“You can add Dennis Quaid to the actors who have successfully gone through the cauldron of playing real U.S. presidents,” says an industry friend who’s seen Richard Loncraine‘s The Special Relationship (HBO, 5.29), which deals with the relationship between President Bill Clinton (Quaid) and British Prime Minister Tony Blair (Michael Sheen, in his third go-round with the character).

“Quaid’s Clinton is certainly one for the ages,” the guy says. “He has everything down perfectly — the look, the accent, the demeanor, even the walk. It’s a real treasure of a performance. What’s surprising about A Special Relationship — for me anyway — is that it doesn’t hit its stride when focusing on his friendship with Blair. Instead, the film finds all its humanity and raison d’etre in watching a marriage pathetically deflate.” Bill and Hillary’s, I presume he means.

“I put Quaid a couple of notches below Anthony Hopkins as Nixon and a couple of notches above Hopkins as John Quincy Adams in Amistad. He’s fucking brilliant.”

The Special Relationship “is an American/British political film directed by Loncraine from a screenplay by Peter Morgan,” says the Wiki profile. “It’s the third film in Morgan’s informal Blair trilogy, which dramatizes the political career of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Tony Blair (1997-2007), following The Deal (2003) and The Queen (2006), both directed by Stephen Frears.

“The first drafts of The Special Relationship dealt with Blair’s working relationships with Presidents of the United States Bill Clinton (1993-2001) and George W. Bush (2001-2009). But Morgan excised the Bush scenes from subsequent drafts because he found the Blair/Clinton dynamic more interesting. He intended to make his directorial debut with the film but backed out a month before filming began and was replaced by Loncraine. The film is produced by Rainmark Films and backed by HBO Films and BBC Films.

The film also stars Hope Davis as Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Helen McCrory as Cherie Blair. Principal photography on locations in and around London, England ran from July 20 to September 4, 2009. The film will be broadcast on HBO in the United States on May 29, 2010. Optimum Releasing will distribute it in cinemas in the United Kingdom; the company website lists a release date of May 7, 2010.”

In a just-posted Boxoffice Magazine piece called “Can Theatres — And Studios — Survive Without Critics?,” Pete Hammond disputes the conventional wisdom that film critics are toast.

He begins by quoting from A.O. Scott‘s fare-thee-well essay that ran in the 3.31 N.Y. Times, to wit: “Maybe criticism mattered once, but the conventional wisdom insists that it doesn’t anymore,” Scott wrote. “There used to be James Agee, and now there is Rotten Tomatoes. [And] rotten movies routinely make huge sums of money in spite of the demurral of critics.

“Where once reasoned debate and knowledgeable evaluation flourished, there are now social networking and marketing algorithms and a nattering gaggle of bloggers.”

No argument, says Hammond. “But then why does every major and minor (i.e. indie) release rely so heavily on critics’ opinions? Just look at the ads: print, internet, TV, radio, billboards, DVDs. The studios have scoured reviews from the biggest papers to the tiniest websites to flaunt whatever compliments are fit to print, even if just a single adjective: ‘Brilliant!’ Reviews aren’t just being read — they’re being parsed.

“‘If critics are irrelevant, then why is every movie ad without exception based on critics’ quotes?’ asks veteran film critic and historian Leonard Maltin (who also publishes a thriving annual movie guide of reviews). ‘And it doesn’t matter who the critics are. They will quote anybody, [and yet] the advertising premise seems to be that you can’t persuade people to go to a movie without quoting someone recommending it.”

“Maltin says the practice is so pervasive that when an ad or a DVD box doesn’t include a quote, he’s immediately suspicious that the movie must really be a dog.”

It’s a persuasive and impassioned article, but it ends with a tart comment from Box-Office reader Steve Simels: “Film criticism isn’t dead, but film criticism as a job where you also get health insurance coverage clearly is.”

This appears to be an apparently legit pirate-capturing of JJ Abrams‘ much-discussed Super 8 teaser. It’s attached to Iron Man 2 in theatres starting this morning so I don’t see the problem in leaking it. It’s now officially a “people’s teaser.” The guy who captured this and put it up on You Tube last night deserves an “attaboy.”

So much for that Vulture report that it’s about kids shooting a super-8 movie in the ’70s, eh? That idea sounded so Steven Spielberg-ish I was ready to dismiss it out of hand. Be very, very afraid of the hand of Spielberg (who’s producing the Abrams-directed Super 8) as his influence will always ring some kind of familiar Spielbergian bell.

This is obviously a superior piece (as was the much-hyped teaser for Cloverfield) and does what a good enticing teaser is supposed to do, etc. But boil it all down and it’s the opening of The Fugitive with a creaure escaping from a derailed train rather than Richard Kimble.

