Jeffrey Wells

“A nation is in peril. Bitterly divided at home, it vacillates between two warring dynasties. Threatened by dark forces abroad, it worries that a decisive moment is coming when one great empire will rise and another will fall. And a female leader is struggling to maintain her femininity while proving she can rule as well as any man.

“Watching Elizabeth: The Golden Age, I couldn’t help thinking of Hillary Clinton, quite possibly the next president of the United States, a woman who often seems to live behind her own plate of glass.

“I [also] wondered the same thing I always wonder when I watch candidates for the presidency putting themselves through the drudgery and the emotional starvation of a long, grueling campaign: is it really worth it?

“The film, and the Clintons, are reminders of all that gets bargained away in public life. At the end of Elizabeth the queen has defeated the Spanish Armada and governs over a golden age of prosperity on England’s shores. Blanchett appears as a living statue in white body paint. Behind her pane of glass, a queen is victorious, ferocious — and utterly alone.” — from Jonathan Darman‘s 10.24 Newsweek piece, “What Elizabeth teaches about Hillary Clinton’s challenge

Between the two Duelling Hitchcock films, HE’s money is on the Ryan Murphy/Anthony Hopkins version rather than Number 13, the comedy-thriller about young Alfred (Dan Fogler) finding his style as a British-based filmmaker in the 1920s. I’ve read an early draft of the Murphy-Hopkins script, written by John J. McLaughlin and largely about the making of Psycho.

16-month old draft of John McLaughlin’s ““Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho,” which Ryan Murphy will direct with Anthony Hopkins as Hitchcock.

The script also weaves in — a bit awkwardly, truth be told — a parallel story about the history of Ed Gein, the Wisconsin mass murderer who was the model for Robert Bloch‘s “Norman Bates” character. I could be reacting too conservatively here. Using the Gein story alongside the Hitchcock saga certainly lifts it out of the usual making-of-a-masterpiece mode a la RKO 281.

The late ’50s period trappings of Ryan-Hopkins film will be easy enough to recapture — the suits, cars, old phones, etc. I just hope that Murphy, a former journalist like myself, will really give it hell as far as putting the audience into the mood and emotions and sub-currents of America in 1959 and ’60. The ground-level enticement in the watching of any period film is that you might have a chance to really go someplace else for a couple of hours. To actually dive into and become part of a past life. Bennett Miller‘s Capote felt like a real time-machine piece; ditto Andrew Dominik‘s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

There was a research screening last night of Tim Burton‘s Sweeney Todd (Dreamamount, 12.21), and it played, for most viewers, as a very satisfying musical horror film. Not a gothic London period tragedy but a classic horror flick in the vein of Phantom of the Opera, says one observer. Oh, and it occasionally morphs into an out-and-out blood bath.

Tim Burton (l.) directs Johnny Depp (r.) during shooting of Sweeney Todd.

So says one guy who attended last night’s research screening of Burton’s film on the Universal lot. During the focus-group discussion “there was some doubt [expressed] that it would appeal to horror fans, even though it clearly is a horror movie, the songs notwithstanding,” writes Cinefantastique.com’s Steve Biodrowski.

“There seemed to be a misapprehension that ‘horror’ equated with Saw, and that fans of that franchise and others of its ilk would [therefore] not enjoy the Burton film,” Biodrowski observes.

“Personally, I think nothing could be further from the truth. The blood explodes in only a few scenes of Sweeney, but when it rains, it pours in unbelievably graphic gouts of gushing red. I can’t remember when or if I ever saw this much red splashed across the screen in a mainstream studio movie.

“More important, the Sweeney character” — portrayed by Johnny Depp — “fits the classic movie monster mold” a la The Phantom of the Opera, Biodrowksi contends. “He does horrible things, but the audience identifies with and even roots for him to dispatch his victims, who more often than not deserve what they get.”

Biodrowski’s piece seems fairly comprehensive, emphasis on the “seems.” The film apparently runs about 110 minutes sans end credits, according to another source. “Very brutal, very bloody,” this other guy says. The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil will be pleased to hear that “Depp and company don’t skip on the singing” and that the “vocals are great.” The film has “five more weeks of sound mixing” to go, he says.

