Varietyr‘s Nick Vivarellis reported Thursday that Francis Coppola‘s Youth Without Youth, a World War II-era saga about an old professor (Tim Roth) imbued with a kind of immortality, will have its world premiere at the RomaCinemaFest, which runs Oct. 18th through 27th. Wait…no Venice or Toronto or Telluride film festival unveilings in September? I guess that’s what “world premiere” at an October film festival would mean, right? Obviously somebody doesn’t want the Toronto or Venice or Telluride-attending journos to have the first looksee. Now, let’s see…what does that suggest?

“Lee Marvin moved across the screen like a shark coming in for the kill,” Manohla Dargis has written in a 5.11 N.Y. Times appreciation for this late, great actor whose films are being honored with a retrospective series at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade theatre.

“Long and lean, with shoulders that looked as wide as his hips and hair as silver as a bullet, he seemed built for speed. He roamed across genres, excelling at gangsters and cowboys. Romance was not his thing. He could make you laugh, at times uneasily, but it’s his bad men that stick in your head. They are scary as hell, sometimes seductively so, because their every punch and twist of the knife seems delivered not in the heat of violence but in its chill.”
Not me. I’ve always admired Marvin’s brute masculine force, bit I’ve always preferred his good-guy variations — Walker in Point Blank (that’s right — Walker is a man of steely character and admirable fortitude in that film), the dry-mannered mercenary in The Professionals, the drunken gunfighter and his evil twin brother in Cat Ballou, the flinty Army officer in The Dirty Dozen, the washed-up athlete in Ship of Fools, the good hired-gun in Prime Cut, etc.
Marvin’s bad guys, by contrast, always seemed way too easy for a guy with that voice, those eyes, that size. His baddie-waddies in The Wild One, The Big Heat and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance always brought out that Bob Dylan in me — i.e., “All right, I’ve had enough…what else can you show me?”

The 2007 Seattle Film Festival, which I plan to visit for three and a half days, will run from Thursday, May 24th to Sunday, June 17th — a full 25 days, which is a good 15 days longer than most big-time film festivals. You can bet that the volunteers are whipped when it’s over. I won’t be seeing the opening-nighter, Garth Jenning‘s Son of Rambo (which was acquired at last January’s Sundance Film Festival by Paramount Vantage) but…well, something will happen.

Some have asked me to recount the car-tossing incident mentioned in Ella Taylor‘s profile of David Poland in the current L.A. Weekly. It wasn’t that big a deal except for what it said about Poland’s character. Taylor writes that “on Poland’s direction,” I was “ordered out of a carful of Poland’s colleagues on the way to Sundance.” And it wasn’t much more than that.
It happened in January ’02 (or was it ’01?) I had flown in on Southwest with critic Andy Klein, who was writing at the time for Poland’s amply-funded Hot Button site. I asked when we arrived in Salt Lake City if I could get a lift into Park City with the Hot Button team (there were three or four others), and nobody objected. Then a woman who was driving started talking to Poland on a cell phone, and after listening to him go on and on for two or three minutes she turned around and said she was sorry but that Poland wanted me out of the car. So I got out and took a bus.
The more significant Poland ejection happened at the start of the Iraqi War (sometime in March 2003) at Nate and Al’s in Beverly Hills. We were talking about smart missiles and collateral civilian damage, and I was expressing a naive belief, based on very limited MSNBC knowledge of the accuracy of smart missiles, that while civilian deaths were inevitable they probably wouldn’t be too high in number. Poland got angry at my opinions (“People are dying, Jeffrey….people are dying!”) and ordered me out of Nate and Al’s. He actually used the words, “Get out!” So I got up, dropped some money on the table and left. It was pretty startling. I’d never been thrown out of any business establishment for having the wrong opinion, and I don’t suppose it’ll ever happen again. Poland is a fairly unique individual.

Green Cine Daily‘s D.K. Holm has written about the conflicting opinions that have greeted Paramount Home Video’s just-released, two-disc To Catch a Thief special edition DVD. Two reviewers — DVD Authority‘s Matt Brighton and Slant‘s Fernando F. Croce — have declared that the new transfer (which is based upon the original VistaVision elements) is identical to or at least not noticably improved compared to PHV’s passable-but-unexceptional 2002 version.

screen capture from PHV’s 2002 version

I watched this disc last night on my untrustworthy 17-inch Gateway, and there’s no delicate way to put this: Brighton and Croce are wrong. They need to get new contact lenses and/or a better-quality DVD player or monitor. I’ll admit that the new transfer isn’t drop-your-pants different from the ’02 version, but it’s obviously smoother, crisper, less artifact-y, less shadowy and more naturally colored. By this I mean that the ’02 DVD looks “pushed” whereas the new version looks more solid and relaxed and straight-from-the-negative.

