An Israeli correspondent has forwarded a 10.11.07 Hebrew- language news story from Haaretz, the Israeli news agency, that Eran Kolirin‘s The Band’s Visit has been disqualified from competing for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. The Academy’s foreign branch has determined that more than 50% of the dialogue is English and therefore, according to the rules, not eligible.

Israeli film blogger Yair Raveh is reporting the same situation also. (Ditto the Jerusalem Post.) Raveh says the Israeli Academy is planning to appeal to reverse the decision, but if the Academy won’t budge Israel will submit Joseph Cedar‘s Beaufort, the runner-up for Best Picture with Israel’s Ophir Award, asa replacement. Cedar won Best Director at this year’s Berlin Film Festival for this film, and Beaufort is also Israel’s biggest natively-produced ticket seller so far this year.

Sony Pictures Classics will distribute The Band’s Visit in early ’08. SPC co-chiefs Tom Bernard and Michael Barker were unavailable for comment. Torene Svitl, the Motion Picture Academy’s foreign film liason/adminstrator, didn’t pick up.

In David Carr‘s 10.11 N.Y. Times piece about today’s absurdly overcrowded movie marketplace, Sony Classics co-president Tom Bernard speculates on the motives of new-to-the-business investors. “Hey, if you’ve made all of your money in corn futures and manage a hedge fund, why not gamble a bit in the movie business?” he says.

“I’d say that there is real money to be made by being the guy that collects and holds all of this money, the theater owner,” Bernard adds, “but I don’t see a bunch of Wall Street money heading into that. Nobody wants to show movies; they want to make them.”

There are two reasons why investors put their money into making and not showing. One is the marginal but tangible benefits of meeting famous people and occasionally hanging with legendary, world-renowned creatives (at lunch or business meetings, or at least at parties). Not just social but also spiritual benefits. The other, which feeds to some extent off the first, is the access that film investors sometimes have in these circles to educated, breathtaking women with immaculate genes and refined breeding.

As Tom Wolfe pointed out in The Painted Word, which looked at the tendency of the super-rich to purchase modern art and, in some cases, develop relationships with artists, nothing matters as much to people with money as the notion that people whose place in history is assured because of their fame or their artistry regard them as a member of the club, or at least as members with honorary status.

To say that a significant portion of today’s hedge-fund multi-millionaires lack grace and refinement is putting it very, very mildly. Such people naturally crave (and in some cases are desperate for) the assurances and status-upgrades that only famous artist elites can bestow.

Creative X-factor women with beautiful exotic looks are usually bored by corn-future investor types, but their cousins — beautiful elegant women who haven’t much edge or talent, or are too lazy to develop what they have — will sometimes entertain overtures from dull guys if they’re rich enough. You never know where things can lead. The key thing is access, and these investor types, in their dreams, live for the chance at meeting and then, given the right vibe and circumstance, pitching these women.

I swear to God that 90% of the financial action in the movie business happens because of these two things.

Nikki Finke‘s explanation of how the whole “working with women” hoo-hah went down with Warner Bros. production president Jeff Robinov from last Friday until yesterday adds layers and intrigues, although I can feel the helium leaking out of this thing.

James Franco delivered a landmark performance as James Dean in a Mark Rydell-directed TV movie six years ago, and without dismissing his subsequent work in any way (I’m a fan of his performance in ’03’s City by the Sea and his small but solid performance in In The Valley of Elah, which should have been larger) this is what I mainly think of when I see or run into Franco.

A performance he gave six years ago…right. Like those Woody Allen fans who say to him in Stardust Memories, “We love your movies, especially the earlier, funnier ones!”

And yet…hold on…a new Franco performance got through to me today when l heard a recording of him reading a piece by Rajarshi “Tito” Mukhopadhyay, an 18 year-old Indian writer and poet. Franco doesn’t exactly breathe fire or rip the roof off. It’s just an unforced, gently emotional reading of some heartfelt probing words and thoughts from a kid who happens to be autistic. You can feel the kid’s patience, intelligence, curiosity, acceptance.

