Are there any official 2011 Venice Film Festival titles that weren’t covered in Nick Vivarelli’s 7.25 Variety piece? Just asking. The Ides Of March, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Wuthering Heights, Texas Killing Fields, A Dangerous Method, Abel Ferrara’s 4:44 Last Day On Earth, Killer Joe, The Exchange, Shame, Carnage, Dark Horse, etc.

AICN’s Capone and a few other goonies recently met with Harrison Ford in Montana to discuss Cowboys & Aliens, and the following exchange was part of it:

Q: “There’s a lot of talk about nostalgia and bringing a sense of nostalgia to movies currently for an audience. Jon [Favreau] mentioned earlier that they had envisioned a scene where Daniel Craig‘s character jumps on one of the alien spacecrafts as sort of a similar moment to that Vick Armstrong stunt in [an Indiana Jones film] where he jumps on the tank. I was wondering if there is also a sense of nostalgia for action adventure that drew you to this film as well?

Ford: “Nope.”

[Everyone Laughs]

Q: “Fair enough.”

Ford: “I’m in it for the money. This is my job. I love making movies and I love being a part of good movies and I love working with ambitious people. Nostalgia doesn’t enter into it for me.”

Shutting down a fanboy question and pissing on nostalgia with a one-word answer…quite excellent! But in another sense everyone says that Ford’s insistence on having his quote met before he opens a script is one significant thing that’s not working in Ford’s favor at this stage of the game. He has to adopt a standard two-tier approach — i.e., getting his quote for the big-budget projects but doing smaller films for a reduced fee because he wants to do them and life is short.

The death of Polly Platt from Lou Gehrig’s Disease (a truly horrible way to go) was announced today. I knew and liked Platt, and I’m truly sorry that’s she gone. She was a whip-sharp, very perceptive producer and production designer who flourished in the late ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. In her prime she was a master at working this town. She knew everyone and everything. Her mind was incandescent. One of the sharpest, shrewdest and most nakedly honest X-factor creatives I’ve ever known.

I had a pretty good relationship with her in the ’90s when I wrote for Entertainment Weekly, People and the L.A. Times. She helped me with various “this is what really happened” stories from time to time, especially when she worked for James L. Brooks and produced I’ll Do Anything and Bottle Rocket.

She offered friendship, political support and wise counsel to Wes Anderson, Owen Wilson and Luke Wilson during the making of Bottle Rocket. The odd thing is that Platt told me she didn’t think that their movie, now regarded as a seminal ’90s film, had turned out all that well. She thought it should or could have been something else, I guess.

Platt started in the late ’60s as a production designer, and then segued into producing (and exec producing) in the mid ’80s with Broadcast News, Say Anything, The War of the Roses, the afore-mentioned I’ll Do Anything and Bottle Rocket, and The Evening Star. She did the production design on The Witches of Eastwick, Terms of Endearment, The Man with Two Brains, Young Doctors in Love, A Star Is Born (’76), The Bad News Bears, The Thief Who Came to Dinner, and four early movies with ex-husband Peter Bogdanovich — Targets, The Last Picture Show, What’s Up Doc and Paper Moon. She was Bogdanovich’s greatest creative counselor and political ally, Cybill Shepherd notwithstanding.

Honestly? I got a little pissed at Polly in ’94 when I FAXed her a letter about how she and Brooks and Columbia should consider releasing both cuts of I’ll Do Anything — the allegedly disastrous musical version that nobody ever saw plus the non-musical version that went into theatres. Platt showed that letter to Pat Kingsley, the tough, combative publicist who was repping Brooks (or the film) at the time. I was told that Kingsley took that letter to an Entertainment Weekly bigwig and said, “Look how Jeffrey Wells, who’s reporting on our film, is crossing lines by suggesting changes in our film…he’s not respecting journalistic boundaries.”

That was easily the most sickening move I’d ever suffered at the hands of an adversarial publicist. I wrote that letter out of passion for the musical form and respect for what Brooks had tried to do. And Kingsley tried to beat me with it, and Platt gave her the stick. I didn’t speak to Polly for about a year after that.

I sucked it in and made up with Polly a year later, and she helped a lot — a whole lot — with an L.A. Times Syndicate story that I wrote about Bottle Rocket in ’96.

If anyone knows where and when Platt’s memorial service might be happening, please forward. She was a great lady to know and shoot the shit with. I’m sorry it ended for her after a mere 72 years.

I thought there might be a decent riff-and-comment thread in discussing not-very-good films with great-sounding titles. His Kind of Woman, for me, is a total home run title — sexy, romantic, sly, knowing. But it just lies there as a film. I saw it for the first time about two or three years ago and I couldn’t believe how mediocre it was. So I figured there must be several others in this vein.

Then I thought it over and remembered that movie titles are so blunt and utilitarian these days (and in fact have been so for the last several decades) that titles with any sense of lyricism or intrigue are almost nonexistent. Titles like His Kind of Woman, I Died A Thousand Times, Ship of Fools, Out of The Past, Phffft, Bonjour Tristesse, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing, All About Eve and Letter to Three Wives just don’t happen any more.

But if anyone can think of any cool title-bad movie combos from the ’80s, ’90s or aughts, please forward. Or great films with lousy titles…anything.

