J.J. Abrams wants to call his monster-on-the- loose-in-Manhattan movie (i.e., the one he’s producing but not directing) Monstrous? Absolutely doesn’t make it. Back to drawing board. Terrible title. End of meeting.

My latest tally of Hollywood-funded Iraq-Afghanistan movies — narratives, not docs — comes to eight. Well, nine if you count Peter Berg‘s The Kingdom, which is set in Riyahd. (There may be others I’m missing.) All but one look like chocolate sundaes to me — dramas about things harsh and seething and generating impact waves as we speak.

allegedly from Brian De Palma’s Redacted (Magnolia/HD Net, early ’08)

Great rivers of hurt are flowing through these two countries right now (God help the people caught up in it), and this, obviously, is where the dramatic raw material of our time is coming from. But who’s interested and who’s allergic? Some of these films may have “possible hit” or “potential award quality” stamped on their foreheads, but I’m wondering what the general attitude is among paying moviegoers.
Not long ago I spoke to a big-time journo who thinks without question that very few people want to plunk down $10 bucks to “go” to Iraq or Afghanistan, so to speak, and that the commercial prospects for these films don’t appear to be all that great as a result. I’m not so sure. Most people take movies as they come. I’m hoping in any case to get a sense of this from HE readers. Not so much what they them- selves feel about Middle East conflict dramas but what their friends, co-workers and family members may be saying, if anything.
Four of these films are about the Iraq War — Paul Haggis‘s In The Valley of Elah (although very little of this moralistic murder-mystery is actually set in Iraq), Brian de Palma‘s Redacted (a you-are-there combat film, due in early ’08), Kathryn Bigelow‘s The Hurt Locker (ditto, just starting to shoot) and Paul Greengrass‘s forthcoming Imperial Life in the Emerald City (shooting later this year), based on the book of the same name by Rajiv Chandrasekaran.
And four are about Afghanistan past or present — Marc Forster‘s The Kite Runner (DreamWorks, 11.2), Robert Redford‘s Lions for Lambs (United Artists, 11.9), Mike Nichols‘ Charlie Wilson’s War (Universal, 12.25) and Oliver Stone‘s Jawbreaker, which is being developed with an idea to possibly shoot next year.

Oliver Stone

I guess I’m just trying to reconcile my own keen interest in seeing these films — even The Kite Runner looks half-promising, given the source material — and this idea that “people out there” not only don’t share my enthusiasm, and may even be looking to flat-out avoid them. Is this the case? If so, why? If not, why?
I think all the neg-head talk was triggered by the failure of A Mighty Heart, but that film went down because nobody wanted to see a film about an American journalist getting his head cut off by terrorists,.

“If they could bottle what gives The Bourne Ultimatum its rush, it would probably be illegal,” writes Variety reviewer Todd McCarthy. “The third and purportedly final installment in the mountingly exciting series is a pounding, pulsating thriller that provides an almost constant adrenaline surge for nearly two hours.
“In setting Jason Bourne on the home stretch of his search to discover who and what made him the killing machine he is, director Paul Greengrass has outdone himself, creating a film of such sustained energy and tension that the infrequent pauses for breath seem startling in their quietude. In other hands, unrelenting nervous camera movement and machine-gun cutting prove wearying more often than not, but Greengrass skillfully employs both not only in the service of excitement, but for the accentuation of telling detail and discreet parceling out of information.
“Result is a breathless doozy that sends Bourne from Moscow to Turin, Paris, London, Madrid and Tangier, Morocco, before alighting in New York, from where the CIA’s extra-legal assassination org has been tracking his movements with the most sophisticated and instantaneous of high-tech equipment. But Bourne continually beats the agency at its own game, outwitting and tricking its surveillance ploys and besting the toughest killers the company can throw at him.”

Earlier this afternoon I interviewed former Marine Cpt. Brian Steidle, author of “The Devil Came on Horseback: Bearing Witness to the Genocide in Darfur” (Public Affairs) and the “star”, so to speak, of the just-emerging doc of the same name, which I wrote about yesterday.

The Devil Came on Horseback has been well directed by Annie Sundberg and Rikki Stern. I was a little suprised to learn that Sundberg and Stern never visited the Darfur region, much less shot any footage there, apparently because it’s too difficult to get into the region and very dangerous besides. George Clooney couldn’t actually get it either. Steidle and I covered all of the basics. If you’re at al unclear about what’s going on over there, have a listen.

