Update: A friend talked to someone attached to the upcoming, yet-to-be-shot Woody Allen film with Josh Brolin, Nicole Kidman, Anthony Hopkins, Freida Pinto, Naomi Watts and Antonio Banderas. And the “someone” says “it’s a serious comedy. Like Husbands and Wives (if only) and Manhattan.”

It was also revealed in that 3.23 Digital Bits chat with Warner Home Video execs that Exorcist director William Friedkin and cinematographer Owen Roizman are working together on the Exorcist Bluray disc, which presumably means Friedkin won’t mess up like he did with that ghastly French Connection Bluray re-do (i.e., bleachy colors, grainstorms, bleeding reds).

I had lunch two days ago with a friend. At one point he mentioned the two most despicable human beings on the planet right now — Bernie Madoff for obvious reasons, and that 73 year-old Austrian guy, Josef Fritzl, who imprisoned his daughter for 24 years for purposes of sexual enslavement, which resulted in seven kids. I nodded but knew there was someone else. It hit me this morning — Octomom. She’s actually the worst of the three. Madoff and Fritzl were merely diseased monsters who satisfied their lusts, but Nadya Suleman represents malignant selfishness (born of celebrity-worshipping delusion) among this country’s lower classes.

Yesterday I explained my objections are to kids and kid movies, particularly ones that celebrate childhood as something sacred and wondrous where wild things run free. The best line of the piece: “The wake-up call of the Great Recession means that the age of the ‘infantilization of movies’ — a term coined by Pauline Kael, as I recall, in an attempt to describe the influence that Spielberg and Lucas began to exert in the mid ’70s — is coming to a blessed and merciful end.”

I should acknowledge that HE reader “Cde.” pointed out the following: “I don’t want to spoil the ending, but I’ll just say that [Where The Wild Things Are director] Spike Jonze seems to have a similar view to your own, which is exactly the reason that the studio freaked out and got into the huge battle with him that lasted eighteen months. They wanted reassuring, obvious bullshit that celebrates childhood and he made a film about the necessity of facing reality.

“A better way of putting all of that would be to say that Jonze wanted to make a film that was true to Maurice Sendak‘s feelings that, while children certainly have compassion, they are often unconsciously cruel or insensitive because of their lack of understanding of the world and those around them.”

It’s been pointed out in a 3.23.09 Digital Bits chat between readers and Warner Home Video executives, but I’ll repeat it anyway: Heat is “currently being remastered for Bluray” under the supervision of director Michael Mann, and that WHV hopes “to have it out shortly.”

Putting aside my aversion to any and all depictions of fecal matter in any form of art (including movies), Steve McQueen‘s Hunger has to be one of the most impressively composed endless-penal-suffering poems ever captured on film. To crib from my Toronto Film Festival response, is “top-notch — a frank and unsparing chronicle of political torture of IRA combatants by the British, and particularly the plight of Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), who died from a hunger strike in 1981 at age 27.”

It’s been playing at Manhattan’s IFC Center for almost a week now. If you can get past the repulsion (or even if you can;t), you’ll find it unforgettable.

I wanted to tap something out about Greg Mottola‘s Adventureland (Miramax, April 3), but I have to be at a 6 pm screening of Paris 36. I rather liked Mottola’s film for many reasons, but the fact that it’s a settled, unforced and proportionately buyable ’80s relationship drama is definitely one. I love teen flicks that are psychologically layered, unextreme, unbawdy and raggedy. And Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart have all the right stuff. They do nicely by themselves and the film. Anyone who trashes this movie deals with me. I’ll write more about this later.

B’way and 50th, 3.25.09, 4:50 pm.

The 2009 Oscars will happen two weeks later than last year — on Sunday, March 7, 2010 rather than Sunday, February 21, 2010. So that’s two more weeks of Oscar advertising. This is a one-time delay to avoid coinciding with the Winter Olympics, which will go from 2.12 through 2.18. So why are they staging the Oscars two and a half weeks later? Why not just a week later, or Sunday, February 28? The ’08 Oscar show aired on Sunday, February 22.

For what it’s worth I passed along talk on March 1st that Sean Penn had been talking to Bobby and Peter Farrelly for their Three Stooges pic. Because earlier this afternoon (i.e., while I was watching Adventureland in the Broadway screening room) Variety‘s Michael Fleming announced that Penn’s definitely on board in that capacity.

