LX.TV is the media sponsor for the Tribeca Film Festival, and they’re sending along videos of the day-to-day action. Today’s video includes a clip of Al Gore, an interview with Paul Haggis, and red-carpet footage of the opening night party.

Ten minutes into watching Stephanie Daley, I was experiencing that “okay, don’t worry, this is going to be very good” realization. But I was also feeling slightly on-edge because I wanted this moody, expertly realized drama to stay on-track and build and dig in and deepen and so on. And it did that. And the performances were killer. And then came the ending, which, to me, felt a little too ambiguous and a touch sudden, as in “wait…that’s it?”

Endings are very, very important — you could argue that they’re almost the whole ball game — but Stephanie Daley is still one of the best solemn-and-sober women’s films I’ve seen in a long, long while. It is absolutely worth seeing on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, or on a weeknight. It will not make you groan or slump in your seat, and the notion of checking messages on your Blackberry in the second act will most likely not come up.

I’m forecasting these reactions because Amber Tamblyn‘s performance as the title character — a 17 year-old high-school junior who may have murdered her baby — is awfully damn good. I’m not using the word “astonishing” because Tamblyn looks and behaves like any young girl with issues pressing on her heart and mind, but “exceptional” definitely applies. It’s almost all in her eyes — a haunted, gloom- ridden, terrified emotional state — and yet she’s immensely watchable, attractively so, every second she’s on-screen. I could call her performance ravishing, but I wouldn’t mean erotically. Talk about a face trying to hide surging currents…

15 months ago I wrote that Tamblyn “is now on the Big Map because of this film.” I added that “it’s too bad after giving such a finely textured dig-deep performance in Daley that she’s agreed to star in the lowballing Grudge 2, but I don’t think this matters. Millions have seen Grudge 2 in theatres and on the screen — a much smaller group will wind up seeing Stephanie Daley, but those who do will not feel in the least bit burned or toyed or fiddled with. It’s all in the mind of the beholder, and it’s a free country.

Stephanie Daley is basically saying that the acts of procreation and giving birth weigh heavily on the soul, and are not to be even considered by kids who are way too young and unable to handle the burdens. The right-to-lifers are going to get hold of this film when it comes out on DVD and show it to high-school kids. It plays right into their view of things, and honestly? I found myself acknowledging as I watched it that the right-to-lifers have a point.

As the film begins the infant death has been discovered and Daley has been saying it was unintentional — that the infant was still-born. The newspapers have been calling her the “ski mom” because she gave birth to — unloaded — a 26 week-old fetus in a bathroom during a school ski trip, and the baby was later found dead in a garbage can.

Enter Lydie Crane (Tilda Swinton), a psychologist assigned to interview Steph- anie and advise the authorities whether or not she should be prosecuted. Crane herself is five months pregnant with a shaky marriage to a guy played by Tim Hutton giving her pause and some grief. (Except for anomalies like The Last Mimzy, it is axiomatic that all relationships with all characters played by Tim Hutton, rumored to be a Charlie Sheen-type hound in real life, are shaky — he has a face that says “alcoholic” and “likely to tomcat around given half a chance.”) Plus she gave birth to a stillborn child a year or so earlier.

This sounds like one of those only-in-the-movies set-ups, but it didn’t feel like a speed bump to me. Such is the level of craft and assurance that Brougher brings to Stephanie Daley. There’s also the beautiful photography by David Rush Morrison, and a kind of smooth painterly quality that seems to transform the innate gloominess of the material into something much more.

The plot isn’t stunningly original, but then again what is? Norman Jewison‘s Agnes of God (1985) was fairly similar, with Jane Fonda playing the older psychologist-investigator and Meg Tilley as a young nun who’d given birth and possibly killed the child. There’s also a 2004 novel by Jodie Picoult called Plain Truth, which is about a young Amish girl accused of killing her baby, and is also about a female lawyer with issues of her own who is assigned to look into the case.

Distributors were naturally scared by the baby-killing aspect, but First Look’s Ruth Vitale stepped up and entered into negotiations with the Stephanie Daley team out of Sundance ’06. But then “the deal got worse and worse” (or so says a person involved in the negotiations), apparently due to someone at First Look not liking the film as much as Vitale, and it all fell apart. Then Regent Releasing, lowballers who open films mainly to promote DVD traffic, stepped in.

Stephanie Daley has an 84% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir, a heavyweight critic, has called it “a major American film, announcing the arrival of an independent director who deserves all the hype.” Tamblyn won the Best Actress award at last summer’s Locarno Film Festival. Brougher won the Best Director award at the Jackson Hole Film Festival. It’s a woman’s film, sure, but the way-above-average pedigree should snag the attention of any half-serious filmgoer.

It’s now playing at Manhattan’s Angelika (subway sounds rumbling up from the floorboards!), and will open on 4.27 in Los Angeles at the Regent theatre — the stand-alone on La Brea, just south of Melrose. Daley will open on 5.11 in Boston, 5.25 in San Francisco, 6.1 in Chicago, 6.29 in Denver and yaddah-yaddah.

