Fifteen seconds after my London flight arrived at JFK this afternoon I learned of Patrick Goldstein‘s bullwhip piece accusing me of showing no balls during my interview with Fantastic Mr. Fox director Wes Anderson .

The Big Wimp-Out happened, in Goldstein’s view, when I questioned Anderson about that 10.11 Chris Lee L.A. Times piece that repeated gripes from Fantastic Mr. Fox dp Tristan Oliver and director of animation Mark Gustafson that Anderson (a) made their lives miserable by being an overly-demanding nitpicker (or something like that) and (b) not being on-set and directing the film by e-mail from Paris.

Goldstein felt that I candy-assed out, wasn’t Mike Wallace-y enough and appeared to be in the tank for Anderson when I said the following: “Now if I were being hired by Wes Anderson to work with him, I would have a very clear idea, before we had even talked about the particulars, that I was going to be working with a guy with a very specific, personality-related, stylistically-related thing, right? So I’m trying to get from you how can — what is the best way to expand upon and understand the, uhm, slight griping in that Chris Lee piece…because I don’t understand how anybody could say, well, when you’re going to do a film somebody’s way, you’re obviously going to be adhering to a very particular thing and that’s all there is to it.”

Goldstein supposed that I’d been bent over, bought off and Crisco-disco’ed by the fact that 20th Century Fox had flown me into London and put me up at the Dorchester, which led me to conduct interviews in an obsequious fashion. Well, let me explain as plainly as I can.

I was in the tank for Anderson going in because I don’t like whiners. If you sign up to work with a director (and especially a particular-minded auteur-level director), you don’t whine about the collaboration not being mellow or groovy enough, as Oliver and Gustafson apparently did. You man up and suck it in and ride it out. Making movies is not about feeling personally happy — it’s about artistic servitude and making the best damn movie you can so you can be proud of it when you’re 90 years old.

I have always supported demanding directors whenever people have complained about them being tough to work with. You could easily find (or certainly imagine) similar complaints about demanding, world-class directors like Jim Cameron, David O. Rusell, Brian DePalma, Oliver Stone, Stanley Kubrick, etc. By the same token Tom Cruise could have theoretically said about the making of Eyes Wide Shut, “Gee, I thought we were going to make a movie for two or three months and it wound up taking a year, for God’s sake, and I felt overworked and unhappy!” Talent talks and bullshit walks.

Anderson is nothing if not precise and meticulous, which is why his films (duhhh) have that uniform Wessy-ness…that absolute stamp of personality. So how in the world could Oliver and Gustafson have agreed to work on Fantastic Mr. Fox without understanding that (a) at the end of the day, making it would not be a collaborative effort as much as a “yes, boss…sure thing, boss…how high d’ya want me to jump?” type of thing, (b) that Anderson, having no experience with stop-motion or animation, would simultaneously be on a learning-curve and, being himself, also not looking to do things the usual way, and, more fundamentally, that (c) crafting and imposing an auteurist stamp would somehow be an easy-going, comme ci comme ca endeavor?

On top of which two or three Anderson/Fox collaborators said during junket interviews that Anderson hanging around the set during the months and months of stop-motion photography on Fantastic Mr. Fox would have been counter-productive.

But if some want to think of me as a pants-around-the-ankles type as a result of this fracas, fine. I’ve been a little too much the maverick, contrarian and anti-authoritarian for much of my life. This Fantastic Mr. Fox thing has established a new side to my personality — i.e., junket slut. I’ve earned enough credits on the other side of the ledger to be thought of in this way without incurring any damage.

Oh, and by the way: guess who’s scheduled to be the moderator for the Envelope/LA Times screening series showing of Fantastic Mr. Fox and the q & a with Wes Anderson on November 3rd? None other than Patrick Goldstein.

The IFC marketing guys are trying to keep the viral Antichrist thing going by asking graphic designers and horror fans to design a final official poster. Blood-soaked fox fur, afterbirth, falling toddlers, clitoral scissors, leg anvils, etc. “Delve into the darker parts of your creativity to create an original poster design for this beautiful and horrifying film,” the statement says, blah blah. Antichrist opens a week from Friday (i.e., 10.23).

