Here’s the HD teaser-trailer for Roland Emmerich‘s 10,000 B.C. (Warner Bros., 3.7.08), which is about “a young mammoth hunter’s journey through uncharted territory to secure the future of his tribe.” Cliff Curtis, Camilla Belle, Omar Sharif, saber-toothed tigers, woolly mammoths, etc.

The long-awaited, double-disc Criterion DVD of Billy Wilder‘s Ace in the Hole (out on Tuesday, 7.17) arrived this morning. I had to immediately grapple with an instinct to stop work, turn down the lights, lock the door and spend three or four hours watching the feature and the supplementary docs and essays (including a 1980 Wilder doc by Michael Ciment called Portrait of a 60% Perfect Man). But as Richard Nixon once said to H.R. Haldeman, “That would be wrong.”

Paramount Home Video is releasing a boilerplate Zodiac DVD, containing the 157-minute theatrical version that played earlier this year, on 7.24.07. But the fans (i.e., guys like me) will have to wait until sometime next year to see the somewhat longer, even more obsessive version, which I’m guessing will be roughly three hours, give or take.

I’m trying to find out the particulars as we speak. Paramount Home Video is looking to siphon all the bucks it can out of this title, and that means doing the old double dip by delaying on the special edition. They all do it, it pisses everyone off, and nothing ever changes.

The “I’ve Got a Crush on Obama” video is obviously more upfront sexual (Daddy Lust, obeisance before power, lay down for the conqueror) than the Hot for Hilary (i.e., Hott 4 Hil) video parody, which obviously toys with the same psychology in a playfully gay vein. And yet there’s real emotional sincerity in these videos. I’m kind of torn about which is the more winning. Thoughts?
It’s common knowledge that many, many people in this country make their decisions about who to put in the White House based on reasonings that have nothing to do with policy and philosophy. John Kennedy surely got some of his vote plurality over Richard Nixon from women who thought about going to bed with him. If it hadn’t been for the notion that George Bush is a regular guy you can relax and shoot the shit with over a beer, he might not have been able to steal the election twice. Let’s face it — millions and millions of voting-age people out there are impressionable little lambs.

Maxim critic, Hollywood Wiretap columnist and Hollywood get-around guy Pete Hammond has done a podcast chat with The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil about some early Oscar favorites. His, not mine; I agree with only a couple of them.
O’Neil doesn’t specifically allude to Hammond speaking about the inevitability of Tommy Lee Jones as a Best Actor candidate for his Olympian performances in No Country For Old Men and In The Valley of Elah, but apparently Hammond does speak of No Country in the recording.
Hammond also pushes the “magnificent” Don Cheadle for his Talk to Me performance as legendary Washington, D.C. deejay Ralph “Petey” Greene. Trust me — it won’t happen. Cheadle almost always gives exceptional performances, but the character has to embody something that people relate to or believe in, and Greene is shown as a bright firebrand who ended up as a loser and a boozer with addictions that ended his life too soon.
Milos Forman‘s Goya’s Ghosts “is not going to go to the Oscars in anything but a technical category,” Hammond predicts. John Waters‘ Hairspray, however, “delivers…it’s a lot of fun.” No, it isn’t — it’s relentlessly fizzy, repetitive and droning, although I recognize that a lot of people are liking it. (I’ve had problems with Waters skin-deep films all along, so my reaction came as no surprise.) Hammond also calls it “a mid-July sleeper.” Okay, and what does this have to do with Oscar prospects?
Hammond is completely correct is predicting Marion Cotillard in La Vie en Rose and Julie Christie in Away from Her are almost certain Best Actress nominees, “no matter what comes up the rest of the year.” A Mighty Heart‘s Angelina Jolie “will get a big campaign,” yes, but it’ll be an uphill effort because of the film’s box-office failure.

If you’ve been following the rumbles and the mutterings about Peter Segal‘s Get Smart (Warner Bros., 6.08), you’ve probably got your guard up. But this trailer, God strike me down, is mildly funny. Making a film about Maxwell Smart may have been a lame idea, but Steve Carell, it appears, was the right guy to play him.

How can Sleuth (Sony Pictures Classics, 10.12) not be good with Michael Caine starring in a Harold Pinter rewrite of Anthony Schaffer‘s very clever (at times delicious) hit play? If Kenneth Branagh isn’t renowned as a great director, he’s certainly a proficient one, and Jude Law — inhabiting the young-cad role that Caine played in the 1972 version opposite Laurence Olivier — will be fine. This movie can’t be a problem…it can’t. Here‘s the trailer.