There was some talk a while back about Sean Penn‘s Into The Wild (Paramount Vantage, 9.21.07), an adaptation of Jon Krakauer‘s book about a young guy who tried to live like Jeremiah Johnson in the Alaskan wilderness but was found dead inside a bus four months later, possibly turning up at the Cannes Film Festival.

the real Chris McCandless

That may have been a slight possibility (Wild wrapped four months ago) and it may never have been one at all, but at least one solid reason why Penn’s film won’t be in France next month is that it’s about to do some extra shooting here in Los Angeles. Emile Hirsch (Alpha Dog, The Girl Next Door) is playing the wilderness guy, Christopher McCandless, with Vince Vaughan, Kristen Stewart and Jena Malone costarring.

Hirsch’s parents, Walt and Billie McCandless, are being played by William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden, and last week’s announcement from casting director Rich King said they’re looking for actors who resemble Hurt and Harden as they might have looked in their early 20s. Shooting is supposedly happening on Saturday, 4.28.

“WE ARE SEEKING A YOUNG CAUCASIAN MALE(20-24YRS) who looks like William Hurt,” the sheet said. “This is for a flashback scene so we need a college-aged guy who looks like William did in his early 20’s. He is approx 6’0 tall and slender with sandy blonde hair. He also needs to have a mustache (or can grow one quickly) and be willing to possibly remove it if asked.

“WE ARE [ALSO] SEEKING A YOUNG FEMALE (20-24YRS) WHO looks like Marcia Gay Harden. This is also for a flashback scene so we need a college-aged girl who looks like Marcia did in her early 20’s. She is 5’5 and wears a dress size 4-6 with shoulder length dark brown hair.”

Alaska — the place where young American malcontents (McCandless, Timothy Treadwell) go to commune with nature and inevitably die due to having under- estimated the potential dangers.

The American Pavilion — the big white schmooze tent on the beach at the Cannes Film Festival — has been re-christened as AmPav to discourage notions that it’s only for Yanks. “More than 40% of our membership is made up of journalists and industry professionals from countries other than the U.S.,” founder Julie Sisk has proclaimed. And something else has changed. Last year it cost $25 bucks to buy an advance entry into this well-run establishment — this year it’s been doubled to $50 in advance and $100 on-site. It’s still worth it but whoa.

Do any Manhattan-based HE readers believe that the High Line Festival, a “ten-day mash-up of music, film, comedy, visual art and performance” that will unfold on the lower west side from May 9th through the 19th, is stealing some of the heat from the Tribeca Film Festival, which is happening now through May 6th? One’s a movie festival, the other’s mainly about music. Robert DeNiro is the big Tribeca honcho, and David Bowie is “curating” the High Line. If I were working Tribeca day and night for twelve days I’d probably feel a little festival-ed out by the time the High Line came along. And they’re probably after some of the same corporate sponsors.

Good god, this original Star Wars trailer was really awful. It must have been cut by some old-school guys on the 20th Century Fox marketing team. It couldn’t have been cut by Marcia Lucas or anyone on the feature-version crew…could it have?

Here’s a slightly better one for The Empire Strikes Back that sounds (could it be?) like it was narrated by Harrison Ford.

What is it exactly about “The Bell Jar” and the grimly fatalistic Sylvia Plath saga (i.e., if not one and the same then at least closely related) that Julia Stiles and her mostly female producing partners (Celine Rattray, Daniela Taplin Lundberg and Galt Niederhoffer along with exec producers Christine Vachon and Jocelyn Hayes) feel has been untapped or insufficiently explored by Gwynneth Paltrow‘s Sylvia, which came out only four years ago and grossed $1,302,242 domestic?

Stiles is planning to star (and possibly direct or write?) a brand-new Plath drama in early ’08, based on the famed autobiographical novel, but who’s going to want to see it? Who outside of the hardcore Plath fans is going to say, “Great..another one!” After slogging through Sylvia and with the memory of that awful 1979 Bell Jar adaptation from director Larry Peerce and star Marilyn Hassett still vivid, I’m totally Plath-ed out.

Gregg Goldstein‘s Hollywood Reporter story says that the “1950s-era drama centers on young book editor Esther Greenwood (Stiles), who grows troubled by the social trappings of her time and slowly descends into mental illness.” Good God, we’ve seen it…we’ve seen it!

Stiles wrote and directed the dramatic short film Raving, Goldstein reports. Starring Zooey Deschanel and Bill Irwin, the short will premiere this weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival and May 8 on the Sundance Channel.

“I think the last time I saw Star Wars was when this (digital) version came out 10 years ago,” George Lucas said during a post-screening interview after the 1977 pop-adventure classic showed at the Academy theatre on Monday night. “It was fun to see it on the big screen. I never get to do that.” This according to a Wired report by…uhm, there’s no byline.

