wired

Curtis Hanson’s In Her Shoes (20th Century Fox, 10.7) is on the longish side (a bit more than 140 minutes) but don’t let that temper your enthusiasm, says an overseas distribution guy who saw it a couple of weeks ago. “I really, really liked it,” he says. “It’s very well-written” — Jennifer Weiner’s book has been adapted by Erin Brockovich‘s Susannah Grant — “and down to the bone and extremely well made. Women will absolutely love it because they will recognize themselves in any of the three main characters.” He was speaking of Cameron Diaz’s flakey irresponsible sister, Toni Collette’s irked-at-Diaz, much more conservative older sister, and Shirley MacLaine’s grandmother whom Diaz goes to visit at an old folks’ home in Florida. “But guys will love it as well,” he says. “It’s extremely well acted and very well directed by Hanson, and it’s clear that Fox gave Hanson the autonomy to adapt the way he saw fit because it sticks very close to the Weiner book. Fox had a plan to release it in May or June, but it was so well received in research screenings they decided to hold it back for awards season. There is definitely, I feel, a Best Suporting Actress nomination in the wings for Shirley MacLaine, partly because she’s so honest in how she looks her age.” In Her Shoes is playing the Toronto Film Festival, of course, so we’ll be seeing soon enough.

I don’t care that much one way or the other, but the new Bob Iger-led Disney has apparently smoothed things over with Pixar and the word is that reps for the companies are negotiating the fine points of a fresh new deal, so it looks like Pixar and Disney won’t be separating after all. Take it with a grain, but that’s I’m hearing.

It’s ironic to say the least that with the divorce between Harvey and Bob Weinstein and Disney about to be over and done with and in effect, the talk is now that Disney is finalizing a deal to handle overseas distribution for four films made by Bob and Harvey’s new outfit, The Weinstein Co., and that the deal will be signed within the next two or three months. The Weinstein Co. films we’re speaking of are Derailed, Breaking and Entering, Scary Movie 4 and the Sin City sequel.

What’s more pathetic? Director Martin Campbell and producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli still trying to figure out which semi-acceptable (i.e., not a complete unknown, and faux-studly in the Sean Connery mold) candidate they should sign and turn into the next James Bond, or the fact that journalists are still writing articles about this embarassing process? The latest indication of the latter is this article (“Search for a Swoonmaker”) from Australia’s The Age, which actually proposes casting Hugh Grant. Nobody ever mentions it, but there is only one trying-to-cast-the-new-James-Bond story, really, and it’s an oldie: nobody who knows the score or has anything career-wise on the ball wants to work with Wilson and Broccoli. They are stoppers and turkeys and micro-managers and caretakers of the lowest order, and this, I’m told, is at least one reason why Hugh Jackman, “evidently at the instigation of his wife, actor Deborah-Lee Furness,” according to the Age story, is reported to have refused a deal to make three Bond movies.

I’ve just come from Bennett Miller’s Capote (Sony Pictures Classics, 9.30). It’s an amazingly rich and resonant thing. It’s largely about stillnesses and intimations, and yet it’s very precise and careful in conveying a defining chapter in the life of author Truman Capote. It lets the actors — particularly the great Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who plays Capote — tell us what we need to feel and understand. I know someone who’s seen it and has said he’s not sure about Hoffman being a likely Best Actor nominee. (Although he’s very enthused about Clifton Collins, Jr.’s performance as Perry Smith, the sad-eyed Clutter family murderer, and a possible Best Supporting Actor nomination.) All I can say about Hoffman not necessarily being a shoo-in is the word “please.” No, I can say more than that: there’s a certain vividness of detail and a certain pitch to live-wire performances that turn up in Oscar-bait movies, and, trust me, Hoffman’s is one of these. It screams Oscar worthiness. It’s a summation, a crescendo…a master stroke. (Jesus, that sounded a bit like a quote from “Eric” something-or-other, the “publicist’s friend” who used to be a regular fixture in the opening pages of the National Lampoon in the late ’70s.) I’ll get into this more next week but Hoffman is so fantastic and rock-solid delightful I’ve decided to go see Capote again as soon as possible. I think there’s another screening on Monday evening…

Tracking says the biggest earner this weekend — oddly, given the buzz — will be Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm. Awareness last weekend was at 76%, definite interest was at 41% and those saying it would be their first choice stood at 17%.

