Writing from Berlin , Variety‘s often contrarian, occasional sour-puss critic Derek Elley has taken a leak on Stephen Frears‘ Cherie. So you can either dial down the buzz a notch or two, or at least accept that there will be an argument of sorts when it opens stateside, as opposed to universal acclaim.

The late-night diner scene in Michael Mann‘s Thief — the best 9 minutes and 55 seconds that James Caan ever delivered, bar none. I found this clip after reading a 2.9.09 essay about this landmark 1981 film by KirbyDots’ Tristan Eldritch. Read it, watch the clip, and then start holding your breath while waiting for a Blu-ray version to appear. The last Thief DVD, released more than ten years ago, was okay, nothing more.

“Thief concerns an accomplished safe-cracker and ex-convict named Frank,” Eldritch writes. “Working independently with a small crew of trusted friends, Frank is a highly successful jewel thief who operates both a bar and a used-car lot as fronts. In terms of character, Mann develops Frank as a brilliant case study in how people are conditioned and shackled by past experience. Frank has already been traumatized by his childhood, in state-run orphanages, but it is his years in prison which ultimately define his personality.

“While incarcerated, he developed as a survival technique the ability to attain at will a state of almost Zen-like self-negation; a condition of complete emotional dislocation which divests his life and personality of all meaning, but nevertheless renders him fearless and psychotic enough to survive in a harsh and violent environment.

“This is, in many respects, a more extreme version of the austere survival discipline Neil McCauley has adopted in Heat: ‘Do not become attached to anything that you can’t drop in thirty seconds flat, when you see the heat coming around the corner.’

“The other chief pivot of Frank’s character, also developed in prison, is the postcard sized photo collage he has made as a symbolical representation of his dream of a better life. Despite his obvious affinities with the world of criminality, and his obsessive dedication to his craft as a thief, Frank longs for a life of domestic tranquillity and security, and his collage depicts all the trappings of this ideal: wife, children, and leafy suburban house and garden.

“Frank’s collage encapsulates what is both sympathetic and unnerving about his character, in that it illustrates the sincerity of his desire for a better life, coupled with an almost sociopathic belief that an idea can be pursued in a single-minded fashion, with no recourse to the complexities and contingencies of real life. A fatal aspect of Frank’s individualism is that he sees the world unfailingly as an extension of his own will, and thus when he sets about attaining his domestic ideal, he does so with almost the same degree of mechanical simplicity with which he has assembled the collage.

“It is worth noting that as much as Mann’s films deal with characters that identify to a compulsive degree with their vocation or career, the characteristic malaise of a Mann protagonist is actually the longing to escape that vocation.

“Frank has been dating a down-to-earth waitress named Jessie (Tuesday Weld), and plans to marry her and have children. He has promised that his criminal career will shortly come to an end, believing himself, in the archetypal style of so many sympathetic criminals in noir thrillers, to be a couple of big scores away from retirement. In his haste to actualise this retirement dream, he reluctantly starts working for a gangster called Leo. Thereby the chief momentum of the plot kicks in, predicated on Frank simultaneously setting up a big score for Leo, and organising his future life with Jessie.

“The problem, however, is that Frank’s life, both domestically and professionally, becomes increasingly and inextricably bound up with Leo. When Frank and Jessie are unable to adopt a child, Leo intervenes and provides a mother who is prepared to sell them her child. Meanwhile, Frank discovers that working for Leo has brought him to the attention of the police, who demand a cut of the take from the robbery.

“In some respects, Thief could be read as an extreme parable about the struggle between individualism and society. It’s Frank’s desire to lead an ordinary, family-based life which leads to his Mephistophelian pact with Leo, and the beginning of the complete erosion of his status as an independent, self-governing operator.

“The deal with Leo is a kind of extreme version of a social contract; Frank gets a home and a family, but with them comes a boss, and a fatal entanglement within a corrupt system of bribes and mutual favors; the system, according to both criminals and cops, of ‘how things are done.’ Leo changes from being a kindly and paternal figure to one of pure malevolence, asserting aggressively that he ‘owns’ Frank. Frank, in turn, realizing finally that he cannot achieve his dream on his own terms, falls back on the mental habits he acquired in prison. He dispassionately disassembles his long cherished dream, piece by piece, in an extraordinary eruption of sustained, cathartic violence. He cuts Jessie and their child completely from his life, sets fire to his businesses, and kills Leo.

