Hold up on those wildcat Friday numbers from back east and consider this studio projection: (1) Jackass: Number Two will end up #1 with roughly $27,317,000 for the weekend; (2) Jet Li’s Fearless will end up with $9,716,000; (3) The Gridiron Gang will end up a hair below that with $9,617,000; (3) Flyboys will come in with $5,042,000; (4) Everyone’s Hero, $4,823,000, (5) The Black Dahlia, $4,358,000; and All The King’s Men will finish with $3,709,000…dead.

While speaking to Factory Girl star Sienna Miller, Daily Mail columnist Baz Bamigboye makes mention of the fact that “those who have seen early rough-cut versions” — partly a reference to yours truly — “tell me the performances of Sienna and leading man Guy Pearce, as Warhol, are brilliant. So much so that studio chief Harvey Weinstein plans a year-end Oscar campaign for them.”

I never said anything rock-solid about Harvey planning to release Factory Girl, so presumably Baz has done some digging of his own. That or Sienna said so.
Here’s how I put it in mid-August: “I know award-quality when I see it, and Sienna Miller’s capturing of Edie Sedgwick totally rates. It may be the most eerily accurate reviving of a dead person I’ve ever seen in a film. And yet Miller projects dimension and gravitas in spades — an unmistakable sadness and snap and aliveness like nothing I’ve gotten from an actress in any movie so far this year. She isn’t just a dead ringer for the real McCoy — she gets her fluttery debutante laugh, that mixture of Warholian cool and little-girl terror, the giddy euphoria, the cracked voice. It’s more than convincing — it’s a kind of rebirthing.”

This Dutch trailer for Paul Verhoeven‘s Black Book (Sony Classics) is interesting for the extreme widescreen framing. It looks like a 3 to 1 aspect ratio…odd. The film is supposed to be Verhoeven’s return to his Dutch roots, but it looks like it was shot with the same technical slickness that he applied to The Hollow Man. I have to give David Poland credit for making me laugh by calling it Showgirl’s List. He called it”a perverse delight…Verhoeven has a strong, kinky voice that is on full display here. Sex, Nazis, excrement, pubic hair bleaching, Lugers, explosions, Jews, redheads, singing, dancing…woo hoo!! This film may actually be Showgirls for the intelligentsia. Can’t wait to see it again.”

What you have to do is watch this Good Shepherd trailer and then read my mid-August HE piece called “Sussing Shepherd” and then let it all sink in, and then you need to stir it around until it becomes a kind of oatmeal mush.

There’s some kind of defensive gatekeeper vibe coloring the advance-screening policy on behalf of Running With Scissors (Columbia, 10.20). The first hint came in mid-August when it was made clear that Scissors wouldn’t be going to the Toronto Film Festival (“The Old Toronto Sidestep“). Then a mild-mannered journalist told me the other day that publicists working the Scissors junket next week have been talking some enforcing very strict rules about who’ll be allowed into the screenings. And over the last two days every call I’ve made about trying to see it has been met with stony silence. A fellow columnist says that Sony “has been pushing us internet guys back, back, back — not letting us see it.”

Last year Brokeback Mountain became a kind of milestone for gay subject matter in mainstream films, in part by lending an aura of class because of all the critical praise and Oscar nominations. This year we have three gayish films of an allegedly strong distinction — for lack of a better term I’m calling them the Gay Trilogy — opening during award- contender season, plus a couple of second-tier so-sos.
None are on Brokeback‘s level — not even close — but they all have same-sex encounters woven into their fabric, and I’m wondering how much of this is a Brokeback legacy thing, if at all, or are gay-tinged films simply becoming more common or…? I haven’t figured it all out yet, but there’s some kind of wave underway.
First out of the gate is Ryan Murphy‘s Running With Scissors (Columbia, 10.20). This isn’t a gay-relationship-driven film — it’s primarily about neuroticism and family dysfunction, and I’m hearing it’s a kind of Less Than Zero-type thing — but it does have a gay lead character (Joseph Cross) and a thread of a relationship with a secondary gay character (Joseph Fiennes).
Next up is Nicholas Hytner‘s The History Boys (Fox Searchlight, 11.22), which has all kinds of homoerotic posturing and ball-fondlings and whatnot, although the spirit of the piece is in another realm (“Pass it on, boys”) altogether.
The final entry is Richard Eyre‘s Notes on a Scandal (Fox Searchlight, 12.22), a heavy-duty relationship drama from the pen of Patrick Marber (Closer) involving a strong emotional attraction on the part of an older instructor (Judi Dench) at a school for a youngish art teacher (Cate Blanchett). This situation is complicated by an “illicit” affair that Blanchett’s character has with (I think) a student. The film has been rated R by the MPAA rating due in part to “some aberrant sexual content.”
On top of which are two lesser efforts in this vein — Douglas McGrath‘s Infamous (Warner Independent, 10.13), the “other” Truman Capote-writes-In Cold Blood movie that isn’t nearly as rich or refined as Bennett Miller’s Capote but is certainly shows Capote in a more flamboyantly gay light, and John Cameron Mitchell ‘s Shortbus (THINKFilm, 10.4), which delves into the lives of several Manhattan characters caught up in the usual hunt forsexual-emotional satisfaction, although most of it is gay-flavored.

