Asked by GQ‘s Alex Pappademas about alleged pressure upon Quentin Tarantino to significantly trim Inglourious Basterds (the Wrap‘s Sharon Waxman reported that the film might conceivably lose as much as 40 minutes), Harvey Weinstein responds with emphatic denials — “this is nuts,” Quentin “won’t cut,” “I don’t think it’s going to be shorter,” etc. And then he says that the film actually will be cut down somewhat.

“Those stories are all untrue,” Harvey says. “There’s no fucking way. Here, read my lips: That is nuts. Please don’t even write that — it’s insanity. There’s not even a question of that. Whatever you’re reading, it’s like some insane blogger. There’s no truth to any of this. He’s not gonna cut.

“What he’s doing is just reorganizing some scenes. I mean, the guy had six weeks to cut his movie [for Cannes]; most guys take six months. Most guys take a year. When I worked with Martin [Scorsese], we’d do eighteen months in post-production. Quentin Tarantino cuts a movie in six weeks? Come on, there’s shit on that cutting-room floor that’ll blow your brains out. I was telling Quentin the opposite — ‘You should put that shit back in the movie.’ There’s scenes with Brad Pitt and the Basterds, and I’m praying he puts that shit back in, ’cause it’s un-fucking-believably great.

“Listen — this movie will be between two hours and twenty minutes and two hours and twenty-seven minutes. I don’t think it’s going to be shorter — it’s just a question of rearranging. I know he’s putting footage back into the movie. I know he’s got some cool shit that he didn’t get time to address.”

Variety‘s Todd McCarthy and the Hollywood Reporter‘s Kirk Honeycutt both reported in their reviews that the running time was two hours and 32 minutes. So what Harvey is really saying is that apart from whatever Tarantino is considering regarding additions and re-shufflings, the final running time will be either five or twelve minutes shorter than what was shown in Cannes.

Weinstein also tells Pappademas that Tarantino long ago wrote a sprawling Band of Brothers-like Basterds storyline that goes way beyond what’s in the film, and that there’s current interest on his and Tarantino’s part to shoot a Basterds prequel.

“We weren’t even gonna do it as a movie!” he says. “We were gonna do this as, like, 16 hours for Showtime or HBO. He had so much stuff mapped out, we could have done like 3 movies. It was just epic. We could do two movies, three movies. I was begging for the movies, but Quentin wanted to do the TV series, Bob [Weinstein] wanted to do the TV series, so it was like two against one, you know? And I was getting outvoted all over the place, so I just figured, ‘All right, forget it, I’m not gonna be a loser, I’ll jump to the winning side.’ And then Quentin turns it into one movie. Go figure.”

Telegraph music critic Neil McCormick yesterday posted the best written and most bluntly honest reaction to Michael Jackson‘s life and passing that I’ve read thus far. Wait for dusk, take the IRT down to Astor Place, walk over to First Avenue and find a clean car to lean against, take out your iPhone or Blackberry and read it that way. Trust me.

“‘This is it, this really is it,’ announced Michael Jackson in his last official public appearance, at the O2 centre on March 5th, 2009. He could have had no idea how true that phrase would turn out to be. The self-styled King of Pop is dead. There was to be no triumphant comeback just a final bizarre twist in pop’s strangest soap opera.

“And that is what Michael Jackson’s existence had long since turned into, a particularly weird real life melodrama, played out in tabloid newspapers, gossip magazines, TV inquisitions and a succession of court rooms.

“It was a story of a prolonged and ugly fall from grace told in whispers and innuendo, but all too rarely (sadly) in song. It was eight years since he made a record, and probably twenty since he made a good one.

“Jackson rose like a showbusiness meteorite from much loved child star to the greatest pop icon of his time, but once installed on the throne he craved, he seemed to unravel before our very eyes. He mutilated his appearance in a vain attempt to turn himself into his childhood fantasy hero, Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up. He installed himself in a playground that he called Neverland, with monkeys and other animals for company. He entangled himself in inappropriate relationships with young boys.”

Wait…I have to stop here. “Inappropriate”? What’s wrong with diseased and predatory?

“He married and divorced Elvis Presley’s daughter. He acquired children through some surrogate shenanigans with his nurse. His nose apparently fell off. He blew an astonishing amount of money and wound up an itinerant superstar, pursued through the courts by creditors and sheiks baying that he owed them millions of dollars.

“Neverland closed its gates. His belongings were exhibited for auction, including such prize items as an actual throne and an oil portrait of Jackson as a fairy tale ruler. He grew skinnier and paler (quite something for a black man) and apparently explored every possible avenue to return to the limelight without actually having to perform live.

