Here we were beating a dead horse, but in the case of Memoirs of a Geisha (Columbia, opening today) it seems fair to note in the wake of the overwhelmingly negative reviews that the chances of this production-designed-and-costumed-to-death period chick flick rating as a Best Picture contender are close to virtually nil. Salon ‘s Stephanie Zacaharek, expressing the general consensus, says that Geisha has “no life, no juice. Instead of tempting you into submission, it merely drugs you.” Academy members can put it up for this or that tech award, but with Geisha getting slammed by the vast majority of big-gun critics (including the New York Times‘ Manohla Dargis, the L.A. Times‘ Carina Chocano and the Wall Street Journal‘s Joe Morgenstern) and racking up a sad 31% Rotten Tomatoes rating, anyone looking to seriously push it for Best Picture is going to look like some kind of clueless clod. Even Zhang Ziyi’s performance won’t have much heat either after today. “Ms. Zhang…shows none of the heartache and steel of her astonishing performance in Wong Kar-wai’s 2046,” Dargis observes. “When her character crumbles with desire in that film, Ms. Zhang’s face seems to break into pieces — you can scarcely believe she could put it whole again. Here [in Geisha], you can hardly believe it’s the same actress.”

How much of a strong Christian element will there be in Oliver Stone’s 9/11 movie that Paramount is releasing next August, and how much of a Chrisitan angle will be part of the marketing of this film? Andrea Berloff’s script is about the true story of two Port Authority cops, John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and William J. Jimeno (Michael Pena), who were buried under the rubble of the fallen World Trade Center towers on 9.11. It’s been reported that the ex-Marine who drove down to the WTC site from Connecticut and wound up digging the cops out and saving their lives (In The Bedroom‘s William Maptoher is portraying him in the film) was a born-again Christian who he believed he was doing the bidding of a higher celestial power in performing his rescue. But what hasn’t been reported is that a late ’04 draft of Berfloff’s script has a scene in which Jesus Christ appears in a hallucination that Jimeno “sees” as he’s slipping in and out of consciousness due to a lack of water, and Christ offers water to him. This scene could easily have been tossed or not filmed, but if it stays and makes the final cut, Paramount Pictures, distributors of the Stone film, will obviously have marketing hook to try and attract the crowd that supported The Passion of the Christ and are soon expected to turn out big-time for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

There’s a new Paul Thomas Anderson script called, I think, Let There Be Blood ….wait a minute…is it There Will Be Blood? I can’t remember but neither will be used because women will be turned off and refuse to go if they stick with either one, and you just know every distributor out there (except, maybe, the all-seeing, all-knowing Bob Berney) will say “forget it” if Anderson insists on staying with either, so we’ll see. I’m mentioning this, in any event, because I’m wondering if anyone has read it or read coverage, even, and can give me a rundown.

Slate‘s Matt Feeney suggests that one reason for the huge popular- ity of Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake on DVD (it’s earned about $20 million, or nine times the U.S. theatrical gross) is that it’s easier to understand the dialogue on a disc. The film’s Cockney accents were indecipherable to most American viewers in theatres, but Cake‘s popularity on DVD suggests, says Feeney, that “viewers are willing to abide this type of difficulty when the ‘pause’ and ‘rewind’ buttons are only a thumb’s-length away.” Maybe, but why would pause and rewind when you can just turn on the English subtitles? This is why, for me, I made a point of getting the DVD of Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday, which I understood about 20% of, at most, when I saw it at Sundance three or four years ago.

I’m mentioning this about four days later than I should have, but there’s a q & a transcript of a chat between Time film critic Rich- ard Schickel and Munich director Steven Spielberg on page 70 of the current issue. And the intro says that Spielberg has collab- orated with Schickel on a TV documentary called “Shooting War.” Schickel, as noted earlier, reviews Munich in the same issue (Munich is on the cover) and extremely favorably. Shouldn’t Schickel should recused himself from reviewing Munich on the grounds of his having worked with Spielberg on the doc? A guy who works for one of the trades has written me about this and called this “a profound conflict of interest. Schickel had no business — NONE — reviewing Munich. Indeed, he must bow out of reviewing any Spielberg film at all. This is really awful, and it makes the accompanying hype all the worse.”

