If only Ed Harris‘s Appaloosa was (a) less interested in charming the audience with “amusing” dialogue between Harris and Viggo Mortensen and (b) didn’t envision Renee Zellweger‘s character as some kind of two-timing slut who goes skinny-dipping with the bad guys. These things aside, it’s not half bad.

Righteous Kill (Overture, 9.12) — a.k.a, the new DePac — “may not be dead on arrival after all,” a Manhattan media friend wrote yesterday. “I attended the New York premiere and despite the hassle of being forced into an overflow screening room across the street from the Zeigfeld, the film played fairly well in a non-industry room of 100 or so.

“I honestly don’t know why [Overture hasn’t shown] this until two days before the release date. It’s fun to see these two guys. The script gives them plenty of eye-rolling moments, and it’s obvious DeNiro took Pacino into a private trailer and said ‘If you do the hoo-hah guy in this thing I’m walking off the movie.’
“But that said, it’s a fairly mediocre thriller with two amazing guys. And that’s worth the price of admission simply because they will probably never do it again. The film does have one trick up its sleeve that I thought worked pretty well, But once it’s revealed the thing goes on too long.
I was asked yesterday by a journo friend about DeNiro and Pacino’s diminished leading-man, tough-guy cred. I didn’t have any hot info so I just spewed opinion.
“The bottom line is that they’re both well past their leading man days — DeNiro is 65, Pacino is 68 — and nobody wants to see a movie about a couple of grandpa-aged urban detectives. 13 years ago they were beautiful in Heat — lean and muscular and in their middle-aged prime with great haircuts. Today they’re softer, grayer, saggier…less cool. It’s a hard pill to swallow, but they’re just not top-dog machismo types any more. It’s over.
“But of course, they knew this going in when they signed to make Righteous Kill. Producer Avi Lerner is an older, behind-the-curve rug-merchant producer in the Golan-Globus tradition and was willing to pay them their fees, so they said ‘sure, why not? How can we lose?'”

Zac Efron is astute, capable and alert as the young-lad protagonist in Richard Linklater‘s Me and Orson Welles, a light-hearted period drama set against the creation of Welles’ Ceasar, a modern-dress adaptation of Shakespeare’s classic, at Manhattan’s Mercury Theatre in 1937.

But Christian McKay‘s performance as Welles is the thing to see and hear. He’s got the deep timbre, the stentorian voice, the attitude, the swagger, the size — much better than Vincent D’onofrio‘s Welles in Ed Wood (which someone voiced for him anyway…right?), and a truly thrilling act of bringing a legend back to life. And it’s not the first time he’s played Welles, either.

I decided against running this Funny Or Die video of Gina Gershon inhabiting Sarah Palin, but I thought it over while I was watching Richard Linklater‘s Me and Orson Welles (which I just came out of) and decided okay, it can’t hurt. But it’s really not that good. The video, I mean.

“John McCain has demonstrated in the last two months that he does not have the character to be president of the United States. And that is why it is more important than ever to ensure that Barack Obama is the next president. The alternative is now unthinkable. And McCain — no one else — has proved it.” — the concluding graph of Andrew Sullivan‘s latest (9.11.08) column, called “McCain’s Integrity.”

I went to see Phillipe Claudel‘s I’ve Loved You So Long last night at the Elgin with an even-handed attitude. I was expecting a good film (but not necessarily great because it’s French-made, and you never know with those guys) with a presumably moving, Oscar-calibre Kristin Scott Thomas performance, which I’d been told about from just about everyone.

It turns out that Scott is that and more — she’ll definitely land a Best Actress nomination, and she just might win, considering that she achieves so much in ILYSL with very little “acting” plus the fact that she’s been around for a couple of decades — but the film itself is a landmark-level achievement. It’s remarkably tight, absorbing and affectng every step of the way — a genuinely profound growth journey taken with quiet and gentle steps.
Whatever happens on the Oscar nomination front, this film has immediately shot to the top of my list of the year’s best films.
You wouldn’t think that a quiet little domestic drama about a female ex-con finding her way back into the swing of things, or one about two sisters who haven’t been in contact for 15 years (and who were even close to begin with) slowly coming to know and care for each other would be all that gripping, but is this ever! And the reason it holds you ever step of the way is because you’re hungry for any and all details that may explain why Thomas committed the crime that put her away.
When the answer finally comes at the end of the third act, it makes for a very sad and yet satisfying resolution. The ending actually borders on being comfortable. I didn’t think anything smacking of completeness or contentment could come from this film, given the particulars, and yet Claudel has come up with an ending that really and truly works.
I have to get down to the festival but I’ll try and add stuff to this review when I’m back at it tomorrow morning. I’m on a plane and back to Los Angeles tomorrow afternoon, thank God.

