How exactly is Roman Polanski‘s The Ghost, a political thriller costarring Pierce Brosnan and Ewan MaGregor, considered to be in limbo now that Polanski is temporarily in a Swiss slammer?

Pierce Brosnan, Ewan MacGregor in Roman Polanski’s The Ghost

We’re in a down market for smallish character- or plot-driven adult films (and especially ones starring Brosnan and MacGregor), but since Saturday’s arrest this film is in great shape…hello? Supermarket moms will want to see this now so they can hiss Polanski’s name when it appears on the credits. And with any luck rural retards will be out protesting it with placards when it comes to their plex…”we don’t want this film shown in our God-fearing Christian community!,” etc. Before Saturday The Ghost was looking like an in-and-outer and maybe even a straight-to-DVD title, but now it’s got a fighting chance to actually make some money.

And getting it ready for release will be a snap, even if Polanski gets serious American jail time, which he won’t.

Several weeks’ worth of extra editing, music scoring and sound mixing may be required before it’s ready to play commercially, but Polanski will have some measure of limited freedom once he arrives on U.S. soil. One way or the other he’ll be able to do the work soon enough, even if he gives orders from a jail cell about which music clip to use and where exactly to cut, etc. 2009 technology will find a way.

Brosnan plays a former British prime minister and McGregor a ghostwriter hired to help complete his memoirs in this adaptation of the novel by Robert Harris. Pic also features Kim Cattrall, Tom Wilkinson, Olivia Williams and James Belushi.

And incidentally…

The people who requested the Swiss to detain Polanski — the U.S. Marshals Southwest Regional Fugitive Task Force (representing the Los Angeles D.A.’s office) plus U.S. State and Justice department officials — are, according to this 9.29 story, so caught up in their bureaucratic rigamarole that “the expected U.S. extradition request” regarding the delivery of Polanski to U.S. soil “has not yet been received by the Swiss.”

This is the slow-as-molasses American legal system. Anyone who’s ever gotten a ticket from a Highway Patrolman and then waited at least 20 minutes as he sits in his car and slowly fills out the ticket with the squawking radio going the whole time knows the truth of this.

Can you imagine being the guy in charge of flying Polanski back to the U.S. and asking a subordinate, “So the Swiss have our formal extradition request…right?” And being told, “Well, they’ll have it before too long.” And you saying, “Whaddaya mean, it’s not ready? You guys have known we’d be arresting him in Zurich for the last two or three weeks…what have you been doing?” And the subordinate saying, “Well, we were just told there’s this extra form that Justice needs, and it requires eight separate signatures and two of them are out sick.”

You have to wait until the 7:00 mark for Arianna Huffington and the Morning Joe gang to talk about the Polanski case. First they run a tape of Zurich Film Festival jury member Debra Winger protesting the arrest, Arianna then compares Polanski to Pablo Picasso (the title of her Picasso biography described him as a “creator and destroyer“) but also wonders “if this is the best use of everyone’s time and energy.”

In response to this a shocked Mika Brzezinski goes “wow” and then suggests with zero proof was Polanski might be (or might have been) some kind of chronic offender with underage girls. (Pat Buchanan later seconds this suspicion,.) And then Mike Barnacle and Willie Geist wonder “why now?” If only they’d bothered to read Michael Wolff‘s 9.28 Newser piece.

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He’s such a happy skeleton. Joyous, really. “I love you…I really do.” And all the smiling suck-ups and fair-weather androids on the rehearsal set are right in step with the sassy “oooh!” vibe. “Michael has a depth to him that people don’t really know,” one is heard saying. In other words, Jackson, who never missed a trick marketing-wise, did a brilliant job of convincing people otherwise for the previous 30 years? Life is

ecstatic…oooh!

It really does say something about the spiritual life of the American Eloi that tickets to this film (which opens on 10.28) are selling like hotcakes. Photographers who are into American grotesques will want to show up on opening night and take shots of the crowds coming out, or going in. I plan to be there, at least.

