The Hollywood Reporter‘s Borys Kit is reporting that Harrison Ford has attached himself to Black Hats, a 1920s-era action film in which he would play an aging Wyatt Earp pooling forces with Bat Masterson against a young Al Capone and his New York henchmen.

(l.) Harrison Ford; (r.) Wyatt Earp near the end of his life in the 1920s.

Pic would be an adaptation of a Max Allan Collins novel with a screenplay by Kurt Johnstad (cowriter of 300 and 300: The Battle of Artemisia).

Kit’s synopsis, condensed: “An older Earp, spending his last years as a private detective and movie consultant in Los Angeles, learns that his friend and compatriot Doc Holliday had a son, now living in Prohibition-era New York City. While Holliday is long dead, the son has gotten himself in trouble with a rising mobster, Al Capone. Earp teams up with Bat Masterson, one of his former deputies and now noted sportswriter for the New York Morning Telegraph, to take on the gang in what becomes a tale of six-shooters versus tommy guns.”

Perfect! This could be great for Ford. It could be his last really iconic stand-up role. You can feel the potential in the premise.

The problem is Johnstad. You need a serious older-guy, soul-man writer — someone on Steve Zallian‘s or Tony Gilroy‘s or Robert Towne‘s level — to give this film the right kind of old-school polish and gravity. In my eyes Johnstad is an ex-electrician android screenwriter — a by-the-numbers guy. He wrote Act of Valor, the rah-rah Navy Seals rightwing movie. Anyone who can serve Zack Snyder is suspect, in my my book.

Boxoffice.com‘s Phil Contrino is projecting that Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Drive (FilmDistrict, 9.16) will open with $13 million and top out domestically at $42 million. Or, in other words, final earnings may be about about half of the $86 million that Fast Five took in its first weekend. They’re both fast-car movies, and that’s where they separate.

Drive will open in far fewer theatres, yes, and Fast Five is the latest version of a longstanding franchise brand that everyone likes or cheaply enjoys, etc. Of course, Fast Five isn’t one-third the film that Drive is. Fast Five is synthetic, revved-up cheez-whiz and Drive is a genuine, perfectly grilled Porterhouse steak with vegetables and sauteed potatoes and a nice glass of wine. And 80% American filmgoers prefer the cheez-whiz. Naturally.

A couple of hours ago a friend described Drive as “kind of an art film.” I choked when I heard this. “But Drive is more or less in the realm of Bullitt,” I said. “It’s different in this and that way but it could have been made by Peter Yates in the late ’60s or ’70s, or by Michael Mann in the early to mid ’80s. That makes it an art film?

“Would Bullitt be considered an ‘art film’ if it had never come out in ’67 and was released today? In 1967 Bullitt was regarded as a total popcorn cop thriller. But by today’s standards it’s seen as a bit somber and austere, my friend was saying. Not video-gamey enough. Terrific. What a degraded movie culture we’re living in today.”

Director Phillip Noyce (Salt, Rabbit-Proof Fence) saw Drive when it played at the LA Film Festival, and has this to say: “Drive‘s artful quirky touches and non-conveyor-belt sensibility certainly set it apart from most studio movies, but it’s a rousing entertainment that simply defies categorizing.”

To go by a description provided by TheWrap‘s Tim Molloy, It would appear that yesterday’s unfortunate ComicCon altercation between Rhys Ifans (Amazing Spider-Man, Greenberg) and security people was Ifans’ fault all the way. He reportedly acted boorishly and belligerently, and that’s no way to be in mixed company.

That said, some security people walk around with a stick-up-their-ass attitude (which I’ve personally witnessed time and again) and some are just too stupid to realize that you don’t fuck with movie actors or people in their entourage. Especially if they’ve had a few.

“It’s not worth it, Mr. Gittes,” Chinatown‘s Noah Cross once said. “It’s reaaaally not worth it.”

Did I not just explain how gray cross-training shoes “look like a form of leprosy” and that “there’s just something about this shoe color that grates on the soul and immediately lowers the value of the stock of the person wearing them”? I posted this only six days ago.

Taken during yesterday’s Tintin promotional festivity at ComicCon.

Los Angelenos interested in catching Lars von Trier‘s Melancholia before its 11.11.11 domestic release date should scoot out to Laemmle’s Fallbrook 7 between today and next Thursday, 7.28. The gloomy apocalyptic drama began quietly playing yesterday on a one-afternoon-screening-per-day basis, and will remain there for six more days.

opened in various Nordic countries last May, and Oscar’s Foreign-Language Wiki page says that “unlike other Academy Awards, the Foreign Language Film Award does not require films to be released in the United States in order to be eligible for competition.”

