Barry Levinson‘s You Don’t Know Jack, an HBO drama about the beliefs and travails of mercy-dispenser Jack Kevorkian, is easily Levinson’s best film since Wag The Dog — a straight-arrow, quietly powerful drama about a courageous if overly headstrong man of principle and compassion vs. the conservative let-them-suffer crowd.

You Don’t Know Jack star Al Pacino, Dr. Jack Kevorkian on the Zeigfeld red carpet before last night’s screening.

And as a somewhat mousey-voiced, gray-haired, bespectacled and bent-over Kevorkian, Al Pacino gives one of his best performances ever, particularly in terms of seeming to truly slip into another man’s skin and with remarkable restraint at that — a feat that feels almost revelatory for a guy who’s been known for decades for his florid chops and shouty line-readings.

Danny Huston also scores as attorney Geoffrey Fieger, who successfully represented Kevorkian in several of his court battles. An audacious legal swordsman and swaggerer in a long-hair wig, Huston seems to really revel in Feigel’s exceptional brainpower and combative spirit — he’s a kind of contact high in this sense.

You Don’t Know Jack (a great title) is a ballsy, no-frills film about a moral-political-cultural issue — whether or not severely afflicted people have the right to die with dignity, and at the time of their own choosing — that pretty much anyone with any life experience has strong feelings about, and which everyone should try to see when it airs on HBO starting on 4.24.

I was particularly moved by real-life video footage (apparently shot by Kevorkian) of a very young sufferer from Lou Gehrig’s Disease — a slender good-looking guy in his early 30s. He’s been explaining to Kevorkian why he wants to end it, and at one point his sister says that she supports him in his effort to be “free.” The young guy is so moved that he begins to weep, and then leans his head over and rests it on her shoulder. Anyone who watches this footage and then turns around and says that what Jack Kevorkian tried to do is fiendish or against God’s will has some serious blockage going on.

British journalist Tom Teodorczuk speaking to You Don’t Know Jack director Barry Levinson. (Co-star John Goodman in b.g.)

And yet despite my beliefs I feel emotionally conflicted about inducing death, no matter how compassionate the circumstances. This is hard to explain because I can’t quite figure why I think one way and feel another, but here goes.

I had a Siamese cat named Zak who was born in ’85 and died in ’00 (or was it ’01)? He passed from pancreatic cancer. He began crying one day for no apparent reason, and then a few weeks later he began to lie on the living-room rug, staring wide-eyed at the fibers. He stopped eating toward the end, prompting me to put Gerber’s baby food on his nose so he would at least lick it off. He was finished and we both knew it. I finally took him to TLC Animal Hospital in West Hollywood for the Big Sendoff. They gave him a sedative, and then something that stopped his heart — and I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stay in the room. I couldn’t deal with having taken his life despite the fact that I was relieving him from agony.

I know that it’s inhumane to force people to live past a certain morbid point. Whether or not that point has been reached can only be determined by the suffererer, but if they’re truly in agony and are begging to be allowed to slip away only a monster would insist on keeping them around. And yet I couldn’t face the euthenizing of my cat so what does that say about me?

That I’m a wuss, I suppose. That I don’t have the steel to look tough issues in the face. Because I find the idea of dying horrific under any circumstance. Because I agree with Woody Allen, to wit: “I don’t want to live on through my work. I want to live on by not dying.”

You Don’t Know Jack after-party at the Four Season restaurant on East 52nd Street — 4.14, 11:15 pm.

Happy 28th birthday to the great Seth Rogen, who doesn’t look a day under 37. For some reason I have an image of LexG looking like Rogen, only with less hair. Rogen has The Green Hornet (as opposed to The Green Lantern) in the can, is currently shooting the film formerly known as I’m With Cancer, and after that has a comedy about infidelity called Take This Waltz, directed and written by Sarah Polley and costarring Michelle Williams.

I’m again requesting some kind of rue d’Antibes market screening of The Expendables during the Cannes Film Festival. We’re speaking of the ultimate rube social event as well as a possible cinematic revelation. In a highly boisterous, rock-n-roll, animal-house, cheap-whore, anyone-who’s-anyone-has-to-be-there sense, The Expendables must be screened on the Cote d’Azur between 5.12 and 5.20.

I’m repeating for emphasis that Julian Schnabel told me at last night’s You Don’t Know Jack screening that he chose not to unveil Miral, his latest, in Cannes, and that the period drama will instead debut in Venice and Toronto. (But not Telluride, he added — too much running around in a too-short time frame.)

