Me to Drive publicist: “I’ve seen that ‘my hands are dirty’ / ‘So are mine’ clip maybe 10 or 12 times. I’m actually tired of seeing it. Would it kill the powers-that-be to come up with a scene that hasn’t made the rounds quite as much?” Drive publicist: “Hahaha…we have a bunch more coming out. Stay tuned!”

A five-star rave of Tomas Alfredson‘s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, written by Empire‘s Angle Errigo, hasn’t been posted on the Empire website. But it’s been scanned and posted by Romangirl88. Sum-up verdict: “Utterly absorbing, extremely smart and — considering this is a sad, shabby, drably gray-green world of obsessives, misfits, misdirection, disillusionment, self-delusion and treachery — quite beautifully executed.”

In an 8.26 Deadline story titled “Can Indies Steal Oscars Again?”, Pete Hammond reported that Tomas Alfredson‘s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy will no longer open stateside on 11.18, but on 12.9.

About 30 minutes ago an MSNBC reporter in North Carolina said that while Hurricane Irene was definitely wet, turbulent and howling, it was causing less damage than initially feared, and that this may be a source of some relief in the northeast corridor. As I said yesterday, Hurricane Irene will deliver the expected “driving rain and howling winds and tree branches snapping off and downed power lines”, but it may turn out to be “a little bit like Carmageddon when all is said and done.” It’s only a Category 1, for God’s sake.

The media likes scaring people a bit more than explaining the realistic likelihoods, I’m afraid.

My first-ever Telluride Film Festival begins in six days, my arrival there in five, and the first leg of my journey there will begin in four — i.e., a 12:30 pm Burbank-to-Albuquerque flight next Wednesday. Am I feeling jazzed? Yeah, sure, I was…until I read a summary of a recent “Telluride Best Bets” tweet by In Contention‘s Kris Tapley. He predicted that Alexander Payne‘s The Descendants, Steve McQueen‘s Shame and David Cronenberg‘s A Dangerous Method will play there…fine. Entirely welcome, looking forward. But then came the other three.

Tapley’s intuitive powers are telling him that…sputter, choke, cough….Sean Durkin‘s Martha Marcy May Marlene will play Telluride? I’ve paid $780 for a festival pass to see a film that played eight friggin’ months ago at Sundance 2011 and Cannes four months ago? He also half-detects, half-suspects, feels and/or believes that Pedro Almodovar‘s The Skin That I Live In — also seen at Cannes 2011, and deemed by most as a relatively minor entry in the Almodovar canon — will turn up. Tapley has also detected railroad-track vibrations indicating that Michel Hazanavicius‘ The Artist (Weinstein Co., 11.23) will play there.

I’m also hearing that Lynne Ramsay‘s We Need To Talk About Kevin — another Cannes movie that I described last May as “emotional rat poison” — will show at Telluride. Please. Telluride co-honchos Tom Luddy and Gary Meyer “love Tilda Swinton,” a semi-insider claimed.

Maybe Kris is right and maybe he’s not, but let me explain something. Telluride, for me and many others, is about discovering the most exciting or intriguing unseen, fresh-from-the-oven films that will matter to quality-seeking moviegoers over the next four months. The festival can sometimes be about prospective awards season contenders, but that’s a peripheral consideration. And I love the prospect of seeing whatever curio mood movies and/or classics or retrospectives that might pop up. But one thing this festival cannot and must not do is show much discussed, heavily vetted Sundance and Cannes re-runs. It won’t do to give people like me a feeling that they’ve been…well, at least partially burned.

Tapley is also hoping to see William Friedkin‘s Killer Joe, George Clooney‘s The Ides of March, Martin Scorsese‘s George Harrison: Living in the Material World, Rodrigo Garcia‘s Albert Nobbs, Roman Polanski‘s Carnage and Luc Besson‘s The Lady. I’m down with all of these.

I’m told that at least one movie that currently has no firm 2011 release date but is a semi-likely 2011 awards contender will play Telluride. The movie being referred to, by the way, is not Albert Nobbs, even though it hasn’t yet landed a U.S. distributor.

