Another no-laugh-funny “comedy”, although I grin every time I think back on it. Director Frank Perry really knew how to convey that lackadaisical ’70s thing — casually hip and born to swagger. Every character was a “character” in this film. Eccentric, imaginative, unsettled, peculiar. (Megan Fox would fit right in if somebody were to try an exact remake.) Those muttering scenes between Harry Dean Stanton (Curt) and Richard Bright (Burt) were classic. I would have films like this again.

Rancho Deluxe was shot in and around Livingston, Montana, which I visited in the late ’90s. Livingston (the home of novelist/Rancho Deluxe screenwriter Thomas McGuane) was a very cool place to live back then, and I’m thinking that Rancho Deluxe may qualify as one of those films that may have been a bit more fun to make than it was to watch (although it’s certainly an enjoyable sit).

McGuane’s career in the early to mid ’70s has been described as the period in which he became known as “Captain Berserko” in which he authored screenplays for Rancho Deluxe, The Missouri Breaks (’76), starring Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando; and McGuane’s foray into directing with the film version of 92 in the Shade ’75).

From his Wiki bio: “The excesses of those years are reflected – though hardly in full – by McGuane’s tumultuous affair with actress Elizabeth Ashley (captured in voyeuristic detail in her memoir, Actress), his divorce from his first wife Becky Crockett, (who went on to marry Peter Fonda) his marriage to actress Margot Kidder, the birth of their daughter, Maggie (herself an author), and by his second divorce, all in the span of less than a year.”

From Richard Eder‘s 11.24.75 N.Y. Times review: “Rancho DeLuxe is handsome, witty, apt and languid. It is so cool it is barely alive. First-rate ingredients and a finesse in assembling them do not quite make either a movie or a cake. At some point it is necessary to light the oven.”

“Oh, give me a home, with a low interest loan. A cowgirl and two pickup trucks. A color TV, all the beer should be free. And that, man, is Rancho Deluxe.”

Diablo Cody‘s 8.29 Red Band Trailer interview is with Megan Fox. It gets pretty good when they talk about how shallow and predatory many journalists have become. (A brief transcript follows the video.) I love Cody’s observation that Fox has a skewed sensibility and that press people don’t know how to handle beauty mixed with perversity. Fox’s handicap, I feel, is her thin and reedy voice. It doesn’t suggest rivers of soul or passion. Beep-beep-beepity-beep-beep-beepity-beep.

Cody: “Do you feel like you’ve been mistreated, misquoted? Do you feel like you’ve had a crappy experience in the limelight, or do you feel positive about it overall?”

Fox: “I would never call it crappy experience. I think…those are such different things. Not so much ‘misquoted’ as the things I’ve said being taken completely out of context or sensationalized into something scandalous when they weren’t. They’re waiting for anything they can take as a sound byte, to sell. And it doesn’t matter what your intention behind your words are never communicated by ‘journalists,’ any more. So it’s hard to be sarcastic. Do you find this happens to, you?

Cody: “I have this theory that it must have been incredibly fun to be a celebrity in, like, the ’70s. Because there wasn’t the sound byte culture. There wasn’t the tabloid culture. You would see these interviews that were like these 17-page interviews in Rolling Stone in which you really got to know a person, and now it comes down to, like, oh, we have to keep 8 million websites rolling so what does one person say today that we can get a clip [from]? It makes it impossible to speak like an individual.

Fox: “I don’t even want to express myself during interviews especialy during print interviews, because I know that everyone is constantly searching for an angle and they’re reaching for those four words that they can piece together for some sort of explosive sound byte.”

“We wanted to do a movie in the vein of the ’70s foreign films that influenced so many great filmmakers today,” George Clooney recently told L.A. Times reporter John Horn for a piece that ran yesterday. “We felt if we kept the budget low, that the outside influences (like a studio) would be minimal and we were lucky that Focus was on board with the concept from the beginning.”

