Three strongly worded reactions — an ecstatic rave, a thumbs-up and a pan — to David Fincher‘s Zodiac (Paramount, 1.17) went up on AICN today following Thursday night’s screening of a nearly-finished cut at Hollywood’s Arclight.

San Francisco’s Transamerica tower was built between ’69 and ’72; the Zodiac action mainly happens between ’69 and ’71.

You can discount the wows or choose to regard them as plants, but it sounds at the very least like an impressively detailed and workmanlike policier coming from an early ’70s Pakula-type place. Given the building consensus that fall-winter season is looking weaker and weaker as we go along, it seems as if a limited December release of Zodiac would fill at least a portion of the void.
The ecstasy guy said he was “blown away,” called it “easily the best film I’ve seen this year,” “an instant classic”, “a great piece of filmmaking [and] easily one of the best films about an investigation I’ve ever seen.” The moderate admirer “didn√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t think it was quite as good as either Se7en or Fight Club” [but] says it operates in a kind of Pakula-type realm (All The President’s Men, Klute) and called it “a terrific film, one that I was long looking forward to…almost consistently compelling, suspenseful, and dramatically effective.”

The shadows are getting longer and I have to make the rounds around Bend (at festival headquarters and at various opening night soirees), so I guess this is one of those days in which five items will have to do. Unless I get industrious later this evening.

Rapidly speaking: (a) Dreamgirls won’t be seen in its entirety until later this month, but it’s feeling more and more like a locomotive; (b) The Departed is Marty’s Rousing Return and a bit of a torch-bearer for the tradition of The French Connection; (c) Based on almost nothing (or virtually nothing), The Good German feels a bit pallid; (d) Little Children is all about Kate Winslet right now…if that; (e) Little Miss Sunshine is on the move again…yes!; (f) We all know about Helen Mirren‘s inevitability, but now The Queen, which seemed good but overly tidy at first, is starting to look like Best Picture material; (g) Babel is an aching, close-to-great film, and also superbly made; (h) hasn’t World Trade Center been out of the picture since August?; (i) Flags of Our Fathers is well respected, has its admirers, etc., but it’s been dissed also — no duckwalk; (j) The Good Shepherd has been sounding like a not-quite-there thing since last summer; (k) The History Boys is apparently over; (l) Bobby never got rolling; (m) Catch A Fire is as well-jiggered as a film of this sort can be; (n) The Pursuit of Happyness is automatically suspect because of Will Smith in the lead role; (o) Stranger Than Fiction died in Toronto; (p) The Last King of Scotland is entirely about Forrest Whitaker.

I’m just adding my voice to those who’ve already cheered Roger Ebert‘s re-appearance from his sick bed yesterday. “I won’t be back to full production until sometime early next year,” he said. “The good news is that my rehabilitation is a profound education in the realities of the daily lives we lead, and my mind is still capable of being delighted by cinematic greatness.”
The recovering critic assures us he “will eventually walk, talk, taste, eat, drink and live, more or less, normally. But it will be a struggle, involving another surgery to complete what began in June.
My favorite passage: “I have discovered a goodness and decency in people as exhibited in all the letters, e-mails, flowers, gifts and prayers that have been directed my way. I am overwhelmed and humbled. I offer you my most sincere thanks and my deep and abiding gratitude. If I ever write my memoirs, I have some spellbinding material. How does the Joni Mitchell song go? ‘Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’? One thing I’ve discovered is that I love my job more than I thought I did, and I love my wife even more!”

I landed in dry and sunny Bend, Oregon, a couple of hours ago — blue skies, clean air, juniper trees. About an hour later I checked into the Marriott Fairfield — bland, sterile, colorless, corporate…and located right next to a freeway. I’m a juror at the Bend Film Festival, which kicks off at 5:30 pm today and winds up on Saturday night. All the corporate brand stores are here in force, naturally. Remember when rural smallish towns had their own particularity, a hamlet-y feeling… far from the madding crowd?

Suddenly there’s a consensus that year-end contenders are weak, weak, weak all over. It does kinda seem that way. I’m not just saying that because the more I hear about the supposed heavyweights coming out in December, the less current they seem to have. Warner Bros. managed to keep people from seeing The Departed so there was no advance word, but when a film is really exceptional and a couple of months away the word will usually seep out. A hint or two, minor leakage…something.
I realize studio p.r. people don’t want anyone saying anything about their Decem- ber films — too damn early — but people are talking anyway. Talking by not talking, I mean. Or by giving you a look at a party, or saying something incon- clusive or abruptly changing the subject. Dreamgirls doesn’t have to worry about anything, and I’m not saying German/Shepherd, Blood Diamond and The Pursuit of Happyness necessarily need to either. I’m just saying there’s beaucoup silence out there.
The perception of weakness makes it all the more likely that The Departed will end up as a Best Picture contender. (In a stronger year it could wind up being dismis- sed as merely a well-made crime film — the fact of it being an exceptionally well-made crime film is why I’m feeling more and more that it has Oscar strength.)
It’s also a welcome thing that Little Miss Sunshine, easily one of the year’s finest no matter what the mainstream winds up deciding, will start picking up renewed heat. This is Pete Hammond ‘s view, at least, in his latest Hollywood Wiretap column.
And I’m amused by the take-it-or-leave-it bluntness of this statement from David Poland ‘s latest Oscar prediction column, to wit: Bill Condon‘s Dreamgirls “is clearly the Best Picture frontunner now that Flags of our Fathers [has] stumbled on exposure to the media (even if the trades and others are still barking up that flagpole).”

