I got into it briefly last August, and now someone else — Slate‘s Kim Masters — has focused on “mom-ager” Dina Lohan, the blonde Medusa behind Lindsay Lohan‘s fixin’-to-die tragedy. Mom, who seems an almost pure manifestation of evil, needs to check into a spiritual-rehab facility while her daughter deals with the substance thing.

Getting this straight: Terry George‘s Reservation Road, an emotionally intense adult drama set in Connecticut that’s based on a respected 1999 novel by John Burnham Schwartz, will open on 11.9.07 via Focus Features. Sam Mendes‘ Revolutionary Road, an emotionally intense adult drama set in Connecticut that’s based on a respected 1961 novel by Richard Yates, will open in December 2008 via DreamWorks.

Joaquin Pheonix, Jennifer Connelly in Reservation Road

George’s film, wrapped, costars Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Connelly and Mira Sorvino. Mendes’ film, now shooting in and around Darien, Connecticut, costars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.

“The next time you see a Hostel: Part II poster, perhaps you’ll ponder for a moment why so many of us get a kick out of movies in which kids are gruesomely hacked to death yet so few of us will bother to look at the carnage when it’s real kids in a real war. It must be why they call the movies escapist art. When it comes to real gore, we like to turn away.” — L.A. Times guy Patrick Goldstein in a 6.5 column about Eli Roth‘s Hostel, Part II.

The L.A. County Sheriff’s department’s decision to release Paris Hilton after a lousy three days is a contemptible joke and utterly shameful. She was sent home after midnight with an ankle bracelet, which she’ll wear for 40 days. A Sheriff’s department spokesperson called it a “reassignment” and mentioned that a “medical” issue had been a factor in the decision to send her home. Medical? The message these LACS chumps have sent to the world is that super-rich ho’s with hot-shot attorneys skate, and that the staffers running the show are political bush-leaguers and totally compliant candy-asses.
Hilton, needless, to add, has completey failed the Robert Mitchum test that I spoke of on May 11th. Mitchum did time quietly and without complaint a following a shady marijuana bust in September 1948, and he came out of it smelling like a stand-up guy. Hilton slithered out of her 23-day sentence like a loftier-than-thou, over-pampered, morally bankrupt reptile.
My 5.11 item included this line: “I don’t think for a second that our very own empty-headed, barren-souled heiress has the character to ‘do a Mitchum,’ but the most potentially profound spiritual experience of her so-far-useless life awaits nonetheless.” I was right, actually — getting herself hustled out of jail after three days has been a profound spiritual experience in the most negative way possible. This is it — Hilton is finished. She had a chance to show some balls and fortitude and has showed she has absolutely none. Which famous woman has been more despised? Leni Reifenstahl?

I’m re-pasting these with the assumption that I’m missing at least two or three that should be included (but aren’t). The 23 prestige fall-winter narrative films to watch for are Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood, Alan Ball‘s Nothing Is Private, Susanne Bier‘s Things We Lost in the Fire, Tim Burton‘s Sweeney Todd, Joel and Ethan Coen‘s No Country for Old Men (seen it…brilliant), David Cronenberg‘s Eastern Promises, Marc Forster‘s The Kite Runner, Sam Mendes‘ Revolutionary Road, Paul Haggis‘s In the Valley of Elah, Gavin Hood‘s Rendition, James Ivory‘s City of Your Final Destination, Shekhar Kapur‘s The Golden Age, Lajos Koltai‘s Evening, Sidney Lumet‘s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Mike Newell‘s Love in the Time of Cholera, Mike Nichols‘ Charlie Wilson’s War; Vadim Perelman‘s In Bloom, Robert Redford‘s Lions for Lambs, Ridley Scott‘s American Gangster, Michael Winterbottom‘s A Mighty Heart (seen it…a strong Michael Mann film), and Joe Wright‘s Atonement.

I tried to dig into Canadian author Rebecca Eckler‘s claim, published in MacLeans magazine, that director-writer Judd Apatow used some of the ideas and situations from her book, “Knocked Up: Confessions of a Hip Mother-to-be“, which came out in early ’05, to make his own Knocked Up. What I mean is that I tried to finagle a non-attributable spin from the Apatow/Universal camp, but the rulebook says to keep your yap shut when issues of this sort arise. The similarities are intriguing, but it’s hard to prove this stuff irrefutably.

