If I were Saul Dibb, director of The Duchess (Paramount, 9.19), I would have changed my name the day I decided to become a filmmaker. Saul Dibb could be an architect, a restaurant owner, a tailor, a stockbroker, the owner of a roofing company, a garment-district clothier, a cab driver or even a stage director, but something doesn’t feel quite right about a guy with that name delivering an upscale period piece aimed at the ladies. It seems to somehow diminish that sexy, elegant 18th Century vibe that films of this sort are supposed to deliver.

Keira Knightley

No comment on the film itself, mind — I’m just saying that “Dibb” rhymes with “bib,” “fib” and “squib.” I wouldn’t want to see a Barry Lyndon-era romance directed by Maury Schlotnik, Sidney Schwartz, Lenny Bruce or Mort Sahl either.
A guy in the business (not a journalist) recently caught up with The Duchess and called it “a commercially serviceable but cinematically unremarkable piece of faux lit-chick (chicklit?) fare, with all possible Diana/Charles analogies brought to the fore and spelled out in boldface.
“Keira Knightley acquits herself capably, though it’s not much of a stretch or progression following on from her strong performance in Atonement. Those who enjoyed Jason Schwartzman‘s performance as an Emotionally Bored Royal With One Expression (in Sofia Coppola‘s Marie Antoinette) will be happy to know that Duchess costar Ralph Fiennes has taken note and upped him, though at least has the benefit of adding Sexual Predator to the character arc. (Plus the dude’s in shape. Men’s Health, call his agent.)

“Production values are sumptuous, but the narrative is mind-numbingly predictable. You’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen the film. The supporting perfs are okay. It’s always great to see Charlotte Rampling, but Dominic Cooper has a serious case of the David Beckhams. Looks great, and then he opens his mouth.
“It’ll make money. Women and girls will probably dig it. But anyone who has the film on their Oscar charts needs to arrange a revision, aside, perhaps, for the pretty costumes.”

Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Three Monkeys, which I was awe-struck by in Cannes, is also slated to show in Toronto. For those who weren’t in Cannes or may have missed it for whatever reason, fit this into your Toronto schedule. Highly recommended, top of my list.

So much for my dream that Oliver Stone‘s W, Jim Sheridan‘s Brothers, Gerald McMorrow‘s Franklyn and Beeban Kidron‘s Hippie Hippie Shake might play the 2008 Toronto Film Festival.

George Clooney, Frances McDormand in Burn After Reading

None of ’em made this morning’s final list which means the first two weren’t submitted and that issues of one sort or another are afflicting the second two, since both are expected to open in England later this year. I don’t mind saying I’m damn disappointed.
Especially about the W no-show. The 10.17 opening, just over a month after the close of TIFF, would make the festival an ideal launch site by giving the film its first big blast of attention. But it only wrapped in July so this morning’s absence presumably means it’s not quite in “ship-ship-shape!,” as Tony Curtis‘s Jerry once said in Some Like It Hot.
The seven new world premiere galas include Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Burn After Reading (the script tells you it’s a can’t-miss comedy in a dry slapstick vein), Rod Lurie‘s Nothing But The Truth (which I reviewed last night); Gavin O’Connor‘s Pride and Glory, the top-tier crime drama with Ed Norton and Colin Farrell that WB honcho Alan Horn is reportedly willing to dump for the right price; and Neil Burger‘s The Lucky Ones, a stateside Iraq War vet drama costarring Rachel McAdams, Tim Robbins and Michael Pena that Lionsgate has delayed the release of over concerns about the failure of other Iraq War dramas.

Michael Pena, Rachel McAdams and Tuim Robbins in The Lucky Ones

Rear-guard galas will include Dean Spanley starring Peter O’Toole; Jodie Markell‘s The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, from a rediscovered Tennessee Williams screenplay (title sounds way too precious); Caroline Link’s A Year Ago in Winter, Jerry Zaks’ Who Do You Love with Alessandro Nivola; Anne Fontaine‘s La Fille de Monaco, Jean Francois Richet‘s Public Enemy No. 1 with Vincent Cassel as legendary gangster Jacques Mesrine, and Singh Is Kinng, a romantic comedy (forget it!) from director Anees Bazmee.
The Masters program will show Paul Schrader‘s Adam Resurrected, about a charismatic patient in a mental institution for Holocaust survivors with Jeff Goldblum and Willem Dafoe. (Does anyone expect Schrader to even hit a strong double these days? I wish it weren’t true, but with each succeeding effort the Schrader balloon seems to leak more and more air.) The festival will also preem Werner Schroeter‘s Nuit de chien.
What fresh insights, I’m asking myself, can possibly come from Adria Petty‘s Paris, Not France, an “examination of the Paris Hilton phenomenon” that’s “modeled after 1960s pic Darling“? Does the latter statement mean it was shot in black and white? Or that it reveals the presence in Hilton’s life of an older British lover who resembles Dirk Bogarde?