“And then he surrendered to the inevitable and announced his return to the stage. Only even then, he seemed to be simultaneously announcing his retirement, telling us it would be the last time we would ever see him, in London at least. Or the last 50 times. ‘This,’ he kept repeating like a mantra he didn’t even believe himself, ‘is it.’

“I was asked last week by the LA Times why I thought Michael Jackson was staging his comeback in the UK rather than the US. ‘Are the British more forgiving?’ the journalist wanted to know. My off-the-cuff reply was that because we watched the whole Jackson saga unfold across the Atlantic, tuning into scenes from LA on our home screens, we always treated it as a kind of fantastic Hollywood soap that said as much about America as it did about Jackson himself. And ultimately it didn’t really matter to us whether his comeback was a triumph or failure, we just wanted to catch the next episode.

“Well, this is it, this is really it. The final twist turns out to have been both impossible to predict, yet strangely anti-climactic, as our hero (or villain) shuffles off the world’s stage, not with a bang, but in an ambulance, to die behind closed doors, out of the public eye.

“I wanted to believe, against all the odds, that this rather lost and bewildered fifty year old superhasbeen was going to stage one last rally, that he had it in him to reconnect with his extraordinary talent. I tried to convince myself he was a showbiz trouper and that the call of the footlights, the impatient rustle of the audience gathering beyond the curtain, would somehow snap him out of his lethargic, disassociative state, and that he would rise to the occasion.

“But his behaviour at his press conference suggested otherwise. And rumours from LA grew steadily worse, as he failed to turn up to rehearsals, appeared at a dermatology clinic carrying a bag labelled ‘skin cancer’ (which seemed to be more of a photo op than an actual health complaint) and then postponed his opening shows for the vaguest of reasons.

“As famous last words go, ‘This is it’ has a certain iconic ring to it, but Michael Jackson’s final recorded public utterances are actually less edifying and a great deal more disturbing. ‘I don’t know how I’m going to do fifty shows. I’m not a big eater — I need to put some weight on,’ Jackson whined to fans gathered outside the rehearsal studio.

“So did the concert promoters do for Michael Jackson? They certainly have some questions to answer. It is pretty clear that he was, in some respects, a reluctant participant, driven back to the stage as a last resort to pay off overwhelming debts, whatever promoter Randy Phillips, head of AEG Live, has said about Jackson wanting to do it for his kids, while he still could.

“Dismissing rumours of Jackson’s frailty and ill health, Phillips declared on 21st May: ‘I would trade my body for his tomorrow. He’s in fantastic shape.’ I think this particular medical expert will probably be trying to keep a low profile for a while.

“The death of someone so famous shakes us to the core, because it is like a death in the family. Love him or loathe him, Michael Jackson was part of the fabric of all our lives. Or maybe worse, it is like the death of a God, a sudden unexplainable absence in the mythos of the times. President Kennedy, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Lady Diana: these are the kind of deaths that confront us with our own mortality, the realization that the end is unavoidable, death stalks us all, no matter how anointed by the fates.

“Such a death is usually greeted with a kind of incredulity. But this is it. This is really it.”

The brittleness and acidity in Carrie Fisher‘s personality feels just right in this scene from Hal Ashby‘s Shampoo. And the look of resignation on Warren Beatty‘s face when she pops the question is perfect. I wish there were more movies like this today. Whip-smart social comedies with more on their minds than just wanting to make people laugh, I mean.

“The Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into World War II has inspired a splendid movie, full of vivid performances and unforgettable scenes, a movie that uses the coming of war as a backdrop for individual stories of love, ambition, heroism and betrayal. The name of that movie is From Here to Eternity.” — A.O. Scott‘s lead paragraph in his 5.25.01 review of Michael Bay‘s Pearl Harbor. It is still one of the most withering put-downs of a mainstream big-budget Hollywood movie ever written.

This dialogue-free Cliffhanger teaser — an arty-looking music video to the strains of Mozart’s Requiem “Dies Irae” — is without question one of the greatest and most inspiring film trailers ever cut by a mainstream Hollywood studio. The reason is that it made a mediocre and needlessly brutal action movie look classy and cool. Most trailers try to reach the lowest-common-denominator dolts. This one went for the PBS wine-and-cheese crowd, selling the choreography, Alex Thomson‘s awesome photography and the splendor of northern Italy’s Dolomite mountains.

I was totally sold on Cliffhanger after seeing it. And then, of course, I saw the film.

