This time with a bit of narration. Narration? That’s like a Harvey thing.

Of the 12 sci-fi classics reportedly being prepared for remaking, the one I’m most interested in seeing — Westworld — is apparently the least likely to happen.

L.A. Times guy Geoff Bouncher wrote yesterday that original director-writer Michael Crichton “had worked recently on a script for a remake (and, at one point, Quentin Tarantino was approached to direct) but the author’s death in November may mark the end of the reboot effort.” Why? We all fall sooner or later, but art (or hugely enjoyable cheap-thrills entertainment) is eternal.

My second wanna-see is Darren Aronofsky‘s Robocop re-do. Breck Eisner’s The Creature From The Black Lagoon might work if it’s cheesy enough. (That means a guy in a rubber creature suit — no CG enhancements!) The new When World Collide will be ruined, I predict, by the hand of the demonic Stephen Sommers , who’s set to direct. Guillermo del Toro ‘s Frankenstein may work, but how many times can we sit for this Mary Shelley story? The rest hold no interest.

Shame enough that MCN’s Gurus of Gold haven’t supported Steven Soderbergh‘s Che as one of their Best Picture favorites, but it is absolutely infamous that not one of them voted for it, even as a ninth or tenth-place choice. History will not judge them charitably, much less kindly.

The reportedly awful Defiance gets a #7 ranking from Sean Smith and #9 rankings from Kris Tapley and Anne Thompson, and Che, which is so much more than that Ed Zwick film that comparisons are a waste of breath and brain cells, is blanked by these three? This is unconscionable. I know what I know.

N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick, incidentally, has given a #9 ranking to Valkyrie. A faith vote based on admiration for director Brian Singer, or has he seen it?

Brad Pitt‘s Benjamin Button performance is passivity incarnate. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. He simply chooses (or was told) to become the watcher — a nice fellow who delights in absorption of all things, a sponge man. But his best performance of the year, hands down, was in Burn After Reading. He wasn’t Hamlet in that Coen Bros. film, but Pitt’s every line and gesture was a kick. His gym instructor was stupidly, radiantly alive, and brimming with presence.

Gus Van Sant “also picked the right time to tell this story. He picked the last eight years of Harvey Milk’s life.” — At The Movies‘ Ben Lyons speaking about Milk. Quote supplied EFilmCritic’s Eric Childress. “As opposed to what?,” Childress asks. “His grade school years?”

A commanding majority of Rotten Tomatoes critics have today reminded themselves that Baz Luhrman, the director of Australia, is more or less certifiable (in a creative, go-for-broke sense of the term) as well as recognized the fact that Australia itself is a work of overwhelming psychedelic cinematic kitsch.

Many of them clearly emerged from their Australia screenings “drained and weakened,” as Salon‘s Stephanie Zacharek puts it, “as if suffering from a gradual poisoning at the hands of a mad scientist.” Or, as I put it on 11.20, as if “injected with Baz serum.”

It is marked, as the Chicago Tribune‘s Michael Phillips puts it, by “constant visual redirection, strenuous comic relief, a synthetically preordained, romance, on the verge of morphing into a singing-cowboy musical. With Zeros.”

N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis calls it “a pastiche of genres and references wrapped up — though, more often than not, whipped up — into one demented and generally diverting horse-galloping, cattle-stampeding, camera-swooping, music-swelling, mood-altering widescreen package…a testament to movie love at its most devout, cinematic spectacle at its most extreme, and kitsch as an act of aesthetic communion.”

Marshall Fine calls it “sprawling, silly, overlong and bizarrely bogus-looking. All of that scenery — and Luhrmann is dicking around on sound stages with green screens. Plot and character are both drawn in the broadest strokes; a subtle moment would die of loneliness.”

New York‘s David Edelstein says it’s “blessed with dialogue that defies parody. In one scene, the transplanted Englishwoman (Nicole Kidman) gazes moist-eyed on the rough-and-ready cattleman (Hugh Jackman) as he caresses an edgy stallion, and you know her line will be a clever variation on ‘You really have a gift with horses.’ Instead, she says, ‘You really have a gift with horses.’ It’s like that all the way through.”

I especially love this Edelstein riff on Kidman’s facial work: “I’ve always admired her gumption in working so hard to overcome a certain temperamental tightness — but that tightness has now spread to her skin. In one scene, she haltingly sings ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ to an orphaned half-caste; but watching that big immovable forehead, I thought of another bit from The Wizard of Oz: ‘Oiiil caaan.’

With a five-day weekend about to start, Four Christmases is tracking at 82, 40 and 15 — not blockbuster numbers but the likely Thanksgiving winner. Baz Luhrman‘s Australia is tracking moderately well — 68, 33 and 12 — with the two strongest quadrants being older women and older men. Transporter 3 is 69, 42 and 15 — young males, better-than-decent business, neck and neck with Four Christmases.

Sean Penn will attend next Tuesday’s Gotham Awards, which will happen at Cipriani Wall Street. Penn will present a special award to Milk director Gus Van Sant. My first time at this event, looking forward, etc.

Okay, I first saw this on Kris Tapley‘s In Contention. The same art is on the cover of Bernhard Schlink‘s “Author’s Notes” pamphlet handed out at yesterday’s Reader screening.

I’m such a fool for Martin Ritt‘s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold that I’m thinking of buying the just-out Criterion DVD of same, even though the 2004 Paramount Home Video DVD has always looked fine to me. I’m mulling the buy on the half-chance that the Criterion may look slightly richer and more detailed. Neither DVD Beaver’s Gary Tooze nor DVD Talk’s Jamie S. Rich offer comparisons between the two.