The MCN link says “The NY Film Critics Circle Sets Its Award Dates for January”…bullshit. They’ll vote on Monday, 12.11 and of course, the winners will be announced right away. The awards ceremony will take place on Sunday, 1.7.07, at the Supper Club, “a new venue for the organization this year.”

89% of the Rotten Tomatoes critics have spat upon All The King’s Men, and in such an atmosphere three or four people have remarked with surprise at Kenneth Turan‘s rave in the L.A. Times. I shouldn’t say anything because I slept through about 30% to 35% of Men when I caught it in Toronto, but a sign of a formidable critic is one who says what he/she likes despite the herd mentality, so Turan’s okay in my book. And he isn’t completely alone. A quick scan of the Metacritic survey tells you tthat Time‘s Richard Schickel is mostly a fan; ditto Toronto Globe & Mail critic Rick Groen…well, he only gave it 2 and 1/2 stars but he’s a big fan of Sean Penn ‘s lead performance.

Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson has penned a column about Zach Helm‘s fabled Stranger Than Fiction script, which “five studios, 37 directors and scores of movie stars threw themselves at.” I knew all about that excitement when it was happening. Everyone was creaming over that script except I couldn’t get past page 20 when I tried to read it (twice), and then I saw the finished film in Toronto and I went, “What the fuck was that about?”

Ostensibly, Fiction is about a problem afflicting IRS agent Harold Crick (Will Ferrell), which is that he’s begun to hear his life being narrated by a woman with a British accent. We gradually learn that the voice belongs to a chain-smoking writer named Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson), who’s having lots of trouble finishing her latest book, which is largely about an IRS agent named Harold Crick. Kay is planning to kill Harold off and doesn’t quite know how. And Harold, once he gets wind of this, seeks her out and pleads with her not to kill him.
Fiction‘s problem is that it never figures out if Crick is or isn’t living inside Kay Eiffel’s head. It never makes a case for the fact that he’s existing in some imaginary realm Kay is creating as she moves along with her book, or, assuming he’s real, how and why Kay’s imaginings have any power over him.
Anyway, Thompson builds her column around conversations she had Stranger Than Fiction director Marc Forster and producer Lindsay Doran, and it reads well in that skillful, well-structured way that Thompson’s columns always read. But then you get to paragraph #13 and it’s like….my goodness! Doran and Forster actually admit to and discuss the film’s fatal flaw.
“One thing they never figured out,” writes Thompson, was”how to explain the logic of exactly how this particularly strange movie fiction works. ‘It was an ongoing conversation,’ says Doran, who sounds amazed that audiences are buying the film at all. ‘We never explain it. I kept saying to Zach, if nothing else we need a scene where somebody says, how could this be happening?’
“Forster shot one such scene, but after preview screenings he cut it. Is he a character out of a book or is he real?’ Forster asks. ‘I see him as real, an everyday man who suddenly has a narrator pop into his life. Some parts of his life are part of the book and some aren’t. Not everything has to be perfectly explained: that’s the freedom and beauty of art and fiction. For me, the title says it all — ‘Stranger Than Fiction.’ ”
Horseshit. Either you work a story out or you don’t. The central riddle in Fiction‘s story has been left open-ended and unresolved, and that’s a shame because I would’ve bought the film if Helm, Forster and Doran had just established and set the rules for Ferrell’s Crick being a character living in Thompson’s imaginary universe…or not. And if they’d gotten rid of Queen Latifah entirely. I hated every moment that Queen Latifah occupies in this film.
Woody Allen‘s story for The Purple Rose of Cairo was a lot crazier and more off-the-charts than Fiction‘s (it’s about a good-looking actor leaving a film playing on a screen in a small town and having a relationship with a female fan in the audience) but he worked out a system and stuck to it. It’s not that hard. You just have to buckle down and figure it out, and then make the crazy figured-out stuff seem inevitable, brisk and entertaining. Hello?

