A guy who hears things and is usually on (or close to) the money says that Mike Myers‘ conduct on The Love Guru “has once again raised the bar for nutty behavior and he’s driven everyone at Paramount over the edge. Crazy, crazy, crazy.” In short, the usual-usual. Eccentricity and exactitude sometimes go with the territory. If you want to deal only with moderate people and moderate behavior, work for the insurance industry. No surprise if what I’m hearing is even half true. I did some Entertainment Weekly reporting about Myers back in the Wayne’s World (and Wayne’s World sequel) heyday, and I heard plenty so don’t tell me.

Slate‘s Kim Masters has taken a poke at the Valkyrie postponement, reporting the United Artists position that the bump to the Presidents’ Day weekend “represented an opportunity to cash in, [although] many see the move as a very bad sign, and, indeed, the buzz on the film is not good.
“What’s not in dispute is that filming remains unfinished, which is remarkable for a movie that started shooting in September 2007. One piece not yet shot is a battle sequence that begins the movie. An insider says director Bryan Singer will film a scaled-back version of what was originally conceived as a Saving Private Ryan-type opening.
“According to this source, the sequence was abandoned at one time as a cost-saving measure — and this movie is racking up the bucks — but when it became clear that the film was too talky, the battle was reinstated.”

Nobody cares about Carol Reed‘s Outcast of the Islands, a 1952 adaptation of Joseph Conrad‘s novel with Trevor Howard in the lead role of Willem, a man who surrenders his dignity and civility for the love of a native woman. It’s a forgotten film and nobody cares at all. Except, I’m thinking, possibly those obsessive weirdos at the Criterion Collection. Those guys are just whacked enough to put out a remastered version of this British-produced film on DVD.

I saw it on the tube eons ago, and I’ve never forgotten a scene in which Robert Morley has been tied up inside a hammock with the hammock having been hung by a rope from a tall tree, and Morley, poor fellow, is shown swinging back and forth while being taunted by Howard and some local natives with sticks and spears.
The story mostly takes place in Malaysia. I don’t remember the particulars. I’ve never read the Conrad book, but I’ve been told it’s a bit grim. Ralph Richardson and Wendy Hiller costar in the film. The striking black-and-white cinematography is by Ted Scaife and John Wilcox.

The fact that you can’t rent or buy Larry Cohen‘s The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover on DVD, and that it hasn’t been shown in a Los Angeles theatre since ’83 or thereabouts makes the three-day booking at the New Beverly Cinema (4.13 to 4.15 at 9:25 pm) something of an event.

Mark Felt as “Deep Throat” over 25 years before the press broke the story. (Or so the press release claims.) Cohen will discuss this and other Hoover matters at a q & a following each screening.
Broderick Crawford plays Hoover, but isn’t shown engaging in curious intimacies with FBI agent Dan Dailey‘s Clyde Tolson. (Revelations about Hoover’s personal life hadn’t surfaced when the film was made.) The film costars Jose Ferrer, Dan Dailey, Michael Parks, Celeste Holm, Lloyd Nolan and Rip Torn. It features a classic musical score by Miklos Rozsa.
The film was shot at FBI headquarters, at the FBI Training Camp at Quantico and at Hoover’s own home — but without Bureau censorship.
The New Beverly Cinema (323.938.4038) is located at 7165 Beverly Blvd., LA 90036.

Yet another take on the slow eclipse of elite film criticism has been filed by L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein (“The Death of the Critic”).

The piece is partly based on his having interviewed students from an entertainment reporting class at the USC School of Journalism, whom Goldstein and L.A. Times reporter John Horn visited last week at the invitation of instructor Charles Fleming.
“The internet has played a big role in [this process],” Goldstein writes. “It has promoted a democratization of opinion in which solo bloggers — most famously Matt Drudge — can outstrip mammoth news organizations. Whenever I spend time with young students, I see an even more intriguing concept at work. Although they are heavily influenced by peer group reaction to films or music, they do listen to critics, but largely as a group, not as individual brands.”
Key quote: “The age of the singular critical voice is ending — people prefer the wisdom of a community.”
Goldstein reports that “nearly [all the students] said that when they want to read up on a film, they often go to metacritic.com or rottentomatoes.com, websites that offer a healthy sample of critical consensus. As student Victor Farfan put it: “They put all the reviews in one easy, convenient, conglomerated source that gives you a breadth of opinions from trusted sources and some less familiar ones.”
“Other students acknowledge that they put little stock in critical opinion, lumping it in with the cascade of hype that accompanies today’s entertainment. ‘We tend to be wary of anything that seems over-hyped, whether it’s by critics or over-advertising,’ said Courtney Lear. ‘Personally, I trust certain actors, artists or directors from previous experiences. The Arcade Fire is playing in Hollywood? Their last album rocked my socks off. When do tickets go on sale? They’ve already gained my trust.’
“For a generation that lives on the web, even the most eloquent critics are distant thunder, rarely promoted well on newspaper websites and often reluctant to use blogs as a platform to spread their gospel. Even among savvy journalism students, it’s hard to find anyone who knows any critics by name.”

