HE reader Dan Gaertner grabbed some Tim Burton/Sweeney Todd music off the official website when they tested it for about three minutes this morning. The clip, he says, is missing a “huge bell “in the beginning, which I presume means some kind of big Notre Dame-like Sunday morning goohhhnng.

There’s a fairly legit-looking full trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood (Paramount Vantage, 12.26) on MySpace.com. They’re calling it an exclusive. If it’s not an official trailer, it’s a pretty good rip-off of one by somebody with talent and access to the materials. Love watching Daniel Day Lewis in every clip…an endlessly fascinating actor. You can tell Paul Dano, portraying a religious wackjob type, is going to be intense, but then he always is.

My second viewing this evening of Anton Corbijn‘s Control (Weinstein Co., 10.10) resulted in even greater elation than I got from last May’s Cannes screening.

What I failed to say adequately in my previous raves is how wonderfully still and centered and untricky it is, and yet how sublimely satisfying it looks (with widescreen black-and-white photography so good it looks like monochromatic ice cream) and how authentic it all feels.

This, you’re left thinking (and even more so than Michael Winterbottom‘s 24 Hour Party People, which went for a slightly absurdist tone there and there), is how the souls of young despairing people in ’70s England truly resonated and registered, and more particularly how the Manchester scene really was or at least seemed to those who were there. (As Corbijn briefly was.)

The only thing about the film that doesn’t exactly turn me on is the gloomy story line. But I believed every line of it, every shot, every performance…all of it. It’s an absolute classic of its kind, and Sam Riley, who plays doomed Joy Division Ian Curtis, is — agree or not, believe it or not — an absolute candidate for Best Actor. Emphatically. No question. He’s dead perfect. (And I don’t mean that as a pun.)

Fox 411‘s Roger Friedman is reporting that Larry-into-Lana Wachowski sex-change story isn’t true. Stories about Larry having made the choice to reassign gender started four years ago without any disputation until now. “Disappointed?,” Friedman asks. “I know. I am too.”

You can’t say that a one-sheet using the suggestion of an old, dog-eared Bible to spread awareness of an allegedly violent period film about the oil business that’s based on an anti-capitalism book isn’t, at the very least, striking. It’s saying, obviously, that Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will be Blood (Paramount Vantage, 12.26) will address bedrock moral issues. Of course, all that blackness suggests somberness, bitterness and severity as well. But this is just a teaser poster (surfacing over three and a half months from release). Other themes and designs will surely follow.

Only fifteen minutes before the 5:30 pm press screening of Anton Corbijn‘s Control (which I’m seeing again for the sheer selfish enjoyment of it). I’ve just come out of Ang Lee‘s Lust, Caution, which started at 2:05 and ran 160 minutes, and my basic feeling (and the general consensus I’ve picked up in three or four conversations so far, two of them in the Cineplex Odeon men’s room) is that Derek Elley‘s Variety pan out of the Venice Film Festival was harsh and unwarranted.

Lust, Caution is what it is — a well-assembled, carefully honed period piece that tells a very twisted love story with some excellent (as in arousing, emotionally defining, envelope-pushing) sex scenes. I was irked at first with the pace but then I began to go with the graduality. The ending pays off, although there was laughter in the house right after a climactic bit of action. (I don’t know how to interpret the guffaws exactly, but third-act laughter in the third act of a heavy drama isn’t a desired reaction.) I wasn’t wowed down to my toes, but Lust, Caution has integrity and conviction, and I respected Lee’s decision to tell the story in the way that he did.

It is axiomatic that one must must approach all Canadian-produced films chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival with extreme caution. Jeremy Podeswa‘s Fugitive Pieces, which I just walked out of, conveys this tendency in spades. I was out the door after 30 minutes, but I was looking at my watch after the first 15 minutes. I don’t care if it kicks in at the one-hour mark or whatever — I won’t sit through films like this.

Expelled for the duration of the festival, and perhaps beyond. We will have no more to do with thee..be gone! Snapped in a Cineplex Odeon hallway after excusing myself from Jeremy Podeswa‘s Fugitive Pieces — Thursday, 9.6.07, 9:35 am

I guess this means I’m dead meat as far as the film’s producer, Robert Lantos, is concerned. If I run into him at at a party I’ll say I’m somebody else.

Pieces is a doleful past-and-present drama about a 40ish Holocaust survivor (Stephen Dillane) who finds it difficult coping with the present with so many World War II ghosts swirling around in his head. I can’t personally cope with Dillane — he kills each and every film and play that he’s in with his withered, crinkly-faced dweeby-ness. And I didn’t believe for a second that a 51 year-old pill like Dillane would entice a 28 year-old blonde hottie (Rosamund Pike, last in Fracture) to hop into bed with him and then propose marriage in fairly short order.

I’m going to catch the last half-hour of Juan Antonio Bayona‘s The Orphanage. Saw it twice in Cannes, and that wasn’t quite enough.

Proving once again that any youngish woman can get into hot-bod shape after having a kid if she sets her mind to it, Maggie Gyllenhaal is the new visual spokesperson for a just-launched promotional campaign Agent Provocateur, the London-based lingerie firm. It’s a semi-legit item (MCN is running it), but the things this column will do to attract readers. The first TIFF press screening starts 85 minutes from now…

Maggie Gyllenhaal

Toronto Film Festival press screenings begin tomorrow morning. I’d like this to not mean slightly spottier, catch-as-catch-can HE coverage for the next eight or nine days, but the syndrome is the syndrome. It’s next to impossible to write at length or with much depth when you’ve got an hour or 90 minutes between screenings and all kinds of interviews, press conferences and parties to wedge in besides. Tomorrow’s films at a glance: Faith Aken‘s The Edge of Heaven, Ang Lee‘s Lust, Caution, Martin Gero‘s Young People Fucking, Michael Moore‘s Captain Mike Across America.

Slate‘s Kim Masters has reported about friction between Russell Crowe and Lionsgate marketers over the release date of 3:10 to Yuma, as well as delays that may have affected the slant and tone of the aarly one-sheets.

Crowe wanted Yuma delayed until ’08, she reports, because he wanted the fall season free and clear for the opening of American Gangster, which opens on 11.2. (Masters is hearing Universal will fund a Best Supporting Actor campaign for Crowe’s performance in that film). But Lionsgate decided to bring out Yuma on 9.7 (two days hence) in order to beat another big western, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, to the punch.

But “once Lionsgate moved the date, everything had to be done in a hurry,” Masters writes. “Crowe was given an unusually small selection of photos to approve for the poster and rejected all of them.” (One of Masters’ sources says “he thought they made him look fat.” Has anyone taken a gander at those recent videos of Crowe doing Yuma interviews? He’s really packed it on.). “But those on his side say the studio didn’t offer enough choices and Crowe was merely exercising a routine movie-star prerogative. Finally, an acceptable option was proffered.”

Could this be the reason why Lionsgate went with those leather-coated-dandy one-sheets early on?

“But Mangold [and his team] apparently were fuming that Lionsgate left them out of the loop on various decisions,” Masters writes. (What decisions? The gay campaign?) “‘They’ve had a big-studio experience with Walk the Line — they know what it means to be included in the process,’ says a source inside the situation. ‘And Lionsgate isn’t used to dealing with filmmakers like that.’

Lionsgate, says this person, “is very comfortable drawing young men to Eli Roth movies, but not with bringing along a more mature movie like 3:10 to Yuma. Ortenberg counters that the 3:10 to Yuma campaign ‘will go down as one of the best of the year.'”

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.