N.Y. Post Lou Lumenick reportedly whacked Roger Ebert with a film-festival program binder during last Saturday morning’s Slumdog Millionaire press screening (which began at 9 am — I was there) and the story doesn’t come out until five days later? What was Rush & Molloy’s source waiting for?

“Soon after the lights went down,” Rush & Molloy have written, “a man in the audience started yelling, ‘Don’t touch me!’ People looked around and shrugged. Ten minutes later, the voice yells again, ‘I said don’t touch me!'”
“Again, people shrugged off the disturbance. But a few minutes later, says our source, ‘the guy stands up in the darkness and thwacks the guy behind him with a big festival binder. He hit him so hard everybody could hear it. Everyone freaked out and turned around.'”
Ebert couldn’t see all that well, apparently. And he couldn’t ask Lumenick to…whatever, slump down or move to the side because he can’t talk due to cancer surgery. And so Lou-Lou stood up and let him have it. I have to be honest — this doesn’t play all that favorably for the N.Y. Post critic and movie blogger, but then stuff happens in the throes of movie-watching passion. You know how it is. You get all cranked up and in no mood for distractions of any kind.
Lou is a mild-mannered gentlemen by my experience. He reportedly didn’t apologize to Ebert, but unless scratches or bruises were incurred it’s probably best to let it go.
This is in fact what Ebert said today when he wrote a piece about the incident.

I saw the final 65% of Steven Soderbergh‘s Che, Part 2 last night at the Elgin. And I was struck once again how well it plays the second time (i.e., just as well the first), and how it’s a flat-out brilliant recreation and neck-deep immersion into a fascinating life and time. Each and every shot and cut is dead-on perfection, thrilling in its verisimiltude, refined just so. And the Elgin’s projection (which seemed to be digital) was eye-pop sharp. The film looked and sounded better last night than it did in Cannes, and that’s saying something.

These troubled and fearful thoughts from the Guardian‘s Jonathan Freedland about how things seem to be turning in the polling are on my mind also, although I was somewhat placated by Gail Collins‘ analysis in yesterday’s N.Y. Times. Make that slightly.
“More troubling was the ABC News-Washington Post survey which found McCain ahead among white women by 53% to 41%,” Freedland notes. “Two weeks ago, Obama had a 15% lead among women. There is only one explanation for that turnaround, and it was not McCain’s tranquillizer of a convention speech: Obama’s lead has been crushed by the Palin bounce.”
I have one thoughtful but foolish hope in my head right now. If the pro-Obama youth vote comes out in huge numbers, the current dire expectations created by likely voter polls (i.e., a reading of mostly-older voters who voted in ’04 or ’00) will be forgotten. The pollsters always say that you can’t call much less measure the under-25s because many if not most of them don’t have land lines. There could be this whole uncharted opinion-base out there that pollsters aren’t even calibrating.
Except the realist in my chest knows deep down that the under-25 Generation of Shame is probably going to stay home in sufficient numbers so that their greatest potential impact may not be felt. It would be glorious, of course, if this turned out not to be true, but those two American Teen costars — Colin Clemens and Jake Tusing, both about 20 — bummed me out to no end when they said they wouldn’t be voting this November and that they couldn’t care less.
The only antidote I can think of is that last night I asked Lovely Still director Nik Fakler, who lives in Omaha, if he and his friends are voting, and he said “of course!” I told him what Clemens and Tusing had said and he smiled, threw his head back and went, “Oh, God!”
Another Encouraging Note: MSNBC’s First Read guys wrote this morning that “in the past 12 hours, we now have new polls for seven battleground states. CNN/Time has Obama up in the blue states of Michigan (49%-45%) and New Hampshire (51%-45%), while McCain is up in the red states of Missouri (50%-45%) and Virginia (50%-46%). And Quinnipiac finds Obama ahead in Ohio (49%-44%) and Pennsylvania (48%-45%), and McCain in front in Florida (50%-43%). Indeed, with the exception of Ohio — and that is BIG exception — these polls suggest that the current map looks a lot like it did in ’04.”

John McCain using the “lipstick on a pig” line, except referring (directly or obliquely) to Hillary Clinton, or perhaps her campaign. (Thanks to the 23/6 guys for this.)