“Conflicted excitement” sums up my reaction to Gregg Goldstein‘s Hollywood Reporter story about Sean Penn being favored by director Gus Van Sant to portray the late Harvey Milk, the openly gay San Francisco supervisor who was shot to death (along with SF mayor George Moscone) in ’78.

Penn will give the part hell, of course, but it feels like an odd call. He doesn’t look like Milk in the least (he’s at least a foot too short) and there’s something about Penn’s gruff Irish machismo vibe that doesn’t feel like a good fit. But it’s an intriguing prospect. Good acting is about transformation, and Penn has shown time and again he knows a thing or two about this.

Matt Damon is attached to play Dan White, the San Francisco supervisor who shot Milk and Moscone but was given a light manslaughter sentence (which outraged the city’s gay community, to put it mildly) and who later committed suicide. Damon seems exactly right for White (he gets working-class guys), although his participation in the Van Sant film is on the iffy side, according to Goldstein.

Michael London‘s Groundswell Prods. is financing the film, and Bruce Cohen and Dan Jinks are producing from a script by Dustin Lance Black. Goldstein is reporting that “the filmmakers are now in talks with a leading specialty division to launch the project,” and that once a deal is in place the untitled feature “hopes” to begin shooting in San Francisco as early as December.

The idea, in part, is to beat Bryan Singer‘s in-the-works Milk biopic, The Mayor of Castro Street, which producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron will produce from a rewritten script by Chris McQuarrie. Warner Independent and Participant Productions will co-finance. I suggested a while back that Adrien Brody — a dead-ringer for Milk — would be a great casting choice on Singer’s part.

“I [recently] caught a very early screening (no end credits whatsoever) of The Heartbreak Kid and I wholeheartedly support Lisa Nesselson‘s Variety review,” Pete Hammond wrote this morning. “The ’72 Elaine May original was great, but so is this on its own terms. And it is grounded in reality, which is why it really works. I don’t think I ever actually saw people literally rolling in the aisles, but at this screening one guy was doing just that. It’s going to be huge and in the case of one performer in it, there’s even — drum roll, please — Oscar potential. I’m gonna save the rest for my own review.”

Jason Reitman‘s Juno, a likably spunky sit-dram that gradually deepens as it goes along, has corralled attention via a Borys Kit/”Risky Business”/Hollywood Reporter item as a possible Oscar nominee. I agree that Diablo Cody‘s script might compete in the Best Original Screenplay category, but I’m not yet convinced that Juno has the gravitas or philosophical reach to qualify as Best Picture material. Agreeability isn’t a problem; this is a very smart, warm-hearted film. But in the end a film has to coagulate into something more than the sum of its parts.

“[Toronto’s] Four Seasons lobby is the place to ask folks like producer Ted Hope what’s happening with the acquisition of Alan Ball‘s controversial pedophile drama Nothing is Private,” writes Variety‘s Anne Thompson.

She then writes that the film “is challenging for distributors and needs some press support to give it some traction.” But how can there be much press support of the two Private press screenings aren’t happening until Tuesday? I liked Ball’s script and would love to see this film at the public showing the other night. But what was I supposed to do, chase down Hope and beg for tickets? Nobody’s flacking for this thing. Ball hosted a wee-hours party last night. Was I invited? No.

“A sampling of non-distrib folks I’ve spoken to liked it but felt pummeled by its clear-eyed look at some difficult material,” Thompson explains. “One studio marketing exec commented that she had never thought to see so much discussion of girls’ periods in two movies in one year. (The other is Superbad.)” In fact, the head of a distribution company told me earlier today that he’s calling Nothing is Private “a period film.”

“The confidence I’ve always had as an actor was never that I was so good, but that others were so bad.” – Into The Wild director and screenwriter Sean Penn talking earlier today to the Newark Star Ledger‘s Stephen Whitty.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age is “all in all, a grand package of hearty acting, design and action with the only caveat being that unlike the first film this [version] can no longer surprise us with its modern twists.” — from Kirk Honeycutt‘s Hollywood Reporter review, showing once again that one man’s dose of strychnine can be another’s cup of tea. Evening update: Variety‘s Todd McCarthy has panned it.

Wow…could the Farrelly Brothers‘ The Heartbreak Kid (DreamWorks, 10.5) actually work on its own terms, independent of (or indifferent to) the legend of the 1972 Elaine May/Bruce Jay Friedman/Neil Simon original?

Variety‘s Lisa Nesselson, having caught the new Ben Stiller version at the Deauville Film Festival, is calling it “a model of intelligent adaptation as well as a free-standing entertainment in its own right…[which] sustains a superlative level of comic invention straight through to final frames.

“With their smart, hilarious update, the Farrelly Bros. make mincemeat of the (often correct) theory that good movies should never be remade. Cleverly bending the template of the…original to their patented brand of profane gagdom, the Farrellys fashion a pitch-perfect riff on the consequences that ensue when getting hitched turns into something out of Hitchcock. Uproarious romp, grounded in believable if gleefully implausible human behavior, is a model of comic timing.”

