David Poland has written that Rachel Abramowitz‘s L.A. Times piece about a series of adult dramas tanking or underperforming with the public (a story that HE readers had a field day with yesterday) is “a mixed bag of truths, falsehoods, spin, and reaction to one piece of mean-spirited, self-serving gossip mongering.

“There is a real discussion to be had about how independent-minded movies are being released, how screens are held and lost, and what the future for this kind of product really might be,” Poland allows. “But hysteria over a few films that didn’t catch in limited releases is short-sighted hooey. There is no real story here. It’s a little more crowded and there is a little more star power in some of these misses, but it’s business as usual when you take a real look at it.”

Poland makes a couple of fair points (I agree that Michael Clayton has performed semi-decently, or at least that it doesn’t qualify as a tank), but the central obser- vation in Abramowitz’s piece — there’s too much product flooding the market, and that diminished ticket sales are part of the cause-and-effect — is unquestionable.

Knowing the Poland songbook as I do, I should add that if I had a quarter for every time I’ve heard Poland slam an article about some business-of-Hollywood topic by saying “there’s no story here,” I could afford a down payment on a new car.

There’s a loose-talk piece on Digital Spy saying that James McAvoy has been “tipped” to play Kurt Cobain in a movie version of Charles Cross‘s “Heavier Than Heaven“, a 2001 Cobain biography that Courtney Love (Cobain’s widow) and Howard Weitzman are looking to produce with Kite Runner screenwriter David Benioff allegedly adapting into screenplay form.

Kurt Cobain, James McAvoy

I flinched immediately upon reading this. Shouldn’t an actor at least vaguely resemble the actor he’s being “tipped” to portray? If you were producing this thing would you hire an actor who resembles Bob Dylan a lot more than Cobain, a famously blonde, blue-eyed, pretty-boy rocker with a beautiful Roman nose? McAvoy’s bee-stung honker is about as far away from the Cobain aesthetic as you can get.

Red Carpet District columnist Kris Tapley has written that four journos saw Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will be Blood last night on the Paramount lot. I may as well admit that I was one of them. But there will be no Blood talk from this columnist until after the San Francisco screening on Monday, November 5th, at the Castro. No vague hints, no between-the-lines innuendo…nothing.

I need to take a moment and thank the folks at Time Warner for interrupting the column for two and a half hours this morning. It may still be out, for all I know — I finally gave up and drove to the nearest Starbucks. It’s not that wireless service goes down occasionally, but that the unfailingly polite technicians who answer when you call never just say “sorry, the service is out in your area.” Which would be fine. We all accept that machines don’t work perfectly 100% of the time.

Instead, they put you through the lower-level tech support paces, checking this and that and and generally wasting your time. On top of this they speak in chirpy little voices with exotic Third World accents that are all but impenetrable. Bring Samuel Johnson and Christopher Marlowe back from the dead and put them on the phone with these Time Warner bozos, and after five or ten minutes they’d curse you for giving them life again.

Steve Carell‘s Dan in Real Life, a surprisingly passable adult family comedy (although not quite on the level of ’80s and ’90s James L. Brooks), is expected to earn between $10 and $12 this weekend. The big winner, however, will be Saw 4 with over $20 million. If this isn’t cause for rejoicing in the streets (the resurgence of torture porn!), I don’t know what would be.

And Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason is reporting that next week (11.2 to 11.4) is shaping up to be a record-breaker with Jerry Seinfeld‘s Bee Movie (Dreamamount) apparently headed for $38 million to $44 million and Ridley Scott, Steve Z., Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe’s American Gangster (Universal) looking “almost certain to open at $40 million plus.”

“As pessimistic as it is — you have to squint hard to find the barest flicker of redemption in its denouement — Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is also curiously exhilarating,” declares N.Y. Times critic A.O Scott. “Some of this comes from the simple thrill of witnessing something, or rather everything, done well. Even the overwrought performances — Albert Finney‘s growls, Ethan Hawke‘s twitches — have integrity and conviction. This is a melodrama, after all, and its lifeblood is in the manic acting, just as surely as it is in the plaintive horns of Carter Burwell’s score.

