I don’t know why the release plan for Clint Eastwood‘s Letters from Iwo Jima has changed, but Variety editor Peter Bart is reporting today that a previously decided-upon January release date for the Japanese-language film — a kind of mirror version of Clint’s Flags of Our Fathers, which opens via Paramount/ DreamWorks on 10.20 — is apparently out the window.
I was told two or three weeks ago that Letters from Iwo Jima was going to come out sometime in early to mid January. But now, says Bart, who’s getting his information straight from Eastwood, it will open “two months” after Flags , or sometime in mid to late December.
“Thus,” Bart writes in a column posted today (it will appear in the Variety print version tomorrow), “the possibility exists that Clint will be the first filmmaker in history to have two films in awards contention in the same year, in two different languages.”
Eastwood is “now completing post-production on both films with an eye to opening both at the Tokyo Film Festival in October,” Bart writes. “The distribution pattern is predictably complex: Warner Bros. is handling both films overseas along with DreamWorks, now owned by Paramount, which is distributing em>Flags in the U.S. The production costs of the two films together is under $70 million. There are no big stars involved: Ryan Phillippe is in Flags and Ken Watanabe in Letters.”
The two Iwo Jima films will complement each other in interesting ways, Eastwood has told Bart.
“One scene in Flags shows American soldiers chatting in their foxhole, when suddenly one of them disappears, having been yanked into a tunnel by the Japanese. The Japanese film does not show the Americans, but rather the Japanese who are pulling down the American soldier.”
Variety‘s Pamela McLintock wrote an analysis story about the dual Iwo Jima pic release.
“Marketing and publicity execs at Warner Bros. and Paramount who are charged with opening [Eastwood’s] two Iwo Jima films believe it’s critical that the two movies be released within a short time of each other in the U.S. and Japan. However, they don’t want the films to crowd each other out. ‘Each movie needs its own space…it can’t be seen as a stunt,’ one marketing vet says.
“There are also a lot of generals in the mix. DreamWorks and Warner Bros. were the original partners on the films, but once DreamWorks was sold to Paramount, Par became involved.
“Paramount bows Flags of Our Fathers (the battle from the American viewpoint) next month in the U.S., while Warners begins opening Letters From Iwo Jima (told from the Japanese side and shot entirely in Japanese) in December. Warners is releasing Flags overseas, and Letters everywhere.”
Friday night’s Telluride Film Festival screening of The U.S. vs. John Lennon was rapturous, according to Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling. “In over 20 years of coming to Telluride, I’ve never seen a more positive reaction to a film than [this],” he wrote yesterday. “People were on their feet crying, clapping, hooting and hollering.” Congratulations to David Leaf and John Scheinfeld , the guys who put this film together, for scoring with such a direct emotional hit. Lennon was a phenomenal artist-performer-rockstar and in some ways a lovable human being, but my reaction to their film was not one of absolute enthrallment, which I tried to explain the other day.
Oh, and by the way: John Horn‘s 8.30 story in the L.A. Times was incorrect, apparently, in announcing that Adrienne Shelly‘s Waitress, a drama with Kerri Russell as a pregnant, unhappily married waitress in the deep south who falls into an affair with a visitor, would be showing at Telluride. No sign of it so far, according to what I’ve been told. Same deal with Susanne Bier‘s After the Wedding, which I expect will be as precise and penetrating as Bier’s Brothers and Open Hearts. No Telluride sightings, I mean. Maybe it’ll turn up as a surprise sneak sometime today.

Peter O’Toole‘s performance in Roger Michell‘s Venus (Miramax, 12.15) is an absolute lock for a Best Actor nomination, says Oscar prognosticator Pete Hammond after catching the British-made comedy-drama yesterday afternoon at the Telluride Film Festival. This is also the view of several others who caught the film yesterday as well, he reports. I’ve been flagging this development for a while now, and trying to see Venus since I first heard about some research screenings last April. Michell admitted to being nervous about the reaction to yesterday’s showings, which were the very first for the final finished print. Venus will be screening at the Toronto Film Festival, and Michell, O’Toole and various other team members will show up also.
I was stuck on a really long (eight and a half hour), occasionally miserable Amtrak train trip earlier today from Toronto to Syracuse, N.Y. The purpose was to visit my son Jett , 18, who started freshman classes here a week ago. I’d forgotten about the intense squalor of freshman dorm life — the constant aroma of leftover pizza, the pizza take-out boxes and empty bags of chips scattered about, the leftover chicken-wing bones on the floor, the communal bathrooms, the stanky T-shirts and grubby socks and athletic shorts on the floor, the general pig-trough vibe.

