Arizona Daily Star‘s Phil Villarreal is reporting that Kevin Smith‘s Zack and Miri Make a Porno (with Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks) will be released by the Weinstein Co. on 10.31. Phil says he was “was sour on the past couple Smith movies” but has a feeling “this one will match the excellence and rewatchable hiliarity of Smith’s first four: Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy and Dogma, with an honorable mention for Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. (Which I liked as well.)
The problem, for me, is that Villarreal has posted the one thing that’s given me pause — that “I”m Fucking Seth Rogen” music video that seemed really stale because it conspicuously rode the tail of the Sarah Silverman and Jimmy Kimmel videos that preceded it.

This Lou Dobbs-dissing trailer for Under The Same Moon (Fox Searchlight, limited) is fairly amusing. Created in-house by the Fox Searchlight guys, It’s airing on CNN today, and particularly on Dobbs’ news and commentary show.

Patricia Riggen‘s film, written by Ligiah Villalobos, is a heart-warming tale of a Mexican immigrant mom working as a domestic in Los Angeles, and her Mexico-residing son from whom she’s separated. Dobbs has been hating on illegal Mexican immigrants for years. There are three quotes in the trailer alluding to the film’s presumed emotional effect upon Dobbs — making him cry, melting his heart, etc.

There’s something hugely satisfying in Chuck Todd and Domenico Montanaro‘s “MSNBC First Read” summaries, which I read each and every morning. I love the internal-office-memo prose style. Their stuff is straight and unpretentious, and always fortified with comprehensive reporting and sharp observations.

The most interesting aspect of Michael Cieply‘s 3.27 N.Y. Times story about the impending divorce between Paramount and DreamWorks is the photo of Laura Ramsey and Jena Malone in The Ruins (DreamWorks, 4.4), an apparently standard kids-in-peril horror film from director Carter Smith and screenwriter /novelist Scott B. Smith. The subdued lighting and amber tones are intriguing, which is more than you can say for Ceiply’s story about clashing egos.

The IMDB keywords for The Ruins include the following: Severed Leg, Accidental Killing, Tequila, Cell Phone, Mexico, Corpse, Chase Scene, Shower Scene, Surgery Scene, Parasite Underneath Skin, Disturbing, Dance Scene, Vacation, Beach, Shot In The Head, Gore, Knife, Fall From Height, Loss Of Brother, Shot To Death, Pistol, Archeological Dig, Broken Leg, Loss Of Friend, Male Nudity, Female Nudity, Vomit Scene, Bow And Arrow, Stabbed in the Chest, Blood Spatter, Suffocation, Cheating On Boyfriend, Breasts, Self Mutilation, Shot In The Chest, Death, Skeleton, Based On Novel and Twist In The End.

HE reactions to Oliver Stone‘s casting choices on W, his about-to-shoot Dubya drama which will star Josh Brolin. Elizabeth Banks, 34, seems too young to play First Lady Laura Bush, who was just shy of 50 when her husband became the Texas governor and 54 when he was inaugurated as President on 1.20.01. James Cromwell as George H.W. Bush — perfect, but he’ll have to be de-aged. Ellen Burstyn as Barbara Bush — fine.
Finding the right guy to portray Dick Cheney will be a make-or-breaker. It’ll be more of a matter of someone who can get the voice right — “So?” Richard Dreyfuss?
Stone wrote the screenplay with his Wall Street co-writer Stanley Weiser. W “is expected to be ready for distribution possibly by the November presidential elections and certainly before Bush leaves the White House in January,” Variety‘s Michael Fleming wrote yesterday.

No two ways about it — Martin Scorsese‘s Shine a Light needs to be seen in the IMAX format. It’ll be agreeable in regular 35mm — fun, engaging — but the wow factor will be missing. The Rolling Stones concert film was shot in a semi-intimate setting — Manhattan’s Beacon Theatre — and the intense close-ups and gigantic size of the bodies and faces of Mick Jagger, Keith Richard, Ron Wood and Charlie Watts make it seem even more so. This movie is all over you.

An approximation of the IMAX aspect ratio (1.43 to 1) of Shine a Light

Robert Richardson‘s camerawork (with celebrated dps like John Toll and Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki working as camera operators) swings, soars and glides with pulsing rhythm. At times the camera dives and swoops like a hawk. At times it makes you feel as if you’re literally dancing alongside Jagger, but with the kind of exacting discipline that Gene Kelly brought to his big dance numbers in those ’50s MGM musicals. (With maybe a little Twyla Tharp thrown in.) The cutting is clean and smooth and exhilarating at times. The film has a phenomenal visual energy.
Scorsese starts things off with a 10- or 12-minute short in a relatively small and boxy (1.33 to 1) black-and-white format. Scorsese is the lead character at this point — the director asking questions, sorting things through, being told he can’t do this or that, etc. This is the footage of the show’s planning, preparation, logistics. And it’s very engaging. But the split-second that the show begins….wham! We’re IMAX-ed up — in color with the images suddenly twice as tall and four or five times louder, and we’re off to the races.
It’s thrilling in nearly the exact same way that audiences were wowed when This is Cinerama! (’53) went from boxy black-and-white newsreel footage of Lowell Thomas to a sudden cut to the full-color, three-camera Cinerama shot of a mountain range as the music soared and the curtains parted to make room for a much taller, super-wide image.

