I’m told that Paramount’s The Gambler, a remake of Karel Riesz‘s 1974 original that was based on James Toback‘s autobiographical script, has turned out so well that it’ll open sometime in mid to late fall. (The IMDB currently has it as a January 2015 release.) Toback tells me Mark Wahlberg is delighted with how the film, directed by Rupert Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) and re-written by William Monahan, has turned out. Gambler producer Irwin Winkler (who also produced the ’74 version) has also been talking about how good it is. It’s not necessarily an award-season contender as you never know with stories about self-destructive types. But it sounds like Wahlberg (who dropped about 50 pounds to play the part) might at least be in line for some Best Actor action.

Wahlberg during the filming of Rupert Wyatt’s The Gambler three or four months ago.

A Paramount spokesperson says “the film is not yet dated and we are not able to offer comment further at this time.” But I’m hearing that the fall release is pretty much a done deal.

Wahlberg plays James Caan‘s role of Axel Freed, a college professor with a compulsive gambling habit and serious self-destructive tendencies. Toback, who created the Freed character by mixing Fyodor Dostoyevsky‘s The Gambler with his own sordid gambling experiences, has an executive producer credit on the new Gambler. He’s been kept out of the creative loop but has, however, been told encouraging things by Wahlberg, with whom he’s been friendly since the mid ’90s.

“I obviously have a huge interest in the outcome of the film since it’s inspired by the closest thing to an autobiographical movie that I’ve ever written or will write,” Toback said this morning. “Mark Wahlberg has been a good friend for 20 years, and I have always known him to be clinically objective in judging his own work. I know he saw a cut of the movie recently, and told me he is thrilled with it, which makes me extremely hopeful about its quality. That’s all I know but he seems genuinely enthused about having delivered an acting job that he’s proud of.

I have a semi-serious question about Lenny Abrahamson‘s Frank (Magnolia, 8.15) that deserves a semi-serious answer. The allegedly bone-dry British-Irish dramedy is about a deranged musician (Michael Fassbender) who goes around wearing a basketball-shaped paper mache cartoon doofus head. (The late English musician Christopher Mark Sievey wore a head like this after adopting the persona of Frank Sidebottom in 1984.) It’s one of those Sundance-y films that invites you to adopt the correct hip attitude in order to get into it. (If you can’t adjust, fine…but it’s your problem and not the film’s.) Obviously Frank has its indie credentials in order but what if Adam Sandler played Frank rather than Fassbender? That’s my question. I might eventually see Frank (haven’t decided yet) but I know for sure that I hate the head. The costars are Domhnall Gleeson, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Scoot McNairy.

Yesterday I happened to notice that Brutal Youth author Anthony Breznican (otherwise and more routinely known as the high-profile Entertainment Weekly movie writer) is signing copies of his book this evening at Santa Monica’s Aero Theatre, more specifically before a screening of Jason Reitman‘s Young Adult at 7:30 pm. (Signing begins at 6:30 pm.) I wrote Breznican and asked what was up. Is Reitman a fan of the book or something? Is he thinking about adapting it into a film?

Breznican’s response (in part): “I would be thrilled if Jason felt like adapting my book, but no bullshit — that is not the case. He has a full slate, and that’s not in the cards. The thing this evening is strictly casual, strictly friendly.

What did the proverbial room feel like while Jersey Boys was playing, and what was the after-vibe as the crowd shuffled out? Obviously $13.5 million isn’t that great for an opening weekend, and even if it triples this a final gross in the mid 30s has to be seen as a flop for a film that cost $38 million to shoot, not counting marketing costs. What I’m sensing is that the none-too-hip 60-plus crowd is fairly pleased with Boys and that it might have longer legs than anticipated….maybe. How did it play? Did anyone notice any under-40s?

I wouldn’t pay to see Michael Bay‘s Transformers: Age of Extinction (Paramount, 6.27) with a knife at my back, but even if I was half thinking about going I would be having second thoughts because it just hit me that it runs 165 minutes. If anything a film like this should run shorter (85 or 90 minutes), like any overripe, over-cranked assault movie that promises an audio-visual pummeling until it hurts.

Fox Searchlight will release Michael Roskam and Dennis Lehane‘s The Drop (formerly known as Animal Rescue) on 9.12.14, or right smack dab in the middle of the Toronto Film Festival. I don’t know if anyone’s seen or reviewed this Boston-set crime drama, but the trailer is selling a variation on the old Charley Varrick formula (mob money stolen by cowboys), etc. It’s also about a bartender (Tom Hardy or James Gandolfini?) who rescues a puppy found in a garbage can, which of course results in all kinds of bile and rage from the dog’s abusive and mentally unstable former owner (played by…?). Costarring Noomi Rapace, Matthias Schoenaerts, John Ortiz and James Frecheville.

