It’s not being announced on the El Rey theatre’s website, but Once costars Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova will perform at that Wilshire Blvd. venue on Wednesday, August 1st. They’ll also perform at an invite-only industry event at West L.A.’s Landmark on 7.31, and tape appearances with Craig Ferguson, Carson Daly and Jay Leno.

Here’s the trailer for David Cronenberg‘s Eastern Promises (Focus Features, 9.14), which will apparently play at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival. The trailer tells you it’s a Cronenberg fim, all right. Steely, ominous undercurrents running every which way. Focus Features is presumably screening it for long-leaders; I guess they’ll get around to guys like me down the road.
Viggo Mortensen is Nikolai (i.e., “Nee-koh-lie”), a London mobster who gets into a head-turning, challenged- values situation when he crosses paths with Naomi Watts‘ Anna, an “innocent midwife” trying to “right a wrong”, etc. The costars are Armin Muehler Stahl and Vincent Cassell (playing a frenzied psycho for the 29th time…he needs to play a concerned straight-laced dad in a family film)
A History of Violence reminded everyone that Cronenberg excels at realistic dramas about moral conflicts. Forget the spiders and the surrealism — Cronenberg operates best in the clear light of day with ordinary but slightly twisted flesh-and- blood mortals. (Crash, one of my all-time favorite Cronies, was more or less in this vein. Ditto The Dead Zone.) It’s his surrealist-fantasy stuff — ironically the genre that put him on the map back in the ’70s — that has begun to gradually diminish in estimation.
This is not to discredit Scanners, Dead Ringers,The Fly, Naked Lunch, Videodrome and all the others in this vein. I’m just saying Cronenberg is “better” — his films feel more profound and penetrating in a straight-up, less labored way — when he’s not working with visual metaphors.

Werner Herzog‘s Rescue Dawn (MGM/UA, 7.4) is “seriously racist,” argues Reeler columnist Lewis Beale in a persuasive and well-organized piece.

“The movie portrays nearly all of Christian Bale‘s Laotian captors and their North Vietnamese allies as subhuman, barely-civilized sadists who live to inflict torture and physical abuse. The paranoia and gaunt frames of the Americans (Bale, Steve Zahn, Jeremy Davies) attest to their brutal treatment, which is no doubt based on reality. Nevertheless, sitting through Rescue Dawn is like watching a war movie made by the Ku Klux Klan.
“Not that I’m surprised by this approach, because the history of movies about the Vietnam War is mostly a history of forgetting: forgetting that the Vietnamese were fighting a war of national liberation; forgetting they were real people; forgetting they had a rich, thousand-year old civilization and had been struggling to overthrow their colonial masters — first the French, then the Americans — for decades.
“For the most part, Vietnam War movies are all about us — the Stars and Stripes — and the ways the war messed with our heads. Thanks to our immersion into the heart of Southeast Asian darkness, we learned the Nature of True Evil, which compelled and even required us to kill everything that moved.
“Rescue Dawn revels in dehumanization. And it doesn’t just demonize the locals; it conveniently leaves out some essential historical context. For starters, Laos was a neutral country being used by various powers as a proxy in a secret war, a sideshow to the bigger conflict in Vietnam proper. U.S. forces flew an estimated 600,000 secret bombing raids into the country between 1964 and 1973.
“The idea that the Laotians are just a teeny bit pissed at our boy Dieter and his counterparts is [therefore] understandable: They’ve been napalming their fields, slowly starving them to death. I’m not defending their treatment of the prisoners, but the film tends to shuck off this information as if it didn’t exist. The slow-motion bombing montage that opens the film stands apart from the narrative that follows; Herzog never connects the desperate situation of the locals — more than 350,000 of whom perished during the bombing campaign — with the depraved acts of their captives.
“Last year Letters From Iwo Jima set out to humanize the Japanese soldiers who fought during World War II, doing so with compassion and realism. Yet 30 years after the end of the Vietnam War, our enemies, whose crimes pale in comparison to the Rape of Nanking and other atrocities committed by the Japanese, are still portrayed as savages of the first order.
“Is there some kind of half-century moratorium before you can acknowledge your opponents as human beings? Even Sen. John McCain, a POW who famously endured six years of imprisonment and torture, has returned to Vietnam and reconciled with his former enemies. Of course, ‘German’ movies were coming out barely a decade after World War II (see Marlon Brando as a sensitive Nazi in 1958’s The Young Lions), but let’s not even go there — that’s an entire graduate course on racial politics.
Rescue Dawn “is a well-made, compelling film, but I have yet to read a review that mentions anything about its racial and historical context. Are critics just giving its world-class director a pass? Maybe they’ve been so caught up in the story, they’ve forgotten to explore its context? Perhaps they simply accept these crazed Asian stereotypes as givens and don’t even notice them anymore (I’d love to hear what some Asian-film aficionados think of this picture)?”

