I have surely heard the cries of HE readers, complaining of slow loading. I myself have felt the anguish of the drip-drip-drip. So today we cut down the number of postings on the front page — formerly 50, now 30. And we’re going to be more vigilant about accepting flash ads, which can also slow things down.

Variety‘s Andrew Stewart reported earlier today that Sony “many finally be conjuring up its long-gestating Harry Houdini project” with Francis Lawrence (Water for Elephants) directing and Jimmy Miller producing — and that’s fine. But I’ll bet serious money that neither Lawrence nor Miller have thought about what would make a good movie about the legendary escape artist (and what would make a bad one) as much I have. Seriously.

In the late ’80s and early ’90s the late Stuart Byron and I had a small business called re:visions that sold analyses of stalled or otherwise troubled film projects. 22 years ago we co-researched and co-wrote an exhaustive 36-page analysis about why Rastar Prods. (the Columbia-based filmmaking company run by the legendary Ray Stark) had repeatedly tried and failed to get its own Houdini movie before the cameras in the ’70s and ’80s, despite having commissioned scripts from the highly skilled James Bridges, Carol Sobieski and William Goodhart.

Our opinion, in a nutshell, was basically “forget it.” We delivered our opinion on page 4, as follows:

“We began our immersion into the Houdini material under the hope that we’d strike oil, some structural flaw or hidden theme that everyone had missed, and thus resurrect the [Houdini] project as it was originally conceived. But after slogging through three Houdini biographies, two-and-a-half stage treatments done for Ray Stark, all of the scripts (some Rastar-owned, some not) and treatments, and various research materials assembled in the Rastar riles through the years, we came to a conclusion which surprised us — certainly one for which we were unprepared.

“The material isn’t there.

“It is not the fault of James Bridges, Carol Sobieski or William Goodhart that none could write a producible script. Harry Houdini may have had a fascinating career. His stage act may have been the biggest knockout of his day. And he may have had, on some deeply repressed level, strong inner conflicts that render him a subject for psychological discourse.

“But he did not lead an interesting life. Indeed, of all the major celebrities of the 20th Century, it could be argued that Harrry Houdini led the dullest and most uneventful off-stage existence. Houdini may have led a life that, to him, was incandescent, but reading about requires great amounts of coffee and fortitude. The dramatic dullness is unrelenting. We wished that once, just once, Harry Houdini had failed in some performance and been publicly humiliated. Or that he’s suffered some crisis of confidence. But it never happened.

Page 4 of our report

“Houdini’s is an example, in fact, of the sort of life in which, dramatically speaking, nothing happens.

“He never fell in love with a woman other than his wife (this no adulterous conflicts or guilt, leading to some cinematic flashpoint). He did not have to leave his country and become an exile. He had no serious rivals or feuds (except for the wars of rhetoric between himself and the spiritualists, fought with terminology and metaphor of an obscure, hard-to-grasp nature). His career never stalled due to some interruptus, like having to fight in World War I, or suffering injury or serous illness, or becoming an alcoholic or dope addict.”

And so on and so on. None of this will stop Lawrence and Miller from making something up that is wholly fictional and CG-flamboyant, but the whole reason for focusing on Harry Houdini is the metaphor of escape, and the fact many of his escapes were done in “real” environments and not as a showbiz presentation.

Aahh, forget it. It’s a different world, a different set of rules. Lawrence and Miller are going to do whatever the hell they want, but they may as well invent something out of whole cloth instead of trying extract something true and historical.

I don’t think there’s anything terribly thrilling in the official announcement that Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life will have its world premiere at Cannes 2011. The big news would have been if Fox Searchlight, the film’s distributor, had decided not to show it there. But we all knew this was coming, just as we know that if Malick could have figured a way to delay showing Tree another year, he would have done so.

Things have changed since The Tree of Life was a no-show at Cannes 2010, and I’m telling you that this Sean Penn-and-Brad Pitt darn-my-dad family dysfunction flick is no longer enough to truly quicken the pulse of the Cannes cognoscenti. In terms of showing a film by a major American auteur and/or some sort of prestige-level director, Cannes 2011 needs something else to make itself vibrant and whole.