“The question remains, however, after Frank has vanished into the dark horizon of the film’s denouncement, to what extent Mann intends Frank’s complete lack of compromise to represent a heroic apotheosis, or the self-defeating actions of a character that is psychologically damaged by his past.”

In my head, the movie delivers both themes simultaneously. The superficial, easy-to-roll-with interpretation is that Caan’s Frank is one of the ultimate hardcase movie badasses of all time. The deeper, ground-level read is that he’s an impossible purist whose bruised psychology has made him incapable of working with ‘the way things are done’ and therefore a tragic figure from the get-go. This fatalistic, fuck-all element is one reason why women have never liked this film (Pauline Kael raked it over the coals) and why it’s one of the all-time great guy films. You either get the take-it-or-leave-it duality or you don’t.

According to a 3.26 review of the London production of Tasmina Reza‘s God of Carnage, which starts previewing here on 2.28, it “savagely rips to shreds the pretensions of the liberal middle class.” I’ve read about the London run, walked by this 45th Street marquee last night, and am figuring that any play with Jeff Daniels, Marcia Gay Harden, James Gandolfini and Hope Davis must have exceptional chops and content.

On top of which a straight play that the tour-bus crowd won’t be flocking to (at least not initially) is right up my alley.

The setting, says the Herald Tribune/AP review, is “the comfortable home of a 40ish couple (Davis and Daniels, I’m guessing), and their uncomfortable guests are another couple (presumably Gandolfini, Harden), whose 11-year-old son has bashed their host’s son with a stick, knocking out two teeth.

“The couples hope to resolve the situation amicably; they are deluded. Before long, their mild discomfort and unease have exploded in a torrent of anger, fear, jealousy and rage. There is drinking, fighting, vomiting and the destruction of tulips,” all of basically feeds into “a living-room Lord of the Flies.

“Reza’s plays have a serious thesis: liberal ‘civilization’ is wafer thin and we are all savages underneath. She insists her works are tragedies, not comedies.

“Whether this is profundity or philosophy-lite is debatable. It is, perhaps, typically British that in Christopher Hampton‘s punchy, fluent translation, the fury is played for laughs. Comedy or tragedy, God of Carnage is an expert piece of stagecraft, and savagely funny.”

“There is more integrity in comics,” Watchmen creator Alan Moore tells Totalfilm‘s Sam Ashurst in an interview published nine days ago. “It sounds simplistic, but there’s a formula that you can apply to almost any work of modern culture. The more money that’s involved in a project the less imagination there will be in the project, and vice versa. If you’ve got zero budget, you’re John Waters. You’re Jean Cocteau, you’re going to make a brilliant film.”

“100 million dollars — that’s what they spent on the Watchmen film which nearly didn’t come out because of the lawsuit. And that’s what they spent on The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen which shouldn’t have come out but did anyway.

“Do we need any more shitty films in this world? We have quite enough already. Whereas the 100 million dollars could sort out the civil unrest in Haiti. And the books are always superior, anyway.”

Has to be the funniest satirical piece I’ve seen this week. (Not the flat-out funniest piece — that would be One-Armed Piccolo Player.) Maybe last week also.

Cinetic is asking two bills for an obscure (and pretty much unseen) 1979 short film called Love in the Hamptons on Amazon’s Video on Demand. The hook is that it includes Mickey Rourke‘s first screen performance, when he was 26 or 27. The 25-minute film is said to be a romantic tale in a roundabout way. Here’s a free quickie preview.

The Envelope‘s Pete Hammond is saying that “history would appear to be on Sean Penn‘s side” in the Best Actor race “since Milk has eight nominations — including best picture — indicating more overall support in the academy than for The Wrestler.

On top of which “Penn is playing a real-life figure and Rourke is not, and recent academy voting trends point to that factor as being very big.” Oh, come on! And yet “trying out an Oscar acceptance speech at any of the precursor award ceremonies can sometimes be a big plus, as in Rourke’s case at the BAFTAs, which has served as a reminder of his own remarkable comeback story. Voters are suckers for that.”

