Notable Hollywood smoothie adorned in regal 17th Century duds and put to canvas by successful Moscow painter Nikas Safranov, profiled by L.A. Times staffer Jeffrey Fleishman. Safranov, a bit of a smoothie himself. is peddling the 2007 version of children-with- great-big-eyes paintings….no?

“Another problem with killing Tony Soprano [at the end of the about-to-start final season] is how likable he is, despite his pathologically long list of misdeeds and murder. We like him, that’s why we watch the show, and doing him in more than the writers and the audience can bear. Indeed, they want to believe he can change.

“‘Arthur Miller used to say, you don’t go to the theater unless you see your- self onstage,’ says Glen O. Gabbard, a psychiatrist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston who wrote The Psychology of the Sopranos: Love, Death, Desire and Betrayal in America’s Favorite Gangster Family. ‘The audience thinks that maybe, just maybe, this bad man can be transformed into a good man. That’s what [Dr. Jennifer] Melfi thinks, that’s what the audience thinks.’

“And yet, something more powerful than the demands of storytelling may dictate Tony’s final fate — Hollywood. Although Chase is ending the series because he’s mined the show for all he can on television, rumors persist about a possible Sopranos feature film. A Sopranos movie without Tony? As the Bada Bing! boys might say, not gonna happen.” — from Martin Miller‘s 4.1.07 L.A. Times piece.

Will Ferrell as an astronaut, a bullfighter, a ballerina and a referee. Four new-movie ideas proposed by Arizona Daily Star smartass Phil Villarreal that would broaden Ferrell’s following and build upon his tremendous talent.

“After Hollow Man, I felt that I should change gears, because I felt that it wasn’t a personal movie anymore. I felt like I could not express myself in a personal way and said that I have to back off from the fantasy and the science fiction or the studios or whatever. I have to do something that’s for me; I want to do something which I believe in again.” — Black Book director Paul Verhoeven speaking to Coming Soon‘s Edward Douglas.

Paul Verhoeven during HE interview at Beverly Wilshire hotel two weeks ago, snapped by yours truly

A letter about comedians going serious (Sandler, Murphy, Rock, Ferrell) by L.A. Times reader named Nicholas Silver was published in today’s edition. I don’t agree with everything he says (particularly a remark about Adam Sandler seeming shallow in Reign Over Me), but he says it fairly well:

“You want to know what we really learn when comics like Adam Sandler and Chris Rock make so-called serious movies? We learn how very shallow they are and, by extension, how very debased we are as Americans for paying so much attention to them.

“Listen, anybody in a moment of quietude can seem to be thinking. Take Eddie Murphy: apparently he was great in Dreamgirls, but talent and charm have never been an issue with him. The question is, where’s his head at? I’ll tell you where: Norbit.

“Will Ferrell is funny and sweet, but he’s stuck in television. Every idea he gets is based on perceptions gleaned from watching TV. Nearly all American comedians post-Saturday Night Live have been siophomoric, developmentally stunted and crude. The bar has definitely been lowered.

“At least when watching a picure by Woody Allen, America’s greatest living comedian, you know you’re watching a man who’s constantly running interference between bona fide seriousness and an irrepressible gift for cracking wise.”

I’ve recently read Peter Buchman‘s scripts of The Argentine and Guerilla (both dated 10.4.06), the two-part Che Guevara saga that Steven Soderbergh will begin filming sometime in May with Benicio del Toro in the title role, and they’re awfully damn good — a pair of lean, gritty, you-are-there battle sagas, one about success and the other about failure. Together they comprise a strong and properly ambiguous whole.

Benicio del Toro as Ernesto “Che” Guevara

Obviously political and terse and rugged, the two scripts are about how living outside the law and fighting a violent revolution feels and smells and chafes on a verite, chapter-by-chapter basis. They’re about sweat and guns and hunger and toughing it out…friendships, betrayals, exhaustion, shoot-outs and trudging through the jungle with a bad case of asthma. What it was, how it happened…the straight dope and no overt “drama.”