Because Tree, I fear, is going to deflate when it finally screens. Too much time in post-production always indicates convolution and a lack of clarity — let’s face it — and it often means double-trouble when the film in question is based on a decades-old idea and a dust-covered script that a director has been waiting half his life to put before cameras.

No, we need something else from this country to play Cannes. As George Clooney said to Tilda Swinton in the finale of Michael Clayton, “I want more.” Something bolder and out of the blue — ballsier, more exciting, cooler, more flamboyant, etc. Because Malick, gifted fellow that he is, has fiddle-faddled for too long. I’m sorry, but that’s how it smells now. And I’m saying this as someone who would dearly love to be proved wrong, if warranted. But I know in my heart and in my insect-antennae vibrations that this film is going to be trouble.

A couple of hours ago on KCRW I heard a quote from Jeanine Basinger stating that the late Elizabeth Taylor launched the era of the superstar salary by hardballing it with 20th Century Fox executives during initial Cleopatra negotiations by saying, “If you want me, you’ll have to pay me a million dollars.” As I heard it the million dollar demand was actually meant in jest. She didn’t want to do effing Cleopatra and figured, “Okay, this’ll get rid of them — ask or some ridiculous amount.”

The new King of Kings Bluray (Warner Home Video, 3.29) arrived yesterday. I’ve said before that it’s not the spiritual content of this so-so 1961 Biblical canvas flick (which I can take or leave) as much as (a) the lusciously detailed Super Technirama 70 photography, which looks mouth-watering on the Bluray, (b) Miklos Rosza‘s legendary score and (c) Jeffrey Hunter‘s performance as Jesus of Nazareth, which seems wooden and posed at first but gradually deepens and sinks in during the second half.

Jeffrey Hunter’s blue eyes were radiant in this film — no question about that.

Golgotha tableux

The best journey-of-Christ movie is Martin Scorsese‘s The Last Temptation of Christ followed by Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s The Gospel According to St. Matthew. But in an odd way King of Kings has a special vibe about it due to Hunter’s Nazarene, who is at once Hollywood-fake and yet captivating and soothing. That handsome face, that nut-brown hippie hair, those light blue eyes, and that red-and-white outfit that he wears during the Sermon on the Mount scene.

I might as well just spit it out: there’s a vaguely erotic appeal to Hunter’s Christ. All the King of Kings characters look at him with half-goofy, half-awestruck expressions, but it’s hard not to presume or imagine that they’re also taken by his physical beauty. (Even Ron Randell‘s Roman Centurion seems to regard him in this light.) There’s no question during the watching of King of Kings that Hunter’s Christ is far and away the best looking….okay, I’ll say it…the hottest guy in the film. If I were a gay Judean and he wasn’t the Son of God…

Two or three years ago I mentioned a sartorial similarity between Hunter’s Jesus and Rebel Without a Cause‘s James Dean with both wearing bright red tunics on top of white T-shirts in climactic scenes. One assumes this was at the urging of Nicholas Ray, the director of both films. Let’s not forget that Ray, according to one or two Dean biographies, had some kind of sexual affair with Dean during the making of Rebel. So it’s at least possible that he injected a subtle erotic undercurrent into King of Kings….maybe.

Technical sidenote: Super Technirama 70 provided 70mm release prints, but not from a 70mm (or 65mm) negative. It used a horizontally-run, 8-perf film almost identical to VistaVision, but with an anamorphic squeeze during the photography so that both 35mmm anamorphic and 70mm prints can be made from the negative.

Except for Netflix, these Google Ads that went up today are horrific. I’ve never had ads on this site that looked so ugly and low-rent and angled at the Walmart crowd. HE happens to be in an in-between period between film-campaign ads, and I was persuaded to allow the Google Adsense ads to run because it’s money and it couldn’t hurt. But look at them! They do hurt!

I once saw Elizabeth Taylor in the flesh. She was standing about ten or twelve feet away in a dense crowd of guys at an after-party at the Roxy, the popular Manhattan roller disco on West 18th, sometime in ’79 or ’80. I managed a glimpse or two of her eyes, and was slightly surprised to discover that they really were as beautiful as I’d been told. I was mesmerized. I think I actually said out loud, “Wow.”

Elizabeth Taylor in either a Cat On a Hot Tin Roof or Butterfield 8 publicity still.