Coming Soon‘s Ed Douglas reports that during a Hurt Locker presentation at last weekend’s New York ComicCon, someone from the audience yelled out to star Jeremy Renner when the movie was coming out, and he yelled back “late August!”

If this is true (and I do say “if”), Summit has decided to release the only Iraq War film that really works in an audience-popcorn sense — it’s Aliens — in a month that has two other big-time, hot-ticket war films — Paramount and Stephen Sommers‘ G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (8.7.09) and Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglorious Basterds (8.21.09). And If Renner’s late August projection is accurate, he would be speaking of Friday, 8.28, which would make The Hurt Locker third in line that month and facing an audience that will be almost certainly be feeling well-fed if not sated as far as bullets, tanks and helmets are concerned.

Could Summit really be contemplating opening The Hurt Locker this way? I can’t believe any smallish distributor would willingly put its own war film in competition with two other high-profile, sure-to-be-aggressively-marketed war films within a three-week period. Am I missing something? Is jumping into a genre congestion situation a strategy that has worked before, or which makes any sense to anyone?

Summit must at least be considering a Friday, 8.14 opening, which will put them second in line (right after G.I. Joe) but will also probably ensure a sharp fall-off in business when Tarantino’s film comes along a week later. Opening directly against the Tarantino would be death, of course, but if I were Summit I’d want to be far, far away from it.

I wouldn’t dream of coming out this August. All along The Hurt Locker has been a movie that has screamed (a) spring, (b) counter-programming in an especially empty or puerile mid-summer period, or (c) between Labor Day and late November. Summit has been so flaky and indecisive and under-energized about this film all along, and now this. It would be well and good if Renner was passing along bad info. Let’s hope so.

Note: Apologies for the disappearance of this and other stories earlier today.

Here, courtesy of a grab posted this morning by New York/”Vulture”, is the official logo for Quentin Tarantino’s absurdist-mannerist-ironic hip cheeseball war dramedy, debuting in Cannes in May and opening in the U.S. on 8.21.

From my Basterds script review that ran on 7.11.08: “It is absolutely the most inauthetic, bullshit-spewing World War II movie that anyone’s ever written. And I love it, love it, love it for that. Every other line is a howl or a chortle. It almost could have been written by some 15 year-old suburban kid who used to play pretend WWII games with his friends when they were 10 or 11. Four or five times I literally laughed out loud, and that’s rare for me. And every scene is pure popcorn, pure shit-kickin’ Quentin, pure movie poontang.”

Note: Apologies for the disappearance of this and other stories earlier today.

Note: Apologies for the disappearance of this and other stories earlier today.

Yesterday morning an absolutely blistering piece by Ron Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler, appeared on Slate that ripped into Stephen Daldry‘s The Reader. He called it “the Worst Holocaust Film Ever Made” and which implored Academy members not to vote it Best Picture. “Somebody has to say [it’s the worst],” Rosenbaum writes. “I haven’t seen others do so in print. And if I’m not the perfect person to do so, I do have some expertise.”

“Somebody has to say [it’s the worst ever made]. I haven’t seen others do so in print. And if I’m not the perfect person to do so, I do have some expertise,” he writes.

“And so I will: This is a film whose essential metaphorical thrust is to exculpate Nazi-era Germans from knowing complicity in the Final Solution. The fact that it was recently nominated for a best picture Oscar offers stunning proof that Hollywood seems to believe that if it’s a ‘Holocaust film,” it must be worthy of approbation, end of story. And so a film that asks us to empathize with an unrepentant mass murderer and intimates that ‘ordinary Germans’ were ignorant of the extermination until after the war, now stands a good chance of getting a golden statuette.

“And so the film never really questions the presumption that nobody could know and thus register moral witness against mass murder while it was going on. Who could have imagined it? That’s the metaphoric thrust of the Kate Winslet character’s ‘illiteracy’: She’s a stand-in for the German people and their supposed inability to ‘read’ the signs that mass murder was being done in their name, by their fellow citizens. To which one can only say: What a crock!”

Note: Apologies for the disappearance of this and other stories earlier today.