“It’s difficult to pinpoint the precise moment when Neil LaBute‘s remake of The Wicker Man completely jumps the tracks. For some, it will be the scene where Nicolas Cage, in dire need of transportation, turns a gun on a passing bicyclist and melodramatically commands: “Step. Away. From. The Bike.” For others, it will be the fight scene that ends with Cage delivering a karate kick to a feisty Leelee Sobieski . (Take that, bi-yotch!) But for most, the point of no return will arrive during an extended climactic sequence that calls for Cage to pad about in a tacky bear costume. It’s so hilarious, it’s almost, well, unbearable.” — Joe Leydon on his Moving Picture blog, wriring in a much more down to it and funnier than his Variety review.

Okay, okay…Bush takes a bullet and croaks in Death of a President, a drama that will show at the Toronto Film Festival and also air on England TV in October. And it’s a big hah-hah. But is it? And if so, why? I’m not getting the undercurrent. I wish Bush had never been elected, but I don’t want to fantasize about him being dead. Maybe it’ll work as a piece of plain old imaginative story-telling, but there’s something vaguely distasteful at the bottom of it.

I read those Laurence Olivier and Danny Kaye stories years ago — common currency — and we’ve all thought about the undercurrent of the snails-and-oysters scene in Spartacus and so on, so I’m not getting why there’s a revisitation piece in the Daily Mail, written by Michael Thornton, about Oliver’s bisexuality.

Ich bin ein Toronto resident now, having arrived here around 9 pm this evening. Same old town, same leafy-shady trees, same friendly people, same old black squirrels.

Is there something incongruent between the MySpace aesthetic (advertising one’s self, celebrating one’s uniqueness, looking to meet people, etc.) and Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed, which is said to be pretty rough and bloody and ferocious? Somehow the two don’t seem like a spiritual match. Nonethess, here’s the Departed‘s MySpace page.

That brief kissing scene (it’s over in a flash) between Toby Young‘s Truman Capote and Daniel Craig‘s Perry Smith is one of many things in infamous (showing this weekend in Telluride and next week in Toronto) that feel askew. Craig’s rugged boxer-like English features couldn’t look more different than the real Smith’s face, which was soft, round and semi-mournful and half-defined by his mother’s Cherokee blood. Craig’s black hair dye and dyed black eyebrows don’t begin to make him look right physically, not to mention the fact that he’s at least a head taller than Young whereas the real Capote and Smith, both shrimps, were almost exactly the same height. And I’m not even mentioning the two rough-up scenes between them that probably didn’t happen, according to a guy I’ve spoken to who was close to Capote.

David Poland, who saw Todd Field‘s Little Children a week and a half or two weeks ago along with a handful of other critics, is calling it the “best American film” and “first American masterpiece” of 2006, as well as on Fields’ part “one of the great sophomore efforts of all time.”
Another guy who’s seen this New Line release admires it but feels it may be a little too cool and detached to rank as a big-time Oscar contender…we’ll see.
Poland says Children “is the film that Ang Lee and Alan Ball and Robert Redford and Paul Thomas Anderson and even Woody Allen have been trying to make for a long time. New Line’s terrific, but narrow, trailer for the movie, understandably, focuses on ‘the affair’ in the film. But man, I am here to tell you — it’s just the appetizer.
“The film is very, very funny, but audiences are afraid to laugh at a lot of the humor.” (How does Poland know that? Is he quoting data from test screening reactions? If so, who’s feeding him tthis?) “After all, how funny are cheating and perversion and mean-spiritedness and outright stupidity? Very funny. But it’s a Kubrickian humor…tough and more than a little shocking. There isn’t a shot in the movie that feels wrong. Whether it’s a table scene with four characters who are each in a completely different place emotionally or a scene underwater meant to force/allow us to see through the eyes of a sex offender or a satirical take on football,
“Field uses the whole toolbox with assurance and detail. And any time you get the feeling that maybe he got the wrong performance out of someone, the reason why it is perfection is right around the corner.”
Here’s another slightly-less-admiring review by Emanuel Levy.

I didn’t go to that 10 pm promotional screening of Neil LaBute‘s The Wicker Man at the Chinese last night after all, but a few reviews are up on Rotten Tomatoes and so far it has a 22% positive rating. Comments about that animal outfit (a “bear suit“, two guys called it) that Cage wears in one scene are troubling. Screen Daily‘s Allan Hunter saw it in Edinburgh and says it’s “particularly ill-judged, diluting, distorting and demeaning virtually all the qualities that made the 1973 British original so haunting. The result is a clunky, conventional mystery yarn that will appeal to aficionados of the Robin Hardy classic that is frequently voted the best British horror film ever made. Younger genre fans without the baggage of old allegiances will merely find it tame and old hat, moreso given its lack of gore and gimmicks.”

