All due admiration and respect for Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud‘s Persepolis (Sony Classics, 12.25), which I liked for the stark Iranian social realism and the austere black-and-white animation, but a lot of people are agog that it’s been selected by France as its Best Foreign Language Film Oscar entry instead of Olivier Dahan‘s La Vie En Rose, which many had presumed was a slam-dunk to receive official submission.

Persepolis is a highly respectable piece (some have called it a masterpiece), but La Vie en Rose is a grand emotional epic — not a great film but a very convincing and richly composed one that rocks with hurt and history and the whole French magillah. Was there ever a greater musical emblem of 20th Century France than Edith Piaf? And those last 20 to 25 minutes are amazing. It really punches through.

The pro-Persepolis decision was an inside-the-Beltway political call made by a six-person Parisian committee, with Unifrance president Margaret Menegoz said to be wielding the most influence.

“The committee figures La Vie en Rose has already had its day and is already a success,” a distribution exec confides, “and that this way Persepolis will mean France has two major award-quality films in the U.S. marketplace. The committee always wants to help the little films…it’s a political thing. Mexico did the same thing a few years ago when they didn’t select Y Tu Mama Tambien because it had already become a hit.”

The French committee is also figuring that La Vie en Rose is doubly ratified because Marion Cotillard, who plays Piaf, has it in the bag to get nominated for Best Actress. Cotillard probably is a lock, but it still seems like an odd internal political call.

Again, no slight intended for Persepolis, which after all shared the jury prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, has a 100% positive Rotten Tomatoes rating, and will close the New York Film Festival on 10.14. Sony Pictures Classics will open it in New York and L.A. on 12.25 with a limited wide release in January.

Because of his decision to executive produce a ten-part HBO miniseries based on Vincent Bugliosi‘s “Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” Tom Hanks is now officially in league with the lone-gunman gang and standing foursquare against the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists, which, in this context, places him in opposition to the beliefs of 75% of the American public.

Besides looking to debunk every last conspiratorial aspect of Oliver Stone‘s JFK (which you’d have to be a denial practitioner of the first order to discount altogether), Hanks has also come out in support of the magic bullet theory.

I haven’t read Bugliosi’s book, but I’ve read Gerald Posner‘s “Case Closed,” which was a well-written refutation that I personally found infuriating. It partly dislodged some of my persuasions about the Kennedy assassination, but it didn’t convert me either.

Hanks and producing partners Gary Goetzman and Bill Paxton can attempt to roll back a belief-and-suspicion system that I’ve held close to my chest all my life, but I will never, ever believe in the magic bullet…no way.

They could get in touch with Lee Harvey Oswald‘s ghost through a seance and digitally record a statement that he absolutely wasn’t in cahoots with anyone and I still wouldn’t buy the lone-gunman position. I’m a grassy-knoll crossfire guy all the way. Who isn’t? JFK conspiracy theorists are as American as apple pie — believing in the Dealey Plaza crossfire is analagous to being a Catholic or a Yankee or Red Sox fan. Believers in Oswald’s stand-alone guilt are, at best, like Christian Scientists or Scientologists.

I’ve looked out from the sixth-floor window of the old Texas School Book Depository Building, and I’ve stood behind the old wooden fence atop the grass knoll where the second gunman is believed to have fired from. Hanks, Geotzman and Paxton are contending that all those people who ran up the knoll after the shots were fired and reportedly saw or smelled remnants of gunsmoke in the air were…what, on drugs?

People believe in the lone-gunman theory because they want to; same for the conspiracy theorists. You can go with Posner and Bugliosi and line up all your Oswald-did-it-alone arguments and you’ll sound like you know your stuff cold, and you can also talk the standard conspiracy line and sound just as sharp and knowledgable. There’s no reconciling. Never the twain shall meet.

It does seem that men of an apparently conservative bent (“Enough of this wackjob conspiracy stuff…we’re taking over the argument!”) are in league with Posner and Bugliosi. And we all know that Hanks is at least a bit of a staunch traditionalist with his misty-eyed involvement in the legends of World War II and space travel and whatnot.

All that said, here‘s an interesting piece of computer simulation that supports the Hanks/Bugliosi/Posner position.

A guy from a dubious Manhattan-based outfit called Iced Media said a new trailer for Robert Zemeckis‘ Beowulf (Paramount, 11.16) would be up today, although that hasn’t been the case so far. (It’s 11:12 am in NYC as we speak.) Maybe it’ll be up later today. I hadn’t perused the red-band trailer (it went up on 9.4), but today’s disappointment inspired me to finally watch it. Excellent stuff.

Two factors in the forthcoming Indian Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (yep, a title that still sounds forced and a bit desperate) have been revealed: (a) Russian baddies and (b) the South American jungle. (Back to the locale where Raiders of the Lost Ark began, and thus completing the circle.) The Indy IVflick is set in the 1950s so obviously the Nazis (the gift that keeps on giving as long the film is set in the 1930s or ’40s) couldn’t fit the villain bill. Not much of a spoiler when you get down to it. AICN, quoting a piece by the Edmond Sun‘s James Coburn) has some more details.

At yesterday’s N.Y. Film Festival press conference for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, director Julian Schnabel hinted at a “juror controversy” at last May’s Cannes Film Festival that supposedly precluded Diving Bell from claiming this year’s Palme d’Or, which was handed to the Christian Mungiu‘s Romanian abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days.

