Sad news about that Nick Papac, a 25 year-old propmaster, getting killed in that crash with an SUV carrying director Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights) during shooting of The Kingdom, starring Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Garner. One thing these stories never to seem to reveal is what really happened (or what appears to have happened). The details always seem to emerge weeks or months later.

Jennifer Aniston‘s publicist Stephen Huvane vs. Us magazine’s Janice Min and and the Today show…old news (over 24 hours! forget it!) but hilarious. Who’s the more-full-of-shit offender in this thing?

N.Y. Times DVD columnist Dave Kehr, whose dismissive snortings have prompted an occasional retort from this corner, has gotten it wrong again. In his current column he refers to Billy Wilder‘s The Spirit of St. Louis, a not-half-bad 1957 James Stewart flick about Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 solo flight from New York to Paris, as “stunningly impersonal.”

In terms of auteurist brushstrokes, he means. And Kehr is right — the film has none of the wit or subversion in Wilder’s best films, and it does seem as if Wilder made it for the paycheck. But in its mid-1950s, earnestly stodgy way, The Spirit of St. Louis is moderately watchable — it moves along in a steady, workmanlike fashion — but also pays off emotionally at the very end. In a blatantly dishonest way, yes, but effectively. And I’ve always found this fascinating.
It’s mainly because of Wilder’s storytelling discipline — he was always one to plant seeds and make them pay off much later in a film — and also, partly, due to Franz Waxman‘s music. But Kehr can’t be bothered to mention this, perhaps because he never realized it or is too smug to pay attention. I only know that I hate it when smart critics diss a film that’s at least partly successful.
Just before the exhausted Stewart is about to land his plane at Le Bourget field in Paris, he starts to lose it — he starts freaking and whimpering over a sudden inability to focus on the basics of landing a plane.
The movie has briefly acknowledged about an hour earlier that Lindbergh was an atheist who believed only in his own aeronautical skills and in the engineering of planes. But just as Stewart is melting down above Le Bourget he thinks back to a “flying prayer” that a priest passed once passed on, and he says aloud, “Oh, God, help me.” And of course he lands safely.

And I swear to God it seems like the right thing to say at that moment — for Stewart/Lindbergh, for the audience, for the film. And I’m saying this as a half- atheist myself. (I found satori when I was 20 — I held universes in the palm of my hand — but mystical flotation fades over time.) It was shameless of Wilder and coscreenwriters Charles Lederer and Wendell Mayes to have pulled such a cheap trick (pandering to conventional religious sentiment, etc.), but it’s amazing when bullshit works despite it obviously being bullshit.
Jean Luc Godard had a somewhat similar reaction when he said he was seized with affection for John Wayne‘s Ethan Edwards at the end of The Searchers when he picks up Natalie Wood and says, “Let’s go home, Debbie.” That’s a dishonest moment also — Ethan is a racist sonuvabitch, and there’s no way he’s doing to do a last-minute 180. But the moment works anyway.
I’ve always felt that any movie that puts at least one lump in your throat is not impersonal. If the filmmakers are talented and clever enough to “get” you, they’re always coming some emotional place themselves. You can’t be totally cynical and touch people. You have to mean it on some level. And that means getting down to the “personal”.

A frank, astute, well-written piece by L.A. Times industry columnist Patrick Goldstein about why film critics seem to more and more irrelevant (or at least being seen as such), and what moves could be made to plug them into the cyber world — i.e., basically bring the learned brahmin types into more of a democratic give-and-take dialogue with the rude and unwashed masses.

The story about Dan Futterman playing Daniel Pearl for Michael Winterbottom during a hip-pocket location shoot in Pakistan, passed along by Reliable Source columnists Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts two damn days ago.

Honestly, truly — if you were Alan Horn and Jeff Robinov at Warner Bros., would you greenlight a second Superman film? Would you want Bryan Singer to “go all Wrath of Khan-y” on it or would you hire someone else of his general calbire?
If it was my call I’d say yes to Singer but under the following conditions:
(1) He has to bring in a two-hour film — no ifs, ands or buts;
(b) Kate Bosworth is dimissed as Lois Lane and Rachel McAdams replaces her in a no-big-deal way, like it was when Val Kilmer was suddenly the new Batman;
(c) All major plot turns and occurences in the script would have to be submitted to a three-person Logic Review Board made up of Superman movie geeks who would ixnay stuff like Superman falling back to earth from gravity when he’s well beyond the earth’s gravitational pull;
(d) No special effects sequences that make you want to go for a bathroom or popcorn break the second time you see the film; and
(e) Singer doesn’t get his sign off on marketing.

