If the casting rumors are true, Orlando Bloom will play an upstanding engineer named Marcus Attilius Primus in Roman Polanski‘s Pompeii, which will start shooting in August. The rumor mill is also saying that Scarlett Johansson may be cast as as Cornelia, the “defiant daughter of a vile real estate speculator who supplies Marcus with documents implicating her father in a water embezzlement scheme,” according to an Amazon synopsis.
How did Johansson become the dominant period actress of our time? She was right for her role and quite good in Match Point, playing an insecure 21st Century neurotic, but did anyone really believe her as a subservient Dutch maid in The Girl with the Pearl Earring? There’s something about her that’s almost molecularly 21st Century — something common and mall-ish in that vaguely teasing, mind-fucky manner of hers. I didn’t believe her in The Black Dahlia and The Prestige, both period films. And she’s up to more period The Other Boleyn Girl and Mary Queen of Scots.
I thought it had been widely agreed that Johansson hasn’t just been over-rated but is close to over. (Which doesn’t mean “dead” — only that it’s time for a serious career re-think.) Why is it that the internet community always seems to understand the the new modes of perception about this actress or that genre months faster than the filmmakers and the suits?

In honor of tomorrow’s opening of Judd Apatow‘s Knocked Up, here’s a re-run of that HE-vs.-Joe Leydon piece I wrote after seeing it 40 days ago. And that Seth Rogenis-the-new-John–Belushi piece. Doing so conveys as impression I’m linked up to the USA hubba-hubba, which, let’s face it, I’m not. Not in the laughing Mediterannean culture of sunny Italy, which is still living in the Bill Clinton internet era. It is easily the biggest and darkest black internet/wifi hole I’ve ever struggled with in my professional life.

L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein takes a gander at the script for Peter Jackson‘s The Lovely Bones, and thereafter understands “why the film’s supporters see it as less of a brooding Little Children-style drama and more of a supernatural thriller, packed with creepy chills and a sense of wonder.”
It doesn’t matter. Even if it’s a dark adult drama about a 14-year-old girl who is brutally raped and murdered, which sounds nervy at the very least. If it’s a Peter Jackson film, I know I’m going to suffer one way or another. All of you Jackson haters out there know exactly what I’m talking about. He can’t and won’t go home again and revert into the filmmaker who made Heavenly Creatures. He’s become like Federico Fellini was in the late ’60s and ’70s (i.e., indulgence is everything!), and nothing is going to change that.
Goldstein then reads the untitled Michael Mann-Leonardo DiCaprio Hollywood period thriller that’s been having trouble getting financed, and concludes this is due to (a) it being too costly at a $120 million, plus the concern that Mann almost always goes over-budget, and (b) the film being “full of familiar Hollywood characters who’ve been portrayed endlessly, in altered form, in films over the years…for all its popularity among filmmakers, the inside-Hollywood movie genre has a limited commercial reach.”
As much as I love anything Mann does, I wasn’t all that thrilled when I first read the idea for thisfilm — DiCaprio as a private gumshoe in 1938 who falls in love with an actress he’s hired to watch/protect. Burnished period stuff has a built-in ceidling. But I’d love to see Mann and DiCaprio make theirversion of For Whom The Bell Tolls.

The Weinstein Company will distribute Woody Allen‘s Cassandra’s Dream, which “has been said to be in a darker vein, similar to Match Point,” according to one published report. Forget darker — it’s pitch black, this film. (I happened upon a massive third-act plot spoiler on the Cassandra’s Dream Wikipedia page.) The drama costars Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell as two brothers under financial pressure who fall for a femme fatale (Haley Atwell), who steers them into a criminal scheme.

With spooky, half-shaped visions of Roman Polanski‘s Pompeii flashing in my head, Hollywood Elsewhere visited the actual Pompeii ruins yesterday.

I’m very glad I went — this is the best-preserved ancient Roman city anywhere, covered as it was and frozen in time by tons of ash that spewed out of Mount Vesuvius on August 24, 79 AD. The problem is that I was too cheap to buy a map or go with a tour group, and by the end of our visit I’d come across only one lousy plaster-covered body.