For whatever inexplicable reason there’s no YouTube trailer for Danis Tanovic‘s Triage, which I missed at the Toronto Film Festival. But here’s one on a European site. Here’s the initial reaction that first got me going.

The Fantastic fanfare was great while it lasted but it’s over — grim up and pack the bags. Training to Heathrow in less than an hour, and late as usual. Plane departing at 11 am (or something like that), back in New York by this afternoon, etc.

Fantastic Mr. Fox voice-star George Clooney, TV-hostess girlfriend Elisabetta Canalis at last night’s post-premiere, London Film Festival party at Chelsea’s Saatchi Gallery.

Prior to last night’s London Film Festival premiere screening of Fantastic Mr. Fox

The cigarette-smoking crowd outside last night’s post-premiere, London Film Festival party at Chelsea’s Saatchi Gallery

I have to get over to the Fantastic Mr. Fox gala screening that kicks off the London Film Festival. The day just flew and now it’s 5:50 pm. I was going to take two or three hours and do this self-orchestrated walking-around-London Beatles tour (i.e., visiting their various residences during the ’60s) but realized too late there wouldn’t be time. And I have to leave tomorrow morning. Too bad. I could easily live here.

I don’t know why Susannah Breslin, a very tough, talented, and truthful writer who’s been around, would want to write about the porn industry, which always has been and always will be composed of the absolute dregs of show-business culture — i.e., people who want to be famous and live pulsing lah-lah lives but who have absolutely no acting or filmmaking talent whatsoever, and who generally aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed either. But she does write about this damn industry, and very well at that. But I’m asking her straight out — why do you write about these scumbags, Susannah? What’s the attraction in wading waist-deep in icky behavior and lower-depths sleaze?

Two Fantastic Mr. Fox themes were expressed at today’s Dorchester hotel press conference. George Clooney said it was more or less about “being true to your animal instincts,” and Wes Anderson called it “a celebration of thievery.”

Walking down London’s Half Moon Street — Tuesday, 10.13, 11:05 pm.

Fantastic Mr. Fox voicer Jason Schwartzman (who told me that Bored To Death, his HBO series, has been picked up for a second season).

Bill Murray behind the bar following yesterday’s pub interview session.

Visited here last night, met up with a couple of HE reader acquaintances.

“So old-fashioned as to look like something brand new, the stop-motion-animated Fantastic Mr. Fox is as recognizably a Wes Anderson film as any of his previous features,” writes Variety‘s Todd McCarthy. “Roald Dahl‘s 1970 children’s favorite about a fox clan and friends eluding human predators has been transformed into a tale of odd family dynamics stemming from the behavior of an eccentric patriarch.

The second talking-fox picture of the year, after Lars von Trier‘s Antichrist, this one features not genital mutilation, but a leading character who gets his tail shot off. It also boasts some of the most gorgeous autumnal color schemes devised by someone other than Mother Nature herself, animal puppets festooned with actual fur, and a sensibility more indie than mainstream.

“The film’s style, paradoxically both precious and rough-hewn, positions this as the season’s defiantly anti-CGI toon, and its retro charms will likely appeal more strongly to grown-ups than to moppets; it’s a picture for people who would rather drive a 1953 Jaguar XK 120 than a new one.

“It’s a curious coincidence that Anderson and Spike Jonze, two of the more prominent musicvid-turned-feature directors, have kid-lit adaptations featuring puppets (albeit of vastly differing sizes) coming out simultaneously, and that both Mr. Fox and Where the Wild Things Are strive for such hand-crafted, individualized looks. The films may have their problems, but the least one can say is that neither very closely resembles anything that’s come before.