I’m flying to Toronto early this afternoon and won’t arrive there until 8:30 Toronto time this evening. I went there a bit early last year and caught two or three of the pre-festival local press screenings, and it helped a bit. Plus I’m training down to Syracuse on Saturday morning to see Jett, who just began his freshman year there last Monday. Later this evening I’ll hopefully be getting a dispatch from a friend or two about the first day at the Telluride Film Festival.

A filmmaker friend has passed along some info about David Fincher and Zodiac, by way of an editor pal who knows a sound mixer who worked on Zodiac a while back.
“This girl is very smart and cool,” this guy says. “She’s very much the San Franciso arty girl who hates a lot of Hollywood shit and is funny talking about working on all the shit she does. Anyway, she said Zodiac is fucking brilliant and so amazing and smart. I really, really trust this girl. She says the movie is great and that George Lucas was blown away by it.
“She also said that Robert Downey, Jr. gives an incredible Oscar-level performance.
“But here’s my favorite detail. The first half of the movie, which takes place in the late ’60s, is mixed mono when all of radio was AM and with the advent of FM, in the chronology of the film as the calendar moves into the ’70s, the movie turns stereo. Such a great idea. She said that Fincher has the best ears of anyone other than David Lynch.
“The other point to make here is that if Zodiac sucked there’s noway Dreamamount would ever greenlight Fincher’s Benjamin Button project, which will star Brad Pitt.”

On the occasion of its Venice Film Festival showing, Variety‘s David Rooney has gone thumbs-down on Douglas McGrath‘s Infamous, the other Truman Capote-writes-“In Cold Blood” movie from Warner Independent (opening 10.13). “There was an integrity and character- complexity to Bennett Miller ‘s Capote that’s missing from this glossier biopic…none of it rings true…Infamous doesn’t measure up to its predecessor and seems unlikely to echo the attention it received.” But Hollywod Reporter critic Kirk Honeycutt thinks it’s pretty damn good. Infamous, he writes early on, “gives you the unique opportunity to see how two sets of filmmakers can take exactly the same story, make extremely tough though different choices in emphasis and tone and achieve brilliant movies.” Go figure. I’ve seen it, but no review until the Toronto Film Festival.

From: Jeffrey Wells, Hollywood Elsewhere. To: Dreamamount publicity/ marketing. Re: An open letter about the selling of David Fincher‘s Zodiac (currently set for release on 1.19.07).

Greetings and salutations, guys: I’m writing to ask what the upside is in not platform-releasing Zodiac at the end of December, which is what certain Dreamamount parties are apparently against at this stage. A late December release, obviously, will put Zodiac into the derby and make it eligible for whatever possible critic awards and or Academy nominations that may result. This, obviously, would fortify the 1.19 general release to some extent.
Not putting Zodiac out as an ’06 platform end-of-December release strikes me as nonsensical, certainly from the standpoint of Zodiac‘s admirers or from the stand- point of any kind of opportunistic, fair-shake approach to creative marketing. Very clearly, going out cold on 1.19 without the buildup of a December platform opening isn’t going to help.
Zodiac is, I’m hearing, a serious quality-level piece. It’s also a longish cerebral procedural, a ’70s period drama, a non-conventional cop thriller. It needs some media massaging to help prime the pump.
The word around town is that there are two reasons that certain parties with Dreamamount may be against the platform-release idea:
(a) Dreamamount will have four films in Oscar contention by the end of the year (Flags of Our Fathers, Dreamgirls, Babel, World Trade Center) and some p.r. and marketing people think that a fifth film in the hopeful-Oscar-pipeline will strain the resources of Dreamamount marketing/publicity and cause this or that film to receive less of an Oscar push effort in terms of manpower and/or ad dollars, and…
(b) DreamWorks honcho David Geffen wants an all-out, balls-to-the-wall Oscar push for Dreamgirls, which is his personal baby, and he doesn’t want to hear about a fifth film potentially sapping the energy or marketing budgets allocated for Dreamgirls push.
What does Paramount/DreamWorks think about all this? What do readers think? Is there merit to the David Geffen theory? This issue has been festering for a long while and I’d like to get some reactions from all corners.