Yesterday brought a Borys Kit Hollywood Reporter story about Jennifer Garner being “in negotiations” to star opposite Matthew McConaughey in New Line’s Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, a Christmas Carol-ish romantic comedy about “a bachelor visited by ghosts of past and future girlfriends who endeavor to connect him with his true love.”

My reaction, naturally, was one of instant nausea. But it was heartening to learn soon after that at least one other McConaughey hater felt the same way. The combination of McConaughey, Garner and the insipid-sounding plotline inspired Burbanked.com’s Alan Lopuszynski to construct a McConaughey rom-com chart indicating that MM’s actress costars tend to wind up with poorly-written roles and poor reviews.

Although N.Y. movie writer Lewis Beale once called McConaughey “the Robert Cummings of our time,” it’s an article of faith in some quarters that he’s a true Hollywood Beelezebub. I ran a piece along these lines on 7.16.06, called “King of the Empties.” Here it is, reprinted and repasted:

“I’m developing an idea that Matthew McConaughey is a kind of anti-Christ. I’m 35% to 40% serious. He may not be the Satanic emissary of our times, but I honestly believe if and when the real devil rises up from those sulfur caverns and begins to walk the earth, he’ll look and behave exactly like McConaughey.

“He’s not just the absolute nadir of empty-vessel pretty boy actors. I’m talking about an almost startling inner quality that transcends mere shallowness. It’s there in McConaughey’s eyes…eyes that look out at the wonder and terror of life but do nothing but scan for opportunity…something or someone to hustle or seduce or make a buck off. Eyes that convey a Maynard G. Krebs-like revulsion at the idea that life may finally be about something you can’t touch, taste or own.

McConaughey and fan

“He has the soul of a Texas bartender who dabbles in real estate and has an overly made-up and undereducated girlfriend who drops by at the end of a shift to give him a lift home, except that he tends to ignore her when there’s a good game on and all his empty-ass buddies are there…a bartender who will clean shot glasses for 20 minutes before looking in your direction…a guy with a thin voice and a hey-buddy Texas drawl who sorta kinda needs to be stabbed with a screwdriver.

“I’ve known guys like McConaughey all my life, and I feel I’ve come to know them as a predator tribe. Guys with fraternity associations and shark eyes and quarter-inch- deep philosophies that tend to start with barstool homilies like “the world is for the few.”

“Because of this I can easily wave away his respectable performances in Dazed and Confused and Reign of Fire and focus on the void. I agree about these standout performances and his being tolerable in one or two other films (U-571, etc.), and because of this I was able to handle his being in movies without cringing for years.

“But then came the double-whammy of Two for the Money and Failure to Launch, and now the mere mention of his name…

With Sarah Jessica Parker in scene from Failure to Launch

“McConaughey is the emperor of the so-called vapid squad. He can kick Paul Walker‘s ass with one hand tied behind his back, in part because Walker is now off the shit list after his sweat-soaked danger-freak performance in Wayne Kramer‘s Running Scared. Forget the unfairly maligned Matthew (a.k.a., “Matt”) Davis, who gave a genuine and unforced performance as a decent-guy football player in John Stockwell‘s Blue Crush…next to McConaughey he’s almost Brando-level.

“I forget who the other contenders are but none of them hold a candle to McConaughey because they haven’t got that deep-down emptiness, which is what it’s all about. Not a matter of craft or affability, but essence.”

Persona-wise, Owen Wilson “isn’t just Mr. Space Case, but one who really has ‘the spirit’ — his characters always seem genuinely imbued and imaginative and familiar with college philosophy basics, and there is no one else on the planet who does this sort of thing with Wilson’s particularity.

“[And] there is no other actor on the Hollywood landscape whose dialogue (large portions of which Wilson always seems to write or improvise himself) is focused so earnestly and consistently on matters of attitude and heart. Pretentious as it may sound, Wilson is an actor with a consistently alive and pulsing inner-ness. Is there any other actor who even flirts with this realm?”

The preceding is from a July 2006 piece on Wilson (called “A True Original“) that I just re-read this morning, and which seems a little more resonant today than it was during the You, Me and Dupree build-up, especially with across-the-board Darjeeling Limited screenings about to commence.

A shorter re-edited version of Richard Kelly‘s Southland Tales — i.e., shorter than the version that played and bombed at the ’06 Cannes Film Festival — will open on 11.9 via Samuel Goldwyn. L.A. Times contributor Mark Olsen has written that Kelly and producing partner Sean McKittrick “have been hard at work on revising the film nearly nonstop” since the Cannes wipeout.

