It was announced today that Jean-Marc Vallee‘s The Young Victoria, in which Emily Blunt portrays the twentyish 19th Century queen-to-be, will close next month’s Toronto Film Festival. Atom Egoyan‘s Chloe, a hothouse drama about marital infidelity with Liam Neeson, Amanda Seyfried and Julianne Moore, will also unspool at a TIFF gala.

Bill Clinton‘s feat in getting those two journalists released from prison in North Korea is one of the most admirable things he’s ever done, either during his Presidency or following it or whenever. It almost erases all the cheap b.s. he was spewing around on Hilary’s behalf during the ’08 Demcratic primaries. Let’s say it balances them out. 11:30 pm Update: Clinton and the two journalists left Pyongyang on a jet to Los Angeles at 8:30 am North Korean time, or about four hours ago.

HE’s Moises Chiullan is reporting that 101 Distribution, a Canadian DVD outfit, is releasing both parts of Steven Soderbergh’s Che on Region 1 DVD tomorrow (i.e., @Wednesday, 8.5) for $27.99 each. Here are Amazon links to Part 1 and Part 2.

The East German Stasi agents running the marketing for the Criterion Co. are still keeping their plans for issuing their Che Blu-ray disc[s] under wraps. Not a hint, no mentions of a possible month or season for release, not even a wishin and hopin’ statement…zip.

If you want to be liberal and mild-mannered about the comme ci comme ca/hoi polloi/easy lay response to G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (Paramount, 8.7), you could say that the word has gone out that it’s cool to drain your brain pan and regress into your 13 year-old self and just popcorn-munch your way through this heavily CG’ed, down-on-your-knees Stephen Sommers film. And if enough people decide to snort and scratch and show primitive love then fine, whatever, it’ll make some dough.

But it’s still looking like an opening weekend gross in the mid 20s to me. Okay, maybe a notch higher. Today’s average first choice rating is 18% with 25% of the under 25 males and 29% of the over-25 males leading the pack. Not bad but not wonderful either. Not enough, certainly, for a film that cost a reported $175 million to make aside from marketing.

The full-length trailer of Peter Jackson‘s The Lovely Bones (Paramount, 12.11) will be unveiled, I suspect, sometime Thursday night. Here’s an Entertainment Tonight teaser, courtesy of Trailer Addict and In Contention. No matter how good, period-perfect, overbearing, great or commercially problematic the film turns out to be (and I’m mentioning the last possibility due to alleged concerns in this realm), it will certainly bear the Jackson stamp. And you know what that means.

It means that The Lovely Bones will try to dazzle, caress, smother, cajole and generally work you over like Lou Ferrigno until you drop to your knees in submission. Or until you rebel. Or — this is what I’m hoping for — audiences are won over by a poetically sad and elegant human drama that has the integrity not to try and sell its immaculate sensitivity.

It seems as if CHUD’s Devin Faraci is ready to surrender, and that’s fine. I’m a declared Jackson hater and that’s fine too, but I’d love to get off that train and start hearing/playing another tune. I’d be delighted if the lighter-touch Jackson of Heavenly Creatures would make a return. I would love to move on and give up the hate. Which, I realize, is boring to read about.

“Jackson surprised everyone [at a small ComicCon presser] by showing a four minute sizzle reel for The Lovely Bones,” Faraci writes. “What we saw was essentially an extended trailer, but it offered a serious look into the world Jackson had created — not just the main reality of the book but also the afterlife which main character Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) visits after being brutally murdered.

“The footage was simply sumptious. Jackson’s eye for period detail was right on (the story is set in 1973); he successfully evokes the era without ever rubbing your face in the 70s aspect of it. The real world was filled with rich, dark hues while the afterlife was brighter, often candy colored. We saw moments in the afterlife without context, and the scenes were fantastical, including a shot where huge ships sail into giant bottles. Susie walks across a lake to come to a lavishly lit floating gazebo. She stands in the middle of speeding traffic on a busy night road. A hippy girl dances gaily at the very curvature of the green Earth.