Approximation of the 35mm aspect ratio (1.85 to 1) of the same shot

I can’t imagine how this effect can be delivered on a conventional 35mm screen, and I’m not precisely sure how the IMAX image I saw last night at L.A.’s Bridge Cinema will be presented in a “flat” format. The IMAX aspect ratio is on the boxy side with an aspect ratio of 1.43 to 1. Movies in regular theatres are projected at 1.85 to 1 or, if filmed and projected in Scope, 2.39 to 1. The Shine a Light bottom line is that either (a) the 35mm non-IMAX version will present more visual information on the sides in order to fill out a wider 1.85 to 1 image, or (b) the IMAX will be cropped to create a 1.85 to 1 aspect ratio on 35 mm. Am I being confusing?
I’ll try to figure this out tomorrow morning. I tried to get a clear understanding of whether the 35mm image will be wider than the IMAX image but smaller in scale, or whether it will be a less tall version of the IMAX image. I asked and asked and asked, and nobody really knew.
The power of those IMAX speakers…my God! And the re-animated groove that the Stones get into with 80% of the songs is sublime. Before last night I thought I’d heard “Tumblin’ Dice” once too often, but the version in the film is so hypnotically cool and soul-freeing that I’d now like to find a soundtrack recording, or at least an iTunes track of this particular rendition. The only rote performances are of the big headline songs (“Start Me Up,” “Brown Sugar,” etc.) The less well-known ones are mostly transcendent. The relatively quiet and contained performance of “As Tears Go By” is a classic.
The IMAX closeups of all those jowls, turkey necks and crows feet on the Stones’ faces are something really new and different in the annals of rock-concert films. This sounds like I’m being a smart-ass, but I found them genuinely cool and fascinating. Keith looks like a Peter Jackson CG creation, a Lord of the Rings troll.
Did director Gore Verbinski put make-up on Richards for his Pirates of the Caribbean cameo? I walked out before Richards’ scene (the film was despicable), but I saw an online photo of Richards and Johnny Depp and it looked to me like Keith’s face was all gunked up. If he looked this way in the film Verbinksi needlessly embroidered one of the world’s great natural weirdnesses.
Shine a Light ends with a knockout Scorsese tracking shot — a half-real, half digital thing in which a single hand-held camera seems to follow Jagger and the others as they make their way through the backstage throng and out the stage door. Scorsese himself, absent since the early black-and-white footage, makes two appearances in this sequence. And then the camera alights and soars over Manhattan and…I don’t want to over-describe, but it’s beautiful.

Whatever happened to the alleged plans of Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio to make The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, apparently with DiCaprio intending to play T.R. I guess it died…right? Because the consensus was that the Leo casting made as much sense as Tom Cruise playing Abraham Lincoln or Giovannni Ribisi playing Harry S. Truman?

Theodore Roosevelt in either his late 20s or early 30s; Leonardo DiCaprio at 30 or 31.

I’m mentioning this because I happened to watch John Milius‘s The Wind and the Lion last night, and I really loved Brian Keith‘s performance as the nation’s 26th president This was largely a matter of internals, but the resemblance factor was a kick because Keith seemed like such a mirror image.
Has there even been a really successful performance of an historical picture in which the resemblance factor was practically zilch? The only one I can think of was the blue-eyed, honey-haired, perfectly pedicured Jeffrey Hunter‘s portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth in Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings — a perfectly absurd appearance and yet Hunter exuded dignity and directness, and was oddly touching at times.