The film has been trimmed “by approximately 20 minutes” and “now has about 600 visual-effects shots, of which at least 100 are completely new,”: Olsen reports. I liked portions of what I saw at Cannes 16 months ago, but I basically called it “a very long throw of a surreal wackazoid football.”

Because I’ve run at least three extended items about the Robert Rodriguez-Rose McGowan alliance — #1, #2 and #3 — that ignited during the shooting of Grindhouse, it seems permissable to link to this “Page Six” thing, which I would otherwise regard as something worth considering while standing in the checkout line at the West Hollywood Pavillions….at best, maybe.

I’m skeptical but at the same time half-persuaded that a special Harry Knowles-orchestrated “secret screening” of Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood (Paramount Vantage, 12.26) will be shown soon — perhaps on Saturday, 9.22 — at Austin’s Alamo Draft House (on South Lamar) as part of Fantastic Fest (9.20 to 9.27). Two sources — one direct, one second-hand — funnelled the info. Paramount Vantage reps denied or poured water on the story. Draft House honcho and festival organizer Tim League didn’t return calls.

Here’s that “what the hell you wanna go fuck with that river for?” dialogue, straight from the preferred 2001 Deliverance DVD. If a consensus builds against the new Deliverance DVD (i.e., too olive, too murky), shouldn’t Warner Home Video stand up like men, admit they got it wrong and re-master it?

DVD Newsletter‘s Doug Pratt has joined DVD Beaver‘s Gary Tooze in calling the transfer on the new Deliverance deluxe edition DVD a problem. (That’s two-to-one against DVD Savant‘s Glenn Erickson, who gave the transfer a total thumbs-up.)

“Although the presentation looks passable if you have nothing to compare it with,” Pratt writes, “the transfer on the deluxe edition is problematic. In his commentary, Boorman claims that he wanted to subdue the verdancy of the wilderness, but what comes out of the transfer is a little too soft and a little too olive to be very appealing.

“Warner’s initial release was slightly windowboxed-thereby conveying the illusion of a wider image than the standard letterboxing on the new release, which has an aspect ratio of about 2.35:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback-and was sharply focused, perhaps to a fault, with slightly pinkish fleshtones but otherwise brightly defined hues. The older version may have left room for improvement, but the deluxe edition swings too far in the opposite direction, and when you place them side by side, you want only to watch the older one and avert your eyes from the other.”

Cheers to Landmark marketer Madelyn Hammond for brokering a deal between Samsung and Landmark Theatres to promote independent film, beginning with the arrival of Sean Penn‘s Into the Wild (Paramount Vantage, 9.21). Marc Graser‘s 9.16 Variety story said the “strategy isn’t meant to push a specific Samsung product but to bolster the company’s brand image among American consumers, especially the affluent auds that indies attract.”

David Sington‘s In the Shadow of the Moon may be the only patriotic, hooray-for-America film I’ve ever truly enjoyed and felt good about afterwards. Since I was in college, I mean. This obviously says as much as about me as it does about the film, but what has this country done besides spearheading the defeat of Nazi Germany and exporting awesome cultural stuff (rock music, hamburgers, iPods, good movies) that’s been seen as 100% beneficial to mankind besides the space program? Think about it.

We have truly come a long way over the last 35 to 45 years. In the heyday of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space programs we were seen (at least in part) as can-do god guys, and today our foreign policy moves have made us the most loathed and despised big industrial country anywhere. The specific targets aren’t U.S. citizens as much as the Bushie neocons running the show, but we’re still vying for the title of being the most hated country of all time after Nazi Germany.

I’d kind of forgotten that the space program, although it was mainly seen at the time as a technical triumph by an elite club of white-collar scientists and bureaucrats, was a real ray of light. I love the slogan on the poster: “Remember when the whole world looked up.”

In The Shadow of the Moon is basically a lot of handsome digitally restored footage of the Apollo moon missions intercut with some very appealing (i.e., intimate, even vulnerable-seeming) interviews with a few retired astronauts — Buzz Aldrin, Alan Bean, Eugene Cernan, Michael Collins (my favorite of the bunch), Jim Lovell, Edgar D. Mitchell, Harrison Schmit, Dave Scott and John Young. And it just works. It’s all about personal impressions, feelings, what it was like from deep within. It’s a genuine high, this film. It really gets hold of something and massages it just right.

