There are two indications of trouble in this trailer for Martin Campbell‘s Edge of Darkness (Warner Bros., 1.29.10). One is the way-too-blissful smile Mel Gibson wears as he hugs his grown-up daughter and says, “Let’s go home.” I know all about grown-children dad hugs and you never smile like that unless you’re an idiot — you keep it tucked inside and project an air of mild serenity.

The other problem is that Gibson takes his eyes off the road twice — twice! — in the middle of a heavy rainstorm in order to look at his daughter, who’s riding shotgun. The HE rule is that any time an actor tries for occasional for eye contact with a passenger instead of watching the road, you’re watching, at best, a mediocre film and possibly a mildly bad one. So that’s it — game over. Too much emotion and bad driving.

Edge of Darkness might be a decent, kick-ass revenge movie, but it looks rote in a Taken sort of way. I don’t watching older guys getting all outraged and tearful and consumed with the thought of bringing those responsible to justice or killing them, blah blah. The best film in this vein in the last several years was Man on Fire because it was cool-and-dry Denzel doing the thing.

So no more Penn/Pitt/dinosaur jokes until sometime next year (maybe) with Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life not so much bumped from a speculative/hoped-for late ’09 release date as much as Apparition’s Bob Berney finally deciding to tell a journalist (Indiewire’s Anne Thompson), “Wait…you thought it was coming out later this year? Wow, I could have straightened you out on that weeks ago.”

The noteworthy thing isn’t that Tree of Life won’t come later this year (that was becoming more and more obvious with no marketing materials anywhere in sight) but Berney admitting (a) “he doesn’t know when it will come out” and (b) that he hasn’t seen it either, despite Malick having been editing Tree for over a year (having shot it in the Austin area during the spring of ’08). Thompson speculates it may turn up in Cannes next May.

I presume that Berney was informed before signing to distribute Tree of Life that Apparition had no collaborative or consulting rights whatsover and should make no assumptions about being able to even see a cut of Tree of Life at some point in the late-in-the-game editing process (i.e., just to get an idea what they’ll be dealing with), or even expect to be informed when it might be ready before Malick feels like telling him. In short he agreed, it would appear, to a very open-ended, no-pressure deal…very lah-dee-dah, “que sera sera,” you-da-man-Terry, etc.

There’s a reason, of course, why Malick is still fiddling and diddling with Tree of Life to the point that his own guy — a respected/admired distributor of the highest order who is not only contractually but spiritually on the Malick/Tree team all the way — is still being kept waiting in the lobby with no apparent clue about what’s coming. The reason is rooted in the apparent fact that Tree of Life is a RADICAL, RADICAL FILM, and, I suspect, because Malick hasn’t yet found a way to make it fuse together as completely and seamlessly as he’d like.

I think I know what “over a year in editing” means. Ask any seasoned edtior — he/she will tell you what it means also, even with IMAX and dinosaurs in the mix. I don’t know anything at all — zilch — but a little voice is telling me that Malick may be going through what James L. Brooks went through when he was struggling with the musical version of I’ll Do Anything. How’s that for a juxtaposition?

I summed up the situation two months ago as follows:

“I was talking about the dino aspect with a journalist friend a couple of weeks ago, and we were both shaking our heads and acknowledging what a bizarre mind-fuck Tree of Life sounds like. On paper at least. And it’s not like I’m blowing the dinosaur thing out of proportion because there’s some kind of Tree of Life-related IMAX dinosaur movie due in 2010 that will augment or expand on some theme that’s expressed within the parameters of the Penn-Pitt story. Right? I’m just trying to sound like I have a clue.

“All I know is that it’s one hell of a transition to go from a story of angry, pained, frustrated people in the 1950s as well as the present and then to somehow disengage the spacecraft and travel into another realm entirely (like Keir Dullea did in 2001: A Space Odyssey when he soared through Jupiter space), and somehow float into a world that is pre-historical and pre-human, and have this time-trip somehow add to our understanding and feeling for the sad/angry/bitter people in the Pitt-Penn realm.

“I mean, if someone like me is scratching his head and going ‘what the fuck…?’ over the unusualness of a ’50s domestic drama mixed with footage of prehistoric beasts , imagine what Joe Popcorn is going to think or say. Don’t even talk about the Eloi.”

“The richest 1 percent of this country owns half our country’s wealth — five trillion dollars,” Michael Douglas‘s Gordon Gekko declared 22 years ago in Oliver Stone‘s Wall Street. “One-third of that comes from hard work, and two thirds comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulating to widows and idiot sons and what I do — stock and real-estate speculation. [And] it’s bullshit.

“You got 90 percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own. We make the rules, pal. The news, war, peace, famine, upheaval, the price per paper clip. We pick that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it. You’re not naive enough to think we’re living in a democracy, are you buddy? It’s the free market. And you’re a part of it.”

As Hollywood & Fine‘s Marshall Fine observed in a 10.14 article, “This is the same message that Michael Moore is offering in Capitalism: A Love Story, except Moore is bemoaning, not celebrating, these ideas.

Gekko’s “bullshit” speech “was overlooked at the time because people were so enamored of the more sound-bite-friendly line, ‘Greed, for lack of a better word, is good,'” Fine writes. “As Douglas was prepping for Wall Street 2, he told interviewers that financial types regularly come up to him and tell him that his famous line inspired them to become corporate assholes like Gekko – thus missing the point of the film.

“But it’s that other speech that nails it. Gekko delivers it to calm Bud (Charlie Sheen), who’s angry at Gekko for dismantling an airline whose sale Bud engineered in order to save it. It’s all there — all the points that Moore makes. That our economy has become consumed with itself, with financial services and their assorted sordid byproducts. Stone was telling the future – and, as I recall, he was castigated at the time for being simplistic and alarmist.”

It’s an excellent piece — please read the whole thing.

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?