Julian Schnabel and Miral screenwriter Rula Jebreal — pic is based on her book of the same name. They were sitting side-by-side in row F at last night’s You Don’t Know Jack screening.

Miral costars The Visitor‘s Hiam Abass and Slumdog Millionaire‘s Frieda Pinto with Willem Dafoe and Alexander Siddig supporting. A boilerplate synopsis calls it “a chronicle of Hind Husseini‘s effort to establish an orphanage in Jerusalem after the 1948 partition of Palestine and the creation of the state of Israel.” (Abass plays Husseini.)

The Tree of Life — Terrence Malick‘s “little tiny story of a kid growing up in the 50s…juxtaposed with a little, tiny micro-story of the cosmos,” in the words of costar Brad Pitt — didn’t make this morning’s official announcement of entries for the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. It was suggested in a 4.11 Variety story that an absence of Malick on this morning’s slate wouldn’t necessarily mean Tree won’t show in Cannes, only that Malick is still dithering in the editing room.

But Charles Ferguson‘s Inside Job — a documentary about the causes and culprits behind the financial meltdown of ’08 — will be shown with a special out-of-competition screening. This morning’s announcement was the first acknowledgment of this film’s existence by anyone on the planet, officially or otherwise, as not even fragmentary info has leaked about this latest effort by the director of the acclaimed No End In Sight, and certainly not a mention of the title.

There was no mention of any extended product-reel screening of Chris Nolan‘s Inception, but then there wouldn’t be at an official Paris press conference. An announcement of this could happen in days to come, or so I’m hoping.

As previously announced, screenings of Ridley Scott‘s Robin Hood will launch the festival on Wednesday, 3.12. And out-of-competition entries, as previously forecast, will include Woody Allen‘s You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, Stephen Frears‘ Tamara Drewe and Oliver Stone‘s Wall Street — Money Never Sleeps.

The top-tier competition entries include Alejandro Gonzales Innaritu‘s Biutiful, Doug Liman‘s Fair Game, Mike Leigh‘s Another Year, Takeshi Kitano‘s Outrage, Bertrand Tavernier’s La Princesse de Monptpensier and Mathieu Almaric‘s Tournee,

The whosit-whatsit competition entries (i.e., a temporary classification) are Xavier Beauvois‘s Des Hommes et des Dieu, Rachid Bouchareb‘s Hors la loi, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun‘s Un Homme Qui Crie (A Screaming Man), Im Sangsoo‘s Housemaid, Abbas Kiarostami‘s Copie Conforme, Lee Chang-dong‘s Poetry, Sergei Loznitsa‘s You, My Joy, Danielle Luchetti‘s La Nostra Vita, Nikita Mikhalkov‘s Utomlyonnye Solntsem 2 and Apichatpong Weerasethakul‘s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

The two announced midnight screenings are Gregg Araki‘s Kaboom and Gilles Marchand‘s L’Autre Monde (Blackhole).

Besides Inside Job, the special screening roster includes Sophie Fiennes‘ Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, Patricia Guzman‘s Nostalgia de la Luz, Sabina Guzzanti‘s Draquila — L’Italia Che Trema, Otar Losseliani‘s Chantrapas, and Diego Luna‘s Abel.

The Un Certain Regard roster: Blue Valentine (d: Derek Cianfrance), O Estranho Caso de Angelica (d: Manouel de Oliveira), Les Amours Imaginaires (d: Xavier Dolan), Los Labios (d: Ivan Fund, Santiago Loza), Simon Werner a Disparu… (d: Fabrice Gobert), Film Socialisme (d: Jean-Luc Godard), Unter Dir Die Stadt (d: Christoph Hochhausler), Rebecca H (d: Lodge Kerrigan), Pal Adreinn (d: Agnes Kocsis), Udaan (d: Vikramaditya Motwane), Marti Dupa Craciun (d: Radu Muntean), Chatroom (d: Hideo Nakata), Aurora (d: Cristi Puiu), Ha Ha Ha (d: Hong Sangsoo), Life Above All (d: Oliver Schmitz), Octubre (d: Daniel Vega), R U There (d: David Verbeek) and Rizhao Chongqing Chongqing Blues (d: Xiaoshuai Wang).