Said this before, saying it again: despite Clint Eastwood having told Variety editor Peter Bart earlier this month that Letters From Iwo Jima, his Japanese-soldier-POV Iwo Jima movie, will be released “two months” after Flags of Our Fathers, or sometime in mid to late December, and despite Pete Hammond considering a scenario that Letters will indeed be competing ‘against’ Paramount and Dreamworks’ Flags and Warner Bros. “sources” yelling him “they are only seeing the film for the first time this week and have not yet decided when it will be released but that “it will ‘not‘ be in 2006″…despite all this (and isn’t the confusion about the Letters release date just amazing? the way it persists, I mean?), the bottom line is still this….actually, hold up. There is no bottom line. I’ve just changed my mind. I was going to say Letters will almost certainly be regarded on these shores as strictly backup for Flags of Our Fathers, but nobody knows anything and and that includes me.

Pete Hammond jumps into the will- Paramount-give- Zodiac-a-platform-opening-in-late-December story in his latest Hollywood Wiretap column, which is basically about how end-of-the-year crowding has left the studios with an embarassment of riches. But before exploring the Zodiac particulars, I have a suggestion.

Robert Downey

Paramount is apparently still on the fence (i.e., reluctant but unwilling to give this reluctance a full voice) about opening David Fincher‘s allegedly top-drawer policier in New York and L.A. on or before before 12.31.06. (The studio intends to release it wide on 1.17.07.) I’ve written two or three articles pushing for this, but I’ve only read an early version of the script. Since Fincher is now, according to Hammond, “completing editing and mixing and the film should be pretty much wrapped in a couple of weeks,” he and his producers should simply arrange for a quiet little columnists-and-critics screening of Zodiac so certain parties can see it and respond first-hand.
Zodiac may not be all it’s cracked up to be, in which case nobody has to write anything one way or the other and Paramount and the Zodiac team can duke it out between themselves. But if it’s an exceptional wow, which I’ve been told by certain parties, then certain columnists and critics could conceivably proclaim this and the Zodiac team would have a stronger case to make to the Paramount foot-draggers.
“Sources are saying it is brilliantly made with great performances across the board,” writes Hammond. “The cast includes Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards. And even though Fincher’s hard edged previous films (Fight Club, Panic Room, Se7en) have received a grand total of 2 Academy nods in tech categories, this is said to be the one that could change that pattern.
“That is, if Zodiac receives a qualifying run in December ahead of its wide January release. If it has to wait until next year, the odds are long [for ’07 Oscars] since January films are a distant memory come nomination time. But hope remains that Fincher’s film will still be a part of this year’s kudos story. We’ve been told that it’s a complex situation and there are ‘discussions that are probably going to take place.’
“One hurdle may be that Paramount really doesn’t need another picture going for the gold this year since they already have World Trade Center and the upcoming Dreamworks’films Flags Of Our Fathers (10.20) and Dreamgirls (12.21). And although it is a completely separate entity, specialty division Paramount Vantage has a major contender in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarittu‘s Babel (10.27).
“But if Zodiac really does deliver the goods (as those few who have seen it believe), then how can it be denied a passport to the Kodak? After all, remember 1974. One studio accounted for three, count `em , three of the five Best Picture Oscar nominations. The movies were The Godfather Part II , Chinatown and The Conversation. The studio was, you guessed it, Paramount.”
Bottom line: if Zodiac is the goodie its supporters say it is, there is no downside — zip, nada, none — to giving it a platform debut in four or six theatres in N.Y. and L.A. in late December. Paramount can’t lose, especially given the apparent likelihood that Zodiac will need some kind of big advance sell since it’s fairly long (about three hours) and doesn’t end its hunt-for-a-serial-killer plot with a conventional finale.

“If I see one more bus ad for one more fucking animated movie with fucking animals in it, I’m going to start screaming” — an actual comment from a director to his manager-producer, apparently in response to seeing an Open Season poster.