It can be safely assumed (I hope) that David Fincher won’t ask Brad Pitt to pick up a guitar and sing in a possible Disney-produced remake of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea…please. Variety‘s Jeff Sneider is reporting that Disney is homing in on Fincher “as it decides whether to move forward with the project, which Se7en scribe Andrew Kevin Walker rewrote in November 2011.” Pic “has not yet received a greenlight,” but Fincher allegedly wants Pitt to play the brawny and rambunctious Ned Land, the Kirk Douglas role in the 1954 original.

Poor Sylvia Kristel has passed on, done in by esophageal and lung cancer. I spoke with her a little bit during the making of a minor, very dull 1988 Cannon film called The Arrogant, which I wrote the press notes for. She was 35 or 36 when it was filmed, and even then she was past her Emmanuelle aura by a decade or so. Emmanuelle was the Fifty Shades of Grey of the early to mid ’70s.

What does an international object of erotic fixation do when he/she gets older? Hang on, keep smiling, play it classy, stay in shape. I’m thinking of all these Rolling Stones song titles that apply to her life — “It’s Not Easy,” “I Am Waiting,” “She Was Hot,” etc. Condolences to friends, fans, family.

I haven’t seen Ben Lewin‘s The Sessions since Sundance ’12 or about nine months ago, so I’m catching it again this evening. It felt genuinely touching the first time, and I can’t imagine it not paying off in the same way. This is a spirited, carefully measured, honestly acted film about touching, needing, being open and the finding of fulfillment. I predicted last January that John Hawkes and Helen Hunt would attract some award-season heat, and that seems to be happening as we speak.

I also described The Sessions (called The Surrogate at the time) as an emotionally erotic variation on the themes in My Left Foot, The Sea Inside and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly with a little dash of Who’s Life Is It Anyway? thrown in.

“The only thing the film (i.e., Lewin) lacks is a strong visual imagination,” I wrote. “Any film about a paralyzed protagonist needs to somehow free itself from that immobility. It can’t just be a series of static interiors or the viewer will start to be hemmed in to some degree.” I didn’t add but I would say now that Lewin’s plain, unstudied medium-shot approach doesn’t diminish his film, exactly, but it doesn’t exactly enhance it either. Otherwise, The Sessions is a nice, liberal, enlightened package of feel-good filmmaking, honed and polished and tied with a red bow. Nothing wrong with that.

The Sessions is current running at 95% positive on Rotten Tomatoes.

I missed showings of Travis Fine‘s Any Day Now (Music Box Films, 12.14) at last spring’s Tribeca Film Festival (where it won the Heineken Award for Narrative Film) and the recent Hamptons Film Festival, but the word has been excellent all along. I don’t know why I never paid attention. This morning Marshall Fine declared that Alan Cumming‘s performance as “a cross-dressing crooner-cum-caregiver” (in the words of Variety‘s Boyd Von Hoeij) is a must-see and a breakout.

Here are raves from Variety‘s Von Hoeij, from Screen Daily and from two or three Rotten Tomatoes stragglers. I’m waiting for Marina Bailey to start showing it in Los Angeles.

Leo’s Calvin Candie sells itself, but my first glance at Samuel L. Jackson‘s Stephen was a timeflash. I forgot about Quentin Tarantino‘s film (Weinstein Co., 12.25) and went back to Woody Strode‘s old Pompey from the opening portion of John Ford‘s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, dressed in a Naval officer’s uniform as he gives testimony at the Caine Mutiny court martial.

An invitation to the AFIFest’s 11.1 opening-night gala premiere of Sacha Gervasi‘s certain-to-amuse Hitchcock arrived a half-hour ago. It offers an excuse to compare the poster art to the original 1960 Psycho one-sheet.

Could there be a tenuous connection between (a) Chuck Norris‘s four-month-old accusation that President Obama and Boy Scouts of America board member James Turley are conspiring to make the BSA more gay-friendly and (b) today’s release of the BSA’s “perversion files,” detailing sex abuse allegations against scout leaders over the last 20 years. It appears as if the BSA has been pedophile-friendly all along (second only to the Catholic church), and that Obama and Turley are latecomers, at best. That or Norris is an asshat.

I gather that 21 Jump Street is the prototype for Ivan Reitman‘s suddenly-greenlighted, actually-destined-to-be-made Ghostbusters 3…”a modern update with winks to the past,” a guy says. Possibly Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, the usual suspects. Paul Rudd subbing for Murray, SNL’s Jay Pharoah…who knows?

Remember when Bill Murray kibboshed an earlier proposed version that would have costarred Dan Aykroyd , explaining that “no one wants to pay money to see fat, old men chasing ghosts“? Except people would, I think, pay to see Murray do it again. He should at least agree to do a cameo.

The only problem with Ghostbusters 3 is that it appears to be one of those projects that’s solely about making money. You can’t make a good movie that way. It has to be “this is really good material,” “it’ll be a good film, and maybe a really good one” and “let’s do it and hope for the best.” It can’t be “this’ll make a shitload of money even if it’s shit,” “let’s make sure everybody gets his quote” and “who’s in line for first-dollar merchandising revenues”?

