A slightly more engrossing, more detailed trailer for Ridley Scott‘s American Gangster (Universal, 11.2) than the one I ran on 8.11. The previous one was pretty much all about Denzel Washington‘s heroin dealer character — this new one gives more dialogue clips to DW nemesis Russell Crowe. The period crime film will begin to screen for elite media just after everyone gets back from Toronto.

“If you want to see a lot of people naked, see this film,” a producer friend said this afternon about Robert Benton‘s Feast of Love (MGM, 9.28). I’ve managed to miss this so far (42 West has only invited me to Manhattan screenings). But honestly? Nudity always raises interest levels. Any guy, straight or gay, who tells you it doesn’t is a liar.

Morgan Freeman, Gregg Kinnear

The actors who don’t take their clothes off in this relationship dramedy are Morgan Freeman, Jane Alexander, Fred Ward and, the producer said, Selma Balir. (She’s apparently wrong about Blair.) The actors who do get naked (full-frontally or partially) are Radha Mitchell (big-time), Greg Kinnear (partial), Toby Hemingway, Alexa Davalos, Billy Burke and (the producer wasn’t entirely certain about the next three, but she says there’s definitely nudity among lesbians) Shannon Lucio, Erika Marozsan and Stana Katic.

Feast of Tits….I like that title.

The spirit of any Wes Anderson film can be found in his choice of pop-music tracks, and the relentlessly insipid USA Today columnist Whitney Matheson (a.k.a. “Pop Candy”) has listed some of the tracks in The Darjeeling Limited (Fox Searchlight, 9.29), and the emphasis is definitely on…the Kinks!

The three Kinks tunes are “This Time Tomorrow,” “Strangers” and “Powerman.” There’s also the Rolling Stones‘ “Play With Fire,” Joe Dassin‘s “Champs Elysees” and Peter Sarstedt‘s “Where Do You Go to (My Lovely).” Anderson “also throws in several classical tracks, like Debussy’s Clair De Lune and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 in A, Op. 92,” Matheson reports.

Rod Lurie‘s Resurrecting The Champ (Yari Film Group, opening today) is a well acted, throughly decent film that is reasonably absorbing as an adult drama and interesting in an atmospheric newsroom sense. I’m a solid fan of Alan Alda and Peter Coyote‘s performances as a newspaper editor and a boxing world veteran, and I’m fairly okay with Josh Hartnett‘s performance as a somewhat immature journalist who can’t be bothered to double- or triple-check his facts before running with a big story.

The plot is about Hartnett having found a scuzzy old homeless guy (Samuel L. Jackson) who may or may not have been a boxing champ in the ’50s, and the truths that come out when he runs a story about the wily old guy. The problem is that I despise sloppiness and inexactitude, and I couldn’t for the life of me understand how any journalist, Hartnett’s character or anyone, could mess up as badly as he does here.

There are no secrets out there, and you can double and triple-check anything in a few hours these days. I just didn’t relate or buy what happens. The only thing that made sense was Hartnett’s guy deliberately fucking up, and I’m not a big fan of stories about guy putting shotguns in their mouths and then pulling the trigger.

At first I had a problem with Jackson’s “whinny” voice. Like with all movie stars, I want Jackson to be Jackson. He’s “acting” here, talking a little bit like Dustin Hoffman did as the 105 year-old Jack Crabbe in Little Big Man, but there’s no denying that it’s good acting. I could sit here and struggle to put together exactly the phrasings, but it’s easier to just quote N.Y. Times critic Stephen Holden, who’s a tad more enthusiastic about Jackson than myself but we’ll let that go.

Jackson is “wily, secretive, charming and pugnacious.,” Holden writes. “At his most charismatic he has the aura of a holy fool…[he] is entirely convincing, and frequently incandescent.”

Champ is also about Hartnett’s slightly older wife (Kathryn Morrris) who has one of the worst pissy-face, naggy-face, guilt-trip expressions you’ve ever seen on any woman anywhere.

In the version of Resurrecting The Champ that I saw last year, Lurie plays a walk-on role as an editor/journalist, and he’s relaxed and believable right rom the start. Lurie should use himself again and again — seriously. He could be the new Sydney Pollack among acting directors.

Resurrecting the Champ hasn’t been tracking all that well, and probably won’t crack $5 million over the weekend. It’s worth seeing for Alda, Jackson and Coyote’s performances, in that order Right now it has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 62% general and 45% Cream of the Crop. I don’t know what else to say except that it’s a tough world out there — a mosh pit.

“I saw The Bourne Ultimatum. I liked the first one the best but the third one is second-best. I like entertainment. Cinema can say many things. There’s nothing wrong with a great Hollywood blockbuster. But sometimes you’re [into] it like crazy while it’s going and when you leave it sort of pops and evaporates.” — David Lynch speaking to MTV.com’s Josh Horowitz. Yeah, we know that tune except Bourne didn’t pop and evaporate because I didn’t want it to. So I went back and saw it twice more.

