I read the Amazon.com info about Matthew Modine’s ‘Full Metal Jacket Diary” too quickly last weekend. It only cost $20 bucks or a bit more, not $63.

Explaining to Time‘s Richard Schickel that sometimes “you have to trust your gut” and go with “a premonition that you can get something decent out of it,” Clint Eastwood is doing something fairly startling. Come February he’ll begin shooting Lamps Before the Wind, a kind of cultural reverse-angle, Japanese-soldier companion piece to his World War II war battle-of-Iwo-Jima drama Flags of Our Fathers (DreamWorks, due in Nov./Dec. ’06) that focuses on the Marines who raised the U.S. flag on top of Mt. Surabachi. Schickel’s excellent piece (“Clint’s Double Take”) reports that Flags screenwriter Paul Haggis begged off writing the Japanese saga, but recommended a young Japanese-American screenwriter, Iris Yamashita. “Taken together, the two screen- plays show that the battle of Iwo Jima — and by implication, the whole war in the Pacific — was not just a clash of arms but a clash of cultures,” Schickel writes. “The Japanese officer class, imbued with the quasi-religious fervor of their Bushido code, believed that surrender was dishonor, that they were all obliged to die in defense of their small island. Yamashita’s script is much more relentlessly cruel [than Fathers]. In essence, the Japanese officers compelled the bravery (and suicide) of their troops at gunpoint. Only the Japanese commander, Lieut. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (a mysterious historical figure who fascinates Eastwood), and a fictional conscript, Saigo, whose fate Yamashita intertwines with his commanding officer’s, demonstrate anything like humanity as a Westerner might understand it.” Flags of our Fathers (which costars Jesse Bradford, Adam Beach, Ryan Phillipe, Paul Walker and Barry Pepper) and Lamps Before the Wind will be released simultaneously in late ’06.

Doug Pratt of DVDlaser.com says we should all check out a five-minute video piece by director Sydney Pollack on the new DVD of The Interpreter that explains the importance of letterboxing. “His plea for getting braindead viewers to understand why letterboxing is better is exceptionally well composed and engaging — essentially the best piece ever done on the topic in a DVD supplement,” writes Pratt. “Pollack talks about how he made films in a scope format initially, and then switched to the boxier, TV-friendly format when he saw what happened to his wide films on TV. He then explains why he chose to return to widescreen for The Interpreter, and demonstrates what the viewer is missing when the presentation is cropped. It is a calm and rational explanation, but his passion is communicated with an equal clarity, and the segment ought to be playing in a continuous loop in the video department of every Wal-Mart and Target in the country.”

Director Peter Jackson has, in a very friendly, brother-to- brother way, whacked composer Howard Shore over creative differences on the King Kong score and brought in James Newton Howard as a replacement. Last-minute score replacements are usually a sign of trouble (it happened on Gangs of New York) but let’s not jump to conclusions. If I were Jackson I would make sure of one thing: the ceremonial drums emanating from the native ceremony on Skull Island (as heard from Carl Denham’s ship anchored a few hundred feet off the coast) would sound just like Max Steiner’s… they would sound crude and spooky and not in the least bit orchestral.

I haven’t confirmed this directly with Warner Bros., but a fairly well-planted exhibitor source tells me the running time of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Warner Bros., 11.18) has been “confirmed” at 157 minutes.

I’ve said it before: the snaggle tooth that Peter Jackson has given his big ape is, I suspect, a blade of grass that hints at what may be going on in the emotional universe of King Kong (Universal, 12.14). The snaggle-tooth is a way of Charlie Chaplin-izing Mr. Kong…of making him seem vulnerable and endearing. (But that’s Jackson…an incorrigible emotional underliner.) Harry Knowles agrees — he says “the wonky tooth [is] a bit lame” and gives Kong “a goofy look.” I’m just saying that the comparison shots that Harry has run (with and without snaggle-tooth) probably don’t mean anything. The tooth footage would almost certainly be locked in at this stage (wouldn’t it?). Beware the tooth…the tooth is the movie…beware the tooth…the tooth is the movie. Although I have to say the stills on the official Universal-Kong site are fantastic. This is going to have wonderfully composed, exquisitely lit visuals. Each and every still looks scrumptious.