I always feel aroused when I hear movie actors do live performances (be it plays or readings) because movies never seem to allow them to go to town with a speech or a poem of any depth. Which is why it’s very cool and unusual to listen to actors act or read outside the bounds of movie scripts. Broadway or London theatre is one way to absorb this, but WordTheatre sessions, which Cedering Fox produces in Los Angeles, New York and London all year ’round, are another. I’ve been to four or five of these shows, and I’ve gotten major contact highs from them each and every time.

Franco and several other actors — Lorraine Toussaint, Dermot Mulroney, Barry Shabaka Henley, Richard Cox, Ian Hart, Wendie Malick, Ming Wen, Annette O’Toole, Gil Birmingham, Stephen Tobolowsky and Michael McKean — are going to read at a WordTheatre event at the Geffen Theatre next Monday evening (10.15). The show, called “Acts of Love: Children,” is a benefit for Cure Autism Now/Autism Speaks. It’s a one-night-only deal. I wish I took time to attend more of these things. You can go crazy just watching movies all the time. My personality sometimes testifies to that.

“I waged a campaign this year against horribly violent horror movies and especially torture porn,” Nikki Finke has told an Elle magazine interviewer in a piece called “The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.” And this campaign, she believes, was influential to some degree.

“I really shamed the Hollywood execs making money on these movies. I do believe that no Hollywood player should earn a dime from a film he’s ashamed to show in his own home. Then other journalists started doing the story. I’m not saying I’m solely responsible, but it’s been gratifying to see that those movies have gone from doing very well at the box office to doing almost no business.”

Is that how it went down, or did torture porn sputter out of its own accord?

I have this rough theory that leading men who’ve established themselves as appealing good guys and/or made it as movie stars shouldn’t play villains until they’re at least 45 or 50 (a la Jack Nicholson in The Shining and Batman, Harrison Ford in What Lies Beneath and Willem Dafoe in Speed 2: Cruise Control), and that an even better time to get into bad-guy roles is when your career is on the way down, or at least when it’s starting to lose altitude.

Eric Bana in Hulk

There are exceptions to every hard and fast rule, of course, so I’m not saying others haven’t played baddies (not flawed protagonists, but deep-dyed villains) at earlier ages and reverted right back to hero roles, but it’s relatively rare.

You can break into the big time playing a sexy, charismatic villain, of course — James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart did this, of course, and George Clooney began this way in From Dusk to Dawn — and then switch over to good-guy roles. But when a relatively young actor accepts a villain role after starring in only five or six features, the industry regards this as a kind of message. “I may not be a bona fide movie star after all,” it says, “and I may even be a character actor, or at least I’m willing to think of myself that way. The important thing is to act, to work…that’s what I care about. And if that means playing bad guys, cool.”

This is my reaction to Taiiana Siegel‘s Variety story about Eric Bana having signed on to play a vlilain called “Nero” in J.J. Abrams‘ Star Trek or Paramount. I really liked Bana in Lucky You and consider his performance in Chopper an absolute classic. I believe that he took a hit, however, from the triple-whammy of Troy (playing a character whose indecisiveness with his randy brother Paris helped bring about the Trojan War), Hulk (obvious reasons) and Munich (that bizarre sex scene at the end), and he never quite recovered, especially if you throw in the financial failure of Lucky You.

I’m trying to be dispassionate and just pass along what I got from Siegel’s story without dumping on Bana, whom I genuinely like. Is there a message in this or not?

Charlize Theron‘s “sexiest woman of the year” designation by Esquire was spoiled by yours truly on 9.2 (and with great delight since I despise the long tease that leads up to the final reveal), and has now been announced in a press release and tapped out for the 10.11 issue of the Hollywood Reporter.

