Conservative-minded actor Gary Sinise had made a support-the-troops Iraq War doc called Brothers at War. Who’s seen it? Is there an on-demand plan of some kind in the works? A filmmaker friend says Sinise’s film has “been suspiciously absent from festivals and just started a small run starting in military communities.”

Why not air Brothers at War on HBO, which has attracted huge numbers by playing the red-state card with recent airings of Ross Katz ‘s Taking Chance? As I’ve noted once or twice before, Taking Chance‘s success is due to the way it massages feelings of heartland pride and patriotism, sadness over the death of too-young American soldiers, and a certain kind of sentimentality that associates itself with feelings of allegiance for the waging of the Iraq War.

In any event, Brothers at War and Taking Chance are discussed in this 3.13 Washington Times article by Sonny Bunch. The piece also quotes the Taking Chance argument that N.Y. Post Kyle Smith and I got into about two weeks ago.

Hey, whatever happened to Pat Dollard‘s Young Americans, which deals with his embed experiences with Iraq combat troops? He shot it…what, four years ago? Five? I have a feeling he’ll never finish this thing. I’d be sorry not to see it. I respect what Dollard did in going over there, etc.

The guy who lives upstairs is so fat that you can’t just hear the stairs and floor beams buckling and groaning under his weight — you can feel the whole building doing this. It’s very unsettling. Imagine a Vietnamese water buffalo walking around on its hind legs, and sensing the tonnage as it trudges up and down a sagging staircase.

Truth be told, the building I’m staying in (which is probably 60 or 70 years old) was built from second-rate materials. It’s not the age of it. I’ve stayed in apartment buildings in Paris and Rome that are 150 or 200 years old, if not older, and their winding, steel-fortified staircases are as solid as trees.

“Once he had Mad Money‘s Jim Cramer at his desk, Jon Stewart showed…embarrassing clips from a 2006 interview with the website [Cramer] founded, TheStreet.com, in which he too candidly explained how hedge fund market manipulation really works.When Cramer explained, ‘There is market for it and you give it to them,’ Stewart stared at him in disbelief, exclaiming. ‘There’s a market for cocaine and hookers!'” — from Alessandra Stanley‘s 3.13 N.Y. Times story about the 3.12 Daily Show interrogation.

“I know Jim Cramer a little,” Andrew Sullivan wrote this morning. “The reason he crumbled last night, I think, is because deep down, he knows Stewart’s right. He isn’t that television clown all the way down. And deeper down, he knows it’s not all a game — now that they’ve run off with grandpa’s retirement money.

“It’s not enough any more, guys, to make fantastic errors and then to carry on authoritatively as if nothing just happened. You will be called on it. In some ways, the blogosphere is to MSM punditry what Stewart is to Cramer: an insistent and vulgar demand for some responsibility, some moral and ethical accountabilty for previous decisions and pronouncements.

“I watched last night’s Daily Show with growing shock last night. Did you expect that? I expected a jolly and ultimately congenial discussion, after some banter. What Cramer walked into was an ambush of anger. He crumbled from the beginning. From then on, with the almost cruel broadcasting of his earlier glorifying of financial high-jinks, you almost had to look away. This was, in my view, a real cultural moment. It was a storming of the Bastille.”

Yesterday the New Yorker‘s Richard Brody lamented the recent departure of Film Society of Lincoln Center’s film programmer Kent Jones while offering a possible reason for his having resigned (i.e., left for reasons not of his own making).

(l.) Recently departed Lincoln Center film programmer and Film Comment contributor Kent Jones; (r.) FSLC exec director Mara Manus.

“I haven’t heard from [Jones] recently and don’t know the specifics of the situation, his departure is emblematic of a greater problem at the Film Society,” Brody wrote.

“In December, the Film Society presented ‘Spanish Cinema Now,’ which was ‘presented in collaboration with the Instituto de la Cinematografia y de las Artes Audiovisuales (ICAA) of the Spanish Ministry of Culture and the Instituto Cervantes of New York.’

“A similar program, ‘Open Roads: New Italian Cinema,’ was co-organized along with a host of organizations last June, including the ‘Ministero per i Beni e le Attivita Culturali (Direzione Generale per il Cinema).’

“And the week of Slovenian cinema last July was ‘presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in collaboration with and with major support from the Slovenian Film Fund.’

“Many of the films shown in these series are far from the best of world cinema,” Brody noted, adding that “these series seem to serve mainly the interests of the governments or national film agencies in question, whether to promote the country for tourism or to promote the movies for possible export.

“It is unimaginable that the New York Philharmonic would take money from, say, Spain’s or Slovenia’s Ministry of Culture in exchange for programming a series of works by composers from that country, or that the Metropolitan Opera or the Great Performers series would accept payment for featuring a particular country’s soprano or pianist.