Late last year director Lars von Trier (The Boss Of It All) spoke of being clinically depressed, but he’s out of it now. He’s confessed to Radar‘s Matt Thompson that “maybe my problem is that I talk too much…I’ve been through three months of depression in the last year, and for some reason everyone seems to think I’m in a straight jacket, which I’m not.”

He explains that The Boss Of It All, which has a very decent 86% positive Rotten Tomatoes rating, is “supposed to be like some of these comedies you make in America: The Shop Around the Corner, Bringing Up Baby, The Odd Couple…all these little talent films. Maybe not so sentimental. Those films were part of my childhood. I was always feeling very secure when I saw them. I was trying to find this mood in Boss of It All.
“It shouldn’t be like Naked Gun, where you’re supposed to laugh all the time. It should only be a little time where you can feel secure.”

Due respect to Matt Damon and his not wanting to be saddled with the Jason Bourne franchise beyond the next and (he says) final entry, The Bourne Ultimatum, but he shouldn’t shut the door too hastily. I’ve loved the last two Bournes (aside from the excessively hyper editing of the Bourne Supremacy action sequences), and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t feel that the Bourne flicks are much more reflective of 21st Century anxieties and vibrations than the Bond films, including the very good Casino Royale. I’d be happy to see at least one or two more Bournes beyond the next one. Besides, Damon has a knack for choosing bombs (I thought he was over after The Legend of Bagger Vance, i.e, “Bag of Gas”) and needs a good commercial franchise to keep things steady.

“The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile, but that it is indifferent. But if we come to terms with this indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.” A well-known director (not Eli Roth) said this. Sometimes you come across a line like this and it just hits the right chord.

God, this sounds delicious! A restored 4K version of Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb will be digitally projected at Landmark’s new complex at L.A.’s Westside Pavilion, beginning on Friday, 6.15. There are few things more beautiful to the naked movieoing eye than exquisite, scratch-free, razor-sharp monochrome films, especially those from the ’50s and early ’60s when black-and-white delivered its greatest visual splendor. Technologically, I mean.

Sony’s restoration guy Grover Crisp has told the Hollywood Reporter‘s Carolyn Giardina that the 4K Strangelove will be “the closest you can get with current technology to showing the film as if you are seeing it in 1964 right off the camera neg.”
Giardina’s piece explains that 4K resolution contains four times more picture information than 2K, the standard for digital cinema, and that Sony is the only manufacturer that offers theaters a 4K projection system. Crisp said that 4K restoration work is being planned for such additional classics as From Here to Eternity and Easy Rider. Hey, what about Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder?

At what point do moral reactions to torture porn flicks overcome standard dispassionate critique-y assessments (i.e., the “ooh, yeah!” Tarantino aesthetic that generally avoids moral considerations, regarding all manner of depicted behavior solely in terms of high-style visual provocation) and under-30 male moviegoers stand up and shout back at the screen, “This isn’t just vile and degrading on Roth’s part — there’s something seriously wrong with us for watching this crap!”? Or is such a reaction beyond this demographic?

Because of the success of Eli Roth‘s earlier Hostel, movies showing attractive youths being put through through agonizing torture prior to being killed is now considered shruggingly de rigeur, and with the release of Hostel, Part II two days from now, I’m wondering if there’s a line of any kind out there, or whether we’ve passed in a moral-spiritual realm in which lines have basically ceased to exist.
Hostel was about torturing guys, but something darker and more primal is being tapped into, it seems, with Hostel, Part II‘s focus on young female victims. Is there any way to say that these scenes aren’t driven by rage currents dwelling inside Roth and his fans, and is it unfair to call these currents sociopathic on some level? The standard assessment is that some kind of metaphorical sexual release factor has been provided by bloody slasher films all along (which is why they’ve always been big with the young date crowd). I doubt if torture porn flicks would make money if they weren’t sexually arousing on some level, but I shudder when I ask myself why certain guys get stiffies over this stuff.
Young women have been getting killed in horrific and grotesque ways since the beginning of the predator-slasher flicks (starting with John Carpenter‘s Halloween) in the late ’70s, and Roth knows he has to raise the bar or risk being dismissed and waved off by genre aficionados. But what are these films really about? And what do they say about the fans who go to them time and again? I know there are some readers who will think me old-school and fuddy-duddyish for asking this, but is there anything that viewers won’t stand for?