“Cue the wah-wah pedal and widen those lapels,” writes Washington Post columnist Ann Hornaday, because “the ’70s are back, at least at the movies.” She mainly talks about Tony Gilroy‘s Michael Clayton, which has a kind ’70s Gordon Willis-y vibe, and also lists The Brave One (Jodie Foster channeling Charles Bronson), In The Valley of Elah (with its echoes of Coming Home and The Deer Hunter), and director James Gray including a French Connection-like car chase in We Own the Night. But she omits the biggest and best ’70s movie of the season — Ridley Scott‘s American Gangster.

In the 1950s, Michelangelo Antonioni began to make features in the ’50s “that considered film’s capacity for visualizing interior states of mind,” writes L.A. Weekly contributor Robert Koehler about Il grido, which screens tonight and tomorrow at L.A.’s New Beverly cinema.

“As a tale of factory worker Aldo (American actor Steve Cochran), who has a breakup with his longtime lover Irma (Alida Valli) and leaves home with his young daughter to get a new grasp on life, the film cunningly borrows many neorealist tropes and then rattles them until they splinter.

“Viewers may at first think they’ve stumbled into a Vittorio De Sica movie involving struggling laborers and their cute kids, but the odyssey here proceeds not toward a final enlightenment or insight, but outward through vast, limitless landscapes that Antonioni brilliantly conceives as physical correlatives for Cochran’s state of mind.”

“You don’t have to know anything about Joy Division to grasp the mysterious sorrow at the heart” of Anton Corbijn’s Control, writes N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott. “No doubt aware of what this movie will mean to devotees of post-punk melancholy, [Corbijn] sticks to the human dimensions of the narrative rather than turning out yet another show business fable. Where it might have been literal-minded and sentimental, Control is instead enigmatic and moving, much in the manner of Joy Division’s best songs.”

Scott declares that Sam Riley, the “hollow-eyed and gentle-looking” portrayer of the late Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, “is crucial to the film’s effectiveness. Since Curtis is known more by his deep, plangent voice than by his face or his physical presence, Riley does not labor under the burden of mimicry. His performance is quiet, charismatic and a little opaque, in keeping with the movie’s careful, detached approach to its subject.”

I’ve been sent two more reports of Jesse James dissing by Warner Bros. distribution execs — one from Las Vegas Review Journal critic Carol Cling, another from Salt Lake Tribune critic Sean Means.

Cling says she received an e-mail from Phoenix-based Allied Advertising (which handles screenings etc. for the Las Vegas market) two days ago, saying he/she had just heard that The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford “will be opening this Friday! If possible, I would like to set a press screening, but I think it may be too late…let me know if there’s still time.”

Cling’s account of what happened after this is confusing (to me anyway), but the bottom line is that she couldn’t work in the James screening or a review of Andrew Dominik‘s film by her Tuesday deadline.

“Now I’ll have to check out Jesse James on my own time,” she says. “Not that I mind, but this is exactly the kind of movie that needs critical support, and the studio seems to be doing everything they can to subvert that.”

Means wrote today that The Assassination of Jesse James “is getting good reviews, scoring a 73 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and an A in Entertainment Weekly. It’s got Brad Pitt in it, for heaven’s sake…so why is Warner Bros. giving it the shaft?

“The movie, is slated to open this Friday in more cities, including in the Salt Lake City area. That was news to Salt Lake critics, who were informed Monday morning by Warner Bros.’ regional representatives in Denver. Those reps, God bless ’em, have scrambled to set up a press screening so the Salt Lake critics could see and review the film.

“Alas, their efforts seemingly have been sabotaged by the studio, which can’t seem to find a print available for a pre-screening. At the moment, there’s hope for a Thursday late-morning screening — almost too late for most papers’ deadlines — but nothing confirmed.”

Plus the Newark Star Ledger‘s Stephen Whitty has linked today to the mishegoss and threw in some comments.