$275 is too much for a seat at a Yankee game. It’s not even outdoors on the first or third-base line where you can smell the dirt and grass — it’s an ambassador club box over the right-field bleachers. They used to charge 25 cents for a bleacher seat in Babe Ruth‘s day. I don’t know what prices were like when Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle were slamming homers, but I’ll bet they had some relationship to the price of rice…unlike today.

TheWrap‘s Sharon Waxman has reported that there may have been “significant misinformation” about the shooting death of Hollywood publicist Ronni Chasen last November. Apparently she may have taken three in the arm and two in the back rather than five in the chest…whatever. The feeling here has always been that the official explanation is ridiculous. The late Harold Smith shot Chasen at a Sunset Blvd. stoplight after chasing her along that high-speed avenue on a friggin’ bicycle? It may have happened, but no self-respecting screenwriter would dream up such a scenario for fear of being laughed out of town.

Last Tuesday Deadline‘s Michael Fleming outlined the latest configuration of Sony’s Cleopatra biopic — Angelina Jolie in the lead, David Fincher possibly directing, Scott Rudin producing from a script by Brian Helgeland (but with a new punch-up writer possibly being sought), based on Stacy Schiff‘s Cleopatra: A Life. An inside source says it’s all “conjecture” at this point, but I’m hearing the project may actually come together.

A guy I don’t know much less trust directed me to an IMDB comment posting, allegedly written by someone in the loop, claiming that (a) Fincher is “almost confirmed,” (b) “Filming to begin late in the year (Malta, Cyprus or Egypt),” (c) “The roles of Julius Caesar and Marc Antony to be given to ‘no big stars,'” presumably because the intent is for Jolie to dominate and be central to the proceedings in every conceivable way, (d) “Brad Pitt was never considered for the role of Marc Antony”…THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN TOTALLY RIDICULOUS!, (e) “The film will be a political epic,” and (f) “Expect a fabulous work of make-up…Angelina to appear completely unrecognizable.”

This last bit of possibly imagined information is the most interesting to me. Cleopatra was not a ravishing beauty, by all historical accounts. The idea of Jolie making herself look a wee bit homely with a different nose or something sounds highly intriguing. It worked for Nicole Kidman in The Hours. When’s the last time a world-famous actress significantly altered her looks to portray a head of state? When Bette Davis had her head shaved for The Virgin Queen?

I’ve read about how this would be “the first telling of the Cleopatra story from a woman’s perspective” and that “instead of simply being a seductress, as she was portrayed by Elizabeth Taylor in the 1963 Joseph L. Mankiewicz-directed film, Cleopatra is also a shrewd politician, strategist and warrior, with sexual charisma to spare.”

What? Mankiewicz and Taylor’s Cleopatra wasn’t just some titillating queen who wore heavy mascara. She was written and portrayed as a complex combination — seductress, clever politician, willful negotiator, perceptive reader of character, something of a battle strategist. So we’re going to have to hear a bit more about the new version to be persuaded that it’s going to be a markedly different thing than 20th Century Fox’s “monumental mouse,” as critic Judith Crist called it in her review.

Here’s how I put it to a friend this morning:

“I’ve been in denial about Sony/Rudin’s Cleopatra project, and now I’m finally facing it full-on: David Fincher, my hero, might actually direct this? Wow.

“Whatsername’s source book is entirely respectable, and there certainly ought to be room for another take on the Cleopatra saga, etc. But — it might as well be faced and dealt with straight-on — the stink from Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1963 turkey, despite Rex Harrison‘s superb performance and other stirring and agreeable aspects, is, 48 years after the fact, still lingering in the air. And so there’s a slight feeling of ‘uh-oh’ or at least ‘oh…really?’ when you hear about a Cleopatra feature.

“Plus I have to wonder how persuadable Jolie, a tabloid queen to millions, can be in a historical context? I’m thinking of my reaction to her as Alexander the Great’s mom in Oliver Stone‘s film. But if they make her look a bit homely, maybe.

“I’m just being honest and open here. Rudin’s project, image- and expectation-wise, has to overcome the stigma of the 1963 film, and that in itself, however unfair, is going to be a bit of an endeavor. And I’m also asking myself how Fincher, a modernist and/or futurist and a digital guy who’s never gone further back in time that early 20th Century New Orleans, is going to find his way into an exotic 2000 year-old culture…the mind reels.

