Tomorrow is Jeremy Piven day at Actors Equity headquarters at 165 West 46th Street, New York, NY. Hit for financial damages by the producers of Speed-the-Plow for abruptly bailing on their show, Piven will appear before a grievance committee to defend a claim that he was more or less forced to quit due to high levels of mercury in his bloodstream caused by gorging on sushi. I’m going to show up with my camera and try to take a photo. This sounds too good to pass up. I don’t know when the meeting is so I guess I’ll just show up at 9 am and take it from there.

HE reader Joel Meares caught Watchmen at a screening in Sydney last night (which would be Wednesday) and was came away “disappointed,” “confused” and “pretty mixed,” he says. Meares isn’t a geekboy and he isn’t exactly David Thomson either so his reactions are about what he liked and didn’t like — take it or leave it.

“I enjoyed the first half a lot,” he notes. “It’s dark, ambitious, New York noir stuff with lots of rain, violence and a gritty-sounding if sometimes unnecessary voice-over by Rorschach (the masked bloke played by Jackie Earle Haley). I liked the conceit that these people are washed-up superheroes, although I was never clear on whether or not they actually had super-powers. And the way it scuttles back and forth through time intrigued without adding any noteworthy confusion.

“I enjoyed Carla Gugino in her small role as the washed-up Silk Spectre. Malin Akerman is nowhere near as bad as I’d been hearing on the various sites. And Patrick Wilson is in fairly good form as the geeky Nite Owl.

“I liked that this is a comic book flick with a bit of sex and a lot of violence. I liked — to a point — the incorporation of real-life events (JFK assassination, Vietnam War, etc). I liked that Snyder uses songs from the mid ’80s and from just before, although these don’t always work with what’s happening on screen and seem a bit thrown in for the sake of it.

“I’ve never seen 300 so knew very little about Snyder’s style other than that it involves a lot of that slow-down, speed-up action stuff. He uses that technique in a lot in Watchmen‘s fight sequences and I was fairly neutral about it — didn’t find it too distracting, felt it didn’t add very much.

“My biggest problem with the film was that as soon as these guys put their suits back on and decide to save the world in the final portion (save the world from what I’m still not sure about, and the uber-villain’s explanation of his actions is out-of-this-world dumb), the film becomes ridiculous. Maybe you have to be a fan to get all that psychobabble from Billy Crudup‘s naked and very blue Dr. Manhattan.

“From the moment Snyder gives us one of the most laughable sex scenes I’ve ever seen, the movie goes off the rails. When it came to the Antarctica-set showdown in which they all come together to fight the villain and his strange blue pointy-eared tiger thing (where the hell did that come from?), I felt like I was watching some awful panto-opera take on Masters of the Universe.

“Everything that was good early on is unstuck by the time the credits role and I came away disappointed and confused.”

“Here’s a bit of background on myself. I’ve never read a comic book in my life, hadn’t heard of Watchmen until I started reading about the film, but I’ve been known to enjoy a good comic flick, I’m a pretty easy lay as you might say (loved Dark Knight, really liked Spider-man 2, enjoyed Iron Man, etc.). I thought last year’s best film was Revolutionary Road, and my favorite US film of the last few years is probably Zodiac.”

The Slumdog Millionaire tykes Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail and Rubiana Ali Qureshi, whose real-life living conditions in Mumbai were described in suspiciously-timed stories that some regarded as anti-Slumdog smears, have been promised new homes. The abodes will be an upgrade over the small huts the kids have been living in with their families. But it isn’t clear who will actually provide the new digs — local Mumbai politicans or Slumdog Millionaire‘s director Danny Boyle, producer Christian Colson and Fox Searchlight, the film’s distributor.

Times Online reporter Rhys Blakely reported today that the “children’s families will be given proper homes under an arrangement that allows local politicians to allocate a small number of flats on a discretionary basis.” He also quoted Amarjeet Singh Manhas, the chairman of the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority, as saying that the kids “deserve to be rewarded for the film’s success at the Oscars…the chief minister [of the state] has approved this…their families will receive notification in a couple of days.”

Daily Mail reporters Liz Thomas and Barney Henderson have also reported today that Boyle and Colson have told them that the kids and their famililes “will be moved to apartments worth ¬£20,000 each in the coming months.”

“There’s an intra-Republican debate: some people say the Republican party lost its way because it got too moderate, some people say they got too weird or too conservative. [Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal] thinks they got too moderate, and he’s making that case. it’s just a form of nihilism. It’s just not where the country is, it’s not where the future of the country is [and] I think it’s insane. I think it’s a disaster for the party.” — Conservative-minded N.Y. Times columnist David Brooks, speaking last night to Jim Lehrer.

