I’ve watched about 30 minutes’ worth of Heaven’s Gate: The Butcher’s Cut, a 108-minute re-cut by Mary Bernard (an apparent nom de plume of Steven Soderbergh) and I have to say it does feel more absorbing than Michael Cimino‘s original 219-minute cut. It really does. The hook goes in and it stays there. Soderbergh statement: “As a dedicated cinema fan, I was obsessed with Heaven’s Gate from the moment it was announced in early 1979, and unfortunately history has shown that on occasion a fan can become so obsessed they turn violent toward the object of their obsession, which is what happened to me during the holiday break of 2006.” Wait…Soderbergh has been sitting on this re-edited version of Gate for eight years?

Bennett Miller‘s Foxcatcher, a dark-toned melodrama about a real-life murder that happened in Pennsylvania in the mid ’90s, was booked for a big premiere screening at AFIFest 2013 last November 8th, which would have launched it into Oscar-season contention. But that went south in late September when Miller and the film’s distributor, Sony Pictures Classics, cancelled the AFI booking and bumped the film into 2014. Now it’s been announced that Foxcatcher, which will compete at next month’s Cannes Film Festival, will open on November 14th. And how about a booking as the opening-night kickoff attraction of AFIFest 2014?

With the Cannes showing approaching I think it’s time for a new trailer, no?

I’m presuming there were two reasons for the British distributor of William Friedkin‘s Sorcerer wanting to sell it as Wages of Fear, to wit: (a) Sorcerer was always a bad title…a suicide title, really, as it obviously implied something scary and supernatural, especially coming from the director of The Exorcist, and (b) Sorcerer tanked in the U.S. soon after opening in June 1977 so the British distributor undoubtedly said, “What the hell, let’s try to sell it with the original Henri-George Clouzot title…maybe it’ll make a bit more money that way.” Friedkin’s Wages opened in England in February 1978.

When they think at all of John Milius‘s The Wind and the Lion (’75), people think of it as Sean Connery‘s film. A dashing, colorful Connery playing a real-life Moroccan warrior and strong man in a turban — Mulai Ahmed er Raisuli. Connery is always delightful, of course, but in my mind Wind is dominated by Brian Keith‘s performance as President Theodore Roosevelt. And now Milius’s film (his best by virtue of being the most directly expressive of his personal philosophy) is about to pop on Bluray via Warner Archive.

Earlier today a Facebook post announced that Kim’s Video (124 1st Avenue, New York, NY 10009) will be closing soon. I just called a few minutes ago and one of the clerks said (a) the closing date will be 7.15 and (b) management is hunting around for another location. This is nothing short of devastating to me. Kim’s has always charged too much for Blurays but I love roaming the aisles and seeing what’s new. It’s my spiritual home away from home. Kim’s has Blurays or DVDs of every movie you’ve ever heard of and a lot that you haven’t. Their cult collection alone is worth regular visits, not to mention their Region 2 films. This is terrible news. An obvious devaluation of Lower East Side culture.

That classic 1971 American Tourister gorilla luggage commercial taught tens of millions of Americans a basic lesson about luggage at airports, which is that it’s going to get roughly thrown around. (The spot also said, quite obviously, that baggage handlers are unrefined types.) I therefore can’t fathom why anyone was shocked by that video of those two Air Canada guys throwing suitcases off the top of a landing gate…that’s totally normal. The two employees have been canned. Tony Montana: “You got to be kidding…five hundred? Who you think we are, baggage handlers? The going rate on a boat is a thousand a night, mang…you know that.”

I don’t get the relatively weak ratings (59% Rotten Tomatoes, 56% Metacritic) rating for John Turturro‘s Fading Gigolo (Millenium, opened on 4.18). It’s not great but it’s fine, and there’s just no reason to be brusque or dismissive. Last September I called it “a gentle, Brooklyn-based, light-touch, indie-romantic fable. It’s appealing in a kindly, burnished, old-fashioned way, and it happens in a realm entirely (and in some ways charmingly) of Turturro’s imagining. Eroticism, trust me, barely pokes through. The atmosphere is one of reverence, nostalgia, dignity, romance, class, compassion, tradition. The big standout element is gap-toothed Vanessa Paradis making her English-language debut.”

Then again what I’ve written above is a moot point as Fading Gigolo did pretty well last weekend. Audiences ignored naysaying critics as well as the general Woody Allen hate brigade. Here’s a piece by Deadline‘s Pete Hammond sussing out the numbers and the meaning of it all.