I have an idea for another Abrams-Spielberg collaboration. It’s called Stovepipe. The rotting skeletal remnants of Abraham Lincoln digs and claws its way out of the 16th President’s tomb in Springfield, Illinois, and begins to slowly make its way across the country in order to find Spielberg, etc.

Missed this Sean Young-authored video when it went up three days ago. There were very few Dino De Laurentiis-produced films that didn’t have something fatally wrong with them. Dune was a huge stinker in its time. Poor Aldo Ray.

Could Criterion be up to its old Third Man tricks in its forthcoming Bluray of John Ford‘s Stagecoach (5.25)? Delivering a Blu-ray of a decades-old classic that not only looks un-finessed and un-improved (i.e., like a good but less-than-dazzling celluloid print playing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1983) but faintly scratched and speckled and lousy with grain? And which sounds “flat” to boot?

To go by Gary Tooze‘s DVD Beaver review, this seems like a distinct possibility.

You need to read this with an understanding that all online DVD and Bluray reviewers tend to tend to look for ways to flatter the appearance of new releases. I’m not saying Tooze lacks integrity — I trust his judgment for the most part and respect his knowledge of the field — but in my opinion he does, like other reviewers, sometimes err on the side of generosity. My point is that even with this dynamic in play, he expresses a form of mildly upbeat disappointment with the new Stagecoach, and suggests that it’s another manifestation of the Criterion purist philosophy when it comes to older films — i.e., make ’em look like film, and no better or worse than they looked when they played in big-city houses on opening day.

In my humble opinion a Bluray of a 1939 black-and-white film should look a little better than that. Stagecoach, I feel, should look the way Ford imagined it might look in his wet dreams, or the way the guy at the processing house wanted it to look — as clean, crisp and silver-satiny as the 1939 monochrome process allowed and then some. It should look like black-and-white plus, which might be (and I want to describe this properly) what Ford saw with his naked eye as he shot his Monument Valley footage but in monochrome — a razor-sharp image with rich velvety blacks and painterly grays and all kinds of subtle gradations.

An ideal Stagecoach sure as shit shouldn’t look like a decent, good-looking but imperfect print, which is what Tooze’s frame-captures suggest.

Criterion’s Stagecoach, says Tooze, “has strong grain structure” — fire drill! ding-ding-ding-ding-ding! — “and because of lesser manipulation seems to show more damage marks (speckles and light scratches)” than the two previous DVD versions. Tooze then tries to put a sheen on this observation, stating that he’s “okay with this” and he’d “rather have the marks than the over-digitization.”

And then comes the Big Whopper: “Masters of Cinema’s incredible transfer of F.W. Murnau‘s City Girl seems to have raised the bar to an inordinate level and this can affect our expectations on such older titles brought to 1080P resolution, like Stagecoach.”

My mouth dropped open when I read this sentence. Tooze is flatly saying that a recently-released Bluray of a 1930 film — shot eight or nine years before Stagecoach, which almost certainly means with more primitive camera and lighting technology — is so pleasing that it creates an unfair standard for Criterion to compete with, and that Stagecoach might be more satisfying to those who haven’t seen the City Girl Bluray!

Then he turns around and decides he needs to say something much nicer. So he says that “while the Criterion improvement in detail and film textures may be only marginally apparent in the screen captures, it becomes much more prominent when in motion.” The Criterion Stagecoach, he insists, “displays dramatic superiority on my system…it has never looked better for home theater consumption.” Okay, maybe. By comparison to previous Stagecoach versions, he means.

But if we could hear the inner Tooze he would probably be muttering to himself, “Gotta be positive about this stuff. The Criterion guys know what they’re doing. I get where they’re coming from. Pure film! But that goddamned Murnau Bluray…sure fucked things up for me! But I have to downplay this. Gotta butter the toast.”

The sound on the Criterion Stagecoach hasn’t been boosted or deepened either, Tooze says. Criterion has “stayed ‘original’ in keeping the single channel audio,” he says. “It is flat but there is a certain level of crispness over the DVD that comes through if you have an ear for it.” Well, do you have an ear for this kind of thing, western fans? Do you have a special liking for the way movies used to sound in the old studio-system days? You know, coming out of those old brick-shithouse mono speakers that sat behind those heavy velour curtains?

It’s truly heartening to read an estimate from Russ Collins, co-chair of the Sundance Institute’s Art House Project, that “there are at least 500 independent community-based art house theaters in the U.S.” I had no idea. I thought there were maybe 150 or so, if that. It’s also encouraging to hear Collins say that “there may even be thousands,” and that “there will be more and more every year because film is arguably the most important art form created in the 20th century.”

Marquee for Manhattan’s Bleecker Street Cinema, which showed classic or avant-garde fare from ’62 to ’90.

