“As a regular reader from Norway, I’d like to open your eyes towards a TIFF screening from my home country. I know you’ve fought the good cause for Mozart and the Whale, but you should know Its Norwegian director Petter Naess (also nominated for Elling back in ’02) hasn’t been sitting still. His new feature Gone with the Woman is having its out-of-country premiere at Toronto, and yesterday it was chosen as Norway’s Best Foreign Film entry for the Oscars.

At my recently launched English-language film blog, Subtitles to Cinema, I’ve just published a riff about Gone with the Woman — check it out if you’re interested.” — Karsten Meinich

London’s Daily Mail has a very cool and clean Valkyrie group shot of the actors playing the anti-Hitler conspirators along with corresponding pics and brief descriptions of each real-life conspirator. It’s good to see Stamp, Nighy and Branagh among Cruise’s allies. The MGM (via United Artists) release of Bryan Singer‘s film is set for 6.27.08.

(l. to .r.) (1) Kevin McNally, (2) Christian Berkel, (3) Bill Nighy, (4) Tom Cruise, (5) Terence Stamp, (6) David Schofield and (7) Kenneth Brannagh

If you go looking for Time‘s pre-Toronto Film Festival coverage online you’ll have to dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig (like the Seven Dwarfs in the diamond mine), which is strange considering that the TIFF is on the cover of Time‘s Canadian print edition. But the stories, written last week by Richard Corliss, Susan Catto and Rebecca Winters-Keegan are there — one about the hot tickets, one about TIFF co-chiefs Piers Handling and Noah Cowan, one about three local TIFF junkies.

In the opening graph of the Handling-Cowan profile, Corliss writes that “you know your film festival is a hit when people nearly kill each other to get into the screening of a movie they couldn’t be paid to see elsewhere. At last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, that film was the British docudrama Death of a President, which imagined the assassination of George W. Bush and the tracking of his killer. Outside the theater, people begged to get in as if it were the one and only Beatles reunion. Yet when the film opened in North America a month later, it earned just $519,086. No matter, at least to festival junkies. Toronto — TIFF to its fans — had chalked up another sensation.”

Well, c’mon…the struggle to catch every film at just about any film festival has the same after-residue. It is hugely important to get into a film (and sometimes it actuallly is), but when I don’t get there in time and I can’t wangle my way in, I calm myself down by saying that nine months from now, the film I’m trying to see will be on the shelf at Lazer Blazer…and chances are I’ll rent something else when I come across it.

The response I’ve gotten is that the movie is incredibly violent,” Eastern Promises director David Cronenberg tells critic Amy Taubin. “And I keep saying, ‘Did you see The Departed? The body count there and the brains all over the wall?’ But some people seem to feel that this movie is more violent than The Departed. So then, what are you talking about? You’re not talking about how many incidents, because The Departed has dozens and we have four. Somehow, it’s the close-up, the intensity, the carrying-through.” (from the current issue of Film Comment.)

“In 2004 the Academy Awards show was moved to late February, the Golden Globes and other awards programs went even earlier, and the studios had one [less] month for their movies to benefit from Oscar-related publicity,” reports Chicago Tribune entertainment reporter Mark Caro in a piece that basically says that October is the new December as far as the Oscar race is concerned.

“So instead of going wide with movies in January and even February of the following year, the studios began releasing many of their Oscar contenders well before New Year’s to help them gain traction with awards voters as well as the public.

“Of last year’s best picture nominees, only Letters From Iwo Jima was released after October. For the others — The Departed, Little Miss Sunshine, The Queen and Babel — the Oscar ‘bump’ was felt in DVD sales. ‘The studios are still doing their Oscar pushes, but in years past they used to start at Christmas, and now they finish at Christmas,’ said Tom Bernard, Sony Picture Classics co-president.”

That’s not true — they keep campaigning until the Academy’s Oscar nomination deadline time, which is on or about January 20th. (Or something like that.) And then it’s on to Phase Two.

3:10 to Yuma costar Peter Fonda tells his “She Said She Said” story to the Toronto Globe and Mail‘s Stephen Cole in today’s edition: “We were at my place in Benedict Canyon, and someone had given John and George a dose, which is unacceptable.” (Somebody slipped it into their drink, he means?) “George was wrecked. He kept saying, `I’m dying.’ I said, `I know what it’s like to be dead.’ Then I told him the story about how I shot myself when I was a little boy. John was looking at me, horrified, and he said, `No, no, you’re wrong.’ Then I heard the song ‘She Said She Said‘ on Revolver. It was all there.”

