In yesterday’s (8.31) L.A. Times, there were two wise and well-phrased thoughts — one about cutting, another about scoring — from What Just Happened? director Barry Levinson, as told to critic Michael Sragow.

Quote #1: “In my mind, I have a scheme about how a scene is supposed to work and what’s needed in each scene. But then you hope that a scene doesn’t suddenly come apart in the editing room so that you’re fighting for its life. Sometimes the scene in front of it is affecting it in some way. And there are all these little surprises that come about. Sometimes you find holding back on some moment makes it all the stronger. It’s extraordinary how much impact a particular cut from one shot to another can have. The mathematics of, ‘We need to extend this shot for six more frames,’ and suddenly with those six frames I feel something there, that moment, and that’s all there is — it’s just extraordinary.”

Quote #2: “Music has a huge effect. You have to find the voice of the music. You don’t want to push the movie emotionally. You have to allow it to breathe on its own.”

What Just Happened?, an inside-Hollywood drama based on Art Linson‘s sardonic roman a clef that was partly about the difficult making of The Edge, the trying-really-hard-not-to-get eaten-by-an-Alaskan-grizzly-bear movie with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin that came out ten years ago.

Levinson shot it a few months ago after toning up the the script. I’ve read the untrammelled Linson version. It’s not The Cherry Orchard but it’s a knowing, real-feeling piece about a barely-holding-it-together producer, in the way that Robert Redford and Michael Ritchie‘s The Candidate was a clever take on early ’70s politics. It will open sometime in ’08.

A slimmed-down, stunningly youth-ified Robert DeNiro (he was looking like a turn-of-the-century Russian wheat farmer for a while there — here he looks like he did in Midnight Run) plays the Linson character. Bruce Willis and Sean Penn play themselves; the costars include Stanley Tucci, John Turturro, Kristen Stewart, Robin Wright Penn and Catherine Keener.

During his Esquire magazine encounter with Sean Penn, Scott Raab follows the director-writer of Into The Wild into the Beverly Hills hotel and encounters Jack Nicholson, and they all retire to the lounge for drinks. Penn mentions that Emile Hirsch, the star of the Paramount Vantage release (and who gives his finest performance of his relatively new career), lost forty pounds over the course of Wild‘s eight-month shooting schedule,” Nicholson “chuckles” and says, “I just played a guy dying of cancer and I didn’t lose an ounce.”

He’s talking about Rob Reiner‘s The Bucket List (Warner Bros., 12.25) , and like I said a few days ago, playing a well-fed cancer patient doesn’t work all that well. My 8.14 posting said that “the closer you are to the end the thinner you tend to be, [and that] even cancer copers with another year to go tend to look a little bit drawn and under-fed.” But that’s Jack for you. The chuckling, I mean.

In the same Esquire piece, Nicholson laments that “moviegoers are no longer able to connect emotionally with a good old-fashioned film,” according to Scott Raab‘s paraphrasing. “It’s like a dead nerve,” Nicholson says. “A whole generation — maybe two generations now — all they know are special effects. Not just all they know. That’s all they want.”

But Penn later disputes this. “They’ll get back there,” he says of audiences (but without specifying GenX or GenY). “Chocolate cake is not a need [but] a luxury. Dreaming is a need — a survival need. And it can pass up epochs — generations can die off — but it’s in the DNA of mankind. It cycles back to the point where people say, ‘No, no, no — I’m not gonna not dream. I’m not gonna not feel. Even if you get a numb generation, that’s not the death of it. It has an Easter.

“I’m committed to the idea — and I always have been — that the audience doesn’t always know that they’re being lied to. And the lies do have damage that they leave behind. But there’s always hope that they know when they’re being told the truth.”

Okay, but it’s not “truth” plain and gleaming that people go to movies for. They go to movies for the myths that they feel they need to open up to and embrace at a given moment — myths that augment or counter-balance whatever the prevailing need or neurosis or hunger might be. If a film settles in deep and true and delivers a certain thing that people feel they want (the awareness of which is sometimes subconcious), it has a chance of catching on.

Because I despise those Esquire magazine “sexiest woman alive” mystery pieces that dingle-dangle for two or three months before naming the actress, I’m going to spoil the current one. The chosen lady is Charlize Theron, and the quotes are from In The Valley of Elah director-writer Paul Haggis. So there.

Martin Gero‘s Young People Fucking, which will show at the Toronto Film Festival on 9.6, 9.7 and 9.8, “lives up to its title — or down to it, depending on your point of view,” according to NOW’s John Harkness. His boilerplate description — “a smart comedy following five couples, in once case a trio, through an evening’s sexual encounters that reflect various elements of the relationships” — is counter-balanced by an admission that “it ain’t La Ronde [although] it succeeds within its own self-imposed limits.” But I’m going to see it (probably, maybe) because Harkness claims “it has the funniest single line in any movie this year.”