This is a few days late also, but at a fund-raiser last Sunday for the American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, and which honored Cinderella Man director Ron Howard, Michael Keaton made a cheap crack. (The event, as reported by Roger Friedman, was atttended by Howard, his producing partner Brian Grazer, Jim Carrey, Edie Falco, Renee Zellweger, Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell, et. al.) “The bad news is that Russell Crowe isn’t here,√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢√É‚Äû√ɬπ Keaton quipped. “The good news is that we don’t have to listen to his [expletive deleted] band. They suck. They√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢√É‚Äû√ɬ¥re horrible. John McCain came up with the anti-torture bill about them.” Oh, yeah? I’ve listened to some tracks by Crowe’s band, 30 Odd Foot of Grunts, and they sound fine. (I got into them after watching a pretty good documentary about the band, called Texas, at a Sundance Film Festival five or six years ago.) They have their own sound (they specialize in folk ballads) and they’re totally tight and professional sounding, and Crowe has a smooth crooning voice and does really well by that.

“Munich is not quite, at least on first blush, the unstoppable Oscar powerhouse that I first thought it might be,” admits David Poland in his current “Hot Button” column about his viewing of Steven Spielberg’s film last night (i.e., Monday). “But it is still the likely winner of this year’s Best Picture Oscar, in my opinion.” [I presume readers are aware that whenever a writer says “in my opinion,” it means he/she is feeling less than 100% resolved.] “It is serious…it is excellent,” Poland continues. “And it is about something important beyond its own storytelling parameters. Brokeback Mountain will have its supporters, but I don’t see it overcoming this film, which speaks to bigger issues, though the issues in Brokeback are extremely important to its constituency.” In other words, if you’re gay or female Brokeback may mean a lot to you, but if you’re a thoughtful two-fisted hetero guy you’re going to find “bigger issues” — i.e., more important content — in Munich, and probably even more so if you’re Jewish. And yet Poland’s first out-of-the-gate reaction to Munich…the first thought that seemed strong enough to merit mention…is that all the performances are strong (especially Michael Lonsdale’s “near cameo”). He states toward the end of the piece that “the theme of [Munich] is the dehumanizing nature of violence over time. No matter how well founded — in your mind or in reality — the ‘right’ to kill is, in order to maintain focus on the effort, one must dehumanize both their target and themselves.” Uhm…okay. But uhm…may I say something? Has there ever been an intelligent film about protagonists involved in killing people that doesn’t convey the idea, in one fashion or another, that violence is dehumanizing all around? Including (but certainly not limited to) Peter Weir’s Witness, Fred Zinneman’s High Noon, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, Michael Mann’s Collateral and about 20 or 30 other films I could mention off the top of my head?

Correction: The trades will be out Friday, 12.16 with their reviews of Terrence Malick’s The New World (New Line, 12.25 limited). Most critics will love it, Academy members will run hot, lukewarm and cold, and the paying public….well, who knows? Film sophisticates will turn out, of course…ditto anyone bored with the commercial mainstream output these days…anyone with an appreciation for an unusually told love story…it’s a sumptuous art film and a class act all the way.