Everyone hated Arthur Penn‘s The Missouri Breaks when it first came out in May 1976 — it was a critical and commercial wipeout — and nobody I know or read talks about it with any particular affection today, and to my knowledge no big-hearted F.X. Feeney type has come along to try and rescue its reputation. And yet it has seemed to linger in the shared consciousness of serious movie fandom.

I personally think of it as a half-good film. It doesn’t tell anything close to an intriguing story, or even one that adds up. At best it’s about interesting dabs of paint rather than the canvas as a whole. And yet every so often I watch it and for whatever reason, stay with it to the end. Why is that?

Jack Nicholson‘s performance is subdued and affected and close to dull, and Marlon Brando‘s Lee Clayton is solely about acting for a paycheck, boredom on the set and brazen showboating — he’s not really in the film. (“Here‘s an interesting little scene in which their characters first meet.) And I depise that harmonica cue signalling that the climax of the train-robbery sequence is supposed to be funny.

And yet The Missouri Breaks has a decent amount of flavor and aroma, ironically, in part, due to Brando’s half-fascinating, half-infuritating locoweed behavior. And due to those two hanging scenes, that Nicholson-Brando “I just slit your throat” scene, that quick scene when John Ryan meets the farmer’s wife behind the barn after dinner for a quickie, that horse-rustling scene in Canada and so on.

After one horse drowned and several others were injured, including one by an American Humane Association-prohibited tripwire, The Missouri Breaks was placed on the AHA’s “unacceptable” list.

“By now there have been quite enough zombie comedies to constitute a little subgenre of their own. If Zombieland doesn’t grade at the head of its class — the valedictorian still being Shaun of the Dead — this lively splatstick item is nonetheless way above the remedial likes of Zombie Strippers, to name one among many recent lower-budgeters. Benefiting from the very different but very appealing comedy styles of Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg even when the script’s wit runs thin, this should be catnip to jaded genre fans, with decent niche theatrical returns and solid long-term ancillary biz signaled.” — from Dennis Harvey‘s 9.27 Variety review.

At a press conference earlier today, the Zurich Film Festival jury wore red “Free Polanski” buttons and accused Switzerland of “philistine collusion” in arresting Polanski. “We hope today this latest order will be dropped [as] it is based on a three-decade-old case that is all but dead but for minor technicalities,” said jury president Debra Winger. “We stand by and wait for his release and his next masterwork.”

Festival de Cannes president Gilles Jacob, Italian star Monica Bellucci and directors Costa-Gavras, Wong Kar Wai and Bertrand Tavernier are among the signatures on a petition demanding Polanski’s immediate release. Harvey Weinstein also lent his support to the cause after being approached by Fremaux. It’s expected the Weinstein Co. boss will head up a Hollywood lobby fighting the extradition.

Didja hear that, HE tubthumpers? Time to rip into Winger for her delusional views and set her straight. And let the others know what for while you’re at it. Don’t allow twisted Hollywood mores to go unchallenged.

Of the nine up-and-comers featured in Vanity Fair‘s April 2000 Hollywood issue, only one — Penelope Cruz — has really made it in a truly stellar, top-of-the-heap way. Selma Blair has hung on visibility-wise with the Hellboy flicks and Paul Walker has done decent work here and there (like in ’06’s Running Scared). But Wes Bentley, Mena Suvari, Marley Shelton, Chris Klein and Jordana Brewster all seem to be swimming upstream and not really doing it. I had to go to the IMDB for find Sarah Wynter, who’s mostly been a TV actress for the last nine years.

(l. to r.) Penelope Cruz, Wes Bentley, Mena Suvari, Marley Shelton, Chris Klein, Selma Blair, Jordana Brewster and Sarah Wynter.

I can’t imagine why any movie fan would give two hoots about Johnny Depp having said he won’t play Cpt. Jack Sparrow in the fifth and sixth installment of Pirates of the Caribbean. But that’s the big hot exclusive news delivered earlier today by Cinemablend‘s Katey Rich. I mean, who wanted to suffer through parts two or three to begin with? Who in their right mind would want to see part four, which Depp is apparently willing (or thinking about being willing) to star in?

Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Carribbean.

“The news that Disney exec Dick Cook was leaving the company was important to the people who work in the studio itself,” Rich begins, “but the part that got movie fans concerned was Johnny Depp‘s suggestion that Cook’s absence might make him less enthusiastic to come back for a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean.

“Our regular tipster is saying that even if he makes the fourth film, he definitely won’t be back for a fifth or sixth. Given that the Pirates franchise is the only live-action property making any money for the studio, Disney execs could reach deep in their pockets to keep Depp on for #4, but they’re also preparing to replace Captain Jack with a entirely new character if he refuses a fifth and sixth film.

Depp “is well aware the second two movies sucked,” Rich writes. (How could he not be?) “That didn’t stop him from signing on for a fourth film, of course, but based on his comments last week it seems that his faith in Cook was a lot of what was keeping him on board.” Deep had faith in Cook to do what exactly? The last two Pirate movies were bullshit. Profitable, yes, but they degraded his brand.

“What this seems to mean for moviegoers is that there will be a lot of behind-the-scenes negotiations to keep Depp happy for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Strange Tides, but there probably isn’t any amount of money that will convince him to stick around after that. Sounds similar to what Tobey Maguire is planning for Spider-Man 4, and probably the only appropriate thing for a guy as busy as Depp to do. But if they decide to replace Jack Sparrow for the fifth and sixth film, I predict they’d have something resembling a fan mutiny on their hands.”

In a discussion of the Polanski case, Vanity Fair‘s Julian Sancton notes that “the French, in particular, are constantly baffled at the puritanical fervor with which the United States pursue men they admire, from Woody Allen to Bill Clinton. Sexual deviance, they seem to believe, is a natural and acceptable side-effect of greatness.”

Which isn’t putting it fairly. The French may have a comme ci comme ca attitude about world-class artists and powerful politicians having certain perverse or flamboyant tendencies in their private moments, but that’s not the same thing as calling such appetites (particularly those involving minors) acceptable. Because they not.

Rich and powerful go-getter types are different from Average Joes and Janes in two respects. One, they dream bigger, think bigger and are consumed by much stronger desires to get somewhere in life (or, in some cases, to get to the very top). And two, once they’ve risen to the upper stations of whatever profession or social network they’re operating in, they’re basically told in a hundred different ways that the Average Joe, lower- or middle-station rules about what you can or can’t get away with are no longer quite as demanding and unchallengable and black-and-white as before.

Rich and powerful people tend to believe they can get away with more, and so they tend to step over the line more because life tells them they can. It really is that simple.

In a 9.28 piece called “Why Arrest Roman Polanski Now? Revenge,” Newser‘s Michael Wolff says that last weekend’s Zurich airport bust was “about the LA prosecutor’s office’s public relations.” But it really happened, he feels, because the office felt goaded by Marina Zenovich‘s 2008 documentary about Polanski, called Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired.

“Prosecutors ignored Polanski for 30 years because it was a terrible case in which the prosecutor’s office and the sitting judge, in the interest of getting publicity for themselves, had conducted themselves in all variety of dubious ways,” Wolff explains. “But then, last year, a documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, came out detailing all this dubiousness. So the first motivation for going after Polanski now, as it so often is with prosecutors, is revenge — Polanski and this film makes the DA look bad.

“The second is that the documentary reminded everybody that the LA prosecutor must be turning a blind eye to Polanski, wandering freely in Europe — hence the arrest now is the prosecutor covering his ass.

“The third is — and it’s curiously the success of the documentary that made the LA prosecutor’s office realize the brand name significance of the case — press. The headlines now sweeping the world are the prosecutor’s ultimate benefit. Many careers are suddenly advanced.

“It could tell us quite a lot about the real motivations and real interest in Roman Polanski in the LA prosecutor’s office, about the sudden enthusiasm for Polanski’s capture and the convenient timing of it, if we just got the date and time — Polanski’s lawyers can certainly get this information through discovery requests — when they began to Google him, and when they set up the first alert.

“Among all media whores, there is none so greedy and mendacious as a prosecutor.”