Was the Cliffhanger teaser-trailer included in IFC.com’s “50 Greatest Trailers Ever Made” article, which went up yesterday? Of course not. Does this omission call the legitimacy of the article into question? Yes, it does somewhat. Especially since it salutes this Zabriskie Point trailer, which has one of the most comically awful ad-copy narrations ever heard.

There was a movie-theatre moment eight years ago when I thought Michael Bay might one day grow into a semi-mature film artist. Maybe. To my delight and surprise the opening seconds of Pearl Harbor began with Hans Zimmer‘s music playing for nine beautiful seconds over a black screen — a semi-overture, I thought at first. But the black gave way to a shot of World War I-era biplanes cruising over cornfields during magic hour — a middle-American nostalgia scene. But that black-screen opener was still…well, mildly impressive.

This YouTube clip cuts off a couple of seconds’ worth of blackness so it doesn’t give the full effect. The first 45 to 50 seconds of this clip are a little too photogenic in a slick-TV-ad sort of way, but they’re otherwise engaging and certainly restrained by Bay standards. If only he’d held that black screen for another five seconds!

I asked Bay about the blackness at a press conference the next day. He talked about how he had to fight hard to begin the film this way, especially since it meant not starting this Jerry Bruckheimer-produced film with the traditional highway-tree-lightning Bruckheimer logo.

It wasn’t much of an artistic call on Bay’s part but it was at least something, I felt. I came away from Pearl Harbor half-convinced that if Bay ever wanted wanted to move beyond shallow whambam blockbuster movies that he had the potential to do so.

I was inspired to write this after reading Kim Morgan‘s recent review of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. She also suspects that Bay has more in his quiver than he’s commonly given credit for.

“After settling into the second hour of the movie, dismayed I had over another hour ahead of me, it started to come to me: Michael Bay is a surrealist. He may not know he is, he may not like that I’m calling him one, but this money-sucking action filmmaker extraordinaire would do well by Bunuel or Jodorowksy or Gilliam or hell, Aqua Teen Hunger Force (which is absurdist surrealism at its finest, especially the ingenious movie, and the characters would have featured brilliantly in this picture — better than Bay’s ‘jive talking’ bots).

“If the filmmaker had some chutzpah, if he truly tapped into the melting pocket-watch corner of his brain, if he understood his full dreamweaving potential (because I do believe Michael Bay can ‘get me through the night’), the next Transformers would be titled Un Chien Andalou LaBeouf.”

ScriptShadow’s Carson Reeves has read Steven Soderergh‘s 6.22.09 draft of Moneyball — i.e., the one that freaked out Sony chief Amy Pascal and prompted a shutdown last weekend. Having also read Steven Zallian‘s December 2008 draft, Reeves pretty much agrees with Pascal and her Sony team that Soderbergh’s draft more or less messed up a good thing and that their decision to deep-six his film was correct.

“The biggest faux-pas is the handling of the all-important ‘on-base percentage’ stat,” Reeves writes. “This is what the Oakland A’s figured out that no one else did — the hidden statistic which is the key to their success. It’s what allows them to compete with half the salary of all the other teams. This is the movie. Yet here it’s treated like an afterthought.

“In fact, I couldn’t even tell you what the A’s secret to success was in Soderbergh’s draft. It’s implied that there’s a spreadsheet involved but the explanation stops there. A spreadsheet of never-explained numbers? That‘s how the team wins? That’s your hook for the movie?

“Look, Soderbergh is the kind of director who likes to find his movies in the editing room. Shoot a bunch of stuff, see what sticks. If something doesn’t connect logically, throw some voiceover in there and add a little score. That seems to be his plan of attack with Moneyball. I don’t know what the final movie would look like so I couldn’t definitively tell you if he would of salvaged this, but I do know he turned a solid script into an incomprehensible mess. And that’s why his movie was shut down.”

(Thanks to The Playlist‘s Rodrigo Perez for commenting on and passing along the Reeves’ piece.]

The death of Michael Jackson “forced a last-minute cut to Sacha Baron Cohen‘s Bruno,” according to the Guardian‘s Xan Brooks. As the news of Jackson’s passing broke, a scene in which Cohen interviews the singer’s sister, LaToya “was hastily removed from the film” for last night’s premiere screening, he reports. “Sources at Universal, Bruno‘s distributor, said the decision had been made ‘out of respect for Jackson’s family.'”

Ten minutes ago I asked Universal publicity if the LaToya footage would be permanently cut. Their response, received at 11 am LA time, was that they “can’t offer comment just yet.”