Star Wars creator George Lucas

“The filmmaking process is naturally very sloppy,” Lucas commented. “People assume that making a movie is very precise, that you lay it all out. It doesn’t work that way. You’re constantly reworking everything over and over and over again trying to make it right. There’s lots of different avenues, lots of ways of working with things. I continue to look at it that way.

“In fact, there was a couple of things I saw in there tonight that I could….” Before finishing his sentence with the expected “do better,” Lucas pulled rerecording mixer Ray West by the arm. “It’s a joke, people!” Lucas said.

Sam Raimi’s two political donations to George Bush in ’04 only amounted to $900, according to Newsmeat.com. The Spider-Man helmer gave $300 to the Bush campaign on 1.14.04, and then another $600 on 7.8.04. Raimi also gave $450 to Senator Arlen Specter, apparently to support his campaign for the ’96 Republican Presidential nomination.

And yet Raimi isn’t a total Republican — he also gave $1000 to Barbara Boxer‘s U.S. Senate campaign in ’02. He also donated $1200 to the Political Action Committee of the Directors Guild of America in ’05.

I like conservatives personally — they talk in a plainer, more straight-from-the- shoulder way than a lot of liberals I know — and I certainly understand the plight of filmmakers who support Republican or conservative causes. I got into this when I wrote a big piece for Los Angeles magazine in early ’95 called “Right Face,” about how it was easier in the liberal Hollywood culture of the mid ’90s to say you’re gay than confess to being a rightie, which could put you on what Lionel Chetwynd called a “white list.”

I’m not trying to slam or pigeonhole Raimi for having conservative values, but my God…he supported Bush in ’04? He either believed or rationalized the WMD bullshit about why we went into Iraq, supported Bush’s anti-conservationist leanings and all the dozens of other bone-headed policies? Raimi’s $900 Dubya donation is offensive to me. It really is. We live in a free society and by all means let’s keep electing right-wing assholes and hasten the global-warming process as much as possible, but Spider-Man 3 ticket-buyers should know, I feel, where a small portion of their ticket money is likely to end up. Pointing this out is fair, surely.

The Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight slate is supposed to be announced on May 3rd, but Variety‘s Alison James is reporting now that the sidebar’s opening-night pic will be Anton Corbin‘s Control, a biopic about the late Ian Curtis, the Joy Division singer who hanged himself at age 23. Bono, members of New Order and Depeche Mode will attend (and may perform at) the opening- night party on Friday, 5.17, following a gala screening of the black-and-white film.

Curtis and child on May 13,. 1980 — five days before he hung himself in his bedroom.

The Becker International production is based on “Touching From a Distance,” a reminiscence by the singer’s widow Deborah Curtis (played by Samantha Morton in the film). The book describes Curtis’s life from his early teen years to his early death, and tells how –with a wife, child and impending international fame — he was seduced by the glory of an early grave. What were the reasons for his fascination with death? Were his dark, brooding lyrics an artistic exorcism?

The Variety story passes along an opinion that a “love triangle” between Curtis, his widow and his mistress may have been a factor.

The Curtis suicide was dramatized in Michael Winterbottom‘s 24 Hour Party People, the well-received faux-doc. Control , however, is said to be a “totally different” film. Directors Fortnight honcho Olivier Pere told James that “it’s a surprising love story about someone who was very ordinary and very modest…it’s very close to English cinema from the 60s and 70s, with a political and social backdrop.”

Robinson Devor‘s Zoo (ThinkFilm, 4.25) deserves a certain respect, although many viewers will find themselves contending with suppressed laughter and/or disgust. Even its detractors will admit it’s a curiously haunting, beautifully photographed thing. (And exquisitely cut and scored.) I acknowledged this in a piece that I ran on 4.3.07 . I also said “there’s something profoundly troubling about a talented filmmaker giving his earnest and thoughtful attention to a ridiculously perverse (the term I’m most comfortable with is ‘diseased’) sexual practice.”

One of the funniest passages I’ve read about this film is contained in Manohla Dargis‘s 4.25 N.Y. Times review, to wit: “Zoo is…about the rhetorical uses of beauty and metaphor and of certain filmmaking techniques like slow-motion photography. It is, rather more coyly, also about a man who died from a perforated colon after he arranged to have sex with a stallion. Mercifully, you don’t see this death on camera, though if you sit close enough to the screen, you will see a few fairly brief images of one sexual event, accompanied by graphic sounds.

“It isn’t pretty, which is why the images appear only on a small television monitor. Art-house devotees may be a tolerant lot, but it’s doubtful they want to look at a stallion’s erect penis stretched across the big screen like a sailboat boom, at least in public. Certainly such an image would work directly counter to the self-conscious poeticism of Devor’s film, to its carefully confected narrative of misunderstood barnyard love and baleful testimonial. It is, after all, difficult to sing of the bodies electric and equine amid a chorus of ‘yucks.'”

A sailboat boom,,,hilarious! Interested parties should click on the Zoo slide show that appears next to Dargis’s review. Devor provides the narration.