L.A. Times writer Deborah Netburn delivers a sum-up of Marie-Antoinette reactions, including one from yours truly.

Director Clint Eastwood has promised that Flags Of Our Fathers and Red Sun, Black Sand, which will both hit screens later this year, “will attempt to show for the first time the suffering of both sides during 36 days of fighting in early 1945 that turned Iwo Jima into a flattened wasteland. He describes Red Sun, shot in Japanese and with a largely Japanese cast, as his attempt to understand the country’s soldiers. ‘I think those soldiers deserve a certain amount of respect,’ he said. ‘I feel terrible for both sides in that war and in all wars. A lot of innocent people get sacrificed. It’s not about winning or losing, but mostly about the interrupted lives of young people. These men deserve to be seen, and heard from.'” — Justin McCurry in Tokyo, writing for the Guardian in a piece than ran two days ago.

You can now scroll down through the entire present-month’s output (in this instance, May’s) by clicking on “Choose Month” in the search engine just above “Discland”. I’m mentioning this only because you couldn’t access all of May in one fell swoop until yesterday. Thanks again to the tireless Jon Rahoi of San Francisco for putting this function in.

Yesterday’s Omen forum was fairly interesting. What about Michael Mann‘s Miami Vice? Here’s the trailer…watch it and tell us what you’re thinking deep down. Does it look like $180 million or $125 million? Impossible to gauge, obviously, but the word “priceless” could also apply. For me, an urban-based Mann film is a near-guarantee of a first-rate, high-style mood piece. Unless he’s wildly off his game, I anticipate seeing this thing three or four times.

Such is the deep-dish appeal of black-and-white CinemaScope (i.e., 2.35 to 1) films, especially when they’ve been well-mastered for DVD, that even the relatively mediocre ones like The Longest Day stir my interest. Especially with this verdict from DVD Savant that says Fox’s Cinema Classics Collection DVD of the film, which came out almost two weeks ago, is “a great improvement over their previous non-enhanced transfer.”

The comments that came in yesterday about The Omen (20th Century Fox, 6.6) show that HE readers are down on it. But something tells me that Average Joe moviegoers are going to give it a $20 million-plus opening . It might die the second weekend (if it’s what I think it might be, I think it’s reasonable to predict that it will die 11 days in), but it didn’t cost very much to make, and there’s something about the novelty of that 6.6.06 opening that people may get into, or are into already.

Columbia Pictures has hired DaVinci Code screenwriter Akiva Goldsman to adapt Dan Brown’s ‘s “Angels and Demons”, another complex European potboiler about brainy Harvard professor of religious symbology Robert Langdon (i.e., Tom Hanks‘ DaVinci character) uncovering a dark plot. A Guardian story says that “no deals have yet been reached for Hanks and director Ron Howard to work on the film, but it is understood that both would have first refusal of the film.” Earth to Guardian: Hanks and Howard won’t come within ten city blocks of this thing. Their careers weren’t hurt by The DaVinci Code, but those $320 million worldwide DaVinci bucks aside, they sure as shit weren’t enhanced either. It’s possible Hanks and Howard enjoyed being mocked and torn down by critics and would like to repeat the experience, but I doubt it. Consider this “Angles and Demons” Amazon synopsis: “Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is shocked to find proof that the legendary secret society, the Illuminati — dedicated since the time of Galileo to promoting the interests of science and condemning the blind faith of Catholicism — is alive, well, and murderously active. Brilliant physicist Leonardo Vetra has been murdered, his eyes plucked out, and the society’s ancient symbol branded upon his chest. His final discovery, antimatter, the most powerful and dangerous energy source known to man, has disappeared — only to be hidden somewhere beneath Vatican City on the eve of the election of a new pope. Langdon and Vittoria, Vetra’s daughter and colleague, embark on a frantic hunt through the streets, churches, and catacombs of Rome, following a 400-year-old trail to the lair of the Illuminati, to prevent the incineration of civilization.” I mean, good God!

You have to look askance considering the source, but Life & Style Weekly reported towards the end of the Cannes Film Festival (when I wasn’t paying attention, for two dozen or so reasons) that there’s more trouble on the TomKat front. I don’t usually get into this stuff, but Katie’s reported “you can’t stop me!” quote struck me as mildly funny. Why, I can’t exactly say…but I smirked. The item comes by way of Jeannete Walls‘s MSNBC gossip column.

