I’d like to describe the ways in which Rex Reed‘s review of Funny People is a vile deviation from appropriate respect and fair-mindedness, but it is one of those rare times when I am at a loss for words. He calls director-writer Judd Apatow “the most tasteless no-talent and truthfully alleged ‘director’ since John Waters and the Farrelly brothers,” derides Knocked Up as “abominable” and calls Funny People “a 146-minute mental lapse that should have been dipped in hydrochloric acid in the editing lab.” Nobody’s “right’ or “wrong” in these matters but at the very least Reed’s rash and excitable judgments throw the film’s virtues (the self-regarding candor and emotional intimacy) out with the bathwater.

Quentin Tarantino‘s somewhat altered cut of Inglorious Basterds is, I’m told, screening today in Los Angeles. I would have liked to attend but InFilm calls. It would have been fun trying to pinpoint which portions of the Cannes cut have been deep-sixed, etc. Not that the changes make a huge bottom-line difference. Joe Popcorn is going to find it too talky by half.

My InFilm touring-around has made it difficult to write anything of any length and keep up with breaking stories, although I’m getting some licks in here and there. I’m writing this from a nice outdoor patio adjacent to a Starbucks located next to Warner Bros. studios. The gang is taking the studio tour, which involves cruising around the lot on one of those little trams…good God. I figured my time would be better spent catching up. I know that lot almost as well as Joel Silver.

A 7.28 N.Y. Times article by Kim Severson made a big to-do about the natural-looking, presumably mouth-watering capturings of various gourmet dishes in Nora Ephron‘s Julie & Julia. This resulted from Ephron being a devoted life-long foodie as well as from the exacting attentions of Susan Spungen, the movie’s food stylist.

Why, then, did Variety‘s Justin Chang write that the film disappoints by failing to offer “glorious culinary eye candy on the level of Babette’s Feast or Eat Drink Man Woman“? He also noted that “whatever auds make of Julie & Julia, it’s hard to imagine that Child herself, an unapologetic Francophile with one hell of an appetite, would have been much of a fan.”

September’s Toronto Film Festival (9.10 through 9.19) will debut Michael Moore‘s Capitalism: A Love Story — an expected but welcome addition — as well as Joel and Ethan Coen‘s A Serious Man, their “Jews in Minnesota” period comedy which I’ve been told works so well that the lack of star names will not be a problem.

Drew Barrymore‘s Whip It, which a friend says is a very decent little sports film-slash-character study, will also debut at the festival.

The other just-announced premieres include (a) Dorian Gray, Oliver Parker‘s re-mounting of the Oscar Wilde tale costarring Ben Barnes and Colin Firth that will unspool as a gala presentation (meh) , (b) Harry Brown, an urban western directed by Daniel Barber and starring Michael Caine (meh), (c) Perrier’s Bounty, an Irish gangster comedy with Jim Broadbent, Brendan Gleeson and Cillian Murphy (maybe, sounds promising) and Danis Tanovic‘s Triage, a war drama starring Colin Farrell (high expectations!).

Did a combination of Universal’s box-office losing streak, the huge critical success of The Hurt Locker plus NBC/Uni topper Jeff Zucker coming out strongly in favor of “easy-to-digest concepts and wish fulfillment” lead to the decision to bump Paul Greengrass‘s Green Zone into an early 2010 release?

Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass during shooting of their Iraq War thriller

Variety‘s Marc Graser is reporting that Green Zone, which was never given a firm ’09 release date but had been expected to compete as a fall/holiday awards season contender, will not open in ’09 but rather on March 12, 2010.

This is a personal heartbreaker, as (a) I’m a huge Greengrass fan, (b) I have a heroin-habit craving for any Iraq War movie, and (c) I had a particularly keen interest in this futile-search-for-WMDs thriller. Greengrass swore to L.A. Times reporter John Horn last January that Green Zone “is not a movie about Iraq [but] a strong, contemporary thriller that is set in Iraq. Thrillers thrive on extremity, and there is no more extreme environment than immediate post-invasion Baghdad.”

My theories about why Green Zone has been been ’86-ed out of ’09:

(a) Green Zone isn’t The Hurt Locker, which is to say it’s not as much a visceral, alls-out, pro-troops pulse-pounder as much as a viscerally shot (by Hurt Locker and United 93 lenser Barry Ackroyd) but essentially political minded quasi-downer about what a cock-up the American occupation was in ’03 and ’04.

I have Greengrass’s Green Zone script (before Brian Helgeland came in or a rewrite) but if the final result is at all faithful to Rajiv Chandrasekaran‘s book it’s almost a dramatic narrative version of Charles Ferguson‘s No End in Sight with the ludicrous incompetence of the American administrators in the early part of the Iraqi war and the pathetic errors of Iraqi Bush guy Paul Bremer as a backdrop.