“On board”? As in believing in Clooney and director Anton Corbijn‘s vision, embracing it, standing behind it, and giving the marketing effort the old college try? Focus Features marketers have run ads and TV spots and decided to open it in 200 theatres, but they’ve all but abandoned any attempt to sell it with interviews. Clooney has done almost nothing, and Corbijn hasn’t even come to the States for the opening.

The American “is a cinematic anomaly,” Horn writes. “A U.S. production that in look, pacing and casting is more European than Clooney’s own Italian villa.

“‘I’m sure a lot of people will think it’s on the slow side of things,’ says Corbijn, whose previous film, 2007’s Control, was a critically acclaimed (but little seen) fictionalized biography of Ian Curtis, the lead singer of the British post-punk band Joy Division who committed suicide in 1980. ‘But I think there is too much explaining in films sometimes. Yes, there’s not a lot of back story on George’s character. But it’s enough for me to follow the metamorphosis that he is trying to achieve.”

“The American is very much a tale of a man alone, and to highlight that vision the filmmakers not only switched its protagonist’s nationality (he’s English in the novel) but also surrounded Clooney with a cast and crew almost exclusively European. At a very late stage, Corbijn even recast the part of Jack’s boss, replacing U.S. actor Bruce Altman with the Belgian performer Johan Leysen.

“Rather than pack pages of expositional dialogue into the script (credited to Rowan Joffe, following drafts by numerous other writers over years of revisions), Corbijn, who is best known as a photographer, relied on long, lingering shots of Jack and the Italian countryside. ‘We were trying to make,’ the director says, ‘a film that had a lot of beauty in it.”

“Corbijn also ‘looked at the film like a western, a morality tale of good versus evil,” he says. ‘Someone has done something bad and wants to escape it, but the past catches up to him.”

“‘Anton is an artist,’ says Clooney producing partner Grant Heslov. ‘And he’s never going to tell a movie in a straightforward way. He’s willing to sit on a shot for a while and not cut away. There are going to be people who are going to be absolutely frustrated by it.'”

Even if Anton Corbijn’s The American was a straight-ahead popcorn thriller, Ethan Maniquis and Robert Rodriguez‘s Machete would kick its box-office ass regardless. I don’t know what The American will be specifically, but it seems to be a truffles and foie gras and elite bullets type of film whereas Machete is strictly a Taco Bell meal with boobs, blood sauce, bikinis and severed limbs, and a side order of pro-Mexican immigrant, anti-racist-cracker politics to keep it spicy.

It’s not a slur to say that Machete is aimed at a typical twelve-year-old mentality. For me, the political satire and anti-yahoo stance makes it Rodriguez’s most agreeable film since El Mariachi (’94). But it’s a very primitive and extremely bloody thing, and pretty much an out-and-out gore comedy (although what Rodriguez film hasn’t had some comedic winking going on?), and there are some moderately funny bits here and there. Given a choice, dollars to donuts an American movie audience will always take a chance on primitive and coarse before rarified and austere.

Honestly? If given an either-or choice even I would probably pay to see Machete first. The reason, I’d be ashamed to admit (if I hadn’t already seen Machete), has to do with the Lindsay Lohan revealings.

Kurt Schlichter‘s American screenplay review suggests it may be Machete‘s match in terms of female nudity, although that has yet to be determined.

I’m saying this without having seen any tracking for this weekend (although I’ve heard second-hand that Machete is tracking fairly well among younger males. The two extra days of commercial playing time for The American won’t make that much of a difference, I’m guessing.

Four days before I posted that Dutch film critic’s review of Anton Corbijn‘s The American, Big Hollywood‘s Kurt Schlichter reviewed Rowan Joffe‘s screenplay, and I have to say it’s moderately amusing. Even though Schlichter is one of “them,” he can be funny. Except he needs to spell arrivederci correctly next time.