“But Lincoln Center allows — perhaps even expects — the Film Society to dilute its curated programming with arrantly sponsored screenings of some inferior movies. As long as that happens, the Film Society will remain a hit-or-miss venue, its programming unreliable and its brand name less than sterling among New York’s cinephiles.

“I don’t know whether Kent Jones’s departure is in any way connected with such programming. I do know that his departure, combined with the frequency of such programming, is an ominous trend.”

Postscript: Jones wrote me from Vienna last night to insist that he resigned and wasn’t “whacked.” I corrected my 3.12 story yesterday afternoon, but wrote back the following: “No offense, Kent, but nobody believes you just ‘resigned.’ They’re presuming, as I do, that work conditions under FSLC exec director Mara Manus led to a level of discomfort and dissatisfaction that you didn’t want to live with. Whether you initiated things by saying ‘I’m leaving’ or Manus initiated things by enforcing workplace policies that led to your departure is a minor distinction.”

HE reader Eddie Garcia-Rivera attended the Joaquin Phoenix performance Wednesday night (i.e., Thursday morning around 2 am) at Miami Beach’s LIV nightclub, inside the Fountainebleau hotel. He filmed the entire “performance” and apparent fight that ensued. The action starts around 2:48.

I love the way a big clump of hair is sticking out of the back of Phoenix’s head. The only way you can get hair to do this (if it’s dense and curly, that is) is to sleep on it for two or three hours and then not comb it. The man is a pig, an animal.

I became convinced after watching Joe Swanberg‘s Alexander The Last that star Jess Weixler would be a near-perfect choice to play the Susan George part in Rod Lurie‘s reimagjned remake of Straw Dogs. Weixler puts out waves of soulfulness and emotional connectivity in Swanberg’s film, and I have an idea that she’d deliver something deeper and more layered (in a whole-hearted feminine sense) than what George and director Sam Peckinpah came up with for the 1971 original.

As long as we’re on the subject, are there any ideas as to who else could handle George’s part with a little something extra? And who, for that matter, could step into the Hoffman role? Keep in mind the international marquee factor.

Lurie’s Straw Dogs is taking place in the south, by the way, and not rural England. I for one admire his bravery in plunging ahead with it. He knows that a certain sector is going to trash him for daring to fuck with a Peckinpah classic no matter how his version may turn out. If you’re going to be a director, as John Ford once told Nunnally Johnson, you have to be a bit of an S.O.B. But you also need the courage of your convictions.

God of Carnage? Fierce, hilarious, appalling — a very dark dysfunctional farce. It’s very funny, outrageously so at times. Sharply written and acted with dazzle and finesse by four crackling leads — Jeff Daniels, Marcia Gay Harden, James Gandolfini and Hope Davis. Who play suburban couples meeting to discuss a violent altercation between their respective sons. You may go in knowing what’s to come, but the anger, disdain and self-disgust that gradually push through are snarlier and more manic than you might expect.

And if you have any rot or mildew or serpents festering inside, a play as well done as this is pure pleasure.

God of Carnage lasts about 90 minutes, I think. It may not have started precisely at 8 pm, so maybe it’s more like 85 minutes. No intermission. But what a fierce workout! Everyone is mad and sweating and drained by the end. Hats off to all four. Great hilarity mixed with patches of despair. Perfectly balanced and honed. I hate my life and you too! Blecchhh!

The basic idea is that beasts and bile lie within everyone, ready to pounce and lash out, and it doesn’t take much to prod the shit into the open, especially with a quart of top-grade rum at the ready. It’s been said that Gods is half British-refined and half farcical in the French sense of that term. For me, the ease of the transition from one to the other is what matters, and I was seriously impressed.

Is God of Carnage as precise and ambitious as it could be in making these four characters represent, in a thorough and particular way, the malignancies of greater society? Is it as thoughtful and primal and thematically profound as it ought to be? Maybe not entirely, but it sure hit the bell for me. Farce can’t take too many breathers or shift gears too often. Some London critics, I realize, were slightly mixed about the production that opened there last March, and it’s conceivable that some might quibble about this or that when it opens later this month.

But the French-speaking author Yasmina Reza and her British translator, Christopher Hampton, obviously made decisions in a clear-headed way that they knew would make the play into this rather than that. They had to decide based on the requirements of the form. Farce has to be done with concentration, precision and rigorous discipline, and the God of Carnage gang (including director Matthew Warchus) know exactly what they’re doing. Okay, it may not be Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but it’s a lot funnier. And just as angry.