Do you want to really go for it and make the best Ghostbusters 3 possible? Get rid of Reitman. Which of course can’t and won’t happen. I only know that he peaked in the early to mid 80s, and that his last half-decent film was Dave (’93).

In response to a 12.16 announcement that the New York Film Critics Circle has decided to junk last year’s late November strategy and vote instead on Monday, December 3rd, I wrote that the all-but-worthless National Board of Review voting tallies will now be announced before the NYFCC, as they have in years past. The last two NBR announcements happened on 12.1.11 and 12.2.10.

And yet the National Board of Review winners will be announced on Wednesday, 12.5, according to a PMK*BNC release sent out this morning. So despite a recent decision by NYFCC chairman Josh Rothkopf to retreat from last year’s strategy, the NYFCC will still be first out of the gate.

Before last year the NBR was always the first awards group to be heard from — it was this way for decades. I asked PMK*BNC’s Lee Meltzer why the NBR will announce four or five days later than usual, and he said this is “to ensure that [they] have seen as many films as possible before voting.” Except the NBR gang will presumably have the same opportunities as the NYFCC membership to see the same films at the same times so Meltzer’s explanation is a head-scratcher.

Rothkopf said this morning that “we may still be first but that wasn’t our intention” in deciding to vote on Monday, 12.3. “Our main function is to be able to have enough time to see everything and fully deliberate,” he said. “We just looked at the dates, at all the important stuff coming out, the publicists told me that they could really use the last weekend of November…so it made sense to vote on Monday the 3rd. That was the optimal date.”

The Los Angeles Film Critics Association will vote on Sunday, 12.9.

In a Hollywood Reporter piece on Peter Jackson‘s The Hobbit (i.e., “The Hobbit: Inside Peter Jackson and Warner Bros.’ $1 Billion Gamble”), Kim Masters reports that Warner Bros. will release the 48 frame-per-second version of the film in 400 theatres on 12.14.

400 theatres? Yeah, okay. I guess that’s not so bad from a big- and middle-sized urban film fan perspective, and not too good for anyone who lives in Bumblefuck….but that’s always been the case, right?

Three Hobbit films will be released, and Masters quotes “a knowledgeable source” claiming that “the first two installments cost $315 million each, and that’s with Jackson deferring his fee. A studio source insists that number is wildly inflated and, with significant production rebates from New Zealand, the cost is closer to $200 million a movie.”

Masters also reports that original Hobbit director Guillermo del Toro may have left the project under some creative duress, possibly over concerns that his vision of the film was being (or was likely to be) compromised by Jackson’s.

“If there’s one message that Jackson and his team want to convey, it’s that del Toro left on his own — without a push from Jackson,” Masters writes. Jackson is quoted as saying that “eventually, he couldn’t wait around anymore [for del Toro to start shooting]…we got to the point that it was six months past when we should’ve originally started shooting.”

“Some close to del Toro suspect the story was a bit more complicated than that.

“‘Do I think Peter wanted to take over The Hobbit? No,’ says one insider. ‘But he was going to be involved one way or the other, and as an artist, Guillermo wanted to make his version of the movie. I think he wondered: ‘How much of an imprint can I put on this? Do I want to spend years of my life being caretaker of someone else’s franchise?'”

“In a statement to THR, del Toro says that ‘leaving The Hobbit after more than two years in New Zealand was the most difficult professional decision I’ve ever had to make. I put a great deal of love and effort into the co-writing and prepping of the Hobbit movies…with Peter, Fran and Philippa. However, I had a number of other professional and personal obligations that I had to fulfill. I left with the confidence that the Hobbit films were in good hands.'”

I understand sympathize with Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman using the success of Catfish, a major breakout at Sundance 2010, to direct Paranormal Activity 3 (which I actually paid to see) and then Paranormal Activity 4. But they’d better be careful. Beyond The Trailer interviewer Grace Randolph soft-pedals the wording of a possibly legitimate Wes Craven quote about how “the horror genre is easy to break into but hard to escape from.”

“In the intelligently ecstatic new adaptation of Anna Karenina, written by Tom Stoppard and directed by Joe Wright, all the world’s a stage — a 19th-century theater whose ornate confines are the setting for scenes taking place in Anna’s home town of St. Petersburg and in the social and political center of Moscow.

“Steeplechase horses gallop across the boards; a quiet dinner or a military banquet may be staged there. And when Anna (Keira Knightley) and Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) meet, the theatrical intensity of their first moments in each other’s arms makes those around them not fellow performers but mute spectators, awed and aghast.

“Wright’s strategy of setting most of the action on a stage [reps] a bold structure. In a way this is opera, but grand opera, with the emotions running at fever pitch and the actors as likely to dance (choreography by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui) as walk. Vronsky and Anna’s meeting at a formal ball expresses their love through dance, exactly as the classic routines of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers did in their ’30s musicals. As Vronsky and Anna whirl, the other dancers freeze. Everyone can detect the expert passion in their movements; the couple might have been spotted in the act of love.” — from Richard Corliss‘s 9.9 Time review.