I was generally pleased with James Mangold‘s 3:10 to Yuma after seeing it the first time, although I had issues and irritations here and there. Then I saw it a second time and those little gnarlies grew on me. And yet I still “liked” it well enough. It’s a moderately decent, straight-up western with a terrific second act and top-notch perfs from Russell Crowe and Christian Bale. And a popular reception seems assured with the current 87% Rotten Tomatoes rating and the 90% positive responses to last Sunday’s sneak.

In fact, there’s such a thumbs-up Yuma consensus that I now feel free to rag on it some. I’ve already mentioned Ben Foster‘s hugely annoying mad-dog villain, and I’ve griped about that ridiculous bit at the end with Crowe’s horse hearing that whistle despite the loudly chugging train engine and subsequently galloping alongside the train in order to…what? Follow the shackled Crowe all the way to Yuma prison and then graze outside the prison walls for a few weeks or months while he plots his third escape?

My other beefs (and let’s get the spoiler warning out of the way right now) are, in no particular order…

* For me, there’s no sense of actors reading lines and giving attention-seeking, strutting-around performances in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (although they were obviously working from a script or plan of some kind), but I felt assaulted — “pecked” is a better word — by actory business all though 3:10 to Yuma, including Crowe’s. (His charisma makes it work.) I just never got around the feeling that I was watching paid actors dressed in western gear and covered in makeup that makes them look as if they haven’t bathed in several weeks. Is what I’m saying analogous to David Denby‘s thought as he watched Cameron Crowe‘s Elizabethtown that he could hear film running through the projector gate? On some level, yes.

* Why give Bale’s “Dan Evans” character a wooden peg leg? It doesn’t pay off or figure significantly in the action, and there’s only one brief shot in which we’re shown a glimpse of it (i.e., after he’s been knocked to the ground during the barn-burning scene). I didn’t need it, and neither did Bale. His character is beaten-down enough at the beginning for other reasons.

* Bale looks at that locket or trinket — each time with an insert shot — at least four times during the film. (It might even be five.) Twice would have been okay. I got irritated when he did it the third time, and the fourth time was, like, “C’mon!”

* I was deeply irritated at Kevin Durand‘s “Tucker” character, and particularly Mangold’s reluctance to rein him in. At least his standard-issue sadist scumbag performance pays off when Crowe stabs him to death in the neck with a fork…yes! This is one reason I like the second act as much as I do.

* The press notes explain that Mangold had a snow issue as he shot the climactic shoot-put scene in the town of Contention. You can see snow in the distance in a few shots — sometimes blanketed, sometimes with spotty patches. And yet the streets of Contention are pure brown because Mangold made a decision to bring in truckloads of soil to make everything nice and uniform. Except snow is a lot more visually interesting than dirt. If I’d directed I would have brought in snow machines instead. A picky-ass thing to bitch about, I realize.

* Why does Crowe decide to seduce Vinessa Shaw‘s barkeep character in that early, post-stagecoach robbery scene when he knows it’s dangerous to hang around? Foster and the other gang members, who take off on their own, are obviously aware of the risk, but Crowe can’t be bothered. It just seems like a lazy and stupid thing to do. Crowe’s attitude (i.e., not his “Ben Wade” character’s) seems to be, “Well, she’s definitely pretty and receptive and I know I can nail her despite my stinky whisky breath. My confidence is based upon two factors — one, I’m Russell Crowe and two, if I don’t get caught there won’t be any story about putting me on the 3:10 to Yuma, so it’s a nice way to spend time until the lawmen get here.”

A more satisfying way to go would have been Crowe trying do her quickly, but with Shaw going cold on the idea because she’s not being treated like a lady and a seduction tension starting up between them — “It’s not like you’re not the most beautiful woman I’ve seen in these parts — you are — but the law’s on my tail and I value my freedom” — and while this is happening the law busts in anyway and grabs him. This I would have been cool with.

“As a regular reader from Norway, I’d like to open your eyes towards a TIFF screening from my home country. I know you’ve fought the good cause for Mozart and the Whale, but you should know Its Norwegian director Petter Naess (also nominated for Elling back in ’02) hasn’t been sitting still. His new feature Gone with the Woman is having its out-of-country premiere at Toronto, and yesterday it was chosen as Norway’s Best Foreign Film entry for the Oscars.

At my recently launched English-language film blog, Subtitles to Cinema, I’ve just published a riff about Gone with the Woman — check it out if you’re interested.” — Karsten Meinich

London’s Daily Mail has a very cool and clean Valkyrie group shot of the actors playing the anti-Hitler conspirators along with corresponding pics and brief descriptions of each real-life conspirator. It’s good to see Stamp, Nighy and Branagh among Cruise’s allies. The MGM (via United Artists) release of Bryan Singer‘s film is set for 6.27.08.

(l. to .r.) (1) Kevin McNally, (2) Christian Berkel, (3) Bill Nighy, (4) Tom Cruise, (5) Terence Stamp, (6) David Schofield and (7) Kenneth Brannagh

If you go looking for Time‘s pre-Toronto Film Festival coverage online you’ll have to dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig (like the Seven Dwarfs in the diamond mine), which is strange considering that the TIFF is on the cover of Time‘s Canadian print edition. But the stories, written last week by Richard Corliss, Susan Catto and Rebecca Winters-Keegan are there — one about the hot tickets, one about TIFF co-chiefs Piers Handling and Noah Cowan, one about three local TIFF junkies.

In the opening graph of the Handling-Cowan profile, Corliss writes that “you know your film festival is a hit when people nearly kill each other to get into the screening of a movie they couldn’t be paid to see elsewhere. At last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, that film was the British docudrama Death of a President, which imagined the assassination of George W. Bush and the tracking of his killer. Outside the theater, people begged to get in as if it were the one and only Beatles reunion. Yet when the film opened in North America a month later, it earned just $519,086. No matter, at least to festival junkies. Toronto — TIFF to its fans — had chalked up another sensation.”