I’d been looking at Taylor in film after film all my life, of course, but those real-life peepers had an extra-glistening, pools-of-passion, send-your-hormones-to-the-moon quality that I’d never quite gotten from a live female before. And they actually did seem to be violet colored, as legend had it.

And now she’s gone at age 79. Everyone and everything fades and recedes and moves on to the next dimension and/or state of being — no exceptions. The once-legendary Taylor, who hit her career and erotic hottitude peak between ’51 (A Place in The Sun) and ’60 (Butterfield 8), has left the earth. Death will happen one day to Chloe Moretz, to Angelina Jolie, to Johnny Depp, to Justin Timberlake, to myself, to Tom O’Neil, to Scott Feinberg, to my two cats….it’s as natural as breathing. But no one likes to think about that, and when somebody like La Liz passes away, it’s like everyone is collectively taking a big solemn gulp and saying, “Uhhm…oh, wow, yeah…of course.”

And the natural urge is to celebrate the highlights. But I can never quite bring myself to do that. Not 100%, I mean.

I’d heard early on that Elizabeth Taylor wasn’t the brightest bulb on the planet. I’d heard a story about her being at a pool party and asking someone what the calendar date was, and that person suggesting that she check the newspaper lying on a table nearby, and Liz doing so and saying the paper was no help because it was from the day before…or words to that effect.

But I heard and read a lot more about her as time went on, and I became persuaded that she was tough and real and super-loyal to her friends…although I never understood why she befriended the freak known as Michael Jackson. I had read once that she saved Montgomery Clift‘s life just after his 5.12.56 car crash by extracting a dislodged tooth that had been stuck in his wind pipe. By all accounts she was a good person to know and share time on the planet with, and also that she was feisty and steady and reliable and no fool. And she liked to drink and have fun and laugh through it all….hah!

I think, in short, that she might have been a somewhat better person than she was an actress. I’m not dismissing her very good ’50s performances in A Place In The Sun, The Last Time I Saw Paris, Giant, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer and Butterfield 8. But she was really quite atrocious — certainly miscast — in the miserable Cleopatra, and with the exception of her brilliant, possibly all-time best performance in Mike Nichols‘ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, she stopped getting the good roles after that and just wasn’t a very interesting presence in the ’60s and ’70s. She was pretty much out of the game by the early 80s.

Her golden time was the 1950s, period, and she was at her hottest back then also. She started to put on weight after Butterfield 8 (i.e., after she hit her early 30s), and the hard truth is that she looked vaguely plump in Cleopatra, and that roundish, slightly boozy and besotted look never went away after that. I’m sorry but that’s how it pretty much was. But those eyes of hers were givers of rapture and splendor.

Taylor lived a hell of a life, and stories will be told and re-told about her over the next two or three days that will refresh feelings of affection and respect and nostalgia, etc. She knew and jousted and clinked glasses with all the best people of her time, and sometimes loved and/or went to bed with men of great style and accomplishment and character and pizazz. (Except for Larry Fortensky.) It’s become more-or-less accepted doctrine that Richard Burton was the love of her life.

Does GenX or GenY know or care about Taylor? Probably not very much.

Honestly? I was looking around this morning for that SNL clip from ’78 or ’79 when John Belushi dressed up as Fat Liz eating fried chicken (and being interviewed by Bill Murray), and then pretending to choke on a chicken bone — that was hilarious.

My only other first-hand connection with La Liz has been my numerous sleepovers at the Nicky Hilton-Elizabeth Taylor house on Route 102 in Georgetown, Connecticut, as the guest of cartoonist Chance Browne. It’s a small cottage where Hilton and Taylor stayed for a period in 1950 during their brief rocky marrriage before she sued for divorce (she complained of spousal abuse) — local legend says Hilton threw Taylor out a window during one of their drunken fights.

In 2.12.11 posting called “Miss Tits”, I wrote that “what life’s natural process does to all of us in the end, even the luckiest and most beautiful and most magnificently endowed, is fairly horrific. I presume it’s understood that it was the great love of Elizabeth Taylor‘s life, Richard Burton, who came up with the above nickname during the shooting of Cleopatra.”

