Cheers to Landmark marketer Madelyn Hammond for brokering a deal between Samsung and Landmark Theatres to promote independent film, beginning with the arrival of Sean Penn‘s Into the Wild (Paramount Vantage, 9.21). Marc Graser‘s 9.16 Variety story said the “strategy isn’t meant to push a specific Samsung product but to bolster the company’s brand image among American consumers, especially the affluent auds that indies attract.”

David Sington‘s In the Shadow of the Moon may be the only patriotic, hooray-for-America film I’ve ever truly enjoyed and felt good about afterwards. Since I was in college, I mean. This obviously says as much as about me as it does about the film, but what has this country done besides spearheading the defeat of Nazi Germany and exporting awesome cultural stuff (rock music, hamburgers, iPods, good movies) that’s been seen as 100% beneficial to mankind besides the space program? Think about it.

We have truly come a long way over the last 35 to 45 years. In the heyday of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space programs we were seen (at least in part) as can-do god guys, and today our foreign policy moves have made us the most loathed and despised big industrial country anywhere. The specific targets aren’t U.S. citizens as much as the Bushie neocons running the show, but we’re still vying for the title of being the most hated country of all time after Nazi Germany.

I’d kind of forgotten that the space program, although it was mainly seen at the time as a technical triumph by an elite club of white-collar scientists and bureaucrats, was a real ray of light. I love the slogan on the poster: “Remember when the whole world looked up.”

In The Shadow of the Moon is basically a lot of handsome digitally restored footage of the Apollo moon missions intercut with some very appealing (i.e., intimate, even vulnerable-seeming) interviews with a few retired astronauts — Buzz Aldrin, Alan Bean, Eugene Cernan, Michael Collins (my favorite of the bunch), Jim Lovell, Edgar D. Mitchell, Harrison Schmit, Dave Scott and John Young. And it just works. It’s all about personal impressions, feelings, what it was like from deep within. It’s a genuine high, this film. It really gets hold of something and massages it just right.

The best moment comes when Collins describes reactions around the world to the first Moon landing (which he was a part of). “Everywhere people were saying instead of saying, well, you Americans did it…everywhere they said we did it, the human race, people…we did it. And I thought that was a wonderful thing.”

Here’s another In The Valley of Elah rave, written by the New Yorker‘s David Denby, that all the Haggis haters and Elah dissers need to gang up on and dismiss before it has any influence upon anyone who might be half-persuaded this could be a film of true merit.

Charlize Theron, Tommy Lee Jones (illustration by Lara Tomlin)

C’mon, guys, you know the drill….piss away. But one thing you can’t piss on, and that’s the fact that Denby knows how to write. Read this piece and tell me it doesn’t arouse your taste buds, even if you’ve seen Elah. (I’ve seen it three times and it made me want to go back again.)

Warner Independent would be well-advised to turn the entire review into a big cardboard standee and put it in theatre lobbies everywhere.

Denby’s riff on Elah star Tommy Lee Jones is the best part: “In his long movie career, Jones has never wasted a word or an emotion. When he’s silent, his glinting eyes and suppressed smile suggest a secret held in reserve. When he speaks, at Gatling-gun speed, the words come out as definitive. There’s no arguing with this man; he doesn’t give you an opening. He says only what he wants to say, and he delivers his lines with commanding off-kilter intonations (rising when you would expect falling, or just deadpan).

“Jones is the driest and most thoroughly stylized of American movie stars — a natural-born hipster wit — but he’s not a lightweight. Even in a spoof like Men in Black, his ease and quickness carried authority (and he didn’t let the grinning Will Smith ace him out).

“In Paul Haggis‘s In the Valley of Elah, Jones plays a Vietnam vet and former M.P., Hank Deerfield, whose son, Mike, after serving in Iraq, has gone AWOL in America. Jones has portrayed military men before, but Hank Deerfield is the role of a lifetime, and he has stripped himself of any vestige of vanity to play it.

“The vertical lines in his face run deeper than ever; a ten-dollar haircut exposes his big ears. Suddenly, he’s a primal American image — awkwardly iconic, with a creased-leather face from a Depression photograph — and he gives a great, selfless, and heartbreaking performance that completely dominates this elusive but powerful movie.

“Haggis, the writer-director of Crash, has done something shrewd: he has mounted a devastating critique of the Iraq war by indirection. Rather than dramatizing, say, the disillusion of a young soldier as he experiences the chaos of the occupation, he has moved disillusion into the soul of a military father. And the anguish that the father feels is all the more affecting because it’s held in check by Jones’s natural reticence.”

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…”