“We never find out much about [George Clooney‘s] back-story, which is okay because we really don’t care,” he says toward the end. “His tattoo reveals that he’s ex-Special Forces, because, as we know, all Green Berets leave the Army to join that giant high-priced international hit man industry we somehow never hear about in real-life. If in reality half as many people were employed as high-priced professional assassins as Hollywood movies depict, the unemployment rate would only be 9% and the Obama administration would point to it as evidence the stimulus is working.

“The script is technically proficient and evocative, meaning that I could clearly and fully visualize all of the tired, hackneyed cliches. On the plus side, other than the ‘you Americans don’t know how to live life’ crap, it’s not political. It’ll be equally dull for adherents of every political stripe.

“And there’s another upside – there’s a hot Italian girl character in it and in pretty much every scene she’s taking off her clothes. I don’t mean just once or twice — I mean this gal makes Lindsay Lohan look like a particularly repressed Amish chick during Sunday school. So Clooney gets to pick up a big paycheck for hanging out in the Italian countryside surrounded by hot naked girls (yeah, there’s more than one), so I can see what was in The American for him. Unfortunately, I still can’t see what’s supposed to be in it for the rest of us.

One plus for the film, Schlicter says, will be the talented Corbijn, last seen directing the very cool Joy Division movie Control. And yet “terrifyingly, a true story about a Goth band and its lead singer’s eventual suicide has more laughs than this script does, which is to say at least one.”

It’s now 12:45 pm. The American will screen in Manhattan a little more than six hours from now.

Update: Who was I to talk about Schichter misspelling arrivederci when I couldn’t spell his last name correctly? Apologies.

The first thing I noticed about the new Movie City News redesign, which looks relatively decent (or at least better than before, being more balanced), is a preponderance of robin’s egg blue. The typeface, the MCN Tweety-bird, the MCN Twitter box, the bars…light blue all around. Plus some light violet. It reminds me of the colors and the vibe in a little boy’s bedroom.

The idea is to convey a certain spirituality or placidity or something. It’s all right or isn’t a “problem,” per se, but it doesn’t feel like a sale. It needs to man up on some level. A little red or orange, maybe.

The second thing I noticed is that Hollywood Elsewhere’s status has been upgraded. After being linked and referred to by MCN for several years as a “gossip,” I’m now included on the “Mainstream Blogger” list (along with Anne Thompson, Deadline, LA Observed, Patrick Goldstein, Roger Ebert’s Journal, The Real Shawn Levy, etc.). Thank you, David. I’ve noticed, by the way, that Deadline and HitFix are listed on the Mainstream Blogger and Gossip rosters. Split personalities?

The other Gossips are /Film, Ain’t It Cool News, Defamer, Huffington Post (really?), Jezebel, Mark Malkin, Movieline, NY Daily News, People Magazine, Star, The Superficial, The Wrap (really?) and Yahoo! Movies.

The third thing I noticed is that the new design disappeared about 11 am Eastern, and that the old design was back in action. Obviously a temporary gears-and-levers adjustment.

Incidentally: I understand about capturing a page image (control – shift – 4) and that if I add control to this combo the image is supposed to appear on Clipboard. Except it doesn’t, and the usual paste function (control V) doesn’t paste it either. So the hell with it.

With a list of 29 contenders, Scott Feinberg is figuring 2010 is the best year ever for documentaries. The list of serious award contenders is much shorter, of course. The Tillman Story, Restrepo, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, Countdown to Zero, Exit Through The Gift Shop, Smash His Camera, Waking Sleeping Beauty, Tabloid, Inside Job, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, Freakonomics and two Feinberg didn’t mention — Werner Herzog‘s 3D cave-painting doc, and Thom Zimny‘s Bruce Springsteen doc, The Promise: The Making of ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town‘?