The shooting of Michael Mann’s Miami Vice (Universal, 7.28.06), which stars Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx, is generating talk among guys in the production-chat circuit. Before I pass this along, understand that similar yarns were spun during production of Mann’s Collateral (i.e., shooting and shooting with no end, unhappy crew, budget overruns, etc.) and look how that one turned out…brilliant. Remember also what Uma Thurman said in Pulp Fiction about guys gossiping with each other, and that the stuff I’m getting now is second-hand. That said, the Vice chatter is that “Mann, Foxx and the budget are out of control,” a friend confides. “One thing that has slipped out is that Mann’s inner circle is turning on him — they can’t deal with him anymore. My source says Farrell’s mullet hair style is the least of the problems. He also worked on Collateral and he wouldn’t say too much about Vice except that he feels like a character in ‘Devil’s Candy 2.’ Mann still doesn’t have an ending to the film and the production is going to Latin America for a month and a half. He said that a majority of the gossip coming off the set is true.” I don’t know about this at all. To me, Mann is the king and can do no wrong. I had a gut feeling about about this second-hand source when the Collateral stories were coming in, which is that he’s one of those whiners who likes his relaxation, doesn’t like to work long hours or do the hard-core thing in order to create lasting quality. In other words he’s a candy-ass, so I wouldn’t put that much stock in these stories…although those mullet reports are troubling. Has anyone heard anything from real men on the set (i.e., non-girls) in a position to actually know stuff?

Matthew Modine’s upcoming coffee-table book about his experience making Full Metal Jacket with Stanley Kubrick (“Full Metal Jacket Diary,” Rugged Land, 10.25) costs about $20 bucks on Amazon…which is a lot cheaper than Taschen’s $200 dollar The Stanley Kubrick Archives . The Publisher’s Weekly review says Modine’s writing “isn’t graceful” — I’ve read another comment claiming Modine adopts the syntax and attitude of his Private Joker character from the film — “but his insider’s view of events have enough acrid flavor and authenticity to compensate. The book is filled with Modine’s excellent photographs, which powerfully supplement the sometimes sketchy narrative. The stainless steel-covered book — each one laser-etched with a serial number — should become a collector’s item for fans of the legendary director.”

DVD distributors re-issue classic titles so often, each time claiming that the film has been beautifully remastered and made to look much better than before…that after a while the pitches don’t register. The marketing of Warner Home Video’s brand-new The Wizard of Oz DVD packages (both a two-disc and three-disc set, out 10.25) on the WHV website promises the same-old “dazzlingly restored picture”…but this time (and I can feel the skepticism before even saying this) it really is exceptional and the best-looking-ever because of a process called “edge detection.” The WHV marketers are figuring there’s no point in trying to reach average-Joe DVD buyers with technical particulars, but this new Oz is in the same class as those relatively recent WHV DVD’s of Gone With the Wind, Meet Me in St. Louis and Singin’ in the Rain. A special software program (called “Ultra resolution” on the disc’s Amazon page) that re-registers and re-aligns Oz‘s three-strip Technicolor separations brings all kinds of new details and textures to the eye. It does more than restore Oz to its former glory, blah, blah…it presents a degree of radiant color and needle-sharp definition than was ever visible in the celluloid versions. Fred Kaplan wrote an excellent explanation piece about the edge detection process on Slate last February.

For all my tussles with David Poland, attention and respect should be paid for his having declared on 5.27.04 that Rachel McAdams “may be the next huge female movie star”…just after he saw The Notebook. I was bored by The Notebook and didn’t care for Mean Girls, so I didn’t get on the McAdams bandwagon until Wedding Crashers and then Red Eye last summer. (And she’s excellent again in The Family Stone.) We have to give the devil his due (and that’s not an inference, just an expression)….Poland called it way before me, before anyone.

It sure is exciting news that NBC/Universal might want to buy DreamWorks after all, and if they don’t maybe Paramount will.

If I was 17 and into seeing a movie with my girlfriend and didn’t care about anything except cheap thrills and maybe getting some action? I’d take her to The Fog, the weekend’s #1 film with a projected $13 or $14 million haul. In Her Shoes is #4 and on track to make $6 million-plus, amounting to a 40% drop from last weekend. I spoke last night to a married movie buff in his 50s who’d just seen The Fog and thought it was shit. I asked if he’d seen In Her Shoes and he said no but he’d like to. (I could tell he wasn’t that into it.) He said his wife wants to see Elizabethtown, which will come in second, by the way, with $11 or $12 million.