This is not a preemptive expression of disrespect, but yesterday’s announcement about Ryan Gosling being cast in Peter Jackson‘s The Lovely Bones produced an involuntary twitching sensation. (Not a literal twitch of the neck or facial muscles, but a faint internal shuddering by way of a psychological spasm.) Both of these guys are renowned for making sure that the movies they make/create are always about them before anyone or anything else, which suggests that a huge battle of the egos will commence when filming begins.
Jackson will insist on turning Alice Sebold‘s best-selling novel into a movie about his miraculous directorial eye and relentless visual energy first, and the celestial story of the murdered Susie Salmon second. Gosling, in turn, will come on set and do all he can to make his character of Jack, Susie’s dad, about the endlessly fascinating currents raging within his own person (as opposed to those within Jack), and that’s a recipe for a movie at cross purposes.
Each and every Gosling performance (including the one in Half Nelson) is about his peculiar internal-ness, which is always about Gosling’s insistence on delivering a “Ryan Gosling performance” — a lot of chuckling to himself, those frosty-blue beady little eyes doing the old hard-stare, internal-shock thing, the nerd wardrobe and the nerd haircuts, tucking himself into emotional fetal balls, that little half-twitter of a laugh.
As I said two or three weeks ago, there’s no stopping (i.e., containing) Peter Jackson now. He’s where Federico Fellini was in the early ’70s, which is to say totally unbound and unable to make any film that isn’t exclusively about the wonderful (and extremely profitable, let’s not forget!) world of his own psychology and imaginings. Whenever he comes to mind I think of Ray Harryhausen‘s “Kraken” in Clash of the Titans.

Indiewire‘s Brian Brooks is reporting that Wes Anderson‘s The Darjeeling Limited will open the 45th New York Film Festival on Friday, 9.28. This is a totally expected announcement given Anderson’s allegiance to the NYFF; Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums opened there in ’98 and ’01 respectively.

The piece also says that Joel and Ethan Coen‘s No Country for Old Men will be the festival’s centerpiece screening, and that4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days — Cristian Mungiu‘s Roumanian “abortion movie” that won the Cannes Palme d’Or — will also screen.

A good percentage of the movie-journo cool-cat brigade will have seen Paul Haggis‘s In The Valley of Elah (Warner Independent, 9.21) by Labor Day, but the odds suggest it’ll be shown at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival (September 6th through 15th). It’s an even safer bet that the investigative thriller-slash-broken-heart drama with Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron and Susan Sarandon will play the Venice Film Festival. I don’t know anything about a Telluride venue.

How to explain the fact that 300 has earned more than $200 million from an overwhelmingly male audience? Does iit mean that “20 million closet cases snuck off to see an illicit fantasy about bare-chested men in Hellenic Speedos,” as Slate‘s Matt Feeney inquires, “or that young men from the vast heartland of this very conservative, Christian, pro-military country flocked to see an unabashedly heroic tale of Occidental, republican military glory?
“To believe the latter, all you have to accept is that, in imagining the sort of heroic figures they themselves would like to be, straight men would project onto them not just excellence but physical beauty. Shouldn’t a guy be able to do such a thing without being called gay?”

Slate‘s Christopher Beam on The Weinstein Company’s decision to pay a Democratic “phone vendor” to contact a select group of potential moviegoers and encourage them to see Sicko, in the manner of a grass-roots political campaign.

“Yippee-Ki-Yay” — spoken by Bruce Willis in the original Die Hard — is not the greatest one-liner in action movie history, as Eric Lichtenfeld suggests in this Slate “Summer Movies” piece. In this context the word “greatest” would have to mean “most satisfying in a zingy, bull’s-eye sense.” Without question, the line that takes the cake in this respect is “Hasta la vista, baby” — spoken by Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Last night’s “Who Let The Blogs Out” poolside chat was okay, but it only really got going during the last 15 or 20 minutes. Moderator and Variety columnist Anne Thompson did a fine job, but I knew we weren’t quite doing the expected thing when I saw an attractive 30-something couple get up and leave about 20 minutes in. “Uh-oh, we’re dying,” I told myself. My only consolation is that the walk-out couple was very attractive, and attractive people tend to be a little more vapid than others. (Ask Woody Allen.)
Would-be panelist Kevin Roderick of LA Observed copped out at the last minute, telling Thompson he was ill and tired and had to pick up his dry cleaning and take his dog to the vet for an emergency appendectomy. Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and L.A. Fishbowl‘s Kate Coe performed nicely, and I kind of muddled through.
The W poolside setting was beautiful, though. I talked to two guys at the Sicko party later on who said they’ve been to the W for drinks on a weekend night, and one of them said he was charged $20 bucks for a beer. After hearing this I immediately wondered, “Where is Tyler Durden living right now? Still in L.A.? Maybe he’s looking for fresh volunteers.”

