French actor Jean-Pierre Cassel died three days ago — Thursday, 4.19 — in Paris after a long illness. A statement was issued Friday, the Hollywood Reporter posted Rebecca Leffler‘s story a day after that, and some of us didn’t get around to reading the story until Sunday. The 74 year-old was Vincent Cassel‘s dad. The elder Cassel’s final film, Julian Schnabel‘s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, will show at the Cannes Film Festival next month.

“From the moment he steps onstage, with his hunched walk and lumbering step, Frank Langella has avoided the obvious route of Rich Little-style impersonation of one of the most impersonated figures in history. What he delivers instead is an interpretation that, without imitation, still captures and exaggerates Richard Nixon‘s essential public traits: the buttered-gravel voice, the scowling smile, the joviality that seemed to contain an implicit threat.

“The friend with whom I saw the play asked me afterward if I had noticed how much better Langella’s Nixon impersonation became as the show progressed. Langella’s performance had not changed, but by evening’s end it had eclipsed the familiar photographic image of the real man. Like Helen Mirren‘s understated Elizabeth II in The Queen, this overstated Nixon seems destined forever to blend into and enrich the perceptions of its prototype for anyone who sees it.” — from Ben Brantley‘s review of Frost/Nixon in the 4.23 edition of the N.Y. Times.

And yet Ron Howard, fearful of moviegoers who may be not be innately aroused by Langella’s talent, wants to cast a “name” guy to play Nixon for his movie version, which starts shooting in August. Note to Ron: cast the best man and the hell with marquee value. Make the best film you can and make your next bundle from Angels and Demons. The Frost/Nixon film isn’t going to break records no matter who plays Nixon. Forget the Wild Hogs crowd, the airport-fiction readers, the Da Vinci Code mouth-breathers…forget ’em all.

L.A. Observed is reporting (and I heard this independently today on my own) that about 70 L.A. Times newsroom jobs are being chopped, which will reduce the editorial staff “from 920 to around 850.” Okay, that’s rough and I’m sorry for those about to be put out to pasture, but if the the paper version of the Los Angeles Times were to disappear tomorrow, a part of me would truly rejoice. I’ve never loathed a newspaper in my life like I hate the Los Angeles Times with those wads and wads of ad supplements falling out all over the place when I read it in a cafe. I love reading a lot of the L.A. Times reporters and columnists, but I hate the paper Times with a passion. Save the forests and make it all cyber. Better yet, bring back the L.A. Herald Examiner.

Danny Boyle‘s Sunshine (Fox Searchlight, 9.14), a sci-fier about a team of astronauts on a celestial mission to re-ignite a dying sun, won’t open stateside until after Labor Day, but it opened across Europe earlier this month. Some British and European critics have been groaning about the ending, but so far it’s got an above-average 88 % Rotten Tomatoes rating, so it doesn’t sound too problematic. It sounds excellent, in fact, if you leave out the equation of the finale.

I’ve asked the Fox Searchlight folks about seeing Sunshine here in Los Angeles before flying off to France and the Cannes Film Festival on 5.14, but so far they haven’t replied. If my suggestion continues to fall on deaf ears I guess I’ll just take a train to Nice and see it in some paid-ticket multiplex during the festival. (It runs from 5.16 to 5.27, and I’m guessing — hoping — that Sunshine, which opened in France on 4.11, will still be playing five weeks later.) I guess I could also see it somewhere in Italy since I’ll be going there for a few budget-conscious days after Cannes.

On one level it’s pain in the ass to have to chase down a movie this way, but it’ll also be kind of fun.

John Carney‘s Once, the most unassuming and wholesomely affecting love story in years that turned into the Big Find at Sundance ’07, opens on May 18th — a little less than four weeks off. Fox Searchlight, which acquired it last February, has launched its own Once website. (The Irish version has a little more pizazz.) Here, in any event, is a fairly decent trailer that catches the mood and tone of the feature.

Glen Hansard, Marketa Irglova in John Carney’s Once

This little Dublin-shot film is about a couple of gifted but struggling musicians — a scruffy, red-bearded troubadour (Glen Hansard, best known for his Irish group The Frames) and a young Czech immigrant mom (pianist and singer Marketa Irglova) — falling for each other by learning, singing and playing each other’s songs. That’s it…the all of it. And it’s more than enough.

Calling Once a “musical” doesn’t quite get it because it’s really its own bird — it’s a tweaking (almost a reinvention) of the form in the vein of Cabaret, A Hard Day’s Night and Dancer in the Dark. On top of which it’s gently soothing in a low-budget, unforced way.. It’s about struggle and want and uncertainty, but with a kind of easy Dublin glide-along attitude that makes it all go down easy.

Once is about spirit, songs and smiles, lots of guitar strumming, a sprinkling of hurt and sadness and disappointment and — this is atypical — no sex, and not even a glorious, Claude Lelouch-style kiss-and-hug at the finale. But it works at the end — it feels whole, together, self-levitated.

