“You’ll be holding your breath for the first 15 minutes of Quantum of Solace — the action is that gripping,” writes critic Marshall Fine. “And you’ll be out of breath by the end – the film is that compelling.

“Casino Royale hinted at it, but this new James Bond film is the one that truly announces: Here’s the Bond for the 21st century. The Bourne films pointed the way but Quantum of Solace, directed by Marc Forster, will be the template for the adult spy thriller in the new millennium.

“It’s got a plot that engages without being gimmicky, action that thrills and a serious emotional palate that leaves little room for the kind of jokey badinage that Pierce Brosnan and his predecessors had to put up with.”

I’ve had to wait and wait and wait, but the Big Encounter happens tomorrow evening at the AMC Lincoln Square.

Last night Variety‘s Michael Fleming reported that the Weinstein Co. “has acquired worldwide film rights to the Pulitzer Prize and Tony-winning play August: Osage County and will produce a feature adaptation. TWC co-chairman Harvey Weinstein will join Jean Doumanian and Steve Traxler as producers of the pic, with playwright Tracy Letts doing the adaptation.”

Deanna Dunagan (r.) as Violet Weston, the family matriarch; Amy Morton (l.) as her daughter, and Rondi Reed (center) as Violet’s sister.

Except seven and a half months ago I wrote that “producer Jean Doumanian is partnering with the Weinstein Co. to produce a film version of Tracy Letts‘ masterful August: Osage County, which N.Y. Times critic Charles Isherwood called ‘the most exciting new American play Broadway has seen in years’ in his 12.5.07 review.”

So what’s new here? Steve Traxler is part of the deal, and the film will be out sometime in ’11 — three years hence. Are they sure they don’t need four or five? Don’t want to rush things. Haste makes waste.

Cut to the chase already and tell us if Harvey and Jean are signing Meryl Streep to play the chain-smoking mother from hell Violet Weston or if they intend to stay with Deanna Dunagan, who killed in the stage version.

“As always, a Broadway hit is one equation and a satisfying hit movie is another. The stage-to-cinema process is always about rethinking, reshuffling, compressing, diluting and, in one way or another, downgrading to some extent,” I wrote last March. “A need for a broader audience = the need to make a play more accessible to Average Joes = problems from the viewpoint of Broadway purists.

“The big questions are (a) will the movie version hold to the play’s three-hour length (there will certainly be pressure to trim it down at least somewhat, perhaps as much as a third), (b) will they try to movie-ize it (visually open it up, etc.) or stick to the pure theatrical scheme of everything happening in the Weston family’s two-story home, and (c) who will Doumanian-Weinstein get to direct…Mike Nichols?

“Doumanian and Traxler, who are lead producers on the Broadway production with Jeffrey Richards and Jerry Frankel, made a deal with Letts during the summer to work on a script,” Fleming reports. “Doumanian said she hopes to have a Letts-penned screenplay within two or three months.

“Weinstein is an investor in the stage play, which begins an eight-week engagement Nov. 21 at London’s National Theater. A national tour starts in the summer.”

I missed this yesterday. Every latent homophobe out there (and particularly the African Americans and Hispanics who voted for Barack Obama and California’s Prop Hate) needs to listen and reflect. Just a couple of minutes. Won’t mess your day in the slightest.

Yesterday Big Bloggy Picture‘s Patrick Goldstein posted a discussion with Sony chairman Amy Pascal about “new rules” that sometimes come to mind when a particular type of movie has just tanked. Death of Soul Men = no more movies about soul singers. Death of The Invasion = WB chief Jeff Robinov reportedly telling producers that WB is “no longer doing movies with women in the lead,” etc. How phobic is Pascal along these lines?

“I did say [that] I hate movies that begin with a bet,” Pascal replies. “It’s a bad idea, because it usually means that it’s a fake story that revolves around a gimmick. But on the other hand, someone made My Fair Lady and it was great.

“Rules are oversimplifications, which are bad no matter how you look at it. It would be like my saying, ‘I’m so sick of Iraq movies, so I don’t ever want to see another script about Iraq.’ But that’s just my reaction in the moment. Someone will make a phenomenal movie about Iraq and everyone’s attitude will change.”

Wells to Pascal: Someone has made a phenomenal movie about Iraq, or at least a first-rate one set in Iraq — Kathryn Bigelow‘s The Hurt Locker.

