“Of all the things to make you pause, hand on wallet, before shelling out for a movie ticket, try this: a film about the aftermath of 9/11, starring Adam Sandler. What possible cultural need, one might ask, could be met by such a project? It is thus with a degree of amazement that I find myself nominating Reign Over Me written and directed by Mike Binder, as a movie that might be worth your time.”

A near-rave review of Reign Over Me from New Yorker critic Anthony Lane? I know it’s a good and uncommonly haunting film with a surprisingly powerful performance by Sandler, but for some reason I’m startled that the snooty Lane not only agrees, but has found other particular Reign things to praise.

The bottom line with the Joe Roth-recutting-Julie Taymor‘s-Across The Universe story (as written by N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman) is one thing and one thing only — the trailer.

We all know that trailers never tell the truth about a movie, but it’s hard to watch this one and not be at least a little bit impressed. It’s a kids-tripping-out-in-the-late-’60s thing with the cast singing and dancing to Beatles songs, and it kind of looks to me like Milos Forman‘s Hair. The trailer has an aura of vision and intelligence — a carefully measured, ultra-colorful, extra-vivid quality is there from start to finish.

The gist of Waxman’s story is that Taymor’s cut of Across the Universe, which cost $45 million to make, ran two hours and eight minutes. But like many strong directors, Taymor (Frida, Titus) has a tendency towards willfulness and obstinacy, and she freaked when Roth created his own version — “about a half-hour shorter” — without her agreement.

“Roth’s moves have left Taymor feeling helpless and considering taking her name off the movie,” wriites Waxman. “Disavowing a film is the most radical step available to a director like Taymor, who does not have final cut, one that could embarrass the studio and hurt the movie’s chances for a successful release in September.”

There must have been something askew and/or unsatisfying with Taymor’s film for Roth to have stepped in like that. Research audiences must have said some pissy things about it. A guy on the IMDB who may or may not have seen it says “it would be cruel to call Across the Universe a two-hour music video because it tries so hard to be more than that, but it wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate either. The movie can be summed up as a series of punctuated scenes and characters each represented by a Beatles song and strung together by a boilerplate love story.”

I say again — look at the trailer.

The costars and cameo-ists are Jim Sturges, Evan Rachel Wood, Joe Anderson, Dana Fuchs, Salma Hayek, Eddie Izzard and Bono. I don’t know who plays what. The release date is 9.28.07. A celebration or a roasting at the Toronto Film Festival could be in the cards.

TMNT “never wears out its welcome and gets the story told efficiently without dragging us down with subplots to pad out the runtime. Nor is the story rushed to ensure a certain number of shows per day in the megaplex. This is a movie about mutated, humanoid turtles who talk like New Yorkers and fight like ninjas…get over it.” — from Moises Chiullan‘s HE review.

I should have posted a link two days ago to Mark Ebner‘s Hollywood Interrupted interview piece about one-time recording mogul and accused murderer Phil Spector, who “was always a fatal train wreck waiting to happen,” Ebner declares. Spector’s trial for the murder of Lana Clarkson is now underway, and Ebner is pledging to provide live-blog gavel-to-gavel coverage from Los Angeles Superior Court.

A pass-along from renowned cartoonist and old-time (i.e, ’70s and early ’80s hangover) Connecticut friend Chris Browne, who’s been writing and drawing “Hagar the Horrible” since 1988.

Denmark’s Niclas Kockum says that yestersday’s post on Premiere.com’s list of greatest movie posters “should acknowledge that the history of good movie posters goes a bit beyond the American borders. If your criteria for a good movie poster is how ‘striking, innovative, eye-catching’ it is, then you just can’t go wrong with old Polish movie posters. Trippy as hell. Practically all of them beat the original posters.”

I was okay with Lasse Hallstrom‘s The Hoax (Miramax, 4.6), but — this column is often about the “but” factor — I can’t get over Hallstrom’s decision to allow an early panoramic shot of New York City’s lower half (i.e., shot from the roof of a midtown skyscraper in the mid 40s, facing south) to momentarily destroy the audience’s suspension of disbelief. Those of you who know that The Hoax is a period film (it happens entirely in 1971 and early ’72) have probably guessed what the issue is already.

The film begins with a wind-blown Clifford Irving (Richard Gere) and his editor (Hope Davis) standing next to a helipad atop the McGraw-Hill building and awaiting the arrival of a chopper carrying the legendary Howard Hughes, whom Irving has allegedly been interviewing for an exclusive tell-all book. So when the camera takes a look at the lower-Manhattan sprawl, the viewer naturally expects to see the World Trade Center towers, which had been built only two or three years earlier.