For the sin of thinking like a free-associating innovator rather than a limits-observing company guy, Patrick Goldstein‘s latest “Big Picture” column — the one that should have been published today — was killed, allegedly by associate editor John Montorio. As L.A. Observed Kevin Roderick reports, “Goldstein’s offense was to propose that the Times follow the lead of the U.K.’s Mail on Sunday (which distributed 2.9 million free Prince CDs) and partner with older artists to give away music in the paper.

Goldstein’s column has been reprinted in full by Roderick.
Goldstein “argued it could help make the Times website a destination for fans and reduce the need for front page ads (which the editor of the Times himself calls a huge mistake),” reports Roderick. Jeez, Goldstein was just throwing out an idea. Something to kick around, run it up the flagpole, etc. What’s so bad about that? This incident illustrates how panicked the L.A. Times editors and management are today. The ship that they’ve known and nourished for years is slowly sinking and they know it, and everyone else knows it.

I think it’s fantastic that Michael Apted‘s Stardust (1974), one of the best movies about the exterior and interior life of a rock musician ever made, is being re-released on August 10th. Okay, kidding. The Stardust that is being released on 8.10 is another matter — an adaptation of Neil Gaiman‘s fantasy novel, with the direction by the undeniably talented Matthew Vaughan (Layer Cake).

The synopsis — “a young man makes a promise to his beloved that he’ll retrieve a fallen star by venturing into the magical realm” — does not set my heart or soul aflutter. At all. The trailer indicates an agreeable vibe, I”ll give it that, and I feel professionally obliged to see it, yes. But my instinct, frankly, is to run in the other direction. Any and all films dealing with “magical realms” are absolute no-nos in this corner. God, what a Frankenstein genre was created by the dreaded Peter Jackson!
The presumably well-paid Stardust costars are Charlie Cox, Claire Danes, Robert De Niro, Sienna Miller, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jason Flemyng, Peter O’Toole, Ian McKellen and Rupert Everett.

Although there wasn’t much in the way of hardball debating and there were no breakthrough moments, the YouTube format — sometimes eccentric Average Joes asking questions instead of the usual jaded media types — used in last night’s Democratic contender debate was revolutionary. It definitely added a newly alive aura — a sense of engagement with the pace of information and the back-and-forth of current online conversation. There were at least a couple of “whoa, that was different” moments. It should become a permanent fixture.

The conventional view is that Lindsay Lohan‘s latest DUI bust in Santa Monica at 1:35 this morning, or roughly nine hours ago (TMZ reported the arrest at 8:45 ayem), means that she’s really finished this time — finito, toast, done. Not because she can’t dry out and come back a la Robert Downey — she could obviously do that — but because she’s become such a pathetic metaphor for our own much-feared inability to defeat our private demons.

One look at Lohan and you’re reminded that you, too, have the potential to not heed the warning signs and screw things up even more. She can’t be an “actress” any more because there’s no accepting her as anyone other than herself — the dumbest and most arrogant meltdown case in Hollywood history. Her rep isn’t David Letterman fodder any more. It’s gone beyond that. It goes without saying that she’s become the industry’s youngest-ever Norman Maine. If this was a movie, the classy sad solution would be to walk into the Pacific…and stay there.
I love this Mark Lisanti Defamer graph: “If there’s a bright side to this latest incident, it’s that her mugshot is somewhat more flattering than those pictures from her Memorial Day meltdown; at least for this latest photo shoot, Lohan was lucid enough to give the camera her best ‘stunned by my amazing capacity to fuck up my life’ pose.”
Fantasy Moguls‘ Steve Mason is predicting that her arrest will boost business for Lohan’s new film, I Know Who Killed Me, which opens this weekend. “According to industry tracking, the pic had a total awareness levels of just 45%,” he reports. “Lohan’s arrest, and the ensuing media onslaught, will almost certainly drive that number up. It’s very possible that the picture will do better than it would have had she been trouble-free this week.
“Without the DUI, Lohan’s new movie was probably doomed to an opening weekend of $2 to $4 million,” Mason says. “Now that she’s the resumed her well-earned role as Hollywood’s most screwed-up young star, I’ll raise that target to $4 millon to $7 million.”
And once again, here’s to Dina Lohan — the Tallulah Bankhead/Josef Mengele of celebrity moms.

Inspired by those perfectly dry Geico caveman commercials, ABC is definitely going with a Geico caveman series this fall. This despite a rumble in early May that the pilot was allegedly awful. It’ll all come down to the writing, of course. The calibre of the writers and, of course, the acting. ABC could screw it up. I haven’t heard any backstage rumble, but they could elbow aside the guys who did the ads and blow off the dry sardonic tone and try to make the cavemen softer, goofier and more red-state. You know…dumb it all down.