One line that will never be crossed is dog torture. If Roth were to show any howling canine getting hung upside down and slowly cut to death and then disemboweled, his career would come to a screeching halt. I don’t know about cats. I used to know guys in my pre-pubescent youth who would half-chuckle at the idea of swinging a cat around by its tail and slamming it into a wall.
A few days ago Film Ick‘s Brendon Connelly slammed Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke over Finke’s calling Roth’s Hostel, Part II as “disgusting” without Finke (apparently) having seen it.
And now David Poland has admitted having watched a bootleg DVD of Hostel, Part II, and has recoiled big-time, slamming Roth for his depraved-puppy wallowings and saying he’d avoid shaking his hand should he happen to run into him.
He calls the Heather Matrazzo torture scene (n which she’s “hung upside down, naked, bound and gagged) ” the most disgusting, degrading, misogynistic, soulless shit I have ever seen in a movie that is going to be released widely in this country.”
He describes the scene thusly: “A beautiful European woman comes in, disrobes, lays in [a bathtub below the victim], and starts toying with the screaming Matarazzo with a long-handled sickle. She starts to draw blood and also starts getting off on it. She eventually removes the gag so Matarazzo can beg more pathetically and then cuts her throat, bathing and luxuriating in the blood as it pores over here.

“At that moment, for me, this was no longer just about a stupid, masturbatory, poorly directed shit piece of horror porn. Eli Roth became a little less human to me. He hung an actress, however willing, upside down and naked, gagged and bound, screaming, as nothing but a piece of objectified meat as Roth’s camera moves her breasts in and out of frame like some sort of sick porn tease.
“This is not the first time a director has done something horrible to an actress, but as the scene dragged on, I felt as though I was watching Ms. Matarazzo being raped on a spiritual level. This director did not identify with her as a human in the scene — she is just the target for a bloody gag.
“And then, like the truly sick punk he is, he made a woman do the dirty work in the scene. All said and done, the only person in the film who actually ends up sexually gratified by torture is a woman. There are others who seem to be going there. But this is the one fully executed torture/murder in the film. And just for fun, the woman gets to be naked too.
“I never did respect Roth’s work,” Poland concludes. “Now, if he and I crossed paths, I would refuse to shake his hand. I would extinguish the fire if he was burning, using something quicker than urine, but I’m not sure that I wouldn’t consider it karmic payback for him.”

Former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson “isn’t a moral authority on anything, he just plays one on television. He isn’t famous for anything he ever did in politics. These days he is just someone else in America famous for being famous, even as a supporting actor,” N.Y. Daily News columnist Mike Lupica wrote today.

I didn’t watch last night’s Republican candidates debate, but as I read Lupica’s article I realized with some embarassment that for the flimsiest of reasons I feel slightly more comfortable with Thompson as a Republican presidential candidate (even though he hasn’t announced) than I am with Rudy Giuliani, John McCain or Mitt Romney.
As lame as it sounds, I feel less rattled about Thompson than the other guys. If, that is, a Republican candidate was absolutely fated to win the ’08 Presidential election (which almost certainly won’t happen…right?) and I had to choose the least problematic contender.
There’s something about Thompson that’s vaguely soothing. That deep baritone voice and easy-going County Sheriff speaking style that made him a favorite on Law and Order, and which provided steady acting work in films like Marie, A True Story (in which he played himself), Die Hard II, Cape Fear, In The Line of Fire and The Hunt for Red October. It’s dopey, but this is my honest gut reaction.
“Maybe it was inevitable that somebody would try to run straight from a long-running series all the way to the White House,” Lupica notes. “Or maybe Thompson thinks he’s ready to lead the free world because he plays President Ulysses S. Grant in the current television adaptation of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
“This all started a half-century ago when we had a President, Jack Kennedy, who looked and lived and carried himself like a Hollywood leading man. Then 20 years later came Ronald Reagan, who went from acting to governor of California and finally to the White House. Now there are people who have urged Martin Sheen to run for some kind of office because his heart seemed to be in the right place on The West Wing and he did a good job delivering Aaron Sorkin‘s speeches.”