Jeffrey Wells

Director Guillermo del Toro has alternated fanboy movies (the Hellboy flicks, Blade II, Mimic) with adult-level dramatic spookers (Pan’s Labyrinth, The Devil’s Backbone, Chronos). But it appears that his next film, a sci-fi thriller called Champions, which he’ll direct, write and produce for Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner‘s United Artists, is a departure. The material is based on a late ’60s British TV series about government agents “who are rescued from a plane crash by an advanced civilization and given superhuman abilities,” according to an 11.7 Variety story by Tatiana Siegel.

For the time being, it’s probably best to hold up on whatever excitement you may be feeling over the re-teaming of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Righteous Kill, which Overture Films will bring out sometime next year.

The first concern is the fact the director is Jon Avnet, whose previous films include Red Corner, Up Close & Personal and The War. None of these films were hugely flawed, exactly, but I don’t recall anyone doing cartwheels or back-flips over their quality when they first came out. (The late production designer Richard Sylbert worked with Avnet on Red Corner, and he told me lots of stories.)

The Avnet factor is mitigated, I’ll admit, by the fact that Inside Man‘s Russell Gewirtz has written the Righteous Kill script.

The second concern is that Pacino and De Niro are both going through that gradual downward swirl phase that many big-name actors start to experience when they hit their 60s. Because they’re less in demand at this age they tend to appear in films that they wouldn’t have considered in their prime. Pacino, especially, has been on a fallow streak lately, his last three films being the underwhelming Ocean’s Thirteen, the barely noticed 88 Minutes (also directed by Avnet), and the moderately awful Two for the Money. The last decent performance he gave was his “Roy Cohn” in Angels Over America four years ago.

Beowulf has been approved by the Academy’s animation committee as one of the twelve animated features eligible for the Best Animated Feature Oscar! I’ve confirmed this twice with an Academy spokesperson…amazing news! Robert Zemeckis, Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman‘s film now stands an excellent chance of taking the prize because it’s such an eye-filling mind-blower — a truly revolutionary step in the delivery of 3D thrills and animated envelope-pushing.

What this decision really means is that it’s now down to a contest between Beowulf (emblematic of the new realms and wonders of mo-cap digital animation that are now upon us) and Ratatouille (a perfectly respectable and in fact beautifully rendered example of ’90s style animation). What makes this extra significant is that one of the old-guard voices who opposed Beowulf‘s Oscar- qualification is Pixar animation chief John Lasseter, who executive-produced Ratatouille.

So it’s a mano e mano between the rat vs. the dragon slayer. And as much as I hate to say it, given how touching, beautifully written and superbly made as Ratatouille is, HE feels that the rat needs to lose.

Not because it lacks anything as a film (far from it), but because Lasseter needs to be slapped around for trying to impede the forces of the brave new digital world. Let this be a lesson to all older fuddy-duds everywhere. If you try and block or discredit the new thing (whatever that thing may be), you are inviting the wrath of the forward thinkers of the world, and you may pay a price for this.

The other qualified titles are Alvin and the Chipmunks (semi-qualified pending viewing by the committee), Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters, Bee Movie, Meet the Robinsons, Persepolis, Shrek the Third, The Simpsons Movie, Surf’s Up, Tekkonkinkreet and TMNT.

As I wrote to Beowulf producer-writer Roger Avary last week, “[Your] film is obviously animated through and through. It deserves the Best Feature Animation Oscar, bar none. I don’t care what anyone says — this is not live-action except in the most rudimentary sense of the physical acting aspects, which represent, in my view, a relatively small portion of the whole.”

“Parents who empower their children” sooner or later discover that “ultimately their children leave,” Youth Without Youth director Francis Coppola has told Vanity Fair writer Bruce Handy.

“But you can be satisfied, you can be happy you did that,” Coppola explains, because having kids like this is “better than kids who are hanging around, sort of dependent on you or something. My kids are not like that.”

Coppola’s wife Eleanor, he says, “always tells me that, because I lament, ‘Where are my kids? Where are my grandkids?’ And my wife says, ‘Well, you gave them a wonderful thing. Aside from everything else you’ve given them, you’ve given them the livelihood that they can go and pursue their own lives.'”

Youth Without Youth is having its first press screening tonight. I’dd like to attend, of course — it’s Coppola, after all, and a long-awaited effort — but the reviews out of the Rome Film Festival have been dispiriting, to say the least. Not to mention the general “forget it” buzz that I’ve been hearing since last spring. The result is that I’m looking for ways to avoid seeing it. There is only one film I’d rather see less, and that’s Love in the Time of Cholera. Is that a fair-minded way of looking at things? No, but it’s the honest truth.

The only thing that scares me about Roman Polanski‘s intention to direct an adaptation of Robert Harris‘s “The Ghost“, a just-published political thriller, is a statement given to Variety‘s Tatiana Siegel by Harris that “most of the story takes place in an oceanfront house during the middle of winter,” which Harris called “classic Polanski territory.”