The earlier plan was for Alexander Payne‘s The Descendants (Fox Searchlight) to open on 12.16. The current plan, announced this afternoon, is to open on 11.23. Is this about the momentum factor between the early September festivals and the theatrical opening? The Fox Searchlight guys are unveiling The Descendants at Telluride-Toronto. I’ve read the Descendants script and am presuming good reviews will happen. With a Thanksgiving opening the FS team will have to keep the ball in the air for eleven weeks, as opposed to 14 and a half weeks with a 12.16 opening.

Alain Corneau‘s Love Crime (Sundance Selects, 9.2) is an icy, brittle thriller about a corporate power war between a 40something super-exec (Kristin Scott Thomas) and a 30something up-and-comer (Ludivine Sagnier). I’m not spilling details but I do find it strange that a perpetrator of a crime would decide to interrupt his/her career by going to prison, knowing full well that evidence has been planted that will eventually exonerate him/her. Why go through that?

This is about 17 years old, but it would still fit nicely into the forthcoming Rupert Murdoch phone-hacking movie.

Top Gun meets an aquatic Independence Day. And a guy gets blown backwards by an explosion! How can Liam “paycheck” Neeson keeping making shite like this? I can’t stand this. Kill me now. Please.

I got more enjoyment out of David Letterman‘s Elizabeth Taylor jokes during Harrison Ford‘s 7.21 visit than I did from any one moment in Cowboys & Aliens (Universal, 7.29). I’m just being honest. Letterman told the joke twice and it worked both times. Jon Favreau and DreamWorks and Imagine and a platoon of screenwriters and the Universal guys invested a couple of years and $100 million to make this thing, and what did they make? Basically a big, noisy, ComicCon alien-invasion film with an agreeable sprinkling of old-west characters and atmosphere.

Yes, a lot of writers were thrown at Steve Oedeker‘s original screenplay — Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof, Thomas Dean Donnelly, Joshua Oppenheimer, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby — and yes, some mildly interesting Old West elements with decent flavoring came out of this process. But the writing overall is still on the crude and primitive side and just okay, and the fundamental delivery is mainly about thump-wham-whoosh-rumble-boom. Orci was quoted a while back as saying the film is “Unforgiven with an alien invasion.” The man is kidding himself.

I’m glad an effort was made to westernize and humanize the film as much as possible in order to keep it from being Wild Wild West. It would been unbearable without this, but it’s still a movie for 13 year olds. It’s blunt, schematic and bludgeoning. And it resorts to familiar moves every step of the way. The punches, shootings and explosions are relentless, and the punches all sound like trucks slamming into a mountain of wrestling mats at 70 mph. And the movie is way, way over-produced.

SPOILER: There’s a bizarre shot at the end of the grand, overbaked finale that was obviously inspired by a certain real-lfe event that happened 25 years ago. Favreau and his team can’t deny this.

There’s a fascist tyranny to ComicCon movies that dictates that the same visual and aural elements and same bullshit cliches be used time and again to the point of punishment. It’s the same light-brown crap over and over and over, and it’s hell to sit through. (Tell me I’m wrong, Drew McWeeny.) This is why ComicCon movies are truly evil and poisonous, and why Favreau and other geek-friendly directors need to severely dealt with. I’m serious. These movies are cancer.

There’s a scene in which a creepy alien sound is coming from outside in the dark, and a lovable dog goes to see what’s up and three seconds after he disappears from sight he YELPS and CRIES. But later on he’s fine. Favreau gets ten demerits for the yelping and 25 if not 30 demerits for letting the dog live. I realize that you’re not supposed to kill dogs in movies, but…God, I hate what Favreau has turned into. All through Cowboys & Aliens you’re begging him not to follow the handbook. You’re moaning “please, please don’t do what I think you’re going to do”…and then he does it anyway. And then he attends a premiere and tells a red-carpet CNN interviewer that “this is why I really love directing.”

Is it possible to watch a ComicCon movie in which a character is not blown backwards from a super-hard punch or some kind of explosive impact? Or is it written into every contract for every ComicCon movie that this kind of thing has to be seen at least once?

And I’m getting really sick of the numbingly repetitious design of aliens in these films. The Cowboys & Aliens aliens are a blend of Ridley Scott and H.R. Giger‘s Alien monster and the big gurgly green guy in Super 8. They have slimy gloopy muck dripping out of their mouths and a gloopy slimy three-fingered hand appendage that pushes out from inside a mucky chest cavity, and that’s very boring.

The Cowboys & Aliens model & effects guys were apparently interested in creating a new kind of monster…but not really. They were obviously terrified of being too original so they borrowed from all the other life forms they’ve seen in other alien movies. How can they live with themselves? Do they honestly expect people like me to go, “Wow, cool”? You know what would be cool at this stage? Hiring seven-foot-tall guys in Martian suits with zippers up the back of their outfits to run around with ray guns and go “aaaah!”

All alien movies are designed by the same community of Hollywood craftsmen, and they all make monsters with the same digital gurgly sound. They all know each other and put their kids in the same schools, and they all copy each other. It’s the same syndrome you get with hillbillies marrying their siblings and cousins and their kids turning out deformed.

So the Ides of March poster is a wide-angle thing with the left and right versions all hazy and out-of-focus? That’s not right. One-sheets have to conform to the usual 27″ x 41″ aspect ratio, or a single, stand-up, vertical-favoring image. George Clooney ‘s political drama plays at the Venice Film Festival on 8.31 and opens on 10.14.