“Mr. Fox is characterized by chapter headings that slide across the screen; trademark Anderson compositions that resemble storyboards and abundant lateral camera moves; a soundtrack that easily accommodates everything from The Ballad of Davy Crockett and the theme from Day for Night to the Beach Boys’ version of Ol’ Man River; and a hirsute male lead who would look right at home on the cover of GQ.

Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) wears a double-breasted, pumpkin-colored corduroy suit, a custard-hued sweater and two stylish wheat stalks peeking out of his breast pocket. His slim, trim wife (Meryl Streep) complements him perfectly, and when he tells her, ‘You’re still as fine-looking as a creme brulee,’ Anderson’s sophisticated following will nod with pleasure while their kids think, ‘What the heck?’

“As in Dahl’s 81-page yarn — whose pencil-sketch illustrations by Quentin Blake (in some editions) could not be more different from Anderson’s fastidious visuals — Mr. Fox’s pelt is desperately desired by three nasty farmers whose produce he regularly poaches. Boggis and Bunce and Bean, “one fat, one short, one lean,” launch all-out war on their adversary, digging down into his lair before recruiting snipers to shoot on sight.

“The geological precision with which Fox and his friends’ great escape is presented reps one of the film’s visual highlights, as they furiously dig through layer after layer of earth to stay ahead of their enemies’ onslaught. Along the way, Fox burrows up into the three men’s properties, from which he pilfers enough to prepare a giant feast, while the war continues to the point of becoming a televised siege.

“But the overarching drama doesn’t interest Anderson and fellow screenwriter Noah Baumbach nearly as much as the family issues. In contrast to the book, in which the Foxes have four largely undifferentiated kids, here they have but one son, Ash (Jason Schwartzman), who isn’t sure he can meet his father’s expectations. Joining them in flight are unassertive cousin Kristofferson (Eric Anderson), opossum Kylie (Wally Wolodarsky) and lawyer Badger (Bill Murray).

“Plainly set in England, the film maintains a linguistic divide between British-accented humans and American-accented animals.

“The thematic thread here pertains to the maintenance of one’s true personality and character strengths. When they have a child, Mrs. Fox gets her husband to promise to cease being a wild thing (apologies to Jonze) and become respectable. When he subsequently reverts to his old, buccaneering ways, Mr. Fox must do so surreptitiously, and when he’s caught in a lie, his wife is deeply distraught that he hasn’t really changed.

“But it’s his true character that wins the day, and it’s a trait Anderson clearly advocates through his own choices.

“Employing a deliberately unpolished, herky-jerky style that traces back specifically to Ladislas Starevich‘s 1941 The Tale of the Fox but also variously recalls the imperfect but imperishable stop-motion techniques in the silent The Lost World, the original King Kong and the work of Ray Harryhausen, Norman McLaren‘s A Chairy Tale and many others, the film achieves a feel that is at once coarse-grained and elegant, antiquated and the height of fashion.

“That said, individual scenes often go off in irritatingly self-indulgent directions, especially when they brush upon lifestyle issues, meditation timeouts and too-cute observations.”

The latest attempt to re-boot the Jack Ryan franchise was announced last night by Variety‘s Michael Fleming. The plan is to put Star Trek‘s Chris Pine into the role of the analytical CIA hotshot, who has so far been played by three previous actors — Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck.

(clockwise from top left) Chris Pine, Alec Baldwin, Ben Affleck, Harrison Ford.

Fleming wrote that Paramount and producers Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Mace Neufeld are working with a script draft by Hossein Amini, based on an original concept” and “are still in deep development.”

This would be Pine’s second franchise on top of playing Cpt. James T. Kirk in a second Star Trek film. “It is unclear whether Pine would make another Star Trek before the Jack Ryan film,” Fleming wrote. Pine “is separately in talks to team with director D.J. Caruso in the Paramount drama The Art of Making Money early next year,” he added.

Here are my cautions and concerns.

One, as Star Trek showed, Pine is convincing as a studly man of action and balls, but less convincing as a man of immense intellectual capacity, much less one of complex intellectual reach. Pine is basically a Baywatch-level actor. I realize that an actor doesn’t have to be a genius to play a genius, but he has to have the ability to make you believe that his character is, and I’m not sure if Pine is a good enough actor to sell himself as Charles Van Doren.