Wait…”gleefully implausible”? Now I’m worried. Could Nesselson be an easy lay, comedically-speaking?

For me, the foundation of all successful movie comedies is that the basic material — plot, characters, situations, etc. — has to be at least faintly plausible, which is to say faintly recognizable and at least somewhat reflective of real life. (Every piece of material in Some Like It Hot, to name one famous example, is at least faintly plausible.) If it’s flat-out implausible, gleefully or otherwise, a movie is not funny. Sorry, but it’s that simple.

How is this supposed “international” Lions for Lambs trailer different than the domestic one? MGM would do well to put another, differently-cut trailer out fast. All Redford’s character (a college professor) does is deliver stern warnings. And does Tom Cruise (a right-wing U.S. Senator) do anything in this movie except loiter around his office and talk tough politics with Meryl Streep (a journalist)?

“I seem to have a homing device in me that leads me to absolutely every bad review that I’ve ever received. If I’m sitting in the hairdresser I’ll pick up the one thing that has horrific stuff about me in it. Which in one sense is incredibly difficult, but in the other constantly makes me go, `Get better! Get better! Get better!'” — Atonement star Keira Knightley speaking to Times Online‘s Kevin Maher, and saying something that seems to have actually produced results, considering her performance in Joe Wright‘s film.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford “is like an extended death ballad, an account of the final days of the famed Missouri desperado and ex-Confederate Jesse James that manages to breathe vitality into the western movie as a popular art form at the same time that it so magisterially administers the last rites. To a genre that’s itself been pronounced deceased more times than James’s death has been dramatized, we may have to make room in the tomb for another classic.” — from Geoff Pevere‘s 9.8.07 Toronto Star review.

You can absolutely confirm and take to the bank all serious notions of Joe Wright‘s Atonement (Focus Features, 10.12) being a top-ranked Best Picture contender. It’s a shatteringly well-made, deeply felt, rich-aroma romance that will go all the way with (almost all) critics, Academy voters and public alike.

Wright has totally pole-vaulted himself past the level of Pride and Prejudice (a well-made Jane Austen-er that I was only okay with) and taken costars Keira Knightley, James McAvoy and especially Vanessa Redgrave (a locked Best Supporting Actress contender) right along with him.

You can add Focus Features and everyone else associated with Atonement (young Irish actress Saoirse Ronanas, cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, production designers Jacqueline Durran and Sarah Greenwood) as well. Everybody wins with this film, the audience first and foremost.

This is one of those bulls-eye period dramas that feels wonderfully sharp and literate and authentic with emotional tone-perfect performances, and yet the profundity of the payoff is in the way it combines cinematography, editing and sound effects (not to mention one of the most enjoyably splendid uncut Steadicam shots in cinema history — the kind that warrants applause in and of itself) to create a sort of cinematic maelstrom effect.

Atonement leaves you with a sense of great regret and sadness (the feel-good kind) that amounts to something much deeper and fuller than what may be suggested by a casual reading of the plotline — a tale about a woman writer crushed by profound guilt over a harmful thing she did as a youth, caused by foolishness that was amplified by sexual panic. Atonement taps into feelings of regret about all things, about how sadly transitional and here-today-gone-tomorrow so much of life is, and injects them into your system like it came from a syringe.

I’m sorry for having suspected that Variety’s Derek Elley was perhaps being just a tad gung-ho-Britain in his Venice Film Festival review (he wasn’t), I now feel that a piece I wrote two years ago about Knightley not having “it” is out of date (Atonement shows that she’s found it and then some since, and without resorting to any of her old tricks) , and I’m sorry for having taken a cheap shot at McAvoy also. I’ve seen the light and am trying to make up as best I can.

Based upon an Ian McEwan novel published in ’01, Wright’s incredibly well-configured adaptation may not entangle younger males as much as other demos, but it’s an absolute slam dunk with mature viewers, couples and over-30 women.

It feels wrong to describe Atonement as a film with three acts, although it is that, because it doesn’t feel defined by “acts” as much as the way Wright has cut it all together, and I mean with not only dazzle but ultra-fine precision. It replays or refrains certain scenes and does flash-forwards and flashbacks with impugnity, and never once does it feel gimmicky for doing so. It all fits together and hums like Swiss machinery.

I can write more about it down the road, including the plot particulars. I have to get to another screening, and I’m late as it is. There’s no getting to even half of what you’d like to get to at this festival. So much of it is about curses and lost opportunities. I love it, of course.

I’m not saying Atonement is necessarily “the one” (I’m hardly in a position to say anything like that), but unless I’m crazy it will almost certainly end up as one of the five Best Picture nominees. And hail to the great Vanessa Redgrave once again. She’s on-screen at the very end for maybe six or seven minutes (perhaps a touch more), and does nothing except talk to an off-screen interviewer, and she hits an absolute grand slam.