“I’m not slagging this project at all. I’m just being upfront and honest about the associations that people have with the name ‘Cleopatra,’ etc. If anyone can turn the image around, it’s Fincher and Rudin…don’t get me wrong. But the image does need turning around because everyone in the media remembers what a catastrophe the ’63 version was….that’s all I’m saying. Obviously doable. An educating process required.”

FilmDistrict’s decision to open Bruce Robinson‘s The Rum Diary, an apparently troubled adaptation of the Hunter Thompson book with Johnny Depp in the lead role, on 10.28 is well and good. FilmDistrict co-founder Graham King has said he’s “extremely proud to bring this novel to film and to honor Hunter’s legacy”…hah!

But let’s not forget that the film may be opening tomorrow (3.31) in Moscow, according to a longstanding IMDB listing. And if it is, let’s hope someone is there to review it. I mentioned on 2.5 that I’d love to fly to Moscow for the occasion, but you have to live within certain limits.

In my head, Farley Granger has always been and always will be “Guy Haines,” the anxious, darting-eyed, pinch-mannered tennis player in Alfred Hitchcock‘s Strangers on a Train (’51). The 85 year-old actor, also known for his performance as an anxious, darting-eyed, pinch-mannered gay murder accomplice in Hitchcock’s Rope, passed on 3.27, but for some reason the news is only just breaking now.

Granger copped a long time ago to being openly bisexual or mostly gay or what-have-you.

Here’s an amusing portion from his Wiki bio: “In Rope, Granger and John Dall portrayed two highly intelligent friends who commit a thrill killing simply to prove they can get away with it. The two characters and their former professor, played by Jimmy Stewart, were supposed to be homosexual, and Granger and Dall discussed the subtext of their scenes, but because The Hays Office was keeping close tabs on the project, the final script was so discreet that screenwriter Arthur Laurents remained uncertain of whether Stewart ever realized that his own character was gay.”

Until this moment I myself have never even flirted with the notion that Stewart’s character was supposed to be (or might have been) gay. I don’t think Stewart had it in him to play “gay.” He was too aww-shucksy for that.

Remember that ComicCon 2010 buzz about Tron: Legacy helmer Joseph Kosinski being “the new James Cameron“? After Tron made the rounds he began to look like the new Peter Hyams. And now Kosinki’s latest project, a dystopian, post-apocalyptic graphic novelly action-quest thing called Oblivion, has been scuttled by Disney.

Kosinski, 36, will bounce back and may even make something good some day, but it’s entirely possible that he won’t. He’s one of the gamer/comic-book generation directors (Battle LA‘s Jonathan Liebesman, 35, is another) and I just don’t trust these guys. At all. Their heads are all about hard-drive visions and jizz-flash sensations, and they all seem to have some kind of cheap CG virus running through their veins.

The rap against the early ’70s whiz kids (Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola, DePalma, etc.) is that they weren’t bringing any real-life experience to their films — only love of other movies. But in retrospect their output seems quite fertile and meditative compared to that of Kosinski and Leibesman and their ilk — born in the 1970s and reared on the infantile fantasies brought about by Lucas and Spielberg, and nurtured by action figures, video games and computers, and destined to bring so much anguish to the likes of myself.

Everything that I love, admire and cherish about the Spanish and south-of-the-border fraternity (Inarritu, Del Toro, Cuaron, Lubezski, Amenabar, Bayona. etc.) is missing in sound-and-fury empties like Kosinski and Liebesman and their slick-operator elders Guy Ritchie and Michael Bay, et. al. They and the suits who support them at the studios are nothing less than a scourge, a pestilence…the spawn of Hollywood seed pods. And who pays to see their films? The ComicCon culture. This is why I’m not entirely kidding about F4 Phantoms strafing the faithful in San Diego, etc.

As God is my witness I never want to see a dystopian, post-apocalyptic graphic novelly action-quest thing ever again.

I don’t know what exhibitors and distributors felt about Terrence Malick‘s Badlands or Days of Heaven or The Thin Red Line or The New World when they first saw them, but I’ll guess they weren’t swooning. Exhibitor and distributor types are always bitching about art films, and that’s the only kind of movie Malick makes so he and they are natural-born adversaries. Industry guys have always hated ambitious cinema — Francis Coppola once told me about exhibitors complaining about how dark and gloomy The Godfather was — so their views need to be taken with a grain.