…and from the just-released special edition

DVD Beaver‘s Gary Tooze has said more or less the same thing, and he also shows you the differences between the two. Sorry, but there’s no question about it. Henceforth, readers need to take all picture-quality comments from Brighton and Croce with a grain of salt, and a somewhat larger amount of suspicion.

Spider-Man 3 is being projected to earn $60,379,000 this weekend — a 60% drop. If people really liked it, it would be doing better than this. (The CinemaScore rating was only a B.) It’s now at $242 million cume, and will end up with a bit more than $300 million domestic. But it cost over $300 million to make and the marketing costs were over $100 million, and nobody but nobody who saw it did cartwheels in the lobby. A cruddy script written by three screenwriters (Raimi, Raimi’s brother and Alvin Sargent, producer Laura Ziskin‘s husband>) and populated with too many villains (i.e., three).
Worldwide and DVD revenues will put it into profit, but it’s on par with Iraqi War in terms of waste and redeeming enjoyment levels.
28 Weeks Later will end up with $10,893,000 — 2304 theatres, $4700 a print. Georgia Rules, a disaster, will finish with $5,896,000 — so much for the drawing power of Lindsay Lohan. Disturbia will earn $4,659,000 by Sunday, off 20%. Lionsgate’s
Delta Farce will end up with $3,505,000 in 1300 venues.
Fracture will make $2,962,000. The Invisibles — $2,108,000. Meet The Robinsons — $1,742,000. The Ex — $1,640,000. Hot Fuzz — $1,613,000, off 27%.

MTV News’ movie blog posted an exclusive yesterday about the biologically- inappropriate Nicolas Cage being cast to play 1920s Chicago crimelord Al Capone in Brian DePalma‘s The Untouchables: Capone Rising, which will begin shooting next October and come out sometime in late ’08. It’ll be a kind of prequel to DePalma’s The Untouchables (’87), which was about Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) and Jimmy Malone (Sean Connery) trying to bust Capone (Robert De Niro) and his henchman.

(l. to r.) Nicolas Cage, Al Capone, DeNiro-as-Capone

The really age-inappropriate aspect is that Capone Rising will be about Capone’s “early years” as a Chicago gangster, and the seeds of his relationship with Connery’s Malone character, who may be played this time around by Sean Penn or Colin Farrell. The Untouchables was also cast in an age-inappropriate way, not that DePalma or critics or general audiences gave a damn. I myself was part of that equation. DeNiro’s ferocious energy when he swung that baseball bat was quite a persuader.
And yet Al Capone was a young man in his gangster heyday. His Windy City career spanned 12 years, from his arrival in Chicago in 1919 at age 20 to his conviction for income-tax evasion in 1931 at age 32. The action in The Untouchables happens in the late 20s when Capone was the same age, and yet Capone was played by the 43 year-old DeNiro, who looked his age and a bit more.
Capone Rising will depict what Capone was supposedly up to during his first few years in Chicago, when the Real McCoy was in his early to mid 20s. And yet the “young” Capone will be played the 43 year-old Cage (i.e., born in January 1964), who also looks his age and will obviously be the same age De Niro was when he played the “older” Capone some 20 years ago.
This whole concept is flim-flammy from any kind of half-realistic vantage point, but of course we all let this slide 20 years ago because DeNiro didn’t look excessively old for the role (not that anyone knew or cared about the biological-historical particulars). But Cage is supposed to be playing a Capone who’s ten years younger than DeNiro’s “Scarface,” and yet he’s the same age and looks it. And he’ll be a good 20 years older than the real Capone was.
Many of the big-time Chicago gangsters in the Prohibition Days were flush with youth (or what passed for the stuff in the 1920s, when a lot of bad guys ate bad food and too much of it, and tended to party fairly hard). Big-time boss Dion O’Banion, born in 1892, was only 32 when he was rubbed out. Earl “Hymie” Weiss, born in 1897, was only 29 when he was killed in 1926. “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn, a key member of the Capone gang who was believed to be the principal shooter in the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, was born in ’05 and died at age 31 in 1936. Eliot Ness was only 28 when Capone was convicted of income-tax evasion in ’31.

