A copy of Scott Z. Burns‘ Contagion — the basis of Steven Soderbergh‘s forthcoming deadly-virus movie for Warner Bros. — arrived a little while ago. I’ve had a chance to skim through it, and it’s scary, all right. Scary isn’t scary unless it’s believable, and this one is. The tone is urgent and tense. It feels like something in which the creepiness will leak through rather than slap you across the face.

The plot follows “an international team of doctors and scientists brought in by the Center for Disease Control after an outbreak of a deadly virus,” etc. Kate Winslet, Matt Damon, Jude Law, Marion Cotillard, Gwyneth Paltrow and Laurence Fishburne have been cast. It’s Traffic-y.

The rule-of-thumb in virus movies is that lead or “name” actors don’t get infected — only supporting actors. If a lead actor does get infected (I’ll know more when I read the whole script tonight), it will be an indication of his/her diminished status. Especially given the Warner Bros. input factor. (Corporate money = conventional/boilerplate thinking.) Of the actors above, whose career could be said to be a wee bit saggy or slipping? That’s easy — Jude Law or Gwynneth Paltrow’s. Which means that if conventional thinking applies, one of these two will get sick. And perhaps both. Perhaps Soderbergh wil go against the grain and arrange for Damon or Winslet to get it.

Contagion is supposed to shoot at the end of this year for release in ’11. Burns’ script is 129 pages long plus a sentence and a word.

It felt necessary to have the Bluray of Sergei Eisenstein‘s Battleship Potemkin sitting on my bookshelf. Knowing it’s there just feels right. Eisenstein is the father of Stanley Kubrick‘s visual sense, and both have strongly influenced my own sense of composition and framing when I’ve taken snaps and videos so Eisenstein feels like family.

I know it’ll be a struggle to persuade my two sons to watch BP. It’s hard enough to get them to watch anything in black-and-white.

The DVD/Bluray of Sam Taylor Wood‘s Nowhere Boy will be purchasable on 5.10, but the Weinstein Co. is delaying its U.S. theatrical debut until 10.8 — six months hence. Here’s my review, posted concurrent with last fall’s London Film Festival premiere. I didn’t hear a peep out of anyone when it played Sundance 2010. “Nowhere Boy‘s somewhat feminized, all-he-needs-is-love story just didn’t turn me on,” I wrote. “I didn’t feel Lennon’s rock ‘n’ roll vitality and virility, and certainly not his rage.”

It’s obviously an excellent thing to support small local cinemas like the Regency Fairfax (as several Los Angeles demonstrators did last weekend, and like Karina Longworth did yesterday in her LA Weekly blog). But I’m no friend of the cause if projection and sound standards aren’t up to par.

My last time at the Fairfax was seeing the director’s cut of Ridley Scott‘s Kingdom of Heaven. The projection and sound were decent but not wonderful. I knew KOH would play somewhat better when I eventually popped in the disc. I finally watched it on Bluray a few weeks ago — by far the best viewing I’ve had (or am likely to have).

This is why I’ve bought a ticket at the New Beverly maybe twice in the last fifteen or so years, and why I always hesitate before going to see a restored classic at Manhattan’s Film Forum. I know that the projection levels won’t come close to matching the image I’ll get on my 42-inch plasma, and that the sound quality will be at least 100% better on my home system. The sound at the Film Forum is close to awful a good part of the time. I was cupping my ears during a showing of Christmas in July last year.

The only decent places for ticket-buyers to see non-first-run films in Los Angeles are (a) the Academy and (b) the Egyptian American Cinematheque theatre on Hollywood Blvd, and (c) the AC’s Aero theatre on Montana Blvd. And at the two Arclights when they occasionally show oldies.

The new trailer for James Mangold‘s Knight and Day (20th Century Fox, 6.25) is suggesting that it may be a comedic Collateral. Tom Cruise‘s Milner (sardonic violent guy parachuting into the life of an average citizen) is Vincent again, and Cameron Diaz is Jamie Foxx‘s Max.

But will it pay off like Collateral? Will Milner prove to be an angel of salvation in disguise (as Vincent was for Max)? Which is to say, will Diaz’s June Havens be portrayed as someone who could use a good swift kick in the pants, or as a character with any depth at all? We’d all be delighted if Mangold could channel Michael Mann, but how would this sit with Tom Rothman? The more this film has been tailored to appeal to Diaz fans, the worse it will be — I know that much.

The older Cruise gets, the more interesting his face becomes. Pretty boys all come into full spiritual flower when they hit their 40s and 50s.

The cool European locations were in Salzburg, Sevilla and Cadiz.

“Nobody follow us or I kill myself and then her!”

Before he became a successful director, a friend asked the late Hal Ashby for a secret tip about how to get an actress to emotionally deliver in a restrained but full-on way. Ashby said, “Tell her to do a scene with every last thing she’s got — scream, cry, pound the floor, no holds barred, pull out the stops. And when she’s done doing that, say to her “okay, now do it again only this time give me nothing. Shut yourself down and be a zombie.” And the residue of the wild take will still be there, and the zombie take will be just right.”