As I understand it, the MGM/UA rationale for bumping Bryan Singer‘s Valkyrie from October 3rd to February 13th (i.e., President’s Day weekend) is simple — they believe it will make more money on that date than it will in early October.

Conventional wisdom says that a twice-bumped movie that ends up opening in February of the following year has a problem. On the other hand we’re all on a moving train, and it’s necessary each and every day to hit refresh and ask, “Okay, what’s changed? What’s evolving? What is the reality of the situation right now?” Here are some thoughts and comments I’ve been processing since posting a brief item about this matter yesterday afternoon:
(1) United Artists publicity/marketing chief Dennis Rice says the reason for the switch was “real simple. The last three years of the first weekend in October produced roughly $85 million for top twelve pictures. For the last three years for President’s weekend, the top twelve have produced $150 million. We’re a small start-up company and we’re looking at the bottom line, and with the February opening we’re looking at a bigger opening, a holiday weekend and a longer playing time.”
(2) I recognize that the President’s Day weekend has delivered bonanza box-office for films like Jumper, The Spiderwick Chronicles, Ghost Rider, Bridge to Terabithia, The Pink Panther, Hitch, Constantine and so on. But all these movies were crap-level “audience” movies, and Valkyrie is a big-budget, class-A World War II thriller with a superstar lead (Tom Cruise), a blue-chip supporting cast (Kenneth Branagh, Terrence Stamp, Bill Nighy), a top-drawer director (Bryan Singer), an Oscar-winning screenwriter (Chris McQuarrie), etc.
(3) So yes, the money-making opportunity is obviously there, but it’s nonetheless unusual for an ostensibly classy, first-rate film of this sort to be bumped out of two release dates in a given year and then shifted over to February. How many films that have been twice bumped have turned into formidable critical and commercial hits?

(4) When I read an early version of McQuarrie’s Valkyrie script, it didn’t seem like an Oscar contender — I was thinking “smart thriller and leave well enough alone.” It could score in the acting categories, however, and certain films — Silence of the Lambs, Gladiator, Crash – have opened outside of the Oscar season fall-holiday weekend and gone on to get recognized. “If recognition comes, so be it,” says Rice.
(5) The February 23rd date was deemed especially attractive after Joe Johnston‘s The Wolf Man dropped out of that slot — fine. But what was Valkyrie facing on October 3rd? The Express, a football movie directed by Gary Fleder, plus Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Nights in Rodanthe and Possession. Obviously not much competition. The big competition the following week (Oct. 10th) would have been Ridley Scott‘s Body of Lies with Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe.
(6) “Actually, I heard the push-back of Valkyrie isn’t necessarily just to [postpone] the film,” a director-writer wrote this morning. “The motive is to give Cruise a chance to court other studios and get a commercial film on the boards, such as The Hardy Men with Ben Stiller or even another Mission: Impossible, before the Singer flick opens and possibly colors perceptions [on this or that level].”
(7) There’s a belief among this and that producer that October is “the new Dead Zone,” as one industry-watcher explained this morning. This is based on the disappointing or underwhelming box-office that several prestige-level dramas and dramadies encountered last October — among them Rendition, Reservation Road, Gone Baby Gone, Sleuth, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Things We Lost in the Fire, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Michael Clayton, Lars and the Real Girl, Dan in Real Life, Control, etc.
(8) “I heard that Singer was trying to shape [Valkyrie] into something like [Alfred Hitchcock‘s] Rope…a kind of intense suspenseful parlor drama,” the director-writer said this morning. “But it was apparently one of those things that was one thing on the page, something that read well, but it became something else when the actors starting saying the lines on the set and people started looking at it as something to watch and sink into. I’ve been told it plays like an HBO movie.” Is that a put-down? Not in my book.
(9) A small group has seen a cut of Valkyrie. A journalist friend says he knows two people who’ve seen it and have said that it’s ‘really good‘ and have said that UA pushed it back because they still have to shoot the big desert sequence.” (I answered that the movie may be fine, but this is early April — almost six months before the 10.3 opening, which is plenty of time to shoot a desert sequence and pop it into the front section.) Another guy I know was told a while back by a person not with MGM or UA that he might be invited to a screening of it, but then it didn’t happen. The vibe he got from this person was a kind of a “hmmm, what do we have here?”