Pheonix-based entertainment journalist Henry Cabot Beck wrote earlier today to report that “here in Arizona it was announced yesterday that despite The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford opening this Friday in Phoenix, it’s been decided at the last minute not to screen it for critics.

“It was touch-and-go yesterday for about an hour with the talk being that they might screen it tonight (Tuesday) with a one-day notice,” he adds. “Depending on how this shakes out, this could mean that Jesse James has become the most lauded, worst-treated movie of the year.

“Everybody’s split on the picture, but some feel that Andrew Dominik‘s film is one of the best of the year. I fall a bit over into that camp. A Brad Pitt picture with some Oscar buzz, a couple of amazing performances — even if you don’t like the movie overall — and they’re treating it like a one-weekend horror turd.”

I’ve been trying to avoid dealing with Fred Claus (Warner Bros., 11.9), an obviously broad and garishly commercial family comedy starring Vince Vaughan, Paul Giamatti and Rachel Weisz, but it’s been made, it opens a month from now, and we may as well stand up like adults and face it. Every November somebody releases a right-down-the- middle family holiday film, and this seems to be a semi-misanthropic 2007 version. An upbeat Bad Santa without the booze and set in a Polar Express-ian Santa’s village?

I was with the trailer until those ninja elves turned up. That was it. Check-out time. I’ll be out in the lobby.

The story is an appropriately snide and smart-ass spiritual redemption tale. Fred Claus (Vaughn) is the embittered brother of Nicholas “Santa” Claus (Giamatti). A repo man sent to the slammer for stealing, Fred is bailed out by Nick on the condition that he return home to the North Pole and enter the family business. And you know the rest.

The trailer strongly suggests this was a straight paycheck job for everyone concerned — Vaughan, Giamatti, Weisz, director David Dobkin (The Wedding Crashers), producer Joel Silver and senior costars Kathy Bates, Kevin Spacey and Miranda Richardson.

Sometimes you just have to suck it in, hold your nose, make the movie and cash the check. And the family audience is happy because they have no taste as a rule and will scarf down anything you put in front of them.

A friend saw a preview and had nice things to say about Giamatti’s Santa Claus (“wonderful…exuded great warmth”) and applauded Weisz for making her part play much better than written. She feels that the script by Dan Fogelman (Cars) is…uhm, how should I put this? I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Okay, the word she used was “terrible.” She also feels that Fred Claus belongs more or less in the same category as Ilya Salkind‘s Santa Claus (’85), but that’s a horrible thing to say. I’m sure she didn’t mean it.

Her final thought: “I thought I’d be seeing another Elf and what I got was something that made those Tim Allen Santa Clause movies seem like Kubrick.” That’s a little blunt. Too abrupt and dismissive. Something tells me this may turn out to be half-tolerable. I can’t accept that Vaughn, who co-produced, would star in something as bad as she’s described here. There must be more to it….no?

Two random thoughts about Rob Reiner‘s somewhat messy but passionate online ad for Hillary Clinton, which was sent around today.

One, Reiner has cast himself in the spot, and seems very much of an amusingly hyper, judgmental live-wire type. (More so than he’s ever seemed to me during junket round tables.) So much so that you can’t help but wonder, “How could such a hyper, judgmental live-wire type make such cautious, edgeless movies like Rumor Has it, The Story of Us, Alex & Emma , North and Ghosts fo Mississippi for the last ten to twelve years?” Reiner doesn’t seem to have put himself into these films. At all.

And two, the central statement in Reiner’s spot comes when he advises a Hillary volunteer to tell people she’s calling that she’s “100% convinced that she’s the only candidate who can actually change things.” This, of course, is code for “she’s the only Democratic candidate likely to win” but is she? And given Clinton’s polarizing profile and temperamental nature, is it all that likely she’ll actually change things, or will she mainly agitate and enrage?

Last Thursday’s Washington Post poll convinced a lot of people that Hilary Clinton is probably going to win against Rudy Giuliani. The Post‘s hypothetical matchup between Clinton and Giuliani showed Hilary leading Rudy 51 percent to 43 percent. A legislator was recently quoted by Peggy Noonan as saying that “it’s all over but the voting.”

The problem for me (for many lefties) is that Hilary Clinton will almost certainly polarize more ferociously and draw more hate (and God knows what else) than Barack Obama would. Hilary might win, but Obama would be a better candidate, a better uniter and a better consensus-builder. We all know that what a rancid, butt-ugly general campaign it will likely be next summer and fall if it comes down to Hilary vs. Rudy. And I shudder to think what the right-wing crazies will throw at Clinton once she (presumably) lands the nomination.