I saw Roman Polanski‘s Venus in Fur at the tail end of the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. It finally opened two days ago (6.20) via Sundance Selects. “Spoken in French, it’s a one-set, two-character piece that’s set inside a smallish theatre in Paris during an evening rainstorm, and which began as an English-language play by David Ives,” I wrote on 9.24. “It was re-written by Ives and Polanski for the screen. It seems to mirror on some level the relationship between Polanski and his wife Emmanuelle Seigner, who costars along with Mathieu Almaric, who portrays the Polanski stand-in, a stage director, and who vaguely resembles the younger Polanski of the ’80s. Other than that it’s…well, I don’t want to abruptly dismiss any work by a great filmmaker but it really does feel like a minor work in a minor and restrictive key. Seigner delivers a snappy, saucy, highly-charged performance — I’ll give her that.”

Yesterday’s trailer posting for The Good Lie prompted a friend to remind me that this Imagine/Alcon/Warner Bros. release (opening on 10.3) would most likely be collecting dust at Paramount if it hadn’t been for the efforts of screenwriter Margaret Nagle. Nagle wrote the script roughly ten years ago, or in the wake of Megan Mylan and John Shenk‘s The Lost Boys of Sudan, a 2003 documentary. (Nagle’s script was allegedly referred to in development circles by the same title.) The project sat at Paramount for five years without a discernible pulse, and then Nagle took advantage of a WGA regulation that allows writers of projects that have languished in development to reclaim them after five years. Dallas Buyer’s Club screenwriter Craig Borten revived that project the same way, saving it from development tedium at Universal. Nagle eventually set Lost Boys up with the fellows at Imagine and Alcon, which gradually led to Reese Witherspoon‘s coming on board in July 2013. “Sometimes the writer matters,” my friend says. Yes and good for that, but if Nagle really did rescue the Lost Boys project from a flatline situation at Paramount and then re-launch it with Imagine and Alcon and so on, why doesn’t she have a producer credit? Doesn’t that seem like a fair thing, that she would get a producer credit? Mainstream Hollywood answer: Sorry but no. You don’t get a producer credit because you’ve been tenacious and resourceful. You get a producer credit by fighting or muscling your way into the inner production circle and then baring your fangs and claws just as fearsomely as the other guys.

First came Megan Mylan and John Shenk‘s The Lost Boys of Sudan (’03), a doc about the struggle of two Sudanese youths to adapt to U.S. culture after fleeing civil war in their country. Then came Christopher Quinn‘s God Grew Tired of Us (debut at 2006 Sundance, released a year later), a “lusciously photographed, exquisitely edited documentary about John, Daniel and Panther — three young Sudanese men, all refugees from their country’s ongoing, utterly devastating civil war — who escape to America to start new lives only to encounter profound longings for home and family, and no small measure of guilt.” And now, finally, The Good Lie (Warner Bros., 10.3) — a presumably heart-tugging Reese Witherspoon narrative version from director Philippe Falardeau (Monsieur Lazhar) and producer Brian Grazer and Ron Howard. Reese plays a humanitarian worker who helps four orphaned men (Arnold Oceng, Ger Duany, Emmanuel Jal, Nyakuoth Weil) find a place to live, some working income and a way to bring the rest of their families to the States. Corey Stoll costars.

Tony Zhou‘s video essay about Martin Scorsese‘s fine use of silences ignores — naturally! — that his next film, which begins shooting next month in Taiwan, is an adaptation of Shusaku Endo‘s Silence. From the moment I first heard of it the concept of Scorsese’s Silence (i.e., son of Kundun mixed with a parable about today’s wacko Christians and Islamics?) has filled me with dread. I don’t want Scorsese guiding me into the gloom of 17th Century Japan. I want him taking me into 21st Century Newark or Oakland or some other den of iniquity and laying on the gangster shit.

When director Raoul Walsh allegedly “borrowed” the body of the recently deceased John Barrymore and then “left his corpse propped in a chair for a drunken Errol Flynn to discover when he returned home from The Cock and Bull Bar,” it was obviously an exercise in macabre humor. The “fun and games with a stiff” concept was used more flamboyantly in Ted Kotcheff‘s Weekend at Bernie’s (’89). But now, according to a 6.22 N.Y. Times story, this shit is happening for real — not humorously but earnestly, respectfully, lovingly. Are these people deranged? Why stop at placing the dearly departed in a sitting position at a dinner table? Why not stand the corpse up with a steel rod, put it on a platform with wheels and give various mourners a chance to waltz with it around the dance floor? Why not put a microphone in the corpse’s upraised hand and play the deceased favorite songs and pretend that the corpse is singing to them karaoke-style?