I’ve read an October 2009 draft of Allan Loeb‘s Untitled Cheating Project (a.k.a., Your Cheating Heart), which will costar Vince Vaughn and Kevin James under director Ron Howard. The Universal-funded Imagine project, reportedly based on an idea by producer Brian Grazer, will shoot in Chicago later this year or next. I’m mentioning this because I didn’t much care for Loeb’s script — in fact I almost hated it — and I’m figuring if I say something now it might influence the development. Or not. I don’t care either way.

I’m not going to give the story away — just the basic set-up. Vaughn and James will play Chicago-based engine designers Ronnie Valentine and Isaac Backman, respectively, whose significant others are Beth (Ronnie’s live-in girlfriend) and Geneva (Isaac’s wife). The central tension is about Ronnie accidentally discovering that Geneva is playing around on Isaac, and the anxieties and trepidations that stem from his not knowing what to do. Should he just blurt out the bad news to Isaac, his business partner and longtime best friend? And if he does, will Isaac somehow blame him for Geneva’s betrayal? (Guilt by association.) Should he mind his own business and stay out of the lives of others?

I was immediately repelled by Ronnie’s response because — hello? — there’s only one thing to do. In such a situation his loyalty would be to his longtime friend, not the wife, and so one way or the other he’d have to share what he suspects. No guy would have to think about this. He’d start out by stressing to his pal that he doesn’t really “know” anything but that he’s seen something disturbing and that maybe something’s up, etc. And then he’d suggest that the friend might want to hire a shamus to learn the facts or whatever. But come what may you must share what you’ve seen and/or suspect.

The fact that jabbering Ronnie — a guy who’s in denial about almost everything, and who fibs all the time like Alibi Ike and has trust issues with everyone — hems and haws throughout the story is infuriating. By my sights the guy has no convictions or cojones, and who wants to spend 110 minutes with a 13 year-old who mostly goes “homina-homina-homina” when faced with a serious issue?

When I heard about this film I thought — hoped — that it might be a darkly comedic riff on Harold Pinter‘s Betrayal — i.e., about a guy having a longterm secret love affair with his best friend’s (or closet business associate’s) wife or live-in girlfriend. Maybe a little Betrayal stew with some Damage seasoning, minus the father-son dynamic. A story about how a heavy attraction for the wrong woman can sometimes get into your blood like a virus, and how sometimes there’s no shaking it off. But not a tragedy — a telling of this odd tale in a jazzy-clumsy comedic way.

For me, a story about a serious emotional deception that goes on for several weeks or months or whatever would be fascinating. A comedy about how betrayal can happen between people who’ve grown up together and genuinely care for each other but at the same time are starting to faintly dislike each other, and how friends and lovers who are growing apart often seem to cut their ties in a passive aggressive way (i.e., by indirectly persuading the other person to reject them).

All to say that that Loeb’s October 2009 draft is a real drag because it’s about a guy-guy (i.e, similar to the characters Vaughn played in The Breakup and The Wedding Crashers) who doesn’t know the first thing about being a solid, stand-up friend when the situation demands this. I was thinking as I read it that I don’t know anyone like this (i.e., an antsy little child), but maybe beer-head and onion-ring guys who watch the Super Bowl are like this when they find out that their best friend’s wife is doing the out-of-bounds nasty.

“Once upon a time, the Oscars were THE awards show,” recalls critic Marshall Fine. “Literally. The Emmy Awards and the Oscars were the only awards shows that were broadcast — those and the Miss America Pageant. They were events. They carried weight. They meant something, or at least we thought they did.

“Now Miss America is crowned on basic cable, the Emmys give out so many awards that I’m surprised I don’t have one, and the Oscars seem to come so late that I don’t even care about those movies anymore.

“Seriously: Inglourious Basterds came out last August. The Hurt Locker was released in June (though it had been kicking around at festivals since the previous September). And I saw and wrote my review of Avatar more than three months ago, [and] everyone in America has now seen it twice. Sorry, but I’ve moved on.

“By coming last, the Oscars are now victims of awards fatigue: the National Board of Review, the SAGs, the DGA, the Writers Guild, the Producers Guild, the Golden Globes – and of course, the endless awards from various critic groups around the nation. (I vote in two different New York groups, including the granddaddy of all of them, the New York Film Critics Circle).

“And you expect me to still get excited by the Oscars? It’s March and we’re still talking about last year’s movies?

“If they want to pump up the excitement that’s been missing from Oscar in recent years, the solution isn’t inflating the Best Picture category — it’s getting an earlier start. Find a way to streamline the process. Announce the Oscar nominations on Jan. 2 and give them out on Feb. 1, perhaps in a Super Bowl pre-game show.”

HE reader and Tim Burton buff Michael Mayo saw Alice in Wonderland last Thursday at Hollywood’s El Capitan, and, contrary to yesterday’s general opinion, was not only okay with it but actually feels it’s “Tim’s best work in a long time.” Perhaps with a pinch of salt…?