It was supposed to be okay as of yesterday (12.5) to start riffing about The Producers (Universal, 12.16), so where are the trade reviews? Let me be among the first to say that this big swanky movie musical may be square (i.e., in a Mel Brooks time-capsule way, which means square with a certain historical authority) but very entertaining in a brassy and unapologetic Tin Pan Alley fashion. The Broadway musical worked beautifully and this is a stodgy but fervent capturing of that Broadway show …and there’s really nothing to beef about. It plays fine even if you never saw the show but liked the original 1968 Mel Brooks non-singing filmed comedy. Nathan Lane’s Zero Mostel-like Max Bialystock is a raucous ride in itself, and chubby Matthew Broderick is loads of fun as Leo Bloom. A bewigged Uma Thurman really gets into that parody-of-a-broadly-sexual-babe routine that Madeline Kahn used to do for Brooks in the ’70s. Will Ferrell is oafishly tedious in the Kenneth Mars part, and is wearing out his welcome fast. Susan Stroman directed, but of course she didn’t make a move without Mel Brooks’ say-so. The queeny gay humor is “funny” in a vaudevillian sense, but only in Brooksland are gay men portrayed as unregenerate pre-Stonewall effeminates. (You just know that Middle Americans will be more comfortable with this shtick than anything in Brokeback Mountain.) Stranger still is Stroman’s visual sense, or rather the photography by John Bailey and Charles Minsky. The Producers is shot and edited as if it was directed by Henry Koster or Henry King in the mid 1950s. The camera just sits there like it weighs ten tons and can only be moved with herculean effort. You couldn’t get further away from the frenetic visuals of Baz Luhrman’s Moulin Rouge if you tried. There’s nothing “wrong” with an approach that says “this is a story set in 1959 or thereabouts, so let’s make a movie that feels like it was shot back then.” But it’s also just plain old-fogeyish, and I wonder how it will sit with the under-25s.

“I don’t think any movie or any book or any work of art can solve the stalemate in the Middle East today,” Steven Spielberg has said in reply to a question about Munich, which deals with Israel’s revenge campaign over the 1972 Olympic massacre murders. “But it’s worth a try. Somewhere inside all this intransigence there has to be a prayer for peace. The biggest enemy is not the Palestinians or the Israelis. The biggest enemy in the region is intransigence.” A wise and perceptive thought…and yet something in me recoils when moral and ethical ruminations become part of a movie’s marketing campaign, however relevant they may be to the subject matter. Paddy Chayefsky once wrote that “nobody gets moral unless they want to get something or get out of something.” Political considerations must be set aside — Munich will rise or fall based on whether it has at least two and preferably three killer scenes that sink in and stick to your ribs. If it has these, watch out.

Here we are at the end of the year with a couple of weeks left to sift things through before everyone leaves for the Xmas holiday, and I’m only just starting to hear about screenings of two big-studio comedies — Dean Parisot’s Fun With Dick and Jane (Columbia, 12.21) and Rob Reiner’s Rumor Has it (Warner Bros., 12.25). We all know that a typical Meathead movie (i.e., one directed by Rob Reiner) will be conservative and tonally smoothed-out as well as diametrically opposed to any kind of loosey-goosey 1980s Pedro Almodovar sensibility, so that kind of diminishes the Rumor want-to-see right off the top of the deck. (Honestly? I’m more interested right now in those Jennifer Aniston papparazzi boob shots that her attorney has been threatening magazine editors about.) I just got invited to a December 12th London screening of Fun With Dick and Jane by Sony’s Anna Whelan…but the Culver City Sony team is curiously silent. (Wait…have I been taken off the screening list because of my Geisha comments?) The irony is that Dean Parisot (director of the great Galaxy Quest and the under-valued Home Fries) is a good guy with good instincts…but leave it to Sony’s p.r. team to convey the opposite impression. Dick and Jane, a remake of a not-very-good 1977 comedy that was co-written by Judd Apatow, Nicholas Stoller and Peter Tolan, was said to be a “troubled” during production…but that’s just talk. It’s about ideal married couple Dick (Jim Carrey) and Jane (Tea Leoni) freaking and turning to larceny when their income dries up.

The first no-holds-barred critics’screening of Steven Spielberg’s Munich (Universal, 12.23) (i.e., one unsullied by notions of giving Munich and Spielberg a Time cover story) happened last night at 7 pm at the Lindwood Dunn Theater on Vine Street…and I’m sure reactions will begin to seep out sometime today and answers to the Big Question — is Munich this year’s Million Dollar Baby? — will start to take shape. I won’t see Munich myself until Wednesday evening.