Why has Fox Searchlight decided to release Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life, which they’ve just acquired from Bill Pohlad, in 2011 instead of later this year? Theoretical Answer #1: They don’t want to complicate or compromise their already-underway campaigns for Black Swan, 127 Hours, Never Let Me Go and Conviction. Theoretical Answer #2: Even if they’ve decided that Black Swan and 127 Hours are their only serious contenders, they’re figuring they can’t ramp up a new Tree campaign fast enough. I think they’re wrong but what do I know? I guess the Malick will finally peep through in Cannes 2011 after all.

With Robert Redford‘s The Conspirator only two days away from its first Toronto Film Festival showing (the first public screening being on Saturday at Roy Thomson Hall), I’m reposting what I wrote last April about the film’s potential, and about James Solomon‘s script in particular:

“The calibre of Robin Wright Penn‘s performance as Mary Surratt, the rooming-house operator who was wrongly executed for allegedly conspiring with John Wilkes Booth and others to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, is unknown. But last night I read a shooting draft of James Solomon’s The Conspirator, the Robert Redford-directed drama about Surratt’s trial, and it’s obviously a sturdily-written, well-burnished thing. And there’s no missing the grace and gravitas woven into Surratt’s character.

“Half the work has been done, I’m saying, for Penn. All she has to do is play Surratt in a straight and solid manner, and she’s got a Best Actress nomination all but sewn up. If, that is, The Conspirator lands a distributor (which it almost certainly will) and comes out in the late fall or early winter, and gets a good campaign going, etc.

“Redford may or may not have have peaked as a director (his last seriously strong film was ’94’s Quiz Show), but he’s always been good with actors. I’m basically saying that Solomon’s script is so fundamentally solid that all Redford has to do is get the period details right, shoot it handsomely and let his quality-level cast do what it does best, and he’s pretty much home free.”

Drafthouse Films, a new Austin-based distribution company headed by Tim League, has announced the acquisition of Chris Morris‘s Four Lions, an Islamic terrorist comedy which has been wandering in the woods and looking for a home since playing Sundance eight months ago. It’ll open in mid October in New York, Los Angeles and Austin, and take it from there.

Here’s my brief review, initially posted on 1.24.10:

“Early last evening I saw Chris Morris’s Four Lions — an unsettling, at times off-putting, at other times genuinely amazing black political comedy about London-based Jihadists — Islamic radicalism meets the Four Stooges/Keystone Cops. It’s sometimes shocking and sometimes heh-heh funny, and occasionally hilarious.

“Morris uses a verbal helter-skelter quality reminiscent of In The Loop, and yet the subject is appalling — a team of doofuses who dream of bombing and slaughtering in order to enter heaven and taste the fruit of virgins. It’s amazing and kind of pleasing that a comedy of this sort has been made, but I don’t want to think about the reactions in Manhattan once it opens.

“At times it felt flat and frustrating (I couldn’t understand half of it due to the scruffy British accents) and at other times I felt I was watching something akin to Dr. Strangelove — ghastly subject matter leavened with wicked humor. An agent I spoke to after the screening said, ‘I don’t know if the American public is ready for this film.’ He’s probably right, but Four Lions is an absolute original — I’ve never seen anything like it, nor have I have ever felt so torn in my reactions.

“I’d love to see it again, but with subtitles.”

The cost of a monthly New York subway pass is…what, about $90? And is good for a solid month from the day you buy it. Toronto sells weekly passes for $36, and they’re only good on a specific date-to-date basis. The one I bought yesterday afternoon (Wednesday) is good until Sunday night. Two rides per day x four and a half days = nine rides at $4 a ride. And then I have to buy another $36 weekly pass to cover next week. Is this reasonable? Not a fan.

So where are the basic elements (trailer, one-sheet, website) for Tom Hooper‘s The King’s Speech (Weinstein Co., 11.24)? The Weinstein Co. has a locked-down Best Picture nomination plus a guaranteed Best Actor nomination for Colin Firth (for his performance as Albert, Duke of York, who later ascended as King George VI) plus a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Geoffrey Rush (as Lionel Logue, “Bertie”‘s unconventonal speech therapist) so where’s the razmatazz? The film opens in six weeks, guys. Hubba-hubba.

“This is a very well made, nicely timed and measured Masterpiece Theatre-type film,” I wrote a colleague early this morning. “It’s nothing we haven’t seen before, but it handles itself very, very well within this appropriately protocol-minded proscenium-arch type realm. Especially considering that the somewhat mannered and old-fashioned quality, familiar to fans of Stephen Frears‘ The Queen, is an appropriate application given the late 1930s British period and Buckingham Palace atmosphere.