“It’s actually more somber than they’re letting on,” he says. “The setup is that Alice (Mia Wasikowska) comes back as a young adult and finds the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) has taken over and is causing a “reign of terror,” etc. Part of Wonderland has dense vegitation and forests like Pandora, but part of it is scorched and spooky from where the Red Queen had the dragon-like Jabberwock (Christopher Lee) attack.

Johnny Depp plays the Mad Hatter with a soft Scottish accent and is his usual amazing self, making Willy Wonka seem almost normal. (Depp actually recites part of the film, and is wonderful while doing so.) Crispin Glover is actually in the film a good deal as the Red Queen’s consort, reminding me Prince Caspian’s evil brother. Wasikowska is rather good — she reminds me of a young Gwynneth Paltrow. As a cat person you’re going to love the silky, Stephen Fry-voiced Cheshire Cat, who has a larger role in this than the original.

:They’ve also set it up for a sequel, if it does well enough. The CGI is not as good as Avatar‘s, but then nothing will match that film’s visual wonders for a long time. But the design is very handsome and captivating. The 3D looks good, but it’s a little hard to tell because they had all the center seats blocked off for the VIPs so us proles got put on the hard-angled sides where it might not have been as effective. You know the El Capitan — if you’re not in the center, you’re screwed.

“The only qualm I have is that, paradoxically, aside from his usual weird design, this feels less personal than a Burton film. It is far more visually straightforward and almost workmanlike film than Burton’s last few films; parts of it feel like they could have been done by almost any competent director (although this probably wouldn’t have resulted in the same type of performance from Depp.)

“I’m going to be very curious to see how it plays with the public, but I think it will be a hit so I’m not quite sure why they’re keeping the lid on.

“Rats! Rain! Lightning! Lunatics! Mausoleums! Migraines! Creepy German scientists! Nobody could accuse Martin Scorsese, in Shutter Island, of underplaying his hand,” writes The New Yorker‘s Anthony Lane.

“The nominal task confronting [Scorsese] and his screenwriter, Laeta Kalogridis, is to take Dennis Lehane‘s novel of the same name and render it fit for the screen. But he has a deeper duty — to pillage all the B movies he has ever seen (including some that were forgotten by their own directors), and to enshrine the fixations and flourishes of style on which they relied.

“In a celebrated riff on Casablanca, Umberto Eco wrote, ‘Two clich√©s make us laugh but a hundred cliches move us, because we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion.’ Shutter Island is that reunion, and that shrine

“The final twist is a fizzle; not because we see it coming (though we do) but because Scorsese, with a great weight of exposition dumped in his lap, struggles to keep it snappy. He even has a character stand beside a whiteboard and point out written clues. It’s like having I Walked with a Zombie interrupted by Sesame Street.

“When it comes to ripe old frighteners — or to any other overheated genre — Scorsese is the most ardent of proselytizers, so much so that I would prefer to hear him enthuse about Hammer Horror films, say, than to watch a Hammer Horror film. Shutter Island, with its remote lighthouse and its spiral staircase, is a fleshing out of these scholarly crushes.

“That is why we get the patient with the Frankenstein stitches across his facial scar, and the iron-hearted prison warden (Ted Levine) who, during his only conversation with Teddy, informs him that ‘God loves violence.’ These are not quite jokes, but nor are they saddled with dramatic meaning; they are light, rhetorical gestures toward the dark.

“No one is denying the energy and the dread that stalked the best B movies of the past, but, when the best director of the present revives such monsters, how can he hope to do better than a B-plus?”

This Chicago Sun Times article would not only have us believe that columnist Laura Washington had never heard of Kevin Smith when she wrote it, but that her editors didn’t advise to skip the part about being ignorant of Smith’s fame. Where’s the upside in confessing to this level of cluelessness? All it does is distract from her message about the pitfalls of obesity and make other journalists ask, “What’s her problem?”

The German-born Douglas Sirk has long been considered a world-class, pantheon-level filmmaker. That’s because the film dweebs have been telling us for years that the dreadfully banal soap-opera acting, grandiose emotionalism and conservative suburban milieus in his films are all of an operatic pitch-perfect piece and are meant as ironic social criticism. (Or something like that.)

The dweebs are playing an old snob game. They’re basically saying that you have to be a serious cineaste to recognize Sirk’s genius, and that if you don’t recognize it then you need to think things through because you’re just not as perceptive as you need to be.

There’s no winning against this mindset, which is somewhere between a schoolyard bully move and an intellectual con. The dweebs (and I’m talking about a very small and cloistered group of big-city critics) have put one over on us. And I’m suggesting, due respect, that the time has come to push back on Sirk and to consider him once again as the Guiding Light-level director that some (myself included) believe that he always was.

Sirk was mostly dismissed by critics of the ’50s and early ’60s for making films that were no more and no less than what they seemed to be — i.e., emotionally dreary, visually lush melodramas about repressed women suffering greatly through crises of the heart as they struggled to maintain tidy, ultra-proper appearances.