Newsvine is reporting that Blade Runner fans are going to be hustled by Warner Home Video into purchasing two more DVD versions of Ridley Scott‘s 1982 future-noir. The item isn’t written as clearly as it should be, but it seems to say that Scott’s “director’s cut”, which first appeared on DVD in 1997, is “being restored and remastered for a brief DVD reissue in September.” Four months later, or sometime in December ’06 or January ’07, this version will be “deleted” (i.e., withdrawn from the market) and replaced by a 25th anniversary “final cut”, which Warner Home Video is billing as Scott’s “definitive new version” of the film.

I presume the rights have already been optioned or bought, but here’s an ideal source for a very strong, possibly very commercial and perhaps even award-calibre Ziyi Zhang movie that could be theoretically helmed by Ang Lee or Wong Kar Wai. It’s basically an emotional wartime diary, initially serialized in newspapers and recently published in book form, about a real-life North Vietnamese female doctor named Dang Thuy Tram who was killed at age 27 on a Vietnam battlefield in 1970. Seth Mydans‘s Herald Tribune article doesn’t mention the title (weird), but the diary has become a best-seller in Vietnam, and if the right people produced the movie version it would have a potential to be a major emotional journey for Americans also, partly because of the lingering guilt factor over Vietnam. With the right chops, it could become a critics’ darling, an art-house hit and perhaps even an Oscar contender. Mydans’ article describes it as a tale of “love, loneliness and death on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.” [Tram], he reports, “was killed in an American assault after serving in a war zone clinic for more than three years. The combination of revolutionary fervor and the vulnerabilities and self-doubts of a too-sensitive young woman might be called ideology with a human face, reminding readers that it was people like them, trapped in a moment of history, who died on their behalf.” The journey of the diary itself, he writes, “has given it a special postwar symbolism for [the Vietnamese]. It was returned to [Tram’s] family just last year by a former American soldier who recovered it” on the battlefield where she died. I don’t disagree with reader Daniel Zelter‘s view that “after Memoirs of a Geisha, Ziyi’s had enough of faking Asian roles different to her own background. But here’s a brilliant idea — why not have a Vietnamese girl play the part?” I mentioned Ziyi mainly because she resembles Dang Thuy Tram’s photograph (scroll down a bit…it’s there), and of course because she’d presumably sell more tickets than a Vietnamese actress would. That sounds coarse, doesn’t it?

I didn’t get to see all the highly-rated Cannes films, but for what it’s worth I agree completely with L.A. Times film critic Kenneth Turan’s statement that “perhaps the best of the slighted films [among the Cannes Film Festival award-winners]” was Guillermo del Toro‘s Pan’s Labyrinth. But as del Toro told me last Thursday evening, Labyrinth‘s accomplishment was simply being shown in Cannes, given the snobbish attitudes that have long prevailed about films with fantasy-and-FX elements, and that a possible award was never realistically in the cards. “The winners have already been spoken for,” del Toro declared. Turan, by the way, has made a small error in describing del Toro as “the Mexican writer-director of Chronicles and The Devil’s Backbone .” Del Toro was one of five producers of 2004’s Chronicles (better known as Cronicas), but he wrote and directed 1993’s Chronos, a masterful vampire film that I presume Turan was referring to. I also wonder about a quote in Turan’s piece from Cannes Jury chief Wong Kar Wai, which is that Ken Loach‘s The Wind That Shakes the Barley “was the unanimous choice for the top prize” — i.e., the Palmes d’Or. I share the same view that Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson expressed last Sunday night: “I suspect that the jury locked over Babel vs. Volver and wound up giving the Palme d’Or to eight-time competition entrant Ken Loach, who had never won the big prize.”

Tracking on The Omen (20th Century Fox, 6.6.06) is expected to uptick this week (as all films do the closer you get to their opening day), but it wasn’t looking very good a week and a half ago. What are the gut attitudes among HE readers? We’ve all seen the trailer and developed a sense of it. Are devil movies over or…? Is there any intrigue in John Moore trying to re-jigger the Richard Donner original (which seems to have been more or less the plan)? How comfortable is everyone with Liev Schreiber playing Gregory Peck, and Julia Styles as Lee Remick? I for one am looking forward to Mia Farrow playing Damian’s nanny-nurturer-enabler…her first villain role, I believe. The more replies, the better.