What Harris means, I suspect, is that an oceanfront home is precisely the same kind of setting Polanski used in Death and the Maiden (1994), a well-written parlor drama that ranks in everyone’s memory as a respectable but middling, and even a touch boring. Note to Polanski and Harris: minimize the oceanfront home scenes and take the story elsewhere. I don’t care if it’s a bathroom in a freeway pit-stop gas station — just don’t resuscitate Death and the Maiden….please!

The Amazon description of Harris’s book: “Adam Lang [read: Tony Blair] has been Britain’s longest-serving and most controversial prime minister of the last half century. And now that he’s left office, he’s accepted one of history’s largest cash advances to compose a tell-all (or at least, tell-some) memoir of his life and years of power.

“As pressure mounts for Lang to complete this magnum opus, he hires a professional ghostwriter to finish the book. As he sets to work, the ghostwriter discovers many more secrets than Lang intends to reveal — secrets with the power to alter world politics, [and] secrets with the power to kill.”

An Amnazon reader reports that “the primary setting for ‘The Ghost’ is Martha’s Vineyard in the winter.”

Read more

There’s plenty to get into each and every day about the Writers Strike, but every time I start to investigate an avenue or tap something out there’s a voice inside that wonders if anyone outside the industry cares all that much. I care about fairness and decency and about the plight of writers everywhere so I want to stay on it. On top of which a reader guilt-tripped me yesterday about being a slacker about this. But I know deep down if I hadn’t run into Diablo Cody yesterday the interest in my little Paramount Studios Bronson gate visit would have next to zilch.

Here are a couple of YouTube clips — clip #1 and clip #2 — that seem to just cut through the crap and spell out the strike situation clean and plain. The cleanest and most Sesame Street-y, posted on 11.5, is a primer about what the writers want and what the studios are offering/not offering in response.

On the DVD front, it basically says that writers get 4 cents from the sale of a $19 or $20 retail DVD, and that what they’re looking for is 8 cents per DVD. Of course, the studio profit margin off that $19 or $20, after expenses and skimmings, is about $5 per DVD. But 8 cents out of five bucks isn’t much. It’s reasonable. You could even call it modest to a fault.

And yet on the AMPTP website, producers’ negotiator Nicholas Counter has written that “no further movement is possible to close the gap between [producers and writers] so long as their DVD proposal” — 8 cents rather than 4 cents per DVD — “remains on the table.” Counter then equates traditional DVDs with electronic sell-through — i.e., internet downloads. Shouldn’t the music download percentages afforded to songwriters be the model?

The other must-see YouTube clip is a pre-strike statement by WGA member Howard Gould. Very well said, well phrased — a statement of seriously manly conviction. (I searched for Gould on the IMDB and came with only a Howard Michael Gould — is this guy and the guy speaking on the clip one and the same?)

MTV’s Josh Horowitz: “Francis Ford Coppola recently told Esquire he doubted how hungry you are for roles anymore. Did those comments upset you?

Jack Nicholson: “He called me. I’ve known Francis for a long time. I didn’t even bother making him explain it. I just told him if anybody in the world understands being burned by an interview, I do. Don’t give it a second thought. [But] if that’s what he said, and that’s what he meant, and now he feels he said something he shouldn’t have, that’s fine by me [also]. I’m hungry in the sense that I always was. Do I have to work? I haven’t had to for quite a long time. Am I as hungry? I don’t know that I’m as hungry, but I’m as vicious about the meal as I ever was.”

A classic sequence from The Train, the very last big-budget action film shot in black and white. I know that your average dipstick action fan doesn’t want to know from monochrome, but it would be a great innovation in today’s market to make a hard-core, black-and-white action flick. You could make it more of a wow if you shot it in 3D. Talk about a visual must-see event. Black and white didn’t hurt Sin City…why not an action or adventure film?

There’s a good-vibe antidote to the bad-vibe quote in that 11.4 N.Y. Post piece by Susannah Cahalan in which the real-life Richie Roberts said that American Gangster depictions of Frank Lucas — Denzel Washington‘s Harlem drug-dealer — “as a family man are ludicrous…to make him look good and me look bad.”

I’m speaking of last Friday’s Charlie Rose Show discussion between Roberts, Lucas, New York writer Mark Jacobson and American Gangster exec producer Nick Pileggi.

The Post piece made it sound like Roberts was pissed and taking swings at the film. That is not the impression he gives during the Charlie Rose chat.

Jonny Greenwood “was really one of the first people to see There Will Be Blood. And when he came back with a bunch of music, it actually helped show me what his impression of the film was. Which was terrific, because I had no impression.” — TWBB director Paul Thomas Anderson explaining the genesis of the score to Entertainment Weekly‘s Chris Willman in a piece that’s mainly a q & a.