Update: Two Hollywood execs — Garth Ancier and David Newman — and a theme-park design guy, Gary Goddard, were named earlier today as defendants in new sex-abuse lawsuits announced by attorney Jeff Herman on behalf of Michael Egan. No offense but this isn’t the hot-news followup I was envisioning when Herman mentioned last week that more defendants would be named. Ancier, Newman and Goddard aren’t as well-known as Bryan Singer, whom Egan and Herman filed against last week in a civil action. They’re just not that “sexy” in a news sense. I’m just being honest.

The West Coast premiere of The Other Woman (20th Century Fox, 4.25) happens tonight in Westwood, and Hollywood Elsewhere will totally be there with bells, camera and notepad. An obviously broad sisterhood comedy (the term “sismance” doesn’t work at all) about taking revenge upon insensitive males, it’s been directed by Nick Cassevetes, produced by Julie Yorn and written by Melissa Stack. The Australian critics posting on Rotten Tomatoes are mostly negative (45%) — it might as well be faced. What I’d like to know is how does Cassevetes go from directing She’s So Lovely (’97), John Q (’02), The Notebook (’04) and the semi-respectable Alpha Dog (’06) to …uhm, this?

Last Wednesday evening 25 or 30 journos were shown five or six scenes from Matt Reeves‘ Dawn Of The Planet of the Apes (20th Century Fox, 7.11). It was a chance to sample the quality of the visual effects, which of course are top-notch, as well as the performances from both the ape and human characters, which I was genuinely impressed by. It was also a chance to get an idea of what kind of film this might turn out to be.

The footage suggested that Dawn is going to be solid and sturdy, but I came away from Wednesday’s screening with a suspicion that it might be not be quite as good as 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which was basically the story of how Andy Serkis‘s Ceasar got smarter and stronger and finally broke out of bondage with his fellow apes. It was all about individual story tension — about the sand pouring out of the glass and the audience wondering when things would finally snap and turn away from James Franco and in Ceasar’s direction.

Dawn seems less personal and more group-oriented. More about military and political tactics than individual direction. Speeches, declarations, taunts, lines in the sand. An ape army standing in opposition to an opposing army of humans. Families and alliances and group dynamics.

Last night’s reading of an early draft of Quentin Tarantino‘s Hateful Eight script was partly a gas and partly a downer. Was it worth the $200 bucks I paid to attend? Yeah, I think so. It was quite the novel theatrical event given the loose experimental vibe and the amusing spectacle of watching several top-dog actors having fun with a vulgar, rambunctious script. The “Tarantino superstars” (including Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Amber Tamblyn, Bruce Dern, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Walton Goggins and James Remar) had a good time and did themselves proud. And yes, Tarantino made it clear (as others have noted) that he’s currently revising the script and is therefore almost certainly interested in making a film version. He also stated that the finale performed last night is being scrapped and will never be heard from again.

But pretty much every account of last night’s performance has failed to say whether The Hateful Eight sounded good enough to be a decent movie. Let me state very clearly and without a shred of a doubt that it didn’t. It’s a fairly minor and almost dismissable thing — a colorful but basically mediocre Tarantino gabfest that mostly happens on a single interior set (i.e., Minnie’s Haberdashery, located somewhere near the Wyoming town of Red Rock during a fierce blizzard) and is basically about a gatherin’ of several tough, mangy hombres sitting around talkin’ and yappin’ and talkin’ and yappin’. And then, just to break up the monotony, doing a little more talkin’ and yappin’. Along with a little shootin’ and poison-coffee drinkin’ and brutally punchin’ out a female prisoner and a few dozen uses of the word “nigger” (par for the QT course) and swearin’ and fellatin’ and whatever else.

A few weeks ago Fox restoration guru Schawn Belston told me that the Blurays of Carousel and The King and I inside the forthcoming Rodgers & Hammerstein Bluray set (Fox Home Video, 4.29) were sourced from the original widescreen CinemaScope 55 elements, which means richer, extra-sharp quality. Both films were shot with the larger-negative process (roughly analogous to VistaVision but with a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, qnd “a picture four times the size of 35mm CinemaScope“) but both were reduced down to 35mm anamorphic film for theatrical projection. So not even the big-city roadshow engagements of these films presented the large-format benefits of the process — every print was reduced down to 35mm. At least Belston’s decision to draw from the original 55mm negative for the Blurays will provide a taste of what these two films might have looked like if Fox had decided against the down-rezzing.

By the way: Frank Sinatra was originally cast as Billy Bigelow in the Henry King film, but he walked off the set when told he’d have to shoot each scene twice a la Oklahoma! (which was shot in 35mm and Todd-AO). This makes no sense at all, of course, as King shot only one version in CinemaScope 55mm. The explanation is that right after Sinatra bolted, Carousel producers found a way to film the scene once on 55mm and then transfer it onto 35mm, so shooting twice was avoided. Here’s his “Soliloquy”, which I’ve always thought was one of his best-ever recordings ever in any capacity.