The rules also say that (a) “Films competing in the Foreign Language Film category must have been first released in the country submitting them during the eligibility period defined by the rules of the Academy, and must have been exhibited for at least seven consecutive days in a commercial movie theater,” and (b) “The eligibility period for the Foreign Language Film category differs from that required for most other categories: the awards year defined for the Foreign Language Film category usually begins and ends before the ordinary awards year, which corresponds to an exact calendar year.”

In short, the reason that Magnolia has booked Melancholia at the Fallbrook is beyond my limited pea-brain capabilities,.

Here’s a portion of my Cannes Film Festival Melancholia review:

“Lars von Trier’s Melancholia is a morose, meditative in-and-outer that begins stunningly if not ecstatically and concludes…well, as you might expect a film about the end of the world to wrap itself up. Von Trier’s ensemble piece ‘isn’t about the end of the world but a state of mind,’ he said during this morning’s press conference. My thinking exactly.

“Melancholia is a much more striking thing for where it starts and what it attempts than how it plays.

“And yet I believe it’s the best…make that the gloomiest, most ambitious and craziest film Kirsten Dunst has ever starred in. Way bolder than Spotless Mind. It’s kind of La Notte-esque, now that I think about it. Dunst pretty much scowls all through Melancholia and does three nude scenes. What I really mean, I suppose, is that she’s never operated in such a dark, fleshy and grandiose realm.

“I can understand Cannes critics going ‘wow!’ over the film’s audacity or whatever (the moody-gloomy beauty, the melancholy current), but I can’t honestly see how they could call it a top contender for the Palme d’Or. It’s basically just a stylishly nutso, intriguing, semi-bombastic ensemble piece about despair in the face of eventual ruination . You know…the kind of thing that most HE readers have in their heads each and every day.

“I felt elation only in the very beginning, and somewhat at the very end. But otherwise it mostly felt like a meditative slog. It’s not without its intrigues but lacking tension and a through-line and a story, really, of any kind. I don’t imagine this film will be embraced by pro-family Christian groups, or even the rightwing end-of-days crowd (although…naah, forget it).

“The movie is never ‘boring’ but only rarely gripping. It’s Von Trier, after all, but when all is said and done it’s basically a downhill swamp-trudge with tiny little pop-throughs from time to time.

“There’s an overhead tracking shot of two horseback riders galloping down a trail during a foggy morning that’s heartstoppingly beautiful. That plus the beginning I will never, ever forget.

“Melancholia is definitely better than Von Trier’s Antichrist — I’ll give it that. Death dance, death art…when worlds collide. Von Trier had a mildly intriguing idea here but didn’t know what to do with it, or he perhaps didn’t care to try. All he does is riff about how tradition and togetherness are over and very few of us care. My sense is that Von Trier experimented and jazz-riffed his way through most of the filming.

“All I know is that I feel the way Dunst’s Justine feels during most of the film, and I’m not dealing with the end of the world. Vaguely scared, unsettled…something’s coming.”

After a brief singing career at the top (roughly ’06 to ’08) that was pushed along by a powerful Motown voice mixed with beaucoup pain, and a life continuously marked by reports of drug abuse, Amy Winehouse is dead. Her body was reportedly found a few hours ago in London. The presumption, given Winehouse’s self-abusing tendencies, is that she bought it.

Yes, it’s possible that Winehouse was walking outside and a tree fell on her and then she was carried into her apartment by passersby. Or that she was hit by a car. So let’s hold off on any rash judgments.

“She was a mess from the beginning,” says Jett, who knows a lot more about 21st Century music and musicians than myself. “She sounded like a coked-up version of Adele.” Winehouse is now a permanent and illustrious member of the live-fast-die-young music fraternity that includes Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, etc. Drugs…yeah!

Winehouse’s best song, ironically, was “Rehab.”

This is Drive, all right. Mood, aroma, atmosphere…all of it. Just shorter.

This trailer for next year’s special presentation of Kevin Brownlow‘s restoration of Abel Gance‘s Napoleon, unseen at this swanky level of presentation for over three decades, is slow to start. The show will play with a live orchestra (i.e., the Oakland East Bay Symphony) at Oakland’s Paramount theatre on March 24, 25, 31 and April 1, 2012.

