I love the brassy-gutsy David Shire music that accompanies the opening credits of The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974) — here’s the clip. And now Entertainment Weekly says there’s a Tony Scott remake coming with Denzel Washington as Walter Matthau…”gesundheit.” Do you think Scott will use that bit with the Japanese businessmen being given a tour of New York’s MTA central control and have Denzel, presuming (as Matthau presumed) they don’t speak English, refer to them as “monkeys”?

As I wrote yesterday, the two best tunes in Wes Anderson‘s The Darjeeling Limited (Fox Searchlight, 9.29) and arguably the most flat-out enjoyable aspects of the film itself are Peter Sarstedt‘s “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)” and Joe Dassin‘s “Les Champs-Elysees.” The Dassin song is a sentimental French cornball thing, but the Darjeeling usage has made it cool. Here‘s the least offensive YouTube video I could find.

Asked if he would defend Adolf Hitler in a theoretical court of law, Jacques Verges — the French ally and defender of numerous leftie extremists and terrorists over the last four decades — says, “I would even defend Bush. As long as he pleads guilty.” A trailer for Barbet Schroeder‘s Terror’s Advocate (Magnolia, 10.12) is up exclusively on Coming Soon. The doc is a primer on the history of world terrorism from the ’60s until today, as told through the experience of Verges.

A reiteration for ESPN fans: To be a hard-core sports buff you need to be inherently conservative on some deep-down level. By this I mean naturally deferential to “order.” Sport happens in a definable, quantifiable world of rules and referees and umpires and end zones and teams guided by coaches and managers. But there’s an unruly world of lonely individualism out there (and “in” there), and it’s a lot wilder and weirder and scarier than anything encountered on a soccer, football or baseball field. Just ask Albert Einstein.

Sport-watching and following (betting, handicapping) is a place that fans tend to live inside of. It’s a kind of haven or cathedral…a floating monastery. My experience is that sport fans are obviously literate but aren’t…how to say it?…burningly passionate about communing with worlds that exist outside their safety zone. Walk into any sports bar in the country and you can feel that sports-fan vibe — friendly and alert, amiable and ordered, but less learned, studied and complex than the one you get when you walk into the Harvard Club on West 44th.

Everybody laughed at that line in Repo Man about “the more you drive the less intelligent you are” but similar analogies tend to be frowned upon.

It’s been nearly three months since I saw Peter Berg‘s The Kingdom (Universal, 9.28), and some of the details have faded. But I remember the fundamentals. It’s basically C.S.I Riyadh with a slowish first two acts and then a wowser third-act shootout — a team of FBI guys and a few Saudi cops blowing away several terrorists (a couple of dozen, at least) who were behind the bombing of an American compound and the deaths of several Americans early on. Crazy-ass towelheads…get ’em!

It’s good material in a keep-it-simple, shoot-the-bad-guys way. Which is what audiences want, right? Millions have made a point of avoiding dramas that have taken earnest, realistic approaches to the Middle Eastern conflict (A Mighty Heart, In The Valley of Elah), and are likely to continue doing so. Leave us alone! Not entertaining! Too gloomy!

Well, they can rest easy this time. The Kingdom is mindful of present-day political currents as well as the history of the region, but the story is relatively straightfor- ward, uncomplicated and non-lamenting. No guilt trips, no left-wing directors or screenwriters telling auds what a tragedy the Iraq War has been for everyone… none of that messy stuff.

The problem is that most of The Kingdom is about how bogged down everything gets when this FBI team, based in Washington, D.C. and led by Jamie Foxx with backup from Chris Cooper, Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman, tries to go Riyahd in the first place to investigate the blast.

Roadblock this, impediment that…it just goes on and on. It’s a hassle getting diplomatic permission to fly over there. And then it’s a political Gordian knot trying to circumvent the Saudi Arabian authorities, led by Col. Faris Al Ghazi (Ashraf Barhom), who initially keep the team from gathering fresh, first-hand evidence.

In short, you have to slog through the first and second acts to get to the rousing third. The finale is worth it, and the depiction of the bombing at the very beginning is well -handled. You just have to grapple with the slow stuff for 60 or 70 minutes. The film lasts 110 minutes, the opening credits and the explosive opener eat up 10 or 15 minutes and the big finale (hot and heavy shootout on a highway, big shoot- out in an apartment complex) goes on for maybe 15 or 20 minutes…maybe a bit longer.

I don’t want to put The Kingdom down too strongly. Berg’s Friday Night Lights was a better film, but you can’t say the newbie isn’t a decent time-passer. And if you can get into the adrenalized excitement of blowing away wild-eyed, wack-job terrorists in the same way it’s fun to shoot at empty beer cans in your back yard with a pellet gun, so much the better.

I don’t know why Garner is on the team in the first place. Aren’t Middle Easterners basically patriarchal and sexist? Why would an FBI team want to complicate matters by bringing in a woman on top of everything else? She spends an awful lot of energy, in any case, showing womanly emotion whenever anyone gets hurt or any time things get hairy. Who needs a partner on the team whose eyes are always getting moist? Whatever happened to the spirit of Sigourney Weaver in Aliens? Suck it in, get hard, kill the enemy…end of story.

