Film Jerk‘s Edward Havens is running a list that’s been kicking around talent agencies for the last couple of weeks of 300 projects in active development — i.e., “[would-be movies] that have become pre-strike priorities for the major studios and a number of top production companies.” Films, in short, that stand a good chance of being made under the strike-threat circumstances. Havens points out that “certain directors have their names attached to two or more projects, while a number of them have no director attached.”

Sidney Lumet‘s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead (ThinkFilm, 10.26) is, for me, a major Toronto Film Festival revelation…a knockout. It’s a New York family crime drama like nothing Lumet (83 friggin’ years old and cooking with high-test like he was in the ’70s and ’80s) has ever attempted, much less achieved. And with a killer cast giving exceptional perfs — Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Albert Finney, Ethan Hawke, Marisa Tomei. It’s like something out of Shakespeare or Greek tragedy…it’s the House of Borgia. And a great suspense film to boot.

I don’t have time to get into this now (have to hit the I’m Not There party and then another film) but I’ll elaborate tomorrow. But I immediately knew this would be exceptional. How did I come to this conclusion? I figured any film that starts off with a naked Hoffman doing it doggy-style with a naked Tomei — a “whoa!” shot if I’ve ever seen one — has to be dealing from a fairly exceptional deck.

Here’s the opening of Lisa Nesselson‘s Variety review from last May…

“An intricate tragedy that plumbs messy emotional depths with cinematic precision, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead explores urban malaise via ingredients so timeless, an ancient Greek stumbling into the theater would recognize the building blocks of mortal folly. Filial impiety, sibling rivalry, marital distress and crippling debt bedevil protags who shop for all their decisions at Bad Choices ‘R Us.

“Satisfyingly draining narrative will probably skew toward older viewers, but the wrenching tale has something for anyone who likes their melodrama spiked with palpable tension and genuine suspense.”

Read more

Directors Peter Medak, Nick Broomfield (the latter in Toronto with the up-for-grabs Battle for Haditha) at Rosewater Supper Club — 9.10.07, 11:45 pm. Also in attendance: Harvey Weinstein, producer Holly Wiersma, Roger Friedman, Baz Bamigboye, Owen Gleiberman, et. al.

Atonement star James McAvoy at same Focus Features gathering — 9.10.07, 11:55 pm. I didn’t have the courage to snap one of the nearby Keira Knightley, fearing that she might have read or heard about that diss piece than I ran about her two years ago.

Read more

El Cantante star Marc Anthony — a.k.a., “Mr. Lopez” — looks as “undead in person” as he did in the film,” reports New York magazine’s “Fug Girls” in the “Show & Talk” column. “Lopez slid in [to a Jennifer Lopez fashion show] about twenty minutes before the house lights went down. He looked faintly cranky, and his pallor was typically zombified. He wasn’t bothered by too many flashbulbs, although that might be because vampires don’t show up on film.” I worship people who write like this. If a guy looks like a Bronx Dracula, don’t pussyfoot around…say it!

I started things off with a 9 a.m. screening of Paul Crowder and Murray Lerner‘s Amazing Journey:The Story of The Who, and I left in an angry huff 25 minutes later. The limited footage I saw told me that Crowder and Lerner are hacks, propagandists and bald-faced liars. By all means see this foggy-minded doc when it turns up on DVD, but you’d do well to inject a heroin-cocaine speedball at the same time. The more drugged up you are, the better it will play.

It was bad enough that Amazing Journey began like a rote-worship piece in the regimented form of all rock-music documentaries. This groaningly familiar format — opening montage, talking-head sum-ups about the group’s legend, adolescent beginnings, struggling parents, first guitars, etc — has been adhered to so closely and so often that it’s become almost comical. Don’t documentarians have any pride when it comes to films like this? Do they think audiences are dumb sheep?

Then things took a bizarre turn about 15 minutes in when the band story was abandoned so that Crowder and Lerner could suddenly downshift into a tribute section about the late John Entwistle, the Who’s miraculous bass player who died on 6.27.02 at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas. One minute, two minutes …”what the fuck are they doing?” I whispered to Meredith Brody, who was sitting two seats away. “The film just started and they’re suddenly doing this Entwistle whitewash thing because he died of drug use!”

Entwistle left the earth “due to a heart attack induced by an undetermined amount of cocaine,” according to most accounts (and one in particular), and it’s pretty well known that Entwistle battled cocaine addiction through much of his adult life. And yet Crowder and Lerner have the nerve to run a clip of Who guitarist-singer- songwriter Pete Townsend saying that Entwistle “had one addiction and it began with the letter H — Harrod’s in London. He was a fashion plate and loved shopping there, but that, really, was his only addiction!” [Note: not an exact transcript, but pretty close to what Townsend says.]

