“Rarely do words as stark as ‘heroism’ get parsed in filmmaking, but that’s just what Clint Eastwood‘s World War II feature Flags Of Our Fathers does. A diffuse and demanding picture that, as with most Eastwood films, takes a while to find its stride, it should nevertheless see good upscale market business, as well as make a deep critical footprint that will ensure awards consideration.” — from Brent Simon‘s review in the 10.11 Screen Daily.

The latest Jamie Stuart New York Film Festival video is mainly about hair — i.e., Stuart’s sparse Soderberghian thatch vs. the angular, abundant topside forest that has always been a component with David Lynch, director of the NYFF-screened Inland Empire . Stuart doesn’t get into how the the film plays, what others seemed to think of it, or the whys and wherefores of Lynch’s decision to self-distribute it.

Another would-be Oscar contender has been dinged just as it rushes out of the starting gate. Nicholas Hytner‘s film version of Alan Bennett ‘s Tony-award-winning play The History Boys has finally been reviewed out of London (two days before its commercial opening over there), and if the word of Variety‘s Leslie Felperin is to be given any weight, there appears to be trouble in River City.

“The History Boys may please fans of the original legit production and the stragglers who didn’t catch it in Gotham or London’s West End,” Helperin begins. “However, auds coming cold to this largely faithful adaptation of Bennett’s clever but contrived classroom comedy won’t be so wowed, given pic’s irrevocably stagy feel.
“Hytner’s flat-footed direction doesn’t help, nor do pic’s younger cast members’ over-rehearsed perfs, [and] the blow-up to the bigscreen makes the original material’s fault lines look more chasm-like. Bennett’s glittery dialogue may encrust the material with jewel-bright, quotable lines, but it sounds just plain phony in the mouths of the younger characters. Plus, the younger actors are so used to inhabiting their roles that all the spontaneity has been squeezed out, although a couple (Barnett, Parker) get better results.
“In the end, they nearly all sound like Alan Bennett characters — and ones who would be more comfortable in the 1950s than the 1980s — rather than real people. Essentially, they’re vehicles to air competing ideas about education, homoerotic desire, and how history is written. All interesting stuff, but it never quite gels as a drama.”

Hollywood Bytes columnist Elizabeth Snead dropped by last night’s Flags of Our Fathers premiere after-party, which I would have liked to attend. And not just for the free food, which was probably of a higher quality than the offerings at Oki-Dog.

This is hilarious — Terry Gilliam on the streets plugging the Manhattan opening of Tideland (IFC, 10.13) and looking for loose change in the bargain. I’ve seen most of Tideland (I walked out after an hour) and this clip is fifteen times more entertaining. Gilliam’s spirit is infectious.

But why has David Lynch arranged to self-distribute Inland Empire, his 172 minute, digitally-shot “fever dream” flick, before the end of the year? What were Lynch’s concrete options before he decided to go this way? Manohla Dargis wrote some respectful things about Empire, but what are the buyers really saying about it behind closed doors? Was nobody was making a serious offer? Gregg Goldstein‘s Hollywood Reporter story is vague about this stuff.

Diane Sawyer: “How much did you read of people who came out and said, Do not work with him again? What do you feel about them?”

Mel Gibson: “I feel sad because they’ve obviously been hurt and frightened and offended enough to feel that they have to do that. Um, and it’s their choice. There’s nothing I can do about that.”

— excerpted from two-part interview Sawyer has taped with Gibson, set to air on Thursday and Friday morning on “Good Morning, America”

Columnist Ray Richmond has mentioned a half-assed site called Celebrity Ranker that claims to calculate how popular and sexy someone with a lot of internet exposure may be. It ranks people by sifting through Google and tabulating the pages focusing on this or that celebrity, which Ranker says number 23,706. (That’s appalling in itself — 23,706 celebrities pressuring maitre d’s to seat them in restaurants before others.)
But the rankings sound like total bullshit. As Richmond points out, George Clooney is only the 3,486th most popular celeb and the 4,618th sexiest. Really? I put in the names of the three Departed stars. Leonardo DiCaprio is behind Clooney in popularity (ranking at #3940 — his popularity rating is 5.127 on a scale of 0 to 7) but ahead in sexiness (#3947). Matt Damon wipes the floor with DiCaprio in terms of popularity (#2500 with a 5.706 rating) but loses out in terms of sexiness (ranked as # 5312). And Jack Nicholson is behind them both with #3689 popularity ranking and a sexy rating of # 6670….whoa!
Among internet columnists, David Poland out-rates me in tems of popularity — he’s #7941 and 4.033 compared to my ranking of #8949 and 3.762 — but I’ve been judged to be much sexier — #4502 compared to Poland’s #6305. But we’re both sexier than Nicholson. (How exactly does this site equate sexiness with internet page views again? Just trying to understand this as best I can.)
Let’s see…Fox 411‘s Roger Friedman is the 8,249th most popular guy online and the 4322nd sexiest. (Beating out Poland and myself in the latter category.) The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil is the 9122nd most popular and the 7709th most sexy. Harry Knowles is more popular than Poland with a #6689 ranking but less sexy with a ranking of #6511. Hollywood Wiretap columnist Pete Hammond is the 9916th most popular and the 6200th most sexy. L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein has an #8787 popularity rating and a sexy ranking of #7719. And Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson has a #6098 popularity ranking and has been judged the 7010th most sexy. Eat my dust, Goldstein!
What I’d like to know is, who the hell are all those celebrities with popularity and sexiness rankings in the realms of 12,000, 15,000 and 20,000, given that most big-name celebrities seem to have numbers in the 3000 and 4000 range and internet columnists are more in the range of 4000 to 9000? You’d have to be a real scumbag with hair growing out of your nose to have, say, a popularity ranking of 14,978 and a sexy rating of 16,235. Think about this. You’d have to be a Serbian war criminal with hives, halitosis and a chronic farting problem to rank in the 20,000 range.
And just think — some psuedo-celebrity out there has been ranked in last place. Who could that be?

