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Variety‘s Todd McCarthy has reviewed the Red Riding trilogy, a forthcoming IFC Films release that was made by England’s Channel 4 presentation and which runs — wait for it — 302 minutes. It will play at this weekend’s Telluride Film Festival but not, significantly, at the Toronto Film Festival. And I wonder why, given McCarthy’s enthusiasm for the level of craft and the acting. The three films are Julian Jarrold‘s 1974 (104 minutes), James Marsh‘s 1980 (95 minutes) and Anand Tucker‘s 1983 (103 minutes).

Wait…McCarthy sat through the whole 302 minutes in one sitting at the Sunset Screening Room on 8.26 (i.e., seven days ago)?

Fifteen months ago the Hollywood Reporter and then Collider‘s Cal Kemp (linking to the THR story) reported about Robert Downey, Jr. eyeing a lead role in Cowboys and Aliens, an adaptation of Scott Mitchell Rosenberg‘s 2006 graphic novel series. Earlier today Variety‘s Michael Fleming reported that director Jon Favreau will probably team with Downey on the project.

I love this idea sight unseen and not even having flipped through Rosenberg’s comic book. I love it because it’s absurd and stupid and dead-on, and because the film has a chance to redeem the idea of merging six-shooters, horses, buckaroos and super-sized other-wordly FX. The debacle known as Barry Sonnenfeld‘s Wild Wild West took this idea and killed it for years. If Cowboys & Aliens doesn’t make it work — or worse yet, if it does the same “oh, God, I hate this, lemme outta here” Wild Wild West thing — the wrath of the moviegoing world will come down on Cowboys & Aliens like a ton of bricks. No, it won’t. People will go to see it no matter what. But guys like me will be shattered.

Why would I drop everything to see Cowboys & Aliens in a New York minute but I can’t stand the idea of Johnny Depp starring in The Lone Ranger? Why would anyone want to see The Lone Ranger for any reason, under any circumstance, under the influence of any drug…whatever? Clearly, the Favreau-Downey is the cowboy movie people want to see. If I were Depp I’d bail.

Cowboys & Aliens will be a DreamWorks/Universal project. The producers are Imagine Entertainment’s Brian Grazer and Ron Howard along with Steven Spielberg. (Good movie for Spielberg — he’ll be able to make more money!) Platinum Studios CEO Scott Mitchell Rosenberg plus Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci are also producing.

Obviously the coolest aspect of Wes Anderson‘s The Fantastic Mr. Fox (20th Century Fox, 11.13) is the stop-motion animation. This is the same technique, of course, used by Merian C. Cooper and Willis O’Brien on King Kong and Ray Harryhausen for his 1950s and ’60s monster movies. It goes with saying that the Eloi, accustomed to the latest super-fluid hard-drive effects, may regard stop-motion as a little too effete and stuck-on-itself. Not me, mind you. I think it’s beautiful. I get it and then some.

I’ve been a little too strident in recent posts and I’m feeling a little sorry about that. It hit me this morning that I should offer an apology. So I am. A totally smooth and edgeless voice in the column would be boring, of course. But I shouldn’t be quite as snarly and self-righteous when it comes to flying-monkey wires and hair colors and such. I like a good argument as much as the next guy but you need to watch it tone-wise.

Something or somebody else takes over when I’m writing HE stuff. It’s a little bit of an alternate-personality thing. There’s the guy I want to be and need to be and like being when I’m dealing with people and visiting my mother and walking around shopping malls and renting cars in airports, and then there’s the other guy who comes into the room when I write the column.

The other guy isn’t wrong or…you know, saying things just to agitate without thought or reflection. I know what I know and passion always involves a bit of gnarly-ness. One of the reasons the other guy works as a voice is that I stopped saying “uh-oh, I’d better not say that” a few years ago. Well, I do say that still but a basic other-guy component is that he’s a bit a loose-screw personality. There’s a bit of a Larry David thing going on. He’s knowledgable and seasoned and knows what he knows but he can be little bit of an eccentric at times, which is why I keep him locked down and muzzled for the most part when I’m dealing with people and opening doors for people and asking for favors and dealing with the upstairs “party elephants.”

I’ve got the other guy figured out voice-wise and attitude-wise and theology-wise and that’s a good thing, but every so often I tell myself I should have pulled back a bit and been a little nicer. And I’m sorry when I haven’t modulated some of my posts with a bit more finesse. It’s kind of a candy-assed cop-out to say “this is a really tough job” and “you try banging out eight to ten stories per day” but it’s true to some extent.