The frescoes and the pottery and the precisely preserved apartments and villas are fascinating, but let’s be honest — if you come to Pompeii, you want to see how the citizens met their doom. You want freeze-frame death statues of people going “aaaah, this hurts!” And in this respect, Pompeii struck me as a faint ripoff. There should be bodies everywhere, in every house. Bodies of men, women, children, dogs, horses. Plus there were no chariots or carts. Or none that I came across.

On top of which the area just outside Pompeii’s ancient walls looks like a cross between Orlando Disney World and the border approach in Tijuana. Scores of ticky-tacky motels, gross souvenir shops, low-grade pizzerias and fruit stands. Jett found it disgraceful, saying that the commerce dishonors the dead.

I’d run a couple of photos but the laughing Mediterranean ISP that’s linked to the Positano internet cafe I’m sitting in is, for some reason, giving me “access denied” messages when I try to upload images to my server. I spent two hours with tech support trying to fix the problem, and it’s costing me 8 euros an hour.

Reader Dennis Costa feels this is “the epitome of the mash-up trailer trend…a downright inspired piece of comedy using Star Wars footage (specifically Vader scenes) with audio clips of other James Earl Jones movies…approaching genius-level…the first three and a half minutes could be the funniest thing I’ve ever seen,” etc. My 1998-level flat screen inside a cafe in Greve (south of Florence about 25 kilometers) doesn’t play video so I’m trusting Costa.

Because the $142 million earned by Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End over the Memorial Day weekend opening was the absolute biggest ever, that means that Movie Nation is delighted, Gore Verbinksi and Jerry Bruckheimer are crowned geniuses who are supremely in touch with the hoi polloi, and all the Pirates haters are curmudgeons who need top re-screw their heads on….is that it?

Two movies made about Mark David Chapman’‘s killing of John Lennon, and they both apparently have major problems and are both sitting around in theatrical-release limbo. Is there something about the material that enforces a kind of cinematic curse? I was told late last year by a director friend that J.P. Schaefer‘s Chapter 27, which showed at last January’s Sundance Film Festival with Jared Leto as Chapman and Lindsay Lohan as a girl he befriends in the days/hours leading up to the Manhattan shooting, had been edited and re-edited to little success. And then there’s Andrew Piddington‘s The Killing of John Lennon, a British-produced drama that’s played two or three film festivals since the summer of ’06 and…nothing.

The Cannes jury has officially stiffed the Joel and Ethan Coen‘ highly praised No Country for Old Men, largely, I suspect, because it ‘s not very women-friendly and therefore didn’t go over with the youngish females on the jury — actresses Maggie Cheung and Toni Collette, director-actress Maria de Medeiros and director-actress Sarah Polley. The Palme d’Or went instead went to a deeply admired, very fine abortion movie — Christian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.

The Grand Prix (a runner-up award) was handed to Naomi Kawase‘s The Mourning Forest
Julian Schnabel won the Best Director prize for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and Gus Van Sant…oh, give me a break! Gus wins a special Prix du 60th Anniversaire for his direction of Paranoid Park, his least focused, least arresting, least persuasive film in years? Words fail.
Faith Akin won the Best Screenplay Award for The Edge of Heaven, and Anton Corbijn‘s Control won a Camera d’Or Special Mention. There was a tie for the winner of the Prix du Jury prize — Marjane Satrapi‘s Persepolis and Carlos Reygadas‘ Stellet Licht were the neck-and-neckers.

I’m sitting inside the southern branch of the Venetian Navigator (i.e., the one closer to the San Marco district) as I wait the Cannes Film Festival winners to be announced online. And as we were all taught in school, a watched pot never boils. Tell you what….here are two heavyweight video clips of yesterday’s rainstorm. Watch ’em or don’t.

I never got around to running this pic earlier, and I somehow want to convey that Josh Brolin did especially well for himself during this festival — his stellar performance in Old Men, his breezy and yet bluntly confessional manner with the press last weekend, his hilarious performance in the Coen Bros. Chacun son Cinema short. He was kind of an amiable kick-around guy before who was okay or pretty good in this or that film — now he’s moved up a couple of notches.

No Country for Old Men star Josh Brolin at last weekend’s press luncheon — Saturday, 5.19.07, 1:55 pm.