The full Pitt quote about Tree of Life, as initially posted on Ain’t It Cool News: “It’s this little tiny story of a kid growing up in the 50s with a mother who’s grace incarnate and a father who’s oppressive in nature. So he is negotiating his way through it, defining who he’s gonna be when he grows up. And that is juxtaposed with a little, tiny micro-story of the cosmos, from the beginning of the cosmos to the death of the cosmos. So that’s where the sci-fi — or the sci-fact — comes in.”

Spitballed titles that weren’t announced this morning include Julian Schnabel‘s Miral (which will be unveiled in Venice and Toronto, Schnabel told me last night), Guillame Canet‘s Little White Lies, Cam Archer‘s Shit Year, Susanne Bier‘s The Revenge, John Cameron Mitchell‘s Rabbit Hole, Jodie Foster‘s The Beaver, Bruce Robinson‘s The Rum Diary, Oren Peli‘s Area 51, David O. Russell‘s The Fighter, Julie Taymor‘s The Tempest, Peter Weir‘s The Way Back, Sylvester Stallone‘s The Expendables, Julio Medem‘s Room In Rome, Kevin Macdonald‘s Eagle Of The Ninth, David Mackenzie‘s The Last Word, and Peter Mullan‘s Neds.

Nor was there any mention of Bertrand Blier‘s The Clink Of Ice, Isabelle Czajka‘s Living On Love Alone, Julie Bertucelli‘s The Tree, Johnnie To‘s Death Of A Hostage (Hong Kong), or Takashi Miike‘s Thirteen Assassins (Japan).

Big Hollywood columnist Kurt Schlicter trashed me today for saying on one hand that I’d be impressed and delighted if authors Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens could somehow arrest Pope Benedict for crimes against humanity during a planned visit to England in September, and on the other hand calling for an end to the persecution of director Roman Polanski for a 32-year-old incident involving unlawful sex with a minor.

Polanski is a major art-god guilty of one despicable act; Pope Benedict is a Catholic Church bureaucrat who officially and administratively looked the other way in the face of strong testimony and evidence about dozens if not scores of rapes of young boys. Not even in the same ballpark.

In acknowledgment of Ridley Scott‘s forthcoming Robin Hood (Universal, 5.14), The Guardian‘s Stephen Moss has written a big, fat, long-winded piece about the historical origins of the legendary forest bandit.

The suede-and-deerskin garbed Robin Hood as played by (l. to r.) Russell Crowe, Kevin Costner, Errol Flynn, Sean Connery and (the most Britishy of the lot) Richard Todd.

Except there’s nothing all that clear-cut about any of it. Okay, one thing emerges, which is that the men whose history may or may not have evolved into the legend of Robin Hood were in no way political or noble or pure-of-heart even — they were just hand-to-mouth thieves in a rather rascally sense.

Here are the boiled-down basics:

(1) The Robin Hood legend is just that — a one-size-fits-all bag of mythical bullshit that each culture re-imagines and re-invents to suit its own agenda. In speaking to Stephen Knight, professor of English literature at Cardiff University and one of the world’s leading authorities on the literary evolution of Robin Hood, Moss is told that “the empirical, real Robin Hood — like the ‘real’ King Arthur — is a 20th-century take on reality. Who cares if there was a real Robin Hood? There’s a real myth which is living and breathing.”

(2) And yet there are kernels of apparent historical truth that nearly amount — in Moss’s mind, at least — to a kind of holy grail. “David Crook, the former assistant keeper at the Public Record Office, says he “can make the strongest case anybody can, given how limited the evidence is, for a person called Robert Hod (‘an outlaw and evildoer of our land’) in 1225, who I think may be the same person as a bloke called Robert of Wetherby, who was chased by a posse of sheriff’s men – specially hired men, which was very unusual — in 1225 and captured. There is a payment for a chain, to hang his body in chains, in the Yorkshire accounts for that year. We even know how much was spent on the expedition to catch him.”

“Crook’s theory is that the tale of the pursuit of Robert Hod/Robert of Wetherby rapidly spread, carried up and down the Great North Road, and within a generation Robe Hod and Robhod had become jokey generic names for outlaw. Crook says he has even found a legal document from 1261, in which a clerk has scribbled out the offender’s real name and entered the joke name.

