Last weekend Time‘s Erin Davies delivered a fairly thorough (read: depressing) summary of the hard economic times plaguing the independent film industry, including a blind quote from an “industry executive” that “very few people think Focus Features is going to survive.” All the bummer statistics are presented, and all of it explaining why ads are a little harder to come by, and/or require a lot more in the way of begging and cajoling.

“There are moments” when Warner Home Video’s new Gone With The Wind Bluray “simply looks ‘better’ than the previous DVDs,” says DVD Beaver’s Gary Tooze, “and then there are times when it makes you gasp. Most notable may be the colors — flesh tones are warm at times but lose that yellow-orangey look of the SD transfers. Detail advances to as high a degree as we are likely to see for this 70-year old classic.”

The GWTW Bluray streets on 11.17. I haven’t received a copy myself but then again I’m at a new Brooklyn address.

“Whites are whiter (no longer creamy), blacks are pitch and the dual-layered, 44 Gig transfer of this almost four-hour film shares the disc with only the Rudy Behlmer commentary and some extensive foreign language dubs and subtitle options.

“Gone With the Wind‘s enormity is half the experience and it’s big here — very BIG. Contrast and lighting visuals have some jaw-dropping moments and I can’t imagine it looking any better for your home theater enjoyment. There is less grain that I would have thought but I don’t feel there was an over-abundance of digital manipulation, and it is smooth in motion.”

Tooze doesn’t mention that his screen-grab comparisons indicate that the Bluray offers slightly more picture information on the sides than the previous standard DVD issue of this 1939 mega-classic. Look closely and you’ll see extra info on both the left and right sides of the Bluray captures.

It can’t be overstated that while Gone With The Wind is nominally about the agonies caused by the Civil War in the 1860s and the deprivations of Reconstruction from 1865 through the late 1870s, it is at heart a portrait of the sufferings Americans went through during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Which links to today, in a sense, in that most Americans are grappling with the bite of the Great Recession, despite recent cheering by the elite Wall Street crowd that the hard times are pretty much over. For them, maybe.

An English-language Salt trailer went online last Thursday, or roughly two or three days after the Russian-language version turned up. The Phillip Noyce thriller won’t open until 7.23.10, so there’s plenty of time to tone down that CG-tweaked feeling in a couple of the action scenes. The Tangier chase sequence in the last Bourne film is the gold standard in this regard.

I saw Oren Moverman‘s The Messenger last July. I went with the menu, respected the chops and intent, found Samantha Morton‘s performance as a bereaved Iraq War widow especially moving. (So far the film has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating.) Last night I attended the after-party at 1Oak following the Manhattan premiere. The Oscilloscope release opens this Friday.

The Messenger costars Ben Foster, Woody Harrelson at 1Oak — Sunday, 11.8, 10:10 pm.

I spoke to Woody Harrelson briefly about that Sunset Strip oxygen bar he owned/ran about eight or nine years ago. We could have gotten into loads of other topics but the loudness of the party and the three or four people hovering nearby, waiting for the slightest opening (i.e., a perceived lull in the conversation) as a opportunity to dive in and say hi to Woody…but that’s human nature, and what these parties are like every time.

I was a bit hesitant about speaking with Foster because his Messenger performance is, for me, a slight hiccup. There’s something inwardly clenched and raging in Foster that won’t let up. Even when he’s smiling and being gentle as he’s looking at Samantha Morton, you half-think he’s got plastic explosive strapped to his chest and he’s about to pull the string. He’s a serious actor trying to be real and plain, and I understand that he’s trying to suppress the wired-nutbag thing in The Messenger. But it comes out anyway.

The upside, of course, is that he’s got this quality as a kind of signature, which every actor needs. So it’s better, really, to be “Ben Foster” in this sense than to be one of hundreds or thousands of likable edgeless actors just looking for work. He’s definitely a brand and a personality. I have this inkling that he’d be great in a comedy.

The Messenger “joins the group of strong Iraq-war movies that, like rejected suitors, stand hat in hand, waiting for an audience to notice their virtues,” writes New Yorker critic David Denby. “My canon includes In the Valley of Elah, The Hurt Locker and the commercially conceived but affecting Stop-Loss. Box-office wisdom holds that it’s too early to make movies about this conflict, but how can it ever be too early to make a good movie?”

In an acknowledgement of the 20-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which heralded the end of the extended and aggravated U.S.-Soviet Union tensions generally referred to as the Cold War, L.A. Times critic Betsy Sharkey has listed her favorite films which reflected that era and mindset. But she misdescribes one seminal 1950s-era monster movie, and overlooks the bulls-eye capturing of American fears of Communist invasion and subversion in the finale of another ’50s monster flick.

In other words, Sharkey calls Don Siegel‘s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) a fear-of-aliens movie when the common interpretation is that the film is a metaphor about encroaching 1950s conformity — about the horror of submitting to the bland uniformity of Eisenhower-era values and attitudes.

And no review of Cold War movies is complete without acknowledging how concisely and comprehensively the last ten or twelve seconds of Howard Hawks‘ and Christian Nyby‘s The Thing From Another World (1951) says it all. “Watch the skies…keep looking, keep watching the skies” is a kind of rough haiku that sums up what all middle-class Americans were vaguely thinking or reacting to on a subconscious level during the height of early ’50s paranoia about “them.”

(Apologies for the ghastly visual quality of the clip.)

To me it’s just more of the same improbable, nobody-could-ever-survive-this-in-real-life action-movie horseshit. I stopped even half-believing what I was seeing before the guy was up the tree. Jean-Luc Godard would spit on it.