“My grandfather, whose background was not so different from Lumet’s, was dismissive of movies that seemed overly dark or despairing. “There wasn’t a single decent human being in the whole movie,” he used to complain. He might not have found any in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, but he would also have recognized the humanism that saves this harsh tale from nihilism. The screen may be full of losers, liars, killers and thieves, but behind the camera is a mensch.”

On the other hand, there’s only one Armond White, the N.Y. Press film critic who sometimes qualifies as the ultimate pain-in-the-ass contrarian. The guy is always feisty and incisive, and brilliant some of the time. But other times he gets down on his knees for films like “the excellent, excellent Munich” and trashes the incontestably intense and deep-drilling Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead.

He pops a cap into the back of the head of Sidney Lumet‘s film because “it’s too proudly depraved,” because “it lacks the seriousness [exemplified by] Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex,” because Lumet and screenwriter Kelly Masterson “continue the corruption of tragedy in the post-Sopranos age [and] fail to attain the lucid, credible emotion of modern tragedy (on view in The Brave One and Reservation Road)…Before the Devil is pathetic, a Hollywood tragedy.”

Read it again and reassemble: Reservation Road, White believes, exemplifies the “lucid, credible emotion of modern tragedy.” Meaning, in other words, that it has the good stuff and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead doesn’t. I lean against a nearby street lamp post to keep from falling over. My mouth is open and my eyes are fixed and glazed.

I sat down late this morning with the extremely bright and gracious Khalid Abdalla, 27, who plays the tortured lead character in Marc Forster’s The Kite Runner (Paramount Vantage 12.14). He delivers a first-rate performance as a San Francisco-residing, Afghanistan-born writer who goes back to his country to try and rectify a terrible error — a betrayal of a friend — he made as a child. Not incidentally, he’s also an immensely nice and likable guy.

The Kite Runner star Khalid Abdalla at the Four Season restaurant — Thursday, 10.25.07, 11:40 am

I had found Abdalla’s performance as one of the United 93 hijackers affecting also, particularly in the looks of doubt and conflict that he wore on his face throughout that harrowing Paul Greengrass film, so I was keen to speak to him when given the chance.

I’ll summarize our chat a bit more tonight or tomorrow morning, but here’s the mp3 of it. It goes on quite a while, but it’s easy to hear and make sense of. Abdalla, whio lives in southwest London, expresses himself clearly and concisely on a range of topics. Sorry, but I have to sign off now in order to make an 8 pm screening of a very important Oscar-level film.

Written by David Benioff and based on the book by Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner is an assured and touching drama about a universal experience, which is the need we all have for redempton and forgiveness. One could argue that with this film, his best since Monster’s Ball, Forster has corrected the three mistakes he made when he directed Finding Neverland, Stay and Stranger Than Fiction.

ditto

I don’t have time to write a review this evening either, but I can report that it seemed to emotionally connect with the Academy members I saw it with two or three weeks ago. There was a warm feeling in the room as everyone filed out. Forster’s film is screening this evening at the Academy, with a q & a to follow and then an after-party. I’m sure I’ll have a sense fo the rreaction by this time tomorrow.

David Fincher‘s Zodiac is, was and always will be one of the finest movies released in ’07. This fact was reiterated when I watched the 164 or 165-minute directors’ cut version that arrived yesterday. The ’70s period thriller would be a likely Best Picture candidate if (a) God existed and (b) took any kind of active interest in the awards game, instead of being a mere concept by which we measure our pain.

A Zodiac “Director’s Cut” screener, some 7 minutes longer than the theatrical version that opened between just under eight months ago.

I haven’t timed it with a stopwatch, but a Paramount guy just told me he thought it was about 7 minutes longer than the theatrical cut, which ran either 157 or 158 minutes. Maybe he’s wrong. The disc itself says, incorrectly, 158 minutes — obviously a typo.