Two worrisome thoughts, one voiced by elrapierwit on Kevin Drum‘s Washington Monthly blog (i.e. “Political Animal”) and a reader quoted on Andrew Sullivan‘s Atlantic Monthly blog.

The Sullivan reader addresses the Obama-regarded-by-righties factor: “Those who say the right will cook up a narrative about Obama just as poisonous and effective as the right’s Hillary narrative are wrong. Poisonous, yes; effective, no.

“I just had dinner with my father, and for several years I’ve avoided talking politics with him; he’s a highly intelligent man but he became a neocon 30 years ago and then, to my horror, a regular Limbaugh listener.

“He belittles every candidate I’ve liked by spitting out the Limbaugh-dictated putdown or some close variant thereof. Anyways, we were forced to talk politics because a friend noticed us and came up to our table and mentioned I am an Obama supporter. I was expecting some anti-Obama venom from my father, but it did not happen.

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Rudolph Giuliani

“Predictably, my father’s going to vote for Giuliani. But he agreed with that Peggy Noonan column from a few days ago saying that Obama is genuine and thoughtful, and he thinks he’s the only Democrat who can avoid being effectively savaged by Limbaugh and the talk-radio world because he thinks their insults don’t stick to Obama the way they stick to Hillary.

“Unscientific, I admit. But when you realize what a hold Limbaugh has over his dittoheads, it’s worth noting that they agree with every word he says about Hillary but they can’t help liking Obama. The reason, I think, is simple. There is an element of truth in the talk radio right’s portrayal of Hillary as a smug, self-righteous, phoney. Liberals and Hillary admirers hate to hear that, but it’s true — an element of truth obscured by a whole mountain of b.s.

“There is not, however, even a grain of truth in the Hannity/Limbaugh Obama slurs to date. The Obama/Madrassah slur won’t stick because it is not only not true; it’s not even ‘truthy.’ Obama is obviously a humanist in the best sense of that word and thus the polar opposite of a Madrassa fanatic. Nor will the slur stick about Obama being a champion of Afrocentric black power because he attends a church whose minister has those leanings.

“To the contrary, it seems extremely likely to me that if Obama steals the nomination from Hillary, a huge cross-section of the country will fall in love with him as a person, either right then and there or after his acceptance speech. That cross section will include conservatives who won’t vote for him but will still like him as a human being. Even those who think this scenario is not highly probable would acknowledge it is more than possible.

“And if they are being honest with themselves, they have to admit that It is simply not possible for Hillary to generate that kind of reaction. She may well win, but even if she does, most of the 49 or 48% who vote for her opponent will walk into the voting booth detesting her and will promptly come to detest her even more after her triumphal inaugural speech and ceremonies. If Obama can pull off a victory, there will be an entirely different vibe.”

El Rapier‘s comment: “[The] assertion that Hillary [has been] ‘made polarizing’ by the right is completely specious. No one can make an individual polarizing. Hillary is polarizing because she confuses power with leadership and is unable to create and build consensus within a diverse group of thinkers. That is why she is polarizing. She tries to drive issues without building a winning coalition.

“All you have to do is look at how she managed the proposed Clinton healthcare plan in the ’90s. It was a ‘my way or no way’ because she thought she had the power as First Lady to drive the agenda on her own terms without taking into consideration what the needs of others were.

“No one told Hillary to divide 500 people into 34 committees and demand they not say anything outside of the meeting nor take notes in the meeting. The right did not make her do that.

“No one told Hillary to take the fight to the Supreme Court on her terms for secrecy. Hillary conceived all of that on her own and she believed she had the power to force her ideas and agenda on others. The right did not make her do that. She simply lacked leadership and the ability to persuade others to the validity of her proposals.

“Hillary is far more polarizing than any other politician during her political era. She in fact is going to be a reason for all the old partisian bickering and long standing grudges to come back to the fore meaning nothing will be accomplished.

“Hillary has told people during her campaign for the Presidency that those not on board with her now will pay when she is the nominee. A hallmark trait of a vengeful politician not a leader.

“So nothing has changed. She is a fighter and a brawler. She is not a leader.”

Conscientious reviewers who plan on reviewing The Bucket List should probably try to hunt down a VHS tape of a British-produced 1988 film called Hawks. It’s about two terminally ill patients (Anthony Edwards, Timothy Dalton) in a grim English hospital yearn who plot an escape for one last wild time, and who hook up with two English women (Janet McTeer, Camille Coduri) on their way to the brothels of Amsterdam . At least for curiosity or perspective’s sake.

