L.A. Times guy John Horn is reporting that George Clooney‘s The Monuments Men will not open on 12.18 “because the film’s visual effects could not be completed in time,” according to director-star Clooney. The World War II saga of a group of art commandos trying to save paintings and sculptures from being trashed or hidden by Nazis will be released Sony Pictures “early next year,” the story says.

“We just didn’t have enough time,” Clooney told Horn from London. “If any of the effects looked cheesy, the whole movie would look cheesy. We simply don’t have enough people to work enough hours to finish it.” Clooney tells Horn that “Oscar attention was never his goal for the film.”

The appearance of a trailer for James Toback and Alec Baldwin‘s Seduced and Abandoned (HBO, 10.28) gives me an excuse to re-run my hotel-room discussion with Toback at the Carlton hotel during last May’s Cannes Film Festival. Here’s the mp3. I called it “Greatest Gabber of the 21st Century.” The chat lasted 40-something minutes — candid, hilarious, insightful as usual.

Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave was made for “a price,” and yet it includes a brief process shot of Washington, D.C. in 1841 — the year that Solomon Northrup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) was kidnapped and sold into slavery. It isn’t much but at least it’s an attempt to convey what the cityscape looked like back then. A generic establishing shot. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think there’s any kind of similar shot of the nation’s capital in Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln. That always bothered me. I really wanted to see a nice, expensive CG panorama shot of Abraham Lincoln‘s Washington — muddy Pennyslvania Avenue, the Treasury building, the White House without the east or west wings, horses and carriages, men in top hats and women in hoop skirts, plumes of smoke from a thousand chimneys…the whole shebang. But Spielberg refused. I don’t even recall seeing a basic establishing shot of the White House and the grounds. Closeups of the north portico but no glimpses of the entire structure.

Violent, occasionally gruesome stuff happens in the novels of Cormac McCarthy, who wrote the screenplay for Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor (20th Century Fox, 10.25). He seems to have a particular passion for slicings, stranglings and the spurting of arterial blood. There’s a famous campfire scene in Blood Meridien in which a guy takes a big knife and slices off another guy’s head, just like that. Dark purple blood comes spurting out of the guy’s neck and goes hissing onto the fire. There’s that arterial splatter strangulation at the beginning of No Country For Old Men. And there’s all manner of grisly murder in The Counselor. There’a scene in the recently-published script in which Javier Bardem‘s Reiner, a drug dealer with Brian Grazer hair, talks about strangling guys with a mechanical “bolito” device [after the jump].

A crudely framed video of an early trailer for Darren Aronofsky‘s Noah appeared earlier today and then was taken down. Side issue: How does Russell Crowe‘s Noah, a simple man living in ancient times, give himself a nice clean buzzcut? There were knives in Noah’s time but no scissors or razors or electric shears. So how did he manage a skinhead cut?

For the most part Hans Zimmer‘s 12 years A Slave score (which hasn’t been commercially released yet) is gentle, lulling, unassuming. Zimmer has called it “translucent.” But there are also a couple of tracks that have a bassy, badass, electronic-tuba-from-hell sound. Obviously conveying something evil and malevolent — the sound of slavers. There’s one (track #4 on a Slave soundtrack that I received this morning) that could be used for a scene in which Godzilla goes stomping through Tokyo. If you ask me Zimmer deserves an Oscar nomination for Best Original Score for this alone

The contemporary sound of this “horror” track was explained by Zimmer in a recent Collider interview, to wit: “Brad Pitt said [this] in Toronto…it wasn’t my quote…that it took an Englishman to make a story about a story about one of the great tragedies of America,” Zimmer told Steve “Frosty” Weintraub. “”12 Years a Slave, which is truly a period piece…..I constantly kept thinking it’s addressing our current…it’s set in the present because it’s the conversations we’ve never had, it’s the conversation we still need to have. And if it does anything it should start a conversation, and I think that’s what McQueen does brilliantly.”

“It’s no Margin Call, but still worth your investment,” said a Toronto Globe and Mail review of Costa Gavras‘s Capital (Cohen Media, 10.25). “Clearly, Costa-Gavras has lost none of his kinetic pacing or his cerebral way with thrills. Unfortunately, the script later gets corrupted itself by a sexual melodrama that lacks both sense and sultriness. However, the picture regain[s] its balance to deliver a mainly entertaining lecture on the root of all evil.” What scares me is the trailer’s on-the-nose English narration.