“Life’s hard…but it’s a lot harder when you’re stupid.” — a line presumably written by novelist George V. Higgins, but definitely spoken by a young illegal-sun salesman (Steven Keats) in The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

“Given the times we live in, Sofia Coppola‘s Marie-Antoinette (Columbia, 10.20) could well become a box-office hit,” wrote Sean O’Hagan in last Sunday’s Guardian. “While not quite as shallow as Liberation critic Agnes Poirier paints it (‘history is merely decor and Versailles a boutique hotel for the jet set, past and present’) nor as visionary as Lady Antonia Fraser insists, it is an oddly empty film.
“Having moved away from the cool contemporaneity of her previous mood piece, the lauded Lost in Translation , Coppola seems adrift in the ancien regime. The result is a historical drama for the Wallpaper generation, all sumptuous interiors, dresses to die for, and an oh-so-ironic ’80s glam-pop soundtrack. As Bow Wow Wow’s trash classic ‘ Want Candy’ blares out its blatant message of self-gratification over yet another baroque party scene, you wonder what happened to Coppola’s signature style, the hazy, impressionistic, understated languor of her two previous outings.”

I have a military underwear problem with Flags of Our Fathers (Dreamamount, 10.20). Nobody will see what I’m talking about for another ten days and it may seem like a chickenshit thing to bring up, but the final scene of Clint Eastwood‘s Iwo Jima film shows the small group of Marines who raised the U.S. flag atop Mt. Surabachi taking a swim in the Pacific Ocean, and they’re all wearing white underwear.

The problem is this: no G.I.’s wore white underwear during World War II — they were all issued olive drab briefs for camouflage purposes. I’m not trying to make a major deal out of this, but it’s definitely a significant error.
As soon as I saw the white briefs I suspected it wasn’t correct, but I wasn’t 100% sure. So I called my father, a former Marine lieutenant who fought at the battles of Iwo Jima and Guam, and he said yup, olive-drab underwear, the film has it wrong.
Then I found a military uniform and accessory site called What Price Glory that says, in discussing 1940s-era underwear, that “soldiers who fought in World War II were introduced to the concept of colored (olive drab) cotton boxer shorts with elastic waistbands.”
I then found another site about cotton apparel that says “during this era of WWII, American troops discovered that the freshly washed white underwear that they hung out to dry attracted enemy fire. A wartime ad for Jockey headlined: ‘Target: White Underwear’ and explained why the armed forces switched from white underwear to OD (Olive Drab), because the latter color blends in with its surroundings more effectively.”
The guys-swimming-in-the-ocean scene doesn’t work for two other reasons. Eastwood deciding to have them wear underwear (two guys jump into the water with their pants on) seems prudish. Was Clint looking to avoid an R rating from all the bare asses and long-shot genitalia? My dad says whenever soldiers took a swim after a battle they always skinny-dipped — nobody wore underwear. He also said that nobody went swimming off the island of Iwo Jima because the water was too cold, the location being in the northern Pacific (only about 650 miles south of Japan) and the time of year being February-March. So the whole scene doesn’t work for me.
Clint has to take the bullet on this one because he’s the boss, but other guilty party appears to be Marynn Scinto, whom the IMDB lists as the “wardrobe costumer” on Flags of Our Fathers.
It doesn’t seem fair, I realize. You work your ass off and get it historically right in dozens of different ways — uniforms, weapons, every last little thing– and then you screw up on the underwear and some guy like me comes along and gives you noise about it. But getting every last detail right is a big part of the challenge in making first-rate films.

IndieWIRE’s Anthony Kaufman is spotlighting the big contenders in the Best Foreign Language Oscar category: Pedro Almodovar‘s Volver (from Spain), Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (Mexico), Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck‘s The Lives of Others (Germany), Deepa Mehta’s Water (Canada) and Daniele Thompson‘s Avenue Montaigne (France).

HE can’t decide which of the three biggies — Volver, Pan’s Labyrinth, The LIves of Others — to stand up for. I love all three equally, but in different ways. The Pedro is one of the finest films ever made about what it takes to keep a family together…a film about women working hard and needing/loving/caring for each other…grounded, emotional, impassioned and yet disciplined at every turn. The von Donnersmarck is well crafted, political, sensuous, uplifting, a thriller…a great German stew. And Pan’s Labyrinth is del Toro’s most soulful, disciplined and deeply felt film to date — a masterwork by any standard.
The runners-up, say Kaufman, are Zhang Yimou‘s lThe Curse of the Golden Flower (sign unseen, HE is dimssing any Zhang Yimou film with the word “Curse” in the title), Emanuele Crialese‘s Golden Door, Paul Verhoeven‘s Black Book (a.k.a. Showgirl’s List), Susanne Bier‘s Danish drama After the Wedding (not up to par with her previous films) and Lee Sang-il‘s Hula Girls.