Pete Hammond‘s latest Envelope column is one of his horse-race commentaries — what’s starting to take shape, what cards the players are holding, etc. The photo of Cate Blanchett (sitting to the right of the article) raises a question, though — one that’s bothering me more and more every week that it’s sidestepped or ignored.

When are handicappers going to stand up and declare Blanchett’s (or her handers’) attempt to land a Best Actress nomination for Elizabeth: The Golden Age a lost cause because the movie is an absolute joke in the eyes of anyone with a smidgen of taste? (Even Oscar-watchers with bad taste or no backbone have come to accept this.) And that Blanchett’s only shot is a Best Supporting Actress nom for her genius-level Bob Dylan performance in Todd Haynes‘ I’m Not There?

“It doesn’t matter how many Oscar winners are in front of or behind the camera — audiences are proving to be conscientious objectors when it comes to this fall’s surge of antiwar and anti-Bush films.” Good God, another article saying the same thing? Fines should be levied upon journalists and editors who run trend stories two or three weeks after everyone else has gone, “Okay, I’ve had enough, what else can you show me?”

The offender in this instance is Washington Times reporter Christian Toto, whose article about this topic went up today.

Aft least it has a stab at dry humor. Dan Vancini, movies editor with Amazon.com, tells Toto that Robert Redford‘s Lions for Lambs could fare well thanks to its starry cast. “They have a word-of-mouth following,” he says, refering to costar Tom Cruise.” Box Office Mojo‘s Brandon Gray says Lambs “will be an interesting test. Is it simply them sitting in rooms giving speeches? That’s what it looks like.”

Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days has to be the front-runner for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. No other contender is generating this much buzz or has won Cannes’ Palme d’Or prize or is blowing people away quite as much. But I guess I should wait until it screens for the Academy’s foreign branch on Friday, November 2nd. You never know with the Academy fuddy-duds.

Screenings have begun already of the 63 entries and continue through 1.12.08. I don’t know anything about the hot titles except that (a) Mungiu’s film is the stuff of instant legend; (b) Persepolis, France’s entry, is looking at an uphill battle because it’s’ animated and set largely in Iran; and (c) Juan Antonio Bayona‘s The Orphanage not only deserves to be a total lock but probably will be unless the fuddy-duds go, “Oh, this isn’t solemn or meaningful enough because it’s just a haunted house movie.”

The titles that seem to have good buzz at this stage (emphasis on “seem” and including the already-mentioned titles) are the following:

12 (Russia, director: Nikita Mikhalkov), The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (Brazil, director: Cao Hamburger); The Art of Crying (Denmark, director: Peter Schonau); Persepolis (France, directors: Marjane Satrapi, Vincent Paronnaud); The Edge of Heaven (Germany, director: Fatih Akin); (Mongol, director: Sergei Bodrov).

Plus: Mongol (Kazakhstan, director: Sergei Bodrov); Caramel (Lebanon, director: Nadine Labaki); Silent Light (Mexico, director: Carlos Reygadas); Gone with the Woman (Norway, director: Petter Naess); Katyn (Poland, director: Andrzej Wajda); 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Romania, director: Cristian Mungiu); The Orphanage (Spain, director: J.A. Bayona) and The Unknown Woman (Italy, director: Giuseppe Tornatore).

If I were king I would scratch Israel’s Beaufort (director: Joseph Cedar). There doesn’t appear to be any question that Beaufort‘s producers lobbied the Academy’s foreign film committee on the 50% foreign-language issue that wound up disqualifying The Band’s Visit. Punish the Beaufort team for playing dirty, discourage this kind of thing, etc.

If I’m missing anything (i.e., apparent standouts I haven’t heard about), please inform.

Too many indie dramas are flooding the well. Cultured moviegoer consciousness is being diluted and depleted by too many choices. Nothing’s happening, nobody’s catching any waves and “we’re all suffering,” says Focus Features chief James Schamus to L.A. Times reporter Rachel Abramowitz. “At least someone should be succeeding. It’s as bad a fall [season] as I’ve ever seen.”

I agree — there’s just too much out there, and that winds up hurting the whole field. But Abramowitz skirts the issue of quality and/or attractiveness in discussing the higher-profile underperformers.