That was it. I looked at the unperturbed Brody, got up, grabbed my bag and bolted the hell out of there. It was all I could to restrain myself from walking up to the movie screen and spitting on it. [Note: A journalist friend says that Amazing Journey admits later on that Entwistle had drug issues, so Crowder and Lerner aren’t total liars — they just allow Townsend to float a lie in the beginning without challenging it. By my standards that’s the same damn thing, but let’s try and be liberal.]

Director Roman Polanski has bailed out of Pompeii, a Euro-funded epic that would have cost a mere $100 million (which is nothing in today’s big-dick movie economy). This means the project is probably dead for good. Producer Robert Benmussa told reporters that the historical drama collapsed over “fears that the looming actors strike could derail the project.” I’m sorry we won’t be seeing it. The CG recreations might have been wonderful. I wouldn’t have cared if Roland Emmerich was planning (or suddenly not planning) to direct, but Polanski is/was another story.

Pompeii ruins, snapped a little less than four months ago

One reason I visited the actual Pompeii ruins last May was that I wanted to write off my Italy sojourn with Jett as a research/business expense. I guess I can still claim this. I went there with a completely realistic expectation that the film would be shot, etc.

Wasn’t Jon Stewart‘s Oscar-hosting gig in ’06 widely seen as underwhelming? Did anyone stand up and say”encore!”? Didn’t a few people write articles that expressed the opposite view? Doesn’t matter because the New York Times is reporting that producer Gil Cates (obviously acting with the assent of other Academy fuddy-duds) is bringing Stewart back to host the 2.24.08 Oscar telecast. Cates’ move is somewhat analagous to Bush accepting Gen. David Petraeus‘ Iraq War progress assessment lock, stock and barrel. This on top of Cates’ recent re-rehiring as producer is the final straw. We need a South American-styled coup d’etat.

Woody Allen‘s Cassandra’s Dream (Weinstein Co., 11.30) plays a lot tighter and stronger than I’d been led to expect by the pans (particularly the one from Variety‘s Derek Elley) coming out of the Venice Film Festival. It’s not Match Point-level, particularly regarding the ending, but it’s a straight, well-acted tragedy piece that struck me as unpretentious, believable and fat-free.

I was especially impressed with Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell‘s portrayals of working-class brothers who get into a horrible financial bind and are pretty much forced (or so it seems from their perspective) to commit murder, which of course only leads to darker, more enveloping states of mind. Farrell’s performance as a weak (certainly vulnerable) fellow with a gambling addiction is particularly gripping.

I have to pack up and get in line for Paul Schrader‘s The Walker (showing at 9:30 pm), but Cassandra’s Dream, for my money, is a solid, mid-level Woody.

HE reader Lois Steinberg has offered her two cents on the ending to 3:10 to Yuma, particularly as she thinks others on this site “may have missed the point.” I’ve edited the fat out and rescrambled a bit, but she’s reading the finale pretty much the way director James Mangold explained it me a few weeks back:

“After the Wade gang takes over the stage with the loot, it turns out one of the marshalls is still alive and grabs one of Wade’s men and threatens to kill him if the gang doesn’t put down their guns,” she begins. “Wade (Russell Crowe) tells him (although he’s really addressing the entire gang) that his guy screwed up, was sloppy and put them all at risk…and shoots him in the neck. That’s what happens if you screw up by not doing what he says.

“I think at the end he sees that Charlie (Vince Foster) and his gang are out of control. Their paying the townspeople to shoot Wade’s captors has turned to chaos and he is at as much risk as Dan (Christina Bale). Charlie doesn’t just shoot Dan once, but again and again, not waiting for word from his boss.

“Wade is the puppet master, and he doesn’t like that the situation got out of his control. So he totally cleans house.
I don’t think the ending means Wade had a change of heart. He just wanted a new staff.

“Dan knew he wasn’t going to make it, though like many in today’s world he was too willing to see people through rose-colored glasses of their own values.

“Wade kept telling both Dan and his son he was no good. He just had his preferences and as long as he called the shots and had control, he could be be…well, not so much ‘kind’ as, for a moment, not a killer.”

Indiewire is reporting that Warner Independent has picked up Alan Ball‘s controversial Nothing is Private, which I favorably reviewed yesterday. That said, I’ve spoken to journo and industry folk who really hate it. When I told one of the haters (a woman) last night that I respected and admired it, she went “are you crazy?” She said she was greatly bothered by the young-girl sexual stuff. I replied that she’s probably more bothered by it than a typical 13 year-old girl would be.