What’s up with Clint Eastwood‘s Hereafter slated for only one public screening at the Toronto Film Festival (Visa Elgin, Sunday, 9.12 at 9 pm) and, according to Hitfix’s Gregory Ellwood, no scheduled press screenings at all? What’s the point of bringing a serious film by a respected, brand-name director to a big festival like Toronto and then taking steps to limit access?

I have some nagging Toronto Film Festival questions about wifi. In my estimation TIFF has always been the least press-friendly festival in terms of wifi press lounges that are close to screening rooms, certainly compared to Cannes which has two wifi rooms inside the Palais. And from what I can gather so far things haven’t changed much.

No one will tell me, for example, if the TIFF Bell Lightbox will have any kind of wifi press room with desks and chairs and free cappucino, like the Palais does. Or, failing that, if the Lightbox will at least have accessible wifi for journalists wanting to file from somewhere within.

There will be a media lounge at the TIFF headquarters at the Hyatt Regency (370 King Street West), but this will only be open from 9 am to 6 pm. The two Cannes press rooms are open until 10 pm. Festival press rooms should ideally be open until midnight. Might as well make it 24 hours.

The bottom line is that people like me, as usual, will be scrounging around filing from Starbucks and wifi cafes. What a slog. As if covering 25 or 30 films within a nine-day period isn’t hard enough.

And what about a Toronto Film Festival iPhone app? Sundance 2010 had a great one. I searched around today and found nothing. There is, however, a Blackberry TIFF app. I’m told this is because BlackBerry is a major TIFF sponsor. So sweetheart kickback deals are what matter and iPhone owners can go suck on a lollipop. The fix is in.

Update: As the son of an alcoholic and one who had alcohol issues in the early to mid ’90s, I have an abhorrence for people who flirt with, invite and/or embrace destruction with alcohol. This was the basis of yesterday’s reaction to the ridiculous demise of Nicole John, the 17 year-old daughter of daughter of U.S. ambassador to Thailand Eric John.

Yes, it’s extremely “sad” when a 17 year-old girl kills herself through drug and alcohol abuse. I understand, rather, that saying “how sad” is the socially acceptable way of responding to such a thing. I for one find such stories (which do appear with some irregularity) infuriating. And I feel it would be far healthier all around if people were to agree that it’s a stupid and appalling waste to end your life at so young an age, however accidental, and to say so without reservation. Because it wasn’t “accidental” at all. She bought it.

I read Christina Boyle and Rich Schapiro‘s N.Y. Daily News account (dated 8.28) of Nicole’s blog statements, and I’m confident that it wasn’t made up. (The authors are staffers — they wouldn’t jeopardize their livelihoods by fabricating a blog of a deceased person.) She clearly had issues or at least serious concerns; she was clearly already on the road to drug-and-alcohol ruin. She had an ugly disease, and the disease ate her. So in this light her death shouldn’t be lamented, I feel, as much as condemned. It’s a cautionary tale.

It’s a sensitive issue for many, however, and I realized after an hour or so that I’d put too much of an edge on my initial statements. I could see from the responses that the thread was going downhill pretty quickly and not for the better. So even though I don’t think I felt or said “the wrong thing,” it seemed wiser to just drop it and move on.

Previous post: I could only roll my eyes as I read about the ridiculous demise of Nicole John, the 17 year-old daughter of daughter of U.S. ambassador to Thailand Eric John.

90 minutes before she fell 22 stories to her death, she posted a Facebook message saying she was totally bombed — “Losing track of the rounds…all a blur now.” 90 minutes later she took her shoes off and “stepped onto the ledge of a tony 25th-floor apartment on W. 34th Street,” a N.Y. Daily News story reports, and lost her balance and fell.

There’s a self-preservation instinct that even the dumbest alcoholics have when faced with obvious risks and threats. Even drunks with exceptionally low IQs know their motor skills are impaired, and that things like driving and tightrope-walking and using bows-and-arrows to shoot apples off the top of friends’ heads are stunningly stupid things to do when they’re wasted. What can you say about a party girl who couldn’t quite figure this out?