Jim Carrey is going to play Curly, and reportedly plans to gain 40 pounds — good God! — and most likely get a Curly tennis ball haircut. (Where is is written that overweight is funny in and of itself? Because all it puts out in my eyes is grotesque.) And MGM is reportedly “zeroing in” on Benicio del Toro — a.k.a., Che Guevara — to play Moe

I accept the proposition that the Farrelly’s don’t have their edge any more and the torch has been passed to the Judd Apatow gang, but this is a great cast. They’ve all played retarded obsessives before — Carrey all his life, Penn in I Am Sam (which makes me cringe every time I hear because it should have been called Sam I Am), and Del Toro in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Let’s all take a moment of silence to remember the Stooges who were talked up at one time and might have been — Russell Crowe as Moe, Johnny Depp as whomever, Mel Gibson as Curly, Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Curly, Robert Downey, Jr. as Larry, etc.

My most wanted buys over the next two months are Criterion’s Bluray of Henri-Georges Clouzot‘s The Wages of Fear (and they’d better not Third Man me this time!), due 4.21; Criterion’s DVD of Stephen Frears‘ The Hit, due on 4.28; and Paramount Home Video Three Days of the Condor Bluray, due 5.19.

The Wages of Fear, The Hit, Three Days of the Condor.

That’s on top of Criterion’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle DVD and Redemption Films’ Girl on a Motorcycle DVD, which are also out on 5.19.

In a 2.17.09 interview with High-Def Digest’s David Krauss, Warner Home Video’s George Feltenstein said that a “murderer’s row” of WHV classics — Gone With the Wind, North by Northwest, The Wizard of Oz — will be out on Bluray later this year. Since that article the GWTW and Wizard of Oz Blurays have been announced (but without a specific date) and the North by Northwest Bluray hasn’t been announced. Is it being bumped into ’10?

The first official response regarding the outrage about alternate subtitles on the Let The Right One In DVD and Bluray, which Icons of Fright wrote about two days ago and which I reported yesterday morning, came from a senior Magnolia guy. “Apparently we were supplied with two different translations by the producers,” he explained, “and for some reason the DVD division used the alternate subtitles for the DVD.

Yeah, but what reason? I never got a clearly worded reply on this.

The Magnolia guy emphasized, however, that “there was no conscious decision to ‘dumb the film down’, which is absurd because the theatrical titles were perfectly understandable and accessible.”

And yet a piece of reporting that was posted yesterday on The Digital Bits revealed that the person who changed the subtitles works for Magnet, the Magnolia distribution arm for oddball films. One presumes that the decision was a conscious (as opposed to unconscious or subconscious) one on someone’s part. As the general consensus is that the alternate subtitles represent a kind of dumbing down of the film’s dialogue, it is therefore fair to say that the subtitles were consciously dumbed down.

The bottom line is that some Magnet person felt that subtitles that were simpler, less wordy, and more American-ized sounding would play better with the DVD market, which is thought to be a little more downscale that the folks who pay to see films of this type in art theatres,.

A Magnet spoksperson said the following to the Digital Bits: “We’ve been made aware that there are several fans that don’t like the version of the subtitles on the DVD/BR. We had an alternate translation that we went with. Obviously a lot of fans thought we should have stuck with the original theatrical version. We are listening to the fans feedback, and going forward we will be manufacturing the discs with the subtitles from the theatrical version.”

Digital Bits asked Magnet how people will be able to identify the new discs, when they’ll be available in stores and if there will be an exchange program for those who have the existing version.

“There are no exchanges,” Magnet replied. “We are going to make an alternate version available however. For those that wish to purchase a version with the theatrical subtitles, it will be called out in the tech specs box at the back/bottom of the package where it will list SUBTITLES: ENGLISH (Theatrical), SPANISH.”

All the fans want is for Magnolia to put this person on a downtown Manhattan street at a designated time and location any time over the next couple of weekends. This person will be the fox. The hounds — i.e., the fans who were so outraged by this decision and will now have to purchase an extra DVD or Bluray of LTROI when the corrected version appears — will agree to give the fox a two-block lead. The fox agrees not to take a subway or a cab. He/she will have to stay on foot during the entire chase. The hounds agree not to physically harm the fox when he/she is caught, although the throwing of fruit and vegetables will be allowed.