Henceforth it’s just “the Wachowskis” — no more “brothers” — because the former Larry Wachowski is definitely, fully and biologically “Lana” these days. That took a while, no? His/her intention to do a “gender reassignment” was announced four years ago, but it actually took more like three years. According to this 7.21.06 report on a site called Rated-M.com, Larry’s intention to opt for womanhood in the summer of ’03 (the news broke just before the debut of The Matrix Reloaded) was substantially complete as of last summer.

Lana and Andy Wachowski

A more recent report that ran on 8.28.07 said Lana “will actually speak to the press” — possibly an exclusive chat with Dateline NBC — about the sex-change thing down the road, but not until Speed Racer (Warner Bros., 5.8.08) has opened. No junket appearances for Lana, the report says, because “the current feeling is that his sex change could hurt the family image that Speed Racer film is going for.”

I can understand the motive in Warner Bros. wanting to play Lana down for the sake of Speed Racer box-office, if a junket duck-out has in fact been planned. (It’s many months off so I doubt it.) But shouldn’t we all be trying to relax about this and accept things as they are and not pretend there’s something askew?

Hiding from the press doesn’t feel like an enlightened move on Lana’s part. She’s obviously a talented director and something of a visionary (although the Wachowskis’ work on the re-shoots of The Invasion have called this notion into question), and in a perfect world she would sit down, look people in the eye and talk about the work.

This Nicole Kidman shot has been used for the cover of the new Vanity Fair. White bra, milky-creamy alabaster skin, a push for Margot at the Wedding. The interview highlights are summarized in a Daily Mail piece, but gazing works better.

Sony chairman and CEO Michael Lynton has written a Wall Street Journal piece that says because American films and TV shows are taking ideas from other nations and cultures and vice versa, “What can be seen in the cinemas and on television screens from Bangalore to Barcelona these days is any indication, globalization does not mean homogeneity. It means heterogeneity.”

Wait a minute…uhmm, that means “the quality or state of being heterogeneous; composition from dissimilar parts; disparateness.”

“Instead of one voice, there are many,” Lynton continues. “Instead of fewer choices, there are more. And instead of a uniform, Americanized world, there remains a rich and dizzying array of cultures, all of them allowing thousands of movies and televisions shows to bloom.

“Audiences around the world are applauding this explosion of home-grown content, because for them, Hollywood is not simply a place in Southern California. It is a symbol of an entertainment culture which is becoming as diverse as it is universal.”

This is why I keep a safety pin near me at all times.

Hand of fate #1: “And what is that, John? What? Bad luck. That’s all it is. I pray in your life you will never find it runs in streaks. That’s what it does, that’s all it’s doing. Streaks. I pray it misses you. That’s all I want to say.” — Shelley “the Machine” Levene in Glengarry Glen Ross.

Hand of fate #2: “So you’ve had a bad couple of months. Well, I’m sorry, but I’ll tell you what you do and it’s no different if you’re J. Paul Getty or Irving the Tailor — you ride it out.” — Lawrence Tierney‘s “Joe Cabot” in Quentin Tarantino‘s Reservoir Dogs.

Moviegoing would be an immeasurably richer thing if exhibitors were to allow the showing of an occasional brief short before the feature. I know…fat chance! But Venice Film Festival audiences saw a “beguiling” 13-minute short film titled Hotel Chavalier — directed by Wes Anderson, costarring Jason Schartzman and Natalie Portman — just before the showing of The Darjeeling Limited. Very cool, and thematically linked yet!

Jason Schwartzman, Natalie Portman in scene from a 13-minute Wes Anderson Darjeeling Limited short called Hotel Chevalier. [still provided by Dazza Buser of www.natalieportman.com]

But Chevalier will not, according to trade reports, be shown in theatres along with Darjeeling when it opens on 9.29 — only at other festivals (i.e., the New York Film Festival), on the internet and eventually on the DVD. Bad call, guys. A pre-feature Chevalier hors d’oeuvre would lend a special dimension — an “echo” or rebound effect — to Darjeeling. Fox Searchlight should definitely reconsider. At least show it at the upscale venues — Landmark, Arclight, etc. — where such a novelty would be appreciated.