I wouldn’t want to take away from HE’s regular reader response traffic, but tech guy Brian Walker has installed a new Hollywood Elsewhere chat room. I’m not sure how much attention I’ll personally be paying to it, but it seems like a mildly cool thing to have going. The link is now sitting on the horizontal navigation bar.

Last Friday’s Script Girl report that QT’s Inglorious Bastards script has officially been bought by Miramax is wrong, a Miramax spokesperson tells me. He’s heard the Weinsten Co. is producing/distributing. Update: News of a Weinstein Co./Showtime deal.

In the 7.21 New Yorker, there are two familiar but distinctively shaped impressions of The Dark Knight from critic David Denby — awed praise for the performance of Heath Ledger, and another lament (the fourth so far from a cultivated dead-tree critic) about feeling throttled and numbed-down into a state that of confusion and lethargy. I thnk it’s fair to say at this juncture that Dark Knight contrarians are now officially a mini-movement — Denby, Edelstein, Ansen and Thompson.

“The great Ledger…shambles and slides into a room, bending his knees and twisting his neck and suddenly surging into someone’s face like a deep-sea creature coming up for air. Ledger has a fright wig of ragged hair; thick, running gobs of white makeup; scarlet lips; and dark-shadowed eyes. He’s part freaky clown, part Alice Cooper the morning after, and all actor. He’s mesmerizing in every scene. His voice is not sludgy and slow, as it was in Brokeback Mountain. It’s a little higher and faster, but with odd, devastating pauses and saturnine shades of mockery.
“At times, I was reminded of Marlon Brando at his most feline and insinuating. When Ledger wields a knife, he is thoroughly terrifying (do not, despite the PG-13 rating, bring the children), and, as you’re watching him, you can’t help wondering — in a response that admittedly lies outside film criticism — how badly he messed himself up in order to play the role this way. His performance is a heroic, unsettling final act: this young actor looked into the abyss.
And here’s the scolding downer stuff…
“Many things go boom [in The Dark Knight}. Cars explode, jails and hospitals are blown up, bombs are put in people’s mouths and sewn into their stomachs. There’s a chase scene in which cars pile up and climb over other cars, and a truck gets lassoed by Batman (his one neat trick) and tumbles through the air like a diver doing a back flip. Men crash through windows of glass-walled office buildings, and there are many fights that employ the devastating martial-arts system known as the Keysi Fighting Method.
“Christian Bale, who plays Bruce Wayne (and Batman), spent months training under the masters of the ferocious and delicate K.F.M. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you a thing about it, because the combat is photographed close up, in semidarkness, and cut at the speed of a fifteen-second commercial. Instead of enjoying the formalized beauty of a fighting discipline, we see a lot of flailing movement and bodies hitting the floor like grain sacks.

“All this ruckus is accompanied by pounding thuds on the soundtrack, with two veteran Hollywood composers (Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard) providing additional bass-heavy stomps in every scene, even when nothing is going on. At times, the movie sounds like two excited mattresses making love in an echo chamber. In brief, Warner Bros. has continued to drain the poetry, fantasy, and comedy out of Tim Burton’s original conception for “Batman” (1989), completing the job of coarsening the material into hyperviolent summer action spectacle.
In other words, Denby “can’t rate The Dark Knight as an outstanding piece of craftsmanship. Batman Begins was grim and methodical, and this movie is grim and jammed together. The narrative isn’t shaped coherently to bring out contrasts and build toward a satisfying climax. The Dark Knight is constant climax; it’s always in a frenzy, and it goes on forever.
“Nothing is prepared for, and people show up and disappear without explanation; characters are eliminated with a casual nod. There are episodes that are expensively meaningless (a Hong Kong vignette, for instance), while crucial scenes are truncated at their most interesting point — such as the moment in which the disfigured Joker confronts a newly disfigured Harvey Dent (a visual sick joke) and turns him into a vicious killer. The thunderous violence and the music jack the audience up. But all that screw-tightening tension isn’t necessarily fun.
“The Dark Knight has been made in a time of terror, but it’s not fighting terror; it’s embracing and unleashing it — while making sure, with proper calculation, to set up the next installment of the corporate franchise.”
This last graph sounds like it came from the same well as that rant I published last Tuesday (“Boom Fart, Whee! and Splat”), to wit: “The world is collapsing, descending into chaos, destroying itself with tribal warfare and asphyxiating itself with fossil fuels. And in a certain spiritual way, corporate Hollywood product is a part of this implosion/self destruction.”

Barack Obama‘s campaign is calling an illustration on the cover of the 7.21 issue of the New Yorker magazine, showing a turban-headed Obama fist-bumping an AK-47-slinging Michelle in the Oval Office, as “tasteless and offensive.” It’s meant as a satire, of course, of the right-wing scum who’ve been pushing the Manchurian candidate myth as well as the rural boobs who’ve been buying into it, but if I were on the Obama team I’d probably take one look at this thing and go “jeeeez!”

Here’s an interview about the cover between New Yorker editor David Remnick and the Huffington Post‘s Rachel Sklar.

Here’s a thoughtful take on the recent Inglorious Bastards dig-down by the Newark Star-Ledger‘s Stephen J. Whitty. Satisfies my concept of a good read, the flattery factor aside.