In his praise of Written on the Wind, Roger Ebert wrote that “to appreciate [this film] probably takes more sophistication than to understand one of Ingmar Bergman‘s masterpieces, because Bergman’s themes are visible and underlined, while with Sirk the style conceals the message.”

Aaaah, the old concealment game! John Ford used to do this also, but you can watch Ford’s films, or at least savor what’s good about them (despite the Irish sentimentality). If Ebert’s comment isn’t Orwellian film-dweeb speak, I don’t know what would be.

I can watch this clip over and over. Puts me in the greatest mood. That’s all.

I’m told that certain British exhibitors and theatre managers who’ve seen Tim Burton‘s Alice In Wonderland feel it’s “a true stinker of a movie…an unmitigated disaster,” as one correspondent puts it. “It’s no shock that Disney want to release this on DVD as soon as possible. Not sure what can save this though the promotion so far might guarantee it a great opening before poisonous word of mouth kills it.”

To which I replied, “Wait…a stinker? Burton might be off his game, but I can’t believe it’s a disaster…c’mon. Burton is no chump, he knows what he’s doing.”

To which the exhibitor replied, “Saw a screening last week, Jeff. Will let you wait to judge it but the movie is a mess. No real plot to speak of and some terrible acting from the likes of Crispin Clover. Even some of the CGI is messy. Cinemas not wanting to show this due to early DVD terms from Disney might not [realize] how lucky they are long-term. There was also a screening last week for critics and that didn’t go well either.”

A Manhattan-based critic friend adds the following: “Alice sucks. Visually amazing [with] many familiar characters but none of the story from the books. No wit, no tension — an action-fantasy, if you can believe that, minus comedy.”

Vulture reported two days ago that AMC, America’s second-largest theater chain, “is threatening to boycott Alice in Wonderland because of Disney’s plan to shorten the film’s theatrical run. Disney wants to keep Alice in theaters for twelve weeks rather than seventeen in order to capitalize on the DVD appeal of this family-friendly movie about pigs that serve as footrests.

“An AMC boycott would seriously harm the box-office returns for Alice, which would lose revenue from the company’s more than 4,500 screens worldwide. And because of that, AMC and Disney are expected to work something out before the movie’s March 5 release.”

London Update: “I see there are already doubters accusing me of lying,” the exhibitor says. “Just wait until you see the movie, Jeff. I was hoping that this would be great as Burton is perfectly capable but alas, this is an expensive disaster. Critics who have seen it are under embargo at the moment. Reviews are going to be interesting.”

Further Update: BBC News is reporting that Alice in Wonderland “will not be screened at Odeon cinemas in the UK, Irish Republic and Italy, the cinema chain says. The move is in response to the Disney studio’s plan to reduce the period in which it can be shown only in cinemas from the standard 17 weeks. The plan would allow Disney to release the film on DVD at the end of May.

“Odeon said this would ‘set a new benchmark, leading to a 12-week window becoming rapidly standard.'”

In an apparent exclusive, Cop Out star Bruce Willis has told MTV News’ Josh Horowitz that (a) “I think we’re gonna do” a Die Hard 5 movie for 2011, and that (b) he’d hire Len Wiseman to direct in a New York minute

It’s being asked which of this year’s Best Picture nominees will be watched by film buffs 50 years hence. Just as I’ve watched (and will watch again) a 50 year-old Korean War film called Pork Chop Hill, I can’t imagine The Hurt Locker not being a fascinating timepiece for those looking to absorb what the Iraq War was for U.S. troops. And just as Ben-Hur is a necessary flick to own (especially when it finally comes out on Blu-ray) or at least see once, who can imagine Avatar not being a essential sit in 2060?

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“This week President Obama is hosting a bipartisan gab-fest at the White House to try to tease out some Republican votes for health care,” Salon‘s Robert Reich wrote this morning. “It’s a total waste of time. If Obama thinks he’s going to get a single Republican vote at this stage of the game, he’s fooling himself (or the American people).

“Many months ago, you may recall, the White House and Dem leaders in the Senate threatened to pass health care with 51 votes — using a process called ‘reconciliation’ that allows tax and spending bills to be enacted without filibuster — unless Republicans came on board. It’s time to pull the trigger.”

Three reactions to the weekend’s box-office tallies: (a) Shutter Island began the weekend with $14 million earned on Friday, but it was down to $10,792,000 — a 34% drop — on Sunday, which of course is due to word-of-mouth and grumbling about that Marshall Fine guy leading us astray; (b) Public opinion also resulted in The Wolfman earnings plummeting 76% from last weekend; (c) Avatar’s domestic cume now stands at $687,851,000 — only $13 million shy of the $700 million mark.

I have to see Avatar in IMAX3-D one more time before it gets pushed out by Alice in Wonderland. It’ll be viewable in other 3D formats down the road, of course. Cameron reminded me during the Santa Barbara Film Festival that there are now stereoscopic 3D laptops hitting the market, and of course we’re seeing more and more displays of 3D flatscreens. But I can’t imagine the IMAX 3D presentation I saw last December at Lincoln Square being topped by anything. One last time, one last time…