Trust me — there isn’t a woman or a soulful guy out there who won’t respond to Once if they can be persuaded to just watch it. The trick, obviously, is to make that happen, and I admit there may be some resistance. Initially. But once people sit back and let it in (and they’d have to be made of second-rate styrofoam for that not to happen), the game will be more or less won. Settled, I mean.

Carney, Hansard and Irglova are starting a 15-market p.r. tour from April 30 to May 18. They’re in Manhattan on May 1st and Los Angeles on May 15th. In each city Fox will be holding special promotional showings followed by a performance and q & a in each market, which is the template that worked so well at each one of the Sundance screenings last January.

It’s a little raggedy and amateurish — it could obviously be a lot smoother and slicker — but the Black 20 folks who made this Spider-Man 3 product-placement trailer were coming from a good place.

If you care about the Vin Diesel vs. Mathieu Kassovitz clash on the Prague set of Babylon A.D., here’s a rundown courtesy of “Page Six.” Diesel is starring as “a war vet-turned-mercenary escorting a woman from Russia to Canada,” blah, blah…and then “things get dangerous when it turns out the woman is carrying an organism that a bizarre cult wants to harvest to produce a genetically modified Messiah,” blah, blah. It co-stars Michelle Yeoh, Gerard Depardieu and Charlotte Rampling. Kassovitz, 39, has directed eight films prior to this one (including ’03’s Gothika) and is a fairly well-known actor(Munich, Amelie, Amen, Birthday Girl). The movie sounds like second-rate crap. Whatever happened to Diesel anyway? He was on his way to being Next Big Guy, and now he’s Jean Claude van Damme.

Brando, the two-part, four-hour Turner Classic Movies documentary that will air on May 1st and 2nd, is a relatively candid, nicely sculpted, entirely respectable portrait of the single most influential actor of the 20th Century, and probably also the greatest.

I was concerned that producer Leslie Greif and writer Mimi Freedman might make it too much of a valentine to the eminent Marlon Brando, and perhaps gloss over the tragedy of his life, but they consider and in some ways explore most of the substantive issues (i.e., the truth as most of his friends understood it) and gloss over the gnarly stuff only somewhat. There’s always pressure to deliver a love sonnet when you’re making one of these career-review docs, and Greif and Freedman are to be commended or at least given a pass for being as honest as the political climate probably allowed.

The glory of Brando is known to pretty much everyone except the under 25s, and anyone of that age who cares anything at all about movies or acting should definitely watch this. There’s a cornucopia of of wonder and ecstasy in Brando’s early performances (i.e., in five of his first six movies — The Men, A Streetcar Named Desire, Viva Zapata, Julius Caesar and On The Waterfront. I’ve always felt that his work in The Wild One was more iconic than rich.

The darkness of the Brando saga hangs on two hooks. One, that his last 30-plus years were all but wasted in terms of what he was capable of, and two, that the tragedies that claimed two of his children, Christian (the Dag Drollet murder, which led to Christian’s imprisonment) and Cheyenne (who hung herself) were strong indications that Brando was some kind of wretched, extremely wounding, self-absorbed father. The TCM doc acknowledges and discusses the first fairly throughly, but it tip-toes around the second.

Plus it doesn’t mention Brando’s longtime friend Wally Cox at all (a truly shocking omission) and it doesn’t get into the darker, kinkier stuff that was reported in Peter Manso‘s biography. It allows that Brando was an egoistic, self-absorbed mind- fucker at times (depending on who he was dealing with, or what the situation was) and it comes close to saying the poor man pretty much wasted his life after the early ’70s triumph of The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris. But it doesn’t bore in on this, and relatively few of the talking heads (Jane Fonda is an exception) are willing to say what they really thought about his dissolution.

The emphasis, in short, is on how much everyone loved and admired him, which is what these docs always do — Marlon was great, he changed acting, he shook the earth, he was a God, etc. But the doc has a lot of truth in it also, certainly the emotional truth of how Brando’s naturalistic acting style impacted so many of his peers and became such an important benchmark — i.e., “before Brando” and “after Brando” — and inspired so much love and excitement.

The talking heads include Al Pacino, James Caan, Edward Norton, Martin Scorsese, Maximillian Schell, David Thomson, Kevin McCarthy, Bernardo Bertolucci, Frederic Forrest, Martin Landau, Budd Schulberg, John Travolta and Jon Voiight, among many others.

Here’s how some of the wrap-up sentiments sound (there’s too much music mixed into it, making the words hard to hear) and here’s Brando’s riveting delivery of the “dogs of war” speech from Julius Caesar.

Collider.com‘s Steve Weintraub (a.k.a. “Frosty”) spoke to producer Avi Arad at the recent Spider-Man 3 junket about the apparently locked-in decision to have a grey-colored Hulk in the new Edward Norton movie. “While someone else may have posted the story earlier than me,” Weintraub writes, “I’m the one who asked the questions that got [Arad] to talk. You can listen to the audio and hear me asking the questions for the proof.”