And she doesn’t venture within a country mile of the other big factor, which is that urban blue audiences that go to occasional indie films are just like rural red-staters in the sense that 95% of them can’t get beyond subject matter. That’s all the vast majority wants to know or talk about. Not how brilliantly written, well acted, passionate, true-to-life and thematically potent the film is (or isn’t), but “what’s the story about?” And, of course, “who’s in it?”

“Why haven’t more people shown up to see A Mighty Heart?,” Abramowitz asks. Could it be because the leave-us-aloners and the too-sooners didn’t want to see a brilliant Michael Winterbottom film — so powerfully composed and finely edited it felt like something directed by Michael Mann — about a good-guy journalist who gets his head cut off by Islamic bad guys?

Why didn’t more people see In the Valley of Elah? Uh, let’s see…because the leave-us-aloners and the too-sooners smelled Iraqi sand in the margins of this deeply touching, beautifully acted (by each and every actor, and not just Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron and Susan Sarandon) father-son story mixed with a whodunit? Because you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink?

Why, she asks, hasn’t there been more interest in Lars and the Real Girl? Uhm…because there aren’t enough people out there who want to hang with a blue-collar simpleton (jowly, moustache, work boots, flannel shirts) who falls in love with a life-size plastic love doll? Because, you know…the average person finds this idea ludicrous, particularly when the film shows dozens and dozens of people (including hospital administrators) pretending out of sympathy and compassion for this borderline retard that the doll is real also?

(I finally saw Lars last night, and while I was genuinely moved by Ryan Gosling‘s lead performance, especially his tearful farewell scene by the lake, the film is obviously too caught up in its own conceit to expect any kind of wide popularity. America is not Park City, and it’s not mid January.)

Brad Pitt, Andrew Dominik

“Films like Richard Gere‘s The Hunting Party, Kenneth Branagh‘s Sleuth or the Mark Ruffalo-Joaquin Phoenix film Reservation Road haven’t made even $1 million,” Abramowitz says.

And we all know why, don’t we? One, the Gere film isn’t very good and nobody wants to know from Serbia-Bosnia-Herzogovina…leave us alone!…bad vibes like Iraq!. Two, Sleuth is too much of an arch, old-world parlor drama with a bizarre third-act twist that goes off the rails. And three, Reservation Road, which wasn’t very well reviewed, too often feels like a coarse and unrefined acting-exercise film

Abramowitz notes that “a crew of classy star vehicles from studios — essentially art films with bigger budgets — has [also] been flailing at the box office. Despite George Clooney‘s tub-thumping, Michael Clayton has earned only $21 million.” And that’s because people sensed corporate complexity and a lack of emotional undertow and figured, “Looks like a smart, well-made film but you know what? Netflix.”

Cate Blanchett‘s Elizabeth: The Golden Age has only earned $11 million because — is everyone sitting down? — it’s an outrageously awful, self-mocking costume drama.

Why has Andrew Dominik and Brad Pitt‘s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford earned only $2 million? Uhmm…because people don’t want to know from exquisitely made western art films that feel like a Terrence Malick time-machine transportation? Because they’re like, uhm…lazy and sometimes moronic in their judgments and determinations?

Abramowitz notes that ThinkFilm will “wade into the choppy waters” this coming weekend with director Sidney Lumet‘s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, which features Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke and Marisa Tomei.

I slipped into a preview screening of this film last night. It was showing to a group of KCET subscribers — an older, fair-minded group that likes adult prestige films — and you just could feel the lack of excitement in the room as they walked out. You could cut it with a knife. They’d just seen one of the year’s absolute best and most of them were thinking “hmmm, downer….not very uplifting!”

Postscript: Apologies for the typos and clumsy sentences in this piece after I first posted in the late morning. I had to run out to do an interview with Kite Runner star Khalid Abdalla before doing a fine edit. Everything’s fixed now, but I die a little bit each time I post a typo and awkwardly phrased sentence and don’t do anything to fix it for an hour or two.