The other side of the coin is that this is a great job. I sometimes feel enormous pride and often a good deal of satisfaction, depending obviously on the day and what’s gone down. The truth is that I’ve been feeling exhausted and a little gloomy on the side over the last few days. I think it’s partly because Jett went back to Syracuse last weekend and I’m feeling kind of despondent on a certain level because of this. I always feel badly when the kids leave. Anyway, I feel slightly better today and will try to be a little nicer and keep the other guy on a slightly gentler leash.

I can’t get enough of Ruben Fleischer‘s Zombieland (Sony, 10.2). The various trailers I’ve seen keep getting more and more kickass. I know exactly what it’ll be (I think) and I’m 90% convinced I’m going to love it unless, you know, it shows a lack of discipline and good story structure and all the other basics. I’m expecting something on the level of Dawn of the Dead mixed with….uhm, Adventureland?

Too bad it’s not being shown at Toronto since every serious-minded film festival needs at least one stupidly enjoyable goof-off flick. And it won’t be that stupid because Jesse Eisenberg is costarring. Eisebnberg’s presence is almost an assurance of quality in that he seems to ask for an Owen Wilson clause in his contracts — he can’t and won’t do full-on stupid, and his lines have to have an element of conversational realism. If it was just Woody Harrelson doing his struttin’ around good-ole-boy thing I might have qualms, but it’s clearly more than that.

Just offering my appreciation to the New York Weinstein Co. publicists for having a screening yesterday of John Hillcoat‘s The Road (opening 10.16) yesterday and not inviting yours truly. This despite urgent pleas on this end to please allow early looksees of Toronto Film Festival selections in order to allow more time to see as many films as possible. I’d like to catch over 35 films in Toronto, but I realistically expect to see, at best, 25 or so.

Thanks also to the good samaritans at Warner Bros. for blowing off repeated requests to see a 2 pm screening today of Steven Soderbergh‘s The Informant! It’s been shown a few times on both coasts and isn’t faring too badly. One guy quite liked it. It reportedly exudes a sort of arch and jocular tone with a kind of robust, attitude-conveying score by Marvin Hamlisch, of all people. In any case the deal in seeing pre-Toronto films is usually “hold your water until you get to Toronto,” which is fine with me. I don’t break my word on this stuff.

The bottom line is that smiles and courtesies are easy and productive because they tend to encourage reciprocity in kind, but that walking around with an attitude chip on your shoulder is its own self-fulfilling karma. Life is always more difficult when certain personalities enter the room. Despite a peace-pipe overture from WB’s departing marketing guy Don Buckley last December, I felt obliged to contact Clint Eastwood directly at the same time in order to somehow wangle an opportunity to see Gran Torino in a timely fashion because the gracious WB p.r. staff wasn’t reaching out. Clint did me a solid and good for him, but wouldn’t it be loverly if certain people could pop a Xanex and learn to chill down?

In addition to the already-tipped Up In The Air, The Road, An Education and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, I’m told that Marco Bellocchio‘s Vincere, Todd Solondz‘s Life During Wartime and Jacques Audiard‘s A Prophet will also play at the Telluride Film Festival, which kicks off two days from now. There’s also a hazy rumor about Michael Moore‘s Capitalism: A Love Story turning up.

I’m also pleased and comforted to say that HE has its Telluride correspondent situation more or less wrapped up as of this morning, although anyone else who’d like to pass thoughts, pics and observations along is certainly welcome. Looking forward to it all.

Give credit where due and acknowledge a knockout idea. The guy who suggested a Top Ten, American Idol-like framework on the Oscar telecast — a mad brush stroke of a concept– is video maestro Jamie Stuart, i.e., “mutinyco.” Here’s how he put it at 11:59 am today on The Hot Blog: “They need to treat the nominees as a top 10 list and not ‘nominees.’ And then structure the broadcast around the top 10 like American Idol and gradually count down the vote tabs from #10 to #1 throughout the program to create suspense.”

Is anyone listening? Have ratings not been a problem with the Oscar telecast in recent years? Not enough Eloi viewers, etc.? Well, the show would be through the roof if they went with this idea. On top of which it would be a huge amount of fun. Tom Sherak…seriously! David Poland showed his colors when he called the idea “slightly creepy”

HE is looking for a special Telluride friend or two or three. Last year’s Telluride friend won’t be attending so get in touch. For some reason I’m not feeling all that jacked about some of the films expected to play there. Jason Reitman‘s Up In The Air , which will make the trek, is feeling more and more like a fait accompli thing. The buzz on The Road has been on the “hmmm, yeah, ahem” side. Werner Herzog‘s hoot movie — Bad Lieutenant: New Orleans Port of Call — will, I’m told, play Telluride instead of My Son My Son, What Have Ye Done? Ditto Lone Scherfig‘s An Education. What else?