“I find Crook’s hypothesis seductive,” Moss writes. “Robert Hod/Robert of Wetherby is a real figure, active in the 1220s, captured and killed by the sheriff of Nottingham (briefly holding the post of sheriff of York) in 1225, spawning a Billy the Kid-type legend that spreads all over England, becoming the generic outlaw, and producing ballads and songs which are common all over England 150 years later. The chronology of cultural diffusion feels feasible: a sliver of reality — a common outlaw in the badlands of south Yorkshire, robbing travellers on the Great North Road, with nothing to suggest his motive was anything other than personal gain and whose criminal career is rapidly, and bloodily, brought to an end — gradually becomes this all-pervading myth which eventually reaches Hollywood and the world.

(3) Robin Hood may have actually been two or three guys combined, in large part because of the legend’s poet laureate — a 14th-century mystic called Richard Rolle. Moss speaks to David Greenwood, “an engineer by trade [who] has spent much of his spare time decoding an early narrative poem” called The Gest of Robyn Hode, and has spent much time “examining — even excavating — sites connected with Robin Hood, and publishing books with his conclusions, the central one being that Gest was written by Rolle.

“The basic conclusion is that Rolle wrote the poem, and that it features not one Robin Hood but three: (1) Robin Hood the archer, (2) Robin Hood the master (based on the wealthy Nottingham merchant Sir Geoffrey Luttrell), and (3) Robin Hood the poet (Rolle himself). Greenwood accepts that, by the 1320s, Robhod was already well established as a generic name for outlawry, and thinks Rolle applied that to himself and his companions in an outlaw band which harried Edward II in both Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire in 1322-23 before being pardoned.

“This is useful for me,” Moss remarks, “because I can fuse the two theories: Crook’s Wetherby criminal establishes the pseudonym; Rolle adds much of the detail, the raw material from which others can flesh out the legend. It is speculative, but very clever [as] the three Robins cover all the bases: archery, amelioration (Luttrell left a will bequeathing much of his money to worthy causes) and art.”

HE’s Moises Chiullan‘s 4.14 report about a slew of 75th anniversary 20th Century Fox Blu-ray releases includes a mention of an “all-new Director’s Definitive Cut” of Michael Mann‘s The Last of the Mohicans. As Chiullan remarks, “The only reason this is relevant to the front page is that it begs the question ‘will Mann ever stop re-editing?'”

That’s great about Universal senior publicist/marketing guy Michael Moses becoming the new co-president of Universal marketing because…you know, whatever, Moses has read and liked HE for years so every well-placed corporate pally in a position to support and approve is a good thing in a loose-shoe hoo-hah sense.

Longtime Universal marketing honcho Eddie Egan will remain in charge and in his same position. He and Moses are now both co-presidents, but Moses will still report to him. Maria Pekurovskaya, whom I’ve never spoken to but whom presumably reads or at least glances at HE from time to time, has been named exec vp creative advertising.

Yesterday The Wrap/Deal Central‘s Jeff Sneider reported that Scarlett Johansson and Sam Rockwell have attached themselves to Lunatic at Large, a “dark and surprising mystery” that Kubrick abandoned shortly after Spartacus.

The script was sent to me a few days ago, and while I’ve only skimmed through it I’m wondering how much of the interest is about what’s actually on the page vs. the intrigue/allure of shooting something that great Stanley K. might have made if he hadn’t transferred his energies to Lolita. Which indicates he may have had problems with Lunatic, no?

Stephen R. Clarke‘s script was “based on a treatment by noir pulp novelist Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me) who was commissioned by Kubrick in the late ’50s after working with the filmmaker on The Killing and Paths of Glory,” Sneider reports.

I say this all the time but this time I’m really serious. If anyone can score a copy of Noah Oppenheim‘s Jackie Kennedy script — the one reported to be a Darren Aronofsky-Rachel Weisz project by Entertainment Weekly‘s Nicole Sperling — and pass it along, I would be most grateful and would reciprocate in kind.

The plan is for Weisz to play the former First Lady and Aronofsky to direct-produce. The script is basically about the former Mrs. Kennedy’s experience from the day of JFK’s assassination in Dallas on 11.22.63 to his burial in Arlington Cemetery four days hence. It would obviously involve all kinds of CG blending of newly-shot material with newsreel and videotape footage of the actual events, etc.

I’m curious because this frankly doesn’t seem like Aronofsky-type material, to be honest.

I’ll be attending tonight’s Zeigfeld screening of Barry Levinson‘s You Don’t Know Jack, the Al Pacino-as-Jack Kevorkian biopic that will debut on HBO on Saturday, 4.24. All along Kevorkian’s aim has been to end suffering. If there’s one thing the American Medical Association is not interested in doing, it’s acting compassionately in the face of prolonged agony caused by a terminal illness.