagen (a.k.a. “Mr. Steely Dan”) have struck again, this time writing to sometime Owen Wilson colleague Wes Anderson. The idea is to get Wes to convince Fox Searchlight to fork over $400 grand for the rights to two songs Becker and Fagin have composed for Wes’s forthcoming The Darjeeling Limited, which was offically announced yesterday in Variety. Here’s the lyrics to the chrous from the first song: “Darjeeling Limited / That’s the train I wanna get kissed on / Darjeeling Limited / But I’ll be lucky if I don√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t get pissed on.”