Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif costarring again, for the third time! For eight or nine seconds I was entertaining the idea of actually paying to see One Night with the King, the Christian conservative right-wing Biblical costume movie, until….

“At the very beginning, Peter O’Toole shows up for a day’s work as the prophet Samuel, looking as if he wandered in from the set of Troy; later, his old friend from Lawrence of Arabia, Omar Sharif, ambles on as well as Memucan, whispering sage advice to the king. Unfortunately they’re separated by five centuries, and never share a scene. For a movie with the most righteous of intentions, that’s perhaps the most grievous moviemaking sins of all.” — from Stephen Witty‘s review in the Newark Star-Ledger.

Of course, no one likes to talk about the second movie O’Toole and Sharif costarred in. It’s a 1967 World War II film called Night of the Generals, and it has a fairly shitty reputation. The Egyptian-born Sharif had to wear loads of makeup to look like a German (he plays an intelligence officer, Major Grau, looking into murder charges that involve three high-ranking generals, one of who is played by O’Toole. The only DVD mastering of the film, directed by Anatole Litvak, is a Spanish import.

Philip Noyce‘s Catch a Fire (Focus Features, 10.27) is a smart, urgent political drama about how an uneducated average-Joe black guy, Patrick Chamusso (Derek Luke), was goaded — brutalized — into becoming an anti-apartheid terrorist in the early ’80s. But the idea the film came from a white guy, albeit an atypical one — Joe Slovo , the white chief of staff of the African National Congress√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s military wing and later Nelson Mandela‘s housing minister.

It all started when Slovo, according to this 10.15 New York Times story by Kristin Hohenadel, told his daughter Shawn Slovo, a screenwriter, that she should write a script about Chamusso.
√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ö‚ÄúTerrorism is the single biggest real fear in the contemporary world,√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ǭù Robyn Slovo, another of Joe’s daughters and one of the flm’s producers, tells Hohenadel. √ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ö‚ÄúWhat√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s interesting is there√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s not enough time spent looking at why a man would do this. Not all terrorists are the same. But this is our attempt to make an audience identify with a terrorist, there√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s no question about it.√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ǭù
Chamusso “does not accept the terrorist label,” writes Hohenadel, adding that his fundamental claim is that he “was pushed to do it.”
For Noyce, Catch a Fire was “ultimately about transcendence,” she writes.
“South Africa’s recent history is a beacon to the rest of the world in terms of the peaceful resolution of bitter interracial conflict, keeping the infrastructure of the country intact, preserving the rights of citizens on all sides,” he says. “The movie really is about the South African miracle. The moral consequences of that struggle to all the participants, and then how in this society they’ve managed to move beyond that struggle. They live with it, they don’t deny it but they live together.”

Bad news, encouraging news: Doug McGrath‘s Infamous (Warner Independent), the second Truman Capote-writes-In Cold Blood movie, opened weakly yesterday in a limited 179-theatre break. $120,000 cume and $600 per print average yesterday — an expected $411,000 and a $2295 per-screen average by Sunday night. These numbers may not sound tragic, but in industry eyes this means it pretty much opened and closed. Stephen Frears‘ The Queen (Miramax), on the other hand, expanded from 11 to 46 screens and will have about $937,000 by Sunday night, not counting last week’s take. It’s doing very well, and will probably continue to do so for a good while. Not to mention the bump that will happen with Mirren gets her Best Actress nomination.

Takashi Shimizu‘s The Grudge 2 (Columbia), showing in 3211 situations, will end up in first place Sunday night with roughly $27,261,000. But the big story is Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed (Warner Bros.), which will come in second roughly $19,369,000, dropping only 26%. That’s a very strong hold from last weekend, especially considering that last Sunday’s business was stronger than usual due to the Columbus Day holiday that came the next day (i.e., Monday, 10.9).
Man of the Year will be third with an expected Sunday-night cume of $12,399,000, Open Season will end up with $11,105 (decent hold). Texas Chainsaw Masscare: The Beginning, weakened by The Grudge 2, will have about $8,559,000. The Marine, which opened without critics screenings, will end up with $6,693,000, give or take. The Guardian, $5,738,000. Employee of the Month, $5,248,000. One Night with the King (a religious-right flick with “some sensuality,” starring Tiffany Dupont and costarring Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif with “some sensuality,” about Esther — as iin “the book of…” — winning the heart of the king). Jackass Number Two will end up with $3,122,000 for the weekend.