Michael Caine, Jude Law

American Cinematographer executive editor Stephen Pizzello has posted a podcast interview with Sopranos director of photography Alik Sakharov, and extracted this quote about the meaning of the blackout.
“To me, [it means] this person will die, whether he dies in the next second or [in] six months,” Sakharov says. “It’s not about whether he’s dead or he’s alive, really. It’s not even important. What’s important is the [thought] process. You know, [it’s] like you have very, very fine caviar: you eat it, and then you let it sit on the palate of your mouth, and then you begin to enjoy the aftertaste.”
It’s not important if Tony Soprano is dead or alive? In what ectoplasmic realm? Saying he may die in the next second or six months from now is like saying he could die 25 or 40 years into the future — it’s a meaningless statement. And we all know about the caviar and the aftertaste and all that — that’s just more bullshit evasiveness.

Of all the new Toronto Film Festival films announced today, the most intriguing (for me) is Alan Ball‘s Nothing is Private, a Scott Rudin production that has no distributor as of this writing. I read the script last April and called it “a very solid and sharply observed thing, and sexually audacious as the dickens.”

Actually I was only describing the first 55 pages, which was all I’d read at that point. But I finished it the next day, and if anything my admiration gained. It may not be a monumental film (whatever that means), but it had, on paper, a feeling of discipline, completeness and clarity of character.
Based on Alicia Erian‘s “Towelhead” and costarring Aaron Eckhart, Maria Bello, Peter Macdissi, Toni Collette and Eugene Jones, it’s about a 13 year-old half-Arab, half-Irish girl named Jasira (Summer Bishil, said to be exceptional in the part) getting sexually involved with two older guys while living with her strict Lebanese father in Houston in the early ’90s.
The other films locked into Toronto are Julian Schanbel‘s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (beautifully made with rivers of feeling, but also a film that makes you wish it would end sooner); Tony Gilroy‘s Michael Clayton (George Clooney in the lead role), Gavin Hood‘s Rendition (Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep); Neil Jordan‘s The Brave One (Jodie Foster, Terrence Howard); Terry George‘s Reservation Road (Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Connelly), and Peter Greenaway‘s Nightwatching.

Lionsgate has decided to push out James Mangold‘s 3:10 to Yuma, the western with Russell Crowe and Christian Bale, on Sept. 7th instead of October 5th. That lets out the Toronto Film Festival (9.6 to 9.15), but does this also mean no-go’s for Telluride and Venice?
Variety‘s Pamela McLintock is saying this will make it the first fall western out of the gate, beating Andrew Dominik‘s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Warner Bros., 9.21) and Joel and Ethan Coen‘s No Country for Old Men (Miramax, 11.9)….although it’s not really accurate to call the Coen’s film a western. It’s more of a mythic end-of-the-world movie set in Texas.

“We are a Date Destination for Grownups,” Landmark megaplex co-owner Mark Cuban tells L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein in a piece about a pair of cool movie-watching houses in West Los Angeles . “You aren’t going to see kids running around. There won’t be Hostel 33 or Saw 15 playing. We will program for our audience. The mix will still lean toward art and indie fare simply because that is how great movies geared toward adults skew.”

Cuban further predicts that the Landmark will be the beneficiary of this glut of new product. “Some producers will face some financial pain,” he says. “But it will result in better movies making it to our screens. Good movies will find an audience.”
But “all the good movies in the world may still not save the Crest,” a single-screen indie theatre running on upper Westwood Blvd. by owner Robert Buxbaum. “Like the other aging one-screen theaters that populate Westwood, it’s a gas-guzzler in a neighborhood full of Priuses. All those lights on its marquee come with a cost — Bucksbaum complains that his electricity bill probably rivals any theater in the country.”

There are three theatres on the Paramount Pictures lot — a big swanky one, an older smaller one and an upstairs screening room above the older one. The theatres have different names but calling one venue “the Sherry Lansing theatre” and another one the blah-dee-blah theatre is too vague. It would be much simpler and clearer if Paramount publicists would just say in their invites that they’ll be screening their new movie at “the big swanky theatre,” “the older little theatre” or “that old funky screening room upstairs.” Keep it simple and colloquial and you can’t go wrong.