Two, the Ryan character is in fact a very bright fellow as well as someone who can handle the derring-do, which is why the Harrison Ford of 15 to 20 years ago (i.e., before he became Uncle Festus) was so good in Phillip Noyce‘s Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. Ford was the Sean Connery of the Ryan franchise. I’ve lived with Ford for almost 30 years now, and I think I know who he is and what he can do and what he’s made of. And I really don’t think Pine carries the same heft. He’s not as tall, his voice isn’t deep enough, he lacks that air of seasoned authority, etc.

Three, if you use the Bond franchise as an analogy, The Hunt for Red October was Dr. No, Patriot Games was From Russia With Love and Clear and Present Danger was Goldfinger. And The Sum of All Fears was 9/11 meets Diamonds Are Forever or maybe The Man With The Golden Gun. The new Ryan franchise, I presume, will in a certain sense be trying to re-energize the way Casino Royale got the Bond franchise going again with…you know, Pine trying to fill Daniel Craig‘s shoes or whatever. Well, at least they’re both blonde.

An interesting thought and a diverting question for Wes Anderson came to me during this afternoon’s Fantastic Mr. Fox press conference (held inside the Dorchester Hotel’s grand ballroom) but moderator Dave Gritten shut things down before I had a chance to ask it. So I followed the talent — Anderson and voice actors George Clooney, Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, etc. — into a reception room and popped it straight to Wes.

“The great malady or affliction of modern cinema,” I said, “is conspicuous CG because all conspicuous CG, in the end, is essentially the same visual effect. The ultimate example of this today is Roland Emmerich‘s forthcoming 2012. Emmerich-styled CG distracts and dazzles, but it’s finally monotonous because it’s all one big digital maul, and so your eyes can’t trust it and in fact immediately reject it, resulting in a certain kind of emotional removal and cynicism.” (Inconspicuous or invisible CG is another matter entirely, and is often glorious.) “Werner Herzog has said the same thing, that perhaps the biggest challenge facing filmmakers today is to persuade audiences to trust their eyes again.

“And the thing I like the most about Fantastic Mr. Fox,” I continued, “is that even though it’s fanciful fakery, it’s fakery you can trust because it was made the old-fashioned organic way with stop-motion photography — the same technique that was used by Willis O’Brien and Merian C. Cooper in the making of the original King Kong — and is therefore, in the realm of movies about unreal things, selling something that is totally and honorably divorced from the 2012 aesthetic. So it’s entirely true and fair to call Fantastic Mr. Fox the anti-2012.”

Wes’s first response was, “What’s 2012?” Oh, you know…it’s that Roland Emmerich end-of-the-world movie, I said. Worldwide destruction, CG up the wazoo, coming out next month. “Gee, I haven’t heard of that one,” he said. “But yeah…it sounds like we’re the anti-2012.”

Those who see Spike Jonze‘s Where The Wild Things Are without knowing how skimpy the narrative is in the original Maurice Sendak pictutre book “are excused for feeling a little let down,” writes The Gothamist‘s John Del Signore.

From Spike Jonze’s Where The Wild Things Are.

“But is there anyone who didn’t fall for Where the Wild Things Are as a child? The book casts a hell of a spell, and Jonze and screenwriter Dave Eggers miraculously succeed in recreating its elusive essence. This is a movie that makes you want to call your mother, and that’s not something you can say about most studio pictures. Not even Dr. Dolittle 2.

“Ultimately, Where the Wild Things Are stays interesting, despite its subdued narrative arc, because it’s an unabashedly heartfelt meditation on the primal emotions that overwhelm us in childhood. It floats along on the strength of its raw sincerity and sharp wits, and if at times it verges on sentimentality, the sentiment is not unearned. It’s rare for a big-budget movie to dare to be this melancholy without any bullshit, cloying contrivances.”