I was reminded of this mindset by a producer pal when I told him yesterday that a journalist friend, quoting a US distribution source, had told me that a group of foreign distributor-investors saw Malick’s The Tree of Life almost exactly a year ago (i.e., March 2010) and felt that it was commercially catastrophic — a movie ostensibly costarring Sean Penn and Brad Pitt “and they’re not even in it,” according to one complainer. (Possible translation: the source felt that Penn and Pitt aren’t in it enough.)

On top of which a second journalist friend told me two or three months ago that he happened to be sitting near a table of distributor types at last September’s Toronto Film Festival “and they had a furious, angry attitude about the movie,” my friend says. “It was really a sense they had that it was beyond repair…they didn’t want anything to do with it, and they couldn’t imagine what any legitimate distributor could do with it.”

Again — that’s par for the course when guys whose main goal in life is to sell popcorn are talking about an art film. It doesn’t mean The Tree of Life doesn’t have value in and of itself. Knowing Malick and his abilities and inclinations as I do, it seems unlikely if not inconceivable that he could create a film utterly lacking in artistic/spiritual value.

It was reported in May 2009 that The Tree of Life had been sold to a number of international distributors, including Europacorp in France, TriPictures in Spain, and Icon in the UK and Australia, but that it lacked a US distributor. In August 2009 it was announced that the film would be released in the US through Bob Berney and Bill Pohlad‘s Apparition. There had been speculation in Screen Daily and elsewhere that Tree might be ready for Oscar contention release in late 2009, but nope. Then came talk of its possible debut at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival and the subsequent squashing of that dream due to “it’s not ready.” And yet it’s believed that Tree of Life was “absolutely finished” in the spring of 2010, and that it had been seen by European distribs who bought pre-sales rights, and they “were shocked and appalled and rejected it” after that alleged March 2010 screening.

Summit Entertainment sold distribution rights to EuropaCorp in France, Icon (UK and Australia), TeleMuenchen Group (Germany), Svensk (Scandinavia), O1 (Italy,) Belga (Benelux) and TriPictures (Spain). Journalist friend #1 “was told by two more people in the Euro biz” that the appalled or angered reactions about a supposed catastrophe “were absolutely true, but I was not told this by anyone with one of the rejecting companies. That’s where I got stuck. Three sources, but none direct.”

“This is like the 9/11 conspiracy theory,” journalist #1 concludes. “How could so many people be keeping this secret?”

Robert Aldrich‘s Kiss Me Deadly (Criterion Bluray, 6.21) is pure black-and-white splendor. You can can take or leave the plot/dialogue/theme, but you can’t ignore the magnificent visual capturings of mid ’50s Los Angeles. All those downtown locations that are gone now plus Ralph Meeker/Mike Hammer’s still-standing apartment building (10401 Wilshire Blvd, NW corner of Wilshire and Beverly Glen and the Hollywood Athletic Club (6525 W. Sunset Blvd.), where Hammer finds the black box with the bright light inside.

I’m not a coffee snob, but I’ve owned a couple of cappuccino machines and been to dozens of European cafes and have acquired a mature understanding, I believe, of what makes a really good cup. Imagine my surprise, then, when it hit me two or three weeks ago that this kind of instant coffee is really delightful — rich, rounded, full-bodied.

This is the raptor seen in one of the micro-squares on that one-sheet for Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life. Would it be out of line to ask for a poster for a screaming Sean Penn and Brad Pitt being chased by a raptor, Jurassic Park-style? If anyone has the Photoshop ability and the time….well, obviously many people do. But do they give enough of a damn to work on it and send it along?

U.S. forces are “stopping the Taliban’s momentum in Afghanistan”? Really? I hadn’t heard that.

I’m almost getting a supernatural, time-trippy Purple Rose of Cairo vibe from this Midnight in Paris trailer. Or maybe more like A Stop at Willoughby? That’s good, I think. Woody Allen hasn’t gone off the imaginative deep end in quite a while.

I know one thing for sure: I felt more than a little nauseous the second that Michael Sheen‘s character began talking about wine. So he plays (a) Tony Blair, (b) mad vampires kingpins with white hair and crazy glazed expressions, (c) soccer coaches and (d) assholes?