Collins is quoted in an Inside Indies piece by Elizabeth Meyer. The articles features an interactive map showing where many of these theatres operate, and containing links to theri websites.

The Sundance Art-House Project is “a national partnership working to build audiences and develop a community of theater owners committed to independent film,” Meyer writes. “To date, 12 theaters around the U.S. have been selected for the Art House Project, a major perk of which is having exclusive access to films from the Sundance Film Festival.” Most of these houses exist as not-for-profit operations, and are always on the hunt for corporate grants and other sources of cash.

I love and cherish all older single-screen movie houses, particularly those that were built in the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s and ’50s.

I come from the world of repertory cinemas, which were all about showing older (or in some instances recent) classic films. Rep houses began to wither and die in the late ’80s or thereabouts, and have been pretty much extinct for the last 15 years, give or take.

My first movie-realm job was working part-time for the Westport Playhouse Cinema starting in ’75. I also worked as a manager at the Carnegie Hall Cinema in ’78. My employer was the incontestably colorful Sid Geffen, a bespectacled real-estate maven with a French-born wife (filmmaker Jackie Raynal) who had bought the Bleecker Street cinema in ’74 or thereabouts, and was also leasing (I think) the Carnegie Hall Cinema, and showing classic films in both.

I’m sorry to report that this was only pic I could find of the late Sid Geffen, the former Manhattan rep-house enterpeneur, born troublemaker and indefatigable “character” in the mold of Sydney Skolsky, Samuel Arkoff and other cigar-chomping showbiz types (although Sid never touched cigars).

Sid fired me from the manager job for putting the ticket roll into the dispensing machine backwards, necessitating a new form of arithmetic in counting the grosses. But then he re-hired me in the spring of ’79 to be the managing editor of the Thousand Eyes Cinema Guide magazine, a kind of TV Guide-styled monthly. This was when there were plenty of Manhattan repertory cinemas to keep track of — the Thalia, the Bleecker, the Carnegie, Karen Cooper’s Film Forum, another one that Dan Talbot ran on the Upper West Side, Theatre 80 Stl Marks, the Collective for Living Cinema, etc.

Putting out the issues was insane. Paper and glue and typefaces and printing presses, and staying up all night checking proofs and re-writing and re-editing. But we had first-rate writers penning articles — Harlan Jacobson, Jonathan Rosenbaum, David Sterritt, Gary Indiana, Annette Insdorf — and we published, I think, four issues before Sid folded it. He was paying for the whole operation out of pocket, and just got tired of the costs without any ad revenue to speak of.

The best thing that happened for the Thousand Eyes p.r.-wise was David Denby, then the New York film critic, giving the magazine a nice three-paragraph plug at the end of one of his columns.

Repertory cinema was strictly a Manhattan realm back then. Everything of any value happened in Manhattan. Nobody even thought about Brooklyn, much less entertained notions of taking a train there. I lived in Manhattan from ’77 to ’83, and I never once visited Brooklyn or Queens (except for Mets games) or the Bronx (except for Yankee games) or Staten Island during my whole six years there.

Another hit job on Nikki Finke has surfaced, this time in an online-only Film Comment piece by Roger Smith: “Finke’s MO is a time-honored one: for fear of becoming a target, high-level sources feed her fairly juicy stuff, hoping to placate her. If those sources are expecting long-term loyalty, or even semi-permanent placation, they had best reevaluate those expectations.

“Of course, this is also a case study in the internet’s extreme degrading effects on journalism — both its ethical standards and its very economic basis. What Nikki Finke has done is combine a deep knowledge of her subject — the business of Hollywood –with a laser-like sense of people’s insecurities and the fact that the instantaneous presentation of ‘news’ 24 hours a day values speed over accuracy, ‘readability’ over thoroughness, and downright thuggishness over professionalism.”

Wells comment #1: It sounds a bit fogeyish to lament readability over thoroughness. The medium is the medium, and I think it’s fairly well understood that in the case of major online columns penned by former print journalists that every post is as thorough as the author was able to make it before publishing. If it’s not 100% thorough, then it’s a fairly safe bet it will improve and be honed with updates and corrections over the next several minutes, or certainly with an hour or two. And if the authors don’t correct soon after they’ll soon be writing their own epitaphs.

Obviously no one posts anything unless they’re 97% or 98% certain that everything in a piece has been researched and double-checked, but if they post with an error or two…wham, you can fix ’em right away as long you’re alert at the keyboard and not going out for a two-hour lunch without your iPhone or Blackberry.

Back to Smith: “With near-perfect timing, Finke’s online dispatches have provided an alternative to spending 30 minutes or so a day reading the trades. Variety and The Hollywood Reporter are chopping staff by 50 percent in a desperate attempt to stay ahead of precipitous drops in ad revenue — an effort that may or may not succeed in saving franchises that are 105 and 79 years old, and until quite recently, almost invariably profitable.

