I could smell Freedomland (Columbia, opening today) coming a mile away. The advance word was atrocious, which was no surprise given that Revolution Studios chief Joe Roth directed it. I didn’t go to the screening (I watched the Criterion DVD of Shoot the Piano Player instead), but N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis did, and she calls it “an early candidate for worst film of the year…an inept, lethally dull drama [featuring] one of the few authentically awful performances of [Julianne Moore‘s] career.” The reviews are 20% positive on Rotten Tomatoes across-the- board and only 13% Cream of the Crop. And if I were Roth I would send a basket of fruit and a bottle of Dom Perignon to the Hollywood Reporter‘s Sheri Linden, who’s calling Freedomland “a moving portrait of hurting souls, brought to life in compelling performances.”

Yesterday I suggested a remake of Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, not realizing that one had already been made by the great Jay Chandrasekhar and released last summer by Warner Bros. Here’s a review and an excerpt: “Chandresekhar is one of the saints of the cinema, and The Dukes of Hazzard is his most heartbreaking prayer. The film follows the life of a muscle car from birth to death, while all the time living it the dignity of being itself — a dumb machine, noble in its acceptance of a life over which it has no control. The General Lee is not one of those cartoon cars that can talk and sing and is a human with four wheels. The General Lee is a muscle car, and it is as simple as that.” Apologies to Roger Ebert, but this is good.

Here’s the first right-wing film critic attack upon V for Vendetta, appearing on Jason Apuzzo‘s Liberty Film Festival site. (It’s odd that the author doesn’t use his own name, going instead by the moniker “the Road Warrior”…what’s that about?) One thing I agree with: V is set in a vaguely futuristic England, but “is very much about America here and now.” Yes! The diversion is RW’s view that the film is “a paranoid, left-wing fever dream of what America is here and now…a psychological study of left-wing projection and paranoia. Needless to say, [it] is everything it accuses the government within the film of being: fear-mongering, deceitful, hateful, and propagandistic. This irony, unfortunately, seems to be lost on director James McTeigue and writers Andy and Larry Wachowski (who adapted Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s graphic novel).” RW is an intelligent fellow, but my God, it’s amazing sometimes how bright people can look at a strong, go-for-broke film like V for Vendetta and come away with such wildly different reactions. Here, again, is my 1.12 review, which is reiterated in the column article below called “Vendetta Dissent.”

Bond franchise producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, widely regarded throughout the film industry as a pair of amiable chumps, tried to get several name actresses to play Daniel Craig‘s leading lady in the currently filming Casino Royale, but the agents and managers for these actresses counselled against it for one reason or another. (One of them being that they think the Bond franchise is on a downswirl these days.) But now Wilson-Broccoli finally have someone to play Vesper Lynd, and it’s Eva Green, last in Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven and before that in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers. Green is an enticing, exotic, sparkly-eyed actress and a good fit, but throw her together with Craig, the recently-signed Mads Mikkkelsen (who’s playing Le Chiffre, the Bond villain) and Jeffrey Wright as 007 second-banana CIA agent Felix Leiter (a character who was first played by Jack Lord 45 years ago in Dr. No) and the prospect of Royale being regarded by audiences as a second-tier, no-star package all the way seems unavoidable. The only thing that has a chance of making a difference with forward-thinking types is the quality of it (if it manifests). The buzz will have to be that Casino Royale is the exception to the 007 rule — that it’s an origin story with an above-average script by Crash guy Paul Haggis, and that it’s not just a formula thing with the usual quips and explosions and a PG-13 notion of adult sexuality by way of a 1964 Playboy magazine sensibility. (Wilson has imposed restrictions on Bond screenwriters for years in order to keep the Bond franchise family-friendly.) If this doesn’t happen and the criteria of Wilson-Broccoli prevails, Casino Royale will be a flatliner and yet another nail in the coffin of a franchise that has been culturally and spiritually dead for a long time. It doesn’t mean a damn thing if it’s been financially profitabile…not a thing.

Novelist and screenwriter Larry McMurtry, 69, says the core theme of Brokeback Mountain is that “life is not for sissies,” which of course means that he thinks Heath Ledger‘s Ennis del Mar character is one. He’s right, of course. The immense sadness that BBM leaves you with at the finale is all about this middle-aged cowboy’s realization that he’s blown it by failing to make something out of his deep-river feelings for Jake Gyllenhaal’s Jack Twist. A Pulitzer Prize winner and BBM co-screenwriter (along with Diana Ossana), McMurtry is an Oscar nominee for Best Adapted Screenplay. He let go with his del Mar diss during a taping of “CBS News Sunday Morning” that will air this coming Sunday (2.19). “You need strength…love is not easy,” he said. “It’s not easy if you find (it), it’s not easy if you don’t find it. It’s not easy if you find it but it doesn’t work out. [Our film] merely says the strong survive, but not everybody is strong.”