Here’s Cenk Uygur talking last summer about Jindal’s exorcism episode.

Thansk to HE reader “raygo” for coining the headline of this piece.

Last night renowned French Connection cinematographer Owen Roizman trashed William Friedkin‘s bleachy, grain-heavy Blu-ray transfer of his 1971 Oscar-winning film, which many DVD and Blu-ray aficionados have already savagely dismissed. Roizman called the transfer “atrocious,” “emasculated” and “horrifying.” He said that he “wasn’t consulted” by Freidkin and he “certainly wants to wash my hands of having had anything to do with [it].”

(l. ro.) Owen Roizman, frame capture from French Connection Blu-ray, William Friedkin.

Roizman was speaking to Aaron Aradillas on a blog-radio show called “Back By Midnight.” Thanks to Some Came Running‘s Glenn Kenny for the tip-off.

Roizman “had only heard about the new Blu-ray version [of The French Connection] when Aaron was booking his appearance,” Kenny informs. “He went out and bought a Blu-ray player and the disc and did not at all like what he saw.”

I transcribed some of what Roizman said so here’s a fuller version: “Billy [Friedkin] for some reason decided to do this on his own. I wasn’t consulted. I was appalled by it. I don’t know what Billy was thinking. It’s not the film that I shot, and I certainly want to to wash my hands of having had anything to do with this transfer, which I feel is atrocious.”

He later called it an “emasculated” and “horrifying” transfer, and said “it would be a travesty to see The Exorcist [which Roizman also shot] transferred in this fashion.”

Here’s a link to the show. Here’s a poorly recorded mp3 of Roizman’s comments. I’ve also pasted an embed code below if you want to listen to the whole show but beware — Aradillas is an undisciplined interviewer who meanders all over the place and even forgets to ask Roizman about the TFC Blu-ray issue. Roizman finally has to prompt him.

Yesterday afternoon EW.com’s Christine Spines ran a quote from Steven Speilberg‘s spokesperson Marvin Levy that the long-gestating Lincoln movie, despite being recently put into turnaround by Paramount, is “alive and well and continues in active development.”

That would presumably mean in development at Disney, the new home of DreamWorks. And the “later this year” means that Disney has committed to fund and distribute the film…right? Levy wasn’t specific. “Everyone is proceeding with great enthusiasm,” he declared. “The script is still being revised by Tony Kushner and our plans are now to shoot the picture later this year.”

Well and good, but shooting later this year presumably means it’ll be released in ’10, so the “possibly finished and released by Christmas ’09” scenario stated by Kushner on 2.9 at Harvard is obviously out the window.

Secondly, Levy is a traditional spokesman dedicated (naturally) to putting a robust and positive spin on everything his boss is up to in a generically general p.r. way. He’s never going to divulge what’s really going on. Not in a particular way, I mean.

If you were to take him literally about Kushner “still” revising the script, for instance, you might wonder if further changes have been requested by Disney production execs because they want the reported $50 million budget trimmed even further? It’s not worth getting into because all Levy really cares about is conveying positivism.

All good scriptwriters are always revising their scripts and all good directors are always pushing for this to be done, but Kushner has been re-writing and honing the Lincoln script since forever. He said during his 2.9 Harvard discussion that the film will cover the last two months of Lincoln’s life, or roughly February 15th to April 15th, 1865 — the day of his death.

As I wrote earlier this month, “If any attention is to be paid to the Civil War during the last 60 days of Lincoln’s term, possible inclusions would be (a) the Union victory at the Battle of Five Forks on April 1st, which forced Gen. Robert E. Lee to evacuate Petersburg and Richmond, the Confederate capital, (b) a subsequent rebel loss at Sayler’s Creek, and (c) Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865, in the village of Appomattox Court House.

When I spoke to Liam Neeson (who will most likely play Lincoln) in the summer of ’05, he said he understood that the film would span the full arc of Lincoln’s time in the White House, beginning in March 1861.”

“Thanks for the kind words,” director Rod Lurie wrote earlier this evening, “and the kind regret you expressed over what happened to Nothing but the Truth (and, for that matter, What Doesn’t Kill You — the terrific film by Brian Goodman).