Damon plays Roy Miller, a warrant officer who helps a senior CIA officer in the search for the mythical “weapons of mass destruction” during the first several months of the Iraq occupation. Damon completed Green Zone before starring in Steven Soderbergh‘s The Informant!, which will play at the Toronto Film Festival.

(b) Universal has determined that out of the 10 Best Picture contenders, the Academy has room in its collective head for one Iraq War film, and the recipient of that largesse — The Hurt Locker — has already been decided upon. And that other award-dispensing groups will probably concur. So with award-season action looking limited and the film perhaps not looking all that commercial on its own terms, Universal has decided to punt.

(c) The reason for this is that Universal’s unfortunate losing streak has disemboldened management from taking any more chances of any kind. If Green Zone bombs or underperforms at the box-office it’ll just be another strike against them in an already gloomy box-office year. Plus it obviously doesn’t adhere to criteria recently urged by NBC-Uni honcho Jeff Zucker. “Easy-to-digest concepts and wish fulfillment is in vogue,” he wrote in a recent memo to Uni toppers. “That’s not our slate. And the choices have been too costly. You’ve got to fix both those things.”

Downside: March ’10 is eight months from now and the urgency/topicality of Iraq is losing sand by the week with Obama pulling the troops out. Doesn’t it make sense to get Green Zone out while it’s still semi-relevant? By next year Iraq will be even further back in the public mind.”

Bottom line? Green Zone should have been greenlit and shot earlier. If it had come out last fall, bingo. But this was a bad Universal year, history is turning the page and people are disengaging on a Bush-era catastrophe.

Note: Thanks to The Playlist for highlighting the Green Zone aspect of Graser’s story. The Green Zone news is buried inside a delayed Wolf Man story that wasn’t even on the front page this morning.

Variety‘s Justin Chang is calling Neill Blomkamp‘s District 9 (Sony, 8.14) “an enjoyably disgusting sci-fier set in and around a rubble-strewn war zone where extraterrestrial refugees have taken up indefinite residence. Better conceived and executed than one might expect from a low-budget rebound project, this grossly engrossing speculative fiction bears Jackson’s blood-splattered fingerprints but also heralds first-time feature director Blomkamp as a nimble talent to watch.

“Shot and set in Blomkamp’s native South Africa, District 9 imagines a present-day scenario in which humans and aliens are forced into an uneasy co-existence and, predictably, bring out the violent worst in each other. As scripted by Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell, the result reps a remarkably cohesive hybrid of creature feature and satirical mockumentary that elaborates on the helmer’s 2005 short Alive in Jo’burg, borrows plot points from 1988’s Alien Nation and takes its emotional cues from E.T..”

This may sound a settled issue in the U.S. and Europe, but The Punch‘s Sam Cleveland is announcing the death of newspaper movies to his Australian readers. He’s right, of course. We’ll never see another one.

“No longer will Hollywood stars loosen their ties and roll up their sleeves as scoop-hungry newspaper reporters,” he writes. “No more will veteran character actors bring knowing splashes of avuncular charm to the stock role of the grizzled editor. [And] no longer will the movie news be broken in print.”

State of Play opened in Australia in late May but Cleveland only recently saw it, which explains why he’s how stating that Kevin McDonald‘s film “marks the end of an era simply because 21st century audiences assume, correctly or not, that news now happens online.”

“While In the Loop is a highly disciplined inquiry into a very serious subject, it is also, line by filthy line, scene by chaotic scene, by far the funniest big-screen satire in recent memory. The hand-held camera work, the hectic jump-cuts and the grubby visuals may resemble television, but the restless pacing and drab appearance serve a clear aesthetic purpose.

“At the end you may feel a little unclean, which is also evidence of director-writer Armando Iannucci‘s satirical rigor. The people in whose hands momentous decisions rest are shown — convincingly and in squirming detail — to be duplicitous, vindictive, small-minded and untrustworthy. But why should they be any different from the rest of us?” — from A.O. Scott‘s N.Y. Times review, which has been posted three days before the 7.31 opening.

I didn’t even know about the online mass rebellion/popular turnoff movement against Katherine Heigl until last weekend. I know that Sarah Ball‘s summary piece in Newsweek seemed unduly harsh and brash so I stopped reading it. Then Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone sent it to me today. This time I read it through to the end. I then checked around to see how many others are piling on. And it does seem as if there’s something going on, “seem” being the operative term.

Katherine Heigl

It still seems like too much. I don’t care for Heigl’s performance in The Ugly Truth either but I don’t want to see her killed or run out of the business. And I wonder how many people feel this way given the $31 million that The Ugly Truth, Heigl’s latest and most detestable film thus far, has made since last Friday. What’s clear is that it’s awfully damn easy these days to go from being loved/admired/enjoyed to being loathed/depised/dumped on. You’re flying high in April, shot down in May.