If Soderbergh does right by what’s on the page, The Argentine and Guerilla (which Focus Features will open within weeks of each other in 2008) will have, at the very least, a Traffic-like impact. The films will almost certainly be Oscar contenders, and you have to figure that del Toro, playing a complex, conflicted hero who ends up dead (i.e. executed in a rural schoolhouse by a drunken Bolivian soldier), will be up for Best Actor. The Guevara role is too well written (nothing but choice, down- to-it dialogue from start to finish) and del Toro is too talented an actor — it can’t not happen.

In fact, I can easily imagine critics comparing Soderbergh’s two-part saga to Coppola’s The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II — not necessarily in terms of quality or emotional-impact issues but because they convey two distinct and disparate sides of Guevara’s saga, the up and the down, in the same way that Coppola’s films are about the youthful ascent and increasingly malignant, middle- aged descent of Al Pacino‘s Michael Corleone.

The Argentine is about Fidel Castro and Guevara’s forces leading their ragtag anti-Batista army from their arrival on Cuban shores in 1956 until their victory in late ’58. Guerilla is about Guevara’s failed attempt to spark a revolution in Bolivia in 1967. The former is about struggle, strength and triumph, and Guerilla is its opposite number — the same fight minus the wind in the sails.

Reading them took me back to a 3.19.07 “Page Six” item that preemptively attacked the Soderbergh venture, which I read as a case of knee-jerk hostility due to the fact that the N.Y. Post, which publishes the column, is a right-wing paper that sometimes lets its agenda seep into the writing.

The item vented concerns shared by right-wing anti-Castro Cubans (i.e., the Andy Garcia brigade) that the two films will portray the famed revolutionary in glowing heroic terms without focusing on his brutal, darkly dogmatic side that manifested when Guevara was put in charge of Havana’s La Cabana fortress and oversaw the trial and execution of 600 political prisoners.

Steven Soderbergh; Benicio del Toro-as-Che charicature; Che Guevara

“To witness such butchery is a trauma that will accompany me to my grave,” Jose Vilasuso, a lawyer who worked under Guevara, is quoted as saying. “The walls of that medieval castle received the echoes of the rhythmic footstep of the squad, the clicking of the rifles, the sorry howling of the dying, the macabre silence.”

In this respect the Cuban righties are not that wrong. The Argentine contains no La Cabana depictions — nothing about what happened in the wake of Castro and Guevara”s triumph, and no reflections at all about the kind of country Cuba became under Castro since then. Guerilla alludes to Guevara’s frustration with being a top-level Cuban comandante, but no specifics are offered. (Oddly, the script doesn’t have any scenes of Guevara visiting New York City in December 1964, which Soderbergh filmed last year.)

And Guevara is clearly portrayed in a flattering light. As far as these screenplays represent what the films will ultimately be (the rule-of-thumb being that scripts are only blueprints), Buchman’s Guevara is an imperfect but admirable fellow — com- plex and dogged, tenacious but plagued by asthma, brave and strong but capable of error, rigid and dogmatic and, in Guerilla, oblivious to the basic shape of things, and yet basically decent and humane and certainly courageous to the last.

And yet the scripts don’t feel like a buff-and-polish job. (Not to me anyway.) Guevara is shown as a right guy, but they don’t attempt to portray a revolution or the Cuban culture or anything sweeping about the wisdom or ultimate goodness of Latin American socialism. They’re about an intelligent, willful, resourceful hombre and his allies slugging it out in a pair of tough battles. No heartfelt speeches, no playing to the galleries — just the rough-and-tumble.

Soderbergh will shoot the films in tandem, using mostly Spanish dialogue. Javier Bardem (as Castro?), Franka Potente, Benjamin Bratt and Benjamin Benite- zare were reported by Variety last October to be “in talks to play key roles.”

The producer is Laura Bickford, who began working on the project with Del Toro and Soderbergh five or six (seven?) years ago, in the wake of their joint Traffic collaboration. The lead financier is the Paris-based Wild Bunch, which “also hung in through twists and turns that included Terrence Malick committing to direct and then dropping out to make The New World.”

Responding to criticism about the Tribeca Film Festival jacking ticket prices from $12 to $18, spokesperson Tammie Rosen has told N.Y. Post reporter Sara Stewart that “in an effort to provide the best possible experience, we have raised our prices, which have until now been lower than most other festivals.”