The air would be too thin to parachute at this height. Or jump out and free-fall for that matter. But if I could snap my fingers and make it happen I’d put on a bright-yellow fireproof jump suit and helmet plus an oxygen tank and mask and jump out and free-fall for I don’t how many miles. (20?) I’d take video on the way down, and I’d twitter about it too.

I’d savor the fall for as long as possible, and then pull the chute and angle myself so I land in Venice or Mar Vista. And then I’d write a story about it. Seriously — I wish I was around to smell that ashy burnt wood-and-sagebrush scent and see the billowing smoke clouds.

All the Luddites and dead-sea-scrollers who were arguing yesterday in favor of keeping the flying monkey and Scarecrow wires visible in Warner Home Video’s forthcoming The Wizard of Oz Blu-ray (or at least keeping some kind of visible-wires edition of the film in a vault somewhere) can fold up their tents and go home. I spoke yesterday with WHV senior vp George Feltenstein and he confirmed what Hitfix’s Drew McWeeny passed along yesterday in the HE comments section, which is that the wires have been digitally erased.

(l.) Warner Home Video senior vp George Feltenstein; witch-and-monkey castle scene from The Wizard of Oz‘s third act; (r.) restoration expert Robert Harris.

Before making the final call, Felstenstein said he went to resoration guru Robert Harris for advice, and that Harris’s basic mantra was that “if 1939 audiences didn’t see the wires when they saw the film in theatres, then present-day audiences shouldn’t see them on the Blu-ray.”

And 1939 audiences didn’t see the wires due to the state of projection technology and the three-strip Technicolor alignment process being what they were some 70 years ago, along with the general coarseness of 1939-era film stock.

“To be precise,” Harris explained this morning, “what matters is to recreate the look and texture of the original film, as seen by 1939 audiences. While by scanning original negatives we do get an image of slightly higher resolution, it’s important to make certain that the extra detail doesn’t expose things that were never meant to be seen.”

The Oz Blu-ray will be out on Tuesday, 9.29, following a series of special promotional screenings across the country including a special New York Film Festival showing on Saturday, 9.,26.

I asked Feltenstein why Warner Home Video’s “Murderer’s Row” trio — The Wizard of Oz, North by Northwest and Gone With the Wind (the last two of which will be available by mid November) — were scanned in 8K when 4K is considered to be as good if not better than 35mm film resolution-wise. “For the future,” Feltenstein said. “We want to be ready for the next expansion or upgrade in high-def viewing, so we won’t have to go back and re-scan them again.”

We both agreed that (a) it’s an essential thing for all large-format films to find their way onto Blu-ray sooner rather than later (a no-brainer), (b) it would be a welcome thing for Paramount Home Video to one day re-master Byron Haskin‘s War of the Worlds (1953) with the wires holding up the Martian space ships digitally erased (ditto), and (c) that it’ll be great when other Alfred Hitchcock films (like Vertigo especially, having been filmed in large-format VistaVision) get the Blu-ray treatment also.

Feltenstein — gracious, highly spirited, obviously super-bright– said he’s a daily HE reader, and that I should feel free to get in touch any time. Great!

It’s awfully nice to have a couple of real film guys — serious Catholics, I mean — back on the At The Movies beat. So who will be the Roger Ebert (i.e., the cerebral, highly knowledgable know-it-all) and who will be the Gene Siskel (the “yes but” guy who comes from a gut place as well as a head place and will sometimes say “naah, not buying it, this is bullshit”)?

My sense is that both A.O. Scott and Michael Philips are Genes at heart. They’re both trying to emphasize their Roger aspects right now, but it’ll eventually boil down to a Gene vs. Gene thing. Or maybe that’s just what I want to see. I know that gut skepticism is generally more fun to hang with than impassioned dweeby cinephile musings.

My only concern (and I’m not trying to be an asshole) is that Scott’s hair is too closely clipped. He needs to exude a little more of that slightly frazzle-haired coffeehouse poet thing — more suede and jeans, less starch in his shirt, maybe a toke or two of pot.

So what happened to the video? It played when I first posted and now it’s saying it’s no longer available. No, wait…it’s back. What?