But The Hoax was shot in 2005 by guys on a budget, and so they’re not there. As lame as that sounds, that’s pretty much the reason why. Worse, the same tower- less shot is used in The Hoax again, around the two-thirds mark. Almost as if someone is saying to us, “Were you getting popcorn when that early missing- towers shot appeared? You were? Well, here it is again. See what screw-ups we are?”

I tried reaching Hoax producer Mark Gordon to ask (a) why Hallstrom or someone else hadn’t pointed out the error and hired a visual-effects house to paste the towers into the Battery skyline, or (b) why Hallstrom didn’t simply aim his cameras west or east or north. But it took the better part of a day just to get Gordon’s publicist’s number — the subliminal message seemed to be “please leave us alone.” So I called Mark Dornfeld at Custom Film Effects, the company that delivered most of the Hoax‘s CG visuals.

Dornfeld, amiable and easy-going, said “there was no discussion” about pasting in the towers — “it never came up” — but suggested that people should cut Hallstrom a break because “he’s not a native.” How much would it have cost if Hallstrom or Gordon had wanted Dornfeld to paste in the towers? “Ohh, I’d say maybe, let’s say, $3500 to $4000. We’re talking about pasting in a still image into a static shot, and it doesn’t have to be too distinct because there’s a lot of haze in the distance of lower Manhattan anyway, so….yeah, $3500 to $4000.”

I don’t know what else to say, guys. I didn’t go into The Hoax with an attitude, waiting to slam any errors I could find. It’s not a bad film at all, but if you show any audience from any country in the world a visual of lower Manhattan they’re going to look for one thing and one thing only — the twin towers if the film is set before 9.11.01, or the absence of the towers if it’s set after. Very simple, slam dunk, no discussion.

A revised estimate has been passed along about the projected gross for TMNT this weekend. A studio-based marketing guy is now saying it’ll be more like $25 to $35 million (he actually thinks it’ll be closer to $35 million) rather than the $20 to $25 million projection I reported yesterday or the day before.

I saw Lasse Hallstrom‘s The Hoax (Miramax, 4.6.07) last night in Westwood at a “special screening” (i.e., red-carpet photography but no after-party). It’s not without problems (or should I use the word “issues”?), but it’s not half-bad. The seams show from time to time (the budget was lean), but it’s better than decently made. A low-key caper movie-slash-ethical drama, The Hoax never once pissed me off, and that’s saying something by today’s standards.

Richard Gere schmoozing after Sunday night’s “special screening” of The Hoax

Set in the early ’70s, it’s about how author Clifford Irving (Richard Gere, giving one of his vigorous, all-out performances in the vein of Mr. Jones or Breathless) flim-flammed most of the world (including book publisher McGraw-Hill) into believing he’d persuaded reclusive wackjob billionaire Howard Hughes to tell all for a definitive autobiography.

The script is by William Wheeler (Empire, The Prime Gig). Marcia Gay Harden, the always superb Alfred Molina (as Irving’s partner-in-crime Richard Suskind), Julie Delpy (as Nina van Pallandt), Eli Wallach, Hope Davis and Stanley Tucci costar.

An actor named Michael J. Burg is billed as having played Truman Capote in the film — to the best of my recollection this performance isn’t in the film. Milton Buras is also credited on the IMDB for portraying Howard Hughes — his performance must have been cut out.

Irving has been quoted as saying, “I had nothing to do with this movie, and it had very little to do with me.”

When I think of Irving (whom I interviewed in the ’90s — I forget about what), I think of him lying on a sunny beach in Ibiza with Nina van Pallandt. But there’s no Ibiza stuff in the film — almost all of it was shot in and around New York City with some extra lensing in Puerto Rico

I’ll have a technical comment to share about the film tomorrow.

I was okay with Lasse Hallstrom‘s The Hoax (Miramax, 4.6), but — this column is often about the “but” factor — I can’t get over Hallstrom’s decision to let an early panoramic shot of New York City’s lower half (i.e., shot from the roof of a midtown skyscraper in the mid 40s, facing south) that momentarily destroys the audience’s suspension of disbelief. Those of you who know that The Hoax is a period film (it happens entirely in 1971 and early ’72) are probably guessing what the issue is already.

The film begins with a wind-blown Clifford Irving (Richard Gere) and his editor (Hope Davis) standing next to a helipad atop the McGraw-Hill building and awaiting the arrival of a chopper carrying the legendary Howard Hughes, whom Irving has allegedly been interviewing for an exclusive tell-all book. So when the camera takes a look at the lower-Manhattan sprawl, the viewer naturally expects to see the World Trade Center towers, which had been built only two or three years earlier.