An Amazon enthusiast has called it “a rare gem that balances humor and pathos and avoids maudlin sentimentality in handling a very serious issue. The chemistry between Dalton’s bitter but lively intellectual and Edwards’s cocky but vulnerable jock propels the film to great heights. And while they keep the humor coming, neither screenwriter Roy Clarke nor director Robert Ellis Miller ever forget the direction that Decker and Bancroft’s lives will ultimately take.”

This high-def trailer for Robert Reiner‘s The Bucket List (Warner Bros., 12.25) is one of those trailers that appears to tell you every major plot beat in the film, start to finish. It even appears to divulge which character dies early and which one survives so he can hug his estranged granddaughter. It seems so on-the nose, so Reinerish…I don’t know.

I haven’t read Justin Zackham‘s script (has anyone?), but I’m seeing this invisible subtitle that says, “Okay, here’s the whole movie including the ending. Now, would would you like to see the feature-length version?

Bucket List thoughts (i.e., things to do before you’re dead) glimpsed on a yellow note pad: 1. Witness something truly majestic. 2. Help a complete stranger. 3. Laugh until I cry. 4. Drive a Shelby Mustang. 5. Kiss the most beautiful [remainder of sentence obscured, but presumably it doesn’t say “kiss the most beautiful dog”]. 6. Get a tattoo. (What’s so spiritual and life-affirming about getting a tattoo?)

Activities glimpsed: Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman sky-diving (rendered, I presume, with very believable CGI — very nice work), driving the Shelby Mustangs on a race track, sitting atop the Egyptian pyramids, riding a chopper along the Great Wall of China, visiting a seaside hill town in Italy.

The question should be, what would two terminally-ill guys without much money do if they wanted to kiss the sky before dying? That notion has no place in Reiner’s head. Not on a Warner Bros. budget, at least.

Baldness sidebar: After Nicholson appeared on the Oscar telecast last February with his head shaved, it was understood this was due to his character, a rich obnoxious blowhard who grows a heart when faced with his own mortality, undergoing chemotherapy, and that he’d be doing the egg-bald thing throughout the film.

Except the trailer shows that his hair is shaved off in the film (presumably in preparation for brain surgery) but he doesn’t spend the whole film bald, as he’s shown in every scene but one with his sparse thatch intact.

A WGA member had this to say this morning about the looming WGA strike situation: “This whole thing started with the producers sitting around…I’m sure this actually happened…none of them respecting the writers, thinking little of them and saying ‘we have to change this residual formula thing. We’re just handing them all this money, and they don’t deserve it.’ They know a strike could happen, obviously, but also that eventually people just get worn down, the rank-and-file start losing their incomes and need to get back to work.

“Those residual checks are so welcome…getting those checks in the mail is so great. And once you’ve had this residual system in place for years, you can’t take the lollipop away from the kid.

“It’ll be disastrous if the [writers] go out now. The producers won’t negotiate a serious deal with the writers until they talk to the directors and the actors. They certainly won’t give a deal to one union without getting an idea from the other two how they stand. The Writers Guild is the weakest union. They don’t have the power that the actors have, or the directors have. Strategically the writers should probably hitch their wagon to the directors.

“The joke of it all is that most of the WGA rank-and-file aren’t working. A relatively small percentage of the writers are employed on a regular basis. A lot of these guys kind of enjoy going out on the picket line and meeting people. Let’s get some coffee, I know this producer who might like your script, we should kick this around. It’s a social network thing.”

There are 39 paragraphs in Dave McNary and Josef Adalian‘s well-reported, well-composed Variety story that went up yesterday about the increasingly likelihood of a WGA strike happening on 11.1 (or perhaps in January) rather than next June, but you can boil it all down to four:

Graph #1: “Many believe a November walkout could be particularly crippling since it could affect both the current TV season and the next one. By Nov. 1, the nets will have enough episodes of current shows in the can to get them through mid-January. But the February sweeps would be decimated, and new shows would halt production well before they’d filled their initial 13 episode orders.”

Graph #2: “There are some observers, however, who think a January strike might make more strategic sense. The TV season would still be hurt, with original episodes of shows running out by late February. Pilot season would still be affected, since nets might be reluctant to lense $4 million pilot segs without scribes available to do rewrites — especially for comedies.”