I’m not challenging the suspicion/belief that Tomas Alfredson‘s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy won’t appear at Telluride. Focus Features passed on Toronto and couldn’t wangle a showing at the New York Film Festival plus it’ll be a costly hassle to fly their talent all the way from the Venice Film Festival, etc. But it would certainly be welcome if Focus decided not to duck all the early-fall stateside festivals. Especially given my costly pledge to fly to England to see it on the weekend of 9.16 if it doesn’t play Telluride. If the Focus guys are cool about it, they’ll screen it for select U.S. journos and thereby save some of us the plane and hotel fare.

James Toback‘s autobiographical script of The Gambler, a fine 1974 Paramount film directed by Karel Reisz, is one of the most perfectly written, jewel-cut character studies to ever reach the American screen. Its portrayal of the typical gambler’s risk-junkie mentality, partially borrowed from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Gambler” and partly from Toback’s own compulsive past, is close to flawless.

James Caan ‘s first-act speech to his students, lifted directly from Dostoevsky, about how “sometimes a man knows, just knows without rhyme or reason but with poetic certainty, that two and two make five” is one of my all-time favorite dialogue passages.

Today Deadline‘s Michael Fleming reported that William Monahan (The Departed) is rewriting Toback’s script for a potential Gambler remake with Leonardo DiCaprio atached to play Caan’s character and (who else?) Martin Scorsese directing. Monahan is too good of a writer to just update or do touch-ups, so I’m wondering does Paramount, which will produce, want to make The Gambler into a somewhat different thing? Maybe they don’t, but the hiring of Monahan suggests that they do.

Maybe they want a different ending. Toback’s, however true to Caan’s character, is a bit downish and masochistic.

Paul Sorvino (playing a loan shark named Lips): “Listen, I’m gonna tell you something I never told a customer before. Personally, I never made a bet in my life. You know why? Because I’ve observed firsthand what with seeing the different kinds of people that are addicted to gambling, what we would call degenerates. I’ve noticed there’s one thing that makes all of them the same. You know what that is?”

Caan (as inveterate gambler and college professor Axel Freed): “Yes. They’re all looking to lose.

Sorvino: “You mean you know that?”

Why does it take so long to figure out when Hurricane Irene will actually hit Manhattan? I know it’s supposed to arrive Saturday around midnight or so, possibly an hour or two later (which would make it Sunday)…but why do you have to search around for this info? Why are news reports so averse to simply stating this likelihood in plain, standing-around-in- front-of-the-neighborhood-pizza-parlor dumb-guy language?

So it’s travelling around 15 mph, and it’s been downgraded to a level 2 from a level 3, and is expected to hit the general, all-spread-out New York City area by the end of Saturday Night Live? And it’ll be gone and on its way to New England by dawn or thereabouts? And that’s it?

So if you want to adopt a Hollywood Elsewhere “you only live once” attitude and experience the damn thing you’re going to have to forego sleep? And if you want to shoot video of Irene’s arrival you probably won’t get a damn thing because it’ll be pitch black? And the NY subway system is going to shut down at noon tomorrow, or roughly 12 hours before it hits? Why not shut down at 4 pm or 6 pm? And movie theatres will be closed?

If Roland Emmerich was handling the logistics for this thing you can be damn sure it would play out differently. I hope the flooding isn’t going to be too bad and all that, and I hope to God no one loses their life or gets badly hurt, but I can feel a little bit of an inkling of a letdown coming. Hurricane Irene is real, all right, and it might be awful, but I suspect it might be a little bit ike Carmageddon when all is said and done. Okay, maybe not quite that much of a shortfall. But a good portion of it, I suspect, is just going to be driving rain and howling winds and tree branches snapping off and electric power lines down and news reporters doing their best to scare the shit out of alert people to the dangers. It will come and it will pass, and the biggest dividend will be “cause for the pause that we all should be taking anyway.”

The young-gangster-falls-for-nice-girl story in Rowan Joffe‘s Brighton Rock (IFC Films, opening today) has nothing — repeat, nothing — to do with the 1964 mod-vs.-rocker riots that happened in Brighton, England, in the summer of 1964. Joffe simply decided to mesh the original Grahame Greene story, set in 1938, with this tumultuous occurence, the mid ’60s being a hipper backdrop than the late ’30s, etc.