I wasn’t paying attention when Aint’ It Cool’s Derek Flint ran that 5.3.07 pan of the pilot. But I was truly horrified to read about it having used “different actors in the cavemen roles, with none of them are nearly as effective as their advertising counterparts.” (Flint wrote that “one of them actually reminded me a little bit of Sanjaya.”) Good God!

The trailer for Wes Anderson‘s The Darjeeling Limited (Fox Searchlight, 9.29) is up and rolling. Trailers speak with forked tongues — you can no more trust a movie trailer than a 17 year-old high school girl can trust the base intentions of a cute guy in a tuxedo taking her to the junior prom — but it’s immediately likable, and I can smell that old intimate- chemistry-between-brothers Wessy thing that I remember from the ’90s. I said to myself, “Please, please…make this Sons of Bottle Rocket and not The Life Aquatic Goes to India.”

I read the script last year and went, “Yeah, okay…another signature Wessy head-trip flick. Quirky humor, oddball eccentricities, three brothers on an adventure, father issues, an exotic train ride across India, dry humor.” But I said the same thing about the Rushmore script — very good, liked it — and then the movie came along and it was even better. Maybe this’ll happen again. Maybe this is the Resurgence of Wes. Maybe last year’s American Express commercial was a harbinger.
I love those formal widescreen Wessy compositions and the dry-eccentric cutting style. But how come there’s no Fox Searchlight Darjeeling website? Chop-chop, guys.
And what about Walter Becker and Donald Fagen‘s proposed theme song? They popped the question last August. The lyrics went as follows: “Darjeeling Limited / That’s the train I wanna get kissed on / Darjeeling Limited / But I’ll be lucky if I don’t get pissed on.”

James Mangold‘s 3:10 to Yuma (Lionsgate, 9.7) is said to be a rough, rugged tale of the Old West — no CG, nothing slick, back to the cowpoke basics. Which is why this poster surprised me. It makes it look like a Bob Fosse western. The guy holding the two handguns has his head down like he’s waiting for a musical cue before going into a hot and slinky dance number. In fact, he could be Catherine Zeta Jones with her hair up.

The Coming Soon guys had this poster first…okay?

“It looks too cool, too stylized,” says a guy who’s seen the film. “It doesn’t reflect the grittiness. It misses the mood of the film. The coat is too stylish-looking. I think it’s the buttons — the buttons are a problem.” Let’s just come out and say it — the jacket looks like it was bought at Bloomingdale’s. Or at Nudie’s on Lankershim. The guy who designed this poster was thinking more about winning a Hollywood Reporter Key Art award than selling the movie that Mangold has allegedly made. (I’m seeing it in early August.)

In last Sunday’s Entourage (episode #48 — “The Weho Ho”), Kevin Connolly‘s Eric — the manager of Adrien Grenier‘s Vincent — decided to bail out as producer of Vincent’s next film because he can’t stand the abrasive personality of the film’s director, Billy Walsh (Rhys Coiro), despite his considerable talent. (According to Vincent and at least one other character.)
In so doing, Eric not only acted like a picky-prissy — he also ignored one of the most essential laws of survival and success in this town, which is that you can never afford to pass up a chance to work with seriously talented people, no matter how distorted or deranged they may be as human beings.

I’m not saying that all assholes are talented or that all talented people are assholes. (Thank God.) But sometimes — some would say often — talent and abrasive or hard-to-take personality traits go hand in hand. At the very least the extremely gifted are often a handful. That’s unfortunate, but also the way it is. Salieri is polite, tactful, politically skilled…and a mediocre artist. Mozart is boorish, vulgar, childish…and a genius.
The finale of Vincente Minnelli‘s The Bad and the Beautiful makes this point very concisely. The film is all about why a famous actress (Lana Turner), an honored director (Barry Sullivan) and a gifted novelist and screenwriter (Dick Powell) despise a certain brutish and egoistic producer (Kirk Douglas). But at the very end they can’t resist picking up a phone so they can listen in on Douglas explaining his latest idea.
But the Kevin Connolly/Eric aesthetic says nope — the talented guy’s a prick, impossible, makes me unhappy, won’t work with him. Eric’s a decent, sensitive guy, but he doesn’t get it. Unless, of course, he’s right about Walsh being “over” with “his best days past him.” In which case he’s doing the right and sensible thing.