It was obvious from the get-go that Balls of Fury — the Chinese Chris Walken ping-pong comedy — wouldn’t be providing much in the way of wit, drollness or sophistication. It’s from the Reno 911 guys, and appears to be aping Shaolin Soccer and Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story. It’s tracking pretty well, though — a lot of people obviously snap-judging in its favor.

Not me, though. I’ll see anything with Walken, but I suspect from the trailer I won’t be able to handle Dan Fogler (School for Scoundrels), the guy with the massive pot belly and the man-beard and matted curly-squiggly hair who overacts like there’s a gun to his head. Clearly coming from a much more coarse and immoderate place than Jonah Hill. No offense, but no thanks.

The big eyeball-to-eyeball on 9.7 will be between two serious “guy” films — 3:10 to Yuma vs. Shoot “Em Up. One will surely prevail at the expense of the other, perhaps by a small margin, perhaps not. There’s no telling from today’s first tracking on these titles what will happen — it’s way too early, and the ad campaigns haven’t really started, much less kicked in — although a rudimentary spitball reading would give a slight edge to Shoot ‘Em Up. The Michael Davis-Don Murphy-Clive Owen actioner from New Line has a 27% general interest, a 29% definite interest and a 2% first choice while the James Mangold-Russell Crowe-Christian Bale western from Lionsgate is at 21, 16 and 1.

The gay-appealing metrosexual ad campaign for 3:10 to Yuma has apparently been shown the door. This is indicated, at least, by the new macho one-sheet. No bent legs or Bob Fosse posturings, no $850 leather Bloomingdale jackets…this new poster art is squarely aimed at baseball-game-attending, beer-swilling, flannel-shirt-wearing straight guys who liked Russell Crowe in Gladiator and Christian Bale in Batman Begins. (Cinematical‘s Kim Voynar alerted me to their exclusive link.)

I posted a link to this now-famous “Women in Film” montage earlier this month (around August 4th or 5th), and then the link went bad and then everyone ran the You Tube link which made me feel left out so here it is again….no harm in reacquainting.

The forward-step element is finally knowing that the auteur is some St.Louis guy named Phillip Scott Johnson (a.k.a. “eggman”), who describes himself on his My Space page as a “corporate nobody by day…artistic dreamer by night.” I tried calling him but there are eight “Phillip Johnson” listings in St. Louis. Vanity Fair or someone should track this guy down and do a profile of him.

I’d like to at least speak with the guy and see if he’s gotten any job offers (with some high-powered production company or ad agency, perhaps?) that might save him from “corporate nobody” status, or at least get him girls.

“I try not to put myself in the position of advocating on behalf of a film’s commercial prospects,” Pop Machine’s Mark Caro writes, “but I remember saying [at last January’s Sundance Film Festival] that I couldn’t believe that no distributor had yet bought Once”

“‘But how do you market it?’ one of the distributor’s acquisitions guys responded.

“‘As a movie that everyone loves,’ I said. ‘It’s a music movie, it’s a love story…’

“‘But music movies don’t sell,’ he said. Plus, the stars were unknown, and, you know, their everyday faces weren’t going to sell tickets.

“‘But everyone loves the movie,’ I insisted. ‘People are moved by it. It’ll have great word-of-mouth.’

“His response was an indulgent smile. Ah, naïve writer… thinking you can sell a movie on the basis of people loving it. Quaint.

“Well, sometimes naïve wins.”

Coast-to-coast alarm bells are ringing in DVD-aficionado circles in response to yesterday afternoon’s posting about the forthcoming Criterion Collection DVD of Days of Heaven (due 10.23), which has been described by producer-technician Lee Kline as deliberately unsweetened and “very different” from the previous version due to the input of director Terrence Malick, who wanted it to look as natural as possible. Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding…!!

Malick didn’t want the film to look” too postcard-like” so the watchword during the color correction session was “not too pretty,” says Kline. The “gold and the warmth” were taken out, the transfer went “to a really different place” than previous versions, and what emerged was something “beautiful but boy, was it different!,” he writes. “I told Terry people were really going to be pretty surprised by this new transfer, since it was such a radical departure from before,” Kline relates, but Malick said it was “perfect.”

Obviously aware of Days of Heaven‘s rep as one of the most hauntingly beautiful narrative films of the 20th Century (Nestor Almendros‘ naturalistic magic-hour photography is a hallmark) and probably anticipating fan reactions to terms like “really different” and “radical departure,” Kline ends his piece with a dash of backtrack-sidestep exuberance.

“Back at Criterion a couple of weeks later, our New York crew went to work on the restoration. I came into the room where Betsy Heistand was cleaning up some damaged frames, and I said, ‘So, what do you think?” She said, ‘It’s beautiful.’ I had to see it again for myself to make sure we really did everything right, since I was still a bit nervous about how different it was from the old transfer (especially with DVD Beaver around!).

“I sat down in our QC room, turned off the lights, and watched the entire film on our great 24-inch Sony Pro-monitor. Betsy was right: it was beautiful. Days of Heaven finally looked the way it should, and I got goose bumps once again.”

