To go by the trailer, Richard Halpern‘s W.M.D. is a inflammatory political fantasy along the lines of Robert Aldrich’s Twilight’s Last Gleaming (’77). A dud when released and pretty much forgotten, it was about a renegade USAF general (Burt Lancaster) who takes over an ICBM silo and threatens to start World War III unless the President (Charles Durning) reveals the real reason why America waged the Vietnam War. W.M.D. looks iffy and lurid and on-the-nose, but I want to see it.

WMD FINAL TEASER from Richard Halpern on Vimeo.

Jane Campion‘s Bright Star, which screened this morning, is about the subdued and conflicted passions that defined the brief love affair between poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and seamstress Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) from 1818 until Keats’ death, at age 25 from tuberculosis, in 1821.

It’s been done quite perfectly — I was especially taken with Greig Fraser‘s Vermeer-lit photography — with immaculate fealty for the textures and tones of early 19th Century London, and a devotion to capturing the kind of love that is achingly conveyed in hand-written notes that are hand delivered by caring young fellows in waistcoats. You know what I mean.

But it struck me nonetheless as too slow and restricted and…well, just too damnably refined. I looked at my watch three times and decided around the two-thirds mark that it should have run 100 rather than 120 minutes. I know — a typical guy reaction, right? The pacing is just right for the time period — it would have felt appalling on some level if it had been shot and cut with haste for haste’s sake — but there’s no getting around the feeling that it’s a too-long sit. It’s basically a Masterpiece Theatre thing that my mother will love. I’m not putting it down on its own terms. I felt nothing but admiration for the various elements.

A journalist friend told me an hour ago that Bright Star will be Oscar nominated in seven or eight categories because it delivers that particular brand of period romance fulfillment that people of a certain persuasion line up for when movies of this sort play the Royal in West Los Angeles and the Lincoln Plaza in Manhattan.

Read Tom Chiarella‘s Esquire rave, watch the trailer, think it over, respond. If it’s as good as all that — not, as Chiarella implies, in an audience-film way but in a formidable-but-tough film lover’s way — why didn’t Harvey bring it to Cannes? I would have. If I could afford it.

“I have not read Dan Brown‘s ‘Angels & Demons,'” N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott confesses in his review of the film version. “I have come to believe that to do so would be a sin against my faith, not in the Church of Rome but in the English language, a noble and beleaguered institution against which Mr. Brown practices vile and unspeakable blasphemy.

“The movie, without being particularly good, is nonetheless far less hysterical than The Da Vinci Code. Its preposterous narrative, efficiently rendered by the blue-chip screenwriting team of Akiva Goldsman and David Koepp, unfolds with the locomotive elegance of a Tintin comic or an episode of Murder, She Wrote.” [Director Ron] Howard‘s direction combines the visual charm of mass-produced postcards with the mental stimulation of an easy Monday crossword puzzle. It could be worse.

“The utter silliness of Angels & Demons is either its fatal flaw or its saving grace, and in the spirit of compassion I suppose I’d be inclined to go with the second option. The movie all but begs for such treatment.”

A friend who passed along A.O. Scott‘s Angels & Demons review asked when I’d be posting my own. “I forgot to post one,” I confessed. “I guess I’ll write something tomorrow morning. It’s a hugely unimportant film.”

The Nine trailer is up. I want to like this and am looking forward despite Rob Marshall directing and Kate Hudson costarring. “A vibrant and provocative musical,” the copy says, “that follows the life of film director Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis) as he reaches a creative and personal crisis of epic proportion, while balancing the numerous women in his life including his wife (Marion Cotillard), his mistress (Penelope Cruz), his film star muse (Nicole Kidman), his confidant and costume designer (Judi Dench), an American fashion journalist (Kate Hudson), the whore from his youth (Fergie) and his mother (Sophia Loren),” etc.

If Martin Scorsese plans to do a warts-and-all, Raging Bull-styled biopic of Frank Sinatra, bring it on. The mafia ties, the downswirl period from ’48 to From Here To Eternity, the temper, snubbed by JFK in ’62, etc. The Sinatra cult is so dug in and devotional that anything the least bit fawning would be seen as a capitulation. Phil Alden Robinson is reportedly doing the screenplay.

Tatiana Siegel‘s Variety story says with absolute seriousness that Leonardo DiCaprio is an “obvious candidate” to play Sinatra. Who else to play a skinny, narrow-faced Italian who was 5’7″ in heels than a 73 inch tall, no-longer-thin, wide-faced guy who looks mostly German?

Forest Whitaker and 50 Cent (a.k.a., Curtis Jackson) playing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in another adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic, with Abel Ferrara directing? This is the worst idea I’ve heard in months. It sounds awful. It would be one thing if the actors looked vaguely similar or at least had similar physiques. These guys don’t even look like cousins. We all want Ferrara to keep body and soul together, but of all the things he could do…

Lou Ye‘s graphically gay Spring Fever didn’t arouse me pro or con or any which way. I tried tapping out a reaction last night but nothing happened. I walked around and shot video instead. I tried again this morning, couldn’t get it up. So I’m deferring to Derek Elley’s 5.13 Variety review, which I fully agree with.

“Three years after tweaking the nose of China’s Film Bureau with full-frontal nudity and direct references to the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident in Summer Palace, mainland helmer Lou Ye is at it again — this time with lashings of gay sex — in the five-way ensembler Spring Fever,” he begins.

“Pic circumvents the bureau’s five-year filmmaking ban on Lou by being registered as a Hong Kong-French co-production, though beyond fests (especially gay ones) and the hardcore arthouse crowd, this over-long, very Euro-flavored Spring won’t make many B.O. wickets bloom.”

Fish Tank star Katie Jarvis “was having an argument with her boyfriend across a train platform at Tibury Town station in the East of England when she was approached by a casting director,” writes Indiewire‘s Eugene Hernandez in a piece called “The Discovery of Cannes (so far): Katie Jarvis.”

“Jarvis, who’d never acted before, didn’t believe she was actually being approached for a film and intially declined to give over her phone number. Later, when asked to dance during an audition, she also declined. But dancing is crucial to the young character of Mia in the film, so the room was cleared and she danced alone in front of a camera. ‘We were looking for a real girl,’ Arnold said this morning in Cannes.

“Well, in Katie Jarvis they certainly found one. Jarvis’ bio reads simply: ‘Katie makes her acting debut in Fish Tank.'”

A “real girl,” I would add, in the instinctual Bristol Palin sense of the term. Jarvis isn’t in Cannes because she gave birth last weekend. Frankly? If Jarvis was into acting or at least trying to make the most of her opportunity, would she have decided to have a kid just as filming was ending, or soon after? (Fish Tank was shot last summer.) If she was committed to having a child this early in life, you’d think she’d at least wait a year or two and see what might come from the acclaim and attention. Kids are expensive.

Prior to last night’s 7pm showing of Lou Ye‘s Spring Fever at the Salle Debussy, journalists were treated to high-quality video of celebrities arriving for the red-carpet premiere of Up, which was happening next door. Watch and listen. I heard swooning sounds when Aishwarya Rai appeared.