Who and what the hell is Ezekiel 22, and why are the principals of this Atlanta-based company allegedly paying $3.8 million for rights in all media to the story of three not-terribly-brilliant Mexican guys who drifted 5,000 miles across the Pacific, from San Blas to the Marshall Islands, and had to resort to “occasionally” drinking their own urine to stay alive?
Is this some kind of put-on? Has Yahoo Entertainment News been taken over by a team of Onion-styled satirists?
Late this afternoon a story was posted on Yahoo Entertainment News with a headline that read “Movie to make millionaires of lost Mexico fishermen.” The story begins, “Three Mexicans who spent nine months drifting across the Pacific Ocean in a flimsy fishing boat eating raw fish and sea birds are to be paid at least $3.8 million to turn their story into a movie.
“The three — all fishermen who said they were too poor to afford a better boat or modern fishing tackle — have signed a contract to sell their story to an Atlanta- based company [which] negotiated 8-year exclusive rights to market the story to film companies, book publishers and merchandisers, said government official Silverio Aspericueta, adding that the final payment could be even higher. He said the company’s name was Ezekiel 22.”
A company calling itself Ezekiel 22 — a chapter in the Old Testament that has to do with the sins of old Jerusalem — seems to indicate an interest in business ventures with a certain historical-religious slant. Do the principals of Ezekiel 22, if there is such a company, see three guys surviving a long trip across the Pacific as some kind of Biblical tale about God’s benevolence, like God letting Jonah live by having the “big fish” spit him up?
Wikipedia says that the book of Ezekiel contains three distinct sections — judgment on Israel, prophecies against various neighboring nations, and prophecies delivered after the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar II. Bible Gateway, a relligious right website, offers the entirety of Ezekiel 22 and at the beginning of the chapter are the words “Jerusalem’s Sins.”
Leaving aside the anti-Israel/Christian-right angle, why would any company prom- ise to pay $3.8 million to three intellectually-challenged Mexican guys for the rights to their story? They could have bought them for a less than that, surely. And who wants to see a movie about Mexican guys who were too dumb to hoist a sail or bring oars on a seafaring journey, and watch them eating fish and seagulls and drinking their own piss?
This is one of the weirdest news stories I’ve ever read.
And by the way, if you want to read some really hot-sounding descriptons of wild sexual abandon by pair of sluts, read Ezekiel 23, which is called “Two Adulterous Sisters.” Some of the language is so graphic and steamy it reads like something out of a 1975 issue of the National Lampoon.
Consider this passage: “Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses. So you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when in Egypt your bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled.”

A byline-free Yahoo Movies article about likely Oscar nomines was posted late this afternoon, and the basic claims are that Helen Mirren may win the Best Actress Oscar for The Queen (duhhh), and Peter O’Toole may finally win for Venus (things have been strangely silent from the O’Toole corner since he bailed on Toronto Film Festival due to ill health).

And also that Jack Nicholson‘s mobster performance in The Departed could result in his tying Katharine Hepburn for a record fourth Oscar (no way…too many people are saying his Costello character is way too over-the top), and that Clint Eastwood‘s direction of Flags of Our Fathers may fortify his rep as “one of the winningest directors in Oscar history” (maybe, but Flags noms are looking somewhat uncertain at this stage).

Just goes to show that whatever the rumble on Running with Scissors, it sure as shit hasn’t stopped director-writer Ryan Murphy from landing all kinds of movie and TV directing gigs. He’s going to adapt and direct a Julia Roberts feature based on Elizabeth Gilbert‘s “Eat, Pray, Love,” but before that he’ll direct another Paramounter called Dirty Tricks, a drama about Martha Mitchell, the loud-mouth Southern-belle wife of Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell, with Meryl Streep attached to star. And there’s still that 4 Oz. series for FX, about a guy who has a sex-change operation. The Roberts vehicle and the guy-getting-his-dick-cut-off series are being produced by Brad Pitt‘s Plan B.

New York Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle was apparently either the pilot or a passenger on that small plane that crashed into a Upper East Side high-rise in Manhattan this morning, which had to take some doing. Does it strike anyone else as as curious that another Bronx bomber — Thurman Munson — killed himself after screwing up behind the controls of a twin engine Cessna Citation jet at Akron-Canton airport on 8.2.79? Munson was practicing takeoffs and landings, and I remember reports saying there was no question his crash was due to poor handling and ignoring the basics. But at least he didn’t clobber a building.

The Hollywood Reporter has another publisher — the third in a year’s time. The new guy is Billboard publisher John Kilcullen (Scottish or Irish?), taking the place of Tony Uphoff, who said he’d rather take an Irvine-based job as president of CMP Technology, which he called “a significantly larger opportunity.” That means Uphoff didn’t work out on some level. Nobody vacates a top-of-the mountain position like THR publisher after less than a year on the job without something askew somewhere. Billboard and the Reporter are sister publications under the Dutch media conglomerate VNU.