Animals aren’t just poking through as the stars of new films, but are giving killer performances…so to speak. This is almost the view of Pete Hammond, who saw Frank Marshall’s Eight Below (Disney, 2.17) at the all-media last Monday. He also showed Eight Below to his UCLA “Sneak Preview” class last week and says “it went through the roof…one woman said it was the best film she’d ever seen at the series.” He also says that the Huskies and Malamutes in the film are phenomenally touching, and that they almost seem to show acting chops. I couldn’t be bothered to see Eight Below because (a) it looked sappy, (b) I’m starting to wonder if Walker is making the right career calls, and (c) because I’m a narrative animal-movie snob. Except, of course, when it comes to movies like Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard, Balthazar (a sad donkey movie)or Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu’s Amores Perros (sad dogs). Bresson’s would be an excellent film to remake, of course. It can’t be improved upon, but most people out there won’t rent or buy the Criterion DVD so at least a remake would be seen, although a Balthazar remake would probably turn out better if the Disney people had nothing to do with it. I’m serious about this — animal movies are vaguely in vogue now, and a Balthazar remake would be an upscale way to go with at least a potential of being a critical favorite and an award-winner, if only because cultured film lovers regard the Bresson film as a landmark art film.

An interactive Oscar ballot that the New York Times would love you to fill out.

I’ve decided to simultaneously shock myself and the readership by actually doing an “Elsewhere Live” broadcast when I’m supposed to, which is Thusdays at 5 pm Pacific, 8 pm Eastern. So here goes…the main subect is John Scheinfeld’s Who is Harry Nilssn (and Why Is Everyone Talking About Him)?…listen if you’ve a mind to.

The writing has been on the wall for Harrison Ford‘s downturn for years. I saw it coming when he turned down the Michael Douglas part in Traffic, and now he’s finally burned himself out with audiences because he won’t divert from doing the same old well-made but tired formula films like Firewall. Plus he’s just looking too grandfatherly to be the older hero type. So it’s downshift time and it happens to the best of them. It happened to Redford and Newman. (I think Newman handled it the best of all with his character parts, etc. Redford seems to be somewhere between over and treading water.) But the Harrison Ford of Clear and Present Danger (the best film he’s made in the last twelve years, I feel) is over the hill and gone for good, I’m afraid. He just needs to start playing crochety older guys, is all. Or start taking offers from the indie sector. Not a terrible thing, and hitting it in the right kind of indie film could bring him back, in a sense.

The feds obviously suspect that Mike Ovitz, the former CAA topper, ex-Disney honcho and failed management-agency chief, hired Anthony Pellicano to use his wiretapping skills to get information about people Ovitz was dealing or negotiating with. This is why Ovitz has been called before a grand jury “to testify about his dealings and conversations with Pellicano, who pleaded not guilty to charges that were unsealed last week in a 110-count indictment,” says a New York Times story by David Halbfinger and Allison Hope Weiner. A person who hires someone to do something illegal means Mr. Moneybags is just as guilty and prosecutable as the one who was hired…right? That’s my layman’s understanding.

Steven Soderbergh‘s The Good German (Warner Bros., early-mid fall ’06) is set in 1945, not 1947…and it’s been described by Soderbergh not as a risky romance drama but as “a real murder mystery.” (Reader Joshua Flower, responding to the Dakr Horizons plot description I posted yesterday, says it “sounds like a bit of a gloss on The Third Man.”) Plus it’s been shot in black and white, and that settles it — I’m in love. Why monochrome? “I’m incorporating archival footage into the movie and there’s just no other way to make it match,” Soderbergh told Suicide Girls correspondent Daniel Robert Epstein. (Pete Hammond tells me he was casually praising Clooney at a party last weekend for keeping the monochrome tradition alive with this and Good Night, and Good Luck, and Clooney answered, “Yeah, well, I think after The Good German that’s about it for the black-and-white thing.”) “Will it premiere at Cannes this year?” Epstein asks Soderbergh. “I hope so,” comes the reply.

Two and a half weeks until Oscar night, and the only question is whether George Clooney will beat Paul Giamatti for Best Supporting Actor. It’ll be Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture, and Ang Lee for Best Director, Capote‘s Philip Seymour Hoffman for Best Actor (although it should ideally be a tie between Hoffman and Heath Ledger), Walk the Line‘s Reese Witherspoon for Best Actress, Cinderella Man‘s Giamatti and Syriana‘s Clooney neck and neck, The Constant Gardener Rachel Weisz winning for Best Supporting Actress, Crash‘s Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco for Best Original Screenplay, Brokeback Mountain‘s Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana for Best Adapted Screenplay, Gavin Hood‘s Tsotsi for Best Foreign Language Film (anti-Palestinian potshots have killed the chances of Paradise Now ); Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride ought to win the Best Animated Feature, but watch the majority give it to Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit; Brokeback Mountain‘s Gustavo Santaolalla ought to win for
Best Original Score (please, please don’t give it John “Tuesday night at the Hollywood Bowl” Williams); “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” for Hustle & Flow deserves to win for Best Original Song (as an overall tribute to the film).