Bulked-up Vincent Cassel in Jean Francois Richet’s Public Enemy No. 1

Special Presentations includes the work-in-progress omnibus New York, I Love You, composed of 12 shorts directed by Brett Ratner, Allen Hughes, Shekhar Kapur, Joshua Marston, Mira Nair, Fatih Akin, Scarlett Johansson, Ivan Attal, Natalie Portman, Shunji Iawi, Jiang Wen and Andrei Zvyagintsev.
25 titles were added to the Contemporary World cinema lineup, including Nigel Cole‘s$5 a Day with Christopher Walken, John Stockwell‘s Middle of Nowhere with Susan Sarandon and Anton Yelchin; Ole Christian Madsen‘s Flame & Citron (a sort-of Dogma movie, apparently) and Olivier Assayas‘ L’Heure d’ete.

I never read enough of Manny Farber‘s stuff to be able to liberally quote him or, frankly, feel all that close to the guy. If you’re talking majestic old-timers I was always more of an Otis Ferguson or a James Agee man. I always knew — recognized — that Farber was one of the great all-time film critics, but…ahhh, I can’t do this. I can’t say it like I ought to because I’m not feeling it because I’m under-informed.
All I know is that Farber was a wonderfully jazzy writer, and that he’ll always warrant respect. He died sometime Monday in San Diego, but he lived until age 91 so he had the right genes or the right diet or something.
Of all the essay-obits I’ve read this evening since coming home at 11 pm, I liked Village Voice critic Jim Hoberman‘s the most, followed by Glenn Kenny‘s on Some Came Running.

Since In Contention‘s Kris Tapley has broken the news that Rod Lurie‘s Nothing But The Truth is going to the Toronto Film Festival, and since he’s offered some favorable impressions of the lead performances (having seen a version a while back), I may as well admit I’ve also seen a not-quite-finished cut and that I feel it’s Lurie’s best, hands down.

Alan Alda, Kate Beckinsale, Matt Dillon

“Best” because it’s feels smoother and crisper and more confidently dug into the soil than The Contender or Resurrecting The Champ or The Last Castle. It’s a growth-spurt thing, a movie that says, almost with a kind of shrug, “Okay, now I really know what I’m doing.” And because each and every actor nails what they’ve been hired to do like the pros they are, and I don’t just mean the leads — Kate Beckinsale, Vera Farmiga, Alan Alda and Matt Dillon, all of whom hit triples and homers.
I also mean costars Noah Wyle and David Schwimmer and even the homie-girl actresses who play Beckinsale’s cellmates when she goes to the pound for refusing to give up a source. I mean everyone up and down. Everybody delivers, nobody “acts.”
The story and theme of NBTT won’t cause the tectonic plates to shift under your feet, but it’s not coming from that kind of place. It’s simply an efficient political drama — no small feat! — that reshuffles the cards provided by the Valerie Plame-Joseph Wilson episode. Beckinsale isn’t Judith Miller, thank God, but a hungry journalist for a major Washington Post -like daily who learns the identity of a CIA agent (Farmiga) from an unlikely source and, for reasons too complex to get into, reveals this in a front-page story.
And is soon being pressured by a tough special prosecutor (Dillon) to give up her source. And who’s counselled by a smoothie defense attorney (Alda). And who isn’t supported enough by her husband (Schwimmer). And who misses her kid(s) and is eventually carrying the cross — incarcerated, traumatized, no makeup, blue.

The film has a little bit of that Alan Pakula ’70s paranoia going on. Everyone is fairly above-board as to their actions and motives, yes, but the world of Nothing But The Truth is faintly unnerving in that one always senses what may be waiting around the corner, patiently and with a court order.
One could call NBTT a prime example of the kind of smart, middle-budget movie that producers and studio guys are making fewer and fewer of these days. I for one worship the ground films like this walk on. Lurie’s film is as good as the highly satisfying Recount, the HBO political drama with Kevin Spacey, and that’s a serious compliment. I know the marketing people always go “eeeek!” when they hear someone say this, but it’s a badge of pride and distinction.
NBTT has been well shot by Alik Sakharov — unpretentious, nicely shaded. The political tension is leavened by occasional servings of wit, humor, attitude. It feels believable in terms of milieu and even the small performances (even Lurie is good in a brief cameo), and basically has every key aspect nailed down and humming and completing the whole.
Each and every performance works, but the best, for me, is Alda’s clothes-horse attorney. (I particularly loved his work in a delicious restaurant scene with Schwimmer, which I can’t explain without spoiling.) Beckinsale’s work is absolutely her finest ever, such that I’m almost persuaded to forgive her for Pearl Harbor and those two awful vampire films. Farmiga’s anger moments are grounded and pan-fried, and I felt completely accepting of (and half-enjoying, in a perverse way) Dillon’s right-wing prosecutorial hard-ass.

And I was very impressed with a conjugal prison scene between Beckinsale and Schwimmer, whom I don’t want to overlook — he’s solid and true in every at-bat.
I came away from this film satisfied and sated (except for a slight reservation about the ending). I had read the script several months ago and yet the film played better than what I expected. That happens every so often, and sometimes the film isn’t as good as the script. All I know is that about 10 or 15 minutes in, I was saying to myself, “Okay, this is entertaining, this is very good, I’m liking each and every scene, there’s no fat, the actors are at the top of their game,” etc.
Yes, I know and am friendly with Lurie, but I know good craft and good material when I see it, and I’m sure as hell not going to sit on what I know and feel because of a reverse-blowjob concern.