The conversation in God of Carnage starts out politely, correctly, considerately and then, slightly and almost imperceptibly, relations start to decline. They degrade and degenerate into bitter, adolescent, at times close-to-submental rage. Which leads to alcohol, incredible ferocity and despair and a question at the every end — “What do we know?”

For what it’s worth, the audience knew. Everyone immediately leapt to their feet at the curtain call. No hesitation, clapping and cheering their tails off. I looked around and figured the crowd was maybe one-third tourists, one-third Sopranos fans, and one-third sophisticated theatre mavens.

Here’s a Playbill podcast interview with all four actors speaking.

Oh, and there’s a splendid special effect that comes along at the halfway mark. Won’t say any more than that.

Conor McPherson‘s The Eclipse, a kind of supernatural, death-dodging love story with Ciarin Hinds and Aidan Quinn, appears to be one of the more intriguing Tribeca Film Festival selections. It’ll be shown next month as one of the World Narrative Feature competitors. I was alerted when an HE reader pointed out McPherson’s illustrious track record as a playwright — The Weir, The Good Thief, This Lime Tree Bower, Dublin Carol, etc.

Based on a story by Billy Roche, who co-adapted with McPherson, The Eclipse is about a widower (Hinds), who befriends Lena (Defiance and High Fidelity‘s Iben Hjejle), a writer who specializes in the supernatural, during a literary festival in Wexford. “Events spiral towards the paranormal,” read a synopsis on a Hinds website, “when Michael finds himself confronted by strange visions, as well as having to contend with a flesh-and-blood menace in the form of author Nicholas Holden (Quinn), who is determined to prevent Michael and Lena from becoming too close.”

Funded by RTE, Bord Scannan na hEireann and the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland,The Eclipse was shot in Cork last year.

In order to address financial concerns, a corporate bitch or bastard is hired to run a family-type organization. He/she soon institutes a reign of terror that would give the ghost of Robespierre pause. Employee after loyal employee is isolated, accused and sent to the guillotine. Those that are spared are focused on two things — shuddering and deciding whether or not to buy a pack of Depends.

Mara Manus, executive director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center

We’ve all seen this movie before, and the melodrama that’s been going on at the Film Society of Lincoln Center for the past two or three months pretty much is that movie. But if you were the casting director which actress would you hire to play Mara Manus, the FSLC’s sabre-toothed exec director? Laura Linney? Allison Janey? Catherine Keener?

It’s commonly understood that the numerous firings and resignations that have decimated the FSLC community are due to Manus’s iron hand since she was hired as executive director last September. Yesterday’s news of the departure of the org’s associate program director Kent Jones is the latest in a series of rolling heads that have included publicist Jeanne Berney, arts programming Joanna Ney and something like nine or ten others — a 25% staff reduction.

An FSLC spokesperson says that Jeanne Berney and Kent Jones resigned of their own accord.

The kisses of steel have been officially attributed to the tight economy and a need to streamline and bring down costs. But a former employee told me this morning that “it’s not a money problem [but] a leadership issue” — i.e., Manus and her ruthless, control-freak management style.

Manus was hired due to a notable run as chief of Manhattan’s Public Theater which, according to Indiewire‘s Anthony Kaufman, resulted in “doubling the downtown theater institution’s budget, increasing individual support by 270% and subscriber revenue by 134%.”

And yet Manus “reportedly clashed with artistic director Oskar Eustis and was disliked by some staffers for her aloof corporate style, hierarchical approach, and hiring those who shared her views and firing or alienating those that didn’t. ‘Her office was pretty much off-limits,” said one former Public staffer. ‘There was never any effort to be inclusive. When she started bringing in people, she set up barriers and people felt the pressure of not being connected.'”

“While griping about unappreciative bosses has been rampant among William Morris underlings, one of Endeavor’s founding partners, Tom Strickler, has cultivated internal good will with gifts as elaborate as reconstructive jaw surgery for one employee and an Argentine polo pony for another.” — from a 3.11.09 N.Y. Times story about a possible Endeavor-William Morris Agency merger, reported by Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply.

Only saps believe you can somehow discern or predict the future. Because saps are especially afraid of what the future might bring, living as they do with a kind of suppressed undercurrent of anxiety. These are the same intrepid souls who believe in numerology, the biblical End of Days and the general theology of supermarket reading. It follows that Knowing (Summit, 3.20) is made for them — i.e., folks who are under-educated and eat the wrong foods and have problematic taste in clothing.

And yet — I have to admit this — I want to see Knowing because the effects look fairly decent. Despite the myriad assurances provided by this trailer that it will make me groan.

Warning lights are flashing due to the hand of director Alex Proyas, whom I was wary of after Dark City and whom I will never trust again after sitting through I, Robot.