From Minneapolis Star-Tribune cartoonist Steve Sack…

For over 25 years I’ve watched films in the finest screening rooms in Los Angeles, New York, Cannes, Paris….all over. The sound, projection and butt-comfort qualities have been sublime at 90% of them. (Paris screening rooms have the best seats — velvety, armchair-sized, sofa-soft. The rear seats at Sony’s high-altitude screening room in Madison Avenue are almost as good.) The point is that I’ve been to screening-room Shangri-la hundreds of times and I know how good it can get, and there’s no way I’d pay $35 bucks to see a movie at a Village Roadshow Gold Class Cinema.
None of the private rooms I’ve been to have projection qualities that exceed what you get at L.A.’s Arclight, where a ticket costs $14 on weekends and $11 on Sundays and weekdays. Why the hell would anyone with my champagne tastes pay two to three times that amount to see a perfectly projected film in a really terrific seat with my feet on an ottoman? I wouldn’t pay $35 to see a film if they threw in a complimentary neck or back massage. I wouldn’t pay $35 bills for a film if they had naked girls as ushers. Well, maybe.
And yet a team of investors — Village Roadshow Ltd., Act III, Lambert Entertainment and the Retirement Systems of Alabama pension fund — are dead serious about spending $200 million to build 50 super-theaters over the next five years. Each theatre will offer 40 reclining armchair seats with footrests, digital projection and the capability to screen 2-D and 3-D movies. The first two venues set to open will be in South Barrington, Illinois, and the Seattle suburb of Redmond in October. Others are planned for Fairview, Texas, near Dallas-Fort Worth, and Scottsdale, Ariz.
I see disaster. The same nouveau-riche money-to-burn types who won’t blink about paying $$70 for two people to see a new film have, of course, top-of-the-line screening facilities at home. I would go so far to call this a stupid idea.

Richard Widmark has departed after living a mostly full and rewarding life for 93 years. We should all be so fortunate. I know I’m supposed to say that his performance as Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death (’47) was his most memorable work. But I’ll always enjoy three of his performances a bit more — the Dauphin in Otto Preminger‘s Saint Joan, the hard-assed Colonel Lawson in Judgment in Nuremberg and his oily operator character in Against All Odds. Plus those run of 20th Century Fox films he made in the early ’50s. Widmark was 15 years younger than the calendar year. He didn’t break into films until in his early 30s.

If Hillary Clinton defeats Barack Obama among the secular, deeply dug-in Pennsylvania Democrats by a lousy 10% margin, it’ll be meaningless. She has to tan his hide with a 20% victory margin or the chattering class will just shrug it off. A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey in Pennsylvania shows Clinton leading Obama 49% to 39% right now, which reflects her favorable rating having dropped to 68% from 76% in the last survey.

Meanwhile, N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd has written in today’s (3.26) column that “some top Democrats are increasingly worried that the Clintons√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢ divide-and-conquer strategy is nihilistic: Hillary or no democrat. Or, as one Democrat described it to ABC√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s Jake Tapper: Hillary is going for ‘the Tonya Harding option’ — if she can√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t get the gold, kneecap her rival.
“Even some Clinton loyalists are wondering aloud if the win-at-all-costs strategy of Hillary and Bill — which continued Tuesday when Hillary tried to drag Rev. Wright back into the spotlight — is designed to rough up Obama so badly and leave the party so riven that Obama will lose in November to John McCain.
Hence the ‘No drama, vote Obama’ placards and T-shirts that “are popping up at Obama rallies,” she writes, “with one of his military advisers [dubbing] him ‘No Shock Barack.'”
Here is one reported result of Hillary’s kitchen-sink tactics. May the vile karma that she’s created come back and swamp her life down the road.

In a 3.25 piece called “How (and Why) Anthony Minghella‘s Talent Wasn’t Quite Fulfilled,” New York critic David Edelstein fingers Harvey Weinstein as…well, not quite the central villain in the life of the just-deceased British filmmaker, but some kind of messy meddler and spiritual usurper.

“Now that the shock of Anthony Minghella’s sudden death has dissipated slightly,” Edelstein begins, “I think it’s less unseemly to say that this brilliant and soulful filmmaker died unfulfilled. And I can’t help thinking that what happened has something to do with someone whose name rhymes with Shmarvey Shmeinstein.
“I am not remotely suggesting here that Minghella sold out and became a Hollywood hack: Every one of his films was an attempt to merge his own bold, socially committed sensibilities with the insistent demands of his shmasters. But why did he complete only six films (counting one in the can) in the eighteen years between Truly, Madly, Deeply and his death? Where were the gutsy little modestly budgeted movies — good or bad or uneven — that could have kept him rooted?
“Anthony Minghella was only 54 and might have had a quarter-century left to break new ground. His passing robs us of the movies he might have made and leaves behind a cautionary tale. It’s not that he was forced to make crap. It’s not that his movies were entirely mangled by big hairy paws. It’s that an artist who could have set an example for gutsy personal filmmaking surrendered his autonomy — as so many others have done — in the name of someone (or shmomeone) else’s ego.”
For what it’s worth, my sense of Minghella is that on some level he was at least half-comfortable with not being the most prolific filmmaker of all time. He was a beautiful man in many respects, but I think he liked to live well. He loved the aromas and textures and ecstasies of day-to-day living as much as (and perhaps a tiny bit more than) the rigors and tortures of creation.
For whatever reason Edelstein’s description of the Anthony-Harvey dynamic has reminded me of the relationship between Rod Steiger‘s Komarovsky and Omar Sharif‘s Yuri Zhivago.