The latest Telluride Film Festival lineup is as follows: Robert Towne’s Ask the Dust, Be With Me (from Singapore), The Bee Season, Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto, Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, Liev Schreiber’s Everything is Illuminated, Live and Become (a French-Israeli production), Merry Christmas, Paradise Now, John Turturro’s Romance and Cigarettes, and a film from Cameroon called Sisters in Law. The festival runs from Friday, 9.2 through Monday, 9.5. I never manage to get there because it’s too costly, but someday…

There doesn’t seem to be any denying that the buying of movie ads in newspapers is starting to taper off and that the studio marketers are looking more and more to digital ads on niche internet websites. In last week’s Nikki Finke column (“Hollywood to Newsosaurs: Drop Dead”) in the L.A. Weekly, it was asserted that “every major movie studio is rethinking its reliably humongous display ad buys in [newspapers] because those newsosaur readers are, to quote one mogul, ‘older and elitist’ compared to younger, low-brow filmgoers — so it makes no sense to waste the dough.” Finke also claimed that “at least two Hollywood movie studios have decided to drastically cut their newspaper display ads as soon as possible.” And then came a report by Joel Topcik in today’s New York Times that pounded the nail in further. Topcik observed that while “web advertisements will not eclipse print and broadcast ads anytime soon” (the industry spent about 2.2 percent of its 2004 ad budgets online), there’s a kind of sea change underway in which “blanket ad purchases seem ready to decline in tandem with box office receipts with studios [looking] more and more to the internet to find audiences. Westport, Connecticut-based marketing consultant Joseph Jaffe says buying online ads with the right sites is “the opposite of buying a spread in a newspaper or a slew of 30-second slots on TV…studios need to stop trying to reach the most people and focus on reaching the best people.”

Matt Damon doesn’t want to hear about Ben Affleck going through any career slump. “People forget that Ben is a terrific actor,” Damon tells Chicago Sun Times reporter Cindy Pearlman. “And maybe through some fault of his own, Ben hasn’t made the best choices in the last couple of years. I ust think it’ll be funny when his new movie, Truth, Justice, and the American Way, comes out and he plays George Reeves [TV’s ‘Superman’]. Everyone will be like, ‘Ben, it’s a comeback!’ I’ll sit there and say, ‘What the f—? The guy has always been great. He never went anywhere.” Loyalty and support is what friendship is all about, but Affleck’s stock has been sinking since the Bennifer/Gigli/Paycheck dog days of ’03 and Surviving Christmas only underlined the problem. Wearing those blue tights and then shooting himself in the head in Truth, Justice, et. al. may bring him back (I hope it does) but there’s also Mike Binder’s Man About Town (done and, I’m told, waiting to make a big debut at Sundance ’06) and Affleck’s direction of Gone Baby Gone, whenever that’s supposed to happen. Will it? Calling Patrick Whitesell!

Screenwriter Josh Friedman‘s blog, “I find your lack of faith disturbing.” is a well-written, refreshingly frank look into his struggle to get credit for writing War of the Worlds, his face off with David Koepp, and his epiphanies about the industry. “Because if there’s a lesson it’s this: you can be David Koepp or Josh Friedman or f***ing Shakespeare…If you’re a screenwriter you’re a screenwriter and if you want people to give you love at your premiere you better bring ’em with you.”

Harold Becker and Al Pacino are onto a good thing in remaking Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955), a classic noir famous for a totally silent heist sequence that lasts roughly 30 minutes…no dialogue or music and next to no “action,” but hypnotic from start to finish. Brian DePalma shot a vaguely similar sequence in the first Mission Impossible (’96), but it wasn’t quite as long. Will today’s audiences sit still for another silent robbery, or will Becker and Pacino blow it off because they don’t want to deal with people like me hammering them if they don’t do it as well as Dassin? Becker will have to make the job as technologically challenging, of course, as the one Dassin’s thieves faced in their day. One assumes that Pacino will play the “Tony le Stephanois” character, an ex-con with a hacking cough who organizes the robbery (and who was portrayed to hard-boiled perfection by Jean Servais in the original). And Becker and Pacino need to come up with a new title since Rififi slapped onto an English-language remake set in the U.S. would sound precious and anachronistic. Together, Pacino and Becker have made two films before, Sea of Love (’89) and City Hall (’01). No distributor or start-date has been announced, but this story should serve as a reminder to those of you who haven’t seen Dassin’s film to rent or buy the Criterion Collection DVD.

This is why I love…no, worship Terry Gilliam. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Hugh Hart, Gilliam says “he hates most computer-generated imagery. He hated The Patriot, though he grew to love its star, Heath Ledger. He thinks mammoth battle sequences have been ‘done to death,’ doesn’t like Men in Black‘s ‘smart-ass’ humor [and] has no patience for ‘macho’ action movies.” Yes! But on the other hand…