The Reeler‘s Stu van Airsdale was at the press conference and is quoting Schnabel as saying that the Cannes jury “made some kind of a deal because it’s a political situation, and then I got Best Director — which is more than I ever bargained for. I shook hands with everybody, even if they didn’t vote for me. Like Michel Piccoli — I’m sure he didn’t. He’s a Communist, but I don’t have a problem with that either.”

The Cannes juries — all juries at all festivals — make deals like this all the time, or at least often enough. Nothing is pure, all politics are local.

Wes Anderson will wade into ground-level sensibilities when he makes a personal appearance following a Wednesday, 10.3 screening of The Darjeeling Limited at Santa Monica’s Aero theatre at 7:30 pm.

The gay bars in William Friedkin‘s Cruising “are portrayed as a kind of hell, photographed in a near-monochromatic black-and-blue color scheme, with an emphasis on heat, humidity, human sweat and sulfuric cigarette smoke,” writes N.Y. Times DVD columnist Dave Kehr. “Though some scenes were fogged up to avoid censorship for the initial release, they are now presented [on the just-released deluxe edition DVD] as Friedkin shot them.

“The film seems to be moving toward a generalized guilt, proposing new suspects at every turn — a homophobic but secretly gay policeman (Joe Spinell), a police captain with a mysterious agenda (Paul Sorvino), the psychotically jealous roommate (James Remar) of a lovable theater queen (Don Scardino) and ultimately Burns himself — all contained in the faceless figure of a man in a leather mask who pops up at key moments” and who later, per Friedkin’s somewhat unfocused strategy, turns out to be “a disappointingly trite perpetrator.”

Great — now those links to Times Select columns that I’ve been posting all along with be accessible to every Tom, Dick and Harry. “I’m fairly liberal to a degree, I want every online newspaper to be free…”

Nuno Antunes, a staffer at Portugal’s Premiere magazine, reports that the editors announced yesterday that the magazine is shutting down. “We received the news Monday,” Antunes writes, “and were caught by surprise. We’ll be closing the October edition this Friday. Our editor-in-chief made an official statement at our blog. Portugal will [henceforth] be without a movie magazine.”

So what else is new? Magazines are dropping like flies everywhere due to internet incursion. But Artunes believes that the French edition of Premiere is next on the chopping block. The Paris-based publication is where the whole Premiere empire began, so this (if it turns out to be ture) is fairly big news. “It is apparently the intention of the French-based Hachette group to close [other] editions of the magazine, as they did with the U.S. edition,” Antunes writes. “Our internal information is that the French edition is next.”

Here are some links to Portugese news stories about the closing that you’ll need an on-line translator for — story #1, story #2 and story #3.

In keeping with the candid, sometimes hyper-dramatic tone of this column, the emergency appendectomy performed on MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann last Friday (which I read about this morning on Jossip.com) had a heavy effect upon yours truly because (and I’m just going with a gut feeling here in more ways than one) something similar may be happening right here at HE central. I’m just saying this in case the column suffers a item/story stoppage later this afternoon, but it seems really weird that I would (a) read about Olbermann’s episode and then (b) suddenly develop the notion (literally seconds later) that I, too, may have a similar concern.

HE reader James Kent saw Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead last night in Pheonix as part of a special screening series, and says that he came out believing that “pretty much everything” I’ve said about this Sidney Lumet film “is true. Intense, tragic, awesome direction, powerful performances…in a way that reminded me a lot of A Simple Plan. Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke were great. As a matter of fact, when was the last time Hawke was so good?

“The crowd was primarily over 60 (the over-60 crowd in Phoenix will go to anything that’s free), maybe 6 people in their 20s, and the rest, like myself and my wife, in their 30s.

“The guy running the program told us that this was the first U.S. screening of the film and that it had just played Toronto and was getting ready to play the New York Film Festival next. He warned the audience that there was sex and violence and that if anyone can’t handle that type of thing, they should probably leave. He warned that he expected a few people to walk out anyway due to the violence ( I guess he’s used to these namby-pamby Phoenix crowds or something), but that he hoped people give it a chance because it is an amazing and powerful film.

“A lot will depend on how the rest of the year end films shape up, but this one could nab Lumet another Oscar nod for director, and you may see Ethan, Phillip and Albert Finney up for awards too. I’d throw in the editing and screenplay in that pool as well. The marketing push should be all about the great critical reaction. I give this film three and a half stars out of four.”

Yesterday David Hauslaib, Debbie Newman and Rebecca Aronauer‘s Jossip posted what looks like most of Jill Ishkanian‘s $55 million lawsuit against Us Weekly and her old bosses, particularly Ken Baker and Janice Min.

Us editors Janice Min, Ken Baker with Jill Ishkanian

I searched The Smoking Gun and they don’t have this….derelict, slacking off.

The lawsuit makes for extremely icky reading. What a nest of vipers! Straight out of a tawdry TV soap opera. Some people laugh at this stuff; I was mainly shaking my head.

It basically alleges that Baker, Us‘s former West Coast bureau chief (and then West Coast executive editor) occasionally marginalized and undermined Ishkanian while she worked at Us as a news reporter, and then, after Ishkanian left to former Sunset Photo Agency,may have been part of an information chain that led to the FBI raiding the offices of Sunset Photo Agency out of concern that Ishkanian may have taken or used contact information owned by Us (or so the lawsuit seems to imply). And yet no actions of any kind resulted from information gathered by this FBI raid.

For what it’s worth, I occasionally worked with Baker at People magazine during my stint there from ’96 to ’98. We did field reporting together in the Pacific Grove area after John Denver was killed in a plane crash in October ’97. He’s a good writer, a sharp and very thorough reporter, and a first-rate human being.