Everyone apparently loved it at the screening “except for a handful of people, one of whom complained that the film provides “no closure” (an assertion dispute by another who says “it may or may not show you exactly what happens to everybody, but it gives you enough information to figure it out satisfactorily”).

The “no closure” guy also sneered about Depp’s performance, saying that he had seen the actor in similar roles too often before; he called Sweeney “Edward Scissorhands possessed by Jack Sparrow.” This remark was obviously intended as criticism, although “the marketing people actually liked it,” reports one poster, “saying they would like to put the comment in their promotional campaign.”

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Footage of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis intercut with Control‘s Sam Riley — posted four months ago, very nicely assembled. Thanks to HE reader Frank Booth for the heads-up.

Three Oscar-predicting lulus have turned up in BBC entertainment reporter Neil Smith‘s 10.24 article: (1) “Having won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar last year for Syriana, George Clooney could also be up for that prize for playing a conflicted lawyer in Michael Clayton“; (2) “Robert Redford‘s political thriller could figure among the Best Picture candidates” (3) “Hairspray could easily land [acting] considerations for Michelle Pfeiffer, Christopher Walken.”

Dan in Real Life star Juliette Binoche on the cover of the latest French Playboy. The magazine has recently undergone staff augmentations (“many big guys have joined the crew,” a reader confides, “big guys with the ability to attract big stars to pose for Playboy“). I could talk about Binoche having been born in March 1964, etc., but…how would a Playboy editor put it? That parted-mouth expression is all.

Jamie Stuart‘s latest video piece isn’t a “piece.” It’s just a straight conversation with the great Sidney Lumet — 18 minutes long and very beautifully monochrome. A lot of tech talk, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, digital vs. analog, Dog Day Afternoon, etc.

A New York-area critic feels that IFC Releasing is missing out on “at least a shot” at 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days winning a Best Foreign Film trophy from the New York Film Critics Circle in December. Only films with an ’07 theatrical release in NYC (or the NYC area) are eligible for NYFCC consideration, but it’s expensive as hell to open a little foreign movie in Manhattan in December. (IFC intends to open it nationwide in mid January after the Oscar nominations are out.)

The Romanian entry has a chance to win, however, with the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the National Society of Film Critics as long as IFC opens it somewhere domestic before 12.31.07. I was told today these two groups (accordingt to their rulebooks) will consider it for their Best Foreign Flick prize even if it plays at some 85-seat theatre in Bumblefuck, Idaho, with fold-up chairs.

A good clip from 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days that doesn’t give away too much, unlike 95% of all trailers (including the French-language one for Cristian Mungiu‘s film).

So Ryan Gosling didn’t argue with Peter Jackson over some aspect of The Lovely Bones, “Page Six” is reporting, and he didn’t walk off the set. (Momentary deflation.) Jackson apparently canned him.

“Peter couldn’t stand Ryan,” a source has told a reporter. The word earlier this week was that Gosling had walked over some creative issue, but the “Page Six” source says it was because Gosling “was so demanding…[he] cut his own hair and was fighting with wardrobe [so] Peter booted him two days before filming started.”

Intuitive, source-free HE interpretation: A serious actor doesn’t get into scrapes over hair and wardrobe unless there are levels of fundamental discomfort going on. The hair and the wardrobe aren’t issues in and of themselves — they’re manifestations. Like most strong and gifted directors, Jackson is a major egotist — “this movie is about this and that, but it’s fundamentally about meee!” — who doesn’t know what to do with moody, complex actors who are all tangled up in their process.

I know absolutely nothing, but I’d like to think that Jackson was the primary a-hole, Gosling responded with his fickle, oddball hair-cutting behavior in order to express his growing loathing for Jackson, and Jackson said to himself last weekend, “No one fucks with me or challenges my power! No one!”