The best moment comes when Collins describes reactions around the world to the first Moon landing (which he was a part of). “Everywhere people were saying instead of saying, well, you Americans did it…everywhere they said we did it, the human race, people…we did it. And I thought that was a wonderful thing.”

Here’s another In The Valley of Elah rave, written by the New Yorker‘s David Denby, that all the Haggis haters and Elah dissers need to gang up on and dismiss before it has any influence upon anyone who might be half-persuaded this could be a film of true merit.

Charlize Theron, Tommy Lee Jones (illustration by Lara Tomlin)

C’mon, guys, you know the drill….piss away. But one thing you can’t piss on, and that’s the fact that Denby knows how to write. Read this piece and tell me it doesn’t arouse your taste buds, even if you’ve seen Elah. (I’ve seen it three times and it made me want to go back again.)

Warner Independent would be well-advised to turn the entire review into a big cardboard standee and put it in theatre lobbies everywhere.

Denby’s riff on Elah star Tommy Lee Jones is the best part: “In his long movie career, Jones has never wasted a word or an emotion. When he’s silent, his glinting eyes and suppressed smile suggest a secret held in reserve. When he speaks, at Gatling-gun speed, the words come out as definitive. There’s no arguing with this man; he doesn’t give you an opening. He says only what he wants to say, and he delivers his lines with commanding off-kilter intonations (rising when you would expect falling, or just deadpan).

“Jones is the driest and most thoroughly stylized of American movie stars — a natural-born hipster wit — but he’s not a lightweight. Even in a spoof like Men in Black, his ease and quickness carried authority (and he didn’t let the grinning Will Smith ace him out).

“In Paul Haggis‘s In the Valley of Elah, Jones plays a Vietnam vet and former M.P., Hank Deerfield, whose son, Mike, after serving in Iraq, has gone AWOL in America. Jones has portrayed military men before, but Hank Deerfield is the role of a lifetime, and he has stripped himself of any vestige of vanity to play it.

“The vertical lines in his face run deeper than ever; a ten-dollar haircut exposes his big ears. Suddenly, he’s a primal American image — awkwardly iconic, with a creased-leather face from a Depression photograph — and he gives a great, selfless, and heartbreaking performance that completely dominates this elusive but powerful movie.

“Haggis, the writer-director of Crash, has done something shrewd: he has mounted a devastating critique of the Iraq war by indirection. Rather than dramatizing, say, the disillusion of a young soldier as he experiences the chaos of the occupation, he has moved disillusion into the soul of a military father. And the anguish that the father feels is all the more affecting because it’s held in check by Jones’s natural reticence.”

All due admiration and respect for Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud‘s Persepolis (Sony Classics, 12.25), which I liked for the stark Iranian social realism and the austere black-and-white animation, but a lot of people are agog that it’s been selected by France as its Best Foreign Language Film Oscar entry instead of Olivier Dahan‘s La Vie En Rose, which many had presumed was a slam-dunk to receive official submission.

Persepolis is a highly respectable piece (some have called it a masterpiece), but La Vie en Rose is a grand emotional epic — not a great film but a very convincing and richly composed one that rocks with hurt and history and the whole French magillah. Was there ever a greater musical emblem of 20th Century France than Edith Piaf? And those last 20 to 25 minutes are amazing. It really punches through.

The pro-Persepolis decision was an inside-the-Beltway political call made by a six-person Parisian committee, with Unifrance president Margaret Menegoz said to be wielding the most influence.

“The committee figures La Vie en Rose has already had its day and is already a success,” a distribution exec confides, “and that this way Persepolis will mean France has two major award-quality films in the U.S. marketplace. The committee always wants to help the little films…it’s a political thing. Mexico did the same thing a few years ago when they didn’t select Y Tu Mama Tambien because it had already become a hit.”

The French committee is also figuring that La Vie en Rose is doubly ratified because Marion Cotillard, who plays Piaf, has it in the bag to get nominated for Best Actress. Cotillard probably is a lock, but it still seems like an odd internal political call.

Again, no slight intended for Persepolis, which after all shared the jury prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, has a 100% positive Rotten Tomatoes rating, and will close the New York Film Festival on 10.14. Sony Pictures Classics will open it in New York and L.A. on 12.25 with a limited wide release in January.