“The idea, which is in the book, is each person experiences [heaven] based on what their life experience is,” Jackson said. “What Susie experiences in her afterlife is based on being a 14-year-old in 1973 and…the pop culture that she’s grown up with and the life experiences she’s had. For our research in the afterlife, we actually looked at episodes of The Partridge Family. Which is not where you normally go for the afterlife.”

“While the afterlife material was visually intriguing, I was most interested in the real world scenes. This will be where the meat of the film happens. 14-year old Susie, is lured into an underground room by neighbor George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), who rapes, murders and dismembers her. Susie’s family must deal with the loss of the daughter and the open-ended nature of the case, all while Susie watches – and tries to communicate — from beyond.

“Tucci is almost unrecognizable. It took me a minute to figure out who the guy was under the make-up.

“‘Stanley liked the idea of playing the part, but I think he was terribly worried about being spat on in malls because he’s a very, very evil character,’ Jackson said. Luckily for the actor his director envisioned a very different appearance for him. ‘Stanley also liked the idea of looking the least like Stanley Tucci as he possibly could.’

“It was Tucci who really stood out; in just a couple of snippets he was utterly convincing playing a cold-hearted evil man, and also a guy who was hiding in plain site, just out of the reach of the law. There’s a scene where Tucci sits on his couch being interviewed by a police detective that will, I think, be electric in the final film. What I saw was impressive, and if voters can get past the evil of the character, I think Tucci could be looking at an Oscar nomination.

“The big question mark for me remains Mark Wahlberg, who came in at the last minute (Ryan Gosling had originally held the role) and who seems to be wearing a cheesy wig. He plays Susie’s dad, a role requiring lots of pain, grief and anger. We didn’t see enough to really get an idea of how Wahlberg plays it, but Jackson did tell us what surprising film won the actor the role.

“We really liked his comedy that was in I Heart Huckabees, and one of the things with the character of Jack Salmon is he’s an obsessive. I mean, he’s kind of an obsessive in a gentle, comedic way, and he’s an obsessive in his relationship with his daughter. And then when she dies and he’s wracked with guilt, but he’s also thinking, ‘Who did this? Who did this?’ And he becomes obsessed with finding the killer. So we wanted somebody, but we didn’t again want to play that heavy and make it maudlin.”

“The entire project is a tricky one; Jackson himself said that the book doesn’t lend itself to a cinematic structure, and the tone of the story is tough to nail. One moment we’re in a strange afterlife with Susie and the next we’re with her grieving, destroyed family. And in the end the film is the story of the brutal slaying of a teenage girl, not the easiest subject. I don’t think that the visuals of the film were ever in doubt, and if they were the four-minute extended trailer removed all of it. But how will the film itself play?”

Keith Olbermann‘s “special comment” last night about rampant Congressional corruption in the face of proposed public-option health care reform was/is a classic. He stated the basics, which is that Republicans are paid big money for serving the insurance industry, Big Pharma, hospitals, HMO’s and nursing homes. Same deal with Blue Dog Democrats. He named names, ripped them thoroughly and warned these lying nobles with impending job loss.

“I could bring up all the other Democrats doing their masters’ bidding in the House or the Senate,” Olberman said. “All the others who will get an extra thousand from somebody if they just postpone the vote another year, another month, another week, because right now without the competition of a government-funded insurance company, in one hour the health care industries can make so much money that they’d kill you for that extra hour of profit, I could call them all out by name.

“But I think you get the point. We don’t need to call the Democrats holding this up Blue Dogs. That one word ‘Dogs’ is perfectly sufficient. But let me speak to them collectively, anyway.I warn you all. You were not elected to create a Democratic majority. You were elected to restore this country. You were not elected to serve the corporations and the trusts who the government has enabled for the last eight years.

“You were elected to serve the people. And if you fail to pass or support this legislation, the full wrath of the progressive and the moderate movements in this country will come down on your heads. Explain yourselves not to me, but to them. They elected you, and in the blink of an eye, they will replace you.

“If you will behave as if you are Republicans — as if you are the prostitutes of our system — you will be judged as such. And you will lose not merely our respect. You will lose your jobs.