On Thursday evening the remnants of the company once known as New Line Cinema — 48 people, although it could be more like 45 — will be celebrating their annual summer shindig at Sky Bar. The theme of the party, I’ve been told, is “hey, we didn’t get whacked!” Okay, I wasn’t really told that.

Something in the vicinity of 450 L.A. New Line employees were guillotined last April as part of the Warner Bros.-mandated engulfment-and-downsizing, and that’s not counting the New York staffers who were also given their walking papers. It’s an old New Line tradition to have a big summer celebration in August and also a holiday party in December. NL production chief Tobey Emmerich could have decided to cancel the Thursday party as a gesture of mourning for the chopped ex-employees, but you have to grim up and live in the now.

Please, please, please — not Gov. Tim Kaine for Obama’s vice-presidential candidate.

Bill Maher and Larry Charles‘ Religulous, the Lionsgate doc that will play at the Toronto Film Festival roughly two weeks hence but won’t open in theatres until 10.3, is now playing twice daily at Laemmle’s Claremont 5, about 20 minutes east of downtown Los Angeles. Here’s the link to the Yahoo page showing the current Claremont 5 listings, and here‘s the recording.

No reference to the crybaby musical genre — it’s just that the letters “clar” and “nt” were dark when the shot was taken.

The reason for the early booking is the Academy’s Rule 12, which states that to be eligible for a Best Documentary Feature “a documentary feature must complete both a seven-day commercial run in a theater in Los Angeles County, and a seven-day commercial run in a theater in the borough of Manhattan between September 1, 2007 and August 31, 2008.”
That means Religulous is probably playing in some out-of-the-way theatre in the Manhattan area also. No critics will be reviewing off the Claremont booking. Even though, it must be noted, N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis reviewed Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired off of a qualifying booking in a theatre in Yonkers last March.

Eleven or twelve years ago Robert Evans shared an unfortunate biological truth with me, which is that “when you get older your nose gets bigger, your ears get bigger and longer and your teeth get smaller.” This is what came back to me, in any event, when I read Elizabeth Snead‘s photo-comparison article about nose jobs.
Snead puts it thusly: “Ears and noses are made mostly of cartilage that may continue to grow as we age. So when a person’s nose is perceived by others to be getting smaller and more refined over the years, it raises question for the eagle-eyed star watchers.”
Cheers to Owen Wilson for holding back, standing his ground and not going with the flow.

I’m one of the many people in this town who are grieved to hear about manager Joan Hyler‘s traumatic accident last Friday night. She was hit by a car while crossing Pacific Coast Highway. She sustained “severe and multiple injuries” and lost a lot of blood. I called the UCLA hospital where she’s being cared for and was told to go to www.carepages.com — my first internet attempt to check up on someone in a hospital and wish them well. My best wishes to Joan. She’s always been a good egg and a kind soul.

In response to hopes that the recently finished W will show up at the Toronto Film Festival, HE talk-backer Rodrigo called this an unlikely scenario. He’s forgetting that W director Oliver Stone is a very fast editor (he whipped JFK together in near-record time). He also needs to be reminded of the production schedule of Otto Preminger‘s Anatomy of a Murder, which began shooting on 3.23.59, wrapped on 5.15.59 and opened on 7.2.59. It was later nominated for seven Academy Awards.

As one who’s reported on the shortcomings of movie-ad campaign decisions by Lionsgate marketing vp Tim Palen (such as Dane Cook‘s 8.12 complaint about the one-sheet for My Best Friend’s Girl) and voiced my own issues from time to time (like the gay-metrosexual ads for 3:10 to Yuma), I have to take my hat off and say “job well done” regarding those new W ads.

The slogan, in particular, is a bulls-eye: “A Life Misunderestimated.” (And it’s not finessed. About.com’s Daniel Kurtzman has reported that Bush said “they misunderestimated me” in Bentonville, Arkansas, on Nov. 6, 2000.) Crew Creative was hired to turn out the ads, but the final creative call always rests with the top in-house marketing guy.
Ad Age‘s Claude Brodesser-Akner is reporting that the W posters will be billboarded in Denver and Minneapolis during the respective Democratic and Republican conventions. The piece doesn’t make clear if the more swaggering poster image of Josh Brolin‘s Bush (look of calm and confidence, cowboy boots up on desk) will be used in Minneapolis while the more doofusy-looking one will be used in Denver, or if the posters are meant to be regarded side by side.
It would be great, of course, if W is on tomorrow morning’s list of the final Toronto Film Festival titles. Here’s hoping. W is opening on 10.17, or slightly more than a month after the festival concludes.
Sidenote: A page on Crew Creative‘s website takes credit for the much-maligned poster for My Best Friend’s Girl….whoops.