To which N.Y. Post critic and blogger Lou Lumenick responds: “While it’s true that the Toronto Film Festival gets $15 a ticket, it’s also true that their offerings are substantially better than those in Tribeca. Those of us who have covered the festival over the years have largely turned a blind eye to the issue that the bulk of the offerings are mediocre or worse — largely films that were rejected by Sundance or New Directors/New Films, many of which are never heard from again.

“The steep ticket prices may force the media to abandon our previous civic boosterism and start looking at Tribeca’s offerings from a more consumerist point of view — are these flicks really worth $18? And I doubt that’s what co-founders Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal wanted.”

As I’ve become a fan of recent spoken-word performances and WordTheatre in particular, I’m inclined to mention a Taylor Negron show being performed at Hollywood’s Egyptian this Sunday, 4.1.07, at 7:30 pm. Called “Taylor Negron Remade As Fiction,” it’s being described as “an invocation with violin, cello, piano and human voice, presented by WordTheatre and Delta Highway.” Negron will riff on Karen Carpenter, Lucille Ball, Charles Manson and the storm surge of Katrina. Lili Haydn (a.k.a., “the Jimi Hendrix of the violin”), L.A. Philharmonic cellist Ben Hong and pianist Adam MacDougall will accompany. Taylor’s stories have been developed with and directed by Cedering Fox. A champagne reception will follow. No one is likely to mention Blades of Glory, much less discuss it in any depth.

One of the most glaring visual errors in major motion-picture history was Alfred Hitchcock‘s decision to use this shot from North by Northwest (1959). A seated pre-pubescent kid (directly to the right of Eva Marie Saint‘s left shoulder blade), having obviously grown tried of listening to loud blam! blam! pistol shots over and over in rehearsals and/or previous takes, plugs his ears prior to Saint “shooting” Cary Grant.

The weekend’s big box-office battle is between Blades of Glory, the Will Ferrell-Jon Heder-New Homophobia comedy that the hairy-backed hoo-hoo crowd is reportedly hot to see, vs. Meet The Robinsons, the Disney 3-D animated deal that toddlers and their families cramming into starting this afternoon. No one cares who the winner will be, or how much money will be made….nobody wants to know anything because it’s a weekend of mourning. If I could wave my hand and make the Ferrell flick into a failure, I would, but it’s expected to do around $35 million.

Today’s Hollywood Hills fire started behind the Oakwood Gardens complex on Barham Boulevard, just up the hill from Warner Bros., around 1 pm or a little before. The fire was first reported as having consumed five acres. It grew to about 100 acres. It peaked for about 90 minutes, and was pretty much suppressed by 4 pm. I was looking at the huge plume — it reminded me of the smoke pouring out of the twin towers on 9.11 — from Olympic Boulevard in West L.A. and then West Hollywood as I was riding on the motorcycle.

photo provided by David Zaugh, c/o David Zaugh Photography

Rod Lurie‘s intention to remake Sam Peckinpah‘s 1971 classic Straw Dogs is perhaps the most inspired idea he’s ever had as far as movie-directing material is concerned. Lurie is a bit of a tough guy and a man’s man (as anachronistic as that may sound), and I’m betting that he understands better than most what makes the original Dogs a great (certainly a near-great) work.

The story, based on a book called “The Siege of Trencher’s Farm,” strikes all kinds of primal macho chords, all of them tethered to the territorial imperative (i.e., the defense of one’s wife and home, and the small-town repelling of exotic invaders). I know that I’ve never felt so aroused and “with” the violence in any film as I have with Peckinpah’s original, which costars Dustin Hoffman and Susan George .

At the very least Lurie’s effort will inspire everyone to re-watch and re-assess the original, which is the second or third-best Peckinpah film ever made (after The Wild Bunch and Ride The High Country). The downside, of course, is that Lurie is asking for trouble. The odds are not overwhelming that he’s going to out-point or out-gun Peckinpah’s version (it being so perfectly cast, so beautifully edited, so full of ominous vibes). Lurie might be able to match the original, but any director would have a difficult time making a better film. But I respect Lurie’s courage in deciding to do it anyway.