The offending scene, as Brooks explains, “features Cohen, in the guise of Bruno, attempting to find Michael Jackson’s phone number on LaToya’s BlackBerry. After Bruno reads aloud what he claims to be the singer’s number, an apparently enraged LaToya terminates the interview and storms off the set. Reports suggest that the scene will not be restored for its official release on July 10th.”

I’ve seen the scene and it’s very mild. It doesn’t slag Michael Jackson — it merely pokes fun at his worldwide fame. LaToya is made fun of but who cares about that? I wouldn’t cut it if I were Universal. Stick to your satirical guns, guys! Stand with Sacha and let the Jacksons eat cake. Why be extra-sensitive about a super-popular and super-talented performer who nonetheless became a full-fledged Frankenstein monster who had his way with young boys?

Compulsively chatty airline passengers and fat movieplex customers who load up on junk food like squirrels getting ready for a long winter — I can’t decide which I despise more.

I’ve cumulatively stood for days (if you consider all my years of going to airports since I was 18) watching airline passengers go up to the initial check-in ticket counter and then proceed to yap-yap-yap with the airline rep for eight or ten or twelve minutes or more. About what?, I’m always wondering. They’ve bought the ticket and their luggage is tagged — what could there be to discuss? And yet they do it every time. Perhaps it’s because some people are nervous about flying and they just want to feel comforted by a friendly voice. Of course, the idea that they’re making others wait in line much longer than necessary never occurs to them. Why should it?

I’ve stared with amazement at Target-dressed, pudgy-bodied moviegoers who go up to the candy counter and buy a couple of extra-large buckets of popcorn, two or three supersize Cokes, trays of nachos with cheese and jalapenos, hot dogs with mustard and relish and an extra-large pack of red licorice, and then load it all onto a couple of carboard trays. Watching this tends to bring about feelings of nausea, of course. On top of the fact that ordering and paying for all this crap takes almost as much time as the yap-yappers at the airport.

It’s well and good for The Hurt Locker to have Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic ratings of 98% and 91% respectively, but you know something really special is happening when the notoriously fickle and eccentric N.Y. Press critic Armond White is standing arm-in-arm with the usual elite-critic suspects — i.e., Joe Morgenstern, A.O. Scott, David Denby, David Edelstein, Scott Foundas, Dana Stevens, etc.

Some excerpts:

(a) “The Hurt Locker might be the first Iraq-set film to break through to a mass audience because it doesn’t lead with the paralysis of the guilt-ridden Yank. The horror is there, but under the rush.” — Edelstein, New York;

(b) “So far, the best fiction films about the Iraq War are Nick Bloomfield‘s Battle for Haditha, Irwin Winkler‘s Home of the Brave and John Moore‘s allegorical Flight of the Phoenix remake. It’s sufficient praise to say The Hurt Locker joins that short list. Kathryn Bigelow has found her perfect subject.” — White, N.Y. Press.

(c) “The Hurt Locker is a viscerally exciting, adrenaline-soaked tour de force of suspense and surprise, full of explosions and hectic scenes of combat, but it blows a hole in the condescending assumption that such effects are just empty spectacle or mindless noise. If it’s not the best action movie of the summer, I’ll blow up my car.” — Scott, N.Y. Times.

(d) “With her strength of revealing character through action, Bigelow comes closer to the tradition of Anthony Mann, Sam Fuller, and other bygone practitioners of the classic Hollywood war movie than to today’s dominant breed of studio A-listers, who create (mostly incoherent) action at the expense of character. The Hurt Locker is the best American film since Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood.” — Foundas, Village Voice.

(e) “In this period of antic fragmentation, Bigelow has restored the wholeness of time and space as essentials for action. Occasionally, a plaintive reader writes me a note after I’ve panned some violent fantasy movie and says something like ‘Some of us like explosions. Ease up.’ Well, I like these explosions, because I believe in them. Realism has its thrills, too.” — Denby, New Yorker.

(f) “A first-rate action thriller, a vivid evocation of urban warfare in Iraq, a penetrating study of heroism and a showcase for austere technique, terse writing and a trio of brilliant performances. Most of all, though, The Hurt Locker is an instant classic that demonstrates, in a brutally hot and dusty laboratory setting, how the drug of war hooks its victims and why they can’t kick the habit.” — Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal.

(g) “After The Hurt Locker (which is without question the most exciting and least ideological movie yet made about the war in Iraq), everyone will remember Jeremy Renner‘s name.” — Stevens, Slate.

Cue all the bloated empties out there in middle America. Are we ready? One, two….”we’re not seeing it because we’d rather just be entertained!”