I saw Days of Heaven in 70mm at the Cinema 1in 1978, and no viewings since have ever come close in terms of basic visual grandeur. It seems inconceivable that Malick would change his mind about how the film should look over the last 29 years, so the Criterion DVD will most likely replicate the way the film looked under the best circumstances way back when, in a tip-top screening facility.

Still, one wonders what Kline really and truly means by this Malick-approved DVD being a “radical departure,” and whether or not he isn’t just protecting his political ass by writing a nice upbeat closing graph so no one will get upset, no ruffled feathers.

I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski, a new fan book aimed at the amiable, libation-enjoying, somewhat ADD-afflicted fan base and written by Bill Green, Ben Peskoe, Scott Shuffitt and Will Russell, will hit stores on Tuesday, 8.21. And on 10.12.07, the two-day L.A. Lebowskifest kicks off at the Knitting Factory and wraps at some blue-collar bowling alley in Carson the following night. (Tickets will go on sale tomorrow at 1 pm via Ticket Web.)

I’ve never gone to a Lebowskifest adnhave never so much as sipped a White Russian, but I’d like to attend the October thing. There are some who look upon the culture with a certain disdain or distaste. Steve Buscemi (“Donny”) has gone on record as saying he would never fraternize with Lebowskifest types, and I’m fairly certain Philip Seymour Hoffman has never attended either. Very bright fellows, these two, but…well, they are who they are.

An mp3 clip from the film, recorded this morning, and an HE Lebowskifest piece than ran in early ’05.

Which reminds me — where are the documentaries about the Lebowski culture? I was told two and a half years ago about three — one that was being worked on by “a couple named Robin and Rose Roman,” another by “a guy named John Nee, who has an outfit called Idiot Works and who also works for Adam Sandler‘s Happy Madison production company” and a third that was called Over the Line, directed by an L.A. guy named Eddie Chung.

As reported by Vinyl Fever, The Playlist and The Oregonian‘s Shawn Levy (who has stopped sending me his stuff since my last link to his column alluded in an admittedly short-tempered way to the ever-present dangers of being regarded as a “list queen”), 33 cuts will be included on the I’m Not There soundtrack album that’s being released on 10.30. This isn’t good enough. We need to go beyond lists and see links posted to leaked tracks…a track here, a track there. Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova‘s cover of You Ain’t Goin ‘Nowhere would be nice.

The Toronto Film Festival foreign-film selections that are popping out at first glance: Ang Lee‘s Lust, Caution, Ken Loach‘s It’s a Free World, Francois Ozon‘s Angel, Hans Weingartner‘s Reclaim Your Brain, Amos Gitai’s Desengagement, Hector Babenco‘s The Past, Nick Broomfield‘s Battle for Haditha, Sarah Gavron‘s Brick Lane, Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen‘s Jellyfish (the Camera d’Or winner at Cannes) and and Frank Whaley‘s New York City Serenade.

I haven’t gotten my usual Thursday numbers yet, but Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason is projecting Superbad as the weekend’s #1 film with a significantly higher figure than I’d previously estimated — about $27.5 million. (I was thinking more like $21 or $22 million, maybe a bit more.) Rush Hour 3 will be second with about $22 milion and The Bourne Ultimatum will come in third with $19. 3 million. Mason foresees The Invasion earning $11 million or so. I see it doing more like $10 million.

Superbad is in solid with under-25 males, but it has an across-the board general awareness of only 54%. Think about that for twenty seconds. Think of all the great reviews, word-of-mouth, advance screenings and constant internet attention that Greg Mottola‘s film has acquired over the last two or three weeks. You’d really have to be unconscious in a cave with earplugs to have missed all the hype, and yet 46% of the people contacted by phone trackers are still going “huh?” — they haven’t even heard of it.

Where do they find these people? How can anyone be walking around this blocked? Do they have corks in their ears? Are they mentally challenged?

I saw In The Shadow of the Moon (ThinkFilm, 9.7) again this evening — still a deeply moving “spirit movie” in the most celestial sense of that term — and later on shook hands with the great Buzz Aldrin, the Apollo 11 astronaut who became the second human to walk on the moon (on 7.20.69) and the first guy ever to take a leak on the moon, a fact revealed in the film. Read Buzz’s Wikipedia bio, and zero in on the short paragraph titled “Confrontation with Bart Sibrel” — my kind of astronaut.

Buzz Aldrin outside Clarity screening room in Beverly Hills — 8.15.07, 10:10 pm

Two years after tanking in Toronto, John Turturro‘s Romance and Cigarettes, a New York working-class karoake musical that isn’t all that bad, will open at Manhattan’s Film Forum on September 7th. The distributor is Turturro himself, and the stay at the Houston Street megaplex is being described by the Hollywood Reporter‘s Gregg Goldstein as “open-ended.” It’s not a total wipeout. James Gandolfini‘s first singing scene and Chris Walken‘s dancing-with-the-cops number have a certain something-or-other.