And I don’t know why Jeremy Piven plays the American ambassador to Riyadh — he’s basically giving us a diplomatic Ari Gold with gray hair.

Foxx delivers an okay phone-in hard-guy performance. Cooper does his usual crusty contentious moves. Barhom handles himself well. Let’s just not get carried away here. The Kingdom‘s all right, but you need to try and keep things in proportion when you’re putting your thoughts to print.

In explaining his $70 million lawsuit against CBS, Dan Rather recently claimed on Larry King Live that news reporting is being routinely diluted, brainwashed and diminished by corporations and big government “Somebody, sometime has got to take a stand and say democracy cannot survive, much less thrive with the level of big corporate and big government interference and intimidation in news,” he told King last Thursday.

In other words, the de-corporatized and disenfranchised Rather repeated almost precisely what was said four years ago in Robert Kane Pappas‘ Orwell Rolls In His Grave.

Boiled down, the doc (which I reviewed at the end of Sundance/Slamdance ’03 when I was working at Movie Poop Shoot) is about the effects of the news media companies all being owned by six or seven giant corporations, and the increasing uniformity and lack of diversity that’s resulted in their coverage of major stories and issues.

Pappas noted that the mainstream media system is basically a subsidiary of corporate America, and asked if big-media companies have become an anti-Democratic force in this country.

The doc went on to present the case that the news media companies aren’t as interested in exposing facts or keeping an eye on political corruption as much as perpetuating their own power as the shapers of a kind of dozing, status-quo, no-rough-edges view of the way things work, while scrupulously avoiding hard truths about same.

Rather told Bill Maher the following last March: “This nexus between the press and the people they’re supposed to cover has become far too close, far too chummy. And, frankly, I think there’ll be some correction as a result of the Libby trial, or at least a little more often, saying, ‘You know, I need to have access, but there’s a limit to the price I will pay for that access.’

And: “You cannot claim to be a well-informed citizen and only look at the internet. But I don’t think you can be a well-informed citizen anymore and not look at the internet.”

In today’s N.Y. Times, Terrence Rafferty reminds that Francois Truffaut‘s The 400 Blows (a new print of which will show at N.Y.’s Film Forum on Wednesday) is “a lyrical and surprisingly tough-minded little picture about a 12-year-old troublemaker named Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leaud), as seen by a sympathetic and slightly more seasoned troublemaker named Francois Truffaut.

Snapped four years ago in the Cimetiere de Montmartre

The originality of this 1959 film “lies in its willingness to trot along to the quotidian rhythms of a boy’s life,” Rafferty explains. “Antoine’s childhood (which bears some similarity to Truffaut’s own) is crummy, but in unexceptional ways. Right from the start of his career Truffaut had the sly gift of holding our attention while appearing to be doing almost nothing, just moving at his own casual pace away from the traditions that dogged him and toward something that might have looked to him as huge and vague and daunting as the ocean.”

A deluge of photos appeared two or three days ago of Sarah Jessica Parker and Chris Noth shooting scenes in Manhattan for New Line’s Sex and the City movie, but I found this one (taken by Anna Zozulinky and supplied by Israeli columnist/ blogger Yair Raveh) especially intriguing because it shows you all the heavy-duty location-shoot regalia — trucks, canvas coverings, metal lighting stands, light reflectors and filters and whatnot.

Sarah Jessica Parker, Chris Noth (i.e., “Mr. Big”), shooting three days ago on upper Fifth Avenue — Thursday, 9.20.07

I’m hardly a production veteran but Parker and Noth look a bit over-flanked. This is how location-shoot hardware looked in the ’80s and ’90s, but does today’s hand- held, ultra-light-sensitive, high-def Red One visual aesthetic really need all this stuff?

What this shot “says” is that Sex and the City‘s dp John Thomas (who shot Whit Stillman‘s Metropolitan way back when but has since worked mostly for television, including 36 episodes of the Sex and the City series) is key-lighting this film within an inch of its life, no doubt having been told to make the cast members (most of whom are 40ish and 50ish) look as young and squeezey as possible, which in itself tells you this the film is probably going to be on the glossy and fastidious side.

Not that anyone expects Sex and the City to be William Friedkin‘s The French Connection or even a mid ’70s Antonioni film, but there’s always hope that a feature-film version of a TV series will kick things up to a higher (grittier, less poised, more New York authentic) level. This photo tells me that ain’t happenin’.

The people giving Into the Wild those terrific per-screen averages in four theatres (which looked like $50,000 per situation yesterday, and now looks more like $52,000 and change) are, of course, the big-city fans of Jon Krakauer‘s book who’ve been reading the rave opening-day reviews of this Sean Penn-directed film and champing at the bit. In other words, it’s been patronized right out of the gate by a bright, thoughtful, literate crowd. It’s a foregone conclusion that the Good Luck, Chuck crowd won’t be as ardent, but the big test is whether or not Into The Wild will attract Midwestern jocks, bright but lazy dilletantes, fence-sitters, under-achievers, etc.