After the W hotel chat I ran over to the Sicko premiere screening at the Academy and…man, am I lucky! I was born with tough Anglo-German genes and I hardly ever get sick. God help me if it were otherwise, and God help all of us if the U.S. health care system isn’t radically overhauled some day soon, meaning that the corporate slimeballs and politicians who are profiting wildly off the misery of many need to be exposed and tarred and run out of town.

Michael Moore during last night’s Sicko after-party — Tuesday, 6.26.07, 10:25 pm

Harvey Weinstein, Phyllis David

Sicko for the second time is still funny and infuriating and a very full meal. There’s no way you’ll come out of it complaining that it didn’t give you enough to think or get angry about. And it’s still quite stirring — it made me feel all mushy toward the end when I saw it in Cannes, and the same thing happened again last night. The crowd was applauding at this and that observation or quip, but the basic current in the room was one of simple, gentle compassion for people who need it…for people everywhere.
The prosecutorial thrust of Sicko is in the details about the general horridness of the U.S. heath care system. And god, what a sickening and inhumane thing that has been for too many people — not the uninsured (which the film barely deals with) but middle-class, for-the-most-part-employed, tax-paying Regular Joes.
I also came out of last night’s screening feeling all the more enraged at the naysayers and nitpickers who’ve been trashing Moore for boiling a very complex situation down to a few simplistic strokes. Moore has done that, yes, but documentarians have to find simple truths in the big tangle. And yes, the stories and situations he passes along in the film don’t convey the entire story and are, of course, slanted. The U.S. health care system may not be quite as venal as portrayed, and the systems in Canada, England and France are, of course, problematic in this and that way.
But Sicko is flawless as a statement of caring — help people who need help, show them some love and TLC, and damn to hell any privately managed health-care system that’s even one half as heartless and abusive as ours, and double-damn those conservative pricks who’ve spent all kinds of energy trying to debate and ridicule what Moore is fundamentally saying here.
Getting sick in this country isn’t a viable financial option if you aren’t insured up the wazoo, and that’s a contemptible state of affairs. Health care should be as free as the cops and the firemen and the libraries that every municipality pays for — end of discussion.
Sicko makes you feel like a human being in the way that Michael Bay or Len Wiseman movies make you feel the other way. Again, Moore’s comparisons between the U.S. system and those in Canada, England and France are incomplete, but watch this film and your heart will tell you that what Moore is saying is essentially true.
I don’t believe that the people he speaks to in this film are lying or fabricating, and I don’t believe they’ve been scripted. When a fire station captain in Havana, Cuba, tells a group of 9.11 workers that all firefighters from every town and country are family, that’s not a lie. I’m basically saying that I believe what Sicko is basically telling me, and there’s no way I’ll listen to the bullshit from the various right-wing, corporate-funded spokespersons who are trying to trash it.
As Moore said during a Sicko press conference, “The French have the best health-care system in the world, and that’s not my opinion. That’s how the World Health Organization rates them. None of them is perfect, but it’s not my role to make criticisms. It’s my role as an American to say, why don’t we take the best elements you’re doing and blend them together, and call it the American system?”
No system is perfect, but Americans “have to take the profit motive out of health- care,” as Moore has said time and again. “It’s as simple as that.” Are you hearing that, status-quo defenders? If there is a Debating God, your ass will soon be grass.

Faced with an either-or situation, I chose to see Peter Berg‘s The Kingdom last Monday night and not Len Wiseman‘s Live Free or Die Hard, which I was invited to see at Westwod’s Avco by Fox publicity. This was my only Die Hard shot, I was told, so I decided to shine the Avco and pay to see it at a commercial screening on Wednesday. (I’ll probably be going to today’s 4:15 pm show at the Grove.)
What follows may sound insubstantial or overly inside-baseball or anecdotal to some, but it’s a weird snapshot that gives you a taste of what advance-screening policies and politics can be like.
I saw David Poland at last Monday night’s screening of The Kingdom at the Arclight, and yet he somehow saw LFODH in time to write a review last night. How did this happen with Monday’s Avco screening ostensibly being the only time Fox had shown it to non-junket press? A freind told me this morning that Fox had a LFODH screening last Friday that Poland (who had openly complained about the Monday evening LFODH conflict situation on the Hot Blog, just as I did last Friday) was either invited to or heard about and wangled himself into.
Fox publicity read my belly-aching item and therefore knew that this conflict was giving me pause, but they chose not to alert me to the Friday screening. And yet Poland somehow got into it, and today he took a huge dump on the movie.
It would be nice if we lived in a fairer world on a more level-type playing field, but we don’t and that’s that. I can roll with it. Missing LFODH wasn’t the end of the world, although paying to see it later this afternoon will be undoubtedly painful.