Every so often a film is re-named by critics and moviegoers in a way that sticks because the smart-ass title seems like a better, more dead-on thing to call it. Whenever I think back to The Legend of Bagger Vance (which is not often), I always laugh at the title that (according to a friend) some wag at Entertainment Weekly had given it — Bag of Gas. In the same tradition an HE reader recently renamed Robert Benton‘s Feast of Love (MGM, 9.28), which I haven’t seen but is said to contain ample nudity, as Feast of Tits. A lame and sophomoric shorthand, yes, but funny if you’ve had a couple of beers. I suspect it’s already making its way into the lexicon.

Surely there have been other good retitlings over the years. I’m leaving it up to the readership to name them. I’m talking about ones that have actually gotten around and settled in. No cheap-ass, on-the-spot retitlings that someone might think up just to put a movie down.

John Cusack has been in 50 films so far, and out of these, he tells the Guardian‘s Ryan Gilbey, ten have been “good.” I would say it’s more like twelve — The Sure Thing, Eight Men Out, Say Anything, The Grifters, Bullets Over Broadway, Grosse Pointe Blank, Con Air, The Thin Red Line, Being John Malkovich, High Fidelity, 1408 and Grace is Gone. (I haven’t seen Martian Child, but isn’t that supposed to be reasonably decent as well? Maybe not.)

John Cusack, Kirk Douglas

On top of which Max, Identity and Pushing Tin weren’t half bad also, and Cusack had a tiny part in Broadcast News also. So let’s make it 15 or 16. To be genuinely or somewhat proud with slightly less than a third of the films you’ve made over the last 24 years is, I think, a pretty good track record.

Put in perspective, this is a better percentage than Kirk Douglas managed to rack up over the course of his 89-film career.

Douglas said almost the exact same thing to me in a chat we had in ’82 — “I’ve made a lot of crap but I’ve made a pretty fair number of good ones also, and that ain’t bad.” By my count, Douglas made 17 films that are either good, very good or classic-level — Out of the Past, A Letter to Three Wives, Champion, Young Man With a Horn, The Glass Menagerie, Ace in the Hole, Detective Story, The Big Sky, The Bad and the Beautiful, Lust for Life, Paths of Glory, The Vikings (love that film!), The Devil’s Disciple, Spartacus, Two Weeks in Another Town, Lonely Are The Brave and Seven Days in May. And they were made over a 17 year run (’47 to ’64).

Cusack started earlier (he was 16 or 17 when he made Class) while Douglas’s career didn’t really get going until he was pushing 30, but Cusack is nonetheless batting about .300 while Douglas’s lifetime average is less than .200.

Until fifteen minutes ago I had never once analogized Cusack and Douglas. I don’t think anyone else has either, and I doubt if anyone ever will again. But they’ve both tried very hard (when at all possible) to be in films of quality, and they’ve done better than most in this respect.

The teenage hormonals and cultural cretins are in the process of rewarding the MGM/Weinstein/Rob Zombie Halloween — a $10 million-plus earner yesterday and a projected $35 million grosser by Monday night — and thereby helping to balance the books on all the Harvey Weinstein projects that don’t as a rule tend to bring in huge amounts of dough (i.e., I’m Not There), which is obviously a good thing.

So let’s hear it for ebb and flow and ecological balance, etc. But what does it say about a moviegoing culture that goes apeshit for Rob Zombie’s latest but will, in all likelihood, blow off or minimally patronize The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford when it opens three weeks from now?

Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason is declaring that Halloween “will easily become the all-time #1 4-day Labor Day weekend champion, but who could have guessed that it would come in 44% above previous record-holder Transporter 2?” And it’s probably the first box-office breakout Malcolm McDowell has been in since Blue Thunder or Time After Time.

So it’s good news all around and I recognize that Zombie is is a respectable craftsman, but getting flush off a movie like this is like lining your pockets from selling heroin.

I was told that earlier this week that the review date for Andrew Dominik‘s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Warner Bros., 9.21) would be Tuesday, 9.4 — a curious guideline that didn’t take into account the imminent unveiling at the Venice Film Festival. The bottom line is that Variety‘s Todd McCarthy and the Hollywood Reporter‘s Kirk Honeycutt went with reviews earlier today — a euphoric rave and a sneering pan, respectively.

I’m too travel-whipped to tap out an opinion — it’s 11:05 pm and I’m fading fast — but McCarthy’s take is the one to consider and trust. Don’t even read the Honeycutt — it’s not even there.

This is a major “art western” of the first order — one of the most immaculate and uncannily “right” time-machine visits into a bygone world ever put to the screen. As far from a post-modern shoot-em-up as you can get and not even a contender in the ways of the rousing, rip-snortin’ Wild Bunch, this is one of those awesomely assembled visitations that just sinks in like a sunovabitch. It makes you sit right up and forget everything except for the novelistic richness and aliveness of what’s filling the screen. Either a movie like this is “in the zone” or it isn’t, and Jesse James‘ worth is unquestionable in this respect. Any film maven who doesn’t recognize this simple fact has, no offense, his head up his ass.