Stephen Frears‘ Tamara Drewe (Sony Classics, 10.8) was easily my most unpleasant viewing of the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. So the trailer has done prospective viewers a favor, I feel, by explaining where the film is coming from. The narrator’s insinuating cornball tone should suffice. If not, the pissing cow will.

I described the film last May as “one of those satires of a form (i.e., romantic fiction) that doubles back and has it both ways by satirizing and playing it ‘straight,’ or straight enough so that romantic fiction fans can themselves double-track by enjoying the cliches at face-value while having a good laugh or snicker. Everybody wins…except people like me.

“Boiled down, Tamara Drewe is (a) a comedy by a hip director that’s aimed (whether its backers admit it or not) at older chump-level couples and intellectually-challenged women of whatever age who read fashion and gossip magazines, and (b) a glossy calling-card movie by a director who’s getting on and would like the producers of crap movies to know that he can do ‘obvious’ and ‘unsubtle” as well as the next guy.

“It’s important to absorb Tamara Drewe in the right ‘insincere’ context. It’s first and foremost an adaptation of Posy Simmonds‘ weekly comic-strip serial of the same name, which itself is a modernized, ‘insincere’ adaptation of Thomas Hardy‘s “Far From The Madding Crowd.” (Simmonds’ complete work appeared in hardcover in 2007.)

“Hardy’s novel was about three fellows vying for the affections of the beautiful Bathsheba Everdene (played by Julie Christie in John Schlesinger‘s 1967 film) — a brawny, whiskered man-of-the-soil type (Alan Bates), an older gentleman of property (Peter Finch), and a dashing mustachioed heartbreaker (Terence Stamp). A lot of horseshit happens, but she winds up with Farmer John at the end.

“Frears has the astonishingly empty and generally worthless Gemma Arterton playing Tamara Drewe, an updated Everdene who stirs the hearts and loins of three fellows when she arrives at a writers’ retreat in an English country village. (The film was shot in, around or near Dorset.) Tamara is a newspaper columnist who comes from the area, when she was mildly homely due to an enormous honker. Then she got a nose job, making herself into quite the beauty and yaddah yaddah.

“The Bates role is played by Luke Evans, the Finch role by Roger Allam, and the Stamp role by Dominic Cooper.

“All I could think as I watched was ‘what a piece of empty unfunny synthetic crap this is.’ The fact that it’s satirizing other works that are genuinely, sincerely and wholeheartedly crappy as opposed to being ironically crappy is of no interest to me. I only know that I was in pain.

“Frears is generally regarded as a first-rate director who lacks a particular visual or stylistic signature, and who goes where the material takes him. But I found it appalling nonetheless that the director of Bloody Kids, The Hit, High Fidelity, The Queen, Dirty Pretty Things, The Grifters, My Beautiful Laundrette, Dangerous Liasons and Prick Up Your Ears could make a film as icky and over-scored and postcard-vapid as Tamara Drewe, even with such values being rendered ‘in quotes.'”

The Last Exorcism (which I may see today, having heard it was worth it) is the weekend honcho, and yet down 22% from Friday and looking at a mere $22 million for the weekend — not much of a win. Second-place Takers went up 2% from Friday, looking at $20.5 million by this evening, or perhaps even $21 million. And the third-place Expendables is looking at a $9.5 weekend tally and an $82 million cume.

Fourth-place Eat Pray Love expects 6.8 to $7 million by tonight, and a cume of $60 million, but will probably hang in there with Machete and Resident Evil 4 being the only new films with any expected heat over the next 2 weeks. And The Other Guyss is fifth with an expected $6.5 million for the weekend and an overall $99.2 million haul.

Avatar: Special Edition only did $1.5 million yesterday (up 28% from Friday) for a likely $3.8 cume. (I decided to shine it after learning of the 16- or 17-minute longer version coming out in November on DVD/Bluray.)