For a recent meeting in Manila with Phillipine president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo at the Presidential palace, Quentin Tarantino wore “a traditional Filipino formal shirt called Barong Tagalog but [ also] wore sandals,” says an 8.16 report in The West. “He was handed size 13 black leather shoes because sandals and rubber shoes are not allowed inside the palace during presidential ceremonies, a staff of the National Commission on Culture and Arts said.”

What kind of an elitist swaggering attitude do you have to have to figure it’s cool to wear sandals to a meeting with a chief of state? Was Tarantino brought up in a barn? Anyone with a vestige of breeding would arrive for a meeting with any head of state wearing at least a sport jacket and some kind of leather footwear. The guy’s an animal.

“Sailing to Byzantium,” the William Butler Yeats poem from which Cormac McCarthy derived the title of “No Country for Old Men.” Yates, not Yeets.

Every now and then I stop what I’m doing and say a small prayer of thanks that Barry Sonnenfeld appears to be working mostly on the tube these days and is no longer making awful CGI-pestilence movies like Men in Black and Wild Wild West or grotesque family slapstick comedies like RV. Or is taking a breather from these, at the very least.

Barry Sonnenfeld extolling the virtues of the Blackberry 8830 World Edition on page 114 of the new Esquire

This morning I was reading a piece Sonnenfeld has written for the latest issue of Esquire (i.e., Sean Penn on the cover) about the Verizon Blackberry 8830 World Edition, and I said to myself, “My God, it’s wonderful not to have this guy’s movies in my head any more.” Sonnenfeld is loaded and kicking back these days (he has homes in Telluride and East Hampton). I hope to God he stays in that realm and enjoys his lifestyle to the fullest.

Anne Thompson reports that the No Country for Old Men red-band trailer will be “live beginning Friday. ” You have to click on the “exclusive red-band trailer” link on the film’s website, but it didn’t work for me after six or seven tries on two different browsers. Wait — a reader has finally located a ready-to-go trailer with no sign-ins. It’s brilliant — a much better trailer than the previous G-rated one.

Thompson says that it’s necessary to see the red-band trailer “so that audiences can see why the mean SOB played by Javier Bardem is really, really scary.”

He is that, but Bardem’s character, a guy named Anton Chigurh (“sugar?”), isn’t an actual SOB. What he is, in fact, is a “ghost,” as Tommy Lee Jones‘ sheriff calls him at one point. That’s hitting it square on the head, I suppose (on top of Bardem’s face being a chalky white), but it’s the Coen brothers’ way of saying to the dumbasses in the audience that “this movie isn’t necessarily about a bad guy killing people and another guy trying to get away with some dope money.”

Chigurh is a kind of metaphor for enveloping darkness and cultural downfall…a falling-away from decency and values that some (mostly older guys) feel has manifested in this country. It’s all written down in Cormac McCarthy‘s original novel. Chigurh is also a bringer of fate. The other big theme in the book is, “You can’t see what’s comin’ and you can’t stop what’s comin’.” That’s Anton, baby.

McCarthy is a poet-novelist of the heartland and the Coens have made a thrilling art-house splatter film without the splatter — they show no gore, always cut away, etc. 90% of the people out there can’t perceive anything in a film except subject matter, but this is one of those cases when even the Seth Rogen types with the Cabo San Lucas T-shirts need to try and look beyond and within.

“Because The Nanny Diaries is essentially a two-character story whose supporting players are wooden props, it would help if the actors playing the two were evenly matched. But Scarlett Johansson‘s Annie, who narrates the movie in a glum, plodding voice, is a leaden screen presence, devoid of charm and humor. With her heavy-lidded eyes and plump lips, Johansson may smolder invitingly in certain roles, but The Nanny Diaries is the latest in a string of films that suggest that this somnolent actress confuses sullen attitudinizing with acting.” — from Stephen Holden‘s 8.24 N.Y. Times review.

Critics who’ve seen Joe Wright‘s Atonement (Focus Features, 12.7) have reacted with breathless superlatives,” according to the Daily Telegraph‘s amiable and usually accommodating David Gritten, “and its showing at the Venice Film Festival and subsequent release will almost certainly catapult Wright into the ranks of world-class film directors.”

Keira Knightley, James McAvoy in Atonement

Oh, yeah? I’ve heard some reactions also and no one’s said anything about viewers doing cartwheels in the lobby. What I’ve heard is “pretty good,” “not at all bad” and “has at least one really good extended tracking shot.”

One also has to consider the unfortunate fact that the two romantic leads, Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, are not only limited talents but have physical traits and tics that can arouse huge irritation at the drop of a hat.

I had trouble with McAvoy in The Last King of Scotland because of his pathetic hunger and eagerness to charm (i.e., that Hugh Grant thing) and his unfortunately large bee-stung nose. I wrote McAvoy off for dead after seeing him in last year’s Starter for 10, a dreadfully cloying and unseductive film. However good Wright’s new film may turn out to be, McAvoy is more or less “over” — he had his fifteen minutes in ’06, and the world has moved on.

I wrote Knightley off two years ago as an overpraised and under-talented actress who has that flirty thing down but lacks an essential inner aliveness, that river-of- feeling quality that all good actresses have.