Jon Kasdan‘s In The Land of Women (Warner Bros., 4.20) has only managed a lousy 48% Rotten Tomatoes rating, but it’s picked some classy “cream of the crop” allies, including L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan, the Philadelpha Inquirer‘s Carrie Rickey, the Toronto Star‘s Susan Walker, the San Francisco Chroncile‘s Mick LaSalle and Newsweek‘s David Ansen.

That said, many of the positive comments come from an attitude that say, in a nutshell, “Jon Kasdan is young and therefore his first-time-director mistakes are forgivable, on top of which it’s a little easier to cut him slack knowing that his dad, Lawrence Kasdan, has made several good films and that Jon will improve and…well, here’s to the family Kasdan!”

It’s being claimed that “the most powerful indictment of the news media for falling down in its duties in the run-up to the war in Iraq” is contained in a 90-minute PBS broadcast called “Buying the War,” which marks the return of Bill Moyers Journal this coming Wednesday (4.25). Editor & Publisher was sent a preview DVD and a draft transcript for the program this week.

“While much of the evidence of the media’s role as cheerleaders for the war presented here is not new,” an E & P analysis reads, “it is skillfully assembled, with many fresh quotes from interviews (with the likes of Tim Russert and Walter Pincus) along with numerous embarrassing examples of past statements by journalists and pundits that proved grossly misleading or wrong.

“Several prominent media figures, prodded by Moyers, admit the media failed miserably, though few take personal responsibility.

“The war continues today, now in its fifth year, with the death toll for Americans and Iraqis rising again — yet Moyers points out, ‘the press has yet to come to terms with its role in enabling the Bush Administration to go to war on false pretenses.’

“Among the few heroes of this devastating film are reporters with the Knight Ridder/McClatchy bureau in D.C. Tragically late, Walter Isaacson, who headed CNN, observes, “The people at Knight Ridder were calling the colonels and the lieutenants and the people in the CIA and finding out, you know, that the intelligence is not very good. We should’ve all been doing that.”

“At the close, Moyers mentions some of the chief proponents of the war who refused to speak to him for this program, including Thomas Friedman, Bill Kristol, Roger Ailes, Charles Krauthammer, Judith Miller and William Safire.

“But Dan Rather, the former CBS anchor, admits, “I don’t think there is any excuse for, you know, my performance and the performance of the press in general in the roll up to the war√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ǭ¶we didn’t dig enough. And we shouldn’t have been fooled in this way.”

“Bob Simon, who had strong doubts about evidence for war, was asked by Moyers if he pushed any of the top brass at CBS to ‘dig deeper,’ and he replies, ‘No, in all honesty, with a thousand mea culpas√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ǭ¶.nope, I don’t think we followed up on this.'”

Hollywood Wiretap‘s Tom Tapp has posted Harvey Weinstein‘s reply to Patrick Goldstein‘s “what happened to the old Harvey?” piece that ran a few days ago in the L.A. Times. Weinstein’s answer is published in today’s Calendar section but not online (and barely visible in the paper) so Tapp has reproduced it for everyone’s reading pleasure:

“Goldstein says he misses ‘the Harvey Weinstein (he) used to know,'” Weinstein begins, “claiming that ‘the Oscar impresario who…was truly, madly, deeply in love with movies’ has been replaced by a ‘slimmed-down mogul…who has lost his way.’

“I never fell out of love with movies,” Weinstein insists. “I did have to spend time building the infrastructure of our new company, but we still produced films I’m extremely proud of, like Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez‘s daring Grindhouse, Anthony Minghella‘s beautiful Breaking and Entering“and the politically charged Bobby.”

Wells replies: Some of us found Breaking and Entering a bit lethargic, Harvey. And if Bobby had in fact been politically charged it might have been a whole different kettle of fish.

“Moreover, Patrick knows full well (because I told him) that I decided to rededicate myself to cutting-edge movies six months ago,” Weinstein continues. “That’s why I went to Sundance in January and bought La Misma Luna, Grace Is Gone, Dedication and Teeth. He also knows (because I told him) that as a result of my rededication, the Weinstein Co. (sic.) will have three movies in the official selection at Cannes next month — Michael Moore‘s Sicko, Quentin Tarantino‘s Death Proof, and Wong Kar Wai‘s My Blueberry Nights, which is being featured as the opening-night movie.

“In addition, we are co-financing the Portuguese-language Elite Squad (the same way we did City of God); Wayne Kramer‘s >Crossing Over starring Sean Penn and Harrison Ford; Denzel Washington‘s The Great Debaters; Richard Shepherd‘s Spring Break in Bosnia and Stephen Daldry‘s The Reader, written by David Hare.

“As I told Patrick, it was six months ago that my brother Bob told me, ‘It’s time for you to get back to making and acquiring movies — to the kind of movies you were once known for.’ Since then, I’ve been doing just that — and it’s just like the good old days.”