Saturday, 9.2.06, 6:45 pm — notice the incongruent “S” letter in the the “S.I. Newhouse Communications Center” banner over the main doorway. The original “S” was lost and the school replaced it, but the replacement letter uses the wrong font. Tens of millions being spent at this university and they get somehting like this wrong. It’s like wearing a perfect $750 Italian suit with one of the buttons being the wrong color.
It was raining hard for three or four hours during the train trip, and the roof of the car I was sitting in was leaking water in six or seven different spots. Hang in there, Amtrak! The U.S. border police stopped the train to check passports, etc. (which is normal) but they kept everyone waiting for an hour and 45 minutes (which is bullshit). The food car sold bad coffee, cheese danishes, chips, shit sandwiches and the like. Bored-out-of-their-minds passengers were lined up all through the trip.
The trip kept me out of internet reach from 7:45 am until 6 pm and when I finally arrived I didn’t feel like jumping online because every now and then life is about something other than jumping online. (I was tempted to write a measured response to David Poland‘s rave review of Stephen Frears’ The Queen but I guess I can wait.) I just wanted to hang and talk and roam the campus and take pictures.
Last night Jett and I ate some truly foul pizza at one of the joints on Marshall Street, and I mean pizza so bad that that the Food and Drug Adminstration agents should be called in to make arrests.
The Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell polls some smarty-pants types about their most impassioned wanna-sees at the Toronto Film Festival…but only three choices each. Shoulda been four or five, and Howell should have also asked for their gut reactions about films they can’t wait to not see…the biggest Toronto Film Festival turn-offs, sight unseen.
I love it, incidentally, that Variety ‘s Robert Koehler said that two of his hottest can’t-waits are films directed by Abderrahmane Sissako (a film called Bamako) and Apichatpong Weerasethakul (one titled Syndromes and a Century). I’m not saying or hinting that Weerasethakul and Sissako aren’t formidable filmmakers, but Koehler is always paying attention to out-of-the-way filmmakers of their calibre, and a good thing, that…because if Koehler didn’t do this, who would?

A very Canadian, “hooray for our side” view of the must-sees at the Toronto Film Festival in the Toronto Globe & Mail. Strictly for local consumption, although I too am keenly interested in seeing Sarah Polley‘s Away from Her, her feature directing debut.) Peter Howell‘s annual what-journos-are-hot-to-see piece in the Toronto Star will probably offer a better sum-up.
“It’s difficult to pinpoint the precise moment when Neil LaBute‘s remake of The Wicker Man completely jumps the tracks. For some, it will be the scene where Nicolas Cage, in dire need of transportation, turns a gun on a passing bicyclist and melodramatically commands: “Step. Away. From. The Bike.” For others, it will be the fight scene that ends with Cage delivering a karate kick to a feisty Leelee Sobieski . (Take that, bi-yotch!) But for most, the point of no return will arrive during an extended climactic sequence that calls for Cage to pad about in a tacky bear costume. It’s so hilarious, it’s almost, well, unbearable.” — Joe Leydon on his Moving Picture blog, wriring in a much more down to it and funnier than his Variety review.
Okay, okay…Bush takes a bullet and croaks in Death of a President, a drama that will show at the Toronto Film Festival and also air on England TV in October. And it’s a big hah-hah. But is it? And if so, why? I’m not getting the undercurrent. I wish Bush had never been elected, but I don’t want to fantasize about him being dead. Maybe it’ll work as a piece of plain old imaginative story-telling, but there’s something vaguely distasteful at the bottom of it.

I read those Laurence Olivier and Danny Kaye stories years ago — common currency — and we’ve all thought about the undercurrent of the snails-and-oysters scene in Spartacus and so on, so I’m not getting why there’s a revisitation piece in the Daily Mail, written by Michael Thornton, about Oliver’s bisexuality.
Ich bin ein Toronto resident now, having arrived here around 9 pm this evening. Same old town, same leafy-shady trees, same friendly people, same old black squirrels.
Is there something incongruent between the MySpace aesthetic (advertising one’s self, celebrating one’s uniqueness, looking to meet people, etc.) and Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed, which is said to be pretty rough and bloody and ferocious? Somehow the two don’t seem like a spiritual match. Nonethess, here’s the Departed‘s MySpace page.