“However, it’s a tad misleading to say that the film made just 3K before it was yanked from theaters. That seems to indicate that some sort of disinterest is responsible for those numbers. The film was put into a couple of theaters as part of an Academy qualification procedure. Both films were only scheduled for a one-week run. But about nine days earlier, YFG went into Chapter 11. The films opened in more or less a four-wall situation without any ads, really. Indeed, no posters were even printed for Nothing but the Truth

“It’s very upsetting, of course. My producing partner Marc Frydman and I had worked for a long time on NBTT and even longer on WDKY. Both films received terrific reviews and I think it was reasonable to think that Kate Beckinsale, Vera Farmiga, Mark Ruffalo and Ethan Hawke could be in the awards mix. Kate and Vera, after all, got BFCA noms.

“Honestly, I can say that this all feels like a bit of a drive-by shooting. YFG has been doing the best they can by allowing the films to play in festivals all over the country, but they’re in a tough, tough spot. I respect them for how they are dealing with all this. Remember, they have several other films in the pipeline.”

“That said, we have really gone for it in the Nothing But The Truth DVDs — very honest commentaries, amazingly produced docs, and some fun deleted scenes.”

Watch CBS Videos Online

Speaking to Wired‘s Adam Rogers, Watchmen creator Alan Moore puts the fanboys in their proper place with a six-paragraph quote: “I have to say that I haven’t seen a comic, much less a superhero comic, for a very, very long time now,” he begins. “But it seems to be that things that were meant satirically or critically in Watchmen now seem to be simply accepted as kind of what they appear to be on the surface.

“If you remember back in the ’80s, there was an incredible spate of monumentally lazy headlines in British and American magazine and newspapers. But also something along the lines of ‘Bam! Sock! Pow! Comic Books Aren’t Just for Kids Anymore.’ I used to think those headlines were just irritating, but it’s only recently that I’ve looked back and realized how incredibly inaccurate they were. Comics had not grown up, bam-sock-pow.

“What had happened was that you’d gotten two or three comics that had gotten, perhaps for the first time, serious adult elements in their compositions. This was judged as miraculous as a dog riding a bicycle back in the 1980s. It doesn’t matter whether he’s riding it particularly well; it matters that he’s riding it at all.

“I think that a lot of people, irrespective of whether they’d ever read a book like Watchmen, took it basically as a form of license. I think there were a surprising number of people out there who secretly longed to keep up with the adventures of Green Lantern but who felt they would have been socially ostracized if they had been seen reading a comic book in a public place.

“With the advent of books like Watchmen, I think these people were given license by the term graphic novel. Everybody knew that comics were for children and for intellectually subnormal people, whereas graphic novel sounds like a much more sophisticated proposition.

“That sounds like the kind of thing a 30-year-old — or a 40-year-old, even — could be caught reading on the tube, upon the subway, without embarrassment. When I started work for DC Comics, I figured that my readership was probably somewhere between — they’d previously been 9 to 13 years old, and now they were around 13 to 18.

“The average age of the audience now for comics, and this has been the case since the late 1980s, probably is late thirties to early fifties — which tends to support the idea that these things are not being bought by children. They’re being bought in many cases by hopeless nostalgics or, putting the worst construction on it, perhaps cases of arrested development who are not prepared to let their childhoods go, no matter how trite the adventures of their various heroes and idols.”

We’re now in the third phase of Watchmen reaction buzz — a turning of the karma that is now starting to point upwards with Devin Faraci‘s very lengthy praise review that went up today on CHUD and Drew McWeeny‘s Hitfix rave. Slight counter-boosts, temporary mood changers. But don’t be surprised if the naysayers rise again.

The first phase began eight days ago (on 2.16) with that rancid, embargo-ignoring, anal-ecstasy fanboy piece by Time blogger and Simpsons exec producer Matt Selman.

That prompted Phase 2 — a series of angry counter-reactions in this and other corners, and my posting of three negative (but agenda-free) responses to the film — “Staggering Failure” on 2.17, “That Whooshing Feeling” on 2.19 and “Watchmen Pan #3” on 2.23. (As well as that stirring review by music-industry fringe player Mike Rogogna!)

Now we’ve got Phase 3 underway with Faraci and McWeeny’s hitback raves and this reader comment from longtime reader “Will,” who saw Watchmen in Austin last night:

“Watchmen dives into the serious social commentary that set The Dark Knight apart from previous comic book-based movies, but that’s part of the reason it’s been a classic in the comic book medium for so long. Is it too faithful to the book? I don’t think so. The film does the source material justice in every way possible outside of a frame-by-frame, panel-by-panel reenactment.

“The changes made from the source are all for the better in terms of plausibility except for the pseudo-superpowers the main characters (aside from Dr. Manhattan) have had added. That’s the only part where this comic fan came out going ‘whaah?’ The friend I went with didn’t care, I don’t think, so take that for what it’s worth. They don’t push you to feel as if you have to like any of the main characters (as in the book), which will turn off some general audience types. That is part of the whole point.