Well, c’mon…the struggle to catch every film at just about any film festival has the same after-residue. It is hugely important to get into a film (and sometimes it actuallly is), but when I don’t get there in time and I can’t wangle my way in, I calm myself down by saying that nine months from now, the film I’m trying to see will be on the shelf at Lazer Blazer…and chances are I’ll rent something else when I come across it.

The response I’ve gotten is that the movie is incredibly violent,” Eastern Promises director David Cronenberg tells critic Amy Taubin. “And I keep saying, ‘Did you see The Departed? The body count there and the brains all over the wall?’ But some people seem to feel that this movie is more violent than The Departed. So then, what are you talking about? You’re not talking about how many incidents, because The Departed has dozens and we have four. Somehow, it’s the close-up, the intensity, the carrying-through.” (from the current issue of Film Comment.)

“In 2004 the Academy Awards show was moved to late February, the Golden Globes and other awards programs went even earlier, and the studios had one [less] month for their movies to benefit from Oscar-related publicity,” reports Chicago Tribune entertainment reporter Mark Caro in a piece that basically says that October is the new December as far as the Oscar race is concerned.

“So instead of going wide with movies in January and even February of the following year, the studios began releasing many of their Oscar contenders well before New Year’s to help them gain traction with awards voters as well as the public.

“Of last year’s best picture nominees, only Letters From Iwo Jima was released after October. For the others — The Departed, Little Miss Sunshine, The Queen and Babel — the Oscar ‘bump’ was felt in DVD sales. ‘The studios are still doing their Oscar pushes, but in years past they used to start at Christmas, and now they finish at Christmas,’ said Tom Bernard, Sony Picture Classics co-president.”

That’s not true — they keep campaigning until the Academy’s Oscar nomination deadline time, which is on or about January 20th. (Or something like that.) And then it’s on to Phase Two.

3:10 to Yuma costar Peter Fonda tells his “She Said She Said” story to the Toronto Globe and Mail‘s Stephen Cole in today’s edition: “We were at my place in Benedict Canyon, and someone had given John and George a dose, which is unacceptable.” (Somebody slipped it into their drink, he means?) “George was wrecked. He kept saying, `I’m dying.’ I said, `I know what it’s like to be dead.’ Then I told him the story about how I shot myself when I was a little boy. John was looking at me, horrified, and he said, `No, no, you’re wrong.’ Then I heard the song ‘She Said She Said‘ on Revolver. It was all there.”

Henceforth it’s just “the Wachowskis” — no more “brothers” — because the former Larry Wachowski is definitely, fully and biologically “Lana” these days. That took a while, no? His/her intention to do a “gender reassignment” was announced four years ago, but it actually took more like three years. According to this 7.21.06 report on a site called Rated-M.com, Larry’s intention to opt for womanhood in the summer of ’03 (the news broke just before the debut of The Matrix Reloaded) was substantially complete as of last summer.

Lana and Andy Wachowski

A more recent report that ran on 8.28.07 said Lana “will actually speak to the press” — possibly an exclusive chat with Dateline NBC — about the sex-change thing down the road, but not until Speed Racer (Warner Bros., 5.8.08) has opened. No junket appearances for Lana, the report says, because “the current feeling is that his sex change could hurt the family image that Speed Racer film is going for.”

I can understand the motive in Warner Bros. wanting to play Lana down for the sake of Speed Racer box-office, if a junket duck-out has in fact been planned. (It’s many months off so I doubt it.) But shouldn’t we all be trying to relax about this and accept things as they are and not pretend there’s something askew?

Hiding from the press doesn’t feel like an enlightened move on Lana’s part. She’s obviously a talented director and something of a visionary (although the Wachowskis’ work on the re-shoots of The Invasion have called this notion into question), and in a perfect world she would sit down, look people in the eye and talk about the work.

This Nicole Kidman shot has been used for the cover of the new Vanity Fair. White bra, milky-creamy alabaster skin, a push for Margot at the Wedding. The interview highlights are summarized in a Daily Mail piece, but gazing works better.

Sony chairman and CEO Michael Lynton has written a Wall Street Journal piece that says because American films and TV shows are taking ideas from other nations and cultures and vice versa, “What can be seen in the cinemas and on television screens from Bangalore to Barcelona these days is any indication, globalization does not mean homogeneity. It means heterogeneity.”

Wait a minute…uhmm, that means “the quality or state of being heterogeneous; composition from dissimilar parts; disparateness.”

“Instead of one voice, there are many,” Lynton continues. “Instead of fewer choices, there are more. And instead of a uniform, Americanized world, there remains a rich and dizzying array of cultures, all of them allowing thousands of movies and televisions shows to bloom.

“Audiences around the world are applauding this explosion of home-grown content, because for them, Hollywood is not simply a place in Southern California. It is a symbol of an entertainment culture which is becoming as diverse as it is universal.”

This is why I keep a safety pin near me at all times.

Hand of fate #1: “And what is that, John? What? Bad luck. That’s all it is. I pray in your life you will never find it runs in streaks. That’s what it does, that’s all it’s doing. Streaks. I pray it misses you. That’s all I want to say.” — Shelley “the Machine” Levene in Glengarry Glen Ross.

Hand of fate #2: “So you’ve had a bad couple of months. Well, I’m sorry, but I’ll tell you what you do and it’s no different if you’re J. Paul Getty or Irving the Tailor — you ride it out.” — Lawrence Tierney‘s “Joe Cabot” in Quentin Tarantino‘s Reservoir Dogs.