Let’s help Envelope columnists Tom O’Neil and Pete Hammond narrow down their possible Best Picture Oscar list, shall we? O’Neil has just posted a big long contender rundown but a lot of titles are instant scratch-outs, I feel, and a few are big maybes.

Brad Pitt in David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

My choices for the leading or most deserving Best Picture contenders right now, in order of likelihood: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (certainly not the front-runner, but the contender with the best script), Milk, Doubt, Gran Torino, Frost Nixon, W and The Visitor. I say this knowing that The Visitor has an uphill climb ahead of it. I’m hearing “yes” and “no” about Doubt. I know that W works on the page. If I was one to recommend that WALL*E be nominated for Best Picture instead of Best Animated Feature, it would definitely be on this list, but since I strongly believe in maintaining the Berlin Wall between reality and animation, it’s not listed.
In my eyes, Steven Soderbergh‘s Che (i.e., The Argentine and Guerilla) easily qualifies as a Best Picture contender — it’s a phenomenal history lesson, high art and a first-rate epic. Of course, there’s reason to wonder if it’ll even open this year, to hear it from the buyers. I know it damn well ought to open and at least try for some award-season propulsion, but guys like myself saying “it’s great” doesn’t cut much ice with the bottom-liners.
I’m sketchy on several titles right now, but I would think the following could be tossed without a second’s hesitation: Appaloosa (possibly worthy Ed Harris western but New Line leftover status dooms it); Burn After Reading (a dry Coen brothers goof, not an Oscar film); Body of Lies (I know nothing about this brilliant Middle Eastern spy thriller that would qualify it as Oscar bait); Changeling (Best Actress nom for Angelina Jolie but the film, while dramatically solid and well made, just isn’t stratospheric enough); The Dark Knight (are Tom and Pete having us off?), Defiance (an Ed Zwick World War II movie about Russian-Jewish resistance guerillas…hello?); Mamma Mia! (all right, that’s enough); Miracle at St. Anna (a Spike Lee movie in which a bank teller is shot by an old guy having a memory seizure?) and Vicki Cristina Barcelona (can’t and won’t happen).
I don’t know enough one way or the other about Australia (younger audiences groaning at the trailer?), Cheri, Happy-Go-Lucky, The Reader, Secret Life of Bees, Seven Pounds (Will Smith treacle factor?) and The Soloist.

Barack Obama‘s time-to-leave-Iraq stump speech is in Monday’s (7.14) N.Y. Times op-ed page, presumably to make the point that he hasn’t waffled or softened his basic position. Which he hasn’t by my sights. He knows that complications and surprise potholes are inevitable, of course, as does everyone else. Life is sometimes a poker game, and however clear your objective, you have to play what’s dealt.

Here, for now, is the definitive restoration-of-The Godfather story, written by L.A. Times contributor Bill Desowitz for the Monday, 7.14 edition.

“Fans who pick up the recently announced The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration,, due out from Paramount Home Entertainment on DVD and Blu-ray on Sept. 23, are likely to see things in the 1972 Mafia saga and its two sequels they’ve never noticed before,” Desowitz begins. “The differences could be subtle to the casual observer, but the improved color and clarity give new visual punch to some of the most cherished sequences in recent cinema history.
“‘We wanted the blacks to be truly black, and the first image of Bonasera [Salvatore Corsitto] was to appear out of that,’ said Francis Ford Coppola, speaking via e-mail about the opening scene of his landmark drama.
“The restoration was a sizable undertaking that required a team of technicians, several hundred thousand dollars and two years of effort, largely because the negative for The Godfather had been nearly destroyed by overprinting and mishandling.
“‘I believe that there were only five or six shots in the first 20 minutes that were still original,’ said restoration supervisor Robert Harris, who previously had worked to restore films including Vertigo and Lawrence of Arabia. ‘Virtually every splice was held together with Mylar tape. Tears went into image in hundreds of frames. Sections were totally without perforations.'”

Cinemascope‘s Yair Raveh reviews Kim Aubrey‘s 18-minute doc about the restoration of the first two Godfather films, and which will be included in the Godfather “Coppola Restoration” DVD and Blu-ray set that comes out in the fall. (The third Godfather film was also worked on, but who cares…am I right?)

In his brief New York magazine review of Mamma Mia!, David Edelstein says that Pierce Brosnan‘s singing “is the best imitation I’ve heard of a water buffalo.” As long as actors singing dreadfully is on the table, I should mention Frances Farmer‘s crooning of “Aura Lee” in Come and Get It! (’36). Her contralto sounds a cross between a seal and a loon. It may seem unkind to mention this, given Farmer’s tragic life and all, but I’ve had this thought in my head for ages.

Elvis Presley‘s “Love Me Tender,” of course, uses the exact same melody.

The Dark Knight “is noisy, jumbled, and sadistic,” writes New York‘s David Edelstein. “Even its most wondrous vision — Batman’s plunges from skyscrapers, bat-wings snapping open as he glides through the night like a human kite — can’t keep the movie airborne. There’s an anvil attached to that cape. [And] the lack of imagination, visual and otherwise, turns into a drag.
“The tumult is spectacularly incoherent. Nolan appears to have no clue how to stage or shoot action. He got away with the chopped-up fights in Batman Begins because his hero was a barely glimpsed ninja, coming at villains from all angles in stroboscopic flashes. There are more variables here, which means more opportunities to say ‘What the f— just happened?'”