Let me get this straight: The man who sang Heroin, Venus In Furs, Perfect Day, Sweet Jane, Dirty Blvd. and I’m Waitin’ For My Man, and who recorded Metal Machine Music, The Bells and Berlin, is hawking an iPhone app called “Lou Zoom.”

Oh, and incidentally: Death to AT&T.

Marshall Fine has called Tim Blake Nelson‘s Leaves of Grass a “textbook example of a promising movie that takes a wrong turn from which it never recovers. Starting well, building good will, assembling a solid farce framework, Nelson’s script suddenly abandons all the comedic promises it makes in the first half and turns into a blood-drenched and sadistic action film.

“It’s like grafting the last half of Death Wish on to a stoner comedy (which, come to think of it, describes the similarly uneven — but much funnier — Pineapple Express).”

I didn’t like Leaves of Grass either, but tone-shifting can be a profoundly cool move. One of the finest, nerviest and neatest films of the ’80s — Jonathan Demme‘s Something Wild — pulled a major attitude-switch toward the last third when Jeff Daniels had to grim up, fierce up and put Ray Liotta down like a mad dog. I for one worshipped Demme’s decision to turn his light and quirky relationship comedy into Cape Fear.

I’m trying to think of other successful examples besides Wild and Pineapple. Need a little help.

Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures have really, really reached their nadir. They can talk about going back to origins of a landmark 1954 Japanese monster flick all they want, but they’ve basically declared an intention to remake a 12 year-old deeply loathed Roland Emmerich film.

If you were a senior Warner Bros. production exec, would you have the stones to greenlight a new Godzilla film? I’d approve it on one condition. If Legendary commits to shooting it in black-and-white with a guy splashing around inside a Godzilla suit, like the 1954 filmmmakers did. Shoot the damn thing on sound stages with stupid-looking miniature buildings and fighter jets on wires and toy ships in the harbor. That I would honestly pay to see. Especially if the Godzilla suit has eyes with white pupils that roll around when the monster gets especially angry. And if they use the old Godzilla roar.

Dave McNary‘s Variety story about the project appears to be historic, however. It actually credits a horror-film website for breaking the initial news. I could be wrong but to my knowledge Variety has never does this — they’re famous for never crediting websites for anything. “Speculation about a new Godzilla has been active since last summer,” McNary writes. “The Bloody Disgusting web site reported in August that the project was in development.”

20 days ago a Wall Street Journal article by Tokyo-based correspondent Yuka Hayashi reported that The Cove‘s capturing of the Best Feature Documentary Oscar “could give the film an audience its makers had wanted to reach: ordinary moviegoers in Japan. The movie has had only a single viewing, at the Tokyo International Film Festival [last] October, and hasn’t yet been distributed in commercial theaters in Japan because of objections from the town it features.”

It further reports that “Japanese theaters have stayed away from The Cove because of protest from Taiji, a fishing town of 3,800 people in Western Japan that bills itself as the ‘birthplace of Japan’s commercial whaling.’ The town’s officials requested the film’s Japanese distributor to drop it, saying it was shot without permission of its people and constituted libel.

“To address Taiji’s complaint that the film was shot without permission from fishermen and other people in the town, their faces will be glazed over. It will also include a note pointing out the controversial nature of an expert’s comment in the film regarding the high mercury content of dolphin meat.” Controversial but not inaccurate.

I’m posting this because last night I ran into Cove producer Fisher Stevens (at the final performance of The Pride at the Lucille Lortel theatre), and he told me that Medallion Media, the film’s Japanese distributor, has postponed the Cove‘s theatrical release (reportedly set for “May or June,” according to Hayashi) due to some manner of pressure from some governmental agency, or perhaps from the courts.

Stevens said today that his sales agent has told him that Medallion had agreed to a May 15th release date, but has recently pushed it back to July 15th over apparent concerns regarding a possible Taiji libel suit. “We told them they have to release the film,” Stevens said. “They’re doing what they can but can’t keep postponing.” In fact, he said, “We’re pushing them to move it back up [to May 15th].”

Stevens also mentioned that pressure has been brought to bear to force the distributor to re-cut the film, alluding to what Hayashi reported almost three weeks ago.

To learn a bit more I wrote Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, whose negotiations with the Tokyo Film Festival led to The Cove being screened last October, but nothing so far. I also cc’ed Lincoln O’Barry, the son of Ric O’Barry — zip.

The front page of last Friday’s USA Today featured a small banner that called DreamWorks’ How To Train Your Dragon a “3-D Pixar film.” I make mistakes like this from time to time, but I fix them within minutes. What this suggests is that the quality of page-editing and page-proofing at USA Today is slipping due to the general cost-cutting and downscaling that has afflicted print publications everywhere.