“But there is also a very real question as to whether the blog business model can be sustained over time. Deadline Hollywood, bolstered by Jay Penske‘s cash, has recently stolen three top journos, one each from Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, plus a senior London-based entertainment writer, the beginnings of building a serious staff and its attendant costs. Whether the website’s ad revenues alone will cover those costs is highly doubtful. And should Deadline Hollywood, down the road, choose to erect a ‘pay wall’ will it see its traffic decimated?”

Wells comment #2: HE’s business model works, I can tell you, by keeping operating costs way down. One full-time salary (mine), two part-time freelancers (advertising and tech) and no collateral office expenses — it’s all done from my pad — and no health or dental insurance costs to speak of, and no operational expenses save for a monthly fee paid to the server, plus necessary equipment (laptop, cameras, desktop computer, chargers, cords) purchased when needed.

Back to Smith: “And until Finke’s million or so unique monthly visitors are asked to pay, they can continue to enjoy, gratis, Finke’s near-patented style of innuendo, unsourced quotes, outright vilification, and attempts to redact her mistakes into ‘updates.’ It appears that the internet, Hollywood and Nikki Finke were made for each other.”

Wells comment #3: The “thuggery” thing I obviously agree with, having tasted it first-hand. Then again power constructs high stone walls and heavy wooden gates and hires goons to guard them, and you can’t get in unless you’re tough and aggressive. That’s the way of the world. But I really detest the mindset that constantly assumes and anticipates that venal or under-handed motives are in play at all times, and that you need to wear armor 24-7 and always keep your handgun loaded with the safety off.

We all need to keep our guard up, of course, but if you allow your dark angels to run too much of the show you’ll be consumed by them. I once admonished a journalist friend for thinking like Herman Melville, for believing in a vision of life in which snapping serpents are constantly slithering through the ponds and rivers and along the terra firma and under the flora, and if you’re not careful you’ll step on one and get bitten in the leg, and maybe even swallowed.

“The sea is calm,” said Claggart, the master-at-arms in Billy Budd. “Peaceful. Calm above…but below a world of gliding monsters, preying on their fellows, murderers all of them. Only the strongest teeth survive. And who’s to tell me it’s any different here on board or yonder, on dry land?”

But can someone name the last romantic-relationship film in which the leading lady clearly outweighed and could probably pin the leading man in a wrestling match, and probably in less than ten seconds? No criticism or judgment implied here. I’m just asking. (Common has, I would say, a physique not unlike this guy’s.)

Russell Crowe‘s British-accented voicing of a British Petroleum exec sounds a lot like Ricky Gervais….”a lot more fun that it sounds!” An extremely witty and funny fellow. To me he’s not the flying-phone guy — he’s the joker. He does need, however, to get back to that Fistbiscuit boxing weight.

“Well, you know, you want some kind of relief from the agony and terror of human existence, which is brutal, agonizing and meaningless with some oases, delight, some charm and peace. Life is not relentlessly black from wire to wire. You can sit down and hear a Mozart symphony or you can watch the Marx Brothers, and this will give you a pleasant escape for a while. And that is about the best that you can do…

“I feel that one can come up with all these rationalizations and seemingly astute observations, but I think I said it well at the end of [one of my films]. We all know the same truth; our lives consist of how we choose to distort it, and that’s it. Everybody knows how awful the world is and what a terrible situation it is and each person distorts it in a certain way that enables him to get through.

“Some people distort it with religious things. Some people distort it with sports, with money, with love, with art, and they all have their own nonsense about what makes it meaningful, and all but nothing makes it meaningful. These things definitely serve a certain function, but in the end they all fail to give life meaning and everyone goes to his grave in a meaningless way.”

No link or hint is being provided to identify the speaker. I’ve pruned some of it down to make it sound less repetitious, but you’re supposed to know who this person is without even thinking about it.

The interesting thing about this just-released schedule of Cannes Film Festival selections is that Doug Liman‘s Fair Game — a competition pic with big stars (Sean Penn, Naomi Watts) — won’t screen until Thursday, May 20th, at which point many U.S. journalists are either packing their bags or have already left town. It’s curious that the festival has decided to screen this Bush-era political drama (which runs 106 minutes) so late in the schedule.

You might think with a digitally restored print of Fred Zinneman‘s From Here To Eternity having shown at the Academy last November and also being shown next Thursday (5.13) at the Cannes Film Festival’s Cinema de la Plage series that a Blu-ray Eternity might be released later this year. Nope. I’m told that Sony’s home video division is looking at late 2011. The applicable metaphor is managing air-traffic control at LAX, and having to make some planes wait before they can land.