I’ll grant that the story meanders in the middle (only nitpicky soreheads will make a big thing out of this…an urge that never once crossed my mind) and that Dominik’s theme about twisted hero worship and the hunger for celebrity is not the most rousing I’ve considered or absorbed (although it’s servicable enough), but the bottom line is that this is a movie about cinematic painterliness of a stunningly fine pedigree, and sometimes this is entirely enough in itself. And to this end kudos are due to not only Dominik but cinematographer Roger Deakins.

As McCarthy allows, “Even those who resist the film itself will be in awe of its surpassing visual beauty and consummate craftsmanship. Just when it seemed that…Deakins had achieved another career high with No Country for Old Men, he trumps himself yet again, here using a subdued palette of parched-plains earth tones captured with an extraordinary luminosity and delicacy.”

As I watched Jesse James the closest atmospheric analogies among westerns I could think of were Terrence Malick‘s Days of Heaven and Philip Borsos‘ The Grey Fox. McCarthy also brings up McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, Bad Company, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, Jeremiah Johnson, The Outlaw Josey Wales, The Long Riders and Heaven’s Gate.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is “a ravishing, magisterial, poetic epic that moves its characters toward their tragic destinies with all the implacability of a Greek drama,” he begins, and is thereby “one of the best Westerns of the 1970s, which represents the highest possible praise. It’s a magnificent throwback to a time when filmmakers found all sorts of ways to refashion Hollywood’s oldest and most durable genre.”

Woke at 5 this morning, Toronto plane took off at 7:05, arrived around 2:25 pm, unloaded and unpacked, walked down Bloor and then south from Bloor and Spadina down to Chinatown in search of a SIM card for my European-purchased cell phone (which took a while), discovered to my frustration that European-purchased cell phone bands don’t work in Canada, bought a cheapie cell with a SIM card so I’d have something to work with, sat down for some Chinese, walked around some, walked the dog, etc. Tomorrow is another day.

Bloor Street line — Friday, 8.31.07, 8:55 pm

GreenCine Daily’s summation of Venice Film Festival reactions to Brian DePalma‘s Redacted — three yays (from the Hollywood Reporter‘s Ray Bennett, the Telegraph’s David Grittten and Alternet’s Adam Howard) and one nay (from Variety‘s Derek Elley) — obviously raises the want-to-see for Toronto Film Festival folk.

At issue is not just the film itself but the long-awaited redemption of DePalma, which many are very keen to see happen. I’m even including myself in this group, despite my having been cold on DePalma for many, many years. I had written him off, frankly. I started to write him off after The Fury. His last half-decent effort was Carlito’s Way, and even that had problems. I don’t want to go over the potholes again. What matters is that DePalma might be back in the game again…maybe.

The differences betwen Robert Koehler‘s Variety review of Paul Haggis‘s In The Valley of Elah (Warner Independent, 9.14 and 9.21) and my own opinion thing-dingie, which I ran last month, aren’t as profound as they may seem.

The only serious divide is Koehler feeling it’s “too self-serious to work as a straight-ahead whodunit and too lacking in imagination to realize its art-film aspirations” while I believe it exemplifies the kind of films that never seem to be doing all that much, but then gradually sneak up on you, laying groundwork and planting seeds and lighting all kinds of fires and feelings. Koehler is wrong, but I respect his intellect and perceptions. It’s just an honest different of opinion.

Otherwise, we both admire Tommy Lee Jones‘ performance and Roger Deakins‘ cinematography, and we both have problems with Mark Isham‘s score and particularly an Annie Lennox song that Haggis stuck on to the very end of the film — an element that wasn’t in the version I saw several weeks ago.

What Keohler seems to miss is that Elah isn’t some concoction, some tricks-of-the-trade movie that’s mainly about pushing buttons and playing audiences like an organ. It’s primarily about respecting real-life experience and refining this into art. Haggis’s screenplay is based on a true story that happened in the summer of ’03, and was first reported a year later in a Playboy magazine article by Mark Boal, called “Death and Dishonor.”

It came from Boal interviewing Lanny Davis, a former U.S. Army M.P., about the death of his son, who had been reported AWOL following a tour of duty in Baghdad. Haggis bought the rights and created a somewhat fictionalized version, although he stuck to the basic bones.

The result, as I said several weeks back, is “more than just a respectable true-life drama, and a helluva lot more than the sum of its parts. I think it’s close to an epic-level achievement because it’s four well-integrated things at once — a first-rate murder-mystery, a broken-heart movie about parents and children and mistakes, a delivery device for an Oscar-level performance by Tommy Lee Jones, and a tough political statement about how the Iraq War furies are swirling high and blowing west and seeping into our souls.”