“Every poll, every analysis, every vote, every region of this country supports health care reform, and the essential great leveling agent of a government-funded alternative to the unchecked duopoly of profiteering private insurance corporations. Cross us all at your peril.”

A music video directed by Heath Ledger sometime in late ’07 will finally see the light of day on Tuesday, 8.4, some 18 months after his stupid accidental death. Modest Mouse will premiere the Ledger-directed video for their track “King Rat” tomorrow on their MySpace music page.

“The animated video was conceptualized and directed by Ledger,” writes Spin‘s Anna Hyclak, “but was left unfinished when the died of an accidental overdose in January 2008. The Masses — a film and music company that Ledger was a partner in — completed the video in his honor.

“Ledger approached Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock about wanting to direct a music video for the band while they were on a boat trip with a mutual friend in Ledger’s native Australia.

“‘Heath’s vision, brave and unapologetic in its nature, would marry his love of bold and original music with his impassioned stance against the illegal commercial whale hunts taking place off the coast of Australia each year,’ the band has written in a post on their MySpace blog. ‘Always one to operate from his heart and take a stand for what he cared deeply about, Heath’s intention was to raise awareness on modern whaling practices through a potent visual piece without having to say a word. It was his way to let the story, in its candid reversal, speak for itself.'”

The new Avatar poster is wrong. The thinking behind it is about telling the uninitiated that this James Cameron film is about exotic blue-skinned people with white pinpoint tattoos. But it also suggests that the film is entirely animated, which of course it isn’t. Or at least, not in the way most people understand the term “animated.” Much/most of Avatar is in 3D animation of a much higher quality than anything seen before, and this poster sells this aspect short. It looks primitive and unimaginative, like a “test” poster. Take it down, Tony Sella , and make something better. Please.

MacRumors.com’s Eric Slivka has posted another story about Apple’s said to be forthcoming “10-inch, 3G-enabled tablet, akin to a jumbo iPod touch.” A veteran analyst is quoted as saying that “the machine impresses with its display of hi-def video content…it’s better than the average movie experience, when you hold this thing in your hands.” Slivka also mentions “a possible $699-$799 price point” with a possible November launch. I posted a link to an earlier story on 7.26 that indicated a slightly lower price.

Following advance ballyhoo, Variety‘s Anne Thompson (a.k.a., “Thompson on Hollywood”) today became an official hotshot IndieWire columnist. Same column name, fresh redesign, different URL…and it’s off to the races. Her first IndieWire column is about how Hollywood is playing it safe, but Thompson says she’s now planning on being a bit more of a freewheeling, let-the-chips-fall reporter/opinionator.

As Thompson admits, this was not entirely her signature style when she wrote her Variety column as well as her previous “Risky Business” column for the Hollywood Reporter. She told it straight but with an eye toward political ramifications. “I had to write within the realm of the trades,” she says. “I had to write within the box. But that no longer exists [for me].”

Everybody who works for a trade (or any mainstream print publication) does the same. Movie critics included. This doesn’t mean staffers necessarily pull their punches as much as occasionally sand off a story’s edge with carefully sculpted prose (i.e., phrases like “remains to be seen”) rather than laying their cards totally face up and blunt-ass.

Nonetheless, Thompson’s statement about being a bit more of a come-what-may candor dispenser at Indiewire reminds me of a story that James Farmer once told about a conversation he had with Lyndon Johnson in the Oval Office. Farmer told Johnson he’d never been much of a civil-rights advocate when he represented Texas in the Senate so what accounted for his passionate support of civil-rights legislation as U.S. president? Johnson replied by quoting a famous line by Martin Luther King: “Free at last, free at last…thank God almighty, I’m free at last!”

Thompson also said, however, that she’s not quite the stand-alone, self-propelling entrepeneur that others are in the online realm. She’s happy about “not being in this entirely all by myself. I own the site and I designed the site myself, yes, but the guys at IndeWire really know their stuff. I know I couldn’t have done it as well without them. And I think it’s going to work.”

Here’s a David Carr/Media Decoder piece about Thompson in today’s N.Y. Times.