I know that if I’d been on the set I could have been a relationship mediator like Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson in the beginning of The Wedding Crashers, and I would have sat in the middle of the table with Gosling and Jackson on either end (and no agents, managers or attorneys present).

And I would have said to Jackson, “Okay, Peter…we all know who you are, and that you have to be the whirling dervish barefoot superman on a movie set…that’s your m.o., your specialty, your particular way of being the genius. And obviously the world loves you for that. I mean, except for the soreheads who are too dim to get you…who lack the aliveness of spirit that it takes to really and truly appreciate your gift.”

And then I would turn and say, “Ryan, you’re a genius too but in a different way. You have to be tricky, fickle, twitchy…and it’s beautiful. We love that you’ve put on weight and cut your own hair because, God knows, real guys out there cut their own hair and return clothes they’ve bought because they woke up the next morning and said, ‘I hate these pants’ or ‘this shirti is 15% polyester!’

“And what you guys have to do is give each other room to be a genius in their own way, but at the same time step back every breakfast, lunch and dinner and listen to the other guy’s song…hear his music, let it in and try to sing it yourself.

“I’m serious, Ryan — pick up that Karaoke mike and try to sing Peter’s tune. You know…stand up and walk a mile in his shoes. And Peter, you need to get a pair of scissors, go to the porta-potty with the mirror over the toilet and cut your own hair every so often. Abnd maybe pick a fight with a wardrobe person, tell them to go fuck themselves, fire their ass! I mean, you should hire them back the next morning which of course you can do, but you need to do this so can start to understand what Ryan has been going through and by and by come to know who he is.”

Congratulations to L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein for bitch-slapping the Academy’s Foreign Film Committee for talking only about “the rules, the rules” instead of the reality of modern communication today, and particularly for having disqualified The Band’s Visit, the much-admired Israeli film, because more than 50% of its dialogue is in English.

Academy rules state that for films to qualify for a Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar, the dialogue must be “predominantly in a non-English language.”

Goldstein’s best point is that “if you’re consistently keeping great films out of competition” — which the Academy’s foreign branch has done a lot — “then you must be doing something wrong.

“Why, might you ask, does this Israeli film have so much English in it? For the simple reason that when Egyptians and Israelis find themselves thrown together, guess what language they use to make themselves understood? English, the new mother tongue. In fact, the English spoken in The Band’s Visit is so fractured that all the dialogue in the film, whether Arabic, Hebrew or English, is subtitled. Having seen the film, I’d argue that it’s grotesquely unfair to punish the movie for simply showing how difficult it is for clashing cultures to communicate.”

I just wrote in my review of 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days that Cristian Mungiu‘s film, whatever he may have intended, is “the most persuasive anti-abortion argument in any form I’ve ever heard, seen or read.”

Naturally, alert Right-to-Lifers (like deaconforlife‘s Peter J. Smith and John Jalsevac) are going to write about and promote the film among the faithful when it opens next January, and they’d be dumb not to do that. Mingiu’s film is mainly a lament about a certain inhumanity that prevailed in Communist Romania in the 1980s, but viewers will find it impossible not to feel profound revulsion about abortion by the end, particularly due to a certain closeup shot in Act Three that will rally the Pro-Life troops like no TV ad or abortion-clinic protest.

But I’ll bet that most Right-to-Lifers, who primarily live in the “red” regions, will avoid this film in droves, and not just because this IFC Release won’t find much of a reception among hinterland exhibitors. It’s my belief that most of the Christian anti-abortion crowd — i.e., the ones who voted for Bush-Cheney in ’04 in order to keep Christian values from being weakened or usurped by liberal Democrats — are largely xenophobic when it comes to sampling foreign cultures and their films. Because they don’t want to know from subtitles, 95% of the rank-and-file will not only not see 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days in theatres — they’ll also avoid it when it comes to DVD.

I’l be flabbergasted if my prediction turns out to be wrong. Only one subtitled film in history has won the support of middle-American conservatives, and that was because it showed Jesus of Nazareth getting punched and whipped over 90 times at the hands of the Romans and the bad Jews.