“The thing is that the cut we all saw last night won’t please everyone, but for the first time I don’t think that’s a bad thing. You chop more out, the movie doesn’t work. You make the fans happy and do the whole director’s cut, you limit your audience exponentially. The acting was good all around, the effects weren’t over-CGed, and the slo-mo wasn’t as crazy as it was in 300. Snyder did the material justice better than anyone has done Alan Moore’s work. Even non-fans will probably go back and see it in IMAX if able.

“I honestly expected to be let down in a big way, because I love the source book. Defying all my expectations, I had to tell my brain to stop thinking about the book because I liked the movie so much. I’ll have to see it again to really soak it all up. You shouldn’t read the graphic novel right before going to see it, and if you have and you’re insisting on it being JUST like it, you’re an idiot who should go back to directing from their sofa.

“The reason I felt I had to write in was that anything posted at Ain’t It Cool will look too much like the original Time blog rave to most readers, and the three pans HE has printed are too smug for their own good. They read like these three guys are reacting not to the movie, but to the first guy’s review and his type of person.

“I know there are people out there that want an adapted work to play like a radical auteur take on existing material. That works for Batman, but not these characters. They have their multi-issue miniseries and that’s it. No dark Frank Miller run in the 80’s, no rebirthing storyline or ultimate super-awesome reset of existing continuity exists for these characters.

“I’m not a slavish devotee of the comic, but I read it some years ago, respected it, and thought the movie did everything it needed to and then some in translating it. The only thing I’ll directly echo from the original Time blog reviewer is that I didn’t think it was possible to do it well or at all. Take the film for what it is, and don’t let the deterrent personality of some anonymous guy reviewing it change your mind.

“Ask yourself a question: do you like movies or do you like criticizing them to look smart with no repercussions to your credibility? The answer to that question determines whether or not I care what you think about this or any film.”

Final Wells comment: I say again that only non-vested straight-talkers who were never that into comic book geekdom can be trusted on this movie. It may be a great film, or a very good or deeply stirring one, but only the pure of heart and the culturally uncommitted can determine this. Trust no one with any kind of deep-rooted, strongly Catholic investment in geek fanboy culture.

In a righteously angry L.A. Weekly piece about the awarding of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar to the “relentlessly medicore” Departures instead of the much more deserving Waltz With Bashir , critic Scott Foundas has written that “it seems likely that Ari Folman‘s film was simply too innovative for the Academy’s notoriously calcified tastes.

“Certainly, by Academy standards, it was one of the more radical works ever to be nominated in the Foreign Language category — a fragmented memory film in which truth and illusion collide on a tide of uncertain recollection. There are multiple narrators, dreams masquerading as reality (and vice-versa), and so many genres exploded moment by moment that it becomes impossible to squeeze the film into an easily definable box.

“And while Waltz builds to a conclusion that many (including this critic) counted among the most emotionally devastating in movies last year, it is a moment that is earned by the film rather than cheaply calculated, and which raises more questions than it answers. That’s something that many viewers of Folman’s film have found thrilling to behold, but which may well have inspired paroxysms of rage in Academy voters who stand by the belief that a movie should have a clear beginning, middle and end and send people out of the theater feeling better about ‘humanity.'”

I just came from a screening of Departures, and Kris Tapley‘s 2.21 assessment of this film was definitely a bit kind. It’s a “sensitive,” curiously comedic at times, sometimes affecting, often cloying and very “middle class” film about transitions and coming to terms with death (and with your dead dad who abandoned you as a child) and feeling the sadness and showing the respect. There are moments when you don’t feel a strenuous, pull-out-the-stops effort by director Yojiro Takitato to emotionally “get” you, but they are few. A movie that makes you feel the effort and hear the grinding gears as much as this one does is in trouble from the get-go.

It certainly was with me minutes after it began. It’s a nice kindly movie in some respects, one that says the right things about life, identity, love, family and the end of life, but in no way is it an Oscar calibre thing, much less an Oscar winning one. It does some things affectingly, yes, but it’s mainly and primarily a second-tier, tonally erratic, touch-feely Japanese James L. Brooks movie with a gimmick (i.e., the Japanese custom of preparing the dead and paying final respects in a gentle way) that is used over and over and over and over. And I’m sorry but Scott Feinberg was wrong, wrong, wildly WRONG for saying in an HE talkback comment Departures deserved the Best Picture Oscar over Waltz With Bashir and The Class.