“We all probably say things like [this], but it’s in the heat of the moment — everyone says things they don’t really mean. So if there’s a really young executive in a meeting and they hear you say something, even though you almost didn’t mean it the minute it came out of your mouth, they sometimes take it seriously, when they should probably do what you do, which is forget all about it five minutes later.”

In other words, we are all Walt Whitman in a sense. We mean what we say when we say it, and then the page turns and maybe we’re looking at things in a slightly different light. Declarations of conviction, faith and aversion are never final. “Do I contradict myself? Then I contradict myself,” Whitman wrote in “Song of Myself.” “I am vast. I contain multitudes.”

“A potentially exceptional story is told in a flatly unexceptional manner in Defiance,” says Variety‘s Todd McCarthy in an 11.10 review. “True-life yarn of a band of Jewish brothers who led a small but resilient resistance movement against the Nazis in Belorussia during World War II seems like such a natural for the bigscreen that it’s surprising it’s never cropped up before.

“But Edward Zwick‘s version of the grim but inspirational events becomes more conventional as it goes, topped by a climax straight out of countless war pics and Westerns.

“Through roughly the first half, viewer goodwill and interest are piqued by the story’s basic circumstances, the promise that at least some of these characters will find a way to prevail, Craig and Schreiber’s rugged appeal, and the muted beauty of Eduardo Serra‘s blue-, green- and gray-infused location cinematography in the forests of Lithuania.

“But through the remaining hour-plus of the script by Clayton Frohman and Zwick, it all becomes pretty standard-issue stuff, filled with noble and tragic heroism, familiar battle images and last-second rescues.

“None of the suffering, sacrifices, anxieties or tests of heart and soul are rendered with any special dimension or heightened force, nor depicted with anything near the staggering, hallucinatory impact of the two great Russian films to have depicted events in wartime Belorussia, Larisa Shepitko‘s 1977 The Ascent and her husband Elem Klimov‘s 1985 Come and See.”

“Zwick has made the debatable decision to have all the actors deliver their dialogue in English with a roughly Slavic-cum-Russian accent, then speak (subtitled) Russian when the occasion demands it. Given the odd disorientation this provokes, one wonders if the accents were worth the trouble.”

I’m getting a funny aroma from this second-hand, loose-talk, Playlist-posted review of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which came from a conversation between Playlist editor Rodrigo Perez and a friend who’d just come from a screening. The gist is that “while the guy didn’t think it was terrible, [he] did say the film wasn’t the tearjerker we all heard it was supposed to be and was much more of an ’emotional dud.'”

That aside, the friend said that David Fincher‘s film has “the kind of tepidness that the Academy loves.”

The reason I’m skeptical is because of a line at the end of the fourth paragraph. After Perez expresses his own concern that Button might contain “some fanciful Forrest Gump-like elements within the story given that Gump screenwriter Eric Roth also penned Button,” he says that the friend “confirmed that the film contained some icky traces of that unfortunately highly-respected dud.”

Forrest Gump bothered the hell out of me, but it obviously worked on its own treacly and manipulative terms — many people were obviously knocked over by it — and calling it a “highly respected dud” is rash and intemperate. This tells me there’s a slash-and-burn, screw-emotion, hard-hearted mindset at work here.

“Apparently the older crowd [at the screening] was digging it and weepy,” Perez summarizes, “but it sounds like a film [that] younger audiences and younger critics might not get behind and support whole hog.” The friend added, however, that “if it becomes a popular hit a la Gump its chances with the Academy will increase.” Naturally.

Every well-made film that connects always does two things. It tells a compelling story and delivers a basic this-is-how-life-is theme that any moviegoer over the age of 10 can make sense of and recognize as truthful. I’m saying this because as much as I liked Ron Howard ‘s Frost/Nixon after seeing it a couple of weeks ago, I couldn’t quite put my finger on the theme until now. This was due to laziness or a form of temporary blockage on my part. Because it’s as obvious as the ski-nose on Richard Nixon‘s face.

Peter Morgan‘s screenplay, based on his stage play, is about a contest of wills and wits between British TV personality David Frost (Michael Sheen) and resigned U.S. president Richard Nixon (Frank Langella) over the course of a four-part televised interview that was taped in 1977. Some have wondered if under-30s will appreciate the historically dramatic importance of the interview or feel the anti-Nixon rooting interest to any degree. I don’t think you need to have lived through the Nixon years to enjoy the Frost/Nixon tension. I feel that Howard’s disciplined hand allows the story to work on its own terms.