“It may be tempting to greet Marie Antoinette with a Jacobin snarl or a self- righteous sneer, since it is after all the story of the silly teenager who embodied a corrupt, absolutist state in its terminal decadence,” A.O. Scott wrote yesterday. on the occasion of Sofia Coppola‘s film being shown at the N.Y. Film Festival. “But where’s the fun in such indignation? And, more seriously, where is the justice? To say that this movie is historically irresponsible or politically suspect is both to state the obvious and to miss the point.”

But it’s not that Coppola’s film, which has visual splendor and a fine tonal consistency all through, is historically irresponsible — it’s the fact that it exudes vapid self-portraiture at every turn. Once you get past the well-honed profession- alism that went into the making of the damn thing, the selective nature of Coppola’s screenplay — she obviously relates to the trapped-rich-girl experience and little else — renders something not so much “boring” as rigorously drained.
And yet here are Scott and L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan (his piece also filed yesterday) defending Coppola’s integrity and basically saying that embracing a vapid approach is okay — deserving of respect — as long as you do it with disci- pline and style. There’s no question that Coppola had a vision when she made this film, and that it was very much her own. I’ve said that from the beginning, but God, what a diminishment of the vision thing.
There’s also no question that a significant factor behind Scott, Turan, Michel Ciment and a lot of other critics cutting Marie-Antoinette a break or going so far as to praise it is a certain sublimated kowtowing to the Coppola legend/tradition/ aura…a veiled showing of respect to a once very powerful king. Without this and other dad-related factors (including the rich-girl-trapped-in-a-royal-court sensibility in the first place), there would never have been a Marie-Antoinette. Is there anyone out there who believes Sofia would have won her 2003 Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Lost in Translation without the Coppola gimme factor plus Bill Murray‘s inspired improvisings?

Had I not been all Bend-ed and distracted yesterday, I would have posted a sampling of reviews of Nicolas Hytner‘s The History Boys (Fox Searchlight,11.21) which opened yesterday in England. The consensus is not one of immense enthusiasm for the film, but derby-wise Richard Griffiths‘ performance as a rotund, intellectually spirited grammar school prof named Hector may — favoring winds allowing — have a shot at a Best Actor nomination.
The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil yesterday reported that Fox Searchlight, encouraged by the rave reviews Griffiths has gotten from London film critics, has decided to push him in the Best Actor category instead of Supporting, which had been the previous thinking due to Boys‘ ensemble-y nature.
Leslie Felperin‘s Variety review last Wednesday was the first to lower the boom on the film itself — now there’s a chorus of critics saying more or less the same things. The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw called it “an odd, faintly directionless experience…a stagey and oddly contrived movie directed by Nick Hytner, with the kind of elaborate, highly worked dialogue that is exhilarating in the theatre, but rather unreal-sounding on the big screen.
“It is set, notionally, in the early 1980s, though Bennett’s mental picture of the scene is surely from decades further back than that. There are some ’80s pop songs on the soundtrack and modernized touches that appear to overshoot the period runway; we get talk of ‘media studies’ (for the Oxbridge term? in the early 80s?) and the boys invoke their ‘rights’ when a master casually whacks them over the head with some exercise books.”
Bradshaw is especially good with his riffs on Mr. Creosote:
“Really, though, we are in Mr. Chips country. And the Mr. Chips who has wisely and wittily guided a number of clever-clogs youngsters to academic success is a master called Hector, rumbustiously played by Richard Griffiths. Heaven knows, Mr. Griffiths was no starveling playing Uncle Monty in Withnail and I 20 years ago — but now he is a mighty presence indeed.
“[Griffiths] actually has a stunt double listed on the final credits, presumably for long-shots showing Hector in his crash helmet sedately riding a motor-scooter into the school grounds, and that is not exactly Mission: Impossible stuff. As far as he is permitted, Griffiths dominates the screen with talent and charm — and sheer equatorial girth.”