I was puzzled after reading Mark Olsen‘s 11.8 “Indie Focus” column this morning. The focus was Sebastian Guitterrez‘s Women in Trouble, an apparently sexy, allegedly Pedro Almodovar-esque indie anthology that will open in New York and Los Angeles on 11.13. It costars Carla Gugino, Adrianne Palicki, Marley Shelton, Simon Baker, Elizabeth Berkley and Josh Brolin.L.A. Times columnist and screening series host Pete Hammond, who knows everyone and sees everything) telling me they’d never heard of Women in Trouble, much less received an invite themselves.

I eventually learned that the film is being repped by Mike Rau of 42West. There have been one or two select screenings in Los Angeles, apparently. (I’m not sure about NYC showings.) The responses, I’m told, have been moderate to cool. A guy I spoke to who’s seen it says “it’s not bad…there’s nothing horribly wrong with it, but it’s not great either.”

Screen Media is a kind of “for hire” vanity distributor, I gather. You pay them, they put it out there, handle the ads and whatnot.

I’m a Gugino fan (especially after seeing her in Desire Under The Elms) and really wouldn’t mind seeing this. Any movie with girls running around in underwear gets at least half a pass from this quarter. Okay, not really but underwear is…you know, a pleasant thing.

Here’s a South by Southwest review by Variety‘s Joe Leydon. Here’s the Wikipedia page. Here’s a promotional/fictional blog by Gugino’s “Elektra Luxx” character.

A long while ago I accepted the notion of Samantha Morton, 33, being the Daniel Day Lewis of younger actresses. She’s a very high-calibre, high-throttle type who can’t help but drill deeply and maybe go a little mad (or madder) with each new performance. Which is what makes her good. But I did mutter “uh-oh” when she first came on-screen in The Messenger. In fact, anyone who’s seen it and claims he/she didn’t say “uh-oh” is probably lying.

Samantha Morton in The Messenger

The truth is that Morton has been…well, physically changing as the years go by, and I’m now starting to think of her, very respectfully, as more of a Phillip Seymour Hoffman type than a DDL, if you get the drift. Is there any way to mention this issue without sounding like a weight Nazi?

I love that Morton hasn’t done a Kate Bosworth or Kate Hudson to herself, and that she seems more or less indifferent to the psychology that Bosworth/Hudson seem to have responded to. I’m not harping on this issue. I’m just saying Morton is looking a little different these days….that’s all. She’s moving in a certain direction.

This weekend Lionsgate’s Precious averaged $100,000 per location in 18 locations — an indie-level record. An Oprah Winfrey-propelled mix of upscale black-and-white audiences (plus middle-scale and downscale black crowds) resulted in a $1.8 million Friday-to-Sunday gross.

The Robert Zemeckis/Jim Carrey/3D A Christmas Carol only managed $31 million from 3,683 locations for a $8,417 average. Not bad but a bit of a shortfall, given the broad family-market potential. I suspect it was because parents decided that the mo-cap Scrooge character looked too scary for toddlers.

Sony’s This Is It was down 40% from last weekend — a relatively decent hold — for a second-place showing of $14 million from 3,481 screens. It has now $57.9 million in the domestic tll and more than $100 million from overseas bookings

Overture’s The Men Who Stare at Goats came in third with $13.3 million earned in 2,443 situations for a $5,444 average.

As expected, Richard Kelly‘s The Box didn’t do too well. The James Marsden-Cameron Diaz horror pic took in about $7.9 million from 2,635 theaters for an average of $2998.

Vanityfair.com‘s Julian Sancton noted yesterday that a brief scene of violence in The Men Who Stare at Goats recalls the recent Fort Hood tragedy. The scene (actually a self-contained clip in a montage) shows a disturbed soldier running amok in Fort Bragg, firing at troops during their morning exercises. Sancton is wondering if Overture Films should omit the scene from future prints.

HE verdict: It happened, move on, let it ride. No one is going to blame Goats for goading the grief. All chickenshit Monday-morning-quarterback censorship calls need to be ignored. It was lame for filmmakers to talk about digitally removing the twin towers in cityscape shots used for films shot in 2000 and early ’01. I was watching the Three Days of the Condor Bluray the other day, and it has shots of the towers and the World Trade Center lobby that are truly wonderful for their time-capsule quality. Don’t erase — watch films in their proper context.

“The associations are inevitable, and they’re not only distracting but detractive to the movie,” Sancton writes. ” When Michael Jackson died, Universal cut a scene from Bruno in which Sacha Baron Cohen rifles through Latoya Jackson’s Blackberry to find Michael’s number. It was the right move to cut it, not because it would have been tasteless — that’s never stopped Cohen — but because the joke would have fallen flat.

“But then Michael died two weeks before Bruno‘s release, so there was time to swap the prints before distributing them. Logistically, it would be much more difficult to alter The Men Who Stare at Goats, now that the film is already in theaters.

The Overture marketing guys who designed (or at least approved) the Men Who Stare At Goats lobby poster were paying oblique tribute to the 1961 Judgment at Nuremberg poster. Have there been others? Probably, but they’re not coming to mind.

The very first version of the Nuremberg poster, by the way, used side-to-side profiles. The below image is from the soundtrack album.

The German city is called Nurnberg, of course. Why have Americans always insisted on calling it Nuremberg? Where is the upside in changing the spelling and adding an extra syllable? How could any English speaker, educated or not, have difficulty saying “Nurnberg”?

The House’s passage of the House Healthcare Reform Bill just barely squeaked through — 220 to 215. A nice event and a victory for Barack Obama, but the bill will be watered down (and possibly even gutted) by its opponents in the Senate.

What happened last night is certainly better than nothing, but all we’re likely to get at the end of the road is a de-balled version of the Swiss health care system. A “vigorous” public option will never get approval from the Senate. The footprints of cowards, eternal disrepute, etc,