“You could theorize that The King’s Speech will connect especially well with the over-50 crowd, but it has, I feel, a carefully burnished quality that should/would work for any age group. It’s affectingly performed, very nicely written by David Seidler, and is generally sturdy and classy and satisfying.”

And that’s about all I have to say at the moment. I could expand a touch but there isn’t much time before I have to scoot down to the Scotiabank plex for back-to-back Affleck brother screenings — Ben Affleck‘s The Town at 12 noon (my first press screening) followed by Casey Affleck‘s I’m Still Here at 2:45 pm.

I agree with much of Kirk Honeycutt‘s Hollywood Reporter review; ditto Peter Debruge‘s review for Variety. If I find the time to add further thoughts I will, but once this festival begins ten-or-twelve-paragraph reviews are harder to come by. Strictly fly-by-night and catch-as-catch-can.

A pre-screening conversation at the Tribeca Screening Room last night, two or three minutes before The King’s Speech began, was about a review that called Mark Romanek‘s Never Let Me Go (Fox Searchlight, 9.15) a “masterpiece.” He’s wrong, one guy said. It’s one of those films for which the phrase “very well done for what it is” was invented, said another. It very gently suffocates. “Really sensitive, delicate, anguished and very carefully made,” I replied. “But it’s morose, and that plus the passivity and resignation doesn’t work.”

Update: Arrived in Toronto at 1:15 pm. Welcomely cooler here than Manhattan. Before: I saw Never Let Me Go and The King’s Speech back-to-back last night. Now there’s no Friday morning press-screening conflict and I’m free and clear to see Black Swan. I ‘m leaving now for Newark and my Toronto flight. (I’m actually past my departure hour.) No more filings until the late afternoon.

Forget the silliness and consider all that beautiful headroom above R. Lee Ermey and Matthew Modine‘s heads. This is the 1.37:1 Full Metal Jacket I know and love and wish I owned on Bluray.

Obama has screwed himself with caution and timidity (he didn’t go far enough with stimulus funding) and allowing the uglies to lead the conversation, but boil the current catastrophes down to basics and it all tracks back to Bush-era excesses and abuses.

So how are Average Joes going to vote in the mid-terms? Simple — they’re going to vote for a Republican majority in Congress, and thereby block any chance of Obama pushing anything through legislatively. They’re going to give more power to those who caused all the problems in the first place (i.e., righties committed to exploiting stupidity and serving the corporations + Tea Party nutters). That’ll fix things, right?

John Curran‘s Stone (Overture, 10.8) is some kind of mind-blower. It really and truly steps outside the box. It serves up moral/spiritual issues and past nightmares and demons and asks you, the viewer, to decide where the real morality and salvation lie.

I spoke to Curran a week or two ago. My audio digicorder was lost at the time so I used my Canon SD1400 camera. In the above clip we talk about Ed Norton, the film’s sexuality, Robert DeNiro, Milla Jovovich, and the challenge facing the Stone marketing team.

There’s a point at which I tell Curran that I’ve turned the camera off, which I really did believe I’d done. I later decided after reviewing it that what Curran said about the selling of Stone was pretty mild stuff, and that we touched on issues that should be heard and discussed, so I left it in. The recording works better with it.

I said in my initial review that Norton’s character “starts out as some kind of scurvy opportunistic convict with a corn-row haircut, but he gradually goes somewhere else. De Niro’s prison counselor seems dull and compromised but half-sympathetic (or at least will eventually seem that way, you’re thinking, once you get to know him) but he, too, goes to an unexpected place. And Jovovich, whom Norton describes early on as a kind of ‘alien’, turns out to be less than that, but is definitely in her own realm.

“And she’s not the character who winds up leaving the planet, so to speak.”

Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones‘ A Letter to Elia, which will play at the Toronto Film Festival, will be shown on PBS’s American Masters series on 10.4, and then appear within an 18-disc Elia Kazan DVD set that 20th Century Fox Home Video will release on 11.9. One of the films in the set, naturally, will be Kazan’s long-missing Viva Zapata (’52).

The 1.78:1 brownshirts who feel Psycho looks better when it’s been top-and-bottom cropped within an inch of its life will perhaps be greatly distressed to learn that Zapata will be mastered at 1.37:1.