The under-theme, for me, comes at the climax when Nixon admits to grave error in his handling of the Watergate crisis, saying he “let the American people down,” etc. But only after a good amount of dodging, tap-dancing, posturing, smoke-blowing, side-stepping and plain old evasion. Which is how most of us, I think, come to the truth about ourselves. We never admit to it early on, always looking to put off the moment of reckoning. Frost/Nixon is a metaphor for this process, for the path that we all travel on the way to facing facts about who we are and what we’ve done.

“I was down with Frost/Nixon from start to finish,” I wrote on 10.28. “It’s very well done, very full and expert for what it is. It’s more satisfying, more underlined (but in a subtle way) and more clearly wrought than the play, frankly. It’s not Kubrick, Bresson, Kazan, Eisenstein, Welles, the Coen brothers or Lubitsch. It is what it is, and that’s in no way a problem. And it significantly improves upon what it was on the New York stage.

“And Frank Langella’s performance as Nixon is naturally and necessarily more toned down than it was on-stage, and that makes it a fascinating, moving (as in genuinely sad), award-level effort.”

“There’s never a doubt that the losers-at-love of British writer-director Joel Hopkins‘ Last Chance Harvey are on intersecting arcs, that they’ll meet cute and stroll off into a sooty London sunset. But stars Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson (reunited after 2006’s Stranger Than Fiction) are so disarmingly charming that even the most treacly moments work an emotional magic.

“Auds may skew a bit older for the Overture Films release, but the hardest cases will be moved and tell their friends. Some couples just look good together. Thompson and Hoffman look like an exclamation point walking a hedgehog. The physical incompatibility gives them added personality, but it also emphasizes the innate awkwardness that has found their characters alone at middle age.” — from John Anderson‘s 9.11 Variety review.

In the beginning of his New York article called “Obamaism,” Kurt Andersen writes that “for those of us born since World War II, never in our adult lifetimes has any single event made us prouder of our country — and for those of us who live in this city, never have we felt more completely in sync with it.

“We’re all Dorothy, stunned at having just stepped out — tripped out, one might even say — from a half-wrecked black-and-white reality into a strange and glorious new Technicolor world.

“Up till now, our country’s big, official civil-rights milestones had consisted of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Fourteenth Amendment, Brown v. Board of Education, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. But compared to all of those rungs up the ladder, electing Barack Obama was by far more democratic. It was done not by presidential or judicial edict, nor by some hundreds of worthies voting in their legislative chambers, but by means of a secret ballot in a popular national referendum with a historically huge voter turnout.

“Paradoxically, he was elected both because he was black and in spite of being black. A hypothetical 100 percent white Obama certainly wouldn’t have generated the same excitement among his white supporters (let alone the black ones), and probably wouldn’t have won the Democratic nomination. Yet it was precisely because Obama’s blackness came to seem so secondary to his being and his candidacy that he was able to attract a sufficient number of voters to elect him. He’s black! But he also just happens to be black. We need a new phrase for this happy converse of Catch-22.

“Even before he takes office, there is one large, low-hanging fruit that Obama is harvesting already: The rebranding of America in the rest of the world is under way. Intolerant, ignorant, bellicose cowboy-America is suddenly…not. And thanks to overwhelmingly white America, as Tunku Varadarajan wrote on Forbes.com, ‘a black man will be the most powerful person on earth’ and ‘the most powerful black man in the history of mankind.’ Also? His father was actually African. Foreigners are even more astonished than we are.

“But the election happily overturned another set of conventional wisdoms that were not specifically racial: Reason and intelligence made a comeback against the heretofore ascendant forces of the idiocracy. For the moment, America is reality-based once again.”

The first half of Steven Soderbergh‘s Che — formerly known as The Argentine — will be released by IFC theatrically on New Year’s Day, 1.1.09, and the second half — once known as Guerilla — will open on 2.20.09, according to a press release. The full boat four-hour-plus version will open in Manhattan and Los Angeles on 12.12 for one week. Or so I recall reading. There’s no official website that I can find.

In a just-released USA Today/Gallup poll based on data accumulated last weekend, President-elect Barack Obama now enjoys a post-Election Day rating of 68% favorable, and President Bush has a 68% unfavorable — which is actually a slight improvement from just before Election Day, when 70% said they disapproved of the job he’s doing.