Contrary to what Hitfix‘s Greg Ellwood reported a day or two ago, there will be a press screening of Clint Eastwood‘s Hereafter during the Toronto Film Festival. It’ll happen a day before Sunday evening’s public screening at the Elgin (9.12, 9 pm) — on Saturday, 3 pm at the Scotiabank plex.

Update: The press screening schedule for the New York Film Festival was sent out this afternoon, and Hereafter — part of the 2010 slate — wasn’t on it.

Another no-laugh-funny “comedy”, although I grin every time I think back on it. Director Frank Perry really knew how to convey that lackadaisical ’70s thing — casually hip and born to swagger. Every character was a “character” in this film. Eccentric, imaginative, unsettled, peculiar. (Megan Fox would fit right in if somebody were to try an exact remake.) Those muttering scenes between Harry Dean Stanton (Curt) and Richard Bright (Burt) were classic. I would have films like this again.

Rancho Deluxe was shot in and around Livingston, Montana, which I visited in the late ’90s. Livingston (the home of novelist/Rancho Deluxe screenwriter Thomas McGuane) was a very cool place to live back then, and I’m thinking that Rancho Deluxe may qualify as one of those films that may have been a bit more fun to make than it was to watch (although it’s certainly an enjoyable sit).

McGuane’s career in the early to mid ’70s has been described as the period in which he became known as “Captain Berserko” in which he authored screenplays for Rancho Deluxe, The Missouri Breaks (’76), starring Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando; and McGuane’s foray into directing with the film version of 92 in the Shade ’75).

From his Wiki bio: “The excesses of those years are reflected – though hardly in full – by McGuane’s tumultuous affair with actress Elizabeth Ashley (captured in voyeuristic detail in her memoir, Actress), his divorce from his first wife Becky Crockett, (who went on to marry Peter Fonda) his marriage to actress Margot Kidder, the birth of their daughter, Maggie (herself an author), and by his second divorce, all in the span of less than a year.”

From Richard Eder‘s 11.24.75 N.Y. Times review: “Rancho DeLuxe is handsome, witty, apt and languid. It is so cool it is barely alive. First-rate ingredients and a finesse in assembling them do not quite make either a movie or a cake. At some point it is necessary to light the oven.”

“Oh, give me a home, with a low interest loan. A cowgirl and two pickup trucks. A color TV, all the beer should be free. And that, man, is Rancho Deluxe.”

Diablo Cody‘s 8.29 Red Band Trailer interview is with Megan Fox. It gets pretty good when they talk about how shallow and predatory many journalists have become. (A brief transcript follows the video.) I love Cody’s observation that Fox has a skewed sensibility and that press people don’t know how to handle beauty mixed with perversity. Fox’s handicap, I feel, is her thin and reedy voice. It doesn’t suggest rivers of soul or passion. Beep-beep-beepity-beep-beep-beepity-beep.

Cody: “Do you feel like you’ve been mistreated, misquoted? Do you feel like you’ve had a crappy experience in the limelight, or do you feel positive about it overall?”

Fox: “I would never call it crappy experience. I think…those are such different things. Not so much ‘misquoted’ as the things I’ve said being taken completely out of context or sensationalized into something scandalous when they weren’t. They’re waiting for anything they can take as a sound byte, to sell. And it doesn’t matter what your intention behind your words are never communicated by ‘journalists,’ any more. So it’s hard to be sarcastic. Do you find this happens to, you?

Cody: “I have this theory that it must have been incredibly fun to be a celebrity in, like, the ’70s. Because there wasn’t the sound byte culture. There wasn’t the tabloid culture. You would see these interviews that were like these 17-page interviews in Rolling Stone in which you really got to know a person, and now it comes down to, like, oh, we have to keep 8 million websites rolling so what does one person say today that we can get a clip [from]? It makes it impossible to speak like an individual.

Fox: “I don’t even want to express myself during interviews especialy during print interviews, because I know that everyone is constantly searching for an angle and they’re reaching for those four words that they can piece together for some sort of explosive sound byte.”

“We wanted to do a movie in the vein of the ’70s foreign films that influenced so many great filmmakers today,” George Clooney recently told L.A. Times reporter John Horn for a piece that ran yesterday. “We felt if we kept the budget low, that the outside influences (like a studio) would be minimal and we were lucky that Focus was on board with the concept from the beginning.”

“On board”? As in believing in Clooney and director Anton Corbijn‘s vision, embracing it, standing behind it, and giving the marketing effort the old college try? Focus Features marketers have run ads and TV spots and decided to open it in 200 theatres, but they’ve all but abandoned any attempt to sell it with interviews. Clooney has done almost nothing, and Corbijn hasn’t even come to the States for the opening.

The American “is a cinematic anomaly,” Horn writes. “A U.S. production that in look, pacing and casting is more European than Clooney’s own Italian villa.

“‘I’m sure a lot of people will think it’s on the slow side of things,’ says Corbijn, whose previous film, 2007’s Control, was a critically acclaimed (but little seen) fictionalized biography of Ian Curtis, the lead singer of the British post-punk band Joy Division who committed suicide in 1980. ‘But I think there is too much explaining in films sometimes. Yes, there’s not a lot of back story on George’s character. But it’s enough for me to follow the metamorphosis that he is trying to achieve.”

“The American is very much a tale of a man alone, and to highlight that vision the filmmakers not only switched its protagonist’s nationality (he’s English in the novel) but also surrounded Clooney with a cast and crew almost exclusively European. At a very late stage, Corbijn even recast the part of Jack’s boss, replacing U.S. actor Bruce Altman with the Belgian performer Johan Leysen.