But The Hoax was shot in 2005 by guys on a budget, and so they’re not there. As lame as that sounds, that’s what happened. Worse, the same tower-less shot is used in The Hoax again, around the two-thirds mark. Almost as if someone is saying to us, “Were you out getting popcorn when that early missing-towers shot appeared? You were? Well, here it is again. See what screw-ups we are?”

I tried reaching Hoax producer Mark Gordon to ask (a) why Hallstrom or someone else hadn’t pointed out the error and hired a visual-effects house to paste the towers into the Battery skyline, or (b) why Hallstrom didn’t simply aim his cameras west or east or north. But it took the better part of a day just to get Gordon’s publicist’s number — the subliminal message seemed to be “please leave us alone.” So I called Mark Dornfeld at Custom Film Effects, the company that delivered most of the Hoax‘s CG visuals.

Dornfeld, amiable and easy-going, said “there was no discussion” about pasting in the towers — “it never came up” — but suggested that people should cut Hallstrom a break because “he’s not a native.” How much would it have cost if Hallstrom or Gordon had wanted Dornfeld to paste in the towers? “Ohh, I’d say maybe, let’s say, $3500 to $4000. We’re talking about pasting in a still image into a static shot, and it doesn’t have to be too distinct because there’s a lot of haze in the distance of lower Manhattan anyway, so….yeah, $3500 to $4000.”

I don’t know what else to say, guys. I didn’t go into The Hoax with an attitude, waiting to slam any errors I could find. It’s not a bad film at all, but if you show any audience from any country in the world a visual of lower Manhattan they’re going to look for one thing and one thing only — the twin towers if the film is set before 9.11.01, or the absence of the tower if it’s set after. Very simple, slam dunk, no discussion.

“Page Six” says the Motion Picture Assn. of America’s rating s board “just might flip out” when they see Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez‘s Grindhouse (Weinstein Co., 4.6), a wink-wink exploitation movie in quotes that’s being sold as a tribute to the cheeseball sex-and-violence flicks that used to play in urban downmarket movie theatres in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.

Wait a minute…”might” flip out? As in “they haven’t seen it yet”? A little more than two weeks before opening? I don’t think I believe that. The Weinsteiners are looking for an R rating but “some of [the film] is so graphic and outrageous for a major Hollywood studio, there’s no question it’s headed for an NC-17 without big cuts,” says a ‘Page Six’ operative who got a sneak peek at the most over-the-top footage.”

So the risque footage may show up on the DVD instead of in theatres? I think most of us understand that system and are actually quite accustomed to it.

The same”Page Six” item also mentions that between the two Grindhouse movies (which are either called Death Planet and Terror Proof or Death Proof and Terror Planet or Planet Proof…same difference) — will be broken up by an intermission composed of a series of fake trailers “for such fictitious titles as Werewolf Women of the SS, directed by Rob Zombie. and another, directed by Hostel‘s Eli Roth, called Thanksgiving, “in which a town’s celebration of Turkey Day is interrupted by a mad slasher.”

Dyanne Thorne in Ilsa, She-Wolf of the S.S.

Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse-themed programming schedule of ’70s and ’80s exploitation films at L.A.’s New Beverly Cinema omits one of the ugliest and most repellent s & m sleaze movies of all time — Ilsa, She-Wolf of the S.S..

Why did Tarantino omit this one? It stinks, it’s diseased, it was produced and performed by untalented people and it makes you feel skanky…why not?

Dyanne Thorne‘s Ilsa — a big-breasted blonde Nazi with a voracious sexual appetite straight out of David F. Freidman‘s libido — died at the end of this wretched film, but this didn’t stop Thorne and the producers from making three more Ilsa films — (1) Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks, (2) Ilsa, The Wicked Warden and Ilsa, Tigress of Siberia. Anchor Bay has issued a reasonably good quality DVD box set featuring the first three — Siberia not included.

Ilsa came out of a ’70s sub-genre of grindhouse cinema that blended Nazis, riding crops and perverse sex, otherwise known as Naziploitation. (I remember the term “homosexual Nazi chic” included in a piece by critic Andrew Sarris in the late ’70s.). The genre began with two exercises in upscale perversity– Luchino Visconti‘s The Damned and Liliana Cavani‘s The Night Porter. But before you knew it the gates were down and the inmates were running the asylum with films like Salon Kitty (directed by Tinto Brass) plus Love Camp 7, Gestapo’s Last Orgy and Beast in Heat plus “Ilsa-clone” films like Elsa, Fraulien of the SS and Desert Foxes.