More than anything else my recent viewing of Brighton Rock recalled Franc Roddam‘s Quadrophenia (1979), which peaked with a rousing, contact-high recreation of the Brighton riots that is much more thrilling (and far more realistic and chaotic-feeling) than the one in Joffe’s film…no offense. I first saw Quadropehnia at Manhattan’s 8th Street Playhouse, and then I showed it to the kids about ten years ago. The older I’ve gotten the more I’ve come to realize that this film — loosely based on the Who rock opera and basically the story of Jimmy Cooper (Phil Daniels) and his identity, friendship and girlfriend issues — belongs in the near-great category.

But what a shock to see this clip and realize that Roddam forgot to change the letters on a movie marquee while shooting a crowd scene, and so we read, however briefly, that Warren Beatty‘s Heaven Can Wait and Randal Kleiser‘s Grease — both released in the summer of ’78, when Quadrophenia was shooting — are the current attractions. What an embarassment for production designer Simon Holland (who’s now dead). I mean, it’s so easy to change the letters on a marquee. It’s not like it costs anything.

The Perry-Bush facemash spotted a week or so ago on Daily Kos. The full Ides of March poster.

I regret having missed out on the Washington, D.C./New York City earthquake, and I’m also sorry about missing Hurricane Irene this Sunday. If I was still in Manhattan I would put on a parka that morning and take the A train to Rockaway so I could see the big waves and feel the full force of the winds. I know people whose entire lives are about living in climate-controlled safety vacuums and avoiding the aliveness of nature at all costs.

During last night’s Thelma and Louise screening at the Academy I fell in love all over again with Callie Khouri‘s dialogue. Especially that scene when Geena Davis‘s Thelma is explaining to Susan Sarandon‘s Louise that things just aren’t the same any more, that something deep and transforming has taken hold of her. Thelma: “But, uhmm, I don’t know…you know? Something’s, like, crossed over in me and I can’t go back. I mean, I just couldn’t live.”

And I love this back-and-forth as they’re driving through Monument Valley:

Thelma: You awake?

Louise: Guess you could call it that, my eyes are open.

Thelma: I’m awake too. I feel awake.

Louise: Good.

Thelma: I feel really awake. I don’t recall ever feeling this awake. You know? Everything looks different now. You feel like that? You feel like you got something to live for now?

Louise: We’ll be drinking margaritas by the sea, mamacita.

Thelma: You know we could change our names.

Louise: To live in a hacienda.

Thelma: I want to get a job, I’ll work at Club Med.

Louise: Yeah, what kind of deal is that cop going to have to come up with to top that?

Thelma: Have to be pretty good.

Louise: Have to be pretty damn good.

Thelma and Louise wasn’t just an important expression of rage and refusal and sisterhood among women who’d had it with predatory male bullshit, but something seminal and primal, and on some level even eternal, if you consider that it’s as strong a film now as it ever was, and perhaps even stronger. I was surprised by how fresh and vital it still seems. And funny — it has more than a few big laughs.

Yes, there were three male characters who were repulsive, sadistic brutes, and Brad Pitt‘s character was no prize in the end, but there was also Harvey Keitel‘s compassionate detective and Michael Madsen ‘s sympathetic boyfriend, and that cop who started crying when he was about to be put into the trunk. And there was also the rasta man on the bicycle who blew pot smoke into the trunk.

I think the above alternate ending (i.e., the one that tested poorly, thereby causing its removal) needed different music, but otherwise it was strong and sad and penetrating.

During last night’s post-screening q & a with moderator Anne Thompson, Thelma and Louise costar Geena Davis, screenwriter Callie Khouri and producer Mimi Polk.

Incidentally: There was no air-conditioning during the pre-screening dinner event, and the theatre itself had no circulating air either…until later during the film, when it finally seemed to kick in. It was pretty awful at first. The Academy fathers need to get someone to come in and make sure the a.c. is operational.

The fact that Bruce Robinson‘s The Rum Diary, based on a book by Hunter S. Thompson, has been waiting in the dugout for a long time to open (principal photography having begun in March ’09) doesn’t necessarily mean that it blows. It might be half funny. It could be semi-original. The only problem in the trailer is an allusion to “some crazed hallucination.” Thompson’s book was begun in Puerto Rico in 1959 when the only drug around was alcohol. No lizard tongues back then.