Graph #3: “If scribes wait until January, they can also claim to have gone the extra mile on negotiations by working without a deal for two months. On the other hand, almost all nets have made early pilot commitments to at least two or three projects, some of which are expected to lense in December.”

Graph #4: “One industry insider believes writers will wait to see if any progress is being made before deciding to walk out. ‘If there’s absolutely no progress being made, they’ll go out,’ the insider said. ‘If there is some movement, they might give it a few more weeks.'”

Suspected militant WGA sentiment: “Make it hurt. Hit ’em hard. They talk tough, but deep down the suits are a bunch of candy-asses. As Terry Malloy said to Johnny Friendly, “Ya know, ya take them heaters away from ya and you’re nothin!’ They’re blustery and unreasonable and trying to break the union. And you can’t deal with unreasonable people.”

The full slate for L.A.’s AFI Fest (Thursday, 11.1. to Sunday, 11.11) was announced today, and as usual the films with genuine intrigue are few and far between. Two of the three big galas — Robert Redford‘s Lions for Lambs and Mike Newell‘s Love in the Time of Cholera — are thought to be half-and-halfers, leaving Jason Reitman‘s Juno as the only solid. The biggest eyecatcher is Gregg Araki‘s Smiley Face, enjoying another festival viewing on its way to the home video bin (which some feel is an unjust fate, especially those who saw at Sundance ’07).

The World Cinema section will show Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Eran Kolirin‘s The Band’s Visit — two likely Oscar nominees for Best Foreign Language Film. Two docs are said to be worth a looksee — Doug Pray‘s Big Rig and Kent Jones‘ The Man In The Shadows: Val Lewton. And a Latino Showcase feature called Manuela y Manuel, directed by Raul Marchand, is said to be a standout.

After the dust finally settles on last week’s Indiana Jones photo-theft caper, it’ll be fascinating to read a detailed account about the web journalist who made the call to Paramount Studios that led to the “sting” arrest of Roderick Davis, the 37 year-old Cerritos resident who tried to sell hundreds of stolen photos from the shoot of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull for $2000 bucks. I don’t know when the details will finally surface, but it’ll make a fascinating story.

Shia Lebouf, Harrison Ford in an action still from Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, obtained from a Czech website.

I did a phone interview last week with Control director Anton Corbijn. I’m not going to describe our chat except to call it easy from start to finish. Nothing remarkable in that, but pleasant all the same.

Control star Sam Riley, director Anton Corbijn at the film’s very first press conference in Cannes last May

I didn’t mention a nagging thought to Corbijn, which is that a film as fine and top-notch as Control — the toast of ’07 Cannes Film Festival, one of the finest rock-music dramas ever made, easily one of the most beautiful black-and-white films of the last 40-plus years — is somehow diminished by opening in a couple of piddly-ass theatres in New York and Los Angeles. This is a film that demands crowds, noise, kleig lights, after-parties.

I’m especialy deflated that it’s debuting here at the Nuart, a place that always manage to diminish the impact of a film due to its small screen and cavern-like shape. Perhaps it’ll be shifted to the Landmark megaplex after the first week.

A naitve of Strijen, a town in southern Holland, Corbijn’s primary rep is that of a rock band photographer. He began his photography career in the mid ’70s before gradually moving into music videos in the early ’90s and then, two years ago, feature directing with Control, which I’ve now seen three times and which seems to improve with each viewing.

Corbijn’s visual style is defined on his Wikipedia page as follows: “Corbijn tends to favor a rawer look, often in black-and-white. His subjects appear to be calm and far removed from everyday life. His photographs show raw emotion. His influential style of black-and-white imagery with stark contrasts on grainy film (sometimes referred to as ‘overcooked’) has been imitated and copied in such extent that it has become a rock cliché and a vital part of the visual language in the 1990s.” This, visually, is pretty much what you get when you watch Control.

I began by asking Corbijn whether any color shots had been taken during the shooting of Control, and he said nope. The monochromatic palette of the film is so dominating that I found myself wanting, perversely, a kind of aesthetic counterbalance to wade into.

Here’s the British website for Control (it’s stunning how the Weinstein Co. refuses to create websites for its releases) and the mp3 of our discussion. Watch the trailer if you haven’t seen it. Corbijn says he definitely intends to make another film, which of course is good news.

This “Fifty Best Breasts in Film History” piece (dated 10.9, which is tomorrow) on the Film Threat site is a bore and a time-waster. The YouTube clips stink, for one thing. It’s the kind of online wank that makes you hate yourself for dancing through it even for four or five minutes.