Being a big fan of Ira Levin‘s “The Boys From Brazil”, which works extremely well on the page, I was more than a little disappointed with Franklin Schaffner‘s film version, which (I don’t believe this) opened 28 years ago. And now New Line is financing a remake of the Shaffner film to be directed, God help us all, by Brett Ratner, who just keeps digging himself in deeper and deeper with each new film. Has Ratner nudged aside McG, Michael Bay, Roger Kumble and Stephen Sommers for the title of the most despised commercial director on the planet? I don’t know. I’m asking.
New Line reportedly has the idea of Boys being Ratner’s immediate followup to Rush Hour 3, with (I’m guessing) a possible ’08 release.
It’s not just that Ratner’s The Boys from Brazil will probably eat shit on a stick; it’s that a reconstituted Adolf Hitler (brought back through cloning) doesn’t mean all that much to the I-Pod-ers. Baby boomers, whose parents fought World War II, were the last generation to have Hitler’s evil impressed upon them first-hand. And I wonder how much the Hitler brief impresses in the shadows of 9/11, Middle East suicide bombings, Islamic fundamentalism , ethnic cleansing killings, poison-gassings and all the other horrors that have manifested over the past 25 or 30 years. He’s not the superstar he used to be.
Michael Fleming‘s Variety story says Richard Potter and Matthew Stravitz‘s script “pitched a take that sticks close to Levin’s novel but sets the action in the present day” — in other words, they seem to be sticking with Adolf. I really don’t get it. Ratner told Fleming that Schaffner’s version “was a flawed film with a brilliant concept…you no longer have to spend time explaining cloning as you did then.” Cloning wasn’t a problem with the Schaffner version at all, trust me.
(Personal disclosure: I was fairly friendly with Jeremy Black, the kid who played all the Little Hitlers in the Schaffner film, back in the mid ’70s. He comes from Wilton, Connecticut, as I do, as is the son of B’way producer David Black and kid brother of poet Sophie Black.)

Reader Neil Harvey passed along a story that hard-core Chicago actor Gary Sinise is reportedly going to Iraq to perform for the soldiers with his band, the Lt. Dan Band. “I think it’s a good thing that he’s taking time to do something for the troops,” Harvey writes, “but given that in Forrest Gump, Lt. Dan was a fictional soldier who followed a family tradition of being cannon fodder in wars and lost his legs in Vietnam, then returned home to alcoholism and horrible living conditions, it just seems…well, It feels kind of like having the deck band from Titanic perform on a cruise ship with a special appearance by Billy Zane, or to have Bruce Willis‘ “John McLane and the Nakatomi Tower Trio” show up to christen a new skyscraper.”

The thrust of this N.Y. Times David Halbfinger story about World Trade Center ‘s first few days of commercial release is…uhm…that it’s doing well for a 9/11 film? I guess. It’s done much better so far than United 93 did, primarily because word has circulated that it’s a warmer, more conservative-minded, hooray-for-the-regular-guys film. And that it did better in the New York area that in Los Angeles. And that Snakes on a Plane (opening this Friday) poses no challenge. And the word-of-mouth is primed to take flight.
“Everything that we hoped about the movie has started to happen,” Paramount marketing chief Rob Moore tells Halbfinger, “and now it√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s about ‘Can you still in this day and age have a movie that can be propelled by word of mouth? You take the movie Oliver made, the initial turnout, the response of the audience and critics, and all of that feels, to us, that we should be able to play and not have a movie that falls 65 percent from Week 1 to 2 and then does all of its business in two weekends. This to us was always a movie that should have exceptional hold. We think it should play for a very long time.”

How strange….how very strange. The reputation of Andrea Staka‘s Fraulein, winner of the Locarno Film Festival‘s Golden Leopard award, has been tainted somewhat by an admission by festival juror Barbara Albert that she co-wrote the film with Staka. How could the festival have allowed even the appearance of a possible conflict-of-interest go unchallenged?
When the news broke last Wednesday, Albert said she would recuse herself from jury discussions relating to the film. And then three days later — Saturday, 8.12 — she resigned from the jury entirely in opes of wanting to avoid the appearance of bias. Obviously, to avoid any trouble whatsover Albert should never have been on the Locarno jury in the first place. One half-presumes she would have never taken any measures if she hadn’t been “outed.” Amazing.
On top of this the festival’s artistic director Frederic Maire, 44, collapsed last Friday night while introducing Little Miss Sunshine in front of a big crowd at Locarno’s Piazza Grande. It’s not fair to throw these two incidents together, but tey do leave you with a vague impression that team Locarno is either eccentric or on wobbly footing, or both.

Variety‘s Adam Dawtrey on Curb Your Enthusiasm helmer Robert Weide planning to direct a Vanity Fair version of Devil Wears Prada. The feature, Weide’s first, will be based on Toby Young‘s “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People“, about his none-too-politically-successful stab at working for VF as a contributing editor in Manhattan several years ago. Shaun of the Dead‘s Simon Pegg will play Young; the part of VF editor Graydon Carter — the character will be called Clayton Harding, an editor of a fictional monthly called Sharps who will presumably share certain Type A characteristics with Meryl Streep‘s fashion magazine editor — isn’t yet cast. I missed a party for Young thrown by the L.A. Press Club three or four weeks ago, and I haven’t read his book either. The script adaptation is by Peter Straughan. The producers are Stephen Woolley and Elizabeth Karlsen of Number 9 Films.