Brownlow has added footage since the original showings at the 1979 Telluride Film Festival and then at the Radio City Music Hall in January 1981 (which I attended). The 1927 classic will screen at a slower projection rate to simulate the actual speed of the action when it was filmed. The new running time will be a bit more than five hours. There will be two intermissions including a dinner break.

Hollywood Marketing Rule #1: Trailers for Steven Soderbergh movies never have Don LaFontaine-styled narration…ever.

It would be snarky to categorize Sarah’s Key (Weinstein Co., 7.22, NY and LA), an intelligent and delicately handled melodrama about a journalist’s exploration of a Jewish family’s incredibly tragic history, as a “holocaust soap opera.” It does, however, feel like this when the personal saga of the 40ish journalist (Kristin Scott Thomas) is focused upon. Mainly a thread about her being pregnant and wanting the baby and her boyfriend not wanting “to be an old dad,” etc.

I didn’t dislike these portions and I do understand the strategy (inspired, I gather, by Tatiana de Rosnay‘s book of the same name) of using a present-day character to take the audience into the past, etc. But I did feel underwhelmed by them.

The heart and marrow of Sarah’s Key is the sad and agonized tale of Sarah Starzynski (who’s mostly played by Melusine Mayance), a child who was scooped up during the arrests of Paris Jews in July 1942 and confined, along with her mother and father, inside the infamous Val d’Hiv arena before being sent to a concentration camp.

SPOILERS (IF YOU LIVE IN A CAVE) FOLLOW:

This is tragic enough, but when the police first come Sarah makes her younger brother hide in a bedroom closet and then locks him in for safekeeping, and keeps the key with her. Five or so weeks after her arrest she escapes from the camp and makes her way back to Paris with the help of adoptive parents to see about her brother. What she finds provokes such horror and despair that she never recovers,. The anguish stays with her as she grows up, emigrates to the U.S., marries and has a son, and right up to the moment that she decides to stop the pain. A bit of a Sophie’s Choice ending, in a sense.

The journalist’s story continues, however, when she tracks down Sarah’s son (Aidan Quinn), a Florence-residing chef who hasn’t a clue about his mother’s history. He becomes an angry denier when Scott lays it all out, claiming he doesn’t want to know, etc. Why am I going over this? Let’s drop this aspect.

SPOILER SECTIONS ENDS.

There’s a significant pothole in the casting of Sarah’s Key. A weak link, to be more precise. Every film is a series of links in a chain, and if one of them fails to hit the right note or deliver the right element, the chain snaps. The movie doesn’t fall apart, exactly, but it does feel diminished to some extent. And the failure, for me, in Sarah’s Key is in the very different eyes belonging to the two Sarah’s (Mayance and Charlotte Poutrel, who plays Sarah in her late teens and early 20s).

Mayance has big, beautiful, glistening-pool eyes, and Poutrel’s eyes are hazel-like and a bit smaller and narrower. They’re really quite different despite the fact that eyes never change as a person ages. The instant you first see Poutrel you know for sure she’s not the little girl you’ve gotten to know over the last hour or so, and that the transition hasn’t worked, and that the illusion has been shattered.

And yet Poutrel, curiously, does strongly resemble Natasha Mashkevich, the actress who plays young Sarah’s mother during the first third. And Quinn, even more strikingly, has watery blue eyes that could have come from Mayance if she’d grown up and had him.

So the casting is interesting and almost right except for the totally unacceptable lack of resemblance between Mayance and Poutrel. This, for me, was more than a speed bump. It’s a stopper.

If I’d been inside Hall H ten minutes ago, I would have never tweeted “Peter Jackson is in the house for Tintin!,” as Indiewire columnist Anne Thompson did a few minutes ago. They’ve lost their aloof and scrutinizing composure down there, the hip bloggers have. Read their tweets aloud and you have to use a falsetto voice. Peter! Peter Jackson! And there’s Steven…Steven Spielberg! Eeeeeeee!

For the sixth or seventh idiotic time, male vampires are supernatural beings made of dead (i.e. no longer living) tissue. It follows that they’re not only incapable of fertilizing female eggs and/or creating a child, but incapable of having orgasms during vampire-human sex because they’re dead, and that even if they could experience some kind of simulated, super-vampire orgasm it would be just be for theatrical show (i.e., to make the female partner feel wanted and/or appreciated).

Certain stories have certain rules, and you can’t just throw them out because you feel like it. If you’re going to bite into the vampire sandwich, Stephanie Meyer, bite into it and live in that realm and stop cheating by breaking through the membrane.