“Rather than pack pages of expositional dialogue into the script (credited to Rowan Joffe, following drafts by numerous other writers over years of revisions), Corbijn, who is best known as a photographer, relied on long, lingering shots of Jack and the Italian countryside. ‘We were trying to make,’ the director says, ‘a film that had a lot of beauty in it.”

“Corbijn also ‘looked at the film like a western, a morality tale of good versus evil,” he says. ‘Someone has done something bad and wants to escape it, but the past catches up to him.”

“‘Anton is an artist,’ says Clooney producing partner Grant Heslov. ‘And he’s never going to tell a movie in a straightforward way. He’s willing to sit on a shot for a while and not cut away. There are going to be people who are going to be absolutely frustrated by it.'”

Even if Anton Corbijn’s The American was a straight-ahead popcorn thriller, Ethan Maniquis and Robert Rodriguez‘s Machete would kick its box-office ass regardless. I don’t know what The American will be specifically, but it seems to be a truffles and foie gras and elite bullets type of film whereas Machete is strictly a Taco Bell meal with boobs, blood sauce, bikinis and severed limbs, and a side order of pro-Mexican immigrant, anti-racist-cracker politics to keep it spicy.

It’s not a slur to say that Machete is aimed at a typical twelve-year-old mentality. For me, the political satire and anti-yahoo stance makes it Rodriguez’s most agreeable film since El Mariachi (’94). But it’s a very primitive and extremely bloody thing, and pretty much an out-and-out gore comedy (although what Rodriguez film hasn’t had some comedic winking going on?), and there are some moderately funny bits here and there. Given a choice, dollars to donuts an American movie audience will always take a chance on primitive and coarse before rarified and austere.

Honestly? If given an either-or choice even I would probably pay to see Machete first. The reason, I’d be ashamed to admit (if I hadn’t already seen Machete), has to do with the Lindsay Lohan revealings.

Kurt Schlichter‘s American screenplay review suggests it may be Machete‘s match in terms of female nudity, although that has yet to be determined.

I’m saying this without having seen any tracking for this weekend (although I’ve heard second-hand that Machete is tracking fairly well among younger males. The two extra days of commercial playing time for The American won’t make that much of a difference, I’m guessing.

Four days before I posted that Dutch film critic’s review of Anton Corbijn‘s The American, Big Hollywood‘s Kurt Schlichter reviewed Rowan Joffe‘s screenplay, and I have to say it’s moderately amusing. Even though Schlichter is one of “them,” he can be funny. Except he needs to spell arrivederci correctly next time.

“We never find out much about [George Clooney‘s] back-story, which is okay because we really don’t care,” he says toward the end. “His tattoo reveals that he’s ex-Special Forces, because, as we know, all Green Berets leave the Army to join that giant high-priced international hit man industry we somehow never hear about in real-life. If in reality half as many people were employed as high-priced professional assassins as Hollywood movies depict, the unemployment rate would only be 9% and the Obama administration would point to it as evidence the stimulus is working.

“The script is technically proficient and evocative, meaning that I could clearly and fully visualize all of the tired, hackneyed cliches. On the plus side, other than the ‘you Americans don’t know how to live life’ crap, it’s not political. It’ll be equally dull for adherents of every political stripe.

“And there’s another upside – there’s a hot Italian girl character in it and in pretty much every scene she’s taking off her clothes. I don’t mean just once or twice — I mean this gal makes Lindsay Lohan look like a particularly repressed Amish chick during Sunday school. So Clooney gets to pick up a big paycheck for hanging out in the Italian countryside surrounded by hot naked girls (yeah, there’s more than one), so I can see what was in The American for him. Unfortunately, I still can’t see what’s supposed to be in it for the rest of us.

One plus for the film, Schlicter says, will be the talented Corbijn, last seen directing the very cool Joy Division movie Control. And yet “terrifyingly, a true story about a Goth band and its lead singer’s eventual suicide has more laughs than this script does, which is to say at least one.”

It’s now 12:45 pm. The American will screen in Manhattan a little more than six hours from now.

Update: Who was I to talk about Schichter misspelling arrivederci when I couldn’t spell his last name correctly? Apologies.

The first thing I noticed about the new Movie City News redesign, which looks relatively decent (or at least better than before, being more balanced), is a preponderance of robin’s egg blue. The typeface, the MCN Tweety-bird, the MCN Twitter box, the bars…light blue all around. Plus some light violet. It reminds me of the colors and the vibe in a little boy’s bedroom.

The idea is to convey a certain spirituality or placidity or something. It’s all right or isn’t a “problem,” per se, but it doesn’t feel like a sale. It needs to man up on some level. A little red or orange, maybe.

The second thing I noticed is that Hollywood Elsewhere’s status has been upgraded. After being linked and referred to by MCN for several years as a “gossip,” I’m now included on the “Mainstream Blogger” list (along with Anne Thompson, Deadline, LA Observed, Patrick Goldstein, Roger Ebert’s Journal, The Real Shawn Levy, etc.). Thank you, David. I’ve noticed, by the way, that Deadline and HitFix are listed on the Mainstream Blogger and Gossip rosters. Split personalities?

The other Gossips are /Film, Ain’t It Cool News, Defamer, Huffington Post (really?), Jezebel, Mark Malkin, Movieline, NY Daily News, People Magazine, Star, The Superficial, The Wrap (really?) and Yahoo! Movies.

The third thing I noticed is that the new design disappeared about 11 am Eastern, and that the old design was back in action. Obviously a temporary gears-and-levers adjustment.

Incidentally: I understand about capturing a page image (control – shift – 4) and that if I add control to this combo the image is supposed to appear on Clipboard. Except it doesn’t, and the usual paste function (control V) doesn’t paste it either. So the hell with it.