Steven Spielberg, Tony Kushner and Daniel Day Lewis‘s Lincoln will be a sad story, an Oscar-worthy collaboration, a possibly legendary performance…who knows? But it will be primarily be about Kushner’s screenplay and capturing something very familiar. Words, dialogue, history…one of those films that owes a certain allegiance to what has already been imagined by millions. So it will be, in a sense, constrained by this. But Spielberg‘s War Horse, which will open on 12.26, could be another matter. Maybe.

I haven’t read Lee Hall and Richard Curtis‘s War Horse screenplay or seen the B’way play, but my vision (which I feel is wise) has always been that it’s Au Hasard Balthazar surrounded by World War I — the story of an innocent creature made to suffer by selfish, warring, myopic men. And given the simple tone and spareness of the story, it follows that War Horse will probably be the last chance that Spielberg, who’s a lot closer to the end than the beginning, will have to make a piece of poetic, possibly wondrous arty-farty cinema for a mainstream audience.

Spielberg can get away with arts gratia artis because he’s Spielberg, and the Academy will love him for it, I believe, if he tries. Robert Bresson led the way; Spielberg has only to follow. But if he shoots the play — an integrated, multi-character drama in which the horse is central but only one of many characters — in typical manipulative Spielbergian fashion, then we will truly be finished in the minds of person like myself. He will have had his chance to make a largely non-verbal masterpiece, told from the POV of a horse, and blown it. I’m not hoping for this. I’m hoping that Spielberg lives up to the potential. But we all know his tendencies, don’t we?

This question can be answered now, of course, by anyone who’s read the script. Well?

Why didn’t they call this movie One-Armed Surfer? And I say this as someone who really and truly liked John Stockwell‘s Blue Crush, which this film is presumably trying to emulate on some level. I realize that One-Armed Surfer wouldn’t attract the Star-reading empties this movie is presumably aimed at, but still….Soul Surfer?

Anyone who seriously surfs knows it’s like worshipping at a great cathedral and communing with the eternal, so they’re a soul surfer to begin with. Having your arm bitten off by a shark or learning to live with a handicap is not, due respect, as soulful as the considerable zen of surfing itself. All I know is that the title has told me to avoid this film (opening on April 8th) at all costs.

The trailer for tonight’s ABC special called “BEST IN FILM: The Greatest Movies of Our Time” (9 pm) has me sputtering and gagging and spitting at the computer screen. My feelings of contempt for those who participated in this show — producers, guest hosts, hoi-polloi voters — are boundless. Harrison Ford agreed to take part in this?

Watch and listen to co-hosts Cynthia McFadden and Tom Bergeron and try not to think of “correcting” them Jack Torrance-style.

Originally posted on 3.21.11, but now updated: One of the healthiest things you can say about anything that’s over and done with is “okay, that happened.” Unless, of course, you’re talking about a stretch in a World War II concentration camp or something equally ghastly. Otherwise you have to be accepting, past it, unbothered. Especially when it comes to ex-girlfriends. We went there, it happened, nobody was right or wrong, that was then and we’re here now, living in the present…let’s get a coffee or a drink and catch up.

All my life I’ve been friends with exes, or have at least been open to same. And they’ve been open to calm and friendship with me. Except one. A very smart blonde with a great ass, a toothy smile and a relaxed and collegiate vibe. She’s married now and living in Pasadena; her husband — a slightly stocky, gray-haired guy of some means — doesn’t resemble me or her first husband (a doobie-toking small-business owner who owned a Harley and liked to go on long motorcycle trips with a gang of like-minded fellows) at all.

I gave up trying to be friendly with her three or four years ago. She really wants to erase that part of her life — the first marriage (which began in the summer of ’96) and the affair with me that began in early ’98 and lasted two and two-thirds years. We last spoke in ’11 or ’12. The most significant thing that happened before that was her friending me on Facebook.

Our thing began at the ’98 Sundance Film Festival and finally ran out of gas in late ’00 when her husband found out. I took the hurt and the lumps. I was dropped six or seven times. It was easily the most painful and frustrating relationship of my life. Whether things were good or bad between us was entirely dictated by her shifting moods. Her father had been a philanderer when she was fairly young and this had caused a lot of family pain, so she felt badly about following in his footsteps. But things kept on. She kept coming back and oh, the hunka-chunka.