Georgia Rule “swerves and spins, taking its predictable plot in some surprising directions,” says N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott. ” Working against its maudlin impulses with lively humor, and at the same time undercutting its laughs with some hard, ugly themes, this movie is neither a standard weepie nor a comforting dramedy. It’s an interesting, maddening mess — not a terrible movie, and by no means a dull one.”
The “incoherence” of it, Scott adds, is in fact “a sign of life, evidence of an emotional energy percolating beneath the glib ‘very special episode√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ǭù surface. The source of that vitality lies with the actors, and with [director] Gary Marshall√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s inclination to give them space and time to explore their characters√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢ idiosyncrasies.”
Scott may be correct in saying that costar Lindsay Lohan “has been subjected recently to the prurient, punitive gaze of an internet gossip culture that takes special delight in the humiliation of young women with shaky discipline and an appetite for fun,” but let’s remember that the brouhaha lastsummer during the shooting of Georgia Rule was not over rumors of this and that, but about Lohan’s temporary boss, Morgan Creek’s James G. Robinson, being fed up with her inability to show up on the set in the morning and do her work because of too much partying.
I would never begrudge anyone having an appetite for fun (unless their idea of fun means laughing really loudly in sports bars….”ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”) but anyone who can’t splash water in their face, change their dress shirt, grim up and conduct himself (or herself) like a pro during work hours is a slouching egoistic lame-o, and deserves every internet rumor that comes his or her way.

David Poland is “a lot more thin-skinned than Sammy Glick,” the L.A. Weekly‘s Ella Taylor observes in a just-up profile. “Like many people who make their living on the attack, he’s better at dishing it out than he is at taking it. Having regularly dumped all over L.A. Times Hollywood columnist Patrick Goldstein, he went public on the site with his distress when Goldstein hit back.

“Still, for all the bile of his well-known war with rival Hollywood blogger Jeffrey Wells — who, on Poland√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s direction, was ordered out of a carful of Poland√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s colleagues on the way to Sundance — he admits to a double-edged appreciation for his equally excitable enemy. ‘Sometimes,’ he says, ‘you just want to go to the circus.'”
Oh, I get it — there’s something broadly theatrical about reading Hollywood Elsewhere. Like listening to a carnival barker in a red coat or watching an Indian elephant stand on his forelegs. Okay, fine, but if HE is a carnival, Movie City News is….uhm…well….I can’t think of a good mean analogy just now. Any ideas?
Taylor calls Poland “a genial, self-deprecating motormouth” and opiners pretty plainly that he’s “shilling for the business on whose advertising he depends.” And yet, she adds, he’s “always an engagingly contrarian read” and
that she doesn’t ” know a critic or film journalist who doesn√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t check out Movie City News at least once a day, as much for diversion as for keeping up with trends in the business.”
Taylor reports that Poland’s Movie City News “boasts a million visitors a week,” but Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke begs to differ (as well as toot her own horn) with this Alexa graph.

I sat down with 28 Weeks Later director Jean Carlos Fresnadillo last Monday afternoon — i.e., the day that my hard drive froze up and died. Fresnadillo is a quiet, meditative guy with a nicely measured European attitude and what felt to me like a very contained and settled ego. The interview is okay, nothing spectacular; the film is much better.

I would have posted the Fresnadillo thing yesterday afternoon but — no complaining, just fact — I was stopped again when the brand-new hard drive, installed only hours earlier, froze on me. Apparently the computer guy from Brooklyn either installed the wrong kind of video driver or installed the right one incorrectly, and the error caused all wsf ads on all pages to flash like lightning bolts and make the web page jitter up and down, and this caused so much stress on the system that it freaked out and collapsed.

There’s a bottom-line rationale regarding Robert Rodrguez being “in talks” to direct a Warner Bros. live-action feature version of The Jetsons for Warner Bros. Pictures. And it can be summed up in eight words: “Danger! Danger! Retreat to the family safety zone!”
With the Grindhouse financial debacle coloring Rodriguez’s industry aura (on top of the fact that most viewers outside serious gore geeks thought that Rodriguez’s Terror Planet was way, way inferior to Quentin Tarantino‘s Death Proof) and his biggest financial successes having come from directing the three Spy Kids flicks (which came out in ’01, ’02 and ’03), a Jetsons flick is a total dive-for-cover move. The producers are Denise Di Novi and Donald De Line.
The only thing I’ve really liked about Rordriguez’s films since his first and best effort, 1992’s El Mariachi, has been his tendency to cast hot women (Salma Hayek, Rose McGowan) and dress them up in hot skimpy outfits